Henderson the Rain King (22 page)

subjected to. There was, for instance, the forefinger with which I had aimed, in imitation of Pancho Villa, at that cat under the bridge table. "Oh, lady, don't do that," I said. "Romilayu--Romilayu--tell her to quit it," I said. "If I had as many fingers as there are hammers to a piano," I told him, "they'd all be at her service. What does the old queen want? These guys are putting the squeeze on her, I can see it." "Help son, sah," said Romilayu at my back. "From what?" I said. "Lion witch, sah. Oh, very bad lion." "They've frightened the old mother," I said, glowering at the Bunam and his assistant. "This is the sexton-beetle. Not happy without corpses or putting people away in the grave. I can smell it on you. And look at this leather-winged bat, his sidekick. He could play the Phantom of the Opera. He's got a face like an anteater--a soul-eater. You tell them right here and now I think the king is a brilliant and noble man. Make it very strong," I said to Romilayu, "for the old lady's sake." But I could not change the subject no matter how I praised the king. They had come to brief me about lions. With one single exception, lions contained the souls of sorcerers. The king had captured Atti and brought her home in place of his father Gmilo, who was still at large. They took this very hard, and the Bunam was here to warn me that Dahfu was implicating me in his witchcraft. "Oh, pooh," I said to these men. "I never could be a witch. My character is just the opposite." Between them Horko and Romilayu made me finally feel the importance and solemnity--the heaviness--of the situation. I tried to avoid it, but there it was: they laid it on me like a slab of stone. People were angry. The lioness was causing mischief. Certain women who had been her enemies in the previous incarnation were having miscarriages. Also there was the drought, which I had ended by picking up Mummah. Consequently I was very popular. (Blushing, I felt a kind of surly rose color in my face.) "It was nothing," I said. But then Horko told me how bad it was that I went down into the den. I was reminded again that Dahfu was not in full possession of the throne until Gmilo was captured. So the old king was forced to be out in the bush among bad companions (the other lions, each and every one a proven evildoer). They claimed that the lioness was seducing Dahfu, and made him incapable of doing his duty, and it was she who kept Gmilo away. I tried to say to them that other people took a far different view of lions. I told them that they couldn't be right to condemn all the lions except one, and there must be a mistake somewhere. Then I appealed to the Bunam, seeing that he was obviously the leader of the anti-lion forces. I thought his wrinkled stare, the stern vein of his forehead, and those complex fields of skin about his eyes must signify (even here, where all Africa was burning like oceans of green oil under the absolute and extended sky) what they would have signified back in New York, namely, deep thought. "Well, I think you should go along with the king. He is an exceptional man and does exceptional things. Sometimes these great men have to go beyond themselves. Like Caesar or Napoleon or Chaka the Zulu. In the king's case, the interest happens to be science. And though I'm no expert I guess he's thinking of mankind as a whole, which is tired of itself and needs a shot in the arm from animal nature. You ought to be glad that he's not a Chaka and won't knock you off. Lucky for you he's not the type." I thought a threat might be worth trying. It seemed, however, to have no effect. The old woman still whispered, holding my fingers, while the Bunam, as Romilayu addressed him, doing his best to translate my words, was drawn up with savage stiffness so that only his eyes moved, and they moved very little, but mainly glittered. And then, when Romilayu was through, the Bunam signaled to his assistant by snapping his fingers, and the black-leather man drew from his rag cloak an object which I mistook at first for a shriveled eggplant. He held it by the stalk and brought it toward my face. A pair of dry dead eyes now looked at me, and teeth from a breathless mouth. From the eyes came a listless and _finished__ look. They saw me from beyond. One of the nostrils of this toy was flattened down, the other was expanded and the entire face seemed to bark, this black, dry, childlike or dwarfish mummy which was gripped by the neck. My breath burned like mustard, and that voice of inward communication which I had heard when I picked up the corpse tried to speak but it could not rise above a whisper. I suppose some people are more full of death than others. Evidently I happen to have a great death potential. Anyway, I begin to ask (or perhaps it was more a plea than a question), why is it always near me--why! Why can't I get away from it awhile! Why, why! "Well, what is this thing?" I said. This was the head of one of the lion-women--a sorceress. She had gone out and had trysts with lions. She had poisoned people and bewitched them. The Bunam's assistant had caught up with her, and she was tried by ordeal and strangled. But she had come back. These people made no bones about it. but said she was the very same lioness that Dahfu had captured. She was Atti. It was a positive identification. "Ame de lion," said Horko. "En bas." "I don't know how you can be so sure," I said. I could not take my eyes from the shriveled head with its finished, listless look. It spoke to me as that creature had done in Banyules at the aquarium after I had put Lily on the train. I thought as I had then, in the dim watery stony room, "This is it! The end!"

