Binstead's Safari Read Online Free Page A

career.
    *
    Ian showed them around the city. They went into shops, to bars, including the hotel bar, had restaurants pointed out, met people walking down the street. Everyone knew Ian. And all at once, everyone knew the Binsteads, too. It was like being in a small town, except for the fact that there were high modern buildings and the crowds were of many nationalities and races and were dressed in all manner of clothing. During a walk of only four blocks Millie saw two women wearing silk saris, an African tribesman in a ceremonial dress decorated with green fur and black feathers, and a white man, dark as a gypsy, who looked as if he had come straight off the plains and was carrying a snake around his left arm. Ian nodded to them all.
    In the evening, they sat outside on the hotel terrace. Ian was their guest, but the talk was of the trip rather than general chat.
    “Anything you can tell me about the whole area,” Stan said.
    “That’s a tall order.”
    “Especially any stories about lions.”
    “You mean travellers’ tales? The one that got away?”
    “I mean lion worship.”
    “Well, there’s the Masai and the spearhunts, but is that what you had in mind? Initiation trials—that sort of thing?”
    “No, not at all.” Stan began to talk about the Swiss researches and theories. In the middle of the explanations it was settled that they all call each other by their first names, which would have been unheard of only ten years before, but now it would be silly not to.
    “What Dr Adler told me, and what he’s given to me in translation, is a series of linked stories about a man with supernatural powers in battle and medicine, and love. When he’s in a tough situation, he can turn himself into a lion, because his bravery was so great that the lions gave him the ability: to make himself one of them.”
    “That’s a new one on me,” Ian said.
    Millie, who had been left out of the talk, suddenly exclaimed, “Like Superman.”
    “No, Millie. Not like Superman.”
    Ian laughed. “I’ll get you out there and interpret for you,” he said. “The rest is up to you.” He said goodnight and left early, before the dancing began.
    Millie and Stan watched for a while, without joining in. As the hotel guests and their friends became drunker, the overall air of comradeship increased. Names were exchanged, people danced with each other’s wives and husbands. It was the kind of thing that happened on board ship. Most of the couples wouldn’t know each other in two days’ time. Talk grew louder, the music slowed down, and Stan began to yawn. The black waiters and bar attendants looked on silently, doing their work quickly and politely, as they had before Independence.
    In the morning, Stan checked with the government officials he had spoken to over the phone. He spent an hour with three of them who were helpful, interested, and glad to be able to act together in such a simple matter—in other words, something that wasn’t political. At least, that was the way it seemed. There was a strange reserve between the men, as though they might have been quarrelling or talking about some unpleasant subject just before he’d come into the room. He was handed a load of papers, all stamped and signed, and went on to talk to a Frenchman named Lavalle about anthropology. Stan told him what Jack had said about the probabilities of fraud.
    “Yes, quite possibly,” Lavalle said. “One must be there, where it is taking place. That’s the only way to find out. It can go the other way too, you know.” He told a brief tale about a Canadian scholar who, against all advice from the professional hunters, mounted an expedition to a part of the country that couldn’t conceivably be interesting, camped there for many weeks until the rainy season, and returned with a thick typescript describing ceremonies and rituals no one had known of before.
    “All fantasy,” Lavalle added.
    And the Canadian had been crazy enough to think he could get