The king’s eyes gleamed into mine with such a power of significance that I felt he could, if he wanted to, pass right straight into my soul. He could invest it. I felt this. But because I am ignorant and untutored in higher things-in higher things I am a coarse beginner, because of my abused nature-I didn’t know what to expect. However, under the light of King Dahfu’s eyes I comprehended that in bombing the cistern I had not lost my last chance. No sir. By no means.
Horko, the king’s uncle, was still marshaling the procession. Over the palace walls came howls and sounds surpassing anything I ever heard from mortal throats or lungs. But as soon as there was a lull the king said to me, “I easily gather, Mr. Traveler, that you have set forth to accomplish a very important matter.”
“Right, Your Majesty. One hundred per cent right,” I said, and bowed. “Otherwise I could have stayed in bed and looked at a picture atlas or slides of Angkor Wat. I have a box full of them, in color.”
“Deuce. That is what I meant,” he said. “And you have left your heart with our Arnewi friends. We agree, they are excellent. I even have conjectured if it is environment or nature. Frequently I have inclined to the innate and not the nurture side. Sometimes I would like to see my friend Itelo. I would give away a very dear treasure to hear his voice. Unfortunately I cannot go. My office … official capacity. Good impresses you, eh, Mr. Henderson?”
In the flash of the sun, tiny gold platelets within my eyes blinding me, I nodded. I said, “Yes, Your Highness. No bunk. The true good. The honest-to-God good.”
“Yes, I know how you feel over it,” he said, and spoke with a weird softness or longing. I could never have believed that I could take this from anybody, or would ever have to, and least of all from this person in the royal hammock, with the purple large-brimmed hat, and the teeth sewed onto it, the huge, soft, eccentric eyes tinged very slightly with red, and his pink swelling mouth. “They say,” he went on, “that bad can easily be spectacular, has dash or bravado and impresses the mind quicker than good. Oh, that is a mistake in my opinion. Perhaps of common good it is true. Many, many nice people. Oh yes. Their will tells them to perform good, and they do. How ordinary! Mere arithmetic. ‘I have left undone the etceteras I should have done, and done the etceteras I ought not to have.’ This does not even amount to a life. Oh, how sordid it is to book-keep. My whole view is opposite or contrary, that good cannot be labor or conflict. When it is high and great, it is too superior. Oh, Mr. Henderson, it is far more spectacular. It is associated with inspiration, and not conflict, for where a man conflicts there he will fall, and if taking the sword also perishes by the sword. A dull will produces a very dull good, of no interest. Where a fellow draws a battle line there he is apt to be found, dead, a testimonial of the great strength of effort, and only effort.”
I said eagerly, “Oh King Dahfu-oh, Your Majesty!” He had stirred me so much. By just these few words spoken as he reclined in the hammock. “Do you know the queen over there, that woman of Bittahness, Willatale? She’s Itelo’s aunt, you know. She was going to instruct me in grun-tu-molani, but one thing and another came up, and—”
But the amazons had put their backs to the poles and the hammock rose and moved forward. And the screams, the excitement! The roars, the deep drum noises, as if the animals were speaking again by means of the skins that had once covered their bodies! It was a great release of sound, like Coney Island or Atlantic City or Times Square on New Year’s Eve; at the king’s exit from the gate the great cacophony left all the previous noises in my experience far behind.
Shouting, I asked the king, “Where …?”
I bent very close for the reply. “… possess a special … a place … arena,” he said.
I heard no more. The frenzy was so great it was metropolitan. There was such a whirl of men and women and fetishes, and snarls like dog-beating and whines like sickles sharpening, and horns blasting and blazing into the air, that the scale could not be recorded. The bonds of sound were about to be torn to pieces. I tried to protect my good ear by plugging it with my thumb, and even the defective one had more than it could take. At least a thousand villagers must have been in this mob, most of them naked, many painted and gaudy, all using noisemakers and uttering screams. The weather was heavy, sultry, so that my body itched. It was an ugly, dusty heat, and there were times when my face felt as if wrapped up in serge. But I had no time to take note of discomfort, being carried forward beside the king. The procession entered a stadium-I stretch the term-a big enclosure fenced with wood. Within was a quadruple row of benches cut from the white calcareous stone aforementioned. For the king there was a royal box in which I sat, too, under a canopy with floating ribbons, with wives, officials, and other royalty. The amazons in their corset-like vests and large smooth bodies and delicate, shaved, immense heads, round like melons, oval like cantaloupes, long like squashes, were posted all around. Accompanied by his retinue and umbrellas, Horko bowed and salaamed before the king. The family resemblance between these two suggested that they could communicate thoughts merely by looking at each other; sometimes it is like that. The same noses, the same eyes, the same implied message of the race. So, in a silent manner, Horko appeared to me to urge his royal nephew to do something previously discussed. But by the look of him the king wouldn’t promise a thing. He was in command here; there could never be any question about that.
Carried aloft by four amazons, one at each leg, came the bridge table. On it was the bowl containing two skulls I had seen a short while ago in the royal apartment. But now they had ribbons tied through the eye sockets, very long and gleaming, of a dark blue color. They were set down before the king, who took note of them with one roll of his eyes and looked no more at them. Meantime this huge Horko, all rolled up so that he stood heel to heel in his crimson sheath, the fat crowded upward to his chin and shoulders, took the liberty of mocking my expression. At least I thought I recognized my own scowl on his face. I didn’t mind. I made a short bow to acknowledge that he had taken me off pretty well. And, like the politician he was, he gave me a glad, impudent wave. The colored umbrella wheeled over him and he went back to his box on the king’s left and sat down with the examiner who had kept me waiting last night, the character whom Dahfu called the Bunam, and the wrinkled old black-leather fellow who had sent us into the ambush. The one who had arisen out of the white rocks like the man met by Joseph. Who sent Joseph over to Dothan. Then the brothers saw Joseph and said, “Behold, the dreamer cometh.” Everybody should study the Bible.
Believe me, I felt like a dreamer, and that’s no lie.
“Who is that man all wrinkled like a Greek olive?” I said.
“Beg pardon?” said the king.
“With the Bunam and your uncle.”
“Oh, of course. A senior priest. Diviner of a sort.”
“Yesterday we met him with a twisted stick,” I was saying, when several squads of amazons lined up with muskets and started to aim at the sky. I could not see the.375 anywhere. These large women began to fire salutes, first in honor of the king and the king’s late father, Gmilo, and for various others. Then, so the king told me, there was a salute for me.