The Martyrdom of Stephen Werner

(originally entitled "Stephen's Passion")

by Roberta Kalechofsky, micah@micahbooks.com, www.micahbooks.com

This is the full text of the novel, in one file. The print version (originally entitled "Stephen's Passion" is available from Micah Publications, 255 Humphrey St., Marblehead, MA 01945, www.micahbooks.com  Roberta's other fiction includes: Orestes in Progress, Justice My Brother, A View of Toledo, Solomon's Wisdom, Autobiography of a Revolutionary: Essays on Animal and Human Rights, and Bodmin 1349.

All of the above books are now available on CD, in a "context" of 270 related classic books,  for just $29:
Works of Roberta Kalechofsky in Context contains five novels, a book of short stories, and a book of essays by Roberta, together with 270 related classic books that provide a context for better appreciating and enjoying her work. The "context" books deal with Jewish Religion, Christian Religion, Medieval Europe (including works of Dante, Boccacio, and Chaucer), Greek classics (including Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles), Latin American History, Animals, Women's Rights, Anti-Slavery, along with works of novelists Conrad, Melville, and Hawthorne. Table of Contents

Micah Publications also publishes Jewish vegetarian and animal rightsbooks, such as: The Jewish Vegetarian Year Cookbook, Vegetarian Judaism--A Guide for Everyone, and Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb. For a full list with descriptions, see www.micahbooks.com

Several of her stories, and two novellas, La Hoya and Stephen's Passion, have been translated into Italian and published in Italy. La Hoya received excellent reviews in major publications, such as Corriere Della Sera., and was included in a college curriculum in Italy under the title, Veduta di Toledo.. Stephen's Passion has also been included in a college curriculum in courses in American Fiction in the University of Florence, under the title, La Passione Di Stephen. Her novel, Bodmin, 1349: An Epic Novel of Christians and Jews in the Plague Years, was included twice in a college curriculum in the United States.

She began Micah Publications in 1975 and has received publishing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, in addition to her literary fellowships. As a publisher, she created The Echad Series, which includes five anthologies of Jewish writing from around the world, and has published 40 different titles in poetry, fiction, scholarship, vegetarianism and animal rights. She is active in the animal rights and vegetarian movements and began the organization, Jews for Animal Rights, in 1985, and coordinates publishing projects with this organization.

She has also been a contributing editor to various magazines, such as Margins, and On The Issues, and taught at Brooklyn College for four years.

She was a participant in a round-table discussion, "Please Use Other Door: Literary Creativity and the Publishing Industry," with Cynthia Ozick, Hugh Nissenson, Gordon Lish, Elizabeth Sifton and Robert Boyers, which was published in RSA Journal, #3 (March, 1992).

She graduated from Brooklyn College and received a doctorate in English literature in 1970 from New York University.

A critical essay on her work can be found in the Dictionary of Literary Biographies, Volume 28: Jewish Fiction Writers. A list of her published work and/or extended resume is available upon request.

Dedication
For my husband -- listener, advisor, fellow journeyer.

Back cover text
The Martyrdom of Stephen Werner is a religious allegory about Christians, Jews, and others, based upon a true story of a Passion play among Yucatan Indians, as reported in National Geogaphic. The locale here is the boundary between Guiana and Brazil, in a place on the atlas designated "area of dispute."

"...a voyage back in psace, in teime, and to an ealier mythos which substitutes itself insistently for history.... What Stephen encounters in the jungle, along with heat, bugs, and the oppressive sense of unseen presence can be compared with what happens in The Heart of Darkness and in Typee.... it is always surprising that the fulfillment of a gradually revealed pattern is so satisfying, even in its agony."  Ellen Ferber

"Roberta quickly and deftly immerses us in another time, another place -- like Penelope Fitzgerald. But at the same time, like Conrad, she imbues that exotic setting with religious and spcyhological implications and involes us passionately in the fate of her hero." Richard Seltzer

Frontispiece

"Guiana is a countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead, never sackt, turned, nor wrought, theface of the earth hath not been torne, nor the vertue and salt of the soyl spent by manurance, the graves have not been openedfor gold, the mines not broken with sledges, nor their images puld down out of their temples.  It hath never been entred by any armies or strength, and never conquered or possessed by any Christian prince. . . ."

Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discoveries of Guiana

"So Man in his unreconciled drama stands where the future can never be ground however sensible the spray that broods like Spirit over the Fall. Once the essence is broken the inter-connection remains unplanted. At the end of the trail thefirst deception happens. . . ."

Wilson Harris, The Spirit of The Fall

". . . the violation of cultures was the hidden reality of history itself . . ."

Wilson Harris, Tumatumari

An archeological map of South America reveals two small interesting items of information, one predictable, the other uncanny as archeological facts sometimes are: (e.g. carving of Moosehead found on rock in the Sahara).  The predictable item of information is that carbon dating of ice age relics in the area of Fells Cave, southern tip of South America, indicates the presence of man in this "remote 11 region in 9,000 B.C. But what was Fells Cave remote from in 9,000 B.C.? Geographical relationships are spinoffs from time.

On the other hand, the uncanny item is that at Nazca, not far from Machu Picchu, but a very long distance from Fells Cave, among the usual geometric shapes and animal effigies of an "unknown prehistoric" people, was found etched into the gravel straight lines, some of which were five miles long - begging the question of what manner of men draw straight lines on a road five miles long?

Over on the Atlantic side, around the area of the three Guianas, a resource map shows people, goods, wealth and society huddled along the coast.  Going inland, the population falls dramatically from people to practically nil.  The social configurations metamorphose from city to town to village to trading station, from ranch to mission, to the straggling dozen of a dying tribe to an isolated hut.

Happy the coastal people! All good fortune comes to them with the traders: shops, botanical gardens, libraries, cinemas, schools and bourbon.  So they regard gold-diggers, ranchers and wanderers into the Interior with wit, derision, or blankly.  They know that civilization is carried in a sea breeze, history laps at shorelines.  Take the strip of coast from Venezuela to French Guiana. The names are tickets to yesterday's fireworks: San Jose de Amacuro, Morawhanna, Charity, Georgetown, New Amsterdam, Nieuw Nickerie, Paramaribo, Nieuw Amsterdam, Devil's Island, Remire and Regina. Civilization, as somebody said, comes out of the barrel of a gun.  Precisely why people like Stephen Werner and Peter van de Groot jumped at the chance to go inland.  Their professions happily combined with the philosophical need to put their souls to the native grindstone.  Up to now their hardships amounted to doing without women, which is practically the foundation of early Christianity.  Hanky panky with the tribal women was not good professional ethics.

A distinguished gap in modern efficiency is that some inland country out here is still unexplored, perhaps unexplorable, some boundary lines are still up for grabs.  On a map of South America, if you place your finger on the northcentral by northeastern tip of Brazil, just north of the equator, between Guyana or what was British Guiana and Surinam or what was Dutch Guiana, there is a piece of geographical nonentity labeled "area in dispute." We are going there.

The International Geographic Study Commission approached Stephen with a proposal to map out the area in an accompanying expedition with the anthropologist, Peter van de Groot.  Though Peter had not been in this area before (few white man had; that's why he was going) this would be his fourth trip into regions of the Amazon and his knowledge of Northern Brazilian territory was deemed invaluable.  To the I.G.S.C. Stephen and Peter looked like a winning team.

Stephen was blonde, long-legged, lanky, in his late twenties, and smoked tiparillos.  He was blessed with an unexpectedly benign disposition, the unpredictable outcome of a frenetic past and present good fortune.  Given the situation where he was accompanying an older and more experienced explorer, he easily allowed him to take the leadership.

Peter was of middle height, in his late thirties, a bit overweight, with a pleasant, round, Dutch burgher face.  Civilization he accepted with grace as a necessary evil along with religion.  Publicly he was a pleasant man.  Provoked, he could be unexpectedly acerbic.  Then the sharpness of the expert to whom humility was not natural surfaced.  It was a minor problem of temperament, if not of philosophy.  He had dark, hairy arms and preferred cigars.  He had divided his time during the last ten years between field work and teaching, and had published two books on Amazonian tribes, one of which had already been referred to as a classic.  On this trip he left behind an elderly Dutch mother, a wife and three blonde children, ages ten, eight and six.

Stephen left behind quarrelling parents, a married sister, a younger brother, two girlfriends named Joanne and Mimi, and a friend in the Bronx.  The jungle was a switch in territory for him . Up to now he had done most of his surveying work on Arctic islands and on the Scottish coast.  He had done undergraduate work at the University of Buffalo and graduate work at the University of Chicago.  From Buffalo and Chicago it was a natural hop to the Arctic circle and the furthest-most tip of Scotland.

Obsessed by riverbends and shorelines, driven into exotic frenzies by straight and curved lines, wondering where they go and even why they go (in the jungle, they mostly go nowhere, seen from the perspective of nine thousand years), he wanted to do something more about lines and curves than think about them.  Coming from a line of soldiers, teachers, tradesmen, a medieval love poet in fourteenth century Spain, a cabinetmaker, a rabbi, a postman, and some more teachers, cartography was a professional innovation for him.  Though, in fact, both Stephen's and Peter's people had travelled similar routes from Holland to South Africa, from South Africa to Brooklyn and from Brooklyn to the suburbs.  The van de Groots moved to Long Island when Peter was eight.  Stephen grew up along the beaches of Brooklyn, drawing maps in the sand of cities legendary and real, tracing visions in lines and circles that disappeared each day with the tide.  It didn't matter.  Being obsessed and a child, he could do the same thing over and over.  Lines enclosed space.  His desk globe bedeviled him.  The need for containment made him into a wanderer.

Not so the Spaniards who appeared on the coast in 1529 with four hundred men and fifty horses.  When asked why they run so hard, they are said to have answered that Spaniards suffer from a disease that only gold could cure.  El Dorado lay on the shores of a lake in Guyana, rumored to have been founded by Manco-Inca, brother of Atahuallpa, who fled Peru after it fell to the Spaniards.  Manco-Inca is said to have escaped across the Corderillas into Guyana, bringing with him civilization and the pursuit of the Spaniards.  They were told magnificent tales of a
tribal chief who anointed himself with an odoriferous resin and gilded his body with gold dust before he set out in a canoe from the shores of Manoa across a lake into whose depths he deposited gold, emeralds and other precious metals before submerging himself in a baptismal rite.  The contiguity of gold and religion was too much for the Spaniards who were famous for both.  They left behind them legends of courage and accounts of cruelty that brought tears of rage to the eyes of Sir Walter Raleigh.

He was the last who came to Guyana in search of El Dorado.  After him come sober traders, ranchers, missionaries, the colonists, plantation owners, slaves, Africans, east Indians, Chinese, coolies and Creoles, sugar and manganese experts, chemists and herbalists financed by pharmaceutical companies, botanists and naturalists on research grants.  Most follow the routes of the conquistadores and Elizabethan explorers.  Whatever there is of sociological density in the Interior drifts in a southwesterly direction, along the Essequibo River and across the benign Rupunini savannahs.  Most travellers take the route from the Atlantic down the Essequibo and then follow the Cuyuni River in the northwest, or in the central district the Mazaruni and Potaro Rivers which take you through the Potaro Gorge to Kaietur Falls or to Mt.  Roraima, the site of the Resurrection massacre and The Lost World of Conan Doyle.

An occasional explorer strikes out towards the southeast, down the Courantyne River on the border between Guyana and Surinam, or takes the Essequibo to the Onoro River and then goes eastward to the New River which rises in the Sierra Accarai on the borders of Brazil.  Like the Amazon, mother of South American rivers, all these waters are infested with pirani and sharks, and are dull-yellow or muddy in color.  They carry the silt of the Interior, decayed lillies and roots of ancient trees, segments of shoreline that fall in at floodtime.  Somewhere in the region of the source of the New River is a mountain range that connects the Accarai and the Carawaimi.  It is called Ouangouwai, or Mountains of the Sun.  The area is densely wooded, vegetation is luxurious.  All is mostly virgin territory.  Common knowledge and the municipal archives in Georgetown have it that, for all intents and purposes, the region is uninhabited.

Schomburgk came into the area in the 1840s.  After came anthropologists, perhaps six, in search of "lost" tribes, of which there are many.  In the jungle too groups of lost people huddle together.  Peter explored the country on the Brazilian side three years before.  This trip would give him the chance to take up an old trail where he had left it off and to see the other side of the
Accarai.

They caught a PanAm flight on Monday and on Tuesday landed in Georgetown.  Everything they needed between Kennedy and Atkinson airports was carried in handbags: reading matter, maps, crossword puzzles, Stephen's tiparillos, a diary, Peter's notes on Amazon tribes, correspondence with Cyrus Mills, a tape recorder and cameras.  The rest had been ordered or was gettable in Georgetown.  Stephen stepped out of the airplane in chinos, a sweatshirt and canvas topped shoes.  The tropical sun hit his gold-rimmed glasses.  The month was almost April.

