A Feast Unknown Page 8

  He picked up the animal, and we traveled three miles before he thought it safe to halt. With his own knife, he cut the beast out of its armor, threw the entrails away, and then dug a hole. He managed to get a small, relatively smokeless, fire going. He curled the armor of pangolin into a bowl, filled it with water from a nearby cataract, put the bowl in the hole, and the hot stones into the water. He sliced the meat and threw it into the armor. He kept taking the stones out as they cooled and putting in hot ones.

  The result was a lukewarm but meat-rich soup. There was enough for both of us and enough for another meal left over. He unlocked my hands from behind me, locked them again before me, and had me carry the armor-bowl with its soup contents. I had to give him credit for some ingenuity.

  17

  That evening, after tying me even more tightly, Enver ate most of the soup and then slept for several hours. When he awoke, he looked up at the mists and the distorted moon behind them. He crawled over to me and said, in English, “I am cold. And I am also hot, my lord. Hot with passion.”

  This was the sort of monologue that my biographer might have put in his romances but which more discriminating readers would reject as absurd. They forget that books are often imitated by people.

  I said nothing. Noli put his arms around me, and, shivering, clung to me for a while. Then he startled me by running his tongue up and down my spine from the nape of my neck to the base. He then lowered his hand and put it around in front of me and began playing with my penis. He moved the foreskin back and forth very softly and slowly. The heat of his breath on my back and the heat of his hand on my penis, and the lesser heat of his clothed body on my back felt pleasant.

  I had not been so handled by a male since I was a youth and living with The Folk. Sexual experimentation among The Folk is permitted by the young from the time they feel like doing it until they pick a mate. The males of my age, from the time we could get a hard-on, stuck our penises in each other’s anuses, and sucked on penises long before we could ejaculate. The females were right there with us, playing with each other and with the males. The hairy playmates of my childhood, however, had small penises. When they attained adulthood, and stood six feet and weighed three hundred pounds, they still had penises only about two inches long when erect.

  Before the hair grew on my pubes, my kq, as it is called in their speech, was the marvel of the tribe. When I became a man, it was the desire of the females and the envy of the males and caused me much trouble from both.

  When I became able to ejaculate, I still played sexually with the male and female young, buggered and was buggered, sucked and was sucked. This was not continuous, of course. Most of our play was the sort found among all young primates (man included), racing, wrestling, playing the jungle version of king-of-the-hill, harassing the very old, hunting for rodents, insects, and bird eggs, and playing leopard-and-victim. And so on. But we also spent at least half an hour a day in exciting each other sexually. We did much of this in full view of the elders and with their permission.

  Only when pubescence began did the elders repress the juveniles, sometimes quite savagely.

  The result is that I grew up with almost no sexual inhibitions. I was inhibited about using violence to gain a sexual end, since this was the one thing the elders stopped at once if they saw it. And they punished us severely.

  When I came of sexual age, I had already lost any desire for the males. Not that, under the proper, or perhaps I should say improper, circumstances, I might not have resorted to homosexuality. But I was not a compulsive homosexual, nor did I know any among The Folk. Compulsive, that is, neurotic, homosexuality seems to be the characteristic of civilization, although there is some among the so-called savages. Compulsive behavior of any kind is neurotic. Which is why I was so disturbed about my orgasmic reactions to my killings.

  Noli played skillfully with me. His hand was big, but it was almost as gentle and knowledgeable as my wife’s. He must have had much practice.

  I failed to respond in the slightest.

  If my aberration had been absent, I might have had an erection and an orgasm eventually. Friction alone can do much, and I was not frightened of him. I was angry, but I doubt that this would have inhibited an erection.

  After a while, he quit with an exclamation of disgust. He began to move his hard penis against my anus. He breathed harder, and then his hands clamped my buttocks and he spread them open. The huge glans was, however, denied entrance. I have a very powerful sphincter, which I closed as far as I could. He shoved for a long time. Then he said, “Let me in, or I knock you out.”

  I didn’t want another headache and possible brain damage, so I said, “Very well.”

  He spit on the end of his penis, I supposed, and, slowly but insistently, pushed the head in. The shaft slid through immediately thereafter.

  I hurt, and I also felt as if I had to get rid of a huge turd. He began to slide the penis back and forth, and the pain increased. He grunted with each lunge, and I could feel the thick stiff hairs against the bare skin of my buttocks. His hands were around me again, one on my penis and one cupping my testicles. He began squeezing on these. I clamped my teeth and endured the pain. Stoic as a wild beast, as my biographer would have said, if he had known about this, although he would have shut such a scene out of his mind, because it would have destroyed his image of me. I could be tortured in his romances, but I could not, of course, be buggered.

  Noli was falsely sentimental as most of his kind, that is, homo sapiens. After groaning loudly and jabbing rapidly in his orgasm, he lay quiet awhile except for his heavy breathing. Then he murmured something which sounded endearing, in Albanian, I suppose. He caressed my face with his hands (I resisted the temptation to bite off a finger) and kissed the back of my neck several times. I suppose he would have acted the same way with a prostitute, male or female. He did not care for me any more than he would have for a whore, but he had to carry out the ritual of love.

