The Setting Sun and the Rolling World

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1987

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Story 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Story 4 Summary: “White Stones and Red Earth”

While away at boarding school, a boy named Bishi is told that his brother Michael is dead. Upon learning the news, Bishi is unable to cry, even though he knows his classmates expect him to do so. He eventually summons tears by thinking about a memory of a white building with a red roof and a smokestack attached to it.

Bishi travels by bus to his home in Mutare. While waiting at a bus stop for a transfer, Bishi dozes off and dreams of the white building. It is a hospital he visited with his mother as a child. The smokestack belches out black pillars from the incinerators used to cremate the hospital’s dead. When he asks his mother if people die in the hospital, she grows uneasy. He hears a familiar sound in the trees and begins to cry.

Bishi wakes up with tears on his face as his transfer approaches. Just outside Mutare, there is a black pile of decaying animal flesh surrounded by vultures.

At his father’s farm, as his family comforts him, Bishi still cannot cry over Michael. That night in bed, Bishi hears the same sound in the trees that he heard at the hospital, both in his memory and in his dream. He goes outside to Michael’s burial mound and cups some of the dirt in his hand to smell it. He hears a mouse squeaking from inside the dirt, accompanied by a low hum. Bishi breaks down in tears, crying himself to sleep.

The next morning, when he wakes up on the burial mound, Bishi is no longer afraid.

Story 4 Analysis

Fundamentally, “White Stones and Red Earth” is a story about a boy’s first intimate encounter with death. Upon hearing about his brother’s death, Bishi struggles to grapple with its implications. Unsure of what he feels, he summons a more generalized symbol of death in the crematorium connected to the white hospital with the blood-red roof. Bishi is prepared to cry over the hospital’s anonymous dead patients, yet he is unable or unwilling to fully confront the death of his brother.

However, when Bishi visits the grave alone in the night, the smell of the soil in his family’s orchard brings with it an uncontrollable surge of tears and emotion. This strong association between smell and home emerges in other stories. For Bishi, by leaving home for boarding school, he severed some profound connection with his ancestral home, making him unable to properly grieve for his brother. Only by returning and having a powerful sensory reaction to his family’s homestead can he fully feel the weight of his brother’s loss. The story’s conclusion is thus consistent with Mungoshi’s exploration of the sense of spiritual alienation a person feels when separated from their home.