en masse for an audience with their tyrannical shaman, who it emerges is not only extremely ancient and powerful but is in fact an albino — with all that extreme congenital pallor connotes in this part of the prehistoric world — and who evidently dwells in a small, austerely appointed lean-to just outside the dominant village’s city limits, and spends most of his time conducting private necromantic rituals that involve playing crude musical arrangements with human tibias and femurs on rows of differently sized human skulls like some sort of ghastly paleolithic marimbas, as well as apparently using skulls for both his personal stew pot and his commode; and the elite villagers come and make the customary obeisances and offerings and then lay out their concerns about the upstart village’s rapid development under the stewardship of this brilliant juvenile lusus naturae—who by the way we are informed has by this time been presiding hierophantically from his raised central dais for several solar cycles and is now something more like ten years old — and they respectfully ask their necromantic leader whether he’s perhaps had a chance to give any thought to the überchild issue and/or might see fit to intervene before the child’s upstart village becomes so advanced that even the predacious —— village’s albescent warriors are no match for it. There are certain intimations that the dominant —— village’s culture is cannibalistic or else perhaps uses the practice of cannibalizing enemy POWs as a way to further terrify and demoralize rival cultures, but all this is left shadowy and as it were merely suggestive. All he could say for certain was that the flight’s highly analytic narrator was darker-haired and — judging from his posture and the distinctively squared-off edge of the haircut against the back of his well-tanned neck — both younger and of a higher social or economic station than was the other passenger, who, again, appeared to have some type of auditory or perhaps cognitive deficit. Structurally, this scene apparently functions as both the climax of the protasis and the as it were engine of the narrative’s rising action, because at just this point we are told that the original exemplum splits or diverges here into at least three main epitatic variants. All three versions involve the maleficent shaman’s hearing out the —— village’s upper-caste citizens’ fears and their pleas for counsel and then conducting a lengthy and very intricate pantheistic ritual in which he boils yams in a special ceremonial skull and reads the rising steam, rather the way certain other primitive cultures read tea leaves or the entrails of poultry in order to divine and inform a certain course of action. In one variant of the epitasis, then, the shaman — whose eyes are described as appearing literally red in just the way certain modern albinistic specimens’ pupils can appear hemean or red — apparently imbibes some melanistic philter or smears himself with dark clay and disguises himself in a cloak and bushy rabbinical beard and magically transports himself bodily across the region to the upstart village, whereupon he insinuates himself into the long line of villagers waiting to ask their respective questions of the child on the dais, and, upon eventually arriving at the queue’s front, the nigrescently disguised shaman presents the child with the offering of a certain mysterious mutant specimen of breadfruit which has a strange excrescent growth resembling the child’s village’s new crude alphabet’s glyph for ‘growth,’ ‘fertility,’ ‘wisdom,’ or ‘destiny’ (the village’s written language still wasn’t very advanced or differentiated) on the breadfruit’s side, and then instead of asking his question aloud at high volume, publicly, which had gradually evolved into the custom at these lunar Q&A rituals, the malefic shaman instead leans forward in his jaguar-hide mantle and flowing French Fork and whispers something in the child’s tiny ear — the natives of this region evidently all have very tiny and close-set ears, rather the way the aborigines of other Third World areas developed racially distinctive eyelids, complexions, and so forth — susurrating some question that is completely inaudible to anyone else in the line but which evidently has a profound effect on the child, because directly after the thanatophilic shaman withdraws and melts back into the rain forest the child on the dais closes its eyes and withdraws its consciousness into some type of meditative catatonic state for weeks or even according to one sub-version of the variant months, refusing to respond to anyone’s questions or to react to or even acknowledge the presence of any of the other villagers; and there are apparently all manner of further sub- and sub-sub-versions of the variant which devote a great deal of narrative time to various speculations and allegations about what it was that the dominant —— village’s incognito shaman whispered to the child, although all the sub-versions’ theories evidently concur that whatever it was had indeed been in the standard grammatical form of a question and not any sort of declarative statement or apothegm or rhyming mesmeric spell. In the second of the epitasis’s three main variants, the autocratic shaman evidently does not disguise or insinuate himself in any way but rather gathers all the upper-caste citizens of the powerful —— village as well as a phalanx of attendants and palanquin carriers and syces and white-painted security personnel and specialized antijaguar squads and travels with this contingent