No Enemy But Time

Chapter One

For nearly eight months Joshua lived in a remote portion of Zarakal’s Lolitabu National Park, where an old man of the Wanderobo tribe taught him how to survive without tap water, telephones, or cans of imported tuna. Although hunting was illegal in the country’s national parks, President Tharaka granted a special dispensation, for the success of the White Sphinx Project would depend to an alarming extent on Joshua’s ability to take care of himself in the Early Pleistocene.

Despite having lived his entire life among the agricultural Kikembu people (Zarakal’s largest single ethnic group), Thomas Babington Mubia had never given up the hunting arts of the Wanderobo. In 1934 he had taught a callow Alistair Patrick Blair (today a world-renowned paleoanthropologist) how to catch a duiker barehanded and to dress out its carcass with stone tools chipped into existence on the spot. Now, over half a century later, Blair wanted his old teacher to communicate these same skills to Joshua—for, although considerably slower and not quite so sharp-eyed, Babington had lost none of his basic skills as stalker, slayer, and flint-knapper.

Babington—as everyone who knew him well called him—was tall, sinewy, and grizzled. In polite company he wore khaki shorts, sandals, and any one of a number of different loud sports shirts that Blair had given him, but in the bush he frequently opted for near or total nudity. Welts, scars, wheals, and tubercules pebbled his flesh, in spite of which he appeared in excellent health for a man belonging to rika ria Ramsay, an age-grade group that had undergone circumcision during the ascension of Ramsay MacDonald’s coalition cabinet in England. For Joshua, the old man’s incidental bumps and cuts were less troubling than a deliberate vestige of that long-ago circumcision rite.

Ngwati, the Kikembu called it. This was a piece of frayed-looking skin that hung beneath Babington’s penis like the pull tab on a Band-Aid wrapper. It hurt Joshua to look at this “small skin.” He tried not to let his eyes shift to Babington’s crotch, and, for reasons other than Western modesty, he did his darnedest not to shed his shorts or make water within the old man’s sight. He was half afraid that to be looked upon naked by Babington would be to acquire Ngwati himself.

Until his circumcision Joshua’s mentor had attended a mission school run by Blair’s Protestant Episcopal parents, and he knew by heart a score of psalms, several of Shakespeare’s soliloquies, and most of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, a great favorite of the old Wanderobo’s. Sometimes, in fact, he disconcerted Joshua by standing naked in the night and booming out in a refined British accent whichever of these memory-fixed passages most suited his mood. In July, their first month in the bush, Babington most frequently declaimed the lesser known of two pieces by Poe entitled “To Helen”:

Sitting in the tall acacia in which he and Babington had built a tree house with a stout door, Joshua looked down and asked his mentor if he had ever been married.

“Oh, yes. Four times all at once, but the loveliest and best was Helen Mithaga.”

“What happened?”

“During the war, the second one, I walked to Bravanumbi from Makoleni, my home village, and enlisted for service against the evil minions of Hitler in North Africa. I was accepted into a special unit and fought with it for two years. When I returned to Makoleni, three of my wives had divorced me by returning to their families. I was Wanderobo; they were Kikembu. Although Helen was also Kikembu, she had waited.

“We loved each other very much. Later, a year after the war, she was poisoned by a sorcerer who envied me the medals I had won and also my Helen’s Elysian beauty. I lost her to the world of spirits, which we call ngoma. On nights like this one, dry and clear, I know that she has fixed the eyes of her soul upon me. Therefore, I speak to her everlasting world with another man’s poignant words.”

This story touched Joshua. He could not regard Babington as a ridiculous figure even when, during the arid month of August, he stood one-footed in the dark and recited,

Nights were never icy in Lolitabu, which was tucked away in Zarakal’s southwestern corner. Instead of bells-on-bobtails you heard elephants trumpeting, hyenas laughing, and maybe even poachers whispering to one another. Babington took pains to insure that Joshua and he never ran afoul of these men, for although some were woebegone amateurs, trying to earn enough money to eat, others were ruthless predators who would kill to avoid detection.

The big cats in the park worried Joshua far more than the poachers did. They did not worry Babington.

He would walk the savannah as nonchalantly as a man crossing an empty parking lot. His goal was not to discomfit Joshua, but to school him in the differences among several species of gazelle and antelope, some of which had probably not even evolved by Early Pleistocene times. Joshua tried to listen, but found himself warily eying the lions sprawled under trees on the veldt.

