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spiritual as well as a physical distance. I noted that the rest of the Asadi—those who surrounded and ignored me on the edge of the communion ground—behaved not as if they feared these sudden visitors, but rather as if they felt a loathsome kinship with them. This is difficult to express. Bear with me. Maybe another analogy will help. Let me say that the Asadi behaved toward their visitors as a fastidious child might behave toward a parent who has contracted a venereal disease. Love and loathing, shame and respect together.
    The episode concluded abruptly when the old man rose from the ground, oblivious to the slow swelling and sedate flapping of his huri, and stalked back into the Wild, scattering a number of Asadi in his wake. (Huri, by the way, is a portmanteau word ior fury and harpy that I've just coined.)
    Then everything went back to normal. The clearing filled again, and the ceaseless and senseless milling about resumed.
    God, it's amazing how lonely loneliness can be when the sky contains a pair of jagged, nuggetlike moons and the human being inside you has surrendered to the essence of that which should command only your outward life. That's a mouthful, isn't it? What I mean is that there's a small struggle going on between Egan Chaney, cultural xenologist, and Egan Chancy, the quintessential man. No doubt it's the result more of environmental pressure than of my genetic heritage.
    That's a little anthropological allusion, Moses. Don't worry

    about it. You aren't supposed to understand it.
    But enough. Today's atypical occurrence has sharpened my appetite for observation, temporarily calmed my internal struggle. I'm ready to stay here a year, if need be, even though the original plan was only for six months. Dear, dear God, look at those moons!
    The Asadi Clearing: A Clarification
    From the professional notebooks of Egan Chaney: My greatest collegiate failing was an inability to organize. I'm pursued by the specter of that failing even today. Consequently, a digression of sorts.
    In looking over these quirkish notes for my formal ethnography, I see I may have given the reader the completely false idea that the Asadi clearing is a small area of ground, say fifteen by fifteen meters. Not so. As best I'm able to determine, there are approximately five hundred Asadi individuals. This figure includes mature adults, the young, and those intermediate between age and youth, although there are no "children" or "infants," surprisingly enough. By most demographic and anthropological estimates, five hundred is optimum tribal size.
    Of course, during all my time in the Wild, I've never been completely sure that the same individuals return to the clearing each morning. It may be that some sort of monumental shift takes place in the jungle, one group of Asadi replacing another each day. But I doubt it. The Wild encompasses a finite (though large) area, after all, and I have learned to recognize a few of the more distinctive Asadi by sight. Therefore, five hundred seems about right to me: five hundred grey-fleshed creatures strolling, halting, bending at the waist and glaring at one another, eating, participating in loveless sex, grappling like wrestlers, obeying no time clock but the sun, their activities devoid of any apprehensible sequence or rationale. Such activity requires a little space, though, and their clearing provides it.

    The reader may not cheerfully assume that the Asadi communion ground is a five-by-eight mud flat between a BoskVeld cypress and a malodorous sump hole. Not at all. Their communion ground has both size and symmetry, and the Asadi maintain it discrete from the encroaching jungle by their unremitting daily activity. I won't quote you dimensions, however, I'll merely say that the clearing has the rectangular shape, the characteristic slope, and the practical roominess of a twentieth-century football or soccer field. This is pure coincidence, I'm sure. Astroturf and lime-rendered hash marks are