Free The Tomorrow-Tamer by Margaret Laurence Page A

did not regard the Apocalypse as poetry.
    â€œWe have positive proof,” he cried, “that the Devil–he who bears the mark of the beast–shall be loosed out of his prison and shall go out to deceive the nations.”
    This event, he estimated, was less than half a century away. Hence the urgency of his mission, for the seven churches were to be reborn in strategic spots throughout the world, andtheir faithful would spearhead the final attack against the forces of evil. Every soul saved now would swell that angelic army; every soul unsaved would find the gates of heaven eternally barred. His face was tense and ecstatic. Around his head shone the terrible nimbus of his radiant hair.
    â€œWhosoever is not found written in the book of life will be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, and will be tormented day and night for ever and ever. But the believers will dwell in the new Jerusalem, where the walls are of jasper and topaz and amethyst, and the city is of pure gold.”
    I could not find one word to say. I was thinking of Danso. Danso as a little boy, in the evangel’s meeting place, listening to the same sermon while the old gods of his own people still trampled through the night forests of his mind. The shadow spirits of stone and tree, the hungry gods of lagoon and grove, the fetish hidden in its hut of straw, the dark soul-hunter Sasabonsam–to these were added the dragon, the serpent, the mark of the beast, the lake of fire and the anguish of the damned. What had Danso dreamed about, those years ago, when he slept?
    â€œI am not a particularly religious man,” I said abruptly.
    â€œWell, okay,” he said regretfully. “Only–I like you, Mr. Kettridge, and I’d like to see you saved.”
    Later that evening Danso arrived. I had tried to keep him from meeting Brother Lemon. I felt somehow I had to protect each from the other.
    Danso was dressed in his old khaki trousers and a black mammy-cloth shirt patterned with yellow diamonds. He was all harlequin tonight. He dervished into the room, swirled a bow in the direction of Brother Lemon, whose mouth had dropped open, then spun around and presented me with a pile of canvases.
    Danso knew it was not fashionable, but he painted people. A globe-hipped market mammy stooped while her friends loaded a brass tray full of tomatoes onto her head. A Hausa trader, encased in his long embroidered robe, looked haughtily on while boys floated stick boats down a gutter. A line of little girls in their yellow mission-school dresses walked lightfoot back from the well, with buckets on their heads.
    A hundred years from now, when the markets and shanties have been supplanted by hygienic skyscrapers, when the gutters no longer reek, when pidgin English has grown from a patois into a sedate language boasting grammar texts and patriotic poems, then Africans will look nostalgically at Danso’s pictures of the old teeming days, and will probably pay fabulous prices. At the moment, however, Danso could not afford to marry, and were it not for his kindly but conservative uncles, who groaned and complained and handed over a pound here, ten shillings there, he would not have been able to paint, either.
    I liked the pictures. I held one of them up for Brother Lemon to see.
    â€œOh yes, a market scene,” he said vaguely. “Say, that reminds me, Mr. Kettridge. Would you like me to bring over my colour slides some evening? I’ve taken six rolls of film so far, and I haven’t had one failure.”
    Danso, slit-eyed and lethal, coiled himself up like a spitting cobra.
    â€œColour slides, eh?” he hissed softly. “Very fine–who wants paintings if you can have the real thing? But one trouble–you can’t use them in your church. Every church needs pictures. Does it look like a church, with no pictures? Of course not. Just a cheap meeting place, that’s all. Real religious pictures. What do you say, Mr.