“We do not have an appetizing smell in their nostrils,” Babington told Joshua. “The fetor of human beings is repugnant to lions.”

“So they will not attack us unless we provoke them?”

Babington pushed a partial plate out of his mouth with his tongue, then drew it back in. “A toothless lion or one gradually losing its sense of smell might be tempted to attack. Who knows?”

“Then why do we come out here without weapons and walk the grasslands like two-legged gods?”

Said Babington pointedly, “That is not how I am walking.”

During this extended period in the Zarakali wilderness Joshua dreamed about the distant past no more than once or twice a month, and these dreams were similar in a hazy way to his daily tutorials with Babington. Why had his spirit-traveling episodes given way to more conventional dreaming? Well, in a sense, his survival training with Babington was a waking version of the dreamfaring he had done by himself his entire life. With his eyes wide open, he was isolated between the long-ago landscape of his dreams and the dreams themselves. He stood in the darkness separating the two realities.

One day Babington came upon Joshua urinating into a clump of grass not far from their tree house.

Joshua was powerless to halt the process and too nonplused to direct it away from his mentor’s gaze. At last, the pressure fully discharged, he shook his cock dry, eased it back into his jockey shorts, buttoned up, and turned to go back to the tree house.

“You are not yet a man,” the Wanderobo informed him.

Joshua’s embarrassment mutated into anger. “It’s not the Eighth Wonder of the World, but it gets me by!”

“You have not been bitten by the knife.”

It struck Joshua that Babington was talking about circumcision. A young African man who had not undergone this rite was officially still a boy, whatever his age might be.

“But I’m an American, Babington.”

“In this enterprise you are an honorary Zarakali, and you are too old to live any longer in the nyuba.”

The nyuba, Joshua knew, was the circular Kikembu house in which women and young children lived.

“Babington!”

But Babington was adamant. It was unthinkable that any adult male representing all the peoples of Zarakal should proceed with a mission of this consequence—the visiting of the ngoma of the spirit world—without first experiencing irua, the traditional rite of passage consecrating his arrival at manhood. If Joshua chose not to submit to the knife (which Babington himself would be happy to wield), then Babington would go home to Makoleni and White Sphinx would have to carry on without his blessing.

On a visit to the park in early September, Blair learned of this ultimatum and of Joshua’s decision to accede to it—so long as Joshua could impose a condition of his own.

“I don’t want a Band-Aid string like Babington’s,” he told the Great Man. “I think I can put up with the pain and the embarrassment, but you’ve got to spare me that goddamn little casing pull.”

Although less than six feet tall and possessed of a pair of watery blue eyes whose vision had recently begun to deteriorate (a circumstance insufficient to make him wear glasses), Blair was still an imposing figure. His white mustachios and the sun-baked dome of his forehead and pate gave him the appearance of a walrus that had somehow blustered into the tropics and then peremptorily decided to make the region its home. He seemed to be swaggering even when sitting on the sticky upholstery of a Land Rover’s front seat, and his voice had the mellow resonance of a bassoon. In the past ten years his appealing ugly-uncle mug had graced the covers of a dozen news magazines and popular scientific journals, and for a thirteen-week period three years ago he had been the host of a PBS program about human evolution entitled Beginnings, an effort that had rekindled the old controversy between paleoanthropologists and the so-called scientific creationists and that had incidentally served to make Blair’s name a household word in even the smallest hamlets in the United States. By now, though, Joshua was used to dealing with the Great Man, and he had no qualms about voicing his complaints about Babington’s plans for the circumcision rite.

Blair assured Joshua that educated Kikembu, especially Christians, also regarded Ngwati with distaste, and that Babington would not try to make him keep the “small skin” if Joshua were vigorously opposed to it.

“I am,” said Joshua, but he neatly parried the Great Man’s many well-meaning proposals for sidestepping the circumcision rite altogether. He felt he owed Babington, and he wanted to earn the old man’s respect.

Apprised of Joshua’s intentions, Babington declared that the ceremony would take place two days hence, in the very grove where he and his protégé had their tree house. Blair then informed Joshua that in order to prove himself he must not show any fear prior to the cutting or cry out in pain during it. Such behavior would result in disgrace for himself and his sponsors. Moreover, to lend the rite legitimacy, Babington had sent messages to several village leaders and asked Blair to invite some of the Kikembu from the outpost village of Nyarati as onlookers. Once the knife glinted, they would applaud Joshua’s steadfastness or, if he did not bear up, ridicule his public cowardice.

