CHAPTER 1
LOLITABU
NATIONAL PARK
ZARAKAL
July 1986 to February 1987
For nearly eight months Joshua lived in a remote portion of Zarakal’s Lolitabu National Park where an old man of the Wanderobo tribe taught him how to survive without running water, phones, or cans of imported tuna. Although hunting was illegal in the country’s parks President Tharaka granted a special dispensation for the success of the White Sphinx Project would depend to an alarming extent on Joshua’s ability to fend for himself in the Early Pleistocene.
Despite having lived his entire life among the agricultural Kikembu people Zarakal’s largest single ethnic group Thomas Babington Mubia had never given up the hunting arts of the Wanderobo. In 1934 he’d taught a callow Alistair Patrick Blair how to grab a duiker barehanded and dress out its carcass with stone tools chipped into existence on the spot. Fifty-plus years later Blair now a world-renowned paleoanthropologist wanted his old teacher to teach these same skills to Joshua for Babington although a lot slower and not quite so sharp-eyed had lost none of his skills as stalker, slayer, and flint-knapper.
Babington as everyone who knew him well called him was tall, sinewy, and grizzled. In polite company he wore khaki shorts, sandals, and any one of a number of different loud sports shirts that Blair had given him but in the bush he opted for near or total nudity. Welts, scars, weals, and tubercules pebbled his flesh in spite of which he appeared in fine health for a man belonging to rika ria Ramsay: an age-grade group that had undergone circumcision during the regime of Ramsay MacDonald’s coalition cabinet in England and Joshua found the old Wanderobo’s incidental bumps and cuts much less disturbing than a certain vestige of that long-ago rite.
Ngwati the Kikembu called it: a bit of frayed skin that hung beneath Babington’s penis like the pull tab on a Band-Aid wrapper. It hurt Joshua to look at this small skin. He would not let his eyes shift to Babington’s crotch and for reasons other than Western modesty he did his darnedest not to shed his shorts or make water within the old man’s sight. He stupidly feared that to be seen naked by Babington would be to acquire a Ngwati of his own.
Until his circumcision Joshua’s mentor had attended a mission school run by Blair’s Protestant Episcopal parents. He knew by heart scores of psalms, a dozen or so of Shakespeare’s soliloquies, and most of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, a great favorite of the old Wanderobo’s. Sometimes he disconcerted Joshua by standing naked in the night and booming out in a refined British accent whichever of these memory-fixed passages most suited his mood. In July their first month in the bush Babington often declaimed the lesser known of two pieces by Poe entitled To Helen:
But now, at length, dear Dian sank
Into a western couch of thunder-cloud;
And thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees
Didst glide away. Only thine eyes remained.
They would not go—they never yet have gone.
Lighting my lonely pathway home that night,
They have not left me (as my hopes have) since.
Sitting in the tall acacia in which he and Babington had built a treehouse with a stout door Joshua looked down and asked his mentor if he had ever married.
Oh yes. Four wives all at once but the loveliest and best was Helen Mithaga.
What happened?
During the war the second big war I walked to Bravanumbi from Makoleni, my home village, and enrolled for service against the evil minions of Hitler in North Africa. A special unit chose me and I fought with it for two years. When I returned to Makoleni three of my wives had divorced me by returning to their families. I was Wanderobo, they were Kikembu. Although also Kikembu my Helen had waited.
We loved each other so much. Later a year after the war she was poisoned by a sorcerer who envied me the medals I’d won and also Helen’s Elysian beauty. I lost her to the world of spirits which we call ngoma. On nights like this one dry and clear I know she has fixed the eyes of her soul upon me and I address her everlasting world with another man’s poignant words.
This story touched Joshua. How regard Babington as a ludicrous figure fool when during the droughts of August he stood one-footed in the dark and recited,
Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night! . . .
Nights were never icy in Lolitabu off in Zarakal’s southwestern corner. Instead of sledge bells you heard elephants trumpeting, hyenas laughing, and poachers whispering to one another. Babington took pains to ensure that Joshua and he never ran afoul of these men for although some were woeful amateurs trying to earn money to feed themselves and their kin, others of them ruthless predators would kill to avoid detection.
