9. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 254-292

19-20

_____

Henderson dutifully follows Dahfu in his efforts to become lionlike: "Daily, I would come up from the den all shaken by my roaring, my throat grated, my head in fever and my eyes like wet soot, weak in the legs, and especially delicate and trembling in the knees." The king assures him he's making progress: "'Your roaring still is choked, Of course it is natural, as you have such a lot to purge,' he would say." But he also becomes aware "that everybody knew where I had spent the morning and feared me for it."

He knows Romilayu disapproves, and tries to persuade him that it's all for the good, but he senses the guide's skepticism: "And it's the destiny of my generation of Americans to go out in the world and try to find the wisdom of life. It just is. Why the hell do you think I'm out here, anyway?" Romilayu replies, "I don' know, sah." He's a Methodist, he says, but promises not to bother Henderson by trying to convert him. Finally Henderson decides to send Romilayu to mail a letter to Lily, and gives him the papers for the jeep he had promised him at the start of their journey. But Romilayu is still bothered because he knows Henderson is in trouble.

In the letter he writes to Lily, Henderson tells her about his travels, and that he has "matured twenty years in twenty days." He also writes about Dahfu: "This king here is one of the most intelligent people in the world and I have great faith in him, and he tells me I should move from the states that I myself make into the states which are of themselves. Like if I stopped making such a noise all the time I might hear something nice. I might hear a bird." But to himself he thinks: " I could never take after the birds. I would crash all the branches. I would have scared the pterodactyl from the skies." He also tells her he is giving up the violin, and asks her to enroll him in whatever medical school will take him and to sell off the rest of the pigs.

I believe that I tried to explain to Lily what Dahfu's ideas were, but Romilayu lost the last few pages of the letter, and I suppose that it's just as well that he did, for when I wrote them I had had quite a bit to drink. In one I think I said, or maybe I merely thought it, "I had a voice that said, I want! I want? I? It should have told me she wants, he wants, they want. And moreover, it's love that makes reality reality. The opposite makes the opposite."

Romilayu leaves the next day. Henderson falls into regret: "this is the payoff of a lifetime of action without thought. If I had to shoot at that cat, if I had to blow up frongs, if I had to pick up Mummah without realizing what I was getting myself into, it was not out of line to crouch on all fours and roar and act the lion. I might have been learning about the grun-to-molani instead, under Willatale." But he remains loyal to the king, and when he is told to wait for Dahfu instead of going to the lion's den, he prepares by washing himself: "I had let myself grow filthy and bearded as it was scarcely suitable to get all cleaned up in order to stand on all fours, roaring and tearing the earth."

The king announces that a lion has been spotted that matches the description of Gmilo, and they prepare for the capture. The people of the village come out to cheer them on, but "As far as I could tell they were not enthusiastic for the king; they demanded that he bring home Gmilo, the right lion, and get rid of the sorceress, Atti." And in the king's retinue Henderson notices, "following very closely, a white creature, a man completely dyed or calcimined. Under the coat of chalk I recognized him. It was the Bunam's man, the executioner." Dahfu admits that his presence is not favorable: "White is not the best omen."

The beaters spread out into the bush to drive the lion toward the trap, and their departure leaves "the Bunam, the Bunam's wizard, the king, and myself, the Sungo, plus three attendants with spears standing about thirty yards from the town." Henderson and the king are unarmed, and the king says it must be that way: "What if I were to wound Gmilo." As for Henderson, he says, "You are with me."

They wait in a hut on a platform above the ground, from which hangs a woven cage. The lion would be driven into a cul-de-sac that would be sealed by a gate, and the cage dropped on him. There is also, extending from the platform, a "pole or catwalk, no wider than my wrist, if that wide," on which the king would balance and from which he would drop the net. Henderson tests the pole and finds it stout enough.

From the perch, Henderson notices "a sort of small stone building deep in the ravine." When he asks the king who lives there, "'It is not for the living,' he told me without glancing toward the building. 'A tomb?' I thought. 'Whose tomb?'" But the king says nothing more about it. While they wait, Henderson shows Dahfu the pictures of Lily and his children that he carries in his wallet, and talks about his experiences in the war.

But soon the sounds of the beaters and the fleeing animals are heard, and finally the king points out the disturbance made in the brush by the lion. Henderson stands up excitedly, only to be rebuked by the king: "'Henderson -- do not,' he said. Nevertheless I took a step in his direction, and then he cried out at me; his face was angry. So I squatted down and shut my mouth. My blood was full of fever, as if it flowed open to the glare of the sun."

Then, at the very doors of consciousness, there was a snarl and I looked down from this straw perch -- I was on my knees -- into the big, angry, hair-framed face of the lion. It was all wrinkled, contracted; within those wrinkles was the darkness of murder. The lips were drawn away from the gums, and the breath of the animal came over me, hot as oblivion, raw as blood.

The lion fights, rearing on its hind legs, and suddenly the king says, "Oh, it is wrong." He has realized that the net has left the lion's hindquarters free. "The lion was incompletely caught, and the king was going to try to work the net over the animal's hindquarters." But the combination of the lion's weight and the king's is too much for the fastenings that hold the pulley, and the king falls onto the lion. "The claws tore. Instantly there came blood, before the king could throw himself over." Henderson pulls him away, but it's too late.

