Coyote At The Dog Show: And Other Stories And Poems q2w3x

Coyote At The Dog Show

And Other Stories and Poems

Walter Max Poitzch

Copyright © 2012 by Walter Max Poitzch.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012923484 ISBN: Hardcover Softcover Ebook

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Coyote At The Dog Show

To Rudy

African Travel

Mkalamo Ward, 1986

Watercolor

Third World Romance

Leviticus Carp

Wachowi

I Could Never Let You Go

Esperanto

Mumyani

Part I

The Hot Land

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part II

The Vampires

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Atlantis

COYOTE AT THE DOG SHOW

All the dogs made up for show;

That’s the reason people go:

To see the dachshund’s leather leash,

The poodle’s collar just released

From some expensive French boutique.

The German shepherd, proud and stern:

What honor will his mistress earn?

But wait! Another waits his turn.

By no master’s hand he’s lead—

Fleas in orbit ’round his head.

In the shadow there he lurks:

Snickering there in the murk.

“What gall!” the shepherd loud proclaims.

“How—small!” (This from the Greatest Dane.)

“By god!” the English setter snorts.

“Be damned,” the shadow grim retorts.

“Coyote, I,” and in he glides—

Beside the greyhound’s sylvan hide.

The spaniel and the Labrador

Are in a rage—and even more

The Russian wolfhound. “There he sits,

“As though by invitation. It

“Appears this uninvited oaf

“Equates himself with Romanovs!”

“And Castlereagh,” the Scottie huffs.

“His gaze is glazed, his coat is rough;

“His claws are chipped, his pads are tough.

“No gentleman, coyote, he,”

The foxhound murmurs thoughtfully.

“And yet…

“I’d swear I’ve seen him, not long past:

“When the moon her shadow cast

“And we, at twilight, heard his laugh;

“Our collars seemed too tight and chaffed.

“Then, leaving us in grim fatigue,

“He sat (the distance was a league)

“And laughed again: I think his scorn

“Was for our master’s hunting horn.

“Dear master’s horse was flecked with foam

“When—cursing—master made for home.

“The burr oak root a tangled claw

“At every foxhound’s blistered paw;

“Till from the haunted copse’s maw

“The expedition fin’lly crept.

“But even then, we hardly slept;

“For through the walls of master’s hall

“Again we heard his mocking call.

“So:

“If again we must compete,

“I’ll hedge my bet he won’t be beat

“By any here whose collared neck

“Is stuck out for a master’s beck.”

At last the foxhound silent fell,

Upon some memory to dwell.

The shepherd bowed his noble crown;

The bulldog wore a thoughtful frown.

The pug and poodle, wolfhound too,

From competition all withdrew

Till there he sat, alone and still,

Unbroken to a master’s will.

But—no more mocking in his glance—

At last coyote broke his trance.

“I must confess—it ne’er occurred—

“Until his lengthy speech I heard—

“That foxhounds thought of me this way.

“I, in turn, have this to say:

“On that frightful night I flew

“From spur and whip—and collars too.

“Not for one moment seemed they brave;

“But now I see Diana saved

“One misplaced paw. A useless slave

“Is horse or foxhound when he’s lamed.

“Coyote, I—the one who’s blamed

“For riot with the hens and sheep;

“My song disturbs your master’s sleep…

“Still, which is best? Your lot or mine?

“Who is bravest: slave or thief?”

And off he glided from the throng.

“Of course, who’d claim that he belonged?”

The shepherd murmured to the pug

(Which worried at his Persian rug)

At last the local dog show’s done.

(Of course, the Russian wolfhound won—

But everyone was quite surprised

At the sadness in his eyes

When his laurel girdled throat

Was leashed again for master’s mot.)

One by one each coach departs,

And to each horse a dog remarks:

“If he should cry ‘Coyote, I,’

“Tonight, at least, you need not shy.”

The horses in their harness nod;

The master wonders, “Very odd;

“That scoundrel from the shadow calls:

“Yet horse and hound heed not at all.

“Tomorrow at the market stall

“Some traps and poison I’ll procure—

“My henhouse’s safety to ensure.”

“Coyote, I!” the foxhounds hear;

“Coyote, he!” the foxhounds cheer.

“The dogs are mad,” the master snorts;

“Coyote, he,” the horse retorts.

A silver ghost upon the vale

The foxhounds saw—and wagged their tails.

TO RUDY

Wenn wir sehen uns nicht in dieser Welt,

Dann sehen wir uns in Bitterfeld.

Teutonic ballads and cucumber salad

And schnapps and Schinkenbrot;

Electric trains and Lili Marlene

Dumplings and strudel

And Rommel and Rudel

(They were real good-looking boys.)

Hup, two, three, four:

Gee, by golly, it’s the Afrika Korps:

Then we play “Greensleaves,” and the Eisenbahn leaves.

And when it storms or it snows

Or the sun cracks the veldt,

We’ll shuffle the deck in Bitterfeld.

Moritz und Max, Hase und Dachs,

There go Witwe Bolte’s hens

(Skorzene must be back in town.)

And the coal mine’s whistle shrieks again

But this time you won’t be going down:

The walker is parked, and the wheelchair is still;

What should we do with the syrup and pills?

I’ll do like you say and flush them away

And wait for you under the linden boughs.

And when it rains in Sahara,

And Siberia melts,

I’ll look for you

In Bitterfeld.

AFRICAN TRAVEL

Djougou, Djougou,

Ougadougou:

Come away and fly with me!

Said the chauve souris

In the mango tree.

Accra!

Accra, Accra, Accra, Suhum!

Said the trotro boy that day employed

To wipe the dust and scrape the rust

While Atewa waved goodbye—

And we said asante! And we said merci!

To the chauve souris

In the mango tree.

Then we made our way

For the rest of the day

Among the potholes and the diesel fumes

While the trotro boy leaned out the door

And he cleared his throat, and he said once more,

“Accra!

“Accra, Accra, Accra, Suhum!

“Djougou, Djougou, Ouagadougou:

“Denge, gongo, bongo, kudu;

“Apoteche, nyam’ ya mbuzi,

“Typhus, typhoid, quinine tree:

“Jacaranda, black acacia,

“Baobab, teak, plantain plantation,

“Coffee, sisal, maize, and tea;

“Rhodolite and gold and voodoo—

“Djougou, Djougou Ouagadougou:

“Come and take a ride with me!”

So we rode, and we ride—

From side to side:

From Usambara where the barabara

Rattled and battled our poor old car;

From Sumbawanga back to Tanga,

Then from Mombasa to Kinshasa

And north, to Timbuktu;

Now south once more,

To the Gold Coast shore

Where the harmattan dust like bloody rust

Turns red the leaves of the mango trees

Where the chauve souris

And the boomslang sang,

Djougou, Djougou,

Ouagadougou:

Come along and fly with me!

MKALAMO WARD, 1986

Roosters crowing, cattle lowing

Drummers drumming, trumpets blowing

Fluters fluting, children screaming;

Wide awake, and yet I’m dreaming:

Can this be my life I’m living,

Or is imagination giving

Life to mountains, rivers, sand?

Am I a god, am I a man?

Who can buy the Southern Cross

When no one seems to know the cost?

Crows are cawing, dogs are barking.

Larks are singing, singers larking

By the old cathedral door;

Still, the priest is sleeping, dreaming:

Is he mad, or is he screaming

At the cockroach on the floor?

All the wealth his church possesses

Can’t approach such steep redresses

And he nor I can spare the cost

Of Mkalamo’s Southern Cross.

WATERCOLOR

Locusts and termites, mosquitoes and gnats

Acacias and baobabs and elephant grass.

Zebra and zebu and green dragonflies:

Blue-painted mountains and stormy gray skies.

Tarpon and marlin, grouper and dace

Coral and mangroves the white sands encase.

Seagulls and hummingbirds, hornets and bats:

Blue-painted mountains and broad tidal flats.

Leopards and leopard-men, drumming and voodoo;

Gerenuk, oryx, impala, and kudu

Colobus monkeys and pink cockatoos

Blue-painted mountains and crocodile sloughs.

Salmon and king crabs and flounder and perch;

Sunshine at midnight when restless you search

The golden horizon and glowing auror’

For the blue-painted mountains of Kodiak’s shore.

Catfish and cottonmouths, herons and hogs;

Low ride the thunderheads over the bogs.

Flat the horizon of cotton and rice

Until the blue-painted bluffs of the Smokies arise.

Civets and duiker and pangolins coiled

On the fronds of the palms where the hornbills steal oil.

Tiger ants, adders, and green golden light:

Blue-painted mountains and firefly nights.

Creosote jungles, red-clay chaparral,

Sun-whitewashed missions, coyotes’ chorale;

Rattle snakes, roadrunners, lizards with horns:

Blue-painted mountains beyond the Sonora.

Blue-painted mountains are home to the gods:

From Kodiak’s coast to the jungles abroad.

From the thunderheads forming in late afternoon

To the dawn to the dusk to the rise of the moon.

When you are weary of toil and care

And seek refuge from hunger and plague and despair

Look to the distance, to the glacier and scree

Where the blue-painted mountains await you (and me).

THIRD WORLD ROMANCE

You cannot understand me,

I don’t know what you said.

I’m a six-inch dictionary,

You’re like coal black stationary.

I’m a word you can’t pronounce,

You’re a page that can’t be read.

Third World Romance: I guess that’s all we are,

Are we really worth the danger, do we really have a chance?

Precious little chance there is to catch a falling star:

Everybody knows this is a deadly circumstance.

I can’t forget about you

All day long while I’m away;

You’re a constant, nagging chancre,

You’re a question with no answer.

Are we really worth the effort,

Of the scary games we play?

Third World Romance; does it always end so soon?

Trying hard for months to write each other every night.

Was it all misunderstanding; was it only just a dream?

Then why the airport taxi and the thirty-hour flight?

LEVITICUS CARP

Leviticus Carp was no one’s fool:

He sent his grandkids to private schools.

He didn’t vote at election time

For some butt-kissing politician:

Because he once caught a gander

At their gerrymander,

And Leviticus knew their position.

“These spineless punks already wrecked—

“Boy, don’t you interrupt me!

“With their plastically Political Correct—

“From New Orleans to Kentucky.”

Leviticus Carp was just a lad

When he rode shotgun for a Galahad

Known then as “Sergeant Krieg.”

Ah… then brave Private Carp

(With leaden heart)

Upon a canvass stretcher bore

Along the Mekong’s muddy shore

The bullet-riddled stalwart, Krieg

To where a chopper sullen perched

Like an evil buzzard to span the leagues

Between the field of contest and

Some air strip in South Vietnam.

Leviticus Carp, no more a youth,

Returned to battle—claw and tooth—

Longhaired radicals in leisure suits

With soft-shelled cars from Europe;

In the village square,

They tossed their hair,

And flashed their designer sunglasses—

Till, with angry shouts and fists employed,

Came Leviticus and his Good Old Boys:

To whip their liberal asses.

Leviticus Carp was a bitter man:

He didn’t care if Pakistan

Was reduced to rubble and ashes.

“Let them camel jockeys keep their rugs,

“Their oil and their goddamned drugs:

“I hope they get fever and rashes.

“I won’t shed a tear,

“If all Asia disappears—

“And Africa rots in hell;

“For I’ve paid all my taxes and revenues—

“With never one word of Well, Carp: thank you!

“Bubba, I’d love to ring Washington’s bell!”

Yet Leviticus Carp was a humble man:

A pillar of the church.

He’d change your tire in a thunderstorm,

And to hell with ice or mosquito swarms:

He’d never leave you in the lurch.

Once he told me, “Son, I like you,

“Y’all’re just a bit confused.

“Sometimes you spout off that junk

“About that public school where y’all’re employed

“To spread the news

“To a pack of ignorant punks.

“Let’s get this straight:

“Boy, I don’t hate

“No man that knows to keep his place;

“But don’t lecture me, son,

“About intelligent ones—

“When they ain’t none in that race.

“I heard all that junk

“Twenty years gone by—

“From them long-haired hippie fools

“’Bout Integration

“Segregation

“And southern procrastination.

“Boy, I seen what they done in Boston!

“I seen them minorities get riled at Republican ploys—

“Claimin’ they were the work of us, Good Old Boys:

“Then they burned their own groceries down!”

Leviticus Carp was a hell of a man:

He said Lucifer wrote the Marshall Plan.

But yet I recall

A night one fall

When the fire bell preempted our slumber;

Then we put on our boots and our fireman’s hats,

And uncoiled our hoses and stepped up to bat.

All the trailer park gathered

To watch us with our ladders

And Leviticus cussed us like thunder:

“The goddamn roof’s cavin’ in, and the propane tank’s caught!

“Where’n the hell’s that new jacket we bought?

“Clear out of my way!” Then asunder

The poor walls caved in and the propane tank sparked

And it took us six hours to resurrect Carp,

And we found them there, jowl-by-cheek:

He was burnt to a crisp,

But a child was wrapped

In the coat of asbestos we’d bought for such tasks.

If it weren’t for the propane, they’d’ve made it.

“Leviticus Carp! Let your spirit be received

“By beautiful Jesus of Galilee!”

(I heard this with my own ears.)

The African Methodist-Baptist pews

Were filled with a sad regret for you

And that little old trailer-trash girl you cloaked

Unheedfull of the fire and smoke

Must bring tears to the angels’ eyes

When her childish voice recalls that night.

For your sergeant, Krieg, and you, like him,

Are the ones that do what they must

When the sirens blow and the levees bust.

They give their britches a hitch,

And say, “Son of a bitch!”

And they square up their shoulders

And double their fists:

And to hell with the odds—whatever the risk.

And on warm summer nights,

When the crickets fall still,

Leviticus Carp and his phantom coon hounds

Prick their ears for waning sounds

While they make their vigilant rounds.

You can call me a liar, but I swear it’s no joke:

You’ll hear cursing and barking

Before you smell smoke.

WACHOWI

At the deserts fringe the sirocco winds

Whip the baobab twigs and the strangler figs

And the oasis echoes howls from the north.

And when the twilight comes

With the witches’ drums

The leopard men steal forth.

At the deserts edge by the Great Rifts’ ledge

Where eucalyptus and acacia sprout

And candelabra trees shade the Atlas’ knees:

Man and beast to their lairs retreat

When the drums commence their frightful sound

And the bravest heart begins to pound.

At the deserts’ border is a great disorder

Of bush and tarn and poor small farms

And villages of ancient tales;

And Islam and Christianity

Wage a war with this insanity:

The shadows of Sahel.

At the deserts’ wall where the jackals call,

Where the locusts and the termites claim their due,

And salt bush thrives in times of dry

The electric world conceded

Because the modern is impeded

In the twilight by a shrill and savage cry.

You may think this tale a joke,

The ignorance of simple folk.

But the kapok trees know better, I maintain:

For the silk wood sprites

Seek their lovers in the night

With hungry whispers through the bedroom windowpanes.

I know no desert kraal that lacks a wall

Of bougainvillea toward the witches off;

And the roosters’ cries are a lullaby

For the red and purple flowers

And the roosters’ waking hours

Make the vampires shy.

these words, and take careful care

If it falls your lot to sojourn there:

Never speak to strangers in those parts.

Keep to roads and keep the company

Of motor cars and electricity

And never answer questions after dark.

At the deserts’ long perimeter

The ancient still holds court.

And the wadis dry and vast

From Morocco to Medina

Are the playgrounds of hyenas

And the other unclean castes.

When the mosque call’s sung the harmattan

Settles lurid red-dust layers on our lives,

And the missionaries pray for the monsoon.

But the Christian or Islamic

Know of no religious tonic

For the fear the natives have of the full moon.

The vultures and the kites and the owls too by night,

Know a story they would tell if they could talk.

But like cobras and like adders

They have seen the cauldrons steam

And heard the frantic victims scream—

And so they’re mum about the matter.

But the lunatics and pilgrims that seek refuge in the wastes

Have eyewitness recollections

Of swift and deadly shadows and

Three-bladed knifes that on the ground

By leopard tracks they claim they found,

At bloodstained campfires on the sand.

At the deserts’ fringe the sirocco winds

Whip the last savanna grasses with a sigh.

In the twilight I hear chanting from the world:

And the kapok and acacia twigs

Tremble leafless while the strangler figs

Choke what moisture they have not yet stole.

Now the moon above us rises, and the virgin sacrifices

And the cannibal debaucheries begin.

And mission and the mosque, the oasis and the kraal

Throw more fuel on the fires in their sleep

While wachowi all creep—

Stealing hungrily outside our bedroom walls.

I COULD NEVER LET YOU GO

I ’m in love with another teacher from Jubilee County public high school. Her name is Janet Davis. She’s a local product, a Delta lady—tall, elegant, and graceful. She talks milk chocolate with none of the dialect mocked by television comediennes from Los Angeles or New York. She has the dignified appeal of a cemetery I once saw—that splendid collision of Catholicism and voodoo outside of Guadalajara where the Mexicans paint the tombstones lime green and blaze orange and baby blue where angry little black bees pollinate the wild flowers that grow among the resting. I teach science; Janet Davis teaches computer applications. I am thirty years old, and I’ve been around the world half a dozen times. I have enough initials after my name to start my own alphabet. I am the guy every other guy wants to be. I am one of two white teachers in an all-black district, and against all odds, we are the county’s mascots. I am an assistant football coach for the first winning team in ten years. The good old boys take me hog hunting and frog jigging. We drive around the Delta drinking Budweiser, rescuing broken-down motorists, putting out fires, and shining cottonmouths. The worst thugs in the school love me. I am on the volunteer fire department. I am a volunteer deputy sheriff. I’m a great guy; I have it all. I have it all.

We have a faculty meeting just before homecoming. Our principal is a nervous little man for whom I have developed deep respect. He has an agenda: he doggedly orders grinning work-release inmates from Parchman to paint over the gang graffiti which the boys and girls just as doggedly replace (usually before the paint is dry).

“May I sit here?”

“If you don’t mind being seen in public with me,” I tell Janet Davis.

“Not at all.”

“OK, right,” the principal begins. “What we gotta do is we gotta pick a theme for homecoming. Any suggestions?”

“How about Aladdin?” a social studies teacher looks around hopefully.

“We did that last year.”

“What about Colors?” says the trigonometry teacher. “That’s what they’re doing at Shelby-Broadstreet.”

“How about ‘Beowulf’s mead hall?’” the guy from Teach-for-America chimes. The principal ignores him; Janet Davis chuckles.

“Colors? What colors?”

“They did green and gold. They were going to do blue and gold; then the kids started fighting over red or blue—so they did green.”

“How about it?” the principal peers hopefully around the library. “Green and gold?”

“How about green and white—like the team?” the head football coach booms. The suggestion is met with eager enthusiasm.

“How about mauve and ochre?” the Teach-for-America boy snaps in his New England accent.

“Red, white, and blue—like Apollo Creed,” the head football coach crows, and the faculty degenerates into a chaos of arguing. The principal looks around helplessly. Janet Davis flashes a very white smile at me.

Then the senior English teacher—a very practical woman—slams her clipboard against a wooden library table with such ferocious effect that the babbling subsides into a guilty chuckle.

“We have one week,” the principal says ominously. “We need a committee.”

“How about the English department?” the head football coach purrs.

Screw that, the Teach-for-America guy mouths at me.

“Ms. Rabbit, will you be responsible for the committee?” Everyone avoids eye with the senior English teacher. “Nother thing.” The principal is suddenly sly. “Lesson plans. As you know, I am paid to evaluate them. The State Department of Education has threatened to suspend my check—until I evaluate them. How can I evaluate them if you don’t turn them in? Also,” he says archly.

“A certain teacher—he shall remain anonymous—is writing them in French.”

“You cold-blooded baby!” the head football coach roars at the New England boy.

This is the week one of our running backs gets blown away in the alley behind the Jitney Jungle. In a small agricultural community, everyone knows about everyone else’s business, so the Good Old Boys aren’t too surprised when I walk into Big John Bennett’s roadhouse one evening wearing my suit.

“You been to the funeral, huh?”

“You teachin’ ’em anything down there?”

“What did you expect?”

“Never seen nothin’ like it, have you?”

“Leave him alone,” says Big John Bennett. Big John Bennett is a large, quiet man with his Purple Hearts framed behind him on the wall under the mounted white tail bucks between a largemouth bass and a Virginia boar.

“It’s getting African in there,” the Teach-for-America boy tells me when I arrive at the homecoming dance.

“You’ve been drinking,” I inform him.

“So have you,” he snorts. “It’s all part of my strategic illness plan.”

“Looking good, fellas,” the principal chatters at us. He scuttles towards the refreshment tables. In the bleachers, the students crouch, eyeing each other over the basketball court.

I escape to my classroom for a while. In the hall, I collide with Janet Davis who leaves behind her in her classroom the sound of a printer.

“Working late?” I ask her.

“Well, don’t we look fine tonight? , you promised to dance with me.”

“Three things white men can’t do: jump, dance, and wear green tuxedos.”

“He didn’t!” she bursts out laughing. (The principal’s wardrobe is legendary.) We walk to my classroom to look at the fish.

“I was writing my resume,” she says by and by.

“You’re not thinking of departing this earthly paradise, are you?”

“Someday,” she smiles at my reflection in the purple green glass of the fish tank.

We walk together to the gym, wincing at the heady throb from the huge stereo speakers. A fair number of students are now grinding on the gym floor, driving the faculty into righteous hysteria. Two of my favorite gangsters see me come in with Janet Davis; they nudge each other and mouth encouragement at me.

If I could retract my friendly refusal, I’d take you up on that dare. I could put one hand on your shoulder, Janet Davis, and hold your hand in my other. You wore a red gown that had no sleeves or shoulders. The glittering ball that the DJ grimly blasted with his laser would reflect on the gold on your ears and around your throat, and you’d smile, like you always did, with your eyes half-shut.

If we liked it, if we were smart and discreet about it, I could take you up to Tunica sometimes, to the casinos; people are so weird there, they’d think we were part of the floorshow. We could go to Memphis sometimes too; there are some things you can pull off in the city. You can disappear there.

If you decided you liked me, I could take you to Guadalajara at Christmas to see the pretty colored lanterns in the streets. We could rent one of those dangerous Mexican Volkswagens so I could take you to see the creosote bush in the mountains when the afternoon sun turns it ochre and mauve. I could never let you go.

ESPERANTO

C handina arrived in the United States the same week (in early April, 1997) that Thanh did. Chandina arrived from Cambodia; Thanh arrived from Vietnam. They were strangers to each other (and everyone else). They were both young and pretty; it is inconceivable that the uniformed men and women at Immigration were not smitten with them. Beyond this, the similarities broke down.

Thanh was born and raised in Ho Chi Min City; she was educated and had starred at the academy where she was trained in a career of entertainment as a concert violinist. Chandina was only a secondary school graduate; at nineteen, she was seven years younger than this Vietnamese princess with whom she would live for the indefinite future. The interpreter that introduced them was a large black man, a veteran of several of the conflicts that had produced generations of Thanhs and Chandinas.

“Father.”

“Futh-tha.”

“Good!”

“Gou!”

The American language teacher shook her head and laughed. “My god, you’re adorable; what a little heart-breaker.”

Of course, Chandina had no idea what the American woman said—but since the American woman smiled, Chandina smiled, too. The American woman held up a picture of two girls.

“Sisters.”

“Sisters,” Chandina nodded. They smiled again then Chandina picked up the next picture before the teacher had a chance. It was a picture of two boys. “Sisters?”

The American woman pursed her lips playfully and shook her head, so Chandina frowned too and shook her head.

“Brothers—buh-ruh-thers.”

“Bah-ruz-zers.”

The American woman had less success with Thanh; Thanh was scornfully resentful of the language class. Already she was recognizing words: Mazda, Coca-Cola, Isuzu.

They had both realized that they were nearly invisible, although they attracted

attention from men of a dozen colors on the endless city streets. This annoyed Thanh and frightened Chandina.

They stopped to buy coffee at a little shop.

“Jesus, God in Heaven, what have we here?” the proprietor grinned.

“Sisters.” Chandina nodded professorially; Thanh glared at her, askance.

Thanh woke with a start; she occupied one room in the little apartment. (Chandina slept in the room next to her.) Thanh stretched like a cat and then noiselessly swung out of bed and trotted over to the other door. She knocked; she heard Chandina choke out some unintelligible reply, so she entered. Chandina was crouched in the corner, her slim arms wrapped around her knees, crying.

“Well—what’s wrong?” Thanh asked briskly. “Can’t you sleep?”

“I’m worried about my mother,” Chandina said in Khmer.

“Muzzer? Mama?”

“Mama,” Chandina nodded.

Thanh disappeared into the little kitchen for a moment. When she returned, she handed Chandina a can of Pepsi. “Pepsi,” Thanh growled. Then, in perfect, unaccented English, she added, “The choice of a new generation.” Chandina’s eyes widened incredulously; she was in awe of this elegant genius. “Count sheeps.” Thanh patted her roommate on the head. “Go to sleep, stupid,” she added in Vietnamese.

* * *

For Chandina, there was wonderful novelty in the sprawling, antiseptic American city; she had arrived in spring, and spring is a forgiving season at the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Thanh, on the other hand, was already worried; she knew that the supply of money and well-intentioned American generosity had its limit. Also, she was burdened with this stranger—Chandina—that followed her around like a little lost dog. Alone, on her own, she knew she could travel farther and faster.

They waited forever for the light to change; a tall fat American waited with them. He stared at them until they stared back. Thanh stared back coldly, having had some experience with men; Chandina shyly dropped her eyes. The American sighed and shifted his briefcase from one pudgy hand to the other.

Presently, they found themselves in a park. Street musicians of all colors and temperaments competed for the sympathy of pedestrians. Chandina wanted to linger by a West Indian steel-drum band, but Thanh had no interest in this cannibal music.

Then Thanh spotted the violinist. He was a stocky white man with a heavy beard on his villainous middle-aged face. He performed improvisations, which irritated

Thanh. Chandina, the little idiot, dropped a coin into his violin case, and he abruptly stopped playing.

“Thank you,” the bearded man said.

“Sister,” Chandina said, pointing at Thanh.

“Your sister?”

“No!” Thanh was intensely irritated.

Chandina pointed at the violin and then back at Thanh. “Sister,” she repeated more emphatically. A light broke out on the bearded man’s face. He handed the violin and the bow to Thanh who frowned, shook her head, and put her hands behind her back.

“Go ahead,” the bearded man said. Thanh shook her head again. “Please?” Thanh sighed and took the violin and the bow. She began to play…

“Little sister wails,” one of the steel drummers purred.

“Now I can die happy,” the bearded man murmured. Thanh looked irritably from one face to the next—and finally at Chandina. Chandina’s eyes glittered, and her full lips were slightly parted over her even white teeth. Her hands (too strong and incompetent for music) were clasped in front of her belt buckle.

“That was beautiful,” Chandina said. “You play as though you were an angel…”

“Damn,” a second Jamaican steel drummer said. “They foreign! You speak English?” (Like anyone who encounters a foreigner for the first time, the Jamaican raised his voice to make himself understood.)

“No English,” Thanh said sharply, jerking her head at Chandina. “Cambodia.”

“Damn,” the drummer repeated. Thanh handed the violin back to the bearded man and gestured to Chandina to follow her.

“So long, Cambodia,” the bearded man called after Thanh.

“No! Not Cambodia! Vietnam,” Thanh snapped.

“Cambodia and Vietnam,” the violinist and the steel drummers chuckled as the two girls walked off—Thanh stalking like an angry leopard, Chandina gliding slightly behind her. “Vietnam and Cambodia.”

* * *

“‘Money?’ You need money?” The language teacher peered at Chandina.

“Thanh… money.”

“Thanh needs money?”

“I need money to buy a violin for Thanh, or she will die. She is the greatest musician in the world,” Chandina said in Khmer. “I don’t care what it costs, I will work fifty years to pay for it.”

“Slow, slow.” The language teacher patted Chandina’s hand. “Thanh?”

“Thanh…” Chandina pantomimed, drawing a bow across a violin; she hummed discordantly.

Two days later, the interpreter handed a violin case to Thanh. “Courtesy of the AMB Church,” he boomed proudly. “Play.”

Thanh shook her head.

“Please play something,” Chandina said in Khmer. “They should hear what I heard…”

Thanh knew full well how the violin came into her possession; she was both irritated and touched—really more touched than irritated—so she shrugged and

took the violin out of the case. She expertly tuned it, put a little purple resin on the bow, and began to play. For the next fifteen minutes, her eyes reflected a brooding expanse, and then she recovered and stopped abruptly. The interpreter nodded without smiling.

“Very good,” he said in Vietnamese. “Very, very good.”

“Beautiful,” the language teacher choked. “But that doesn’t approach it.”

* * *

“Next time, ask for a car, stupid,” Thanh told Chandina.

“What?” Chandina smiled helplessly. Thanh shook her head and rolled her eyes.

They found the bearded man in the same place, again competing with the steel drummers.

“Hello, princess—well, well!” The bearded man smiled brilliantly. Chandina returned his smile just as brilliantly. Thanh shrugged and removed her secondhand violin from its battered case. As they tuned the two violins to each other, the West Indians glided over.

The bearded man was no professional; he was a visiting professor from Glasgow

who played his violin in the park to observe people. He recognized tragedy in some like the homeless and the drug addicts. He found camaraderie with the other musicians, artists, and jugglers. In others, like Thanh, he occasionally found genius. The steel drummers’ eyes gleamed at the elegant music; they felt a fierce, proud impulse to protect it and smash anything that dared interfere with it. Other musicians—some with saxophones, others with guitars, sprawled on the manicured grass; some policemen—curious at first and then enchanted—sat silently on their horses.

“My brother can make him some cheese with Little Sister,” one of the steel drummers told the bearded man when the performance was over.

“I’ll never play with her again,” he sighed. “But I know someone who will.”

* * *

The gentle summer was replaced by fall—brisk, efficient fall—the season when money is negotiated, accumulated, and invested. Chandina worked in a restaurant now. She seldom cried at night any longer; she was discovering ambitions and desires that feverishly chased her nightmares away. Now she sent money to her family in Cambodia every month. Her English improved exponentially, although it was a mischievous exponent; son of a bitch, for example, had a dozen meanings depending on circumstance and inflection. One night, she dropped a steam tray at the restaurant. The rest of the kitchen staff froze. Chandina glanced from one expressionless face to the next, and then she snarled “son of a bitch!”

“You goddamn right, baby, screw this job!” the kitchen manager howled.

At Christmas, she went to the Chicago Symphony. She had a new dress from the language teacher, a necklace from the interpreter, and an corsage from her boyfriend.

The curtain rose, and the lights dimmed; the conductor strode out to eager applause. When the solo was finished, the audience erupted without control. On the stage, Thanh bowed stiffly, blinded, and engulfed in the stage lights and in adoration, flowers, and tears of the crowd. The Hispanic boyfriend felt Chandina’s strong, warm hand tighten on his arm; he looked at her and saw that her eyes glittered, and he understood well enough when she whispered goodbye, sister, in Khmer.

MUMYANI

The Office

T he police ran his license number and found that the man had permission to be in the building after hours. They gave his presence no more thought.

The man had lied to his employer and his wife; no one except the police knew that he was alone in the building. He had carried a small duffel bag into his office. He emptied the contents onto his table: a bottle of whiskey, a pack of cigarettes, a packet of letters, and a loaded automatic pistol. From a metal shelf, he withdrew a folder, placing several documents next to the packet of letters. The first document was a foreign driver’s license. The second identified him as a special deputy from a county in the Mississippi Delta. He had a plastic badge that showed him to be a member of a university faculty. He had expired ports, and he had two photographs.

The first photograph showed a powerful man in a military uniform, one booted leg draped over the other, a cigar in his large hand. The man sat on a crude bench under an olive tree. The photograph was very old. The second photograph showed a small boy—barely two years old—peering back at the camera with frightening concentration.

Erlau—this was the man in the office with the gun, the photographs, and the whiskey—shuddered. He turned the photograph of the little boy over (because it made him sad); he considered the soldier-under-the-olive-tree a little longer, and then he shuddered again and turned this photograph facedown too.

Erlau withdrew a printed computer message from the packet of letters. He squinted at it and read: Dear Friend: come to Israel with us! We have to buy truck tires. We own ten trucks. We will send you the ticket! Please, please come to Israel with us! Erlau chuckled a little, thinking about the men who had sent him the message. Then he thought about the little boy in the photograph, and he grew sad. He drank some whiskey and then kneaded his eyes while he toyed with the automatic and soon the flashes of light his optic nerves produced—and the throbbing hum of the building’s generator—took shape, and for a while, he forgot about the letter, the soldier-under-the-olive-tree, and the little boy with the strange, haunted eyes…

PART I

The Hot Land

CHAPTER 1

1987

T he sky over the Mkalamo Irrigation Scheme turned from blaze to gold, and the light on the Usambara Mountains two kilometers to the north turned from gold to red. The dragonflies concluded their patrol over the rice fields and disappeared to wherever dragonflies go at night. Frogs and monitor lizards and otters crept through brown and brittle cornfields toward the feeder canals; from out of obscure clumps of weeds stole mongoose, snakes, and cane rats.

In the vast salt bush that began half a kilometer to the south, the drought held sway with iron tyranny, but close to the Soni River laid this gaudy splash of a thousand hectares of brilliant green—the Mkalamo Irrigation Scheme. Like some verdant magnet, it drew life and hope from the surrounding wilderness, the air at five o’clock in the evening throbbed with the noises of the lean Maasai cattle, goats, and asses, their leaner wardens, and the sing-song voices and laughter of the Samba women bathing in the muddy canals. Below this was the contralto of the wild: the earthy, solemn calling of herons and wild cocks and guinea fowl and shrikes and the electrical humming of billions of mosquitoes.

The white man, Erlau, shrugged off his sweat-soaked shirt and tossed it onto the black clay bank of the fishpond. His white skin was pale as ice from the base of his neck to his waist. His forearms, face, and neck were the color of the roasted corn he had eaten during the last six hours. He wore clay-caked boots, muddy olive pants, and a muddy leather belt. From the denim shirt he had thrown on the bank of the fishpond, he gingerly fished a muddy pack of cigarettes and a muddy matchbox.

Erlau was a contract man, not a missionary. He was working his first contract, and he was young. He reflected that here, south of the Equator, the January temperature rose to forty-five degrees above zero¹—while in America or Scandinavia or Siberia, it might well be forty-five degrees below zero at this hour.

Erlau finished his cigarette. He balled up his sweaty work shirt, buttoned on the denim shirt, and retrieved his panga. The panga is the Africans’ answer to the Latinos’ machete, a long, heavy bush knife. Erlau had used this panga to cut dense green weeds in a path lining a dry canal. This canal was thirty meters long and three meters wide. He had started at nine o’clock in the morning and finished at five o’clock in the evening, resting for only a little while at noon when he ate the roasted corn and sucked a little sugar cane. He had worked during the hottest hours of one of the hottest countries in the world. It gave him a perverse satisfaction that the African, whose canal he had cleaned, was hardly able to do this—to work until sweat blinded him and the poorly made hilt of the panga cut through his leather work glove and the siafu² forced him to the shade of a banana tree where he sucked more sweet juice from a dirty section of sugar cane.

Erlau trudged along a two-kilometer stretch of heavily corrugated black alluvial clay (the main road in the Irrigation Scheme). He ed a two-hundred-meterlong reservoir pond. (It was empty of water.) If I can only convince them to fill the goddamned thing, it’ll be enough work right there for two years, he thought. The pond had been dry for several years. It had filled in with bush. No children played in the deep basin, and no goats were herded in to devour the thick bush. Pythons had been seen entering and leaving the basin, and at certain times of the day, puff adders, cobras, and black mambas were visible sunning themselves on the dry, rock-hard clay. If I had thirty men with pangas and thirty women with jembes,³ I could kick them in their tails and clear it in two days. Then open the sluice gate at the far end during the rains when the river’s high and fill the bloody thing in less than a week. Then there’d be water for all those bloody Maasai cows, and they wouldn’t erode the damned riverbanks anymore. God!

What I’d give for a few crocodiles here . . . Jesus Christ, what a country.

Erlau stopped and examined a froth of pig tracks frozen onto the road. The pigs had ed months earlier, and, along with the animals that had moved a few hours before and a few hours after them, they had left a permanent signature in the clay. Their tracks were the last of the rainy season and would remain there— natural graffiti—until replaced by the next rainy season.

They were warthogs. No one at Mkalamo kept pigs. Not even the few Christians. Warthogs, pythons, Maasai, heat, malaria, siafu, Erlau chanted to himself. “Africa’s Vanishing Wilderness.”

At last he arrived at the Irrigation Scheme office. A guard in a dirty uniform leaned on his battered Chinese rifle under the tin eaves of a dilapidated building.

“Jambo,” Erlau said absently. He fished a cigarette out, lit it, then lit another one off the first, and handed the first to the guard.

“Asante,” the guard replied. “When you go home, can I have your boots?”

“Sure,” Erlau laughed resignedly. “In twenty months, unless you want to trade them for the rifle?”

The African shook his head. “When will you get a new motorcycle?”

“Whenever the wakubwa Americans decide to send me one.”

“I heard the cops got the bastards that stole the first one.”

“Two of them; the mwizi mkubwa is still loose. He’s somebody Kadogo, some Chagga.”

“Mrombo Chagga,” the guard amended. He spat disgustedly into the dusty shadow of the office. “All Chagga are thieves.”

“And all Samba are whores,” Erlau said. This made the guard laugh.

“I heard one of the thieves was that boy, Arufane, the one from the pombe shop⁴ of your neighbor—that other Mrombo.”

“Sure it was. Mikono grabbed him in the market. He’s in the prison at Korogwe now. I hope the wardens send him to work in the fishponds.” The fishponds of the Korogwe penitentiary were full of crocodiles.

“Oh, they’ll make sure he suffers,” the guard said sympathetically.

“I hope they kill him. I hope they sodomize him and then kill him,” Erlau said venomously. The guard grew a little nervous. Like many of the local Africans, the guard was often nervous around Erlau.

“Got another cigarette, brother?” the guard asked.