The park’s big cats worried Joshua more than the poachers did. They didn’t worry Babington. He walked the savanna with the air of a man crossing an empty parking lot. His goal wasn’t to discomfit Joshua but to teach him the differences among several species of gazelle and antelope many of which hadn’t even evolved by Early Pleistocene times. Joshua tried to listen but found himself warily eying the lions sprawled under trees on the veldt. We don’t smell appetizing to their nostrils, Babington told Joshua. Lions find the fetor of human beings repugnant.
Then they won’t attack unless we provoke them?
Babington pushed a partial plate from his mouth with his tongue then sucked it back in. A toothless lion or one slowly losing its sense of smell might be tempted to attack. Who knows?
Then why do we come out here weapon-free and walk the grasslands like two-legged gods?
That’s not how I am walking, Babington answered.
During this extended period in the Zarakali wilderness Joshua dreamed about the far past no more than twice a month: dreams similar in a hazy way to his tutorials with Babington. Why had his spirit-traveling episodes given way to more conventional dreaming? In a sense his survival training with the Wanderobo was a waking version of the dreamfaring he’d known every night his entire life. With eyes wide open he existed alone between the long-ago landscapes of his dreamfaring and the dreams themselves. He stood in the darkness separating two distinct realities.
One day Babington came upon Joshua urinating into a clump of grass near their treehouse. Nonplussed Joshua could neither halt the process nor direct it away from his mentor’s gaze. The pressure at last discharged he shook his cock dry, eased it back into his jockey shorts, and turned to go back to the treehouse.
You are not yet a man, the Wanderobo informed him.
Joshua’s embarrassment mutated into anger. It’s not the Eighth Wonder of the World but it gets me by!
You’ve not been bitten by the knife.
It struck Joshua that Babington was talking about circumcision. A Kikembu man who had not undergone this rite was still a boy whatever his age.
I’m an American, Babington.
In this enterprise you are honorary Zarakali and too old to live any longer in the nyuba. The nyuba, Joshua knew, was the circular Kikembu house in which women and young children lived.
Babington!
But Babington stood firm. No adult male representing all the peoples of Zarakal should embark on a mission of this weight visiting the ngoma of the spirit world without first enduring the traditional rite of passage consecrating his arrival at manhood called irua. If Joshua chose not to submit to the knife which Babington enthusiastically offered to wield then Babington must return to Makoleni and White Sphinx must proceed without his blessing.
On a visit to the park in early September Blair learned of this ultimatum and of Joshua’s decision to accede to it. So long as Joshua could impose a condition of his own. I don’t want a Band-Aid string like Babington’s, he told the Great Man. I can stand the pain and the embarrassment but spare me that goddamn casing pull.
Although less than six feet tall and possessed of a pair of watery blue eyes whose vision had begun to weaken a circumstance insufficient to make him wear glasses Blair still cut an imposing figure. His white mustaches and the sunbaked dome of his forehead and pate gave him the appearance of a walrus that had blustered into the tropics and then decided to make the region its home. He seemed to swagger even when sitting on the sticky upholstery of a Land Rover and his voice had the mellow resonance of a bassoon. In the past ten years his appealing ugly-uncle mug had graced the covers of a dozen magazines and popular scientific journals and for a thirteen-week period three years ago he had hosted a PBS program about evolution entitled Beginnings that had rekindled an ongoing set-to between paleoanthropologists and self-designated scientific creationists and that had also served to make Blair’s name a household word all across the world. By now though Joshua well knew the Great Man and had no qualms about voicing his complaints about Babington’s plans for a circumcision rite. Blair assured Joshua that educated Kikembu, especially Christians, also regarded Ngwati with distaste and that Babington would not insist that he keep the small skin if Joshua objected to his doing so.