The coastline of Georgetown is four and a half feet below sea level during the spring tides.  Canals carry off drainage water and a seawall protects the city from being inundated by the springtime ocean, which pleases the descendants of the Dutch.  The British took over from them in 1796.  They abolished slavery in 1834 and built an excellent cricket course.  Buck Indians, Caribs, Chinese, east Indians, west Indians, Africans, Creoles, whites, Ackawoi Indians and descendants of the Dutch, the Spanish and Portugese salute the same flag.

Even before they checked into their hotel Stephen and Peter took a taxi to Cyrus Mills, near Cathedral Square, who was checking his watch just as his secretary peeped into his room.  "Right," he said, peering over a stack of volumes.  Tall, blonde, scholarly, ex-basketball player, he legged it over to the door.  "Mills here," he said and held out his hand.  Stephen and Peter grasped it.  Their trail began here.

Seated, Mills tipped back his chair and said, "Let's see.  The last time I was in New York was in 1968.  Convention of something or other.  I gave the Museum of Natural History a blowpipe to be used in case of attack by native New Yorkers." That joke over with, he straightened his chair and got down to business.  The glasscases behind him, filled with Indian jewelry, blowpipes, neopenera ants (dead, of course), bespoke the curator and Minister of Interior, the country's storage tank of data on Indians, rainfall, missions, missionaries, snakes, kenaima, animism, recondite poisons, hallelujah sects, sugar yield, flora, fauna and cargo tonnage.  The walls were lined with scenes from Guyanese life: Mt.  Roraima, the Potaro-Konawaruk Road, the It6 Palm, a mission hut, Timehrei rocks on the Courantyne River, the seawall around Georgetown with musicians and strolling lovers, the Botanical Gardens, a picture of Mills and two companions in a jeep on the Rupununi Savannah, a picture of an Ackawoi Indian stringing a six foot arrow through a bow, a picture of an Indian and his wife, tongues outstretched, receiving the host, a picture of Mills,'beaming, his arm around a Makushi Indian boy in native dress, beaming.

"Shopping list," he waved a paper at them.  "Everything you'll need in the way of rations and headache powder.  You should be able to carry about a hundred pounds apiece along the trails.  I've arranged for you to get most of what you'll need at Guiana Goods on Water Street." He rang a buzzer and told his secretary to bring in some drinks.  He offered cigars.  Peter took one.  Stephen lit a tiparillo.  Mills poured drinks and spread a map on his desk top.  Stephen's instincts warmed, feeling for the super reality behind the wavy lines.  Of course, he had drawn his own maps of the region, provisional ones, but necessary to get the sense of the area.  He knew that on the trip surprise and discovery would predominate.  The earth kept changing muchly.

They would take the Berbice into the Interior, to its source in the eastern spur of the Kanuku Mountains.  They would cross the mountains and travel south by foot to New River, which was a distance of about twenty miles.  They planned to navigate the river through the Mountains of the Sun to its source in the Accarai.  Thus, they would approach the river from an unexplored direction.  Assuming success, they would then travel along the spine of the Accarai to the Aramatau River, make their way down the Aramatau until it met with the Courantyne and return via this river, completing a circle which was, roughly, the perimeter of unexplored territory.

The trip should take four months, they would use between thirty and forty guides.  The expedition was organized like the pony express.  The steamship would take them up the Berbice to the terminus at Paradise, where they would pick up their first set of guides.  Mills said, "They'll go with you as far as Via Sacre, an Arawak village on the Kurudini River.  There's a small mission here called Ecce Homo.  After that, there's fifty miles of cataracts and rapids between Via Sacre and Immanuel.  The Indians who go out with you from Ecce Homo are expert at handling canoes and pulling them over falls.  They'll go to the end of the river with you.  Father Reuchlin runs a mission here for Wais-Wais, called Immanuel.  We'll have a plane fly out a part of your rations there.  It's always nice to get fresh supplies.  Some of the guides may bring their wives along, but the women won't be any trouble.  And if there are no women the men won't fuss.  They can do without for. a long time.  You're not likely to be bothered by anything but sharks, alligators, pirani, electric eels, bushmasters and false trails.  Try not to fall into the river and swim where the Indians swim." He gave them a trade smile.  "Once you get to New River, I don't know how far they'll go with you.  Indians don't like to go into territory they're not familiar with, especially if they suspect kenaima.  My advice is not to go on without competent guides.  But I've known a fool or two in my lifetime obsessed with the next mile of trail." He felt he was saying this to Stephen, who was a blank to him.  He knew Peter's work and had met him several times at conferences.

"What happened?" Stephen asked.

Mills floated blue eyes up towards him.  "I wish 1 knew.  We hate to have the jungle get a bad reputation for that sort of thing.  But, hell, I got lost on the Manhattan Interchange and wandered in circles.  People don't disappear in bush and jungle anymore than they do in big cities.  When you get to Immanuel, Father Reuchlin will fill you in on any local jungle gossip.  There's an unholy rumor that he's gone native, but keep any discoveries to yourselves.  We like to keep jungle life peaceful.  There's another mission at New River.  Father Aigan.  Runs a language center and four bed hospital.  Try not to get snake bite or malaria until you reach him.  Mission of the True Cross.  Bush-pilot makes a trip there twice a year, drops down magazines and medicine.  No landing field or we'd offer you a ride back at the end of June.  But he'll unload your goods there for the return trip.  If you don't hit any snags you should get to New River source by Easter.  Father Aigan will be thrilled to see you.  His wireless went on the blink three years ago." He stood up.  "We're expecting you for dinner tomorrow night.  My wife's throwing a party.  As you go down the shopping list and get your gear in line, let me know if something is missing." Stephen opened his overnight bag and took out a rolled-up map.  "A small gift from an admirer," he said.

Mills unrolled the map and smiled.  It was ersatz 1625, complete with Dutch and French names that had since disappeared.  Little figures of Quesada, Raleigh, Keymis and Harcourt marched across the map, planting flags and crosses.  A pastiche of Renaissance history and medieval cosmology, Eden was located surely in the central district, an Ite palm to mark the place.  Harcourt stood on the map where Issano meets the Mazaruni.  But that was for dramatic effect.  Transcribing the border from then to now, it was hard to tell where Harcourt had been.  El Dorado could have been five hundred miles to the west.  So could Harcourt.  Mills was pleased.  The map was done well, if picturesquely.  He told Stephen that if he went in for archaic cartography there was a replica of Tatton's map, circa 1668 (or 1608) in. the hallway.  "The original is in the British Museum, having served its term in settling a boundary dispute."

Stephen looked at it as they went out.  Naturally, the differences between it and a modern map were mind boggling: a warning to wanderers and map makers.  What you draw is what you get and what you got is what you were looking at, the products of scholars and conscientious draughtsmen like himself.  He would have given a lot for the luxury of snorting with disrespect.

Mills carried Stephen's gift in his hand, rolled up with a rubberband.  He tapped Stephen's shoulder with it.  "Bring us up to date," he said.  "Incidentally, it's dinner jackets and black ties tomorrow night.  If you're caught short, go down to Redford's on Water Street.  They rent evening wear."
Stephen and Peter hit the sun-dazzled street.  Stephen realized he was in the tropics and popped on his sun glasses.  They caught a taxi and took it to the Hotel Prince Edward.  The building was not regal, but loyal to its period.  The lobby carpet was an import from Turkey, brass spittoons gave comfort to aging men sitting in highbacked chairs reading The London Times.  Homey with a wide verandah mannered and comfortable the hotel wept: come home to the nineteenth century.

Stephen suffered a sudden attack of inertia, like a blow to the solar plexus.  He crawled to his room and fell on his bed.  Balls of sunlight popped in his eyes.

Peter's nerves were in better shape.  But then he was no initiate to the tropics.  He knocked on Stephen's door and gave him a sympathetic smile when he saw him stretched out on the brass bedstead.  "Get a good night's sleep," he said, "tomorrow will be hectic.  The party is probably in our honor.  You may not know it, but we're a cultural event.  I called a meatdealer in town.  We can have a hundred pounds of smoked beef loaded on the boat at New Amsterdam.  And I called Guiana Airways and made arrangements for delivery service."

"You're a good man, Charley Brown," Stephen said and dropped into sleep like a shot bird.

At four in the morning he dreamed that the moon was engorging the earth: a symptom of travel fatigue.  He woke.  A moon of elephantine size bore down on his window.  He groaned and dozed and muttered to himself that he should pull down the blind and protect himself against moonstroke.

By five:forty-five the sun was shining.  It rose out of the Atlantic and sent a shaft of steel light into the dark water.  Pierced seagulls cried.  Stephen felt saltspray on his lips, a taste of childhood.  His mother held him by the hand lest he get lost in the crowd.  He rose, disoriented and hurtled himself into a shower.  It cleared his brain.  By eight o'clock they were on Water Street, collecting gear and examining netting, hammocks, canvas and cutlasses.  They picked up evening wear at Redford's and spent the afternoon sightseeing.  The scent of frangipani was in the air.  They wandered into the Botanical Gardens and the Parklands.  Macaws, brilliant in blue and yellow, swung through baobabs from Africa, eucalyptus from Australia, native bamboos, sugar-cane palms and moras.

They wandered into Strabroek Market.  Collages of culture: turbaned Indians argued and painted Indians ate fried plantain on a street corner.  A laundress from the sub-Sahara carried a basket on her head, a Creole babe signalled for a taxi.  Fat-assed lady shook her wares.  A businessman hurried by.  No contact of eyes.  Women with orchids in their hair.  Sexual smiles in the men's teeth.  World in cinematic technicolor.  The benignity of human rhythms.  A parrot sat on a perch in the door of a shop and eyed them with harrowing intelligence.  He looked as if he could recite the Gettysburg Address: culture is mongrelization.

They wandered into a residential section, white wooden houses, balconies with iron lace-work, colonial architecture.  Palm trees pillared the streets.  Victoria in the tropics.  Gardens blazed with bougainvilla, morning-glory, coraleta.  The flamboyante was in flower, the poinsettias desperately carnelian.  But more.  The month was almost April.  The lily bloomed, pretentiously funereal.
Stephen was sapped by tropical intensity.  Again he crawled to his hotel room to wait for his brain to stop reeling.  He lay down on his bed and tried to reduce the scene to flat planes.  The venetian blind on his window looked erotic like a dancing girl with a gold ring in her nose.  A breeze blew and her belly rippled.  He got up and showered.  He felt better after he was dressed.  The sight of his well-behaved blonde mustache and his tanned face framed by a white dinner jacket perked him up mightily.

Both looked in the pink of professional condition as they got into a taxi.  They matched the scenery.  Tropical twilight.  Pink and white houses.  Trees toppling everything.  Rose scent everywhere.  Oriental languor threatened ambition.  A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou beside me in the wilderness.  Stephen tattooed the poem in his head as he watched a pink moon rise over a cocoanut palm.  The ocean growled erotically.

The first person he caught sight of as they entered Mills's house was a blonde girl in a kelly green dress.  But she disappeared in the crowded rooms.  Mills's wife came through the collector's jungle in ruby chiffon toward Stephen and Peter, a bleary glaze on her eyes.  Her dress hung irrelevantly.  She looked beset by the problem of housekeeping in a clutter of culture: walls decorated with feathered headdresses, carved gourds, stuffed snakes, Indian masks, sharks' teeth and a replica of the Aztec calendar.

The rooms were dense with people who drank rum and watched the canape trays go by.  The races were mixed.  Only the clergy stood out against the white dinner jackets.  Stephen took note that there were young girls in the room, but he couldn't find the one in the kelly green dress.  Mrs. Mills put her arms through theirs.  "I must introduce you around.  You're our guests of honor, you know." She laughed hopefully.  "But maybe you'd like a drink first," and disappeared like a poltergeist.

"Van de Groot.  Werner." Mills clapped them on the back.  "How did the shopping go?"

"Thorough.  "

"Good.  Now, you can relax.  You're the guests of honor, you know." He put a glass of rum in each of their hands.  "Drink up.  There'll be nothing to match this rum until you return.  Haasl" He caught hold of a gentleman's jacket.  "This is Professor van de Groot and Dr. Werner.  Jack Haas.  You can thank him for the rum." He held up his glass in salute.

"Excellent," Stephen murmured.

"Will replace Canadian and Irish whiskey," Mills winked.

"And French wines," Haas added.

Stephen caught sight of kelly green slipping through a terrace door.

A group gathered around them.  They were very much the guests of honor.  Peter accepted the fact.  Older than Stephen, he accepted the homage that went with achievement.  He managed his audience directorially.  He was at his best when his pedagogic instincts were appealed to.  What to do about the native peoples was everybody's concern.  It was the humanitarian question of the era.

"You'll find," the lady next to Stephen said to him, "that people here hug the coast."

"Why is that?" he asked.

"Good heavens! What's in the jungle but trees and snakes."

The rum hit rock bottom and mixed with fragrance of frangipani.  He said, "I would have thought that there would be better things to hug than a coast."