“Sure.” They smoked another cigarette; the pack was empty. Erlau crumpled the paper wrapper and threw it on a pile of dry leaves. “See you tomorrow,” he told the guard.

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” the guard said.

“I’ll be here. So will you.” The guard watched the white man disappear, shaking his head half in pity and half in iration.

* * *

Erlau ed a gang of men lounging near a pile of sand they had shoveled out of the Soni River. They now rested in the shadow of a huge mango tree. There were half a dozen of them, regarding the several hundred sand-and-cement bricks they had stacked into a pyramid.

“Jambo, mzungu!” one of the brick makers hailed the white man. Erlau swung around. He tossed the panga from his left hand to his right, catching the heavy blade harmlessly. He then flipped it in the air and caught the handle; it was a fluid motion, like the coiling of a snake.

“What did you call me?” His voice was neither a snarl nor a bark, but it drooled

with threat, like the wasps hovering among the flickering yellow shadows of the mango tree.

“Nothing,” the African said quickly, taken aback. “I didn’t say anything.”

“That’s good,” Erlau replied tonelessly. He ambled away, his shoulders and hips moving like a bull’s.

The brickmakers let out a collective sigh. “What’s wrong with the mzungu?”⁵

“It must be the sun. No one can work in the sun like that and not go crazy.”

“Or it might be the motorcycle; the white man always worked like this, but he never got angry like this until they stole his motorcycle.”

“I hear they have that little Mrombo locked up—that Arufane boy.”

“Sure they do. I heard he begged the cops not to let the white man kill him; he’s in Korogwe now, in the cage. I hear it’s pretty bad there, out in the jungle, you know—with the snakes and the monkeys and all.”

“That Mrombo was a damned fool. This Kadogo—his brother—he’s the worst thief I ever saw, and he made off with the pikipiki. He’s a true Chagga all right, filthy thief! He’s going to get it, though. Sheik Ndoto’s after him now.” The last statement was a stage whisper; all of the brickmakers looked about uneasily.

Sheik Ndoto was the most powerful of the local witches.

“Sure, he’s going to get it in the end. Even the other Wachagga hate him now. The white man lives with a Chagga, you know, the one from Sanyajuu. Machame, his name is. Half the cops are Chaggas after all.”

“I heard it was that Sukuma—the one they call Simba—that grabbed Arufane.”

“Sure it was. Him and Marangu—that Chagga CID man.” The reference to the CID man was made in the same hushed voice as the reference to the witch.

“I hear Kadogo has a gun.”

“He smokes bangi too…”

“I heard the mzungu has a gun.”

“Well—what did you expect? All white men carry guns—even their women do. that little old bibi, the first wife of McDonald? Even an old woman like her carried a gun.”

“I say! McDonald… his second wife was a Chagga girl, wasn’t she? Say, why do wazungu men always go for Chagga women?”

“Maybe our white man needs a Chagga wife. That’s probably what makes him so mean.”

“Well, if that’s the case, there’s a little Mpare whore I know…”

“Maybe he smokes bangi too; that always makes people mean…”

* * *

Erlau ducked under a rusty chain fence and entered the crowded, bus-lined twilit thoroughfare that runs from Korogwe to Mkalamo and, by extension, to Same, Kilimanjaro, Arusha, and finally the Kenyan border. During the day, the town had a population of five thousand; then at dusk, the population would swell fourfold as trucks, buses, and military convoys stopped here for fuel and refreshment. Sometime between very late at night and very early in the morning, the pilgrims and the thousands of venders, mechanics, stevedores, prostitutes, and thieves that depended on the commerce of the international highway would disappear. The next day, the migration from village to town would repeat itself— a migratory flux on which much of the local economy depended. Erlau fished a few coins out of his pants pocket and gestured to a small boy. The boy carried a tray of oranges.

“Twenty shillings,” the boy said in English.

“Kuma ya mama yako,” Erlau replied.⁷ “Go and get me cigarettes.”

“Cigarettes are five shillings each.”

“Three shillings.”

“Four shillings.” The boy was Little Mohammed. He was quickly growing in notoriety as a thief. A few Africans—some black, others Asian—heard the conversation. They chuckled secretly.

Erlau walked up a steep road lined with shops, cheap restaurants, bars, and cathouses. Outside of one of the restaurants, he stopped. A husky young man roasted goat meat; he had chunks of it impaled on the broken spokes of a bicycle. His fire was a shallow cauldron of charcoal. When he saw the white man, the African picked a piece of straw off the dusty, heat-frozen ground and thrust it into the glowing coals. He held the burning end out; the white man nodded and lit a cigarette from it. The African and Erlau were around the same age.

“How’s the football?” the white man asked. It was the most civil tone he had used all day.

“Good. Everyone is happy that Indian is back—the son Sharif Ashrav sent to study the Koran. He’s out best striker. We have to play next week; will you come?”

“No, neither will your opposition. I heard the road ate three more buses this week.”

The football player grinned. “When will you wazungu fix it?”

“Ask the bloody Germans. I hear they’re in a mess with the police again.”

“Why? What have they done now?”

“Stealing rhodolite, I imagine.”

Erlau left the African at his charcoal stove and continued up the rocky street toward his house. He ed the business of a clan of hairdressers. Some of them were slovenly and aging, but most of them were young and lithe as impala. They called lilting taunts to the white man. Instead of answering, he glowered ahead and flicked the ash from his cigarette in their direction. In his left hand, his knuckles whitened on the hilt of his panga.

“What’s wrong with that boy?” one of the hairdressers asked. “Is he msenge?”⁸

“Maybe not. Maybe he doesn’t like African girls. Too bad there are no wazungu women around here.”

“Well, I don’t like him anyway. He has bad eyes, and they say he carries a gun.”

On the cement porch of the white man’s house, in the shade, sat the Chagga Machame. His right leg was in a cast from the knee down. As he came around the corner, Erlau saw that Machame was talking to a girl. She was a young

beauty, maybe sixteen years old. She was in the flower of health and youth; she had strong, flowing muscles on her long arms and legs; she was slim but had wide shoulders and hips. She had very white regular teeth and delicious eyes; her expression was fixed perpetually between a pout and a smirk. She was well aware of her attractions and disdainful of her irers.

Machame and the girl had an eerie, beautiful, pagan appearance in the late rays of the equatorial sun, like two lions under the branches of an acacia tree out past Kwasewa.

“Ndugu! Pole za kazi!”¹

“Thanks.” The white man sank down next to the Chagga and stared incautiously at the girl; she boldly reciprocated his appraisal. “Where’s your wife?” the white man asked softly.

“Inside, making your tea,” the Chagga said cheerfully. “I say, Ndugu, do you have money for cigarettes?”

“Sure.” Erlau pulled a tattered bank note out of his pocket—the last of his money—and held it out toward the girl. “Go and get five cigarettes,” he told her.

She hesitated; then adventure stronger than prudence, she barked, “Why? Am I your wife?”

Machame muttered at her. The white man gestured imively to one of a group

of small children that had gathered to watch him. The child approached timorously, snatched the money, and fled toward the bar across the street.

“So what?” the girl shrilled to the Chagga. “Do you want me to come to your house tonight or not?”

“You know,” the white man turned to the Chagga. “She’s a hell-of-a-goodlooking little bitch, but she’s got a mouth like a magpie.”

“What did he say? What did the mzungu say?” the girl demanded, dancing impatiently in front of Machame and the white man. “What did you say, mzungu?” She lunged forward and grabbed at the white man’s leg. A dangerous light flickered across his face; his cheeks and jaw tightened, and his eyes clouded. He grabbed the girl’s wrist in his left hand and pulled her, facedown, over his knees. Then he whacked her shapely bottom with the flat of his panga. The children fled, shrieking with terror. The Chagga, Machame howled with laughter.

“I said,” the white man said in Swahili, “that I’ll sell you to the Maasai. Get out, malaia.”¹¹

She regained her balance and danced away, rubbing her injured portion, glaring at the white man and the Chagga with an expression that combined anger and challenge. The white man leaned back, resting against the whitewashed bricks of his house.

“It’s not easy being the mzungu,” he announced.

The Chagga laughed again.

The child returned with five cigarettes; then she danced a little pirouette, shrieking—an ingenious imitation of the older girl, which made the Chagga and the white man laugh again.

“Two other wazungu came to visit you,” the Chagga said. “Germans. They’re some of the ones who are building the road.”

“What did they want?”

“Only to pay their respects.”

“Damned kind of them.”

The Chagga and the white man stared unconsciously at the vista of Rift Mountain north of Mkalamo. This is the Great Rift, you know; this particular extension is called the Usambara Mountains. They rise abruptly from the dry salt bush. A column of peasants was visible, toiling up a steep trail toward the remote village of Kilundai.

From the door of the house, a soft voice called the two men in to tea. The white man rose fluidly and then picked the Chagga up by the elbow as though the African was made from dry grass and burlap, not flesh and blood. Machame marveled again that God makes white men so strong when they look so fragile;

they have light, fine hair and porcelain skin, and eye glasses. The woman—the Chagga’s wife—watched the two. They were a strange sight, she thought; her handsome husband and then this mzungu, this big white man whose eyes look so alarmingly like the pale eyes of a cat.

The woman had, at first, suspected the white man of mocking her; he was too polite. He demanded nothing. At length, she lost this suspicion, but she was still a little afraid of him. Only Machame was not afraid of the white man, and he spoke Kizungu better than anyone, even the police commissioners and the sisal manager. Machame was the only person the white man joked with.

The woman, Sarah, was pregnant with Machame’s child. The pregnancy left her exhausted. She was exhausted with the pregnancy and exhausted from the heat of Tanga Region to which she was not yet accustomed. In Kilimanjaro, at least in the evenings, it grows cool when the wind spills off the glaciers and whispers through the orchards of banana, coffee, and avocado. Here, in Mkalamo, the wind loses itself among the red clay veldt, the baobabs, the jagged little volcanic mountains, the salt flats, and the endless unkempt sisal plantations. The villages here seemed so dirty, so unlike the Euclidean order of Kilimanjaro.

At length, Sarah served their supper, the food she bought with the money the mzungu gave her every day before he left for work. Tonight, they had three little fish from Pangani or maybe Tanga on the coast. The fish were served with a plate of kachumbare. This was made from lemon juice, tomatoes, onions, and peppers. There were a few papayas from the mzungu’s garden and a plate of rice. They drank tea with milk in it. That morning, the white man had given Sarah an extra hundred shillings to buy two kilos of sugar, so they had plenty of that, for once. When the men were finished, Sarah cleared the table, and her husband and the white man drank the rest of the tea, smoking and talking in the strange, harsh Kizungu.

“Make more tea, guests are coming later,” Machame told her. Sarah put more

water into the teakettle and lit the wicks of the kerosene stove. She made a mental note to remind Machame to ask the white man for more money to buy more kerosene. She was cleaning the plates when the guests arrived.

One of the guests was a half-caste; he was middle-aged and coarse. The other was new in Africa; his skin was still pallid like the bloated belly of a dead fish. He had no lines by his eyes or the corners of his mouth; his expression was open, curious, and cordial. His hair was not yet bleached. He smiled easily.

“Sarah! Come here!” Machame called. She rose from the bucked of soapy water before which she knelt to wash the dishes. Machame conspicuously drew a dirty note for twenty shillings from the pocket of his shirt. He thrust it at her. “Go to the bar and get us some cigarettes.” She nodded obediently. “My wife,” the Chagga told the two guests.

“Me, I am Chagga,” he said proudly. “From Kilimanjaro. You know Kilimanjaro?”

“Of course,” the half-caste growled.

“Last month, I broke my leg when we had our motorcycle wreck. The police took me to the hospital up in Lushoto. When my friend here came to visit me, some bloody black bastard thieves broke in and stole his motorcycle.”

“I’m sorry,” the younger of the Germans said sincerely. The older man—the half-caste—peered coldly at the American. Bloody, stupid, careless bastard, his eyes conveyed.

The host, the American contract man, shrugged and poured himself another cup of tea. At the bottom of the pot, a glob of tea leaves and milk curds had formed. This fell into the American’s cup with a suggestive splash. The half-caste laughed coldly. Just then, Sarah returned with the cigarettes; her husband, embarrassed by the teapot, turned angrily on her.

“Where the bloody hell is some more tea?” he backed in Kichagga.

“Sorry,” she said wearily. She gingerly placed the cigarettes in the center of the table and turned to the kerosene stove. The younger of the Germans quickly stood and said something in the unintelligible monkey talk, Kizungu. The tone was friendly and sympathetic. Machame spoke sharply to him, and the white man sat down again. The American and the half-caste looked from Sarah to the young German to Machame to each other; they exchanged a look of understanding not unlike the looks of understanding that might between turtles. The four had a brief exchange in Kizungu.

“Here, I’ll help you.” (This is what the younger German had said.)

“Let her do it, it’s her job. She shouldn’t be lazy.” (This was Machame.)

“He’s right, you know. This isn’t . You’d better get used to it.” (This was the American.)

“Huh.” (This was the half-caste.)

Sarah brought more tea. When the American picked up a cigarette, she lit it for him. He nodded to her; she nodded expressionlessly back and retreated to her stool in the corner.

“You don’t smoke?” the American asked the younger German.

“I quit.”

“Better start again. Keeps the mosquitoes off.”

After a little while, the guests stood up.

“How do you say thank-you in Swahili?” the young German asked.

“Asante.”

“Asante,” the young German told Sarah. “Asante for the tea.”

“What did he say?” she asked Machame quickly. He ignored her. The three white men walked to the door and shook hands.

“Good night… thank you—asante,” the young German smiled a little under his blonde beard.

“See you around,” the older German grunted.

“Inshallah,” the American grunted back just as coldly, the older German, the half-caste, finally grinned.¹²

The American returned to where the Chagga had remained seated at the table. They smoked the two remaining cigarettes, and then the white man took the kerosene lamp to the washroom. After a moment, he emerged and opened the door that lead to the garden and the outhouse.

A three-meter cement wall, topped by broken glass, enclosed forty square meters of sun-baked ground. This was the compound garden. The garden had a few papaya trees and one large lime tree. At the southeast corner of the garden sat a small cement room with a roof of corrugated iron sheets. The floor of the room had two slight elevations—each the size of a brick. Between them was a cavity that oozed stench. The white man squatted over the open pit and defecated. Out of some terrible curiosity, he held the kerosene lamp at an angle that showed the bottom of the hole, four meters down; maggots oozed and writhed like the masses in hell. Midway down the pit, large cobwebs were already under repair; the spiders raced to repair the damage done to their mother lodes during the latest of a dozen daily bombardments. The white man shuddered with revulsion. A horizontal shaft connected the offal of his house with a larger sewer common to several neighboring houses. How many flies were conceived, underwent metamorphosis, and took wing each day was a question that no longer held much interest for him. When a pit was full, a new one would be excavated; there must hundreds of these communal sewers in Mkalamo. Erlau used old newspaper to wipe himself. When the newspaper was gone, he would use a corncob until he had more newspaper. He always wiped himself with his left hand; he could not the last time he had put anything near his mouth with his left hand.

The Islamic custom of using the right hand only for eating or greeting or touching anything important was quite sensible. Erlau scooped a handful of lime from the bucket in the corner; he poured the powder down the hole to lessen the stench. The lime would kill the top layer of bacteria and maggots, but beneath, the organic soup would thrive. If the pits flooded…

When he returned, he replaced the lamp on the table and winced.

“If I hear ‘Mr. DJ’ one more time, I’ll shove that goddamned tape player up Mrombo’s bloody ass.”

“Mr. DJ” was a popular song from South Africa:

Thank you, Mr. DJ, for playing that song:

Thank you, thank you, I’ve been waiting so long.

Sarah helped Machame to his feet. With her assistance and his crutches, he made his way to the washroom.

The white man closed the door of his bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed. He pulled his boots off and then the denim shirt and his muddy pants. He felt his way to the wardrobe and groped for a shelf at the height of his chest. At length, his fingers closed on the rubber handle of a knife. He flashed the knife with a vagrant shaft of moonlight.

Beyond the sound of the bar music and the many voices of the patrons and the desperate, eager, shrill laughter of the bar girls was the noise of the bush, a few hundred meters away: the barks of baboons, the unnerving, piercing cries of bush babies, and the periodic coughing of a frustrated jackal. The white man pulled the mosquito net over the bed, crept under it, and then tucked it in around the edges of the soggy foam mattress. He carefully secreted the knife between the mattress and the mosquito net. He always slept with the knife.

For a little while, the white man thought about the beautiful, vulgar girl. Then he thought about fighting. Finally, he closed his eyes and focused on his left hand, clutching and twisting the weeds—and then the heavy arc of the panga—and then he could no longer hear the monkeys or the pombe shop but only the solid noise the panga made when it dug into the soggy black clay.

He rolled onto his side and muttered something as he fell asleep.

In the next room, Sarah heard him speak. The sound made her shiver a little because he slept with a knife. He had colorless eyes and knotty muscles, and his bleached hair made him look like some evil thing.

Machame was already asleep.

CHAPTER 2

E rlau woke with the first uneasy stirrings of predawn. The Germans’ heavy machinery rumbled to life ten kilometers away. Above this majestic percussion, the roosters and the pied crows added their distorted melody. From somewhere in the murk, the Mullah at the mosque beseeched the faithful to adjourn to their prayers.

Erlau yawned and stretched and eased himself off the soggy mattress. He rubbed his back and squinted out at the glowing profile of the Usambara Range. The velvet-black atmosphere was clammy and already an hour before sunrise—it was hot, hotter than it ever gets in Europe or America, hot as only Africa is hot.

Erlau’s muddy pants were still damp from the night before. At least he had clean socks to put on. He pulled on his rubber Wellington boots and cursed when he saw that they were reversed, left from right. When he pulled them off, the clean socks were already soggy and dirty. He struggled into a clean undershirt and stomped through the dark house to the washroom.

In the elevated basin of the washroom was a razor. He had Chinese blades, still in their wrappers. No one liked to use Chinese blades; they were dull after only one shave. Still, this was better than not shaving at all. The white man had no mirror. (He had not seen his reflection in months). He shaved by feeling his jaw and cheeks with his fingertips. When he was done, he groped for a plastic bottle of scented alcohol; he slapped it on. It stung him sharply where he had cut himself.

He unlocked the door of the house, stretched, and breathed deeply. Peasants from

Kilundai trotted past in the darkness, carrying baskets and bundles on their heads. When they saw the white man, some of them slowed down and eyed him hopefully.

“Eggs?” a little girl asked.

“How much?”

“T-twenty sh-shillings.”

“For how many?”

“W-one.”

“Kuma ya mama yako! Get out of here, thief!” The American picked up a rock from the street. The little girl shrieked, clutched her basket down tightly on her head, and scampered off. The people behind her laughed.

“Kuma ya mama yake! Such a small girl and already such malaia! You— mzungu, you want pears? Eggs? What about milk?”

By and by, Erlau had ten bread rolls, half a dozen pears, a few eggs, and a bunch of bananas. By now, it was getting light outside; still, Sarah had the kerosene lamp lit when Erlau returned to the main room of the house. I wonder if he ed to buy milk, she thought.

“Shikamoo,” she said formally.¹³

“Marahaba,” the white man said instinctively.¹⁴

Erlau drank his tea and ate alone. Sarah helped Machame to the washroom and then the outhouse.

At length, with a half groan, half sigh, Machame ed the white man at the table.

“Good morning,” the Chagga said with deferential cheer.

“Shikamoo,” Erlau said sardonically.

The Chagga laughed. “The woman wants to know what you want for supper.”

The white man didn’t reply; instead, he watched the Chagga pour his tea and then add four spoons of sugar to it.

“How can you drink that crap?” Erlau asked.

“My wife asks the same thing about you: how can you drink tea with only one spoon of sugar?”

“That’s the way everyone in America drinks it. And who the hell told you Africans to mix tea with milk? You mix coffee with milk—not tea.”

“I wish I had some coffee,” the Chagga sighed. “If we lived in Kilimanjaro, we’d always have coffee.”

“I wish I had a beer,” the American grunted. “Anyway, ask your wife how much she needs for the market.”

“I think one-fifty is plenty.”

“Take two hundred. That’s enough to buy cigarettes. Just save some for me.”

Erlau put on his cap. He picked up his leather gloves and the panga and started for the door. As an afterthought, he stopped and nodded to Sarah. “Thank you,” he said in English; then he was gone.

“Why did he thank me?” Sarah asked Machame.

“For making tea—for going to the market—who knows? That’s the way wazungu are, you know, always so damned polite.”

“But it’s his money,” she said, mostly to herself.

* * *

` The white man whistled his way through Mkalamo. He ed the house of A. J. Muhando. A. J. Muhando was the bank manager. A. J. Muhando was probably still asleep with one of his concubines. Several other women hung wash between the trunks of the trees in Muhando’s garden.

At the shop of Sharif Ashrav, the Asian merchant, the white man slowed down a little, but the door and windows were still secured against the intrusions of the African night.

The white man ed the spot where the brick makers worked; since it was Sunday, no one was there. At the office door, the guard’s bench was empty.

When he arrived at the field, the white man was astonished to find the droughtstricken foliage damp from dew. Rather than begin by burning the grass he had cut the day before, the white man began to clear a second canal, perpendicular to the first one. He left his cigarettes and matchbox, his cap and the right-hand glove on the sun-hardened clay bank of one of the fishponds he had helped this farmer build.

He approached a wall of reeds and brush taller than his head. He bent from the waist, keeping his knees locked. He twisted his left hand—the palm facing outward—away from his body. He then seized a fistful of stems and twisted. He

brought the panga down in a heavy arc that severed the roots below the surface of the rock-hard soil. He grunted a little when he wrenched the panga free; the black clay below the surface was sticky and heavy, and it made the blade clumsy.

He twisted a little at the waist. He clutched the next handful of weeds and repeated the maneuver. Presently, the rhythm of the panga grew swifter and smoother. The clay stopped clinging to the blade. It flashed silver black in the powerful morning sun. Erlau moved like a crab, sideways, in an odd little dance that carried him ten meters in half an hour, leaving a gauge half a meter wide in the wall of jungle.

He repeated this four times without resting.

When he did pause, he straightened up too quickly. For a moment, the jungle, the canal, and the panga were replaced by a cool welcoming darkness. He caught himself as he stumbled forward.

Presently, he returned to the canal that he’d cleaned the previous day. By now, the brush was dry enough to burn. He retrieved the glove, the matchbox, the cigarettes, and the hat from the bank of the fishpond. He soaked the cap in the green water of the pond, then squeezed it, and put it over his bleached, cropped hair. He lit a match to a cigarette and tossed it onto the dry brush. A little parched grass smoked. Suddenly, it flared up. Abruptly, the shriek and whine of vaporizing moisture mixed with the underlying crackle and the whole mess dissolved into a conflagration.

Satisfied, Erlau trudged to a neighbor’s canal. This canal was a garden; it was lined with banana trees, plantains, papaya, sugarcane, and breadfruit. Erlau cut a sugarcane stalk down. He cut off the bottom half meter; the rest he tossed into the spreading fire. Using the sharpest part of the panga blade—the part closest to

the hilt—he cut off the thick bark of the cane and then sucked the sweet juice.

When the sun reached its zenith, the fire had largely burned out. Erlau left the canal he had continued clearing and retrieved his hat, shirt, and matches. He carried the panga by its blade in his left hand. He attached his gloves and hat to his belt. He carried the matchbox in his right hand; his pants were too damp from sweat.

Instead of returning by the office, he ed through the rice village—Jitengeni.

On the way, he ed skeletal dusty red cornfields, forlornly scavenged by emaciated goats. Several times he was compelled to take exaggeratedly long steps to avoid columns of siafu. The voracious insects marched in an intrepid and endless quest for forage among the January foliage of ochre, olive, and rustcolored soil. In one clearing, a farmer and his wives burned their field. Before the advancing flames paraded marabou storks and vultures, snapping up rice rats, frogs, lizards, and snakes.

In a sink, a three-hectare section of virgin bush remained uncleared. The wild vines, acacia trees, and thorn brush towered like an evil mirage over the surrounding desert of ashes and dust. If only the whole country still looked like that, the white man thought. He pictured himself with a chain saw, a shotgun, and no contract. He looked over his shoulder at distant Mount Mafi. Only the peak was visible in the clearer air of twenty-five hundred meters. At the lower elevations, the shivering heat waves, and wind-whipped clouds of dust lowered visibility to less than two hundred meters.

Overhead, the kites circled, riding the thermals in an endless, dizzying ballet. Shortly before Jitengeni, a falcon plunged to earth and then soared instantly upward with a limp snake dangling from its talons. In front of the white man, a

herd of Maasai cows trudged behind a line of women; the women carried huge bundles of firewood on their heads.

At noon, Africa is a brutal place. It is a huge creature that swallows men and women and slowly digests them, grinding them down day by day. That anyone should live in Mkalamo Ward at all was remarkable to the white man. Here lived giant lizards and poisonous snakes, voracious ants and clouds of bees, locust swarms and mosquitoes, tsetse flies and termites. Here was erosion and stinging wind and heat.

In America, people lived in fear of the abstract: cancer, diabetes, AIDS, aging, bankruptcy. Here, daily fears were quite tangible: cobras, cholera, malaria, drought, and starvation. Petrol, flour, kerosene, salt, sugar—these might disappear any time. Only in sleep can one find freedom here—and sometimes not there either. In the past year, the Shihata News Service reported lions killing villagers in Bagamoyo, Kibaha, and Tunduru; and in the Korogwe government hospital, there were two main cases: cholera and tetanus. The tetanus occurred mostly among women who washed their clothes in the Ruvu River; they were bitten by small crocodiles, which didn’t recognize that a hand or a leg is attached to something much larger… The big crocodiles knew very well. Their victims never went to the hospital.

Villagers watched the white man’s progress down the street that connects the village of Jitengeni to Mkalamo. He appeared preoccupied, or maybe he was tired from the heat. In any case, like most white men, he was unfriendly. He looked neither right nor left. Many people were curious to speak to him—why is he here? What does he want?

He stopped at a duka¹⁵ and bought a cigarette. The shopkeeper saw that at the corners of his eyes, the white man’s skin was wrinkling and pinching. The white man was dirty from smoke and drying clay. He smelled strongly of sweat and smoke and freshly cut grass, a feral perfume more appropriate for a Maasai

herder than a rich mzungu.

“Pole za kazi,” the African said.

“Asante,” said Erlau.

“You shouldn’t go to the shamba when it’s so hot. Besides, it’s Sunday. Don’t you go to church? Aren’t you a Christian?”

“All gods are the same, and all weeds are the devil.”

The shopkeeper laughed. “Tutaonana baadai,” he told the white man.¹

“Inshallah,” said the white man.

The shopkeeper mused at the departing white man. The white man’s gloves clawed over his greasy clay-caked green pants. The panga dangled carelessly from his left hand. The cigarette added a new flavor to his strong aroma. His pace was slow, certainly deliberately slow—as though he wanted to spend more time in the furnace, turning his neck and forearms to an even angrier red.

“Is he a lunatic?” One of the women with the firewood dumped her bundle in the dust and sank down on it, in the shade of the duka.

“I don’t know.”

“To be out working on a hot day like this!”

“All wazungu do that. That’s how they got to the moon.”

“To the bloody moon! God is great!”

* * *

Starting at the spot where the road from the rice fields converges with the Jitengeni Road, by the brick makers’ mango tree lies a lush tropical forest of a few thousand hectares. It is an arboretum and a tree nursery. Here, cultivation, cutting, burning, hunting, grazing, and constructing of houses are prohibited. The white man stopped here for a minute to watch the green vervet monkeys in the trees. The monkeys might spend their entire lives in one or two trees, descending only in quick, furtive sorties to drink from the river. Here also lived duiker and other animals too; the shy, delicate little antelopes shared the damp, musty forest with otters, badgers, rabbits, bush babies, civets, and pythons.

The white man tossed away the butt of his cigarette and crossed the railroad bridge that spans the Soni River. He glanced over the rail; women crowded in the cool shadows that fringe the river. Some were old; some were children. Many were mature ladies. Many others were adolescents, their white eyes and teeth flashing in the heavy green-gold shadows. These seemed to the white man less human and more like the duiker; they disappear in the blink of an eye. He hurried across the bridge to the railroad yard. From the railroad yard, he ducked

under a barbed-wire fence and entered the line of dukas along the International Highway. Little Mohammed was there with his plate of oranges.

“You! Come here!” the white man ordered.

“Shikamoo,” Little Mohammed said coldly.

“Marahaba,” the white man answered just as coldly. “Get me a cigarette. Not for five shillings either.”

When he had his cigarette, the white man went to the fanciest of the shops. This belonged to the son of Sharif Ashrav. The white man sank onto a bench that lined one wall of the small aluminum building. Next to him on the bench sat a young Maasai moran. The Maasai was resplendently attired; he wore a red robe and new Adidas sneakers. His hair was elaborately braided and caked and dyed with red clay. He had a good deal of jewelry: glass and stone beads, gold, rhodolite, tanzanite, and a plastic whistle on an aluminum chain. About his trim, almost girlish waist, the Maasai wore a heavy fifteen-inch knife, girdled by a leather belt whose buckle was a brass seven-fingered leaf of marijuana. Opposite the knife hung a large police flashlight. The Maasai’s heavy ebony knobkerrie¹⁷ balanced against one bony knee.

“Yerro, sovai,” said the white man.¹⁸

“Eva,” the Maasai said automatically. Then his pretty hazel eyes widened, and he burst into a peal of shrill laughter. The Indian smiled benignly.

“Look, Muhindi! An mzungu, and he speaks Kimaasai!”

“This mzungu speaks all languages. Ndugu, kemsho.”

“Majamache,” the white man said.

“By god!” the Maasai yelled. Then he shrieked with laughter again. He examined the white man with close interest; his thin Roman nose wrinkled. “Have you been farming, mzungu?”

“No, I’ve been hunting kenge.”¹

The Maasai gave a shrill, whistling gasp of iration.

“By god! That’s a good game. They’re hard to catch,” he said eagerly. The Indian caught the white man’s eye and winked.

“Here! You, Muhindi! I want to buy him a Mirinda. I never met an mzungu who speaks Kimaasai and Kihindi and hunts kenge.” The Maasai shoved a twohundred shilling note at the Indian. The Indian gave the white man a bottle of Mirinda and the Maasai one hundred and seventy-five shillings. The Maasai frowned suspiciously at the Indian and then at the money. He thrust the money toward the white man.

“Is this right, mzungu?”

“I think so.”

“Good. You can’t trust Asians, you know—bloody thieves, all of them. Well, so long, msela.”² The Maasai shook hands with Erlau, glared suspiciously at the Indian, and stalked off, muttering to himself.

“That’s the first time I ever got anything free from an African.” Erlau chuckled.

“Black bastard,” the Indian said with emotion. “You can’t trust Asians, you know. Filthy monkey.”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? You know damned well he can’t count. If I weren’t here, you’d’ve told him to pay three hundred for the bottle.”

“Can’t count, hah! Last week, his njomba²¹ from the Toronto Maasai comes in and tells me, ‘Bwana Muhindi, please. I must have a drink, and I have no money… All Maasai are very poor.’ Now, this bastard’s wearing a gold watch, but I give him the soda anyway.

“Then I tell him, ‘Jacobo, you know my wife? I tell you, yerro, she causes me no end of grief and trouble. I want to sell her off. You know someone who wants a Muhindi wife? I’ll take fifty cows for her.’

“‘Fifty cows?’ says Jacobo. ‘That’s not too bad. I’ll ask around. My wife cost me forty.’ I ask him, how many wives could he afford? He says, ‘Asians? Sixty.

Maasai? Seventy-five.’”

“That’s got to be a damned lie. Nobody has three thousand cows.”

“Maybe so, but—all Maasai are very poor, my bloody ass.”

The Indian and the white man laughed. Two little boys scurried into the shop. The Indian leaned over the counter and picked them up, each in turn, setting them on the edge of the counter so that they faced the white man. He gave each of them a bottle of soda. They were dressed identically; they had white socks and polished leather shoes. They wore bright green suits—shorts and shirt, and although their hands, faces, knees, and clothes were smudged, the dirt was coincidental, not habitual. Their hair was freshly combed and oiled; their fingernails were manicured and only edged with grime.

“My nephews,” the Asian said with immense pride. One of the little boys reached out and touched the white man’s bleached hair.

A little girl had followed the two boys; she stood shyly, half in the shade of the duka’s awning. She was the half sister of the boys, but her uncle did not pick her up or give her a bottle to drink. She was not the daughter of an Indian lady; the little girl’s mother had been an African girl that had died giving birth to her. The Indians took the little half-caste baby away from her maternal family; she was being raised as a servant.

The mother must have been a beauty because the little girl certainly was.

Her hair was thick and coarse, like her mother’s, but it was not stiff and smoky. It was long and straight and chocolate brown. It hung in a single thick braid far down her back. Her eyes were large and luminous, unblinking and tragic. The white man could never look at these eyes more than a second or two. She wore a green sari and green tros, but she had no leather shoes, like her half brothers; instead, she had rubber sandals made from an old tire. A cheap plastic bow held her rich bangs from her clear forehead. She peered up, and the white man smiled radiantly. He shuddered.

“Who’s this?” he asked the Indian.

“Fatima… my… niece.”

“Grandmother sent me to collect kerosene,” the little girl said in a lilting voice.

“How old are you?” the white man asked her.

“Ten years old.”

“Do you go to school?”

“Well, sometimes.”

“When you’re fifteen, I’ll marry you and take you to America. You can finish school there. I’ll buy you a car. How’s that?”

The little girl and her uncle laughed delightedly at the fairy story, but the smaller of the little boys scowled.

“Can I go to America too?”

“Sure, I’ll let you wash her car.”

The little boys shrieked.

“I’m going to America to wash Fatima’s car!”

“God, she’s beautiful,” the white man said. The Asian nodded absently; he was engrossed in the ledger and receipt book of Sharif Ashrav. Fatima glided away, disappearing among the heat shadows of the International Highway.

Across the street, steep roads climbed through Mkalamo toward the Usambara Rift. On the lower slopes, just out of town, the unkempt acreage of the Ralli and Mwelia Sisal plantations merged with the heavy bush that grows in areas too steep for any use but collecting firewood or herding goats. The last of these roads was the new one—the Lushoto Road that the Germans were resurfacing. About three hundred meters up, this road is the police station.

The white man entered the dim front office of the police station and shook hands with the desk officer. The officer’s name was Marangu. He was a Chagga. He was a veteran of the Idi Amin War, and although a diet of local beer and goat

liver was beginning to show in his cheeks, neck, and stomach, he maintained a distinctly military presence.

“Is the commander here?” the white man asked.

“No. He’s gone to Korogwe. Is it about the motorcycle?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing new to report. Don’t worry. Even if we don’t get the motorcycle back, we’ll nail that Mrombo bastard Kadogo. I promise you that.” Marangu nodded reassuringly and reshuffled the papers on is crude desk. He noticed the strong smell of the white man. The knuckles on the white man’s right hand were bleeding. The white man was dirty and sunburned.

“Have you got a cigarette?” the Chagga asked.

“No,” the white man said curtly. I come here to find out about the motorcycle, and then this bastard hits me up for a smoke, the white man thought bitterly.

“Then have one of mine.” Marangu unlocked his desk drawer and reached beyond his paper clips, paper punch, and handcuffs to where he had secreted several packs of government-issued cigarettes.

“Asante.”

“Pole za kazi,” Marangu said, turning his face down to the papers on his desk to indicate that the visit was concluded. Why is he here? Marangu asked himself for the thousandth time. These wazungu. Once I saw a movie about Michael Jackson. In America, everybody dresses well. Then I saw another movie, once, about James Bond and one about a boxer. Even Africans dress well in America. I’d better ask him some time why he and the other wazungu come to Africa where it’s so hard and so bloody hot and dirty. So much malaria, so many thieves . . . I wonder if he’s in the CIA? Once, I heard of a white man that lived in Ruvuma, and he was from the CIA . . .

Erlau crossed the alley and entered the road on which Sharif Ashrav’s house was located. The door of the house was open; instead of Sharif Ashrav, a fat old Gujarati woman sat in the shade under the awning.

“Shikamoo.”

“Marahaba. Sharif Ashrav has gone to meet with the Mosque Committee. Will you take tea? A young lady is here waiting for Sharif Ashrav, but he didn’t say when he’d be back.”

Erlau followed her through the large cool house. It had a perpetual twilight, one of the few buildings in Mkalamo with electricity; it was lit by a few ancient fluorescent bulbs. It smelled pleasantly of newly printed paper.

In the shop end of the building, stacks of Hindu and Islamic literature neatly sat side by side next to even piles of clean used clothes. On meticulous shelves, Sharif Ahsrav had arranged batteries, matchboxes, cigarette lighters, and other commodities. A fat old cat rested on a cushioned chair; she opened her pale blue

eyes briefly, appraised the white man, flicked her tail once, snapped one pointed ear at an orbiting fly, and then went back to sleep.

Erlau followed the old Asian woman into the kitchen.

A young African woman sat at the table. She was young and pretty and well dressed. She had quick, flirtatious eyes; when she saw the white man, she dropped her long lashes and then smiled a little. I wonder what this goes for, Erlau thought.

He was seated opposite her. The old woman poured a cup of tea. When the white man took out his cigarettes, she laid a copper ashtray on the table next to the teapot. Then with a small bow, she left them and returned to her vigil, waiting for Sharif Ashrav.

“You’re the mzungu who digs, aren’t you?” the woman asked.

“Yes. Who are you?”

“My name is Jasmine. I am the new telephone operator of the post office.” She reached across the table, and they shook hands. Jasmine held his hand a little and toyed with it. “You’re American. Take me to America. I love America.”

Sharif Ashrav returned. He was tall and heavy with a manicured beard and thick eyeglasses. He wore an embroidered white Islamic cap, and his hands, face, and clothes were impeccably clean. He exuded an atmosphere of confidence and

affluence. He greeted the white man in English; he spoke without accent or hesitation.