I do, said Joshua but he parried the Great Man’s well-meaning proposals for sidestepping the circumcision rite. He felt that he owed Babington and wanted to earn the old man’s respect. Apprised of Joshua’s intentions Babington declared that the ceremony would take place two days hence in the grove where he and his protégé had their treehouse. Blair then told Joshua that to prove himself he must betray no fear prior to the cutting or cry out in pain during it. Such behavior would disgrace him and his sponsors. Also to legitimize the rite Babington messaged many village leaders and asked Blair to invite some of the Kikembu from the outpost village of Nyarati as onlookers. Once the knife glinted they would applaud Joshua’s steadfastness or if he failed to bear up ridicule his public cowardice.
Onlookers? Joshua exclaimed.
It’s traditional. Of what point are the strength and beauty of a leopard if no one ever sees them?
Of great point if you’re a leopard. Besides we’re not talking about leopards but my one and only reproductive organ. Onlookers be damned!
They’re for purposes of verification, Joshua.
Let Babington circumcise a leopard. I’d love to see them verify that.
Now-now, Alistair Patrick Blair said. Tsk-tsk.
Joshua spent the night before his irua at the park’s sprawling Edwardian guest lodge with Blair. At dawn he bathed himself in a tub mounted on cast-iron lion’s paws, donned a white robe, and set off with Blair for his rendezvous with Babington aboard a Land Rover driven by a park attendant.
They arrived in the acacia grove not long after eight AM and found it teeming with young men and women from Nyarati. The women sang spiritedly imparting a boisterous gaiety to the crowd all out of proportion to the trimming of an innocent foreskin. Blair took Joshua’s robe and pointed him to the spot where the old Wanderobo would enact his rite of passage.
You’re not to look at Babington. Don’t watch the cutting either.
I thought that would be part of proving my manhood.
No. Rather than being required it’s prohibited.
Thanks be to Ngai for small mercies.
Naked and shivering Joshua entered the clearing beneath the treehouse, sat on the matted grass, and averted his face from the ladder that Babington would soon climb down. Blair his aide could offer no physical assistance until the rite concluded. The songs of the Kikembu women, the bawdy masculine repartee at his back, and the anxious hiccupping of his heart isolated him from the event’s reality.
Cold he turned inward and felt even colder.
Then Babington arrived and knelt before him with a knife. Joshua put both fists to the right side of his neck and his chin on one fist and stared into the savanna. The cutting began. Joshua clenched his teeth and tightened his fists. Refusing to yip or whimper he caught sight of two tourist minibuses rolling over the steppe from the vicinity of the guest lodge. He’d seen them that morning parked inside a courtyard next to the lodge. When the minibuses pulled abreast of the acacia grove clouds of dust drifting away behind them Joshua stared at the vehicles mouth agape.
The faces in the grimy vehicles’ windows belonged to astonished Caucasians, many elderly women in multicolored head scarves, out-of-fashion pillbox hats, or fancy wigs much too youthful for their wearers. The cutting ceased. Passengers from both vans dismounted at the outer picket of trees and filtered inward to stand behind the swaying and ululating Kikembu women.
Jesus, Joshua said.
Hush, Babington said, or I’ll deprive you of much future pleasure and many descendants.
A portly middle-aged tour guide with a florid complexion used a megaphone to make himself heard over the singing and hand-clapping Africans. The cutting resumed. Joshua shut out the man’s spiel to focus on the waves of pain radiating through him from the knife point. Still he saw the eyes of the female tourist nearest the guide had grown huge behind her thick-lensed glasses. A stout ruin of a woman whose magenta head scarf resembled a babushka she tried to sway in unity with the svelte graceful Africans. Her swaying and the guide’s ceaseless patter distracted Joshua a bit from the pain as did the fact that a male tourist had just brandished an expensive Nikon camera.
Finished, Babington declared.
Don’t leave Ngwati, Blair told him. Please remove it.
Babington snorted his contempt but sliced the offending string of flesh.
In celebration of the successful irua a chorus of voices echoed through the grove and over the steppe. Now Joshua looked down. Blood flowed from him into the grass like water from a spigot. Blair steadied him and wrapped the immaculate white robe around his shoulders.