"Is it Gmilo?" the king asks. The Bunam comes close enough to the ensnared lion to check the markings on its ears that will identify it, then asks for a musket and shoots the lion. "'It was not Gmilo,' the king said." Then he asks Henderson to "see no harm comes to Atti." Henderson keeps urging the king to return to the palace with him, but Dahfu says no. "I cannot be ... among the wives. I would have to be killed." Then the king reveals that the body in the hut the night Henderson arrived was that of the former Sungo, who was strangled because he could no longer lift Mummah. And Henderson realizes that the reason Turombo had not lifted Mummah was that "he didn't want to become the Sungo, it's too dangerous. It was wished on me. I was the fall guy. I was had." Dahfu also reveals that the Sungo is the successor if the king has no child old enough to succeed him. Henderson reproaches Dahfu: "Was this a thing to do to a friend?" But the king only replies, "It was done to me ..."

The beaters pick up the king and carry him toward the stone building. He dies on the way to it.

This small house built of flat slabs had two wooden doors of the stockade type which opened into two chambers. His body was laid down in one of these. Into the other they put me. I scarcely knew what was happening anyway, and I let them lead me in and bolt the door.

8. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 220-254

17-18

_____

"We talked and talked and talked, and I can't pretend that I completely understood him." That Henderson is taxed by the king's ideas a sign of Dahfu's intellectual superiority, or is it a warning that he's not to be fully trusted? For sometimes the king sounds an awful lot like a New Age guru whose ideas are not fully anchored to this Earth:

He had some kind of conviction about the connection between insides and outsides, especially as applied to human beings.... And what he was engrossed by was a belief in the transformation of human material, that you could work either way, either from the rind to the core or from the core to the rind; the flesh influencing the mind, the mind influencing the flesh, back again to the mind, back once more to the flesh.

So the reader may be pardoned in approving Henderson's question, "Are you really and truly sure it's like that, Your Highness?"

In the end, Dahfu gives Henderson some of the books and journals he had brought with him from medical school. "Dahfu and Horko had loaded it on the donkey when they came over the mountains from the coast. Afterward the beast was butchered and fed to the lioness." But Henderson is not quite up to the task of reading. "Firstly I was afraid to find out that the king might be a crank." And Henderson is "a nervous and emotional reader. I hold a book up to my face and it takes only one good sentence to turn my brain into a volcano."  Reading in one of his father's books, "The forgiveness of sin is perpetual" was like "being hit in the head with a rock.... I didn't want to hear any more than that about sin. Just as it was, it was perfect, and I might have been afraid the guy would spoil it when he went on."

[Let me interrupt here for an observation: Those last two sentences remind me -- in tone, cadence and diction -- of Mark Twain. And it's not the first time I've been reminded of Twain in this novel. "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," as we know, because Hemingway told us so. More on this later.]

Characteristically, Henderson is daunted by his hunger to have it all: "When I started to read something about France, I realized I didn't know anything about Rome, which came first, and then Greece, and then Egypt, going backward all the time to the primitive abyss. As a matter of fact, I didn't know enough to read one single book." But he makes a stab at one of the journals Dahfu had given him because the first paragraph of an article by a man named Scheminsky looks easy. He begins to skim when he encounters the term Obersteiner's allochiria. (Allochiria is a neurological disorder in which a stimulus on one side of the body is felt on the opposite side.)  But he manages to glean that "Most of these articles had to do with the relation between body and brain ... and a few of the descriptions were absolutely dandy. What I kept thinking was, 'I'd better scour, brighten, freshen up the old intelligence, and understand what the man is driving at, for my life may depend on it.'"

That conclusion is reinforced when he is paid a visit by Horko, the Bunam, and the man, clad in black leather, who had pointed the way to the village. "These three made way to let a fourth person enter, an elderly woman who had the look of a widow." This is Dahfu's mother, Yasra. And they have come "to get me to reveal about the lioness and then also to use any influence I might have with the king. He was in trouble, and very seriously, over Atti." They are upset at the king's failure to capture Gmilo, the lion they believe to be Dahfu's father. "They claimed that the lioness was seducing Dahfu, and made him incapable f doing his duty, and it was she who kept Gmilo away."

Finally, "the Bunam signaled to his assistant by snapping his fingers, and the black-leather man drew from his rag cloak an object which I mistook at first for a shriveled eggplant.... This was the head of one of the lion-women -- a sorceress. She had gone out and had trysts with lions. She had poisoned people and bewitched them." She had been captured and strangled. "But she had come back. These people made no bones about it, but said she was the very same lioness that Dahfu had captured. She was Atti."
I could not take my eyes from the shriveled head with its finished, listless look. It spoke to me as that creature had done in Banyules at the aquarium after I had put Lily on the train. I thought, as I had then, in the dim watery stony room, "This is it! The end!"

That night, Henderson startles Romilayu by joining him in prayer:

"Oh, you ... Something," I said, "you Something because of whom there is not Nothing. Help me to do Thy will. Take off my stupid sins. Untrammel me. Heavenly Father, open up my dumb heart and for Christ's sake preserve me from unreal things. Oh, Thou who tookest me from pigs, let me not be killed over lions. And forgive my crimes and nonsense and let me return to Lily and the kids."