XVIII

That night Romilayu's praying was more fervent than ever. His lips stretched far forward and the muscles jumped under his skin while his moaning voice rose from the greatest depths. "That's right, Romilayu," I said, "pray. Pour it on. Pray like anything. Give it everything you've got. Come on, Romilayu, pray, I tell you." He didn't seem to me to be putting enough into it, and I flabbergasted him altogether by getting out of bed in the green silk drawers and kneeling beside him on the floor to join him in prayer. If you want to know something, it wasn't the first time in recent years by any means that I had addressed some words to God. Romilayu looked from under that cloud of poodle hair that hung over his low forehead, then sighed and shuddered, but whether with satisfaction at finding I had some religion in me or with terror at hearing my voice suddenly in his channel, or at the sight I made, I couldn't be expected to know. Oh, I got carried away! That withered head and the sight of poor Queen Yasra had got to my deepest feelings. And I prayed and prayed, "Oh, you � Something," I said, "you Something because of whom there is not Nothing. Help me to do Thy will. Take off my stupid sins. Untrammel me. Heavenly Father, open up my dumb heart and for Christ's sake preserve me from unreal things. Oh, Thou who tookest me from pigs, let me not be killed over lions. And forgive my crimes and nonsense and let me return to Lily and the kids." Then silent on my heavy knees and palm pressed to palm I went on praying while my weight bowed me nearly to the broad boards. I was shaken, you see, because I now understood clearly that I was caught between the king and the Bunam's faction. The king was set upon carrying out his experiment with me. He believed that it was never too late for any man to change, no matter how fully formed. And he took me for an instance, and was determined that I should absorb lion qualities from his lion. When I asked to see him in the morning after the visit of Yasra, the Bunam, and Horko, I was directed to his private pavilion. It was a garden laid out with some signs of formal design. At the four corners were dwarf orange trees. A flowering vine covered the palace wall like bougainvillaea, and here the king was sitting under one of his unfurled umbrellas. He wore his wide velvet hat with the fringe of human teeth and occupied a cushioned seat, surrounded by wives who kept drying his face with little squares of colored silk. They lit his pipe and handed him drinks, making sure that he was screened by a brocaded cloth whenever he took a sip. Beside one of the orange trees an old fellow was playing a stringed instrument. Very long, only a little shorter than a bass fiddle, rounded at the bottom, it stood on a thick peg and was played with a horse-hair bow. It gave thick rasping notes. The old musician himself was all bone, with knees that bent outward and a long shiny head, tier upon tier of wrinkles. A few white weblike hairs were carried in the air behind him. "Oh, Henderson-Sungo, good you are here. We shall have entertainments." "Listen, I've got to talk to you, Your Highness," I said. I kept wiping my face. "Of course, but we shall have dancing." "But I've got to tell you something, Your Majesty." "Yes, of course, but there is dancing first. My ladies are entertaining." His ladies! I thought, and looked about me at this gathering of naked women. For after he had told me that he would be strangled when he couldn't be of any further service to them, I took kind of a dim view of them. But there were some who looked splendid, the tallest ones moving with a giraffe-like elegance, their small faces ornamented with patterns of scars. Their hips and breasts suited their bodies better then any costume could have done. As for their features, they were broad but not coarse; on the contrary, their nostrils were very thin and fine, and their eyes were soft. They were painted and ornamented and perfumed with a musk that smelled a little like sweet coal oil. Some wore beads like hollow walnuts of gold, looped two or three times about themselves and hanging down as far as their legs. Others had corals and beads and feathers, and the dancers wore colored scarves which waved flimsily from their shoulders as they sprinted with elegant long legs across the court and the basic scratching of the music went on as the old fellow pushed his bow, rasp, rasp, rasp. "But there is something I have got to say to you." "Yes, I suspected so, Henderson-Sungo. However, we must watch the dancing. That is Mupi, she is excellent." The instrument sobbed and groaned and croaked as the old fellow polished on it with his barbarous bow. Mupi, trying out the music, swayed two or three times, then raised her leg stiff-kneed, and when her foot returned slowly to the ground it seemed to be searching for something. And then she began to rock and continued groping with alternate feet and closed her eyes. The thin beaten gold