V

 

Esmeralda Miller was an interesting color, a gray as of iron filings so fine the eye could not detect the individual grains. In Hakim's fancy the tint, which savored of manufacture, was a by-product of her beliefs, her economic determinism. At the same time she was an attractive, ecto-morphic young woman, with a lean prognathous face, almond-shaped eyes framed in pink plastic spectacles, and a bewitching way of thoughtfully swaying her jaw, as if testing molar crowns her father had made for her. "What are you trying to achieve?" she would ask the young deserter from Noire, across the table in the Off-Campus Luncheonette, or later in the Pure Dairy Products Ice Cream Parlor, or later still in the Badger Cafe, with its beer-soaked sawdust on the floor, and its bubbling, phosphorescent advertisements. "Messing around with this deluded bitch Candy."

    "Achieve? That's a rather other-directed way of putting it. What did Freud say? Pleasure is the removal of tension. There is a tension that screwing her relieves. No doubt the sex has a component of vengeance, of tasting evil, of stealing Charlie's prize, et cetera.

    From her side, kindred craziness. Still, we get along."

    "She's no prize, is what you can't see. She put the move on you in the first place. You just took it. You've been taking it for years, now, and she's got marriage in her eye. What happens when you graduate?"

    "I have told her, more than once, that I am married."

    "To some old black cow in the heart of nowhere? This white girl no more cares about that woman than a bug under a rock. She doesn't believe she exists, and neither do I. Anyway, who says you're ever going back? Let's face it, Haps, you're American as apple pandowdy. I try to talk sense to you friend to friend, and you give me back David Riesman and overheard Freud. I love you."

    This last was said as lightly as these words can be said, as Bob Hope or Clark Gable says them, but Felix took them in, and understood her advice now as propaganda. He began to play with her. "As a Muslim, I am entitled to four wives."

    "Shit. You're about as Muslim as I am Daddy Warbucks. I hope that stuff hasn't taken you in; it's just our usual native storefront I'm-comin'-home-Jesus routine, with a few funny phrases thrown in. Inshallah, Walla-Walla."

    "I don't mock your faith," he said stiffly.

    "Anyway, you're wrong about my never going back.

    You don't follow the African news in the back pages. The British have given in to Nkrumah, and de Gaulle has been brought to power to end the Algerian war. Only de Gaulle can face down the military."

    "God, you're impossible when you get on your great men kick. De Gaulle is just Ike with a bigger nose; they are balloons.

    History is happening underneath.

    When the op- pressed peoples rise up, they will just take.

    Meanwhile, nobody is giving them anything. France can bleed all it wants, international capital won't let it let go."

    "International capital, I believe, has decided colonies are obsolete. The companies themselves, and their insidious products, are the new armies."

    "The proletariat-was "The proletariat, there is no proletariat. Show me the proletariat here. You have the blacks, kept in ghettos because of a superstitious horror of their skins, their rolling eyes, their whiplike penises-was "Some are stubby," Esmeralda said.

    "You have the Indians," Felix went on, "who never knew what hit "em. And you have the white workers, who Marx to the contrary are thoroughly enrolled in consumerism, making junk and buying junk, drinking junk and driving junk. That is the revolution, surely-the triumph of the unnecessary. If Marx could see his English proletariat now, he wouldn't recognize such softness, such silliness, soaked through and through with ale and the telly. He thought the proletariat was a sponge that would have to be squeezed until a revolution ran out. What happened instead is it sopped up some of the surplus its labor had created and bloated, in a spongy way. There is a kind of poisonous mush abroad in the planet, Esmeralda, and the Muslims aren't quite wrong about its being devilish. It crowds out the good, it makes goodness impossible. Great fanatics can no longer arise; they are swamped by distractions."

    "There you go, into obscurantism again. Ideas go back to basics. Food and shelter and clothing, medicine and transportation and the rest of it.

    Everybody has the same needs, but ninety per cent of the world's wealth is in the hands of ten per cent of the world's people. A revolution has to come."

    "Movements have to come. Marx was right, the world is a machine; but he thought some parts, the parts he named, moved while the rest held still. I see two major motions in the world now. There is this seeping down and outwards of Euro-American consumerism.

    And there is this groping upwards of the dusky underdog.

    But a third motion encompasses both. As the poor man reaches upwards, the ground is sinking beneath his feet, he is sinking in the spreading poverty, the muchness of humanity divided into the same weary constant, the overused, overpopulated world." He sipped his beer; its bubbles reminded him: "In my boyhood the giraffes, the elephants, the lions were familiar deities, come to play on the horizon of our world. Soon there will be no animals left bigger than men. Then, only cockroaches, rats, and men. So these gestures of economics are like the reaching gestures on Geri-cault's painting of the raft of the Medusa, gestures that will never grasp their objects, because the raft is sinking. Your Communism is such a failed gesture. In the industrialized countries of Western Europe, where Marx reasoned the uprising must come, the Communist party officials wear suits with vests, and sidle forward for their share, as you Americans say, of the pie."

    Her silence, during which she appeared to be focusing closely upon his lips, emboldened him to continue, in what he fancied a Dostoevskian vein: "The age of any revolution is five years. After that, either its participants have wandered off, dismayed by failure, or else have succeeded and become an establishment, generally more tyrannous than the one they displaced. We Africans like de Gaulle. He reminds us of the giraffe, of the gods that no longer visit us. He will make a revolution, not from underneath but from above; give him five years.

    Algeria will get its independence, and with it, because the French are imperious and demand absolute logic of themselves, all the vast lesser bits of French West Africa, even my empty, unloved Noire. That is how history happens, in fits of impatience.

    Then de Gaulle will be thrown aside, like Robespierre; or else become a fussy old man losing quarrels with his Parliament. No matter; by then I will have returned.

    Au revoir, @ltats-Unis!

    Farewell, Esmeralda!"

    The future Ellellou had a strange sensation, sometimes, in talking to these Americans, black or white: their faces were units in a foreign language, they inhabited a stratum of reality, a slant of thought, so remote from his own that in the effort to be understood he grew dizzy.

    Esmeralda's solemn gray face, with that touch of languid sexuality working at the rounded points of her jaws, seemed across the table a chasm or a well he was looking straight down into, where his own head was distantly, waveringly mirrored.

    She said, "You should write some of that up and send it to The Journal of Underdeveloped Political Thought."

    The journal was really called Political Thought in the Underdeveloped Nations, and was published by a group of suspect liberals and malcontented expatriates in an adjacent Midwestern state, one also shaped like a mitten.

    Hakim took her advice, spinning out in a few long caffeine-crazed nights between terms that little string of articles mentioned sixteen years later, with unintended provocative effect, by the unfortunate Gibbs. They comprised in Hakim's mind the third triumph of his undergraduate career. The second had been his near-election, missing by four votes (his four black friends, he suspected), as Campus Organizer of Pep. His first had been his seduction of Candy.

    "You really taking that bitch back with you?" Esmeralda asked.

    He toyed with his empty beer glass, wondering if he should have another. "I had not thought so."

    "Good luck, black boy, losing her. These white chicks like to call the tune; leave off the loving, they holler rape."

    "My native land would seem a barren place to Candace." The balusters of her staircase, the claustrophobic comfort of her father's living-room, swirled through his mind, as he exposed his lower teeth in reflection, conscious of Esmeralda's abnormally intent focus upon his lips. Her stare was numbing his gums.

    "Somebody that strong-headed and spoiled thinks she could melt the North Pole if she went there. That's the weakness of a ruling class, they can't take in adverse information. How do you feel about Craven?"

    He flipped the little cardboard coaster, idly, to the side without an advertisement. "Unhappy. I believe there have been tender passages between them."

    "You can bet your ass on that. She'll fuck anything as long as it's not a boy her own age, race, and income bracket. That's her revolution. Haps, she's bad news.

    She's tough, and she's cold. What is the magic? You've been making yourself conspicuous with that girl since you set foot on free soil."

    He thought of Candy, her pink cheeks, her red knitted headscarf, her neurotic sharp smile, and of how, coming up to her along a diagonal path, standing next to her in the cold, he felt airy and towering. He told Esmeralda, "It's like eating snow." Even this seemed too much a confession, a betrayal; he became angry with his interrogator.

    "Why should I come to this country to sleep with a black woman?" he asked her explosively. "My country is nothing but black women." Still in that squeezed voice of anger, he said, "How about another beer?"

    "Beer back at the YCC," Esmeralda mumbled, submissively. The Young Communist Club kept two rooms in an asbestos-shingled tenement house on a back street of Franchise, for a rent that, though beyond the means of the meagre membership, was somehow met. Esmeralda could count, this night as on most nights, on having the place to herself. They walked along pavements packed with snow, only the heads of the parking meters protruding from the drifts, the whiteness hardened to ice and tinted by neon signs and the half-lit display windows of closed shops, ungrated in those safe days, even the windows of jewelry stores. Back from Commerce Street the pavements were erratically shovelled, so for some stretches, where a widow lived, or a family that had fallen below the social norms, glossy mounds had to be traversed on little paths, worn by the boots of schoolchildren. Candy for this weekend had gone away with her family, skiing in the Laurentians. The YCC quarters were identified only by the initials.

    No hammer and sickle, no red star. There had been problems with broken windows. Esmeralda turned up the heat. A mattress on the floor did for a bed.

    The term "crash pad" had not yet been invented.

    Esmeralda's body, naked on the sheetless ticking, was the same slate hue her face was, an even soft gray that moved him, taken with her stringy hips and underdeveloped breasts; the slaver's sperm, it seemed, had entered her blood line to steal shine from her skin, and joyful African protuberance from her body. When she left the bed, instead of glimmering in the darkened room like a candle, she vanished. What Felix liked best about these American seductions was not the exchange of salivas and juices but the post-coitus, the ritual cigarettes and the standing around in the kitchen rummaging up something to eat, their exploited genitals lit up by the sudden glow of the refrigerator, its polychrome wealth of beer cans, yogurt cups, frozen vegetables, packets of cheese and luncheon meats and other good bottled, wrapped, and encapsulated things. The young Communists, like any frat, kept a sweet, starchy, and spotty larder. To Hakim, reared on nuts 8: and porridges, this gentle, naked pecking after food-Esme-ralda concocted herself a sandwich of peanut butter and marshmallow fluff-savored of home and soothed the acerb aftereffects of the tragic act of love. She had had no climax, and he had been distracted by the giant red poster of Lenin, goateed and pince-nezed, staring upwards with the prophetic fury of a scholar who has just found his name misspelled in a footnote. "She ain't even taught you how to screw," Esmer-alda said, pleased to have an additional score on Candy, and depressing her lover with the hint that their fornication, in such romantic surroundings, had been merely an extension of a propaganda campaign. To an extent, it worked; he looked more kindly upon Marx thereafter, as Marx, from a poster on the other wall, grandfatherly and unfoolable, had looked kindly down upon the heaving buttocks of the future Ellellou.

    The time had come for them to leave the caravan. The flinty passes had widened and the Massif now tipped downwards toward the highlands of Zanj and, weeks to the northeast, the southwest corner of Egypt. We thanked Sidi Mukhtar with a purse of hundred-still pieces. Feeling that our relationship, though extended in time, had been less close emotionally than it might have been, I confided that I and my beautiful bride (as amorous, I further confided in coarse Berber, as she was shapely) had peeked into some of the caravan's cases and discovered their unexpected contents. His grin displaying the rift between his front teeth, and lifting a pearl-sized wart nestled in the flange of one nostril, our leader explained the eventual destination of the office supplies: Iran. "The Shahanshah," he said, "has much wish to modernize. In his hurry he buy typewriters from West Germans and paper from Swedes and then discover only one type spool fit type- writer, only one type eraser not smudge paper.

    American know-how meanwhile achieve obsolescence such that only fitting spool stockpiled in Accra as aid-in-goods when cocoa market collapse.

    Formula of typewriter eraser held secret and cunning capitalists double, redouble price when Shah push up oil price to finance purchase of jet fighters, computer software, and moon rocks.

    French however operating through puppet corporations in Dahomey have secured formula as part of multi-billion-franc deferred-interest somatic-collateral package and erect eraser factory near gum arabic plantations. Much borax also in deal, smuggled by way of Quagadougou. Now Sadat has agreed to let goods across Nile if Shahanshah agrees to make anti-Israeli statement and buy ten thousand tickets to son-et-lumiere show at Sphinx."

    I did not believe the rogue's garbled story, but deemed it prudent to suppress my doubts.

    Instead, I repeated our appreciation of his rejela (valor) and dhiyafa (hospitality), said that his skill at navigating through the perils of the Balak argued a pious intimacy with the purposes of Allah, and, by way of parting compliment, confided, "Unbeknownst to you, you have been transporting, in the guise of two mendicant musicians, the President of Kush and one of his First Ladies. Je suis Ellellou." u

    Je sais, je sais"

    Sidi Mukhtar responded out of his bag of tongues, his face in merriment twitching like the skin of a sand lizard just emerged from his hole. "Otherwise, I kill. We see Benzi following us before mountains become too bad. Super car, gives ride free of sway."

    "Why would you have killed me?" It is perhaps part of my inheritance from the communally tender, multi-generational, intra-supportive village of my upbringing to be always astonished that any real harm lurks in the world.

    The third component of Sidi Mukhtar's personality, his sirge (thievishness), shuffled cheerfully to the fore. He answered me, "To sell Madame to the Yemenis.

    Good posh black girls, with correct long neck and hollow back, very hard to come by. Only shoddy slaves come on market now. Mostly drug addicts from bourgeois European families, decadent riffraff looking for security.

    Yemenis, Saudis need intelligent slaves, to operate electrical appliances."

    Here, too, I doubted the mercantile tall tale, and distrusted the note of socialist snobbery he had injected, presumably to please me. His men loaded our camels with sacks of dried dates and sloshing skins of water. We exchanged farewells: my "Allah Ma'ak" for his "Aghrub 'Anni."

    The caravan, our home for these moons, shuffled, clanked, and sighed its way out of sight, as the tepid dawn washed away the shadows of the night and, with them, the stars. An hour later, we discovered that the villain had given us not water in our zemzimayas but wine, which our religion forbade us to drink, though from its bouquet it was a fair vintage; a lot of sturdy Bordeaux found its way into our trade routes, brought back to Dakar in the peanut-oil tankers as ballast.

    Glimpses of rock doves led us upwards and leftwards, into a porous region of caves. At this height color crept back, first by way of iridescent hints in the birds" feathers, next in the rainbow-shimmer on the oil-smooth face of an overhanging rock. We passed through pastel moments much as Esmeralda and I had paced a gallery of neon auras on the way to our betrayal of pale Candace. Sheba rode a camel of the coveted azrem shade-a pinkish eggshell, dun toward the tail and white in the huge eyelashes that fringed the iris of glacial blue. My own steed was a mud-brown gelding with a worrisomely depressed hump and a nagging habit of clearing his throat. The pads of their feet, evolved for the erg's slipping sands, split on the rocky trails, and as the days wore on we often dis- mounted and walked beside them, winding our way upwards, led by the bubbling coo of coral-footed doves. The geology was strange. Certain summits appeared to have been molded by a giant, ill-tempered child, finger-furrows distinct and some petrified depressions holding the whirling ridges of what seemed a thumbprint. The terrain felt formed by play, of an idiotic sort that left no clues to the logic of the game. A frozen bulbousness-double-dip, Reddi-Whip accumulations of weathered lava topped by such gravitational anomalies as natural arches and big boulders balanced on smaller comgave way to cleavages and scree as geometrically finicking as the debris of a machinist's shop. Amid these splits and frolicsome tumblings, caves abounded; where the caves multiplied, so did the paintings left by the mysterious happy herdsmen and hunters of the Green Sahara. Centuries of calm sunlight had not faded their sheltered ochres and indigos. Wild buffalo bore between their horns little round marks like shrunken halos; their hunters were depicted with skins the color of oranges and enlarged heads round as the helmets of space travellers. In a deep cave a galloping goddess, daintily horned, a shower of grain between her antennae like static, rose to the domed ceiling, carrying up with her the steatopy-gial silhouettes of naked mortals, running also, overlaid and scattered like leaves in agitation slipping from a tree. Brown, gray, custard, pepper, cinnamon: the colors of our African cookery depicted, with the primitive painter's numinous, nervous precision, the varieties of cattle, as the herding culture replaced the hunting. These very herds, no doubt, had helped turn the grassland from green to tan, to dust, to nothing.

