“You will be a help to me,” I said, “because you know the language.”

Plum examined the ground at her feet. I smiled at the women and made eating motions. They smiled back at me and repeated the motions. I rubbed my stomach, put my fingers to my mouth, and panted like a dog. They giggled. Plum kept studying the earth.

They brought us bread baked from flour made from some sort of roots. It was bland and very dry, but tasted as though it probably had a comfortingly high protein content. Another woman brought a jug of blood-colored liquid, bubbling with fermentation and with a faint aftertaste of carrion. If the bread hadn’t been quite so dry I might have passed on this, but it was impossible to get it down without liquid, so I took an optimistically hearty drink. The first gulp was a trial, but it got better as you went along.

We were still eating when the men came back. They had been hunting but didn’t seem to have caught anything. The woman who seemed to be in charge explained our presence to several of the men, and they came and grunted, and I smiled and grunted back at them, and I drew a map in the dirt to show where we had come from, and they filled in details on the map. I put a mark where I had left the car and managed to convey to them what the car was and where I had left it and that they might find something of use there. I figured they could find it as worthwhile to strip an abandoned car as the kids do in my neighborhood, but I’m not sure whether or not they got the point. They didn’t seem all that excited about it.

They gave us a couple of hunks of bread to take with us. A tiny boy, naked and giggling, presented Plum with a small lizard and raced back to his hut. We couldn’t decide what we were supposed to do with the lizard. The only things we could think of were to eat him, make a pet of him, or pray to him. None appealed, so when we were well on our way we let him go, and he disappeared immediately in the tall grasses.

Plum said, “They were very nice. I wish we had had something to give them in return. I was afraid they might, oh, kill us or something.”

“They were friendly.”

“How could you tell?”

“When they befriended us and gave us food, I knew. Just like that.”

“I mean before, silly.”

“Who knew?”

We angled back toward the road but never quite got there. We stayed with the path we were on. It was a perfect day, with a high hot sun and a breeze that rippled the grass around us. We saw small herds of animals grazing, antelopes of one sort or another. Now and then a hawk would circle overhead. It was calm and clear and absolutely silent.

Just before nightfall we saw buzzards gathering ahead of us on the right. We approached quietly. An antelope lay in a bloody circle of trampled grass, gutted and lifeless. The lion that had made the kill was somewhere sleeping it off now, and a pair of hyenas were worrying what it had left behind. The hyenas looked formidable, but I ran at them, bellowing like a bull, and they turned tail and ran. I cut some steaks from the antelope’s haunches and wiped the blade of the Swiss Army pocketknife on the beast’s hide. Plum looked at the meat in my hand and made a face.

“Steak,” I said happily. “I wish we had a knapsack or something. There’s meat enough to last for weeks if we could only take it along.”

“I hope you don’t expect me to eat that, Evan.”

“Of course.”

“It’s dead meat.”

“A few hours dead.”

“From an animal in the jungle. A wild animal.”

I took her chin in my fingers and looked at her. “ Plum,” I said, “all meat comes from dead animals.”

“When you buy it in the store, you don’t have to think about it.”

“ Plum, this is your country, for Christ’s sake.”

“I know.”

“I mean-”

“I know,” she said.

When it began turning dark we picked a spot for the night. We camped near a scraggly wali tree, and I used dead leaves and twigs to get a fire started. Once it was blazing nicely I began ripping off parts of the tree and feeding them to the fire. We shishkebabed the antelope meat and Plum overcame any objections she may have had to it. I pulled up grass and cut palm fronds and made a bed for her beside the fire. She lay down on it and looked expectantly at me. I sat next to the fire and fed it with a couple of handfuls of dry grass.

“Are you coming to sleep?”

I said I would sit up awhile.

“I want you to sleep with me, Evan.”

“I am not tired.”

“That is not what I mean.”

I looked at her. “Oh,” I said, light dawning. “Plum, don’t be silly.”

“You do not like me.”

“Of course I like you.”

“You do not think I am pretty?”

“You’re very pretty.”

“You do not care for my body.”

“Plum, you’re just a kid. You’re fifteen years old, for heaven’s sake.” I had this very strange and quite uncomfortable feeling in my throat, and the beginning of a headache. “You go to sleep now,” I said. “I’ll tend the fire.”

“I cannot sleep,” she said. And I thought she was going to say something else, but she didn’t, and when I looked at her again she was out. She lay on her back, her hands clenched into little fists at her sides, and she slept.

Chapter 5

At one village the head man wore polished wooden hoop earrings and spoke a sort of pidgin Dutch. “I know Sheena,” he said. “A moon is born and dies, and another, and another, and another, and another.” He drew five moons in the dirt with a sharpened stick. “Sheena comes from the place of trees and vines. She kills with the sun and rides off with the moon. I am told she roasts babies and eats their flesh, and hacks off the breasts of the women, and the private parts of men. I am also told what she does with them, but I see none of this with my own eyes, and do not believe or disbelieve. For men’s words are carried upon the wind, and some wind is always blowing, is it not so?”

And at another village where the women were ornamented with ridges of clay beneath the skin and where no one spoke anything which I could understand, the name Sheena brought a volley of gasps, an embarrassed silence, and, finally, a brusque gesture, a pointing toward the northwest.

So the white goddess, the Queen of the Jungle, seemed more than a figment of the Chief’s imagination. The general consensus seemed to be that she and her gang were somewhere to the northwest, somewhere beyond the plain where the tropical rain forest began. I would have liked to ask about Sam Bowman and Knanda Ndoro, but even without a language barrier that would have been hard to manage. “Did two black men pass through here? Or one black man?” Wonderful.

In a way, we seemed to be on the right track. But only in a way. Imagine, if you will, that we were supposed to search in a coal mine for a black cat that wasn’t there. Well, we were heading for the coal mine. Progress of a sort, but nothing to get excited about.

I didn’t particularly mind, because there were other things to get excited about. Mornings, for instance, with the sun suddenly breaking above the eastern horizon, and the sure songs of birds in the thickets, early birds in swift pursuit of late worms. Animal sounds in the brush, and drums pulsing in the distance, and rainstorms that blew up suddenly just before sunset, lashing the earth for twenty or forty minutes, then ending as abruptly as they had begun.

Meals of sweet overripe melons, mahogany on the outside, salmon pink within. Plump water birds that bobbed in a muddy stream and held the pose trustingly while one shied a stone at them. Roasted over a wood fire they tasted rather like duck, which I suppose they were.

The warmth, the space, the silence. There were lions about, and hostile tribes, and things that went bump in the night, and yet from the onset I felt completely at ease in that open country. It was unpeopled and unpaved, and it let me remember that I was alive. If we never found Sheena, if the jungle had swallowed Sam Bowman, if the Retriever was lost and his treasure irretrievable, that was fine. And if I never got back to civilization, that wasn’t so bad either.