Visitants by Randolph Stow Page A

and said: ‘Now, taubada, you are a young man again.’
    And truly, after all that beard was gone, he was a very young man, and when he looked at his face in the glass it was as if he had forgotten. A long, long time he looked at his face in the glass, and then he said: ‘Very good, Kailusa, now cut my hair.’ And next he went and put out the wooden figures for the game called chess that he played with Mister Dalwood. So afterwards the Dimdims thought that he was like before, in the days when the sinabada lived with him. But I knew that that was not true, and that some day I would have to say.
    All the time, while I was thinking about Mister Cawdor’s face, the men from the village were passing with chickens. Some chickens were tied and some had green palm-fronds woven around them, and all of them were crying out. The dinghy was filled with them, there was a great pile of them on the shore, and old Sayam was stamping up and down, furious because of his boat.
    ‘Taubada,’ Sayam called to Mister Cawdor, ‘how many chickens are going in the
Igau
?’
    ‘I do not know,’ Mister Cawdor said. ‘You count.’
    ‘I counted already,’ Sayam said. ‘Taubada, seventy-three chickens.’
    ‘Very good,’ said Mister Cawdor. ‘We will eat, and these people will smoke.’
    ‘But seventy-three chickens, taubada,’ Sayam cried out. ‘They will shit everywhere, everywhere.’
    ‘E,’ said Mister Cawdor, moving his shoulders, ‘it is their custom.’
    Sayam looked for a little while at Mister Cawdor. Then he spat a lot of betelnut on the sand, and went out through the water to the dinghy, muttering: ‘Madness.’
    Mister Dalwood had found a little hermit crab without a house, and was searching for a shell to give it. When he did find a shell, the crab would not go into it, because there was another crab inside. So Mister Dalwood searched again, and at last found an empty shell. It was too big, but the crab got into it, and scuttled away.
    ‘My good deed for the day,’ said Mister Dalwood.
    Sagova said to Mister Cawdor: ‘You like to eat chicken, taubada?’
    ‘Yes,’ Mister Cawdor said. But he lied, because he never liked to eat anything.
    ‘You like to eat this, taubada?’ Sagova said, and he opened a banana-leaf parcel and offered Mister Cawdor a boiled mango.
    Mister Cawdor looked round for Kailusa, sighing a little. ‘Kailusa,’ he said, ‘give my companion a stick of tobacco.’ And to Sagova he said: ‘My very great thanks, but today I do not eat. However, my nephew will eat it.’ Then he spoke in English to Mister Dalwood, and said: ‘Right, Tim, ram it down.’ That was Mister Dalwood’s biggest work in the villages, to eat, and a ship could not contain all the yams and maize and sago dumplings and pig-fat that he has put into his belly this year, in order to look polite.
    Mister Dalwood sighed too when Mister Cawdor said that, but ate the mango, making noises of joy. All the time Sagova stared at his throat, and looked proud whenever he saw Mister Dalwood swallow.
    ‘Sagova,’ said Mister Cawdor, ‘speak to me. Do you remember Taudoga?’
    ‘Oh, yes, taubada,’ Sagova said. ‘But I was a child then. I was not in those doings.’
    ‘What were they like,’ Mister Cawdor said, ‘those doings? Were they like Christians, like Church?’
    ‘Truly, I do not know,’ Sagova said. ‘I did not see. But I know the reason. The older men did not want the young men to have the girls. So they called themselves sergeants and names like that, and said that the girls were only for them. They had dancing, taubada, but the young men were not allowed to see it. The older men and the girls danced in two circles, and when they stopped the man seized the girl facing him and took her away into the bush.’
    ‘That is like a game,’ I said, ‘that they play at the Mission. It is called Musical Chairs.’
    ‘True, Osana,’ Mister Cawdor said. ‘Sagova, you say: did Taudoga truly vanish? You did not hide