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detention rooms where no one had ever been detained, and the customs office, its roof not flat like the other two but a pise dome from whose pinnacle the beautiful Kushian flag fluttered as the day swiftly expired. A flash of green, indeed, signalled a phase of the sun's withdrawal-a kind of shout of expiration from just below the horizon, whose parched reaches were duplicated by a saffron strip at the base of the westward sky, slag residue of the day's furnace. Directly overhead, an advance scout of the starry armies trembled like a pearl suspended in a gigantic crystalline goblet of heavenly nectar. By these mingled lights, amid the lip-music of camels and the clack of camel-bells, through the fragrance of cooking-fires fed by dried dung and hacked tamarisk, I threaded my way among the Kushites toward a space of confrontation, where the four young border guards, in pith helmets and parade whites, none of them older to my eye than eighteen, rigid and luminous in their terror, faced the muttering horde drawn to this place by the hill of aid heaped on the edge of enemy Sahel. Ruled by a foppish Negritudinist whose impeccable alexandrines on brown beauties swaying under their laden calabashes followed the poems of Valery in Le Livre de Poche anthologies and whose successive Parisian wives were kept svelte by lubrications of bribery from the toubab corporations and the overachieving Japanese, Sahel from the air presented a patchwork of tin roofs and hotel swimming pools, drenched golf courses and fields perforated like colanders by the patient mudholes of hand-dipped irrigation. Contempt inspired me, enlarged me, at the thought of my rival state and its economic inequities, so that by the time I had wormed to the front of the crowd, I had forgotten my mystic's rags and presented myself to the soldiers as if my authority were manifest. The sergeant in command lifted his rifle and levelled it at my chest as I stepped forward too boldly. "I am Ellellou," I announced. Kutunda, unasked, out of female curiosity or presumptuous loyalty, had followed me, and now embraced me from behind, lest I step into a bullet. "Ellellou, Ellellou," the crowd murmured at my back, in widening, receding waves. They did not doubt; skepticism is wonderfully sapped by hunger. The youngest of the four soldiers stepped forward andwiththe butt of his rifle, deftly as if dislodging a scorpion, knocked my clinging protectoress loose. "He is a poor magician!" she shouted from the sand, through bloodied lips. "Forgive him his madness!" The soldier nodded in bleak disinterest and lifted his rifle again-of Czech manufacture, and obtained at a unit cost that Michaelis Ezana had more than once cited in his mockery of Communist brotherhood-to give me a similar tap, when I produced from the folds of my rags the medal the Soviets had awarded me the week before. Its brass star and bas-relief Lenin made the young man blink. And the crowd behind me, having taken up my name, was now returning it to the fore with such a windy swollen chorusing that my claim to authority seemed divinely reinforced. "Ellelloti, Ellellou": it was a whirlwind. To the sergeant who, having inspected the medal, now pressed it against his own breast with a smile from which the two lower incisors had been removed, I suggested, within our growing complicity, that he compare my face with the portrait of the President of Kush that must hang somewhere in his official quarters. Slowly comprehending, he sent his corporal to fetch such an image. The boy returned, after what seemed a long search, with a framed oleograph half occluded by ingrained dust. The framed face was set beside mine. As the sergeant considered, I considered the medal he still held to his chest. I tried to compose my features into Ellellou's calm, hieratic blur; at least our two faces were coated with the same dust. Kutunda meanwhile was kissing my feet in some paroxysm; whether she was adoring me as her leader, or bemoaning me as a