PART THREE
The Ritual of Death and Designation
From the final digital draft of the one
complete section of Egan Cheney’s
otherwise unfinished ethnography:
*
DEATH
On Day 120 the old chieftain, whom I called Eisen Zwei, took ill. Because it had been several days since he had gorged himself during the general “feast,” I then supposed that his sickness was unrelated to his earlier intemperance. I am still of that mind. For five days he had eaten nothing, although the other Asadi refused to observe his fast and began eating whatever herbs, roots, flowers, bark, and heartwood they came across. They ignored the old man, and the old man’s huri, much in the way they ignored The Bachelor and me.
Eisen Zwei’s sickness altered this pattern. On the afternoon of the first day of his illness, he abruptly rose and made the glottal, in-sucking noises he had used to summon his people to the meat six days before. I ran out from my lean-to. The Asadi moved away from their old chieftain, stopped their shuffling and shambling, and stared with great platterlike eyes whose pinwheeling irises had stalled on a single color. A spastic rumbling replaced the old man’s in-sucking noises, and he bent at the waist, his arms above his head, to heave and heave again—until it seemed he would soon vomit into the dust the very lining of his bowels. Out of his mouth came the half-digested crimson oddments of his spectacular, six-day-old meal. Abashed by the sight, stung by the odor, I turned away. The heaving continued, and since the Asadi stared on, I turned back to observe their culture in action. Duty is a harsh mistress.
The chieftain’s huri flew up from his shoulder and flapped into the air like a tiny, wind-collapsed umbrella. I had never seen it fly before. (I was surprised that it could.) Its ungainly flapping excited the already agitated population of the clearing, and together we watched the huri rise above tree level, circle back, and dip threateningly toward the branches of the trees on the western perimeter. The old man vomited on, but now every pair of color-stalled eyes followed the feeble aerial progress of the huri, which plummeted toward the perch where The Bachelor sometimes sequestered himself.
But The Bachelor wasn’t there, and I had no idea where he could be.
After descending through foliage, the huri caught itself up and returned with blind devotion to the airspace over its master. An ugly joke, it defied gravity. I thought that at last the huri was going to eat, that its sole diet might well consist of Eisen Zwei’s vomit. I expected the starved oddity to fall to earth upon these—but it didn’t. Somehow it kept itself aloft, flapping, flapping, waiting for the old man to finish. Finally, it was not the huri that waded into the vile pool of vomit, but the old man’s shameless conspecifics. My curiosity overcame my revulsion, and I watched the Asadi carry away their portions of the half-digested mess as if each semisolid piece were an invaluable relic. No fighting, no elbowing, no eye-searing abuse. Each Asadi picked out his relic, took it a short way into the jungle, and deposited it in some hidden place for temporary safekeeping. During this solemn recessional, the huri quickened the air with its wing beats and an anonymous Asadi supported Eisen Zwei by clutching—tenderly clutching—his mane. When everyone had taken away a chunk of regurgitated flesh, the chieftain’s helper laid him down in a dry place, and the huri descended to squat by its master’s head.
The Bachelor was one of those who appeared in the mourning throng to select and depart with some memento of Eisen Zwei’s illness. He came last, took only a palm-sized morsel, and retreated to the clearing’s edge. There he climbed into the tree above which the huri had flown its nearly disastrous mission only minutes before. Until sunset The Bachelor stayed there, observing and waiting.