“How was the Mosque Committee?”

“It was bloody. Everyone talked at once—all about raising money, and every time they mentioned money, they stared at me.”

“How much do they need?”

“Maybe thirty, maybe thirty-five thousand.” Sharif Ashrav set a coffee can on the table and shook it. It made a noise of rattling coins. On it he had scratched Mosque Fund.

“Here.” Erlau handed the Asian a filthy twenty-shilling bill. Sharif Ashrav frowned at Jasmine.

“Why don’t you run along?”

She sashayed out with a final comprehensive survey of the Asian, his shop, the can for the Mosque Fund, and the American. When she was gone, the Asian snorted.

“She’s an idiot. I tell them to install a telephone extension in my house. Instead of sending me the fundi,²² they send some malaia that can’t even spell her own

name.”

“She’s a hot little cat, isn’t she?”

“Be careful. You’d have lots of competition from the police, from the politicians, and from those Germans. They were both by here this morning. That’s probably why she was here looking for them.”

“How do you like them? The Germans?”

“White men—in general—are too sure of themselves. Some of them are harmless. I never could stand Arabs. Stay for tea. I’ll tell the old woman to fix you something.”

“No, thanks.”

On the way up the hill, the white man saw that A. J. Muhando and his tribal brother Simba were seated in the shade of Muhando’s bank manager’s house. When they saw him, the two called him. He unlatched their metal gate and walked to the porch.

“My dear Ndugu,” said A. J. Muhando. He had a rich, deep musical voice. He had broad shoulders and a harem of ladies. Every time the white man ed his house, A. J. Muhando called out: Come and meet my wife! Every time it was a different girl, and they were all pretty and young. There were half a dozen of them; he had had exactly one child by each. The children ranged in age from

infancy to five years. The whole clan dressed with fine shoes and good clothes. Everyone knew A. J. Muhando was embezzling, but no one knew how much or when he would disappear.

Simba was a head taller than A. J. Muhando. He was handsome and powerful. His eyes were warm and dangerous in a deceitfully friendly way, like the eyes of a lion. He had caught the first two thieves that had stolen the white man’s motorcycle and turned them over to the police.

“Ndugu! Come in and have a beer. Simba! Get the Ndugu a beer,” A. J. Muhando said.

“Aisha!” the huge man said, smiling but never taking his wary, patient eyes off the white man. A young woman appeared at his shoulder. “Get three more beers.” She obediently set aside the kettle she had been scrubbing and trotted into the house. “I want to teach you our language, Ndugu. Then I’ll take you to Lake Victoria and marry you to a Sukuma princess I’ve been saving for you.”

The two Africans laughed. The wives of A. J. Muhando paused in their chores and glanced up, flashing hopeful smiles at the three men. Muhando gestured expansively, and the white man obligingly sat down, facing the shimmering white road beside his hosts.

Opposite Muhando’s house was the property of the Irish Catholic priest. The priest was rarely at his station. In six months, the American had met him only once.

“Please,” a gentle voice said behind them. The white man turned and saw that

the wife had returned. She held a plastic bowl of water for the men to wash their hands.

“My wife,” Muhando said proudly. “The mother of my first born.”

It was well into late afternoon when the white man left the bank manager’s house. He had not tasted alcohol in several months, and the three large bottles of Safari Lager left him rather drunk.

At his own house, he found Machame with the same girl from the day before. When she saw him, she made a small yelp of mock terror and scampered off, looking over her shoulder.

“It’s late,” said the Chagga.

“I went to see some people. The cops, Sharif Ashrav, and Muhando. You have a cigarette?”

“No. You! Rukia! Come.”

The girl sidled back.

“Go to the table and bring me five cigarettes.”

She nodded and started past him. Then the Chagga snatched the panga and slapped her bottom with the flat again. She yelped and darted into the house where Sarah sang softly.

On the Usambaras, the light changed slowly to gold and red. Now, in the early evening, the air was so still that the sounds of the cowbells drifting down from Kilundai were audible over the crickets and frogs. Bats and owls, civets, baboons, wild hogs, and oryx stirred in hidden hollows and erosion gullies where the dampness of the clay trapped hidden pools, ing oases of jungle on the dusty slopes. Below this the sisal swept down east of Ralli Sisal Estate headquarters. Pied crows congregated in their rookeries among the naked branches of the baobab trees.

A breath of wind tumbled from the Usambaras; it brought an earthy smell, like the smell of sweat and damp black clay, tobacco, and freshly cut bush. Rukia returned with the cigarettes. From the pombe shop, the inevitable chorus of “Mr. DJ” began. Another day was over.

CHAPTER 3

O n Monday morning, the white man awoke late. He was always in an evil mood on Monday; on Sunday night, he took his prophylactic drugs for malaria and these gave him the same hallucinations and nightmares time after time.

To make matters worse, there was no money to give Sarah for the market or for breakfast. As a consequence, he had to go to the bank.

At the bank, the door was locked. It should open at 8:30 a.m.; now it was 8:45 a.m., and the bank was locked tight. The large shop of Sharif Ashrav was also closed. Only one small duka was open. Outside the duka, a huge eucalyptus tree had fallen in a storm. The felled log now made a bench for Power, the Sukuma guard who protected the bank. Opposite him, on a little stool, sat the shopkeeper —a young Chagga. The bank guard might have been twenty-five or forty-five years old. It was impossible to tell because fat had obliterated his features. He wore a uniform of olive green, highly polished black boots, a smart military cap with a well-polished visor, a polished black belt, and he had a polished AK47 machine gun. The latter he had removed from his bullish shoulders and propped against the tree trunk.

The Chagga was tall and skinny. He had hard, commercial eyes, but at least his mouth smiled as the white man appeared. Between them, the Africans had placed a square of cardboard with a checkerboard designed on it. In lieu of real pieces, they played with bottle caps; the Chagga’s forces were from Pepsi bottles. The troops of the bank guard were Safari Lager.

“Good morning, Ndugu,” the guard said merrily.

“Peace be unto you,” Erlau answered sourly in Arabic.

“Are you waiting for the bank to open?”

“Hmm.” What the hell does it look like I’m doing?

“Got change for a soda? No? Chagga! Get the Ndugu a soda. I’ll pay for it— later.” Power’s cheerful porcine eyes glittered at his opponent. The Chagga swallowed a few times then grinned humorlessly and reached over the counter of his shop.

“Why can’t Muhando ever open the goddamned bank on time?” the white man sighed poisonously.

“It’s not too late,” the Sukuma said loyally.

“In America, fifteen minutes too late would get him fired.”

“You know? I heard a joke the other day. Three men die together—an Asian, an African, and an mzungu. They all appear before God. God gives each of them a special gift. The mzungu gets this.” The guard tapped his temple. “The Asian gets this.” The guard rubbed his fingers together in imitation of someone counting money. “The African? He gets this.” Power pointed to his crotch. The two Africans laughed uproariously. The white man chuckled sourly.

“Speaking of this,” the Chagga said. “When are you going to take an African wife, Ndugu?”

“Maybe he’s scared of AIDS,” the Sukuma said.

“I’m scared of relatives,” the contract man corrected. “I’m the sister of the second cousin of your girlfriend Amina’s good friend Juma. Please give me two kilos of sugar.” The Africans roared with laughter again at this insult.

“These Samba ladies!” the Sukuma choked. “When I was transferred here from Morogoro, I already heard about Mkalamo. All of East Africa’s heard about Mkalamo. My commander tells me, ‘Power, you watch your big ass there. Bad girls, those.’

“After a month of abstinence, a girl comes and asks me, ‘Power, why do you hate the Wasamba ladies so much?’

“I say, ‘Hate the Wasamba? What do you mean?’

“She says, ‘Every time one of us comes to your house, you chase her away. Are you impotent? Are you msenge?’

“I say, ‘No. I’m afraid of AIDS.’

“Then she breaks down, laughing. ‘AIDS?’ she says. ‘Last year, we had a girl with AIDS in Mkalamo. We killed her. So, Power, you see? There’s nothing to worry about anymore!’”

At 9:30 a.m., the bank opened.

Inside, the secretaries sorted stacks of withdrawal slips on the counter for another thirty minutes, ignoring Erlau.

At 10:30 a.m., Muhando arrived, cheerful and robust.

“Ah! Good morning, Ndugu.”

“Shikamoo,” the white man snarled. “Tell me, if I’m the only customer, why do I have to wait a goddamned two hours to get my own money?”

A. J. Muhando winked at the secretaries, who smiled secretly behind the white man’s back. My wives, he thought with happy pride. He dangled a key coquettishly in Erlau’s face. He grinned impudently.

“I’m the only one with the key to the safe!”

* * *

An hour before noon, the white man arrived at the shamba. In less than five minutes, he disturbed a hidden colony of siafu. He fled, and with him fled a flock of grasshoppers, a number of lizards, snakes, frogs, rats, and a mongoose. The ants were relentless and merciless in their pursuit. When he finally escaped by jumping over a narrow flooded canal, dozens had entered his clothes. He spent fifteen minutes cursing, naked while he twisted the ants’ large heads out of his skin.

Goddamn it, enough is enough, he thought. I worked on Sunday. I get Monday off.

At the office, the guard was flirting with the secretary. When she saw the white man, she abandoned her first victim and turned her affections toward a more promising target.

“Ndugu! It’s too hot today, boy. You come and sit by me, boy.”

He grunted and sank down next to her on the little wooden bench. The guard, anxious to reclaim her attention, cleared his throat and leaned across the girl to the white man.

“I say, Ndugu, did you know Arufane’s back?”

The guard regretted it the moment he’d said it. The white man started violently, and then he grinned, inhumanly, like a badger.

“Well, I’d better go and see him then.”

He stalked off like a drunk, the panga dangling dangerously in his left hand.

“Bloody fool!” the secretary hissed at the guard. “Who knows what he’ll do now?”

“Well—I—oh, who cares?” The guard spat at a locust with sudden conviction. “I hate Chaggas anyway.”

The white man was dazed. What do I do now? One voice screamed Kill goddamned Arufane! While another roared back Get hold of yourself. In eighteen months this will all be a nightmare. What difference does it make? He shook his head violently to clear it of the debate. A few Africans saw this and shook their own heads sadly.

A little in front of him, another debate was going on. This debate involved two African gentlemen, well-dressed individuals of obvious importance. One was tall, slender, and dramatic with a goatee and piercing eyes. He was in his early forties. This was the manager of the rice plantation.

The other was a generation older. He was short and stout. He had a fierce and indignant expression stamped on his bulldog features. This gentleman was the mayor of Jitengeni.

The quarrel originated from the disappearance of fifty bags of fertilizer. It had rapidly escalated into a vicious exchange of insults, mostly involving tribal heredity. The two were of clans that had engaged in a terrible tribal war before Nyerere stamped out such destructive inclinations. Now, under the cold raptorial eye of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi,²³ the feud was continued in a sort of cold war. Both of these gentlemen were practitioners of witchcraft. Their reputations were imposing, and each secretly feared the other might have some unknown element at his disposal. For this reason, having no antidotes against such potential weapons, they felt a mutual relief at the arrival of the white man.

“Good afternoon, Ndugu,” the manager said in his cultured English. Goddamn this bastard, thought the mwenyekiti. He speaks Kizungu, and I don’t. Who knows how he’ll poison the white man against me?

“I say,” the manager pressed. “There’s a matter of this fifty bags of fertilizer we had stacked outside the tool shed. You haven’t any idea of what happened to it, have you?”

The guard stole it, of course, Erlau snarled to himself. Of bloody course, the goddamned guard stole it! Then he sold it to some Asian or Chagga, and they took it to Moshi or Arusha and sold it for three times as much as the government paid to buy it. Then you got your cuts, and you’re only arguing to have something to argue about, damn you! Leave me alone! I’m hot and covered with ant bites, and I want to kill Arufane. Why don’t you leave me the bloody hell alone?

As these thoughts revolved in his aching head, the white man began to slap the flat of his panga against his rubber Wellington boots. The noise was ominous, and the manager and mwenyekiti did not fail to notice a lunatic flicker in his pale eyes. Then the bleak, bored look replaced this dangerous shadow, and he shook his head determinedly.

“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t even know they were gone.”

He continued down the dirt road. The two Africans were suddenly united with a common sympathy.

“He works too hard,” said the mayor of Jitengeni. “He’ll kill himself, at this rate. It won’t even start raining until June this year.”

“How do you know it won’t rain until June this year?” the manager said, the suspicious fear flaring up again.

Erlau presently arrived at the brick makers’ station. They broke out in a chorus of greetings, inviting him to sit down. He leaned against their pile of bricks. Somewhere in the background, he was aware of a low electrical humming. The intensity was almost below . One of the brick makers ed the white man a homemade cigarette—green tobacco rolled in newspaper. The white man took a long drag; it was as potent as marijuana. It occurred to him that the vervet monkeys were missing; no one was on the road to Mkalamo. Low over the road hung a cloud of what the Erlau supposed was dust.

“Bloody hot, eh?” one of the brick makers said in a friendly voice.

“Too hot to work, right, white man?” said another. Erlau was growing a little suspicious.

He finished the cigarette and started to leave; they pulled him back.

“Better rest a while, white man. Too hot to walk all the way to town right now.”

“I’m hungry,” he said coldly.

“Oh… well… then someone can climb the tree and fetch you a mango, Ndugu.”

“Goddamn it, I’m going home!”

As soon as he tried to rise, they pulled him back. There was no hostility—it was a sort of appeal.

“What’s the problem?”

“Nyuki.”

“I don’t understand this, ‘nyuki.’ What’s nyuki?”

“You know… nyuki! Bzzz…” The brick maker waved his fingers in the white man’s face and made a buzzing noise behind his teeth.

At this moment, the manager happened by. The brick makers hailed him.

“Mzee!²⁴ Make him understand about the bees!”

“Ah, yes, Ndugu, you see the bees? Nyuki. Bees.”

The manager gestured vaguely at the sun-bleached road and the ominous little cloud over it. Suddenly the absence of the monkeys, the emptiness of the road, and the humming noise connected with the ominous cloud in a terrible logic.

“Black bees,” the manager said amiably. “Very dangerous. More dangerous than siafu, even. May do us some good. Kill a few of these bloody bastard locusts, maybe. Well, the only way home is this.” The manager sat on the hard, rocky ground and began to remove his shoes, socks, and pants. “Come on, Ndugu, these bloody nyuki won’t settle down until the sun sets.”

On the other side of the river, the two men dressed again. In the excitement of the bees, Erlau had forgotten about Arufane being released from jail. At the bus station, a single bus, bound for Kilimanjaro, was mobbed by several hundred would-be travelers. Erlau bought a cigarette from the duka of Sharif Ashrav and watched the struggle.

When he saw Arufane fighting among the engers, the block of ice Erlau had formed in his gut exploded. He strode across the shimmering, jagged highway like a determined lion toward a herd of unsuspecting antelope.

Because he was struggling to board the bus, Arufane didn’t see the white man until he was spun around by the shoulder; by then, it was too late. Erlau slammed Arufane in the face with a gloved fist, a good solid blow with a noise like a hatchet striking raw meat in a butcher’s stall.

The rest of the engers shrieked with confusion. For a moment, the path behind Arufane was clear, and he bolted for the door of the bus. But in Korogwe, he had been beaten and raped and bitten by mosquitoes, flies, spiders, centipedes, scorpions, and other nameless horrors; he was weak and sick, and the white man caught him easily.

The gloved hand closed around Arufane’s throat and slammed him against the metal of the bus, knocking the wind out of him. Erlau swayed like a cobra, and the blade of the panga trembled.

The other engers caught their collective breath and began shouting. Half knew neither Arufane nor the white man. They had no idea why the white man was attacking this African, and they were outraged. The other half roared encouragement to the white man.

With a final exhausted effort, Erlau slammed Arufane against the side of the bus and staggered away. Many engers implored him to return and kill the thief.

At the shop of Sharif Ashrav, the Indian observed this episode with the chief of the Toronto Maasai. The Indian shook his head.

“This may be the end of him,” Sharif Ashrav said.

“Maybe. He should have killed Arufane.”

“Maybe someone else will do it for him.”

Erlau proceeded with his head down. To the people on the street, he looked furious. In reality, he was dizzy with fatigue and confusion. A enger from the bus chased after him, caught him by the arm, and barked an angry demand; the white man just as angrily shrugged off the African and stalked away. The African called after him in an accusing tone. The African was an old man with strange features, almost like the features of an eagle—one of the big eagles that hunt monkeys.

On the veranda of the post office, the postmaster and a substitute telephone operator watched his approach. The substitute telephone operator held a telegram with the white man’s name on it.

The postmaster was a hateful person. He was hunchbacked, squinting and leering with the scars of smallpox distorting his face. Nature had provided a fitting carapace for the thing that crawled within. Like Muhando, the postmaster was an embezzler. Unlike the bank manager, however, the postmaster was selfish with his money. He was a bully and a drunkard who insulted and seduced as far as he was able. This Caligula would inevitably call attention to his indiscretions; in the mean time, his employees and his public suffered his wanton acts with bitten tongues.

The substitute telephone operator was a fleshy creature of medium height. He was a homosexual, temporarily transplanted from the main bureau in Dar Es Salaam. He and the postmaster hated each other. However, the postmaster

suspected the telephone operator of connections with the CID, and so the two lived in a hostile détente.

“Did you see that?” the telephone operator asked distastefully. “I hate it when people fight like that—as though they were dogs or rats.”

“Sure, just like rats,” the postmaster agreed. Inwardly, he snarled, Rats, hell! Men fight. Animals, like you, sodomize. Imagine getting it up the tail from a goat like him!

“Oh, well, maybe this is good news for him. Yoo-hoo, mzungu!” The telephone operator rose on his toes and waved the brown envelope. The postmaster shuddered again.

“Shikamoo,” Erlau muttered to the postmaster whom he suspected of intercepting and stealing his mail.

The homosexual proffered the brown envelope with a hopeful simper. The white man opened it, read it, and then, with trembling, dirty, scarred hands, deliberately and carefully folded the message and secreted it in his shirt pocket. With exaggerated calm, he returned to the burning white light of the street. What a pretty boy, the telephone operator thought. What a bloody maniac . . . Must be in the CIA . . . the postmaster thought. These wazungu go crazy when they’re in the sun too long.

* * *

In the meantime, while the white man was having this terrible day, the Chagga— Machame—was having quite the opposite experience.

After one o’clock, it was obvious that Erlau would not return for lunch. Sarah began to clear the dishes in the plastic bucket when her husband interrupted her.

“Leave that for now. Scrub the floor instead. It’ll make the Ndugu happy when he comes home. Too hot for work in the shamba anyway.”

The Chagga hobbled out to the porch where he sat with only the cast on his broken leg in the sun. He looked at the house next door and thought, I wonder where Rukia is today? At length, the door opened, but it was not Rukia that emerged; it was her grandfather, an ancient man bent with age. When he saw the Chagga, he nodded. The Chagga called out a greeting, and the old man responded enthusiastically. He accepted an invitation to sit with the Chagga on the porch of the white man’s house.

“Sorry about the leg, msela,” the old man told him.

“It’s not too bad, unless an insect gets under the cast. Then it itches like crazy, and my wife has to scratch it with the mzungu’s thermometer.”

“Where is the mzungu?”

“He went to the shamba.”

“In this heat? Kuma ya mama yangu! Well, that’s why they made it to the moon, I suppose, and we didn’t.”

“Well, if we had, we Chaggas would have made it before you Wasamba.”

“Well, I’m an old man, and I’ve seen lots of things, and I guess you’re right. All the same, I wish your Ndugu was here. I’d ask him for a cigarette.”

“He gave money to my woman to buy food at the market. Maybe if she has a little change, we can send her to the pombe shop to get us a smoke. She’s inside —scrubbing the floor.”

“Well, leave her to it then. If it were my house, I’d send her but since it’s the white man’s house, let’s send Rukia instead. Wait a minute.” The old man hobbled back across the alley to his own house and called through the door. When no one answered, he held up a gnarled finger to the Chagga and disappeared inside.

That’s a good sort, that old man, the Chagga thought. The Ndugu’ll be happy when he comes home and finds the floor clean.

What a good boy that Chagga is, the old man thought. There’s a young fellow with an education that hasn’t forgotten heshima.²⁵

As soon as the old man was out of sight, a new guest arrived—Simba, the tribal brother of A. J. Muhando, the bank manager.

“Hello, brother,” Simba told the Chagga.

“Come and sit where it’s cool. The white man’s not back from the shamba yet.”

The huge Sukuma sank onto the cement next to the Chagga, his back resting against the cement of the house.

“My wife is inside cleaning the floor. Wait, I’ll tell her to make tea. You! Wife! Come here.” Sarah appeared at the door. She was wet and dirty from cleaning the floor. This was the hottest time of day during the hottest month of the year. She was sweating and sick. By contrast, Simba and her husband were relaxed and relatively clean and cool. The Sukuma smiled at her. My god, he’s beautiful, she thought abstractly.

“Fix tea,” Machame ordered. “My wife,” he told the Sukuma.

The old man returned with two young women. One was the beautiful, vulgar girl, Rukia. The other was slender and had large, guileless eyes and a shy, tentative smile. She was several years older than Rukia, and she was married. The Chagga, Machame, knew that she was married; the Sukuma, Simba, did not. Simba was instantly alert.

“Go inside and help the Chagga’s wife scrub the floor,” the old man told the girls. “My granddaughters,” he told the other two men.

“This is the brother of Muhando from the bank,” the Chagga said. “He has come to visit the white man. Right now, my wife is fixing tea, so you might as well rest here until she’s done.”

Rukia sank down next to the Chagga and draped one of her legs over his cast. She smirked hopefully at Simba. The other woman smiled shyly again and started toward the door of the house. As she ed him, Simba grabbed her calf; she looked down and shook her head innocently. He thought, here’s a good woman. Now, this other malaia?

Aisha, the shy lady, found Sarah in the house.

“You are Machame’s wife?” she asked in Kichagga.

“Yes.” Sarah knelt in front of the kerosene stove, boiling water. Aisha knelt across from her, and they appraised each other.

“Shikamoo,” Aisha said after a moment.

“Marahaba,” Sarah said, relieved.

“My man is Mushi—the water engineer. He’s part mzungu. His grandpa left with all the other wazungu after Uhuru. I think he was a British man.”

“Oh.”

“You’re pregnant. That’s good! I want to be pregnant too. I am now married to Mushi since three years, and still there is no baby. He is a good man, but still…” Her voice trailed off, and Sarah looked at her sharply. The smile was still innocent, so both women shrugged and continued preparing the tea.

“How old are you?” asked Sarah.

“Nineteen. What about you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Is this your first?”

“Yes.”

“You’re lucky. I hope you have a boy.”

Aisha and Sarah carried the thermos, six cups, and the sugar bowl out to the cement porch. The old man, Simba, Machame, and Rukia were laughing at something.

What beautiful children they are, the sons and daughters of Uhuru, the old man thought. He was very proud. What a people we are to produce children like

these. He carefully regarded the erudite, educated Chagga; the powerful Sukuma; and the beautiful samba girl, Rukia. My people. My tribes.

Sarah started to pour herself a cup of tea. Machame stopped her.

“Go inside and continue cleaning,” he said. “Ndugu will be home soon, and the house should be clean for him. These will help you when their tea is done,” he finished, nodding at Rukia and Aisha. Aisha looked at Sarah with regret. She liked Sarah. She started to rise, but Machame held her down by the wrist.

“Finish your tea first.”

The big Sukuma smiled at Aisha again. His teeth were very white and perfectly even. What a good woman, he thought again. Half an hour ago, I’d have laid her like a common whore. Now I’d kill the man that molested her.

These are good people, Machame thought. This old man, he knows heshima. He brings women to help my wife clean the house of the white man. The Sukuma, he caught the thieves. I know he is a thief himself. The owner of the petrol station told me so. He’s smuggling salt, rhodolite, and gold . . . but is that so bad?

God, what beautiful men, Rukia was thinking.

“In the old days,” the old neighbor continued aloud. “The white men used to shoot eland and leopard up there by Kilundai. They went to Tanga on Sundays to get drunk together. They had big trucks. There was order in life when the white

men were here.”

“Are there still leopards at Kilundai?” the Chagga asked.

“Sure. Haven’t you ever seen a leopard?”

“Not here. I’ve seen lions, though, in Ruvuma. I was there in the National Service.”

“Are you good with a gun?”

“Well, I was with the bunch that routed the Black Madonnas out of Dodoma. There was plenty of shooting, but I didn’t exactly stop and say excuse me, bandit, did I shoot you? What about you, old man? Can you use a gun?”

“Yes,” said the old man. “In the old days, the Maasai were—well—less like they are today and more like they pretend to be. They used to come at night to the plantations of the wazungu—the sisal, tea, and rubber—and steal our cows. Sometimes they stole Samba girls too. In those days, we had shotguns. When Mzee Abou Hassan Ali came home from Borneo after the Big War, he and some others taught us to shoot and hunt men the way we shot and hunted snakes, monkeys, and pigs in the shambas.”

“I say,” the Chagga turned to the Sukuma. “Have you got a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke.” Understanding the real meaning of the question, Simba pulled a two-hundred shilling note from his pocket and handed it to Aisha. When she reached for it, he caught her wrist and held it for a moment. “Go to the Mrombo and bring us three packs of cigarettes,” the Sukuma told her.

A casual erby might have found the group amusing, had he understood all the conversations. They might appear frightening because all three of the men were killers. They could be construed as crude—especially the treatment the two younger men gave to the beautiful, vulgar Rukia and the delight with which she received it. No one, however, could mistake their tranquil and beautiful camaraderie.

The old man found all here that larger society lacked. Here were no trucks to spray him with mud. Here was no loud and incomprehensible music. Here was no rude, thieving child. Here was peace and respect.

I like this Chagga, Simba mused. He understands business.

“Do you think the white man will get a new motorcycle?”

“Maybe… why?” The Chagga was instantly alert.

“Well, it’s like this. I’ve heard of a lovely little load of rhodolite past Kwasewa. It’s just that it’s a damned long way out there…”

Oho! Machame thought.

“Sure, msela. He’ll probably get another one, and maybe he’ll take you there… only I don’t think he’s . . .”

“Certainly not,” the Sukuma retreated with gracious gentility. “That’s a business below wazungu.”

“Bloody hell, you say! What about all those Germans that got deported last year?”

“True. I’d forgotten about them.” The three men chuckled at the memory; the Germans had begun the road project with ten brand-new Mercedes seven-ton dump trucks. Oddly, rather than using sand from the Soni River—as the brickmakers did—they drove deep into the bush past Kwalukonge to a lake bed that lay dry and cracked and flat as a pancake for ten months of the year. They returned three of the ten trucks to the work site; the other seven were gone for a week at a time. The Germans dumped the sand north of the Kenyan border where the Kikuyu businessmen paid a price for tons of earth that glittered with gold dust. By and by, three of the trucks didn’t return at all; the theft was never reported until a West German auditor from the GTZ furiously fired his engineers and replaced them with a less ambitious staff. Corruption, the Africans smirked, was like syphilis; it really didn’t matter who caught it from whom. It was just business, wasn’t it? “Still, I don’t think this white man is after rhodolite.”

“What is he after?” Rukia sulked. “He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t like girls—all he does is go to the shamba and come home dirtier than a bloody Maasai cannibal.”

“Is that so bad?” the old man asked sharply. Aisha returned with the cigarettes.

She gave the Sukuma his change. The Sukuma gave one pack to the old man; the rest—and the change—he gave to the Chagga.

“You! Wife!” Sarah appeared in the door again.

God! She looks like a beggar or a lunatic, Rukia thought with revulsion. Poor thing, I’ll help her, Aisha thought. Good woman, knows her work, the old man and the Sukuma thought together.

“Bring matches,” Machame ordered.

“The white man was in a fight today. He fought Arufane.”

“I hope he killed Arufane, bloody thief!”

Aisha slipped into the house.

“Can I help you now?”

“Just wash the cups, that’s all.” Sarah was exhausted.

A few minutes after Simba, Rukia, Aisha, and the old man left, the white man returned. As he reached the pombe shop across the street, he was accosted by

Suleiman Hosa, the town lunatic. Sulei Hosa lurched out of the pombe shop and grabbed the white man’s arm.

“Excuse me,” he roared in English. “Can you tell me what does litigation mean?”

The white man stared at the lunatic until the lunatic released him and staggered off, wheezing and gesticulating and muttering to himself. The crowd from the bar had witnessed this encounter; they suppressed a uniform, maddening impulse to howl with laughter. They suppressed it largely because the white man was slapping the flat of the panga against his rubber boot again. It was the noise of little waves lapping against the pilings of a harbor pier in the days before a typhoon arrives.

The white man sank down next to the Chagga.

“God, what a day,” the white man muttered.

“Pole za kazi,” the Chagga said soothingly.

For a minute, they sat in silence, and then the white man stood with an effort.

“I’m going to take a bath.”

He stumbled through the door. Sarah straightened up from the floor.

“Shikamoo,” she said tentatively. He grunted a response. His boots left large accumulations of mud on the still-wet floor. Sarah felt a sudden fatigued despair, and she was consumed with guilty resentment. He didn’t even see it was clean, she told herself bitterly.

After supper, the Chagga and the white man smoked and drank tea while Sarah cleaned the dishes.

“Say, Ndugu, I hear you got a letter from Dar today.”

“Who told you that?”

“You know Mushi—the water engineer? Well, that msenge who operates the telephone told his wife. Mushi’s wife said the msenge told her the letter made you very angry. What about it?”

The white man pulled the folded envelope out of his pocket and handed it to the Chagga. The Chagga read:

Very concerned stop not receiving monthly reports stop please keep office alerted to all activities stop PS do not press charges of motorcycle thieves stop bad for image stop.

“What does that mean—do not press charges?”

“That means that little kicheche² Arufane is free! So is the other little bastard. Goddamn it!” The white man slammed his fist on the table. “They don’t send me my paycheck, they don’t give me another motorcycle, all they bloody well do is let those little vicheche go, and then they have the goddamned balls to tell me I’m not sending them their goddamned monthly reports!”

“That’s disgusting,” the Chagga soothed. He picked a cigarette out of the pack; the matchbox was empty. “I say, Ndugu, have you got a match?”

“No. Sarah!” The Chagga’s wife was half asleep, exhausted, and queasy from her labors and her pregnancy and the terrible heat of Mkalamo.

“Bei?” she said irritably.²⁷ Her husband heard the tone, and he stiffened.

“Bring matches,” the white man called. Get up and get them yourself, she thought angrily. Am I your wife too? With sleepy irritation, she found a new box of matches on a ledge in the kitchen. She tossed the box to the white man from a few meters away; all three of them stiffened. The enormity of the offense was incredible. The Chagga looked at the white man without expression.

“Since when do we throw shit in the house?” the white man said softly.

Sarah moaned silently. He’ll kill me. The white man will kill me, and I deserve it. Even if he doesn’t kill me, Machame will kill me. She no longer had a baby in her belly; she now had a block of ice.

“Go to your room. Now.” Machame did not look at her; he kept his face averted, his handsome profile outlined by the kerosene lamp. “Help me to the door, Ndugu.” At the door to his bedroom, the Chagga said, “Good night, Ndugu.” He did not look at the white man.

At the table, the Erlau finished his cigarette. He lit another one as he heard the noise of a hand striking flesh. He heard the low, menacing growl of Machame’s voice, but the woman was silent. The white man blew out the kerosene lamp and went to his bedroom. He closed the door. Through the brick wall, he heard the beating continue. He heard soft crying and Sarah saying, “Please, Machame, not there. You’ll hurt the baby…”

Above the woman’s voice came the man’s: low, vicious, incessant. It’s not fair! Sarah screamed silently. Aloud, she patiently repeated, “Please, not there. You’ll hurt the baby…”

“Jesus Christ,” Erlau groaned. “The perfect ending to a perfect day.” Suddenly, he slammed his fist into the brick wall. He felt sticky numbness ooze warmly between his knuckles and his fingers; a sweet relief flooded through him, and to the strange lullaby of the baboons, the bush babies, the drunks and their whores, and “Mr. DJ,” he fell asleep. As he did, he noticed that in the next room, the beating had stopped. Just before he slept, he had a strange memory—the old man at the bus station.

“I want you to tell me how much farther I have to dig,” the old man had demanded angrily.

CHAPTER 4

F ebruary stretched into March. March crept groaning and bleeding into April, and still there was no rain in Korogwe District—or Handeni District—or Muheza District—or any part of Tanga Region.

The bus engers that ed through Mkalamo on the International Highway brought rumors of rain in Arusha and Mwanza. Those that came from the opposite direction—from south of Kibaha—told tales of fresh green grass and cool evenings in Iringa, Rukwa, Mbeya, and Ruvuma… But in Tanga, the terrible heat stalked the blasted corn fields and cracking dried cassava unchallenged, preceded by zephyrs of fire and dust and locusts and tsetse flies. The Maasai spoke in hushed voices of crocodiles pouring out of the swamps and marshes past Kwasewa on the Handeni shortcut into the Ruvu River and its tributaries.

Poachers were as unpredictable and wary as the sparse game.

Cobras, adders, mambas, and pythons roasted alive in the clay where they tried to hibernate. They emerged dazed with rage at any movement that might betray their terrible tormenting enemy.

Oddly, like the secretary birds or the vultures, Erlau thrived. To the farmers with whom he shared these trials, he was another derivative of the evil universal heat. The great witch—Sheik Ndoto—saw that the white man’s eyes now held less anger. The witch heard the white man sing while he walked, and the witch watched the white man work until sweat poured from his limbs and drenched his pants and his Wellington boots. Then the witch, crouching in the heat shadow of

a baobab tree, watched as the white man worked nearly naked, his skin now dark as an Arab’s. The witch watched the white man’s hair bleach while his dark beard reddened.

He is at war with the heat, the witch thought, satisfied. It, in turn, seeks to crush him with reciprocal enthusiasm. He has learned to turn his rage against the intangible. But does he know about the mumyani? The son of the oldest witch has identified him. How shall I protect the white man from her?

Starvation loomed like a monsoon thunderhead. Voracious rats, weaverbirds, and locusts consumed the rice. The corn wilted ingeminated; skeletal stalks of once fertile fields were picked over by solemn armies of pied crows. The hawks, eagles, vultures, kites, shrikes, and marabou storks wheeled endlessly in the restless sky above all this havoc, waiting for the flicker of the carrion flies.

One night while Sarah was preparing supper, Arufane and the other thief came to the door of the white man’s house and begged to see him. They resembled the soil of Tanga; their skin was cracked and blistered, and Arufane had lost an eye. The empty socket oozed a flood of disease. His hands were palsied. His wrists and arms, neck and legs were as thin and brittle as twigs on the naked branches of the thorn scrub. He wheezed painfully when he breathed.

“We go to Moshi and from then to Namanga. We will kill Kadogo who has destroyed us as you see. On behalf of our families, we are sorry.”

As the thieves departed, the white man turned to Machame; the two of them shared a strange derisive laughter. Sarah shuddered. These days, the white man was her good friend. He was never angry, and there was plenty of money suddenly. At night, he and Machame sat together at the table and smoked. They roared with laughter at what the white man said in his strange language; Kizungu

was high pitched and girlish one moment, and the next moment, it dropped to a low, menacing snarl. It reminded Sarah of nothing so much as a pack of hyenas —which are also creatures that seem to thrive in conditions that destroy other life.

The white man glanced up and saw Sarah staring at him. She shuddered, dropped her eyes, and returned to work. He lit his next Sportsman and continued to watch her.

A day or two later, Simba, Machame, and the white man stood outside the bank with the askari²⁸ Power. They all laughed at something; they seemed of some coven that performed the danse macabre, a dreadful dance that became progressively purposeful with each ing hour. Each setting sun was the fire over the camp of a vanquished enemy. They had cheated the heat; they had outmaneuvered death.

By and by, the Mrombo shop owner ed them under the shade of the mango tree. Suddenly, from up the hill, someone began to shout. Thief! Thief!

A boy, his arms loaded with stolen clothes, came bounding through the shimmering white light on the street like some evil apparition.

Power snatched up his machine gun and emptied half the magazine. The thief’s skinny legs buckled, and he fell in a broken heap among the stolen clothes. Power picked up his cigarette from where he’d dropped it; he put it back in his mouth and continued smoking. The incident was never referenced.

A few nights later, a Maasai came to the pombe shop across from the Erlau’s

house. He was very drunk, and he began to abuse the Wasamba in the pombe shop:

“I am Maasai! With my own hands I killed a lion on the steppe when it pursued my cows. I killed crocodiles when they stole my goats. I killed a bastard Kenyan Wandrobo that tried to steal my woman. Who of you is a killer? Who among you is a Maasai like me? You are all wasenge! Bah! Silly, stupid black apes, that’s what you Wasamba are!”

In the morning, he was found in the rain gutter outside the pombe shop with his own simi² stuck in his back. An investigation was ordered; nothing was uncovered.

Still it grew hotter; the temperature ed fifty degrees.

The river dropped until the kambale³ flopped, dying, in the shallows. Samba children picked them up as if they were mangoes. The mayor of Jitengeni and the manager of the rice plantation organized a party of convict laborers to clean and burn the brush out of the storage pond. Then they cleaned the access canal. For hours, then days, muddy water oozed in, filling the pond to a depth of five meters over an area of twelve hectares. From out of nowhere came storks, egrets, herons, ducks, geese, swans, and hammerkops. At night, the sounds of the frogs were deafening. In the morning, the hoof prints of many wild things had churned the dusty banks of the pond into a chaos of mud.

The farmer for whom the white man had labored now had several fishponds— twenty-five by forty meters, a meter-and-a-half deep. They were filled with opaque green water fertilized with ox manure; shoals of tilapia fry gulped twice a day for the rice bran the farmer fed them.

Yet—with all these signs of intense life—the sense of resignation and death intensified in Mkalamo Ward. The Rift Valley that stretches from Kilimanjaro along the Upare and Usambara Mountains to the Indian Ocean became an alley down which heat and exhaustion strode unchallenged over vanquished, cowering, fragile victims. The forests on Mount Mafi glowed orange red at night from the fires started by heat lightening. Between Mkalamo and Kilundai, the mountainside was black. On the flanks of cattle, sheep, and dogs, their ribs stood exposed like shafts of bamboo.