She was taken aback, but recovered and laughed.  He stayed near her.  Her perfume was excellent.  Conversation everywhere else was intense and political.  He was unfamiliar with the problems.  A poet accused him of being miscreant in not knowing Indian dialects.  Stephen said he knew no languages other than English and a few Scottish phrases.  The poet abandoned him.  Stephen surmised he had been insulted and wandered glumly about.  He could not even share Peter's horseplay with a missionary.  Father Rosacky preached the Second Coming, no smoking and monogamy.  Stephen recalled Peter's A B C's of doctrinal feuds among the missionary sects.  Peter attacked robustly.  He assailed Father Rosacky on the issue of smoking, which the Indians love.  Peter was an agnostic and had no patience with theological battles, but he only argued contra the idea that Christianity was a blessing when it threatened the Indian's right to smoke or be naked.  In the city Christianity looked natural to him.  It was when he met with it in the bush that he felt constrained to give as his professional judgment that the missionary might be invaluable, but he was a pain in the ass.  Himself raised a Lutheran he had ceased to believe in the resurrection, heaven, hell, the trinity, the virgin birth.  He admired Jesus, as who would not.  He called to mind for him a type of heroism like keeping a stiff upper lip or, if you will something more literary, grace under pressure.  The ideal was further elucidated in a chapter heading in his Sunday school book called Blood of Martyrs.  From the crucifixion descended the history of martyrdom and Peter's moral scenario.  His own life was a testing ground, the point of which had become lost in the assumptions of agnosticism.

Later, in college he learned that crucifixion had been common, that in the year Jesus was crucified over two thousand men had been crucified around the same hill.  Dozens had been hung nightly on the cross.  Peter had a vision of Crucifixion Hill: thousands of slaves, renegades, protesters, men who got in the way of others, rotting on the wood, unknown.  Jesus had been lucky, being saved by the coming of the Sabbath from further agony he had hung on the cross six hours; usually they hung for three days.  Jesus's death was not unique; it was common, glory bought with less pain than the others had endured; but his name had survived to verify the immorality of imperial power.  His
magnanimity: consciousness, of fate; the logic of events; discernment of personality, awareness of betrayal: friendship not enough to keep watch an hour, let alone save him; knowing this, avoiding nothing, kept faith with the crucified.

Circumspectly, Stephen meandered and found himself standing near the terrace doors.  Breezes blew.  Voices mingled with the ocean's surf.  An electric shock told him that the girl in the kelly green dress was out there.  An incredible desire overtook him.  He wandered out, a glass of rum in his hand, conscious of his white dinner jacket and marvelous mustache, whistling Danny Boy.

She sat by a window, writing a letter by the dull light that came through the curtains.

Stephen stopped whistling.  "Good God!" he thought.  She had liquefying curves in the corners of her mouth and hair that fell, lay, looped, curled and caressed her shoulders.

She looked up at him.  Her eyes were green.  They matched her dress.  Around the bend of the verandah couples whispered eternal truths.  The moon lay on the ocean.  Out in the distance, on the sea wall, a band played a lascivious rhumba.  Stephen felt portentous.

"Dr.  Werner?" she said.

"How'd you know?"

"You're the guest of honor." She stopped writing and smiled at him.  His glass of rum fell from his hands and broke softly in the garden below.  She was friendly, not at all what he would have thought a beautiful girl in a kelly green dress would be like.

"I envy you," she said.  "What an exciting trip you're about to take." She was candid.  When she spoke the curves in her mouth disappeared.  It became less erotically burdensome, to his relief.  She was forthright.  Stephen decided to be casual and humble.  "Actually, I'm scared.  I've never been in the jungle before."

"You've never done jungle before?"

The phrasing was strange to him, but appealing.  It struck his ear like an exotic bell.  He answered in like manner.  "No, I've done the Scottish coastline and islands, but never jungle.  This should round out my education.  I'm told the area has hardly been explored, practically uninhabited."

"Practically, but not altogether." She was proud to say it.  He was curious.  "Do you know something about it?" He felt awkward standing by the railing while she sat on a sofa.  He did not know whether to move to her or to ask her to move to him.

"You plan to explore New River to its source," she said.

He was surprised by her information.  He said, "How'd you know?" But he wanted to say, why don't you come over here where you can hear the ocean.  It's raining moonlight out there.

"Cyrus Mills told me, I have something for you to give to Father Algan.  "

Stephen had to think a moment to remember who he was.  "He's the one at New River mission." His phrasing was unfortunate.  She stiffened.  "He's my father." His glasses smoked slightly.  The line struck: funny, she doesn't look like a missionary's daughter.  He looked about for his glass of rum and remembered that it had dropped into the garden.  "Would you like a drink?" he asked.

"I don't drink," she said.  He felt for his tiparillos in his pocket and remembered Peter's argument with Father Rosacky.  He felt rudderless.  "Eat?" he offered.

"Very well, " she said.  It was primly put, but he was glad to take her by her bare arm and escort her to the buffet table.  The atmosphere inside was less unnerving than the dark night where the scent from unseen gardens lay in ambush.  She looked less intoxicating by wattage light, more part and parcel of the human race to which he belonged.  He could even imagine her reading a newspaper or eating an apple.  He introduced her to Peter who waved cheerily before attacking another missionary.  "You've been into the Interior' then, " Stephen asked.

"Only part way.  I spent six months with Father Reuchlin. Daddy was not too happy about this.  He doesn't approve of Father Reuchlin's methods.  He lets the Indians continue Hallelujah."

Stephen helped himself and her to a dish of prawns and tried to sort a note on the Hallelujah sect from his reading.  Appendix B popped into his mind.  Millenial cults among the Guyanese Indians.  Hallelujah sect: a religious movement that sprang up among the Indians in the late nineteenth century.  A Makushi Indian named Bichiwung who had been a servant in the house of a clergyman in Georgetown had learned the elements of Christianity.  He had returned to the interior and taught them to an Ackawol Indian named Abel whom he had met in the savannah.  Abel appointed himself prophet and became an evangelist.  Soon the movement had leaders with names like Moses, Noah, and Christ.  Bichiwung preached that the Indians would become whitefaced and inherit the white man's power if they became Christians.  Though faced with persecution a remnant of adherents remain loyal.  Their meetings continue under surreptitious circumstances.  A signal goes out and they come together from isolated parts of the jungle. joined, they mostly dance and pray.  Sometimes they drink a great deal of cassiri and smoke.  The prawns were excellent.  "That doesn't sound so terrible to me," Stephen said.  She gave him a peculiar look.  "It's antithetical to Christian belief." He strained for further elucidation.  Introductory notes: moonstroke happens.  It is common knowledge.  The people worship no god.  They make remedies from plaster of herbs.  They can mimic the sound of any bird or animal.  They can imitate cockney from a tape recorder.  They know the secrets of ventriloquism and oral birth control and are good family people.  Folks.  They render the idea of justice as the vindictive spirit of kenaima.  He wished he could say something that would entertain her for four months.  "No doubt," he said, "then why did you stay?"

"Once out there I had no place to go.  You can't exactly hop a bus when things go wrong.  Besides, I plan to go into missionary work and Immanuel is a good place to get training."

He wavered between laughing and complimenting her.

"I have only another sentence to write and to sign my name," she said.  "This is a letter for my father which I would be grateful if you would deliver."

He made a mock click with his heels and gave her his most endearing smile.  "At your service."

Unembarrassed, she put the paper on the buffet table, surrounded by platters of candied yams, pineapple soaking in brandy, lobster swimming in cheese souffle.  People stretched across her, waiters detoured around.  She took a pen out of her evening bag and set to work as if she were at her desk.  That's what I like, Stephen thought, a woman of conviction.  "By the way, what's your name?" he said.

"Ursula." She licked the envelope closed and gave it to him.

It took four hours to go sixty miles by train from Georgetown to New Amsterdam.  Stephen was disappointed in the scenery.  It was tame and domestic: a flat land with men and women working in the rice fields. He wanted his tropics exotic, had expected that most of it, at least, would be of the Garden of Eden variety.  The soot from the train dirtied his glasses and rolled on his tongue.  The sky was overcast.  Everything looked gritty, stained and watery.  Flotsams of thought, like regarding the weather as a bad omen, floated into his mind: worries of a voyager.

By two in the afternoon they were aboard the Providence on the mouth of the Berbice River.  Stephen paused on the gangplank, astounded.  There was the jungle over his shoulder.  All he had to do was to look upriver.  A foul odor blew down from the Interior.  He took his tiparillo out of his mouth.  "What's that?"

"Probably a dead alligator," Peter, phlegmatic and professional, was reassuring.  Stephen laughed.  "Better a dead alligator than a live one."

The boat carried fifty passengers: a few porknockers or people looking for gold, ranchers, three clergymen, two nurses, farmers, and traders who had goods to sell at the various villages along the river.  Chickens squawked in baskets, roosters strutted on the deck, some Africans spread out straw mats.  As soon as the boat drew up its anchor a Guianese took out a guitar and entertained with Calypso songs, a woman got up to dance.  One of the clergymen put his feet on a deckchair and read pocketbooks by Ray Bradbury unswervingly.  The scene from the boat's deck took in the eighty foot tower of the Town Hall, a half mile of red roofed cottages flanked in the foreground by the steeples of the Anglican and Presbyterian churches.  Stephen stuck his tiparillo in his mouth, set the telescopic on the Minolta and shot a picture of the view.  The whistle blew and the boat began its trip through a hundred miles of overgrown coast.  The river was narrow and yellow, clogged with fallen trees and dead fauna.  A smell of decay, earthy, moistly tropical, hung in the air.  Some hours later the boat dropped anchor forty-five miles inland at Fort Nassau.  Peter came to the rail for, a sight of it, mainly jungle and a cemetery inhabited by snakes.  "Once the seat of government for Berbice County." The inference was Ozymandian.  Peter tilted the brim of his sunhat, clasped his hands on the ship's rail and beamed.  "By the time this trip is over you'll have proper respect for the jungle."

Stephen took his novitiate condition good naturedly; "You really dig this stuff?"

"You will too.  Give me one of those things." He pointed to Stephen's tiparillo.  "Everyone who travels into the Interior does.  You shed civilization.  I don't mean," he leaned across for a light, "that you start running around in warpaint and loincloths.  That's for nineteenth century novels.  Tarzan is' dead, long may he stay buried.  There's plenty of civilization out there," he pointed with the tiparillo at the shore, "but it isn't yours.  Out there you have only a name and a profession, no tribe.  When Makushi and Wais-Wais feud, it's not your fight.  When Ackawol threatens kenaima and vengeance, you're safe.  They mean some other fellow.  Where else can you be so safe?" He laughed like a contented sow with a cigar in his round face.  "I tell you, Stephen, alienation is a blessing.  Don't knock it.  The jungle's the safest place in the world.  Four months in the bush and ten months back on the streets of New York and you'll start wondering what foundation you can tap for your next trip." He puffed on the cigarillo and looked like a suburbanite in a sunhat leaning on his back fence.

They were on their way again.  The Calypso singer went from Calypso to dirty Calypso.  A group brought out a steel band.  Three women got up to dance.  A baby played with Stephen's shoelaces, trying to figure out the magic of how they came untied.  Bottles of rum and slabs of cheese got passed around.  The porknockers, the clergymen, the nurses and Peter and Stephen ate hard boiled eggs.  The Indians did not.  Belly bolted at eating white man's food: sheep, goats, fowl, and fowl eggs: symbols of ingesting the conqueror.  Easier to convert them than to get them to eat a chicken's egg.  Preference was for reptiles' eggs, a basket of which lay covered on the boatdeck eyed censoriously by one of the clergymen.  Reptiles' eggs outlawed by Seventh Day Adventists.  Religion gets down to basic things like food and sex laws, artifacts and civilization.  Emboldened by a breeze, the Calypso singer snapped his fingers at prohibitions and became a musical director.  He led the group in songs.  He clicked his fingers and kept the beat with his hips.  With a look of love and lust on his face he beckoned to the crowd to inspire him.  The women's teeth gleamed.  The shoreline shimmered in aquamarine.  The clergyman with the portfolio of Ray Bradbury snored in his deck chair.  His neck turned red under the sun.  Trees two hundred feet sprang up.  Wallaba, mora, greenheart.  Their trunks were mossy and slimy.  The shoreline darkened.  Lianas and vines twisted from the trees and made the view impenetrable.

In the jungle night comes to the terrain while there is still considerable daylight in the sky.  The earth turns dark and wet while the sun still shines above the treetops.  But one has to look two hundred feet up to see it.

Hollandia, Zeelandia, Oosterbeck, Dornboom, desolated plantations of a once confident future, slipped into the grey jungle as the boat went down the coast.  Stephen noticed that Peter was squinting at a guidebook.  He wondered if the Dutch names salivated in his soul and if he was checking them out.  Local histories are sometimes surprising.

