conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book about Linda, Bobby, Egypt entitled In a Free State.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In a Free State: The narrator is initially on a ferry to Egypt, and concludes many years later as a tourist in Egypt again.\nThe first tale concerns an Indian servant from Bombay who, having no real alternative at home, accompanies his master on a diplomatic mission to Washington,C.\nThe two Indians suffer abominably from the poor value of Indian currency.\nThe servant lives in almost a cupboard and inadvertently blows several weeks salary just buying a snack.\nHowever he gets to meet a restaurant proprietor who offers him an apparent fortune as a salary, so he absconds and works for him.\nOnce he has his affairs in reasonable order, however, he starts to live in fear that his master will find him and order him back.\nHe also learns that he is working illegally and liable to deportation.\nThe only way of resolving the situation is to marry a woman who had seduced him but she had avoided ever since out of shame for his behaviour.\nThe second story has an unreliable narrator.\nIt concerns a rural West Indian family, a set of cousins, one of whom being in a better situation manages to humiliate the narrator.\nThe richer family has a son who goes to Canada and is destined to do well, while the others can expect nothing.\nThe younger brother of the second family then sets out for England to study engineering, while his elder brother does all he can to support him.\nEventually the elder brother follows him to England with the aim of helping him further.\nHe works all hours in demeaning jobs to keep him, but eventually makes enough money to set up his own business.\nHowever he discovers that the brother, despite appearances is doing no studying at all, while his restaurant is frequented by yobs.\nThe narrator, in a fit of rage, murders one of these yobs, who is in fact a friend of his brother.\nThe story ends when he attends his brother\'s wedding, with a prison guard for company.\nThe story is set in an African Great Lakes state that has recently acquired independence.\nThe King, although liked by the Colonials, is weak, and is on the run while the President is poised to take absolute power.\nThe level of violence in urban centres of the country is rising and there are rumours of violence in the countryside.\nThere is mention of the Asian community being "deported".\nBobby is an official who has been attending a conference in the capital city.\nHe now heads back to the governmental Compound where he lives, and he has offered a lift to Linda, another colleague\'s wife.\nWe learn early on that Bobby is homosexual.\nHe is rebuffed by a young Zulu when he tries to pick him up at the Hotel bar.\nHe soon discovers that Linda has plans of her own as they embark on the journey.\nThe relationship between the two is complex from the outset; it seems Bobby is intent on aggravating the initially calm Linda.\nHis previous history of mental illness is explored.\nThings go from bad to worse when they put up at a Hotel, run by an old Colonel who can not adapt to the new conditions in the country.\nThere, they have dinner, and they witness a scene between the Colonel and Peter, his servant, who he accuses of planning his murder.\nFurthermore Bobby discovers that Linda was planning some extra-marital activity with a friend along the way, and he becomes furious and hostile.\nThe two reach their destination, but not before witnessing the site where the old King was recently murdered, a philosophical Muslim planning to move to Egypt and the beginnings of a genocidal wave of violence.\nBobby is beaten by the army at a check point, where he and Linda experience first hand the growing violence.\nThe story follows the conventions of a road trip with the reader becoming aware, as do Bobby and Linda, of the situation and how serious it has become.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In a Free State: The narrator is initially on a ferry to Egypt, and concludes many years later as a tourist in Egypt again.\nThe first tale concerns an Indian servant from Bombay who, having no real alternative at home, accompanies his master on a diplomatic mission to Washington,C.\nThe two Indians suffer abominably from the poor value of Indian currency.\nThe servant lives in almost a cupboard and inadvertently blows several weeks salary just buying a snack.\nHowever he gets to meet a restaurant proprietor who offers him an apparent fortune as a salary, so he absconds and works for him.\nOnce he has his affairs in reasonable order, however, he starts to live in fear that his master will find him and order him back.\nHe also learns that he is working illegally and liable to deportation.\nThe only way of resolving the situation is to marry a woman who had seduced him but she had avoided ever since out of shame for his behaviour.\nThe second story has an unreliable narrator.\nIt concerns a rural West Indian family, a set of cousins, one of whom being in a better situation manages to humiliate the narrator.\nThe richer family has a son who goes to Canada and is destined to do well, while the others can expect nothing.\nThe younger brother of the second family then sets out for England to study engineering, while his elder brother does all he can to support him.\nEventually the elder brother follows him to England with the aim of helping him further.\nHe works all hours in demeaning jobs to keep him, but eventually makes enough money to set up his own business.\nHowever he discovers that the brother, despite appearances is doing no studying at all, while his restaurant is frequented by yobs.\nThe narrator, in a fit of rage, murders one of these yobs, who is in fact a friend of his brother.\nThe story ends when he attends his brother\'s wedding, with a prison guard for company.\nThe story is set in an African Great Lakes state that has recently acquired independence.\nThe King, although liked by the Colonials, is weak, and is on the run while the President is poised to take absolute power.\nThe level of violence in urban centres of the country is rising and there are rumours of violence in the countryside.\nThere is mention of the Asian community being "deported".\nBobby is an official who has been attending a conference in the capital city.\nHe now heads back to the governmental Compound where he lives, and he has offered a lift to Linda, another colleague\'s wife.\nWe learn early on that Bobby is homosexual.\nHe is rebuffed by a young Zulu when he tries to pick him up at the Hotel bar.\nHe soon discovers that Linda has plans of her own as they embark on the journey.\nThe relationship between the two is complex from the outset; it seems Bobby is intent on aggravating the initially calm Linda.\nHis previous history of mental illness is explored.\nThings go from bad to worse when they put up at a Hotel, run by an old Colonel who can not adapt to the new conditions in the country.\nThere, they have dinner, and they witness a scene between the Colonel and Peter, his servant, who he accuses of planning his murder.\nFurthermore Bobby discovers that Linda was planning some extra-marital activity with a friend along the way, and he becomes furious and hostile.\nThe two reach their destination, but not before witnessing the site where the old King was recently murdered, a philosophical Muslim planning to move to Egypt and the beginnings of a genocidal wave of violence.\nBobby is beaten by the army at a check point, where he and Linda experience first hand the growing violence.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.. End with the sentence ' When he came to the foot of the gangway he took off his hat, and we saw that he was an old man, with a tremulous worn face and wet blue eyes.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In a Free State
  IT WAS ONLY a two-day crossing from Piraeus to Alexandria, but as soon as I saw the dingy little Greek steamer I felt I ought to have made other arrangements. Even from the quay it looked overcrowded, like a refugee ship; and when I went aboard I found there wasn't enough room for everybody.
