waded through the ankle-deep water to join me beneath the trees on the sandy bank. Her manner was quietly reassuring.
“I’m all right,” I said. “Go ahead—eat with the others. It’s not every day we run into something like this.”
Helen would not budge from my side. She sat with one arm draped over my shoulder. Upon occasion she would wave off an encroaching vulture or fling a handful of sand, but otherwise she was motionless. She seemed to be willing to share my lack of appetite. I looked down at the swollen ball of her abdomen. Its surface bulged once, then surrendered to a run of elastic waves. The fetus—our child—was fisting out feisty rhythms in the bistro of Helen’s womb.
“You’re eating for two, Helen. Go on now, get down there, take your share.”
She would not budge. She was adamant. If I would not eat, neither would she. I wanted to make a sacrifice for her, to give her an excuse to eat—but I could not face the prospect of forcing down a single bite of blancmange, not even one, and so kept Helen from feeding with the others. I was ashamed of myself and half in awe of Helen. She was a saint, a genuine habiline saint.
* * *
Jomo fell ill. Unable to eat, hunt, or tolerate the japeries of the children, he tried to remove himself as a burden to the Minids by wandering off alone into a distant thicket on the plain. That same afternoon, missing him, Guinevere conferred anxiously with Helen. Tottering wide-eyed about Shangri-la, singing her distress in eerie bass notes, the old woman raised a small expedition to search for her husband.
Ham and Roosevelt accompanied Guinevere, Helen, and me down the mountain, tracking Jomo by scent and virtually imperceptible trail signs. Within an hour we had found the old man. He was sitting in a beautiful Kaffir boom tree, staring out over the savannah with glassy eyes. He would not come down. His languid intractability on this point so discouraged Roosevelt and Ham that they began foraging their way back across the grasslands. If a crazy old habiline wanted to sit by himself in a tree, who were they to interfere?
Guinevere, Helen, and I waited out the long starry night in the clearing beneath the Kaffir boom. In the absence of any leaves, the tree’s coral-colored flowers waved petals like tiny tentacles. The trunk of the tree bristled with blunt spikes, but Jomo had climbed to his perch without any regard for the hurt they were inflicting upon him.
Once, foolhardily braving these spikes, I tried to climb up to Jomo, but he placed the sole of his foot on my head and levered me to earth with a single forceful thrust. That dampened my enthusiasm for trying to rescue him. Scratches tattooed my belly and thighs, and all that night my right buttock throbbed incessantly. If a crazy old habiline wanted to sit by himself in a tree, who was I to interfere?
Then I remembered Genly’s death and its ritual aftermath, events that seemed as long ago and far away as my childhood in Van Luna, Kansas. Jomo, I realized, had taken his own funeral arrangements in hand. If the penultimate resting place of a Minid was the fork of a tree (the ultimate, of course, being a leopard’s maw or the gullets of a gang of carrion birds), why, then, he would install himself in the tree of his choice. He had picked a beauty, too. His vertical coffin was a truly awesome coral tree, with wood of resilient softness and durability.
With the three of us alternating watches beneath the old man, he lasted two days in the tree. Vultures began circling overhead on the second day, however, for the odor of Jomo’s mortality hung heavier in the air than did the fragrance of the tree’s scarlet flowers. Finally, his spirit—his soul, if the species known as Homo habilis possessed that intangible commodity—left him, and he toppled out of the Kaffir boom in a heap.
You could not leave a patriarch like Jomo—who had perhaps once occupied the Minids’ chieftaincy—lying crumpled on the ground. We must get him back up his prickly tree. Helen, after indicating by mumbles and signs her intentions, set off to Shangri-la to retrieve another prospective corpse-booster or two. During her absence I used a lava cobble to grind off as many of the Kaffir boom’s spines as I could reach. Guinevere, meanwhile, lay across Jomo’s body, daintily picking vermin from