The shaman produced a big, shallow drum. He beat on it with long, slow, regular strokes. From deep within his chest, a song grew. The song was not for us to hear but for the spirits who would help him in performing this seance. Half its words and cadences were outside the range of even my own rather sensitive ears. Klosterheim leaned forward over the fire to splash water on the heated stones. They hissed and steamed, and Ipkaptam's chanting grew louder. I struggled to keep my breathing deep and regular. The scar on his face, which I had seen as an irregular wound, now took on shape. Another face lurked beneath the first, something baleful and insectlike. I tried to remember what I knew. I felt nauseated and dizzy. Were the Pukawatchi human? Or did their race merely take on human characteristics? According to Klosterheim such ambiguous creatures were quite common here.

As I came close to losing consciousness, I was alerted by Klosterheim's changing voice. He sounded like a monk. He was chanting in Greek, telling the tale of the Pukawatchi and their treasures. He threw fuel on the fire, blowing until the stones were red-hot and then splashing on more water. The fire danced up again, casting shadows, increasing the heat until it was impossible to think clearly. All my energies were largely devoted to remaining conscious.

The beating drum, the rhythmic chanting, the strange words, all began to take me over. I was losing control of my own will. It was not pleasant to feel that somewhere I had experienced all this before, yet I was also somewhat heartened by the thought. I hoped a higher purpose was being served by my discomfort.

During my youthful training I had been absorbed into many such rituals. I, therefore, made no particular effort to hold on to individual identity but let myself be drawn into the dark security of the heat and the shadows, the chanting and the drumming. I say security because it is like a kind of death. All worldly and material cares begin to disappear. One is confronted with one's own cruelties and appetites, experienced as a victim might experience them. There is remorse and self-forgiveness, an incisive glance into the reality of one's own soul, as if we stand in judgment on ourselves. This creates a peculiar psychic spiral in which one is redeemed or reborn into a kind of purity of being, a state which enables one to be open to the visions or revelations which are almost always the result of such formalities.

Apologizing to us that he no longer possessed the tribe's traditional redstone pipe bowl, Ipkaptam produced a large ceremonial pipe and lit it with a taper from the fire. He turned to the four points of the compass, beginning in the east, chanting something I could not understand, puffing the smoke as he did so. He held the pipe aloft. Again he chanted and puffed. Then he passed the pipe to Klosterheim, who knew what to do with it.

Now Ipkaptam began to speak of the tribe's great past. In rolling tones he described the Great Spirit's creation of his people deep below the ground. The very first people had been made of stone, and they were slow and sleepy. They had in turn made men to run their errands for them, and then made giants to protect them against rebellion. The men ran away from the giants to another land, which was the land of the Pukawatchi.

The smaller Pukawatchi were too weak to fight so many; thus they fled underground. The giants had not pursued the men. The tall men had not pursued the Pukawatchi, and soon they were at one with men and giants.

All had been equal, and all had gifts the others could use.

Warmed in the womb of Mother Earth herself, they had no need of fire. Food was plentiful. They were at peace. Every year the great Eternal Pipe, the redstone smoking bowl of the Pukawatchi, which they had won in war against the green people, was produced and presented to the Spirit. The pipe was smoked by every tribe and every people in creation. It was always full of the finest herbs and aromatic bark, and it never needed to be lit. Even the bear people and the badger people and the eagle people and all the other peoples of the plains and forests and mountains were invited to the great powwow, to confirm their bond. All lived in mutual harmony and respect. Only in the world of spirits was there conflict, and their wars did not touch on the lands of the Pukawatchi, nor of the tall men, nor of the giants.

I realized I was no longer hearing Klosterheim's Greek but Ip-kaptam's own language in his own voice. Ipkaptam easily made the mental links necessary for me to understand their language. At last the words had found their way directly to my mind.

With the words came pictures and narratives, crowding one upon the other. All were sufficiently familiar. I absorbed and understood them quickly. I was learning the whole history of a people, its rise and fall and rise again. I was hearing its own legends. Would I learn about a lost sword with a habit of escaping or killing those who possessed it?

More water was poured on the stones. The pipe was passed again and again. As I learned to inhale its strange smoke, my sense of reality grew even dimmer. Ipkaptam's insectoid features seemed those of a great ant and his crown of feathers antennae. I refused to lose either my life or my sanity. I pretended his disguise was all that was visible to me. I remembered the teachings of a people I had lived among briefly, who spoke of a god they called the Original Insect. He was supposed to be the first created being. A locust. The story was told how the locust could not eat, so the spirits made it a forest where it might graze. But the locust was so hungry he ate the whole forest, and now he cannot do anything else. Unless stopped, he will attempt to eat the whole world and then eat himself.

I found nothing sinister in the tale the shaman told of his people's history. Perhaps there was nothing sinister in the tale itself, only in the teller. What Two Tongues had learned might not have been from his fathers. Nonetheless, I listened.

The steam and the smoke continued to make me very faint. My heart sank when the great red sandstone peace pipe was passed again. Once more it was offered to the spirits of the four winds. Klosterheim took a small, mean puff and passed it to me. I inhaled the fragrant barks and leaves and came suddenly alive. It was as if the smoke curled through every vein and bone in my body, inhabiting all of me and filling me with a sense of well-being, leaving none of the effects of my usual desperate drug-supported state. Those drugs fed off my spirit as I fed off their energy. These were natural plants, dried but not cured. I felt as if I inhaled all nature's benefits in one long pull on the pipe. I was hugely invigorated.

Ipkaptam took back the pipe with reverence. Again he offered it to the sky, then to the earth, then to the four winds, and only then replaced it on the stone before him. His widening lizard eyes glowed huge in the firelight.

"Many times, " he said, "the spirits tried to involve us in their wars. We would fight neither for one side nor the other. These were not our wars. We did not even have the means to fight them. We did not have the will to kill our fellows." He seemed to grow in stature as he spoke with reminiscent pride. "Once all peoples, giants and men, came peacefully to trade with the Pukawatchi in their underground realm. We traded the metal we chipped from the rocks. With this metal the whole world tipped its arrows and lances and made fine ornaments." Iron was more highly prized than gold, said Ipkaptam, for with iron a man might win himself gold, but with gold he was always vulnerable to the man with iron. Metal was even more highly prized than agate and quartz for the edge it would take.

Men were cunning, had fire, but they did not know where to look for the metals and stones. Their tools and ornaments, their weapons, were made of flint and bone, so they traded furs and cooked meat for the Pukawatchi iron. Giants had sorcerous powers and ancient wisdom, for they were the folk of the rock. They had the secret of fire, and they knew how to burn metal and twist it into shapes. All had to come to the Pukawatchi for their metal, and the most prized of all the metals was the sentient iron mined at the heart of the world.