  There was no deck to speak of. The bar, open on two sides to the January wind, was the size of a cupboard. Three made a crowd there, and behind his little counter the little Greek barman, serving bad coffee, was in a bad mood. Many of the chairs in the small smoking-room, and a good deal of the floor space, had been seized by overnight passengers from Italy, among them a party of overgrown American schoolchildren in their mid-teens, white and subdued but watchful. The only other public room was the dining-room, and that was being got ready for the first of the lunch sittings by stewards who were as tired and bad-tempered as the barman. Greek civility was something we had left on shore; it belonged perhaps to idleness, unemployment and pastoral despair.
  But we on the upper part of the ship were lucky. We had cabins and bunks. The people on the lower deck didn't. They were deck passengers; night and day they required only sleeping room. Below us now they sat or lay in the sun, sheltering from the wind, humped figures in Mediterranean black among the winches and orange-coloured bulkheads.
  They were Egyptian Greeks. They were travelling to Egypt, but Egypt was no longer their home. They had been expelled; they were refugees. The invaders had left Egypt; after many humiliations Egypt was free; and these Greeks, the poor ones, who by simple skills had made themselves only just less poor than Egyptians, were the casualties of that freedom. Dingy Greek ships like ours had taken them out of Egypt. Now, briefly, they were going back, with tourists like ourselves, who were neutral, travelling only for the sights; with Lebanese businessmen; a troupe of Spanish night-club dancers; fat Egyptian students returning from Germany.
  He was slender, of medium height, and he moved from the knees down, with short springy steps, each foot lifted high off the ground. It was a stylish walk, as stylish as his polka-dotted saffron neck-scarf. But when he came nearer we saw that all his clothes were in ruin, that the knot on his scarf was tight and grimy; that he was a tramp. When he came to the foot of the gangway he took off his hat, and we saw that he was an old man, with a tremulous worn face and wet blue eyes.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me another paragraph.. Start with the sentence 'They wore felt hats with conical crowns and brims pulled down low'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: They wore felt hats with conical crowns and brims pulled down low. Many were in long drooping jackets, brown or dark-grey, which looked like cast-off European clothes. Quite a few, men and women, were brilliantly patched. Two or three men with pencils and pads were marshalling the Africans into open lorries with high canopy-frames. Policemen in black uniforms watched.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last three paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Peonies, China! So many empires had come here. Not far from where we were was the colossus on whose shin the Emperor Hadrian had caused to be carved verses in praise of himself, to commemorate his visit. On the other bank, not far from the Winter Palace, was a stone with a rougher Roman inscription marking the southern limit of the Empire, defining an area of retreat. Now another, more remote empire was announcing itself. A medal, a postcard; and all that was asked in return was anger and a sense of injustice.
  Perhaps that had been the only pure time, at the beginning, when the ancient artist, knowing no other land, had learned to look at his own and had seen it as complete. But it was hard, travelling back to Cairo, looking with my stranger's eye at the fields and the people who worked in them, the dusty towns, the agitated peasant crowds at railway stations, it was hard to believe that there had been such innocence. Perhaps that vision of the land, in which the Nile was only water, a blue-green chevron, had always been a fabrication, a cause for yearning, something for the tomb.
  The air-conditioning in the coach didn't work well; but that might have been because the two Negro attendants, still with the habits of the village, preferred to sit before the open doors to chat. Sand and dust blew in all day; it was hot until the sun set and everything went black against the red sky. In the dimly lit waiting-room of Cairo station there were more sprawled soldiers from Sinai, peasants in bulky woollen uniforms going back on leave to their villages. Seventeen months later these men, or men like them, were to know total defeat in the desert; and news photographs taken from helicopters flying down low were to show them lost, trying to walk back home, casting long shadows on the sand.