I am contagious, like Typhoid Mary. Without me you would have been okay. You are the noblest guy I ever met." "It's the other way around. The shoe is on the other foot � The first night you were here," he explained as a fellow will under the creeping numbness, "that body was the former, the Sungo before you. Because he could not lift Mummah �" His hand was bloody; he put thumb and forefinger weakly to his throat. "They strangled him? My God! And what about that big fellow Turombo, who couldn't pick her up? Ah, he didn't want to become the Sungo, it's too dangerous. It was wished on me. I was the fall guy. I was had." "Sungo also is my successor," he said, touching my hand. "I take your place? What are you talking about, Your Highness!" Eyes closing, he nodded slowly. "No child of age, makes the Sungo king." "Your Highness," I said, and raised my weeping voice, "what have you pulled on me? I should have been told what I was getting into. Was this a thing to do to a friend?" Without reopening his eyes, but smiling in his increasing weakness the king said, "It was done to me �" Then I said, "Your Majesty, move over and I'll die beside you. Or else be me and live; I never knew what to do with life anyway, and I'll die instead." I began to rub and beat my face with my knuckles, crouching in the dust between the dead lion and the dying king. "The spirit's sleep burst too late for me. I waited too long, and I ruined myself with pigs. I'm a broken man. And I'll never make out with the wives. How can I? I'll follow you soon. These guys will kill me. King! King!" But the king had little life left in him now, and we soon parted. He was picked up by the beaters, the end of the hopo was opened and we started to go down the ravine among the cactuses toward that stone building I had first seen from the platform at the top of the wall. On the way he died of the hemorrhage. This small house built of flat slabs had two wooden doors of the stockade type which opened into two chambers. His body was laid down in one of these. Into the other they put me. I scarcely knew what was happening anyway, and I let them lead me in and bolt the door.
XXI
At one time, much earlier in this life of mine, suffering had a certain spice. Later on it started to lose this spice; it became merely dirty, and, as I told my son Edward in California, I couldn't bear it any more. Damn! I was tired of being such a monster Of grief. But now, with the king's death, it was no longer a topic and it had no spice at all. It was only terrible. Weeping and mourning I was put into the stone room by the old Bunam and his white-dyed assistant. Though the words came out broken, I repeated the one thing, "It's wasted on dummies." (Life is.) "They give it to dummies and fools." (We are where other men ought to be.) So they led me inside, crying my head off. I was too bereaved to ask any questions. By and by a person rising from the floor startled me. "Who the hell is that?" I asked. Two open, wrinkled hands were raised to caution me. "Who are you?" I said again, and then I recognized a head of hair shaped like an umbrella pine and big dusty feet as deformed as vegetable growths. "Romilayu!" "Me here too, sah." They hadn't let him get off with the letter to Lily, but picked him up just as he was leaving town. So even before the hunt began they had decided that they didn't want my whereabouts to be known to the world. "Romilayu, the king is dead," I said. He tried to comfort me. "That marvelous guy. Dead!" "Fine gen'a'man, sah." "He thought he could change me. But I met him too late in life, Romilayu. I was too gross. Too far gone." All I had left in the way of clothing was shoes and helmet, T-shirt and the jockey shorts, and I sat on the floor, where I bent over double and cried without limit. Romilayu at first could not help me. But maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end. So that it shouldn't last forever? There may be something in this. And bliss, just the opposite, is eternal? That is no time in bliss. All the clocks were thrown out of heaven. I never took another