ex officio of the entire village, and to invest the child with some sort of unique unprecedented legal status that was neither minor nor adult nor member of any caste, neither a village exarch nor a thane nor a shaman per se but something entirely else, and with the nominal ‘parents’ granted certain special rights and privileges to compensate them for their supplantation by the village in loco—the exarchs apparently having come in secret to none other than the child itself to help them structure this whole delicate compromise — and they construct for the child a special sort of raised wicker dais or platform in the precise geometric center of the village, and they designate certain extremely rigid and precise intervals and arrangements whereby once every lunar cycle the villagers can all come to the village’s center to line up before the dais according to certain arcane hierarchies of caste and familial status and to one by one come before the seated child with questions and disputes for him to resolve via ethical fatwa and are in return to compensate the child for its services with an offering of a plantain or dik-dik haunch or some other item of recognized value, which offering was what the primitive but complex legal arrangement provided for the child to live on and support himself instead of being his alleged parents’ comme on dit ‘dependent.’ The context in which my own friend then had the narrative related to him by his acquaintance is unknown to me as anything more than ‘quotidian’ or ‘everyday.’ They would all line up before the dais to offer the child a yam, an ampoule of blow-dart phytotoxin, et cetera, and in return the child would undertake to answer their question. As exempla of this sort of mythopoeic cycle so often go, this arrangement is represented as the origin of something like modern trade in the villagers’ culture. Prior to the child’s evection, everyone had made their own clothes and lean-tos and spears and gathered all and only their own family’s food, and while certain foodstuffs were sometimes shared at equinoctial religious festivals and so forth there was evidently nothing like actual barter or trade until the advent of this child who could and would answer any question put to it. And the small child thereafter lived atop this platform and never left it — the dais had its own lean-to with a pallet of plantain leaves and a small hollowed-out concavity for a fire and primitive cooking pot — and apparently the child’s entire childhood was thenceforward spent on the central platform eating and sleeping and sitting for long periods doing nothing, presumably thinking and developing, and waiting out the 29.518 synodic days before the villagers would again line up with their respective questions. And as the village’s trade-based economy became more modern and complex, one novel development was that certain especially shrewd and acute members of the shaman and midwife castes began to cultivate the intellectual or as it were rhetorical skill of structuring a monthly question in such a way as to receive a maximally valuable answer from the extraordinary child, and they then began to sell or barter these interrogatory skills to ordinary villagers who wished to extract maximum value for their monthly question, which was the advent of what the narrative apparently terms the village’s consultant caste. For instance instead of asking the child something narrowly circumscribed such as, ‘Where in our village’s region of the rain forest should I look for a certain type of edible root?’ a professional consultant’s suggestion here might be that his client ask the child something more general along the lines for example of, ‘How can a man feed his family with less effort than we now expend?’ or, ‘How might we ensure a store of food that will last our family through periods when available resources are scarce?’ Whereas on the other hand, as the whole enterprise became more sophisticated and specialized, the consultant caste also discovered that maximizing the answer’s value sometimes entailed making a certain question more specific and practical, as in for instance instead of, ‘How can we increase our supply of firewood?’ a more efficacious question here might be, ‘How might a single man move a whole downed tree close to his home so as to have plentiful firewood?’ And evidently some of the village’s new consultant caste developed into rather ingenious interlocutors and managed to design questions of historic cultural importance and value such as, ‘When my neighbor borrows my spear, how can I make a record of the loan in order to prove that the spear is mine in case my neighbor suddenly turns round and claims that the spear is his and refuses to return it?’ or, ‘How might I divert water from one of the rain forest’s streams so that instead of my wife having to walk miles with a jar balanced on her head in order to haul water from the stream the stream might be made to as it were come to us?’ and so forth — here it was not clear whether my friend or his acquaintance were providing their own examples or whether these were actual examples enumerated during the dialogue he overheard on the United flight. He said that certain very general conclusions about the two passengers’ different ages and economic status could be deduced from their respective hair’s color and cut and their postures and the backs of their necks, but that that was all. That there was no reading material except the seat pocket’s customary in-flight catalogue and safety card, and the wing’s engine’s constant noise would have prevented him from sleeping even had he taken a pill, and that there was literally nothing for him to do but lean ever so subtly forward and try as unobtrusively as possible to make out what the darker-haired young passenger was relating to his less educated seatmate or companion, and to try to interpret it and fit it into some context that would as it were ground the narrative and render it more comme on dit illuminating or relevant to his own context. And that but at certain points it became unclear what was part of the cycle’s narrative Ding an sich and what were the passenger’s own editorial interpolations and commentary, such as the fact that it was evidently during the child’s decade-long occupancy of the special raised platform that the village’s culture evolved from hunting and gathering to a crude form of agriculture and husbandry, and discovered as well the principles of the wheel and rotary displacement, and fashioned their first fully enclosed dwellings of willow and yam-thatch, and developed an ideographic alphabet and primitive written grammar which allowed for more sophisticated divisions of labor and a crude economic system of trade in various goods and services; and in sum the entire village’s culture, technology, and standard of living undergo a metastatic evolution that would normally have taken thousands of years and countless paleolithic generations to attain. And, not surprisingly, these quantum leaps arouse a certain degree of fear and jealousy in many of the region’s other paleolithic villages, which are all still in the pantheo-shamanistic, hunting-and-gathering, hunch-round- the-fire-when-it’s-cold stage of cultural attainment, and the United flight’s narrative focuses particularly on the reaction of one large and formidable village, which is ruled by a single autocratic shaman in a kind of totalitarian theocracy, and which has also historically dominated this entire region of the rain forest and exacted tribute from all the other villages, this both because their warriors are so fierce and because their autocratic shaman is extremely ancient and politically astute and merciless and frightening and is universally regarded as being at the very least in league with the primitive rain forest’s diabolical White Spirits — recall that this is an equatorial Third World region, such that here dark colors are apparently associated with life and beneficent spiritual forces and light or whitish colors with death, absence, and pantheism’s evil or malignant spirits, and evidently one reason why the dominant village’s warriors are so formidable is that the shaman forces them to smear themselves with white or light-colored clay or ground talc or some canescent indigenous substance before battle such that according to legend they present the appearance of a regiment of evil spirits or the risen dead coming at one with spears and phytotoxic blowguns, and the sight always so terrifies all the other villages’ warriors that they quail and lose heart before battle is even joined, and the dominant village has had no serious opposition since the necromantic shaman took charge many aeons ago. Even so, the more politically astute upper castes of the dominant village eventually become concerned, obviously, about this other village with the messianically brilliant child; they fear that as the child’s village continues to evolve and becomes more and more advanced and sophisticated it will be only a matter of time before some prescient member of the little village’s warrior caste comes before the child and asks, ‘How shall we attack and defeat the village of ——’ (the fellow could not understand or reproduce the airline passenger’s pronunciation of the dominant village’s name, which evidently consisted mostly of glottal clicks and pops) ‘and take their lands and hunting grounds for our own more advanced and sophisticated culture?’ and so on; and a delegation of the bellicose —— village’s upper-caste citizens finally work up their nerve and appear