And still the heat increased.

One evening, the white man swayed dizzily. His hands batted futilely in front of his tearing eyes to disperse the sparks and flashes that danced there. For a crazy moment, the world seemed a photographic negative of itself; the ground was bleached and fried so that the soil reflected whitely—while the air was a throbbing blackness darkened by dust and murky clouds that rotated in turbid orbit about the red sun.

A day like bad art, he told himself whimsically. Bad animation.

The white man dipped his cap into the slimy water of a fishpond. He replaced it on his cropped head and swayed to a line of sugar cane. He cut a stalk and sucked the sweet juice; where it landed when it dribbled off his stubbled chin, it evaporated instantly. Dirt was driven irretrievably far under his nails; his hands were callused, cut, and rough. Clay caked his pants. His boots were soggy from sweat.

Through the swirling dust and heat came dragonflies. Their wings were reddened

in the late sun like bombers in the smoke of war—or gulls in the maw of a Tanga typhoon.

This heat is death, thought Sheik Ndoto as he watched the white man from the baobab tree. The heat is death, but you and I live, white man. We will never again be as alive as now.

CHAPTER 5

One day, Simba, Machame, and Erlau were ed by one of the other contract men—the younger German.

“I’m bored,” he told them. “Got a smoke? I should have gone to Thailand after all. Tea! In this heat…”

A woman walked slowly past. She was filthy and carried a dilapidated gunny sack on her head. When she ed the white men, she turned and smiled toothlessly. She was Zaina, the madwoman.

“Zaina!” Machame called her.

She sidled over and peeped up coyly at the two young white men.

“Shikamoo,” the German said tentatively. He didn’t know she was mad.

“Marahaba,” she said sweetly. “Mnaonaje?”

“Kwa macho,” Machame said seriously.³¹

The American, the Sukuma, and Sarah laughed at this exchange. The German shuddered. Now he saw the cloudy depths in her yellow eyes; the depths that would never again be fathomed and the clouds that would never again disperse.

“Sarah! Give her something.” Sarah gave the old woman a chapati; Zaina curtsied and drifted away, munching the chapati and muttering brainlessly.

“Zaina, the beautiful and the fair,” Simba chuckled. “Poor old princess.”

“Do you know the story of Zaina?” Machame asked the German. “She comes to visit our Ndugu every day. Once she was married to an mzungu—long before Uhuru when white men owned the Mwelia Sisal Estate. In those days, she was not toothless and wrinkled as you see her now; she was the most beautiful girl in the Usambara Mountains. She was a princess of the Wasamba. Why else would the wazungu want her for a wife?

“In those days, she ceased dressing like a Samba and began to dress herself like a white lady: stockings—white and clean every day—leather shoes, cotton sundresses. She combed her hair like a white woman and wore ribbons and flowers in it. She no longer called herself Zaina. She took a British name, Katrina.

“Now, all of this made the Wasamba happy. That is, until she neglected her people—even her parents. They lived where Kilundai is now on the Soni Road near Meili Tano. One day, a child from her village fell ill with fever. Many Wasamba had come to Zaina for medicine or money to buy local medicine. She said, ‘How should I keep giving and giving my man’s money away? Do you think he has a tree on which he grows money?’ The child died.

“Then she began to eat only European food with a knife and fork. She disdained African food. She said to eat ugali with one’s fingers made Africans look like baboons.

“One day, visitors came to see her white man. Two were white men. One was a white lady. They say the white woman was a beautiful as Zaina but fragile and soft—not some robust Samba filly like Zaina-who-called-herself-Katrina.

“The three wazungu stayed with the owner of Mwelia for two months. At the end of these two months, the two wazungu men left Mwelia, but the young woman stayed and shortly thereafter Zaina returned to Kilundai.

“Why aren’t you with your man? The Wasamba asked her. He is no longer my man, and the white lady has sacked me from his house, said Zaina. So now you come back to your people, the ‘baboons’ whom only last week you ridiculed because they eat with their fingers and drink coconut milk out of the shell instead of mixing it with the pombe the white man keeps in his green bottle?

“I fear it is so, said Zaina.

“Zaina, you are mad. You will work hard and suffer much to compensate for the humiliations you have heaped on us while you were the concubine of the mzungu. Further, since you were too good then to be the wife of a Samba man, you are surely still too good to be the wife of a Samba man.

“Then they beat her in the face—which is why she has no teeth. They broke her knees—which is why she shuffles, now. She is quite out of her mind. She still thinks she is the beautiful mistress of a white man. That’s why she comes to visit

Ndugu, here, every day.”

Machame snubbed out his cigarette and stood carefully—his leg was almost healed—to pour more tea for the American, the German, and Simba. The German stared at the distant madwoman for a moment and then, with a shudder, he laughed.

Simba said something in Swahili that the German didn’t understand.

“He wants to know if you will go to Kilundai today,” the American translated.

“Mountain climbing? In this heat? Why not? I’ll go and get my boots.”

Accompanied by the Sukuma, the German disappeared, his Pajero plunging into the white turbulence. As soon as they were gone, the American summoned Sarah.

“Take this twenty shillings. Go to the Mrombo at the pombe shop. Buy cigarettes from him, and tell him I want to see him.”

When she was gone, the Chagga informed the American, “Simba wants to go into business with you and the German.”

“What kind of business?”

“He wants to export rhodolite.”

“He’s out of his mind. I don’t know anything about mining. The Germans are already in trouble over gold. We’d end up dead or in prison. Now, if Simba really wants to get into the Export Business, he ought to forget about rocks and try exporting animals instead.”

“Animals? What kind of animals?”

“Wild animals. You know these damned kenge?”

“Sure.”

“Any idea of what you could get for a two-meter kenge in America or ?”

“Maybe… fifty dollars?” (The sum was astronomical to the Chagga.)

“Fifty, hell! Try two or three thousand, maybe.”

“For a goddamned lizard? I say, let’s do it!”

“Well, it’s not that easy. First, you need an export license. Then you have shipping costs, quarantine, import tariff… you might actually get a profit of a few hundred off the damned thing.”

“But still!”

“Forget the kenge for a minute. Think about all the other animals: pythons, chameleons, monkeys, baboons…”

“Baboons? You mean someone would buy one?”

“Sure.”

Sarah returned with the Mrombo.

“You last week when you said you wanted those shoes I have? The ones with the holes in the toes?”

“The football shoes?”

“Yeah. Well, you can have them.” Machame started at this; it was unexpected. Then the white man continued, “But you have to do something for me. Take this medicine to Mzee Abou Hassan Ali. He has bad malaria. Then when you come back, I’ll give you the shoes—if you walk to Kilundai with me.”

The Mrombo happily accepted the offer.

“Why didn’t you take the medicine to Mzee Abou Hassan Ali yourself?”

“Several reasons. This way, he and the Mrombo will talk about how generous I am. Second, some people can’t take this medicine—it makes them even sicker. This way, it wasn’t me that gave him that medicine. Then if it works? Mzee Abou Hassan Ali will return to the mosque in a few days, and all the people will be informed of who cured his homa.”³²

“Now you think like a Chagga,” Machame said proudly.

At last, at midmorning, Simba, the German, the Mrombo, and the American set off across the shimmering white sand of the road toward the trail that leads to Kilundai. While they had waited for the Mrombo to return, Machame had explained the value of baboons to Simba. At first, Simba thought it a lie; most Africans are involved in one agricultural pursuit or another. Many animals— baboons no exception—enthusiastically pirate the fruits of this labor. Thus, baboons are vilified in most parts of rural Africa.

When he was convinced, Simba was determined to catch at least one baboon.

* * *

Erlau was the strongest climber. He was enraptured as soon as the noises of machinery and bawling cattle faded into the noises of the mountain.

At this month, the Usambara Mountains are blasted and baked by heat: the heat from the sun, which reflects off sun-bleached boulders and sheer-cliffed escarpments; the heat from charred soil, where careless fires have burned out of control; the heat that moves like a great snake among the blackened trunks of trees whose leaves have long since yellowed and fallen among the boulderstrewn heights and unexpected capillaries running into great erosion gullies.

Sun spiders, scorpions, geckoes, black-and-yellow-striped snakes, squirrels, and beetles darted out of the hunters’ path. From that bush remained birds, and an occasional monkey scolded drowsily.

Sweat drenched their boots and pants and shirts—but still they climbed on, like men escaping from imprisonment. They collected behind a large outcropping of rock. The American pointed at a tunnel three feet in height and roughly the same breadth that bore through the thorny thickets parallel to their path.

“Pigs,” the Sukuma announced quietly. He was elated; the fires hadn’t scared everything off, after all. The hunger of the hunter stirred in his broad chest.

They continued for another thirty minutes at a more cautious pace. They used their hands more, now, clutching at roots and jagged rocks for balance. At last they came to an immense boulder. Erlau hoisted himself to the top then hauled the Sukuma up, then the German, and finally, the Mrombo. The branches of an acacia tree spread above them. Below them, thousands of square kilometers of Africa rolled majestically to distant blue mountains. Behind the boulder, gigantic trees with jagged naked branches provided some shade; someone had recently excavated a small pit from the rock-hard earth below the trees.

“Damn,” the German said breathlessly. “How high are we do you think?”

“Maybe seven hundred meters. Look, you could hit the CCM office from here if you had a howitzer…”

The view was spectacular. In the shade of the tree, the climate was much improved—even chilly. Far off, hundreds of meters below, the vultures, kites, and their kin circled over the Mkalamo Irrigation Scheme. The rice plantation now seemed like a tiny green postage stamp on an unmade bedspread of ochre and rust.

A few women ed the rock. They were from tiny villages. They carried bundles of firewood on their heads, miraculously balanced on the steep treacherous trail.

“Did you hear what they said?” the Sukuma laughed. “Is my panga where I can reach it? I tell you, no mzungu has ed here for twenty or thirty years—if even then. They think you two are mumyani—come to steal their daughters. They think you have no blood because of your color.³³ If you came here alone, they might try to kill you.”

“I when Sheik Ndoto painted the red eyes on your windows,” the Mrombo said. “The vicheche bastards used to stay up all night on the Ndugu’s porch. They prayed, they sang, they fought, they fornicated. I used to hear him three or four times a night: get your bloody black asses out of here! Then they’d laugh and run away, and ten minutes later, they were back and louder than ever.

“I went to Sheik Ndoto and told him the mzungu was having a problem. Give me two hundred shillings and a black chicken, he says. What he did with the chicken I can’t say; with the money, he bought a can of red paint. He painted eyes on every pane of glass.

“These are the white man’s eyes, he tells us. Even if he goes back to America, he’ll be watching you.

“Nowadays, no one sits on the white man’s porch unless—”

“Quiet!”

Something was descending the treacherous path down which the women had shortly ed. A hacking, coughing noise and an eerie chatter arose among the broken, twisted little trees and the shattered white boulders.

“Nyani!” Simba hissed.³⁴

“Now what?” the Mrombo whispered.

“We catch one,” said the Sukuma. The Mrombo peered at him incredulously.

Twigs snapped, and the irregular carpet of yellow leaves rustled. Birds scolded warnings from unseen rookeries. Sixty meters away, the first baboons appeared. One was a female with an infant clinging below her. Her canine muzzle pivoted

from side to side, and she halted, crouching apprehensively over the trail. Behind her, a big male materialized. His shoulders rolling with muscle, he brushed her aside and continued arrogantly down the trail. If the baboons feared the scent of the Samba women, they showed no sign of it. They were notorious for attacking villagers—especially women—and stealing plantains and maize from the baskets the women carried on their heads.

More and more baboons appeared. In all, there were several dozen; mostly juveniles, females, and infants, the troop had a few hugely muscled male askaris. One in particular moved like a boxer, obviously in defiance of the others’ interests. That’s the one we want, Simba thought.

Suddenly, from across a gully, at a distance of two hundred meters, a sharp cry of irritation and pain echoed off the rocky escarpment. Through the dry forest, the four hunters picked out the source of the noise, another battalion of baboons. This clan was gathered in the branches of several acacia trees. The noisy one was a big male; his mouth opened, displaying huge canine teeth. The baboon unleashed another mournful howl.

“We’re surrounded,” the German said happily. After months of machinery that was prone to breaking, managers that were prone to stealing and employees that were prone to malaria or witchcraft; it was a strangely relieving sensation to be completely isolated by wild things.

“That’s the Babu,” Simba said, pointing at the big male in the tree.³⁵ “The Babu has a toothache. Let’s catch him.”

“How?”

“That’s your problem.”

“I say we circle around and take them from the rear by surprise.”

Everyone looked directly at the Mrombo.

“What? Not me! When I was a boy growing up in Moshi, we had a dog. One day, some nyani got into my father’s coffee shamba. When we sicced the dog on them, they tore her open from ass to elbow. I tell you, her guts were hanging out. Poor bitch! If you want one of those things, go catch it, msela. Count me out.”

Exasperated, the Sukuma looked from one face to the next.

“Fine,” he finally rumbled. “I’ll do it myself.”

He leaped off the boulder and charged the oncoming baboons. At the sight of this huge human bearing down on them, the troop let out a collective howl of outraged terror. With the exception of the big males they turned and fled back up the mountain toward Kilundai. The other gang—across the gully—shrieked unanimous for the first bunch.

As the Sukuma drew nearer, the male baboons flared their nostrils and bared their long canine teeth. They shrieked terribly.

“Let’s go!” the German roared. “They’ll rip the lining out of him!”

The German sprang down from the boulder followed shortly by the American and the protesting Mrombo. With these sudden reinforcements behind him, Simba became too menacing for the baboons. They quit the field and ran like hell.

The Sukuma sank to his knees. Tears ran down his dirty cheeks, and he convulsed with laughter. The German leaned against a tree trunk, gasping for breath. The other two men leaned on their knees, panting.

“To hell with the baboons,” the German finally said. “I need a drink.”

* * *

Back at the American’s house, Sarah finished washing the teacups. She crept into the American’s bedroom and collected all of the dirty clothes. She dumped them in a pile in the washroom. She had just filled a bucket with water and opened a blue paper carton of OMO soap when someone knocked at the door. It was Aisha. Aisha’s eyes were red, and the dust on her soft cheeks was streaked and muddied in long tracks.

“Why are you crying?”

“My husband. He is very sick with malaria. A certain woman, the second wife of Mzee Abou Hassan Ali, said that the white man gave the Mzee some medicine for his homa. I want to ask him for some.”

“He may give it to you. It is a dangerous medicine. Every Sunday night, the mzungu takes his pills. Every Monday morning, he is vicious. I never leave the bedroom on Monday until I’m sure he’s gone.”

“Is he here?”

“No. He and the Mrombo from the pombe shop, that other mzungu, and the Sukuma—Simba, the brother of the bank manager—went to climb the mountain to Kilundai. They left a long time ago.”

“In this heat? Kuma ya mama yangu! What in God’s name for?”

“They—they went to catch a baboon.”

“What?” Aisha’s eyes widened in disbelief and then narrowed suspiciously. She suspected mockery. Sarah wearily shook her head.

“It’s true. Machame understands these things better than I do, but it seems that in America or Uliya,³ one can sell baboons and kenge and such animals for three thousand American dollars.”

“Don’t say!”

“Well, ask him yourself. I don’t understand anything about wazungu. When the white man comes back, I’ll ask him about the medicine.”

Aisha left the house, shaking her head in confusion. Outside she met Little Mohammed who was prowling about with several of his henchmen.

“Do you know,” Aisha said in a superior voice, “that in America, wazungu will buy kenge and nyani for three thousand American dollars?”

Little Mohammed had a vague idea about three thousand shillings; he knew that one American dollar was worth more than a hundred shillings on the black market. After a moment of reflection, he started off at a trot for the Ruvu River.

“Where to, msela?” one of his lieutenants panted.

“Think, idiot. If a kenge is worth three thousand, a tortoise ought to fetch a thousand, at least.”

Several hours later, Machame returned, walking without the crutches now. He had ed the bank, and Power had informed him that the hunting party had not yet returned.

“What are they hunting?” Power asked.

“Baboons,” said Machame.

“Kuma ya mama yangu,” Power said, shaking his head.

When Machame arrived at the white man’s house, he found his wife looking ill, tired, and a little frightened.

“In two days, I will send you back to Kilimanjaro,” the Chagga said.

“Very well,” she said, and although her face was expressionless as always, she was suddenly weak with happiness and relief. She told her husband about Aisha’s request.

“You see? Malaria is now everywhere in Mkalamo. In Kilimanjaro, it has been raining for some time. The climate will be cool there. Besides, I want my child to be born at home, not in this banda of the Wasamba.”

“Who will cook for the Ndugu while we’re gone?”

“I’ll be back in a few weeks, then I’ll cook for him like I did last year.”

“But who will take care of me?” Sarah had a sudden panic.

“You will be with my parents. When the time for the baby is close, send word with a bus, and I’ll come as fast as I can.”

“What will the mzungu say?”

“Oh, he won’t mind. I talked to the babu next door. He’ll have Rukia cook for the white man while we’re gone.”

“Machame…”

“Yes?”

“For two of us to travel and then for you to return? That’s over a thousand shillings. Where will we get money?”

“Well, maybe from the Sukuma.”

Sarah started to tremble as Machame started for the door that led to the garden. He frowned at her, limped out, and she shut her eyes.

“What the bloody hell!”

In the garden that Machame and Sarah had laboriously cultivated—neat rows of spinach, onions, and tomatoes—only a wreckage now remained. Among the stripped stalks they had so faithfully watered and weeded paraded a dozen huge mossy tortoises. From their humorless, grinning mouths dangled the precious

foliage. Machame spun around, incredulous.

“Where did these malaia come from?”

“From Little Mohammed,” Sarah said, trembling. “He wants ten thousand American dollars for them.” She stammered her explanation and then burst into tears. For a moment, Machame watched her, his mouth opening and closing like a beached kambale.

“So—now we’re rich, are we?” He laughed unexpectedly. She cried harder now because of the sick husband of Aisha, because of the white man, alone in the house when she and Machame would leave, because Machame wasn’t angry about the kobe destroying the garden, and mostly because of the terrible heat of Mkalamo in the afternoon.

Shortly before dark, the white man returned. Machame informed him about the sick man. The white man frowned. He gave Sarah money and sent her for cigarettes. When she returned, he and Machame went to see Mushi, the husband of Aisha.

The old man—the grandfather of Rukia, Aisha and Little Mohammed—sat outside. Little Mohammed and Rukia were with him; they eyed the mzungu suspiciously.

“Shikamoo,” the white man and the Chagga told the old man together.

“Marahaba. Mushi is inside. He is very sick. Did you bring him the medicine?”

“Yes.”

` “Good. God will reward you for this.”

“No one has medicine these days—not even the rich people. Where has all the medicine gone?”

“A certain Chagga has taken control of all the medicine that comes to the dispensary.”

“Who is he?”

“The heaster of the school.”

Rukia watched the white man’s eyes narrow. He looks like a vulture when his eyes are like that, she thought. The Chagga and the white man left them on the porch and went into their house.

“What do you think he’ll do to the heaster? Will he beat him the way he did Arufane?” Rukia was hopeful. She recalled the heaster without fondness as a small girl he had whipped her mercilessly. Later, he had exacted other punishments.

“I hope so,” Little Mohammed said.

On a thatch mattress, Mushi lay wrapped in a sheet in the darkness. The sheet was wet with his perspiration, and his teeth chattered. His emaciated frame trembled violently; he was a naturally thin man, and this malaria reduced him to a skeletal appearance.

“Hello, brother, are you dying?” Machame asked cheerfully.

“Msela,” Mushi said feebly.

The two men—the American and the Chagga—watched Aisha hold a glass of tepid water to Mushi’s cracked lips. He painfully choked down five pills.

“Give him two more when he wakes up—or else wake him in four hours,” the white man said expertly.

They left Aisha and Mushi together in the dark room.

“Will Mushi be well again?” Rukia asked the Chagga.

“Inshallah,” he grunted.

“You went to Kilundai today,” the old man said. “Did you see anything?”

“Baboons. Some pigs left a trail.”

“Pigs, yes, pigs. Many pigs. They’ll be rooting in the rice once it rains down here. I spoke to a certain Samba the other day who says a leopard will move down toward Mwelia too. Will you go to the mountains after the rain, Ndugu? If I weren’t so old, I’d take you myself.”

Back at his house, the white man drank a cup of tea. By and by, he went to the outhouse. Machame held up a finger to his wife. The white man returned a few minutes later. For a moment, he smoked in silence, and then with a deep sigh, he exhaled.

“All right, why do we have turtles in the garden?”

They laughed for a little while.

Suddenly, Machame ed. “I say! This came for you at the post office today, I’m afraid.” He held out a brown telegraph envelope. The white man read it and snorted with disgust. He handed it to the Chagga. It read:

Very concern about lack of input stop what actions are you taking re ministry of parks and wildlife stop to DSM immediately stop urgent conference necessary re personal behavior, etc., stop.

“What will you do?” Machame asked.

“Go to Dar immediately, I guess,” the American sighed.

CHAPTER 6

E rlau arrived in Dar Es Salaam thirty-six hours later. Twenty-four of these hours had been spent on a bus. The last half of the journey was through a torrential monsoon. That stretch of the international highway is unpleasant under the most favorable conditions. But with heavy rain, on a crowded bus, the windows shutting out any fresh cool air and locking in the smoky, sweaty stench, the long night is an essence of its own. It is a predatory creature that slowly digests one hundred people in an aluminum gut designed to hold half that number.

The American arrived stinking and disheveled at the Kisutu bus station. He did not notice the heady perfume from blooming bougainvillea and lilac or the pleasant metallic smell of diesel. He did not see the thousands of chattering black-and-white pied crows in their rookeries. He was not thinking about Sarah; or if he had, he did not have any idea that he would never see her again.

He thought only of his own misery.

He had worn his good clothes—the clothes that had been packed in a suitcase for more than a year without disturbance. Now he smelled of sweat and tobacco; his polished shoes were scuffed; and his pants and shirt were dirty from greasy, intruding fingers and other unknown sources of violation.

He had not slept since the morning of the day when he had hunted baboons in the Usambara Mountains. This seemed years away now. He stepped off the bus and into a deep puddle of water and the predatory jeers and entreaties of the venders, hustlers, thieves, and pilgrims that peopled Kisutu—even at six o’clock in the morning.

Scudding gray clouds reflected dully in oily puddles. The sun was still twenty minutes below the horizon of the Indian Ocean, but already the dismal light of dawn illuminated the depression scene of the Kisutu bus station.

“Hey! Mzungu!” a street woman called. She had a harsh voice.

“Kuma yako,” the American barked back. Several African men burst into delighted applause.

“That’s telling her the filthy cat! Where to, msela?”

Before he could get a cab, a young man—about his own age—fell into step beside the American.

“Ah, friend, do you me?”

“No,” the American said coldly.

“We met in Arusha last month.”

“Like hell we did. I wasn’t in Arusha last month.”

“Oh! Well, where did we meet?”

“Kitanda ya mama yako,” the American snarled.³⁷

“Say!” The young African jumped acrobatically in front of the American. He cocked his hands on his trim hips and leaned forward, smiling conspiratorially. “What do they charge you for bangi now days?”³⁸

“Get out of my goddamned way.”

“You have dollars?” the African purred. “I give you one ninety for the dollar! Think about it—one ninety!”

“Get your black ass out of my way, or I’ll kick your goddamned teeth in. Think about it.”

The young African smiled without emotion, shrugged, and sauntered away.

“You! Shit bloody bastard!” A large man shook his fist at the departing hustler. He turned to the American. “Where you go, brother? I take you New Kilimanjaro Hotel. I take you Bushtrekker Hotel. I take you Kunduchi Beach Hotel. I take you Serengeti Hotel. Where you go, brother?”

“Take me to Msasani,” the American said.

“Allah! You speak Swahili! God is great! Let’s go. Five hundred shillings.”

“Because I’m white?” Erlau said angrily. “I tell you, I’m a goddamned Chagga. I look like this because I have goddamned leukemia.”

“Chagga, eh? Shimbone.”

“Nashisha,” the American said poisonously.

“God is great! Kuma ya mama yangu! This mzungu speaks Kichagga! All right, mangi, one hundred then.”

* * *

The office was nearly empty of staff. A guard with a machine gun itted Erlau. Inside, on a bench, another American sat. This was a dark, swarthy man in his late thirties. He wore tattered blue jeans, a Chicago Cubs baseball cap, a Tshirt with a picture of the Incredible Hulk, and sunglasses. Jesus Christ, Erlau thought. Here’s a real cowboy. Erlau nodded, and the cowboy nodded back.

“What’s going on?”

“You tell me,” said the cowboy. “Who’re you? The guy from Mkalamo?”

“Yeah. Who’re you?”

“I’m the second half of the nightmare, Mkalamo.”

“Whose nightmare?”

“That depends. What’d you do to piss the bosses off so much?”

“I don’t know.”

“Joey Mosel,” the cowboy said, extending a scarred hand. His grip was very strong.

“Why are you here?” Erlau asked.

“I… uh… lost a tooth. Eating… uh… sugar cane.” Joey Mosel grinned to confirm this story. “Got a smoke?”

“Sure.” Erlau handed Joey Mosel his pack of Sportsman.

“Buddy, that ain’t the kind of smoke I had in mind. You got any of the other kind?”

“No.”

“Wanna buy some?” Joey Mosel grinned again. “Hey, buddy, you ever been to Margot’s?”

“That disco?”

“Is that what they call it? Yeah. Tell you what, you get a shave, a shower, and let’s see that pretty smile, and we’ll cut the rug at Margot’s tonight.”

Joey Mosel shut his eyes and appeared to fall asleep. Erlau sank down next to him. A shaft of yellow sunlight penetrated the dirty air, bathing the two men in a halo of narcotic warmth. An amiable, tranquil silence enveloped them, and soon Erlau dozed.

He had a dream of jungle drums: boom boom boom-ba-da-da . . . boom boom boom-ba-da-da . . . gourds filled with dried beads added to the rhythm. Sha shasha-da-da-da . . . sha sha-sha-da-da-da . . .

The orange sunlight on the backs of his eyelids became a fire about which shadowy black figures sprang and danced: masked people, naked and oiled with sweat, abandoning reason to emotion. Suddenly he saw himself among them; a princess emerged from the ring of dancers. She clung to him and dragged him to

the dusty brown foliage…

Joey Mosel was shaking him by the arm.

“Show time, baby, don’t you tell these bastards nothing.”

Erlau stood and stretched. In his subconscious, the drums continued: boom boom boom-ba da-da . . . His feet seemed to shuffle out the rhythm of the gourds when he crossed the linoleum floor. Sha sha-sha-da-da-da. The hot May morning sunlight glinted on his bloodshot eyes. The razor stubble and dust on his face, his dirty hair and greasy, muddy clothes made him disheveled and careless. Still, he had a provocative, almost threatening saunter as he opened the outer office door. He exchanged a final appraising glance with Joey Mosel and entered the sanctum of authority.

The blast of the air conditioner was arctic. The next sensation was the strong perfume used by the office secretary.

She was gorgeous. Some indulgent friend had labored over her hair for hours. She had great liquid eyes and full pouting lips. She wore too much lipstick and too much mascara. Like painting eyes on an ebony statue, Erlau thought. She flashed a very white smile at him.

“Well, how are things at Mkalamo? We haven’t seen you in… ten months!”

“Hmm. Are you pregnant?”

Instinctively, she felt her belly. Reassured by the flat, muscular surface, she pouted.

“Certainly not!”

“Would you like to be pregnant?”

She giggled. “The director will see you in a few minutes, Ndugu.”

“It would only take a few minutes… Can I smoke in here?”

“Sure, say! These belong to the director. He forgot them in his office yesterday.”

She handed Erlau a nearly full pack of Marlboros.

He lit one and sat on the edge of her desk. He leaned forward and exhaled a trail of blue smoke at her.

“I could get to like it, here. Maybe I’ll settle here and we’ll get married. We could raise us a whole el of kids.”

“My husband wouldn’t approve.”

“How big is he?”

“You know? You and Joey Mosel talk exactly alike.”

“We should. We speak the same language. We’re from the same tribe.”

“What tribe is that?”

“We’re called the Red Necks.”

A voice called from the next room. The secretary rose, and the white man followed her shapely legs. Husband, my ass. Boom boom boom-ba-da-da . . . went the tight leather drums in his imagination.

“The director will see you now,” she chirped.

He brushed a little too close to her and sauntered into the director’s office.

The American director was seated behind a huge walnut desk. He wore fresh pastel polo shirt. He had a manicured beard and a rugged, handsome face, the kind of rugged handsomeness that results from hours of tennis and yachting. His

eyes had the frank, businesslike intensity that results from hours of leadership seminars.

Beside him sat an assistant director. This was an African, the photographic negative of the director. The assistant director had manicured fingernails. His hair was neat and freshly oiled. He had a jaunty mustache and a pressed safari suit of expensive material and foreign cut.

Both the director and the assistant director wore sunglasses, although there were no windows in the office.

“Well?” the director asked icily.

“Well, what?”

“Isn’t there something you’d like to tell us?”

“Uh—why am I here? Everybody seems to know except me.”

“Everybody? ‘Everybody,’ like whom?”

“Well, this Mosel guy, for one…”

“How did he find out?”

The director leaned forward aggressively and folded his large tanned hands on the glass plate that surfaced his desk.

“Find out what? How the hell should I know?”

“Bernard?” The director’s sunglasses turned toward the assistant director’s sunglasses.

“I’ll get on it right away,” said Bernard in a smooth confident voice that implied he had no other ambition in life.

“So… here we are, again. Why am I here?”

“I think you’d better tell us.” The director leaned back and compressed his aristocratic lips. He folded his big arms across his broad chest.

“Listen! I just spent twenty-four hours on a goddamned shamba-bus on that bloody-assed road. I haven’t slept in three goddamned days, and you’re playing twenty questions. What’s going on? Is my brother dead or something?”

This was delivered in a dangerous, deadpan voice. It did nothing to diminish the absolute authority of the director and the assistant director, although it did seem to impress them.

“Now, you listen,” said the director. “If your brother had died, I wouldn’t send you a goddamned telegram. I’d personally drive my personal car to Mkalamo and get you, myself.” The director nodded to confirm his own statement. “Understand?”

“Sure,” Erlau said uncertainly.

The director sighed.

“You really don’t know why you’re here?”

“No.”

“Look,” the director sighed. He leaned forward on the desk and tapped his fingertips together. He removed his sunglasses and blinked twice as he wiped the lenses on his spotless khaki pants. “Rumor is you have a gun.”

“I have a what?” Erlau roared with incredulous laughter. The incredulity was not lost on the staff; they watched him intently like a pair of bloodhounds. Suddenly Erlau stopped laughing and snarled, “You called me in for that?”

“Then it isn’t true?” the director asked smoothly.

“Hell, no! What son of a bitch fed you that crap?”

“All right, all right,” the director began. He sighed deeply. “All right. We’ve been getting mixed reviews about you. They say you work hard—maybe harder than anyone expected of you. That’s the one hand. But then there’s the motorcycle thing, and now this gun thing…”

The director leaned forward so abruptly that Erlau jumped nervously.

“Listen, here’s what we want you to do. Go find a hotel. Rest up for a day or two. Then come back, and we’ll talk again.” The director stood and put his big hand on Erlau’s shoulder. “How have you been otherwise?”

“Well—”

“Good, good. You’re due for vacation—four hundred dollars.”

“Can I get it in cash?”

“Shillings. Otherwise… here.” The director handed Erlau an envelope.

“American Express.”

“Go have a beer or two, and we’ll talk later. Send Mosel in, will you?”

“How did it go? You still got both balls, buddy?” Joey Mosel asked. The two contract men smoked in the sultry corridor.

“I got accused, pardoned, and patronized. And I got turned down by the receptionist.”

“Buddy! There are other fishes, and it’s a wide ocean.”

“Sure, but there’s AIDS and other things in the sea. Living here is like being in Marshall Fields with no money.”

“Here, buddy.” Joey Mosel ed Erlau a condom in its small plastic envelope. “Too expensive, huh? Never heard of credit cards, buddy?”

Erlau lit a cigarette in the garden of the compound. The guard with the machine gun strolled over; they shared a smoke together.

“Don’t try to sell those things here,” the guard said professorially, tapping the envelope with the travelers’ checks which poked out of Erlau’s shirt pocket. “I have a cousin in Same that works with the tree cutters. He’ll give you a hundred fifty. That’s as good as you’ll get in Dar, and he’ll keep his mouth shut.”

“Thanks.”

“When you go back to Tanga, can you get medicine for my auntie? She’s in Muheza.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“She needs an operation, and the washenzi want twenty thousand.”

“Hamna tabu.”³

* * *

Several hours later, Erlau and Joey Mosel drank at a tourist hotel. Joey Mosel and Erlau were now well dressed, clean shaved, and had applied a liberal dose of cologne. They were not at the establishment where they had checked into two rooms.

This one was too expensive for contract men; it was on Msasani Peninsula. All the richest people in Dar Es Salaam congregated here: Indian, Arab, Palestinian, and Chagga businessmen; the more affluent expatriates; cabinet ministers; embassy staff.

A long bar faced the sunset on the Indian Ocean. A cool breeze wafted in from towering monsoon clouds, and far off in the roiling surf bobbed little fishing dhows. Soft Western music percolated among the ferns and palm trees of a little

garden; the cultured, cordial babble of a dozen languages ebbed and flowed at little tables. Ice cubes tinkled seductively in glasses of whiskey and vodka and brandy.

Presently, Erlau found himself floating in a warm alcoholic haze, moored to the rational safety of Joey Mosel. Mosel was fraternal and sympathetic; the world revolved around the two of them. Mosel signaled for the waiter.

“Bring us a menu. We’re going to—ah—check out the garden.”

Instead of checking out the garden, Joey Mosel lead Erlau to the parking lot where he whistled for a taxi.

“What’s going on?”

“We’re on a limited budget, right, bwana? Well, this is how we get laid, drunk, and taxied on a limited budget, baby. We don’t pay for none of it.”

“Where you go, brothers?” the taxi driver asked.

“You know Margot’s?”

“Sure, brother. You looking for a lady?”

“Sure, Juma. You know a lady?”

“Yeah, brother, you ask for Amina. You say you got sent by Kamal, right? She’s a little Malawi princess, make you forget your religion.”

“Sounds like fun. What’s the going rate?”

“You want to put a price on love, brother? Give her a thousand, and I promise she’s worth every centi.”

The driver let them off at the street level entrance to the second-story disco. The doormen were a pair of tough-looking Arabs.

“How much?” said Joey Mosel.

“For both of you?” the Arabs exchanged a meaningful glance. “Six hundred.”

“Quss umakh,” Erlau said.⁴ The Arabs’ eyebrows went up, and they laughed.

“You guys smoke bangi?” Joey Mosel asked them.

“Sure, man.”

“You want to buy some?” This made the Arabs laugh again.

“For you two, one hundred each.”

Inside, they parted company.

Erlau found a seat at a table with two huge Europeans. They were ferociously drunk. One periodically unleashed a peal of hollow laughter; then he would pound his meaty thigh with a gigantic fist and slide back into spaniel-eyed melancholy.

The other looked sad; he slowly nursed a bottle of gin. A prostitute curled up on his lap. She, also, looked sad. She stroked her client’s furry chest, and the two of them stared at each other with bleary, knowing affection.

The first man reached across the table and shook hands with Erlau.

“Hey, you want a drink?”

“Sure.”

“Get my brother a drink, malaika.”⁴¹ The prostitute slithered to her feet and glided toward the bar. Her client cleared his throat.

“Where are you from, brother?”

“America.”

“Are you a tourist?”

“No. I work contract. In Tanga. You know Tanga?”

“Sure. We been in Tanga. Last month.” He jerked his immense thumb at his companion, who was in the melancholic phase. “We’re Polish. Sailors. Tomorrow we go back to Poland. That’s my girlfriend. She’s been my girlfriend for a whole week. Why don’t you drink some gin?”

“No money.”

“Crazy! Intense! You, you’re an American, and you got no money. Me, I’m a Polack, and I got money. Here, have some money. After tonight, it won’t do us no good anyway.” The sailor thrust several thousand shillings at Erlau. It was more than two months’ salary. The prostitute returned. She placed a bottle of Safari Lager in front of Erlau and resumed her perch on the sailor’s knee. They looked very sad. The other Pole laughed unhappily again.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He had a girlfriend too. Then when we come to Margot’s tonight to say goodbye, she’s with some Italian. So the captain hit the Italian’s nose, and they called the cops. It was a good thing malaika was here.” The sailor stroked the prostitute’s hair with mournful affection.

“Why is that?”

“I know all the cops,” the prostitute said in perfect English. She had a faint British accent. Then in Swahili, she added, “Besides, msela, in the morning, he’ll give me more money that I got off him in the last six days. He loves me.”

“Where did you learn English?”

“From men like you. In school too. I’m a Form Six graduate. I wanted to go to an institution outside Nairobi, but I wasn’t allowed in.”

“Why not?”

“I wouldn’t screw the principal.”

The captain selected this moment for another round of his ghastly laughter.

“I learned French too,” the prostitute continued. “I know some Swedish too. I lived with a Swedish tourist for a month. He took me everywhere: Burundi, Malawi, Botswana, South Africa… then he brought me here, to Tanzania, and he

got sick with malaria, so they sent him home. I want to go home to Kenya.”

“I loved her,” the captain announced loudly. “I loved her very much.”

“He loved her,” the prostitute echoed philosophically. “It was a bad thing that Swahili bitch did, running away with that Italian msenge.”

“Kuma ya mama yake,” Erlau told the prostitute. She giggled; the two Poles looked on with bovine interest.

“Did you really love her?” Erlau asked the captain.

“Of course, I loved her,” he said indignantly. “I felt true love for her, the bitch.”

