It was torn around the sides and three places elsewhere, but he could read most of it. The top printing was --24--, which he supposed was the number of the page of the book in which the sheet had been:
The first died of pneumonia! The second became an idiot! Or as good as an idiot! What a waste, what a tragedy! All my money, time, thought, hopefulness, and tremendous effort had been lost, spent to no avail. But no! I had not totally wasted my time, for I had learned much. After being plunged into the blackest of despairs for a long time, almost, but not quite, on the point of giving up, I finally recovered my spirits. The same courage and perseverance that had enabled me to come up as a penniless immigrant from America during the depths of the depression to attain one of the largest fortunes in South Africa now kept me from abandoning my project, so dear to me for so many years, so important not only to me but to the world, the world which would have been horrified if it had known but will some day honor me for this.
Fortunately, the second failure had a younger brother, born six years later, and only three months old when I began to plan again. This time I made the arrangements for securing him through entirely different channels, since the previous agents had tried to blackmail me. They paid for their mistakes. I made sure they would not try such treachery on me or on anyone ever again. Word went through the grapevine about them, and I was sure that nobody would try that dastardly trick again. The name of
Ras did not understand much of the printing. There were a number of words he had not encountered. Pneumonia, tragedy, money, avail, penniless immigrant, America, South Africa, and many others. Yusufu might be able to explain their meanings.
He folded the sheet and put it in his antelope-hide bag. After finishing the monkey, he threw the bones down onto the ground, and then climbed down and resumed his search. By noon he had found nothing. There was no sign of the yellow-haired angel or of the stiff-winged bird, which should have fallen close to the burning Bird of God.
He returned to the dead Bird. The flames were burned out now, and the ashes and the bones had cooled off. He touched various parts of it and was surprised. So the Bird had bones made of the same stuff as his knife. Some thought about this convinced him that a bird made by Igziyabher was just as likely to have metal bones as bone bones. After all, Igziyabher had made his knife. According to Mariyam, a knife was what was left after a lightning stroke hit the ground. Igziyabher dealt with metal, and He had fashioned this Bird, so why wouldn't He give the Bird metal bones? Or make it entirely out of metal, since it was evident that the Bird had no flesh, was, in fact, all bones?
It was then that Ras began to wonder if Igziyabher had not been experimenting when He made the first creatures and, after some thought, had decided that all-bone creatures were superior to those of flesh and bone. Perhaps. But from the viewpoint of the creature itself, flesh was superior. How much could an all-bone being feel?
As he examined the remnants of the Bird, he heard the faint chuttering. For a few seconds he crouched in bewilderment and fear. There was another Bird coming!
Then he disappeared into the jungle, where he hid beneath a bush. Presently another Bird, just like the first, rode into the sky and hovered about fifty feet above the dead one. He could see that there were two angels--or men--in the belly of this one, and they wore masks. He hoped that they would land to investigate, but the Bird began to cast back and forth above the jungle, as if the angels in it were searching for those who had been in the dead Bird. And, of course, they must be looking for the yellow-haired angel.
After a while the Bird went northward, presumably back to its nest on top of the pillar of black stone in the middle of the lake.
Ras spent some more time going over the area that had been covered by the ants. He found the mud-prints of the angel and followed them, but they curved around until they came to the bank of the creek. Here they disappeared. There were none on the other side. She could have waded up- or downstream for some distance, and so he went upstream for several miles, looking on both sides, and then downstream for the same distance from the point where the prints ceased. He had no luck.
Her apparent soaring into the sky, combined with his desire to have Yusufu interpret the full meaning of the sheet, finally decided him to return home. He waded back up the stream for many miles, because it was the easiest way to travel for a while. Then he cut across the land toward the river, which would lead him to the foot of the cataracts. Near them was a trail up the cliffs to the plateau. It was not recognizable to anybody besides him as a trail. Its identity as a path consisted in his knowing exactly where to go and when to go, what toeholds and handholds existed, what slivers of ledges, what slight projections and recesses. Where a stranger would have taken hours finding the correct places on which to get up, he could scale the five hundred or so feet within ten minutes, if he felt like doing it.
