The champion tipped Hummat back on his shoulder, and carried the mountain god twenty feet. Among the rest, he set him down on his base. Winded, the man now turned and looked back at Mummah, alone in the middle of the ring. She was even bigger than Hummat. Amid the applause the champion looked her over. And she awaited him. She was very obese, not to say hideous, this female power. They had made her very ponderous, and the strong man facing her seemed already daunted. Not that she forbade you to try. No, in spite of her hideousness she seemed pretty tolerant, even happy-go-lucky like most of the gods. However, she appeared to express confidence in her immovability. The crowd was egging him on, everyone standing; even Horko and his friends in their own box were on foot. His umbrella now threw a shadow of old rose, and in his tight red robe he held out his stout arm and pointed at Mummah with his thumb-that great, wooden, happy Mummah, whose knees gave a little under the weight of her breasts and belly so that she had to spread her fingers on her thighs for support. And, as gross women sometimes do, she had elegant, graceful hands. She awaited the man who would move her.
“You can do her, guy,” I too shouted. I asked the king, “What is this fellow’s name?”
“The strong man? Oh, that is Turombo.”
“What’s the matter, doesn’t he think he can move her?”
“Evidently he lacks confidence. Every year he can move Hummat, but not Mummah.”
“Oh, he must be able to.”
“Just the contrary, I fear,” said the king, in his curious, singsong, nasal, African English. His large, swelled lips were more red than was the case with others of his tribe. Consequently his mouth was more visible than mouths usually are. “This man, as you see, is powerful, and a good man, as I believe I overheard you to exclaim. But when he has moved Hummat, he is worn out, and this is annual. Do you see, Hummat has to be moved first, as otherwise he would not permit the clouds passage over the mountains.”
Benevolent Mummah, her fat face shone to the sun with splendor. Her tresses of wood were like a stork’s nest and broadened upward-a homely, happy, stupid, patient figure, she invited Turombo or any other champion to try his strength.
“You know what it is?” I said to the king. “It’s the memory of past defeats-past defeats, you can ask me about this problem of past defeats. Brother, I could really tell you. But that’s what got him. I just know it.”
Turombo, a very short man for his girth and strength, really seemed to be bucking a whole lot of trouble. Those eyes of his, which had grown large and humid with strain when he took a grip on Hummat, now wore a duller light. He was prepared for failure and the motion of his eyes, rolling at us and at the crowd, showed it. This, I want to tell you, I hated to see. Anyway, he tipped his fez to the king with a gesture of dedication that already acknowledged defeat. He had no illusions about Mummah. Nevertheless, he was going to try. He gave his short beard a rub with his knuckles, walking toward her slowly and sizing her up with a view to doing business.
Ambition must have played a very small role in Turombo’s life. Whereas in my breast there was a flow-no, that’s too limited-there opened up an estuary, a huge bay of hope and ambition. For here was my chance. I knew I could do this. Ye gods! I was shivering and cold. I simply knew that I could lift up Mummah, and I flowed, I burned to go out there and do it. Craving to show what was in me, burning like that bush I had set afire with my Austrian lighter for the Arnewi children. Stronger than Turombo I certainly was. And in the process of proving it, should my heart be ruptured, should the old sack split, okay, then let me die. I didn’t care any more. I had longed to do some good to the Arnewi when I arrived and saw their distress. Instead of accomplishing which, I had rashly brought down the full weight of my blind will and ambition upon those frogs. I arrived clothed in light, or thinking so, and I departed draped in shadow and darkness, humiliated, so that perhaps it would have been better to obey my first impulse on arrival, when the young woman burst into tears and I said to myself maybe I should cast away my gun and my fierceness and go into the wilderness until I was fit to meet humankind again. My longing to perform a benefit there, because I was so taken with the Arnewi, and especially old blind-eye Willatale, was sincere and intense, but it was not even a ripple on the desire I felt now in the royal box beside the semi-barbarous king in his trousers and purple velvet hat. So inflamed was my wish to do something. For I saw something I could do. Let these Wariri whom so far (with the corpses in the night and all in all) I didn’t care for-let them be worse than the sons of Sodom and Gomorrah combined, I still couldn’t pass up this opportunity to do, and to distinguish myself. To work the right stitch into the design of my destiny before it was too late. So I was glad that Turombo was so meek. I thought he’d better be meek. Even before he had touched Mummah he had implicitly confessed he would never be able to budge her. And that was the way I wanted it. She was mine! And I wanted to say to the king, “I can do it. Let me in there.” However, these words found no utterance, for Turombo had already come upon the goddess from behind. He took a lifting stance, crouching, while he folded his thick arms about her belly. Then beside her hip there appeared his face. It was filled with effort, preparation for strain, fear and suffering, as if Mummah, toppling, might crush him beneath her weight. However, she now began to move in his embrace. The stork’s nest, her wooden tresses, tipped and swayed like a horizon at sea in rough weather when you stand in the bow of the ship. I put it like that as I felt this motion in my stomach. Turombo heaved from the base like a man trying to uproot an old tree. This was how he labored. But though he shook the old girl he couldn’t raise her base from the ground.
The crowd razzed him as he acknowledged at last that this was beyond his strength. He simply couldn’t do it. And I rejoiced at the guy’s failure. Which is a hell of a thing to admit, but it happens to have been the case. “Good man,” I thought to myself. “You are strong but it so happens I am stronger. It’s not a personal matter at all. It’s only the fates-they willed it. As in the case of Itelo. This is a job for me. Yield, yield! Cede! Because here comes Henderson! Just let me get my hands on that Mummah, and by God …!”
I said to Dahfu, “I’m real sorry he didn’t make it. It must be tough on him.”
“Oh, it was foregone he could not,” said King Dahfu. “I was certain.”
Then I began in deepest, grimmest earnest, as only I can be grim, “Your Majesty—” I was excited to the bursting point. I swelled, I was sick, and my blood circulated peculiarly through my body-it was turbid and ecstatic both. It prickled within my face, especially in the nose, as if it might begin to discharge itself there. And as though a crown of gas were burning from my head, so I was tormented. And I said, “Sir, sire, I mean … let me! I must.”
If the king made an answer I couldn’t have heard it just then, because I saw only one face in this hot and dry air, off to my left and deaf to the raging cries made by the crowd against Turombo. A face concentrated exclusively upon me, so that it was detached from all the world. This was the face of the examiner, the guy I had dealt with last night, the man Dahfu called the Bunam. That face! A stare of wrinkled and everlasting human experience was formed on it. I could feel myself how charged those veins of his must be. Ah, holy God! The guy was speaking to me, inexorable. By the furrows of his face and the pressure of his brows and the fullness of his veins he was conveying a message to me. And what he was saying I knew. I heard it. The silent speech of the world to which my most secret soul listened continually now came to me with spectacular clarity. Within — within I heard. Oh, what I heard! The first stern word was Dummy! I was greatly shaken by this. And yet there was something there. It was true. And I was obliged, it was my bounden duty to hear. And nevertheless you are a man. Listen! Harken unto me, you shmohawk! You are blind. The footsteps were accidental and yet the destiny could be no other. So now do not soften, oh no, brother, intensify rather what you are. This is the one and only ticket-intensify. Should you be overcome, you slob, should you lie in your own fat blood senseless, unconscious of nature whose gift you have betrayed, the world will soon take back what the world unsuccessfully sent forth. Each peculiarity is only one impulse of a series from the very heart of things-that old heart of things. The purpose will appear at last though maybe not to you. The voice did not sink away. It just stopped. Just like that, it finished what it had to say.