The darkness in the city is a darkness of burning smells and a vaguely friendly danger, as if the cutpurse or cutthroat shares some secret with you, and robbery or murder is not so bad when it is, so to speak, all in the family. There is less despair here, less desparation, than one would expect, in a city so comparatively poor, so relatively backward. Somewhere helium-neon lights remove the darkness entirely, and on cellular phones people mention the city as a possible source of market expansion. But no transmission towers embrace the city this year, and smoke often obscures the stars.