The Coup by John Updike

a few children, had tucked themselves well back from the trucks, in the alley-mouths and beneath the cafe-awnings at the shady rim of the square. So far from continuous, a blanket of unified humanity as Ellellou had imagined, it was a crowd of clots, as recalcitrant-appearing perhaps as those clots of blood from which Allah first fashioned men. The king lifted his arms. He spoke in no language that Ellellou knew. A few of the crowd, its drowsy buzzing ceased, stepped forward from the alleys and the awnings onto the blazing clay, better to hear; these were the ones who understood Wanj. Thus the blackest and most stoic faces sifted forward, leaving behind the brown, the reddish-tan, the merely dusky. The king in his blindness stared directly into the sun, orating. "People of Wanj, rejoice with me! Today I go to join our ancestors, who live below, who are our blood! These mad soldiers who attempt to govern us are puppets of the ancestors, who dangle them a moment before they toss them aside. If their rule is just, why has the sky-god withheld rain these five years? They say Edumu is the center of the sickness, but when I was the Lord of Wanj and had bewitched the French with their little round hats to be my policemen and scribes, rain fell in abundance, and the palms poured their wine upon the ground, and there were not enough camels in Noire to carry our peanuts to Dakar! Of what am I accused by these poor soldiers, those apostles of He socialisme scientifique" [for Wanj had no words for this concept]? Of black magic, of being l un element indesirabWill within the fabled purity of Kush! I say Kush is a fiction, an evil dream the white man had, and that those who profess to govern her are twisted and bent double. They are in truth white men, though their faces wear black masks. Look at them as they sit behind me, with their fat wives and fatter children! What have these men to do with you? Nothing. They have come from afar, to steal and enslave. I challenge them by the ancient code of Wanjiji: let him who accuses me execute me! If a demon give his hand strength, then guilt shall travel up his arm and become his soul's burden. If he falter, then I will live, and those who speak Wanj will still have a Lord and a living connection with the gods of their ancestors!" The crowd hissed and murmured in its desultory way; the sun, mounting higher, was draining purpose and clarity from the holiday. Colonel Wambutti, who spoke Wanj, crouched forward and murmured the gist of the king's words into Ellel-lou's ear. The President promptly nodded, comprehending the challenge. He stood and glanced about for the executioner's sword. Credit the now (in some quarters) discredited Ellellou with the grandeur of his response in this hour. Squeamishly he had absented himself from the interrogations of the king, and upon the occasion when the old man, his feet so flogged their soles had become bubbles of livid flesh, had indeed confessed to conspiring with Roul the desert devil and with Jean-Paul Chremeau, the Christian, alexandrine-indicting premier of Sahel, to bring about drought and demoralization, Ellellou had been prowling the city disguised as an orange-seller; by the time the President could be located and brought to the dungeon, the king had recanted, and hurled at him an absurd litany of American trade-names-"Coca-Cola! Polaroid! Chevrolet! IBM!" Indeed, the scandalized marabouts and professional torturers agreed, devils were at work here. Ellellou had gone pale at the outburst, and turned on his heel. Not so now. A power beyond him descended and gave him calm. He stepped lightly to the king's side. The king said softly into the sun, "I know that step." "Are you sure?" The king did not turn his head, as if to avoid what glim- mers of my face might come to him. He preferred to rest his gaze in blank radiance. "Another saying came to me after our conversation." "What was it, my Lord?" "Wer andern eine Grube grdbt, fallst selbst hinein. Who digs