The Poison Oracle

Two

1

IN A SEALED and seasonless environment, such as the palace, it was difficult to judge the passage of time. Morris used the wrecked aeroplane as an erratic calendar, judging the weeks since its landing by the amount of it that remained unstolen. Despite the three turbaned guards who sat gambling in its shade the whole machine was gradually disappearing. The baffled engineers who had come to study the problem of flying it back to civilisation would soon have no problem left—the aeroplane would simply have dissolved like an object acted upon by two powerful acids, the thieving aboriginals of the marshes and the thieving Arabs of the sands. Morris saw that another large chunk had been sawn from the tail fin: that made it about five weeks since that nightmare day. (If it has been possible for him to peer through the surface of time, instead of seeing only the reflected past he would have been able to watch a different process of disintegration, and used it to measure the two weeks and two days that remained before the murders.)

Meanwhile the haze above the marshes had steadily thickened, as it was bound to do when the floods were at their height. Something was happening at the marsh edge, where the first reeds rose—a small body of men, mostly slaves, stood there. Four of the slaves carried a blue canopy, fringed with gold. Another carried a long pole with a wicker box at the top. Morris fetched his binoculars and saw that a little Arab was sitting on a carry-chair beneath the canopy; he was dressed all in white, and his grey beard flowed to his waist; it could only be bin Zair.

As Morris came to this conclusion the group stirred and bin Zair rose from his chair. Morris lowered his binoculars and saw that a long canoe was emerging from a channel between the reeds, paddled by a dozen naked marshmen, all as black as the blackest negro. Like most marshmen they were small and scrawny, and so was the man who stood near the bows holding a pole with a box at the top, similar to the one on the shore. But the man who sat in the stern, clothed all in white, looked really big, as big as the Sultan or Dyal, though his face was as black as any of the others’. He hadn’t been there last year.

Last year! Time suddenly became solid and exact.

This day last year Morris had stood at the window with Kwan beside him, and the gaunt old marshman had explained the meaning of the ceremony. It was a preparation for the flood-going feast, at which the compact between the first Arab conqueror of Q’Kut and the last free ruler of the marshmen was celebrated and re-stated. According to Kwan the boxes on the ends of the poles contained the mummified right hands of the two heroes.

Morris turned away from the window. Three days after the flood-going feast last year Kwan had been dead, and Morris still missed him.

With a shrug he went to his little work-bench, unlocked a Dinah-proof drawer and took out a sheet of blue plastic. Marking out a precise row of blue crosses was soothing work, and as soon as his little jig-saw began to whine Dinah woke and filled his mind completely. She was always thrilled with excitement when Morris started to cut new symbols, and then unmanageable with disappointment if they merely turned out to be replacements for ones which she had lost or broken, or simply hidden (which happened frequently with the red circles.) She watched the cutting out with panting absorption until he gave her the first complete cross, untrimmed and unpolished, to play with. He stopped work and watched her carry it over to her toy-store. Her own collection of counters was kept in a leather bag; she shook them out on to the floor and, as usual, sorted eagerly through them just in case (Morris believed) one of the symbols meaning fruit had appeared among them. Then she set out a well-known practice sentence:

white square: Dinah

green circle with hole: go

yellow/white square: bed

She barely sniffed at this before flinging herself to the curtain-rail over the door, from there to the top of the bookshelf and from there with a crash and rattle into her nest, where she shook herself a couple of times and chattered while she studied the blue cross she still held in her left hand. Then she lowered herself gently to the floor and loped back to the symbols.

She tried the cross both at the beginning and end of her sentence, removed it, replaced it first with a blue triangle which turned the sentence into one half of a conditional clause, then with the blue square which meant Morris. Morris made a few notes and returned to his crosses. He had cut them all out and was adjusting his polishing wheel when a eunuch’s flute tootled tunelessly beyond the door-curtain.

“Come in”, he called in Arabic, then realised that the flautist couldn’t hear him so got up and pulled the curtain aside.

A black slave, grinning like an idiot, entered. Dinah leaped to her nest and crouched there, peering over the edge like a soldier in a fox-hole. The slave took the curtain from Morris, allowing him to back into the centre of the room to receive his visitor—Hadiq’s mother, presumably, come for a PTA meeting—with proper formality. But, concealing though the robes were, the figure that came through the door could not possibly have been that of the Sultan’s fat, worried first wife—and the pale blue eyes that showed through the eye-slits were unique in Q’Kut. Morris’s mouth fell open and began to twitch, just as it had done when he had last seen her.

“I hope you’re not busy,” she said, glancing at the cluttered desk and work-bench, and Dinah’s spilt toy-store, and the gnawed and tattered furniture.

“No, no,” he said. “Come in. Sit down. The chairs are cleaner than they look.”

“This bloke’s got to stay too, you know?” she said. “It’s that kind of scene.”

“I’m used to it,” said Morris. He unlocked another drawer and tossed the slave two of the sticky black cheroots he had originally bought for Kwan. The slave grinned, propped his scimitar in the corner and settled down to chew them like liquorice sticks. Morris brought him a bowl to spit into.

“How will he react if I take this lot off,” said the girl, feeling for the brooch of her robe.

“What are you wearing underneath?” asked Morris nervously.

“Just clothes.”

“I should think that’ll be OK. He’s not a Moslem. That flute code is quite elaborate, but I doubt if it covers points like this. He could slice your head off, of course, but I don’t know whether he’s empowered to do that without consulting higher authority.”

“I’ll risk it.”

She plucked the black, mask-like veil over her head, smoothed her hair and began to unfasten the swathing folds of the robe. As she did so she glanced sideways at Morris with a curious teasing look, provocative but not exactly sexually provocative. He half expected her to emerge wearing something to startle or embarrass him—a diving suit, or a belly-dancer’s outfit with the naked skin tattooed with revolutionary slogans; but what she had on was the traditional baggy trousers, in pink silk, and a frothy white blouse fastened up to her throat with long crisscrossing laces, like a skater’s boot but following a slightly shallower curve. She still looked as fit as a gymnast, though her face had paled during her five weeks out of the sun—paled till the pink-and-white beneath the fading tan made it even less likely that she was any kind of Arab. Morris decided that she was as English as himself.

She adjusted the glossy swathes of black hair, slightly ruffled by the removal of her veil. It was a tactful little gesture, deliberately inviting Morris to inspect her without actually staring. But for her eyes he mightn’t have recognised her as the same girl who had stood declaiming about women’s rights from the wing of the wrecked aeroplane. She hadn’t exactly changed, but had, so to speak, adjusted. Her lips seemed fuller; her cheekbones showed in the softened planes of flesh; even her slightly hooked nose had somehow become less accipitrine than columbaceous; and the pride with which she held herself was the confidence of good breeding rather than any Amazonian arrogance. Later Morris was to discover how fast she could re-adapt her features to any role she chose, but for the moment he was only conscious of being asked to look at an outstandingly pretty woman and feeling awkward about it.

“OK?” she said to the slave, but he didn’t look up.

“I can never remember which ones are deaf and dumb,” she said to Morris. “In fact it’s difficult to believe they really are—the other women treat them as if they weren’t there—or weren’t human anyway, more like dogs. You don’t mind what you do in front of them, after a bit. Where do they all come from? Africa?”

“No. Most of the ordinary slaves come from Africa, but these are marshmen from Q’Kut. It’s a hereditary job.”

“That can’t be easy. They’re eunuchs,” she said, settling into the less ramshackle armchair. Morris sat down also but couldn’t loll. He found himself crouched forward on the edge of his chair with his elbows on his knees and his fingers tightly laced together.

“No, it’s like that,” he said. “Down in the marshes there’s one clan—the eel clan—who always castrate their second sons and cut out their tongues and pierce their ears. If that son doesn’t survive they do it to the third son, and so on.”

She looked at him with lordly disgust.

“I hate sick jokes,” she said.

“I’m afraid it’s true. In fact it’s an essential part of the economy of the marshes, and population control.”

“How horrible.”

“Not much more than . . . oh, forget it.”

Morris had no wish to start an argument about the ethics of terrorism. He hated that amount of involvement, and usually lost, too. She smiled at him with sweet complicity. There had been a very severe-seeming administrative officer at Bristol; she too had sometimes smiled at Morris like that, because he’d had digs in the same street as her and had seen how she dressed in the evenings, to go out with how many varied men, in what cars. Just so this girl was smiling now to establish a convention whereby that other girl—the one with the gun at her hip and the dead bodies of innocent men behind her—had nothing to do with this visit. This visit was quite different, the daughter of the big house paying a social call on, oh, the rather dull local doctor, being uncondescendingly charming, not yet mentioning whatever business it might be that the charm was expected to pay for.

“Do tell me about your zoo,” she said.

“Well, I’m not really a zoologist. My field is psycholinguistics . . .”

