I ate the fish and game and tropical fruits which my hosts set in front of me on banana leaves. This sated my hunger, but not my curiosity. I endured about fifteen minutes of ignorance regarding the meaning of the words they exchanged with one another when suddenly, a moment after each tribesman spoke, I heard their words in the Queen’s English. Queerer still, it was my own voice. The strange circlet that I had appropriated from the Doughty brothers was now serving as a translator.
“Why have you returned?” was the question on their lips. Apparently they mistook me for a deity who had once brought them sacred knowledge from a far shore. They wondered whether I brought more gifts or retribution. A possibility occurred to me.
“Have you done wrong?” I asked. Immediately, my words were substituted for words from their language, issued from my open mouth, generated by the device that was attached invisibly to my head. I had suspected that if it could translate what fell upon my ears, it might well translate what my tongue spoke as well. They looked up at me beseechingly.
“Why do you fear retribution if you have done nothing wrong?” I asked.
“We stopped following your commandment,” a man with a headdress composed of brightly colored feathers arranged in a dizzyingly complex pattern said with bowed head and upturned palms. “We have learned about the absurdity of life since you left us instructions to respect it.”
The absurdity of life? Let alone the idea that I had been here before and had advised them to respect life – a point upon which they now demurred. Even though every word spoken was clearly translated, I still understood next to none of it.
“Where did you learn about the absurdity of life?” I was asking the hard questions, gauging by their expressions.
Headdress placed a wooden tray in front of me. Two hemispherical earthenware cups sat upon it. He picked one up, drew it to his chest, then gestured with a nod for me to do the same. He drew his cup to his lips and drained it in one prodigious swallow. I followed suit and the contents were so bitter that my mouth and my stomach puckered at the same time.
The tray with the cups was picked up and replaced by two tightly-woven baskets. Once my host emptied his heaving guts into the one closest to him, I mirrored both his action and his ferocity in filling my own. The world around me fell away like petals wilting from a flower. I had no reckoning of myself, but rather that of the entire planet and the suffering of all its people through all time. I was wracked with pain and hunger and rent asunder in a variety of ghastly ways. I saw mountains of skulls, all smiling in anticipation of what came next. From their perspective, death was but a doorway. Deliverance from pain; the promise of a better life..
Literature in Small Doses 