    Sheba, gaunt now as a ballerina, her sumptuous costume in tatters from which color had forever fled, her intricate necklaces of lapis lazuli and jasper and of coral from a shore where milk-warm waves lapped life into quivery barnacles fallen bit by bit along our way, wanted to stay in a cool dim cave, and die. We had drunk the sardonic wine on the second day, blaspheming against our bodies, and had vomited accordingly. The dried fruit stuck in our throats like ash; her dear tongue was swollen like the body of a frog in the dried mud of an exhausted water hole; she spoke indistinctly, but I understood her to say that she was dizzy, and that her skull had a sun of pain in it. Begging her to rise and stumble another kilometer forward with me, stooping down and with my own depleted strength tugging at her resistless limbs, I thought of all the women I had led into such a wilderness, a promised green land of love that then had turned infertile, beneath the mono-maniacal eye of my ambition, my wish to create a nation, to create a nation as a pedestal for myself, my pathetic self.

    The whites of her eyes, rolling upwards in a delirious faint, had become an astonishing golden color, as in the hollow head with which a mummified Pharaoh is helmeted for his space-flight, the golden eyes inset with onyx irises that have been stolen.

    "Do it to me, baby, do it, do it," I crooned, to tease her back to life, to bring her back from mummification into the moist full skin of the girl I had met strolling the alleys of Istiqlal, her svelte jaws methodically chewing uppers and downers, kola and khat, her ear pressed to a transistor radio tuned to the perfidious pop-rock stations of Brazzaville, the same Flus Haute Quarantine over and over. I had been in the disguise of a gum-seller, little packets of Chiclets that sold two for a lu, or for a kiss in lieu of that. At the first touch of her lips I knew Sheba had the mouth for me. Now those satin cushions, the upper even more generously stuffed than the lower, were split, the skin at the edges of the split blackened as if deliberately singed, and the pale inner lining, next to her gums, blued by the onset of cyanosis.

    "My... Lord," she pronounced. "Divorce ... me."

    "Never," I said, and managed to work her limp body onto my shoulders. I carried her from the cave to the camels, who were waiting with that impeccable poise of their species, conserving their inner resources. But as I dropped her diminished weight across the embroidered saddle cloth of her beautiful azrem mount, the creature died. It did not even keel over, but held in death its sitting position; the head on its long neck simply rested on the rocky trail, and twisted gently as the muscles relaxed.

    Its albino lashes lowered like drawgates.

    Was this the end?

    Never, I repeated to myself. All of the nubile women in our land of Kush, above the lowest social stratum, carry a dagger with which to stab their own hearts if their honor is compromised, ere the rapist can work his will.

    My mother, alas, had had no such implement, but Sheba did. I plucked it, its blade of Damascus steel and handle of polished chalcedony, from the bindings of her bosom and cut open the dead camel's stomach, so we could drink the brackish green water secreted there. With this liquid I called Sheba back to life; she shuddered and wept, and as her strength returned cursed me in the astonishingly vile language which flows so easily from the lips of even the prettiest of the younger generation.

    As she gave out these signs of restored vitality, I loaded our baggage onto our surviving camel, my mud-colored mount, with his housemaid's knees and smoker's hack. He accepted Sheba's weight- Takbtr!- and I shuffled beside them on foot.

    Vistas loomed, through clefts and apertures worn by wind erosion, of a hazed sea of sand so far below us as to be another planet; the prospect was westward, to the Ippi Rift Valley that runs north and south through the center of my great land. Closer to our eyes, petrophagous lichen silvered the relative damp of some shadows, and an inverted dwarf species of thornbush (alhagi inversum) adorned the underside of ledges. The quality of the rock-paintings, too, was subtly changing; daubed ground ochre and charcoal paste gave way to a furry, swirling technique of primary colors sprayed from a can. Swastikas, stylized genitals, and curious forms involving circles attached to crosses or arrows or circumscribing a kind of airplane replaced the magical representations of Green Sahara's vanished animists. Some of the hieroglyphs could be read: Rockets, Class of '55, Gay Is Good, Revolucion Ahora, Quebec Libre, Helter Skelter, Fat City. The letters of this last were themselves fat; this style was prevalent. Many of the inscriptions had been overlaid: the simple sign STOP had been amended to STOP WAR and then an anti-pacifist had scratched out the S. Some inviting surfaces were muddy with a mad tangle of colors, defying all decipherment, even if Sheba and I had had the stomach for it, which we did not. For our drink of camel bile had turned our bowels queasy. She had become the gray of the cardboard that stiffens a fresh ream of paper. I too, at this oxygen-scant altitude, under the vertical gaze of noon, on this leaden planet, could go on no farther. We half-toppled, half-crawled into the scribbled mouth of a cave, that seemed to be the entrance, a kind of kiosk, to a subterranean system in whose depths, unless my senses of smell and hearing betrayed me, cold flowers were being sold and pinball was being played.

    The camel accompanied us inside, and was the first to fall asleep. Then Sheba succumbed to oblivion, her head, that little snug sack of loyalty, resting on my arm. The green demon of nausea churning within kept me from sleeping instantly; as my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw that our shelter and, it seemed likely, tomb had once been a bower of love, and still was love's memorial. Tex loves Rita, a wall opposite proclaimed, and from this same wall, and those adjacent, the names of many more thronged like clouds of the damned to my attention, not all of them written in the flatfooted alphabet Roman imperialism marched through Europe, but many in our own incomparably dancing Arabic script, and some in the chunky formations of St. Cyril, the flowerets of lower-case Greek, Asia's busy bamboolike brushstrokes, and the staring, rectilinear symbols of Tiffinagh, that traces Tamachek onto the sand. So many names, so much love, so many cries uttered on the verge of la petite morte, so much sperm; my stomach sickened, and the blood ebbed from my head. But before I lapsed, in tune with Sheba's breathing, into the sleep that might be our last, I noticed, on a rock above her head this indelible legend: Happy loves Candy.

    "What did your father say?"

    "It's not as if he talks about you a lot, he doesn't. He used to ask a lot of questions, he was very interested in you. He thought you could tell him the secret, of how the blacks can be the way they are, of why they don't love this country the way he does."

    "His and theirs aren't the same country. They're as different as Heaven and Hell."

    "I know that, Happy, don't argue with me.

    I'm just trying to be him for a minute. My goodness, you're touchy these days."

    "Pre-partum blues," he suggested, in his lover's weary voice. The snow had melted, refroze, and finally receded for the last of the four times he would witness this beautiful North American relenting; their graduation approached.

    "And carping," Candy continued, unmollified. "At times you sound exactly like Esmeralda. Fucked her lately?"

    He said nothing. He realized that to assure her that he had not slept with Esmeralda after the occasion that Candy had, with the astonishing nose that white women have for infractions of their property rights, sniffed out and goaded him to confess, would be to repaint in newly vivid colors this baleful lapse, and to renew Candy's hyperbolic anger and grief. Her overreaction had baffled and then frightened him. He had tapped, all innocently, a source of passion, of human power, unknown to Africa. In the village, the bushes had every night quivered with casual pairings. He had taken Kadongolimi's many previous lovers into his arms along with her tattoos. The episode with Esmeralda had been painless, instructive, more healthful than another beer, and on the whole less intimate, in terms of penetration of his nervous system, than would have been a trip to her father the dentist. Really, Candy had punished him too severely for this walk through the snow; her copious tears over the event had dried to an unending sarcasm, a baring of fangs in her voice.

    These toubabs were indeed poison; he had less trouble believing, as W. D. Fard has proclaimed, that these blue-eyed animals, once engendered, had to be banished, a race of snarling, howling wolves, to the icy caves of Europe.

    Candy would get a wolvish look at the thought of his infidelity. Her lips would go parched; her eyes would turn lifeless, cold, and small. She would begin to talk about the sacrifices she had made for him.

    Her whole life had been ruined, it seemed, by the injection of his sperm. Yet, paradoxically, not a drop of that sperm must be spilled out of her body.

    She had rights. She had put herself in great social peril. She, she.

    She told him, "I can't trust you at all anymore. You two can sneak off into the bushes any time. You have such wonderful things in common. You both hate whites. You both have rhythm. I bet you talk about me, don't you? You call me pinktoes."

    "Please," he said, embarrassed for her.

    She did not notice this, in her zeal to embarrass him. "Don't you find her bony?" she asked. "And pedantic? And-well, dreary?

    So just barely middle-class? Think of her father, drilling all those teeth."

    "As opposed to glorious yours, selling all those policies."

    "Sneer at Daddy if you must, he'd do anything in the world for Mother and me. He'd kill for us, if he had to."

    "Or just for the pleasure of killing."

    Tears turned her eyelids pink. She set her arms stickily around his neck, proud of those tears, of her hot close breath. "Happy, this isn't us.

    What's gone wrong?"

    You have gone wrong. You must let go.

    He suppressed these words, patiently asking once more, "What did your father say, exactly?"

    "He was horrible," she sobbed. "Just horrible."

    Holding her, he was reminded of how, in an intermission of soldiering, he, a young husband not out of his teens, had held one of Kadongolimi's babies, that had been born while he was a year away, against his chest, and patted it to ease its colic, its inner demons, and this infant wished upon him had burped air; the women gathered around like a single-bodied black continuum had praised this little hiccup. So Candy now wanted to be praised for her sobs. "He said," she forced out, "he'd kill you if you tried to marry me."

    "Marry you? And what did you say to that, darling?"

    "I said"-a shudder, a big gulp, a sob, and then-"he couldn't stop us, we'd elope."

    In his sleep with Sheba, Ellellou rotated, his robes entangled beneath him and enfolding lumpy pockets of the white dust of the cave floor. He was aware through his dreams of these lumps and of her body, sunk in forgetfulness but now and then roused to rotate like his own, two carcasses turned on parallel spits, touching with a rustle, their hunger and thirst borne by shrivelled organs submerged beneath the reach of pain. Yet no submergence quite concealed from that mass of sporadic lights, colors, and linkages that was his immortal consciousness the fact of this proximate woman, her scent and sadness and the warm skin beneath her own robes, that had come through the Balak faded as by too scalding a wash. His sleeping brain acknowledged the certain graciousness of her accompanying him, though from the Marxist standpoint it could be maintained that she had no choice, it was accompany him or wander the streets as a waif of poverty. But what was this, this trek through silicon and starlight and now this death in a cavern strewn with condoms and Kleenexes and other sedimented evidences of love, but poverty? In Ellellou's sleep an arch of pity and sorrowful gratitude built itself from his beating heart to this his rib, his mate, enclosing as in a crypt Sheba's body, her yielding lips, her blue-black brow smooth and round as a dome of tile. Then a scent of vodka was at his nostrils, and water was at his lips.

    "Prosnis , chernozhopyif" a Targui was shouting in my ear; and my first waking thought was that of course it must have been the Russians who stole the head of the king, for only they would have been so anthropologically obtuse within their own passionate, isolate culture and prodigious territories as not to know that the Tuareg were the traditional enemies of Wanjiji, holding the riverine kingdom in thrall when they were strong, retreating back into the desert when they were weaker. The Tuareg could not help but regard us as slaves, and we them as devils, devils from the desert, howling like the harmattan, their mouths masked because they had no jaws, just gaping throats that spewed vile yells and cruelty. These Tuareg succoring me had their mouths and noses swaddled; nothing showed but their wolvish pale eyes, and their muffled voices.

    "Eta chernaya pizda nichevo zhivchik, a?"

    "Spokoino, u nikh u vsekh sifilis."

    They muttered as if I had no ears. One of them wore steel-rimmed spectacles; when his comrades noticed I was awake, he began to address me in his slurred Iraqi Arabic and, his vocabulary failing, his sloshy French. "Rise up, Mr.

    President!" he cried through the haze of languages. "You are near the end of your journey! The path has been made easier!

    Vive Kush!

    Vive le peuple et la fraternite socialiste et islamique! tlcrase Pinfdme capitaliste, monopolise, et tres, tres decadent!"

    Several Tuareg women, their naked faces impassive, the wrists and ankles dyed blue, were laving Sheba's feet and re-braiding her hair; though my dear girl flickered toward me a feeble smile, her eyes, under a helpless pressure, kept closing, the lids freshly anointed with antimony.

    It was true, the upward path had been made easier. The steepness declined, as the summit neared, and an asphalt strip, wide enough for a golf cart, with green-painted pipe railings on the side of a precipitous falling-off, had been engineered where the natural trail might have seemed impassably rugged. Yellow signs advised Falling Rock and Oryx Crossing, and others advertised our growing closeness to the Oracle's Cave, to La Tete Qui Parle, to MaB3OJ-IEII 3ayMy HeTB-EPTORO. My old brown baggage camel, who had been fed a barrel of Ukrainian millet (or could it have been Nebraska sorghum?), fairly danced on his threadbare legs as he bouncingly bore along the sumptuous little body of Sheba, who had been slipped a few kola nuts and was chewing through a high. I felt, as one does after too deep a sleep, uncaught-up with myself: the physical half hurried along to expectancy's accel- erated heartbeat, while the spiritual man loitered behind in a fog, groping for the reason for his shadowy, guilty sensation of something undone, of something disastrous due. The path, briskly engineered through the rose-colored cliffs and abysses, was crossed by a newly built funicular railway; the crossing-marking, X, reminded me of something unpleasant I have always wanted to forget.

    "You are crazy," Oscar X firmly, patiently stated, as if reciting a memorized speech. "You are what the Messenger terms a black man with a white man's head. Man, you are sad. You are evil and you are sad. I wash my hands of you. I wish to wipe you from my mind.

    And la a'rifuka.

    The Nation of Islam is one thousand per cent opposed to what you are undertaking. The mixture of the races is a crime against purity. The Word of God unambiguously proclaims, sooner a black man mate with a lazy shit-smeared sow or the female of the alligator species than entrust his ebony penis to the snatch of a white devil mare."

    Felix imagined in the floridity of this indictment a simultaneous undercutting, a self-mocking. But he detected no humor or mercy in Oscar's face.

    People when they go behind the curtain of a creed become unknown. He said, "You know Candy. You like her."

    "I have tolerated her," Oscar said. "But I have not liked her. She is the offspring of the stock that has enslaved us, that spits on us whenever it chooses. This woman has spit upon you, and you don't have the mother wit to wipe your fucking face." He sipped his Ovaltine and came up with a scummy lip.

    Barry Little tried to help, telling Felix, "She was raised too clean. She needs to get down into it, but doesn't want to get real dirt on herself. So she tells herself a story in the dark. In her mind, you are the pimp and the customers both. That's a way these upper-class sheltered girls get their kicks, it's nothing personal in regards to you.

    Make it personal and permanent, that would be a big mistake. I'm not saying white and black can't live together, they got to, this separate black nation old Elijah Poole keeps plugging is fantastical purely.

    But in this particular case, of you and little Miss Cunningham, I'm saying that would be one fantasy on top of another. You don't know America, and she don't know Africa."

    "Perhaps we know each other."

    "You know each other in the dark," Barry said. "Out in the light, what do you see? Her momma's a washrag and her daddy's a redneck who'd fry your ass if he could find the button. Kiss her good-bye, you'd be doing her a favor as well as yourself. I'm not talking black or brown, I'm trying to talk to you straight. If you and she were both green in color, I'd have my doubts about the personalities."

    "No such thing as color blind," Turnip Schwarz interposed. "No such thing."

    Esmeralda said indignantly, "You're all talking to this boy as though he had a choice. Any choice he ever had he threw away. He's been hustled. He's in over his head and can't say No now."

    "Just get on the plane to Timbuctoo, the way to say No," Turnip said.

    Felix felt hemmed in, shoved, in the businesslike American manner. He resented their attempt to pry him open and meddle in the fate he was nurturing within; he could not explain to them how delicately all the truths they advanced were built into his plan, were included in the sprawling, devious budget that in the end would balance. It was true, Candy had come upon him and was sweeping him along; but we can propel ourselves only a little way out of ourselves and for the rest must play with the forces beyond us that impinge. He gazed steadily at Oscar and said, "I have been reading the Book of Books, as the Messenger advises.

    Women are your fields: go, then, into your fields as you please."

    Oscar blinked, and quoted back: "You shall not wed pagan women, unless they embrace the faith. A believing slave-girl is better than an idolatress, although she may please you."