The next morning he goes to see Dahfu and asks to talk to him privately. When he takes the king away from the women who are entertaining him, "some attacked me with shrill voices ... while several shrieked, 'Sdudu lebah!' Lebah -- I had already picked the word up -- was Wariri for lion. They were warning him about Atti; they were charging him with desertion." Since the king's life depends in part on his ability to service his wives, Henderson is right to be concerned.

But when Henderson tells him, "In case you don't know it you are in a hell of a position," Dahfu says he knows. He calls the display of the shrunken head "the well-known fear business. We will withstand it." He insists, "I will capture Gmilo and the trouble will entirely cease. No one will dispute or contest me then. There are scouts daily for Gmilo. As a matter of fact reports have come of him. I can assure you a capture very soon."

Meanwhile, Henderson has realized that the king is taking him to see Atti again. But he has grown so dependent on his friendship with Dahfu that although he expresses his fear, he backs off when the king says, "If it is positively beyond you we may as well exchange goodbye and go separate ways." Henderson realizes that "unless I understood about lions, no deepening of the friendship was possible." The threat of losing the king's friendship is too strong. "The threat was exceedingly painful also to him. Yes, I saw that he suffered almost as hard as I did. Almost. Because who can suffer like me? I am to suffering what Gary is to smoke. One of the world's biggest operations."

Dahfu then explains what he can learn from the lion: "First she is unavoidable. Test it, and you will find she is unavoidable. And this is what you need, as you are an avoider.... She will force the present moment upon you. Second, lions are experiencers. But not in haste. They experience with deliberate luxury. The poet says, 'The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.' Let us embrace lions also in the same view.... She has much to teach you." Henderson is prodded forward by the possibility that he might change.

His terror doesn't fade when he enters the den with Dahfu, but he follows the king's instructions, even to the point of going down on all fours. "I understood that he wanted me to imitate or dramatize the behavior of lions," but he's not certain to what end. "I intend to loosen you up, Sungo," the king tells him, "because you are so contracted." Each of his forefathers, he says, "absorbed lion into himself," and he wants Henderson to do likewise. Atti, meanwhile, stretched out on the platform, "with crossed paws, only occasionally looked at us." The king chides Henderson for his reluctance: "Is this the Henderson who flew half around the world because he had a voice which said I want? And now, because his friend Dahfu extends a remedy to him, falls down?"

Eventually, Henderson gets into it:

And so I was the beast. I gave myself to it, and all my sorrow came out in the roaring. My lungs supplied the air but the note came from my soul. The roaring scalded my throat and hurt the corners of my mouth and presently I filled the den like a bass organ pipe. This was where my heart had sent me, with its clamor.... I had claws, and hair, and some teeth, and I was bursting with hot noise, but when all this had come forth, there was still a remainder. That last thing was my human longing.

The king praises Henderson, and gives him a break by shutting Atti away in her other room. But Henderson begins to come down from the experience. He realizes that he isn't the lion Dahfu wants him to be: "'It's the pigs,' I suddenly realized, 'the pigs! Lions for him, pigs for me. I wish I was dead.'"

But Dahfu is still full of ideas, particularly about the power of the imagination. "And then he began to repeat what a procession of monsters the human imagination had created.... 'Think of what there could be instead by different imaginations. What gay, brilliant types, what merriment types, what beauties and goodness, what sweet cheeks or noble demeanors. Ah, ah, ah, what we could be! Opportunity calls to rise to summits. You should have been such a summit, Mr Henderson-Sungo.'" Henderson had talked to him about "grun-to-molani. What could be grun-to-molani upon a background of cows?" Dahfu says, dismissing the commonplace ambitions of the Arnewi. But Henderson is only reminded of pigs again, and of his impulsive,  mocking decision to raise pigs in his conversation with Nicky Goldstein. He recalls when Frances protested against the pigs in the driveway and he told her not to harm them. "Those animals have become a part of me."

He begins to examine his body and find piggishness in it. "It seemed to me that I couldn't even breathe without grunting." And Dahfu notices "the peculiar noise" he is making. He tells Henderson, "You show the work of a powerful and original although blockaded imagination." For Dahfu the imagination is supreme:

"All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!... What Homo sapiens imagines, he may slowly convert himself to. Oh, Henderson, how glad I am that you are here. I have longed for somebody to discuss with. A companion mind. You are a godsend to me."

7. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 190-220

15-16

_____

Henderson is in a bad way, "filthy, naked, and bruised," and he says to himself, "I lost the bet and am at the guy's mercy." But he follows Romilayu's counsel: "You sleep, sah. T'ink tomorrow." When he wakens, two amazons bring him the clothing of the Sungo: green silk trousers that he slips on over his stained jockey shorts. "In spite of my rest I was not in top condition. I still had fever."

He refuses the offer of the two amazons, Tamba and Bebu, to walk on his back in a therapeutic massage, but eats a little pineapple and drinks a little whisky before Tatu the generaless comes to take him to King Dahfu. The Bunam's wives watch as he passes by. "I guess I must have caused them to smile in those billowing, swelling, green drawers of the Sungo and the pith helmet and my rubber-soled desert boots."

