Searching For My Wives

Joy along the Indus. Shimmer and Ahalya wed again and move upstream to tame water buffalo, farm, and love. "The Serpent was a buffalo, and profit was the Apple." Ahalya seduced by business. Shimmer, distraught, goes into the hills. Alone in the Karakoram Range. Goes home: "YOU NEVER LOVED ME!" Karla. Reconciliation.

Scouts come back from the river's end and are not believed: half the Earth lost, become a salt-tasting, useless, pitching ocean. Ocean-going curraghs. The Nation paddles north along the coast, crosses out of sight of land. The Poison Coast: thirst; Ahalya and child die in the boat. Father Indus, Mother Ganges.

Chapter 3. Bandits torment the Tanganyikan lakeshore people. Shimmer, a young curragh paddler, leads The Nation towards an eastern land remembered in the oldest legends. He is married to Ahalya. Two thousand people make a line of boats and rafts two miles long. The portage to a long river flowing east. Shimmer and Ahalya's first child, a daughter, arrives.

Life along Lake Tanganyika. Murk's villains re-emerge. Enslavement and revolt. Along the southwest coast of Africa, The Nation meets the people from Lesotho. Shimmer and Ahalya marry; the hoodlums re-appear; Ahalya is killed; Shimmer takes revenge. "I lead a flight of three Masai across dry level ground ..."

Chapter 2. Chesowanja and Lesotho ascend to humanity: Shimmer as the digging-stick maker tells how. Birth of The Nation in Chesowanja; The Nation migrates south. Jack and Sally invent the raft and curragh. The Nation moves to Lake Tanganyika. De Quincey uncovers the roots of Deep British: drag, trudge, trek.

The meerkaat hunter's tale. The nuclear family emerges with Sita and daughter Ahalya. Murk attacks. Ahalya is orphaned, then tormented. Murk's malevolence is traced back to a prior world. The universe of ten dimensions, and the beings who live in dimensions beyond our three-plus-time.

These tales are told as dreams to the English essayist Thomas De Quincey. Sita, Shimmer's other wife, dwells in Mary Wordsworth. Shimmer's lady ape discovers rawhide and invents the digging stick. She is murdered. Old Shiver strikes. Shimmer lives short lives, and De Quincey grieves.

Chapter 1. One and one-half million years ago, eastern Africa: hominids forage on the broad savannahs, but they are not yet human, although they do have souls. Some souls help the rise of Man; others work against it. Villains scavenge, rape, and kill, but Shimmer and Ahalya, two good souls, discover love and tenderness.