Charmed Particles Read Online Free

mysterious book— The Secret Museum of Mankind —for which he immediately sent away. It arrived a few weeks later, a hefty volume filled with dusky mimeograph-quality photo reproductions.
    He spent his nights under the covers of his bed, flashlight in hand, poring over the book’s images and captions— Smiling Mothers and Their Wooly-Headed Brood, Men of a Tribe of Sinister Reputation, Witch Doctor of Darkest Africa and His House of Fear: With keen, cunning eyes…he sits by his primitive stock of quackeries…. Expert in hypnotism, trances, and sleights of hand, he rules the village —imagining the day when he might venture out into such a world of mystery and exoticism.
    This strange object , he underlined in a stubby pencil by light of his flashlight, with bits of iron, small bells, rusty nails, copper coins, and other metal rubbish dangling about him, and holding a weird drum, is a Shaman priest in ceremonial garb, ready to conduct intercourse with supernatural powers .
    In the section titled The Secret Album of Africa , the young Randolph drew a careful question mark in the margin beside the caption reading: The African has not the European’s sensibility to pain .
    From The Secret Museum , he had found his way to Livingstone’s accounts of his travels through the dark continent, and from there he had graduated to Thesiger’s travels in Arabia, Grant’s A Walk across Africa , and Sven Hedin’s treks through the Himalayas, having already decided that this was the life for him.

    In between his expeditions and assignments for the magazine, Randolph lectured on his adventures, traveling mainly through the small towns of the American Midwest, where he seemed strikingly exotic himself. He had met Rose at one of these lectures—a young girl itching to stretch beyond the rural farm community where she had grown, confined, into a smart and curious young woman, listening with rapt attention to his presentation. Then, after the lecture, coffee at the Cozy Café and Diner, during which she had peppered him with question after question and Randolph had fallen under the spell of Rose’s bright, curious eyes.
    And so at eighteen Rose had eloped with Randolph. They married aboard a steamer en route to Ceylon (she sent her parents a telegram by way of announcement), honeymooned among the Wanniyala-Aetto people, where the local women, clucking in disapproval at Rose’s shocking lack of skill as a homemaker, had taught her to gather edible roots and berries, and, alarmed to find that she had never been taught to prepare pittu, a staple of any respectable meal, had taken it upon themselves to teach her.
    By the end of their honeymoon, Rose was as taken with exploration as Randolph.

    During the Imilchil Betrothal Fair in Morocco, Randolph and Rose watched, transfixed, as the young men dressed in djellabas stood unmoving, displaying their silver daggers, a sign of wealth, the young women moving past, assessing this plumage, the Middle Atlas Mountains rising up around them. At the Palace of Winds in Jaipur, they turned their faces up to the small windows lining the walls, imagining the royal concubines, kept secluded there, peering out over the city. In Madhya Pradesh, they visited the sandstone temples of Khajuraho, admiring the erotic sculptures that decorated the walls.
    With each expedition, Randolph felt he was unveiling a bit of the world, coy temptress, slow to reveal her secrets. He came to life on these trips—at night, around the camp’s fire, the sound of animals all around them, and later, sleeping side by side under the stars, the sound of native drums from the bush.
    Two years into their travels Rose discovered she was pregnant. She told him at a Shinto temple, whispering the news into his ear over the monks’ chanting.
    They decided she would go home, to the small farm town outside of Chicago where she had grown up. But the small farm town had changed