In the dystopian epic Mountains Oceans Giants, the most momentous step in alienating humanity from the natural world is the development and free distribution of Synthetic Food, made almost entirely from inorganic matter. The masses at first welcome their freedom from agrarian toil and the vagaries of the weather, but over just a few generations the drawbacks can no longer be ignored.
1. Meki
The Promethean urge to bend the world to human purposes achieves a major ‘success’, with enormous implications for the environment and human wellbeing. (This excerpt was first published by The Brooklyn Rail in December 2016 at http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/german/mountains-oceans-giants)
2. The first impacts
Consumerism laid bare as the political control of the masses
3. Degeneration
Against the hideous Promethean reality behind Synthetic Food, primal yearnings for a life connected to nature re-emerge.
4. Awareness
Strolling players from Africa dramatise the dire predicament of the degenerating European masses.
Meki
The Promethean urge to bend the world to human purposes achieves a major ‘success’ with enormous implications for the environment and human wellbeing.
WITH THE synthesis of artificial foodstuffs in the twenty-sixth century, an unprecedented global change of course set in. It transformed every condition of life, and at the same time necessitated a reversion to a strict – the strictest – regime of government. No well-meaning objections could counter the force of this necessity. Those who pursued the dreadful invention most intensively, and precipitated the reaction to it, came to prominence from among the masses. The leading senates had avidly promoted the work; its success threw them into turmoil. When the first happy results were obtained after decades of trials they were shocked, at first called a halt to the work, wanted to start over; then held back the results. The invention must not be revealed, the researchers must be confined to their own circles. For decades in Chicago and Edinburgh the experimental arrays lay ready which, if activated, were bound to have a catastrophic impact on the way humans lived together.
They had not simply followed a path of inorganic synthesis, but worked outward from observations of plant and animal organisms. Ultramicroscopic observations and ultrafine measurements of living organs had, after enormous difficulties wrong tacks, after exhausting work by battalions of chemists physicists physiologists, achieved clarity about the processes of change in living bodies. It required major advances in physics, in the construction of ultramicroscopes, apparatus for electrical measurements. Alice Layard in Chicago, a white woman, a wonderful example of humanity, fantastically beautiful, was the decisive stimulus for the measurement the automatic charting of ancillary micro-electrical and heat processes in organic cells. The goal of laying bare the complex mechanisms of assembly and disassembly lay now within reach.
Physicists and chemists emancipated themselves from animal and plant life. For a long time, reluctantly, with a half-laugh, thoughts of famine had surfaced: a single dry summer could inflict it on an entire region; absurd human thraldom to heat and drought. These chemists and physicists hated nothing so much as a green field of crops, meadows, the grotesque assemblage of a herd of cattle. As in earlier ages, slaughterhouses sausage-shops bakeries still obtruded into daily life. Bakeries: already mentioned on ancient Assyrian clay tablets.
In the townzone of Edinburgh, the great Meki headed the leading laboratory. Two hundred selected personnel worked there. For years on end those not occupied with inconsequential sub-routines never left the zone. Meki, a member of the Edinburgh senate, was constrained by the senate to watch his colleagues closely, not shy from interning them on the slightest suspicion.
People spoke then and later of Meki’s Green Round Table. All his men and women wore identical green clothes. All two hundred sat at tables in the refectory in the big residential building behind the institute. Inside the horseshoe-shaped space formed by their tables stood smaller tables, at which purple-clad people ate and drank: these were called guests. If someone said “guest”, a newcomer to the institute would curl the upper lip in a smile; older colleagues would frown. For these were human sacrifices, used for the experiments once they had reached a specific stage. They looked like anyone else; their appearance gradually changed; they were replaced. The senate sent the people to them as needed, never anyone uneasy or nervous, no one harbouring suspicions, but always a random selection from those willing to help and believing they were being inducted into secrets. But they were not inducted, those hundred people who wondered about the daily weight checks, the temperature taking, the ushering into a gas chamber. But they offered no objection, for they could see that green-clad colleagues also underwent weighing and checking. They walked with the others in the woods, ran, played sports, but always some went missing. They did not see the hospital lying far to the rear with its thousand beds for humans, next to the stables for sick horses and dogs. For so many sick piled up from time to time. They lay singly in private rooms; none ever spoke to others; and any who recovered were transferred to Chicago, near Alice Layard’s facility, which Edinburgh wanted to keep an eye on.