    "Jesus preserve us," Esmeralda breathed. Candy had come in at the door of the luncheonette; even at a distance, through the smoke and jangle, the future Ellellou could see she had been crying. More trouble with her parents, or Craven, or some other white spokesmen. She came toward their black table timidly now, sensing that here too she was abhorred. Yet in honor of spring she had put on a forsythia-yellow sweater and a pleated white skirt. Felix lifted from his chair as a tide toward the moon.

    Oscar X stood up angrily. "I will not contaminate myself any longer," he stated so all could hear, hisby consorting with mongrel clowns and lackeys of the doomed devil-race." To Felix he said, again with the precision of something rehearsed, u L'anatu Allahi "alayka."

    He walked out, taking with him Temple Two and Temple Three, the joyful car rides together, the Brotherhood. His curse Felix felt as a blast of heat upon his face, the heat whose first wave had been, in infancy, the absence of his father. He felt this heat as Allah. Allah is the essential seriousness of things, their irreversibility. Our friends all die to us, some before we are born.

    Let us step back a moment, onto the spongy turf of psycho-historical speculation. There was in our young hero (not so young as he appeared to his clamorous advisers; by 1958 he was going on twenty-six) an adsorptive chemical will that made him adhere to just those surfaces that would have repelled him: he took away from the United States not only the frightened body of Candy Cunningham in a blue linen suit but the Nation of Islam, internalized as a certain shade of beige idealism mixed of severity, xenophobia, decency, and isolation. As New World immigrants preserve in their ethnic neighborhoods folk dances and items of cuisine that in the old country have become obsolete, so Ellellou held to a desiccated, stylized version of the faith that meanwhile failed for Oscar X, who fell away in the mid-Sixties, when the scandals of the Messenger's sexual strayings (not one but two secretaries pregnant!) unfolded to a bloody climax in the gunning-down of his schismatic Chief Minister Malcolm in New York City, on West 166th Street. So the Nation of Islam was just another gangland after all. In the strength of his disillusion Oscar became a trainee with the Chicago police, and with unfeigned enthusiasm helped bop long-haired protester heads at the 1968 Democratic Convention, at the same time as his repudiated brother was fomenting the revolution that overthrew Edumu IV and brought Islamic socialism to Noire, renamed Kush.

    Now the path was continuously paved, and littered with bits of paper-torn tickets and Popsicle wrappers. The pigeons were thick about us, throbbling and strutting in their streetwise self-importance, too full of crushed Fritos and dropped popcorn to flutter away. The first people we saw were Chinese-a small close flock of official visitors, in their blue-gray many-pocketed pajamas, their mass-produced wire-frame spectacles (no doubt of identical prescription) resting on the fat of their cheeks as they smilingly squinted up from their guidebooks toward something on high we could not yet see. We had come upon them around a corner and, as if the dusty spectacle of the disguised President and his delectable, stoned consort on foot and camelback respectively had been organized for them as an additional local wonder, they obligingly switched, in a unified motion, their twinkling attention full upon us.

    These tourists appeared amazed when the weary camel plodded straight toward them, rippling his upper lip contemptuously, forcing them to break formation and crowd to the sides of the path. They joked among themselves in their curious pitch-chirping.

    How had these Confucians come here? The question was answered by the next turn in the path, which revealed a parking lot blasted from the outcroppings and holding six or seven large tourist buses, some striped like zebras and others spotted like giraffes.

    Emblazoned on their sides was the name of a Zanj tourist agency, the same which in other directions exposed to the stupefied gaze of aliens, through smoky-blue windows that bathed our Africa in perpetual twilight, the oceanic herds of the Tanzanian grasslands, Lalibela's cathedrals carved from solid rock, the inexhaustible salt quarries of the Danakil Depression, and what other bleak marvels were exploitable in this continent whose most majestic feature is the relative absence of Man. To such buses the Zanj border was not far away, and evidently the entrepreneurs found no insurmountable obstacle there. I must create one. "I will close the border," I confided to Sheba. "This is an atrocity."

    "I think it's an improvement," she said languidly, from within her trip. "Can I have another lemonade?"

    We had patronized a refreshment stand manned by a detrib-alized Djerma, offering beverages in all bubbling colors. "The delicate ecology of the Balak," I told her, "is being devastated."

    "There's lots left," she pointed out.

    "One germ can kill a giant," I explained to her, vowing, "I'll have old Komomo's hide for this."

    Wamphumel Komono, President-for-Life of Zanj: height six foot six, weight three hundred seventy pounds. He wore (and still wears, but for my own peace of mind let this description be consigned to the past tense) garish robes so intricately worked each sleeve cost a seamstress her sight and a crown that consisted of a cheetah's snarling skull, gilded.

    Worse, he was a flirt. The British had taught him this. They had flirted with him by capturing him when he was a guerrilla leader, placing him in prison, scheduling his execution, and then, when the rising tides of freedom forced them to decamp, suddenly installing him as President, in return for his promise not to expel the white settler community from the fertile highlands and along the little seacoast. The shape of Zanj reached out to include its miserable Red Sea port like a child touching wet paint while looking the other way. The bulk of Zanj was as infertile, unprofitable, and stately as Kush. But old Komomo, with his picturesque regalia of catskins, ornamental welts, and medals from the lesser European armies, tirelessly flirted with the international community, inviting the Americans in to build him a desalination plant and then expelling them, inviting the Russians in to train his air force and then expelling them, milking even the Australians and the post-Sukarno Indonesians for their dollop of aid, their stretch of highway, their phosphate refinery, or mile-high broadcasting antenna.

    Now his pets were the Chinese, who were building him a railway from his nasty little port to the preposterous new capital he had ordained in the interior, Komomo-glorifying Zanjomo, its street-plan cribbed from Baron Haussmann, its government buildings based on photos of forgotten World Fairs, its central adornment a mock-heroic bronze stalagmite bearing Komomo's shifty features in imitation of Rodin's Balzac and likely to survive the model's death for one week, by which time the old nepotist's competing sons-in-law will have melted it down for bullets.

    Not a tuck in his patriarchal robes ungarnished by private gain, which he extracted from the toubab corporations as blithely as his forebears the cannibal chiefs extracted bongo from the Arab slavers, Komomo flirted moreover with all the elements within his country, appearing in ostrich feathers in a veldt village and a hardhat in a magnesium mine, placating the Africa Firsters by taxing the Indian shopkeepers and placating the Asian community with public readings from the Upan-ishads, balancing his denunciations of Ian Smith and the still-exclusivist Zanj Athletic Club with frequent photographs of himself embracing some visiting devil or local "landowner" and "business leader," touting with scrupulously equal decibels the "tribal integrity" of "our great African masses" and the "total impartiality" of "our color-blind Constitution." The American press loved this artful clown; in their rotogravures he looked like a negative print of Santa Claus. Now he was flooding my purified, penniless but proud country with animalistic buses stuffed full of third-echelon Chou Shmoes, German shutterbugs, British spinsters, bargain-seeking Bulgarians, curious Danes, Italian archaeologists, and trip-crazed American collegians bribed by their soused and adulterous parents to get out of the house and let capitalism collapse in peace-all to see a dead head in the dead center of the Bad Quarter.

    At the next turn of the path, as the bridle burned in my hands, so hard was it being tugged by my pack camel in the frisky throes of restored vitality, I could see a polychrome, polyglot little mob gathered at the mouth of what must be the cave. It looked artificial, but badly made, like a department-store window display, besprinkled with greenish glitter-dust. It is said that God, as he created these mountains of the Balak, worked in haste.

    It is also said that the royalty of Kush, chased from Meroe by the Christian hoards of Axum, may have come this way, constructing as they went cities scarcely distinguishable from the rocks. Or perhaps-a third possibility comthe unsubtle Soviets, having selected this as the site from which to broadcast slander against the incorruptible President of Kush, had with their usual heavy hand engineered the locale to resemble one of those concrete medleys of domes and parapets that speak to their huddling hearts.

    One of Dr. Frederic (without the k, yes) Craven's courses in the Government Department of McCarthy College was "U. s. vs. USSR: Two Wayward Children of the Enlightenment."

    Another course was "Plato to Pound: Totalitarianism as the Refuge of Superior Minds." There was a sardonic touch, too, to his seminars: "Bureaucratic Continuity During Political Crises" studied, with use of original documents, phenomena such as the adjudication of misdemeanors and traffic fines during the French Revolution and mail delivery during the American War Between the States.

    "Weak or Strong?: The Presidency from Fillmore to the Second Harrison" took the paradoxical position that American history would have been much the same if the opponents of these Chief Executives had been elected instead, and that the average man fared better under Pierce and Grant than under Lincoln. He also taught the only course that touched upon the darkest continent: "The Persistence of the Pharaonic Ideal in the Sudanic Kingdoms from 600 to 1600 a.d." Felix and Candace took this course together; their shoulder-rubbing proximity during lectures gave the lecturer pain. Candy was one of Craven's "pets." In that sinister way of American intellectual men, he had grown handsomer with age, his boyishly gaunt figure filling out without ceasing to be essentially youthful; kept tendony by tennis and tan by sailing through September on the cerulean, polluted surface of Lake Timmebago, he had created in time a kind of vertical harem of undergraduate mistresses, whom graduation disposed of without his even having to provide a dismissive dowry. Candy, apparently, in some interstice or worn spot of her harassed liaison with the future Ellellou, had placed herself among Craven's concubines, and had renewed the relationship when the young African-understandably, to all but her-had waffled or responded sluggishly to her female call for a "commitment" that translated into elopement, bigamy, and for all he knew, American arrest and incarceration. One warm day deep in the reign of Dwight Eisenhower, Craven invited the black student to his office, a cozy cave lined with leaning gray government manuals and smelling of the peculiarly sweet pipe smoke it was one of Craven's vanities to emit. He offered Felix a low seat on his Naugahyde seducer's couch but the youth, his manner stiff with a wary dignity, took instead a hard straight chair whose seat, all but the edge, was loaded with blue exam booklets.

    End of term was at hand.

    "Hakim Felix," the professor began, evidently imagining this mode of address was swankily parallel to use, in Russian, of the patronymic, "let me begin by confessing some slight disappointment in your exam. You had the facts down pat, but, if I may say so, you seemed to show less gut feeling for the African ethos than some of the middle-class white kids in the course.

    Miss Cunningham, for instance, wrote an essay on kinship that damn near made me cry."

    The student perched still farther forward on the overburdened chair. "Africa is large," was the best excuse he could offer for his curious failure. "Also, the French did not encourage our ethos, they were intent upon inculcating their own.

    "Well," Craven briskly conceded, sucking lip-smackingly upon his pipestem, releasing a blue wraith of saccharine alter-ego, "far be it from me to out-African an African. There was nothing strictly wrong, just my nebulous sense of something missing."

    "Perhaps that is the very African ingredient."

    Craven closed his pale, rather too mobile lips upon the amber of his pipestem. He did not relish fancy thinking not his own. "I asked you in, though, not to talk about that but to wish you well, really. Can you tell me your plans, Felix?"

    "I plan to return, sir. The U.S. immigration officials have never been happy with my status here, though the college has been most liberal and supportive. In Noire, King Edumu, placed back on his throne-placed, I should say strictly, on a throne he never before occupied-in the wake of Guy Mollet's loi-cadre proclamation two years ago, has instituted a policy of amnesty toward political criminals under colonialism. And now that de Gaulle has offered the territories either internal autonomy with assistance or complete autonomy without, I think a new era is even more decisively under way, and I will be able to rejoin the military, and serve the new nation, without fear."

    "There is no politics without fear," Craven said, "as there is no organization without coercion.

    However, I wish y out well. Have you no fear, may I ask, of having lost touch, these four years, with the realities of your own people?"

    "As your examination suggests I have. I do not know.

    My guess is, America will fade for me as even the most intense dreams fade, and in any case the realities of my people are not static, but in the process of transformation. Perhaps I can help create new realities."

    "Perhaps." The pipe came into even more elaborate play, the amber stem pointing this way and that as Craven knocked, blew into, and rapidly reamed this little instrument of pleasure.

    "Will America fade, I wonder, so rapidly if you take a piece of it with you? A living piece.

    You know to whom I refer."

    "I do, and assume your concern is for my political future. Rest easy, I beg you.

    The new President of Sahel, a poet of sorts, has for wife a mignette from Lyons. The mighty Sulie-man, as you well know, made his queen Roxelana, a consort of Russian blood paler than even the lovely strawberry-blond Mrs. Craven, to whom I hope you will forward my parting regards."

    "I will," he said, in unwilled echo of his broken wedding vows.

    "Surely," the student meekly persisted, "distinctions in tint of skin have no priority in the world that my professors, you foremost, have taught me must be welded into one, lest the nuclear holocaust transpire. I have come here in innocence, anxious to learn, and part of my American experience has been to fall in love; how could it have been otherwise? This is the land where love is broadcast with the free hand of Johnny Appleseed."

    "Be that as it may"-one of Craven's favorite phrases, while he searched for his place in the lecture-"in the instance I have in mind, sentimental exogamist though I am bound to be, I can see, frankly, little good. The female is spoiled, neurotic, headstrong, and too young to know her own mind. You are older, a man of some experience, though I sometimes wonder if your experiences as you describe them do not partake of the fabulous. Why could you not be, for example, an American from, say, Detroit, who affects a French accent and the prissy African manner? That would explain why, in your examination, you showed so little feel for the, shall we say, heart of the matter."

    "Might it be the instructor who lacks the feel?

    Africa is not only log drums and sand dunes; we have cities, we have history, which you proposed to teach. We have languages, more than any other continent. We are a melting pot that will not boil over with the addition of one more female Caucasian. I think in your intelligence you have made an idea of blackness; when you look at me, you see an idea, and ideas do not talk back, ideas do not lust for the unlikely, ideas do not carry away the professor's-what do they say, in comic books?- 'date bait." his "You speak as though you are the abductor. The impression I gather from your friends, mon bon Felix, is that you are the abducted."

    "If by my friends you mean Esmeralda and Oscar, they have their own points of view, their own reasons for jealousy and malice. I cannot really see why you are bothering to hector a student on the subject of his personal life. If you have a claim to exert over Miss Cunningham, or a proposal to make to her alternative to mine, then do so; otherwise, let her join in silence the ranks of your lovely one-time students."

    "Your welfare concerns me as well as Candy's."

    "Let me ask you this: were I a Swiss or a Swede or even a pale-skinned Tibetan, would you be so concerned? Would you, even if you were, presume to call me in, like some shoeshine boy who has applied the wrong color polish?"

    "I resent your implication. I have friends of every race; I was a vocal supporter of the civil rights movement long before it became fashionable. I am a charter member of the Franchise Fair Housing Committee. The fact that you and she are black and white is not the issue. Your education here has been an utter waste if you imagine that it is."

    "My education here has been strange," Felix told Craven, contemplating with loathing the toubab's dry, prematurely gray hair; his soft broad lips like two worms bloodless and bloated; his complacent, ever youthful eyes. This man, the African thought, sails on the black waters of the world's suffering; the future Ellellou announced, "Your warnings about myself and Candy are not altogether foolish. Nevertheless, I will take her with me."

    "Why on earth?"

    "Two reasons at least. Because she wishes it, and because you do not. She has asked to be rescued, to be lifted from the sickly sweetness of her life in this sickening-rich country and replanted in an environment less damaged. Though you would all, black and white, deny her this, I will grant it. I will grant her freedom, in the style of your heroes, with their powdered hair and rouged faces, the Founding Fathers; Liberty or Death is the slogan you fling from your ivied fortress, your so-called Department of Government; I fling it back, demonstrating that your instruction has not been entirely wasted upon me. I thank you, Professor Craven. Good luck in your Cold War, your battle against Sputnik. Good luck in your magnificent campaign of seduction of ignorant virgins, so as to avoid looking into the ravishing eyes of the loyal, sorrowing Mrs. Craven."

    Craven's white face had gone whiter, realizing through the sweetish pipesmoke that he was closeted with a demagogue. The dictator, remembering the incident, one of a number of better-forgotten run-ins obstructing his departure with Candy from America, realized that Craven (who had given him, in petty retaliation for this interview, on a postcard that took seven months to arrive in the then Caillieville, a B- for the course) had somewhat resembled the martyred Gibbs.

