PART ONE
Preliminaries: Reverie and Departure
From the private journals of Egan Chaney: There are no more pygmies. Intellectual pygmies perhaps, but no more of those small, alert, swaybacked black people, of necessarily amenable disposition, who lived in the dead-and-gone Ituri rainforests; a people, by the way, whom I do not wish to sentimentalize (though perhaps I may). Pygmies no longer exist; they have been dead or dying for decades.
But on the evening before the evening when Benedict dropped me into the singing fronds of the Synesthesia Wild* under three bitter moons, pygmies lived again for me. I spent that last evening in base camp rereading Turnbull’s The Forest People. Dreaming, I dwelt again with the people of the Ituri. I underwent nkumbi, the ordeal of circumcision. I dashed beneath the belly of an elephant and jabbed the monster’s flesh with my spear. Finally, I took part in the festival of the molimo with the ancient and clever BaMbuti.
All in all, I suppose, my reading was a sentimental exercise. Turnbull’s book had been the first and most vivid ethnography I had encountered in my undergraduate career; and even on that last night in base camp, on the hostile world of BoskVeld, a planet circling the star Denebola, his book sang in my head like the forbidden lyrics of the pygmies’ molimo, like the poignant melodies of BoskVeld’s moons.
A sentimental exercise.
What good my reading would do me among the inhabitants of the Synesthesia Wild I had no idea. Probably none. But I was going out there; and on the evening before my departure, the day before my submersion, I lost myself in the forests of another time, knowing that for the next several months I would be the waking and wakeful prisoner of the hominoids who were my subjects. We have killed off most of the “primitive” peoples of Earth, but on paradoxical BoskVeld I still had a job.
And when Benedict turned the copter under those three antique-gold moons and flew it back to base camp like a crepitating dragonfly, I knew I had to pursue that job. But the jungle was bleak, and strange, and nightmarishly real; and all I could think was There are no more pygmies, there are no more pygmies, there are no
*
* This was Chaney’s private and idiosyncratic term for the rainforest that we called either the Calyptran Wilderness or the Wild. T. D. B.
*
Methods: A Dialogue
From the professional notebooks of Egan Chaney: I was not the first Earthling to go among the Asadi, but I was the first to live with them for an extended period. The first of us to encounter the Asadi was Oliver Oliphant Frasier, the man who gave these hominoids their name—perhaps on analogy with the word Ashanti, the name of an African people who still exist, but more likely from the old Arabic word meaning lion, asad.
Oliver Oliphant Frasier had reported that the Asadi of BoskVeld had no speech as we understood this concept, but that at one time they had possessed a “written language.” He used both these words loosely, I’m sure, and the anomaly of writing without speech was one that I hoped to throw some light on. In addition, Frasier had said that an intrepid ethnographer might hope to gain acceptance among the Asadi by a singularly unorthodox stratagem. I will describe this stratagem by setting down here a conversation I had with my pilot and research assistant, Thomas Benedict. In actual fact, this conversation never took place—but my resorting to dialogue may be helpful at this point. Benedict, no doubt, will forgive me.
BENEDICT: Listen, Chaney, what do you plan on doing after I drop you all by your lonesome into the Wild? You aren’t thinking of using the standard anthropological ploy, are you? You know, marching right into the Asadi hamlet and exclaiming, “I am the Great White God of whom your legends foretell”?
CHANEY: Hardly. In fact, I won’t go into the Asadi clearing until morning.
BENEDICT: Then why the hell do I have to copter you into the Wild in the middle of the goddamn night?
CHANEY: To humor a lovable eccentric. No, no, Ben. Don’t revile me. The matter is fairly simple. Frasier said that the Asadi community clearing is absolutely vacant during the night; not a soul remains there between dusk and sunrise. The community members return to the clearing only when Denebola has grown fat and coppery on the eastern horizon.
BENEDICT: And you want to be dropped at night?
CHANEY: Yes, to give the noise of the Dragonfly a chance to fade and be forgotten, and to afford me the opportunity of walking into the Asadi clearing with the first morning arrivals. Just as if I belonged there.
BENEDICT: Oh, indeed yes. You’ll be very inconspicuous, Chaney. You’ll be accepted immediately—even though the Asadi are naked, have eyes that look like the murky glass in the bottoms of old bottles, and boast great natural collars of silver or tawny fur. Oh, indeed yes.
