Jupiter's Travels

I was becoming a carrier of the dreams of men. I gathered themlike pollen, fertilizing as I went. But I had not yet quite realized my power, nor its transforming effect on people, and I still thought they were as I saw them.

This is another reason why I am here: to experience (nothing less) the brotherhood of man. Imagine meeting these men in a London pub or an American diner. Impossible. They could never be there what they are here. They would be made small by the complexities, the paraphernalia that we have added to our lives, just as we are, although we have learned

What happened on the way, who I met, all that was incidental. I had not quite realized that the interruptions were the journey.

I had launched myself on a journey to circle the globe, but I seemed to be on another journey as well, a great voyage of discovery into my own subconscious. And I trembled a little at the thought of what monsters I might encounter there.

The girls are rehearsing, hands linked in a line, singing a chant and making little runs across the sand. The men insist on posing for endless group shots, faces set in the sternest expressions, except for Minderbender, who fools about constantly in his khaki shorts, ruining the fake authenticity and making it real.

Well, we're all just acting out other people's fantasies, aren't we? Maybe we're not much good for anything else.

Perhaps there are men raised in peace and lucidity, with no phantoms on their tails, who see nothing in a storm cloud but convection currents and water vapor. In any case I would not change places with one of them. What grandeur there is in my life blossoms out of my own mean beginnings. What times of peace I know are a thousand times more precious

He and his six brothers, he says, fled to Uganda when the Muslims killed his parents in the war. They lived by hunting in the bush. Now all his brothers are famous. So he says. Why not believe him, until it becomes important?

A window flew open on the past, on half-baked impressions left by Bible tales and Christmas carols which I had discounted then as silly fables and superstitions. Such things had no place in the crowded streets and classrooms of my childhood. They were only possible here, under this sky, in this light and on this land. This was Bible country, and on