    The Kush International Airport, a single runway east of Also-Abid, shimmers like a mirage amid the whistling-thorn. The tires of planes touching down frequently explode from the heat. Zebu, before the drought reduced the herds to hides and bones, were a sometime hazard. Now, the government has erected a two-meter aluminum fence to protect incoming visitors from the squalid, disease-infested emergency camps of refugee pastoralists from the deserted savanna. The glinting fence and the riveted wings of the Air Kush 727 and the great metallic sheet of cloudless sky contracted to pained pinpricks the pupils of the two Americans disembarking and exchanging greetings with the three-person welcoming committee: an oval-faced young Fula wearing a fez; a shorter plumper older African affecting Italian shoes, an English suit in the flared mod cut, and a wristwatch without a face; and a fetching if slightly stocky Sara woman accoutered in seersucker and secretarial half-glasses resting on her bosom, hung from a wildebeest-hair cord about her neck. Had the encounter been witnessed by an interested observer (instead of by the indifferent, wraithlike mechanics in sagging gray coveralls drifting through the haze of hunger, heat, and jet fuel fumes) he might have deduced that a reunion among long-separated kin had been effected. In truth, there was a similarity between the effusive welcomers and the greedily welcomed, though the former were solid black and the latter all-American. There were two, a man and a woman.

    The woman was blond, not in the flaxen way of Candy but brassily, glintingly, with a tinge of tangerine; her peach-colored suit was too hot for this climate and a rose flush overspread her face in the first minute, before she was completely down the shimmering metal stairs. Shadows below her eyes, emphasized by dents near the bridge of her nose, testified to the fatigue of her just-endured journey and perhaps to her recently suffered grief. This was Angelica Gibbs, whom I had widowed. For all her fatigue, she gave off, in my vision of this encounter where I was absent, that American freshness which never ceased to delight my eyes on the McCarthy campus, that air of headlong progress, the uptilted chin cleaving gaily through the sub-arboreal shade, a freshness born of fearlessness born in turn of inner certainty of being justly blessed with health and love.

    She winced but would not wilt in the brightness of Kush- a constant lightning, an incessant noon. She shook hands with Ezana, Kutunda, and the (among his other titles) Acting Chairman of the Board of Tourism. Her manner was polite, timid, tired, tentative. Not so the manner of the man with her, a short plump man with heavy lids, liquid and lively brown eyes, a hairline mustache waxed to two thornlike points, and graying hair parted as centrally as his mustache. His limbs were short and his center of gravity seemed low, so that nothing could topple him, not even the uproarious embraces of Michaelis Ezana as the two joked like spiritual brothers at last corporally united, Klipspringer (for it was he) egging the hilarity on with his farcical Arabic and worse Sara. Kutunda was enchanted into guttural giggles by the apparition, out of the tinny-voiced telephone, of this magical man who had libraries in his pocket and who pretended the world was round as an orange. Mrs. Gibbs, her youthful face prematurely consigned to a widow's watchful sobriety, and the young Acting (among other responsibilities) Minister of the Interior, were the most reserved, but were willing, even they, to pin the enthusiasm of hope to this sun-swept intermingling, as the giant turbines of the 727 died, whined to a silence, and the less prestigious passengers-shabby Moroccan merchants carrying carpetbags, black chieftains as languidly scornful as rock stars, waxen-faced alcoholic Belgian mercenaries on their furtive way south, Japanese salesmen of telecommunication components, nationless agents of the hydrocarbon cartels, plump disaster bureaucrats from the UN, Jehovah's Witness missionaries from New Zealand, and other motes of the mer- cantile and messianic riffraff that has always drifted across the monotonously unanswered question our continent poses-poked their heads from the plane, squinted, and tumbled down the stairs.

    "Welcome to the People's Republic of Kush," said Ezana in his Oxonian English accent.

    "Looks like the country north of Vegas,"

    Klipspringer told him. "My sinuses feel better already. Washington's a freezing swamp this time of year." He spoke with the pith of memos.

    "God!" He rapturously inhaled. "Heaven!"

    He smoothed back his already smooth hair and beamed toward the aluminum fence, behind which children fought rats for morsels. There was no such thing as garbage in refugee camps.

    Klipspringer's black counterpart, as if dancing for his life, which in a way he was, for he had arranged this meeting on sufferance of my interim appointees, made expansive ushering gestures toward the black official Cadillac which had been specially borrowed from the running dogs of Sahel for the occasion. The Mercedes was shadowing me, and the old official Citroen had ceased to go up and down on its pneumatic springs and rattled worse than a Dahomey taxi.

    "In my country," Ezana told him, "there once were two seasons, dry and rainy. Now there is one."

    "Where is the poverty?" Mrs. Gibbs asked Kutunda.

    Kutunda looked toward Ezana to decipher the gibberish. "Nowhere," he prompted her in Sara.

    Presiding above this friendly confusion was the serene oval face and sleek fez of the Acting Co-ordinator of Forests and Fisheries, who now, having been rehearsed in some ceremonial English, bowed above the short, pink, hopeful, jet-lagged Americans and said with exquisite intonation, "Good-bye."

    "Hello, he means," Ezana interjected. "A greatly gifted administrator, a superb student of the Koran, but untrained in your language, which is an exotic one to most of our people."

    Hearing the word "Koran," this Chief of the Bureau of Transport amended his greeting, "Also-Salamu "Alaykum," and at the touch of these satin syllables Angelica Gibbs thrilled.

    Dear lady, why are you one of this quintet gathered, in the haze of my mind's eye, to make alliance against Colonel Ellellou, who wanders more kilometers away than there are footprints on the moon, seeking to isolate the germ of the curse on his land?

    Can he who follows the guidance of his Lord be compared to him who is led by his appetites and whose foul deeds seem fair to him?

    I "zero in" on your face, dear Mrs. Gibbs, you mother of fatherless sons, you trekker through endless supermarket aisles and gargantuan consumer of milk and gasoline. How can you hate me-me, a fatherless son? I am so little. Your face is vast; powder has silted into the pores; years have gently webbed your beauty; disillusion has subtly dimmed the once-blue lakes of your eye-whites, the sensitive black of your pupils; there is a girlish, anxious tousle to your hair. I want to hide amid its ruddy roots, from shame at having caused you distress, at having displaced your far-flung arrangements with the world, all the filaments of your careful socio-economic compromise at a blow wiped away. Your great face, conjured from afar by the mystery of your unctuous, scrambling husband's death, turns a moment, before eclipse within the shadows of the Cadillac, toward the miraculously blank Kushite sky; your face is then blanched by solar fury as well as fatigue, and I, your invisible enemy, see, beneath your lifted upper lip, halfway down one of your splendid American incisors, a tooth bared by a vagary of thought and incandescent in the sun, a speck, no bigger than a bi, no bigger than the dot on a hi, a speck of lipstick, a clot of blood.

    As, both on foot now, amid the lengthening shadows of the hour of sunset prayer, we moved upwards to the domed cave, Sheba surprised me by talking.

    "My lord, my husband: must this be?"

    "My dear Sheba, we have travelled to the verge of death so we may arrive at this point."

    "So you say; but perhaps the travelling, our hardships and our survival of them, was what was necessary for my lord's purpose: to purify his life and redeem his land."

    "If that were so, then rain would be falling."

    "Rain in the Balak would be empty noise on stone: perhaps beyond the southern horizon, where the savanna waits to be green again, rain falls."

    "When rain falls in Kush, my blood will know it."

    "My blood, too, talks. It tells me to be afraid."

    "What could my Sheba fear? Her President is with her, and the Mercedes follows always behind, with Mtesa and Opuku and their machine guns."

    "My President, I think," the girl said, her coiffure restored and her necklace resplendent yet the normal elastic sway of her walk still hobbled, as she made her way with bent, reluctant steps, "has no cause to fear. He does not love his life, and such men travel enchanted through the adventures they bring upon others. But I, I have not lived two decades, and am a woman, and my life is of the earth; though I have given my blood to the earth, it has not yet given me a child, and such peace as I have must come in the chewing of kola nuts and khat, and in the music which lifts one's soul a little free of sadness."

    "I am sorry you are sad. A thousand girls in Istiqlal would exult in the honor of your position."

    "The honor has been empty, but I embrace it still. My lord is the touch of Allah to me. Even when my tongue was so swollen I feared I would choke, I adored him. But here, amid these strangers, at the mouth of this artificial wonder, we enter an area of transgression. I wish I were back on the streets of Hurriyah, digging the scene and thinking of nothing."

    "You sense this is a trap. But I have no choice but to enter it. I am the key that must dare to lose itself in the lock."

    "Forgive me, but I do not fear for you, but for myself.

    That raid by the Tuareg, I was not so dazed I did not wonder if it was not for me they had come. And then those Tuareg that gave us water, I felt their lust.

    Our caravan driver said, the Yemenis are starving for slaves. I have value, else my lord would not have stolen me from the streets."

    Her shoulders gave a limp doleful shrug as I hugged her. "How foolish and conceited my little queen has become! Always thinking of herself! Anyway, the Yemenis keep their slaves now in little air-conditioned ranch houses, with kitchenettes, door chimes, and a rumpus room with a dartboard!"

    Yet, though I tried to tease her fear to nothing, her fresh self-expressiveness-her attempt to become an independently anxious and defensive individual-sexually excited me, so that, that night, my member, adamant as an adolescent's, penetrated the gently resistant darkness of a woman, troubled and palpable in her fear. My explosion of seed felt engendering, as her hips heaved to receive me deeper, on the oversoft, antiseptic motel bed, and then rolled, instantly, into sleep. For an hour, I caressed Sheba's shoulders, sheathed shoulder blades, and relaxed buttocks as if tenderly to seal a pledge into her body. Of the events that followed none more enduringly torments me than my never knowing if my instinct was correct, and whether or not a little Ellellou, wrinkled, innocent, and indignant, nine months later bubbled into this world's scorching atmosphere out of my fourth wife's beautiful blue-black loins.

    We had to spend the night because the cave was closed.

    Indeed we were lucky to find a room in the shabbily constructed tourists" lodge, with its paper-thin partitions and dubious desk clerk. As we had made the last turn on the golf-cart path through the lengthening lavender shadows, the matching frocks and mocking glances of a pack of Northern European schoolgirls poured past us on either side, and beyond them we saw a green steel grate inarguably drawn across the cave-mouth, saying Fermee, less-than jli*, 0, 3aKpirr. In smaller type beneath, we read, Ouvert A Heures 900-1200, 1400-1730.

    Billets d'entree 50 lu.

    At nine the next morning, therefore, having breakfasted at one of the concessionaire stands that had sprung up like fungi on the spot, vending croissants and caviar, teriyaki and chili, kebab and hot dogs from beneath a chorus of umbrellas, Sheba and I joined the polyglot, vacuously titillated crowd waiting for admission.

    Among its members I noticed Mtesa and Opuku, standing slightly apart in their uniforms, which appeared fresh. Under cover of the bustle as the green shutter-gate was slowly cranked upwards, and a clammy waft of cold air breathed from the mysteries within, I sidled up to Mtesa and asked, "How did you get the Mercedes up those gorges?"

    He stared at me almost impudently; he was growing a little mustache. "No need," he said. "Broad road up from plains. Well-marked, all tourist services. You came the scenic way."

    A bell rang, and the crowd pushed forward. Sheba clung to my side in the jostling, sudden darkness.

    Concrete stairs and ramps alleviated but did not entirely eliminate the treacherous unevenness of the cavern floor. Small spotlights illuminated noteworthy graffiti and, at one spot, a cluster of Silurian mollusc fossils whose sea bed had been gradually lifted into this arid altitude. The oracle was situated in an artfully framed recess; chains held back the curious from close inspection.

    La tete du roi, which as we stared slowly gathered to itself a greenish glow derived (i surmised) from the illuminatory expressionism of the Moscow Arts Theatre, seemed at first one more rough, cracked rocky protuberance among the many others that filled the recess like buds of subaqueous coral, like the polyps the electron microscope reveals in the smoothest matter. Then its details dawned.

    Edumu's head, so small in life, had grown larger in death. Its eyes were closed, its lips lax and drooping on one side, perhaps deformed by the force of its severance. I had never chopped off a head before, and one of the disappointments of the Tuareg capture had been my subsequent inability to check my craftsmanship. I had kept my wrists firm and paused at the top. The blow had felt smooth and well-angled, considering my state of nervous tension and the muscular inhibition it induces.

    A wreath of white cloth, reminiscent of the old king's lungi, enwrapped the sliced throat, and a kind of altar of Plexiglas demonstrated with its transparence that no body existed beneath the head. The head's expression was, well, drab. I was reminded of the dusty relics of grandeur in his cell, though the symbolic riband of gold on his Torehead took glitter from the rheostatted spotlight. His foolish ecstatic halo of wiry white wool had been tidied and diminished; undertakers never get the hair quite right. When Edumu's eyelids lifted, the crowd gasped and Sheba grasped my hand so hard I felt a metacarpal snap. The pain lost itself, however, in my wonder at the old king's shallow-backed eyes. The crazed pallor of the irises was unmistakably his, but these eyes saw.

    Rather than drifting skywards as they used to in our interviews, they focused out upon us-upon me, it seemed-levelly. Fighting down the vomitus of superstitious terror rising in my craw, I reasoned that in this detail the enemies of my state had forfeited credibility.

    The head's lips moved with the slight stiffness of an engine starting in the morning. "Patriotic citizens of Kush," it creakily addressed the rapt crowd, "there is great evil among you. A greatly evil man, whose name is known to you all, and whose face is known to few."

    He and I had chosen my name together, laughing, on an evening in the Palais when he thought the Revolution was a joke, and he would be released from detention when its first wave of bluster was by.

    "This man," the head continued, the mechanical action of its lips now uncannily corresponding to the drifting way Edumu had talked, as if a kind of wind blew in and out of his heart, "pretends to unite the multitudinous races and religions of Kush against the capitalist toubabs, the fascist Americans who carry forward the cause of international capitalism on behalf of the world's rapacious minority of blue-eyed white devils."

    Yes, his voice had slightly shifted, in the drafty chambers of my associations, to that of the Messenger, droning on softly in Chicago's Temple Two, a little brown precipitate of centuries of wrong, a gentle concentration of hate.

    The head kept talking, with a sudden shrill jump in the amperage of the electrical system that, I realized, was picking up and broadcasting the vibrations of the lungless voice-box. "This man, while proclaiming hatred of the Americans, is in fact American at heart, having been poisoned by four years spent there after deserting the Troupes coloniales.

    He is profoundly unclean. One of his wives is American, the wife who is called the All Wrapped Up. Because of his black skin, he was subjected to discrimination and confusing emotional experiences in the land of the devils, and his political war, which causes him to burn gifts of food and assassinate those functionaries who bring these gifts, is in truth a war within himself, for which the innocent multitudes suffer. He has projected upon the artificial nation of Kush his own furious though ambivalent will; the citizens of this poor nation are prisoners of his imagination, and the barren landscape, where children and cattle starve, mirrors his exhausted spirit. He has grown weary of seeming to hate what he loves. Just as nostalgia leaks into his reverie, while he dozes above the drawing-board of the People's Revolution so vividly blueprinted by our heroic Soviet allies, so traces of decadent, doomed capitalist consumerism creep into the life-fabric of the noble, beautiful, and intrinsically pure Kushite peasants and workers."

    I felt the hand of a hack writer had intruded these phrases into the tape and exclaimed aloud the Berber word for still-fresh camel dung. My neighbors in the throng shushed me angrily, having been thus far held fascinated by the head's analysis of our internal difficulties.

    "Wrongly," the head continued, with a new decibel shift, dropping the voice into a more plaintive timbre, "was I, a harmless and cynical figurehead at worst, sacrificed to the welfare of the state. The head that should have rolled belongs to Colonel Hakim Felix Ellellou.

    Even as his public self puts on a wrathful show of extirpating traces of foreign contamination, his private self, operating upon the innocent vacancy of our sublime but susceptible territory, engenders new outbreaks of the disease. Even now an entire American boom town, with false fronts, brazen bubble-gum-blowing whores, and po8nbe-dispensing saloons has materialized within the Ippi Rift, above a reservoir of water stored in porous sandstone since the beginning of time against the coming of the Mahdi.

    Destroy this evil city, citizens of Kush! But unless you destroy its source, the repressed affections and idle dreaming of your shadowy leader, other excrescences will spring up instead, and your children will continue to harken to rock music, your wives will secretly desire to expose their ankles, and your brother, with whom you have shared your last curd of goat cheese, will succumb to the profit motive and become a soulless robot of greed and usury, a cog in a machine driven by economic forces beyond all human appeal! Citizens of Kush: Overthrow Ellellou! Overthrow Ellellou, and rain will fall!"