shells, like hollow walnuts, rustled on this Mupi's body. She took the king's pipe from his hand and knocked out the coals on her thigh, pressing down with her hand, and while she burned herself her eyes, which were very fluid with the pain, never stopped looking into his. The king whispered to me, "This is a good girl--very good girl." "She's certainly gone on you," I said. The dancing continued to the croaking of the two-stringed instrument. "Your Highness, I've got to talk �" The fringe of teeth clicked as he turned his head with the soft, large-brimmed hat. In the shade of this hat his face was more vivid than ever, especially his hollow-bridged nose and his high-swelled lips. "Your Highness." "Oh, you are very persistent. Very well. As you claim it is so urgent, let us go where we can talk." He stood up and his rising caused a great disturbance among the women. They began to spring back and forth, loping across the little pavilion, crying out, and making a clatter with their ornaments; some wept with disappointment that the king was going and some attacked me with shrill voices for taking Dahfu away while several shrieked, "Sdudu lebah!" Lebah--I had already picked the word up--was Wariri for lion. They were warning him about Atti; they were charging him with desertion. The king with a big gesture waved at them, laughing. He seemed very affectionate and I guess he was saying he cared for them all. I was waiting, standing by, huge, my worried face still stiff from the bruises. The women were right, for Dahfu did not lead me back to his apartment again but took me again to the den, below. When I realized where he was going I hurried after him saying, "Wait, wait. Let's talk this thing over. Just one single minute." "I am sorry, Henderson-Sungo, but we are bound to go to Atti. I will listen to you down there." "Well, forgive me for saying it, King, but you're very stubborn. In case you don't know it you are in a hell of a position." "Oh, the divil," he said. "I am aware what they are up to." "They came and showed me the head of a person they claimed was the same as Atti in a former existence." The king stopped. Tatu had just let us through the door and was standing holding the heavy bolt in her arms, waiting in the gallery. "That is the well-known fear business. We will withstand it. Old man, sometimes things cannot be so nice in cases like this. Do they harass you? It is because I have shown my fondness about you." He took me by the shoulder. Owing perhaps to the touch of his hand, I almost broke down on the threshold of the stairs. "Here," I said, "I am ready to do almost anything you say. I've taken a lot from life, but basically it hasn't really scared me, King. I am a soldier. All my people have been soldiers. They protected the peasants, and they went on the crusades and fought the Mohammedans. And I had one ancestor on my mother's side--why General U. S. Grant wouldn't even start an engagement without him. He would say, 'Billy Waters here?' 'Present, sir.' 'Very good. Begin the battle.' Hell's bells, I've got martial blood in me. But Your Highness, you're breaking me down with this lion business. And what about your mother?" "Oh, divil my mother, Sungo," he said. "Do you think the world is nothing but an egg and we are here to set upon it? First come the phenomena. Utterly above all else. I talk to you about a great discovery and you argue me mothers. I am aware they are working the fear business upon her, as well. My mother has outlived father Gmilo already by half of a decade. Come through the door with me and let Tatu close it. Come, come." I stood. He shouted, "Come, I say!" and I stepped through the doorway. I saw Tatu as she labored to place the great chunk of wood which was the bolt. It fell, the door banged, and we were in darkness. The king was running down the stairs. Where the light came through the grating in the ceiling, that watery, stone-conditioned yellow light, I caught up with him. He said, "Why are you blustering at me so with your face? You have a perilous expression." I said, "King, it's the way I feel. I told you before I am mediumistic. And I feel trouble." "No doubt, as there is trouble. But I will capture Gmilo and the trouble will entirely cease. No one will dispute or contest me then. There are scouts daily for Gmilo. As a matter of fact reports have come of him. I can assure you of a capture very soon." I said fervently that I certainly hoped he would catch him and get the thing over with, so we could stop worrying about those two strangling characters, the Bunam and the black-leather man. Then they would stop persecuting his mother. At this second mention of his mother he looked angry. For the first time he subjected me to a long scowl. Then he resumed his way down the stairs. Shaken, I followed him. Well, I reflected, this black king happened to be a genius. Like Pascal at the age of twelve discovering the thirty-second proposition of Euclid all by himself. But why