The king begins by anticipating Henderson's question: "You see, the Bunam felt sure you would be strong enough to move our Mummah. I, when I saw what a construction you had, agreed with him. At once." But Henderson asks about the wager: How could he be sure that it would rain? Dahfu says that he wasn't: "That was in a spirit of wager and nothing else.... I knew as little about it as you do." And when Henderson asks if the ceremony always works, Dahfu admits, "Very far from always. Exceedingly seldom."

Dahfu tells him about his education and travels. "From my point of view the science instruction was most especially worth while. I was going for an MD degree, and would have done it except for the death of my father." When Henderson observes that it's hard to reconcile the interest in science and medicine with the king's life among the Wariri, Dahfu replies, "It is interesting, I do admit. But also it is not up to me, Henderson -- Henderson-Sungo -- to make the world consistent."

Henderson observes, "Like all people who have a strong gift of life, he gave off almost an extra shadow -- I swear. It was a smoky something, a charge. I used to notice it sometimes with Lily.... It is something brilliant and yet overcast; it is smoky, bluish, trembling, shining like jewel water." He had felt it with Willatale but more strongly with Dahfu than with anyone."

The king then reminds him of the story about how he became king: his father's death, the maggot that bred in his body, and the lion cub that was captured and presented as a replacement. The cub was set free by the Bunam, and now that it has grown, Dahfu has to "capture it alive and keep it with me." The lion that Henderson has been hearing is "quite another animal. I have not yet captured Gmilo. Accordingly I am not jet fully confirmed in the role of king. You find me at a midpoint. To borrow your manner of speaking, I too must complete Becoming."

Henderson is still trying to bring a coherent image of the king into focus: "you saw yesterday what savagery can be if you never saw it before, throwing passes with his own father's skull. And now with the lions. Lions! And the man almost a graduate physician. The whole thing is crazy." Henderson has not yet recognized in the king what amounts almost to a parody of his own "savagery" -- his own disrespect for his father in turning the estate into a pig farm -- or the irony that while he always talked about becoming a physician, and urged his son to become one, it is the "savage" king who actually attended medical school but left to honor a cultural tradition.

And yet, the king is also alienated from his culture, from the people he leads. Henderson initiates a pact between them: They will always expect the truth from each other. And Dahfu confesses, "I intentionally wished to keep you with me a while hoping that exchanges of importance would be possible. For I do not find it easy to express myself to my own people. Only Horko has been in the world at all and with him I cannot freely exchange, either. They are against me here...."

Henderson observes that "it has been going through my mind for some time that there is a connection between truth and blows," and tells the king that when he was chopping wood last winter a piece of it flew up and broke his nose. "So the first thing I thought was truth!" While the king doesn't entirely agree with the relationship of truth to violence, he observes that "there is a law of human nature in which force is concerned. Man is a creature who cannot stand still under blows. Now take the horse -- he never needs a revenge. Nor the ox. But man is a creature of revenges. If he is punished he will contrive to get rid of the punishment. When he cannot get rid of punishment, his heart is apt to rot from it."

Henderson replies, "You say the soul will die if it can't make somebody suffer what it suffers?" And Dahfu says, "For a while, I am sorry to say, it then feels peace and joy." Henderson recognizes the application to himself and to the gods who were punished in the ceremony, but observes that "there are some guys who can return good for evil." Dahfu agrees: "A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him. He shall keep the blow." But, he adds, human nature will have to be transformed for this to be the rule rather than the exception. "Perhaps I am not the one to make a prediction, Sungo, but I think the noble will have its turn in the world." And he asks Henderson's pardon for using him in the ceremony.

"I saw that he was some kind of genius," Henderson says. "Much more than that. I realized that he was a genius of my own mental type." Whatever that may be. Dahfu follows by expressing his admiration for Henderson:

"I see the world in your constitution. In my medical study this became the greatest of fascinations to me and independently I have made a thorough study of the types, resulting in an entire classification system, as: The agony. The appetite. The obstinate. The immune elephant. The shrewd pig. The fateful hysterical. The death-accepting. The phallic-proud or hollow genital. The fast asleep. The narcissus intoxicated. The mad laughers. The pedantics. The fighting Lazaruses. Oh, Henderson-Sungo, how many shapes and forms. Numberless."

As for Henderson, "everything about you ... cries out, 'Salvation, salvation! What shall I do? What must I do? At once! What will become of me? And so on. That is bad." And then he says he wants to show him "something without which you will never understand thoroughly my special aim nor my point of view."

Accompanied by Tatu, Henderson follows the king down a staircase, with Tatu shutting and bolting the doors behind them as they descend. He loses sight of the king in the darkness as they go deeper under the palace until finally he realizes where they have been going: "A low ripping sound behind the door was self-explanatory. It was the lion's den." Dahfu has gone before to prepare the animal for him. "She rubbed herself against him so that I felt the stress of her weight through the medium of his body. She stood well above our hips in height." Dahfu reassures him that she is going to accept him, and tells him that her name is Atti. Henderson watches as Dahfu leads the lioness to a platform where he sits, "taking her head on his knee, scratching and stroking, while she pretended to box at him." Henderson stays put, not even moving to push back his helmet when it falls over his face. "No, I stood there, half deaf, half blind, with my throat closing and all the sphincters shut."