“Oh.”

(She meant “Oh?”)

“It’s rather a vague subject—it’s the study of the effect of language on the mind, and one way you can tackle it is by researching into the linguistic abilities of non-human creatures. I happened to start working with a particularly intelligent female chimpanzee at Bristol, but about eighteen months ago when the Sultan was in London he asked me to come up and have dinner—we used to live on the same staircase at Oxford and got on pretty well—and I told him what I was doing. He offered me a fantastic salary to come out here with my chimp and look after the zoo as a sideline.”

“What’s in it for him?”

“God knows. When you’re that rich you don’t have motives any longer—or rather any motive is as good as any other motive, since you can satisfy them all. I think he likes having me about. And he’s a bit obsessed with Oxford—he never sat his finals, you see. And if Dinah really comes up to scratch we actually might one day hit the academic headlines.”

“That’s a slave name.”

“I didn’t choose it. And I don’t think of it like that.”

“You think you don’t think of it like that. What are you actually doing with her?”

Morris clicked. Instantly Dinah exploded from her nest to the top of the bookshelf, then sprang, whirling like a falling sycamore seed, down to his lap, where she sat pouting at the stranger.

“This is Dinah,” he said. “My name’s Wesley Morris, but everyone calls me Morris. I’m afraid I don’t know yours.”

“I’ve got a lot of names. You’d better call me Galayah.”

He repeated the name, but couldn’t help correcting her pronunciation.

“Bloody hell!” she said, flushing. “All right, call me Anne. I used to answer to that.”

Dinah stopped pouting and shifted round until she could pick at Morris’s shirt-buttons. She had never discovered a satisfactory way of grooming him, except in the sparse and unrewarding strip of hair that circled his bald patch. This was only a sign that she would like to be groomed herself, which in turn meant that she wanted reassurance. That makes two of us, he thought, starting to pick systematically along the fur of her forearm.

“Well,” he said, “currently I’m setting up an experiment to investigate Dinah’s ability to cope with the idea of time.”

“Animals don’t have one.”

“So people say. We’ll see. If you’d asked me five years ago, I’d have said that animals couldn’t understand or construct conditional clauses, but Premack in California taught a chimpanzee called Sarah how to, and Dinah and I have duplicated his work. So why not time?”

“I see. What else?”

“Well, the Sultan is very anxious to make a breakthrough with an experiment for which he can claim some credit, and his idea is that Dinah should have a baby, and then we can see how much she teaches it of what she’s learnt from me.”

“Will she even look at a male chimp? Doesn’t she think she’s human, living all the time with you?”

“We don’t know, yet. She spent her first three years at Bristol with other chimps, including her mother, only coming out for tests and lessons. Since then she’s lived with me, but I’ve never treated her as a human—I mean dressed her in clothes or let her eat with a knife and fork. She doesn’t sleep in a cot, but as near as I can arrange to a jungle nest. She’s got her own room—that’s essential, so that I can shut her up if I have to do something without her—but it isn’t at all like a human room. She even wears a leash sometimes, though she hates it. Nowadays she spends a bit of her time with a family group of near-wild chimps we’ve imported, and my impression is that she recognises them as being the same species as herself. For instance, one of the females was in season a few weeks ago, which meant that her sex organs swelled to a large pink mound on her rump. Dinah saw it, and spent a lot of time inspecting herself for the same symptoms.”

Anne laughed and stretched. Morris found himself relaxing slightly, but when he started to lean back in his chair Dinah grabbed his hand and re-applied it to the bit of her shoulder he had been working on.

“So that’s why you’re in Q’Kut,” she said. “For bread.”

“Not entirely,” said Morris. “I mean, I don’t need all that money. I do like having an unlimited budget for my research, of course. On the other hand I miss the kind of colleagues I could talk things over with. I didn’t realise it till I got here, but the real attraction of Q’Kut is the marshmen.”

“And the marshwomen?”

“No, as a matter of fact, not. Oh, I see, you mean sexually. Not that either.”

“You’ll have to explain.”

“Well, there are about a dozen languages left in the world which are not dialects of other languages and are spoken exclusively by a coherent group of people. By ‘exclusively’ I mean they are monoglots. They don’t speak any other language. There’s a few in New Guinea, a few in Brazil, and a remarkable tribe in the Andaman Islands called the Jarawa. There may be something still in Central Asia, but I doubt it. But the Q’Kuti marshmen are easily the largest and most uncontaminated of such groups, apart perhaps from the Jarawa. From a psycholinguist’s point of view, Q’Kut is the most exciting place in the world.”

“It doesn’t look it.”

“No, but the marsh language . . .”

“Can you speak it? How the hell many languages can you speak? You hissed away in Japanese, didn’t you, that day I came? Can you speak Chinese? Have you read Chairman Mao in the original?”

“I’ve only read his thoughts,” said Morris, rather bowled over by this sudden spate of eager questions, and afraid that it might signal a metamorphosis to some other role, terrorist or vamp or ardent student. He felt better able to cope with her as she was.

“That’s great,” she breathed.

“I don’t know. I mean, you can understand a language without understanding what somebody is saying. That’s one of the things psycholinguistics is about.”

“Please go on about that,” she said, politely laying the ghost of Chairman Mao.

“Oh, well, the marshmen have a very interesting language. It contains a number of unique elements, but it lacks a number of other things which we would regard as normal, if not essential. For instance, there are no words and no grammatical structures with which to formulate notions of cause and effect. It can be done, but you have to go a long way round, using very clumsy expressions to achieve it. There are almost no general nouns, either. You see, the marshes are a closed world, in which almost everything is known, and has its own name. They have a few general nouns for things that seem to them mysterious, such as foreigners and particularly witchcraft. But you can’t say ‘plant’, for instance. You can’t even say ‘reed’. You have to name the particular type of reed.”

“That must make life difficult.”

“They get along. Then there’s another aspect of the linguistic-cultural nexus that particularly interests me. You speak the language in sentences, but the sentences are made up not of words but of word-accretions . . .”

“Like those long words in German?”

“A bit like that. But all the word-accretions are constructed round roots of relationship . . .”

“Cousins and things?”

“Not that kind of relationship—or not only. We tend to build up our sentences round verbs. That’s to say our central notions are notions of action. They accrete their words round particular roots which describe the relationship between the various parts of the accretion. Their central notion seems to be a notion of everything’s position in a very complicated network of relationships.”

“Isn’t cause and effect a relationship?”

“Yes, of course it is, but I didn’t say that they had ways of describing all possible relationships—only the ones that seem to matter to them. For instance they can use a single syllable to express a particular personal obligation which it would take us several sentences to attempt to describe. But the thing about cause and effect is that it’s a relationship of such enormous power—I mean for us it is the relationship—it’s what verbs are about—that if you admitted it into a system like the marshmen’s I think it would destroy it—destroy the language, and thus, ultimately, the way of life. I must admit that I find the whole problem of relation-roots absolutely fascinating.”

“That’s funny. It doesn’t sound really your thing.”

“Oh?”

“Well—oh hell, I suppose this is rude—but you don’t look as though you related to anything much, except Dinah.”

With extreme care Morris parted a fresh section of the short, almost bristly hairs and peered at the line of greyish flesh below.

“It is arguable that the looker-on sees most of the game,” he said in as distant and donnish a voice as he could contrive.

“That’s what I mean,” she said. “You sit up here in this glass fortress, miles from anything that’s actually happening, teaching a monkey conditional clauses. That’s all done with, that way of life. You can’t know what it’s like, what it’s about, what it means, until you’ve been part of it. I bet you don’t even go into the marshes if you can help it!”

“I don’t go at all. I was taught the language by an old man called Kwan, who was the previous Sultan’s bodyguard. He used to arrange for the singing boys who sometimes come for state occasions to sing me a lot of their songs, which I taped. But he died just under a year ago, and as far as I know the only other person in the palace who speaks the language is Dyal, the present Sultan’s bodyguard.”

“There are some in the women’s quarters. I think that’s what they must be. I hadn’t realised.”

“There ought to be eight of them, very black, tattooed with different patterns under their eyebrows.”

“I haven’t looked that close. They keep to themselves, and—I oughtn’t to say this, but they really stink.”

“I believe they rub themselves all over with rancid buffalo milk.”

“It smells worse than that. The Arab word for them means . . .”

“I know.”

“I’m glad it’s only buffalo milk. Why eight?”

“Well, there’s a slightly odd arrangement down in the marshes. I’m not an anthropologist, so I don’t know if it’s unique. There are nine clans, eight of which conform to a pattern you do find elsewhere. That’s to say they all have different fishes or animals for their totem, and strict rules about which clan you have to sell your sisters’ daughters to, and so on. Each of those eight clans provides the Sultan with a wife. That’s who they are.”

“What about the ninth?”