“I believe you,” the sailor told the captain. “The thing is, she didn’t believe you’d come back in six months.”

“What about you?” Erlau asked the prostitute. “What do you want?”

“I’m building a house, north of Nairobi,” the prostitute said proudly. “Then I’ll find a man to love me, and we’ll live in the house together.”

“You’re a fool,” Erlau said. “No one would ever trust you. Where would such a

young girl get so much money, except the way you do? Who’d marry a prostitute?”

“I would,” the captain said sadly. “I told the other bitch I’d take her back to Poland.”

“Liar,” the prostitute laughed.

“No, I believe him,” Erlau said. “In America—or Poland—we don’t have women as beautiful as you. But I’d never take you to America.”

“Why?”

“It’s like picking the blossom from a jacaranda tree. It has a million flowers, and they’re all perfect. But if you remove them from the tree, they wither and die and then are of no use.”

“That’s true,” the captain said, staring intensely at Erlau. Then he laughed unhappily again and pounded his thigh.

They sat for a little while in comfortable philosophical silence. Finally, the prostitute whispered something to the sailor, and they disappeared together.

“What do you think of her?” the captain asked.

“She’s a liar,” said Erlau.

“How can you be sure?”

“No one learns English like that from tourists. She’s probably a refugee. Maybe she worked in an embassy somewhere before. Also, she’s lactating. Her breasts are too big for such a hungry thin body. She probably has a baby hidden somewhere in Kariakoo. I doubt if she’s a Kenyan. She’s probably never been north of Tanzania. Maybe she came to Dar to find a job as a stewardess or a secretary, got knocked up, and needed to get medicine for her brat. Maybe she’s a Chagga. They’re all liars.”

“Huh,” the captain said thoughtfully. “You may be right.”

“Did you really beat up an Italian?”

“Yeah, I really did. I got him good.”

“Good. I hate Italians. Too bad it wasn’t a Frenchman.”

“Or a German,” the captain said, brightening. “Goddamned murdering bastards, the Germans. Russians are even worse.”

“What about Americans?”

“Sure! Americans are all right. I was in America one time. I went to Florida. I met Mickey Mouse. You know Mickey Mouse?”

“Only by reputation.”

“Then I got drunk with some colored bitch. On the way out of the bar, some schwartzers jumped me. The bitch set me up.”

“Did they rob you?”

“Well, they tried. I bet one of them is still pissing blood. Have a drink, comrade.”

The captain ed the bottle of gin to the American. The American took a swig. He held the bottle up to the captain in a salute.

“To solidarity,” the American said.

“Kuma ya mama yako,” the captain replied in heavily accented Swahili.

A little later, Joey Mosel returned.

“Having fun?”

“Who are you?” the captain slurred.

“He’s an Italian,” Erlau said.

“Shit. I hate Italians. Little bastard pricks.”

“What the hell is he talking about?” Joey Mosel asked.

“It’s a long story.”

They finished the gin; the captain bought another bottle. The sailor and his true love returned. Joey Mosel announced it was time to go.

“To Lech Walesa,” he said, holding the bottle up like Liberty’s torch.

“Oh, screw you,” the captain mumbled. He was perspiring heavily and nearly unconscious.

Outside the night was cool, and the pavement glittered with fresh rainfall. White,

green, and red lights from the traffic, and the surrounding buildings made pretty reflections in the oily puddles.

“Let’s walk back,” Joey Mosel said.

They returned to their own hotel. Over the Indian Ocean, the moon illuminated a colossal, boiling, frothing ballet of cloud. The waves reflected the maelstrom in a hypnotic kaleidoscope.

“Looks nice,” said Erlau.

“Yeah. Let’s go down to the beach and get stoned.”

On the beach, Joey Mosel turned his back to the wind and the ocean and lit a t. They ed the marijuana back and forth, inhaling deeply. Suddenly Joey Mosel felt something in the shadows of the palms, the smell of decaying vegetation and the marijuana that resurrected unsettling memories. He began to walk quickly back toward the road.

“Hey,” said Erlau. “Where are you—”

An arm tightened around his neck. He felt hot breath just below his ear. Dark figures sprang out of the shadow at Joey Mosel. Joey Mosel ducked under the deadly, slow arc of a panga. He twisted his body and drove his cowboy boot into one shadow.

Erlau jammed his left elbow back. It slammed obligingly into soft flesh, and the hot breath grunted in surprised pain. He spun around and snapped his fist into the assailant that crouched menacingly behind him.

His left hand caught the right wrist of a hand that held a knife. Erlau fumbled under his Hawaiian shirt for his own knife. He twisted his left hand with the confident pressure he knew from months of cutting bush. His knife thudded solidly, and then the progress was slowed, like a truck that has driven into a river.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Joey Mosel take another thief down; if Mosel pushed any harder, he would break the thief’s neck. Mosel shoved the thief toward Erlau. Erlau kicked the thief in the face. Mosel and Erlau whirled around, breathing hard, but the thieves were already melting into the shadows, taking their wounded with them.

“You all right, buddy?”

“Yeah. Where’d you learn to fight like that, Mosel?”

“Vietnam. Two tours. Infantry. Let’s go.”

“Where? I think I killed one—look at this mess on my clothes. Shit. I hope the little son of a bitch didn’t have HIV.”

Joey Mosel laughed.

“You’re all right, cowboy. Cold as ice.”

At the tourist hotel, they found the guards asleep. Joey Mosel kicked them awake. He tried to explain: the combination of adrenaline, gin, marijuana, and “Amina” made him incoherent.

Finally, the manager, intrigued by the noise, strolled out in flowered boxer shorts, sunglasses, and rubber sandals.

“Just say it in English,” he said suavely.

Mosel described the fight. The manager nodded approvingly.

“I hope you killed the little washenzi.”⁴² He turned to his guards and questioned them briefly. “They say to ask you if the thieves didn’t get anything—and one of them is probably dead—what the hell do you want us to do about it?”

Joey Mosel and Erlau stumbled back out to the road. Joey Mosel snickered.

“Man, what a day.”

A Mercedes with Swedish embassy license plates pulled up next to them. A young woman rolled down the window of the driver’s side.

“Problem, love?” she said with a heavy British accent.

“We got jumped, angel,” Joey Mosel growled. A second young woman tumbled out of the enger’s side. She lit a cigarette and then held her lighter up to examine Erlau’s face.

“I hope you didn’t get hurt,” she purred.

“Hell, no,” Joey Mosel growled. “We kicked their asses. I think the kid here killed one of them.”

“Good on you, love. I’m Rita. This is Mrs. Ziegler. That’s Ziegler in the car.”

She indicated a man’s face, pressed grotesquely against the glass of one of the rear windows. His eyes were shut; his nose was bleeding.

“Ziegler ed out some time yesterday—at the Australian ambassador’s beach party. Afternoon, I guess.”

“So,” Joey Mosel leaned on the hood of the Mercedes. “What do you guys do for fun?”

Mrs. Ziegler stroked Joey Mosel’s swarthy jaw with her delicate knuckles and

then tapped his thin lips with a perfect, soft fingertip. “Want to go a party, killer?”

CHAPTER 7

T he drought reigned on in Mkalamo. Even the Irish father—Danny—donated a goat to be butchered at the mosque. Only the witch—Sheik Ndoto—benefited from the drought. It was because of his prized Brahma bull. This was a strange occurrence:

The bull caught a fever—probably hydrophobia which was now common—and went on a rampage in the Irrigation Scheme. It smashed dikes, mauled other cattle, and chased anyone or anything that moved. The madness was unpredictable. The local Catholic missionary desperately called on his friend, Father Brian of Tabora—a renowned hunter. Father Brian was gone, south with the relief trucks, to Mozambique.

At this time, the locusts were in full fury, devouring rice, maize, even tomatoes. There came a lamentation of hunger from the desperate farmers. If the locusts were not enough, weaver birds came in flocks of ten thousands, then hundred thousands, and then seemingly millions.

And still the heat increased.

A leopard arrived on the steep slope between Mkalamo and Kilundai.

A big bull buffalo wandered down from Mount Mafi and began chasing Maasai cattle. One day, it bumbled into the Irrigation Scheme where it was promptly assaulted by the Brahma bull. The buffalo opened the Brahma from shoulder to

rump, spilling oily coils of intestine onto the dust before cantering back to Mount Mafi. Flies and vultures and hyenas descended on the stinking bonanza; the mwenyekiti and the manager angrily ordered the witch to remove the dead Brahma. Sheikh Ndoto smiled benignly

That night, the local leopard—with Herculean effort—dragged the five-hundredkilo bull a few meters to a low, stunted tree. The leopard attempted to carry the heavy load to safety, but finding this far too taxing, left the bull with his head wedged two meters off the ground, and the rest of his bulk reclined against the parched bark. It looked as if the bull was listening to the tree. This inspired all manner of crude and derisive jokes; the witch smiled again.

A patrol of siafu found the blood and then the carcass and suddenly siafu from dozens of colonies poured from out of cracks and fissures in the scorched earth, and the dead bull was quickly engulfed in voracious ants. The ants formed reconnaissance divisions so ambitious that for the next week, no one dared enter the Irrigation Scheme.

When the week had ed Erlau, two police, the mwenyekiti, and the manager cautiously followed Sheik Ndoto to the sun-bleaching skeleton of the Brahma bull. The rice and maize fields were sterilized: locusts, weaver birds, dung beetles, termites, scorpions, spiders, roaches, snakes, lizards, otters, civets, rats, mongoose, herons… The ants had either devoured or driven off all animal life.

Sheik Ndoto was feted widely. He was called King of Witches. It was he, they said, that conjured up the wrath of demons in the shape of a bull, a buffalo, a leopard, and the ants.

If the white man was an eccentric before, he was a lunatic now. He awoke three hours before dawn. This was the time when evil things in the shapes of jackals,

hyenas, and warthogs roamed the refuse heaps and deserted bus stands of Mkalamo.

The white man pursued no honest activity; he ran. He ran like a Maasai, up the new road the Germans were building, five miles uphill then the same five miles downhill. Every morning, he saw troops of baboons bivouacked on the fresh tarmac.

Then one morning, the baboons were absent. A large creature—maybe a cow— lay in the road under the branch of a jacaranda tree. When the animal saw the white man approach, it leapt vertically three meters, caught the branch, and disappeared into the dark dry forest.

“The leopard has heshima,” said the old man next door. “This is the spirit of a good man.”

The economic adventures of Muhando, the bank manager, grew more gruesome and more beguiling, like the web of some spider creating a web of terrible beauty. Those whose purpose it was to destroy this web—the auditors and the CID—had no desire to subdue their intended quarry; Muhando was generous with his acquisitions. He belonged to the natural order. With him and a few others in local authority, the economy was called corrupt; without them, there might be no economy at all.

The other embezzler, the postmaster, seized on the wrong moment (and the wrong woman), and in a fit of jealousy, a policeman brought charges from distant Korogwe. News travels faster than the law, and so the postmaster escaped (some said to Kenya) with forty thousand shillings. It was concluded in the mosque and at the pombe shops that the postmaster was a fool. If you must steal, they said, steal something big. Forty thousand shillings might keep the fool alive

for a month in Kenya. The new postmaster was likable and generous; he knew heshima.

* * *

One day, the Erlau killed a two-meter monitor lizard in one of the fishponds. It had crawled into one of the pipes that diverted water from the irrigation canal to the pond. Erlau pulled it out by the tip of its tail and then broke its back with his panga.

He paraded through Jitengeni, holding it before him like Bertrand in hell with his severed head. Suleiman Hosa, the town lunatic, ed him. They marched like soldiers and sang Hosa’s song:

Pretoria, Pretoria!

All hail to thee, Queen Vic-to-ri-a.

Pretoria, Pretoria:

Pray-tow-ree-ah!

The people of Jitengeni howled hysterically. They were under siege, siege from the environment without and the environment within. Wild animals like the

leopard, the buffalo, and the ants came once or twice in a decade. Many of the Wasamba had never seen a leopard.

The flies, the dust, the fleas, the locusts, and the mosquitoes were worse than any year in more than a decade. Many children were sick, and some had died from hunger, fever, heat, or snake bite. The specters of starvation and plague were cloaked in hot, wind-swept clouds of flies and dust; the Africans heard them muttering plots against man, and in the mosque, the prayers were desperate, and the lamentations and repentance were heartrending.

Now this white man and this lunatic, parading and singing Colonial primary school marches with their dead lizard, provoked an almost dangerous hilarity.

Throughout Mkalamo Ward—throughout all of Korogwe District and most of the rest of Tanga region, except the coast—the dying rivers presented many grim threats. Two women and several cows disappeared from around Toronto where the crocodiles were thickest.

A python killed a Maasai boy. He had herded his goats and calves—the payment for a bright-eyed Maasai girl to whom he was engaged—to a shallow spit of sand on the Ruvu River. Suddenly two other boys saw a huge python—they told the police it was seven meters in length—slide into the water a few hundred yards upstream.

The first boy reentered the water to hasten his herd before the monster stole one of them. To their horror, the other boys saw the python appear briefly among the rotting hyacinths that covered part of the oily, muddy water. Seconds later, a huge roll of muscle carried the boy under the water. He was never seen again, and the python disappeared. His young bride underwent her circumcision ceremony with the other Maasai girls. She was wed to another boy.

Witches thrived in this climate. No one was safe—not even the white men.

One night, Erlau had a terrifying dream. In the dream, he found a python in his house when he returned from the shamba. He killed the python with his panga. As it writhed in the throes of death, it grew arms and legs; it turned into an old woman. The old woman was very evil; she screamed shrilly. She had a staff; the end of which was forked like the tongue of a snake. She flew at him. He screamed and then awoke, drenched in his own sweat. Outside the window, the shadows of baboons darted.

The next day, in the shamba, he met the old woman from his dream. She carried the staff; the ends of the fork were pointed sharply.

“Shikamoo,” Erlau said, greatly unnerved. In response, she flashed her cold eyes at him. Her wrinkled skin contracted malevolently, and she hissed through her toothless gums.

He ran to Sheik Ndoto. The great witch listened with immense interest. When the story was over, he nodded.

“Yes, I know her. She stands outside your house every night, probably, and tells you this story while you sleep. Now you will have this dream, for a long time, I think.”

“Why?”

“There is someone whom you injured that seeks revenge on you. But don’t worry. Get me a chicken and a few shillings, and I’ll get rid of her for you.”

Later that day, Detective Marangu came to the Erlau’s house. He accepted a cup of tea and a cigarette. He mopped his sweating forehead with a handkerchief.

“I thought you should know, Ndugu. That Mrombo that stole your pikipiki? Kadogo? He’s dead. The police in Moshi found him with his throat cut.”

* * *

A few times a day, Erlau walked past the house of Mzee Abou Hassan Ali. The old man never forgot the malaria medicine the white man had given him. When he heard about the baboon hunt, the kenge, and the sorcery, the old man chuckled.

Mzee Abou Hassan Ali was a tall and powerful man, even in his late years. He worked like a man in his thirties, looked like a man in his fifties, and was, in fact, in his late sixties. On the tax records at the CCM office, his profession was listed as peasant, but in fact and in heart, Mzee Abou Hassan Ali was a professional soldier.

Mzee Abou Hassan Ali had killed Maasai in his youth. Then he was drafted into the King’s African Rifles; he fought and killed Italians and Germans in North Africa, and later, Japanese in Borneo. When the World War was over, he returned home, was sent to Kenya, and killed Mau Maus. He was a learned man.

He read and spoke the Koran in Arabic. He had always stood in respect—but never in awe—of his superiors: the plantation owner, the Mullah, and, especially, the officer. His great heroes were Wingate, Mountbatten, Fox, and Montgomery. Especially Mountbatten, Abou Hassan Ali loved Mountbatten without reservation.

He viewed white men with the profound dision of someone who had seen empires arise and collapse amidst fields of rubber, tea, coffee, sisal, and cotton. He had helped build the rice plantation of Mkalamo. He had watched wazungu go mad, and he knew the reason; it was not heat, plague, lions, or locusts. It was their incredible, arrogant, unyielding pride. They were greedy, arrogant people; they were unable to accept failure. They were unable to humble themselves before God—and so live in paradise; instead, they rebelled against God and were cast into tormenting madness. God is great.

The African, Abou Hassan Ali thought contentedly, is a humble creature. Unless he is Chagga, Maasai, or Kikuyu. We Samba do not build skyscrapers like the Chagga. We cannot live a lifetime on a diet of blood and milk like Maasai. Unlike wazungu, we do not travel to the moon or make pets or snakes and leopards. The Indian and the Arab exceed us in business. But the damned, pitiful pride they all have!

Ah, how many times did McDonald and Walther call me “wog” or “boy” when I had already killed a hundred times? I had the strength to crush their fragile white egg-shell-domed heads with one blow. Where are McDonald and Walther now? I helped Walther burn his shamba when Uhuru came, and Mwalimu Nyerere said it no longer belonged to him.

How angry Walther was that night! His eyes burned like the furnaces of hell, and he drank pombe from his green bottles as though it was his mother’s milk. I was angry too that the serikali⁴³ could just take what Walther had labored so hard to build since he came to Africa as a young man.

And what about McDonald? He built paradise out of the bush. His European wife died of a fever, and he took a princess of my color, a whore that left him after a month because she couldn’t stand the awful solitude of the bush. Then he shot himself in the head because she had shamed him—as if he’d failed her in bed. Doesn’t that make him like us? McDonald carved a modern farm out of the bush. He had an electrical generator and a boat landing . . . He even had horses, I .

McDonald was a great man, but he was a fool. He thought he was a god. He challenged God. No one can defy God. We Africans—we Moslems—we would never defy God. No one can beat God. God is great.

Abou Hassan Ali looked out over the bleached, blasted land, and smiled. Now I am old, but still I can work young men into the ground. I can work like this white man—this Ndugu—for ten hours in the sun. Young Africans cannot work like us. If God wills, they will learn. I am a wise old crocodile. I am covered with moss, but I am formidable, and my teeth are sharp . . .

You are a foolish old man. He laughed aloud, startling his wives. If it weren’t for the chloroquine the white man gave you, you would be dead. God provided me with the white man. It is hot and dry this year, but I know hotter and drier times. A leopard has come to Mkalamo, but I recall the time when we all slept together in a banda, like goats, because the lions roamed the streets after dark and broke into our houses. They killed at their leisure with impunity.

Then they killed one of McDonald’s horses. McDonald and Walther were furious. They hired trackers—evil men from the Wasandowi tribe—cannibals, really. The cannibals and the white men killed fourteen lions in one month. Then the rains came, the fever broke, and we butchered cows in their honor.

How great they were! McDonald and Walther, Fox and Wingate and Montgomery, and Mountbatten. Especially Mountbatten. How great and how futile. I know the richest man in East Africa. Last time I saw him, he was filthy and barefoot, proffering his dented tin cup to sneering foreigners. Was he mad? No! He had just completed his Hajj. He had learned sublimity before the prophet’s cradle. Now he learns humility by begging from ignorant wazungu while his sons and grandsons monitor the comings and goings of his freighters. He must rejoice in each fly, he must take delight in each scrap of stale chapati and every rotting fruit that is given to him by the left hand. God is great! That Arab is a fortunate man . . .

Every day when Erlau ed his house, Abou Hassan Ali called him, “Pole za kazi!”

Then Erlau would call back, “Shikamoo!”

To which Mzee Abou Hassan Ali replied, “Marahaba! Karibu!⁴⁴ Come and eat ugali with me, white man!”

Then Erlau would say, “Labda baadai!”⁴⁵

And Mzee Abou Hassan Ali would finish, “Inshallah!”

The conversation always delighted Mzee Abou Hassan Ali.

Now, today, Erlau finally accepted his invitation. He trudged over and slumped on the cement next to Mzee Abou Hassan Ali in the shade of a eucalyptus tree.

“Please take this chair, mzungu.”

“No. I am a young man. You are mzee. You should sit.”

“I am a host, you are a guest. You should sit.”

“I am an acolyte, and you are Imam. You sit.”

“I am a Samba, and you are mzungu. Give me a cigarette, msela. Come inside. I want to show you something.”

Inside the house, the cement block walls and cement floor sweated; the air was musty and dank. Mzee Abou Hassan Ali lit a kerosene lamp. He held up his thick weathered hand and said, “Wait.”

He disappeared down a narrow corridor. The white man heard him shout.

“You! Woman! What kind of worthless woman are you? You keep this mzungu standing when he ought to sit. You starve him for tea. Oh! You are a bad, evil woman. I’ll sell you to the Maasai, that’s what I’ll do!”

“I am a worthless woman,” a female voice boomed lustily back. “I should sleep alone and cold, as I deserve!”

She strode into the room where the white man stood. She was Mzee Abou Hassan Ali’s youngest wife. She was ten years younger than his eldest son.

“Shikamoo,” she told the white man. “Sit down.” This was an order, not an invitation. “You will take food.” She curtsied majestically and walked out with great dignity. She ed her husband in the corridor and stifled a giggle; he was dressed in an ancient brown uniform. He wore new rubber Wellington boots and a new fez; around his expanding waist, he had girdled a King’s African Rifles sash. On one side hung a ceremonial sword; on the other side a plastic canteen.

“Ten-shen!” he bellowed at Erlau. “One, two, three, March! Halt! Puh-rade… rest!” He scowled ferociously then swept the saber out and stood at attention. “Kings African Rifles, sir. Fought with Montgomery. Fought with Wingate and Fox. Fought with… General Mountbatten. You know General Mountbatten?”

“Of course.”

“You know General Rommel? I fought General Rommel for almost two years. How is General Mountbatten? Still alive?”

“No, he’s dead.”

“Dead! How? Another war?”

“No, not another war. He got blown up—by a bomb. On a ship.”

“How?”

“On a ship… some… they killed him on a ship.”

“Too bad. Mountbatten was a great fighter. Good officer. Met him once, you know. He even spoke to me! I was a master sergeant in the KAR. Mountbatten told me, ‘You! Sergeant! Get those troops the bloody hell out of here! Want to get your bloody heads blown off?’”

Mzee Abou Hassan Ali shook his head sadly. So Mountbatten was dead; maybe it was just as well. Abou Hassan Ali showed the white man a portrait on the wall.

“This is me when I was young like you.”

“Who’s this with you?”

“This handsome young boy, he was my elder brother. He was my superior in the KAR. The strong old man was our father. This was our mother. The associate tea commissioner of Tanga had our portrait taken. He liked us because my brother and I killed Japs in Borneo. He was an Indian, and his people lived in Borneo. He was a good friend after that, the Indian. He took our picture, and then he gave it to us as he’d promised. He was our friend, and he kept his word. It was a good

thing to send an African a portrait because in those days, photographs were a great rarity.”

“Is your brother alive still?”

“No. He was killed by a Kikuyu when we went to fight the Mau Mau.”

They ate lunch. Erlau asked about the old days before Uhuru.

“Were there many elephants and rhinos when you were a young man?”

“Oh, so many. Then for many years, they all disappeared. Now, a few have come back: the buffalo and the leopard… the oryx, the hippopotamus, the impala and kudu, and a few others.”

“What about the elephants?”

“I believe they are gone, and I do not think they’ll ever be back. I’m glad.”

“Why is that?”

“You, white man, have you ever seen an elephant?”

“Only once—in Mikumi.”

“It’s a good thing you don’t see them here. I them everywhere: Mkalamo, Jitengeni, Mwelia, Ralli, Toronto, Makuyuni, Bumbuli, Soni, Lushoto… They look different when they are in a village. Then their eyes glow like coals in a charcoal stove, and they stink like the breath of a crocodile. They move with impunity, eating rice and yams, smashing bandas, and scattering chickens and goats. A single bull can devour an entire shamba in one night.

“I was glad when the wazungu killed them off. I laughed when their tusks were sold to Arabs and Somalis for a handful of cartridges. With these cartridges, we killed more elephants. No, elephants are an evil thing to me. Elephants, hippos, rhinos, buffalo, lions, leopards, crocodiles, hyenas. They are all evil. They are the servants of Satan.”

“What about the buffalo that brought the ants to Jitengeni?”

“He was different,” Mzee Abou Hassan Ali said wisely. “He was the will of God.”

PART II

The Vampires

CHAPTER 8

T he tantalizing smell of rain permeated the air. In Korogwe District, it remained cruelly hot and dry, but the Soni River rose ominously. The water came from the Usambaras. The deforestation left much runoff silt that turned the water many colors from the different types of soil. The river looked like a flood of oil.

The heat began to break—but only early in the morning and in the evening when it was pleasant to sit on the porch.

The Islamic majority of Mkalamo had endured their long fast, and Idd Al Fitri was now only a few days away. Sharif Ashrav bought many goats for the celebration of the holiday; he suspended work on his new guesthouse.

For the moment, it seemed, the God of the Christian and Islamic faiths—the God of monotheism—had for a brief moment relented and paroled the old pagan gods.

Little Mohammed, in defiance of his optimistic name, launched a criminal jihad against all authority—civil or religious. He and his gang of older boys launched raids on Erlau’s garden that sadly diminished his lemons and papaya.

Little Mohammed perfected a strategy for robbing tourists. He noted of the engers in Land Rover caravans that (1) white people—all white people— wear watches; (2) they wear the watch on the left wrists; (3) almost invariably, when a white man and white woman travel together, the woman sits on the left—

on the enger’s side; (4) for some reason, when he sold oranges (stolen oranges) on a metal tray, the white women found him irresistible; and (5) wazungu generally are timid of making a fuss and chasing after you.

His first attempt was an unqualified success.

A white British embassy Pajero ed through Mkalamo. The driver, a beefy white man, filled the petrol tank from a blue chupa.⁴ Little Mohammed approached the engers’ window. He assumed an expression of abject, pitiable poverty.

“What an adorable child,” the British woman exclaimed. “Poor little thing!”

She was new in Africa and had not yet learned that you never use your left hand for eating, greeting, giving or receiving anything. She held out a ten-shilling coin. Little Mohammed shuffled over. When he had expertly measured the distance between himself and the potential pursuit of the white man and the gas station attendant, Little Mohammed threw the plate on the dirty ground, grabbed the shrieking woman’s left arm, tore off her watch, and ran like hell.

He fenced the watch in Same. He thought the Chagga a fool when he sold it for two thousand shillings. The watch was a Rolex; he later learned he could have demanded twenty times as much. He publicly cursed the Chagga and privately ired him.

The hairdressers who lived a few houses down from Erlau seized Suleiman Hosa, the town lunatic. They bound his hands and then painted his nails red with polish bought from the shop of Sharif Ashrav. When they released him, the

man strode imperiously through the dusty streets of Mkalamo, proclaiming:

“See how they have adorned me, the fair daughters of Africa!”

Little Mohammed discovered a new source of revenue—charcoal. A great deal of it ed through Mkalamo from the mountains where it was loaded onto buses going to Dar Es Salaam. Little Mohammed studied this flow of manna for a few days and then mobilized his gang as stevedores.

“Shikamoo,” he told one Samba charcoal merchant. The Samba had twenty bags of one hundred kilograms each. “Sir, for fifty shillings, we boys can load your charcoal smart.”

“What smart, sharp boys,” the Samba boomed. Privately, he told Sharif Ashrav, “The little fools! I would have paid them five hundred!”

Sharif Ashrav smiled. “God is great,” he told the Samba.

Little Mohammed waited until dusk. He put three of his boys on the street side of the bus in plain view. Two more stood on top. The remaining ones hid on the other side of the bus in the darkness. The five visible boys loaded several bags of charcoal. Satisfied, the merchant entered a conversation with Little Mohammed; thus, the latter distracted the former while the boys on top of the bus commenced to dumping bags off the other side. When the bus left, it carried nine bags of charcoal. Little Mohammed sold the rest to Sharif Ashrav—for six hundred shillings each.

At last the Erlau took some revenge on Little Mohammed.

The town beauty—the little half-caste girl, Fatima—ed the white man’s house carrying a large bundle of firewood on her head. Behind her, Little Mohammed danced, suggestively rubbing himself and now and then, taking little liberties with Fatima’s person since she was essentially helpless with her heavy load.

“Malaia, malaia, your mother was a prostitute,” he chanted.

Silently, Erlau followed Little Mohammed. They ed in front of the hair salon, and then Erlau kicked Little Mohammed squarely on the ass. Little Mohammed was airborne for a second. He landed in a snarling heap and then fluidly rolled to his feet and bounded away where he shrilly hurled insults at the white man. The hairdressers cheered; Fatima smiled lustrously at Erlau.

The German, the baboon hunter, was an unobtrusive and diligent worker. He lived quietly with a large dog behind a wire fence. He kept his visa in order, and as a reward, the local officials granted him a permit, and he shot a kudu in the dry bush between Mkumbara and Mazinde, a few kilometers north of Mkalamo. He was immensely proud of the curved horns.

One day, a traveling merchant sold Sharif Ashrav a consignment of used clothes. The crate was marked For Donation Only: African Methodist Baptist Church of Baltimore, Maryland.

Digging through the clothes in case anyone had left money in the pockets, Sharif Ashrav found a rubber gorilla mask. He loaned it to the owner of a mill.

When the white man and Simba came to buy rice bran for the fishponds, the mill owner donned the mask. To his disappointment, Erlau ignored him until he and the Sukuma picked up the heavy bag of bran. At this point, the miller tapped the white man on the shoulder.

“I say, comrade, have you got a cigarette?” the miller asked through the gorilla mask. This was too much; the white man and the Sukuma dropped the bag and roared.

* * *

All around Mkalamo the rains had arrived: out toward Handeni, past Kwasewa and Mkalamo, even west toward Same. In Korogwe, the crocodiles, pythons, hippos, and buffalo retreated far back into the bush far from agricultural land. They were followed by the gentler populations: the impala, oryx, gerenuk, dikdik, duiker, and monkeys—which fled the rising floodwaters of the dried swamps into which they had migrated, seeking yellowed grasses and dusty moss.

Now the monkeys sought the refuge of the trees. The copses of acacia and baobab, jacaranda, mango, fever and umbrella, gum trees, kapok, coconut palms, banana and plantain, and the immense shade trees planted two generations ago by the British settlers rustled and chirped with colonies of vervet and colobus monkeys.

The bosses in Dar Es Salaam brought a new motorcycle. Erlau returned from Korogwe one day and was waylaid by villagers below the decrepit Mwelia sisal plantation. They had captured a hyena—a baby of thirty or forty pounds whose

clan escaped when the villagers confronted them along the wooden boma behind which the goats and cows milled agitatedly. The hyena had a forlorn expression; the rope around its neck was ridiculously thick. Sheik Ndoto bought the hyena for fifty shillings. When someone questioned him about it later, the old witch smiled and said, I ride on him at night. Like a donkey? No! Like an owl.

A few kilometers east, the midpoint between Mkalamo and Korogwe, the international highway es parallel to the Ruvu River at a place called Msambiazi. Msambiazi is a place associated with particularly bad spirits. To make matters worse, a gang had taken up residence there for a few months. Some said they were the last of the notorious Black Madonnas.

The gang waylaid several enger cars before graduating to more ambitious endeavors. The first involved the Tazara railroad track that snaked through the jungle on the river bank opposite the international highway. The gang wedged a metal pole—several meters in length with the diameter of a man’s wrist— through the couplings of the rails. When the locomotive hit the pole, the entire train was derailed; the gangsters swarmed over the stunned engers, robbing them and beating anyone that dared resist.

The second strike occurred when the gang chopped nearly through two of the huge eucalyptus trees that grew in a plantation leading to a leper colony. As a bus from Kenya approached—around three in the morning—the gang knocked the first tree down, blocking the vehicles progress. The canny driver jammed the bus into reverse, but it was too late; the gang had already knocked the second eucalyptus tree down behind the bus, preventing escape. The engers of the bus suffered the same violence as the Tazara enger train.

President Mwinyi was in the early days of the istration ed on by the venerable Mwalimu Nyerere. The new president dispatched the Field Force Unit to deal with the problem. The commander of the FFU battalion was a competent, tough campaigner. A year earlier, he had dealt with a near international incident;

he had prevented a civil war from erupting between the Kenyan Maasai and the Tanzanian Maasai. The northerners raided cattle from the south, and the Kenyan border patrols prevented the Tanzanian southerners from pursuit.

The FFU commander ambushed the Kenyan rustlers one evening. He did not shoot them; he worked them over with a kiboko. Kiboko is the hippopotamus. The hippopotamus has hidden an inch thick. The FFU commander used a rubber club descended from the hippo-skin clubs the drill sergeants had utilized during his basic training years earlier. The commander knew how to swing his rubber kiboko forehand and then snap out a backhand backlash that can break a man’s jaw or shatter his skull. When his battalion was finished with the Kenyans, he escorted them to his counterpart’s outpost; after this, there were no more cattle rustlings.

The same FFU commander now rounded up all of the vijana from several villages around Msambiazi. He randomly selected several of them for a demonstration, explaining to the others that if the gang struck again, the FFU would return to work them all over. Then the TPDF Land Rovers escorted the FFU back to Dar Es Salaam. There were no more piracies at Msambiazi, but the place had an even more ominous reputation than before.

The legend of Msambiazi centers around two huge rocks—about two meters apart from each other. The whole river narrows to a current of terrifying strength that blasts between these rocks. Having ed through the Ruvu widens again, a hundred-meter-wide flood of murky water with sand bars on which crocodiles sun themselves while wary storks and herons stalk among them. It is said that no one can jump from one rock to the other; evil spirits in the water will seize the hapless athlete and drag him into the black surge where he will be devoured.

Erlau had heard the stories for more than a year now. He was not afraid of the river. He was not afraid of snakes or the leopard he had seen once on the lowest section of the Lushoto road. Since the fight at Oyster Bay, he was not afraid of

thieves. He carried two knives—one strapped to his calf under his khaki pants, the other shoved into his waist band. He carried a backpack filled with tools, inner tubes, and a tire pump. He wore his panga under the backpack like a rifle. His jungle boots had steel toes. His leather gloves had copper-weighted knuckles. He felt that the devil feared him.

About a month after the FFU commander exorcised the thieves from Msambiazi, Erlau left Korogwe—where he had inspected the fish ponds of the prison—to return to Mkalamo. He departed Korogwe when it was still dark. As he approached the spot by the two rocks, the headlight of his XL125 illuminated an obstruction in the road; the thieves must have returned. Erlau stopped the motorcycle and considered the log that blocked the international highway. He doffed his helmet and lit a cigarette. The eucalyptus log stood up, and the largest crocodile he had ever seen desultorily quit the road whose day-time heat the monster had sought during the cool hours of night when the place should be properly deserted. After all, Msambiazi is haunted; why should anyone disturb a dozing crocodile?

The international highway is an ancient thoroughfare; ing between the breaks and sloughs of the river with their unpredictable soils and the sheer escarpments of the Usambaras and Upares, the international highway is shaded by an endless progression of mango trees. The story goes that these are the result of seeds cast down by slaves, marching shackled one behind the other on their fateful march to the Arab and Portuguese ports on the glittering coast of the Indian Ocean. Msambiazi is certainly haunted, and there are few reasons to suspect the ghosts of benign intention.

* * *

The Alberta sisal plantation—twenty kilometers south of Mkalamo—had long since fallen into disrepair; the local population had dispersed into the bush,

replaced by a clan of Wabena so industrious that they were feted as the Ujamaa Village, the prize of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi in northern Tanzania. Their village was perfectly clean; they were pure socialists; the epitome of a village society and their geometric fields and manicured orchards were a staggering contrast to what remained of the Alberta sisal plantation.

Deep in the bush, well beyond the Ujamaa village, ten thousand hectares of perfectly flat sun-baked lake bed surrounded three or four thousand acres of reeds, obscuring a stagnant, saline waterhole. The water was so salty that for only a few weeks did the Maasai water their herds in the senile lake. Birds— herons, storks, hammerkops, fish eagles, kingfishers, and others—remained in aeries lost in the thorny tangle of baobab and black acacia that fringed the irregular perimeter of the lake. During the brief two months of flood—when the lake swelled from three thousand hectares to thirteen thousand hectares—these copses of baobab and acacia would turn to islands where monkeys and baboons shrieked at the massive shadows that circled them in the murky yellow water below.

Let’s see what this son of a bitch can handle, Erlau thought. The needle on the motorcycle’s speedometer ed one hundred and thirty kilometers.

“You want to kill us?” Simba shouted into his ear. Erlau eased off the accelerator, and the motorcycle was suddenly engulfed in dust. “Listen, my friend. You are here to check what kind of fish they’re catching, right? Now, if I wave to you, like this, just get out. Run like hell.”

“I can’t move faster than a bullet.”

“These washenzi don’t have guns. They do it with pangas and pikes.”

The fishermen camped under dilapidated tarps. They sharpened their pangas and fish hooks, smoking green tobacco and drinking tea and growing ever more restless in the jell of heat where they slowly suffocated. When they saw a white man under the helmet, they grew more restless yet, like hyenas around a new kill. After a few minutes, the big Sukuma turned to Erlau; and through the murk of dust and heat shadows, Erlau saw Simba flash his confident smile. Simba ed an envelope to the fishermen; they returned an oily parcel in exchange.

A few minutes later, Simba and Erlau roared back across the dried lake bed. Erlau glanced in the side mirror and saw Simba chuckling. That night, Erlau was feted at Muhando’s house; they drank a great deal of beer and ate a great deal of goat meat. A few strangers were present—Chagga and Indian businessmen—and now and then, they glanced at Erlau and then at each other, not suspiciously, so much as calculatingly.

* * *

Idd al Fitri and the rain arrived on the same day.

The day dawned bright and cool. The sky was brilliant blue gold with no prophesy of what impended. Even so, Mkalamo was electric.

Because they were Christians, Simba, Muhando and their clan, most of the Chaggas, and the two white men put five cases of beer into a cable drum full of water. They started drinking as soon as the sun rose. They made drunken, fraternal salutes to Mzee Abou Hassan Ali, Sharif Ashrav, and the other Islamic elders as they strode by in white-robed majesty.