Meki’s Purples also knew nothing of the big strange cemetery. Small concrete cellars were dug into the ground, and brightly lit. If you went down the steps, there before a deeply scalloped wall stood an array of flasks glasses beakers, their openings either stoppered or fitted with taps through which gaseous matter flowed hissing in and out. Little humming ventilator fans drew the cellar’s acrid sour air out through a flue. Each flask and beaker was labelled; a great ledger full of notations was chained to the wall. The Purples were harassed even after death: changes in their organs once interactions with other organs had ceased were investigated further. The Greens were never indifferent when one of those died and lost what was flippantly called their “soul”, their “life”. From the refectories and laboratories they strolled to the cemetery, made further measurements of heat, drew off fluids, added substances, regulated gas flows, ran electric current, sent rays surging through inert body parts.
The Purples never knew what was being done to them. They thought they were living eating breathing drinking like the others. But they ate pretend food, drank pretend drinks; in their rooms, their secure rooms set well back, they breathed air saturated with secret substances. What was set before them in the horseshoe-shaped space between the chattering tables of the Greens looked like chops, tasted like sauces wine cakes coffee chocolate. Now and again, at the start almost always, the chop the sauce were actually there, a vehicle for the experimental material. Later, only pretend food was presented: gelatinous masses that looked like meat, with meat’s toughness or the consistency of liver. These were enriched with whatever substances were currently being investigated.
They went about here in the woods rooms halls, these Purples, the guests, young men and women of every race, as if it were nothing. Now and then some would be fetched away of an evening, a man and a woman. Two or three Greens would be in the silent bedroom, would look at the being who stood upright, having dropped its bright-coloured clothes to the floor, would ask the female the male if they were ready to sacrifice one of their limbs. The being would start, and scream, would at once be sedated. Or it would slowly lower its head, look from one Green to another, ponder and ask tremulous questions. There were many who did not scream, but pondered and questioned. They accepted every explanation. “Why not? Why not?” came from clenched teeth, “if you can manage it.” And they went between Greens, bowels loosening, stumbling and distracted, steered along corridors. “Nothing to do with me. Show what you can do.”
And their eyes swept triumphantly, as if it were they who had set it all up, over the dazzlingly lit white-tiled observation hall, the tables on which the apparatus stood, the curious glass caskets almost like coffins in which lay people and linen-covered assemblages of limbs that moved, straightened fingers, gripped. They took in the scene with pleasure. Humming buzzing all around. A strange heat was wafting everywhere, came from gaps in the glass caskets in which people, surrounded by tubes and wires, washed by fluids, lay with eyes closed, brightly lit, chest visibly rising and sinking. Soon they too, swelling with joy, had the enrapturing mask over their face.
All around them in glass cabinets, in caskets waterbeds, at differing temperatures from the cold of soil to high heat, pale and ruddy organs and organ parts either covered or bare lay on cotton wool, floated in harnesses. Standing jars pumped nutrient transfusion serum through narrow tubes. This serum also trickled through the bodies the muscles of the unconscious dormant opened up people, men and women from Uganda from Cape Town London, from wherever it was they had been herded here. Everywhere monitoring apparatus had been inserted into the living organisms, living organs, pulsing organ parts. Greens went here and there, took cell samples, carried them in dishes to other caskets. Enormously tall glass cylinders, in which pale red-veined intestines moved slowly like worms in their mesenteric tissue, either severed from or connected to the organism. Substances were sprayed dusted painted onto them, changes observed in the oozing mucous membrane, the thin intestinal wall. Many of the people had had their skulls opened, the hairy scalp lay beside them, the protruding pulsing brain behind them in a warm liquid bed. Blue bulging veins curled thickly over the pale convoluted mass; it had been opened up, wires and little tubes inserted deep into it. Wires and little tubes led as well to the intestines, the blood, the liver. Everything was connected up to gleaming metal apparatus, transmitting registering. Men and women in face masks went on rubber soles through the spaces where no sound could be heard apart from an occasional songlike moan from the glass caskets. Heavy metal walls, movable, separated the tiled spaces from strongly walled spaces where plants, trees low and tall, grew in beds mounds of earth. These too were enmeshed in a confusion of wires and little tubes. They were split open, bored through; connectors were let into crowns stems roots. In some lofty rooms a cool breeze blew; in others the air lay heavy; red green phosphorescent lights glimmered on the plants.