    I looked about me to see a citizen of Kush, and of course there were none to be seen, only foreigners, adventurers, curiosity-seekers whose minds had already darted ahead to the next sight, the return to the bus, the probability of finding a rest room without a long line. The head was concluding, its lips clearly out of sync, "This has been a vision vouchsafed to me in Paradise, where the veil is lifted from the eyes of men. It comes to you courtesy of Soviet technology. Thank you for your attention.

    Feel free to wander about the cave, only do not touch the prehistoric Saharan art work, which the moisture of your breath is gradually eroding. For your further entertainment a slide show depicting the Kush national heritage will be shown on the wall behind me."

    The President, all later accounts agree, had endured the diatribe with dignity. Only when the slide show began did he forcefully intervene.

    Gad, remember, in the tattered galabieh of a desert wanderer-an assistant musician, a sideman -Ellellou stepped over the chain while the first slides exploded from the projector: Kodachrome fixations of dunes, of peanut pyramids, of the hydroelectric dam beloved of Michaelis Ezana, of feathery tribal dances along the muddy Grionde, of pirogues, of shambas, of a camel ruminating and a muffled Targui glowering before the unexpected background of Isti-qlal's East German skyscraper. Taking abruptly distorted fragments of these images on his back and writhing shoulders, he ripped the head by its fleece from its roots of color-coded wiring cleverly threaded through the top sheet of Plexiglas, which was perforated two-ply. Sparks-green, orange-flew. Fear and astonishment made a momentary circle of peace around the desecrator.

    Edumu's head shocked Ellellou's haptic sense with its weight, far less than when filled with watery brains and blood, and its texture, which combined those of paper and wax, dead in such different ways. The skull had been enlarged, to receive so much mechanical and electronic apparatus: another Soviet-ism, the dictator reasoned-forwith their superior miniaturization techniques the Americans could have fitted all this into the skull of a mole. Yet, despite the small distortion of scale, Ellellou, hugging the head to his chest to break the last stubborn connections, found tears smarting in his eyes, for in life this head, mounted atop the closest approximation to a father the barren world had allowed him, had never been held by him thus, and the act discovered the desire. They had been two of a kind, small cool men more sensitive than was efficient to the split between body and mind, between thought and deed. The king had prepared him to rule, though it had meant his own ouster. "A king must be a stranger," he had told his ambitious attache. "His function is to take upon himself the resentment of his people for their misery."

    A king must be a stranger: this truth, peculiarly African, rustled in Ellellou's own skull while the desecrated other pressed its little fig of a nose, rubbery in reconstruction, against his hushed heart. Then the affronted electronic engineers, and a motley guard clad in indigo Tuareg robes and green soldiers' uniforms, burst from their hidden places and encircled him with intent to kill.

    Russian, Wan), Arabic, Tamachek were shouted; Ellellou's galabieh was rudely tugged and Edumu's head was torn from his arms, though the riband of gold, the dwindled veil of a sacred presence, remained in his fist. His captors, pressing close about him, had terrible breaths: not only vodka but the spoiled yeast of native beer and the sourness of millet porridge licked from dusty fingers mingled fiercely in the captive's face, along with an unaccountable distant sweet tang, of barbershop hair-oil.

    "Je suis Ellellou," he said, repeatedly, for his first assertion was not heard, or else his accent was not understood. He was struck beside the ear; a scarlet numbness overspread his face from that portion; he was spat upon, mistily; his arms were pinioned and his wrists twisted as an unseen other struggled with his fingers for the golden headband.

    The pressure ceased, the uproar was quelled.

    Opuku and Mtesa had stepped forward, gleaming in the nakedness of power, Opuku's machine gun a beautiful mitrailleuse after a design by Berthier, oiled like a Nubian whore, and Mtesa's.44 magnum scarcely less enchanting. A patriotic poster was unfurled beside Ellellou's face; the crowd of tourists, comprehending little and cowering back from the violence, applauded as if this comparison were part of the show, of the Kush national heritage. Indeed, the slide show had automatically continued throughout, planting a Berber grin squarely upon the grimace of a furious technician, and the next instant projecting upon our struggle the pastoral peace of a herd of sheep overgrazing the Hulul Depression.

    Due to the poor photogravure of the poster, my identity was unsettled until one of the Soviets came forward and shook my hand; I recognized, amid the cocoa-paste of his absurd disguise as a nomad, the shallow, tilted, alert, hunted yellowish eyes of his race. "Colonel Ellellou," he said, "je presume."

    "Colonel Sirin," I remembered.

    "Death to the people's enemies and revisionist counterrevolutionaries wherever they may be found," he said, through his translator, who had appeared at his side in the baggy costume of a bespectacled Maoist sightseer.

    "Just so," I said, and nodded toward the dreary relic of Edumu IV where it lay on the cavern floor, one more piece of debris, debunked, inoperative, a prop at the back of the stage. "Have you asked yourself," I asked the colonel, "if your perpetration of this charade does not constitute a serious breach of the treaties between our two great democratic nations?"

    The" colonel shrugged and talked at Russian length, words that were translated as, "It is very boring, in the bunker. As part of detente, our government has instructed us to mingle more freely with the local populations."

    "There was no population here, until your contraption attracted it. Even so, the audience is composed of day-trippers from Zanj, with whom our border will be henceforth closed. Your plot has served to put a little profit into old Komomo's pocket, but has left the loyal citizens of Kush unmoved."

    "Not quite unmoved, Comrade; for the First Citizen of Kush has personally come far to attend to the oracle, as we knew he would." The colonel was shedding his shamed face and costumed unease, and his affectation of omniscience rankled in conjunction with the recalled ordeal of his bunker hospitality-his drunken toastmaking, his materialist cliches, his atheistical mockery. The Koran says, Woe to those who debar others from the path of Allah and seek to make it crooked.

    And the king had once advised me, Enemies are a spiritual treasure, allies a practical burden.

    In his swinish Slavic fashion my ally, confident that the joke of his devious interferences was now shared, debonairly lit a Kocmoc cigarette, that went ill with his rags and his paint. It came to me that in addition to closing the Zanj border I should abrogate the missile treaty, as Ezana had often advised: thus I was thinking fondly of Ezana at the very moment, give or take a minute, when he was falling in love, over cocktails and freeze-dried peanuts, with Mrs.

    Gibbs, her brassy hair playing Ping-Pong with points of light in Mr. Klipspringer's freely administered bourbon. The wires leading into my head were as many as those into the dismantled king's.

    I told the smirking colonel opposite, "And the oracle spoke a great deal of facile, impudent, and traitorous nonsense, in the style of that messiah of bourgeois self-seeking, the Zionist Sigmund Freud."

    "The oracle spouted not only psychology, but geography as well-did you not notice?"

    "The rumor of the metropolis in the Ippi Rift I take to be as phantasmal as the gadget's analysis of the President's neurotic sublimations."

    "Not a metropolis, but a small industrial city, of the type you call-was Consultation with his translator finally produced the word, "upstate."

    "With variegated housing and charming recreational sites," the translator added.

    "Not an encampment of beggars could exist there," I told them, "but that the Minister of my Interior would have informed me. In our sublime vacancy even the birth of a camel makes vibrations."

    The colonel smiled, and flakes of cocoa-paste fell from his cheeks. "The Minister of your Interior you have judged, correctly, to be a traitor. Also he is a man who dislikes friction. Your Soviet friends, however, remain true to the Revolution. In alerting you to danger, we have gone to some lengths to avoid your official channels, which are rotten with revisionist spies."

    Ellellou saw that truly he must travel on, westward to the Ippi Rift; but as this new leaf of adventure unfolded before him he felt only an exhaustion, the weariness of the destined, who must run a long track to arrive at what should have been theirs from the start: an identity, a fate. His trip to the Balak had been, in its wantonness, its simplifying hardships, freedom; his trip down from the Massif, by the unscenic highway, in the air-conditioned Mercedes, without his beloved Sheba, heartsick duty. Sheba had vanished in the tumult that had surrounded his uprooting of the head; in what shadows and by what hands she had been seized remained mysteries.

    The Russians, anxious to dispel the suddenly hysterical President's threats of abrogation and anarchy, had assisted in the furious search. Every cranny of the cave was probed; the apparatus of audio-visual illusion was overturned; the technicians' lockers were ransacked, even the refrigerators in the cafeteria, even the caviar barrels. She was not in the cave.

    She had been taken outside, then. The clefts of the rocks were searched, while pigeons wheeled overhead and Ellellou in an agony of remembrance relived running his fingers along the clefts of her body, recalled amid the mineral wilderness the wistful thin melody of her anzad, the rounded perfection of her glossy shoulders and blue-black thighs, the velvet caress of her lips on his indifferent member, her stoned docility and soft intermittent plea that there must be a better life than this. The taste of her, Ellellou remembered, the kola in her kisses and the salt of her female secretions that mixed with the alkaline dryness of borax when, on the dirt beneath the stars, he would perform cunnilingus. The fast food and soft drink stands were one by one overturned and smashed as at Ellellou's command the Kushite soldiers the Soviets with usurped authority had enlisted joined the frantic search.

    Divorce me, she had begged, after telling him, You make what 1 do seem very little.

    The tourist buses, wheeling in the parking lots with their squealing loads of curiosity-seekers from Dorset and Canton, were halted, and the passengers made to stand with their arms above their heads in the now-vicious noonward sun, as small in the sky as a pea, as a white-hot bullet. "Beat them,"

    Ellellou commanded. "Rape them!" The soldiers, bewildered teen-agers fresh from the peanut fields and the fishing villages, attempted in their innocence to obey, but the beatings were feeble and the objects of rape, withered and twittery in their long-sleeved English gardening dresses and floppy rose-gathering hats, were unappetizing. Russian engineers, galvanized by Ellellou's fury, went through the buses with measuring tapes and hand computers, hoping to deduce a space where the priceless bride might be concealed.

    Tires were slashed, windshields smashed. The drivers, detrib-alized Zanjians preening hitherto on their trousered power to steer machines bigger than elephants, were pummelled for the fun of it.

    "Destroy!" the dictator cried, to the consternation of the Soviet colonel. "Destroy everything in this vicinity not created by the hand of God!"

    "But the concrete walkways-was "Shall be reduced to rubble. All this was imposed without my authority; by my authority all traces of desecration shall be removed."

    "We obtained permits," the Russian sputtered.

    "The new head of the Department of Forests and Fisheries-all forms in order-a boon to future travellers-Eurodollars." His translator was struggling to keep up.

    "Travellers," Ellellou sweepingly replied, "were never meant to trivialize these peaks. But find me my Sheba unharmed, Colonel Sirin, and we will let this amusement park endure as a memorial to the happy event. Otherwise by my decree its desolation shall forever objectify the desolation of my heart."

    "I offer a theory," the translator said in his own words, whether couched in sloshy French or muddy Arabic, I forget. "There were among us some authentic Tuareg, acting as advisers, scouts, and regional experts." In the exhilaration of speaking his own thoughts he went on, "Do you know, some say-it is very interesting-the Tuareg are descended from Christian medieval crusaders who strayed; hence their fre- quent use of the cross as decoration, and their chivalric refusal to work with their hands?"

    "That is interesting," Ellellou agreed. "Where are these kafirsPeople"

    It was soon discovered, amidst the swirling dust of poured concrete being pulverized and immobilized buses being overturned, that there were only false Tuareg, that the true had fled.

    "They will sell her to the Yemenis!" Ellellou cried.

    "If so," the translator offered, "that too is not without historical interest, for Yemen was, in Biblical times, the land of Sheba. Perhaps she will feel at home there."

    She would have a kitchenette, a frozen food locker, a little ranch house with chimes for a doorbell and Muzak piped into the den. She would wear an apron and house slippers, she would learn to push a vacuum cleaner. She would forget him; he would shrink to the size of a hi in her mind. The strong man wept. Ellellou ordered Opuku to line up all the tourists and machine-gun them.

    His child, like himself, would have a rumor, a gust of wind, for a father. This fantasy, that he had impregnated the disparue Sheba, hardened to a conviction as, having left the contrite Soviets in charge of restoring their developed hectare of the Balak to its pristine condition, Ellellou descended in the Mercedes westward toward the Ippi Rift. The hum of the highway dulled his ears. His mind was carried back to the times when he and Oscar X and some one or two others (such as John 46X, who had kicked the heroin habit with the aid of Allah, had tried out for defensive lineman with the Packers, and had shoulders as broad as Opuku's, so when he came along Felix had to sit in the back seat) would descend south from Franchise to worship at the temple in Milwaukee or, an hour farther to the south, the Holy of Holies in Chicago.

    The green fields of Wisconsin would swing past like the swells of a soft sea. The white barns and silver silos bespoke an America where they in their gas-guzzling, mufflerless Olds were a devilish impurity, black corpuscles cruising along America's veins, past heaves of soil that, though casual as the shrugs of an ocean, had been memorized by farmers' footsteps, generation after generation. Over the car radio came Doris Day and twanging country plaints and, as the city neared, Dinah Washington and the rickety, jolly, hot-from-the-cozy-dark black man's jazz. Those tinkling notes never failed to catch the edge of the wave. Set on a ridge with the pride of a castle, a gaunt gabled farmhouse kept company with its one big tree. Poverty had roofed a house here and there with a patchwork of discounted shingles six different colors. Felix was fascinated by the power-line towers, steel skeletons whose shape suggested giants daintily holding threads of pure force in tiny arms hanging straight down, insulators. The delicate grandeur of their latticed forms repeated to the rolling horizon, and in moments the swiftly altering perspective from the back seat stamped one upon the other; such moments, like those of dejd vu, were thrilling, with a resonance beyond their visual proof that the towers diminished along a perfectly straight line. And Felix felt a meaning too in the backs of billboards, visible on the left, slatted structures solemnly designed, cut, trussed, and nailed to carry a commercial message fleetingly; one billboard had a curved silhouette which a backwards glance revealed to be that of a pickle, and another the outline, ominous when seen from afar, of a steer advertising his own demise through the channels of a local steakhouse. In the occasional distance a water-tower stood on its long legs like a Martian invader puzzling what to do next. In winter these fields turned white, white sprinkled with the black calligraphy of snow fences and leafless trees, a landscape as void of growth as the one his gray car was endlessly speeding through, gobbling one horizon only to be faced with an identical other.

    At times the dictator wanted to flog his country for being so senselessly vast. The day arched like a blinding headache above their endless meal of kilometers.

    Ellellou, alone in the back seat, his motionlessness a mask for his suffocating struggle with the resurging, undownable fact of Sheba's absence, was slow to sense the constraint in the car, a tension and disapproval emanating from the back of Opuku's round bald skull, connected to the mass of his shoulders by a glistening pyramidal neck.

    Ellellou recalled that he had never heard machine-gun fire, though he had ordered some. He leaned forward and asked, "The tourists-did they die well?"

    Opuku held silent.

    Ellellou persisted, "Or did they die ignobly, begging and cackling for mercy? Pigs."

    He quoted, "When the Hour of Doom overtakes them, the ivrongdoers will sivear that they had stayed away but one hour."

    Opuku confessed, "I didn't shoot them. I told them, Run away into the rocks. Those too frightened and feeble hid behind buses."

    Ellellou, his heart engulfed by rhythmic waves of grief, asked his bodyguard why he had thus betrayed L'fimergence. The motions of his heart, when he focused upon them, were like the attempts of a man with clumsy mechanical hands to drown in a bucket of bendable, skidding plastic a cat crazy to live.

    "No betrayal," Opuku said. "Those poor toubabs just dragged in by Zanj tourist package.

    Old ladies. Gentlemen marabouts."

    "Capitalist vermin," Ellellou replied apathetically, gazing out the window at the streaming void. "Warmongers and exploiters."

    "Slant-eyes too," Mtesa pointed out.

    "Nixon-lovers," was the reply, still lacking in spirit.

    But he did not like Mtesa's siding with Opuku.