Finally the king tells Henderson to shut the door through which they entered. (Tatu has long since remained behind.) He urges Henderson to come forward slowly and sit on the platform by him. The lioness sniffs at Henderson, and the king tells him not to be afraid. Henderson replies, "It's not only that I'm scared of her, and I'm scared all right, but it isn't that alone. It's the richness of the mixture. That's what's getting me. The richness of the mixture. And what I can't understand is why, when fear has taken me on and licked me so many times, I am not able to stand it."

Dahfu tells him "to appreciate the beauty of this animal," and that he's not testing Henderson. "If I were not positive of my control I would not lead you into such a situation. That would truly be scandalous." And Henderson watches as Dahfu puts his arm into the lion's mouth and then lies down and wraps his legs around her body and his arms around her neck. "Face to face she carried him up and down while he talked to her.... On her own animal level it was clear beyond any need of interpretation that she loved the guy. Loved him! With animal love. I loved him too. Who could have helped it?"

The king takes Henderson's hand and presses it to the lioness's flank. "Slowly her fur passed under my fingertips and the nails became like five burning tapers. The bones of the hand became incandescent. After this a frightful shock passed right up the arm into the chest." But what Dahfu delights in is Henderson's fear:

"And how you are afraid! Really! In the highest degree. I am really delighted by it. I have never seen such a fear manifestation. It resembled anxious pleasure to me. Do you know, many strong people love this blended fear and satisfaction the most? I think you must be of that type.... And when you cried! I adored when you began to cry."

Then Dahfu says, "Atti and I influence each other. I wish you to become a party to this." Henderson is shocked to realize that Dahfu has something in mind that involves him and the lion. Dahfu promises to explain what.

Then he opens a gate that lets the lion into another part of the den and closes it behind her. "Once again I brought to mind that old prophecy Daniel made to Nebuchadnezzar. They shall drive thee from among men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. The lion odor was still very keen on my fingers. I smelled it repeatedly and there returned to my thoughts the frogs of the Arnewi, the cattle whom they venerated, the tenant's cat I had tried to murder, to say nothing of the pigs I had bred. Sure enough, this prophecy had a peculiar relevance to me, implying perhaps that I was not entirely fit for human companionship."

Dahfu explains that he captured Atti about a year or so ago to the great disapproval of the tribe, and especially the Bunam. There is supposed to be only one lion in the palace, "who is the late king. It is conceived the rest are mischief-makers and evildoers." The lion that is the late king must be captured and not left among the evildoer lions. "I am the object of a double criticism. Firstly I have not yet succeeded in obtaining Gmilo, my father-lion. Secondly it is said that because I keep Atti I am up to no good." He vows to capture Gmilo, and when Henderson wishes him luck the king grasps his arm -- surprising Henderson, because the king never does anything abruptly. The king goes on:

"Men of most powerful appetite have always been the ones to doubt reality the most. Those who could not bear that hopes should turn to misery, and loves to hatreds, and deaths and silences, and so on. The mind has a right to its reasonable doubts, and with every short life it awakens and sees and understands what so many other minds of equally short life span have left behind... That human creatures by pondering should be correct. this is what makes a fellow gasp. Yes, Sungo, this same temporary creature is a master of imagination."

Henderson is slow to grasp what Dahfu is getting at, but the king explains, "I am convinced you are a man of wide and spacious imagination, and that also you need ... You particularly need." And then Henderson tells him about the voice: "The form it actually takes is, I want, I want." And that the voice has never told him what it wants. The king is fascinated: "How much better I an interpret now why you succeeded with Mummah. Solely on the basis of that imprisoned want." Henderson is grateful for the recognition, and recalls an article in Scientific American about desert plants that bloom only once in forty or fifty years, and then only when they get the right among of rainfall. "It has to wash over them for a certain number of days. And then for the first time in fifty or sixty years you see lilies and larkspurs and such. Roses. Wild peaches." And the fact that the magazine was one Lily subscribes to brings her to mind. "To speak of Lily also moved me very greatly."

Then the king says that he wants Henderson's "patient confidence. Plus, at the very outset, I request you to believe that I did not leave the world and return to my Wariri with an aim of withdrawal." The king, like Henderson, has something he wants.  

6. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 166-189

13-14

_____

As the ceremonies proceed, Henderson's skepticism about their rain-making possibilities increases to the point that he bets the king that it won't rain. There's not a cloud in the sky. The king takes him up on it. Henderson has been admiring Dahfu's ring, "a huge garnet set in thick gold and encircled by smaller stones," so the king put that up for his side of the wager. Henderson has nothing of equivalent value, so Dahfu, after warning "You should not assume at all that you have a sure thing," proposes, "let us say that if I win you will remain a guest of mine, a length of time." When Henderson asks how long, Dahfu says, "Let us leave it an open consideration for the moment."