In small and inconspicuous sombre workshop-like side rooms and cellars, in vats, steaming cauldrons and cabinets, the main work of the facility was done: the emulation and reconstruction of the observed processes, first with copious living tissue from the animals and plants in the neighbouring rooms, then with ever smaller amounts. The assistive fluids and cells were reduced to an absolute minimum; it went so far that Meki said he needed no more living substance for a type of fat or protein group than the brewer of earlier days needed hops for his beer. In actual fact Meki never succeeded in doing entirely without organic material. And the work that represented the first step in the practical development of the enterprise was the fitting out of giant hangars for the conservation and breeding of specific cell materials from animal and plant bodies.
In the end, little long-bearded man Meki – he was a sceptic philosopher, with eyes that blinked, and when he spoke to someone he looked down at the floor beside them – had a house built for himself in the forested grounds of the facility, a long way from the laboratories and quarters, which to the delighted surprise of his uninitiated assistants was exactly like a factory. They watched as apparatus they had used on the organs in the halls of the living and in the cemetery rooms was transferred to the hundred cell-like spaces in the building. They brought drums of chemicals, set up gas emitters. They saw how the spaces, floor by floor, comprised a unity, how substances flowing from one space to the next always with a change of temperature were following a path, here lingering, there passing swiftly through, became altered as they mixed smelted dissolved with others. The small building surrounded by gardens and walls, completely windowless, receiving air through intakes in just one room, this lightproofed airproofed house was filled with a cacophony of snuffling tootling rumbling noises. When you approached from outside, it purred in every cranny like an angry beast; to exclude all light the external walls were clad in a continuous sheath of black glass.
When snippets first reached Chicago about the synthesis of artificial food, the extreme agitation this occasioned in the city led New York and London to alert allied states and townzone leagues to the dangers of rash decision-making, to caution against an overhasty rollout of the technology. But since Chicago had been moving forward independently, and Alice Layard had declared publicly that she already had the means to nourish whole populations decade after decade without the need for fields or sun, the only recourse was to minimise as far as possible the risks of the new invention.
It was known that Alice Layard was a leading figure in the North American sororities. Sorority members pointed out to her what a dreadful weapon women would have in their hands if they were to reserve the synthesis to themselves; they meant to prompt Alice, that capricious being, to keep the technology secret and make Chicago the centre of a gynarchical state. Alice, however, could not deny herself her triumph over millions of men; she could not keep quiet. But in the Chicago Senate she was soon alone against the men. This she could not tolerate. She demanded influence again in her sorority; but the women’s support came with hostility. Then she played one of those tricks that women were often said to use. She turned up at her sorority, spoke darkly of misunderstandings around herself and her actions; soon all would be clearer. Then for months nothing was heard of her.
In the region around the Chicago townzone, to which unprecedented streams of people were making their way, the artificially nourished began to fall sick. Meki was summoned by the Senate to Chicago to explain the process. Meki was a cool customer, used to swift action. From afar he had suspected beriberi or scrofula; but when he saw the people in the streets or in their houses, the thousands struck down by fits and paralysis, it became clear to him that foul deeds were afoot to discredit the process. The toxic stages of certain protein bodies had always been held back. His observations revealed Alice Layard, to his astonishment, as the witting saboteur of his work. He found the lovely pale woman with the acute mind resting in her apartment; she was distraught, depressed, unwilling to talk to him. She was not brought down by the disaster she had caused, but by the vengeful hardness of those of her own gender, who now also rejected her. She could not wash her hands of it; just dug deeper. The Chicago Senate, disturbed and deeply aggrieved by information on the case, had this lovely being, who had enjoyed such fame and was the pride of half the world, beaten to death in her apartment by five Blacks. Women said nothing.
The first impacts
Consumerism laid bare as the political control of the masses
NOT LIKE rain directed from a sprinkler onto a parched field of beets, but like a bull led down a lane, restrained left and right by iron staves: thus, prodding restraining, did the great western townzones in the second third of the twenty-sixth century unleash this monstrous innovation onto their populations. No other event before or since so welded together senates new ruling elites, gave them the strength of rock. Now people would find out what they were. Everyone saw the great example set by England, wise experienced queen-leader of the human masses, who treated the great Meki as Spain once treated the much inferior Christopher Columbus: they imprisoned him for almost ten years in his Edinburgh facility. Released to attend a conference in London, Meki took his own life.
London understood that monopoly control of the secrets of the synthesis and all the facilities was essential, and that with this would come unprecedented power. While sister-city New York dithered, London’s calm silent men and smiling women had already constructed facility after facility in Wales and Cornwall. And while senates on the continents advised delaying tactics, rationing the roll-out to the masses, suddenly one May day the London Senate announced the menacing news to all its directly controlled and allied zones, released the number and locations of the strongly defended factories, named Meki, the fabled dead man, and ordered memorials to be erected in every large centre on the anniversary of his suicide.
