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A good deal of the inspiration for this story came from the works of Ernest Becker, Bruno Bettelheim, Joseph Campbell, Marcel Griaule, Alfred Metraux, Oliver Sacks, and Victor W. Turner. With the caution that this book doesn’t offer to represent their thinking, I want to acknowledge my debt to these students and teachers of humankind.

The quotes on pages 45—6 come from All About Dinosaurs by Roy Chapman Andrews (Random House, 1953). Those on pages 152—3 come from Nagasaki: The Forgotten Bomb by Frank W. Chinnock (The World Publishing Company, A New American Library Book, 1969). Phrases from the Koran are quoted from the Penguin Classics edition of the N. J. Dawood translation.

It is a pleasure to thank the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Arts Council for grants that made this writing possible; and Bill and Nancy Webb for a gift of space and privacy.

HERE, AND ALSO SOUTH OF US, THE BEACHES HAVE A YELLOW TINT, but along the Keys of Florida the sand is like shattered ivory. In the shallows the white of it turns the water such an ideal sea-blue that looking at it you think you must be dead, and the rice paddies, in some seasons, are profoundly emerald. The people who inhabit these colors, thanked be the compassion and mercy of Allah, have nothing much to trouble them. It’s true that starting a little ways north of them the bodies still just go on and on, and the Lord, as foretold, has crushed the mountains; but it’s hard to imagine that such things ever went on in the same universe that holds up the Keys of Florida. It strains all belief to think that these are the places the god Quetzalcoatl, the god Bob Marley, the god Jesus, promised to come back to and build their kingdoms.

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