    Their little counterrevolution must be quelled. The President took his eyes from the congenial dun vacancy visible and sought to ignite with a spark of his old fervor the predictable were idling of his rhetoric. "You had the gun in your hands and their faces before you," he told Opuku, "and pity intervened. Pity is our African vice. We pitied Mungo Park, we pitied Livingstone, we pitied the Portuguese and let them all live to enslave us." A sickening clothy memory, of Sheba mounted on her pink camel in full regalia, squeezed his body down, so his discourse continued in a higher pitch. "Imagine yourself a statistic on a toubab's accounting sheet, and further imagine that by inking you out, you and a thousand others, he can save a dollar, a shilling, a franc or even a lu on the so-called bottom line. Do you imagine, Lieutenant Opuku, that his finger will hesitate to pull that particular trigger? No, the ink will flow. You will be Xed out by Exxon, engulfed by Gulf, crushed by the U. s., disenfranchised by France, not only you but your entire loving nation of succulent wives, loyal brothers, righteous fathers, and aged but still amusing mothers.

    All inked out, absolutely, without the merest flourish of compunction. In the vocabulary of profit there is no word for "pity." So your squeamish refusal to follow my distinct orders was a laughable freak, a butterfly from the moon, speaking an incomprehensible language to these deaf and dumb earthlings, who have no hearts, whose bodies are compounded of minerals utterly foreign to your own elastic arteries and stalwart bones. These people consist entirely of numbers; pulling the trigger of your government-financed-I am obliged to point out-machine gun, your superb Berthier mitrailleuse, would have constituted an act of erasure impeccable in its innocence, as well as being a gift of obedience pleasing to your President, and a polite enough message that even old addle-pated Komomo, the king clown of pan-African confusion, might have comprehended.

    Opuku, remember the Book: Mohamet is Allah's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one anotherPeople Ellellou sank back into the velour, exhausted.

    He tucked little remembered bits of Sheba-her earrings, the fleshy bump in the center of her upper lip-around himself like ends and corners of a blanket. But he could not doze; the tension in the car remained. Opuku smoked a plastic-tipped cigarillo, having sulkily removed the highly crinkly wrapper, and Mtesa steered unswervingly through the flatnesses of the Ihoo, a plain of hardened talcum hammered to its present form by millennia of the sun's stagnant fury. In such a world Ellellou's mind could fashion no shelter for itself, though his eyelids closed. He saw green fields, the slatted backs of billboards, and heard Mtesa suddenly grunt.

    "Another truck?" Ellellou asked. He was resigned, now, to such wonders multiplying.

    "No truck, sir. Look to the left."

    Perhaps seven kilometers to the south, a lost city shimmered comone of the red cities that, some archaeologists believe, the refugee royalty of conquered Kush erected in what was then grassland.

    Others thought they were Christian monasteries, whose cells were later used to house the harems of wilderness sheiks expatriate from Darfur. The stones of the walls, blue-speckled bricks it takes two modern men to lift, are silent, and for all their solidity have crumbled, so that at this distance, to Ellellou's eyes, which also were not what they once were, they suggested that ring of fragile shred which remains when a wasps' nest is knocked down. Out of this ragged papery rim rose, still intact and scarcely weathered, hewn from imperishable indigenous stone, a monolithic stairway leading nowhere.

    Meanwhile (to extrapolate), at a choice table of the Afri-kischfreiheitwursthaus the East Germans had installed on the top story of their skyscraper, Mrs. Gibbs, Mr. Klipspringer, Michaelis Ezana, Kutunda Traore, and the young police spy in the plum-colored fez were enjoying a glittering luncheon. Ezana was happy, in his element among the twinkling imported cutlery and crystal steins, talkative, giddy on Liebfrau-milch, and in love with the brassy-haired American widow, whose natural grief was underlined by stomach troubles and an ear problem originating in the imperfectly pressurized Air Kush 727.

    Ezana was showing off his African cynicism and gift of tongues, and though his coquetry was wasted upon its object, it was enjoyed by her benignly smiling, heavy-lidded, delicately mustachioed escort, the professionally patient Mr.

    Klipspringer.

    "Your Mr. Nixon," Ezana prattled in his musical, trippingly accented English, "I do not think this Watergate matter should do him any harm.

    How could such a puny contretemps offset his stirring accomplishments of the last six months? He has ceased to bomb Cambodia, renewed relations with Egypt, created trustworthy governments in Chile and in Greece, provided himself with a new Vice-President as tall and handsome if not as eloquent as the old, and enhanced the American economy by arranging with the Arabs to double the price of oil. Truly, a charismatic dynamo, who has fascinated the American people again in the workings of their own democracy."

    Klipspringer chuckled. This man, what good nature, what tireless tact! "Maybe so, Mike," he allowed. "But from where I sit he looks like a loser."

    "Indeed, a loser in a narrow sense; but reflect upon the purgative value of a leader who unravels before a nation's riveted eyes. If he falls, he will carry your nation's woes with him into the abyss.

    Twice recently, if I mistake not, your federation has been humiliated, by the North Vietnamese with their mortars, by the Arabs with their embargo. What more poetic and profoundly satisfying"-here he bestowed a dazzling, ignored smile upon the American widow, who was studying her plate wondering what, exactly, had gone into this sausage-"psychotherapy, if my term is correct, than the evisceration of a President, out of whom tumble in majestic abundance tapes, forgeries, falsified income taxes, and mealy-mouthed lies? This is theatre in the best African tradition, wherein the actor is actually slain!"

    "Your own President, where is he?" asked Angelica Gibbs, prodding herself out of absorption with her own, obscurely troubled interior.

    Ezana translated the inquiry into Sara for Kutunda and Fula for the man in the fez, who both laughed, that wicked bubbling African laughter connecting directly with the underworld; it rang in Ezana's ears as a permutation of his own intoxication with this tired-looking, diarrhetic angel who had come from afar to sit opposite him across the Afrikischfrei-heitwursthaus's laundered linen.

    Instead of answering her, he lifted a fork before his face and said through its thoughtfully twirled tines, "The channels of the mind, it may be, like those of our nostrils, have small hairs-cilia, is that the word?

    If we think always one way, these lie down and grow stiff and cease to perform their cleansing function. The essence of sanity, it has often been my reflection, is the entertainment of opposite possibilities: to think the contrary of what has been customarily thought, and thus to raise these little-cilia, am I wrong?-on end, so they can perform again in unimpeachable fashion their cleansing function.

    You want examples. If we believe that Allah is almighty, let us suppose that Allah is non-existent. If we have been assured that America is a nasty place, let us consider that it is a happy place."

    "It's the place for me," Mr. Klipspringer cheerfully interposed, "and I've been to Hell and gone. When I see that old soapy-looking Capitol dome from the window of the jet, I think, This is it. This is me."

    Ezana would not cease his flirting with the poor fatigued Mrs. Gibbs. "Now your President," he informed her, "is a master of such alternations of assumption. Let us suppose, he says, that China is not a bad place but a good place, a friendly place. We have many pleasant Chinese restaurants in the United States, he reasons, perhaps China is equally pleasant. Or let us suppose, he says, that the way to rule is not to lead and inspire the people but to hide from them, to absent oneself increasingly, like the ancient Tiberius, who frolicked upon his island while Jesus Christ was spreading subversion-are my facts correct?"

    "I never heard it put quite that way, Mike,"

    Klipspringer said, closing his lips then upon the wetted end of a Cuban cigar, which had cost him twenty lu in a basket shop where stacks of them were rotting, and crossing his eyes to ignite the other end with a propane-flame lighter. The man in the red fez noticed the lighter with admiration, and Klipspringer passed it to him. "It's yours," he said, with a soft chop of his manicured plump hand. And, with further delightful gratuity, blew a perfect smoke ring, that came spinning from beneath his pert mustache like a new-fangled missile.

    "Our President also," Ezana continued to the pallid American beauty, "rules by mystical dissociation of sensibility, if I understand the phrase. Leaving the development of a plausible pragmaticism to those of us that stay behind in fallible Istiqlal, he explores the wider land for omens, to discover the religious source of the drought."

    The man in the red fez, who was growing to understand more English than the others expected, interrupted with a spate of local language to which Ezana listened at first amusedly, then with some gravity. By a smart soft chop of his hand the speaker indicated he wished Ezana to translate.

    "He says," Ezana told Klipspringer, "there is no drought. The nomads have survived many worse, by loaning their cattle to sedentary farmers in the south and reclaiming them when the dry sahel recovers again. The introduction of the cash-crop economy at the behest of the French has made this system difficult. The farmers no longer traffic with nomads, they need paper money to buy their wives Japanese sandals and transistor radios. And he says furthermore the well-meaning white men drilled wells and vaccinated against rinderpest, and this increased herd size to the point where desert was formed by the livestock. He says there is no drought, just bad ecology."

    Klipspringer's eyebrows were elegant silvery structures, trimmed but not overtrimmed, riding up and down on the emotions behind his brow like the vessels of Ra on eddies of spirit. They had arched high, lifting his heavy careful lids; in the space thus cleared his liquid brown eyes poured forth to the faces at the table all their luminous gift of caring. His baritone trembled with emotion. "Mike," he said, "you tell the man for me, No problem. Our technical boys can mop up any mess technology creates. All you need here is a little developmental input, some dams in the wadis and some ex- tensive replanting with the high-energy pampas grass the guys in the green revolution have come up with. You have a beautiful country here, basically, and we're prepared to make a sizeable commitment to its future.

    You tell the man we're very sensitive to the ecological end of things, not to worry. They were worried in Alaska and now they've stopped worrying. The caribou've never been better off.

    Miracles are an everyday business for our boys."

    "I want this murderer brought to justice!" Mrs.

    Gibbs suddenly cried from the depths of her sorrow and impatience, her queasiness and interrupted sexuality. "I want Don avenged." Baring her teeth, she exposed a fleck of lipstick on one incisor.

    Klipspringer put his hand adroitly over hers.

    "Angelica, revenge isn't part of the international picture. Internationally speaking, revenge is a no-no. What we have instead are realignments."

    "Madame is a guest of the state," Ezana reassured her. "It pains me to think she should be denied anything she desires in Kush."

    Kutunda, jealous of her former patron's infatuation with this freckled she-devil from the land where ice grows downward, launched into a long story of how she had been taken captive by Ellellou; he had broken into her hut where she slept, the chaste daughter of a widely respected dibia, and had desecrated her body with his urine so that, unmarriageable, she had no choice but to become his concubine. He kept her in a closet, illiterate, and compelled her to perform unclean acts; he even refused to give her typing lessons. The young man in the fez, whose Sara was nearly as good as his Fula, expressed rapture at her telling; he choked back his laughter, lest he miss a word. Ezana's Sara was not fluent enough to follow the torrent of vigorous and redolent idioms, and he contented himself with saying brusquely, at the tale's end, to the white widow, "This lady, a cultural attache, also has grievances against our President. It is regrettably true, he has committed many unpopular actions in the last half-year. His inspirations are not always happy.

    He put to death our old king, whom many of the river-folk superstitiously venerated."

    "Where is he? Where is he?" Angelica all but screamed.

    "He has ventured, you might say, upon a good-will mission," Ezana said, glancing at the black face of his wristwatch, as if space as well as time were packed into its shallow depths, like life in a coil of DNA. "It is hard to say where."

    "Where-iss-ee. his was the Acting Minister of the Interior suddenly enunciated, in halting but vivid English.

    "Ee-iss- here!"

    Everyone laughed, except Mrs. Gibbs, and Ezana turned to Klipspringer. "Let us discuss what you call our expanding relations. If the Braille Institute is to be built, it must be by local laborers, enlisted from our new masses of the urban unemployed, and following an indigenous design, in conformity with African humanism."

    The American diplomat lowered his eyelids and rounded his cigar ash on the rim of the plate holding a few discreet shreds of sauerkraut and the rubbery tied ends of his consumed knackwurst. "You bet," he said. "Maybe with a little souklike string of shops, boutiques and travel agencies, nothing noisy, along the ground-level mall. We want to help you become yourselves. A settled identity is the foundation of freedom. An unsettled nation is an enemy of freedom. A nation hates America because it hates itself. A progressive, thriving nation, whatever its racial balance and political persuasion, loves America because, frankly, in my not so unprejudiced opinion, but the facts pretty well bear me out, America is downright lovable. America loves all peoples and wants them to be happy, because America loves happiness.

    Mr. Ezana, you and the boss-man here"-his hand chopped toward the wearer of the plum-colored fez, who obligingly smiled and underneath the table squeezed Kutunda's knee so hard her own smile widened with pain-"may wonder why the American revolution has lasted nearly two hundred years, and yours is limping after only five. The answer is, All our Founding Fathers promised was the pursuit of happiness. Our people are still pursuing it, they'll never catch up to it; if they did, they'd turn right around and blame the Revolution. That's the secret, if you follow me."

    "Ed, cut it out," Mrs. Gibbs said. "What are you doing about Don?"

    "We're working on that," he assured her. "First you said you wanted his ashes, now you want revenge."

    "There is a city," Ezana offered, "perhaps prematurely named, we might instead call Gibbsville."

    "Where is this city?" she asked.

    A spark of communication ran around the ring of faces, and Ezana sadly confessed, "We are not at liberty to divulge."

    She looked at her companions at the table and saw through her tears black faces smilingly sealed upon secrets, secrets.

    Ezana looked at her and saw beyond the brassy toss of her hair, through the tilted plate glass set there to make a panorama around the restaurant, at such a height above the city no odor or peep of misery could arise, Istiqlal to the southeast: the bristling rectilinear business section directly underneath the skyscraper, narrow polychrome boxes whose sides were scrawled with lettering in many languages including even the native Hindi of the shopowners; the rows of camels and bicycles tethered and parked in the clay square of the Mosque of the Day of Disaster; the mosque itself, its minaret a dusky phallus, its dome a blue-tiled breast; the boulevards the French had diagonally cut through the maze of mud rhomboids and irregular alleyways; the dead chestnuts and poplars lining the boulevards and resting like a tenebrous cloud upon the pastel villas of Les Jardins; the scrappy glinting quilt of the shantytown at Also-Abid; to the left, the airport and the slender road to Sobaville; to the right, the venerable jumbled hump of Hurriyah lifted like a coy shoulder into the rosy cliff of the west wing of the Palais d'Administration des Noires; beyond, the souk and the rickety dock and the pirogues; and farther beyond, a black curve of the blue Grionde. still love you, 1 love you ran through Michaelis Ezana's mind dizzily, and the white woman's weary queasy face, the merriment arising between the red fez and Kutunda's bleached hair, the American's blanketing gray confidence that all would be taken care of-all merged in this embracing, spiralling, panoramic feeling. In Kush, the politics of love was being born.

    The Ippi Rift is a global curiosity that hides itself among the valleys of Northern Europe, belches forth its tensions at Mount Etna and the Valle del Bove, slips beneath the Mediterranean, and continues south to the vicinity of Johannesburg. Astronauts in their orbits see it plainer than China's Great Wall. Those who live in it do not see it at all. According to the theory of continental drift, the Rift marks the line along which Africa will eventually break in two-not, as would seem from a human standpoint sensible, along an east-west axis, so that the Islamic/caucasoid third would separate from the predominantly Negroid area south of the fifteenth parallel, but longitudinally, with all our latitudinal diversity of race and climate not only preserved but duplicated. The lengthy fault, whose incidents include the 0resund, the po- litical division of the Germanies, Lake Tanganyika, and the Kimberly diamond fields, excites geological aberrations, and there have long been rumors of oddities-oases, rumblings, auroras-in its vicinity as it cleaves the otherwise featureless desolation of central Kush.

    Nevertheless, the President of the nation was surprised, on the second day of his droning, mournful ride with the sulky Opuku and the evasive Mtesa, by the bulge of emerald that jumped through their windshield at a turning of their descent, in second gear, down the steep, pink-gray slope of the Rift's eastern bank.

    In some parts of the world this green would have been a simple suburban lawn; here it appeared with an evil intensity, as a sudden face of Roul. Back upon the lawn crouched a menacing fabrication, a low "ranch" house, a facade of bricks gratuitously whitened in splotches and of aluminum siding that feigned the wooden condition of clapboards.

    Similar, though not quite identical, houses were arrayed along both sides of this road, which had become one of those curbed asphalt curves realestate developers dub "crescents." Lawn sprinklers hurled rainbows against the crystalline aridity of the air. Otherwise there was no sign of life, not even a lone postman. The children must be at school, the housewives at the supermarket. Or else the whole development was a mock-up constructed to torment him. Ellellou felt a skimpiness, a threadbare nameless something as of those towns that come and go while the passenger dozes above the road map in his lap and the driver fiddles with the radio, seeking a non-religious station.

    As for the unbelievers, their works are like a mirage in a desert. The thirsty traveller thinks it is water, but ivhen he comes nearer he finds that it is nothing. He finds Allah there, who pays him back in full.

