Dread and some of the related emotions will often approach me by way of the nose. As when you are given an injection of novocaine and feel the cold liquid inside the membranes and the tiny bones of that region.
“Wait until I find my lighter,” I said. And I ground the little wheel of the Austrian lighter with my thumb harshly. There was a flare, and when I advanced into the hut, holding it above me to spread light over the ground, I saw the body of a man. I was then afraid my nose would burst under the pressure of terror. My face and throat and shoulders were all involved in the swelling and trembling that possessed me, and my legs spindled under me, feeling very feeble.
“Is he sleeping?” I said.
“No. Him dead,” said Romilayu.
I knew that very well, better than I wished to.
“They have put us in here with a corpse. What can this be about? What are they trying to pull?”
“Wo! Sah, sah!”
I spread my arms before Romilayu, trying to communicate firmness to him and I said, “Man, hold onto yourself.”
But I myself experienced a wrinkling inside the belly which made me very weak and faint. Not that the dead are strangers to me. I’ve seen my share of them and more. Nevertheless it took several moments for me to recover from this swamping by fear, and I thought (under my brows) what could be the meaning of this? Why was I lately being shown corpses-first the old lady on my kitchen floor and only a couple of months later this fellow lying in the dusty litter? He was pressed against the canes and raffia of which this old house was built. I directed Romilayu to turn him over. He wouldn’t; he wasn’t able to obey and so I handed him the lighter, which was growing hot, and did the job myself. I saw a tall person no longer young but still powerful. Something in his expression suggested that there had been an odor he didn’t wish to smell and had averted his head, but the poor guy had to smell it at last. There may be something like that about it; till the moment comes we won’t know. But he was scowling and had a wrinkle on his forehead somewhat like a high-water mark or a tidal line to show that life had reached the last flood and then receded. Cause of death not evident.
“He hasn’t been gone long,” I said, “because the poor sucker isn’t hard yet. Examine him, Romilayu. Can you tell anything about him?”
Romilayu could not as the body was naked, and so revealed little. I tried to consult with myself as to what I should do, but I could not make sense, the reason being that I was becoming offended and angry.
“They’ve done this on purpose, Romilayu,” I said. “This is why they made us wait so long and why those broads with the torches were laughing. All the time they were working on this frame-up. If that little crook with the twisted stick was capable of sending us into an ambush, then I don’t put it past them to rig up this, either. Boy, they’re the children of darkness, all right, just as you said. Maybe this is their idea of a hot practical joke. At daybreak we were supposed to wake up and see that we had spent the night with a corpse. But listen, you go and tell them, Romilayu, that I refuse to sleep in a morgue. I have waked up next to the dead all right, but that was on the battlefield.”
“Who I tell?” said Romilayu.
And I started to storm at him, “Go on,” I said. “I’ve given you an order. Go, wake somebody. Judas! This is what I call brass.”
Romilayu cried, “Mistah Henderson, sah, whut I do?”
“Do what I tell you,” I yelled, and the loathing of the dead I felt and all the rage of a tired man who had broken his bridgework filled me.
And so, unwillingly, Romilayu went out and probably sat down on a stone somewhere and prayed or wept that he had ever come with me or had been tempted by the jeep, and probably he repented of not having turned back to Baventai alone after the explosion of frogs. Certainly he was too timid to wake anyone with my complaint. And perhaps the thought had come to him, as it now did to me, that we were liable to be accused of a murder. I hurried to the door and leaned out into the thick night, which now smelled malodorous to me, and I said, as loud as I dared, and brokenly, “Come back, Romilayu, where are you? I’ve changed my mind. Come back, old fellow.” For I was thinking that I shouldn’t drive him from me as tomorrow we might have to defend our lives. When he came back we squatted down, the two of us, beside the dead man to deliberate and what I felt was not so much fear now as sadness, a regular drawing pain of sadness. I felt my mouth become very wide with the sorrow of it and the two of us, looking at the body, suffered silently for a while, the dead man in his silence sending a message to me such as, “Here, man, is your being, which you think so terrific.” And just as silently I replied, “Oh, be quiet, dead man, for Christ’s sake.”
Of one thing I presently became convinced, that the presence of this corpse was a challenge which had to be answered, and I said to Romilayu, “They aren’t going to put this over on me.” I told him what I thought we should do.
“No, sah,” he said intensely.
“I have decided.”
“No, no, we sleep outside.”
“Never,” I said. “It will make me look soft. They’ve unloaded this man on us and the thing for us to do is to give him right back to them.”
Romilayu began to moan again, “Wo, wo! Whut we do, sah?”
“We’ll do as I said. Now pay attention to me. I tell you I see through the whole thing. They may try to hang this on us. How would you like to stand trial?”
Again I spun the lighter with my thumb, and Romilayu and I saw each other under the small pointed orange flame as I held it up. He suffered from terror of the dead, whereas it was the affront, the challenge, that got me most. It seemed to me absolutely necessary to exert myself, as I was horribly stirred. And my mind was resolute; I had decided to drag him out of the hut.
“Okay, let’s pull him out,” I said.
And Romilayu insisted, “No, no. Us go out. I mek you bed on the ground.”
“You’ll do no such thing. I’m going to take him and stick him right in front of the palace. I can hardly believe that Itelo’s friend the king could be involved in any such plot against a visitor.”
Romilayu began to moan again, “Wo, no, no, no! Them catch you.”
“Well, unloading him in front of the palace probably is too chancy,” I conceded. “We’ll lay him down somewhere else. But I can’t bear not to do anything about it.”
“Why you mus’?”
“Because I just must. It’s practically constitutional with me. I can never take such things lying down. They just aren’t going to do this to us,” I said. I was too outraged to be reasoned with. Romilayu put his hands, which, with their shadows, looked like lobsters, to his wrinkled face.
“Wo, dem be trouble.”
The provocation of this corpse to me thrust me to the spirit. I was maddened by his presence. The lighter had grown hot again and I blew it out and said to Romilayu, “This body goes, and right now.”
I myself, this time, went out to reconnoiter.
Up in the heavens it was like a blue forest-so tranquil! Such a tapestry! The moon itself was yellow, an African moon in its peaceful blue forest, not only beautiful but hungering or craving to become even more beautiful. New ideas as to its beauty were coming back continually from the white heads of the mountain. Again I thought I could hear lions, but as though they were muffled in a cellar. However, everyone seemed asleep. I crept by the sleeping doors and about a hundred yards from the house the lane came to an end and I looked down into a ravine. “Good,” I thought. “I’ll dump him in here. Then let them blame me for his death.” In the far end of the ravine burned a herdsman’s fire; Otherwise the place was empty. No doubt rats and other scavenging creatures came and went; they always did but I couldn’t try to bury the fellow. It was not for me to worry about what might happen to him in the darkness of this gully.