A Feast Unknown

I cut out the liver, chewed off a piece, and swallowed it.

The Arab by the tree turned as gray-blue as the dead man when he saw me ejaculate on slicing into the man. He tried to retch but was unsuccessful. I waited. I had made no threats. None were needed.

When he had quit trying to throw up, he leaned his head against the tree. His black eyes were dull below the half-closed lids. A snake of spittle ran down his chin.

I said, “I will ask. You will reply.”

He knew, probably from experience in torturing others, that very few men can hold out against prolonged torture. He was willing to settle for a quick death. He answered my questions fully, and his information seemed to be valid.

The leader and organizer of this expedition was an Albanian. He went under the Arabic name of

Muhmud abu Shawarib. His real name was Enver Noli. The others were mostly Arabs, although a few were Bulgarians who had fled to Albania because of their Red Chinese sympathies.

Noli had promised every man in his army that he would have enough gold to support him and four wives for the rest of his life. That is, if the Englishman, John Cloamby, Lord Grandrith, were captured alive.

“He talked only of gold?” I said.

“Yes. Was there anything else?”

Noli was not likely to promise his men the secret of prolonged youth, even if he believed that I possessed it. They would think him crazy and would not follow him. It was possible that he had no thought of the elixir, but I have encountered other men, all dead now, who believed, with good reason, that I had an elixir and were prepared to do anything to get the secret from me.

The Arab said, “You can kill me, Nasrani. But Noli will find you and inflict great pain upon you until you tell him where your gold is hidden. He is a very determined man, very cu

“That may be,” I said. I stabbed him in the solar plexus. Now I failed to have a sexual reaction, and I hoped that the aberration was, for some reason, gone. I doubted it. The truth was that I had only so much jism, and it had been used up for the time being.

I booby-trapped the vehicle with some wire and grenades so that three shells—one by the gas tank—would go off if the cab doors or the hood were opened. Then I went into the woods and up a tree and waited. The sounds of battle had died out. Presently, as I knew they would, the invaders came on the track of the vehicle. Two jeeps drove up; behind them straggled a mob, the survivors of the battle with the Kenyans.

6

Enver Noli was a huge man with a large belly, a shaven head, and great drooping moustaches that fell to his chest. His nose was immense, curved like a scimitar. He wore green coveralls and paratrooper’s boots.

He held his kepi in one tremendous fist and whacked it across the palm of the other hand. When he gave an order, he bellowed.

A soldier ran out from the main body of the troops and warily approached the vehicle. When he looked into the cab, he saw the wires I had gone to some pains to hide. He reported this to Enver, who stood up in the jeep, which was about seventy feet from the half-track. The soldier raised the hood to check the motor for traps there, and the grenade exploded and then the three shells. The vehicle and the soldier disappeared in smoke and flame. Noli was knocked off the jeep, but he bounded up and ran away with the rest. Unfortunately, nobody was hit by the shells or splashed by the gas. I did shoot two during the noise and panic.

Noli stopped ru

The two hills yielded more dead. The wounded had either been taken away or put out of their pain.

The carrion eaters were busy here, too.

The village was entirely burned down, and of the survivors there was no sign. I knew they were hiding in the forest. They had fled to the forest more than once from Arab slave-raiders, though not until after great losses. I had been the one who had led them to victory against the Arab invaders and then led them across the country to terrorize the slavers so much that they never again dared enter Bandili country.

I had led them against the Germans in World War I. I had led them in a great raid into Gekoyo. Now they were hiding again, and if they came out once more and fought, they would do it without me.

For 60 years I had been a Bandili and the great father, the elephant who charges, for the Bandili. Now,

I was truly exiled. This was no temporary loss. It was forever.

I wept then. I had loved these people as much as I could any group of humans. I was far more Bandili than I was English. I had had true friends among them. But all that was ended. Although this village was the only one of the ten Bandili villages that had betrayed me, the others would be no better. The young were too hating and the old too feeble and too few.

Moreover, the Kenyan government had made it plain that I could no longer live in this country. Not in the open, at least.

I made a sentimental gesture. I waved my rifle at the ashes of the village and then at those hidden in the forest. It was the only good-bye I could give, and doubtless no one saw it.

Then I turned and began to trot across the sava

My destination was the mountain range that lay far beyond the hills, approximately a hundred and fifty miles away, and twenty miles into Uganda. I trotted all night. The false dawn, the wolf’s tail, was graying the sava

I ran along easily with the sava

The rifle soared up out of my hand, torn away by a blow like that from a crocodile’s tail. It spun off, and then the sound of the shot came from the hills.