Canoes of Indians came out from rotting wharves and followed the boat like a school of fish.  The people on deck shouted to them and tossed them packages of food.  Regional custom.  A hazy sun set over the tops of the high trees.  Sounds were absorbed into the mossy earth.  The tongues of snakes were stilled.  The alligators lay on the banks and waited for night.  Pirani swam soundlessly.  The river was as yellow as mustard.  Human life faded into the dark green.  Here a voice on the boat rang out into nowhere, an arm floated up and the twilight swallowed it.  The canoes of Indians fell away.  The humidity mounted.  The earth shrank into a wet, green ball.  The river turned black.

The jungle loves the twilight.  It celebrates it with a religious stillness that separates the forms of life: the white bell birds that sit in morning vines and the insects that crawl at night, the pink ibis that stands with outstretched neck and the alligator that slides into the dark river.  When the ritual is over then the jungle, in its antique and justified renown, emerges.

They docked in a village called Noytgedacht.  Peter explained that the word meant unexpected.  They shared a hut and slept in hammocks and slung their goods in a basket over a rafter, as Peter advised.  "You'll know why about three in the morning," he said.

It didn't take that long.  As soon as Stephen tried to fall asleep he realized that the room was filled with living things.  He heard them on the floor and on the walls.  Startled, he heard them drop on to his netting.

"Tuck in well," Peter said.  "If you leave a toe out it may be gone in the morning."

The sounds were barbarous: grinding, sucking gnawing, slithering.  Red ants came out by night and set about the work of their civilization.  Monkeys wept.  Beetles crawled under their brittle primordial backs.  Some whistled shrilly and rubbed their legs secretly beneath their shells.  So thin, so small, negligent of man's nerves, the sound was grinding.  Centipedes groped morbidly.  The green parrot snake, unseen, circled the room.  The vampire bat, legendary and real, hovered in the air.  And the mosquito, symbol of man's defeat by little things, buzzed relentlessly.

In the distance, tigers, jaguars and wild horses, the tread of heavy animals on branches, the bush cow, the wild hog screaming to the night.  And dogs barking everywhere.  Finally, the cry of the howler monkey, grossly heartbreaking: a cry of doom that reaches into the marrow of the bones.
Stephen was desperate for a smoke, but man can't cope with the thought of putting his feet down into a mess of insect life.  "You didn't tell me about this," he whispered hoarsely.

"About what?" Peter mumbled.

"This.  All this humming and knocking and batting.  Does it get better or worse the further into the Interior you go?"

"Stays about the same."

"Son of a bitch.  Don't tell me you can sleep in this."

"Have to," Peter mumbled.

"The coast people are right."

"What?"

"You heard me."

"That's dirty language, Stephen.  You're not going to funk
out.

No, he wasn't.  But he never acquired Peter's appetite for the Interior, or the professional forebearance he was able to muster out of enthusiasm.  Peter loved the jungle as a compensatory vision.  Stephen came to love some of it.  Peter never seemed to be uncomfortable and what Stephen found irritating about him was that he didn't like complaints, as if he thought they were signs of

In the morning things looked different.  The humidity of the night was dissipated.  Saman and mango trees curved along the river's coast in a rain of sunshine.  A forest of slender bamboos stretched inland for miles.  Birds, ruby, red, dark red and maroon flew between them.  Where lilacs grew on vines butterflies alighted.  Parrots screeched boorishly.  The ibis stood upon a leg and looked trustingly about as the boat glided by.  The sound of bell birds followed.  Companeros.  Stephen lit a tiparillo and beheld from the deck of the boat an orchidaceous land.  They breakfasted on fried rice and bananas, grapes and yams.  A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou.  Ahl wilderness and Ursula in it.

Thinking of Ursula he turned from the rail and asked Peter why he thought she found the Hallelujah sect offensive.

"Hallelujah is an authochthonous version of Christianity.  No room for missionaries in it.  Puts them out business." Stephen smiled at Peter's professional self-righteousness.  "What else?" he said.

"Why do you want to know?"

"In case I meet her in the woods and she quizzes me."

Peter shut a scaly eyelid.  "She's not Rima, you know."

Stephen glowed.  "She'll do."

Peter assumed the mantle of his experience.  He puffed out a thoughtfully considered circle from his cigar and said, "Look here, my boy, don't carry a memory of her from out there to in here. just remember that in here memories grow bigger than life and get to seem like the real thing.  They're up against a stasis."

Stephen smiled blandly.  "I'm going to meet her father.  I better get the thing straight."

"Straight?" Peter attacked.  "Bichiwung went to heaven and God told him that white man's religion was old and used up.  Hallelujah was the new thing.  If the Indians were good and faithfully practiced their new religion, God would give them light, strength, and would protect them from their enemies, white man included.  Indians insist Hallelujah came directly from God, His gift.  So they cut connections and obligations to the missionaries.  Can't teach them cross-cultural influences.  Hallelujah preaches that only the Indians can go to heaven."

"As nationalistic as all that!"

"Can't say I blame the missionaries for wanting to see the thing buried.  Must make a man's stomach turn to see a bunch of ingrates take over his territory."

"Anymore?"

Peter cut himself a slice of yam.  "They believe that Jesus Christ was two people.  One was good and one was bad.  The good man was Jesus.  The bad man was named Christ.  There was a schism.  Someone killed Bichiwung with kenaima.  The followers of Abel vanquished the followers of Christ.  Christ went down in defeat and Abel became the first Ackawoi prophet, He died in 1920, not too soon some think." He blinked up at him.  "Think you're prepared for Father Aigan now?"

"How come Father Reuchlin lets them practice it?"

"I don't know.  You can ask him when you see him." He stuffed the yam in his mouth.  "But I can tell you it's feuds like this which keep the jungle hopping."

"Tell me more," Stephen said.  Peter squinted at the sunlight and offered Stephen a yam section.
"What do you want," he said, "a course in jungle theology?"

Stephen took the slice of yam and leaned over the rail of the boat.  On the left bank the forest dwindled and rolling savannahs appeared.  "Could be looking at the plains of Nebraska," he said.  The view was that familiar.  On the right were sand dunes, some a hundred feet high.  In the distance the grass was dusty and stiff with heat.  Beneath the blank blue sky the river was amber.  An alligator's head lay on the bank, its rows of teeth a prize.  Stephen ate his slice of yam and watched it.  Everyone crowded to the rail.  An Indian appeared between the trees.  He took aim with his bow and struck accurately.  The alligator's mouth clamped shut forever.  Power turned off.  Stephen's slice of yam fell into the river.  The boat slid away from the scene.

They arrived in Paradise late in the afternoon.  A storm was blowing in.  The shacks leaned towards each other for comfort.  The passengers on the boat dwindled to thirty.  Most would return with the steamer in the morning.  The clergyman with his bundle of Bradbury books and a nurse disembarked.  A group of Makushi children were there to greet them.  The clergyman kissed each one.  The nurse was new.  He introduced her.  The children shook hands and gave her flowers.  Their parents came forward.  One put his arm around the clergyman's neck and wept.  "Long time
no see," he cried.  "We wait boat every week." The clergy poked his tongue into the corners of his mouth.  "Long time no see, George," he said in a trembling voice.  They gathered themselves together, boxes, steamer trunks, new supplies, books, games for the children, and disappeared into the dusty road.

Stephen and Peter hustled about, getting their equipment off the boat.  A man came forward in a bushwanger hat.  "Samuel McTaggart," he said.  "Professor van de Groot and Dr. Werner?" They shook hands.  "I have place ready for you."

"You got Cyrus Mills's message," Peter said.

"Indubitably." He smiled in striking fashion.  He wore a loincloth, a khaki shirt and army boots from an army surplus store, and an I.D. bracelet.  "You stay with me and wife.  In morning I give you breakfast and guides.  Now is time to rest and eat.  Wife cook all day."

"What gives with Samuel McTaggart?" Stephen asked later.  Peter laughed, "Kind of jolts you, doesn't it.  Probably took the name from'some Scotsman he admired who gave him the I.D. bracelet.  The Indians like to keep their own names to themselves." Peter pulled a leather belt around the camping equipment.  "If they don't take the name of some man they like they take the name of a famous person, most often from the Bible since that's usually the only book they know."
Sure enough in the morning Stephen was introduced to Jonathan, John, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Adam I and Adam II, and Jesse James.  Each bowed and said, "I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.  I will try to serve you to the utmost of my capacity." Thereafter the talk was in Indian dialect or pidgin English.

Samuel was chief guide and efficient at it.  He ran the trading post in Paradise, which his wife and sons managed in his absence.  Being a guide worked well for his business.  The boat brought goods for his store: beads, fish hooks, cutlasses, sandals, mirrors, rope.  He brought back from the Interior hammocks and baskets, herbs and artifacts.  Peter went in the first canoe with Samuel, Adam and John.  Stephen went in the second canoe with Abraham, Isaac and Jesse.  Jacob, Adam II and Jonathan followed in the third canoe.  The equipment was loaded into the canoes in the early morning under a cloudy sky.  The river was choppy.  It was filled with cold pirani, hona shark and electric eels.  Stephen kept his hands well inside his canoe,

As soon as they took off, Abraham removed his pants and Jesse took off his shirt. Abraham was in his sixties.  He was a grandfather and on his third wife. His torso was aging.  He had a loose paunch over deeply buried muscles.  He kept an unlit cigarette in his mouth all the while that he paddled, and he wore a necklace of seeds.  Isaac's hair was cut short, an inch above the ears, straight and even all around.  Itis chest was painted with geometric designs of which he was very proud.  He flung off his shirt with every intention of showing off his body paint.  Jesse smoked constantly.  He kept a cigarette clenched between his teeth and looked like Jimmy Cagney.  He wore a necklace of alligator teeth.

The men paddled for six hours without a stop.  When they camped for lunch, Stephen learried they had gone twelve miles.  "More current than we thought," Peter said.  It was a phlegmatic observation.  Jonathan killed an haimara with an arrow and they cooked the fish for lunch.  Peter and Stephen had a few cans of beer along, but the guides drank paiwai.  After lunch the canoeing became harder.  The wind blew up, the current ran against them.  The river narrowed to about thirty yards and ran swiftly.  It was clogged with fallen branches.  Quite a few times thev had to stretch out in the bottom of their canoes as it passed under a fallen tree.  Once Stephen caught sight of a snake eyeing them from its perch on a low swinging branch as they passed under it.  Everyone lay flat, Jesse's cigarette sticking up.

The rain started slowly.  The tops of the trees waved delicately in the wind.  Then the wind increased and the rain came down with a crash.  Peter's canoe disappeared around a bend.  Neither could Stephen see the canoe behind his.  The river turned dark brown and fish, with wide, grinning teeth, jumped on the waves.  The rain fell like an avalanche of pebbles.  They dragged the canoe up on the bank and wrapped it in canvas.  Abraham, Isaac and Jesse slung their hammocks from trees and pitched a tent of canvas over themselves.  Stephen followed their example.  They sat in their hammocks and ate cold rice and rations.  Even Jesse's cigarette was wet.  Abraham began a story.  He lay back in his hammock for an hour and half sung, half recited an endless tale.  Now and then lightning lit him up, the thunder drowned out his voice.  The soaked forest hissed with steam.  In a flash of lightning Stephen saw a pair of alien eyes behind Abraham's hammock.  His hand went for his dagger, then it went for a tiparillo.  But the wind kept blowing his light out.  Abraham got out of his hammock and stood in front of him to block the wind.  The wordless friendliness made Stephen ache.  He offered tiparillos around.  Jesse and Isaac took.  Abraham declined.  "I got religion," he said.  He climbed back into his hammock and continued his story for another hour.  At the end a voice said:

Yam section.  Try again.  Eyam section.  Again, slower.  Iamsurrection.  Good.  Again.  I am the resurrection.  Now, you've got it.

Stephen rolled out of his hammock.  Isaac and Jesse were asleep.  Abraham was asleep too, but he was still story-telling.  But those weren't his words.  "I am the resurrection and the life.  I am, Sir, the resurrection and the life?" Lightning struck somewhere.  A tree snarled.  Stephen crawled to the canoe.  He found the eythylene oil lamp and lit it with an unsteady hand.  "Who's there?" he called.  Abraham snored.  Stephen swung the lamp around.  The fish jumped in the river.  Their teeth bit his light.  The bank was loose beneath his feet.  It slipped.  He moved away and cast the light into the trees.  The rain hissed everywhere.  Abraham, Isaac and Jesse slept like the dead, but the voice said, "This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood." The voice was masterful now.  Stephen shouted at it, a prolonged yell that bounced about the dark jungle like a beserk goat.  The thunder answered.  The voice said: "He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter.  By his knowledge of death shall my righteous servant justify many." Stephen crawled through the jungle, swinging the lamp through every dark hole and shadow and licking rain from the ground.  By luck, before his sanity came to an end, he stumbled into Peter's camp a quarter of a mile down the river.  Samuel and Adam beamed at him.  "Me good pupil," John said, "me learn good from missionary." He clicked off the tape recorder and grinned, pleased that he had had more of an audience than he had thought.  The necklace of alligator teeth gleamed on his neck.

