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hull-tar— each leaning in to hear his reply.
    “This is ridiculous,” he said. “She will die. What happened to Nancy was some kind of fluke. It was not a treatment.”
    “We have tried everything,” the doctor said.
    “What you ask is impossible,” the shell collector repeated. “Worse than impossible. Insane.”
    There was silence. Finally a voice directly before him spoke, a strident, resonant voice, a voice he heard five times a day as it swung out from loudspeakers over the rooftops of Lamu and summoned people to prayer. “The child’s mother,” the mwadhini began, “and I, and my brothers, and my brothers’ wives, and the whole island, we have prayed for this child. We have prayed for many months. It seems sometimes that we have always prayed for her. And then today the doctor tells us of this American who was cured of the same disease by a snail. Such a simple cure. Elegant, would you not say? A snail that accomplishes what laboratory capsules cannot. Allah, we reason, must be involved in something so elegant. So you see. These are signs all around us. We must not ignore them.”
    The shell collector refused again. “She must be small, if she is only eight. Her body will not withstand the venom of a cone. Nancy could have died—she should have died. Your daughter will be killed.”
    The mwadhini stepped closer, took the shell collector’s face in his hands. “Are these,” he intoned, “not strange and amazing coincidences? That this American was cured of her afflictions andthat my child has similar afflictions? That you are here and I am here, that animals right now crawling in the sand outside your door harbor the cure?”
    The shell collector paused. Finally he said, “Imagine a snake, a terribly venomous sea snake. The kind of venom that swells a body to bruising. It stops the heart. It causes screaming pain. You’re asking this snake to bite your daughter.”
    “We’re sorry to hear this,” said a voice behind the mwadhini. “We’re very sorry to hear this.” The shell collector’s face was still in the mwadhini’s hands. After long moments of silence, he was pushed aside. He heard men, uncles probably, out at the washing sink, splashing around.
    “You won’t find a cone out there,” he yelled. Tears rose to the corners of his dead sockets. How strange it felt to have his home overrun by unseen men.
    The mwadhini’s voice continued: “My daughter is my only child. Without her my family will go empty. It will no longer be a family.”
    His voice bore an astonishing faith, in the slow and beautiful way it trilled sentences, in the way it braided each syllable. The mwadhini was convinced, the shell collector realized, that a snail bite would heal his daughter.
    The voice raveled on: “You hear my brothers in your backyard, clattering among your shells. They are desperate men. Their niece is dying. If they must, they will wade out onto the coral, as they have seen you do, and they will heave boulders and tear up corals and stab the sand with shovels until they find what they are looking for. Of course they too, when they find it, may be bitten. They may swell up and die. They will—how did you say it? —have screaming pain. They do not know how to capture such animals, how to hold them.”
    His voice, the way he held the shell collector’s face. All this was a kind of hypnosis.
    “You want this to happen?” the mwadhini continued. Hisvoice hummed, sang, became a murmurous soprano. “You want my brothers to be bitten also?”
    “I want only to be left alone.”
    “Yes,” the mwadhini said, “left alone. A stay-at-home, a hermit, a mtawa. Whatever you want. But first, you will find one of these cone shells for my daughter, and you will sting her with it. Then you will be left alone.”
     
    At low tide, accompanied by an entourage of the mwadhini’s brothers, the shell collector waded with Tumaini out onto the reef and began to upturn rocks and probe into the sand beneath to