Naked, I held on to him and bent over, my feet slipping as he led me to the king’s box. Four women were holding a cover over Dahfu to keep off the rain and his hammock had been raised. They were carrying him away.
“King, King,” I cried.
He drew aside the edge of the cover they had thrown over him. Under it I saw him there in his broad-brimmed hat. I cried out to him, “What has struck us?”
He said simply, “It is rain.”
“Rain? What rain? It’s the deluge. It feels like the end ….”
“Mr. Henderson,” he said, “it is a great thing you have performed for us, after which pains we must give you some pleasure, too.” And seeing the look on my face he said, “Do you see, Mr. Henderson, the gods know us.” And as he was carried from me in his hammock, the eight women supporting the poles, he said, “You have lost the wager.”
I was left standing in my coat of earth, like a giant turnip.
XV
This is how I became the rain king. I guess it served me right for mixing into matters that were none of my damned business. But the thing had been irresistible, one of those drives which there was no question of fighting. And what had I got myself into? What were the consequences? On the ground floor of the palace, filthy, naked, and bruised, I lay in a little room. The rain was falling, drowning the town, dropping from the roof in heavy fringes, witchlike and gloomy. Shivering, I covered myself with hides and stared with circular eyes, wrapped to the chin in the skins of unknown animals, I kept saying, “Oh, Romilayu, don’t be down on me. How was I supposed to know what I was getting myself into?” My upper lip grew long and my nose was distorted; it was aching with the whiplashes and I felt my eyes had grown black and huge. “Oh, I’m in a bad way. I lost the bet and am at the guy’s mercy.”
But as before Romilayu came through for me. He tried to hearten me a little and said he didn’t think that worse was to be expected, and indicated that it was premature for me to feel trapped. He made very good sense. Then he said, “You sleep, sah. T’ink tomorrow.”
And I said, “Romilayu, I’m learning more about your good points all the time. You’re right, I’ve got to wait. I’m in a position and don’t have a glimmer as to what it is.”
Then he, too, prepared for sleep and got down on his shinbones, clasping his hands with the muscles beginning to jump under his skin and the groans of prayer arising from his chest. I must admit I took some comfort from this.
I said to him, “Pray, pray. Oh, pray, pal, pray like anything. Pray about the situation.”
So when he was done he wound himself into the blanket and drew up his knees, slipping his hand under his cheek as usual. But before closing his eyes he said, “Whut fo’ you did it, sah?”
“Oh, Romilayu,” I said, “if I could explain that I wouldn’t be where I am today. Why did I have to blast those holy frogs without looking left or right? I don’t know why it is I have such extreme intensity. The whole thing is so peculiar the explanation will have to be peculiar too. Figuring will get me nowhere, it’s only illumination that I have to wait for.” And thinking of how black things were and how absent any illumination was I sighed and moaned again.
Instead of troubling himself that I hadn’t been able to give a satisfactory answer, Romilayu fell asleep, and presently I passed out too while the rain whirled and the lion or lions roared beneath the palace. Mind and body went to rest. It was like a swoon. I had a ten-days’ growth of beard on my face. Dreams and visions came to me but I don’t need to speak of them; all that is necessary to say is that nature was kind to me and I must have slept twelve hours without stirring, sore in body as I was, with cut feet and a bruised face.
When I awoke the sky was clear and warm, and Romilayu was up and about. Two women, amazons, were in the small room with me. I washed myself and shaved and did my business in a large basin placed in the corner, I assumed, for that purpose. Then the women, whom I had ordered out, came back with some articles of clothing which Romilayu said were the Sungo’s, or rain king’s, outfit. He insisted that I had better wear them as it might make trouble to refuse. For I was now the Sungo. Therefore I examined these garments. They were green and made of silk, and cut to the same pattern as King Dahfu’s—the drawers were, I mean.
“Belong Sungo,” said Romilayu. “Now you Sungo.”
