“I don’t blame you, sah.”
“Don’t get me wrong. The human race needs guys like this king more than ever. Change must be possible! If not, it’s too damn bad.”
“Yes, sah.”
“Americans are supposed to be dumb but they are willing to go into this. It isn’t just me. You have to think about white Protestantism and the Constitution and the Civil War and capitalism and winning the West. All the major tasks and the big conquests were done before my time. That left the biggest problem of all, which was to encounter death. We’ve just got to do something about it. It isn’t just me. Millions of Americans have gone forth since the war to redeem the present and discover the future. I can swear to you, Romilayu, there are guys exactly like me in India and in China and South America and all over the place. Just before I left home I saw an interview in the paper with a piano teacher from Muncie who became a Buddhist monk in Burma. You see, that’s what I mean. I am a high-spirited kind of guy. And it’s the destiny of my generation of Americans to go out in the world and try to find the wisdom of life. It just is. Why the hell do you think I’m out here, anyway?”
“I don’ know, sah.”
“I wouldn’t agree to the death of my soul.”
“Me Methdous, sah.”
“I know it, but that would never help me, Romilayu. And please don’t try to convert me, I’m in trouble enough as it is.” “I no bothah you.”
“I know. You are standing by me in my hour of trial, God bless you for it. I also am standing by King Dahfu until he captures his father, Gmilo. When I get to be a friend, Romilayu, I am a devoted friend. I know what it is to lie buried in yourself. One thing I have learned, though I am a hard man to educate. I tell you, the king has a rich nature. I wish I could learn his secret” Then Romilayu with the scars shining on his wrinkled face (manifestations of his former savagery) but with soft sympathetic eyes which contained a light that didn’t come from the air (it could never have penetrated the shade, like an umbrella pine, that grew across his low forehead), wanted to know what secret I was trying to get from Dahfu.
“Why,” I said, “there’s something about danger that doesn’t perplex the guy. Look at all the things he has to fear, and still look at the way he lies on that sofa. You’ve never seen that. He has an old green sofa upstairs which must have been brought by the elephants a century ago. And the way he lies on it, Romilayu! And the females wait on him. But on the table near him he has those two skulls used at the rain ceremony, one his father’s and the other his grandfather’s. Are you married, Romilayu?” I asked him.
“Yes, sah, two time. But now got one wife.”
“Why, that’s just like me. And I have five children, including twin boys about four years old. My wife is very big.”
“Me, six children.”
“Do you worry about them? It’s a wild continent still, no two ways about that. I am all the time worrying lest my two little kids wander off in the woods. We ought to get a dog-a big dog. But we’ll be living in town anyway from now on. I am going to go to school. Romilayu, I am going to send a letter to my wife, and you are going to take it to Baventai and mail it. I promised you baksheesh, old man, and here are the papers for the jeep, made over to you. I wish I could take you back to the States with me, but since you have a family it’s not practical.” His face expressed very little pleasure at the gift. It wrinkled especially hard, and as I knew him by now I said, “Hell, man, don’t be toying with tears all the time. What’s to cry over?”
“You in trouble, sah,” he said.
“Yes, I know I am. But since I’m a reluctant type of fellow, life has decided to use strong measures on me. I am a shunner, Romilayu, and so this serves me right. What’s the matter, old pal, do I look bad?”
“Yes, sah.”
“My feelings always did leak into my looks,” I said. “That’s the type of constitution I have. Is it that woman’s head they showed us that worries you?”
“Dem kill you, maybe?” said Romilayu.
“Okay, that Bunam is a bad actor. The guy is a scorpion. But don’t forget I am the Sungo. Doesn’t Mummah protect me? I think maybe my person is sacred. Besides, with my twenty-two neck they’d have to have two guys to strangle me. Ha, ha! You mustn’t worry about me, Romilayu. As soon as this business with the king is completed and I have helped him capture his dad, I’ll join you in Baventai.”
“Please God, ’e mek quick,” said Romilayu.
When I mentioned the Bunam to the king, he laughed at me. “When I possess Gmilo, I am absolute master,” he said.
“But that animal is raging and killing out there in the savanna,” I said, “and you act as though you had him safe in storage already.”
“Lions do not often leave a given locale,” he said. “Gmilo is near here. Any day he will be encountered. Go and write the letter to your missis,” Dahfu told me, laughing very low on his green sofa amid his black troop of nude women.
“I’m going to write to her today,” I said.
So I went down to have lunch with the Bunam and Horko. Horko, the Bunam, and the Bunam’s black-leather man were always waiting for me at the bridge table under the umbrella. “Gentlemen …” “Asi Sungo,” said everyone. I was always aware that these people had heard me roaring and probably could smell the odor of the den on me. But I brazened it out. The Bunam, when he did glance my way, Which was rarely, was very somber. I thought, “I may get you first. No man can know that and you’d better not push me hard.” The behavior of Horko on the other hand was invariably genial, and he hung out his red tongue and leaned over the little table with his knuckles like tree boles until it swayed with his weight. There was an air of intrigue under the transparent silk of the umbrella, while entertainers skipped for us out in the sun and feet flitted in and out of robes as Horko’s people danced to amuse us and the old musician played his pendulum viol and others drummed and blew in the palace junkyard with its petrified brains of white stone and the red flowers growing in the humus.
After lunch came the daily water duty. The laboring women, with deep stress marks on the skin of their shoulders from the poles, carried me out into the lanes of the town where the dust of the ruts was reduced to a powder. The lone drum bumped after me; it seemed to warn people to stay away from this Henderson, the lion-contaminated Sungo. People still came to look at me out of curiosity, but not in their previous numbers, nor did they particularly want to be sprinkled by the crazy rain king. So that when we got to the dunghill at the center of town where the court was situated, I made a point of getting on my feet and sprinkling right and left. This was stoically taken. The magistrate in his crimson gown seemed as if he would have stopped me if he had had the power. However, nothing was done. The prisoner with the forked stick in his mouth leaned his face against the post he was tied to. “I hope you win, pal,” I said to him and got back into my hammock.
That afternoon I wrote to Lily as follows:
“Honey, you are probably worried about me, but I suppose you have known all along that I was alive.” Lily claimed she could always tell how I was. She had some kind of privileged love-intuition. “The flight here was spectacular.” Like hovering all the way inside a jewel.
“We are the first generation to see the clouds from both sides. What a privilege! First people dreamed upward. Now they dream both upward and downward. This is bound to change something, somewhere. For me the entire experience has been similar to a dream. I liked Egypt. Everybody was in basic white rags. From the air the mouth of the Nile looked like raveled rope. In some places the valley was green and it was yellow. The cataracts resembled seltzer. When we landed in Africa itself and Charlie and I put the show on the road, it wasn’t exactly what I had hoped in leaving home.” As I discovered a pestilence when I entered the old lady’s house and realized that I must put forth effort or go down in shame. “Charlie did not relax in Africa. I was reading R. F. Burton’s First Footsteps in East Africa plus Speke’s Journal, and we didn’t see eye to eye about any subject. So we parted company. Burton thought a lot of himself. He was very good with the épée and saber and he spoke everyone’s language. I picture him as resembling General Douglas MacArthur in character, very conscious of having a historical role and thinking of classical Rome and Greece. Personally, I had to decide to follow a different course, as by any civilized standard I am done for. However, the geniuses love common life a great deal.”