Today he felt like it, and so he was soon on the lip of the plateau. The ground from here sloped generally upward, ending nine miles to the north against the glossy black wall. The black wall rose straight up for many thousands of feet, as if the angry hand of God was held out, black, wrathful palms vertical, and saying, "Not one step more!"
Mariyam had said, many times, that the black cliffs were the limits of the world. The sky, which was actually a blue extension of the cliffs, formed a ceiling over the world. The sun climbed up the ceiling every day, just as a fly or lizard could climb up the walls and across the ceiling of their hut, and the sun went into a tunnel in the west and traveled underground through the hole in the stone of the world, and he got to the end of the tunnel just at daybreak.
The sun, Sehay in Amharic, was, in some as yet undefined way, also Igziyabher. Battered by Ras's questions, Mariyam said that it was a flaming bird on which Igziyabher sometimes rode. Ras had managed to see the sun when it was low on the horizon of the cliff tops and other times through fog, and he thought that the sun looked more like a flaming egg than a bird. This was when Mariyam had further confused him by saying that the bird had not hatched yet, but when it did, there was no telling what horrors might result. Perhaps the world might burn up.
Ras might have been more scared by her story if Yusufu had not yelled at her to quit telling the boy such lies.
Where the plateau ended in the drop-off, the distance from west wall to east wall was about ten miles. That same length was maintained as the walls marched northward until near the end, where the walls moved in closer to each other and thus made the north wall about seven miles across.
The jungle started up again close to the edge of the plateau and continued for three miles through hilly and sometimes rough country. Then a plain with many scattered trees ran for three miles. The land became suddenly higher here, and the trees more numerous but not enough to earn the name of jungle. The vegetation in the hills near the cliffs was jungly, however, and it was here that the gorilla bands were usually found.
From the place where black stone met blue sky, three broad cataracts fell. These were along the northwest side, and they fell into the lake, which was three miles broad along the foot of the cliff but narrowed to two miles of breadth along its southern shore. Three creeks flowed out from the south border of the lake and came close to each other after many windings to the edge of the plateau. They fell side by side to form the headwaters of the river at the bottom of the plateau.
Ras followed a deer trail through the jungle and then was on the plain. Here, at various distances, were small groups of elephants, a family of buffalo, antelope, and some wart hogs. In the distance, a jackal yapped. There was not much game on the plains, which were about five miles across and three miles deep. But it was increasing, because most of the leopards had been killed by Ras. He and Yusufu hunted the plains for meat, but they did not kill as much as the leopards had, who had been getting too numerous. Janhoy, the lion, hunted here, too, but he did not catch much. He needed fellow hunters to run the prey toward him, and it was only occasionally that Ras went with him.
On
ce out of the jungle, Ras saw the top of the stone pillar that thrust up from the middle of the lake. As Ras passed across the plain and then climbed up the steepness leading to the forest land, he saw the pillar rising up. When he got through the trees of the forest and came out upon the comparatively clear land by the shore of the lake, he saw it in its fullness.
It was glossy and black and twisted. It was roughly four-cornered and did not rise straight but leaned out a little this way and then curved back in and began to lean out a little the other way and so on up to the top, which was at least a thousand feet from the surface of the lake.
Even when Ras had been a very little child, he had thought that this torque of stone was strange, if not sinister. Why was it alone? Why were there no other structures of rock to break the otherwise smooth lake? What had made the stone spurt up from the water and then freeze? It seemed to him that something had given way to a tremendous pressure against the crust of the world at the bottom of the lake. The stone had been so hot it was liquid, and it had spurted upward to reach so high, and then the stone had cooled and so stopped--soaring forever.
And at some time in the dawn of life, the Bird of God had come to build a nest on its top.