    Too soon, considering the spaces the city-builders had at their disposal, the crescents yielded to an unlovely straightaway with supermarkets and trash dumps and low windowless go-go dives.

    In the front seat, Mtesa and Opuku were becoming noisy; they had never before seen gasoline stations with plastic twirlers, or ice-cream stands in the shape of a sundae cup, with a painted cherry on top doubling as an air-conditioner vent. Or the golden parabolas of a MacDonald's, a meagre hutch of an eatery dwarfed by both its monumental self-advertisement and its striped lake of a parking lot. The sight of these wonders at first caused them to mutter and then to jubilate aloud, hilariously, as people will laugh with terrified exhilaration when immersed in the mist and tumult of a waterfall.

    The straightaway thickened into a drab little "downtown," with pavements and traffic lights. Here, the sight of their countrymen wearing cowboy hats, blue jeans, tie-dyed T-shirts, and summer-weight business suits provoked even louder delight, infuriatingly, for Ellellou was trying to plan his attack, to screen out the superfluous, to concentrate. He put on his NoIR sunglasses. The Mercedes had slowed to a stop-and-go crawl. A young girl, younger and coarser than Sheba, but with a touch of the ruminating insouciance Ellellou painfully remembered, strolled past beneath the awnings, beside the parking meters, wearing an apricot halter tied high, tattered denim cut-offs the buttocks of which were patched with two faded cotton heart-shapes, and shiny-green platforms ten centimeters thick at the heels. She was chewing bubble gum with all of her brain.

    Opuku leaned out and called to her in demotic Arabic, "Where you goin', little girl?"

    "Wherever you ain't, fat man," was her answer, capped by a popped bubble, which sprung forth fresh hilarity from the two soldiers.

    The girl, who had delivered her rebuff with yet that Ian- guid provocative sideways tug of the eyes that Kushite women affect in potentially compromising social intercourse, was strolling past the window of a cinq et dix, and the ill-assorted muchness of its windows-the gimmicky, plasticky, ball-and-jacky, tacky, distinctly dusty abundance of these toys, tools, hobby helps, and cardboard games-agitated Ellel-lou's breast with the passion to destroy, to simplify, to make riddance of.

    His hands trembled. He tried to reason.

    This excrescence in the heart of Kush was not lava, it was an artifact, a plurality of artifacts, that had been called here by money. Where money exists, there must have been pillage: Marx proves this much.

    There must be capital, exploitation, transmutation of raw materials. In a word, industry. Where there is industry, there is machinery, delicately poised and precariously adjusted. This poise, this adjustment, can be destroyed, and the whole devilish fabric with it. There was a blue-collar stink to this town. Franchise had been cleaner, with its breezy lake, its ivied sanctuary. A4any of the men on this street wore oily coveralls, and some affected aluminum hardhats.

    Ellellou bid Mtesa stop the Mercedes before the entryway to an Army and Navy store, which, he discovered within, catered principally to the proletarian fads of youth, and was so far, here in the Ippi Rift, from the centers of distribution that its stock, especially for a man of Ellellou's precise and wiry stature, was absurdly limited. In exchange for his khaki uniform-the Galla trader behind the counter was happy to have it, for the sheen and softness acquired during natural wear cannot be machine-imitated, and is much prized by the young-and several thousand lu Ellellou obtained a pair, not of the greasy gray coveralls conspicuous on the streets but of blue bib overalls stiff with newness and double-stitching, an antique pith helmet in lieu of a hardhat, and a lemon-yellow T-shirt upon which were stencilled the words Left Handers Are Easy to Love.

    Thus attired, the dictator commenced, as was his way, to mingle with his people, leaving Mtesa and Opuku illegally parked in a loading zone.

    The Saharan sun beat down dryly upon the twinkling conveniences of this doomed suburb of nothingness.

    Ellellou felt this doom blazing within him.

    Thirsty, he entered a corner drugstore. It was cool within. Tall phials of colored water symbolized the healing magic of pharmaceutics.

    A rack of sunglasses stood dim with dust, untouched. The commercial contents of the shelves were a mere scattered shadow of the merchandise of the drugstore in Franchise. Lest the reader imagine that the disembodied head's facile diagnosis of the dictator's supposed psychotic condition was here being borne out by an hallucinatory echo of Franchise, Wisconsin, he should understand that this city was in every respect inferior to that prosperous lakeside paper-town; it was a Third-World stab at an industrial settlement, scarcely a block deep on either side of the main "drag," thin of soil and devoid of history and shade trees, its citizens transparently African, its commercialism sketchy and even, one could say, humorously half-hearted. Franchise was to this place as a fondly pruned and deeply rooted hydrangea bush would be to a tumbleweed.

    The druggist, a tall black Hassouna in the traditional high-buttoned antiseptic jacket, glanced at the disguised tyrant's pith helmet with amusement. "Allah is good," he said. "How can I serve you, sir?"

    "I am thirsty," Ellellou explained. "Do you have a soda fountain?"

    "Such frills went out of modern use years ago," the druggist explained, "when the minimum wage for soda jerks went sky-high. You are living in the past, it seems. A machine that vends cans of soft drinks purrs in the rear of the store, next to the rack of plastic eggs holding gossamer panty hose. Take care, my friend, not to drop the pull-tab, once removed, back into the can.

    Several customers of mine have choked to death in that manner. We call it the Death of the Last Drop."

    "I also, effendi, need advice," Ellellou told him, less timorous now that he had caught something of the man's accent and style. For all its brave show of consumer-goods, the shop seemed infrequently visited, and its keeper had not lost the desert love of conversation. Words will bloom where nothing else does. Ellellou confided, "I am looking for useful work."

    The druggist lifted his elbows and polished the top of his case with his hands, which were long and limp as rags.

    "What sort of work might the gentleman be able to perform?"

    The dictator was at a sudden loss. Fakir, digger, orange-peddler-his costume corresponded to none of his priorly assumed professions. He thought of Mr. Cunningham, his patchy florid face, his starched white shirts.

    He said, "I am in the insurance racket. I am a claims adjuster."

    "I have heard of such men," the druggist admitted. He straightened up with startling briskness, as if suddenly awakened to the possibility that this stranger might be a hold-up man. His voice took on a solemn hollow threatening tone. "Well, sir, around here, the only work is to be had at the wells. Without the wells, and the toubab know-how, this would still be wilderness. You have heard, I dare say, of the wells?"

    "Of course," Ellellou lied.

    "A tremendous natural resource," the other solemnly affirmed, having relaxed again, and replaced his tattered elbows upon the glass case, which his dusting had revealed to contain packets of candy-colored condoms and a fan of cream-colored vibrators, like smooth flashlights searching in all directions. "Hydrocarbons," the druggist intoned. "That is the future in a word, sir. The path away from poverty, the redemption of the nation. Gross national product, balance of trade, you know all these terms, I am sure. They might well have need for a man of your experience, sir. I have heard tell of accidents amid the machinery, of near-explosions. I recommend that you apply, and my baraka go with you. Would you like to freshen up on your way to the personnel offices? Some deodorant, a swig of mouthwash? Personal hygiene counts for a lot with these infidels. God sees the soul; men smell the flesh."

    A wearisome fellow, really. A nation of shopkeepers is a morass of pleasantries.

    Woe to the economy that puts its goods on the rack of petty mark-ups.

    Nationalize, Ellellou thought furiously.

    Nationalize.

    He asked, "How do I find these wells?"

    "You follow your nose, man. Where have you been living, beneath the ground?"

    "I have come from the Balak," the traveller apologized. "I have been a long time tracking down a claim. Permit me one more question, of a simplicity that may astonish you. Pray, what is the name of this town in which I find myself?"

    The druggist indeed looked astonished.

    "Ellellou," he said. He straightened again to his height before the banked Latinate myriads of his medicine-shelves, his dried herbs, his poisons distilled from convolute carnivorous flowers, his love-potions, sleeping-potions, antihistamines, and diuretics.

    "Ellellou" he boomed, with the volume of a muezzin calling.

    "Our national independence leader, a god descended to us to fight for our freedom, a great man whose iron will is matched by his penis of steel." The druggist leaned far over the counter and whispered, "I trust you are not among those who with the arch-traitor Michaelis Ezana conspired against the purposes and teachings of our inspired head."

    "I am a simple apolitical professional man," the disguised dictator replied, with dignity, "seeking employment in the midst of a drought."

    "No drought here, my good man. Our peerless leader, whose enemies foreign and domestic gnash their teeth in vain, perceived that the Rift, in its geological contradictions, would trap all life-enhancing fluids-water and petroleum, to name the foremost two."

    Ellellou had the irritating impression, from the discontinuous vigor with which the druggist adopted one manner after another, of a systematic insincerity that might relate (it occurred to him) to his failure to make a purchase. Still thirsty, but embarrassed and anxious to be off, he said in farewell, "God is good."

    "God is great," was the disappointed answer.

    Outside, the Saharan sun pounded down upon the faded awnings, unlit neon signs, and brick false fronts of the Avenue, a sign proclaimed, of the End of Woe. Ellellou entered a luncheonette, narrow as a running man's stride and every surface of it coated with a film of wiped-away thumbprints and spillings. He ordered a lime phosphate, which he drank up with a single long lunge through the straw. The short-skirted waitress read his T-shirt and giggled. Her face was ugly-her teeth stuck straight out-b her legs were firm and smooth and the color of good healthy shit. He ordered a second lime phosphate and took it to a booth. Each booth had a mock-ivory selector for the jukebox at the back of the luncheonette, and he was surprised, flipping its yellowed leaves, to recognize some of the songs: "Sixteen Tons," by Tennessee Ernie Ford; "The Rock and Roll Waltz," by Kay Starr; "Blueberry Hill," by Fats Domino; "My Prayer," by the Platters. This last he could almost hum, as green fields and silver silos skimmed by. He began to feel bloated with flavored carbonation. And the Formica tabletop depressed him, its oft-wiped smoothness too much like the blankness of the sky. Ellellou got up, paid, tipped the waitress a lu, and left. As he went out the door, the jukebox began to play, very scratchily, "Love Letters in the Sand."

    A siesta emptiness possessed the streets. At the intersection where the Avenue of the End of Woe met another, an oblong traffic island held a statue of himself in bronze-even his sunglasses and bootlaces in oversize bronze, his face deep in shadow, his kepi and epaulettes whitened by guano-within a fountain, whose rhythmic surges of water tossed upwards veils and ghosts of spray that evaporated before the droplets could fall back into the stone bowl from which these patient explosions were fed. Around the rim of this great bowl the nation's twelve languages spelled their word for Freedom. In Wanj there was no word, all of life was a form of slavery, and this gap in the circle of words children had worn smooth, clambering to frolic in the water. There were no children now. They were captive in school, he imagined, thinking of how aptly this fountain symbolized the universe, that so dazzlingly and continuously pours forth something into nothing.

    Sinuous green growth of a Venezuelan density nourished in the lee of the fountain, whose wafted breath licked him like a tongue as he crossed the shimmering intersection. Alone on the pavements with his sharp small shadow, helmeted and baggy, Ellellou followed his nose. The shopping district thinned to barbershops and grimy-windowed printing emporia with cases of their alphabets gathering dust beside the quiet presses. Low cafes and pombe bars awaited the after-hours wave of worker clientele. Single-bladed ceiling fans desultorily turned within; there was sawdust on the floors, and big green bottles keeping cool under soaked burlap. An odor met his nostrils as sulphuric even, as caustic and complex, as the scent of the lakeside paper mills in Franchise.

    There, too, there had been, along the approaches to the industrial heart of the place, its satanic raison d'etre, this multiplication of trailer-homes with bravely set-out windowboxes and bird-baths, ever more overwhelmingly mingled with low cinder-block buildings enigmatically named or in naked anonymity serving the central complex, which was enclosed in apparent miles of link fence hung with scarlet signs warning of high voltage, explosive materials, and steep fines for even loitering on the fringes.

    Ellellou approached this fence and looked in. Across a large margin of macadamized desert that made absolute dimensions difficult to grasp, a dark heap of slant-roofed sheds, inscrutable chutes, black-windowed barracks, tapered chimneys, towers with flaming tips, and rigs for pounding pumps belched forth a many-faceted clatter and the oceanic chemical stench of hydrocarbon refining. The ball-topped fractionating towers, the squat storage tanks were linked to their underworld source of supply by a silver spaghetti of parallel piping. Little pennants of burn-off flame adorned the construct like a castle.

    Though Ellellou's eyes spotted few human figures, which perhaps in this uncertain scale would have been invisible, the whole monstrous thing was delicately in motion, eating something from the soil and digesting it into a layered excrement palatable to the white devils worlds away. Beyond and above the stinking, smoking, churning, throbbing emissary of consumerism, the lavender western wall of the Rift, too precipitous for any road, too barren for any life, hung like a diaphanous curtain behind which waited like a neglected concubine the idea of Kush. But Ellellou could not smell the desert. Everything in the land his heart knew had been erased, save the blank sky, its blue so intense it verged on purple, overhead.

    He moved along the fence, through the litter of drained cans and discarded brown pay-envelopes, until he came to a guard post, a plywood shack no wider than a telephone booth, and asked the man slumped in there for admission.

    "Show me your pass."

    "I have no pass, but I have business inside."

    "Those at the main gate will determine that. What sort of business? You are dressed like a fool."

    "I have a claim to adjust. I am a claims adjuster. There has been an accident inside."

    This guard, a long limp Moundang in an unclean burnoose, studied him suspiciously. "There's been no accident here."

    "From my mother I inherited the gift of foresight, maybe the accident is soon to occur," Ellellou replied, and was about to improvise an ingratiating fable when he recognized the other man. "Wadal!" he cried. "Wadal the well-digger-have you forgotten your servant? We met north of the Hulul, in Ramadan, and together we repelled the American infiltration."

    From within the hood of his burnoose Wadal studied me with deepened suspicion, and placed his hand on the rifle in the sentry box. "I remember much confusion and smoke," he said. "And my Kutunda being taken from me."

    "Kutunda for whom you had no use, and whom you had taken from another, and who in turn has been taken from me, by one who will not keep her long. You exploited her because you have been exploited. Let me in, Wadal, and we will bring these desecrators and exploiters of the poor to justice. There is fuel for much smoke here."

    He was still trying to fix me in his mind, as, emerging from the shadows of his tent, a traveller squints to distinguish mirage from mountain. "You claimed to be Ellellou," he said, "and were clumsy with a shovel."

    "I was clumsy because you chose unworthy places to dig. But now your nose has led you nobly. How did you come to this place? How long has it been here? How is it capitalized, and who provides the expertise?

    Who is its manager, its president?"

    "We never see him, and we never ask," Wadal said, still unfriendly, the gun brought in close to his body. Through a rent in his burnoose I glimpsed his penis, languid. "He feeds us and pays us, and that is enough. He generates employment and boosts the gross national product. A few more wells, and we will be another Libya, another Oman."

    "Another Bayonne, another Galveston,"

    Ellellou replied. He commanded, "Admit me to this inferno."

    Instead of obeying, Wadal lifted his rifle as if to strike with the butt. A happy spark, the prospect of righting an old imagined wrong, lit his morose face from within; but at that moment a gray Mercedes in the silence of its perfect workings slid by on the crackling, littered gravel alley that ran beside the fence, and Wadal lowered his weapon.

    Ellellou waved the car on, and turned his back upon the guard, having formed a more visionary plan than brute coercion wherewith to secure admission.

    He went back through the streets of this new world named for him, into the barbershops and drugstores, the economy furniture outlets and the cinq et dix stores, the pombe bars and realestate offices, the dens wnere men labored to repair electrical appliances engineered to be irreparable and the cinemas where numb heads pondered giant pink genitals laboring to symphonic music, and Ellellou asked the citizens of Kush he found in these places, "Are you happy?" When their embarrassment produced a silence, or a grunted "What's it to you?" or a defiant "Yes" or an equally defiant "No" or an evasive measured response, he pursued the issue, saying, "Those who are not perfectly happy, follow me." And some did, though many did not, and some others were drawn along with the crowd, attracted by its promise of excitement, its air of destination, for they led lives of relative prosperity yet were kept by the very nature of the economy, its need to justify production by exciting consumption, in a low fever of dissatisfaction and ill-defined hopefulness. This little brown man, with his attractively fanatic military bearing in his crisp and absurd costume, fed that hopefulness, as does a comet, a mass murderer, a state lottery, an albino camel, or any other such remission from the hunger pains of the ordinary. With a mob at his back Ellellou demanded admission at the main gate.