The banks on the way to Via Sacre were overgrown with mocco-mocco, a coarse long grass that grows fifteen feet high.  The trees were far back now, but there was less view.  The mocco-mocco on each side of the bank was a solid wall as the canoes slid between them.  Occasionally a halocanaid butterfly slept on a blade of grass or flew by.  The soul leaped, but the thing was past in no time.  Stephen decided t ' o keep his camera ready around his neck.  By mid-day they saw other canoes and knew they were near Via Sacre.

The Indians called out greetings to them.  "Good day, sirs.  Please make yourselves welcome at our village."

Their canoes went by swiftly.  Flocks of canoes.  The movement of a riverine people.  The men grinned.  Some had bone ornaments in their lips.  Some were on their way to hunt peccary and carried bows and arrows.  Women sat in the canoes and gave their men wifely, encouraging smiles.  Some wore dresses around their arms or had them piled on top of their heads.  Some carried babies and nursed them.  One girl, unmarried, sat in a canoe and gleamed her teeth at Stephen's boat.  Her breasts were still small and brown.  She wore only her beaded queyu.  She stood up unabashedly to show him her plump figure.  He was not unaffected.  Jesse and Isaac passed a joke between them.  Isaac popped up a cigarette for her to take as their canoes slid by.  She leaned across and took it.  Her breast touched his hand.  He stood up and flexed his chest muscles, rippling his designs at her.  The boat got tippy.  Stephen barked at him to control himself and to stay on course.  Her boat was followed by a missionary in a canoe bearing down swiftly after the others.  Two Indians paddled while he balanced himself standing.  He carried a Bible and made the sign of the cross over Stephen's canoe as they went by.  Stephen aimed his camera and shot a picture of him.

He dreamed of Ursula that night.  She stood in a canoe and beckoned to him.  Her belly was brown and her hair was blonde.  An intoxicating queyu covered her parts beneath her navel.  It had an elaborate design on it: a crossword puzzle with a cryptic message worked in beads: INRI.  He leaned across to read it.  She leaned away from him and fell out of the canoe.  Her yellow hair streamed into the amber river.

In the morning they met the Reverend Newton, who had come recently to Via Sacre.  He was a young man in his middle twenties, with a blonde, old-fashioned, cherubic face.  Until he had arrived the spring before the place had been a deserted mission.  Why?  Nobody knew.  Some said the Indians had killed a Jesuit missionary there a century ago.  Reverend Newton, a member of the United Evangelist Church, relayed this with mischievous humor in his eyes.  Some said there had been a massacre of the Indians for mysterious reasons.  An unholy orgy, a recondite ritual.  It was all buried beneath garbled tales and at any rate had happened a long time ago.  Via Sacre was now becoming an oasis in the Interior, the healing scab over an old wound.  Reverend Newton waved his arm around the Arawak village with its patches of farmed land, chickens, dogs and roosters.  Anyone could see that the place's reputation was unjust.  The scene was pastoral, if dusty.  This was his first mission, but he was confident he would transform the place into an Eden.  He said, with a beam of sunshine in his eyes and a tuft of blonde hair waving in the wind, "It is a land flowing with milk and honey.  Let us all go up at once and possess it, for we are well able."

He directed them to take a walk about the area.  He pointed out a hizh Lrrass-covered dune called Resurrection Mountain and recommended the view from there.

Peter said, when out of ear-shot, "Let's piously hope it didn't earn its name the way Resurrection Valley did." The topic embarrassed him.  Stephen courteously did not press for details.  He knew the outline.  An Indian by the name of Awakaipu had preached the resurrection to the Indians, that if they died they would come back in three days' time with white skins, and if they had white skins and the white man's religion they would have his power.  All the tribes sent a thousand Indians each.  They met in the Kukenaam Valley at the foot of Mount Roraima.  In the Middle Ages people who could read and write were considered to be magicians.  In like and reverent spirit Awakaipu presented the Indians with little pieces of pages from The Times as amulets to carry them into the next world.  Then with faith they clubbed, hacked and knifed each other to death.  They died slowly, resisting help.  Watchmen waited for these brethren to rise.  Only the vultures appeared.  After two weeks, the remnant went after Awakaipu.

They climbed a steep trail through dense mocco-mocco.  Stephen kept his tiparillo clamped between his teeth and grasped the grass with his hands, climbing with bent knees.  Halfway up, Peter said, "History of an idea from 33 A.D. to 1900.  Preaching is a dangerous sport." Stephen did not comment.

On top of the dune, overlooking other dunes, was an old fort and a church.  The fort had been Dutch, the church had been Lutheran.  The fort still had a rusty cannon aimed at the river below.  Peter translated the Dutch words on it.  The church was made of prepared slabs of stone.  It was anybody's guess at what it took to get them there.  Much effort.  The words, Ecce Homo, were carved into the arch over the doorway.  The room was small and moist and dark.  There were six benches.  The altar was crumbling.  A colony of ants marched across it, bearing the body of a slain warrior.  A mural of Jesus on the cross in faded ochre was painted on the wall.  The plaster was peeling.  In the comers and on the molding cobwebs predominated.  A bushmaster snake lay curled beneath the mural.  Stephen stopped at the doorway.  He saw the bushmaster and the bushmaster saw him.  Its tongue flicked with primitive malice.  They moved silently away and shut
the door.

Outside a wind blew.  Below, the river ran brown beneath them.  The view was bleak.  The descent went down into a rocky valley where a ton of mountain stone had fallen.  Vultures circled over it, searching for a moving rodent.  Except for the fort and the church and this small clearing with its antiquated legend, the rest was jungle and stone.

When they came down Reverend Newton asked them how they liked the view up there.  He had a particular affection for the place.  He had set it aside, he told them, as a retreat.  He clasped the Bible in front of him and said, "It is written ye shall seek the Lord in the desert and in the waste places." He grasped their hands in a farewell gesture and prayed that the Lord Jesus Christ watch over their journeying.  Stephen squinted at the sun and bit off the end of his tiparillo.

Adam 1, John Jacob and Jonathan came only as far as Via Sacre.  They were replaced by guides, Joshua, John Quincy Adams, a young boy of seventeen named David, and a newly married man named Solomon who brought his wife along.  She turned out to be the daughter of Abraham's nephew's second wife.  Though he had not known of her existence, not having known that his nephew's first wife had died, he was as pleased to see her as if he had been looking for her all his life.  Her existence seemed to add to his stature and he took to strutting, his unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth.  She sat shyly in the last canoe with a dog in her lap and never looked at the men.  Stephen only wondered at the dog.  He was getting used to the rest.

"This is the crew until we get to Immanuel?" he, said.

"This is it," Peter said.

For Stephen things remained the same.  Abraham, Isaac and Jesse stayed in his canoe, which was fine with him.  Their temperaments complimented one another.  Jesse was withdrawn, even surly if provoked.  He was a married man with several children.  He had a patch of ground in Paradise where he raised yams, sweet potatoes and chickens.  He was efficient, but responded slowly to polite conversation and always looked waspish when Isaac joked.  Isaac was to be married when he came back from this trip.  He had a good woman from his tribe picked out, he said, but now that he had seen this one at Via Sacre maybe he would change his mind.  He put an edge of glitter to the idea that he was still free to choose that got on Jesse's nerves.  Abraham ignored them.  He was alert, but his muscles were going.  His eye was still good.  He could pick out a snake at fifty feet, and he was a seasoned traveller, reliable, not likely to scare easily.  He and Samuel knew the river well, where there were inland trails and where there were rapids ahead.

Particularly, Abraham was valuable as a story-teller.  Every night, in rain or under stars, Solomon and his wife, Adam II, David, Joshua, John Quincy Adams, Jesse, Isaac, all of them were rocked to sleep by Abraham's stories, partly sung, partly chanted, partly recited.  The tradition rarely varied.  At night they slung their hammocks, they built a fire, they ate their food, they smoked their cigarettes except for Abraham, and they lay back to listen to his tales.

Solomon and his wife set their hammocks apart from the others.  If they stopped in mid-afternoon for a rest, he would build a canopy of palm leaves to shield her from the sun.  Stephen asked them to pose for a picture.  Solomon's wife put on a dress for the occasion.  Solomon adorned his nostrils with a plumage of ostrich feathers.  He twined his hair into a long braid and wrapped a vine through it.  His chest expanded and he looked as kingly as his namesake.  His wife looked tense and serious.  She stared into the camera with conscientious, unblinking eyes.  Sometimes they giggled at night, which interrupted Abraham's recitation and displeased him.

What he said, Stephen only knew from Peter.  Abraham spoke in his native tongue when he gave a recital.  Stephen learned that the stories were mostly about his tribe's history: slave raids by the Caribs, kidnappings of their women, wanderings in the jungle in retreat from the white man, wars they had fought with other tribes.  When he could, Peter taped Abraham's voice, which delighted Abraham.  He would dress for the occasion, put pants over his loincloth, put on a shirt and a string of jaguar's teeth.  He knew that the speaking box went back to big cities.  The thought of being heard by the high and the mighty of the world was very flattering and he was not beyond hamming it up.

The trip out from Via Sacre was not difficult at first.  The current ran with them.  The jungle was far away.  For two days the view was of savannahs, sandhills of fine, white sand.  Though they were travelling in the rainy season and the river was rising, it still kept its course.  They came to a series of itabu where the river widens into lakes.  The scene was bucolic.  The shores were decorated with trees which bore chartreuse blossoms and yellow-green leaves.  Cows lay on the banks under them and swished their tails.  Birds sat on wide ferns on the water and were carried round and round by the current.  Stephen made out the thatched roofs of huts above the high grass.  Abraham told him it was a village of Wapisani Indians.  "No got religion," he said.  "They move far from mission.  Disappear." He told them his mother's sister had married a Wapisani Indian and had disappeared for twenty years.  One day she re-appeared.  She said her husband had died and now she came back to get white man's religion so she could go to heaven to see him.

They stopped at the village.  Children and dogs set up a shout.  The paiman came down to greet them officially, but he knew only one or two English sentences.  "Immanuel there," he pointed up the river.  "No mission here." He ordered peccary roasted in honor of the guests.  They ate foods tabooed at the missions: eggs gathered from the reptiles, the wild hog, labba, scaleless fish, and drank a great deal of cassiri.  The paiman rolled cigarettes and offered them cautiously.  They sat in the twilight and smoked.

Peter was generous and gallant.  He gave gifts to the women, beads and mirrors.  Children came to him like a bee to a flower.  For them he had packets of salt, dearly loved by the Indians.  The children nuzzled their mouths into it like deer at a salt-lick.  They curled into his lap, little balls of aboriginal flesh smelling of grass and bush and brown tropical rivers.  Their body incense could bring thoughts of doe-eyed Miriam standing in the river's reeds.  Peter nuzzled the children's necks and sniffed the grassy oils from their heads.  He -got Abraham to act as interpreter and ask the villagers if they would speak into his tape recorder.  Abraham spoke first and let his voice be played back to demonstrate the benignity of the speaking box.  The paiman sat crosslegged, smoked his cigarette and listened to Abraham intently.  When Abraham was finished the paiman stood up.  With a glitter in his eye he made a very long speech.  Abraham told them that the paiman said that white man was very clever, he know how to put his voice in a box, but Wapisani Indian can put his voice into anvthing.  The paiman then put on a mask of painted wood and with a leap gave them a demonstration of ventriloquism.  Voices came from cows, sheep, roosters.  They jumped out of the river.  They flew from the tongues of birds.  They leaped from the throats of dogs.  They oozed like scent from the flowers.  They escaped low, low, low from the ants on the ground.  They dropped screeching from the mouth of a hawk and they soared from the setting sun.  They descended from everywhere and came from all sides, from behind trees and leaves, from under stones and from Stephen's throat.  Then the paiman took off his mask, looked contemptuously at the tape recorder and walked away.

In the morning the men from the village came to the river's edge to say goodbye.  The young boys decorated themselves to have their pictures taken.  They greased their hair and put white down feathers in it.  A canoe party, with unembarrassed dismay over their departure, trailed them for a distance, their canoes filled with dogs and babies.  The scene stayed in Stephen's mind for a long time.  He took many pictures of it, but he never saw them developed.  He looked back again and again, but within minutes you could not tell the huts from the grass.  The village sank into the earth.  The grass was so tall that as the third canoe came around a curve, the grass covered over the river with a yellow curtain.

Up ahead the landscape was different.  For three days they swirled through cataracts and rapids.  Oncejoshua fell out of his boat and scrambled in again an inch ahead of the snapping mouth of an alligator.  He became sick over his narrow escape and vomited for an hour.  At night he said that he had had enough.  John Q. Adams and David were impressed with his arguments.  Samuel challenged their integrity.  He disciplined them verbally. Joshua quieted down.  They went on, but the idea of insurrection was added to their load.