On Days 121, 122, and 123, Eisen Zwei continued sick, and the Asadi paid him scant attention. They brought him water twice a day and “kindly” refrained from stepping on him. The huri sat by the old man’s head. It seemed to be waiting for him to die. It never ate. At night, the Asadi deserted their dying leader without a glance: I feared he would die in their absence. Often, looking out at his inert silhouette, moonlight dripping through the fronds, I thought he had died, and a mild panic assailed me. Did I have a responsibility to the corpse? But the old man did not perish, and on Day 124 another change occurred. Eisen Zwei sat up and stared at Denebola as it crossed the sky—stared at the angry sun through spread fingers, hands crooked into claws—and tore impotently through the blur that Denebola must have seemed to him. The huri sat smug and blindly knowing, as always. But the Asadi noticed the change in the old man and reacted to it. As if his wrestling with the sun were a clue, they again divided into two groups and formed attentive bands to the north and south of Eisen Zwei. They watched him grasping at the sun’s livid corona, tearing with gnarled hands at its gaudy streamers of gas. At noon, the old man rose, stretched out his arms, sobbed, clawed at the sky, and sank back to his knees. Two Asadi from each band went to his aid. They lifted him from the ground. Others on the clearing’s edge chose large, lacquered palm leaves and passed these over the heads of their comrades to the place where their chieftain had collapsed. The Asadi supporting him took the leaves, arranged them into a pallet, and set the old man’s fragile body on it: the second cooperative endeavor I had witnessed among the Asadi, the first having been the shaving of The Bachelor’s mane. It was short-lived, though, for aimless shambling replaced chieftain-watching as the main activity within the two bands on either side of his pallet. Denebola, finally free of the old man’s gaze, crept toward the horizon.
I walked unimpeded through the clearing and bent down over the dying Asadi chief, careful to avoid the huri eyeing me with its uncanny, eyeless face. I peered instead into the real eyes of its master. And experienced a shock, a physical jolt. The old man’s eyes were burnt-out, blackened holes in a hominoid mask. Utterly dead they were two charred lenses waiting for the old man’s body to catch up with their lifelessness.
And then the diffused red light that signaled sunset in the Wild came pouring through the foliage, and the clearing emptied.
Alone with Eisen Zwei and his huri, I knew that during this night the old man would die. I tried to find some intimation of life in his eyes, but saw none and withdrew to the cover of the Wild and the security of my lean-to. I did not sleep. But my worst premonitions betrayed me, and in the morning I saw Eisen Zwei sitting cross-legged on his pallet, the huri once again atop his skinny shoulder.
Then Denebola’s copper-colored light filtered through the foliage signaling sunrise and rejuvenation on BoskVeld. The Asadi returned, once again taking up places north and south of their dying chieftain. Day 125 had begun. I call the events of Day 125, as a cumulative whole, the Ritual of Death and Designation. And we will never fully understand the narrowly “political” life of the Asadi until we can interpret, with precision, every aspect of this Ritual.
The eyes of every Asadi in the clearing—but for The Bachelor’s—turned a deep and melancholy indigo. And stalled there. Profound indigo and absolute silence. So absorbent were the eyes of the Asadi that Denebola, rising, could throw out scarcely one dancing, shimmering ray. Or so it seemed. The morning resembled an Impressionist painting rendered in flat pastels and dull primaries. A paradox. And then the Asadi’s heads began to rock from side to side, the chin of each animal inscribing a figure eight in the air. The heads moved in unison. This went on for an hour or more as the old man nodded in the solemn morning stillness. At last, as if they had inscribed figure eights long enough, the Asadi broke from their bands and formed concentric rings around the old man. The members of each ring began to sway. The inaudible flute I had once heard in the Wild had now become an inaudible bassoon. Ponderously, the Asadi swayed, their manes undulating with beautifully choreographed grief. And The Bachelor—alone, beyond the outermost ring—swayed in lugubrious cadence with the others. This swaying lasted through the last forenoon hours and on toward the tardy dusk.
I retired to my lean-to, but thought better of just sitting and climbed the tree in which The Bachelor often perched. I ignored everything but the ceremony in the clearing, giving myself up to the hypnotic movements of the grey, shaggy beasts that a bewildering universe had given me to study. . . . I nodded but I did not sleep.