“They’re quite different. They provide the Sultan’s bodyguard, but they’re set apart in a lot of other ways. It isn’t just that they’re so much bigger than the others that they look like members of a different race—they’re expected to behave differently, too. They never lie, for instance . . .”

“How do you know?”

He laughed.

“I don’t, of course,” he said. “It’s just that they haven’t got a totem animal, but where you’d normally get a totem-reference in a song, with the ninth clan you get a reference to their truth-telling. I’m so wrapped up in the songs that I hadn’t even considered that that might be a polite fiction. Anyway, they’re also set apart by not marrying. They steal women from the other clans, but as they haven’t paid for them it doesn’t count as marriage. There’s quite a bit of feuding among the other eight clans, so a lot of men get killed and the survivors are polygamous, but they’re all very strict about adultery. Kwan said that if they discover a couple in the act the woman is drowned and the man made to take poison; but if he’s a warrior of the ninth clan they let him off scot free. They don’t even demand the bride-price from him. They just drown the woman.”

“Jesus!”

“I don’t think it’s always as bad as that. They’ve got to be caught in the act, for one thing; and I’ve got a tape of a song about a ninth-clan warrior who took a man’s wife and defended her from the man’s family until she was too old to bear children, and then she drowned herself and he poisoned himself with his own spear.”

“This still goes on?”

“Drowning women? Yes, I should think so.”

You cannot groom a chimpanzee to her satisfaction without careful scrutiny of every millimetre of flesh that is exposed as you move the hairs, so Morris had been talking without looking at the girl. The quality of this new silence made him look up.

The ghost of Mao was back at her elbow. She was sitting straight up in the chair, square-shouldered, pale-cheeked, her pretty mouth a hard slit. Her angry Wedgwood eyes held his.

“You sit here,” she said, snipping the words apart with bright emphatic teeth, “teaching an animal tricks while there are people down there living like . . .”

She was trapped by her own rhetoric, by the use of the earlier noun. She changed gear.

“You’ve never been down there, even,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like. You just wait here, snug as a bug in a rug, learning it all second hand.”

“That’s right,” said Morris. “Perhaps I prefer to work that way, so perhaps it’s lucky I can’t.”

“Can’t?”

“Uh-uh. One, the Sultan wouldn’t permit it. Two, if I tried the marshmen would skewer me through with poisoned spears.”

“Oh.”

“They aren’t isolated by accident. They chose to be isolated. It’s all in the Testament of Na!ar.”

“Go on.”

Morris picked up Dinah’s limp hand and studied it, as though he thought a secret might be hidden in the strangely non-human lines that criss-crossed the human-seeming palm.

“As far as I can make out,” he said, “all this basin was once fertile and was inhabited by the ancestors of the marshmen. There are songs which seem to imply that. Then the sands encroached and they retreated into the marshes. It probably took centuries. Then—quite late—the Arabs came, and they fought. The marshes are pretty well impregnable, so it was stalemate until the last of what I think must have been the ruling clan of the marshmen, a hero called Na!ar, managed to ambush the chief of the Arabs, Nillum ibn Nillum. They killed each other, but seem to have reached some sort of agreement before they died. Or perhaps their followers reached the agreement, and put it back into their mouths to sanctify it, if you see what I mean. Anyway, it’s all in the Testament, which is a perfectly marvellous epic song-cycle embodying the treaty; and the main effect is that the marshmen acknowledged Nillum’s heirs as their overlords, and in return he gave them the right to kill any of his followers who trespassed into the marshes . . .”

“No feud? No blood-money?”

“The Sultan would pay that, but in fact it doesn’t happen. There hasn’t been anything to go into the marshes for, until recently. The Arabs don’t even water their camels here if they can help it, because the water’s so full of diseases. There’s probably every known form of bilharzia down there, and quite a few unknown ones. I’m always astonished that they manage to produce specimens as magnificent as Dyal and Kwan—the singing boys and the musicians are all weedy little runts.”

“The women are tiny too,” said Anne. “But why didn’t you get them to teach you? That might have persuaded you that you ought to do something about those people, instead of just sitting here.”

Morris shrugged, stuck his lower lip out, pulled at it, retracted it. Dinah, who had been peering into his face to see whether he would carry on grooming her, imitated his grimace but made it ludicrous by the extreme size and elasticity of her own lips. The girl laughed and became a social caller again.

“I don’t know,” said Morris seriously. “I didn’t think of it. I suppose I ought to learn the women’s language, which is a bit different, supposing they’d teach it to me. But as for doing anything, I don’t know. I mean, all I know is that it’s not up to me to make moral decisions about other people’s lives. Of course I agree that some of the things that happen down there seem unspeakably vile—there’s a lot worse than I’ve told you—but . . . well, take these blokes . . .”

He nodded towards the eunuch in the corner, now nibbling cheerfully at his second cheroot.

“I’ve never seen any of them looking at all unhappy. Admittedly I can’t even bring myself to think what it was like when they were . . . you know . . . done, but now they seem perfectly content. And Kwan always talked about life in the marshes as if it were a lost paradise. Last year, when the boys were singing the Testament at the flood-going feast I saw his face streaming with tears . . .”

“But all you really know is what one man has told you. One man.”

“I suppose so. But there’s something else. I was telling you about the language—well, in fact the whole verbal culture is as rich and sophisticated as anything I’ve come across—certainly anything that exists among illiterate people. It’s not just the language, it’s the way they use it. I’ve never heard anything to touch the songs, which range all the way from little blessings for the birth of a calf to great chanted epics. Those are perfectly marvellous. You get a basic story, but inside it you get dramatic sections, and love lyrics, and witches’ spells—there’s a lot of witchcraft in the marshes—but it isn’t a hotch-potch, it’s shaped and coherent, quite fit to stand up beside anything I’ve read in Western literature. Anyway, I’m quite certain that as soon as you started tampering with the culture, bringing in outside influences, pop music (I mean, look what’s been happening in Java, for instance) Cairo radio, Bible societies, all that, you’d kill the culture dead in a generation and the language in two. Look, half the world these days seems to tear its hair out and beat its breast if a rather dull species of bird is in danger of extinction. It seems to me much more terrible to risk the death of a language.”

The unaccustomed energy of Morris’s speech seemed to unsettle Dinah. She shrugged herself free of his inattentive hands, slid off the side of the chair and loped over to her toy-store. Knowing her as well as he did Morris could see that this was only one of her typically devious feints. She had decided that Anne was not a hungry predator and was therefore worth investigating, stealthily, from the flank.

“Is that Bruce’s line too?”

“Bruce?”

“Your Sultan. I always call my blokes Bruce. It keeps them in their place. In fact I know an Anatolian village where they now think Bruce is the English for ‘darling’.”

“Oh . . . er . . . I didn’t know.”

“Why should you?”

“Um. Well, if you ask him he just takes the line that he has an hereditary obligation, and that’s that. He takes it seriously, anyway. I mean, there’s much more comfortable places he could live, but he stays here ten months of the year.”

“I know. The women spend most of their time grumbling and discussing what they’re going to buy next time they go to Paris. How rich is he?”

“I don’t know. Enormously, but I don’t know how enormously. He told me he couldn’t afford to buy a Concorde. It wasn’t the capital expenditure, it was the upkeep. But that’s his sort of joke.”

“Did you see the emerald he gave Simoko when she left?”

“Simoko?”

“That’s a funny thing about this place. It’s just one building, but there’s such a lot going on in it that people only a few rooms away haven’t any idea about the dramas happening in your bit. Simoko was one of the air hostesses—the plain one, too sweet—and she and Bruce had a passionate five days; they kept at it just as if the world was ending, and when the plane came to fly the Japs out he gave her an emerald as big as my thumbnail. You could have bought a Phantom with it. It was rather funny—the other women weren’t at all jealous, even the real wives. In fact they loved it—something to gossip about. But if Bruce can afford that sort of thing, why doesn’t he do something for the marshmen? I bet there isn’t a school or a clinic anywhere. What about his hereditary obligation?”

Out of the corner of his eye Morris could see Dinah beginning her flank attack, pushing a couple of building-bricks with deceptive aimlessness across the floor. He kept his gaze on Anne so as not to spoil the fun, and saw that her indignation was again simmering up to a full revolutionary boil-over.

“There are clinics and schools for the Arabs,” he said quickly. “There’s a young Parsee doctor who goes round the tents in a very up-to-date mobile unit, and the Sultan flies in teachers during the winter, when there’s steady grazing up in the hills which means that the kids stay all in one place for a bit. But he won’t let anyone touch the marshmen—I don’t think he’d be very pleased if he knew how far I’d got with the language.”

“It seems bloody selfish to me.”

“Ung. Well, I expect you realise that most of his money comes from the oil company. Apparently their geologists decided that the richest fields were probably under the marshes, but he wouldn’t let them drill there. He still won’t.”

