The scout comes running back toward us shouting, his loincloth bobbing, his jostling spear flashing in the sunlight. My native guide hears his news in its breathless torrent of clucks and gibberish. He chews somberly on his bottom lip. "Well?" I demand. We're about to emerge, I am informed, into a country where precautions have now to be taken. To assuage aroused spirits; to assure them we intend no aggression.

The guide steps past me and sharply issues orders to the bearers. They set down their loads, murmuring. Glancing at each other, they open their mouths gaping wide. They reach in and start removing their teeth. They stow the gleaming items into the pouches among the beads around their necks. I watch in suspicious distaste. The guide returns to my side. "You too, bwana," he informs me, his mouth shrunken like an old man's. I hold myself stiffly upright. "I absolutely shall not," I reply, hearing the starchy ring of my voice. "It's beneath my dignity, as a civilized man," I declare. The guide starts to protest. I cut him off with a sharp motion of my hand. "Let's get moving, shall we?" I tell him. He looks at me. He grunts. He tugs his pouch straight and turns on his bare heel and exhorts the bearers once more to their burdens.

Amid this strange company, I enter a dry flatland of high, sun-scorched grass. Every few hundred yards a twisted plane tree rises up, like a piece of abandoned sculpture. We make camp. The bearers eat mush and giggle away at each other's countenances. But their eyes are hard and fearful. The guide intrudes on my tent, apologizing, while I'm still laboring over the boiled meat of my dinner. Again he makes his plea; again I dismiss it. "You ought to see yourself in the mirror, granddad," I joke roughly. He retires, his earring disk waggling as he shakes his head at the consequences.

In the middle of the night, I wake up to a low growling outside my tent. I stab a hand about for my gun, and sit up holding it at my side, pointing uncertainly at the tent wall. A roar goes up that makes my hair stand on end. I tilt back in mesmerized fright, my finger slowly closing on the trigger. Another roar. The gun blast tears a hole into the tent, into the vast night itself. A voice screams. General clamor. The noise of running. The guide bursts into my tent. One of the bearers has been almost carried off by a beast! All because I still insist on my teeth, he cries, shrivel-mouthed against starlight at my tent flap. "Nonsense, nonsense," I retort, shaken. I fumble with my canvas bag, for the whiskey flask. "Someone must have left food out, the animal smelled it," I insist. "Get the medicine, fix the man's wounds," I go on. I gulp an agitated swallow that spills down my chin.

The next morning we set off with the injured man tottering along on a makeshift crutch, supported by someone's shoulder. The extra work for the other bearers slows us down. I brood, feeling the sullenness of pursed mouths around me. The sidelong glances. I'm all too aware of the dire consequences of a mutiny, out here in such circumstances. At lunchtime, I decide I have no other choice. I call the guide over. His face lights up in relief. He leads me behind the privacy of a plane tree and shows me how it's done. I stop him after my uppers are out. "That's enough. Enough," I tell him. My speech whistles thick and broad, like a six-year-old's after a playground mishap. The guide counters in alarm that everything must be removed, for the proper observance of diplomacy. "No, no, this is fine, as a symbolic gesture of supplication," I exclaim. "Believe me," I assure him, "I understand about all this animistic hocus-pocus. Believe me." I order him back to his charges.

But it's vanity that's playing my hand in this. And a stubborn pride of culture that's feeling offended.

"You know, I do this for your sake," I inform the guide, as I rejoin our party. I sniff pointedly. "I myself trust in this, and this," I declare, tapping my head under my bush hat, and then my gun in its holster. "Now tell them all to stop grumbling like that," I order. "And let's get back on the trail."

During the night there's another attack. At light of day my tent is riddled with bullet holes, scorched with gunsmoke. I realize the intolerable: I will have to fully submit. My cheeks throb scarlet when the guide is done assisting me. I lift my trembling chin as high as it will go. "Kindly remove the shaving mirror from my tent," I announce, my gums clanging strangely, "and have it hidden from my sight. And do not break it, thank you," I add.

We resume. Through the long stunned hours of heat and plodding silence, I seem to make out one tiny sound: the high distinct clinking of our pouches. The night passes, tense but undisturbed. The following one too. The guide can't restrain a small crumpled smile of triumph as he sees me at my plate of mush. I ignore him.

On the last of these days, to my mortification, we encounter a party headed the other way. My bush-jacketed equal greets me with firm-mouthed cheerful courtesy, with barely a hitch in his manner at my condition. But the briefest narrowing of his pale eyes gives away his private thoughts: that one of his kind has degraded himself, has soiled his cultural authority by submitting to the grotesqueries of savages. I stare off into the grass, mumbling commonplaces through the screen of my hand. I ask the loan of some medicines for our injured. These are supplied with patronizing generosity. We salute good-bye. "You'll learn, sonny boy," I mutter clacking, watching the upright proud pale back moving off. "I will be clear of here tomorrow morning, and reassembled," I go on. "You, in your foolish, starched pride, have terrors and horrors awaiting you."

I turn, and my guide falls in beside me. "He, in his foolish arrogant pride, has terrors and horrors awaiting him," he declares. I glance at him sharply. I shrug. I stare ahead. "Whether or not that is so, that is no business of yours," I inform him, to reclaim the order of things. And the next day, mercifully, we leave the angry grasslands; we open up our pouches, and after some fumbling, all goes back to proper order. Except for the guide's lingering trace of a smile, which, of course, I ignore.

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