The Senate coolly allowed this blow to whistle down on its European and African regions. It pointed out the very limited workforce needed for synthetic sugar fat meat-tissue; pushed internally to secure control of the innovation, and externally to turn the substances created by science into pleasing amenities for all; declared a new era for the work of humanity: this triumph lifted a burden from a mankind striving for freedom and dignity.
London knew there would be upsets and disturbances in all its zones of influence, and also that it would end up master of the situation. With bated breath the continental states and great townzones watched where London was going, its determination, looking centuries ahead, to show weaker daughter-states what path they should follow: absolute possession of the levers of power by a trusted clique. Turbulence erupted in the zones ruled by England in the British Isles and Africa.
Nothing can compare to the rapidly growing tumult that within a few weeks enveloped those areas, notably in southern Africa, devoted to agriculture and livestock rearing. When the great townzones halted the summer migration of cattle to high pastures. When granaries were no longer guarded, doors left open, flour spilling by the sackful over the courtyard. In many places hardly a decade passed before great mill complexes appeared, constructed on new principles; they covered the area of a large village, were surrounded by playgrounds houses shopping malls. Granaries were allowed to close down, were then set on fire by idle mobs, who left their places of residence, gravitated to large centres in search of a goal. The townzones themselves were undermined, the halls of great factories lay deserted.
Out into the world flooded those who had lived on the land, the peasantry scattering, waves of men and women who had provided iron tools for the fields, had smelted annealed forged trimmed cooled polished. In this heaving humanity swirled a to-and-fro of feelings. No one went short of food, no one could claim they had been deprived of anything, yet they bled, were recalcitrant, glowered when they were driven from the oven, let the mill stand idle. They would be told, so they learned in the centres, what it was they should do; they would want for nothing. And initial doubts were laid to rest by the fact: iron trains laden with barrels and sacks still rolled up to the same sheds where flour was once unloaded. Even as all the granaries were being emptied and torched by howling mobs without resistance from the senates, indeed clearly with their approval, bakery shelves groaned under lavish displays of bread and cakes. London had advised the senates to hand out free flour for several weeks, in order to strengthen the impact and enhance the disorienting force of its blow. Great market halls for butter oil edible fats offered synthetic goods; to promote the changeover, these looked in shape and colour just like the natural product, though their consistency was firmer.
Laughing white black brown people went arm in arm through the halls of the English and South African centres. People thought they were in Cloud-Cuckoo Land. “They have synthetic animals. They can make trees.” Only the meat-like toughened gelatine, the vehicle for proteins, was mocked. What was trucked everywhere out of the factories in the form of sliceable brown and pink globs, some liver-like, some bone-like, softening when cooked, sometimes turning to mush, was spat out as unsuited to strong teeth that liked to rip and tear, cheek muscles that needed to chew and grind. Tastes drifted away from animal musculature. A period of grace was given to livestock-breeders livestock-herders, until they too gave way to Meki-meat. Dessert for the gourmet was now the boiled roast baked steamed flesh of real birds fish cows shelled creatures.
Fields abandoned, those vast expanses of land tended tilled loved over millennia by generation after generation. Jungles had been cleared, ensnaring vines pulled down.
Wild beasts had been shot, the tawny lion the panther. Termites had been chased away, streams diverted, huts built, solid houses, villages with dogs, sheds for hens geese cows.
In the southern zones there were districts that had been cleared and deforested only a century or two earlier. Northmen in their iron glory had come, had torn up ripped throttled the land, devoured mangled chewed plants and roots. Stones buried in the soil were lifted and dumped in rubble heaps. In the black bed left behind by the corpses of trees and plants they sowed pale delicate seeds by the million. The ground welcomed them, the seeds pushed green tips above the surface. Wide green fields, dense forests of stalks, ears of grain waving gently in the breeze. There they lay, beside the barns sheds living quarters that now were emptying. People returned to the vast cities. They encysted themselves in the cities. Left most of the Earth to itself. The ground rested.
Stalks grew wild, faded; bright flowers once called weeds proliferated among them, animals crept in, field-mice hopped about in the open.
The age-old ground lay silent under the alternating lights of the heavens, winds warmth thunderstorms pouring rain. Covered its nakedness with flowers plants animals, curled up like a hedgehog.
The masses of humanity, enticed into the cities, were firmly in the iron grip of their rulers.
