draped about his shoulders, exactly as those ancestors had worn one in the season of the cold wind called harmattan. Aaron introduced himself as Haruna, the Hausa version of his name; and the guest made himself known as Sarki—Chief—of the village of Datura. His given name was Kazunzumi. Wutzchen snuffled in his sleep. The Sarki glanced at the huge pig and smiled. Aaron relaxed a bit. The Islamic interdict on swine had been shed by the Murnans when they'd become apostates, just as Colonial Survey had guessed.

Stoltzfoos' Hausa, learned at the Homestead School at Georgetown University, proved adequate to its first challenge in the field, though he discovered, with every experimenter in a new language, that his most useful phrase was magana sanoo-sanoo: "please speak slowly." Aaron let the Chief commence the desultory conversation that would precede talk of consequence. Martha, ignored by the men, sat on the edge of the bed, reading the big German-language Bible. Aaron and Kazunzumi sang on in the heathen tongue about weather, beasts, and field-crops.

The Sarki leaned forward to examine Aaron's beard and shaven upper lip, once; and smiled. The Murnan does not wear such. He looked at Martha more casually now, seeing that the husband was not disgraced by his wife's naked face; and remarked on the whiteness of her skin in the same tones he'd mentioned Wutzchen's remarkable girth.

Aaron asked when the snows would cease, when the earth would thaw. The Sarki told him, and said that the land here was as rich as manure. Gradually the talk worked round to problems involving carpenters, nails, lumber, hinges—and money. Aaron was pleased to discover that the natives thought nothing of digging a cellar and raising a barn in midwinter, and that workers could be easily hired.

Suddenly Sarki Kazunzumi stood and slapped his palms together. The tent flap was shoved open. Bowed servants, who'd shivered outside for over an hour, placed their master's presents on the sack table, on the twig floor, even beside Martha on the bed. There were iron knives, a roast kid, a basket of peanuts, a sack of roasted coffee beans, a string of dried fruit, and a tiny earthware flask of perfume. There was even a woolen riga for Aaron, black, suggesting that the Survey had said a bit to the natives about Amish custom; and there were bolts of bright-patterned cloth too worldly for aught but quilts and infant-dresses, brightening Martha's eyes.

Aaron stood to accept the guest gifts with elaborate thanks. Sarki Kazunzumi as elaborately bemeaned his offerings. "Musa the carpenter will appear on tomorrow's tomorrow," he said. "You will, the Mother willing, visit me in Datura tomorrow. We will together purchase lumber worthy of my friend-neighbor's barn-making. May the Mother give you strength to farm, Haruna! May the Mother grant you the light of understanding!"

"Sannu, sannu!" Stoltzfoos responded. He stood at the door of his tent, holding his lantern high to watch the Sarki and his servants ride off into the darkness.

"Er iss en groesie Fisch, nee?" Martha asked.

"The biggest fish in these parts," Aaron agreed. "Did you understand our talk?"

"The heathen speech is hard for me to learn, Stoltz," Martha admitted, speaking in the dialect they'd both been reared to. "While you had only the alien speech to study, I spent my time learning to grow the buglets and tell the various sorts apart. Besides, unser guutie Deitschie Schproech, asz unser Erlayser schwetzt, iss guut genunk fa mier." (Our honest German tongue, that our Saviour spoke, is good enough for me).

Aaron laughed. "So altfashuned a Maedel I married," he said. "Woman, you must learn the Hausa, too. We must be friends to these Schwotzers, as we were friends with the English-speakers back in the United Schtayts." He pushed aside the bolt of Murnan cloth to sit beside his wife, and leafed through the pages of their Familien-Bibel, pages lovingly worn by his father's fingers, and his grandfather's. "Listen," he commanded:

"For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey; a land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass. When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the Lord they God for the good land which He hath given thee." Aaron closed the big book reverently. "Awmen," he said.

"Awmen," the woman echoed. "Aaron, with you beside me, I am not fretful."

"And with the Lord above us, I fear not in a strange land," Aaron said. He bent to scrape a handful of earth from beneath Martha's pine-twig carpet. "Guuter Gruundt," he said. "This will grow tall corn. Tobacco, too; the folk here relish our leaf. There will be deep grasses for the beasts when the snow melts. We will prosper here, wife."

The next morning was cold, but the snowfall had ceased for a spell. The Stoltzfooses had risen well before the dawn; Martha to feed herself, her husband, and the chickens; Aaron to ready the horse and wagon for a trip into Datura. He counted out the hoard of golden cowries he'd been loaned as grubstake, did some arithmetic, and allowed his wife to pour him a second cup of coffee for the road. "You may expect the Sarki's wives to visit while I'm gone," he remarked.

"I'd be scared half to death!" Martha Stoltzfoos said. Her hands went to the back of her head, behind the lace prayer covering. "My hair's all strooby, this place is untidy as an auction yard; besides, how can I talk with those dark and heathen women? Them all decked out in golden bangles and silken clothes, most likely, like the bad lady of Babylon? Aaron Stoltz, I would admire a pretty to ride into town with you."

"Haggling for hired-help is man's Bissiniss." he said. "When Kazunzumi's women come, feed them pie and peaches from the can. You'll find a way to talk, or women are not sisters. I'll be back home in time for evening chores."

Bumping along the trail into Datura, Aaron Stoltzfoos studied the land. A world that could allow so much well-drained black soil to go unfarmed was fortunate indeed, he mused. He thought of his father's farm, which would be his elder brother's, squeezed between railroad tracks and a three-lane highway, pressed from the west by an Armstrong Cork plant, the very cornstalks humming in harmony with the electric lines strung across the fields. This land was what the old folks had sought in America so long ago: a wilderness ripe for the plow.

The wagon rumbled along the hoof-pocked frozen clay. Aaron analyzed the contours of the hills for watershed and signs of erosion. He studied the patterns of the barren winter fields, fall-plowed and showing here and there the stubble of a crop he didn't recognize. When the clouds scudded for a moment off the sun, he grinned up, and looked back blinded to the road. Good tilth and friendship were promised here, gifts to balance loneliness. Five years from spring, other Amish folk would come to homestead—what a barn-raising they'd have! For now, though, he and Martha, come from a society so close-knit that each had always known the yield-per-acre of their remotest cousin-german, were in a land as strange as the New York City Aaron, stopping in for a phone-call to the vet had once glimpsed on the screen of a gay-German neighbor's stereo-set.

Datura looked to Aaron like a city from the Bible, giving it a certain vicarious familiarity. The great wall was a block of sunbaked mud, fifty feet tall at the battlements, forty feet thick at its base; with bright, meaningless flags spotted on either side of the entrance tower. The cowhide-shielded gate was open. Birds popped out of mud nests glued to the mud wall and chattered at Aaron. Small boys wearing too little