Then in the arena some men appear dressed in black plumes and begin to mock the statues of the gods that are placed there. "The attitude of the tribe seemed to be that it was necessary to come to the gods with their vices on display, as nothing could be concealed from them anyway by ephemeral man." Henderson is a little shocked by the irreverence and blasphemy. When the men have kicked over, toppled and moved the smaller statues, they call on the crowd to help with the larger ones. Some larger and stronger men begin to haul the statues around, and when one of them hoists a statue the way Henderson had carried the corpse the night before, Henderson gasps aloud, attracting Dahfu's attention.

Finally, all the gods have been carried out of the middle of the arena except two: "Hummat the mountain god and Mummah the goddess of clouds." Several men have made attempts to move them with no success. Now a man comes out of the crowd and takes on Hummat. Henderson joins in cheering him on, and the man finally carries the statue twenty feet and sets him among the other gods. But he's exhausted and unable to move Mummah. The king comments, "This man, as you see, is powerful, and a good man, as I believe I overheard you to exclaim. But when he has moved Hummat, he is worn out, and this is annual. Do you see, Hummat has to be moved first, as otherwise he would not permit the clouds passage over the mountains."

As the man, named Turombo, struggles with Mummah, Henderson begins to think, "Ye gods! I was shivering and cold. I simply knew that I could lift up Mummah, and I flowed, I burned to go out there and do it." He thinks of his failure with the Arnewi and begins to be convinced that this was a chance to redeem himself. When Turombo gives up, the crowd mocks him. And Henderson decides to step in: "I understood now why the corpse had been quartered with me. The Bunam was behind it. He sized me up right. He had wanted to see whether I was strong enough to move the idol. And I had met the ordeal."

He tells the king what he wants to do, and Dahfu asks, "Do you not rush through the world too hard, Mr Henderson?" Yes, Henderson says, he does, but he feels some compulsion to serve. "I have a feeling that I could move her." Dahfu replies, "I am obliged to tell you, Mr Henderson, there may be consequences." This doesn't deter Henderson:

I had got caught up in the thing, and it had regard only to the unfinished business of years -- I want, I want, and Lily, and the grun-tu-molani and the little colored kid brought home by my daughter from Danbury and the cat I had tried to destroy and the fate of Miss Lenox and the teeth and the fiddle and the frogs in the cistern and all the rest of it.

Finally, the king gives his assent. Henderson pulls off his shirt, kneels before the statue and sizes her up, and "lifted her from the ground and carried her twenty feet to her new place among the other gods." The crowd goes wild. "The sensations of illness I had experienced since morning were all converted into their opposites. These same unhappy feelings were changed into warmth and personal luxury." He returns to the king, who congratulates him, and "the sky began to fill with clouds.... I was inclined to take it as my due."

Then the Bunam appears, "his arms full of of leaves and wreaths and grasses and pines," joined by the "generaless," as Dahfu called her, the head of the amazons. More of the amazons appear, along with the woman who had tossed the skulls with Dahfu. Two of the women are bearing pikes with skulls on top of them, and the others had "odd-looking fly whisks which were made of strips of leather. But then from the way they grasped these instruments I suspected that they were not meant for flies. These were small whisks."

Dahfu tells him, "The man who moves Mummah occupies, in consequence, a position of rain king of the Wariri. The title of this post is the Sungo. You are now the Sungo, Mr Henderson, and that is why they are here." But Henderson is suspicious and fearful, imagining his fate reported back home:

"That big Henderson finally got his. What, didn't you hear? He went to Africa and disappeared in the interior. He probably bullied some natives and they stabbed him. Good riddance to bad rubbish. They say the estate is worth three million bucks. I guess he knew he was a lunatic and despised people for letting him get away with murder. Well, he was rotten to the heart." "Rotten to the heart yourselves, you bastards." "He was full of excess." "Listen, you guys, my great excess was that I wanted to live. Maybe I did treat everything in the world as though it was a medicine -- okay! What's the matter with you guys? Don't you believe in regeneration? You think a fellow is just supposed to go down the drain?"

The king chides Henderson for his suspiciousness. All they want, he tells him, is "your attendance to cleanse ponds and wells. They say you were sent for this purpose.... It is evident you must have been born for something."

And so Henderson is stripped naked by the generaless, and forced to run through the streets with the amazons. "With feet lacerated by the stones, dazed, running with terror in my bowels, a priest of the rain. No, the king, the rain king." The generaless, Tatu, teaches him to yell as they run: "Ya-na-bu-ni-ho-no-mum-mah!" They run beneath the gallows where the vultures are feasting on the hanged men, and when they reach a cattle pond, "They picked me up and gave me a heave that landed me in the superheated sour water." He emerges covered in mud and continues to chant, "crying in my filth and frenzy, 'Ya-na-bu-ni-ho-no-mum-mah!' as before."

Yes, here he is, the mover of Mummah, the champion, the Sungo. Here comes Henderson of the USA -- Captain Henderson, Purple Heart, veteran of North Africa, Sicily, Monte Cassino, etc., a giant shadow, a man of flesh and blood, a restless seeker, pitiful and rude, a stubborn old lush with broken bridgework, threatening death and suicide.... And with all my heart I yelled, "Mercy, have mercy!" And after that I yelled, "No, justice!" And after that I changed my mind and cried, "No, no, truth, truth!" And then, "Thy will be done! Not my will, but Thy will!" 