CHANEY: No, Ben, not immediately accepted.
BENEDICT: But almost?
CHANEY: Yes, I think so.
BENEDICT: How do you plan on accomplishing this miracle?
CHANEY: Frasier called the stratagem I hope to employ “acceptance through social invisibility.” The principle is again a simple one: I feign the role of an Asadi pariah. This tactic gains me a kind of acceptance because Asadi mores demand that the pariah’s presence be totally ignored. He is outcast not in a physical, but a psychological, sense. Consequently, my presence in the clearing will be a negative one, an admission I’ll readily make—but in some ways this negative existence will permit me more latitude of movement and observation than if I were an Asadi in good standing.
BENEDICT: Complicated, Chaney, and it leaves me with two burning questions. How do you go about achieving pariahhood, and what happens to the anthropologist’s crucial role as a gatherer of folk material: songs, cosmologies, ritual incantations? Won’t your “invisibility” deprive you of your cherished one-to-one relationships with those Asadi members who might be most informative?
CHANEY: I’ll take your last question first. Frasier told us the Asadi don’t communicate through speech. That in itself limits me to observation. No need to worry about songs or incantations. Their cosmologies I’ll have to infer from what I see. As for their interpersonal communications, even should I learn what there are, I may not be physically equipped to use them. The Asadi aren’t human, Ben.
BENEDICT: I know. Tell me how one of them attains to pariahhood?
CHANEY: We still don’t know much about which offenses warrant that punishment. We do, however, know how the Asadi distinguish the outcast from other members of the community.
BENEDICT: How?
CHANEY: They shave the offender’s collar of fur. Because all adult Asadi have these manes, regardless of sex, this manner of distinguishing the pariah is universal and certain.
BENEDICT: Then you’re already a pariah?
CHANEY: I hope so. But I’ll have to shave every day. Frasier believed his hairlessness—he was nearly bald—led him to make those few discoveries about the Asadi we now possess. But he arrived among them during a period of strange inactivity and so spent a lot of time studying the artifacts of an older Asadi culture: the remains of a temple or pagoda between the jungle and the sea. I’ve also heard he lacked the patience essential for field work.
BENEDICT: Just a minute. Couldn’t one of the Asadi be shorn of his mane accidentally? He’d be an outcast through no fault of his own, an artificial pariah.
CHANEY: It’s not very likely. Frasier reported that the Asadi have no natural enemies, that the Synesthesia Wild appears almost wholly devoid of life beyond the Asadi, not counting plants, insects, and various microscopic forms. Also, the loss of one’s collar through whatever means requires punishment. That’s the only offense that Frasier firmly established. The others, as I’ve said, we don’t really know.
BENEDICT: If the jungles are devoid of living prey, what do the Asadi eat?
CHANEY: We don’t really know that, either.
BENEDICT: Well, listen, Chaney, what do you plan to live on? I mean, even Malinowski condescended to eat now and again.
CHANEY: That’s where you come in, Ben. I’ll carry in sufficient rations for a week. But each week for several months you’ll need to make a food-and-supply drop in the place you first set me down. I’ve picked the spot. I know its distance and direction from the Asadi clearing. It’ll cost, but the people in base camp—Eisen, at the top—have agreed that this work is vital. You won’t be forced to defend the drops.
BENEDICT: But why so often? Why once a week?
CHANEY: That’s Eisen’s idea, not mine. When I told him I’d refuse any contact at all during my field work—any contact with you people, I mean—he decided the weekly drop would be the best way to make sure, periodically, that I’m still alive.
BENEDICT: A weapon?
CHANEY: No, no weapons. Besides food, I’ll portage in only my notebooks, recorders, some reading material, a medical kit, and maybe a little something to get me over the inevitable periods of depression.
BENEDICT: A radio for immediate help?
CHANEY: No. I may get ill once or twice, but I’ll have flares if things get really bad. Placenol, lorqual, and bourbon, too. But I insist on absolute separation from any of the affairs of base camp until I’ve concluded my stay among the Asadi.
BENEDICT: Why are you doing this? I don’t mean why did Eisen decide we ought to study the Asadi so minutely. I mean, why are you, Egan Chaney, committing yourself to this ritual sojourn among an alien people? Others could have volunteered, I’m sure.
CHANEY: Because, Ben, there are no more pygmies . . .
