I had gotten more of a result than I could have known in the first instants, and instead of an answering cry I heard shrieks from the natives, and looking to see what was the matter I found that the dead frogs were pouring out of the cistern together with the water. The explosion had blasted out the retaining wall at the front end. The big stone blocks had fallen and the yellow reservoir was emptying fast. “Oh! Hell!” I grabbed my head, immediately dizzy with the nausea of disaster, seeing the water spill like a regular mill race with the remains of those frogs. “Hurry, hurry!” I started to yell. “Romilayu! Itelo! Oh, Judas priest, what’s happening! Give a hand. Help, you guys, help!” I threw myself down against the escaping water and tried to breast it back and lift the stones into place. The frogs charged into me like so many prunes and fell into my pants and into the open shoe, the lace gone. The cattle started to riot, pulling at their tethers and straining toward the water. But it was polluted and nobody would allow them to drink. It was a moment of horror, with the cows of course obeying nature and the natives begging them and weeping, and the whole reservoir going into the ground. The sand got it all. Romilayu waded up beside me and did his best, but these blocks of stone were beyond our strength and because of the cistern’s being also a dam we were downstream, or however the hell it was. Anyway, the water was lost—lost! In a matter of minutes I saw (sickening!) the yellow mud of the bottom and the dead frogs settling there. For them death was instantaneous by shock and it was all over. But the natives, the cows leaving under protest, moaning for the water! Soon everyone was gone except for Itelo and Mtalba.
“Oh, God, what’s happened?” I said to them. “This is ruination. I have made a disaster.” And I pulled up my wet and stained T-shirt and hid my face in it. Thus exposed, I said through the cloth, “Itelo, kill me! All I’ve got to offer is my life. So take it. Go ahead, I’m waiting.”
I listened for his approach but all I could hear, instead of footsteps, were the sounds of heartbreak that escaped from Mtalba. My belly hung forth and I was braced for the blow of the knife.
“Mistah Henderson. Sir! What has happened?”
“Stab me,” I said, “don’t ask me. Stab, I say. Use my knife if you haven’t got your own. It’s all the same,” I said, “and don’t forgive me. I couldn’t stand it. I’d rather be dead.”
This was nothing but God’s own truth, as with the cistern I had blown up everything else, it seemed. And so I held my face in the bagging, sopping shirt with the unbearable complications at heart. I waited for Itelo to cut me open, my naked middle with all its fevers and its suffering prepared for execution. Under me the water of the cistern was turning to hot vapor and the sun was already beginning to corrupt the bodies of the frog dead.
X
I heard Mtalba crying, “Aii, yelli, yelli.”
“What is she saying?” I asked Romilayu.
“She say, goo’by. Fo’ evah.”
And Itelo in a trembling voice said to me, “You please, Mistab Henderson, covah down you face.”
I asked, “What’s the matter? You’re not going to take my life?”
“No, no, you won me. You want to die, you got to die you’self. You are a friend.”
“Some friend,” I said.
I could hear that he was speaking against a great pressure in his throat; the lump in it must have been enormous. “I would have laid down my life to help you,” I said. “You saw how long I held that bomb. I wish it had gone off in my hands and blown me to smashes. It’s the same old story with me; as soon as I come amongst people I screw something up—I goof. They were right to cry when I showed up. They must have smelled trouble and knew that I would cause a disaster.”
Under cover of the shirt, I gave in to my emotions, the emotion of gratitude included. I demanded, “Why for once, just once!, couldn’t I get my heart’s desire? I have to be doomed always to bungle.” And I thought my life-pattern stood revealed, and after such a revelation death might as well ensue as not.
But as Itelo would not stab me, I pulled down the cistern-stained shirt and said, “Okay, Prince, if you don’t want my blood on your hands.”
“No, no,” he said.
And I said, “Then thanks, Itelo. I’ll just have to try to carry on from here.”
Then Romilayu muttered, “Whut we do, sah?”
“We will leave, Romilayu. It’s the best contribution I can make now to the welfare of my friends. Good-by, Prince. Good-by, dear lady, and tell the queen good-by. I hoped to learn the wisdom of life from her but I guess I am just too rash. I am not fit for such companionship. But I love that old woman. I love all you folks. God bless you all. I’d stay,” I said, “and at least repair your cistern for you …”
“Bettah you not, sir,” said Itelo.
I took his word for it; after all, he knew the situation best. And moreover I was too heartbroken to differ with him. Romilayu went back to the hut to collect our stuff while I walked out of the deserted town. There was not a soul in any of the lanes, and even the cattle had been pulled indoors so that they would not have to see me again. I waited by the wall of the town and when Romilayu showed up we went back into the desert together. This was how I left in disgrace and humiliation, having demolished both their water and my hopes. For now I’d never learn more about the grun-tu-molani.
