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.. (It occurs to me that preliminary Yage nausea is motion sickness of transport to Yage state....) "All medicine men use it in their practice to foretell the future, locate lost or stolen objects, to diagnose and treat illness, to name the perpetrator of a crime." Since the Indian ( straitjacket for Herr Boas -- trade joke -- noth- ing so maddens an anthropologist as Primitive Man) does not regard any death as accidental, and they are unacquainted with their own self-destructive trends re- ferring to them contemptuously as "our naked cousins," or perhaps feeling that these trends above all are sub- ject to the manipulation of alien and hostile wills, any death is murder. The medicine man takes Yage and the identity of the murderer is revealed to him. As you may imagine, the deliberations of the medicine man during one of these jungle inquests give rise to certain feelings of uneasiness among his constituents. "Let's hope Old Xiuptutol don't wig and name one of the boys." "Take a curare and relax. We got the fix in..." "But if he wig? Picking up on that Nateema all the time he don't touch the ground in twenty years.... I tell you, Boss, nobody can hit the stuff like that.... It cooks the brains...." "So we declare him incompetent...." So Xiuptutol reels out of the jungle and says the boys in the Lower Tzpino territory done it, which surprises no one.... Take it from an old Brujo, dearie, they don't like surprises.... A funeral passes through the market. Black coffin -- Arabic inscriptions in filigreed silver -- carried by four pallbearers. Procession of mourners singing the funeral song... Clem and Jody fall in beside them carrying coffin, the corpse of a hog bursts out of it.... The hog is dressed in a jellaba, a keif pipe juts from its mouth, one hoof holds a packet of feelthy pictures, a mezuzzoth hangs about its neck.... Inscribed on the coffin: "This was the noblest Arab of them all." They sing hideous parody of the funeral song in false Arabic. Jody can do a fake Chinese spiel that'll just kill you -- like a hysterical ventriloquist's dummy. In fact, he precipitated an anti-foreign riot in Shanghai that claimed 3,000 casualties. "Stand up, Gertie, and show respect for the local gooks." "I suppose one should." "My dear, I'm working on the most marvelous inven- tion... a boy who disappears as soon as you come leaving a smell of burning leaves and a sound effect of distant train whistles. |
