“Thank you, Mr. Henderson. I have understood how you feel.” After a quiet hesitation, he said, “Should I guess? Death is on your mind?”
“It’s on my mind, all right.”
“Oh yes, very much. You are exceptionally given to it.”
“Over the years, I’ve gotten involved with it a lot.”
“Exceptionally. Exceptionally,” he said as if he were discussing one of my problems with me. “Sometimes I think it is helpful to think of burial in a relation to the earth’s crust. What is the radius? Four thousand five hundred miles more or less, to the core of the earth. No, graves are not deep but insignificant, a mere few feet from the surface and not far from fearing and desiring. More or less the same fear, more or less the same desire for thousands of generations. Child, father, father, child doing the same. Fear the same. Desire the same. Upon the crust, beneath the crust, again and again and again. Well, Henderson, what are the generations for, please explain to me? Only to repeat fear and desire without a change? This cannot be what the thing is for, over and over and over. Any good man will try to break the cycle. There is no issue from that cycle for a man who do not take things into his hands.”
“Oh, King, wait a minute. Once out of the light, it’s enough. Does it have to be four thousand five hundred miles to be the grave? How can you talk like that?” But I understood him all the same. All you hear from guys is desire, desire, desire, knocking its way out of the breast, and fear, striking and striking. Enough already! Time for a word of truth. Time for something notable to be heard. Otherwise, accelerating like a stone, you fall from life to death. Exactly like a stone, straight into deafness, and till the last repeating I want I want I want, then striking the earth and entering it forever! As a matter of fact, I thought, out in the African sun from which the hooked wall of thorn temporarily cooled me: it’s a pleasure when harsh objects like thorns do something for you. Under the black barbs that the bushes had crocheted above us, I thought it out and agreed: the grave was relatively shallow. You couldn’t go many miles inside before you found the molten part of the earth. Mainly nickel, I think-nickel, cobalt, pitchblende, or what they call the magma. Almost as it was torn from the sun.
“Let us go,” he said. I followed him more willingly after that short talk. He could convince me of almost anything.
For his sake I accepted the discipline of being like a lion. Yes, I thought, I believed I could change; I was willing to overcome my old self; yes, to do that a man had to adopt some new standard; he must even force himself into a part; maybe he must deceive himself a while, until it begins to take; his own hand paints again on that much-painted veil. I would never make a lion, I knew that; but I might pick up a small gain here and there in the attempt.
Anyway, I followed him empty-handed toward the end of the hopo. Probably the lion had already wakened, for the beaters, about three miles away, had begun to make their noise. It sounded very distant, far out in the golden stripes of the bush. An air-blue, sleepy heat wavered in front of us, and while I squinted against the sprays and flashes of sunlight I saw a sudden elevation in the hopo wall. It was a thatched shelter which sat on a platform, twenty-five or thirty feet in the air. A ladder of vines hung down, and the king took hold of it eagerly, this crude, slack-looking thing. He began to climb it sailor fashion, from the side, pulling himself powerfully and steadily up to the platform. From the dry grass and brown fibers of the doorway he said, “Take hold, Mr. Henderson.” He had crouched to hold out the ladder to me and I saw his head, on which was the pleated, tooth-sewn hat, only slightly above his powerful knees. Illness, strangeness, and danger combined and ganged up on me. Instead of an answer, a sob came out of me. It must have been laid down early in my life, for it was stupendous and rose from me like a great sea bubble from the Atlantic floor.
“What is the matter, Mr. Henderson?” Dahfu said. “God knows.”
“Is something wrong with you?”
I kept my head lowered as I shook it. The roaring I had done, I believe, had loosened my whole structure and liberated some things which belonged at the bottom. And this was no time to trouble the king, on his great day of joy.
“I’m coming, Your Highness,” I said.
“Take a moment’s breath if you need it.”
He walked about on the platform under the elevated hut, then came back to the edge again. He looked down from that fragile dome of straw. “Now?” he said.
“Will it bear our weight, up there?”
“Come on, come on, Henderson,” he said.
I took hold of the ladder and began climbing, placing both feet on each rung. The spearmen had stood and waited until I (the Sungo) joined the king. Now they passed under the ladder and took up a position around the corner of the hopo. Here, at the end, the construction was primitive but seemed thorough. A barred gate would be dropped to trap the lion after the other game had been driven through, and the men would prod the animal into position with their spears so that the king could effect the capture.
On the fragile ladder, which wavered under my weight, I reached the platform and sat down on the floor of poles lashed together. It was like a heat-borne raft. I began to size up the situation. The whole setup was no deeper than a thimble when compared to the volume offered by a full-grown lion.
“This is it?” I said to the king after I had studied the layout.
“As you see it,” he said.
Now on the platform stood this shell of straw, and from the opening on the interior side of the hopo I saw suspended a woven cage weighted with rocks at the bottom. It was bell-shaped and made of semi-rigid vines which were, however, as tough as cables. A vine rope passed through a pulley suspended from a pole which was attached at one end to the roof-tree of the hut and at the other was fixed into the side of the cliff, a width of ten or twelve feet. Below it ran another pole from the floor of the hut; it too was set in the rock at the other end. On this pole or catwalk, no wider than my wrist, if that wide, the king would balance himself with the rope and the bell-shaped net, and when the lion was driven in, Dahfu would center the net and let it drop. Releasing his rope, he was supposed to capture the lion.
“This …?”
“What do you think?” he said.
I couldn’t bring myself to say much about it, but, hard as I fought my feelings, I couldn’t submerge them-not on this particular day. I was visibly struggling with them.
He said, “I captured Atti here.”
“Yes, with this same rig?”
“And Gmilo captured Suffo.”
I said, “Take the advice of a … I know that I’m not much … But I think the world of you, Your Highness. Don’t …”
“Why, what is the matter with your chin, Mr. Henderson? It is moving up and down.”
I brought my upper teeth down on my lip. By and by I said, “Your Highness, excuse it. I’d rather cut my throat than demoralize you on a day like this. But does the thing have to be done from up here?”
“It must.”
“Can’t there be an innovation? I’d do anything, drug the animal … give him a Mickey …”
“Thank you, Henderson,” he said. I think his gentleness with me was more than I deserved. He didn’t remind me in so many words that he was king of the Wariri. I soon reminded myself of this fact. He allowed me to be present-his companion. I must not interfere.
“Oh, Your Majesty,” I said.
“Yes, Henderson, I know. You are a man of many qualities, I have observed,” he said.
“I thought maybe I fitted into one of your bad types,” I said.
At this he laughed somewhat. He was sitting cross-legged at the opening of the hut that faced the hopo and the cliff, and he began to enumerate, half musingly, “The agony, the appetite, the immune, the hollow, and all of that. No, I promise you, Henderson, that I have never classified you with a bad group. You are a compound. Maybe a large amount of agony. Maybe a small touch of the Lazarus. But I cannot fully subsume you. No rubric will fully hold you. Maybe because we are friends. One sees much more in a friend. Rubrics will not do with friends.”