—End of simulated dialogue on initial methods.
Perhaps I’ve made Benedict out a much more inquisitive fellow than he truly is. All those intelligent questions! Actually, Ben is glibly voluble about his past without being especially informative. In that, he’s a lot like me . . . But when you peruse the notes for this study, Ben, remember that I let you slip in one or two unanswered hits. Can the mentor-pupil relationship go deeper than that? Can friendship? As a man whose life’s work involves accepting a multitude of perspectives, I believe I’ve played you fair, Ben.
Forgive me my trespass.
*
Contact and Assimilation
From the private journals of Egan Chaney: Thinking There are no more pygmies, there are no more pygmies, there are no . . . I lay down beneath a tree resembling an outsized rubber plant and I slept. I slept without dreaming, or else I had a grotesque nightmare that, upon waking, I suppressed. A wrist alarm woke me.
The light from Denebola had begun to copper-coat the edges of the leaves in the Synesthesia Wild. Still, dawn had not quite come. The world was silent. I refused to let the Wild distort my senses. I did not wish to cut myself on the crimsons, the yellows, the orchid blues. Nor did I have any desire to taste the first slight treacherous breeze, nor to hear the dawn detonate behind my retinas.
Therefore, I shook myself awake and began walking. Beyond the brutal fact of direction, I paid no attention to my surroundings. The clearing where the Asadi would soon congregate compelled me toward it. That fateful place drew me on. Everything else slipped out of my consciousness: blazing sky, moist earth, singing fronds. Would the Asadi accept me among them as they negatively accept their outcasts? Upon this hope I had founded nearly five months of future activity. Everything, I realized, floundering through the tropical undergrowth, derived from my hope in an external sign of pariahhood; not a whit of my master strategy had I based on the genuine substance of this condition.
It was too late to reverse either my aims or the direction of my footsteps. You must let the doubt die. You must pattern the sound of your footfalls after the pattern of falling feet—those falling feet converging with you upon the clearing where the foliage parts and the naked Asadi assemble together like a convention of unabashed mutes. And so I patterned the sounds of my footfalls after theirs.
Glimpsed through rents in the fretworkings of leaves, an Asadi’s flashing arm.
Seen as a shadow among other shadows on the dappled ground, the forward-moving image of an Asadi’s maned head. The Wild trembled with morning movement. I was surrounded by unseen and half-seen communicants, all of us converging.
And then the foliage parted and we were together on the open jungle floor, the Asadi clearing, the holy ground perhaps, the unadorned territory of their gregariousness and communion, the focal point of Asadi life. The awesome odor of this life—so much milling life—assailed me.
No matter. I adjusted.
Great grey-fleshed creatures, their heads heavy with ragged drapings of fur, milled about me, revolved about one another, and came back to me seeking some confirmation of my essential whatness. I could do nothing but wait. I waited. My temples pulsed. Denebola shot poniards of light through the trees. Hovering, then moving away, averting their murky eyes, the Asadi—individual by individual, I noticed—made their decision and that first indispensable victory was in my grasp: I was ignored!
*
Xenology: In-The-Field Report
From the professional files of the library of the Third Denebolan Expedition: I have been here two weeks. Last night I picked up the second of Benedict’s food drops. Happily, they come on time, arriving on the same coordinates where Ben first set me down. The Asadi do not eat as we do, and the Synesthesia Wild provides me with foodstuffs neither in the way of edible vegetation nor in that of small game. I cannot tolerate the plants; as our base-camp biochemists predicted, most of them induce almost immediate vomiting, or their furry bitterness dissuades one from swallowing them. A few may be edible, or may have juices pleasing to the palate—Frasier, after all, discovered the tree from which we distill the intoxicant lorqual—but I’m no expert at plant identification. As for animals, none exist but Asadi. The jungle is stagnant with writhing fronds, with the heat, steam, and infrasonic vibrancy of continual photosynthesis. Rainwater I can drink. Thank God for that, but I do boil it before considering it potable.
I have reached a few speculative conclusions about the Asadi.
With them nothing is certain. Their behavior, though it must have a deep-seated sociobiological function, does not make sense to me. At this stage—as I often remind myself—that’s to be expected. But I persist. I wonder, “If you can’t subsist on what BoskVeld gives you, how do the Asadi?” My observations in this area have given me the intellectual nourishment to combat despair. Nothing else on BoskVeld has offered a morsel of consolation. In answer to the question, “What do the Asadi eat?” I can truthfully respond, “Everything I do not.”
