“Where is the king?” I said. “This gentleman is not the king, is he? I could speak to him. The king knows English. What’s all this about? Tell him I want to go straight to his royal highness.”
“Wo, no, sah,” said Romilayu. “We no tell him. Him police.”
“Ha, ha, you’re kidding.”
But actually the fellow did examine me like a police official, and if you recall my conflict with the state troopers (they came that time to quell me in Kowinsky’s tavern near Route 7, and Lily had to bail me out), you may guess how as a man of wealth and an aristocrat, and impatient as I am, I react to police questioning. Especially as an American citizen. In this primitive place. It made my hackles go up. However, I had a great many things lying on my mind and conscience, and I tried to be as politic and cautious as it was in me to be. So I endured this small fellow’s interrogation. He was very grim and business-like. We had come from Baventai how long ago? How long had we stayed with the Arnewi and what were we doing? I held my good ear listening for anything resembling the words cistern, water, or frog, though by this time I was aware that I could trust Romilayu, and that he would stand up for me. That’s how it is, you bump into people casually by a tropical lake with crocodiles as part of a film-making expedition and you discover the good in them to be almost unlimited. However, Romilayu must have reported the severe drought back there on the Arnewi River, for this man, the examiner, declared positively that the Wariri were going to have a ceremony very soon and make all the rain they needed. “Wak-ta!” he said, and described a downpour by plunging the fingers of both hands downward. A skeptical expression came over my mouth, which I had the presence of mind to conceal. But I was very much handicapped in this interview, as the events of last week had undermined me. I was infinitely undermined.
“Ask him,” I said, “why our guns were taken away and when we’ll get them back.”
The answer was that the Wariri did not permit outsiders to carry arms in their territory. “That’s a damned good rule,” I said. “I don’t blame these guys. They’re very smart. It would have been better for all concerned if I had never laid eyes on a firearm. Ask him anyhow to be careful of those scope sights. I doubt whether these characters know much about such high-grade equipment.”
The examiner showed a row of unusually mutilated teeth. Was he laughing? Then he spoke, Romilayu translating. What was the purpose of my trip, and why was I traveling like this?
Again that question! Again! It was like the question asked by Tennyson about the flower in the crannied wall. That is, to answer it might involve the history of the universe. I knew no more how to reply than when Willatale had put it to me. What was I going to tell this character? That existence had become odious to me? It was just not the kind of reply to offer under these circumstances. Could I say that the world, the world as a whole, the entire world, had set itself against life and was opposed to it-just down on life, that’s all — but that I was alive nevertheless and somehow found it impossible to go along with it? That something in me, my grun-tu-molani, balked and made it impossible to agree? No, I couldn’t say that either.
Nor: “You see, Mr. Examiner, everything has become so tremendous and involved, why, we’re nothing but instruments of this world’s processes.”
Nor: “I am this kind of guy, rest is painful to me, and I have to have motion.”
Nor: “I’m trying to learn something, before it all gets away from me.”
As you can see for yourselves, these are all impossible answers. Having passed them in review, I concluded that the best thing would be to try to snow him a little, so I said that I had heard many marvelous reports about the Wariri. As I couldn’t think of any details just then, I was just as glad that he didn’t ask me to be specific.
“Could we see the king? I know a friend of his and I am dying to meet him,” I said.
My request was ignored.
“Well, at least let me send him a message. I am a friend of his friend Itelo.”
To this no reply was made either. The torch-bearing women giggled over Romilayu and me.
We were then conducted to a hut and left alone. They set no guard over us, but neither did they give us anything to eat. There was neither meat nor milk nor fruit nor fire. This was a strange sort of hospitality. We had been held since nightfall and I figured the time now would be half-past ten or eleven. Although what did this velvet night have to do with clocks? You understand me? But my stomach was growling, and the armed fellow, having brought us to our hut, went away and left us. The village was asleep. There were only small stirrings of the kind made by creatures in the night. We were left beside this foul hovel of stale, hairy-seeming old grass, and I am very sensitive about where I sleep, and I wanted supper. My stomach was not so much empty, perhaps, as it was anxious. I touched the shank of the broken bridge with my tongue and resolved that I wouldn’t eat dry rations. I rebelled at the thought. So I said to Romilayu, “We’ll build a little fire.” He did not take to this suggestion but, dark as it was, he saw or sensed what a mood was growing on me and tried to caution me against making any disturbance. But I told him, “Rustle up some kindling, I tell you, and make it snappy.”
Therefore he went out timidly to gather some sticks and dry manure. He may have thought I would burn down the town in revenge for the slight. By the fistful, rudely, I pulled out wisps from the thatch, after which I opened the package of dehydrated chicken noodle soup, mixing it with a little water and a stiffener of bourbon to help me sleep. I poured this in the aluminum cooking kit and Romilayu made a small blaze near the door. On account of the odors we did not dare to venture inside too far. The hut appeared to be a storehouse for odds and ends, worn-out mats and baskets with holes in them, old horns and bones, knives, nets, ropes, and the like. We drank the soup tepid, as it seemed it would never come to a boil owing to the poverty of the fire. The noodles went down almost unwillingly. After which Romilayu, on his shinbones, said his usual prayers. And my sympathy went out to him, as this did not seem a good place in which we were about to lay our heads. He pressed his collected fingertips close under the chin, groaning from his chest and bending down his credulous head with the mutilated cheeks. He was very worried, and I said, “Tonight you want to make an especially good job, Romilayu.” I spoke largely to myself.
But all at once I said, “Ah!” and the entire right side of me grew stiff as if paralyzed, and I could not even bring my lips together. As if the strange medicine of fear had been poured down my nose crookedly and I began to cough and choke. For by a momentary twisting upward of some of the larger chips from the flame I thought I saw a big smooth black body lying behind me within the hut against the wall.
“Romilayu!”
He stopped praying.
“There’s somebody in the hut.”
“No,” he said, “dem nobody here. Jus’ me-you.”
“I tell you, somebody’s in there. Sleeping. Maybe this house belongs to somebody. They should have told us we were going to share it with another party.”