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prophecies.
    Encarnación, casting about for an ally, spotted the tin can into which her tormentor had recently emptied her bladder. This she snatched up. Then, shaking the can from side to side before the old woman's astonished face, she circled her prey to cut off her escape down the interior stairs. The crone gasped, Page 19

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    covered her eyes with her forearm, and darted beneath a wire supporting the threadbare burden of her family's wash.
    “ Tenga merced, ” she cried, ducking beneath a pair of trousers. “Have mercy, Señorita.”
    The child, hooting, pivoted to keep the action in view. He had forgotten the pigeons, if only for this moment.
    The chase continued, and Encarnación permitted the old woman to sweep back beneath the clotheslines and to reach the stairwell. The crone was turning the corner on the first lower landing when Encarnación, upending the can, scored a warm, liquid bull's-eye on the retreating figure's head and shoulders.
    Screaming and gibbering, her piety altogether flushed from her system, the vieja disappeared into the bowels of the building. Her cries echoed clamorously in the tiled enclosure.
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Chapter Four
An Ecology of Mirage
    Birds, wheeling birds.
    From the western edge of Lake Kiboko, in the lee of the ramparts on that side of the Rift, there lifted a glittering cloud of birds. Cormorants maybe, or kingfishers. They were too far away to identify easily (even with my combination reduced-print Bible and field guide), but in spite of the distance I believed that they were reacting to my presence in their world. Their appearance above the lake legitimized my arrival.
    In fact, it seemed to me that I had somehow summoned these birds into existence.
    The past was awakening.
    Once, long ago, in another past, my first awakening to my “talent” as a spirit-traveler sprang from a vision of pigeons flying above the rooftops of an ancient city. Birds on the wing invariably provoke this early memory in me, as a taste of madeleine soaked in a decoction of lime flowers always brought to Proust a vivid recollection of his childhood village. A paradox. Nearly two million years before my birth I had been recalling my infancy....

    * * * *
Suddenly the lakescape was alive.
    Not forty feet away, a crocodile—a moment ago merely a ridge of pebbly earth beside the lake—slithered into the water. Beyond the crocodile, a family of hippopotami, submerged almost to their nostrils, were taking their ease in the weed-grown shallows. These animals were members of the extinct species H. gorgops , immediately recognizable by their periscopic eyes.... Ah, but language plays tricks on me. How could they be extinct when I saw them snorting and yawning like living engines? I, not this family of riverhorses, was the anachronism here.
    Never one to surrender without a fight to the fallibility of tomorrow's technology, I took out my transcordion and keyed in this message: “ I ' m home, Dr. Kaprow. This is the destination foretold for me in thousands upon thousands of spirit-traveling episodes. It ' s inhabited, this place, and I ' m Page 20

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    one of the inhabitants. ”
    Then I typed, “ Wow. ” And waited for a response that never came. And put the transcordion back in my pocket.
    Well to the south, a small herd of rather shaggy antelopes—they looked overdressed for this latitude—was tentatively approaching the lake. I thumbed past Revelation all the way to Ungulates and confirmed that they were either waterbucks ( Kobus ellipsiprymnus ) or their Early Pleistocene equivalents. A solitary bull with a pair of impressive ringed horns led his harem down to the beach, and even though I had assumed the water to be too brackish for drinking, the cows and several yearlings spread out along the shore and nervously lowered their