Maps Read Online Free PDF Page B

Arla, my sister, then you were at least a day old. For sight, my dear Askar, is a door which does not open instantly in the newly born. What I mean is, that it takes longer than a few minutes for a baby just bom to develop the knack to look, let
alone “stare". Be that as it is. But the fact that it shrouds your beginnings in mysteries preponderant as the babies born in the epic traditions of Africa, Europe and Asia
—
this fact does interest me greatly. Did you sprout like a plant out of the earth? Were you born in nine months, in three or seven?
    In other words, do you share your temperament with the likes of Sunjata or Mwendo, both being characters in Africa's epic traditions? For example, it is said that Sunjata was an adult when he was three. Mwendo, in the traditions told about him, is said to have chosen to be delivered, not through the womb, but through a middle finger. There are other epic children who took a day to be conceived and born and yet others required a hundred and fifty years to be bom at all Now why did this “epic child” wait for a hundred and fifty years? Because he made the unusual
( I
almost said, rational) request not to use as his exit (or was it his entrance) the very organ which his mother employed as her urinary passage. Another feature common among epic children is that they are all born bearing arms. And you, Askar, you’re armed by name, aren’t you?
    Again, this is nothing unique to epic traditions of peoples. The world's religions produce “miracle” children. Can you imagine an Adam, a grown man, standing naked, with leaves of innocence covering his
uff,
when God pulls at his ribs and says to him, “I am sorry but it won’t take a second, I assure you, and it won’t give you any pain either. Now look. Here. A woman, an Eve, created from one of your ribs”? I am sure you’ve heard of heroes given birth to by mountains or rivers or fishes or for that matter other animals. It seems to me that these myths make the same point again and again: that the “person” thus born contains within him or her a characteristic peculiar to gods. Well Where do we go from here?
    All is doubt
.
    Are you or are you not an “epic” child of the modern times? Do we know what the weather was like the moment you were born? Yes, we do. Your mother, in her scrawls, tells us that the sky was dark with clouds and that a heavy storm broke on her head as she fainted with the pains of labour and the heavens brightened with those thunderous downpours. But you didn‘t take shorter than a month to be conceived and bom, or seven hundred years. And there was no eclipse of the moon or the sun. I've read and reread your mothe' s journal for clues. I am afraid it appears that you completed your nine months
.
    Please think things over. And please do not do anything rash. We will miss you greatly if you go—but we understand. Rest assured that we’ll not stand in your way if you wish to return to your beginnings
.
    Much, much love.
Yours ever,
Uncle Hilaal

CHAPTER TWO
    I
    M isra never said to me that I existed for her only in my look. What she said was that she could see in my stare an itch of intelligence—that’s all She said she had found it commendable that I could meet death face to face and that I could outstare the Archangel of Death. For, in my stare, there was my survival and in my survival, perhaps “a world’s”—mine and hers. I remember how often she held me close to herself, and how, lamenting or plaintive, she would whisper into my ears, endearments the like of which I am not likely to hear ever again. One of these endearments, I recall, was, “My dearest, my little world”! She would then lapse into Amharic, her mother-tongue, and, showering me with kisses, she would utter more of such endearments I wouldn’t understand. Then she would end them with the one she most often employed when teasing me or