Henderson labels himself as a Christ figure, a rather unconvincing one. Back in the arena the crowd shrieks. "Above all this I heard the roaring of lions, while the dust was shivering under my feet." He watches as the amazons attack the figures of the gods with whips, and protests against it. In the frenzy he is struck several times too.

Then, after a thunderclap, "after a great, neighing, cold blast of wind, the clouds opened and the rain began to fall." He sees a terrified Romilayu and asks him to bring his clothes. Romilayu leads him to the king, who, unperturbed by the rain, is being carried away in his hammock by four women. The king tells him that he has performed a great service and must have some pleasure after his pain. He also reminds him, "You have lost the wager."

5. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 136-165

12

_____

Henderson gives up on the dead body problem and spends the rest of the night outside."I was aware of a great peculiarity either in myself or in the day, or in both. I must have been getting the fever from which I was to suffer for a while. It was accompanied by a scratchy sensation in my bosom, a little like eagerness or longing."

The village begins to come to life for what seems to be a day of festival. Finally a group of "women of unusual stature, the female soldiers or amazons of the king," approaches, beating drums and accompanying a "heavily built man" underneath a large umbrella. There is another umbrella that turns out to be for Henderson. The man is Horko, the uncle of the king, and he speaks English. Henderson joins the entourage, which heads toward the palace. Romilayu, staggering under the weight of their gear, follows.

As they approach the palace, Henderson sees bodies hanging upside down from a scaffold. "It was no wonder they hadn't made any inquiry about their corpse. What was one corpse to them? They appeared to deal in them wholesale." But when Henderson mentions them to Horko, he gets no response. They arrive at the palace, which "was three stories high with open staircases and galleries, quadrangular and barnlike. At ground level the rooms were doorless, like narrow stalls, open and bare. Here there could be no mistake about it -- I heard the roar of a wild beast underneath. No creature but a lion could possibly make such a noise."

Before meeting the king, Horko has a bridge table brought out and serves food to Henderson. "I ate some sweet potatoes and drank the pombo, a powerful beverage which immediately acted on my legs and knees.... Half hopefully I thought I was going to be sick. I cannot endure such excitement as I then felt." Finally they climb the stairs and reach the other side of the building were some men were hoisting large stones into the branches of a tree. Horko explains that "these stones were connected with clouds for the rain they expected to make in the ceremony soon to come." Henderson notes that the sky is clear. "There were only, so far, these round boulders in the branches, apparently intended to represent rain clouds."

When they reach the king's quarters, Horko leaves and one of the amazons conducts Henderson into the room. "Before I saw Dahfu himself, I was aware of numbers of women -- twenty or thirty, was my first estimate -- and the density of naked women, their volupté (only a French word would do the job here), pressed upon me from all sides. The heat was great and the predominant odor was feminine. The only thing I could compare it to in temperature and closeness was a hatchery."

Dahfu is stretched out on a long sofa on the other side of the room. He has a "well-developed athletic body" and is "six feet or better by my estimate, and sumptuously at rest. Women attended to his every need." Henderson is seated on a stool about five feet away from the king, and between them is a bowl containing two human skulls. Dahfu says, "Do not feel alarm. These are for employment in the ceremony of this afternoon."

Henderson extends greetings from Itelo, and when Dahfu asks if they wrestled and who won, replies, "We came out about even." Dahfu says, "I could not throw him, which gave him very high pleasure." Again feigning modesty, Henderson says, "I'm beginning to feel my age," which Dahfu says is "nonsense. I think you are like a monument. Believe me, I have never seen a person of your particular endowment." He reassures Henderson that they won't have to wrestle.

"You are my first civilized visitor," he tells Henderson, indicating that they prefer to remain secluded. Henderson thinks "there was something about this man that gave me the conviction that we could approach ultimates together." Then Dahfu asks for "a candid answer to the question I am about to put.... Do you envy me?" Henderson stumbles for an answer, then observes that Dahfu's people seem to value him highly and tend to his every need.

Dahfu then reveals that when he begins to show signs of weakness, the women who attend on him will report it to the Bunam, the chief priest, and that the priests will take him out to the bush and strangle him. The priest will then wait until a maggot appears on the king's body, wrap it in silk and show it to the people as the king's soul. And after while, the priest will go back into the bush and return with a lion cub, telling the people that the king's soul has entered into a lion. And finally, a successor will be named and the story will be told that the lion has become the new king.

Henderson brings up the matter of the corpse in his hut, and Dahfu seems to be indignant about it. He assures Henderson that as far as he knows, there's no significance in it, and apologizes for it, but asks no further questions about who the dead man might have been. Henderson notes, "I was so glad to escape the anxiety of the thing that at the time I didn't note this peculiar lack of interest." He accepts Dahfu's invitation to stay in the palace, but when he says, "I keep hearing a lion," Dahfu changes the subject with the old bothersome question: "What brings you here to us, Mr Henderson?" And when Henderson replies, "I am just a traveler," Dahfu follows up with "What kind of traveler are you?"