Frequently they had to build makeshift bridges and drag their equipment over cataracts and falls.  Twice they were forced to go inland and carry the canoes on their heads, their equipment on their backs, while they cut a trail through matted courida.  On those days in twelve hours of slashing, cutting and hacking, they journeyed two miles.  The road to Immanuel was rougher than Stephen could have imagined.  And always the fear of the bushmaster snake camouflaged in the roots and the vines haunted everyone.  For this the dog was invaluable.  He ran ahead and barked at every living thing except the smaller beasts that were depriving Stephen of his sanity.  Ants feasted on his body, no matter how he pinned down his clothes.  They got into his hunting boots and crawled under his socks.  They got into the legs of his pants and inside his underwear.  They crawled inside his ears.  Flies and mosquitos rode on the sweatbeads that dropped from his face.  Once he heard a buzzing and thought a wasp was sitting on his neck.  It was a bushplane signalling to them.  It swooped low.  The pilot waved gaily to them and made a gesture that said, "Hey, crazy, man," and flew away.

Stephen hit his neck as if the wasp had been there and scanned the sky.  "How about that?" he said.  He picked up a clump of matted courida he had just hacked out of the earth and threw it into the air.  The plane shook its tail at him.

Peter, unperturbed, sat on a rock and tried to set a battery in the tape recorder.  His intrepidity didn't warm the cockles of Stephen's heart.  Stephen could have followed Peter into hell out of admiration and faith in his grit alone, but it would never teach him to call hell heaven.  Peter preached the Interior.  If one suggested that it was less than one had expected, it was an indictment against the pedagogue himself.  The gulf widened in their judgments about reality.

Not that there wasn't recompense, sights that could not be seen from any other vantage point.  One had to cut through tangled roots or wander lost in a bamboo forest for the privilege of seeing the dance of the cock-of-rock.

One day, Solomon on bent knees, a finger to his lips to caution silence, waved them over to a clearing behind some granite boulders.  There on a level patch of circular ground about three feet in diameter were nine male birds, each the size of a pouter pigeon.  In color, flaming orange with yellow tails.  They stood in a circle and performed a dance meant to be seen only by their coveted female.  Solomon quietly pressed down a bush so that his wife could see them.  Underneath the leaves stood the female bird, expectant, receiving the gift of the flaming plumage and the dance of the male birds.  Never again would Stephen see such a sight.  In captivity, they lose their color and do not dance.

They passed huge granite boulders overgrown with lichen and moss, but Abraham and Samuel knew what lay beneath the growth.  Samuel drew pictures in the sand on the river's edge and pointed to the boulders that hung a hundred feet above them.  Peter decided it was worth while to stop for the morning and investigate.  Abraham and Isaac led the way.  Isaac went up like a mountain goat.  When they got to the top and scraped away the moss they saw legible drawings of hunters, boars, fishermen and hieroglyphics carved into the rock.  Tumatumari, the rocks were called: sleeping rocks.  Isaac was proud to discover that some of the designs were like those on his chest.

Peter asked how they knew the rocks were there.  Samuel swung his arm to indicate the terrain.  "All Indians know.  In old days, Indians have big, big village here.  Now is only rock left."

"How long ago was that?" The question was futile.  The Indians do not reckon time.  But Samuel wanted to be agreeable.  He knew the white man's proclivity for answers.  He scratched his head, shrugged his shoulders and said, "Eight, twelve, fifteen." Stephen made a drawing of the rock and tried to ascertain its location.  He judged it to be about 4'20'.  In three days' time he was more precise; the rock was a three days' 'ourney by canoe from Christmas cataract.

Schomburgk named it in 1835 because he spent Christmas there among the guides who brought him to the spot.  Celebrating the holiday in a wilderness, Schomburgk made it a point to give his guides extra measures of rum and sugar.

Peter stood at the edge of the great, green fall and thought about Schomburgk in the jungle at Christmas.  How agreeable it was, the conjunction of so many virtues: the indefatigable warrior-explorer retaining his religiousity so far from home among people who knew nothing of his traditions.  Stephen stood next to Peter and peered over the fall with him, but Peter savored the anecdote privately.  Stephen knew the place, having worked over all of Schomburgk's maps.

The Interior had its rewards, seas of floating gardens, pools of lillies, waterfalls that fell a hundred feet where white birds danced in the spray, puzzling trails that went nowhere, reminders of lonely heroism, footsteps that were still warm on the ground and beckoned the spiritually hungry.  Peter, unlike Stephen, could anticipate them.  He had been through the experience before.  He was sure he would be justified.  He simply ignored the going when it was rough or mindlessly monotonous.  His stoicism rested on this: he found antinomous feelings intolerable and ignored the universe when it gave signs of arousing such.  He loved virginal beauty and was prepared to pursue it.  It reminded him of that perfection of nature which had been promised to him: the lillies toil not, neither do they spin.

For the next half week they made two miles a day.  John Q. and Adam became sullen.  They did not like the lack of progress.  It meant falling rations, possibly hunger.  Insurrection hung in the air.  Jesse caught a fever and became useless.  He couldn't paddle or carry his load.  They put him in the third canoe where he lay -dn the bottom and moaned.  Stephen was anxious and Peter was reassuring.  Solomon and his wife took Jesse's place in Stephen's canoe and the dog came along.  He sat on his mistress's lap and looked sharp-eyed.

For two days they moved through a shallow, swamp-like river overgrown with bush.  It was only ten yards wide.  Ants, centipedes and spiders sat on the grass and crawled on the surface of the unmoving river.  It was the end of the dry season and the river had fallen to its lowest point.  It was almost entirely mud and almost impossible to trace its course.  In two weeks' time they had gone
fifty miles.  Not an inch on a map, Stephen thought.  The humidity rose from the ground.  Nothing moved.  Moisture, pressure and loneliness abounded.

Their canoes stuck in an alligator colony.  Samuel and Peter held a discourse on the matter.  Stephen took out a tiparillo and lit it.  By this time he was indifferent to the centipedes and the ants and figured he had won his confidence badge.  The dog yipped at the alligators as they slipped by, their eyes rotating in their heads.  Stephen looked down at the red end of his tiparillo and reflected on love, fate, death and Ursula: how in hell's name had she made the trip?

"Trust a missionary to find a way," Peter said, "probably dropped from a plane."

An alligator winked at Stephen.  Stephen tipped his tiparillo to him.  The insouciance hit Peter wrong.  Stoicism was one thing, levity was another.  "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he called over.

"What you got in mind?"

"Get your gun and start shooting.  If I think of something else I'll let you know." He picked up his rifle and shot to death one, two, three, six alligators.  Their tails struck out against the sun, their teeth bit the foaming water.  One head sank beneath Stephen's boat, its mouth grinning at him.  The river turned red and foamed.  Then it was quiet.  They watched the river for a long time.  Sweatbeads gathered on Abraham's neck.  "O.K., get the boats on to dry land," Peter said.

"You got them all?" Stephen asked.

"In my opinion, yes."

Stephen looked at the foamy water.  Nothing did move.  He had a wi ld thought of what it would be like to gamble wrongly on Peter's judgment, but it was hard to beat his faith.  He turned t Solomon, Abraham and Isaac.  "Let's go," he said.  Abraha scratched his ear and looked queerly at him, which turne Stephen sour.  By now he knew the Indian's respect for safet Adventure, as a spiritual activity, was foreign to them.  His orde stretched their confidence in him.  "No, go, man," Abraha said.  It's a bad sign when your guide contradicts you.  Stephen bi the end of his tiparillo.  "You heard what the boss man said."

Peter took off his sunglasses and wiped his brow on his sleeve. "Don't call me that," he said.  The resentment came up from his toes.  Stephen could not misunderstand.  He said in a conciliate voice, "There's no telling what's underneath that brown water.  Who's going to be the first man in, Peter?  I won't ask my men."

Peter looked at the dog.  Solomon's wife shrank away.  Peter wiped his brow again.  "Explain to her he'll be in no danger.  We'll shoot anything that moves at it." Stephen did not envy Peter's leadership.  He told Abraham to assure the girl that there would be no danger to the dog.  She was not convinced.  The men became argumentative.  The water was still.  They argued that that was on their side.  Solomon suggested they could sit it out until it rained.  Peter became impatient.  His eyes snapped at the dog.  Jesse got the cue.  He popped up a cigarette and offered it to Solomon's wife, keeping a running conversation with her on the pros and cons of the matter.  She reached for the cigarette.  He grabbed the dog from her lap.  Solomon moved to prevent him and fell out of the boat.  Peter took aim and fired immediately.  Solomon scrambled furiously for half a minute.  Then his eyeballs turned upwards.  Abraham reached for his outstretched hand.  Peter fired a thousand times.  Solomon disappeared from view.  The grin of an alligator's head sank with him.

Twilight settled on the red water.  The sky fell.  The air turned wet and cold.  Solomon's wife lay unconscious in the bottom of the canoe. Her dog rested in her lap.

They dropped anchor and sat it out until daylight.  All night they heard the movement of animals.  Pairs of green eyes, jaguars and tapirs, came to the water's edge and stared at them.  Joshua whispered to the others that he had had enough, the water was possessed by spirits.  Peter remembered that it was about here that Schomburgk's men refused to go further and had persuaded him to turn back.  Not to go further now would be pointless.  Peter lit a cigar, but they did not speak to each other.  A rim of light in the east appeared, but the sky was heavy with rain.  Hope stirred.  Abraham looked up at the sky too.  His face had aged through the night.  "What say?" Stephen said.  Abraham scanned the sky.  "It rain byanby."

The only sign of regret that Peter gave was that he asked Stephen what Abraham had said.

They sat for half a day under a lead-colored sky.  Joshua's whispering went on, though for the time being it was inconsequential.  Not he nor anyone else was going to get out of the boats to look for an overland trail, though they were down to two days' worth of astronaut rations.  Now and then an alligator went by.

The sun came and it went.  It pulsed behind clouds.  Once it even glowed.  Stephen's spirits sank.  Then the sun turned gray as if a tornado blew across its path, and the rainy season began.  The rain fell for eight hours without stopping.

By night the river had risen enough to move them off the mudbank, but they waited for morning.  By then the swamp was gone and the river had broadened to a hundred and fifty yards.  The current moved with them, but they had only one day's supplies left.  It did not matter how far they were from Immanuel.  They could be five miles away around the bend of the river and it could take them a week to get there.  Distance, Stephen had learned, was eccentric.

That night they camped along the muddy banks.  Solomon's wife squatted on her knees and rubbed earth into her thighs and arms.  Samuel and David built a platform in the river from which they tried to spear fish.  They caught two, which cheered everyone.  But in the morning, Joshua, Adam II, John Q. and Jesse were gone, along with what was left of their rations, four cutlasses, four hammocks, an assortment of other implements and Stephen's tiparillos.  Samuel apologized for their behavior.  He told them there was a path to the Essequibo from where they were which they must have taken.  He hesitated.  Then he said, "Is best we go too." Peter did not blink an eye.  He put his arm around Samuel's neck and sai i ' "I think we've seen the worst, Samuel.  I wouldn't tell you to go on if I didn't think we couldn't make it."

"No food," Samuel said.

"That's right," Peter said, "but it will be the same if we take the path to the Essequibo.  No matter what direction we take we might not have food.  But we know the river has fish.  Who knows what we'll find if we go inland."

Doubt would have ended the trip.  Peter was firm.  He drained them of every drop of loyalty and faith that he could.  Then he reminded them of their agreement: he would not pay unless they completed the trip.

Samuel and Abraham consulted each other about what to do.  They talked openly about Peter and Stephen, weighing their merits and demerits, whether they were honorable leaders or not, whether they would be dishonorable if they deserted them, what it would do to the reputation of the guide business.  Reluctantly Samuel and Abraham loaded what was left of the equipment into the two canoes, but it was clear that integrity had won out over conviction.

It took three days to reach Immanuel.  Luck was with them.  They were able to catch fish and on one evening David shot a duck with his arrow.  It was to Peter's credit that they had gone beyond Schomburgk, a feat that would likewise find its way into a record.  The mission lay around the bend of the river in the armpit of a cataract that spit them into the village.

It is one of the expectations of jungle travel that when you meet a white man in it he will have a story to tell about himself.  What's he doing here?  That's the question.

No such question surrounds the man living on 84th and Lexington.  But be his guest for dinner in a palm -thatched benab in a Wais-Wais village at the source of the Berbice and the question hangs in the air like a bat from a tree.  A tasty dinner, a bottle of rum and everyone is ready for a tale.  Stephen and Peter were entertained that night in jungle style and treated to forty years of news by Father Reuchlin.