  In about fifteen minutes, he repeated his assault. I endured it. He kissed me on the neck and then got around before me and kissed my penis and ran his fingers gently between my testicles and the hollows of my thighs. I did not respond except to spit at him. He struck me hard on the face, got up, made sure I was tied securely, and then lay down to snore. No doubt, he dreamed of former loves.

  18

  That day, we put the water-rich green mountains behind us. We were in ranges as dry as a camel fossil. These mountains are subject to a local freak of climate, which diverts the rains to the mountains on the north and south. It is in this area that the valley which once held the gold was located.

  We went down one mountainside and up another and the following day started down the other side. We were hungry because we had eaten nothing but a hare which Noli had killed with a shot that destroyed half of it. He put the carcass on top of a flat stone, tied me up, and then went to look for firewood.

  I reached out a foot and closed my toes around the hare’s ear and pulled the body to me. After shoving it against a bush to hold it, I got on my side and put my face against it and began eating on the part left open by the outgoing bullet.

  When Noli returned, I had devoured everything but the skin, the entrails, and a goodly amount of meat barred from me by the bones. There was enough left for a meal for him, but he was furious. I think he had intended to let me have a leg and to keep the rest for himself. He called me a dirty bloody animal and beat me with the stock of his rifle. He did, however, pull his punches. Even in his rage he kept enough control to remember that I was the guide to wealth and immortality. The blows hurt, especially the ones over the kidneys. But I kept silent and did not move my face muscles.

  “You’re nothing but a wild beast,” he said. “Look at you, with blood all over your mouth. You disgust me!”.

  I did not reply. Cursing, he turned to making a fire and to cooking the remains. After he had eaten, he felt better. We continued our journey.

  The valley where the gold had been
lay between two high, steep, and barren mountains. The topography resembles that described by my biographer as the site of the lost city which contained a secret underground chamber full of gold and jewels. My biographer also described the lovely high priestess of the sun cult of the degraded locals and her unrequited love for me. The basis for this romance was an actual ruined city. Or, I should say, about four acres of tumbled stone under earth and some stones uncovered by wind now and then, part of a wall, and the six foot high stub of a tower. It resembled the ruins of Zimbabwe in South Rhodesia. About four dozen people lived among the ruins in wattle-and-mud huts. With their peppercorn hair, yellow-brown skin, epicanthic folds, and tendency to female steatopygia, they resembled Bushmen. They may have been descended from the builders of the original city. They called the ruins remog, meaning, father-stones. They spoke a language unrelated to any other, as far as I know.

  In 1911, during one of my long wandering journeys across Africa, I found this valley and the ruins. I did some preliminary digging at random, and when I found a gold bracelet and a gold figurine not six inches below the surface, I named this place Ophir, after the Biblical city of treasures. I returned with some equipment a few months later and made some deep cuts. I found no more gold, although I did discover broken pottery, a few beads, some carved ivory, and some impressions of weapons which had left a bronze residue. I also found some primitive gold melting and refining equipment.

  I explored the mountainside behind the ruins and found some caved-in mines. There was still gold ore worth extracting on the ground, and I was sure that richer deposits were in the mountain.

  When I started to dig in the ancient burial ground near the ruins, the natives became angry and drove me off. I returned at night to dig some more. The moon was full, they saw me, and they called the entire adult male population, that is, nine men. These rushed me from downwind and surprised me. I fought with my shovel for a while and then when its edge remained wedged in a skull, I killed a man with a knife thrown into his solar plexus and, with his club, smashed in some skulls. Another club took me from behind, and I awoke with a headache and with my hands and feet tied. The shaman of the tribe was a young female whose face was not too unpleasant. She had enormously fat buttocks and full uptilting breasts. She also had a very large vagina and may have been disappointed in the ability of the males to fill her. She came to me that night and dismissed the guards. I was not very responsive, but she sucked on me and worked me up to a full erection. After this, she sat down on me and bobbed up and down like a balloon on a string until we both had come. This went on all night until just before dawn. I fell asleep for a while and awoke with a piss hard-on. A fly landed on my sensitive glans and precipitated another ejaculation. It was caught in the first spurt and died. I have never forgotten that. It may be the only one in the history of flies to have died in this manner.

  The Ophirians were worshippers of the sun and the moon and a number of other natural bodies and forces. I never did find out just which deity I was intended to be sacrificed to, or, indeed, that I was being sacrificed to anything. It was apparent that they intended to kill me. First, though, the female shaman meant to get out of me all I had to give. She came to me for six nights straight. On the seventh day, she communicated to me, through signs, that I was to die at noon.