Then Eisen Zwei gave a final sob, maniacal and heartrending, and grabbed with palsied hands the huri clinging with evil tenacity to his mane. He exerted what seemed his last reserve of strength and, strangling the huri, lurched out of the dust to his feet. The huri flapped, twisted, and freed one wing. The old man squeezed his hands together to grind the life from the creature that had imprisoned him even as it did his bidding. He did not succeed. The huri used its tiny hands to scratch fine crimson wounds in Eisen Zwei’s face. Then it flapped out of his grasp and up to the height of nearby trees. I feared it would dive upon me in my borrowed perch, but it skirted the clearing’s edge, dipping, banking; silently cawing: its imaginary screams curdled my blood. Meanwhile, just at sunset, Eisen Zwei fell sideways across his pallet, dead. I waited for his people to flee, to leave his brittle corpse for an Earthman’s astonished scrutiny. They did not. Despite the lethal gathering twilight, they stayed. The attraction of his death outweighed their fear of exposing themselves out in the open to the mysteries of darkness. In my arboreal lookout, I had just witnessed two events that I had never previously seen among the Asadi: Death and a universal failure to repair.
*
DESIGNATION
The Ritual of Death and Designation passed into its second stage before I understood that stages existed. Ignoring my hunger, I put away any thought of sleep.
The Asadi converged upon the old man’s corpse. Adults let smaller animals crowd into the center of the clearing and lift the dead chieftain over their heads. The young, the deformed, the weak, and the congenitally slight formed a double column beneath the old man’s outstretched body and plodded with him toward the northern end zone.
Arranged in this fashion, they forced a new revelation upon me. These Asadi had manes of one texture and color: a stringy, soap-scum brown. They bore the dead Eisen Zwei with stoic acquiescence. The larger, sleeker specimens of Asadi—with thick silver, silver-blue, or golden manes—formed single columns on each side of their dingy counterparts; and together these two units, like water inside a moving pipe, flowed northward—the only direction that Eisen Zwei had not entered from when he toted three dressed-out carcasses into the clearing. African driver ants use just this sort of tubular alignment when they travel great distances as a group: the workers inside the column, the warriors without. And nothing in Africa is more feared than driver ants a-march . . . with the noteworthy exception of Humankind.
Almost too late I realized that the Asadi would edge out of the clearing and beyond my reach unless I abandoned The Bachelor’s tree. Nearly falling, I scrambled down. As if viewed through a photographer’s filter, the foliage through which the mourners trod emitted a soft gauzy glow. I ran. Running, I kept up easily, so cadenced and funereal was the step of their procession. At length, I slowed to a walk behind it. Trudging in the mourners’ wake, incorrigibly hangdog in his pariahhood, limped The Bachelor. Meanwhile, the twilight rang with the footfalls and leaf lacerating nudges of hundreds of single-minded communicants.
The huri flew above the procession where the shoulders of the smaller Asadi bore its master. Avoiding branches, the huri turned an accidental cartwheel in the air, righted itself, and landed on E. Z.’s bony chest, where it did a little preening dance, for all the world like an oil-coated rooster wooing a hen. Then the column snaked leftward, the Wild closed off my view of the marchers, and darkness drifted in like black confetti. How long we trudged, I have no idea. An eternity of infinitesimal moments. I won’t try to estimate. Say only, quite a long time. Finally our procession flowed into another clearing.
There, rising against the sky like cloud of basalt, loomed the broad and impervious mass of something built, something made. All three moons shone, and the black bulk of this structure was spotlighted in the old-gold claret shed by the three moons together. Even before those of us at the end of the procession had left the jungle, the lofty, winglike roofs of this sudden artifact, and its high, deep-violet windows, appeared. Was I the only marcher whose first instinct was to plunge back into the nightmare forest? As we approached, members of both the inner and the outer columns began swaying from side to side, plodding and swaying at once. The Bachelor’s head moved in wide arcs; his whole body trembled as if from the paroxysms of ague. If he had once been punished for leading me to this place, maybe now he trembled from fear. On the other hand, if the Asadi wished this temple kept inviolate, wouldn’t they punish me if alerted to my presence? I almost bolted back the way the Asadi had led me, but the pagoda had captured my imagination, and I resisted. But I did have the good sense to climb a tree on the clearing’s edge fronting the pagoda. From there, I watched the proceedings in relative safety.