“Why, these damned pants are transparent,” I said, “but I suppose I’d better wear them.” I was wearing my stained jockey shorts above-mentioned, and I slipped on the green trousers over them. In spite of my rest I was not in top condition. I still had fever. I suppose it is natural for white men to be ill in Africa. Sir Richard Burton was as close to iron as the flesh can be, and he was taken badly with fever. Speke was even sicker. Mungo Park was sick and staggered around. Dr. Livingstone day in, day out was sick. Hell! Who was I to be immune? One of the amazons, Tamba, who had ugly whiskers growing from her chin, got behind me, lifted my helmet, and combed at my head with a primitive wooden instrument. These women were supposed to render me service.
She said to me, “Joxi, joxi?”
“What does she want? What is this joxi? Breakfast? I have no appetite. I feel too emotional to swallow anything.” I drank a little whisky instead from one of the canteens, merely to keep my digestive tract open; I thought it might help my fever as well.
“Dem show you joxi,” said Romilayu.
Face downward, Tamba stretched herself on the ground and the other woman, whose name was Bebu, stood upon her back and with her feet she kneaded and massaged her and cracked her vertebrae into place. After she had plied her with those ugly feet—and to judge from the face of Tamba, the process was bliss—they changed positions. Afterward they tried to show me how beneficial it was and how it set them up. Together they tapped their chests with their knuckles.
“Tell them thanks for their good intentions,” I said. “It’s probably wonderful therapy, but I think I’ll pass it by today.”
After this Tamba and Bebu lay on the ground and took turns in saluting me formally. Each took my foot and placed it on her head as Itelo had done to acknowledge my supremacy. The women moistened their lips so that the dust should stick to them. When they were done Tatu the generaless came to conduct me to King Dahfu and she went through the identical abasement, with the garrison cap on her head. After this the two women brought me a pineapple on a wooden platter and I forced myself to swallow a slice of it.
Then I went up the stairs with Tatu, who today allowed me to take the lead. Grins, cries, blessings, handclapping, and chanting met me; the older people were especially earnest in speaking to me. I wasn’t as yet used to the green costume; it felt both wide and loose about the legs. From the upper gallery I looked out and saw the mountains. The air was exceptionally clear and the mountains were gathered together lap over lap, brown and soft as the coat of a Brahma bull. Also the green looked as fine as fur today. The trees were clear and green, too, and the blossoms underneath were fresh and red in the bowls of white rock. I saw the Bunam’s wives pass below us with their short teeth, turning their dainty big shaven heads. I guess I must have caused them to smile in those billowing, swelling, green drawers of the Sungo and the pith helmet and my rubber-soled desert boots.
Indoors, we passed through the anterooms and entered the king’s apartment. His big tufted couch was empty, but the wives lay on their cushions and mats gossiping and combing their hair and trimming their fingernails and toes. The atmosphere was very social and talkative. Most of the women lay resting, and their form of relaxation was peculiar; they folded their legs as we might our arms and lay back, perfectly boneless. Amazing. I stared at them. The odor of the room was tropical, like certain parts of the botanical garden, or like charcoal fumes and honey, like hot buckwheat. No one looked at me, they pretended I was nonexistent. To me this appeared kind of impossible, like refusing to see the Titanic. Besides, I was the sensation of the place, the white Sungo who had picked up Mummah. But I figured it was improper for me to visit their quarters
, and they had no alternative but to ignore me.
We left the apartment by a low door and I found myself then in the king’s private chamber. He was sitting on a low backless seat, a square of red leather stretched over a broad frame. A similar seat was brought forward for me, and then Tatu withdrew and sat obscurely near the wall. Once more he and I were face to face. There was no tooth-bordered hat, there were no skulls. He had on the close-fitting trousers and the embroidered slippers Beside him on the floor was a whole stack of books; he had been reading when I entered, and he folded down the corner of his page, pressed it several times with his knuckle, and put the volume on top of the pile. What sort of reading would interest such a mind? But then what sort of mind was it? I didn’t have a clue.
