Last year Morris had regarded this passage as a disappointing one, after the reverberant nastiness of the scene in which Na!ar’s grandmother’s second brother had gathered and prepared the poisons, and the barbaric clutter of the preparations for the hunt. This time he listened with increasing absorption to the sparsely ornamented lines that brought the two heroes together for their necessary deaths.
One of the traditional adornments employed by the makers of the marsh songs was a patterned arrangement and modulation of the successive relation-roots; even an apparently artless lyric would on inspection turn out to contain, for instance, three sections, the outer two using a series of roots in the same order and the central one reversing them. There was none of that in the description of the duel. Word-group after word-group clustered round the same root, the strong (or willed) transitive. The groups themselves were unusually short, the nominal and adjectival elements always the commonest of many possible synonyms, inflected very straightforwardly—straightforwardly, that is, for a language in which it was possible to inflect the nominal element “cheese” so that three syllables meant “the first-pressing cheese made last drought from the milk of my elder brother’s three-year-old buffalo”. As the heroes closed, the language became drier still.
Nillum rode by the reeds.
His servants and his friends were far behind him,
Hunting a different boar.
Hidden in the winter reeds Na!ar waited.
His spear-thrower was hard in his hand.
The tip of his spear glistened with fresh poison.
He moved like a fisherman,
An old fisherman who creeps to spear a quick fish.
Nillum rode by the reeds. He reined in his horse.
Na!ar sprang up. He threw his spear.
He shouted with joy to see it fly straight.
Nillum heard the shout . . .
Of course the story carried the listener through. Cynical calculation? If your material is all blood and drama, it’s a waste to put frills on it, because no one will notice them? But to a man of Morris’s temperament the whole passage seemed to prove that he was listening to the work of a truly potent artist, a forgotten savage who had understood the essential nature of action, its drabness, the perfunctoriness of muscle-movements compared with the salivating torments of anticipation and the long, rich pastures of regret.
The expressionless clay mask chanted on. The voice of the main singer was expressionless too, telling, as if in a stone frieze, the precise cruelties that the two heroes dealt each other until both were dying.
Na!ar dragged himself through the reed-bed
Using only his arms.
The barbs of his own spear held fast in his liver.
The spear-shaft caught and dragged among the reed-roots.
Where clear water gleamed he lay still.
He saw the piebald horse wallow away, saddle empty.
He saw Nillum kneeling in the water.
He felt the poison-creatures beginning to suck up his soul.
Words then Na!ar, shield of the people, spoke.
Morris thrilled to the grammatical surprise, though he was ready for it, the sudden, rare null-root, the expression of general and involuntary action, contorted almost to the end of the longest word-group for many minutes. He was quite sure that the effect was intentionaclass="underline" the fight itself had been a personal matter between two men, moving their own limbs at their own will; but now a different power stirred in Na!ar’s dying mouth, as large and impersonal as the movement of the floodwaters or the return of day, for which the null-transitive root was invariably used. A series of heavy strokes on the slack-stringed harps seemed to underline the effect and at the same time to usher in another procession of dishes to fill the interval before the cryptic exchange of oaths and absolutions that actually embodied the ancient treaty.
Shivery and sighing Morris switched his tape-recorder off. In an attempt to protect his inner silence from any idiot who might want to break in with gossip or comment he pretended to be absorbed in the ridiculous architecture of the Council Chamber.
Even the Sultan was a bit ashamed of the Council Chamber; he would never explain quite how it had been designed, but Morris’s own theory was that the architects had been told to go to Oxford and Cambridge and produce a large room that combined all the most striking features of various college dining halls—though it looked as though they might have strayed into a few chapels as well. In some ways they had been ingenious, adapting the idea of a music gallery to make the place whence the women could watch from behind a screen (carved into a uniquely eclectic Gothic-Arabic design) their lord gobbling. No use had been found for the pendulous great nodules of plaster that hung from the fan vaulting—unless there were secret switches that enabled the Sultan to release them like bombs on to the unwelcome guest. The stained-glass windows had to be lit by an electric sun, because the chamber had no outside walls. The chandeliers were certainly very fine. But everything had somehow been thrown out of proportion partly (Morris suspected) because the Sultan had at a late moment decided to add a few feet to the dimensions here and there, and partly because of the tables. Perhaps it is impossible to design a room which will look right when all the furniture consists of one low throne, a lot of cushions, and five enormous black oak tables only eighteen inches high; Morris was actually beginning to wonder about this as he came out of his trance when the persistent litigant on the far side of bin Zair belched so loudly that he woke himself up. Bin Zair turned pointedly away from him, so could hardly avoid addressing Morris.
“I will come and see the animals to-morrow morning,” he said. “Thus we will settle this matter.”
“I am your debtor already,” said Morris.
“It is convenient,” explained bin Zair. “These Yemenis are slave-merchants; thus I can buy what you need, or order it if they do not have the stock in hand.”
He was turning away but the litigant, quite unrebuffed, was still there waiting his chance. Bin Zair half rose from his cushions so that he could resettle with his back completely towards the man, which brought him directly opposite the tape-recorder.
“What is the machine?” he asked.
Morris explained, adding that he already had a tape of the Testament, but that the quality was poor as last year he had been sitting further away.
“And what use do you make of these howlings?” asked bin Zair when he had finished.
“I have learnt the language. I find it very interesting.”
Bin Zair nodded like a grave goat.
“I have lived all my life at the edge of the marshes,” he said. “But I have learnt no more of their language than is needed for various ceremonies.”
“You have been busy with greater matters, no doubt.”
“Perhaps.”
At last the litigant rose and stalked away. Bin Zair bowed with great politeness to Morris but closed the conversation, which was a relief. As Morris settled to brooding on the passage they had just heard, he realised that it had been at this point in the feast last year that he had seen Kwan’s lined face glistening with tears, glistening like the spear in the song and the other spear which lay crosswise on top of the primitive offerings, its point looking as though it had been dipped in the blackest of black treacle. He wondered to whom else, now, the song had such a fierce meaning—none of the Arabs; not the Sultan who, Morris already knew, claimed to speak the language when in fact he had only an ill-accented smattering; Dyal, of course, and the new black giant sitting on the mat behind Prince Hadiq on the far side of the room; Morris himself, in his academic way; and (strange, strange) the eight women whom Morris had never seen, sitting up in the screened gallery, stinking of rancid milk. For them, perhaps, each syllable meant the stench of the lagoons, and the smoke of dried buffalo dung filling reed huts, and fevered babies muttering in the moist dark, and fighting duck, and home.