Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [25]
the beginning that he must be distinguished. And then to console me he said that I was the first white visitor here in more than thirty years, so far as he knew. "Well, Your Highness," I said, "you're just as well off not to attract many outsiders. I think you've got a good thing here. I don't know what it is about the place, but I've visited some of the oldest ruins in Europe and they don't feel half as ancient as your village. If it worries you that I'm going to run and broadcast your whereabouts or that I want to take pictures, you can just forget about it. That's not my line at all." For this he thanked me but said there wasn't much of value to attract travelers here. And I'm still not convinced that I didn't penetrate beyond geography. Not that I care too much about geography; it's one of those bossy ideas according to which, if you locate a place, there's nothing more to be said about it. "Mr. Henderson, sir. Please come in and enter the town," he said. And I said, "I suppose you want me to meet everyone." It was gorgeous weather, though far too dry, radiance everywhere, and the very dust of the place aromatic and stimulating. Waiting for us was a company of women, Itelo's wives, naked, and with the dark color worked in deeply around the eyes as if by special action of the sun. The lighter skin of their hands reminded me continually of pink stone. It made both hands and fingers seem larger than ordinary. Later I saw some of these younger women stand by the hour with a piece of string and play cat's cradle, and each pair of players usually had several spectators and they cried, "Awho!" when one of them took over a complicated figure. The women bystanders now laid their wrists together and flapped their hands, which was their form of applause. The men put their fingers in their mouths and whistled, sometimes in chorus. Now that the weeping had ended entirely, I stood laughing under the big soiled helmet, my mouth expanded greatly. "Well," said Itelo, "we will go to see the queen, my aunt, Willatale, and afterward or maybe the same time the other one, Mtalba." By now a pair of umbrellas had come up, carried by two women. The sun was very rich, and I was sweating, and these two state umbrellas, about eight feet tall and shaped like squash flowers, gave very little shade from such a height. Everybody was extremely good-looking here; some of them would have satisfied the standards of Michelangelo himself. So we went along by twos with considerable ceremony, Itelo leading. I was grinning but pretended that it was a grimace because of the sun. Thus we proceeded toward the queen's compound. And now I began to understand what the trouble here was all about, the cause of all the tears. Coming to a corral, we saw a fellow with a big clumsy comb of wood standing over a cow--a humped cow like all the rest, but that's not the point; the point is that he was grooming and petting her in a manner I never saw before. With the comb he was doing her forelock, which was thick over the bulge of the horns. He stroked and hugged her, and she was not well; you didn't have to be country bred, as I happen to be, to see at once that something was wrong with this animal. She didn't even give him a knock with her head as a cow in her condition will when she feels affectionate, and the fellow himself was lost in sadness, gloomily combing her. There was an atmosphere of hopelessness around them both. It took a while for me to put all the elements together. You have to understand that these people love their cattle like brothers and sister, like children; they have more than fifty terms just to describe the various shapes of the horns, and Itelo explained to me that there were hundreds of words for the facial expressions of cattle and a whole language of cow behavior. To a limited extent I could appreciate this. I have had great affection for certain pigs myself. But a pig is basically a career animal; he responds very sensitively to human ambitions or drives and therefore doesn't require a separate vocabulary. The procession had stopped with Itelo