“Oh,” he said, “now you have shaved and rested you make a very good appearance.”
“I feel like a holy show, that’s what I feel like, King. But I understand that you want me to wear this rig, and I wouldn’t like to welsh on a bet. I can only say that if you’d let me out I’d be grateful as anything.”
“I understand,” he said. “I would very much like to do so, but the clothing of the Sungo really is requisite. Except for the helmet.”
“I have to be on my guard against sunstroke,” I said. “Anyway, I always have some headpiece or other. In Italy during the war I slept in my helmet, too. And it was a metal helmet.”
“But surely a headcover indoors is not necessary,” he said.
However, I refused to take the hint. I sat before him in my white pith hat.
Of course the king’s extreme blackness of color made him fabulously strange to me. He was as black as—as wealth. By contrast his lips were red, and they swelled; and on his head the hair lived (to say that it grew wouldn’t be sufficient). Like Horko’s, his eyes revealed a red tinge. And even seated on the backless leather chair he was still, as on the sofa or in the hammock, sumptuously at rest.
“King,” I said.
From the determination with which I began he understood me and he said, “Mr. Henderson, you are entitled to any explanation within my means to make. You see, the Bunam felt sure you would be strong enough to move our Mummah. I, when I saw what a construction you had, agreed with him. At once.”
“Well,” I said, “okay, so I’m strong. But how did it all happen? It seems to me that you were sure it would. You bet me.”
“That was in a spirit of wager and nothing else,” he said. “I knew as little about it as you do.”
“Does it always happen like that?”
“Very far from always. Exceedingly seldom.”
I looked my canniest, greatly lifting up my brows because I wanted him to see that the phenomenon was not yet explained to my satisfaction. Meanwhile I was trying also to make him out. And there were no airs or ostentations about the man. He was thoughtful in his replies but without making thinker’s faces. And when he spoke of himself the facts he told me matched what I had heard from Prince Itelo. At the age of thirteen he had been sent to the town of Lamu and afterward he had gone to Malindi. “All preceding kings for several generations,” he said, “have had to be acquainted with the world and have been sent at that same time of life to the school. You show up from nowhere, attend school, then go back. One son in each generation is sent out to Lamu. An uncle goes with him and waits for him there.”
“Your Uncle Horko?”
“Yes, it is Horko. He was the link. He waited in Lamu nine years for me. I had moved on with Itelo. I didn’t care for that life in the south. The young men at school were spoiled. Kohl on their eyes. Rouge. Chitter-chatter. I wanted more than that.”
“Well, you are very serious,” I said. “It’s obvious. That was how I sized you up from the first.”
“After Malindi, Zanzibar. From there Itelo and I shipped as deckhands. Once to India and Java. Then up the Red Sea—Suez. Five years in Syria at denominational school. The treatment was most generous. From my point of view the science instruction was most especially worth while. I was going for an M.D. degree, and would have done it except for the death of my father.”
“That’s just remarkable,” I said. “I’m only trying to put it together with yesterday. With the skulls, and that fellow, the Bunam, and the amazons and the rest of it.”
“It is interesting, I do admit. But also it is not up to me, Henderson—Henderson-Sungo—to make the world consistent.”
“Maybe you were tempted not to come back?” I asked.
We sat close together, and, as I have noted, his blackness made him fabulously strange to me. Like all people who have a strong gift of life, he gave off almost an extra shadow—I swear. It was a smoky something, a charge. I used to notice it sometimes with Lily and was aware of it particularly that day of the storm in Danbury when she misdirected me to the water-filled quarry and then telephoned her mother from bed. She had it noticeably then. It is something brilliant and yet overcast; it is smoky, bluish, trembling, shining like jewel water. It was similar to what I had felt also arising from Willatale on the occasion of kissing her belly. But this King Dahfu was more strongly supplied with it than any person I ever met.
