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double chord of curved ribs, the arms and legs similarly demarcate, femurs and fibias wrapped tightly, the same tightness pulling the lips back against the teeth and covering the temple concavities of the skull with pulsing drumheads, while in contrast certain protuberances acquired a glossy bulging smoothness, the bloated bellies and those pop eyes magnetically alert beneath the children's brows like the stares of gods through ritual masks. The cattle had grown too emaciated to bleed, and in these steppes blood mixed with curdled milk into a coagulated, chewy porridge was a staple of the diet. From being fed, our party of well-diggers turned into feeders, sharers of the stores of goat cheese, peanut paste, and dried smelt that at night I received from the refrigerated hampers of the Mercedes, which followed us some miles behind, gray as a ghost, nearly invisible, but for the pillars of dust it raised and that stood motionless above the steppes for hours on end. When I asked those around me, in my rusty Salu or my defective Berber, if they blamed Allah for their condition, they stared uncomprehendingly, asserting that God is great, God is beneficent. How could the proclaimed source of all compassion be blamed? And several, with burning eyes, with the last embers of their energy, picked up a stone to hurl, had I not turned my back. And when I asked others if they blamed Colonel Ellellou, the President of Kush and Chairman of SCRME, one man responded, "Who is Ellellou? He is the wind, he is the air between mountains." And I felt sickened, hearing this, and lost in the center of that great transparent orb of responsibility which was mine. Another told me, "Colonel Ellellou is expelling the kafirs who have stolen our clouds; when the last white devil has embraced Islam or his head has rolled in the dust, then Ellellou will come and bleed the sky as the herder slits the neck-vein of his bullock." And I felt myself a deceiver, in my dirty disguise, my mouth still sore from last night's magic. A third shrugged and said, "What can he do? He is a little soldier who to secure his pension killed the Lord of Wanjiji. Since Edumu passed to his ancestors, the underworld has sucked happiness from the earth." And this vexed me with a question of policy: should I kill the king? Some had not heard of Ellellou, some thought he was a mere slogan, some hated him for being a freed slave, one of the harratin, from the south. None seemed to look to him to lift the famine from the land. Only I expected this of Colonel Ellellou, who should have been in Istiqlal, signing documents and reviewing parades, instead of making his way with a few outcasts through the cloud of nomads that had been drifted toward the border by rumors of an impending miracle. The border of Kush in the northwest is nine-tenths imaginary. Through the colonial decades the border was ignored by the proud Reguibat, Teda, and Tuareg who drove their herds back and forth across it without formality or compunction; the vast departments of French West Africa were differentiated only in the mysterious accountancies of Paris. But since 1968, when our purged nation took on a political complexion so different from that of neighboring Sahel-Rush's geographical twin but ideological antithesis, a model of neo-capitalist harlotry decked out in transparent pantaloons of anti-Israeli bluster-border outposts have been established to safeguard symbolically, in the ungovernable vastness, our Islamic-Marxist purity. As we approached the border station we could see, all the length of a day's travel, sometimes striated and inverted by the atmospheric mirrors of mirage, an unnatural mountain, made of tan boxes. A crowd of thousands, a lake-sized distillation from the emptiness, had gathered about this apparition, which loomed a few meters over the border, at this place called Efu. The station consisted of three low buildings of flint, flattened cans, and sun-baked mud: the barracks for the soldiers, the