    Wadal must have alerted his employers of impending trouble, for a number of armed, uniformed guards were assembled behind the padlocked pipe-and-wire gates, and a toubab had been produced from within the insidious alchemy of the oil works. He was short and pink and flustered; he wore a button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves and had several pens clipped to the pocket. In the past, some had leaked, leaving blue spots. This was a mere desk-worker, a timid engineer, an agent of agencies in distant cities of glass. He was no taller than I, and his eyes peered levelly into mine through his rimless spectacles and the electrified mesh. "You want work?" he asked.

    "I want justice. We want reparations."

    "Uh-think you've come to the wrong place. Hasn't he?" He made this inquiry of a tall black Nuer who had appeared beside him, clad in a three-piece checked suit of some slithery synthetic summer stuff, his shoulders wide as a buzzard's wings, a clipboard in his hand.

    "You bet the punk has," this black man said, and told me, "I'm in P-R here. What's the story, buddy?" His brow bore the Nuer scars but his American English was smooth.

    "I am Ellellou," I told him.

    "Sure, and I'm O. J. Simpson. You don't look so easy to love to me."

    "The shirt is not my message. My message is, Justice, or Destruction."

    "How about that? What sort of justice you have in mind?

    Big justice, little justice, or justice of the peace?"

    "Justice for all. These citizens of Kush behind me claim to be imperfectly happy."

    "So that's news? They sure as hell busted their asses to get here. Look, I don't know how well you know the local situation, but it's not exactly a hotbed of alternatives. We don't ask "em to come to us, we fight 'em off. This is a pilot project, we're trying to keep it low-profile."

    Ellellou wearied of looking upwards at this slangy front man; he spoke to the plump white devil. "By whose authority was this project established?"

    "Everybody's, as I understand it. We deal with the Ministry of the Interior, mostly. The President's a canny type who's lent his name but keeps his distance otherwise. The initial contacts were finalized before my time; they only keep us here a year, it's considered hardship duty. My company's cut of this operation is peanuts, but the top brass back in Texas has a soft spot for the Third World. The chairman of the board came up from a turnip farm."

    "This isn't business," the P-R man interposed, a bit stiffly, in unspoken rebuke of his superior's garrulity, "this is philanthropy."

    Ellellou asked the toubab, "You are yourself not top brass? What is your title?"

    "Engineer's my title; recovery's my racket.

    A new strike like this is an oddball at this late date, better recovery in the established fields is the name of the game. Hydraulics and fluids have been my life. It's a miracle, what you can squeeze out of a rock if you know where to pinch it. There's enough water down there in domes to flood the Hulul."

    "And the oil? Is it O.k.?"

    "Beautiful," said the engineer, chattery with the relief these infidels feel when discussing their work in avoidance of emotional or ideological issues.

    "It comes up so sweet you could gargle it.

    Prettiest sludge I've seen outside of Oklahoma. You know oil? When you crack most crude by the Burton process-was The P-R man interrupted. "You are wasting your time with this man. He is a terrorist. He has no interest in real information."

    "Anyway," the toubab lamely concluded, reluctant to leave his specialty, "your Mr.

    Ezana, he's pleased as punch, and he's got reason to be."

    The crowd, bored by a technical conversation they could not hear, was beginning to chant, "Ellellou, Ellellou..." The P-R man with his winglike shoulders and Nuer brow scars correctly scented danger in the situation, though he pretended not to recognize his President. At his command a small army of harried, bearded boys had appeared bearing a tangle of wires and an assortment of electronic boxes-loudspeakers, transformers, tuners. This system was set up on the parched earth.

    When the connections had all been made, he took up a hand mike of the phallic type, with a glans of soft black rubber, ivhoofed into it experimentally, and, satisfied, spoke: "Ladies and gentlemen, workers and independent tradesmen, all citizens of Kush irregardless of tribe and tint: return to your homes and places of business. This madman, no doubt inspired by religious impulses he deems genuine, has misled you with a vision of unreal happiness. Your hopes of real happiness, that is to say, a relative absence of tension and deprivation, lie not with absolutists and charismatics but with an orderly balance of capitalist incentives and socialist mediations. Joyously allow foreign capital and expertise to com- bine with your native resources and ingrained cultural patterns." He consulted his clipboard, and continued: "The African humanism of your forefathers, as over against the ant-like societies of Asia and the neurotic sublimations of the Christian West, urges upon you the ideals of patient cheerful labor, intuitive common sense, and a many-stranded web of kinship ties that reinforces rather than dilutes individuality. Do not, ladies and gentlemen, yield your priceless personhood to destructive gestures by alleged saviors. There is no God, though you are free to worship as you wish, as you are free to indulge in bizarre sexual practices with another consenting adult."

    The speech went on too long, not so much for the crowd, which, ceasing to chant "Ellellou," had fallen under the spell exerted by oratory in our still predominantly oral culture, as for the American, who, natively impatient, of short attention span, and anxious to make an impression of himself as a genial and forceful fellow not prone to "stand on ceremony" and permeated with a sense of "fair play," took the microphone from his eloquent assistant and awkwardly boomed into it: "Open the gates, we're not afraid of these good folks. Industry's been a fine friend to this oasis, and by golly we intend to continue to be!"

    The gates were swung open, the mob laughingly pushed through. The young technical crew hastily relocated their equipment and unsnarled the wires, and in the confusion Ellellou-gently, as if lifting a little burden from the pink hand, a flower or libation proffered in homage-took up the microphone himself. It was as if he had seized a gun; he became potent; the crowd halted, conceding him a little stage of bare earth.

    His heart was pounding; his hand, holding the instrument, looked to his own eyes small and magically withered.

    He was beset by variable mental winds. The thought of Sheba returned to him-her dull betrayed eyes sought his from within a crush of cloth and coral-and with it a weary soft awareness of his lack of a woman, a woman who would lull him out of anger and put him to bed. But then he began to talk, and the breath of his throat as it leaped the inch between his lips and the spongy tip of the microphone was in his ears taken up by an amplified echo that seemed to blanket the world and impose a hush upon all its multitudinous contra-indications, and his heart was at peace in the center of the storm of his voice: "Citizens of Kush! You have been grievously betrayed! You have been led by the atmospheric machinations of Roul the desert devil, in league with the dead hand of Edumu the Fourth and the living perfidy of Michaelis Ezana, to dwell in this pestilential hellhole called Ellellou! still am Ellellou! still am freedom!" He took off his pith helmet, to show his visage. The cheering was less than he expected. The P-R man had made a move to grab the mike, but now stood idly by, close, checking the integrity of his manicure, whistling through his teeth in an impudent attempt at distraction.

    "What is freedom?" Ellellou went on. "Can you put it on with chains, can you hold it within stone walls, behind steel doors, in the circumference of electrified fences?"

    "The fences are electrified for the safety of juveniles and stray dogs," the P-R man swiftly whispered.

    Ellellou spurned the clarification, urging into the amplifying system the swollen self-answer, "No.

    These heavy material things do not bestow freedom, they bestow its opposite, bondage. Freedom is spirit. Freedom is peace within the skull.

    Freedom is righteous disdain of that world which Allah has cast forth as a vapor, a dream. The Koran says, The mountains, for all their firmness, will pass away like clouds.

    The Koran asks, Have you heard of the Event, which will over- whelm Mankind?

    Freedom is foreknowledge of that Event, whose blazing light is the only true light, whose fire melts our chains and evaporates the walls of our impoverished lives!"

    The P-R man muttered at his side, "Make your pitch. We can give you five more minutes."

    Ellellou said, and the microphone turned his words into clouds, scudding above the choppy black sea of the faces of the crowd, "You see at my side a bought black man, dressed in a white man's suit and taught to mouth the white man's glib tricknology. You see at my left an authentic pink devil, as apparently mild as the first suck of milk a baby lamb takes from its mother in the misted dawn pasture, but in truth as poisonous as the sting the scorpion saves for the adder.

    You see at my back a monstrous pyramid, foul in its smell and foul in its purpose, a parasite upon the soil of Kush and a corrupter of its people. As your President I command you, as your servant I beg you, to destroy this unclean interloper. A few well-aimed bullets should do it. The conflagration will lighten your hearts forever, and become the subject of a song you can sing your grandchildren!"

    "He's advocating violence," the white man said, behind Ellellou's back.

    "He's got to be kidding," the P-R man reassured him. He held up three fingers where Ellellou could see them, to indicate to the orator that, by some arcane rigor of technology, only three minutes were left to him.

    "The beast behind me, drinking the sacred black blood of our earth, belching smoke and blue flame, and defecating the green by-products of petroleum," Ellellou enunciated into the microphone, "is a mortal creature like any other, and I advise that my soldiers direct their first bullets into its jugular vein-that is, the exposed conduit removing the volatile gasoline vapors from the top of the fractionating tower, below the condenser ball." He wondered at himself, that he could spout all this; it was like holding live coals in the mouth, all it took was saliva and faith.

    Yet the soldiers did not shoot. They stood in their green uniforms within the motley crowd, innocent bemused boys from herders" tents and grass huts, waiting for an apparition they could take an order from.

    Ellellou strove to become that apparition, with only his voice and two more minutes of electricity to lift him above the mass. The crowd, in its still good-humored bafflement and wishing perhaps to touch the fabulous electronic equipment, which in flaking gilt bore the name of a now-dismantled, drugs-scuttled rock group, called Le Fuzz, crowded closer, menacingly close. As he tried to gather his inner forces to speak, he was aware at his back of the P-R man and the white engineer scratching quick memos-contingency plans, "scenarios"-to one another and also of, high in his nasal passages, an incongruous odor overriding the chemical stenches of industry. The smell had a penetrating sweetness, it carried with it woolen clothes and falling leaves and rosy Caucasian cheeks, it was, yes, the fresh glazed doughnuts the Off-Campus Luncheonette peddled to students as they sought a refuge from the sub-zero Wisconsin cold on mornings between classes. The doughnuts were laid out on waxpaper, still warm from the baking, their dough so cunningly fluffed it melted to a sugary nothing in the mouth, leaving flakes of glaze on the lips-how could that scent, forerunner of the taste, be present here, so vividly that Ellellou, in this pause of his oration, salivated? No snack-cart for the workers was visible; yet the scent lived in his nostrils. And in his ears the scratching pencils of his enemies. These distractions joggled the fragile chalice holding the distillate of his message, his cosmic indignation, and prevented, perhaps, from being as good as it should have been this, the last speech of his public career.

    He returned, in a low-pitched, factual voice, to the theme of petroleum by-products.

    "What does the capitalist infidel make, you may ask, of the priceless black blood of Kush?

    He extracts from it, of course, a fuel that propels him and his overweight, quarrelsome family-so full of sugar and starch their faces fester-back and forth on purposeless errands and ungratefully received visits. Rather than live as we do in the same village with our kin and our labor, the Americans have flung themselves wide across the land, which they have buried under tar and stone. They consume our blood also in their factories and skyscrapers, which are ablaze with light throughout the night and as hot as noon in the Depression of Hulul! My people: in my travels, undertaken only for love of you, that I may better bear your burdens, I have visited this country of devils and can report that they make from your sacred blood slippery green bags in which they place their garbage and even the leaves that fall from their trees!

    They make of petroleum toys that break in their children's hands, and hair curlers in which their obese brides fatuously think to beautify themselves while they parade in supermarkets buying food wrapped in transparent petroleum and grown from fertilizers based upon your blood! Of your blood they make deodorants to mask their God-given body scents and wax for the matches to ignite their death-dealing cigarettes and more wax to shine their shoes while the people of Kush tread upon the burning sands barefoot!"

    A new scent, also sweet but astringent, had arisen; he groped to identify it, while returning to larger, more spiritual themes: "Such are the follies of a race that scorns both Marx and Allah. The world groans beneath the voracious vulgarity of these unbelievers. They suck dry vast delicate nations in the service of the superfluous and the perverse. The earth, misconstrued as a provider of petty comforts and artificial excitements, cannot but collapse into a cinder, into a gnawed bone whirling in space. Hasten that Day of Disaster, blessed soldiers of our patriotic army, and shoot the giant slave of grease mercifully in the throat, and restore this ancient Rift to its pristine desolation, beloved of Allah, the wise and all-know-+!"

    Ellellou identified the odor that had intruded: it was of the pink, "sanitizing" cake of soaplike substance that reposed within the bottom lip of urinals in the men's "rest" rooms of some American service stations and restaurants, and which had puzzled young Felix until he had been acclimated enough to understand it intuitively.

    "You may say these wells have brought water. I say the Almighty could have made a river flow in this Rift. You say grass grows here now, where sheep can feed, and date palms, and orange trees, and what cannot be grown is purchased. I say, the Sahara once was altogether green, and the Merciful bestowed upon it a superior beauty, the beauty of the minimal, the changeless, the unpolluted, the necessary. The battle now in the world lies between the armies of necessity and those of superfluity. Join that battle. God has placed in your hands today the power to pulverize and incinerate this evil visitation, this malodorous eruption!"

    But had he, intuitively or otherwise, understood its essence? The pink cake of strange substance, no doubt petroleum-derived, had sat across the porcelain slots meant to carry urine away; what purpose did this obstruction serve? A spiritual purpose, that of a talisman, a juju, an offering to the idea of purity.

    "You say," he called into the microphone, which now seemed the narrow neck of a great echoing calabash trumpet, "that life here is hard and the drought has made it harder. I say, the unclouded sky mirrors the unclouded heart of Kush, the heart released from the tyranny of matter.

    Magnify your Lord, cleanse your garments, and keep away from all pollution."

    The devils behind him were still consulting. The crowd, whose depths and reaches he could not see, felt to his sense like a sail on far-off Lake Timmebago, at that instant when either the wind would catch, bellying the sail out taut, or else, the wind's drift having been misjudged, the sail would luff.

    "My people: your President has carried our drought in his heart heavily, it has nearly dragged me down, until I made this recognition: the drought is a form of the Manifest Radiance, and our unhappiness within it is blasphemy. The Book accuses: Your hearts are taken up with worldly gain from the cradle to the grave.

    The Book promises: You shall before long come to know. Indeed, if you know the truth with certainty, you would see the fire of Hell: you would see it with your very eyes.

    Come, my people, let us build a great pyre. The white devils and their machinery have entered by the gate of our weakness, our wandering and unsteady dedication to the ideals of Islamic Marxism, the beauty of L'@lmergence, the glory of Kush that was the envy of the Pharaohs and anathema to the Christians of Axum!

    Redeem your wandering, my people! Destroy this vile temple to Mammon! Soldiers, shoot!

    Ellellou orders you to shoot!!"

    In the answering, teetering silence, the P-R man's voice muttered, "O.k., that's plenty."

    The microphone was pulled from the dictator's hand.

    The P-R man said into it, "The management has a question I'm sure everybody here would like to hear your response to. The question is, What makes you think you're Colonel Ellellou?"

    "It shall now be proven," he said serenely, and waited for the crowd to give way before the irresistible certification, the Presidential Mercedes.

    But the crowd failed to move as a single thing, as a sea pushed aside; instead, each head oscillated expectantly, amusedly, while the minute yielded no unifying phenomenon. Ellellou stood on tiptoe, then attempted to jump himself higher by placing a hand on the P-R man's winglike shoulder. He saw neither Mtesa nor Opuku-no, on the third leap, there was Opuku, standing as a passive spectator just outside the fence with, the fourth jump revealed, the gum-chewing girl in the apricot halter. Of Mtesa and his Mercedes there was no sign, except possibly the scarlet letters, quickly faded to salmon in the Sahara sunshine, atop a ramp-riddled concrete structure, spelling PARK.

    Beyond this sign, the sky was blank.

    The crowd, as no omen materialized, began to rumble, cheated. The white engineer-his face glazed with perspiration and the parallel harrow-marks of a comb fresh in his thin pale hair, hair the color of the dung of a sick goat-said into the indispensable microphone, "Whaddeya think, good people?

    I think we've given this fella his chance. Any of you folks thirsty, you can have one free beer each at the commissary, to the right of the front door as you enter.

    Don't push, there's plenty for everybody."

    "This is treason," Ellellou managed to shout, his last official utterance, before the crowd with murderous jubilation rolled over him. He became a beanbag, a toy. The wells continued to pump, and on the other side of town the lawn sprinklers continued to twirl. A little cloud covered the sun.