A little later, the new postmaster arrived with his staff; they were Wapare Christians, and they had a gang of Sikh and Hindu road engineers and loggers with them. This private celebration continued for hours. At times, several contingents of the growing party accompanied the police as they confiscated more beer, gin, and cigarettes from the government warehouse. Finally, weary of the plundering, the warehouse manager returned with them and ed in.

It was an alcoholic maelstrom by early afternoon, a typhoon of good humor and brotherhood (and sisterhood): an archipelago of lupine, dour persons over whose Gibraltars flooded tidal waves of contentment.

As this happy orgy continued, the celebrants failed to observe that the climate was momentarily cooling. The sun was more brilliant than before because the blue had deepened into a sort of ultramarine. It now resembled the Star of David in the African night sky. No one noticed when the birds and locusts fell silent; no one saw goats creeping dispiritedly under the naked branches of bougainvillea shrubs or wooden porches. For less dubious reasons, the celebrating Moslems were equally oblivious to the changing climate.

In late afternoon, the manager of the government warehouse wandered into a bedroom and shook Erlau awake. Erlau extricated himself from the soggy mattress and stumbled after the manager.

“I say, Ndugu, we need to get some more b-b-beer…”

“Right… let’s go.”

“Better put your pants on first.”

“Get Simba… he can carry it…”

The big Sukuma blearily noted a frigid wind howling down from the Usambaras.

They barely made it to the warehouse.

The American thought he’d seen the most that Africa had to offer: locusts, malaria, dust, heat, bees, siafu, termites and crocodiles, tsetse flies and scorpions, and poisonous snakes. These are but a few of the facets in that great and mysterious obelisk; Africa has many tempers. Nothing can prepare one for the suddenness and ferocity of the rains; no one can catalogue the sheer terror of their intensity.

For a quarter of an hour, the earth shook with the avalanche that shrieked whitely in the drainage canals and erosion ditches. The Usambaras, Mount Mafi, the rice plantation, the sisal, Mkalamo itself—all were swallowed into an icy, cavernous gut to be digested in the innards of the new and terrible creature that had stalked and now overwhelmed the brutal drought. The drought had been like the hydrophobic bull; here, now, came the buffalo. This was the Wrath of God as the Imam and the Catholic missionaries vainly sought to elucidate. The storm shrieked and howled and destroyed… But unlike the terrors of Pandora, it had a beginning and an end. This time, the wrath of God was directed against the drought—not the faithful.

The warehouse manager, Simba, and the American regarded one another in humble silence.

The goats crept out from under the dripping vegetation.

A rooster crowed somewhere in Mwisho wa Shamba—another answered from Jitengeni. A whole chorus piped up from Mkalamo in between.

Sheets of water billowed out of the bougainvillea when a gaggle of pied crows left their refuge; the magpies flapped into the suddenly crisp and cool air to survey the havoc.

Like Lazarus, Mkalamo awoke. The earth trembled with life. Waterfalls thundered in endless cascades from the Usambaras; weaverbirds swirled like smoke in the later afternoon, the sunlight glittering red and gold on their wings. Their feathers scattered rainbows in the twilight.

Ants and termites poured out of damaged pyramids. Dogs yelped and howled— the instinctive, overwhelming terror of hydrophobia erased in a quarter of an hour. The dogs cried with bliss at the smells that poured intoxicatingly from the mountains, smells familiar and refreshing and haunting, like the music of childhood.

Along the flooded banks of the Soni and Ruvu Rivers, the vervet and colobus monkeys shrieked and chattered at the racing froth below them as it crept up the trunks of the trees in which they sought refuge.

All the evil black magic was gone. The drought was broken. From the mosques, the plaintive minor prayers were protestations of grateful thanks: God is great!

The rains have come.

In the Usambara Mountains, the hyenas, jackals, warthogs, and baboons left the steep rocky slopes and ran all night back to the sisal fields.

The lake bed past the old Alberta plantation flooded; boats stranded five hundred meters from the water now bobbed among the reeds and hyacinths, while the fishermen sang and dragged seines of tilapia and catfish. In the face of such bounty, it was inconceivable that only a week earlier they had been the feared miners that supplied gold, rhodolite, tanzanite and rubies to Simba and the other smugglers. Now they directed their pikes and pangas against crocodiles, pythons, and hippos. They were the romantic picture of Old Africa.

For three days, the rain and the celebration continued in sporadic, hilarious episodes. Erlau went to the shamba wearing his Wellington boots, carrying his panga, and smoking a cigarette that trailed soggy smog in the mist that hung heavily over fresh young green jungle. On the third day, the beer was exhausted. Idd Al Fitri was over, and the New Year was begun.

* * *

These days Simba, the contract man, Machame, and the young German road engineer were inseparable. Mysteriously, Erlau and Simba returned from a trip to Same with forty thousand shillings; Machame carried a load of iron sheets to Kilimanjaro.

“How did you afford them?” Sarah asked.

“Your friend, the white man, he gave me forty thousand shillings and told me not to return until I had built a house.”

“Why did he give you forty thousand shillings?”

“He said it was because you cooked for him.”

“We ate it too…” Sarah shook her head and took the baby back from Machame. With the iron sheets, they would have one of the best houses in the town. It was his money that had bought the food; she and Machame had eaten his food, and now he was paying them for eating it. Well, maybe the Moslems were right; maybe it was God’s will that Machame had broken his leg on the mzungu’s motorcycle. Now, the mzungu had another motorcycle; she and Machame and the baby had a house with iron sheets and a water barrel, and Kadogo and the other thieves were dead. God is great.

Mount Kilimanjaro towered above the town like a benevolent patriarch at the head of a feast table. The towns and villages of Arusha and Moshi were neatly arranged. Like most of the houses in their town, the one that Machame had built was whitewashed; schoolchildren had painted flowers and birds on the white background. An electric line powered their two light bulbs. They had water whenever they needed it, clean and cold from a pump two houses down the smoothly surfaced tarmac road.

A battalion of schoolchildren marched past, swinging their arms and chanting behind their ramrod-straight teachers. The boys and girls wore identical uniforms like schoolchildren all over Africa. Sarah felt Moses move behind her in the hammock created by her kanga. She set him on the ground. For a moment,

he struggled, and then—to her wonderment and delight—Moses lurched to his feet and took two wobbly steps before collapsing to his hands and knees.

One of the schoolchildren slipped out of formation and ran toward them. It was Marcella—the house girl—the ten-year-old daughter of Machame’s brother. Machame paid her school fees and bought her supplies and uniforms; she attended a good school here. This school even had foreign teachers from the Lutheran mission. When Marcella returned from school, she did the housework. Marcella carried Moses on her back and sang songs to him. The other girls in standard four fought over Moses. All of Marcella’s friends swore that they would marry no man if not Moses.

“Auntie! Look! Moses can walk!”

Sarah and her niece held Moses’s hands for a moment; when they released him, he took three steps, this time—and then a chicken stalked in front of him. Moses tried to chase the chicken, and after a wobbly start, he tumbled forward and began to bawl. Overhead, a glittering silver white jumbo jet screamed, the nose dropping toward the smooth runways of Kilimanjaro International Airport.

“Where is it from, Auntie?”

“Uliya.” Sarah shrugged. Moses cried a little, frightened by the roaring jet. Several women from neighboring houses ed them in the cool shade of Machame’s house.

“Bring coffee,” Sarah said.

“Yes, Auntie.”

“Machame has gone back to his mzungu in Tanga? Maybe the mzungu will take him to Uliya. Maybe the mzungu will marry an African girl and take her to Uliya.” The youngest of the women leaned back against the bony knees of the eldest. The younger woman yelped.

“Granny! Not so tight!”

“Be quiet, binti, we have to make your braids tight and beautiful so the wazungu will marry you and take you to Uliya.”

Moses tried a few more wobbly steps to the women’s vocal approval. The shiny vehicle of the Swiss Lutheran missionaries purred by; the missionary and his wife waved, and the African women waved back. The African women sang, “Uliya, Uliya: Where the tortoises are king!”

* * *

Machame’s leg was healed; they walked everywhere. They walked clear to Lushoto—a distance of more than thirty kilometers—on the Old Road. The Old Road was now imable to even motorcycles; it curved through quartz quarries that echoed the tink, tink, tink of the poaching miners’ hammers. The miners were invisible, scurrying off like kobolds, but the four men—the two Africans and the two white men—still held their hands up, palms out to show that they carried no weapons besides the habitual pangas.

One day, an old man with a strangely familiar face accosted Erlau in the market.

“I want you to tell me how much farther I have to dig,” the old man glowered. “You promised to come back and tell me, and you never did.”

“What are you digging? A fish pond?”

“Fish pond! Damn you. How much farther do I have to—look out.”

A huge shadow appeared next to Erlau. “Shikamoo,” Simba purred. “What do you want, Mzee?”

“Nothing!”

“He wants me to tell him how much farther to dig,” Erlau said.

“What are you digging, babu? A fish pond?” Simba smiled.

“Fish pond! What have I got to do with fish ponds? If you want to know what I’m digging, ask him. Besides, what have you to do with him? Are you a thief?”

“This is no thief,” Erlau growled. “This is more than my brother. What you tell him you tell me. Are you crazy?”

“I thought I was… Now I know better. You’ve come to take it back, haven’t you? And you’ve killed your two friends too. Oh, I’ve seen you on the old road to Lushoto, and I’ve seen you prowling on the rocks behind Kilundai. You’re looking for it, aren’t you?”

“Gold?” Simba grinned whitely.

“And rhodolite… and guns. He knows where he buried them, and he’s come to steal them back—but they’re mine.” The old man glared from one face to the other. “Now, tell me once and for all—how much farther do I have to dig? I’ve gone down ten meters, and I haven’t found it yet.”

“Where, babu?” Simba smiled patiently.

“You know damned well where. They showed you. The white men. I saw you and some other boy and the two white men there, back when I’d just started digging. You know—at Kilundai… behind the Mwelia sisal plantation!”

“The baboon hunt,” Simba muttered.

“And then you came to our village on your pikipiki the day that witch rode off on the hyena. That’s where she saw you. Now, how much farther do I have to dig?”

“Come by my house tomorrow. I’ll tell you then.”

“Well, don’t try to cheat me. I’ve been digging for months, and it belongs to me. Diamond Daoudi.”

“Of course,” Erlau said politely. When Diamond Daoudi was gone, Erlau and Simba chuckled sadly. Diamond Daoudi did not return the following day, but he did come back two weeks later with startling information.

In the mean time, Erlau had a birthday party; he invited Machame, A. J. Muhando, Simba, a few of the police, and the German.

“How old are you now?” A. J. Muhando asked.

“Twenty-four,” the American said. They stared at him in wonder.

That night, he got very drunk; and the next day, he met God.

* * *

“I went to the bush,” Erlau told the German. He went to the bush the day after his birthday because he had had too much to drink. He went to the bush to clear

his head.

* * *

The bush began at the end of the rice fields. The entire plantation drained into a huge canal, ten meters wide, two meters deep; the water was strangely clear because of all the salt that washed in. At the algal bottom of the last great round catchment, pond crabs scuttled, and in the translucent green water shoals of strangely gaudy tiny fish flickered like apocryphal flakes of snow.

Beyond this, the first kilometer was easy going. The ground was heavy with salt. Few things except marsh grass and waxy shrubs grew here. Two days after the rains, the sun had hardened the black clay, preserving the prints of the creatures that had ed here. Mostly they were hoof prints from cows and goats. Here and there, the white man discerned the paw prints of herd dogs and other creatures: the deep, arrogant stride of the honey badger, widely spaced prints of a jackal bouncing on her toes; many otter tracks; now and then, the big ominous tracks of hyenas or wild dogs.

This salt-affected area ended at a creek. It was a clear stream half a meter deep and two meters across. It meandered through a relatively flat flood meadow. Erlau jumped across at a narrow spot.

On the opposite bank, the ground rose steadily. The marsh grass separated clusters of thorn bush here. This bush was too dense to see through, but at irregular intervals, some intrepid juggernaut—probably a warthog—had delved tunnels through the thick thorns and interlocking branches. Countless small brightly colored birds flickered in and out of the thorn branches. They nested next to colonies of bees and wasps. Orb weaving spiders sat in castellated

defiance of any predator except the wasps. The siafu had been at work since the last rains; their millions of marching feet had worn the rough rain-pelted black soil smooth in some places. Here and there, a sudden pinnacle of termite mound thrust up like the creation of some mad African sorcerer.

The coughing, cackling dialogue of baboons was so incessant that at length, it faded like the rasping chorus of the locusts and the many sharp voices of the weaver birds into a backdrop that one could safely ignore.

These islands of bush grew larger and larger over the next kilometer until they gradually merged into one another, making larger and larger copses. The occasional eucalyptus, baobab, or acacia poked out of the lower branches and towered against the brilliant blue sky. Cobwebs stretched between the trees. Great vines, thick as a man’s wrist, associated one tree with another, one bush with another until at last the islands became a vast continent of sharp twigs and tiny leaves, buzzing insects and darting chameleons, geckoes, lizards, and birds. Monkeys scolded from unseen lairs, and the only connection with the world of men was the narrow game trail. By and by, the contract man arrived at the first river.

The river was swollen, and the surface was free from scum. The water was black because of the many decaying leaves that collected on the bottom. Even so, it was clear like tea. In the depths, Erlau saw shoals of tiny darting fish, armadas of tadpoles, and—on the bottom—a great number of turtles.

Something very large moved at a great speed through the bush a few meters away. A huge kenge slid down the muddy bank and into the water. As big as a small crocodile, the monitor lizard drifted to the bottom and settled itself there, one cold eye fixed on the white man. It dug its claws into the mud on either side of a turtle.

How would he cross the river? On either side, a jungle of fresh bamboo and rushes grew out of the water. The water had a diseased look; crocodiles and snakes were probable and schistosomiasis, typhus, flukes, leeches, and cholera were inevitable.

Fifty meters downstream, a huge eucalyptus log lay over the river. It had fallen from the north to the south. At the point where it reached the other side, it hung three meters above the muddy bank. A circular spiderweb was constructed on the south end; the web was several meters in diameter, and the architects were clearly visible, silhouetted against the sun-washed green gold reeds beyond. They were silky spiders; they were enormous. Their outstretched legs would easily span a dinner plate. They had a handsome, cylindrical body, striped with sinister bright bands of green blue on a brilliantly black abdomen.

Erlau retraced his path and found a tangential narrower game trail. He followed it to the river to a spot not far from the eucalyptus log. A sudden movement arrested him; from out of the reeds a few meters away, a large black snake entered the river. It was a black mamba. This is a very dangerous snake, one of the few animals that may make an unprovoked attack on a human. It has a deadly toxin. It is hated by all rural Africans.⁴⁷

Four meters of shiny, deadly muscle flowed like rich syrup through the ferns and into the hyacinths near the shore. A moment later, the snake exited the river and faded into the undergrowth on the opposite bank.

The white man cautiously mounted the thick eucalyptus trunk and edged his way to the far end, above the opposite bank. He lowered his legs over the bark and had the nauseating sensation of pushing his boots through the spiderweb. He released his hold, falling to his hands and knees in the mud. A spider scuttled off his pants and scurried into the undergrowth in the direction the black mamba had taken. The siafu will eat her now—or maybe the wasps, Erlau thought. He breathed deeply until his pounding heart calmed.

For a little while, he moved carefully up and down the riverbank. The mud was churned up like snow in a busy park. From the tracks, it was plain that only a little earlier many goats and cows had ed here. Among these marks were the footprints of humans, some barefoot, others wearing sandals. This is where the Maasai watered their cattle.

The cattle had left a wide trial that was easy to follow up the steep bank and back into the bush. It led quickly out of the heavy thorn scrub along the river and into more open country. Suddenly, the bush ended, and a wide strip of grassland opened, snaking toward Mount Mafi in one direction and the Usambara Range in the other. The grass was young, tall, and bright green; after the heavy shade of the thorn bush, it looked almost white. The heady sunlight reflected off it with such brilliance that for a few minutes, Erlau squinted uneasily into the open ground in front of him.

Listen, this is the early afternoon in an East African meadow, late in the month of June when the temperature is Mediterranean mild; bees and wasps and hummingbirds, sunbirds, and bee-eaters move along the grasstops. Above them float the killers: hawks, shrikes, falcons, and fish eagles. Great white clouds rise over Handeni and drift toward Same. The light is lazy now, not fierce as it was in March. The sun is a brooding golden animation—like a lioness asleep after a heavy meal, lying under an acacia out past Kwasewa. Moving along the trail here is like brushing your fingertips over the smooth skin of a lover next to whom you recline; you don’t dare to disturb her, but you long to awaken her.

A large animal had walked on the game trail not long before. The white man followed the trail closely. He was studying the ground so intently that his heart leaped when an impala suddenly sprang up not five meters in front of him. The graceful animal bounded away over the waving grass. It was a ewe; the lamb must be hidden somewhere near.

The ewe crossed the golden green meadow and disappeared into a shaft of sunlight, ing between two acacia trees on the far end of the meadow where the next bastion of wilderness commenced.

Unlike the earlier environs, this ground was not flat flood plain. Here, the bush clung to the clay sides of deep erosion ravines and run-off gullies. Here, the clay was not black alluvial clay; it was red clay. The foliage was less dense. Trees were more common; low, twisted acacia with blasted fire-scarred trunks to which fungi and vines adhered tenaciously. Termite mounds projected everywhere. Many had been smashed open during sieges by aardvarks, warthogs, or badgers. Here, the ground was rockier—great sun-bleached boulders or stretches of gravel, sandy patches where the heavy rain had washed away seeds and topsoil. In one place, many tree trunks lay scorched and twisted on the ground. Those trees that remained were broken and splintered a meter or two off the ground. Among this debris crawled lizards, hyrax, rats, and toads; they looked like nothing so much as the victims of war, wandering dazed through a bombed-out city.

Far off tinkled many bells. This was the grazing ground of the Maasai. Suddenly, the contract man no longer saw them as a people caught between the ancient and the modern. They were suddenly the inhabitants of a vast and frightening place upon which the gods waged their savage, unremitting wars.

This is a moving place. This is a place where the ground heaves and plunges, like an animal in the final moments of the cruel agony that conclude a hunt. The brute has sparse fur, the defiant, stunted trees and clumps of bush whose roots secure a little poor soil. Here live men and women that have no need to know how to count the change for a bottle of soda. These people would find nothing ironic in hunting kenge. They hold in contempt anyone who does not survive in the dry bush.

Less than a kilometer off Mount Mafi rose like a clenched fist through a

mysterious girdle of clouds. White man! The mountain called. Where is your shotgun, your chainsaw, your dynamite, and your tractors? Bring it all! I will swallow you. I have swallowed all of you!

The white man shuddered unconsciously.

A cough startled him out of his revelry. A troop of baboons wandered among the white boulders and flowering thorn scrub. On the slopes of the Usambara Mountains below Kilundai, they had amused Erlau. Here, they were slopeshouldered, tawny-gold creatures. They had the loose economical body movements of boxers or wrestlers; their deep, close-set black eyes estimated his threat.

Overhead a harsh, tragic shriek echoed toward Mount Mafi; it was a crested eagle, probably hunting monkeys, hares, or small antelopes. It shrieked again and then banked back toward the sisal fields to the north. The white man was suddenly exhausted. He retraced his path toward Mkalamo.

At the spot where he had to cross the river by the eucalyptus tree, he found a final message from the mountain; it was a stern warning, one that made him tremble.

Neatly imprinted over his own boot prints and the footprints of the Maasai, their cattle, goats, and dogs was the footprint of a lion. It had not been he that had startled the impala, nor had the snake fled from him.

On a map, East Africa is often colored green and yellow. The yellow part grows momentarily larger while the green parts are farther and farther apart, irregularly

shaped spots with fewer and fewer isthmuses to communicate among them. The legend of the map indicates that green is uncultivated land, usually uncultivated because of tsetse flies. Yellow is agricultural land.

The green areas remain green because the acacia and baobab trees have deep roots that reach groundwater far below where sisal, maize, or beans can reach it. Tsetse flies thrive in the trees and where the flies live; neither humans nor their livestock will survive long. If you remove the trees, and there is drought, as there was a generation ago, you create a desert.

In the year when the lion followed Erlau on his walk in the bush all of Mkalamo Ward—most of Korogwe District, in fact—was colored solid yellow. In those days, East Africa was seventy-five percent green.

CHAPTER 9

L ife in Mkalamo continued, carrying strange days into strange weeks, the weeks into months, and the months finally combining into dreamlike years. Language was no longer a conscious challenge; the language the contract men used was a hybrid whose parentage included the genetic traits of Swahili, Arabic, Gujarati, Samba, German, and English.

When they dressed in the morning, the contract men carried their gloves, pangas, boots, and knives as unconsciously as they wore their patched, faded, and frayed khakis.

They had been born in Africa, maybe; they ed little of what had come before. Here, they faced daily challenges of a predominantly physical nature: punctured tires, broken chains, heat, dust, mud, mosquitoes, flies, snakes, gonorrhea, malaria, cholera, worms of the intestines and the eyes, thieves, and potholes. The need for housing, insurance, security: these were now meaningless. All that mattered was the contract. No matter how many physical challenges they confronted and overcame, they had the plane ticket in their Dar Es Salaam offices. This set them apart from the Africans more than the color of their skin. The outside world they too now knew as Uliya. America, Cuba, Russia, , Japan, England, Italy, Scandinavia, Arabia, India, Australia— all were collectively the same place. This is a wonderland where ladies can have as many lovers as they wish and maintain respectability. Boys of sixteen drive cars. Strange things called ice, cheese, and chocolate are consumed on some intellectual Olympus. They are fitting ambrosia for the fickle Parthenon whose messengers race motorcycles over the potholes and gravel beds of what in East Africa es for roads. When Erlau ran his ten miles, the villagers cheered him on, crying “Maradonna!” because Diego Maradonna was the collective white man, just as Jackie Chan was the collective Asian.

They received letters from Uliya; they knew that time was ing inexorably toward the end of their contracts; the midway points were long past.

They were introduced to great men and women—Don Johansson, Jane Goodall, Karim Agha Khan… They had a sense of history—the history of what was past and the history of which they were a part. And then, in a weird dream, the two histories fused.

* * *

The new road to Lushoto had many gradual curves and a few abrupt ones. The first stretch, up to Meili Tano, was one of the gentler extensions. The first curve enveloped a valley of several thousand hectares, which, when viewed from two hundred meters up, looked orderly and productive. In fact, the sisal was in terrible repair. Bush and thorn and termites had ed the stage of insurgency; they were guerillas no more but the of a full-scale war of independence. The sisal was a monoculture—the product of colonial thinking. The counterculture of termites and tsetse flies, monitor lizards and baboons was the thunderous fanfare of Nyerere and Nkuruma against the echo of European overlordship. As if to emphasize the metaphor, the plantation barracks of what had been a colonial plantation had ed beyond the first phase of their revolution—when they had been a postcard of the Ujamaa village—and were now a village whose population had the notorious reputation of a witch cult.

During the day, one could stand on the Germans’ new road and look down upon the village for hours without seeing so much as a goat or chicken stirring the dusty somnolence. But at night!

Erlau ran past this village twice, first around three-thirty in the morning and then

again half an hour later on the way down the mountain. Then he looked down into a valley illuminated by bonfires and torches echoing with drums and chanting and ululation. On his other side, the Usambaras rose sharply in rocky crags, jagged copses of thorn scrub concealing the monkeys and baboons that hooted and giggled at the ing intruder. Once a month, the lustrous full moon bathed the Goyaesque scene with silver golden light and piercingly black shadows; bats and owls flashed about Erlau’s head, and his heart thundered in his chest, louder than the witch drums of the sisal valley. Then, from Mkalamo, the first minor chords issued from the mosques—some of the Imam had lungs that shamed Italian tenors; the great bell of the Catholic mission answered the Moslems, and the cocks crew; and with a final fiendish giggle, the denizens of the mountain bush and the witch village fell still. The buzzing of the insects and the distant rumble of the Germans’ heavy machinery guided him back to the rice town—to what he now knew as civilization.

* * *

Simba followed the two white men and Diamond Daoudi past a clutter of extinct machinery, empty drums of petrol, diesel and hydraulic fluid, and firewood. The four were in the heart had once been McDonald’s plantation; the enterprise had once covered five square kilometers. McDonald had felled cloud forest of millennial maturity in a decade; now, in the generation since his suicide, it was neither geometric sisal nor majestic forest through which the mysterious Diamond Daoudi led his curious charges. It was bush. The thousands of generations of towering trees had leeched the nutrition from the soil; the succulent sisal had sucked up the moisture. What was left was gravel strewn over rock-hard red laterite clay. All that could pierce this otherwise impervious crust were the termites whose towering spikes sprouted sharply spined bushes. Locusts abounded; rabbits, mongoose, lizards, snakes, birds, and duiker thrived.

The pilgrims followed a row of sisal until they reached the terminus of McDonald’s enterprise. Here, the bush took over completely.

“This way,” Diamond Daoudi barked impatiently.

The three younger men followed their skinny guide who, despite his emaciated frame, tattered clothes, and flapping rubber sandals, was suddenly as vibrant and eager as a hound on a good spoor along what appeared to be a pig trail. The trail wound ever up, perhaps another three hundred meters of vertical elevation over a distance of three or four sweaty, dusty, fly-bitten kilometers. And then—abruptly —a pit opened before them.

The pit was excavated in a cup rounded by huge boulders and several large trees. Three or four meters wide, the bottom was murkily visible at a depth of twice the distance. “Jesus Christ,” Erlau muttered. Behind him, Simba chuckled. Diamond Daoudi glared at them.

“I’ve reached solid rock down there. That’s why I want you to tell me how much farther to dig.”

“How do you get the dirt out? You did this all alone?” the German asked reverently.

“I go down on a rope with a bucket and a shovel. I fill the bucket, and then I climb up, pull the bucket up, empty it, and go back down.”

“One bucket at a time,” Simba purred. From the angle of the sun, Erlau saw that at one place—midway down the pit—something looked different. The soil was not the red laterite of the mountainside. It was black river clay with irregularly

shaped limestone and quartz rocks shoved into it. He pointed this out to Diamond Daoudi.

“Yes, I saw that. There—and there—too.”

“What’s supposed to be in here?”

“As if you didn’t know!” Diamond Daoudi grabbed Erlau by the sleeve. “Gold! And guns. You put it there.”

“I did?”

“Yes! Mother recognized you! She’s dying, but she’s not blind or confused.”

“Your mother?” Simba laughed incredulously.

“Of course, my mother! But it’s ours—mine and my mother’s! Oh, you can have your share if you show me how much farther to dig.”

“Well, we’ll come back tomorrow then we’ll have a look for ourselves. Of course, we’ll need to talk to your mother too…”

Diamond Daoudi’s mother lived in the witch village. Daoudi took his three

conspirators the following day. The village was in the grip of cholera; none of these poor witches would ever come for aid to the Catholic mission or the government clinic, nor would any Imam read prayers over them. Blank faces peered at the white men with dull curiosity; since Independence, no whites had ed through the dusty ranks of sisal. They had only looked down through their binoculars from the Lushoto road project.

The sickest villagers were nearly comatose; their skin was dry and cracked, and their eyes seeped pus, and their hacking coughs pulled their desiccated lips back from protruding yellow teeth. Others sat in a circle under an umbrella tree, chanting and pounding mechanically on the hide-covered drums they clenched with their knobby knees. “Dear God,” the German moaned, spitting on the dust to clear his mouth of the swarming flies. The stench of death was overwhelming; Erlau had a vision of the Brahma bull disemboweled by the buffalo…

“This way,” Diamond Daoudi directed them to a dark door. The four ed into stifling darkness and stench. A few shafts of pallid light ed through holes in the badly rusted iron sheets of the roof. The usual charcoal cooking pot sat in the center of the hut; in one corner, a wretched skeletal cot elevated a prone figure off the dirt floor. A few sullen children—they seemed well enough—brushed an aura of flies away from the cot. Diamond Daoudi barked at them, and they scuttled away to the periphery of the room where they watched the proceedings with unnerving interest. Daoudi gingerly elevated the prostrate figure; for what seemed like an eternity, a bald yellow head turned until two deep sockets fixed on the white men. They heard a labored whisper from the apparition, and then Daoudi barked, “Come here!”

Erlau and the German bent over the cot. Erlau shivered with revulsion and fascination; a clawed hand—the nails yellow and gray and cracked—caressed his cheek and he heard the labored whisper again.

Daoudi cleared his throat. “My mother welcomes you back. She says you have

changed little, and she apologizes for the way she has changed. She asks why— since you are hunting half-naked in the bush every morning—you are so late to visit her.”

* * *

The German stared into space. “Let’s suppose Diamond Daoudi is… seventy years old. How old does that make her?”

“Well… Daoudi said the Germans were putting boxes into the pit at the end of the War. That must mean 1918!”

This is the story that Diamond Daoudi told the men from Mkalamo; it was Imperial that surveyed and then cultivated the plantations in Tanganyika at the end of the nineteenth century. One could see evidence seventy years later; in Bagamoyo, boys still sold German colonial coins to tourists. A small valley in the Usambaras had the nickname Jaegerthal. In those days, the Usambaras were covered with thick forest, and the villages of the Wasamba supplied the work force for the German entrepreneurs that felled the trees, dammed the streams, and occasionally took local girls for their entertainment. Such was the parentage of Diamond Daoudi.

Nineteen eighteen… Despite the heroics of Von Lettow Vorbeck, it became apparent to the founders of the sisal plantation that the enemy would win the war in Europe—and that the colonial possessions of the Germans in Togo, Southwest Africa, Tanganyika, and Cameroon would be transferred to British or French istration.

One morning, the German plantation bosses led their young African mistress into the mountains. They showed her the winch affixed to the tree; she peered down into the pit between the boulders. She listened to their warning: if they did not return to collect the guns and the gold ore, it was hers—hers and her sons— but beware! The Germans would leave powerful magic to protect it…

Seventy years had ed since then, and the girl with the long legs and the Roman nose and the braided hair and the bewitching eyes was now the ancient fly-covered wreck that saw the white men again; they hadn’t aged at all, it seemed… There was nothing in the village to excite the interest of a white man —unless to chase baboons or run like some mumyani through the starlight on the road to Jaegerthal. Some mumyani leave you with a broken neck, taking various parts of your body for the sake of their black magic. Other mumyani leave you with a broken heart and a little brown baby—for the sake of the Kaiser’s imperial holdings. Either way, they tear out your heart.

The following day, Diamond Daoudi was electrified. “I’ve found it!”

On the German’s suggestion, he had suspended himself from his sisal rope and dislodged the rocks from the black clay midway down the shaft. As he worked away, swinging precariously, he discovered a little chamber that someone had dug into the side of the mountain—a little cube of about one square meter.

“I’m going to have a look,” Erlau announced. “Holy shit!” he yelled a moment later. The bottom of the little chamber was made of cement. In the center of the cement floor, Erlau found two round holes; they were perfectly spaced. The chamber had been chiseled out of the rock with great attention to architectural criticism. There was certainly something in the pit.

* * *

Little Mohammed was not at ease.

In the month since their first visit to Diamond Daoudi’s pit, the two white men and Simba had returned several times; they found themselves dancing with the giddy specters of history and myth, and then tragedy struck, and the curse of the pit was realized. The treasure remained intact.

This year, the drought and heat were not as bad as last year. Cholera reigned in their place. Cholera killed without scruples or mercy, smiting random targets. The contract men were cold and hard again. Their eyes were glassy, and their hands shook when they drank their beer or smoked. Now they were together more often, seeking safety in their numbers. That way, they could speak in the language of Uliya and pretend that they didn’t understand when the Africans presented them with dying children.

A. J. Muhando was no longer as jovial as before; the sons of two of his wives were dead. They died squalling; neither the embassy-supplied drugs of the white men, nor any medicine from the bush brought by Sheik Ndoto succored their childish agony. The Catholic priest could do nothing for them. Now Simba stalked through Mkalamo with his head bowed—his great shoulders hunched silent in his suffering—like an ox that has stood tethered and hobbled while his mate is butchered.

“I have seen it worse,” said Mzee Abou Hassan Ali. “It will end. It has always ended—when God wishes it to end. God is great.”

None of this is what troubled Little Mohammed. What troubled Little Mohammed were geese.

The Irish Catholic priest kept a flock of snow-white geese. They were prized birds, imported from the Orient. Sheik Ndoto coveted them. He required birds of one solid color—either all black or all white—to complete the most powerful recipes. The local poultry was quickly exhausted, and so he turned to thievery; he employed the best thief Mkalamo had ever produced. This was the illustrious Little Mohammed.

Sheik Ndoto paid well enough for the geese, well enough that rather than risk arrest (or worse) by entrusting one of his bumbling henchmen, Little Mohammed himself undertook crepuscular guerilla raids against Father Danny.

Father Danny—more frequently in residence lately—responded by borrowing the German’s Rottweiler bitch. The dog, with some brilliant flash of canine intuition, preferred morning whippings from the frustrated priest to the tortures to which Little Mohammed subjected her. By and by, the priest swore publicly that he would kill the thief. He was haggard from his largely futile efforts to save the lives of cholera victims. One day, he was spotted examining his shotgun outside the mission house. Little Mohammed reluctantly—but prudently— elected to curtail the lucrative contract.

“If you want more birds, babu, get them yourself. Me? I’m finished.” Little Mohammed puffed on a cigarette and peered shrewdly at Sheik Ndoto from under the crown of a cowboy had he’d stolen from an Australian tourist. He had expensive sunglasses and a gold watch. He had his eye on a number of motorcycles in towns fifty kilometers away. “As for me, I don’t want to be around that mzungu. Brr! His eyes look bad.”

Now Sheik Ndoto was not at ease. The neighbor of the white American, the young woman named Aisha, was pregnant. Shortly after this was announced, it was revealed that her sister, Rukia, had missed two periods. Of the two girls, the witch had no fear for Rukia. She had a healthy body and a lusty constitution. She would be an easy delivery.

Aisha had a thin body; her hips were narrow. This would be a difficult pregnancy. Also, Sheik Ndoto cringed when he thought of her getting sick. All around their house, people fell ill with cholera. Sheik Ndoto had delivered scores —maybe hundreds—of babies. Sometimes, they lived; often, they did not. Still, midwives from far and near consulted him and deferred to him.

“She is your sister,” Sheik Ndoto growled to Little Mohammed. “You care nothing about being the njomba⁴⁸ to Aisha’s baby?”

Enough money finally persuaded Little Mohammed to steal more geese, and so the geese disappeared again, and the dog was beaten routinely, and Father Danny (who, in his defense had slept little in several weeks because of the cholera) seethed and primed his arsenal in anticipation of the thief’s return.

* * *

Father Danny was a lonely man. He had the most luxurious accommodation in Mkalamo—even more so than Muhando or Sharif Ashrav—but he was haunted. He was haunted by the realization that he had reached middle age and had nothing. He had no family, no property, and no money. All belonged to the Holy Roman Catholic Church—an institution in which he felt his participation was negligible. His faith had long since dwindled to a mechanical and tiresome routine.

He held mass every few months to uphold some semblance of credibility among the authorities, but mostly, he traveled to neighboring missions, an endless and cynical alcoholic pilgrimage. The most threatening of the dark humors that clouded his life were two girls he’d adopted. He rescued them from war and starvation when they were toddlers. Now they were teenagers and very beautiful, and he adored them and was terrified of them.

Long ago, he had been the secretary of a poisonous old vulture in Ruvuma—just after Independence. It had been this old vulture that introduced young Father Danny to the church in Africa.

Father Danny had come to Africa from his homeland not so much out of adventure or idealism but because it seemed like both a safe hole and a career opportunity. Unemployment and street violence had claimed his friends and cousins; he had an aptitude for academics—especially history—and the neighborhood priests saw an avenue to save this flower from the grime in which fate had planted it. But the road to hell… once he had tasted the various mermaids’ tails—once the jungle drums syncopated irresistible pagan percussion between his ears—did he understand that he was a sort of Faust. He was a white man in Africa, a god on earth. Only if and when he stepped foot out of Africa on furlough, the memories—tiny devils with tiny hide-covered drums—keep him tossing and restless with guilt. He had no more home in Europe. This “god” had followed a proud and flamboyant prince into the Inferno.

Africa is a whore, Father Danny thought. He arranged hypodermic needles and little vials of medicine on a shelf, preparing them for the onslaught of holloweyed Faithful the following day.

Africa is a high-titted, long-legged whore with firm full lips and hungry black eyes with hair like a poodle’s groomed fur and soft black skin, strong, slender

arms that throttle like a leopardess’ jaws… Africa is the Mumyani incarnate.

Everywhere around him, the yawning abyss of earthly pleasure cooed and twittered, flirting from the bougainvillea and lilac in his garden. Only if he drowned himself in gin or whiskey did he find release from the succubae that followed him about like evil, hopeful pets. And yet he adored them; he worshiped them, and to his eternal terror and shame, he knew that it was to them that he said his Ave Maria.

His two adopted daughters—his house girls—wore little silver crucifixes that dangled over the tender curves of their plump breasts. They wore expensive cotton dresses that he ordered from Europe. They hid their braided hair in silk scarves; they wore white stockings and leather shoes. He hid them away from village boys.

He had once beaten the hell out of a businessman that expressed amorous intentions where one of them was concerned. He knew that everyone around him assumed he enjoyed their affections in some gross, corporeal way, and he was, in fact, smitten with them—obsessed with them—tortured by them.

In the morning and the evening, the girls bathed together behind a wooden door. He heard their lilting voices and their melodious laughter, and he was repulsed and obsessed by the image of them running their delicate hands over one another’s curved, muscular backs, arms, buttocks, and necks. He was revolted, and he hated his obsession, and yet he could not drink it deeply enough.

They were destroying him, and he loved them in a savage, primitive way. When their baths were over, they exited the forbidden fountain of youth, sheets wrapped under their armpits so that all of their delicious chocolate shoulders, necks, and arms and their shapely athletic calves were exposed; the damp fabric

clung to their lithe bodies and jiggling hips and bosoms, and they flashed their teeth and eyes at him.