Degeneration
Against the hideous Promethean reality behind Synthetic Food, primal yearnings for a life connected to nature re-emerge.
THE SHAMANS whispered: in the Meki-factories, unbelievably horrible things are done. They pile stones sand soil salts in the yards of the facilities, mills and crushing machines work away, wind blows through the buildings; they stir the mixture into huge basins with half-dead vegetation, trickle it over dying animals. These they keep alive, keep alive. Even before the Urals War there was vegetation, a green layer on the ponds in the facilities; they washed salts and soil through it. Human limbs lay there twitching, Negro and White, said to be a hundred years old, older. They live on the spirits of those dying mosses algae animals people, those fat-producing guts livers fish-bodies sheep-stomachs. How could stones soil salts chalk gravel water acids air be turned into the food we eat. In Meki-factories they tend the half-dead, the never-dying. No light of moon or sun shines in. No rain falls. There’s no spring summer autumn winter. Nothing but glass tubes, hot ovens, basins of marble and metal exposed to invisible rays, and in these they squeeze the substances together. But the never-dying plants and animals are forever harried to toil and never stop. Like a weary beast, ribs showing, whipped on to run and run, it obeys the whip, no longer bothers to whimper with eyes downcast under the blows – that’s how these exhausted spirits toil.
Tasty as they are, how bitter these foods seem on many a day. And yet these spirits are the only thing that has entered into them. For the rest, all you scoff is soil sand air salt. You are no different from those trapped plants and beasts. What does not live cannot die. Dying is a capability, like living. The ability to die is a power that only the living can possess.
And now came the climax of the shamanistic doctrine. They had observed and ascertained in a myriad ways that the townzones, buildings factories plazas streets stairs lanes roofs, were filled and saturated with ghosts. When they, the shamans, wrapped themselves in their cloaks so that they could not be harmed, and then at certain hours went through the streets calling the ancient Indian words “Oh Igak-chuati” – “For Thee!” – then they could see them through their glasses, teeming. Spirits thronging always around the temples, in the courtyards, outside the doors. More of them near the temples than elsewhere. Dangling from doorposts like handkerchiefs, they stretch thin as worms through keyholes, drift like smoke into walls. People think they are vapour that you can walk through. But they move so cold and uncanny, creepy and crawly, leave dampness and wetness on your skin, you can hardly breathe among them. All kinds of creatures, white halfbreed coloured, children men girls, as well as dogs cagebirds cats. Out in the street there are thousands. In the parks it’s terrifying how they bump around. They twine around each other, dangle swaying in treetops. In autumn they crawl into gaps in the bark, holes in the earth, try to enter the roots. Many trees are covered in them, like swarms of bees. Only when the shaman comes do they loosen their grip, whirl away high with a rushing sound, like a wetted finger sliding down a lutestring.
“When we call ‘For Thee, for Thee!” they calm down, act as if we aren’t there, as busy as ants. What sort of people dogs cagebirds cats are these? Some of them we know. Some are not from here, wandered flew floated here from far away. From foreign zones, lands of the east the south. Many must have crossed the sea, how hard their journey must have been. Had to cling to the masts of ships, be flung about by the wind, blown into the salty sea and lifted up again. There are ancients among them. The wind, the impetus seems to come from south and east towards the west. We have met huge crowds of spirits and ghosts from the Urals War. No one in the western townzones understands what it is there that drives and unsettles them. Everywhere they pass they make people weak, paralyse the soul day by day. They wander ever farther west, across the ocean, to America, over great mountains, prairies, through cities. Not a single Asian human, not a single Asian animal is among them, even though these populate half the Russian plain. We are so close to the centre of Europe, yet we have never seen a person, a spirit, from the land of Marduk, of Zimbo. What are these spirits? Neither living nor dead! Ghosts of beings like us, born but never flourished.”
And they pointed to the long wasted arms of their believers, their weak muscles. How your hair falls out a few years after puberty, a time of violent overheated lust when you are on fire; and after a few years you can no longer reproduce. How women melt into their fat and can hardly give birth. People flicker for thirty years, then die. These are your spirits, the ghosts of parents grandparents siblings, pressing and thronging and filling the cities, they can’t come free from the walls towers streets, just as they couldn’t come free while they lived. They fly to trees, to ponds and lakes. But always the towns bring forth more.