“Onlookers!”

“It’s traditional, I’m afraid. Of what point are the strength and beauty of a leopard if no one ever sees them?”

“Of considerable point, if you’re the leopard. Besides, we’re not talking about leopards. We’re talking about my one and only reproductive organ. Onlookers be damned!”

“They’re for purposes of verification, Joshua.”

“Maybe Babington ought to circumcise a leopard, Dr. Blair. I’d love to see them verify that.”

“Now, now,” said Alistair Patrick Blair. “Tsk-tsk.”

Joshua spent the night before his irua at the park’s sprawling Edwardian guest lodge with Blair. At dawn he bathed himself in a tub mounted on cast-iron lion’s paws, donned a white linen robe, and, in company with the paleoanthropologist, set off for his rendezvous with Babington aboard a Land Rover driven by a uniformed park attendant.

They arrived in the acacia grove shortly after eight o’clock and found it teeming with young people from Nyarati, both men and women. The women were singing spiritedly, and the boisterous gaiety of the entire crowd seemed out of proportion to its cause, the trimming of an innocent foreskin. Blair pulled off Joshua’s robe and pointed him to the spot where the old Wanderobo would perform the surgery.

“You’re not to look at Babington, Joshua. Don’t try to watch the cutting, either.”

“I thought that would be part of proving my manhood.”

“No. Rather than being required, it’s prohibited.”

“Thanks be to Ngai for small mercies.”

Naked and shivering, he entered the clearing beneath the tree house, sat down on the matted grass, and averted his face from the ladder that Babington would soon be descending. Blair, his aide, could offer him no physical assistance until the rite was concluded.

The songs of the Kikembu women, the bawdy masculine repartee at his back, and the anxious hiccupping of his heart isolated him from the reality of what was happening. This was not happening to him. Only, of course, it was.

Then Babington was there, kneeling before him with a knife, and Joshua put both fists to the right side of his neck, placed his chin on one fist, and stared out into the savannah. The cutting began. Joshua clenched his teeth and tightened his fists. Doggedly refusing to yip or whimper, he caught sight of a pair of tourist minibuses rolling over the steppe from the vicinity of the guest lodge. That morning while boarding the Land Rover, he recalled, he had seen them parked inside a courtyard next to the lodge. Somehow the tour guide had learned of the approaching ceremony. When the minibuses pulled abreast of the acacia grove, clouds of dust drifting away behind them, Joshua wanted to scream.

The faces in the windows of the two grimy vehicles belonged primarily to astonished Caucasians, many of them elderly women in multicolored head scarves, out-of-fashion pillbox hats, or luxuriant wigs much too youthful for their wearers. The cutting momentarily ceased. Passengers from both vans dismounted at the outer picket of trees and filtered inward to stand behind the swaying and ululating Kikembu women.

“Jesus,” Joshua murmured.

“Hush,” cautioned Babington. “Or I will deprive you of much future pleasure and many descendants.”

A portly, middle-aged tour guide with a florid complexion used a megaphone to make himself heard over the singing and hand-clapping Africans.

The cutting had begun again. Joshua shut out the man’s spiel to concentrate on the waves of pain radiating through him from the focus of the knife.

The eyes of the female tourist nearest the guide, Joshua noticed, had grown huge behind her thick-lensed glasses. She was a stout ruin of a woman whose magenta head scarf resembled a babushka. Her body appeared to sway in time with those of the svelte, graceful Africans. Her swaying and the guide’s ceaseless patter distracted Joshua from the pain of the circumcision rite.

“Finished,” Babington announced.

“Don’t leave Ngwati,” Blair countered. “Remove it, please.”

Babington snorted his contempt for this command, but swiftly removed the offending string of flesh.

In celebration of the successful irua, a chorus of voices echoed through the grove and across the steppe. Now Joshua could look down. He saw blood flowing from him into the grass like water from a spigot. Blair steadied him from behind and wrapped the immaculate white robe around his shoulders.

Now people were dancing as well as singing, extolling the initiate’s courage as they wove in and out among the trees in a sinuous daisy chain of bodies. Some of the tourists had joined the conga line, and the two groups, Africans and foreigners, were suddenly beginning to blend. The Kikembu waved their arms in encouragement, and more tourists—sheepish old white people—snaked their way into the celebration.