Samuel, Abraham, David and Isaac jumped from the canoes with relief.  New guides surrounded Stephen and Peter with watchful eyes, sizing up their masters for the coming journey.  James, the head guide, singled himself out.  He was a long, stringy man with elongated muscles in his thighs and calves, long narrow feet and toes that dug the ground.  His hair was straight, slickly oriental, cut even to the earline.  He wore beaded armbands, a necklace of alligator teeth and a leather thong over his chest to carry arrows.

Within six minutes after their arrival, Samuel, Abraham, David and Isaac discovered relatives and friends, a cousin of a cousin married to a cousin, the second wife of an uncle who had run away with the brother of the husband of an aunt.  Their connections seemed legionary and infinite and they gloried in them.  They spent the first night drinking cassiri and knitting up old relationships.  Roosters squawked under their feet and chickens ran in all directions like nervous news carriers.  Three women took charge of Solomon's wife and led her away to ?- iiut.  Father Reuchlin, pear-shaped, the nose and mouth of John XXIII, welcomed them and suggested they rest for the afternoon.  On the whole, Stephen thought, looking up at the village of neat benabs and patches of cultivated ground, arrival was anticlimactic, considering the journey they had just mastered.  Except that the benabs were roofed with palm leaves and some were open on two sides, the view could have been that of a village tucked into a fold of the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1749 with a sleepy river winding through it.  No surprise on anyone's face that two canoes of men had traversed a river of alligators, sharks, electric eels and pirani and come jumping a cataract into their village.  Precisely, it is the nature of jungle life to mix up the proportions of ordinary to extraordinary.  At the end of the larger-than-life adventure is a village of earnest men and women raising turkeys, hunting dogs and yams.  Immanuel was a small, very old civilization.

Besides, the bush pilot had already spread the news that they were coming, had given their location, etc., and had dropped via parachute some goodies, a note to Reuchlin that said, "Expect visitors for dinner," and a note from Mills to Peter and Stephen: "If you've come this far, congratulations!  Carry on." Stephen and Peter were shown to the hut where their things were stored for them and where they would stay.  There were tins of meat, dried fruit, medicine, lotions for insect bite, snakebite and arcane poisons, a can of apricot jam, a bottle of rum packed in absorbent cotton and palm leaves, three back issues of Playboy, a box of cigars and a box of tiparillos.

"Blessed are those who fly bush planes in the jungle," Peter said.

"Amen to that," Stephen said.  He took out a tiparillo, lit it and took a deep drag.  They unrolled their hammocks and hung them up. Peter lay down with two copies of Playboy for a pillow and blew smoke rings at the roof.  Stephen hung up his camping mirror and looked into it.  He had a blonde beard.  The sight of it gave him great pleasure.  "Son of a gun," he said to himself.  He decided to leave it until he got back to the coast.  "Wanna bathe?" he said to Peter.

"Why not?" He rolled luxuriously out of his hammock.  They unpacked clean clothes and raced each other down to the river, found a private piece of shore where the Indian men swam, and jumped in, cigars and all.

Lianas looped from tree to tree.  Gorlings and blue butterflies flew between them.  A bald-headed cotinga called raucously, llmwaaar, myaaar, mwaaar." Stephen floated on his back and let paradise close over him.  The Capparis trees, timekeepers of jungle life, broke out into their afternoon blossoms.  The yellow river lightened.  White buds appeared where there had been green trees.  The four o'clock sun was kind.

Stephen and Peter rubbed each others' backs and returned through grassy lanes to their hut for a nap.  Dark-skinned girls, naked to their belts, walked by, tending goats.  Most were shy and nodded only formally.  One was bold and flashed a smile.  Her breasts were tiny, her nipples like brown berries, her belly soft.  Stephen's heart leaped.  Peter put a fatherly arm around his shoulder.

"You got any girlfriends back home?" he asked.

"A few," Stephen said, "why?"

"Do me a favor," Peter said, "when you get back marry one of them.

They sank into their hammocks.  Peter was asleep in thirty seconds.  Stephen tried to stay awake and read an issue of Playboy.  The magazine dropped from his hands and he was asleep in five minutes.  His hammock swayed voluptuously.  Naturally, he dreamed of Ursula.  She peered at him with yellow eyes over the bank of the yellow river.  He ran across a meadow of Capparis blossoms.  Goats ran with him.  The white buds flowed in drifts before their feet.  He reached the bank and knelt towards her and held the river in his arms.  The goats drew their lips over their teeth and laughed soundlessly.

He woke, stood in the doorway to the hut and looked at the vi 'llage through her eyes.  Women sat under their roofs and grated cassava roots.  Babies crawled on the ground and poked fingers into the eyes of dogs.  Hunting bows hung from the rafters, pots, woven plates, hammocks, baskets.  What feeling for the deficiencies in their lives or aspirations for a spiritual one for them brought her here?  Would he believe it was the word of God?  Peter, of course, was familiar with the idea that the missionary and the church were co-created, evangelism and Christianity inseparable, like Christianity and western civ.  You can't have one without the other.  The missionary could be found anywhere, clinging like coral to a rock in the ocean or squatting like cactus in the desert.  A universal religion has its logistical problems as well as its rewards.  "The world is my parish." St. Peter's is small compared with that.  Christianity moved out of the churchyard and followed the trail of Fray Matolinia with conquistador and explorer.  How far back does the idea of wilderness go, anyway?  As Stephen was to learn, its presence was religious before it was anthropological.

Stephen wondered as well how Father Reuchlin got to Immanuel.  Mind could not conjure him in a canoe or lowering from a helicopter.  There was nothing of the athletic missionary about him swinging axes, felling trees, building schoolhouses.  His brow and 'aw heavy Germanic-Itallanate, no lean Francis or hungry Anthony, he looked homely, domestic and trustworthy.

Peter joined Stephen in the doorway.  "Quiet town," he said.  He suggested they get a guide and take a walk before dinner, "see what the suburbs look like." Stephen checked his camera for film.  They found Isaac in a coy mood, sitting in the center of a circle of girls.  When asked to accompany them, he leaned over his knees and said meanly, "Big feet in jungle." Peter took the cigar out of his mouth, annoyed, wet end soggy.  "What's that supposed to mean?" Isaac grunted at his ignorance.  "Feet in forest." He stood up and did a little dance to show his joy that his contract with Peter and Stephen had terminated just in time.  "Whole village say feet in forest make kenaima." Then he sat down again.  "You go New River alone.  Me going to sit right here and be and listen for news of you." He laughed and stuck a cigarette in his mouth.

Stephen focused his camera on the girls.  He spotted the bold one with the small breasts.  "Smile," he said.  "What do you make of it?" he said to Peter.

"Don't know.  Let's find James and have a chat."

James sat squat-legged on the ground in front of his hut, putting a metal tip on an arrow.  He confirmed Isaac's story.  A week ago he had been in a hunting party and had seen the footprints, but he smiled.  "No kenaima, " he said.  He put a finger against his forehead to show that he thought kenaima was in the minds of simple men.  Peter was alert.  "Why aren't you afraid, James?" he said.  James rattled loose a little cross he wore among his alligator teeth.  "Me now Christian for two years." They persuaded him to drop what he was doing and guide them up a trail.

In five minutes they were out of Immanuel.  The demarcation between village and jungle was that sudden.  Stephen and Peter perceived that a small clearing was all that the Wais-Wais villagers could claim for security.  Growth was abrupt and immense.  The sun disappeared.  It was a yellow blur two hundred feet up the column of a slimy trunk.  There was a bad odor in the air.  Vultures were flying downriver, their necks stretched to inhale the odor.  Moss was so thick sounds were absorbed, their voices muffled.  But everywhere was a sense of animals, bushcows, tapirs, hogs moving warily, rodents scurrying into holes.  James loped through the thicket on the balls of his feet, his body bent from the waist over his long legs.  The ground was green, spongey and unsavory.  Within five minutes their shirts were wet.  No river to guide them, the twenty miles overland to New River would be a different reality.

They found the first footprint six hundred yards from the village.  It was long, narrow, delicate in shape, the toes prehensile-looking.  Stephen took a dozen pictures of it.  "What do you think?" he said.

Peter took the cigar out of his mouth.  "Animal or man.  So what else is new?  In this case I'd prefer it to be an animal.  If kenaima is suspected in the village we may lose our guides." And Peter was goddamned annoyed.  For the first time Stephen saw that on his face: impatience with the native system; ambition thwarted by primitive pessimism.  Peter said: "In a curious way James is right when he says it's in the mind.  Kenaima makes sophisticated use of psychology.  No simple matter of killing a man.  First his soul is sucked out." He crouched down and blew some stray sand from the print.  He instructed Stephen so that he would understand all the ramifications.  "The avenger befriends his victim, shows him kindnesses, flatters him.  It's when the victim least suspects his doom that the avenger strikes." He looked up.  His eyes said: this may sound melodramatic but you better dig it, the situation could be grave.  Nor was he assuaged b@ James's attitude.  "A few years ago," he jerked his head surreptitiously in his direction, "he would have been paralyzed with terror.  Now he's not only not afraid, he's indifferent." James stood by the trunk of a tree, dignified and unshaken, not even curious.  It was impressive.

The lighting was not good.  Stephen slipped a filter over the lens of the camera and jockeyed it in front of his eyes.  "Is that good or bad?" he said.

Peter was not interested in making the trip out of Immanuel into a religious test.  In the jungle he preferred the pagan's expertise.  He shrugged his shoulders.  "Conquest of fear is always good." He chewed the wet end of his cigar and tried to puzzle out the implications of the print, "but is it smart to be indifferent?" They examined the ground together for another hundred yards and in a sandy patch at the end of a growth of moss they found another print.  Peter got up off his knees and wiped the sweat from his brow with his arm.  "Welcome to kenaimaland, heartland of jungle life." It was not said with special anxiety because he was an outsider, and as an anthropologist it gave him a fruitful opportunity, except for the practical effects it might have on his guides.  But neither did he say it with relish because no one likes a creepy situation.

It was the first topic of conversation that night, among a dozen others.

"So you've heard the village news," Father Reuchlin said.  He looked massive in cassock and cap, and quite authentic.  He had a remnant of reddish hair, but it was best to describe him as bald-headed.  The forehead predominated.  His homeliness was subversive.  It made him look as if he lacked seriousness.  His intelligence came as a surprise.  Against a back wall stood a refectory table with a cross and a Bible on it.  Also piles of notes, books, plants planted or uprooted, specimens of spiders and butterflies surviving in solutions.  Books were scattered on the floor, piled in corners.  The room seemed more dormitory than domicile, academia in disarray.  A highboy and an embroidered sampler, God is Love, gave the room nostalgia and domesticity.

They came in out of a heavy rain, grateful that the hut was closed on four sides.  "European man's obsession with privacy," Father Reuchlin said, welcoming them in.  "In forty years I haven't learned to shake it, though I can shoot a bow and sleep in a hammock." They were embarrassed: he didn't look the type to do either.  He surmised he was a curiosity.  He wasn't offended.  He allowed his comments to serve as introduction to himself.  His smile was complex: apologetic, shrewd, and kindly.  It had been six years since he had had guests for dinner.  Ursula never did him the honor.  Wouldn't sit at a table with his grand-daughter in the same room.  Never said so.  But he knew it.  Not that Ursula was a racist.  On the contrary, as she said: "If I were would I bother to Christianize them." It was him, the grand-daughter-maker she had objected to.  Such verbal play was what had sent him to the jungle forty years ago in search of linguistic simplicities.  For the most part the wilderness had restored him to native verbal innocence.  Except for that incident with Ursula he forgot how unstable language is.  He had no sense of irony, which would have cheapened his pessimism, and which kept him from getting cleverly crabbed.  A further acquiescing smile said much: habits of adaptability were not dependable.  Love bumped against the psychology of oneself.  God is love and man is a bundle of nerves, kneejerks, neuroses, hangups, repulsions, retreats, psychic anathemas.  Break, break theyself upon the stone of thyself.  Father Reuchlin had two long creases in his cheeks that ran along the sides of his nose to below his lips.  He waved his hand around the room as if he considered it an addiction.  A four-sided house establishes a different relationship to the world than a two-sided house.  Geometry gets to be psychological.  Books were piled up for lonely seasons, the European impulse, the defense of the intellectual.  Shelter was largely symbolic because any bushcow could have knocked the hut down.  No protection against snakes and bats as Stephen could tell, spying out a few massive cobwebs in the corners with indescribable insects clutching the threads.  A likewise indefinable shaggy dog panted in a corner, name of Barney.  He had the head and coloring of a St. Bernard, the body of a Dalmatian and the ears of a cocker spaniel.

In spite of it all, the hut emanated a regal civility on a rainy night. A square table stood in the center.  Candles were lit.  Stephen and Peter tried not to show their curiosity about Father Reuchlin's adjustment or lack of it, their desire to trace the sutures between the civilizations.  But Father Reuchlin was sensitive to anomalies, himself among others.  Conscious of his role as host and guide through this little civilization he had made for himself, he said, "The dividing line is clothes, cigarettes and metal pots." He laughed.  "One might have hoped for something more spiritual."