Now people danced and sang extolling the initiate’s moxie as they wove amongst the trees in a sinuous daisy chain of bodies. Some tourists had joined the conga line. The Kikembu waved in encouragement and more tourists snaked into the celebration. Joshua afraid he would faint held his robe front away from his groin to keep from staining the garment.
The magenta-scarf woman approached him from the grove’s edge and said in the flat Alf Landon accents of a native Kansan, Give you twenty dollars for that robe. Joshua gaped. Tell him twenty dollars, the old woman commanded Blair. Another five if he’ll let me take a Polaroid. Our tour guide said to ask.
Mrs. Givens, Joshua said. Kit Givens of Van Luna, Kansas!
He’d last seen this woman at his grandfather’s memorial service fourteen years ago occupying a rear pew in the stained-glass apricot-and-umber sanctuary of the First Methodist Church. She was seventy-two if a minute. Her withered cheeks and chin shone with the iridescent hues of a mandrill’s mask.
I’ve never seen him before, she told Blair as if sharing a confidence. How could he know my name?
When I was a baby you pulled my hair in my grandpapa’s grocery.
Mrs. Givens told Blair: I wouldn’t pay that impudent nigger five dollars to mow my yard.
Despite his weakness Joshua doffed his robe and handed it to her. I’d like you to have this. Take it back to Van Luna the sooner the better.
Mrs. Givens took the robe from the wounded man, backed away clutching it, and turned again to the paleoanthropologist.
Walk me back to the tour bus please. I’ve never met this man in my life.
Of course, Mrs. Givens.
As Blair led the woman through the rowdy throng to the bus Babington helped Joshua climb into the treehouse. Many of the Kikembu from Nyarati had brought banana leaves to the ceremony and the old Wanderobo had arranged them into a pallet upon which Joshua could rest without fear of exacerbating his wounds. His cock wouldn’t stick to the leaves as to linen or other pallet fabrics and the wounds would heal faster. Lying on that pallet his sex a knot of fire Joshua saw Babington’s face beholding him with visible pride. A face that looked to have been created just as the wind sculpts sand dunes or rain cuts channels into rock.
Everyone wants a bit of the sacred, Joshua murmured writhing. Even if it isn’t sacred. Dreaming makes it so and dreaming goes on and on. Until it’s a habit.
Sleep, Joshua, the old warrior said.
Three weeks passed before Joshua felt strong enough to resume his White Sphinx training. For two nights despite the antibiotics Blair had brought him from the hospital at Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base he hallucinated. In his delirium the lacerated ghost of his adoptive father visited him as did a gnomish Spanish woman who opened her blouse to suckle him like a baby, a young black soldier with no head, and the robed figure of Mutesa David Christian Ghazali Tharaka, President of Zarakal. Unlike the others, Joshua learned from Babington, this last visitor had come in person.
Why? What did he say?
Babington handed Joshua an autographed picture of the President. He said he loved you. You are bridging a chasm between Zarakal’s pluralistic tribal beginnings and its modern aspirations. That you an American Negro submitted to the knife speaks volumes about your commitment to our dream.
What else? What else?
He gave me a photo too. Babington pointed at the wall of the treehouse where he had hung his copy. This one bore an inscription to the Wanderobo. Joshua couldn’t see it from where he lay but it had certainly touched Babington’s heart.
At first Joshua mourned that he was taking so long to heal but his mentor noted that he too had suffered a throbbing tenderness more than a month after his irua. By mid-October though Babington and he stalked game again, dug tubers, picked fruit, and dove ever deeper into wilderness lore. Joshua’s glans was no longer so sensitive that just to pee was to conduct electricity. Joshua learned his lessons: how to alter his upright silhouette by tying foliage about his waist, how to move on a wily diagonal stalking game, how to club a sick or wounded animal to death without exhausting himself or making an ugly mess of his kill, and how to eat raw meat, birds’ eggs, and insects without nausea or qualm.
The time in Lolitabu flew.
The night before Joshua returned to Russell-Tharaka for more study textbook and simulator work, with reviews of the paleontological information he’d digested last spring and summer he awoke and went to the door of the treehouse.
Silhouetted on the edge of the grove Babington declaimed from Poe:
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.