  I had been straining against the leather ropes binding me whenever I got the chance. I finally managed to break those binding my wrists. I broke the shaman’s neck and killed the guard carrying my uncle’s knife and killed another guard with that and with the club I killed the rest of the males except for an old man who fled. The entire village followed him into the mountains. I never saw them again. I felt regret about this, because, at that time, I did not kill human beings unless they attacked me. I felt that if they had explained how strongly they felt about the burial ground, I would have abstained from digging.

  Later, I dug in the cemetery again and found a number of gold bracelets, figurines, and symbols the meaning of which I did not know. These have remained in my private collection in my home in the Cumberland.

  The gold that made me one of the wealthiest men in the world—in potentio—came out of the mountain. It came out with much hard labor on my part. I did everything alone, the digging, the melting, the refining, and the final packing out of the mountains. I packed out golden ingots on my back for a hundred miles on the mountain trails, an ingot at a time, each ingot weighing a hundred pounds. And, of course, I handled the initial negotiations with the underground market.

  More than once, I escaped abduction and murder at the hands of those who wanted to track me to the source or torture the information from me. My biographer had planned to use some of these episodes for his romances before he died. However, as he had done in some previous episodes, he would have altered the truth so the villains would be after the immense treasure of gold and jewels in the mighty ruins of the inconceivably ancient city peopled by the degraded descendants of a civilization which disappeared below the ocean 12,000 years ago. The male citizens would have been fantastically ugly and the women would have been fantastically beautiful. I am not ridiculing him. I can see why his readers would prefer his colorful imagination to the reality.

  The gold gave out after I had amassed about twenty million pounds (in English currency), although I believe that there is more deeper in the mountain. I buried the ruins so that no one would suspect that anyone had ever lived in this desolate valley. First, I made extensive diggings, recordings, and photographs, just like a professional archeologist. I had a Master’s in archaeology from Oxford by then.

  (An aside, for the reader’s benefit. I also have an M.D. from Johns Hopkins and a Ph.D. in African Linguistics from the University of Berlin. I have not been entirely idle in my almost eighty years.)

  I had destroyed all evidences of mining, too. I thought that it would be a long time before anybody found anything. Even in these times, when Africa is relatively crowded and men are everywhere, few get to these rugged mountains. Moreover, the area has a reputation among the natives for being demon-haunted.

  So I was surprised when we came over the mountain and looked down into the valley. At least a hundred men were digging on the site of the ruins or on the west side of the valley. Noli swore. He tied me to a tree and studied the valley through his binoculars for a long time. I took the opportunity to strain against the handcuffs, as I did every time his eyes were not on me. The metal was made of very tough material, otherwise I would have parted the links a long time ago. I stopped when Noli turned to untie me, and we went down the mountain, but away from the floor of the valley. When we had reached the top of the next mountain he again studied the intruders, after tying me to another tree.

  “There’s a strip of land which looks level enough for a plane to land on,” he said. “Although from here you can’t be sure. Is there a place where a plane could land?”

  “There is,” I said. “But these men may have come in by foot. I think someone told them where the gold is. Otherwise, they would have captured me first to make me tell. They would not have tried to kill me before they found out what they needed to know.”

  He looked through the glasses again. He said, “How did you know they were Kenyans?”

  “It seemed likely,” I said.

  “They’ve removed their insignia because they’re in Uganda, but they’re Kenyan.”

  He put the binoculars down and turned to me. He was red-faced and scowling. The tips of his moustachios quivered.

  “You said the gold was in the valley beyond this one!”

  I did not answer. He began to beat me again. I kicked out against his shin and knocked him down and then kicked him in the chest with the sole of my foot. He rolled away and fought to regain his wind. I spat at him.

  He looked as if he would like to kill me. He would have, since he knew, or thought he knew, where the gold was. But there was the elixir. He said, “You will pay dearly for this.”

  “I have paid,” I said. “T
hat kick was for the beating. But I still owe you for much more. And I am one who pays his debts.”

  “Is the gold really down there?” he said.

  “They will find none,” I said. “Not unless they dig much deeper than I did. The only way you, or they, can get my gold is to demand a ransom. My fortune is secure in fifty banks throughout the world.”

  He grimaced. He could walk only by limping. I had kicked him harder than I had intended.

  “Caliban is down there,” I said, “and he is showing himself so that the soldiers will chase him. But they won’t catch him. They will catch us instead, unless we travel far and fast, because he will lead them to us.”

  He looked at the northern end of the valley, where we had crossed. The tiny figure should have been unidentifiable to the naked eye. He had, however, shed all his clothes. The sun gleamed on that metal-cap-like hair and the bronze skin. He moved as if he were a cloud driven by the wind.

  A number of Kenyans were running towards him and firing, though he was so far from them they had no chance of hitting him. Others on the slope were after him, too. He angled in towards them. They may have been puzzled about that, but they took advantage of it.

  He came up the mountainside like a great bronze-colored rock baboon. I have never seen a man run up such a steepness and rockiness so swiftly or bound so from projection to projection.

  “He is leading them up to us,” I said.

  Noli had been watching him through the binoculars. He said, “Why is he doing that?”