Naturally Romilayu wanted to go back to Baventai and I said to him that I knew he had fulfilled his contract. The jeep was his whenever he wanted it. “However,” I asked, “how can I go back to the States now? Itelo wouldn’t kill me. He’s a noble character and friendship means something to him. But I might as well take this .375 and blow my brains out on the spot as go home.”
“Whut you mean, sah?” said Romilayu, much puzzled.
“I mean, Romilayu, that I went into the world one last time to accomplish certain purposes, and you saw for yourself what has happened. So if I quit at this time I’ll probably turn into a zombie. My face will become as white as paraffin, and I’ll lie on my bed until I croak. Which is maybe no more than I deserve. So it’s your choice. I can’t give any orders now and I leave it up to you. If you are going to Baventai it will be by yourself.”
“You go alone, sah?” he said, surprised at me.
“If I have to, yes, pal,” I said. “For I can’t turn back. It’s okay. I have a few rations and four one-thousand-dollar bills in my hat, and I guess I can find food and water on the way. I can eat locusts. If you want my gun you can have that too.”
“No,” said Romilayu, after thinking briefly about it. “You no go alone, sah.”
“You’re a pretty regular guy. You’re a good man, Romilayu. I may be nothing but an old failure, having muffed just about everything I ever put my hand to; I seem to have the Midas touch in reverse, so my opinion may not be worth having, but that’s what I think. So,” I said, “what’s ahead of us? Where’ll we go?”
“I no know,” said Romilayu. “Maybe Wariri?” he said.
“Oh, the Wariri. Prince Itelo went to school with their king—what’s his name?”
“Dahfu.”
“That’s it, Dahfu. Well, then, shall we go in that direction?”
Reluctantly Romilayu said, “Okay, sah.” He seemed to have his doubts about his own suggestion.
I picked up more than my share of the burden and said, “Let’s go. We may not decide to enter their town. We’ll see how we feel about that later. But let’s go. I haven’t got much hope, but all I know is that at home I’d be a dead man.”
Thus we started off toward the Wariri while I was thinking about the burial of Oedipus at Colonus—but he at least brought people luck after he was dead. At that time I might almost have been willing to settle for this.
We traveled eight or ten days more, through country very like the Hinchagara plateau. After the fifth or sixth day the character of the ground changed somewhat. There was more wood on the mountains, although mostly the slopes were still sterile. Mesas and hot granites and towers and acropolises held onto the earth; I m
ean they gripped it and refused to depart with the clouds which seemed to be trying to absorb them. Or maybe in my melancholy everything looked cocksy-worsy to me. This marching over difficult terrain didn’t bother Romilayu, who was as much meant for such travel as a deckhand is meant to be on the water. Cargo or registry or destination makes little difference in the end. With those skinny feet he covered ground and to him this activity was self-explanatory. He was very skillful at finding water and knew where he could stick a straw into the soil and get a drink, and he would pick up gourds and other stuff I would never even have noticed and chew them for moisture and nourishment. At night we sometimes talked. Romilayu was of the opinion that with their cistern empty the Arnewi would probably undertake a trek for water. And remembering the frogs and many things besides I sat beside the fire and glowered at the coals, thinking of my shame and ruin, but a man goes on living and, living, things are either better or worse to a fellow. This will never stop, and all survivors know it. And when you don’t die of a trouble somehow you begin to convert it—make use of it, I mean.
Giant spiders we saw, and nets set up like radar stations among the cactuses. There were ants in these parts whose bodies were shaped like diabolos and their nests made large gray humps on the landscape. How ostriches could bear to run so hard in this heat I never succeeded in understanding. I got close enough to one to see how round his eyes were and then he beat the earth with his feet and took off with a hot wind in his feathers, a rusty white foam behind.
Sometimes after Romilayu had prayed at night and lain down I would keep him awake telling him the story of my life, to see whether this strange background, the desert, the ostriches and ants, the night birds, and the roaring of lions occasionally, would take off some of the curse, but I came out still more exotic and fantastic always than any ants, ostriches, mountains. And I said, “What would the Wariri say if they knew who was traveling in their direction?”
“I no know, sah. Dem no so good people like Arnewi.”
“Oh they’re not, eh? But you won’t say anything about the frogs and the cistern, now will you, Romilayu?”
“No, no, sah.”
“Thanks, friend,” I said. “I don’t deserve credit for much, but when all is said and done I had only good intentions. Really and truly it kills me to think how the cattle must be suffering back there without water. No bunk. But then suppose I had satisfied my greatest ambition and become a doctor like Doctor Grenfell or Doctor Schweitzer—or a surgeon? Is there a surgeon anywhere who doesn’t lose a patient once in a while? Why, some of those guys must tow a whole fleet of souls behind them.”