Such words shook the towns. Fed the fears of everyone who lived ailed sickened in the towns. People wept. Decades earlier some individuals had wept, now whole towns whimpered laments. They saw themselves dying, rotting away. Their lives shortened, bodies decaying. At the age of twenty, teeth could be pulled painlessly from the jaws between two fingers. People never grew as big as their ancestors. Only the head everywhere was a great swelling; the brows of later generations were prominent; deepset eyes below. In some regions people grew unnaturally tall, their bones two yards long, thin smooth muscles pasted onto them. They walked slowly, the heart was too small; these types fell apart at an early age.
People who survived to twenty stored up inordinate amounts of fat. In the western townzones there were people with big bony heads, throat wobbling between plump jowls, but on their arms and legs fat hung literally in blobs and bags that swelled over fingers and toes, made walking grasping laborious. The fat grew over some like a malignant parasite, grew from top to toe: neck and chest remained narrow, the head above gazed out friendly and helpless. From the chest down they began to swell, rolls of fat thickening; the body expanded to three times the width of the chest, not swaying when it moved, the mass solid and steady. Legs and feet were wrapped like bulging parcels. People stomped about in them, groaned stared like pyramids of flesh. Depending on the race they filled out or stayed thin, grew tall; descendants of Negroes fattened quickest. In some regions a few grew up with knobby swellings and knots at their joints, like plants. Slender delicate limbs flexed from huge round hinges, trembled. Thick knobby elbows, tiny finger joints knees bones of feet and hands. These could move fast, had the strongest muscles, but they quickly faltered weakened ossified. Everyone felt it must come from the sweet peculiarly rich food they were given, that their parents and grandparents had demanded; from inactivity, lounging in weatherproof houses, covered malls and streets. But it was like a runaway horse, no one could stop it.
The sorcerers were besieged by weeping crowds, victims of paralysing ailments none could name or cure. The lame were legion. Arms and legs grew limp, eyelids couldn’t open, in the end they gurgled, others had to feed them. The mouth couldn’t feel food, they swallowed, choked. There were no doctors for these people. Doctors belonged to senatorial circles, kept mum. The sick the wretched listened entranced to the mysteries of the shamans. Long lines flew or drove to the hills where the little temples stood. They gathered like winter birds around a feeder. Showed arms and legs. Bodies and expressions were ghastly in the harsh light of day. Many died at these gatherings. Many refused to be carried back. The sorcerers had to summon nearby settlers to build huts for the desperate. Some recovered. When people from the heated artificial towns climbed here and looked around at fields and little hills, their misery was great. Angry soft fist-shaking complaints were uttered hissed swallowed back.
Near Bedford a woman sang, cried out: “I am a woman. My parents, my grandparents lived in London. They came from Africa or America, were strong. Then magic spells were cast on them. They grew weak. They went to the witch-doctor’s house. They had no need to fear, to go thirsty, hungry, no one now could mess them about. No one could finish them off with spear dagger gun. See my fingers, my neck, my breasts. I am a woman. Twenty years old. I had two children. Both dead. And am I alive? It’s no gun that’s finishing me off. But what to do. Am I fat? Am I human? Must I die now? I want to die, I don’t want to live like this. I curse myself every morning when I wake up. Who made me like this? I myself. I myself. I knew no better. The bosses in the towns know what they’re doing. They’re the wicked ones. Wicked to me, to everyone. Decades ago they made a war. Now they make war on me. Tell me they’re not winning, the wicked ones. Wicked. Wicked.” The woman jabbered, lay on the ground beside a settler, chewed grass. “Should have all sunk down in the Earth with those who went off to the war. What sorrow. I should have sunk down in the Earth with my babies. I am nothing. Barren, can’t run, can’t hold, can’t swallow. Buried alive. I have to scream.”
And yet when people hurried away they had a great fear: they could lose the towns, would have to leave their houses, no one would give them food, they’d be forced to think for themselves how to live. They were not inclined to wildness like those before the Urals War. Rather, were soft tender immature, sunk in thought, racked by feelings, eager for stimulus, keen on finery, meek. Ready to pray, to serve, fluttering from one hour to the next, clinging sensuously to life. From time to time ideas of persecution swept across the continents, people bowed under them, mentioned them in horror, after a while shook them off, more terribly preoccupied than before.
And always new people among them. The urge of the African continent to send its children north and west had never ceased. The southern continent, its settlements almost all destroyed, poured people out like sun and heat.
