border? Who would sell it fuel?" Mtesa conceded, "Funny thing," but with no more concern than if he had seen an unusual bird at a water hole, or a bi-zarrely maimed beggar on the street. The ignorant see miracles every day. It occurred to Ellellou that Mtesa was bluffing, humoring him; he had seen nothing. He commanded, "Tell me what you saw. What funny thing?" "Big truck toting squashed voitures." "What kind of voitures?" "Not Benzis." Ellellou slumped back defeated. He would have preferred that the truck have been his private hallucination. Better his own insanity, he reasoned, than that of the nation. The vision, if actual, placed upon him an unwelcome necessity to act, to cope with a strange invasion, for he knew that the affronting apparition was a commonplace sight on the clangorous, poisonous, dangerous highways of the United States. Kutunda, who had been asleep, and to whom the thing had been invisible, felt to occupy the only undistorted quadrant of the car, and in his weariness Ellellou toppled into the comfortable vacancy of her fragrance of musk and dung, of smoke and hunger, of Kush. Evidently upon his return to Istiqlal Ellellou established Kutunda in an apartment above a basket-weaving shop whose real dealings were in hashish and khat; her presence here, and his suspicion of a conspiracy whose headquarters were in the capital, reinforced his habit of venturing disguised into the city, especially the disreputable section known as Hur-riyah, which rises, like heaps of mud boxes stacked for removal, against the eastern wall of the vast Palais d'Administration des Noires, with its sixteen pilasters representing the sixteen most common verbs that require etre instead of avoir as auxiliary in all compound tenses. Its facade is topped with eight marble statues of an unreal whiteness, uneroded in this climate, that symbolize the eight bourgeois virtues- Assiduite, Economie, Mediocrite, Conjugalite, Temperance, Optimisme, Dyna8nisme, and Mo d emit every. Its blank side glows in the dawn like the flank of an eternal, voluptuous promise heaving itself free of the earth, above the little roofs of thatch, cracked tile, and rock-weighted tin. So it loomed in Ellellou's eyes, as he blinked from the pallet he shared with Kutunda. In sleep her stringy, lustreless hair-so different from the soft and wiry curls that adorned, cut close or braided in ornate patterns, the skulls of Ellellou's Salu sisters, and three of his four wives-had drifted stickily across her face; her hair held red streaks amid the black, and the kohl with which she had beautified her eyes had smudged. The dusty brown of her cheeks showed in the slant light linear shadows of a single diagonal tribal cicatrice, one on each cheekbone. The noises about them in the slum, the banging of calabashes and scraping of warm ashes and the unwrapping of hashish packets concealed in fasces of rattan below and the buzzing of children's recitation from the Koran school across the steep ochre alley, made it hard to return to sleep, his salat as-subh performed, and Ellellou lay there beside her hard-breathing unconsciousness like a thirsty man lying on the lip of a well, conscious that the nation was dying, that the beginnings of its day were the leavings of the night, that the dry sounds he heard, of rattling, scraping, unwrapping, reciting, were hopeless sounds, scavenging sounds, of chickens too thin to slaughter pecking at stones that would never be seeds. Allah Himself was dried-up and old, and had wandered away. When Kutunda awoke, he asked her, "Would it help, to kill the king?" She performed her duties in a pot and went about the room naked, carelessly mingling her limbs with the swords and sentinels of sun the horizontally slatted windows admitted in impalpable ranks. Shafts of radiant dust swirled like barber poles. The room was irregular in shape, with rafters of twisted tamarisk. The walls of hardened clay mirrored her skin, flickeringly, as, with the quickness of
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