Romilayu lay on the ground with his hand slipped under his cheek. His straight Abyssinian nose expressed great patience.
“The king of the Wariri, Dahfu, was Itelo’s school chum. But you say they aren’t good people, the Wariri. What’s the matter with them?”
“Dem chillen dahkness.”
“Well, Romilayu, you really are a very Christian fellow,” I said. “You mean they are wiser in their generation and all the rest. But as between these people and myself, who do you think has got more to worry about?”
Without changing his position, a glitter of grim humor playing in his big soft eye, he said, “Oh, maybe dem, sah.”
As you see, I had changed my mind about by-passing the Wariri, and it was partly because of what Romilayu had told me about them. For I felt I was less likely to do any damage amongst them if they were such tough or worldly savages.
So for nine or ten days we walked, and toward the end of this time the character of the mountains changed greatly. There were domelike white rocks which here and there crumpled into huge heaps, and among these white circles of stone on, I think, the tenth day, we finally encountered a person. It happened while we were climbing, late in the afternoon under a reddening sun. Behind us the high mountains we had emerged from showed their crumbled peaks and prehistoric spines. Ahead shrubs were growing between these rock domes, which were as white as chinaware. Then this Wariri herdsman arose before us in a leather apron, holding a twisted stick, and although he did nothing else he looked dangerous. Something about his figure struck me as Biblical, and in particular he made me think of the man whom Joseph met when he went to look for his brothers, and who directed him along toward Dothan. My belief is that this man in the Bible must have been an angel and certainly knew the brothers were going to throw Joseph into the pit. But he sent him on nevertheless. Our black man not only wore a leather apron but seemed leathery all over, and if he had had wings those would have been of leather, too. His features were pressed deep into his face, which was small, secret, and, even in the direct rays of the red sun, very black. We had a talk with him. I said, “Hello, hello,” loudly as if assuming that his hearing was sunk as deeply as his eyes. Romilayu asked him for directions and with his stick the man showed us the way to go. Thus old-time travelers must have been directed. I made him a salute but he didn’t appear to think much of it and his leather face answered nothing. So we toiled upward among the rocks along the way he had pointed.
“Far?” I said to Romilayu.
“No, sah. Him say not far.”
I now thought we might pass the evening in a town, and after ten days of toilsome wandering I had begun to look forward to a bed and cooked food and some busy sights and even to a thatch over me.
The way grew more and more stony and this made me suspicious. If we were approaching a town we ought by now to have found a path. Instead there were these jumbled white stones that looked as if they had been combed out by an ignorant hand from the elements that make least sense. There must be stupid portions of heaven, too, and these had rolled straight down from it. I am no geologist but the word calcareous seemed to fit them. They were composed of lime and my guess was that they must have originated in a body of water. Now they were ultra-dry but filled with little caves from which cooler air was exhaled—ideal places for a siesta in the heat of noon, provided no snakes came. But the sun was in decline, trumpeting downward. The cave mouths were open and there was this coarse and clumsy gnarled white stone.
We had just turned the corner of a boulder to continue our climb when Romilayu astonished me. He had set his foot up to take a long stride but to my bewilderment he began to slide forward on his hands, and, instead of mounting, lay down on the stones of the slope. When I saw him prostrate, I said, “What the hell is with you? What are you doing? Is this a place to lie down? Get up.” But his extended body, pack and all, hugged the slope while his frizzled hair settled motionless among the stones. He didn’t answer, and now no answer was necessary, because when I looked up I saw, in front of us and about twenty yards above, a military group. Three tribesmen knelt with guns aimed at us while eight or ten more standing behind them were crowding their rifle barrels together, so that we might have been blown off the hillside; they had the fire power to do it. A dozen guns massed at you is bad business, and therefore I dropped my .375 and raised my hands. Yet I was pleased just the same, due to my military temperament. Also that leathery small man had sent us into an ambush and for some reason this elementary cunning gave me satisfaction, too. There are some things the human soul doesn’t need to be tutored in. Ha, ha! You know I was kind of pleased and I imitated Romilayu. Brought to the dust I put my face down among the pebbles and waited, grinning. Romilayu was stretched will-less, in an African manner. Finally one of the men came down, covered by the rest, and without speech but stoically, as soldiers usually do, he took the .375 and ammunition and knives and other weapons. and ordered us to get up. When we did so he frisked us again. The squad above us lowered their guns, which were old weapons, either the Berber type with long barrels and inlaid butts, or old European arms which might have been taken away from General Gordon at Khartoum and distributed all over Africa. Yes, I thought, old Chinese Gordon, poor guy, with his Bible studies. But it was better to die like that than in smelly old England. I have very little affection for the iron age of technology. I feel sympathy for a ma
n like Gordon because he was brave and confused.