The people who had the deepest and most distinctive impact on the cities of Europe came from West Africa. They were Fula from the Guinea coast, were Mandarawa Bagirmi Wadai Igbo Yoruba, little pilgrim communities from Kordofan and Sennar. They were delicately built with a high rounded forehead, big open expressive eyes, skin reddish brown to yellow, ever active, playfully boisterous; curiously fractured characters, now soft and melting, now unyielding. They quickly thronged into every zone, their presence lending a special air to the life of the city. Soon no one could do without the glamour and vivacity, the unshakeable naivety of these people who showed themselves not at all inclined to fight back. They felt as much at home in Europe as raindrops, not strange at all, were saddened by attacks on them, hid away for a time, emerged again.
Europeans had never heard anything like the songs and tales of these men and women from Mandara and Bagirmi. The sweetness of their tales and songs melted every heart, as those of the jongleurs and troubadours of southern France and the Po plain had done centuries before. They sang and told of trees, the sky, rain-spouts, deer, tigers, lions, cold and heat, vines, black magic. Of waterfalls pelicans crocodiles. And of the beauty of the great cities to which they had migrated; they named these in their skits, creating an incongruous effect. They wrapped in tenderness the streets shop-windows fashions cars planes electrical and magnetic devices, the food; applied to them expressions that the locals at first found comical, because they were normally used only for things long gone. But their manner was sweetly endearing, and people willingly let their heartstrings be plucked. They were vain, overjoyed when given the chance to show off, beamed when people applauded.
After a while they were everywhere. Sprouting like grass, they had introduced a novel elusive element into the rattling already lamed noisy howling machine-mighty world cities. The men and women who drove technology forward and guided industries, the melting pot of races enfeebling itself in the Meki-works were moved by these young things around whom everything revolved.
But soon rulers and leaders, souls of the twining jolting yielding mega-settlements, would see these amusing people in a different light. In London Le Havre Hamburg, the Fula built their little theatres. Built them, on the anxious advice of their priests, away from towns in forests, performed for their audiences compelling and tender comedies fairytales love stories. Very rarely there were outbreaks of happy laughter, or fear. For these dainty foreigners were slowly infected by the general dread that reigned in the huge urban centres.
Awareness
Strolling players from Africa dramatise the dire predicament of the degenerating European masses.
THE AFRICAN players performed the fate of a great king. He imposed himself on all neighbouring kings and drove their ponderous bodies, victory fanfares blaring, in chains to his house. He could tame rivers. They had to flow where he wanted, had to water his dry fields so that palms and breadfruit would grow, had to flow against cliffs to undermine and wash them away. When he commanded, they had to flow into his house, creep through narrow pipes, creep into every room, those wild waters from the cataracts. Soon he had piled up so much gold and jewellery from his victories and looting expeditions, bracelets rings carts, that his sheds and barns could not hold it all. The delicate Fula, these brown men and maidens with their crinkly hair, showed what happened next.
How the great ruler sat in the hall of his palace, and all the stuff closed in around him because he would not let it from his sight, it reflected his glory. They showed the paradise of Mbutiland in the interior of Africa, its gently rolling valleys, slopes covered in banana trees and oil palms, groves, innumerable springs. Sugarcane grew thickly along riverbanks, sweet potato on the sunsoaked hills, big fields of peanuts sesame tobacco. But the king, bloated blackbearded face, big earlobes pierced with thick smooth copper rods, on his head a huge hat with swaying feathers of peacock and parrot, flabby womanly breasts uncovered, on it a hundredweight of gold and silver chains, copper rings, carved amulets, heavy copper plates on the fat resting arms, around veined swelling calves. In the dangling right hand his sickle-shaped chiselled sabre with pearl inlay. Mansu the King behind his stockade now never left the palace. He grew fatter and fatter on his splendid throne. His wives massaged him. Every day another one must come. It amused him to have movement around him, to behead them when they were done and he was feeling comfortable on his throne. More and more stuff was heaped around him: lion’s fangs, great piles of civet skins, giraffe tails. Beside his hall were storehuts and granaries, directly in his line of sight the armoury along the passage to the door, with spearpoints daggers shields sabres machetes.
He swelled and swelled, Mansu. Became immobile, stuck in the woven seat that had become his bed and table too. More and more adornments were strung around his neck. From every one of his teeth a copper ring hung on a hempen thread. Under his hat his hair was twisted in little braids, on every braid an amulet to ward off sickness. The skin of upper arms and thighs was pierced, strings passed through for the heads of neighbouring kings conquered by his warriors. His narrow throne room of solid timber, with only one door and one window, grew dark with the riches that filled it. Only one narrow passage was kept clear. Then one morning King Mansu, yawning awake and slurping palm wine, swung his sickle-shaped sword and called for his women. Dawn was about to break. Behind the hills of skins and lion’s fangs he heard horns and flutes and his wives singing: “Ei, ei, Munsa chupi, chupi ei.” He called and waited, slurped some more, became apoplectic, blue in the face, tossed about, called again. Swaying in front of him the big fly-whisks, bunches of red parrot feathers. Beyond the skins the tooting and singing continued.