They appear to be herbivorous. In fact, they eat wood. Yes, wood. I have seen them strip bark from rubber trees, rainthorn, alien mangroves, and lattice-sail trees, and ingest it without difficulty or qualm. I’ve seen them eat pieces of the hearts of young saplings, wood of what we would regard as prohibitive hardness even for creatures equipped to digest it.
Three days ago I boiled down several pieces of bark akin to that so many of the young Asadi consume. I boiled it until the pieces were pliable. I managed to chew the bark for several minutes and finally to swallow it. Checking my stool a day later, I found that this “meal” had gone right through me. Bark consists of cellulose: indigestible cellulose. And yet the Asadi eat wood and digest it. How? Again, I speculate. I believe the Asadi digest wood as earthly termites do—with the aid of intestinal bacteria, protozoa that break down the cellulose. A symbiosis, as Benedict might say, versed as he is in biological and ecological theory.
Later: I must talk tonight, if only to this device. With the coming of darkness, the Asadi have again fled into the jungle, and I am alone.
On my first three nights, I too returned to the Wild when Denebola set—to the place where Benedict had dropped me, where I curled up beneath the palm and lattice-sail leaves, slept through the night, and from which I joined the inevitable dawn pilgrimage of the Asadi back to this clearing. Now I stay here all night. I sleep on the clearing’s edge, just deep enough into the foliage to find shelter. I revisit the jungle only to fetch my food drops.
Although the Asadi disapprove of my behavior, because I am an outcast they cannot act to discipline me without violating their own injunction against recognizing a pariah’s existence. As they depart each evening, some of the older Asadi—those with white streaks in their mangy collars—halt briefly beside me and breathe with exaggerated heaviness. They don’t look at me because that, I assume, is taboo. But I don’t look at them, either. Ignoring them as if they were pariahs, I’ve thereby dispensed with those senseless and wearying treks in and out of the clearing that so exhausted me initially.
To absolve myself of a seeming lack of thoroughness, I must mention that on my fourth and fifth nights here I tried to follow two different Asadi specimens into the jungle—in order to learn where and how they slept and what occupies their waking time when they are away from the clearing. But I was not successful.
When evening comes, the Asadi disperse. No two individuals remain together, not even the young with their parents. Each Asadi—I believe—finds a place of his or her own, one wholly removed from that of any other Asadi. This practice runs counter to my experience with almost every other social group I’ve studied—but is somewhat analogous to the solitary nest building of chimpanzees, as often observed in the Gombe Stream Reserve in East Africa. Female chimps, however, do sleep with their young. Now that I think of it, perhaps female Asadis do, too. . . . In any case, I was humiliatingly outdistanced by the objects of my pursuit. Nor can I suppose I’d have any more success with different specimens, given that I chose to follow an aged, decrepit-seeming Asadi on my first evening and a small, barely pubescent creature on my second. Both ran with persuasive strength, flashed into the trees as if still arboreal by nature, and then flickered from my vision and my grasp. . . .
Two moons gleam, burnt-gold and unreal. Shadows and growing loneliness net me in. Field conditions have seldom been so austere, and I’ve begun to wonder if the Asadi were ever intelligent. Maybe I’m studying a Denebolan baboon. Oliver Oliphant Frasier, though, reported that the Asadi once had a written language and a distinctive system of architecture. He was not forthcoming about how he reached these conclusions—but the Synesthesia Wild contains many secrets. Later I’ll act more resolutely. But for today, I’ve got to try to understand the Asadi who are alive today. They conceal the key to their own, and the distant Ur’sadi, past.
One or two final things before I try to sleep:
First, the eyes of the Asadi, which are somewhat as Benedict noted them in the imaginary dialogue I wrote two weeks ago. That is, like the bottoms of thick-glassed bottles. Except that the eye actually consists of two parts: a thin transparent covering, apparently hard, like plastic, and the complex, membranous organ of sight that this covering protects. It’s as if each Asadi is born wearing preattached safety glasses.