lions? Because, Mr. Henderson, I replied to myself, you don't know the meaning of true love if you think it can be deliberately selected. You just love, that's all. A natural force. Irresistible. He fell in love with his lioness at first sight--coup de foudre. I went crashing down the weed-grown part of the stairway engaged in this dialogue with myself. At the same time I held my breath as we approached the den. The cloud of fright about me was even more suffocating than before; it seemed to give actual resistance to my face and made my breathing clumsy. My respiration grew thick. Hearing us the beast began to roar in her inner room. Dahfu looked through the grating and said, "It is all right, we may go in." "Now? You think she's okay? She sounds disturbed to me. Why don't I wait out here?" I said, "till you find out how the wind blows?" "No, you must come," said the king. "Don't you understand yet, I am trying to do something for you? A benefit? I can hardly think of a person who may need this more. Really the danger of life is negligible. The animal is tame." "Tame for you, but she doesn't really know me yet. I'm just as ready to take a reasonable chance as the next guy. But I can't help it, I am afraid of her." He paused, and during this pause I thought I was going down greatly in his estimation, and nothing could have hurt me more than that. "Oh," he said, and he was particularly thoughtful. Silently he paused and thought. In this moment he looked and sounded, again, larger than life. "I think I recall when we were speaking of blows that there was a lack of the brave." Then he sighed and said, with his earnest mouth which even in the shadow of his hat had a very red color, "Fear is a ruler of mankind. It has the biggest dominion of all. It makes you white as candles. It splits each eye in half. More of fear than of any other thing has been created," he said. "As a molding force it comes second only to Nature itself." "Then doesn't this apply to you, too?" He said, with a nod of full agreement, "Oh, certainly. It applies. It applies to everyone. Though nothing may be visible, still it is heard, like radio. It is on almost all the frequencies. And all tremble, and all are wincing, in greater or lesser degree." "And you think there is a cure?" I said. "Why, I surely believe there is. Otherwise all the better imagining will have to be surrendered. Anyways, I will not urge you to come in with me and do as I have done. As my father Gmilo did. As Gmilo's father Suffo did. As we all did. No. If it is positively beyond you we may as well exchange good-by and go separate ways." "Wait a minute now, King, don't be hasty," I said. I was mortified and frightened; nothing could have been more painful than to lose my connection with him. Something had gone off in my breast, my eyes filled, and I said, almost choking, "You wouldn't brush me off like that would you, King? You know how I feel." He realized how hard I was taking it; nevertheless he repeated that perhaps it would be better if I left, for although we were temperamentally suited as friends and he had deep affection for me, too, and was grateful for the opportunity to know me and also for my services to the Wariri in lifting up Mummah, still, unless I understood about lions, no deepening of the friendship was possible. I simply had to know what this was about. "Wait a minute, King," I said. "I feel tremendously close to you and I'm prepared to believe what you tell me." "Sungo, thank you," he said. "I also am close to you. It is very mutual. But I require more deep relationship. I desire to be understood and communicated to. We have to develop an underlying similarity which lies within you by connection with the lion. Otherwise, how shall we maintain the truth agreement we made?" Moved as anything, I said, "Oh, this is hard, King, to be threatened with loss of friendship." The threat was exceedingly painful also to him. Yes, I saw that he suffered almost as hard as I did. Almost. Because who can suffer like me? I am to suffering what Gary is to smoke. One of the world's biggest operations. "I don't understand it," I said. He took me up to the door and made me look through the grating at Atti the lioness, and in that soft, personal tone peculiar to him which went strangely to the center of the subject, he said, "What a Christian might feel in Saint Sophia's church, which I visited in Turkey as a student, I absorb from lion. When she gives her tail a flex, it strikes against my heart. You ask, what can she do for you? Many things. First she is unavoidable. Test it, and you will find she is unavoidable. And this is what you need, as you are an avoider. Oh, you have accomplished momentous avoidances. But she will change that. She will make consciousness to shine. She will burnish you. She will force the present moment upon you. Second, lions are experiencers. But not in haste. They experience with deliberate luxury. The poet says, 'The tigers of wrath are wiser than the
