He felt himself being received as a special guest, being driven in an old sedan down the only flattened-out road of an outpost town, the driver dispersing all in the way with an authority the dispersed were honoring.  He’d already been served tea under the regal tree that was the bus depot, and his driver had gifted him an ancestral bone.  All within sight became infused with a majesty, a nobility:  the greeters under the tree, the driver, the huts and shacks lining the road, even the feeble animals and weary people turning an eye in traffic.  Yet when the driver then stopped to respond in a bellicose exchange with a face in the window of a shack, and he found himself soon forgotten, he turned away and struggled to recognize the rundown and withered village out his side window.