Ras walked from the southeast corner of the lake northward along the eastern beach until he came to the still-blackened stones that marked where the cabin had once stood. From here he turned to the east, went up the easily sloping hill covered with tall grass, and so into the forest. The trees here were mainly tall and thick-trunked with few, but broad and flat-topped, branches that extended far out. The leaves were no larger than his hand, almost square, curving in slightly at the ends, which formed a double tip. The smaller leaf-bearing branches were numerous, however, so that the upper part of the trees were fat with green. Once a year, the thimato trees grew white, stiff, seven-petaled flowers and large, triangular, flattened-out nuts with shiny black cases.
The trees also grew thousands of many-shaped and many-colored birds and monkeys and other creatures the year around. The chattering, squeaking, squawking, whistling, clacking, chirping, hooting, whinnying, cawing, grunting, yaayaaing, drumming, bugling, and so forth went on loudly during the day and somewhat less noisily at night. Ras's earliest memories were of this somehow tuneful and pleasing racket.
He looked upward and grinned at familiar figures. Some of the monkeys came down and ran up to him but did not stay with him long, since he had no food for them. The brush beneath the trees was moderately heavy, far from being a jungle, because the closeness of the trees, their binding together with many parasitical python-thick vines, and the meeting of branches of neighboring trees, darkened the earth beneath and killed all but the lucky and the hardiest. Except for several hours during noon, the space beneath the trees was gloomy.
But in the upper parts, the sun penetrated more easily, and here the birds and animals thronged. And here, at least seventy-five feet up, was set a house for Mariyam, Yusufu, and Ras. It was on a platform of split logs on two great branches that grew outward at just the right angle for placement of a platform. The house, of bamboo brought down from the hills, was round, with a conical roof of elephant's-ear leaves and bamboo understructure, and had three doors, two windows, and three rooms. There was enough space between the walls of the house and the edge of the platform to form a wide veranda that completely circled the house. The veranda had a bamboo fence along its outer edge, and Ras remembered when he was first held by Mariyam and allowed to peer over the fence into what seemed then an interestingly vast distance to the ground.
There were three ways to get up to the house. One was to climb up the wooden rungs nailed into the trunk. The second was to use the lift, which could be let down or hauled up by ropes and complicated tackle. The third was to climb hand over hand up a ladder of rope. The last two required so much muscle work (not to mention the balkiness of the lift), that they were seldom used to get up, although they were handy in getting down.
When Ras had been young, only this house had existed. But five years ago, the aging Yusufu and Mariyam had decided that it was too inconvenient and demanding to go up and down the ladder or the lift a dozen times a day. So they had built another house, almost a duplicate, directly below. The tree house was used mainly during the night.
Several monkeys sat on the roof or the veranda. A female chimpanzee slept on top of a table on the veranda. A pangolin, a scaly-armored anteater, prowled around the base of the house. The shrill voices of Mariyam and Yusufu reached him even at this distance. He frowned and felt a roiling in the pit of his stomach. There were times when he was amused by their quarreling and bickering, but usually he felt disturbed, ill at ease, and often angry with them.
They had been always gentle and loving and happy-voiced when he was young, or so it seemed to him. But as the years went by, as their companions, the other adults, died, and they were left alone with each other, they seemed to find it more difficult to endure each other. Ras could understand this somewhat. But when they had a third person to talk to, they lessened their arguments only slightly. Often, they both turned on him when he entered. It seemed that they were, somehow, blaming him for their being in this predicament, but what the predicament was, they would not, or could not, explain.
There were other things he did not understand about them.
"You think you're not an ape?" Yusufu would say. Yusufu, tiny man with the big head, long body, and short, bowed legs, legs not much longer than Ras's arm from elbow to wrist, would reach up to Ras. His woolly, white hair and frizzly, white beard, brown-skinned, smudged face with pushed-in nose and nostrils like a gorilla's, his thick lips (not as thick as the Wantsos) would rise as high as tiptoes would carry them.
"Bend down, son of a camel," he would growl. "Bend over, djinn, so that I, your father, begetter of a gorilla, to my everlasting shame, may switch you properly and painfully and so teach you better manners."
