Three years ago a drought nearly wiped out the old seeds of Tamba, a village in the dry hills. The grandmothers saved a few handfuls in clay jars. Now Amina, a botanist of thirty-eight, carried a small box of them to a vault inside a frozen mountain on an island in the Arctic, where seeds from all over the world are kept safe in case of disaster.
The box held red beans, which her grandmother had called "the patient ones" because they could wait years for rain, millet and a small hot pepper that grows nowhere else. The journey took four days: a small boat across the river, nine hours on a bus, two planes and a van through the snow. Amina, who had never seen snow before, held the box on her knees the whole way, like something alive.
At the entrance a guard in a thick coat, a young man with frost in his eyebrows, wrote in a book, "Tamba: beans, millet, pepper," and took the box in both hands. Amina walked down the long, quiet tunnel, past shelf after shelf of silver boxes holding the seeds of many countries, kept at eighteen degrees below zero. The cold stung her face, her breath hung in the air, her footsteps sounded very loud, and she felt very small and, strangely, very hopeful: behind these walls waited the bread, the rice and the soups of a thousand tables not yet laid.
On the plane home, above a white world that went on forever, she thought of the grandmothers and their clay jars. If something ever happens, she thought, the beans of Tamba will grow again.