But suddenly something was moving in the passage. A delicate little man came slowly down the narrow space, pulling a cart behind him. Bowed: he brings gifts from the Babuker, who are his loyal servants, as the great king knows. He lifted great round lumps from the little cart, wrapped in leaves, laid them beside the king. The king sat straight, stared at him, roared: “I want my women,” thrust with his sword at the little man, who stepped smartly aside, calmly unloaded more lumps.
“Cheese. They are cheeses,” he whispered. “We are poor people, goatherds. The Masana have more, the Mongo have more; we are just goatherds. It’s goat’s cheese, you’ll like it.”
Mansu, half out of his seat, snapped at air, tugged at his amulets. The women nearby behind the civet skins were still shrilling their “Ei, ei, Munsa chupi, chupi ei.” And as the sweating king, half-dazed with foreboding, pressed an amulet to his brow, the little man disappeared, bleating: “They’re very tasty, you must try them. The Babuker are your loyal subjects.”
The fly-whisks stirred. He opened his eyes wide, called out. Beyond the feathers an old man was rocking himself left and right in the passage, the big straw cloak on his head and body leaving only eyes and nose free. He had the appearance the gait the voice of the king’s witch-doctor. Would not approach, ignored Mansu’s command. “You are sick, Mansu,” he whispered, prostrated himself.
“Bring me something to drink to make me better, or I’ll beat you to death.”
The witch-doctor whispered to the ground: “I have the drink. I knew you were sick. I brought it with me. It’s here, under my cloak. I mixed it an hour ago in the temple.”
“Give.” – “I cannot.”
“Give. Give it me. I’ll cut off your head.”
“You must take it with water, at sunrise, out there in the temple.”
“Give it here. I’m not going outside.”
“Come,” the witch-doctor cajoled; he retreated a little, “or it won’t work.”
The king rose snorting, called help to his women. “You must come,” whispered the straw-cloak man on the ground. “The sun will be up soon, the drink will spoil, you might die.”
“Wait, wait,” Mansu threatened as he stood, fumbled on the throne for his sickle-sword, fell back. The witch-doctor cajoled: “Come, come. I’ll put the drink here, by the door. Here, you can see it.”
Mansu stumbled down from the dais, picked himself up. He tried to undo the strings holding the heavy hangings round his neck, could not. His hand snagged on the jumble of rings and chains.
“Here’s the drink. By the door. Hurry. The sun will soon be up.”
The king groaned, the passage was too narrow. Lion’s teeth tipped his tall hat down, it flapped against his mouth. He turned sideways, he was too fat, couldn’t come through. He roared to the witch-doctor, to his wives: “I can’t come through.” The witch-doctor had vanished. The songs behind the hill of skins hummed soft and jaunty; clappers clapped, the king in his half-daze liked this. He wrestled with the pile of animal skins and tails sliding down onto him. He assailed them with his sickle-sword. He fought with them. More and more slid down. He shoved at them.
The drink was there, not far to the door. He dropped the sword. His left hand was caught in the chains at his throat, he couldn’t extricate it. Now screaming in fury he stomped forward. He tried to push through the skin-mountain with his head. He turned and turned about. A heavy pile of giraffe tails slid clattered over him. He freed himself, tottered into a heap of dried bananas. And as he threshed around he pulled strings of lion’s fangs and a big tusk down from the ceiling. They knocked heavily onto him. His head was squashed down. Bananas squeezed his throat and his screaming face.
Soft thick pulp rose to his ears, blocked his snorting nostrils, filled his gaping mouth. He gulped at it, spat, spat, wanted to scoop it out with his hands; they were jammed fast against his knees, he couldn’t feel them. His head jerked this way and that like a fish out of water. Then the sweet pulp engulfed him entirely. His jaws ceased working, the panic in his eyes faded. He suffocated in the pulpy fruit, his legs sinking as into a bog. Hours later, when his wives arrived to the sound of flutes, they found him completely buried in the soft churned mess. The women, the sons praised his death; they wept: such a kingly death.
And the dusky players hauled the dead man from his yellow coffin, sponged him down, set him on his feet. He pulled on his big tall hat. They danced together around the stage, blew away the pulp. The king danced in a puddle on his fat legs.