Dinah had left her bricks and was creeping in behind Anne’s left shoulder.

“The Sultan’s manner is very deceptive,” said Morris. “He really is very superficially Westernised. His Oxford accent and his slang and the gadgets in the palace are all a sort of parody of our civilisation—at least half-deliberate—a way of having what he wants of us and rejecting our values at the same time. Anyway, I’m not sure he isn’t right about the marshmen. We’re all rushing along, faster and faster, like water in a river before a cataract, dragging the developing nations along with us. It might be important that there are a few totally undeveloped peoples, so undeveloped that they don’t get involved when we go over the edge. It really isn’t an untenable attitude, but if you adopt it you’ve got to go the whole hog. Those Jarawa I was talking about aren’t the only tribe in the Andamans, but all the others have made vague contact with the rest of the world and either been assimilated or died out—dying out’s more usual in fact. The Indian government won’t let anyone go near the Jarawa, not even anthropologists—that isn’t because they’re enlightened, it’s because the Andamans are an important naval base. But the result is that they’re still totally isolated—different—themselves, and it is just possible that the future of mankind might lie with them. Or with the marshmen here.”

She was about to retort, but was distracted. During the last sentences of Morris’s harangue Dinah’s face had emerged above the tatty chintz of the arm of Anne’s chair, the ludicrous arch of her brows expressing wonder and surprise as her brown clear eyes gazed first at the glossy black hair, then at the soft-skinned cheek, and last at the lacy promontory of the bosom. Suddenly her dark arm snaked forward and two fingers probed at the white curve. Anne barely recoiled. She looked down and laughed kindly.

“Hello, future,” she said.

It is uncomfortable to find oneself liking, however momentarily, somebody of whom one disapproves with all the poor passion at one’s command. Morris distracted himself by watching Dinah, and immediately wished he’d had a camera going—it was a perfect example of her quickness that she should at once recognise in her own nature an element that she shared with this stranger but did not share with him, for she was peering sideways and down at her chest and feeling with her fingers the area round her own nipples. It would have been anthropomorphism to say she was dissatisfied, but to a comical extent she looked it.

Anne, still laughing, reached out a careful hand and started to tease at the fur on Dinah’s nape. Dinah was entranced. For a few seconds she stayed where she was, hunched like a man in a shower to relish the process; then she skipped on to the arm of the chair, took Anne by the wrist and moved her hand to a place on her ribs which she seemed to think needed attention. Anne, Morris could see, did instinctively what he himself had only learnt to do by watching Hugo van Lawick’s films.

“You ought to have trained as a vet,” he said.

“Oh, Mummy always has a dozen dogs in the house. And my father behaved as though our education was complete when we’d learnt how to groom a horse. But they’d have thought vets a bit beneath us. Will you do something for me?”

She had chosen her moment beautifully, establishing a deliciously cosy relationship with Dinah, slipping in a quick reference to her real social superiority to anything Morris knew, then asking. She mightn’t be brainy, but she was cunning.

“Ung?” he said.

“Are you still Foreign Minister?”

“I think so. I’ll know to-morrow, when I see where I’m sitting at the feast.”

“Can you fix me a passport?”

Morris said nothing, but stared at her gloomily, pulling his lip. She and Dinah made a charmingly posed contrast, both beautiful examples of their species, absorbed in their simple task: it was difficult to imagine refusing either of them anything. Really, this girl was a hundred years out of date. The roles she wanted weren’t being written any more—barging about the middle east, meddling in native politics, upsetting everybody, landing in some fracas far beyond her and then expecting to be rescued by a British Naval Party under the command of a snappily saluting little snotty. Now she was expecting Morris to come to the rescue.

“Haven’t you got one?” he said.

“I’ve had my British one withdrawn, the sods. I’ve been getting about on a Syrian travel document, but I think Bruce has impounded it. A Q’Kuti passport would be just the job.”

“Ung.”

She stopped grooming Dinah to look at him with the same speculative glance he had seen earlier. She was calculating his price. Not money, not sex . . .

“The point is,” she said, “I don’t think Bruce is going to let me go. Ever. We’re having a wild time together at the moment, but it can’t last. And when it’s over . . . He hasn’t said anything, but I’ve been listening to the women . . . sometimes he’s taken a fancy to a dancer from Dar or somewhere and had her flown in for a week and given her a present and sent her home . . . they talked about Simoko as if she was one of those. But they talk about me as if I’m one of them—you know, there’s several old women there who were Bruce’s father’s girls—they’ve been shut up in the women’s quarters for years—when it was only a sort of mud fort. OK, I’m enjoying myself right now, but I’ve got work to do.”

“Exactly,” he said.

She stopped grooming Dinah and swung round at him like a gun on a tank turret.

“Who made you judge in Israel?” she snapped. “Slavery for life, is it?”

“I don’t know . . . nobody . . . I’m not a judge . . . to set you free, either.”

“As far as you’re concerned I’m just another monkey in Bruce’s zoo? And you’re one of them? ”

She made a gesture, vivid with passion, towards the oblivious eunuch. Dinah parodied it. Anne didn’t laugh this time.

“I don’t know what I think,” said Morris. “I’m not very clever at either/or situations, I’m afraid. As a matter of fact I don’t really approve of the Sultan keeping a zoo here at all; but since he insists on having one I try to make it tolerable for the animals. And, well, I suppose you’re better off here than you might be in prison.”

“Which is where I belong, you think?”

“I tell you, I don’t know!”

Slowly she swung back to Dinah.

“Sorry, sweetie,” she said. “We got interrupted.”

They returned to the silent ritual of grooming. Morris felt a twitch of jealousy that they should seem to understand each other, instantly, so much better than he understood either of them. Hell, there were things he could accomplish which this girl could never begin on—he began to run his mind over the probable grammar of Dinah’s exploration of the future tense.

“What were you saying about to-morrow night?” said Anne. “About this feast, I mean, and knowing whether you were still Foreign Minister?”

It was uncanny how smoothly she flipped herself back into the unruffled stream of polite chat.

“Oh,” said Morris, “well, there’s this feast. Theoretically it’s held when the floods begin to recede, but it doesn’t work out like that . . .”

“It’s probably something to do with the moon. Like Easter.”

“Yes. Well . . . you know, you ought to go and listen to some of it. The Sultan gives this feast—it lasts six hours—and in between the courses boys from the marshes sing the Testament of Na!ar. There’s one clan—the rock-dove clan—where all the boys have to learn all the traditional songs. Really it’s an astonishing performance, especially if you know that they aren’t allowed to sing them after they’ve reached puberty. Why don’t you make friends with the marshwomen? They could explain. You see, there’s a special gallery with a pierced screen where the women can sit if they want to . . .”

When she had gone, mission unaccomplished, Morris settled again at his work-bench; the whine of his fine-toothed saw, the hum and fizz of his polisher discs, the small feeling of accomplishment as each blue cross took on an almost professional finish—these should have been soothing, but despite them he felt irritated and disappointed. Dinah, too, was suddenly tiresome. Quite soon he had to give up his work to try to occupy both their minds with education.

It didn’t go well. Morris kept thinking about Anne, and perhaps Dinah did too. He was surprised, almost alarmed, by the strength of his wish that she had stayed longer, and how his original awkwardness and resentment in her presence had changed to liking. If the Sultan had known, be would have been full of jeering innuendoes, but . . .

Dinah suddenly swept a row of six counters off the coffee-table and squatted sullenly, waiting for some kind of reproof or punishment that would give her the excuse for a tantrum. When it didn’t come she shuffled off to her nest, stuffed her mouth with shavings and went to sleep.

Morris picked up the scattered counters and then sat crouched forward on his chair, poking them around at random and thinking about himself. This was not a thing he often did in any analytic way, because he considered his own personality rather null and unrewarding; he spent much more time speculating about Dinah’s character, or the Sultan’s. But now he was struck once more with a kind of resentment of a trait in his own nature which seemed to make it impossible for him to enjoy the company of suitable friends and colleagues—suitable in the sense that his mother had used when she selected suitable children for him to play with; all his life the people he had got on with had been quite wrong for him, hopelessly out of his sphere, or even morally corrupt—a raffish collection of High Tory squirelings at Oxford, that ruthless fat Dutchman who smuggled orangs and talked about nothing but guns, the Sultan, Kwan, and even this murderess.

Lucky are they, beyond earth’s common lot,

Whose friends amuse, whose enemies do not.

