Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [116]
from their huts with earthenware cups for their drops of tank water. I lay in the shade and listened to the sleepy drum-summons with my fingers heavily linked upon my belly. When we reached the center of town I climbed out. This was the market place. It was also the magistrate's court. Dressed in a red gown, the judge sat on the top of a dunghill. He was a coarse-featured fellow; I didn't care for his looks. There was always a litigation, and the defendant was tied to a pole and gagged by means of a forked stick which stuck into his palate and pressed down his tongue. The trial would stop for me. The lawyers quit hollering and the crowd yelled, "Sungo! Aki-Sungo" (Great White Sungo). I got out and took a bow. Tamba or Bebu would hand me a perforated gourd like the sprinklers that laundresses used in the old days. No, wait--like the aspergillum the Catholics use in their churches. I would sprinkle them and people would come to me laughing and bowing and offer their backs to the spray, old toothless fellows with grizzled hair in the cleft of their posteriors and maidens whose breasts pointed toward the ground, strong fellows with powerful spines. It didn't escape me altogether that there was some mockery mingled with respect for my strength and my office. Anyway, I always saw to it the prisoner tied to the post got his full share, and added water drops to the perspiration on the poor guy's skin. Such, roughly, were my rain king's duties, but it was the king's special aim that I have to tell you about, and all the literature that he had given me. This I shunned; after our preliminary conversation I guessed that there might be trouble in it. There were the two books, which looked pretty well used up, and there were scientific reprints, coverless, with shabby top pages. I looked through a few of these. The print was close and black, and the only clearings in the text were filled with diagrams of molecules. Otherwise the words were as thick and heavy as tombstones, and I was very disheartened. It was much like taking the limousine to La Guardia Field and passing those cemeteries in Queens. So heavy. Each of the dead having been mailed away, and those stones like the postage stamps death has licked. Anyway, it was a hot afternoon and I sat down with the literature to see what I could do with it. I was wearing my costume, those green silk drawers, and the helmet with its nipple on the top, and the shoes with the crepe soles trodden out of shape and curled like sneering lips. So that's how it is. Illness and fever have made me sleepy. The sun is very absolute. The stripes of shadow look solid. The air is dreamy with the heat and the mountains in places are like molasses candy, yellow, brittle, cellular, cavey, scorched. They look as if they might be bad for the teeth. And I have this literature. Dahfu and Horko had loaded it on the donkey when they came over the mountains from the coast. Afterward the beast was butchered and fed to the lioness. Why should I have to read the stuff? I thought. My resistance to it was great. Firstly I was afraid to find out that the king might be a crank; I felt it was not right, after I had come this long way to pierce the spirit's sleep, and picked up Mummah and become rain king, that Dahfu should turn out to be just another eccentric. Therefore I stalled. I laid out a few games of solitaire. After which I felt extremely sleepy and stared at the sun-fixed colors outside, green as paint, brown as crust. I am a nervous and emotional reader. I hold a book up to my face and it takes only one good sentence to turn my brain into a volcano; I begin thinking of everything at once and a regular lava of thought pours down my sides. Lily claims I have too much mental energy. According to Frances, on the other hand, I didn't have any brain power at all. All I can truly say is that when I read in one of my father's books, "The forgiveness of sin is perpetual," it was just the same as being hit in the head with a rock. I have told, I think, that my father used currency for bookmarks and I assume I must have pocketed