Three servants were there to wait on them.  One was a young boy of fourteen who wore a loincloth, a khaki shirt, alligator teeth and a cross.  It was his job to go from the hut to the outside somewhere and bring back platters of food.  In deference to his guests Father Reuchlin had decided not to cook the meal over his earth stove which smoked on wet nights.  Moreover, the hospitality was abundant.  A middle-aged woman with oily black hair to her shoulders had the sharp-eyed look of chief housekeeper in an important establishment.  As it turned out, she was the first wife to the paiman.  Her pendulous breasts lay flat on her brown, boney rib cage.  But conscious of her merits, status and sharp tongue she was indifferent to loss of beauty and youth.  The third servant was the bold girl with the small breasts.  She wore scarlet feather earrings.  Stephen was delighted and alarmed.  A topless dinner.  Peter was right.  When in the jungle, shed.  She leaned over his shoulder and set down in front of him a whole fish, including the head and an orchid in its mouth.  His shoulder burst into flame.  Outside a nightbird sang a love song in the rain.  Her proclivities were known to others.  The paiman's wife pushed her with her hip.

"Pay attention," Peter said.

"To what?" Stephen sat up-

"Father Reuchlin thinks there are tribal movements out in the jungle, perhaps Ackawoi moving further into the interior."

Stephen scratched his beard.  He wondered if the girl spoke English and if he looked impressive.  Father Reuchlin paddled over to the highboy.  "Besides the footprints, we've found these," he said.  They were steel arrowheads, six inches long.

"No rude implement that," Peter said.

"One reason to believe the footprints are made by people on the move from coastal civilization.  You have to buy these in a store.  "

"The village seems convinced it's kenaima," Peter said.

Father Reuchlin sat down.  "You know, they're usually right about those things."

"Does it mean someone in the village is marked.  It must be hard for you to think that," Stephen said.

He smiled kindly to a naive comment.  "Yes, I'd prefer not to think that.  "

Stephen was surprised at his passive acceptance of a superstition.  Father Reuchlin raised an unoffended eyebrow on behalf of his mission.  "You think it's hocus pocus?" He had stopped reading articles about Indian life a generat' ion ago.  Their authors were courteous, tolerant, sympathetic, but unbelievers.  Belief created its own logic.  What conversation could follow: Sir, I respect your right to believe in a virgin birth, but as for me; or, of course, you believe in evil spirits and we encourage you to do so.  It's part of your Indian rights.  It was natural that in living away from Europe for forty years he had spent time thinking about the civilization he had left.  He had collected a few simple rules about it.  One of them was that controversies are most meaningful to those who are asked to die for them.  Some seek martyrdom, and some have it thrust upon them.  Either way the event is an illuminating one.  He discovered that one afternoon when he found an Ackawoi arrow sticking into his ribs and was made part of the tribal furies.  Raids are always quick.  Raiders have no respect for tribal boundaries and old agreements.  The technique is ancient stealth.  Without so much as the warning of a cracked branch, the Ackawoi stampeded into the village, left six dead and carried off seven.  No one liked to think about what happened to these.  He drew the arrow out of his ribs slowly.  It took several years, thinking all the time how the feuds of the Indians strike everyone but the Indians as a form of philosophical entertainment, and that anything that died, except an evil human spirit, was sanctified by its agony.  Given such egalitarian pessimism, inevitably he married: their past, their future, their tribal boundaries, their history.  Their destiny being his, he suffered a loss of philosophical direction.  He played with such puzzles as: Wyclif was burned posthumously for translating the Bible.  Would that make sense to a Hindu? and if not, what does it mean?  He took a helping of cassava pudding and put it on his plate.  He said to Stephen, to put the matter in a sophisticated way: "The Indians believe that retaliation is a law of life.  They see to it that it's carried out ritualistically.  Sometimes I think that most of what the rest of the world calls justice is a variation on this.

But Peter was in a playful mood.  The subject appealed to his sense of the macabre and he knew the subject so well.  "It's all suitably gruesome," he said to Stephen, "just the sort of thing one expects from jungle justice, uncannily clever.  The avenger never actually kills his victim, he provides the conditions for dying." His familiarity with jungle life allowed him to be playful with its clich6s.  He said his bit with amusement, pedagogical and coy.  "He drugs him and breaks his bones or rubs his pores with poison.  He puts a piece of poisoned splinter through his tongue so that the victim cannot call for help or name his murderer, and so on and so on.  "

Stephen had read Peter's text on the subject.  As a matter of fact, some of the phrasing sounded familiar.  But in the real situation he felt unprotected.  He twirled the orchid in his hand.  Peter said without conviction, "We're lucky to have James."

Father Reuchlin chuckled.  "Occasionally Christianity comes in handy.

Keeping score of the losses and gains in Christianity was one of the aspects of Peter's trade, but he didn't tackle openly in the field.  He recognized a helping hand.  If it weren't for Immanuel they might still be floundering in an alligator swamp.  Gratitude was graceful.  He took olit a cigar and offered one to Father Reuchlin.  He sniffed it generously, but returned it.  "I'm not opposed on principle.  I have bronchitis."

"The humidity here doesn't help that," Peter said.  The tone was sympathetic.  He was dependent upon Father Reuchlin for guides and for guidance in the matter.

"It only gets bad at night," Father Reuchlin said.  "And then this being the rainy season I have to be careful." He thumped his chest and wheezed convincingly.  The hazards of jungle life.  He often asked himself if when Jesus said: Follow me, did he have in mind a foot trail in Guyana?  "Send me a box when you get back to the coast.  I'll save it for the dry season."

"Let me leave you a dozen," Peter said.

"No, no, you have a long trip ahead of you." His smile blended prescience and kindness.  "If you haven't got religion a good cigar is useful for nerves, low spirits and homesickness." He put the tips of his fingers together.  "When you get to the Mission of the True Cross - " He paused, he looked drowsy for a moment, he flicked a piece of dust from his cassock.  "And I have no doubt you will get there Father Algan will be more instructive about doctrinaire matters than I can be.  I tend to lose such arguments.  My reputation is not good." His smile suggested something fatally complex.  "Father Aigan will probably tell you that I have gone native.  Whatever that means." He brushed the cap on hi@ head and straightened out the few red hairs.  The gesture defined him.  It said: I am an overweight, old man who likes to read books, collect butterflies and plants.  Occasionally I create a hybrid.  I know a little medicine and a great deal of theology, most of it casuistical, Which are my credentials for mingling my blood with theirs.

The servants stood behind their chairs holding trays heaped with pineapple, roasted meats, fish, sweet potatoes.  The bold girl supported her tray against her waist.  Atop the pineapples her breasts rested like cherries.

"You see," Father Reuchlin said.  He waved a hand at her.  "My grand-daughter." Stephen's chin sank penitentially on his chest.  The question flew on to his plate.  "Would it be impertinent to ask?" "Not at all," Father Reuchlin said, "we always do." And rightly so.  "Mine is a dull story." That was said out of politeness.  Actually, the facts never ceased to amaze him.  "1935.  In Bavaria,
in my small town of Schverlieben.  I defended a Hebrew translation of the Bible." Peter raised an eyebrow.  Not enough tinder in that to spark a man down a 'ungle trail.  He suffered from the rational man's hubris.  "How could that get anyone into trouble?" he said.  Stephen knew enough not to react one way or the other.

Father Reuchlin clicked his teeth goodnaturedly.  "The history of Christianity is the history of translations.  I thought the Bible should be read in its native language.  Plato in Greek, Virgil in Latin, Isaiah in Hebrew.  I was accused of minimizing German." The drift was now clear.  His grand-daughter sallied forth with the pineapples, going from plate to plate.  Stephen took the top piece.  "I was accused," Father Reuchlin said, "of minimizing German and maximizing Hebrew.  I was accused of being unpatriotic."

"Absurd," Peter said.

Father Reuchlin gave him his best pontifical look and wagged a finger at him.  "You would have trouble making your way through the thicket of men's souls.  Reason is a bad guide.  I was
accused of worse things.  I was accused of being in the pay of Jewish bankers.  I was accused of spreading seditious ideas." The drift was very clear by now.  He said, "I was accused of being Jewish.  "

Stephen felt the floodlight on him.  Center stage again, he thought.  Peter said "absurd" again.  Stephen passed up comment on that.  It was too complicated in any language.  The rain thundered on the roof.  The paiman's wife set down a pot of steaming soup.  Her breasts swung like emptied wineskins.  Father Reuchlin sat back in his chair and succumbed to the 'oys and sorrows of reminiscing.  "I was twenty-three.  Bookish, badly bookish.  Very fat and very bookish.  It's a bad combination for a youth.  Bound to get you in trouble." An irrelevant detail came to mind.  He fished under his cassock and took out a watchfob.  "I took that with me when I left.  Bought it on a hiking trip through the Alps." He wound it up.  "The Indians call it the tick tick thing from far away." He put it back in his pocket.  "Still keeps remarkable time." He went back to eating his food.

Was he going to desert them in the middle of the tale?

"You left us hanging over a cliff," Peter said.

"Over the ministry, to be exact," Father Reuchlin said.  "Yes, I was just wondering how to proceed." He looked up and smiled.  "What to leave out and what to confess to.  It doesn't all redound to my credit." His eyes clouded over in proof of this.  But he went "My situation had become something of a cause celebre.  I had been used to a monkish room, night-table, desk and bed.  I found the publicity painful.  My parents had died when I was twelve.  An epileptic uncle raised me.  He was a difficult person for his day.  I'm afraid he left me with a permanent compulsion to withdraw.  He was brilliant and moody, starved for companionship and afraid of people.  We had in common books.  We walked and we talked.  He had theories about everything: how Hannibal had managed his elephants, why Napoleon kept his arm in his jacket, how the Red Sea had parted, why the Greeks had developed mathematics.  He was a great wonderer.  He spoke Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Chinese and Old English.  He left me afflicted with a talent for language and the need to hear an idea in its original cadence; music and timing and rhythm and accent being part of an idea.  One rainy night he died as he feared he would.  A fit seized him while he was on his way home.  He fell down, his head hit a rock, his nose and mouth sank into the puddle.  He had always lived with this fear.  I and a pastor were the only ones at the funeral.  The town thought it was just as well he had met his end.  Except for a milkmaid who watched from across the field.  She brought us some wine to drink when the service was over.

Stephen and Peter knew the rest.  Of course, he had fallen in love with the milkmaid.  Was she the reason for his leaving?  The candlelight shone on his embarrassed face.  He scrambled for a handkerchief under his cassock.  His head flipped back, fetching for a sneeze.  "The rainy season," he said breathlessly.  "You must be careful.  The whole countryside seems to shift about." He finally got out the sneeze.  "We thought of fleeing.  I wanted to defend myself, free speech, freedom of translation, Greek, Hebrew, scholarship, humanism, intelligence, reason, history, wiisdom." He was rendered helpless by a twitch in his nose.  He said through a mucous-muffled voice, "I asked for a trial.  Some small translations I had made were burned.  My position at the university was attacked.  Parents demanded my removal.  One night my room was broken into, and so on.  Well, trials take time.  Mine was postponed from one month to the next.  An election interferred, a demonstration, and so on.  Nature, as you know, postpones nothing." That's fate.  Some things come on time, while others don't.  He blew his nose very hard.  He didn't concede loss of responsibility.  He said he knew he had had a choice between her and them, even as western civilization and the birth of her baby raced to the finish line.  "I have since discovered the Indians have no word for such categories and I do not miss them.  In those days women in her position took their lives.  Here we defend ourselves against marauding tribes, poisonous snakes and animals.  The Indians do not know what an evil idea is.  You cannot explain it to them.  If you say it is like an evil spirit, they think it is an enemy who makes kenaima.  I have learned from them to simplify my language." He succeeded in clearing his nose to his satisfaction and folded up his handkercheif into a neat square and put it away.  "So I am here." He looked at Stephen.  "But why are you here?  From Brooklyn, you said?" Stephen nodded, but he thought: no one there holds a tray of pineapple
like your grand-daughter, He had an instant fantasy: a walk down Fifth Avenue with her, her queyu flapping against her brown thighs.  Would she demand clothes?  He would dissuade her.  Would the police demand clothes?  They would cheer.  What would his mother say?  The incontrovertible Gentile.  She beamed white teeth at him.  He looked at the fish on his plate.  Its scales twinkled at him.  Barney, the dog, got up and shook a cramped leg.  His ears, limp as they were, went rigid.  "He hears something," Father Reuchlin said.  They listened too.  The rain thundered on the thatched roof.  "Amazing how it stays dr-y," Peter said.  "Really quite serviceable," Father Reuchlin said.  Peter said they would stay over only one more night.  Father Reuchlin thought that was wise.  They should move quickly before the rain dissolved all trailmarks.  "Actually," he said, "you have no choice but to take converted Indians or not go."

"Just as well," Peter assured him, "since we hope to arrive by Easter time.". They stood up to leave.&