Sometimes he had considered this trait to be a reaction of his mother’s insistence on suitability, but since he had been in Q’Kut he had come round to believing that it was a phenomenon of western civilisation, and that there were probably a lot of people like him in existence in countries where all recognisable cultural structures had withered or exploded into fragments. Living among Arabs, whose ancient culture had the strength of its own narrowness and so was only now beginning to collapse, or listening to the songs of marshmen who still knew the exact function of every man, every buffalo, every reed-channel in their universe, he had come to understand as a tangible reality what had before been only an academic commonplace, that the great thing is to belong, know what you belong to, and your place in it, to accept it and be accepted by it. But not any old grouping would do—it had to be of a graspable size, to contain its own inner structure, to give at least the appearance of permanence. A desert tribe, or a mining village, yes; the Pan-Arab nation, or some bloody great industrial union, no. Old bin Zair knew what he was, and where he belonged, but Morris had been unable to accept his own native culture. It had none of the desiderata—it was too large, too boneless, too impermanent. So quite unconsciously he had refused to accept his role in it, by refusing to accept people apparently like himself who had accepted their roles; and in the end he had escaped to Q’Kut, to the highly unsuitable roles of zoo-keeper and Foreign Minister, acceptable because of their very absurdity.

Morris thought about these matters erratically, poking the symbols into meaningless messages as he did so; in the end he got cramp in his left haunch, rose to ease it and rambled round his room full of a vague inner smugness at his own isolation. I am heroically alone, he thought. There is no one remotely like me in all Q’Kut.

Stooping to clear the counters away he saw that the last message he had made actually meant something, if you could call it a meaning:

blue square: Morris

brown circle: has qualities of

black square: person other than Morris

(The brown circle did not exactly mean “is”. It had been mainly used in an earlier stage when Dinah had been learning about qualifiers—Morris would present her with a banana and a yellow play-brick and a sentence to say or ask what they had in common.)

All right, he thought, all right. I probably did it subconsciously. It doesn’t mean anything.

But as he tidied the counters away he wondered whether in fact Anne too had chosen her role as a rejection of the non-culture she was supposed to belong to. Her roles, rather, because that was the alternative course. You could choose, like Morris, to be a quietist and wash about where the tides drifted you; or you could actively seek roles, the more extreme and violent the better, switching them as the mood took you, wearing mask after mask to hide the lack of features behind. Perhaps even the vet-despising, dog-owning Mummy was an invention, a beauty spot on such a mask—there had been something a little off key about her very first line in the role—absolutely giddy bonkers. Hmph.

He wondered what she would make of the flood-going feast, if she bothered to go and watch it from the women’s gallery.

2

Quite unreasonably Morris had expected the boys to be the same three that had sung the Testament last year. They wore the same white clay masks whose lips were set into a permanent pout to allow room for the funnels that made the young voices resonate, but they were three different boys. The main singer’s voice was less limpid than last year’s but he sang with greater drive and drama, even with a slight harshness that contrasted well with the softer voices of the younger pair. Their naked black bodies were striped with ochre designs. They sat cross-legged, motionless on a patterned reed mat in front of the throne, while to either side of them the little orchestra of their fathers and elder brothers thumped and clinked and gurgled at their tuneless instruments.

The wonderfully ornate passage about the preparations for Nillum’s boar-hunt came to an end in an onomatopoeic flourish of hoofbeats and horns. A vast series of dishes piled with spiced rice and mutton was carried in to the hail. The audience—petty sheikhs and their cousins, random brigands, senior palace courtiers, a party of town Yemenis on some unexplained mission, several groups of litigants who had arranged their cases to coincide with a famous free meal but whose real interest was in camel-theft and water-rights and blood-money—maintained for the most part the extraordinarily dignified silence with which they had listened to the singers, not one word of whose song any of them could have understood.

The Sultan spoke affably to a small fat sheikh. The leader of the Yemenis listened, nodding. Akuli bin Zair scratched his ribs, pulled his beard and turned to Morris, who was evidently still Foreign Minister, to be sitting so near the throne.

“Your excellency is entertained by the squealings of the savages?” he asked in his high, tinny voice.

“I like the songs,” said Morris.

“I have made a film of the performance of one of our dancing boys, one of the Hadahm. He is very beautiful and can do strange things. Your excellency must come to my quarters to see it.”

“The pleasure would be as great as the honour,” said Morris, who had in fact often been forced to watch the smutty contortions of young male prostitutes which seemed for some reason to delight and amuse quite respectable old Arabs. He himself detested them, so switched the subject back to the marshmen.

“I saw yesterday, from my windows, the ceremony at which the tribute was brought,” he said, gesturing at the odd little pile of offerings in front of the singers. “What do you do with them when the feast is over?”

“The spear is burnt, always. It is a sign that the killing of each other is finished. The boar-tusks we put in a chest, as we did even when the Sultan’s father lived under tents. That is how it has always been done.”

“You mean that if you were to count the pairs of tusks in the chest, you would know how many years ago the ceremony first started?”

“No doubt,” said bin Zair. “However, some may have been lost or stolen.”

“Even so, I expect you could have the oldest ones carbon-dated.”

“You think the matter important?”

“It is not for me to say. I am always interested in such matters. But if, for instance, there were to be some question about the validity of the treaty, then it might be useful to be able to prove its antiquity.”

Bin Zair sat pulling his beard and looking at Morris with his old, bloodshot eyes.

“The matter shall be looked into,” he said at last. “I trust, excellency, that all your animals are in beautiful health, and the slaves attending to them with care.”

Morris blinked. So abrupt a change of subject is not common in polite Arab conversation, nor had bin Zair ever before evinced the slightest interest in the zoo. No doubt the old man considered that the new Foreign Minister was in danger of regarding his post as other than merely honorific. But in fact there had been a tedious little dispute about the number of helpers needed in the zoo—the sort of problem that in a place like the palace could only be settled by high authority, but which was in itself too trivial to bother high authority about, and so never got settled. Morris explained. Bin Zair nodded non-committally. The meat came round. A litigant sidled up and began, with ridiculous circumlocution, to sound bin Zair out on the possibility of helping his case along with a few bribes; Morris turned away and pretended to adjust the tapes of his recorder, ready for the next episode of the song. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the Sultan was starting on his second bottle of “sherbert” (bottled on the Heidsieck estates in Rheims, but re-labelled in Aden.) At last a soggy little drum began to revive the echo of the hoof-beats, and hands as black as insulating cable slid over the strings of two little harps, producing a tuneless, shivery whispering. Morris started his recorder. The music, if you could call it that, died. The boy in the centre threw back his head and sang.

Last year Morris had regarded this passage as a disappointing one, after the reverberant nastiness of the scene in which Na!ar’s grandmother’s second brother had gathered and prepared the poisons, and the barbaric clutter of the preparations for the hunt. This time he listened with increasing absorption to the sparsely ornamented lines that brought the two heroes together for their necessary deaths.

One of the traditional adornments employed by the makers of the marsh songs was a patterned arrangement and modulation of the successive relation-roots; even an apparently artless lyric would on inspection turn out to contain, for instance, three sections, the outer two using a series of roots in the same order and the central one reversing them. There was none of that in the description of the duel. Word-group after word-group clustered round the same root, the strong (or willed) transitive. The groups themselves were unusually short, the nominal and adjectival elements always the commonest of many possible synonyms, inflected very straightforwardly—straightforwardly, that is, for a language in which it was possible to inflect the nominal element “cheese” so that three syllables meant “the first-pressing cheese made last drought from the milk of my elder brother’s three-year-old buffalo”. As the heroes closed, the language became drier still.

Nillum rode by the reeds.

His servants and his friends were far behind him,

Hunting a different boar.

Hidden in the winter reeds Na!ar waited.

His spear-thrower was hard in his hand.

The tip of his spear glistened with fresh poison.

He moved like a fisherman,

An old fisherman who creeps to spear a quick fish.

Nillum rode by the reeds. He reined in his horse.

Na!ar sprang up. He threw his spear.

He shouted with joy to see it fly straight.

Nillum heard the shout . . .

Of course the story carried the listener through. Cynical calculation? If your material is all blood and drama, it’s a waste to put frills on it, because no one will notice them? But to a man of Morris’s temperament the whole passage seemed to prove that he was listening to the work of a truly potent artist, a forgotten savage who had understood the essential nature of action, its drabness, the perfunctoriness of muscle-movements compared with the salivating torments of anticipation and the long, rich pastures of regret.

The expressionless clay mask chanted on. The voice of the main singer was expressionless too, telling, as if in a stone frieze, the precise cruelties that the two heroes dealt each other until both were dying.

Na!ar dragged himself through the reed-bed

Using only his arms.

The barbs of his own spear held fast in his liver.

The spear-shaft caught and dragged among the reed-roots.

Where clear water gleamed he lay still.

He saw the piebald horse wallow away, saddle empty.

He saw Nillum kneeling in the water.

He felt the poison-creatures beginning to suck up his soul.

Words then Na!ar, shield of the people, spoke.

