The Train to Djibouti
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ONE
London, March 2004
Only a few days have passed since my return. It is cold, still too cold.
The pale morning sun illuminates my desk at intervals: the scattered papers, some pictures and maps of lands that are distant but always vivid in my mind.
What I’m about to tell, they’re not simply memories, thoughts drawn from the journal of a trip; it is not only the story of one adventure or the recollection of precious moments. It is rather my attempt to revisit the weft of a thick mosaic of emotions, never, before then, experienced; a wood inlaid with indelible, incorruptible images, a drape embroidered with the faces of an entire people; a painting of thousands of colours; a story of a world of dreams, sometimes not appreciated by those who want to achieve other dreams. A story of dreams not understood by those to whom that world does not belong. A story of lives hanging from a thread and that of landscapes hanging in the void.
The story of ancient hidden treasures; the story of a man vanished into nothing and that of others who came out of it. The story of an invisible train and that of a river that disappears into the sands.
London, December 2003
Everything began here, wrapped by the fogs of a tedious London winter.
December was passing through slowly, between endless watery coffees and even more endless third-page interviews, assigned to me to cover the void of a world, by now so used to wars and catastrophes that it doesn’t even consider them noteworthy any more.
It was half-past four in the afternoon, dark by then for almost an hour: I decided that I’d had enough and I returned home.
I chose to cross the calm of St James’s Park, rather then entering the jungle of the ‘tube’, the London Underground, at that time already suffocated by the presence of an ‘army’ of tired office workers with their grey suits and grey moods, with their eyes reddened by the screens of the computers and their minds made dizzy by the rings of the phones, the outbursts of the bosses...
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About the Book
‘’ … if you will receive my sayings and treasure up
My own commandments with yourself, if you
call out for understanding and for discernment,
if you keep seeking for it as if for silver, and as
for hid treasures you keep searching for it, in that
case you will understand the very knowledge of
God. For God himself gives wisdom.’’
[ Proverbs 2: 1-5]
What I’m about to tell, they’re not simply memories, thoughts drawn from the journal of a trip; it is not only the story of one adventure or the recollection of precious moments. It is rather my attempt to revisit the weft of a thick mosaic of emotions, never, before then, experienced; a wood inlaid with indelible, incorruptible images, a drape embroidered with the faces of an entire people; a painting of thousands of colours; a story of a world of dreams, sometimes not appreciated by those who want to achieve other dreams. A story of dreams not understood by those to whom that world does not belong. A story of lives hanging from a thread and that of landscapes hanging in the void.
The story of ancient hidden treasures; the story of a man vanished into nothing and that of others who came out of it. The story of an invisible train and that of a river that disappears into the sands.
About the Author
Lara Bordin Kassa was born in Turin, Italy in 1976. She studied law and then moved to London where she lives with her husband since 1999.