horses of instruction.' Let us embrace lions also in the same view. Moreover, observe Atti. Contemplate her. How does she stride, how does she saunter, how does she he or gaze or rest or breathe? I stress the respiratory part," he said. "She do not breathe shallow. This freedom of the intercostal muscles and her abdominal flexibility" (her lower belly, which was disclosed to our view, was sheer white) "gives the vital continuity between her parts. It brings those brown jewel eyes their hotness. Then there are more subtle things, as how she leaves hints, or elicits caresses. But I cannot expect you to see this at first. She has much to teach you." "Teach? You really mean that she might change me." "Excellent. Precisely. Change. You fled what you were. You did not believe you had to perish. Once more, and a last time, you tried the world. With a hope of alteration. Oh, do not be surprised by such a recognition," he said, seeing how it moved me to discover that my position was understood. "You have told me much. You are frank. This makes you irresistible, as not many are. You have rudiments of high character. You could be noble. Some parts may be so long-buried as to be classed dead. Is there any resurrectibility in them? This is where the change comes in." "You think there's a chance for me?" I said. "Not at all impossible if you follow my directions." The lioness stroked past the door. I heard her low, soft, continuous snarl. Dahfu now started to go in. My nether half turned very cold. My knees felt like two rocks in a cold Alpine torrent. My mustache stabbed and stung into my lips, which made me realize that I was frowning and grimacing with terror, and I knew that my eyes must be filling with fatal blackness. As before, he took my hand as we entered and I came into the den saying inwardly, "Help me, God! Oh, help!" The odor was blinding, for here, near the door where the air was trapped, it stank radiantly. From this darkness came the face of the lioness, wrinkling, with her whiskers like the thinnest spindles scratched with a diamond on the surface of a glass. She allowed the king to fondle her, but passed by him to examine me, coming round with those clear circles of inhuman wrath, convex, brown, and pure, rings of black light within them. Between her mouth and nostrils a line divided her lip, like the waist of the hourglass, expanding into the muzzle. She sniffed my feet, working her way to the crotch once more and causing my parts to hide in my belly as best they could. She next put her head into my armpit and purred with such tremendous vibration it made my head buzz like a kettle. Dahfu whispered, "She likes you. Oh, I am glad. I am enthusiastic. I am so proud of both of you. Are you afraid?" I was bursting. I could only nod. "Later you will laugh at yourself with amusement. Now it is normal." "I can't even bring my hands together to wring them," I said. "Feel paralysis?" he said. The lioness went away, making a tour of the den along the walls on the thick pads of her feet. "Can you see?" he said. "Barely. I can barely see a single thing." "Let us begin with the walk." "Behind bars. I'd like that fine. It would be great." "You are avoiding again, Henderson-Sungo." His eyes were looking at me from under the softly folded velvet brim. "Change does not lie that way. You must form a new habit." "Oh, King, what can I do? My openings are screwed up tight, both back and front. They may go to the other extreme in a minute. My mouth is all dried out, my scalp is wrinkling up, I feel thick and heavy at the back of my head. I may be passing out." I remember that he looked at me with keen curiosity, as if wondering about these symptoms from a medical standpoint. "All the resistances are putting forth their utmost," was his comment. It didn't seem possible that the black of his face could be exceeded, and yet his hair, visible at the borders of his hat, was blacker. "Well," he said, "we shall let them come out. I am firmly confident in you." I said weakly, "I'm glad you think so. If I'm not torn to pieces. If I'm not left down here half-eaten." "Take my assurance. No such eventuality is possible. Now, watch the way she walks. Beautiful? You said it! Furthermore this is uninstructed, specie-beauty. I believe when the fear has subsided you will be capable of admiring her beauty. I think that part of the beauty emotion does result from an overcoming of fear. When the fear yields, a beauty is disclosed in its place. This is also said of perfect love if I recollect, and it means that ego-emphasis is removed. Oh, Henderson, watch how she is rhythmical in behavior. Did you do the cat in Anatomy One? Watch how she gives her tail a flex. I feel it as if undergoing it personally. Now let us follow her." He began to lead me around after the lioness. I was bent over, and my legs were thick and drunken. The green silk pants no longer floated but were charged with electricity and clung to the back of my thighs. The king did