Morris thrilled to the grammatical surprise, though he was ready for it, the sudden, rare null-root, the expression of general and involuntary action, contorted almost to the end of the longest word-group for many minutes. He was quite sure that the effect was intentional: the fight itself had been a personal matter between two men, moving their own limbs at their own will; but now a different power stirred in Na!ar’s dying mouth, as large and impersonal as the movement of the floodwaters or the return of day, for which the null-transitive root was invariably used. A series of heavy strokes on the slack-stringed harps seemed to underline the effect and at the same time to usher in another procession of dishes to fill the interval before the cryptic exchange of oaths and absolutions that actually embodied the ancient treaty.

Shivery and sighing Morris switched his tape-recorder off. In an attempt to protect his inner silence from any idiot who might want to break in with gossip or comment he pretended to be absorbed in the ridiculous architecture of the Council Chamber.

Even the Sultan was a bit ashamed of the Council Chamber; he would never explain quite how it had been designed, but Morris’s own theory was that the architects had been told to go to Oxford and Cambridge and produce a large room that combined all the most striking features of various college dining halls—though it looked as though they might have strayed into a few chapels as well. In some ways they had been ingenious, adapting the idea of a music gallery to make the place whence the women could watch from behind a screen (carved into a uniquely eclectic Gothic-Arabic design) their lord gobbling. No use had been found for the pendulous great nodules of plaster that hung from the fan vaulting—unless there were secret switches that enabled the Sultan to release them like bombs on to the unwelcome guest. The stained-glass windows had to be lit by an electric sun, because the chamber had no outside walls. The chandeliers were certainly very fine. But everything had somehow been thrown out of proportion partly (Morris suspected) because the Sultan had at a late moment decided to add a few feet to the dimensions here and there, and partly because of the tables. Perhaps it is impossible to design a room which will look right when all the furniture consists of one low throne, a lot of cushions, and five enormous black oak tables only eighteen inches high; Morris was actually beginning to wonder about this as he came out of his trance when the persistent litigant on the far side of bin Zair belched so loudly that he woke himself up. Bin Zair turned pointedly away from him, so could hardly avoid addressing Morris.

“I will come and see the animals to-morrow morning,” he said. “Thus we will settle this matter.”

“I am your debtor already,” said Morris.

“It is convenient,” explained bin Zair. “These Yemenis are slave-merchants; thus I can buy what you need, or order it if they do not have the stock in hand.”

He was turning away but the litigant, quite unrebuffed, was still there waiting his chance. Bin Zair half rose from his cushions so that he could resettle with his back completely towards the man, which brought him directly opposite the tape-recorder.

“What is the machine?” he asked.

Morris explained, adding that he already had a tape of the Testament, but that the quality was poor as last year he had been sitting further away.

“And what use do you make of these howlings?” asked bin Zair when he had finished.

“I have learnt the language. I find it very interesting.”

Bin Zair nodded like a grave goat.

“I have lived all my life at the edge of the marshes,” he said. “But I have learnt no more of their language than is needed for various ceremonies.”

“You have been busy with greater matters, no doubt.”

“Perhaps.”

At last the litigant rose and stalked away. Bin Zair bowed with great politeness to Morris but closed the conversation, which was a relief. As Morris settled to brooding on the passage they had just heard, he realised that it had been at this point in the feast last year that he had seen Kwan’s lined face glistening with tears, glistening like the spear in the song and the other spear which lay crosswise on top of the primitive offerings, its point looking as though it had been dipped in the blackest of black treacle. He wondered to whom else, now, the song had such a fierce meaning—none of the Arabs; not the Sultan who, Morris already knew, claimed to speak the language when in fact he had only an ill-accented smattering; Dyal, of course, and the new black giant sitting on the mat behind Prince Hadiq on the far side of the room; Morris himself, in his academic way; and (strange, strange) the eight women whom Morris had never seen, sitting up in the screened gallery, stinking of rancid milk. For them, perhaps, each syllable meant the stench of the lagoons, and the smoke of dried buffalo dung filling reed huts, and fevered babies muttering in the moist dark, and fighting duck, and home.

3

Dinah was having trouble with the concept of time. At first, though clearly puzzled by the blue cross being a different shape from any of the other nouns, she naturally attempted to identify the symbol with the egg-timer. Morris had anticipated this, and produced a square counter divided into blue and red along the diagonal.

Blue/red diagonal square: egg-timer.

He had also prepared a couple of other blue-diagonal squares, one for the clepsydra he intended to make out of a coffee-tin, and one for the kitchen timers he had sent for. He thought that Dinah’s first move would probably be to try and use the blue cross as a general noun to cover all transparent objects—glass always fascinated her. That wouldn’t be too hard to correct by producing the other gadgets—but then she would try to use the cross as a symbol for “gadget”.

Morris was watching her build one of her untidy towers of play-blocks, and thinking of carefully timed processes which did not involve gadgets, when the curtain was pulled aside. Dinah fled to her nest.

“Hi,” said the Prince. He looked grave. There was someone in the corridor behind him.

“Come in,” said Morris, not rising.

The newcomer turned out to be the large young marshman whom Morris had seen a few days ago in the canoe, and last night at the feast. The Prince produced what was obviously a very carefully rehearsed sentence.

“Friend of my father, it is Gaur.”

“Gaur is welcome,” said Morris, rising.

The Prince made an encouraging little nod to his companion.

“Salam Alaikum,” said Gaur, stumbling over the ancient desert greeting of the Arabs.

“Alaikum as Salam,” said Morris, then added in the language of the marshmen their own salute: “Thy buffaloes may rest in my wallow.”

Gaur hesitated an instant, no doubt because Morris had used the special vocative for addressing a warrior of the ninth clan, but there was no place in the language for somebody who, like Morris, did not belong to the hierarchy of the reeds. In the end he settled on a strange, archaic form which Morris had only come across before in a ballad in which two men met by night and could not identify each other’s status.

“Half my cheeses are thine,” he eventually replied, guardedly.

“Be welcome,” said Morris. “Dost thou eat tobacco?”

Gaur unsmilingly handed Morris the Batman comics and accepted a cheroot to chew, but before he had settled to it Morris saw him flinch and stare across the room. Dinah was doing her trench warfare trick again. Gaur muttered an invocation and made a curious sideways gesture with spread palms, as though he were glancing some missile to the side.

“What what?” said the Prince, like an early Wodehouse character.

“Gaur thinks that Dinah is a demon,” said Morris slowly.

“What means demon?”

Morris explained in Arabic.

“The marshes are full of witches and demons,” he added.

“Oh, I know it. You speak Gaur Dinah goods. Dinah is good. Speak you teach me English. I teach Gaur Arab.”

Something had happened, Morris saw, to produce this erratic flow of language. Normally the Prince would have paused for a minute between each sentence, and then ejaculated it unhappily; but today he thought it no shame to be wrong. Morris explained to Gaur, but Dinah for some reason refused to emerge from her nest to demonstrate that she was a mere animal (and was she?), while Gaur reluctantly returned the cheroot to its box; his smooth young face remained impassive, but his free hand now clutched the little amulet that had hung round his neck since he was a child. At the explanation about the English lessons he merely nodded.

At this point a pompous little slave arrived to say that bin Zair really was going to pay his unlooked-for visit to the zoo, and trusted that Morris had recovered sufficiently from the feast to be able to meet him there; very likely this was the self-same official who had hitherto thwarted Morris over the zoo-cleaners, for he managed to fill his little message with indignities. Morris never minded about that sort of thing, but suddenly the Prince snapped, in Arabic, “Thy soles shall be flayed off thy feet before this dusk,” and the slave whimpered away. Certainly the Prince was full of sudden confidence.

“We learn . . . we shall learn . . . more English with animals?” he asked.

“Fine,” said Morris.

He clicked at Dinah. Gaur flinched as she came leaping to the door but his big hand did not move to his knife or to the heavy new revolver at his hip—such weapons are no use against demons—the only hope is to clutch your amulet. To calm him Morris carried Dinah. She clung close all the way to the lifts.

The syndicate of architects who had designed the palace had made their name running up swish hotels in Beirut. The Sultan’s fantasies had dictated certain elements, such as the absurd external elevation, the grottoed audience chamber, several internal vistas and coups de theatre—and, of course, the zoo. But between these fixed points the architects had doodled in the light of their past successes, producing a series of plush but garish suites and lobbies. There were even meaningless side-rooms, dark and secret, which in a less teetotal environment would have been cosy little bars for lonely travellers.