Ras would remain upright. He would grin down at him. Yusufu, dark face twisted, beard flying, would jump up and down. He would curse in Swahili, Arabic, English, and Amharic.
"Must I punish you, O Lord Tyger, whip you into the trees you love so much, like the true monkey you are? Bend down; do as I, your father and disposer of your body, command you. O droppings of a camel, accidentally formed as a man, bend down!"
"What is a camel?" Ras would say, although Yusufu had described the beast to him many times.
"It is your true father, that son of Shaitan, that stinking, spitting, humped thinker of evil thoughts! And you, your father was a camel and your mother was an ape!"
"But you once told me you were my father and that you were an ape!" Ras would say.
"And he is an ape!" Mariyam would scream. "But he is not your true father! He is your stepfather, and he would do well to remember that! That monster hatched from a raven's egg!"
The two seemed lately to act as if they blamed him for being in this world. What was wrong with this world? Where else could they be?
Looking past the hut, through the openings between the branches of the trees of the forest, he could see the black cliffs that walled the world.
"Black as the tongue of the devil," Mariyam had said of them.
"Black as a vulture's anus," Yusufu had said. And in saying this, both revealed the cast of their minds and the course of their speech.
"Six thousand feet straight up," Yusufu had said in answer to Ras's question.
"Feet?"
How long was a foot? Yusufu said it was as long as one of Ras's feet. But Ras remembered that his feet had been shorter at one time.
"A child's foot?" he had said.
"O my beloved, banana of my eye," Yusufu had said. "You are teasing me, an old man with white hairs and many wrinkles, gotten from worrying over you. Do not mock me or I will strip the skin off you and make from the skin a whip to whip you to death."
"What is a foot?" Ras had said. "I know how long my feet are now. But I am growing. What if I keep on growing, and the walls of the worl
d, now six thousand feet, become only half as much? What if I grow, the world shrink, and I become as tall as the pillar in the middle of the lake?"
Yusufu would laugh at this picture, and he would be happy for a while.
Ras stopped when he was fifty feet from the house and hallooed, since it would be dangerous to burst into the house on Yusufu, who was nervous and might throw his knife before he realized at whom he was throwing it.
The quarreling voices stopped, and then the door swung open and Mariyam ran out. Yusufu followed her. Mariyam's head was no higher than Ras's hip. Her head was huge in proportion to her body, and her legs were short and bandy. She wore a white robe that came to her calves. She was smiling and weeping at the same time. He took her in his arms and lifted her up and cuddled her while she kissed him and her tears were smeared over his face.
"Ah, son, I thought that truly I would never see you again!"
Mariyam always said this if he were gone for more than a day, and while she did not fully mean it, yet her words did mean that she had missed him. He had never tired of receiving this greeting.
Finally, he put her down and patted her white, black-speckled head and waited for the scolding that always came because he had grieved her by staying away so long.
Yusufu, who was perhaps an inch taller than his wife, whose head-hair was all white and whose long beard was gray with black threads, waddled on stubby, curved legs to Ras and said, "Bend down, you taller-than-an-ostrich, that you may kiss me as a respectful son does his father."
Ras did so, and the old man kissed him on the lips in return.
Ras waited until they had entered the house, where a fire burned in a mortared-stone fireplace in the middle of the room. The room had many odors: monkeys, monkey excrement not yet removed, birds and bird excrement, a sweat-soaked shirt of Yusufu's overdue for washing, and, most powerful, the odor of smoke. The chimney of the fireplace was faulty, and any adverse breeze was likely to blow down the chimney and spread smoke around the room. One of Ras's earliest memories was of Mariyam nagging at Yusufu to repair the chimney and Yusufu replying that he would certainly do so when the weather permitted. When Ras was older, he had offered many times to repair or completely rebuild the fireplace and chimney. Yusufu had resented the implication that he would never do the job. No, by Allah, he would get the work done at the first chance. But he never did.