Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [20]
me to ask, since my object in coming here was to leave certain things behind. Anyway, I had great trust in Romilayu, the old fellow. So for days and days he led me through villages, over mountain trails, and into deserts, far, far out. He himself couldn't have told me much about our destination in his limited English. He said only that we were going to see a tribe he called the Arnewi. "You know these people?" I asked him. A long time ago, before he was full grown, Romilayu had visited the Arnewi together with his father or his uncle--he told me many times but I couldn't make out which. "Anyway, you want to go back to the scenes of your youth," I said. "I get the picture." I was having a great time out here in the desert among the stones, and continually congratulated myself on having quit Charlie and his wife and on having kept the right native. To have found a man like Romilayu, who sensed what I was looking for, was a great piece of luck. He was in his late thirties, he told me, but looked much older because of premature wrinkles. His skin did not fit tightly. This happens to many black men of certain breeds and they say it has something to do with the distribution of the fat on the body. He had a bush of dusty hair which he tried sometimes, but vainly, to smooth flat. It was unbrushable and spread out at the sides of his head like a dwarf pine. Old tribal scars were cut into his cheeks and his ears had been mutilated to look like hackles so that the points stuck into his hair. His nose was fine-looking and Abyssinian, not flat. The scars and mutilations showed that he had been born a pagan, but somewhere along the way he had been converted, and now he said his prayers every evening. On his knees, he pressed his purple hands together under his chin, which receded, and with his lips pushed forward and the powerful though short muscles jumping under the skin of his arms, he'd pray. He fetched up deep sounds from his chest, like confiding groans of his soul. This would happen when we stopped to camp at twilight when the swallows were dipping back and forth. Then I would sit on the ground and encourage him; I'd say, "Go on. Tell 'em. And put in a word for me too." I got clean away from everything, and we came into a region like a floor surrounded by mountains. It was hot, clear, and arid and after several days we saw no human footprints. Nor were there many plants; for that matter there was not much of anything here; it was all simplified and splendid, and I felt I was entering the past--the real past, no history or junk like that. The prehuman past. And I believed that there was something between the stones and me. The mountains were naked, and often snakelike in their forms, without trees, and you could see the clouds being born on the slopes. From this rock came vapor, but it was not like ordinary vapor, it cast a brilliant shadow. Anyway I was in tremendous shape those first long days, hot as they were. At night, after Romilayu had prayed, and we lay on the ground, the face of the air breathed back on us, breath for breath. And then there were the calm stars, turning around and singing, and the birds of the night with heavy bodies, fanning by. I couldn't have asked for anything better. When I laid my ear to the ground I thought I could hear hoofs. It was like lying on the skin of a drum. Those were wild asses maybe, or zebras flying around in herds. And this was how Romilayu traveled, and I lost count of the days. As, probably, the world was glad to lose track of me too for a while. The rainy season had been very short; the streams were all dry and the bushes would burn if you touched a match to them. At night I would start a fire with my lighter, which was the type in common use in Austria with a long trailing wick. By the dozen they come to about fourteen cents apiece; you can't beat that for a bargain. Well, we were now on a plateau which Romilayu called the Hincha-gara--this territory has never been well mapped. As we marched over that hot and (it felt so to me) slightly concave plateau, a kind of olive-colored heat