But upon this characterless background the inhabitants and transients had imposed their own pungent culture. Morris had never yet met a goat trying to graze the amber pile of a corridor, but he would not have been surprised if he had. Stacks of coke-tins tended to collect in corners behind pierced mock-alabaster screens; tribesmen, wrapped in their tattered cloaks, snored and stank in random gathering-places, or played their stone-age version of peggoty in noisy groups round the indoor fountains; their tobacco, which they smoked in spent cartridge tubes passed round from hand to hand, smelt of gunpowder and dung-fires; somewhere far off someone always seemed to be boiling sour mutton-fat, but this odour was occasionally swamped by the presence of a young Arab who had been experimenting with cheap scent from Dar. They were a people who moved with great silence, while the plush decor muffled their fidgets. All the sounds in the palace seemed to come from mouths—arguments about the virtues of a strain of camels, reminiscences about old murders and raids, prayers, whisperings, greetings, snores and tubercular hawkings, and the mysterious reedy code of the eunuchs’ flutes. It was a world where action was hushed but every sound had a meaning, and for that reason it suited Morris. He had even come to like the smells.

The lifts were working today. Dinah escaped from his arms for long enough to press every button on the control panel, so it took them some time to ascend the four floors to the zoo. While the slow box sighed from floor to floor Morris studied Gaur, who would not meet his glance; he was a magnificent specimen, even allowing for his having lived on milk from birth and never having drunk the wriggling waters of the marshes. His skin was so black that in the dull light of the lift the shadows on it had a bluish tinge; his face, like Dyal’s, had in it only a few suggestions of Arab blood but was not at all negro—flattish, thin-lipped, high cheekboned, and narrow-eyed. He wore a white turban beneath which, Morris knew, the straight black hair would be surprisingly sparse, although it had never been cut. He would never grow a beard. (Kwan had once told Morris that he had at first felt friendly at the sight of another hairless face, and thought it very curious that Morris needed to shave to achieve the effect.)

Suddenly a number of possible explanations slid together. Morris turned to the Prince.

“I suppose the age-sets must have changed down in the marshes,” he said.

Even when he turned the sentence into Arabic the Prince only shrugged and nodded at Gaur. Morris asked the giant direct.

“New men became,” said Gaur. “At the flood-going.”

“Would I had been there to see,” said Morris—though to be honest he would rather have read about the ceremony, and perhaps watched a film of the dances. But his mild courtesy was received with a withdrawn glance that flickered for a moment from him to Dinah and then away. Still, it was gratifying to have guessed right; with the initiation of a new age-set—boys “became men” at roughly five-year intervals—Gaur must have reached warrior status and so could be sent to the Palace to guard the Sultan’s eldest son; and his arrival constituted an acknowledgement that Hadiq was indeed the chosen heir—with so many other products of the royal loins available, even an eldest son by a first wife needed to be constantly awarded symbols of his primacy. Gaur was a very potent symbol, with his gun at his hip and his hand on his amulet.

When at last the lift doors opened, Morris saw that the lobby outside the zoo was not empty. Two eunuchs sat on the floor playing their inexplicable finger-game; they had not, of course, heard the movement of the lift but the alteration of light made them look up and come smiling to their feet. They grinned at Dinah and made a curious wristy gesture to Gaur, but when the party moved towards the zoo doors they barred the way.

“My father is at here,” said the Prince. “One woman also.”

His hands fluttered through the sign language of the harem. Dinah recognised the process, though not the symbols, and promptly made her own sign to demand food. One of the eunuchs laughed, a breathy gargle. The other used his flute to blow a short message, answered almost at once by a near call and a distant answer. It was Dyal who opened the doors. Morris paused in the short corridor that led to the main inspection gallery and said to the Prince “Your father will ask how your English lessons are going. Tell him ‘Not so dusty’.”

“Dust was . . . dirt?” asked the Prince.

“Forget it,” said Morris.

But, like almost everything else that happened that morning, the idea turned out badly. The Sultan was showing off his marksmanship to Anne, who was wearing a very English tweed skirt, a powder-blue twin-set and a double row of pearls. Only the pearls were different from what her alleged mother might have worn at a point-to-point twenty-five years ago—they were far too big. Presumably the Sultan had sent for this gear in order to gratify his penchant for the English county style, and it was amusing to see how Anne wore the clothes: not exactly to the manor born, but with the slightly exaggerated stance and gestures of a musical comedy actress of the ‘thirties playing a manorial role; whether deliberately or by luck, she had hit the exact off-key note that would entrance her captor.

“Hello,” said the Sultan affably. “And how’s the English going, my lad?”

The Prince stammered, looked desperately at Morris and blurted out in Arabic “Not as the language of excrement.”

“I should think not,” said the Sultan. “Morris, you haven’t been trying to muddle his wits with the marshmen’s lingo, have you?”

“No . . . well . . . I mean . . .”

But before he could sort out the mistranslation they heard more fluting from the doors and another cry from Dyal. This time, of course, it was bin Zair, and the explanation about the Prince’s linguistics got lost in an argument about how far the old man should be forced to crawl, with the Sultan insisting on his own ludicrous rights simply because both Anne and Morris asked him not to. He then decided that as there were now seven people in the zoo they would have a shooting match. Dyal and Gaur were summoned from the door and they all took it in turns to bombard the gorilla with empty hypodermic darts. Anne, very much in a squire’s-lady fashion, attempted to put Gaur at his ease by striking up a conversation, all smiles and good-will; and despite the lack of language they seemed to get on well enough to spoil the Sultan’s aim; then Prince Hadiq had the lack of tact to shoot straighter than his father; either Dyal knew better or he too was disturbed about something. Anne turned out to be a very moderate shot; Gaur started badly, never having seen any kind of gun till a week ago, but improved quickly; Morris completely missed the gorilla with two of his five shots, while old bin Zair never hit it at all and was heaped by the Sultan with the harsh traditional mockery of the desert for the feeble warrior. They tried to get Dinah to shoot, but she was unable to connect the gun itself with the sudden appearance of the darts on the gorilla’s chest. In any case she had never much cared for the gorilla, who had been stuffed in a bristling pose of snarling anger. Morris found it a relief when he could at last pick her up and retreat, side by side with bin Zair, backwards from the Sultan’s presence. He took the old man into his office and made the ritual coffee. Dinah settled down to trying to type on the ancient, unbreakable Remington he kept for her.

“The women of your country, are they all so shameless?” asked bin Zair.

“It is not our custom to wear a veil,” explained Morris.

“Oh, I have seen the faces of women, many times. I have talked with Freya Stark. Even now there are women who work at the oil wells, unveiled. But I have not seen them roll their eyes and show a moist lip to some young savage, as your countrywoman did.”

“She was only trying to be friendly.”

“Among my people, if a man’s sister behaved so he would shoot her, and be praised by his friends.”

Morris could only shrug and pour bin Zair his second tiny cup of coffee. After this they would be able to get down to business. As so often before, he was maddened by the lack of subjects for small-talk—life in an unvarying climate made one realise how much the English owe to their crazy weather as a source of uncontroversial chat.

“What was Freya Stark like?” he asked, though in fact the lone explorers of Arabia, the Doughtys and Starks and Thesigers, filled him only with relief at not being like them.

“She wore strange shoes,” said bin Zair. “Now, the women at the oil-wells are like men—and the men are like women. Perhaps you will see them when they begin to drill in the marshes.”

The old man’s watery and blood-shot eyes looked speculatively at Morris, as though trying to guess whether his taste ran more to manly women or womanly men.

“They will not drill in the marshes, surely,” said Morris. “The Sultan won’t let them.”

“My master has many minds. No man can know them all.”

“But the treaty—the Testament of Na!ar!”

“Is my master a child, or a lover, to turn from his path for the sake of a song? I tell you, sir, I have done what you suggested and have counted the tusks in the chest. There are eighty-two pairs. The ceremony of the tribute therefore began when my master’s grandfather was a young warrior. If the treaty is true, it is yet not truly old.”

“There may have been another chest.”

“True. But where is it?”

Bin Zair peered into his empty cup like a hairy little ape looking for a fat grub in a hole. Dinah suddenly lost her temper with her typewriter and slid it angrily across the floor, but Morris hadn’t time just now to start her off on a new ploy; against all his own rules he fetched a banana from the cupboard and gave it her.

“Surely the marshmen will fight,” he said.

“With spears, against guns and aeroplanes?” asked bin Zair, holding out his cup to be filled.

“Perhaps,” said Morris as he poured. “In the Sudan, in the south, there are tribes which have warred for ten years against the government, and have not been conquered. They too live in marshes and swamps.”

“It is said that these marshes can easily be drained. They have but to build two short new watercourses through the southern hills; and when that is done, they also say that where the waters were will be good land, able to feed many cattle.”

“Has he told Dyal?” asked Morris, remembering how comparatively badly the bodyguard had shot.

“A slave? Sir, will you speak to my master of this matter?”

“I will ask him, yes.”

Bin Zair leaned forward, suddenly emphatic.

“Let not my master know that I have told you of it,” he said. “I am old, and so speak more than I should. You must ask him cleverly, as if the thought came from your own mind. He is your friend—he will not lie to you. Now you must show me your needs.”