"Oh ... that depends. I don't know yet. It remains to be seen. You know," I said, "you have to be very rich to take a trip like this." I might have added, as it entered my mind to do, that some found satisfaction in being.... Being. Others were taken up with becoming. Being people have all the breaks. Becoming people are very unlucky, always in a tizzy.... Now Willatale, the queen of the Arnewi, and principal woman of Bittahness, was a Be-er if there ever was one. And at present King Dahfu. And if I had really been capable of the alert conscousness which it required I would have confessed that Becoming was beginning to come out of my ears. Enough! Enough!  Time to have Become. Time to Be! Burst the spirit's sleep. Wake up, America! Stump the experts. Instead I told this savage king, "I seem to be a kind of tourist."

"Or a wanderer," he said. "I already am fond of a diffident way which I see you to exhibit."

Henderson is stymied, and for a moment tries to summon up a sense of superiority: "I was among savages." But it is the king who observes, "I will not conceal you are a specimen of development I cannot claim ever to have seen."  And Henderson begins to "sweat anew with anxiety." He tells Dahfu that he thinks he is running a fever, but Dahfu observes that he is sweating. He also confides about the broken bridge, that he has "a pretty bad case of hemorrhoids" and is "subject to fainting fits." But it isn't epilepsy, he says, when the king asks if it's "petit mal or grand mal." To himself he reflects that his fainting seems to be "perversity of character ... my heart so often repeated I want, that I felt entitled to a little reprieve, and I found it very restful to pass out once in a while."

The king's scrutiny has made him so nervous that he tries to escape: "I know you are planning to make rain today and probably I will only be in the way. So thanks for the hospitality of the palace, and I wish you all kinds of luck with the ceremony, but I think after lunch my man and I had better blow." The king is having none of it and insists that he stay for the ceremonies, which are about to begin. And so he is forced to accompany the entourage as the king is carried in a hammock to the event.

Along the way, the king mentions that the Arnewi "have a difficulty of water," and Henderson has a panicky moment when he thinks word has reached the king of his disaster with the cistern, but he says only that they seem to have been unlucky in that matter. Dahfu observes, "A legend exists that we were once the same and one, a single tribe, but separated over the luck question. The word for them in our language is nibai. This may be translated 'unlucky.'" The Wariri "'have luck,' he said. 'Incontrovertibly, it is a fact about the luck. You wouldn't dream how consistent it is.'"

As for the Arnewi, "They have made the impression on you which so commonly they make.... Generous. Meek. Good.... Good impresses you, eh, Mr Henderson?" Henderson assents, and, speaking "with a weird softness or longing," Dahfu goes on:

"They say ... that bad can easily be spectacular, has dash or bravado and impresses the mind quicker than good. Oh, that is a mistake in my opinion. Perhaps of common good it is true. Many, many nice people. Oh yes. Their will tells them to perform good, and they do. How ordinary! Mere arithmetic.... M whole view of life is opposite or contrary, that good cannot be labour or conflict.... A dull will produces a very dull good, of no interest. Where a fellow draws a battle line there he is apt to be found, dead, a testimonial of the great strength of effort, and only effort."

Enthralled by Dahfu's talk, Henderson starts to question him about Willatale, but is interrupted by the noise of the crowd as they pass through and enter "a stadium -- I stretch the term -- a big enclosure fenced with wood." They take their seats under a canopy with other members of Dahfu's family, as Henderson surmises from their similarity in appearance, and Horko, Dahfu's uncle, approaches them. Then four amazons enter with the bridge table on which are the two skulls, threaded through the eye sockets with long dark blue ribbons.

With Horko and the Bunam, Henderson recognizes the man who had given them directions the day before, who is a "senior priest. Diviner of a sort." The women soldiers begin to fire off guns, and Dahfu tells Henderson they're firing a salute for him and urges him to stand. Henderson thinks, "The word has got around how I dealt with that corpse. They know I'm no Milktoast but a person of strength and courage. Plenty of moxie." So he "uttered a roar like the great Assyrian bull.... I no longer wondered that this Dahfu had come back from civilization to be king of his tribe. Hell, who wouldn't be king, even a small king? It was not a privilege to be missed."

But then a priest is brought forth and ritually slashed with cuts across the chest, which Dahfu reassures Henderson is a "semi-usual" part of the ceremony. The blood "is supposed to induce the heavens also to flow, or prime the pumps of the firmament," a phrase that delights Henderson. The king then gets up and takes his place in the arena, facing a tall woman whose "face was covered with a beautiful design of scars that looked like Braille." And they begin to whirl the skulls around by the ribbons, throwing them in the air and catching them as they come down. "Soon I understood that this wan't only a game, but a contest, and naturally I rooted for the king. I didn't know but what the penalty for dropping one of those skulls might have been death."

Neither of them drops a skull, however, and the king returns. Henderson is exhilarated by the contest and full of praise for the king, but unable to express it until he finally says, "King, I had a feeling that if either of you missed, the consequences would not be pretty." But the king assures him, "'the factor of missing is negligible.... Some day the ribbon will be tied through here.'  With two fingers he pointed to his eyes. 'My own skull will get the air.' He made a gesture of soaring, and said, 'Flying.'" A cow is then sacrificed. "She fell to the ground and died. Nobody took much notice."