The Expedition to the Baobab Tree Read Free Page A

was changing nothing in the nothingness.But it made me feel good to handle the things and to wonder and to give my imagination rein, supplemented by memories of a different kind of earlier time.
    For it was endowed with nothing but memories that I landed here, a famished, tattered being, struggling through plains and valleys, fevered with privation, stumbling on towards a steadily receding horizon, always day stages away, always the same, to be swallowed in by a tree, merciful harborage, merciful cool shelter that reminds one roughly of a building with walls and spout-shaped rising ceiling and earth for a floor, a giant hut crowned with branches and leaves.
    Curse the will-o’-the-wisp that led me here, that traveler through my life and the lives of others on whose lips I hung and whom I slavishly obeyed, blind with obsession, disordered, out of my senses. Curse him who made a spectacle of our sacrifice and wanted to give the attractiveness of understanding to hardship, the attractive useless self-knowledge that killed him, oh the talk, the talk, the omniscience, the all-investigating consciousness that could explain nothing, least of all the betrayal of comrade and following. Oh, the powerlessness of reasonableness!
    Stranger in msasa-red clothes, from the beginning his wit charmed me. He knew the quips that light up an all too gloomy conversation. He knew more points of the compass than the disputatious poets and other such celebrities who congregated in the home of my owner, the rich widowed merchant, to eat my well-prepared meals and to pay for them and for the intercourse with his pretty slave girls with sophisticated conversation, even if this was limited to looking anddesiring, or at most to some daredevil trying to fondle them when he thought his host was looking the other way. This one, on the other hand, in his msasa-red, in his water-green, in his flame-yellow, this one with his gold-speckled necklaces and slim gold bracelets was in no small measure well-read and self-confidently informed about affairs. Without being asked he delivered a rejoinder, briefly summed up long-windedness, and time and again carried the arguments to ridiculous ends. Which made him little loved among our great spirits, who without success egged him on and tried to catch him in sacrilege or sedition. Let the gods stare over our heads. They know what they see. He asserted. Let the ancestors alone. Their intercession is not needed when you live unimpeachably.
    Isn’t that so? he asked. Isn’t that so?
    As fresh and new as lightning he put it to me.
    So too the intercession of the prophets and the intercession of the family members of the prophets and the intercession of the gods combined and the intercession of god-fearing people, as well as the moral lessons to be learned from the experiences of people who elevate their tribal history to a religion – all this is interesting, and long may it be so. And invoking a deity morning and evening is beautiful music, is a resonant component of the sounds with which a man attests that he not only thinks of food and propagation but considers himself immortal as well and therefore wants to take appropriate measures to ensure himself a pleasant afterlife. Let them. Let them by all means.
    And let the merchants carry on. They are providing all this prosperity – and with an eloquent gesture he handed a porcelain dishof shrimps stewed with rice in sesame oil and coconut milk to the peevish poet on his right, while smiling in my direction. I thought he winked at me.
    My owner’s sardonic gaze rested on me. He beckoned me closer and his copper bracelets fell from his wrist to his elbow, so thin had his arm become. I picked up the palm fan to fan him. His upper lip was damp with droplets of sweat. Tonight he would again shiver with fever. He was already a sick man, probably dying, when I moved in with him and dared to become his youngest favorite. With long regular movements I tried to stir the heavy air