As they rose Dinah picked up the typewriter again and threw it with a crash across the room; she must have decided it was an easy way of being given bananas. Morris clicked at her and she followed him sulkily out into the passage.

Bin Zair was a very Arab Arab, Morris found. One of his characteristics was that he was unselective about the relevance of information. He seemed to want to see everything; as a result the zoo inspection took well over an hour. For instance Morris had to go into exact detail of how the apparent cost of the equipment to purify the polar bear’s water, and the labour to keep its litter clean, was negligible compared with the cost of providing a new bear every few months. Bin Zair combed his beard with thin, shaking fingers and watched the big beast pad its ceaseless figure-of-eight across the diagonal of its cage. Polar bears always reminded Morris of mediaeval barons, narrow-brained, shaped for slaughter, magnificent, useless. No doubt Nillum ibn Nillum, the Sultan’s original ancestor, had been of that nature also, so the Sultan had come a long way. There was hope for mankind yet.

Far off in the other gallery the whoosh of the spring-guns sounded through the stillness.

“Must each animal have its own slave?” said bin Zair dubiously.

“No. All I want is two men who do their work properly, and do only that, and are not taken from the zoo to perform other duties. I want no more than I need. It is less trouble to use two good men than a lazy twenty. I would prefer hired men to slaves—I am not accustomed to the idea that an animal should be worth more than a man.”

“I can remember a horse which my father bought for the price of three hundred slaves,” said bin Zair. “Now let us consider the rhinoceros.”

But at that moment Dinah raced away down the front of the cages to the chimpanzee grove and crouched chattering by the bars. One of the caged chimps answered her. She bristled and backed away, still chattering, while the deeper voice of one of the males joined in the racket. Though she was perfectly safe Morris instinctively hurried to her side.

He found the whole group more lively than he’d yet seen them. Except for Murdoch, who had retired for safety with her baby to the top of the central tree, they were all ranged along the front of the cage, chattering or grimacing at Dinah. The scene reminded Morris of an episode in some ancient Wizard where the town urchins mock through the school railings one of their number who has been forced to dress in an Eton jacket and be educated with the nobs. Dinah answered their jeers with bitchy confidence, as if she knew that she had indeed left the slums to join the evolutionary smart set, Man.

At the back of the cage the shiny panel of black glass slid up, and there were Anne and the Sultan leaning on the window-ledge, laughing at the scene. The Sultan beckoned.

“His Majesty is angry,” said bin Zair. “You must go quickly. I will wait in your office.”

“Good,” said Morris. “I hope you’re wrong. He looked pleased.”

Even so he was slightly nervous as he took Dinah by the paw and hurried her off to the upper gallery, where he found that the atmosphere was indeed stickier than he would have guessed from that glimpse of the couple at the window. Dyal and Gaur were sitting against the wall several yards down the corridor. The Prince stood apart, withdrawn and angry, fiddling with one of the spring-guns as though, in the usual Bedouin manner, he wanted to take it to bits and put it together. Anne continued to lean on the window-sill while the Sultan turned unsmiling to Morris.

“What the hell have you been up to?” he said.

“In what way?”

“You don’t seem to have taught Hadiq a single syllable of English.”

“Rubbish mate! He’s not getting on at all badly, considering. He just lacks confidence, especially with you standing there expecting him to spout a mixture of Wordsworth and Bertie Wooster.”

The Sultan turned his head towards Anne.

“You are quite right, my dear,” he said. “It is a clear proof of the need to hire properly qualified teachers for the school.”

“You aren’t being fair,” she said. “Mr Morris is an absolute whizz at languages.”

“What school?” said Morris.

“Oh, it’s just a little plan we’ve dreamed up,” said the Sultan. “Dinah doesn’t seem to be making much progress either.”

“Rubbish again. She’s getting on fine.”

“She didn’t appear to be just now,” said the Sultan.

“Oh, that . . . I was talking about her learning the future tense.”

“There is a limit to my patience, Morris. I have gone to great trouble and expense to set up this experiment, and you dismiss it as ‘Oh, that . . .’ How much time has Dinah actually been spending with the other chimps?”

“Not very much, so far. I’ve had to wait for them to settle down.”

Morris did in fact feel mildly guilty about his having kept so much to the old routine that had prevailed before the wild chimps came, with Dinah spending practically all her time in his company; but he hadn’t expected the Sultan to react with such cold, bullying anger. The little dark eyes were like opaque beads in the flat, sand-coloured face. Morris, always easily cowed, was beginning to stammer reasons when Anne deliberately broke the tension.

“I’d love to see Dinah read something,” she said. “Could she do that now?”

“I don’t know,” said Morris. “She’s not in a very good mood, and in any case she’s just had a banana.”

“By God, Morris,” shouted the Sultan, “you seem to think you own this place!”

“OK, OK, let’s give it a go,” said Morris. “What would you like her to do?”

He found that he too, by now, had joined in the general fit of sulks that seemed to have permeated the gallery; he had always particularly disliked making Dinah do her reading as if it were a circus trick.

“Let her fetch the spring-gun from Dyal and give it to me,” said the Sultan, and without waiting to ask whether this was practicable he called to Dyal to put the gun in front of him on the floor. Morris scurried back to his office to fetch fruit for a reward to Dinah, and found bin Zair looking systematically through the files in the small cabinet. He looked up and smiled when Morris apologised for the delay.

Back in the upper gallery Dinah scampered over at the first rattle of the counters, instantly the alert pupil, teacher’s pet. Morris laid out a message on the tiles.

white square: Dinah

green circle with hole: go

orange circle with hole: get/fetch/take

yellow square: thing with no name

She sniffed a couple of times at the message, which was a form they normally used for search-games, then set off towards Morris’s office. Morris clicked and slapped down the red negative circle. She sniffed at it, then set off in the opposite direction, along the bleak corridor towards where the two guards set. Gaur shrank visibly from her, but Dyal laughed and when she picked up the spring-gun and returned he rose and followed her. She placed the spring-gun on the floor and dubiously compared it with the yellow square. Morris added a positive green circle to the message, and she immediately began to bounce up and down, eager for the banana, then chattered irritably as he spelt out a new message.

white square: Dinah

yellow circle with hole: give

yellow square: thing with no name

black square: (to) person other than Morris or Dinah

purple rectangle: qualifier “big”

All might have been well—tempers been smoothed, Morris’s treatment of Dinah justified, even his qualifications for teaching Prince Hadiq confirmed—had not Dyal and Gaur come to join the group; but Dinah was never very happy with the qualifying group of symbols; she knew perfectly well how they worked, but their presence in a message seemed to make the whole thing harder for her. Now she picked up the gun, trailing it by its muzzle, and studied the possibilities before her, the Sultan, the Prince, Anne and the two bodyguards. The hush of waiting became ridiculously tense, almost as though it should have been filled by a circus drum-roll. At last, with a rush, she laid the gun ungraciously at Gaur’s feet and scampered back to Morris’s side.

The ten seconds’ silence was so intense and shocking that it seemed almost as though Dinah’s mistake had some ritual significance.

“Well,” said the Sultan at last, “what went wrong?”

“Honestly it was pretty good,” said Anne. “In fact it was marvellous. Only she gave it to the wrong person.”

“Exactly,” said the Sultan, clearly so angered by her intervention that Morris wondered whether his haphazard reading had included some potted Freud.

“Give her a chance,” said Morris. “She’s got a tiny vocabulary, with as few nouns in it as possible, because we’re more interested in her grasp of logical sentence-structure than just lists of words. I told her to give the bloody gun to a big man. That’s the nearest I could get. The language doesn’t contain a name for you.”

As if to settle things he gave Dinah her banana, with which she retreated to the far wall, as though one of them was going to try to steal it off her. Morris crouched to pick the counters off the tiles, scrabbling with his finger-nails on the slippery surface.

“Whose names does she know?” asked Anne.

“Just her own and mine—these two. This black square means a person other than one of us . . .”

The Sultan interrupted, dropping into Arabic, the first time for years that he had used it, except on formal occasions, when talking to Morris.

“By God, Morris, you do me great shame. You and the ape have eaten my bread and taken from me many gifts, and yet you have not thought me worth a name of my own, to tell me apart from some slave or goat-boy!”

“I’m sorry . . .” Morris began in English.

“Let it be seen to. I will have a name. Let a black symbol be made and on it set in gold the shape of a hand, the symbol of my house.”

“If you like,” said Morris. “She’s going to have to see quite a bit of you if she’s going to learn to associate it with you, and only you.”

The Sultan laughed, and reverted to English.

“She can come to the Council—we’ll make her Minister of Education, eh, my dear? And Morris, old boy, you really must see that she spends more time with the other apes. Got it?”

He smiled, a jovial great genie. But his eyes were still as hard as glass.