not stop talking, which I was glad of, since his words were the sole support I had. His reasoning I couldn't follow in detail--I wasn't fit to--but gradually I understood that he wanted me to imitate or dramatize the behavior of lions. What is this going to be, I thought, the Stanislavski method? The Moscow Art Theatre? My mother took a tour of Russia in 1905. On the eve of the Japanese War she saw the Czar's mistress perform in the ballet. I said to the king, "And how does Obersteiner's allochiria and all that medical stuff you gave me to read come into this?" He patiently said, "All the pieces fit properly. It will presently be clear. But first by means of the lion try to distinguish the states that are given and the states that are made. Observe that Atti is all lion. Does not take issue with the inherent. Is one hundred per cent within the given." But I said in a broken voice, "If she doesn't try to be human, why should I try to act the lion? I'll never make it. If I have to copy someone, why can't it be you?" "Oh, shush these objections, Henderson-Sungo. _I__ copied her. Transfer from lion to man is possible, I know by experience." And then he shouted, "Sakta," which was a cue to the lioness to start running. She trotted, and the king began to bound after her, and I ran too, trying to keep close to him. "Sakta, sakta," he was crying, and she picked up speed. Now she was going fast along the opposite wall. In a few minutes she would come up behind me. I started to call to him, "King, King, wait, let me go in front of you, for Christ's sake." "Spring upward," he called back to me. But I was clumping and pounding after him trying to pass him, and sobbing. In the mind's eye I saw blood in great drops, bigger than quarters, spring from my skin as she sank her claws into me, for I was convinced that as I was in motion I was fair game and she would claw me as soon as she was within range. Or perhaps she would break my neck. I thought that might be preferable. One stroke, one dizzy moment, the mind fills with night. Ah, God! No stars in that night. There is nothing. I could not catch up with the king, and therefore I pretended to stumble and threw myself heavily on the ground, off to the side, and gave a crazy cry. The king when he saw me prostrate on my belly held out his hand to Atti to stop her, shouting, "Tana, tana, Atti." She sprang sideward and began to walk toward the wooden shelf. From the dust I watched her. She gathered herself down upon her haunches and lightly reached the shelf on which she liked to lie. She pointed one leg outward and started to wash herself with her tongue. The king squatted beside her and said, "Are you hurt, Mr. Henderson?" "No, I just got jolted," I said. Then he began to explain. "I intend to loosen you up, Sungo, because you are so contracted. This is why we were running. The tendency of your conscious is to isolate self. This makes you extremely contracted and self-recoiled, so next I wish--" "Next?" I said. "What next? I've had it. I'm humbled to the dust already. What else am I supposed to do, King, for heaven's sake? First I was stuck with a dead body, then thrown into the cattle pond, clobbered by the amazons. Okay. For the rain. Even the Sungo pants and all that. Okay! But now this?" With much forbearance and sympathy he answered, picking up a pleated corner of his velvet headgear, the color of thick wine, "Patient, Sungo," he said. "Those aforementioned things were for us, for the Wariri. Do not think I am ever ingrate. But this latter is for you." "That's what you keep saying. But how can this lion routine cure what I've got?" The forward slope of the king's face suggested, as his mother's did, that it was being offered to you. "Oh," he said, "high conduct, high conduct! There will never be anything but misery without high conduct. I knew that you went out from home in America because of a privation of high conduct. You have met your first opportunities of it well, Henderson-Sungo, but you must go on. Take advantage of the studies I have made, which by chance are available to you." I licked my hand, for I had scratched it in falling, and then I sat up, brooding. He squatted opposite me with his arms about his knees. He looked steadily at me across his large folded arms while he tried to make me meet his gaze. "What do you want me to do?" "As I have done. As Gmilo, Suffo, all the forefathers did. They all acted the lion. Each absorbed lion into himself. If you do as I wish, you too will act the lion." If this body, if this flesh of mine were only a dream, then there might be some hope of awakening. That was what I thought as I lay there smarting. I lay, so to speak, at the bottom of things. Finally I sighed and started to get up, making one of the greatest efforts I have ever made. At this he said, "Why rise, Sungo, since we have you in a prone position?" "What do you mean, prone position? Do you want me to crawl?" "No, naturally not, crawl is for a different order of creature. But be on all the fours. I wish you to assume the posture of a lion." He got on all fours himself, and I had to admit that he looked very much like a lion. Atti, with crossed paws, only occasionally looked at us. "You see?" he said. And I answered, "Well, you ought to be able to do it. You were brought up on it. Besides, it's your idea. But I can't." I slumped back on the ground. "Oh," he said. "Mr. Henderson, Mr. Henderson! Is this the man who spoke of rising from a grave of solitude? Who recited me the poem of the little fly on the green leaf in the setting sun? Who wished to end Becoming? Is this the Henderson who flew half around the world because he had a voice which said _I__ _want?