Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [140]
purple umbrella, and he was wearing his large velvet hat, as attached to it as I was to the helmet. Hat, hair, and face were in close union under the tinged light of the silk arch, and he lay and rested with that same sumptuous ease which I had admired from the beginning. Above him, as above me, strange hands clasped the ornamented pole of the umbrella. The sun now shone with power and covered the mountains and the stones close at hand with shimmering layers. Near to the ground it was about to materialize into gold leaf. The huts were holes of darkness and the thatch had a sick, broken radiance over it. Until we got to the town limits I kept saying to myself, "Reality! Oh, reality! Damn you anyhow, reality!" In the bush the women set me down and I stepped from the hammock onto the blazing ground. This was the hard-packed white, solar-looking rock. The king, too, was standing. He looked back at the crowd, which had remained near the wall of the town. With the game-beaters was the Bunam, and, following very closely, a white creature, a man completely dyed or calcimined. Under the coat of chalk I recognized him. It was the Bunam's man, the executioner. I identified him by the folds of his narrow face in this white metamorphosis. "What's the idea of this?" I asked, going up to Dahfu over the packed stone and the stubble of weeds. "No idea," the king said. "Is he always like this at a lion hunt?" "No. Different days, different colors, according to the reading of the omens. White is not the best omen." "What are they trying to pull off here? They're giving you a bad send-off." The king behaved as though he could not be bothered. Any human lion would have done as he did. Nevertheless he was irritated if not pierced by this. I made a very heavy half turn to stare at this ill-omened figure that had come to injure the king's self-confidence on the eve of this event, reunion with the soul of his father. "This whitewash is serious?" I said to the king. Widely separated, his eyes had two separate looks; as I spoke to him they mingled again into one. "They intend it so." "Sire," I said, "you want me to do something?" "What thing?" "You name it. On a day like this to be interfered with is dangerous, isn't it? It ought to be dangerous for them, too." "Oh? No. What?" he said. "They are living in the old universe. Why not? That is part of my bargain with them, isn't it?" Something of the gold tinge of the stones came into his smile, brilliantly. "Why, this is my great day, Mr. Henderson. I can afford all the omens. After I have captured Gmilo they can say nothing more." "Sticks and stones will break my bones but this is idle superstition, and so forth. Well, Your Highness, if that's the way you take it, fine, okay." I looked into the rising heat, which borrowed color from the stones and plants. I had expected the king to speak harshly to the Bunam and his follower who was painted with the color of bad omen, but he only made one remark to them. His face appeared very full under that velvet hat with the large brim and the crown full of soft variations. The umbrellas had stayed behind. The women, the king's wives, stood at the low wall of the town at assorted heights; they watched and cried certain (I suppose farewell) things. The stones paled more and more with the force of the heat. The women sent strange cries of love and encouragement or warning or good-by. They waved, they sang, and they signed with the two umbrellas, which went up and down. The beaters, silent, had not stopped for us but went away with the bugles, spears, drums, and rattles, in a solid body. There were sixty or seventy of them, and they started from us in a mass but gradually dispersed toward the bush. Antlike they began to spread into the golden weeds and boulders of the slope. These boulders, as noted before, were like gross objects combed down from above by an ignorant force. The departure of the beaters left the Bunam, the Bunam's wizard, the king, and myself, the Sungo, plus three attendants with spears standing about thirty yards from the town. "What did you tell