So I was brooding in my palace room when Tatu came in, wearing the ancient Italian garrison cap. Thinking this was the daily summons to join the king in the den, I heavily got up, but she began to tell me by word and gesture that I should stay where I was and wait for the king. He was coming.
“What’s up?” I said. However, nobody could explain, and I tidied myself a little in anticipation of the king’s visit; I had let myself grow filthy and bearded, as it was scarcely suitable to get all cleaned up in order to stand on all fours, roaring and tearing the earth. Today, however, I went to Mummah’s cistern and washed my face, my neck, and my ears and let the sun dry me on the threshold of my apartment. It soon did. Meanwhile I regretted that I had sent Romilayu away so soon, for this morning brought to mind more things that I should have told Lily. That wasn’t all I had to say, I thought. I love her. By God! I goofed again. But I didn’t have much time to spend on regret, for Tatu was coming toward me across the rough yard of the palace, gesturing with both arms and saying, “Dahfu. Dahfu alamele.” I rose and she led me through the passages of the ground floor to the king’s outdoor court. Already he was in his hammock, under the purple shadow of his giant silk umbrella. He held his velvet hat in his fist and beckoned with it, and when he saw me above him his swelled lips opened. He fitted the hat over his raised knee and said, smiling, “I suppose you gather what day it is.”
“I figure—”
“Yes, it is the day. Lion day for me.”
“This is it, eh?”
“Bait has been eaten by a young male. He fit the description of Gmilo.”
“Well, it must be great,” I said, “to think you are going to be reunited with a dear parent. I only wish such a thing could happen to me.”
“Well, Henderson,” he said (this morning he took an exceptional pleasure in my company and conversation), “do you believe in immortality?”
“There’s many a soul that would tell you it could never stay another round with life,” I said.
“Do you really say so? But you know more of the world than I do. However, Henderson, my good friend, this is a high occasion for me.”
“Is there a good chance that it is your dad, the late king? I wish I had known. I wouldn’t have sent Romilayu away. He left this morning, Your Highness. Could we send a runner after him?”
The king paid no attention to this, and I figured his excitement was running too high to allow him to consider my practical arrangements. What was Romilayu to him on a day like this?
“You will share the hopo with me,” he said, and, although I didn’t know what this meant, I of course agreed. My own umbrella approached, this hollow or sheath of green with transverse fibers in the silk transparency which helped to convince me that it was no vision but an object, for why should a vision bother to have such transverse lines? Eh? The pole was held by big female hands. Bearers brought my hammock.
“Do we go after the lion in a hammock?” I said.
“When we reach the bush we will continue on our feet,” he said.
So I got into the hammock of the Sungo with one of those heavy utterances of mine, sinking into it. It looked to me as if the two of us were going out barehanded to capture the animal-this lion, that had eaten the old bull, and was sleeping deeply somewhere in the standing grass.
Shaven-headed women flitted near us, shrill and nervous, and a gaudy crowd had collected, just as on the day of the rain ceremony-drummers, men in paint, shells, and feathers, and buglers who blew some practice blasts. The bugles were about a foot long and had big mouths of green oxide metal. They made a devil of a blast, like the taunt of fear, those instruments. So with the bugles and drums and rattles and noisemakers of the beaters’ party gathered around us, we were carried through the gates of the palace. The arms of the amazons shook with the strain of lifting me. Various people came and looked at me as we were going into the town; they gazed down into the hammock. Among them were the Bunam and Horko, the latter expecting me, I felt, to say something to him. However, I didn’t say a word.
I looked back at them with my huge red face. The beard had begun to grow out like a broom and the fever, which had gone up again, affected my eyes and ears. A tremor in the cheeks occasionally surprised me; I could do nothing about this, and I reckoned that under the influence of lions the nerves of my jaws and nose and chin were undergoing an unsettling change. The Bunam had come in order to communicate with me or warn me; I could see that. I wanted to demand my H and H Magnum with the scope sights from him but of course I didn’t have the words for “give” and “gun.” The women struggled with my weight and the hammock bulged out greatly at the bottom and nearly touched the ground. The poles were almost too much for their shoulders as they carried the brutal white rain king with his swarthy, reddened face and dirty helmet and gaudy pants and big, hairy shins. The people whooped and clapped and leaped up and down in their rags and hides, flaunting pieces of dyed hair as pennants, women with babies that swung at their long spongy breasts and fellows with teeth broken or missing. As far as I could tell they were not enthusiastic for the king; they demanded that he bring home Gmilo, the right lion, and get rid of the sorceress, Atti. Without a sign he passed among them in his hammock. I knew his face was bathed by the shadow of the purple umbrella, and he was wearing his large velvet hat, as attached to it as I was to the helmet. Hat, hair, and face were in close union under the tinged light of the silk arch, and he lay and rested with that same sumptuous ease which I had admired from the beginning. Above him, as above me, strange hands clasped the ornamented pole of the umbrella. The sun now shone with power and covered the mountains and the stones close at hand with shimmering layers. Near to the ground it was about to materialize into gold leaf. The huts were holes of darkness and the thatch had a sick, broken radiance over it.
Until we got to the town limits I kept saying to myself, “Reality! Oh, reality! Damn you anyhow, reality!”
In the bush the women set me down and I stepped from the hammock onto the blazing ground. This was the hard-packed white, solar-looking rock. The king, too, was standing. He looked back at the crowd, which had remained near the wall of the town. With the game-beaters was the Bunam, and, following very closely, a white creature, a man completely dyed or calcimined. Under the coat of chalk I recognized him. It was the Bunam’s man, the executioner. I identified him by the folds of his narrow face in this white metamorphosis.
“What’s the idea of this?” I asked, going up to Dahfu over the packed stone and the stubble of weeds.
“No idea,” the king said.
“Is he always like this at a lion hunt?”
“No. Different days, different colors, according to the reading of the omens. White is not the best omen.”
“What are they trying to pull off here? They’re giving you a bad send-off.”
The king behaved as though he could not be bothered. Any human lion would have done as he did. Nevertheless he was irritated if not pierced by this. I made a very heavy half turn to stare at this ill-omened figure that had come to injure the king’s self-confidence on the eve of this event, reunion with the soul of his father. “This whitewash is serious?” I said to the king.
Widely separated, his eyes had two separate looks; as I spoke to him they mingled again into one. “They intend it so.”
“Sire,” I said, “you want me to do something?”
“What thing?”
“You name it. On a day like this to be interfered with is dangerous, isn’t it? It ought to be dangerous for them, too.”