Frasier’s impression of their eyes as “murky” is one not wholly supported by continued observation. What he saw as murkiness may have resulted from the fact that Asadi eyes—behind the outer lens or cap—almost continually change colors. Sometimes the speed with which a yellow replaces an indigo, a green a yellow, etc., makes it difficult for a mere human being to see any particular color at all. Maybe this accounts for Frasier’s perception of their eyes as “murky.” I am certain, though, that this chameleonic quality of their eyes has social significance.
Secondly, despite the absence of any discernible social order among the Asadi, today I may have witnessed an event of the first importance to my so far unhappy efforts to chart their group relationships. Previously, no real order at all existed. Dispersal at night, congregation in the morning—if you choose to call that order. But nothing else. Random milling about during the day, with no set times for eating, sex, or their recurrent bloodless feuds. Random plunges into the jungle at night. What’s a humble human to make of all this? A society bound by institutionalized antisocialness? What happened today sabotages that conclusion.
Maybe.
This afternoon, an old Asadi whom I’d never seen before stumbled into the clearing. His mane was grizzled, his face puckered, his hands shriveled, his ashen body bleached to a dingy cream. But so agile was he in the Wild that no one detected his presence until his oddly clumsy entry into the clearing. Then everyone fled. Heedless, he sat in the center of the Asadi gathering place and folded his long, sparsely haired legs. By this time, his conspecifics were in the jungle staring back at him from the clearing’s edge. Only at sunset had I ever witnessed the Asadi desert the clearing en masse. But I still haven’t exhausted the strangeness of this old man’s visit. You see, he came accompanied. With a small, purplish-black creature perched on his shoulder. It resembled all at once a winged lizard, a bat, and a deformed homunculus. But whereas the old man had great round eyes that changed color extremely slowly, if at all, the creature on his shoulder lacked even a pair of empty sockets. It was blind—by virtue of its lack of any organs of sight. It sat on the aged guy’s shoulder compulsively manipulating its tiny hands, tugging at the Asadi’s mane, then opening and closing them on empty air before once again tugging at its protector’s grizzled collar.
Together, the old man and his beastlike/manlike familiar had a furious unreality. They existed at a spiritual as well as a physical distance. The rest of the Asadi—those who surrounded and ignored me on the periphery of the communion ground—behaved not as if they feared these rare visitors, but as if they felt a loathsome kinship. This is hard to express. Bear with me. Maybe another analogy will help: the Asadi behaved toward their visitors as a fastidious child might behave toward a parent who has contracted a venereal disease. Love and loathing, shame and respect together. The episode ended when the old man, oblivious to the slow swelling and sedate flapping of his huri, rose from the ground, and stalked back into the Wild, scattering Asadi in his wake. (Huri is my self-coined portmanteau word for fury and harpy.)
Then everything returned to “normal.” The clearing filled again, and their ceaseless and senseless milling about resumed. God, it’s amazing how lonely loneliness can be when the sky contains a pair of nuggetlike moons and the human being within has surrendered to the essence of that which should command only one’s outward life. That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? What I mean is that small struggle now roils between Egan Chaney, cultural xenologist, and Egan Chaney, the quintessential man, a struggle more the consequence of environmental pressure than of genetic heritage. That’s a sly little anthropological allusion, Moses. Don’t fret it. You aren’t supposed to understand it.
But enough.
Today’s atypical occurrence has sharpened my appetite for observation and temporarily calmed my internal struggle. I will stay here a year, if need be, even though the original plan was for only six months.
Dear, dear God, look at those moons!
*
The Asadi Clearing: A Clarification
From Egan Chaney’s professional notebooks: My big collegiate failing was an inability to organize. A specter of that failing haunts me today. Therefore, a digression of sorts.
In looking over these quirkish notes, I see I may have given the reader the false idea that the Asadi clearing is small, say fifteen by fifteen meters. Not so. As best as I can determine, there are about five hundred Asadi here. This figure includes mature adults, adolescents, and animals between age and youth, but, surprisingly, no “children” or “infants.” By most demographic and anthropological estimates, five hundred represents an optimal tribal size.
Of course, during all my time here, I’ve never been sure that the same animals return to the clearing every morning. Perhaps a monumental shift takes place in the jungle, one group of Asadi replacing another each day. But I doubt it. The Wild encompasses a finite (though large) area, after all, and I have learned to recognize a few of the more distinctive Asadi.