__ And now, because his friend Dahfu extends a remedy to him, falls down? You dismiss my relationship?" "Now, King, that's not true. It's just not true, and you know it. I'd do anything for you." To prove this, I rose up on my hands and feet and stood there with knees sagging, trying to look straight ahead and as much like a lion as possible. "Oh, excellent," he said. "I am so glad. I was sure you had sufficient flexibility in you. Settle on your knees now. Oh, that is better, much better." My paunch came forward between my arms. "Your structure is far from ordinary," he said. "But I offer you sincerest congratulations on laying aside the former attitude of fixity. Now, sir, will you assume a little more limberness? You appear cast in one piece. The midriff dominates. Can you move the different portions? Minus yourself of some of your heavy reluctance of attitude. Why so sad and so earthen? Now you are a lion. Mentally, conceive of the environment. The sky, the sun, the creatures of the bush. You are related to all. The very gnats are your cousins. The sky is your thoughts. The leaves are your insurance, and you need no other. There is no interruption all night to the speech of the stars. Are you with me? I say, Mr. Henderson, have you consumed much amounts of alcohol in your life? The face suggests you have, the nose especially. It is nothing personal. Much can be changed. By no means all, but very very much. You can have a new poise, which will be your own poise. It will resemble the voice of Caruso, which I have heard on records, never tired because the function is as natural as to the birds. However," he said, "it is another animal you strongly remind me of. But of which?" I wasn't going to tell him anything. My vocal cords, anyway, seemed stuck together like strands of overcooked spaghetti. "Oh, truly! How very big you are," he said. He went on in this vein. At last I found my voice and asked him, "How long do you want me to hold this?" "I have been observing," he said. "It is very important that you feel _something__ of a lion on your maiden attempt. Let us start with the roaring." "It won't excite her, you think?" "No, no. Now look, Mr. Henderson, I wish you to picture that you are a lion. A literal lion." I moaned. "No, sir. Please oblige me. A real roar. We must hear your voice. It tends to be rather choked. I told you the tendency of your conscious is to isolate self. So fancy you are with your kill. You are warning away an intruder. You may begin with a growl." Having come so far with the guy there was no way to back out. Not one single alternative remained. I had to do it. So I began to make a rumble in my throat. I was in despair. "More, more," he said impatiently. "Atti has taken no notice, therefore it is far from the thing." I let the sound grow louder. "And glare as you do so. Roar, roar, roar, Henderson-Sungo. Do not be afraid. Let go of yourself. Snarl greatly. Feel the lion. Lower on the forepaws. Up with hindquarters. Threaten me. Open those magnificent mixed eyes. Oh, give more sound. Better, better," he said, "though still too much pathos. Give more sound. Now, with your hand--your paw--attack! Cuff! Fall back! Once more--strike, strike, strike, strike! Feel it. Be the beast! You will recover humanity later, but for the moment, be it utterly." And so I was the beast. I gave myself to it, and all my sorrow came out in the roaring. My lungs supplied the air but the note came from my soul. The roaring scalded my throat and hurt the corners of my mouth and presently I filled the den like a bass organ pipe. This was where my heart had sent me, with its clamor. This is where I ended up. Oh, Nebuchadnezzar! How well I understand that prophecy of Daniel. For I had claws, and hair, and some teeth, and I was bursting with hot noise, but when all this had come forth, there was still a remainder. That last thing of all was my human longing. As for the king, he was in a state of enthusiasm, praising me, rubbing his hands together, looking into my face. "Oh, good, Mr. Henderson. Good, good. You are the sort of man I took you to be," I heard him say when I stopped to draw breath. I might as well go the whole way, I thought, as I was crouching in the dust and the lion's offal, since I had come so far;