In answer to my last question he said, “For more reasons than one I could have wished my father to live longer.”
As I conceived, the old fellow must have been strangled.
I guess I looked remorseful at having reminded him of his father, for he laughed to put me at ease again, and said, “Do not worry, Mr. Henderson—I must call you Sungo, for you are the Sungo now. Don’t worry, I say. It is a subject which could not be avoided. You do not necessarily refresh it. His time came, he died, and I was king. I had to recover the lion.”
“What lion are you talking about?” I said.
“Why, I have told you yesterday. Possibly you have forgot—the king’s body, the maggot that breeds in it, the king’s soul, the lion cub?” I recalled it now. Sure, he had told me this. “Well, then,” he said, “this very young animal, set free by the Bunam, the successor king has to capture it within a year or two when it is grown.”
“What? You have to hunt it?”
He smiled. “Hunt it? I have another function. To capture it alive and keep it with me.”
“So that’s the animal I hear below? I could swear I was hearing a lion down there. Jupiter, so that’s what it is,” I said.
“No, no, no,” he said, in that soft way of his. “That is not it, Mr. Henderson-Sungo. You have heard a quite other animal. I have not yet captured Gmilo. Accordingly I am not yet fully confirmed in the rule of king. You find me at a midpoint. To borrow your manner of speaking, I too must complete Becoming.”
Despite all the shocks of yesterday I was beginning to comprehend why I felt reassured at first sight of the king. It comforted me to sit with him; it comforted me unusually. His large legs were stretched out as he sat, his back was curved, and his arms were folded on his chest, and on his face there was a brooding but pleasant expression. Through his high-swelled lips a low hum occasionally came. It reminded me of the sound you sometimes hear from a power station when you pass one in New York on a summer night; the doors are open; all the brass and steel is going, lustrous under one little light, and some old character in dungarees and carpet slippers is smoking a pipe with all the greatness of the electricity behind him. Probably I am one of the most spell-prone people who ever lived. Appearances to the contrary, I am highly mediumistic and attuned. “Henderson,” I said to myself, and not for the first time, “it’s one of those luth suspendu deals, sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne. And you saw yesterday what savagery can be if you never saw it before, throwing passes with his own father’s skull. And now with the lions. Lions! And the man almost a graduate physician. The whole thing is crazy.” Thus I reflected. But then I also had to take into account the fact that I have a voice within me repeating, I want, raving and demanding, making a chaos, desiring, desiring, and disappointed continually, which drove me forth as beaters drive game. So I had no business to make terms with life, bu
t had to accept such conditions as it would let me have. But at moments I would have been glad to find that my fever alone had originated all that had happened since I left Charlie and his bride and took off on my own expedition—the Arnewi, the frogs, Mtalba, and the corpse and the gallop in vine leaves with those giant women. And now this powerful black personage who soothed me—but was he trustworthy? How about trustworthy? And I, myself, hulking in the green silk pants that went with the office of rain king. I was smarting, harkening, straining my ears, my suspicious eyes. Oh, hell! How shall a man be broken for whom reality has no fixed dwelling! How he shall be broken! So I was sitting in this palace with its raw red walls, and the white rocks amid which the flowers flourished. By the door were amazons, and, more particularly, this fierce old Tatu with big nostrils. She sat dreaming on the floor in her garrison cap.
All the same, as we sat there talking I felt we were men of unusual dimensions. Trustworthiness was a separate issue.
At this time there began a conversation which could never be duplicated anywhere in the world. I hitched up the green pants a little. My head was swayed by the fever but I demanded firmness of myself and I said, speaking steadily, “Your Majesty, I don’t intend to back down on the bet. I have certain principles. But I still don’t know what this is all about, being dressed up as the rain king.”
“It is not merely dress,” said Dahfu. “You are the Sungo. It is literal, Mr. Henderson. I could not have made Sungo of you if you had not had the strength to move Mummah.”