Grey shadows moved in the deep shadow cast by the Asadi temple. Then two violently green flames spurted from the iron flambeaux on either side of the top step of the tier of stone stairs climbing to the temple’s ornate doorway. The torch-lighters—formerly the moving grey shadows—now descended the steps. Again, wonder, even disbelief, stunned me. This clever use of flambeaux and an unknown starting agent destroyed a host of my previous conclusions about the Asadi.
Fire: they understood fire!
By this time the four columns of Asadi had ranged themselves in parallel files before the structure’s stairway, and six slight menials bore the corpse of Eisen Zwei—an uncanny apple green in the torchlight—up the broad stone steps to the grey catafalque before the door. Here they set the corpse down and lined up behind it, staring out over their waiting kinspeople, facing the cruel ambivalence of the Wild, three on each side of the old man. Unaccustomed to such pulpish grandeur, I began to think that Placenol, or a drug more sinister, was flowing through my veins: surely, this was all hallucination? The moons cried out with silent mouths. The flambeaux uttered bright tatters of unsteady light.
But the ritual did not conclude. As night drew on, the moons rolled, and the four files of Asadi tribesmen shuffled in place. Some stretched out their hands and fought with the tumbling moons just as Eisen Zwei had wrestled with Denebola, the sun. None left the clearing, though I felt that many wanted to. Wrestling with their fears, they waited. The pagoda and the corpse of their chieftain commanded them. In turn, their awesome patience commanded me. Wedged like a spike into my tree, I watched Melchior drifting jungleward down the sky. The Bachelor winced, and the two iron torches guttered like spent candles.
Dawn delayed.
Two vacuums existed: the vacuum in Nature between the end of night and the beginning of day, and the vacuum in the weird hierarchy of the Asadi tribal structure. Night and death. Two vacuums in search of compensatory substance. When would dawn break? How would the Asadi designate their dead chieftain’s successor? A commotion in the clearing! Four neat files of Asadi had dissolved into one clumped mass of milling bodies: a chaos, an anarchy, as on their original assembly ground. How could a vacuum of leadership exist in this arbitrary mélange of unrelated parts? Only the pagoda had solidity, only the pagoda did not move.
Above me, the old man’s huri floated high above this disorder, floated rather than flailed: a gyrfalcon, not a pelican. It rode the prismatic, predawn breezes with unlikely grace, flew off so effortlessly that in a moment it had dwindled to a scrap of light far beyond the temple’s central spire. Then it folded its wings behind it and plummeted down the roseate sky. I almost fell. My feet slipped through the fork that had supported me, and I dangled, arms above my head, over one edge of the pagoda’s forecourt. The anxiety-torn communicants were too caught up in their own panic to notice.
Meanwhile, the huri rocketed earthward. It dived into the Asadi and skimmed along their heads and shoulders with cruel, serrated wings. Dipping in and out, it flapped, again, like a torn window shade, all its ephemeral grace now crass exhibitionism (I don’t know what else to call it) and unwieldy flutterings. But the huri did what it wished—scarred the faces of several Asadi. A few struggled to capture the huri. Others, more reasonable, ducked away or threw up their arms to ward it off. The huri did not discriminate. It scarred anyone who got too near its bladed wings, whether they tried to catch it or to flee. The eyes of the harassed Asadi flashed through their individual spectral displays; the heat from these changes made the clearing phosphorescent with shed energy.
The fact that The Bachelor’s eyes stayed cool and hueless drew little from the heat of those thousand eyes. The Bachelor: I’d nearly forgotten him. He stood apart from his panicked comrades and watched, neither grappling for nor fleeing from the huri, his eyes clayey-white, devoid of all intellect or passion. As for the huri, it performed a wobbly banking turn, slashing with its murderous pinions at everything. Then it shot up through the pagoda’s shadow, wildly flapping, until it pitched over and dived on The Bachelor. It flew into his face, bore him to the ground; it battered him with numberless malicious wing beats. To the last animal, the Asadi quieted, queued up randomly, and watched this penultimate act in their day-long ritual. It took me a moment, but then I realized: The Bachelor was the designee, the chosen one, the chieftain elect. Somehow it seemed an inevitable choice.
