Lord Tyger Read Online Free PDF Page B

to the other. Many fell, and some hurt themselves, and then Ras was worried that they would run screaming to their parents.
    No one ever told. Ras was their secret. Though they must have swelled almost to rupture with the desire to talk, they managed to keep silent for several years. Ras, not their own self-control, was mainly responsible for this. He told them that he would take any betrayer to Ghost-Land with him. Moreover, Igziyabher, his Father, would destroy the village and kill everyone in it with lightning.
    The children turned gray and speechless at this threat. Wilida, however, managed to say, "But if we're all killed, we'll be ghosts anyway, and we'll all be with you in Ghost-Land."
    "No, you won't," Ras said quickly. "I'll send the one who talks to the underworld, in the big cave into which the river empties, and he'll be tortured forever by demons and monstersand won't ever get to see his friends or parents again."
    The children shrieked, but they must have half-enjoyed their terror, because they insisted that he describe what would happen to the betrayer. He enjoyed telling them, because he got very excited and exercised his imagination as if it were a muscle, making it grow and grow. He also told them about Wizozu, the All-Wise, All-Horrible Old Man on the islet at the gateway to the underworld. He knew less than they did about Wizozu, but this did not stop him, and after many descriptions and stories of Wizozu, punctuated by rollings of eyes and little shrieks from his audience, he had convinced them, and himself, that he was an authority on Wizozu.
    He was vague on what Wizozu demanded in return for answering your questions. He hinted at things too terrible to even think about; even then he knew that hints were sometimes far more effective than the most grisly descriptions.
    The children said that Wuwufa, the spirit-talker of the Wantso, had traveled through the Many-Legged Swamp, slipping by the Great Spider, and through the land of the terrible Shaliku and their even more terrible crocodile god, and had gone on down the river to the island of Wizozu. Nobody knew what Wizozu's price had been, although some said that it was Wuwufa's liver. According to the Wantso, the liver was the seat of thought. Whether this was true or not, all agreed it could be true. Wuwufa acted as if he had lost his mind, sometimes, and he often went into convulsions.
    Ras told himself that he, too, would some day visit Wizozu. At the age of nine, he had had many questions to which he could get no answers that satisfied him. Three years later, he stillwanted to visit Wizozu, but some of the questions had changed.
    The group numbered five. There were two boys, Bigagi and Sutino, and three girls, Wilida, Fuwitha, and Golabi. After six months, they introduced him to some other games besides hide-and-seek, guess-which-finger, and puzzle stories. One afternoon, as they all squatted under a bush only four feet from the river, Wilida, giggling, referred to the whiteness and largeness of Ras's penis. Bigagi resented this. He said that his was every bit as big as Ras's and that the whiteness made Ras's look like a worm under a rock. A dead worm, at that. Wilida, still giggling, said that she did not think it was as dead as it looked at this moment. She had seen it become very much alive when Ras was wrestling with the boys or the girls. And she was certain that it was bigger than Bigagi's.
    Bigagi stood up and began to play with his penis. He dared Ras to do the same. Ras stood up by Bigagi's side and began to slide his foreskin back and forth. He was no stranger to his genitals. Despite Yusufu and Mariyam's harsh warnings of idiocy and impotency if he played with himself, he had done so many times when he was out of their sight. And he had had a monkey pet which had loved to suck on his penis, although Ras had never been able to top the erection with orgasm.
    Now he was determined to prove his superiority over his playmates in this as in all