Free Happy Ant-Heap by Norman Lewis

said. It was of a woman accused by her husband of adultery with five lovers. Although any Liberian of standing, Williams explained, was expected to have no fewer than three wives—each purchased from her father at the standard bride price of forty dollars—the law was very strict in dealing with any wife falling short of absolute marital fidelity. Mr Williams ascribed the woman’s fall from grace in this instance to the use of borfina, in itself a criminal offence only where a woman was concerned.
    A trial by burning iron was to be held in the yard at the back, where we found a heart man preparing his fire. The accused woman and her husband, dressed with extreme formality and devoid of expression, were seated side by side. The heart man pulled a long iron spoon from the fire, tested its glowing surface with his spittle and nodded to the girl, who put out her tongue. He bent over her, and there was a faint sizzle. Someone passed a jug of water to her, and she rinsed and spat and thrust out her tongue for the court’s inspection. There were insufficient signs of burning, and Mr Williams declared her not guilty. I asked if her five lovers would stand trial, and he seemed surprised. They had already been fined ten dollars each on the spot, he said, but the money, he assured me, would be refunded.
    This is the closest I have come to the real hard core of sexual stimulants, or supposed ones. The softer aphrodisiacs are better known, though in my experience just as fanciful; the irrationality of the search for sexual vigour knows no bounds. Rhinoceros horns have been sawn off to be replaced by plaster imitations in the museums of the world. A whole category of animals in China are deprived of their gall bladders, the contents of which are mixed with white wine. All parts of a tiger are now marketable, including skin, whiskers and intestines. There are regular gatherings by diners in a Hong Kong restaurant to consume not only bird’s nest soup, but a more invigorating broth prepared from the lungs of a vulture. In Britain, animal-welfare groups claim in advertisements that Canadian fishermen have slaughtered at least 10,000 seals so that their penises can be exported to China, where they fetch a hundred pounds apiece as an important constituent of ‘sex potions’.
    But oysters remain by common consent at the top of the aphrodisiac league, despite the extraordinary physical passivity of molluscs compared with tigers and Liberian children. Throughout recorded history, many bon viveurs have sworn by them. Casanova, bolstered by their support, is said to have become the lover of 130 women, two of them nuns who rapidly forsook their vows after being plied by the seducer with oysters and champagne. The latter I have no argument with—champagne’s useful consequences are easily demonstrable—but aphrodisiac oysters seem to me no more than a persistent and universal self-delusion. I have thought so ever since an experience suffered in my youth, nearly sixty years ago, on a journey by dhow up the Red Sea.
    I had gone with two friends in the hope of entering and exploring the Yemen, in those days hardly known in the western world. Permission to land was refused, and shortly afterwards we ran into a storm which stripped away the dhow’s mainsail, forcing us to take refuge on the desert island of Kamaran, a few miles off the Arabian coast. The island’s principal inhabitants were a tribe of pearl-fishers, who spent their lives scouring the sea bottom in search of oysters and had developed a lung capacity which enabled them to stay underwater for up to four minutes. The diver wore a clip on his nose, a weight round his leg and was connected by a line to a dhow from which he leaped feet first. Having collected the oysters in his basket, he gave the signal to be pulled up. Coming to the surface, he was on the point of suffocation. Sometimes divers were brought up unconscious and occasionally they could not be revived. They suffered from