Arms aching, I fell from the tree onto the clearing’s floor. Before me were the narrow backs of twenty or thirty Asadi. I could not espy The Bachelor, although I could still hear the churning of the huri’s wings and the altered breathing of the tribespeople. Then a figure, insanely rampant, broke the wall of the crowd and darted through a quickly closing gap of bodies to my right. The Bachelor had regained his feet and was fighting the huri off. These two thrashed their way up the stairs before the temple. Soon they were on the paving beside the catafalque where Eisen Zwei still lay.
On that sacred, high place The Bachelor surrendered to the inevitable. Down on his knees, he lowered his head and ceased to resist. The huri, sensing victory, made a pummeling circuit over the body of the dead chieftain, sawed devilishly at the faces of the corpse bearers, rippling like dry brown paper. At last it settled on The Bachelor’s head. Flapping for balance, it faced the multitude, and me, with blind triumph. No one breathed. No one acknowledged the dawn’s disclosure of the caustic verdigris coating the pagoda like an evil frost. Slowly, painfully so, The Bachelor got to his feet draped in his own resignation, the invisible garb of an isolation even more pronounced than that he had suffered as an outcast. He was the designee, the chosen one, the chieftain elect. The huri dropped from The Bachelor’s head to his shoulder, entwined its fingers in the remnants of his mane. Again immobile and scabrous, there it clung.
The Ritual of Death and Designation had nearly concluded. Two of the six corpse bearers on the temple’s highest tier moved to complete it. They touched the head and feet of Eisen Zwei with the tips of their two great flambeaux, and instantly the old man’s body raged with green fire and the raging flame leapt up the temple face as if to abet the verdigris in its more patient efforts to eat away its façade. The Bachelor stood in the very blast of this conflagration. I feared that he, too, would be consumed. But he was not. Nor was the huri. The fire died, E. Z. had vanished, and the corpse bearers came back down the steps to join the shaggy anonymous mass of their revitalized people.
The Ritual of Death and Designation had ended.
For the purposes of this ethnography, I will minimize the significance of what followed and report it as briefly as possible.
Several of the Asadi turned and saw me in the pagoda’s clearing. They looked at me. After having been ignored for over four months, I had no clue how to react to the signal honor of abrupt visibility. Out of monstrous surprise, I returned their stares. They began advancing upon me, hostility in the blur of colors occurring in their eyes. Behind me, the Synesthesia Wild. I turned to escape into it. Another band of Asadi had insinuated themselves into the path of my escape route, blocking my way.
Among this group I recognized the animal I had christened Benjy. Cognizant of nothing but a vague paternal feeling toward him, I offered my hand, but his nervous hand abruptly cuffed my ear. I fell. Dirt in my mouth, grey faces leaning toward me, I understood that I ought to be terrified.
But I spat out the dirt, and the manes and faces retreated as quickly as they had come, and my incipient terror evaporated like alcohol in a shallow dish.
Overhead, a familiar flapping.
The huri was returning to The Bachelor’s outstretched arm. He had released the creature upon his fellows in order to save me: an action illustrating the mind-boggling complexity of the relationship between the Asadi chieftain and the huri.
Which of them rules?
Which submits to command?
At that moment I didn’t much care.
Denebola had risen, and the Asadi had dispersed into the Wild, leaving me dwarfed and humbled in the presence of their self-sustaining pagoda and the reluctant chieftain who stared down from its uppermost tier.
Although he remained aloof, before the day was out The Bachelor led me back to their original assembly ground. Without his help, I ought to add, I never would have found it. I would still be out there today . . .