Joshua, afraid he would faint, held the front of his robe away from his groin to keep from staining the garment. The woman with the magenta scarf approached him from the edge of the grove and addressed him in the flat, Alf Landon accents of a native Kansan.

“I’ll give you twenty dollars for that robe.”

Joshua gaped.

“Tell him twenty dollars for the robe,” the old woman commanded Blair. “Another five if he’ll let me take a Polaroid. Our tour guide said to ask before I took a Polaroid.”

“Mrs. Givens!” Joshua exclaimed. “Kit Givens from Van Luna, Kansas!” He had last seen the old woman at his grandfather’s funeral fourteen years ago, piously occupying a rear pew in the stained-glass, apricot-and-umber ambiance of the First Methodist Church. She was seventy-two if she was a minute.

Her withered cheeks and chin were tinted all the iridescent colors of a mandrill’s mask.

“I’ve never seen him before,” Mrs. Givens told Blair, as if sharing a confidence. “I don’t know how he could know my name.”

“You pulled my hair in my grandfather’s grocery when I was a baby.”

The old woman rallied. “You’re an impudent little nigger. I wouldn’t pay you five dollars to mow my yard.”

Defiant despite his weakness, Joshua doffed his robe and handed it to Mrs. Givens. “Here. I want you to have this. Take it back to Van Luna—the sooner the better.”

Mrs. Givens took the robe from the bleeding man, backed away from him clutching it, and turned again to the paleoanthropologist. “You’ll walk me back to the tour bus, please. I’ve never met this man in my life.”

“Of course, Mrs. Givens.”

As Blair directed the old woman through the rowdy throng to the bus, Babington helped Joshua climb the ladder into the tree house. Many of the Kikembu from Nyarati had brought banana leaves to the ceremony, and the old Wanderobo had already arranged the leaves into a pallet upon which Joshua could rest without fear of exacerbating his wounds. His penis would not stick to the banana leaves as to linen or other sorts of bedding, and the wounds would therefore heal more readily.

Lying on this pallet, Joshua saw Babington’s creased face staring down at him. A face that seemed to have been created in the same way that wind sculpts sand dunes or rain erodes channels into the hardest rock.

“Everyone wants a piece of the sacred,” Joshua whispered. “Even if it isn’t sacred. Dreaming makes it so, and the dreaming goes on and on until it’s a habit.”

“Go to sleep, Joshua,” the old man said.

Three weeks passed before Joshua felt strong enough to resume his survival training. For two nights, despite the antibiotics that Blair had brought to Lolitabu from the hospital at Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base, he was delirious. In his delirium he was visited by the lacerated ghost of his adoptive father, as well as a gnomish Spanish woman who opened her blouse and let him nurse like a baby, a young black infantryman with no head, and the robed figure of Mutesa David Christian Ghazali Tharaka, President of Zarakal. This last visitor, Joshua learned from Babington, had actually been there.

“Why was he here? What did he say?”

Babington handed Joshua an autographed picture of the President. “He said he was very proud of you.

You are bridging a chasm between Zarakal’s pluralistic tribal beginnings and its modern aspirations. That you, an American black man, submitted to the knife bespeaks the fullness of your commitment to our dream.”

“What else did he say?”

“He gave me a photograph, too.” Babington pointed at the wall of the tree house, where he had hung another copy of the same photograph. This one bore an inscription to the Wanderobo. Joshua could not see it from where he lay, but he could tell that it had made Babington very happy.

At first it disturbed Joshua that he was taking so long to heal, but Babington explained that he himself had suffered intense pain and then a throbbing tenderness for well over a month after his irua. By mid-October, just as his mentor had predicted, they were stalking game again, digging tubers, picking fruit, and diving ever deeper into wilderness lore. Joshua’s glans was no longer so sensitive that simply to urinate was to conduct electricity. He was himself again.

Joshua paid attention to Babington’s lessons. He learned how to alter his upright silhouette by tying foliage about his waist, how to move on a wily diagonal while stalking game, how to club a sick or wounded animal to death without exhausting himself or making an ugly mess of his kill, and how to eat raw meat, birds’ eggs, and insects without nausea or qualm. The time in Lolitabu passed quickly.

The night before Joshua was to return to Russell-Tharaka for additional study—textbook and simulator work, with reviews of the paleontological information he had digested last spring and summer—he awoke and went to the door of the tree house. Babington, silhouetted on the edge of the grove, was reciting from Poe: