The next patient was no inspiration even to an amateur physician. He was a prematurely old man if you could judge from the teeth and the genitals. He breathed with difficulty and his temperature was one hundred and four. His tongue was white and furry and there were white pockets and caves in his throat when I depressed his tongue. When I touched his liver lightly, the pain was almost unbearable. He said he had great pain in his head, in his belly, in his chest and he had not been able to evacuate for a long time. He did not know how long. If he had been an animal it would have been better to shoot him. Since he was a brother in Africa I gave him chloroquine for the fever in case it was malaria, a mild cathartic, aspirin to take for the pain if it continued and we boiled the syringe and laid him flat on the ground and gave him one million and a half units of penicillin in the tired, sunken, black cheek of his left buttock. It was a waste of penicillin. We all knew it. But if you go for broke that is the way you go and we all felt ourselves to be so fortunate in the religion that we were trying to be kind to all those outside of it and who should hoard penicillin when he is headed, self-propelled, for the Happy Hunting Grounds.
Mwindi, who had entered into the spirit of it all and was wearing his green robe and green skullcap and thought that we were all non-Islamic bums but also Kamba bums, said, “Bwana, there is another Masai with bubu.”
“Bring him here.”
He was a nice boy, still a warrior, and proud but shy from his defect. It was the classical. The chancre was hard and it was not new and after feeling it I added up the penicillin we had left in my mind and remembered that no man should ever panic and that we had an aircraft that could bring more and I told the boy to sit down and we boiled the syringe and the needle again, although what he could get from them that was worse than he had I did not know, and Msembi wiped off the buttocks area, with cotton and alcohol, this time hard and flat as a man’s ass should be, and I made the puncture and watched the tiny oily ooze that was the mark of my inefficiency and the wastage of that which now was like the Host, and through Mwindi and Arap Meina I told the boy, upright now and with his spear, when he should come back and that he should come six times and then take a note to the hospital that I would give him. We did not shake hands because he was younger than me. But we smiled and he was proud of having had the needle.
Mthuka, who had no business there, but had wandered by to watch the practice of medicine and in the hope that I would undertake some form of surgery since I did surgery out of a book which Ngui held and which had fascinating colored pictures some of which folded over and could be opened so that you saw the organs of both the front and the rear of the body at the same time. Surgery everyone loved but there had been no surgery today and Mthuka came up, long and loose and deaf and scarred beautifully to please a girl a long time ago and said, wearing his checked shirt and his hat that had once belonged to Tommy Shevlin, “Kwenda na Shamba.”
“Kwenda,” I said and to Ngui, “Two guns. You and me and Mthuka.”
“Hapana halal?”
“OK. Bring Charo.”
“Mzuri,” Ngui said since it would have been insulting to kill a good piece of meat and not have it legally butchered for the Moslem elders. Keiti knew only too well that we were all bad boys but now that we had the backing of a serious religion, and I had explained that this religion in its origin was as old if not older than the Mountain, Keiti would take it seriously. I think we could have conned Charo, which would have been a terrible thing to do since he had the comfort of his own faith which was much better organized than ours, but we were not proselytizing and we had made a great stride when Charo took the religion seriously.
Miss Mary hated what she knew of the religion, which was very little, and I am not sure that in our group everyone desired that she be a member. If she was a member by tribal right it was all right and she would be obeyed and respected as such. But on an elective entrance I am not positive she would have made it. With her own group, of course, headed by all the Game Scouts and led by the magnificent, well-starched, erect and handsome Chungo, she would have been elected to be the Queen of Heaven. But in our religion there was not going to be any Game Department and while we planned to abolish both flogging and capital punishment against anyone except our enemies and there was to be no slavery except by those we had taken prisoner personally and cannibalism was completely and absolutely abolished except for those who chose to practice it, Miss Mary might not have received the same number of votes that she would certainly have had from her own people.