I took a fold of my gaudy pants to wipe my face which, 195 due to the fever, was ominously dry. Just then I should have been pouring sweat.
“And still,” he said, “Gmilo must be taken. I will capture him.”
“I wish you loads of luck.” He then took me by the wrist with a sharp pressure and said, “I would not blame you, Mr. Henderson, for wishing this to be delusion or a hallucination. But for my sake, as you have applied to me for reciprocal truth-telling, I request you to be patient and keep a firm hold.”
About a handful of sulfa pills would do me a lot of good, I thought.
“Oh, Mr. Henderson-Sungo,” he said, after a long instant of thought, keeping his uncanny pressure on my wrist-there was seldom any abruptness in what he did. “Yes, I easily could understand that-delusion, imagination, dreaming. However, this is not dreaming and sleeping, but waking. Ha, ha! Men of most powerful appetite have always been the ones to doubt reality the most. Those who could not bear that hopes should turn to misery, and loves to hatreds, and deaths and silences, and so on. The mind has a right to its reasonable doubts, and with every short life it awakens and sees and understands what so many other minds of equally short life span have left behind. It is natural to refuse belief that so many small spans should have made so glorious one large thing. That human creatures by pondering should be correct. This is what makes a fellow gasp. Yes, Sungo, this same temporary creature is a master of imagination. And right now this very valuable possession appears to make him die and not to live. Why? It is astonishing what a fact that is. Oh, what a distressing picture, Henderson,” he said. “To come to the upshot, do not doubt me, Dahfu, Itelo’s friend, your friend. For you and I have become united as friends and you must give me your confidence.”
“That’s okay by me, Your Royal Highness,” I said. “That suits me down to the ground. I don’t understand you yet, but I am willing to go along on suspended judgment. And don’t worry too much about the hallucination possibility. When you come right down to it, there aren’t many guys who have stuck with real life through thick and thin, like me. It’s my most basic loyalty. From time to time I’ve lost my head, but I’ve always made a comeback, and by God, it hasn’t been easy, either. But I love the stuff. Grun-tu-molani!”
“Yes,” he said, “indeed so. This is an attitude which I endorse. Grun-tu-molani. But in what shape and form? Now, Mr. Henderson, I am convinced you are a man of wide and spacious imagination, and that also you need … You particularly need.”
“Need is on the right track,” I said. “The form it actually takes is, I want, I want.”
Astonished, he asked me, “Why, what is that?”
“There’s something in me that keeps that up,” I said. “There have been times when it hardly ever let me alone.”
This struck him full-on, so to speak, and he sat perfectly still with his hands mounted on his large thighs, and his face with his high-rising mouth and his wide, open-nostriled, polished nose looking at me.
“And you hear this?”
“I used to hear it practically all the time,” I said.
In a low tone he said, “What is it? Demanding birthright? How strange! This is a very impressive manifestation. I have no memory of a previous description of it. Has it ever said what it wants?”
“No,” I said, “never. I haven’t been able to get it to name names.”
“So extraordnary,” he said, “and terribly painful, eh? But it will persist until you have replied, I gather. I am touched to hear about it. And whatever it is, how hungry it must be. The resemblance is also to a long prison term. But you say it will not declare which want it wants? Nor give specific directions either to live or to die?”
“Well, I have been threatening suicide a lot, Your Highness. Every once in a while something gets into me and I throw my weight around and threaten my wife with blowing my brains out. No, I could never get it to say what it wants, and so far I have provided only what it does not want.”
“Oh, death from what we do not want is the most common of all the causes. Well, this is such a remarkable phenomenon, isn’t it, Henderson? How much better I can interpret now why you succeeded with Mummah. Solely on the basis of that imprisoned want.”
I cried, “Oh, can you see that now, Your Royal Highness? Really? I’m so grateful, you can’t have any idea. Why, I can hardly see straight.” And that was a fact. A spirit of love and gratitude was moving and pressing and squeezing unbearably inside me. “You want to know what this experience means to me? Why talk about its being strange or illusion? I know it’s no illusion when I can speak straight out and tell you what it has been to hear, I want, I want, going on and on. With this to lean on I don’t have to worry about hallucinations. I know in my bones that what moves me so is the straight stuff. Before I left home I read in a magazine that there are flowers in the desert (that’s the Great American Desert) that bloom maybe once in forty or fifty years. It all depends on the amount of rainfall. Now according to this article, you can take the seeds and put them in a bucket of water, but they won’t germinate. No, sir, Your Highness, soaking in water won’t do it. It has to be the rain coming through the soil. It has to wash over them for a certain number of days. And then for the first time in fifty or sixty years you see lilies and larkspurs and such. Roses. Wild peaches.” I was very much choked up toward the end, and I said hoarsely, “The magazine was the Scientific American. I think I told you, Your Highness, my wife subscribes to it. Lily. She has a very lively and curious mi—” Mind was what I wished to say. To speak of Lily also moved me very greatly.
“I understand you, Henderson,” he said with gravity. “Well, we have a certain mutual comprehension or entente.”
“King, thanks,” I said. “All right, we’re beginning to get somewhere.”
“For a while I request you to reserve the thanks. I have to ask first for your patient confidence. Plus, at the very outset, I request you to believe that I did not leave the world and return to my Wariri with an aim of withdrawal.”
I might as well say at this place that he had a hunch about the lions; about the human mind; about the imagination, the intelligence, and the future of the human race. Because, you see, intelligence is free now (he said), and it can start anywhere or go anywhere. And it is possible that he lost his head, and that he was carried away by his ideas. This was because he was no mere dreamer but one of those dreamer-doers, a guy with a program. And when I say that he lost his head, what I mean is not that his judgment abandoned him but that his enthusiasms and visions swept him far out.
XVII
The king had said that he welcomed my visit because of the opportunity for conversation it gave him, and that was no lie. We talked and talked and talked, and I can’t pretend that I completely understood him. I can only say I suspended judgment, listening carefully and bearing in mind how he had warned me that the truth might come in forms for which I was unprepared.
So I will give you a rough summary of his point of view. He had some kind of conviction about the connection between insides and outsides, especially as applied to human beings. And as he had been a zealous student and great reader he had held down the job of janitor in his school library up there in Syria, and sat after closing hours filling his head with out-of-the-way literature. He would say, for instance, “James, Psychology, a very attractive book.” He had studied his way through a load of such books. And what he was engrossed by was a belief in the transformation of human material, that you could work cither way, either from the rind to the core or from the core to the rind; the flesh influencing the mind, the mind influencing the flesh, back again to the mind, back once more to the flesh. The process as he saw it was utterly dynamic. Thinking of mind and flesh as I knew them, I said, “Are you really and truly sure it’s like that, Your Highness?”