They were skilled nurses; when they cradled a newborn, they purred over the baby with lowered lashes and plump lips parted over perfect white teeth, singing in the discordant, captivating voice of their pagan ancestors. When a patient died, they wailed and wept with an abandon long lost to the pathologically reserved culture of their adoptive father. And yet they knew the contents of his medicine reserves—and how to apply them—as competently as any third-year medical student. They were an anomaly.

He had made a pet of a wild creature; he had bought with his blood—with his soul—a few years of their lives when they were little girls, and they had curled up innocently on his thick knees, listening to him relate unbelievable anecdotes from the outside, from Uliya. He had read to them from the Holy Bible and then from great literature and then from the months-old financial pages of newspapers that he hungrily appropriated from visiting tourists and dignitaries. They mimicked the journalists of the BBC and the Voice of America with such profound gravity that they reduced him to tears of laughter. Throughout these recitations, the droll, nasal Oxbridge accents they used would have shamed any European comedienne. Their eyes twinkled mischievously, but their grave delivery was ingenuous. They were as informed about international politics, history, literature, and Holy Scripture as any Oxford Don—yet they were innocent of the enormous power they wielded over the man they idolized—even deified—for rescuing them from the marauding army of Idi Amin.

They were refugees of the Uganda War, and their home village had been vaporized in a bombing run. They had toddled out of the inferno mewing like kittens, and when he scooped them into his brawny arms, they wept so pitifully that he too—this white god—had broken down with horror and sorrow.

They sensed his moods with terrifying accuracy, and they would spare no effort

to lighten his humor. They loved him and adored him, and had they had any notion of how they tormented him, it would have broken their substantial hearts a thousand times. He was in secret correspondence with dozens of missionaries to find them suitable mates, and yet the notion of separating them from each other—or from himself—so appalled him that he was losing his mind.

Tonight, he sat on the porch of the mission house drinking from a bottle of whiskey. He considered the African landscape the portraiture of a deranged artist. In the dry season, the earth was pastel, and the sky oil. Now, with the throbbing black green of fresh jungle and the brilliant blooms of the bougainvillea, the sky was pastel over an earth awash in exaggerated fluorescence. From within the house, a muffled snore made Father Danny shudder.

Father Brian had come in from the bush early that day, having driven for three days straight from Tabora. Father Brian had arrived twenty-five years ago, just before Independence; his soul was long gone from the point at which it might have reconciled itself with church doctrine. Father Brian was a street fighter and a poacher. He was an alcoholic and an avid connoisseur of forbidden fruit. He drove a Japanese pickup with a well-stocked gun rack prominently displayed in the rear window. He bragged openly of having never once read mass in Africa, yet this pariah was not only tolerated by the church and the African Ministry authorities; he was idolized. Father Brian produced.

Father Brian bullied local politicians into repairing old bridges and erecting new ones. He bullied his way across borders with no port and then bribed the police; they all knew him, and they used him to negotiate tribal disputes, to transport bodies from one country to the next for funerals, to take gunias of charcoal to their villages, and to deliver and then christen their babies. He could quote the Koran in Arabic—he often did to the delight of the local Imam—and he could make any motor vehicle operational no matter how venerable or tetanic it might he.

He shot crocodiles and then burned them in public, dousing them with precious gasoline. His excuse was that the liver is so toxic that had one clan of witches procured it they might have flavored the tea of hundreds of their rivals. The real reason was simpler; he looked bloody savage, hoisting the three-and-four meter crocs onto what was horrifyingly obvious as a parody of the Crucifixion. The more savage and competent he looked, the more improbable the task with which he was entrusted. He was a mechanic, an engineer, a doctor, a soldier, a professional hunter, and a safari boss with a reputation for delivering under the most adverse conditions. He was famous (or infamous) from Somalia to the Limpopo River.

Only a few people knew his weak moments—when the bottle was empty. Then Father Brian wept and cursed; he was uncertain and defenseless. It was Father Danny’s mission in life to protect the reputation of this Iron Messiah; no one should ever know the chink in the armor… in the guest room Father Brian covered his closed eyes with his burly forearm and lashed at the mosquito net with his other hand; a terrible ghost had followed him for a generation. Father Brian dreaded sleep more than crocodiles, cholera, or tsetse flies. When he slept, she was there—peering at him with her vague but promising smile. Had the smile betrayed the slightest bit of accusation, he might have found grounds for exorcising her, but she did not accuse him. She forgave him, and her forgiveness tortured him with red-hot iron pokers. She was the vampiress of a thousand Gothic verses…

* * *

Brian had spent the waning days of the Tanganyika postcolonial istration in a remote place where the oceans of the astral pole link the world of the Zanzibari to the worlds of the Arab, the Aborigine, and the Veda. These various currents of heat and cold, ancient and young, in an act of savage love, bore the child whose face was the soft and eternal mist obscuring the coconut plantation behind which sat the hundred or so buildings called Kijiji Chambogo.

Chambogo was one of the last haunted places. It was built on the ruins of Kaole, the once great Arab port. Chambogo long ago exported spices, ivory, slaves, the hides of the vicious predators and graceful hoofed animals from the dry veldt inland, and the gemstones and gold that once adorned princes and their concubines. The curtained chambers were now carpeted with tapestries of dusty moss and cobwebs, haunted by cobras and fruit bats.

In its present condition, the rumor of these distant times was as allegorical in Kijiji Chambogo as the rumor of electricity (which had a generation earlier reached Bagamoyo to the south and then turned back—overwhelmed by the ancient brilliance of Chambogo days and the young sensuality of Chambogo nights.) Not that Brian missed electricity; a few years earlier, he had abandoned it after finding no comfort in marriage or alcohol. He returned from service in Algeria, infected more by disgruntlement and restlessness than the narcotics to which he had become mildly addicted in North Africa. He left the military and his young wife—they had no children; thanks be to God—and entered the priesthood, quickly recruited by the Rosminian Missionaries.

Now he had Koroffi, his cook, and Suria (his house girl and Koroffi’s third and youngest wife), and the children they brought into his seven whitewashed rooms. These chambers formed three sides of his rectangular compound.

The fourth side was a shed with a roof, open to the inspections of nomadic chickens and goats. In the center of the compound rose an immense gum tree from the limbs of which the fruit bats, hornets, and boomslangs scorned the company of the civets, mongoose, and voracious driver ants. In the shade of this great tree, his retainers cultivated some beds of tomatoes, onions, peppers, egg plant, and mihogo. It was Brian’s financial obligation to supply the rice and corn meal that sustained them. When available (four or five times a week), they ate poultry, fish, or the occasional roasted goat, the ribs grilled on charcoal. In fact, the smell of the charcoal fires was one of his strongest impressions of Kijiji Chambogo. On the whole, he found it a vastly agreeable place.

* * *

Brian had a motorcycle, a Land Rover, and a chainsaw. He was permitted to own a shotgun. He had the tools necessary to keep these things operable on the condition that he supply them when reasonable for the public benefit. Next to his compound was the main Catholic mission run by another Irishman named Glen. On the other side of Brian’s house was the police station—in the same building as the offices of the mwenyekiti, the officers of fisheries, wildlife, forestry and bee keeping, and a few other ministers. (In retrospect, there were few citizens of Chambogo that did not hold an office of one type or another in the heady early days of African Socialism.)

Behind these three cement buildings stretched an alley—from one dusty jungle to another—down the length of which a stone aqueduct drained the monsoon from their metal roofs into the greedy bush. The neighborhood on the other side of the alley was composed of the mosque (opposite Brian), the pombe shop (opposite Shemliegh), and the mercantile enterprise of Patel, the Indian merchant, opposite the government building.

Other than this, Chambogo was a few score mud-and-wattle houses. The more affluent had tin roofs. The inhabitants were friendly persons with little collective experience beyond the rickety shamba bus that gasped into town once a fortnight. The bus was always grotesquely overcrowded, usually with the dealers that took their mangos, dried fish, and heady, jungle-fresh tobacco to Tanga and Dar Es Salaam.

The heat of the day kept the place so quiet that Brian was able to spend hours at low tide, usually alone but sometimes with Glen, Patel, and a few of the local politicians, at their favorite rock. Even with them, there wasn’t much

conversation. Patel and the politicians were after fish, and Glen lived in sadness. This sadness was, at the time, obscure to Brian. It was also obscure to Glen, which is just as well, because it was the kind of sadness that results from despairing loneliness.

If Brian wanted noise, he had the children and their (largely) surrogate mother, Suria, who after her second child had just turned eighteen. In fact, Suria mothered him too; he often drank too much with Patel or returned heat-crazy from the white light of the poor road to the protective shadow of the gigantic gum tree.

That Brian should have no apparent employment was of no concern to the village chairman; the mwenyekiti, a Moslem, was satisfied with him because he supplied medicine purchased on the black market when the cholera or malaria was particularly bad. Glen and Brian frequently supplied the mwenyekiti and the mullah with goats—to be butchered in their honor at the mosque—their names respectfully mentioned in abstentia.

* * *

It was the evenings Brian loved best. He was learning Swahili, and Suria and Koroffi spoke a little English. They spent hours talking, communicating in a strangely fluid hybrid dialect. He loved these times. Adija, the oldest of Koroffi’s resident children, would remove the dishes to be cleaned, and then Koroffi and Brian sat at the table, and Suria sat in the corner on a stool in the warm light of the kerosene lamp. This lamp made fantastic shadows on the whitewashed wall; mantis and spiders hunted roaches in the sooty lane behind Brian’s drums of water. (Chambogo had a public pump; the water appeared once or twice a month for a few hours.)

“Is it not true, bwana, that in Uliya, a man marries only one woman?”

“And did you not marry one yourself?”

“Yes, and yes.”

“And what became of her?”

“I was a soldier. We were sometimes gone for six months at a time. My wife grew anxious in my absence.”

“Ah… what a shame you married that type of woman.”

“She was not that type of woman. She was a good woman from a good family. The fault was mine. In Ireland, a soldier makes more money fighting for the British than he could, digging coal and staying home.”

“So she perceived that the money was of more importance to you than she herself?”

“Yes.”

“Then she was a very stupid woman. If Suria here had found such a woman, she

would have taken the man away from her.”

“There was such a time,” she affirmed quietly.

“There is still such a time,” Brian smiled slightly.

“No. When a woman has a child with no father, who will have her, unless as the servant to other wives?”

I would, Brian thought for the thousandth time.

“You had no children, bwana?”

“I had a nephew. He died.”

“I’m sorry. Did he have cholera?”

“In Ireland, there is no cholera, mzee.”

“What a country! No cholera. Is it true, bwana, that even the fishermen in Europe have electricity?”

“Absolutely.”

“And you leave all that behind to come here?”

“I told you before, mzee. In Uliya, a man can die on the street, and people will step over the body with no more thought than were it a pile of dead leaves.”

“I saw a man killed once in Dar Es Salaam. He stole a shirt from a Hindi’s shop. The Hindi ran into the street shouting thief! Thief! We stoned the thief to death.”

“I have never been to Dar Es Salaam,” Suria frowned.

“All cities are the same,” Brian told her. “I have been in cities on four continents. I have lived in villages on three. On the whole, I prefer the villages.”

“I agree,” said Koroffi. “Cities are a cold place.”

* * *

“What do you think?” The game officer, Kibanda, knelt by the body, waving his hand in front of his eyes to ward off the blowflies.

“Lion,” said Patel. “I’ve seen this before in Kenya. I was a game scout there.”

“Bwana Father?”

“Lion,” Glen grunted. “Can’t imagine what in the name of wonder she’s doing here, though.”

“‘She?’”

“Jike,” Glen repeated. “I know.”

“How do you know?” asked Godfrey, the police commissioner. He was a Chagga on his first duty post.

“One knows,” Patel shrugged. It was a typical response from him, one that had hundreds of meanings.

“What else could it be?” Kibanda muttered.

“Mumyani,” Brian told the mwenyekiti, Mzee Hamidu, who chuckled without much humor.

Kibanda, Godfrey, and Mzee Hamidu trudged back across the blazing street to

their offices; Patel ed Glen and Brian for a cup of tea at the mission. The talk was desultory and made little reference to the body that was now removed for burial behind the mosque.

“He was a drunk,” Glen said when Patel was gone. “He was piss drunk day and night on denge, and when he wasn’t, he was chewing kat or smoking bangi. He was a burden.”

“Still, he died hard.”

“He died quickly. You’ve seen men eviscerated by plague and fever. They die in months. This jike broke his neck… and then she disemboweled him.”

“Why is she here? Nothing left in the bush but a few monkeys. Of course, there are plenty of goats and cows, but if she’d been killing goats or cows, we’d know, wouldn’t we? At least Godfrey or Kibanda or Mzee Hamidu would have. She must be a very old lioness.”

“She is young. We wait two weeks then I’m going to a friend of mine. His Ridgebacks are legendary. He was one of the ones that killed those lions who made all the mess in Ruvuma last year. He’ll nail the bitch, all right.”

“If she comes back.”

“She’ll be back.”

Glen refilled their shot glasses with whiskey.

* * *

The night after the body was discovered, the witches—wachowi—commenced an ngoma with drums and torches that quickened Brian’s heart and set his teeth on edge.

“This is bad,” Koroffi muttered at the table. “I don’t like those wahuni. They’re an abomination.”

“The children are afraid,” Suria agreed. “They fear the wachowi more than the lion.”

“Perhaps there is no lion,” Brian offered whimsically. “Perhaps those drummers are mumyani.”

“Some things are not to be suggested, bwana.” Koroffi was angry. “Tonight, you will hear many strange voices. They mean you no evil. Only sleep, sleep under your mosquito net. And if you can’t? There’s always the whiskey.”

“Always the whiskey,” Brian laughed.

“I fetch you some malaia from the next village,” Suria said in a teasing voice.

“She’ll put you to sleep.”

“Did you go to the grave, binti?” Koroffi turned his gray head sadly to his young wife. “It was a terrible thing. Even before the sun had warmed the fresh ground, the ants had found the body. It was a terrible thing. They made three tunnels in— thick as the roots of a kapok tree—seeking his flesh.”

“I know,” Suria said softly. “The widows wept over it.”

“Widows! Does such a cur deserve even one wife?” Koroffi growled.

“He beat them, I’m told,” Brian said.

“And worse,” Koroffi nodded sagely. “Perhaps the lion is the Justice of God.”

“These mosquitoes are dreadful,” Brian said and walked over to the shelf to get another kerosene lamp. When he lifted the lamp, a scorpion that had hidden under it scuttled away. Suria made a yelp of disgust and tried to crush it with her rubber sandal; it escaped into a crack in the cement.

“Shaitani!” she scolded.

“Do not mention such things,” Koroffi said quickly.

“Do you know?” Suria laughed suddenly. “I was in the soko today. The father’s house girl told me he drank too much of his pombe from the green bottle with the curious shape. When she tried to put him to bed? He groped her!”

“Poor man,” Koroffi hacked humorously.

“She’s a big one, all right,” Brian said. “She used to mock me: ‘Bwana, why won’t you take a wife?’

“I told her, ‘I only want a woman with a big arse.’

“She says, ‘What about me?’

“I say, ‘You insult me. I ask for a hippo, you bring me a mongoose.’”

Outside, the intensity of the drumming increased. It was augmented by shrill whistles and chanting. The children, two rooms away, began to cry in terror. With a venomous glare at the iron lattice of the window, Suria glided out of the room, taking one of the kerosene lamps with her.

“She is afraid,” Koroffi said. “She is as afraid as the children themselves.”

“And you, mzee?”

“I was afraid when I ed the King’s African Rifles and went to kill the Japanese. I was afraid when I fought the Mau Maus. I was afraid of those cannibals. I am afraid of hunger, cholera, and mambas. Why should I be afraid of these babbling lunatics?”

“And uchowi?”

“These fools are no wachowi. This is mere ngoma. The real uchowi comes later, bwana.”

The Third World was already an endless bureaucracy. You spent up to an hour at the bank when you were the only customer and had known the manager and tellers for more than a year. Trying to clear paperwork on a vehicle—let alone ammunition or a firearm—can only be accomplished by offering chai.

Sometimes, there is water. Sometimes, there are stamps at the post office. Sometimes, there is no kerosene but plenty of cooking oil; other times, kerosene is easily come by, but there is neither coffee nor tea nor sugar.

Consequently, those who can afford to hoard things. Brian purchased a jar of jam from Patel once; it was sealed with wax. He had jam on his chapati that first morning. By noon, the ants were all over the inside of the jar. If he tried to keep mangos or bananas, the bats, roaches, and cane rats found them. What he could he hoarded in sealed plastic containers: wheat flour, salt, sometimes sugar. Whatever else he wanted, Suria sent Adija or one of the other children to fetch. Sometimes, a man brought over a tin of cows’ milk which Koroffi brewed into strong tea.

When breakfast was over, he could sit on a stump outside the metal gate, watching the millipedes or looking at the sun refract on the chipped glass that encrusted the top of the wall until some government bureaucrat came by— ostensibly on official business. They might take the motorcycle or the Land Rover out on some fabricated agricultural survey; sometimes, they counted monkeys. Whatever the findings, they were typed up at the post office and posted to one ministry or another for the perusal of nonexistent superiors. By then, it would be lunchtime and the heat so intense that they retreated to their respective mosquito nets until supper. They could have accomplished a great deal—had there been any reason to change things. However, since they observed that their governments had forgotten about them, they forgot about their governments too, and life proceeded in its usual dreamy, narcotic fashion.

This business with the lion eclipsed their slow orbit about the welcoming candle. Godfrey went to Bagamoyo to ask for bullets. Patel gave him the address of his cousin at Kariakoo who marketed.375 ammunition under the counter of his haberdashery. It was highly likely that the district police in Bagamoyo had as much difficulty getting bullets as the Chambogo officers did.

Glen and Kibanda took Glen’s elephant gun and a bottle of water and headed up a pig trail they’d all traversed hundreds of times without seeing the spoor of even a leopard.

Mzee Hamidu and Brian remained at Brian’s compound which was now through some unspoken agreement their command center. With all these preparations, Brian felt some odd gratitude toward the lioness; she had interrupted his droll routine with some exotic meaning. Nothing like this had happened since Glen caught a tiger shark off the reef; for months, the fishermen saluted him with shrill ululation, and the children ran from him in terror. There is something purposeful in such animals.

“These wachowi, they are nothing,” Mzee Hamidu began. He sat opposite Brian

at the table; Suria sat in her usual corner on her stool. “The real witches? They come from Sumbawanga.”

“I have heard that the Sukuma have an especially potent form of it.”

“True. The Wasamba? They use it as an aphrodisiac. The Chaggas deny it altogether.”

“While all speak in awe of the Coast,” Brian laughed.

“Not without cause,” Hamidu said proudly. “At least in the old days. Now Kijiji Chambogo is one collective whore. The young care for nothing but radio batteries and kangas imported from India. They are obsessed with dancing in Tanga and Dar Es Salaam. But we wazee? We when the thunder in the trees meant something more than—wee! Binti!”

“Bei?” Suria trilled. Her eyes glittered at Brian with amusement.

“You see? You see bwana? These vijana and the malaia they run with, they have no more respect, no heshima. Otherwise she would have poured the tea without my asking. The young! They are an abomination.”

In the next room Koroffi began singing; presently the children harmonized him. In the courtyard, the chickens and pied crows strutted importantly about; a hot wind whistled through the palms.

“These fools know nothing of witchcraft that call themselves wachowi today. They speak of the vampires—mumyani—as though such things existed in abundance here. To find the true mumyani, one must go to the Usambara Mountains or the Upares. Here, in the old days, it was the djin with which we were most concerned.”

“Did they teach you such things in the mosque?” Suria chirped and then danced out of the room to avoid the cursing of the village chairman.

“She is a good girl,” he hacked when she was gone. “But my god! What a slut she was before Koroffi wed her.”

“Has it been long since you had lions here?” Brian asked eager to change the subject.

“They come, and they go as they wish. If you want to find them, look on the roads. After all, a lion is no fool. If I were a lion, I would prefer to avoid the siafu and the snakes on those foul pig trails. Only thieves and devils use the trails. Now one speaks of the bush as though it was a dangerous place…

“The coconut plantation on the other hand? We burn it twice a year to keep the ground clear of vines and figs. Even so, ngire—even buffalo—I have seen in the coconuts in the last ten years. No, if I were the lion, I would prefer the road or the coconuts where I am more likely to find an easy meal.”

“And if you were mumyani?” Koroffi leaned against the door, his skinny arms folded across his dirty shirt, his yellow eyes and toothless gums grinning at Brian.

“If I were mumyani, I would do the same,” the village chairman shrugged.

* * *

“Any success?”

Godfrey poured twenty bullets onto Brian’s table.

“How are you set?” Glen turned to Brian.

“Full box, twelve gauge slugs.”

“Good. Two military rifles… my.45-70… and your shotgun. What do you think, Muhindi?”

“I’ll go,” said Patel. “But not armed. I have no more hunger for killing anything, and sometimes these days, my hands shake. I’ll find her. You can kill her.”

“Good.”

“Last time, she killed in the morning before the mists cleared,” Patel said, sipping his tea. “We can’t wait for her to try again.”

“I tried to get my friend, the one with the Ridgebacks, but he’s gone to Congo with the CRS trucks. He’ll be gone for months. He’s the best one left. All the others are gone now. So that leaves us. Bwana Wanyama.” He nodded toward Kibanda. “And Bwana Polisi here. If you kill her, you’ll have a reputation from Litembo to Kilimanjaro. You’ll have many children if you kill her.”

The two young African men laughed nervously.

“For now,” Glen nodded at Brian. “You and I are going for a walk. Take a panga. You won’t need your gun right now. Muhindi, what does my colleague at the mosque say about all this?”

“These bastards—these wachowi—they sicken him. He thinks, and I think if there is another killing, it will be done by pombe and panga—not by the jike.”

“Bloody pillocks,” Glen muttered, carefully stepping over the thick column of siafu. Overweight and an alcoholic, he suffered terribly in the heat that penetrated the mottled shadows cast by the kapok, teak, eucalyptus, baobab, and acacia. Woody vines connected one tree to another, and these vines were further connected by the webs of the orb weaving spiders and the other spiders, the ones with the weird triangular bodies and short, stubby legs. Millipedes and centipedes scuttled and shuffled across the dry red clay of the forest floor.

“Why don’t they cut here? This is the best timber for miles.”

“Superstitious,” Glen said, his voice muffled in the stifling atmosphere. “You see, the old chiefs are buried here. They hearken back before Jesus, or Mohammed dared into this den of sorcery. You cut these trees, and the mumyani will take you. They’re probably watching us right now,” he added ironically. “Amazing, isn’t it? The only real bush left on the coast, and it’s all because of the dead. Look up there.”

In the green cloud of a huge kapok tree, a clan of vervet monkeys peered down at the white men, blinking and leering with hostile curiosity.

“I saw a python here, once. It was huge,” said Glen. “We killed off the buffalo and the wild hogs and the antelope after the War. Now the pigs, goats, cows, and chickens wander in here and go wild. They’re as cunning here as they are stupid in the banda. This land never changes, only the people. Can you smell the civet?”

After another mile of forest, they broke out of the shadows, and Brian was temporarily blinded by the sun glittering on the Indian Ocean. Coral bluffs stretched interminably in either direction, fringing dark and ominous jungles of mangrove. Glen sat down with a groan and pulled a soggy cigarette out of his pocket.

“We could never take her back there. Thank God we won’t have to.”

“Why don’t we bait her? With a goat or something?”

“That’s what I told Patel, but he said she took a drunk before she took a goat, so we might as well bait her with a drunk.” Glen chuckled and snubbed his cigarette out against the timeless coral rock.

* * *

“This is intolerable,” Koroffi snarled. “They’re driving me crazy with their blasted ngoma.”

“Why don’t you take the shamba bus and stay with your other wives at Bagamoyo until it’s over?”

“You’ll cook for the bwana, binti?”

“Of course,” Suria said, affronted.

“It’s not the lion I mind, you know. It’s these damned wachowi. God in heaven! They drive me to distraction.”

Suria’s younger child, barely a year old, gazed from one speaker to the next, her eyes wide above the dainty thumb she sucked. Koroffi glanced at his daughter.

“Give me the baby,” he barked. Suria wordlessly surrendered the quiet child to her husband. “She has a fever,” Koroffi said.

“A little homa,” Suria shrugged, but her eyes were worried.

Outside, the wailing and drumming escalated.

“Can she take the dawa, bwana?”

“We can try,” Brian said. “But , last year, I gave it to Rehema’s baby— which had an allergy to it…”

“No one blamed you for that. Many children died from the homa to whom you had not given medicine. Others, to whom you did give it, are dancing out there like filthy cannibals. I wish they’d light their damned roofs on fire with those torches. That would teach these stupid washamba to commune with such filth. In less than a year, our girls will bear children from these animals, and they will take from us in their own girls’ bellies the children of our young men. Soon, we will all be a civilization of bastards.”

Koroffi handed the baby back to Suria.

“Tomorrow, I will go to the bush before I leave for Bagamoyo.”

“You know the roots. You’re as bad as those savages out there,” Brian chided.

“I know the roots, so does Hamidu. I taught him when he was a boy, and I was already an old man.”

“You have always been old,” Suria laughed suddenly.

“I have always been old,” he nodded. “And I have always attended the mosque, and I have always studied the roots, and I have always cooked for wazungu like the bwana here. It is through such discipline that one gets old, little fool.”

* * *

Somewhere in the triangle between Australia, Africa, and the bitter peninsula of the Antarctic, a great storm was raging; a monster storm with waves that crash over the feeble machinations of humanity and erase them from memory. Although the sun shone on, warm and sensuous as ever, huge surf roiled—even at low tide—and none of the fishermen braved it with their sails and oars. Instead, they stayed in the shade of the coconuts, mending nets and sharpening pangas, singing discordantly. They smoked their green tobacco and drank denge from the shells of coconuts. Above them, in the sharp green fronds, an angry specter thrashed, bending the long gray trunks of the palms with agonized noises. The activities of the goats and the chickens were furtive; the children cried with more than their usual pathos; and the eyes of the maidens watching the fishermen were more adventurous than usual.

Suria was bewitched like the rest. She kept the sick baby on her back, suspended by a kanga. She wore a second cloth around her body, tied below her armpits. A third wrapped her head like a tiara. On the cement floor, she had no need for shoes. Her feet were the only part of her that wasn’t young. The soles of her feet and her knees, that is, and the palms of her hands… and the knuckles…

“I am going to Same,” Brian said, watching her from the table. “I am going to Same to buy you earrings and a necklace made of rhodolite.”

“Such things are expensive,” she smiled without looking up from the broom.

“All wazungu are rich, though. You have told me so many times yourself.”

She smiled again without looking at him.

That night, she cooked a king fish.

“Mussa caught three of them. Patel got two, and I got this one before the father’s house girl heard of it.”

She had also fixed kachumbare with tomato, onion, and dill for the rice.

Brian ate alone, in silence, occasionally glancing up to meet the steady gaze with which she watched him from her stool. The sick child lay sweaty and restless in her slender arms.

“How is she?”

“Not well—but better, since I put the dawa in her milk.”

“I wonder what it is.”

“Not even the Mullah would ask him that,” she said proudly.

Among Brian’s other luxuries was an indoor toilet. This was a hole cut into the cement into which he poured lime to kill the stench. He kept a barrel of water in the same small room for washing; he put a rubber hose into the warm brackish water from the barrel and then sucked, spat out the bitter-tasting mouthful, and filled a plastic bucket with enough to wash his hair and under his arms.

When he was finished in the bathroom, he left the kerosene lamp for Suria, who, as always, waited outside the door wrapped in her kanga with a chunk of alkaline soap and her sharp hairbrush.

“Wazungu have such soft, pretty hair,” she mused. “My own hair is like steel wool by comparison.”

“We lose our hair at an early age. Then we look like lizards. Our blood is no warmer, either. Africa is an old place where the young struggle. Uliya is full of toys for the young, over which the aged ponder in confusion.”

“Uliya,” she laughed disbelievingly.

He walked past the children’s room; their little voices stopped, and they peered at him solemnly.

“Tomorrow, you kill the lion, Ndugu Brian?”

“Inshallah,” he said gravely.

“Inshallah,” they responded in unison.

* * *

That night, the ceremonies in the village reached such a fever that by no excess of whiskey, nor any of his usual intellectual wanderings, could Brian have fallen asleep. Presently, the voices lost touch with the drums, degenerating into a terrifying banshee howling.

Down the corridor he heard the children whimper. He heard the unmistakable sound of a striking match, and then, in her eerie lilting voice Suria sang the children back to sleep.

Brian pulled his boots on; they were still damp inside. His shirt was still sweaty. He forsook the refuge of the soggy mattress and the stained mosquito net and took the half-full bottle of whiskey back to the kitchen. As he lit the kitchen lamp, Suria drifted in, her features perfect and mysterious as an ebony carving in the lamp she carried from the children’s room.

“It is my fondest hope that you kill the jike quickly. Otherwise, I must Koroffi and my mistresses in Bagamoyo. Not for my sake, but the children oughtn’t to see this.”

“Plenty of wazungu pay good money to fly from Europe and America to see similar excesses performed not by wachowi but by charlatans—in the lobby of the Kilimanjaro Hotel.”

“What an idiocy! What do they want with it?”

You must know, Brian thought. Or you wouldn’t smile when you ask.

“What do you wazungu want in Africa anyway?”

“Some seek to get rich. Sometimes, they succeed. Other times, they are destroyed. So it was with war and me. There is either destruction or wealth. Nothing between.”

“You told us once that if an African found a crocodile on the beach, he would run and tell all the other Africans. Then they would avoid the beach for ten years.

“And then you said, if an mzungu found the crocodile, he would tell his comrades who would run to the beach to make sure he wasn’t lying.”

“That’s true,” Brian laughed. “It is through this lethal curiosity that wazungu will walk on the moon.”

“You believe it? That they will walk on the moon?”

“It may be a fabrication. I believe just as much in Koroffi’s roots. They have worked when my medicine—made by wazungu—did not.”

“While at other times, they are a silly superstition,” she laughed. A cane rat scuttled across the clean cement floor. “Malaia,” she called it languidly.

Suddenly, a hideous cacophony of drumming and chanting erupted just outside the gate of the compound. The noise came so abruptly that it caught them by surprise. Suria gripped Brian’s arm with surprising strength. Her hands were damp and trembled a little. Her eyes, at first wide with fear, quickly transposed back to their usual playful look.

“Can you understand what they’re saying?”

“No.”

Her fingers moved a little on his arm.

“Listen, they’re saying that the mzungu is a great killer, and that he will destroy the jike tomorrow.”

“He is likely to disappoint them.”

“Hardly! I know what they’re thinking. They’re thinking tomorrow the mzungu will exhaust himself in fruitless blundering and that they will sleep all day in safety—and then carry on even worse debaucheries tomorrow night. They are thinking that many children will be born in nine months.” She giggled, finally letting go of his arm. “Give them some money, and they’ll go away.”

Brian returned a few minutes later. She had been resting her head, wrapped in a handkerchief on her hands. When he shut the door, she sat up and slapped a mosquito off her calf.

“Well?” she smirked.

“There were a dozen of them. Their leader wore a hat made from the fur of a Colobus monkey. He had a plastic whistle which he blew at me repeatedly. There were four vijana with wooden drums. All of them were missing teeth. They were very dirty. They had with them two old hags and some girls one would expect to see soliciting romance from tourists in Kariakoo or Oyster Bay.”

“I have never been to Kariakoo or Oyster Bay, but I know some malaia that frequent the pombe houses in Bagamoyo. One of them is an Arab half-caste. I knew her when I was very little, at which time she was a genuine beauty. I have not seen her in many years.”

“I know her, and she has kept her beauty. One of the Swedes that did the rice survey last year left her with a little brown baby.”

“That she bore stillborn. The Mullah said it was the will of God, but I suspect gonorrhea.”

“A shame when a woman has a child with no father,” Brian said and regretted it the moment it was out of my mouth. Suria only shrugged.

“When one bears a child to the driver of a sisal truck and is forced out of her home by her stepmother, she must herself somehow.”

“A pity. I could have had at least twenty goats for you, I imagine.”

“That is no longer our way. The vijana with whom I and the other girls ran had no goats at all. As a result, one must be some unmarried malaia like the Arab lady or else the third wife of someone like Koroffi, in which case, she is always treated like a house girl by the first two.”

* * *

In the morning, no one was around. Brian went back to the tidal rock, which was now inaccessible, under brutal siege by massive waves. The wind off the limitless ocean was vicious, even cold. The waves had the color of weak tea. Sea

grape had washed far up the sandy patches of beach.

There is no end to this storm. Brian knew the storm from long experience. It moves with relentless purpose from one ocean to the next on a lonely rampage, destroying anything in its path.

When he returned home, his breakfast was ready.

“Mango, papaya, eggs. I think I’ll sack Koroffi and promote you, then I’ll find a new house girl for you to tyrannize.”

Suria smiled but said nothing.

“How’s the baby?”

“The fever is gone.”

“Koroffi will be happy.”

“He was happy two days ago.”

“Otherwise, he would never have left.”

“True,” she said with quiet pride.

A knocking on the door mercifully ended his longing for time to end now with the child’s fever broken, with the wind thrashing the palms, howling through the leafless great trees of the dry season, with the perfect profile of Suria, her rich lips and even teeth parted slightly while she murmured her eerie music, her long eye lashes fanning away the dust blown in through the iron grating on the window.

Godfrey and Kibanda sat opposite Brian, nodding appropriately when Suria placed their tea before them.

“I say, Bwana Brian, have you got a cigarette?”

“Here. What about Glen and Patel?”

“They left long ago while the cursed ngoma was still raging. North, they went. I saw their tracks.”

“We follow the road then toward Bagamoyo. When we reach the mangos, it’s too late, we try again tomorrow.” Kibanda was obviously afraid, but he trusted Godfrey and Brian too much to conceal it.

“There’s no shamba bus today,” Brian recalled.

“No. And these washenzi are too frightened to go to the farms anyway.”

“Then we’ll be alone,” Brian said. “Wait a minute.”

He went to his bedroom and unlocked the closet from which he removed a suitcase locked at either end. From this, he removed a mass of oily rags. He fished out the parts and commenced to assemble his shotgun.

“I can do that with a Kalashnikov—and an SKS,” said Godfrey from the door. “I learned how in National Service.”

“I was taught but superficially,” Kibanda said over his shoulder. “I was a mechanic. I went everywhere with the convoys: Singida, Tabora, Rukwa, Tunduru… We had teachers—wazungu—but I don’t recall hearing where they were from.”

“Maybe they were Russians,” Brian suggested.

“Or Cubans,” Godfrey said thoughtfully. “We had a Cuban advisor who had been a national boxing champion. Our regimental champion challenged him one day when the convoy was delayed.”

“Who won?”

“The Cuban, although he, the Cuban, was injured. Our champion was stronger, but the Cuban was much faster. After that, we called the Cuban Lieutenant SMG: Sub-machine Gun… because he was so fast.”

Brian had finished with the shotgun. He loaded four slugs into it.

“Ready?” Kibanda asked with a tense smile.

“Bismillahi,” Brian grinned. His breakfast churned angrily in his stomach. He handed the shotgun to Suria. “Hold this while I piss,” he told her. She cleared her throat and started to say something; then she smiled and shrugged and held the gun with both hands as though it was made of glass.

* * *

The village—the residents and the dubious minstrels—formed a corridor for the three of them to walk through, as if an electrical switch had been thrown they commenced their kelele, ululating, chanting, and swaying.

Godfrey managed a guilty grin.

“They’ll frighten the jike clear to Tanga with all that racket.”

* * *

On the inland side of the road, leading south from Kijiji Chambogo to Bagamoyo, stretched the vast and poorly cultivated rice fields of the national prison. Egrets, herons, and storks shouldered their way through the rice and the tall intrusive weeds; dragonflies dodged invisible obstacles, devouring clouds of midges and mosquitoes in midflight. Far away, between the low dirty barracks of the prison and the rice paddies, a two-hundred-meter wide ribbon of dense forest preempted the view of the rice from the prison.

On the other side of the road is the endless cultivation of coconut palms, miles upon miles of them, in a strip less than a quarter-of-a-mile wide, beyond which white sand spills into the Indian Ocean. The road is a bad joke: potholes that snap axles and bend the rims of motorcycle tires with the indifference of a rock thrown through a spiderweb; patches of deep sand; and jutting claws of coral rock, immeasurably old. The soil itself breathes there; the air is alive—turbid, clammy, feral.

Brian walked down the middle of the road. Godfrey was a few yards behind him on the left, and Kibanda was on the opposite side where the gray green trunks of the palm trees swayed and groaned in the fierce breath of the approaching storm.

After a few hours, Brian stopped; the other two plodded over, their faces averted to the side and downward because of the sandy wind.

“Well?” said Godfrey.

“This damned dust. We’ll be hours, cleaning these guns tonight.”

“I’m thirsty,” Kibanda said. “Give me your knife, ndugu.” Brian traded him the machete for the African’s.375. He trotted over to the nearest palm tree.

“Watch,” Godfrey grinned, although the remarkable performance was well known to Brian by now. Kibanda slid the blade of the panga under his belt. He braced his knees against the trunk of the palm. Holding on with his arms extended, he edged up the sixty-foot trunk with alarming speed.

Brian turned away, facing out of the wind. He lit a cigarette; he lit a second off the first one and gave the first one to Godfrey.

“We won’t get her today,” Brian said hopefully. “She could smell us clear to Dar.”

“Sometimes, the wind makes animals move, though. I one time I saw an oryx running from a dust devil on the road between Same and Moshi. Cows will do that too—instead of going to ground like most animals.”

A few coconuts sailed down and landed mutely on the thick mat of decaying palm leaves. Kibanda descended the swaying trunk as effortlessly as he’d climbed it. They were still young men.

Godfrey and Brian ed him in the flickering shade. Kibanda deftly decapitated a green coconut, which he handed to Brian. The second he topped for Godfrey; finally, he opened one for himself. They drank the milk, scraped a little fruit out with the tip of the panga, and then settled down with their backs to the wind.

