Lord Tyger Read Online Free PDF

disturbed and that they might question their parents about it and so might reveal where they got this idea, he laughed and said that he had told all this merely to entertain them. He was the son of Mutsungo, but he did not look like a spider because Mutsungo had wanted him to look like his mother. She was an ape, and that was why his lips were thin and his hair was straight. And he was white because his mother had conceived by a lightning stroke sent by Mutsungo, and everything in her womb had turned white. The thin nose resulted from Mutsungo grabbing him too hard when he had pulled him out of the mother's womb by his nose.
    The story of the lightning stroke was Mariyam's; the other details, Ras's.
    Bigagi said that this could all be true, but Ras, whom he called Lazazi, to fit the sounds and structure of Wantso, was still a ghost-child.
    Ras bristled and had to control himself to keep from violently arguing with Bigagi. Wilida smoothed out their tempers then by saying that perhaps this spirit-father of Ras's was chief spirit in the land to the north (she tactfully avoided saying Ghost-Land) while Mutsungo was chief spirit in this land. Just as Basama, the Crocodile-Spirit, was chief spirit of the Shaliku, and so on. The whole question could be settled when they grew up, and then they would be able, if they had the courage, to go south on the river, through the Swamp, through the land of Shaliku, and to the end of the river and the world, where the river plunged into the land beneath the earth. Here, on an islet just before the entrance to the land beneath the earth, lived Wizozu.
    Wizozu was a very very very ancient man who knew everything and who would answer a question--for a price. He had lived forever and would live forever, and he was a terrible old man.
    Ras was to hear more of Wizozu, and eventually he decided that when he became a man he would journey to the end of the river and the world and ask Wizozu several questions that no one seemed to be able to answer.
    He was going to question his parents about him, but since neither had ever mentioned anything like Wizozu, he thought he would keep silent. They would suspect that he had been talking to the Wantso, and he did not want that. Although they no longer tried to keep him from wandering, they still warned him against the wicked and dangerous Wantso. Igziyabher would not like it if He knew that Ras went near them. When Ras became older, then he could approach them.
    Sometimes, Ras would pack six of his rubber balls in his antelope-hide bag and take them to the meeting-place. The children were amazed. They knew nothing of rubber, and asked him where the balls came from. He said that they had appeared mysteriously in the tree house one morning. His foster father had said they were a gift from Igziyabher. Allah, rather, since that was the day scheduled for Arabic to be spoken.
    Ras showed the children the juggling tricks with the balls that he had learned from Yusufu. He also performed backflips and somersaults. He showed them how he could hit a small target at forty feet with a knife.
    Sometimes, Ras performed tricks on the tightrope three feet above the ground between two trees. He wanted to put therope much higher to impress them, but he did not want to be exposed to the view of the women in the fields or the guards on the wall across the neck of the peninsula. He chose a place where the ground sloped down to the river. There, while the children squatted to watch, he walked back and forth from tree to tree and then stopped in the middle and backflipped, turning over once and landing on his feet on the rope.
    The wide-eyed children would clap their hands over their mouths to keep from making so much noise they would attract the women or older children.
    Ras would cap all his tricks by walking on his hands across the rope while he bounced a ball between his feet. The Wantso children wanted to try ropewalking, of course. Some were eventually able to get from one tree