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jagged lines on his hips and thighs, Kanili drew a crude representation of a lion between his nipples, then, muttering to himself, he had opened a small box,

    dipped his finger in an azure powder and further decorated his body.
    When the last boy had been painted, they had all lined up and one by one, starting with Tamboura, they had been taken to the huts of their fathers. The village was deserted. All of the women, who were forbidden to witness any of the rites, were outside the stockade preparing the feast, and the men sat rigid and formal in their huts, waiting to welcome the initiates.
    Mandouma and Bansu greeted Kanili with the rich-speaking words used on such occasions and welcomed Tamboura into the hut. With unwonted graciousness, Bansu took the] carved wooden dipper down from a shelf and Mandouma! filled it with the yeasty millet beer from a large gourd. He too seemed kinder than usual, and when Tamboura kneltl before him and Mandouma laid his hands on his head to blessj him, his voice was almost tender.
    "May you be a brave hunter, my brother. May you slayj many beasts, despoil many virgins and father many sons."] Mandouma handed him the cup.
    Tamboura drank. He remembered the bitter taste of the! beer. He remembered sitting on the floor with his back against his spirit pole and then . . . after that he could noti remember anything.
    And now he was here, although he did not know where here was. Time passed. Just how much time, Tamboura did not know but the heat inside the flimsy tent was stifling. Heat and pain—wrist pain and ankle pain. Flies settled on the blood that seeped from his wrists where the leather thongs had bit into the flesh. His head ached, his back ached, and the muscles in his arms and legs were cramped with immobility. Time passed and still, in his agony and bewilderment, he refrained from opening his mouth.
    His own brother had done this to him! Of this he was sure; or, if not his brother, then certainly his brother's wife or son. He was now an outcast from his own village, branded with the mark of a coward, for he had not faced the knife. But crowding out the resentment and hatred which he felt for his brother and the bitch Zarassa and the mewling Bansu was the crowning disappointment that he had not reached his long-hoped-for man status. Now, he was certain, he never would. Not only was Iba left behind, imtried and untouched, but never, during his whole life, would he ever taste the de-Ughts of any woman, for no woman would ever have him.

    His homesickness was as nothing compared to the terror that a lifetime of unsatisfied desires engendered. A whole vicious circle of thoughts whirled in his head—his grief at not being a man, his homesickness, his fear, his hatred and his pain— combining, twisting and growing into new thoughts that almost erased the pain, the heat and the flies.
    The horse plodded on, until the striped shadow of Tam-boura's head was directly beneath his body. Suddenly the slow motion of the horse ceased and he heard a word in a tongue with which he was unfamiliar but which he could somehow understand. Then a hand, with long, black bony fingers and spatulate nails reached inside the tent and rested for a moment on the flesh of his thigh. It was removed and soon his legs were free. The hand reached inside again, this time followed by a deformed cranium, covered with thick black moss, growing low over a forehead which shadowed small, squinting yellow-white eyes and a pair of large nostrils like two black holes gaping above thick, rubbery lips. A quick slice of a steel knife severed the leather thongs and tixe hand developed into an arm, long and powerfully muscled, which grasped Tamboura around the waist and slid him off the saddle onto the ground. The long confinement of his legs had made them useless and he was unable to stand. He crumpled to the ground.
    The ground I He remembered old Kanili's teachings. If he could but lie there, flat on his back for a few moments, he