Therefore, five hundred seems about right: five hundred grey-fleshed creatures strolling, halting, bending and glaring at one another, eating, grappling like wrestlers, copulating, obeying no clock but the sun, their activities devoid of any clear sequence or rationale. Such activity takes a fair amount of space, however, and their clearing provides it.
Do not assume, then, that the Asadi communion ground is a mere mudbox between a BoskVeld cypress and a malodorous sump hole. Not at all. Their communion ground has both size and symmetry, and the Asadi keep it discrete from the encroaching jungle by unremitting daily activity. I won’t quote dimensions, however; I will merely note that the clearing has the rectangular shape, the characteristic slope, and the practical roominess of a twentieth-century football or soccer field: pure coincidence, I’m sure.
Astroturf and lime-rendered hash marks are both totally absent.
*
A Dialogue of Self and Soul
From Egan Chaney’s private correspondence: The title of this exercise is from William Butler Yeats, dear Ben. The substance of my dialogue, however, has almost nothing to do with the Old Master’s poem of the same name.
I wrote this imaginary exchange in one of my notebooks while waiting out a long night on the edge of the Asadi clearing (just off the imaginary thirty-yard line on the south end of the field, western sideline), and I intend for no one to read it, Ben, but you. Its lack of objectivity and the conclusions drawn by its adversaries make it unsuitable for the formal ethnography I have yet to write.*
[* Even though we shared dormitory space for a time, Chaney “mailed” me the letter containing this dialogue. We never discussed his “letter.” T. D. B.]
But you, Ben, will understand that a xenologist is also a human being and may, I hope, forgive me. Because I have withheld my Self from you in our many one-sided conversations (you dominated them, I know, because my silence was a spur to your volubility), here I mean to show you the mind that my silences concealed.
But one can never tell the players without a program, so I herewith offer a program. The numbers on the players’ metaphysical jerseys are, yes, Self and Soul.
PROGRAM
Self = The Cultural Xenologist
Soul = The Quintessential Man
Manager(s): Egan Chaney
SELF: This is my eighteenth night in the Synesthesia Wild.
SOUL: I’ve been here forever. But let that go. What have you learned?
SELF: Most of my observations lead me to declare emphatically that the Asadi are not fit subjects for “anthropological” study. They manifest no purposeful social activity. They do not use tools. They have less social organization than did most of the extinct earthly primates and hominids, including our few extant chimpanzees and baboons. Only the visit, three days ago, of the “old man” and his disturbing companion indicates even a remote possibility that I’m dealing with intelligence. How can I continue?
SOUL: Out of contempt for the revulsion daily growing in you. Because the Asadi are, in fact, intelligent—just as Oliver Oliphant Frasier said they were.
SELF: But how do I know that what you insist is true is really true? Blind acceptance of Frasier’s word?
SOUL: There are signs, Chaney. The eyes, for instance. But even if there weren’t, you’d admit the Asadi are as intelligent in their own way as you or I, wouldn’t you, Egan?
SELF: Yes. Their elusive intelligence haunts me.
SOUL: Now you’ve misstated the facts—you’ve twisted things around horribly.
SELF: How? What do you mean?
SOUL: You’re not the haunted one, Egan Chaney. You’re too rational a creature to be the prey of poltergeist. I’m the haunted and bedeviled one, the one ridden by every insidious spirit of doubt and revulsion.
SELF: Revulsion? You’ve used that word before. Why do you insist upon it? What does it mean?
SOUL: That I hate the Asadi. I despise their every significant—or insignificant—act. They curdle my essence with their alienness. And because they do, you, too, Egan Chaney, hate them—for you’re just the civilized veneer on my primordial responses to the world. It’s I who haunt you, not the Asadi.
SELF: While they, in turn, haunt you. Is that it?
SOUL: It is. But although you’re aware of my hatred for the Asadi, you pretend that part of my hatred which seeps into you qualifies as a kind of professional resentment. You believe you resent the Asadi for destroying your scientific detachment. In truth, that detachment doesn’t exist. You feel the same powerful revulsion for their alienness that roils in me, the same abiding, deep-seated hatred. I haunt you.
SELF: With hatred for the Asadi?
SOUL: Yes. I admit it, Egan. So admit that even as a scientist you hate them.
SELF: No, damn you, I won’t. Because we killed the pygmies, every one of them. How can I say, “I hate the Asadi, I hate the Asadi,” when we slew every pygmy? —Even though, God forgive me, I do. . . .