“I wish that other father—the one from Tabora—was here. He is a man that enjoys frightening other men. He is the pet and the pride of the TPDF— especially the shock troops and the medical corps. During the war, he drove an ambulance. It was joked that if he could find no one to cure, he shot the Italians himself so that he might have someone on whom to exercise his mercies.”

“I was told of him,” Godfrey added. “That during the famine years, after the war, he poached elephants and sold the tusks to Somalis in exchange for the medicine and food sent to the horn by the relief agencies. He is a great killer… and his dogs!”

“That kind of dog, do you know it, Bwana Brian?” Kibanda leaned on his elbow. “It is born to fight big cats and wild boar. It fears nothing: not lions, not hyenas, not leopards, not thieves. I knew an mzungu who had two of them; if even the shadow of a bird came close to the children of the mzungu, the dogs went crazy.

“Such animals, Bwana Brian? I don’t like them. Myself, I became the Bwana Wanyama because I did well in Form Six, and I had a good record in the National Service. I was sent to the institute, in Moshi. Maybe one day I will be sent to Europe or America for further studies. What do you think, Bwana Brian?”

“I think we ought to turn back. She’s not moving today.”

* * *

“Any luck?” Glen peered at the three young men. “No? Well, that’s good. If you’d had any luck, we’d have two of them to deal with.”

“She moves around in a circle, maybe fifteen kilometers.” Patel moved his hands expressively. “She’s young and confused and alone. She’s hungry, but she’s afraid. The first man she met was a sheep—a drunken sheep—a drunken pig who didn’t notice her until she broke his neck with her sharp young teeth.

“She ate his innards, and then she heard the stirrings of less innocuous men, so she ran away and watched as her meal was carried off by thieves.

“She wants to return to find what became of it; she also wants to run away.

“Tonight, her confusion will increase—and her anger—because of all this stupid kelele these blasted heathen wachowi commit. She hates and fears their shrilling and their drumming—and—especially—their torches.

“But tomorrow… tomorrow she finishes her circle. She is so, so hungry, and during the day, the coconut plantation is empty, and the village filled with stupid oxen is quieter. So early tomorrow, she tries to find her meal.” Patel nodded at Kibanda. “Then you kill her,” he concluded.

*

“You think the Muhindi is right about the jike?”

Suria cradled her youngest child which breathed gentle and somnolent health.

“Glen agrees.”

“Bwana Glen and the Muhindi are wise men, aren’t they? The Muhindi has two Land Rovers. He owns the shamba bus. His brother in Bagamoyo and the rest of his clan, in Dar Es Salaam, all ask Patel for advice. His house girls often tell me this. They say that the rest of the Wahindi speak of things in front of them that house girls have no business hearing. Patel is not so indiscreet. Patel is a man from whom even the Mullah seeks advice.”

Outside the chaos of noise and flame boiled on… But now the children, a few rooms away, slept as peacefully as their sister in her mother’s arms. Suria looked up from the baby and saw Brian staring at her. Rather than speaking, she smiled, rocked the child, and began to sing again, in her low, mysterious voice.

“Suria,” Brian said. “Your name was not well chosen.”

“It is not the name my mother gave me.”

“What name was that?”

“Bahati.”

“‘Bahati,’ the lucky one.’ What luck have you had?”

“Neither good nor bad. Only the kind that would make me want to change my name.”

With a supreme effort, Brian leaned back in his chair, poured another shot of whiskey, lit a cigarette, and nodded toward the darkness outside the window. “Listen to them howl like jackals,” he said.

“Yes, they are eager.” She swallowed a lump in her throat and looked away from him. “For tomorrow they eat the flesh of the jike.” She stood and walked quickly out of the room.

* * *

“The sites are open. Leave them bloody open. If she’s where Patel said she’d be, leave them open. Keep the safety off for God’s sake—just make sure you don’t shoot the mzungu here. If Patel was right, you’ll have time to line up a clean shot… downwind and all, you get me? Oh, dear Jesus God, let her be where Patel said she’d be…”

Goodbye, Glen, Brian said to himself. I grew up by the sea, Glen. I know the sea as Patel knows the bush. I know the wind that comes to the land from the sea, and never was there a storm like this one, far out in the middle of the lonely Indian Ocean, that whips the dried branches of Chambogo tonight.

* * *

Brian trotted down the path to the Islamic cemetery, Kibanda just behind him. They found the boulder of extinct coral just as Rhamadhani had described it. Brian sat on the left of it on the ground, hoping that the tempest would discourage the centipedes with as much obliging efficiency as it did the mosquitoes. Kibanda knelt on the right, motionless. The boulder had a coconut palm next to it with a huge splintery trunk that snaked up in a great arc to an invisible canopy of long sharp fronds. Brian had a terrifying, comical vision of a coconut dislodging by some mischievous djin and stunning Kibanda at the critical moment.

“There,” Kibanda breathed. The lioness trotted into view at an angle to them— exactly as Patel had said she would. “She’s beautiful,” Brian heard Kibanda barely whisper.

The jike stiffened at his voice. The wind whipped on far above them in its lonely crusade… Her ears rotated a little, and the lioness was satisfied. The wan light from far out to sea intensified a little as the moon disappeared to the west, back toward the Ruwenzori where it was still night time.

The lioness shook herself with a lovely ripple of muscle. Then, making audible chuffing coughs, she turned into the wind.

“Now,” Brian said.

She spun once—snarling—in a pirouette that ended when Kibanda’s second bullet slammed into her ear.

The white man and the black man walked over; there was no shaking in Brian’s legs now, and his heart beat slowly again, the blood surging through him like the great storm’s surf.

“Dead,” said Kibanda, and Brian had a sad, strange feeling that Kibanda would climb no more palm trees.

“Dead. From Arusha to Songea, people will talk about that shot. You are now the true Bwana Wanyama. You will be sent to Europe now where you will be introduced as Kibanda who killed the man-eater of Kijiji Chambogo.”

Godfrey and Glen trotted out of the swirling mist. Godfrey made a shrill whistle of iration, and Shemliegh nodded his approval.

“I’ll send her to an mzungu I know in Dar who has connections in Botswana. We’ll have her mounted, and the mwenyekiti can keep her in his office—to show tourists, maybe…”

“Give me the panga, Bwana Brian,” said Godfrey. He cut two young trees with straight, strong trunks, fashioning poles. Then he took off his uniform shirt and tore it into strips, which he used to tie the front paws and the back paws of the jike together. He and Brian walked in front, holding one end of a pole. Glen wheezed behind Brian, while Kibanda stalked steadily behind Godfrey. In this formation, they brought her, conquered to the shrill and inhuman kelele of Kijiji Chambogo.

* * *

Asleep, in the Mkalamo mission, Father Brian’s fists tightened, and he muttered. A generation had ed since the events of the dream; surely there were no more lions there. Chambogo must have electricity and AIDS and “Mr. DJ” by now. Glen had died a year after the lioness was killed—from liver cancer. Certainly, he had known about the cancer for a long time; he had confided only in Patel, though. It was Patel that had taken Glen’s body to Dar Es Salaam. Suria would be old—if she was alive at all—and Koroffi must be dead, and his children—if they were alive—would have forgotten Brian.

Every night, the dream was the same—and somehow, each time, it was more vivid than before, the horror that the girl would forgive him. A real man would have fallen into her arms and delivered her from the hunger and poverty of the ensuing decade; a real man would have forsaken the pointless undertaking of mission work in this heathen stronghold and stolen her away… To what? Even then Brian had known that in Africa, he could do anything—while in Ireland he was nothing; he had nothing… There was no fertile place for a tropical orchid.

She would wither and die under the incredulous condemnation of his culture— while her own culture had embraced him like the creeping sap of some Jurassic tree over the delicate wings of a dragonfly.

Brian had been transferred out—promoted—and when he left, she gave him a fan woven from reeds; she had created a pattern of dancers on it. Woven into the gold Gothic reeds were others dyed red, inscribing the entreaty do not forget us. Plainly, she was one dancer, and he was the other. And the lioness would forgive him; he had slaughtered the girl and the lion both with his meaningless presence. Somehow, the two were the same beautiful entity, their pagan forgiveness far more potent than the Christian forgiveness promised by that other crucifixion… White men had no more business now than ever in Africa.

Father Brian pounded the foam mattress with his large scarred fist. How he dreaded sleep! How he craved the alcohol that gave him at least some respite!

* * *

Father Danny stared at the house of his neighbor, Muhando. He liked Muhando. Everyone liked Muhando.

Father Danny thought vaguely about the old vulture—Father Andy Simms—that had initiated him into the church in Africa. Father Andy! Father Andy drank straight Irish during mass. He had a pen full of mistresses, and he sent his halfcaste bastard children to the Islamic School in Tanga. Everything about the man had been a mockery. He had kept a book of photographs showing himself with his boot up on the nose of a white rhino. Father Andy had killed a dozen white rhinos during the forties and fifties.

Father Andy had christened babies during their baptism by solemnly intoning:

Dominicum, Ararat;

Et in Dulce Expatriate.

Father Andy had mocked young Father Danny twenty and some years ago; he’d made a fool of him in front of the Africans and insulted him to his face. Father Andy had kept a dog, a police dog. This dog had been a detestable brute, a vicious killer that like the civilization from which its ancestors were bred sought

to crush “lesser” races. The dog wished to impose martial law on all that had been chaotic and innocent before its arrival. The Basenjis moved in terror around Father Andy’s mission.

Father Andy had beaten his house servants, slapped and bullied townspeople, and flaunted authority. But when finally he was packed to return to Ireland, his shoulders sagged and his tight, wind-and-sun-burned face and white beard faded and wilted. In Africa, he was a legend—a man of immeasurable respect (if little affection). In Ireland, he would be an old alcoholic, muttering wild stories about Africa to bored nurses, winked at and injected with sedatives while he slowly lost control of his bodily functions.

Father Andy’s wicked dog had howled—an eerie, cognizant howl—as the old vulture was driven off amidst the relieved cheers of his parishioners. Then a few weeks later, the dog was dead. Most suspected poison. Others said the dog died of a broken heart.

Father Danny tilted the bottle, and a last red ray of the setting sun pierced the Stygian flood within. The liquor winked at him like a friendly devil.

He jumped a little when Maria, one of his house girls, gently laid her hand on his shoulder.

“You have three visitors, Father.”

“Who is it?”

“One is the Ndugu of the rice plantation. The other two are the Germans who build the Lushoto Road.”

“Bloody hell,” he grunted. He craned his head around and glanced up. Her silhouette was framed by the red sunset. Her perfect features were almost black. Only the flashing white of her eyes and teeth moved to show that she was not a sculpture of some genius, sun-maddened artist. In the sunset, her white dress was made translucent. Father Danny trembled a little.

“Very well—show them in.”

“Good evening, Father,” the older German, the half-breed, said coldly. “We come to pay our respects.”

“Good on you,” the priest nodded with sham joviality. “Maria!”

“Bei?”

“Bring in four bottles of beer, there’s a good girl.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Hello, little sister,” the half-breed said in his sinister voice. “Are you a nun, little sister?”

Damn you, I’ll kill you, Father Danny thought wildly. Aloud, he cleared his throat and turned to the other younger German.

“I thought perhaps you’d come for your bitch,” the priest said coldly. The other three men stared at him for a moment. “The bloody dog, I mean. Fat lot of good she did me too.” The half-breed snickered.

In the corridor, a shriek was followed by a lusty roar and then a fit of feminine giggling. The three guests glanced at Father Danny. He closed his eyes and shivered.

Father Brian swaggered in. He glared at the guests, and then a spasm of recognition engulfed him. His eyes and hair were wild; he had a thin film of sweat on his chest and shoulders.

Father Brian twisted the cap off a beer bottle with his teeth. He drained half the bottle, wiped the foam from his thin lips on his bare, hairy arm, and plodded to a vinyl couch on which he collapsed. The second house girl, Rachel, stood at the end of the couch, giggling at Father Brian’s antics. He reached out with the speed of a striking cobra, caught her around the waist, pulled her onto his lap, and leered at Erlau.

Father Danny groaned inwardly and ed the whiskey to Father Brian. The latter took a long gulp. A dreamy look softened his granite face. For the moment, he looked reflective, sad, and noble.

“Goddamned cholera,” Father Brian groaned. He was suddenly furious. He slammed his large fist onto the armrest of the couch. Rachel took this opportunity to scurry off his lap. She darted into the kitchen and then returned promptly with a fresh bottle of beer. She demurely handed it to Father Brian, keeping well out of his reach. Good girl, Father Danny thought.

“Anyways,” Father Brian said. “I tell you what, boys. Six, seven years ago, there wasn’t any grain anywhere. This is just after we whipped that fat boy in Uganda, you know. Why, I harvested enough ivory to keep a hell of a lot of kiddies alive, sure enough. Sold it to the Somalis for the UN grain they’d stolen. The damned Somalis dropped of gunias of rice and millet and drove back with good Rungwa ivory…”

The Irishman stared sadly into space, lost in memory. He drained the bottle, and when he tried to put it on the little table, he dropped it on the floor where it broke. Rachel and Maria hurriedly cleaned the glass and smiled furtive apologies at Erlau and the Germans. Erlau had a sudden intuition: the Rosminians were imperfect men; they were flawed and scarred, and yet, of all the seductive snakes in this Eden to which they had been consigned, it was not that serpent that would poison them. He was—through the haze of the alcohol—suddenly aware of a profound sympathy for the priests.

Outside the dog began to bark ferociously.

“What the hell?”

Father Danny peered out the curtain. He caught sight of a dark figure from one hand of which a smaller shape dangled.

“You bastard,” he roared. He raced to his shotgun. It was already loaded.

The tall figure was almost over the wall when Father Danny fired. The shadow in the garden shrieked with rage and pain.

The four white men and the two house girls charged into the garden. The priest had fired at Little Mohammed—fortunately from a long range. “You dirty little thief,” Danny choked, jerking the action of the gun violently to chamber another cartridge. Father Brian and the older of the Germans roared encouragement.

“Give me the damned bird,” the thief hissed. “My sister is in labor.”

“Oh god! Aisha!” Erlau said. He was abruptly sober.

At the gate, Machame and Simba appeared.

“Hurry!” Simba boomed.

The baby lived—the mother did not. Father Danny gently shut her eyes.

“Well done,” Father Brian grunted approvingly to Sheik Ndoto. They had delivered the baby together—a caesarean operation worthy of any surgeon. Only there was nothing to halt the hemorrhage of the slender mother. “A boy.”

“No medicine would have helped,” said the old man, Aisha’s grandfather. “It was the hand of God. It was God’s will. God is great.”

The beautiful, vulgar girl, Rukia, took the baby. Her breasts were plump with the milk for her own baby which was due soon. Aisha’s baby began to nurse. Rukia held the baby gently, her eyes half-shut, her lashes fanning the baby’s face. Maria and Rachel ed a growing throng of women; the women wailed just as African women will always wail to show their sorrow. The two Irish fathers shuddered. Somewhere, Suleiman Hosa bellowed, “Two, four, six, nine… My brother owns a bus… What does it mean?” The half-breed glared at the voice then chuckled sourly and spat on the dirty dusty street.

“Well, that’s that,” said Father Brian. “What about the wake, boys?”

The half-breed German pulled the American aside. “Listen, boy, I know all about that hole at Mwelia. I’ve seen a dozen of them myself. There’s nothing there for you. Get out of here, boy, while you can! Run like hell!”

“I went back, alone,” said Erlau. “I went back, and I couldn’t find it. I asked Ndoto, and he said, ‘Well, now that Daoudi knows there’s something down there, what makes you think he’s willing to share? Of course you can’t find the hole—the mumyani moved it last night.’”

“My goddamned father took me to ,” the half-breed spat on the potholed street. “He left my mother in the village. She died. They told me from malaria, but I know the dirty jealous bastards killed her. It broke her heart.”

Erlau pulled a telegram out of his pocket. He unfolded it and handed it to the

half-breed. It said, “Please proceed to DSM office for COS stop reports received stop well done and congratulations stop you are booked eighteen days via KLM routed Amsterdam.”

“It’s over,” Erlau said bitterly. “Just like that.”

“It’s too late for you, boy. I see the tooth marks on your goddamned throat. Let’s have a drink.”

* * *

Erlau jumped a little when the generator in the basement of the office building kicked on. He had dozed off. Half the whiskey was gone now, but the pack of cigarettes remained unopened; it had remained unopened for twenty-five years. Once, on a whim, he had looked up Mkalamo on the computer in his office; on the map, it was still colored yellow. The closest green was far to the west and far to the south. But Mkalamo was still notorious for the high incidence of crocodile attacks.

Erlau drank a little more whiskey. He took the magazine out of the gun and then pulled the action back; a live round landed on the table. He replaced the round in the magazine and slid the magazine back into the automatic with a reassuring click. Erlau looked at the two photographs, first the one of his grandfather in the uniform of the German Army taken in Italy during a lull in the fighting. Maybe his grandfather had shot at Abou Hassan Ali.

Erlau reread the message from Simba about truck tires and flights to Israel:

Simba and Muhando had eventually caught the attention of the auditors; only, even the dreaded auditors liked Muhando, so he was tipped off four hours before they were set to arrest him. Simba apologetically borrowed twenty thousand shillings from Erlau who assumed that the embezzlers were lost to him. But this was not the case.

Erlau had returned to East Africa for another contract. He had not believed that one can never return once the treasure hole is closed to him. The Berlin Wall had collapsed, and the Cold War had ended… The consistencies of life—good and bad—evaporated like predawn mist over the coral headstones of a coastal cemetery. (Dozens of the headstones in question record the same final day—in 1915—when young men born in the heady last decades of the British Century fell in a brutal, obscure fight with the Germans—an odd little minuet lost in the thunder of a great and tragic opera. Small boys in the heady last decades of the American Century sold the colonial coins plundered from the dead soldiers’ uniform pockets.)

One day, when he was falling ill with cerebral malaria, a carload of Arab boys at Kariakoo informed Erlau that “someone wanted to speak with him.” Erlau wasn’t afraid of them. They took him to the Arab quarter where he was ushered through a maze of colonial era courtyards until he found—enthroned on a wooden bench—Simba. You see bwana? We Wasukuma don’t forget our debts! And then Simba had handed him an envelope stuffed with two hundred thousand shillings. They consumed the bottles of beer that the Arabs provided. Erlau ed little of the month he had spent with Simba and the Arabs. He ed reading War and Peace. He ed vegetable soup and sweet bread and quiet, solemn children and an almost constant outpouring of prayer from what seemed like a hundred neighboring mosques. When Erlau was strong enough to travel, Simba was already gone.

For the rest of his life, Erlau would defend Islam with almost violent loyalty. God had provided the Kariakoo Arabs with the white man, giving them the opportunity to show him that they were generous and loyal like the two

Wasukuma from whom they had bought a quantity of inexplicably lovely rhodolite and tanzanite. God is great.

Simba and Muhando had moved to Mozambique and gone into lumber cutting; now Simba and Muhando were rich enough to fly to Israel to buy truck tires. They were feted as “The Business Future of a New Africa” in an article in the top economic periodical in Uliya. They were featured along with their photograph, smiling benignly and dressed in stylish business suits. They rode the waves with fearless, jaunty élan—now and then calling out some encouraging pleonasm to the impending shipwrecks that floundered all about them. They wore the latest styles and carried the latest technologies. They were the elders, the counselors and chairmen, of the Global Village. They must the old Erlau with his XL125 and his knives and weighted gloves and steel-toed shoes; what would they think if they could see how he had ended?

Erlau lost his teaching position. He now worked third shift at a factory. He felt exhausted and middle-aged. The currents of politics and economics moved like the storm surge of Father Brian’s description; the only way to survive the surge was to flee it—to find a safe port. But his days of running from one port to the next were done now. He was married, and a married man cannot work contracts.

Now and then, he had to fill out forms that asked if he had preexisting medical conditions or had ever been treated for depression or mental illness. The woman Erlau had replaced at Mkalamo had died in-country of cerebral malaria. Erlau was replaced by the man whose body he—Erlau—was dispatched to recover. The man had died in a head-on collision with a sisal truck just outside of Korogwe. Never mind the others—some dead from HIV—or McDonald, dead by his own hand. Erlau had a relapse of malaria every year in April. Erlau usually ignored the question about his medical history.

Then he looked long and hard at the picture of his little son. Unlike Brian, Danny, or Glen, unlike McDonald and the Polish captain at Margot’s and Joey

Mosel and the Germans-that-had-buried-something in the Mwelia treasure pit, unlike Zaina’s lover, unlike the father of the half-breed road engineer, he had married his African girl,the father of his little son. He had met her in West Africa —not East Africa—but the stories from West Africa were the same. Erlau had done half-a-dozen contracts from the Arctic to the Equator, and the stories were all alike. Erlau had many, many ghosts—but not that ghost. He was free from that mumyani, he realized; unlike the others, he had his wife and his little son. God had provided him with them… God is great.

Erlau dozed off again; there would be no more lying to his wife, nor his bosses at the factory. One day, he would tell his little son about the treasure hole at Mwelia. His wife would surely understand how the witches can move a pit three meters wide and twice as deep in one night. She was an African, and she had spent her childhood in the bush.

The police prowler ed the parking lot and saw that Erlau’s car was still alone in the parking lot. In the office, Erlau was asleep at the table, the automatic and the whiskey bottle harmlessly reflecting the fluorescent bulb of the ceiling lamp.

ATLANTIS

From Beirut on a dhow they sailed:

A dozen pirates often jailed

For drinking wine from palm distilled,

Or loving girls against their will.

The sultan would have hanged these brutes,

Except their talents to compute

The furthest stretches of the sea

From India to Tripoli

Unequaled in the world were said;

And so the felons kept their heads.

“Atlantis—that’s the name I heard

“From Athens’ old ambassador.

“In Egypt it is said to lie

“Beyond the sunset where the sky

“Forever bright is lit with stars

“Unknown to our astronomers.

“I give you seven years, you sharks,

“To sojourn hence and then the marks

“Against your names will be erased

“And you’ll be free—if you stay chaste.”

All the while the hangman smirked—

Behind the sultan where he lurked.

The royal guards were hiding grins:

“He might as well have slaughtered them!

“Atlantis! What a pretty myth;

“They’d just as well jump off a cliff.”

But several there were not so sure

(The poets and astronomers)

“The stars may guide you. That’s the most

“Advice we have beyond the coast.”

All the royal sultanate

Showed up at the departure date.

They cheered the end of what you see

Had been a bad fraternity.

And as the breeze the sails filled out

The crowd grew bolder with their shouts:

“Hail Atlantis! Hail the end

“Of our most lamented friends!

“In seven years we’ll toast your fate;

“Free, at last, the sultanate!”

* * *

Six years and near a seventh gone;

A blink, a shrug, a stretch, a yawn.

The harbor heaves with sullen waves,

From boats propelled by chanting slaves.

Dust and dirt and dirt and dust,

Spiderwebs and mold and rust

Decorate the palace now—

For little bounty bring the dhows.

At night, the sultan hardly sleeps,

And day by day his kingdom weeps.

Then when things are growing tense,

An embassy at court presents

A stalwart, swarthy caravan

Behind a well-dressed gentleman.

“A better welcome, would I had,”

The sultan sighs. “But in Baghdad

“The Caliph writes he suffers too;

“From India, the Mogul drew

“A portrait of famine, drought, and flood;

“And Pharaoh swears the Nile’s blood!

“But—even so, you’re welcome, knight;

“Pray tell us—what’s that eerie light

“That from your silk robe emanates?

“Are you perhaps some prophet great?

The emissary parts the folds

Of his red robe, and then he holds

A jewel of most impressive size

Before the court’s astonished eyes.

“A gift I bring to my lord the king

“From Atlantis where the sirens sing.

“For I was once a pirate here;

“A brutal, wicked man, I fear!

“But six good years the dyads taught

“What by any mortal’s sought.

“Now would my lord permit me say

“The things I saw along the way?”

For many hours the pirate told

Of the marvels that Atlantis holds.

The sultan and his court were awed

By what the pirate claimed he saw:

* * *

Heat! Hot, hot, hot!

No more to drink we pirates got!

Soon our arms will be too weak

To pilot and our deck of teak

Will splinter in the vengeful jaws

Of the ocean’s wicked maw.

Curse the sultan and his kine:

We’d rather have the hangman’s twine

Than burn and broil alive this way…

We curse Atlantis, but we stay

Alive! Life, life, life

Is dedicated now to strife.

Against them we’ll avenge some day:

They thought they’d made our end this way.

War! War, war, war

Is how we’ll settle up the score…

And so our fever ever grew

Until the final hour or two

When to a port at dusk we came,

Atlantis was the harbor’s name.

* * *

The tropic sun is kind and warm.

The surf is gentle—seldom storm

Or cyclone hastens there the pace

Of life pastoral. Carapace

Of mountains high, adorned with snow,

Looks down with noble, lofty brow.

By mist at dawn, in fog at eve,

Atlantis folk cannot conceive

Of selfishness or jealousy

Where gold and sapphires are had free.

At dawn, our dhow pulled in from sea

And lonely swayed, the docks it seemed

Unguarded stayed the while we paced

About with scimitar and mace;

The only sentry that we saw

A cat or two with head on paws.

We sheathed our pirates’ weapons then,

And hunted ’round the piers again:

Then wandered on deserted streets,

Not soul to see nor face to greet.

Hour by hour the day went by;

We moored the dhow along the quay

And pondered on Atlantis’ mind

For we had never met this kind:

What purpose lies in robbery

When no one makes to stay the thief?

What value lies in villainy

When no one makes attempt to flee?

Atlantis’ folk are left to chore

The way they will—no less, no more:

Their shepherds high on mountain knees

Play softly flutes, their hearts at ease

When lions wander near the flocks,

Then fall asleep on sun-bleached rocks.

Together, men and lions yawn

Bemused by playing foal and fawn.

The sun reflects in dancing waves

From white-bleached rocks to cool dark caves.

No lamb or calf fears leopards while

The mountains in the sunlight smile.

The fisher folk no nets will cast

While sun and glitter are not past.

Instead they sleep in sun-

Lit coves were gentle eddies run.

Not till the sun is in the west

Will stir Poseidon’s mighty breast.

His fishes by the sun are smote,

Their silver scales await his mot.

The sharks like shadows side by side

Above the coral slowly glide.

The cattle in their wallows lie,

Their noses only to the sky

Exposed; no matter, for what gnat

Would venture to that hellion vat?

Where white stones line the weedy shore

And stately storks like statues more

Than birds pretend to cock an eye

At winding eels and darting fry?

We watched their children laugh and run,

Free from fear beneath the sun.

Now wait! The sun is setting slow,

The harbor lights begin to glow.

The valley bells begin to toll,

And carts from mountain highways roll

To villages where shutters tight

Are open thrown where candle light

To street lamps adds a greater glow

Than that of sunsets setting slow.

The fires of the hearth are stirred

And laughter sends a welcome word.

The tropic day leaves breezes cool.

The surf still gentle, rocks and pools

Illuminate with colored lights,

Reflected from the glacier heights.

We saw the sharp cliffs to our awe

Beyond the clouds progress toward God

From sea and mountains silver mists—

Arise and fall like lovers’ trysts.

The vespers dance along the strand—

Like god and goddess hand in hand.

In dusk, the ships sail out to sea,

The lug and jib breathe eagerly.

The stevedores and longshoremen

Stack bales and barrels high again

While embassies from lands unknown

Prepare to court Atlantis’ throne.

The merchants oversee their loads,

In silk-and-spice-filled after holds

Then push their way through crowded streets,

Old friends and colleagues there to greet.

The shepherds high on mountain knees

Are watchful now for enemies.

When lions stray too near the flocks

They raise their voices for the dogs.

They love a nymph named Artemis.

Their courage is their honored gift,

For when the goddess bids them strike,

All hunters are to her alike.

And when at dawn, the chase is done,

They yawn together at the sun.

The fisher folk their nets now cast,

And struggle at the oars and mast.

They push their boats amidst great schools

Of dace in coves and tench in pools.

Now—since the sun has gone to the West—

Poseidon heaves his mighty chest.

His legion fish their game begin

In silver froths where mermaids swim

With sharks in some bizarre ballet

’Round Aphrodite’s sultry play.

The cattle in their pasture chew

The grasses close. Until the dew

Is nigh they’ll feel no tick or gnat,

Nor heed the flies but shy the vat

Of darkness where the whitened rock

A ring of light makes ’round the loch.

The storks are swift to seize the dace

And winding eels that seek the place

Where children run beneath the moon

And frolic to the fairies’ tunes.

Ah, look! Atlantis springs to life

When red sun’s glow is gone at night.

The valley bells are now the parts

Among the music of the carts

In villages where windows bright

Are hid by flowers, red and white.

The lamps are lit with golden glow,

The sea reflects a cheery flow

Of lights and lanterns freshly fired,

While laughter flows from dhow to byre.

The heat and life, the fire and song:

Atlantis’ children run along!

Lovers seek the shadows where

The maidens with their raven hair

With flowers wove, their sparkling eyes,

Await their gallants that arrive

With mandolin and rose and wine

By trellises that orchids vine.

This city—green, and red, and white:

A treasury of sound and light.

From high on mountains, lions look;

From tangled thorn and forest nook

The wolf and bear, the fox and lynx

Observe the spectacle, this sphinx,

This mystery; a shame the jackal

Does not love the cheery crackle

Of Atlantis’ venders’ fires,

Or Atlantis’ minstrels’ lyres.

The witches chant a dread commotion

But no spell, no evil potion

Grim or dark, no incantation

Can break Atlantis’ exaltation.

We brigands were bewitched that night

By Atlantis washed in life and light.

The owl and bat may sometimes stray

In moonlight though not in the rays

Of valley fire. Nor will cross

The lions far beyond the moss-

Filled copses where the pine trees are

The only towers to the stars.

The fairy folk at evensong

With village children run along;

In city lights they masquerade

As mortals—cunning elves of Hades!

They court the maidens, beckon men

Of tender years to forsake glen

Of forest, of Atlantis’ towns,

To take their hands and lead them down

To Persephone’s domain—

There forever to remain.

But hark! Atlantis’ bells are rung,

And softly angels’ praises sung.

From Cross and Crescent fairies flee;

While they cry, “Pray, follow me!”

A few may follow (most do not)

And those who do are not forgot,

But fond ed for you see,

Now they dance eternally.

The hour of twelve has come and gone;

Prayer is over, prayer is done.

Accordions and violins

Replaced the organ and the hymns

Then tablecloths of red and white

Were spread beneath the palm trees. Night

Was young, the wine was poured;

The butter spread, and then a gourd

Of fruit was ed from guest to guest.

A jolly man said, “This be blessed.”

This is how we ed the eve;

Our voyage troubles were relieved.

Green and red and white the night!

Green the hills, the fields, the bight;

Red the fever of the dance:

White the flowers that enhance

The raven eyes and raven hair

Of the maidens that dwell there.

Gowned they are in red and white,

The youth and maidens when at night

They sing and dance and chase their fun,

And never heed the hour one.

Mincemeat in the market stalls

Was d by venders’ calls.

Oranges, coconuts, and grapes,

Are sold in plenty. Curtains draped

Are drawn away from balconies

While serenaders melodies

To virgin beauties boldly give.

Atlantis! There the muses live!

Apollo—his daily labors through—

Dances at the hour two.

The palm trees are connected all

By strings of lanterns, making halls

Of gold and purple, silver, pink…

Oh, what would the sultan think!

This rainbow night, this empire bright,

This city of a million lights?

These dances merry, maidens fair,

These marvels one sees everywhere?

This merriment, this levity,

Atlantis at the hour three?

All together, singing loud,

With voices lusty, bragging, proud:

The cobbler, cooper, butcher, reeve,

The knight and lackey; each believes

He has the fairest, noblest song;

The least and greatest sing along.

The bells are chiming, children call

Within these great littoral halls.

They brought us wine—we called for more

And merry ed the hour four.

At length, a wise man bade us to

Indulge him in an interview.

He asked us why you’d sent us hence.

We told him it was recompense

For many wicked things of late

We’d done. He bade, “Elaborate!”

We spoke of murders, thefts, and more:

The things we’d done on foreign shores.

We feared he might have us expelled—

Or curse us with a magic spell.

Instead the wise man bade us rise,

And to the mountains turn our eyes.

And there we saw—from many leagues—

As clearly as from you to me

That like Your Highness’ sultanate

A wilderness, with fear and hate,

Filled up lay just beyond the gate

That to Atlantis brought us late.

But the ramparts had no guards it seemed,

And I saw no sentries’ torches gleam.

The wise man bade us watch the moor,

Just below the glaciers’ tour.

There, the wild things run in fear:

The boar and stag, the bull and deer.

There, witch and devils cruel conspire,

And prophesy of plague and fire.

There dwells a wicked breed of man:

A red-eyed, grasping, thieving clan.

And I was much ashamed, you see,

For all this lot looked much like me.

“Now see the lion run to death

“The hind; and see the healthy breath

“Of glacier wind on grassy waves.

“Too slow the chamois! See, he saves

“Himself not from the hungry jaws

“Of the wolves’ and leopards’ maw?

“See the lions stalk the wolds;

“See owls strike at fleeing voles.

“The wild things have one humble prayer:

“To live till five is all they care!

“You see,” the wise man counseled on.

“I saw your dhow arrive at dawn;

“For many days I waited, why!

“I was the cruel sun in the sky.

“For many years I followed thee,

“From India to Tripoli.

“You tremble at the thought that those

“Poor red-eyed villains might draw close.

“Would it surprise you if you knew

“They weep with fear—because of you?

“In life, there are no accidents;

“Things always happen as they’re meant.

“Your sultan sent me his twelve sons;

“I fear I must return him one.

“The others may remain with me;

“Atlantis’ guardians to be.

“Now let us to the town repair

“And leave those creatures to despair.

“They’re trapped away from love and light

“And nothing know their wrong from right.”

In Atlantis alleys fair,

The fairies fled the changing air.

To East the spectacle appeared:

Apollo’s steeds their proud heads reared.

Soon the dawn with gold would flow

And back to Beirut I must go.

Aphrodite slept, a vision fair:

Her perfumed skin, her oiled hair,

Flowing on the water, thick,

While Atlantis’ bells tolled six.

Atlantis’ bells tolled six or so

I thought! But in my face, there showed

The age of six years! My mates

Remarked upon my careworn face

While they, it seemed, had younger waked.

From man to man I stared in case

I was mistaken in my thought,

But no, the magic was already wrought.

And I alone returned to sea,

To bear the gifts they wished for thee.

Day is night, and night is day

Where the rocks dance in the haze.

The sun is tropic, wind is warm,

The surf is gentle, never storm

Or cyclone hastens there the pace

Beneath the glaciers’ carapace;

And mountains mighty, crowned with snow,

Guard well the treasures down below.

In misty dawn, with the stars of heaven,

I left Atlantis at the hour of seven.

The cats were weary now to chase;

The storks no longer sought the dace.

The lions stretched to rest again,

Beside the shepherds in the glens.

And I, alone, returned to sea,

To bear the gifts they wished for thee.

And then I formed this caravan,

And journeyed to my native land:

But how I yearn Atlantis’ streets

Where man the muse and angels meets!

1 113° Fahrenheit 2 African driver ants 3 A hand-hoe 4 Pombe: locally brewed alcohol—usually from millet. 5 Mzungu, Wazungu: Swahili for white man. Literally, “the dizzy one(s).” Kizungu: the language of white men. Note: Many East Africans assume that Germans, Russians, Cubans, English, etc., speak one common language— Kizungu—rather than many national languages. 6 Pikipiki: motorcycle 7 Kuma ya mama yako: “Your mother’s vagina.” 8 Msenge: homosexual 9 Ndugu: a title of respect: “the honorable so-and-so,” rather than bwana: “mister so-and-so” 10 Pole za kazi: “Sorry for the work you’ve done.” (an expression of sympathy) 11 Malaia: whore; prostitute 12 Inshallah: Arabic: “if God wills” 13 Shikamoo: Swahili—a greeting of respect to someone older or of higher social standing. 14 Marahaba: Swahili—the correct response to “shikamoo.” 15 Duka: a small shop or kiosk where necessities—matches, eggs, steel wool, sugar, tea, etc., are sold 16 Tutaonana baadai: “See you later.” 17 Knobkerrie: a club carried by some tribes

18 Yerro, sovai: “Hi, buddy” (This is a tribal language—Kimaasai.) 19 Kenge: monitor lizard(s) 20 Msela: buddy, comrade 21 Njomba: uncle 22 Fundi: mechanic, technician 23 Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM): the Socialist Party of Julius Nyerere 24 Mzee: “old man” or “sir” as in this case. 25 Heshima: respect 26 Kicheche: mongoose. Note: Various animals are attributed with human characteristics. For example, a fisi maji (otter) is a person who is constantly sexually aroused. 27 Bei: “yes.” If the question is addressed to a man, he would answer “nam?” 28 Askari: guard, soldier 29 Simi: bush knife used by Maasai 30 Kambale: catfish 31 Mnaonaje?: “How do you (plural) see things?” Kwa macho: “with our eyes” 32 Homa: fever (usually from malaria) 33 Mumyani: vampire 34 Nyani: baboons 35 Babu: grandfather or old man; an expression usually associated with respect 36 Uliya: Europe; the world outside of Africa 37 Kitanda ya mama yako: “your mother’s bed”

38 Bangi: marijuana 39 Hamna tabu: “no problem” 40 Quss umakh: your mother’s vagina (Arabic) 41 Malaika: angel 42 M(Wa)shenzi: bastard(s) 43 Serikali: government 44 Karibu: “welcome!” 45 Labda baadai: “maybe later” 46 Chupa: barrel 47 Black mamba: The author once observed the driver of a sisal truck break the front axle of his truck by running it into an erosion ditch while trying to crush a black mamba. The green mamba is also poisonous, but this slender arboreal snake is not, in the author’s experience, nearly as dangerous as the black mamba. 48 Njomba: uncle (shangazi: aunt)