Communication as a concept is much used in anthropology. From one perspective, whole cultures may be viewed as systems that govern the communication of women, goods, rights and obligations and messages. A classic work deals with the importance of gift-giving as a means of tying individuals and groups together to form the basis of society. It would seem therefore that the hopeful anthropologist would find such matters a fruitful topic for research and a useful means of creating his own bonds with the people he is studying.

One of the customs that attracts the jackdaw gaze of the ethnographer is the surrogate language used by Dowayos at circumcision. The 'talking drums' of West Africa feature commonly in ethnography and lurid adventure stories. In principle, they are generally much like the surrogate language of the Dowayo boys isolated, after the cutting, in the bush. Whereas the drums vary in tone to imitate the tone patterns of speech, Dowayos use small flutes to copy the patterns of language. Such flutes must be used to communicate with women to whom the boys are very dangerous. Similar flutes 'sing' songs at particular festivals. Such a usage could easily be adapted for more practical purposes. In the mountainous terrain of the Canary Islands, a whistled language enables men to communicate over a distance of miles that would take many hours to cross on foot. In the Dowayo mountains, however, the only people who ever found it useful were Matthieu and I when in pursuit of the elusive rain-chief. We could each visit a different peak where he was simultaneously supposed to be and report to each other across the void whether we had found him or not.

The young man who did the washing at the mission proved to be adept at the skill and we withdrew from the prying eyes of women into the bush so that he could point out the refinements of the tongue. Here, I was given my small flute and instruction began. It was the only experience of formal teaching that I ever had in Dowayoland. Dowayos, until the introduction of French teaching in schools, learned their languages while still small in social encounters. The notion of deliberately setting out to learn a tongue, of studying a verb in all its parts, would be unknown. Boys, however, had to be taught the uses of the flute in a fairly concentrated bout of step-by-step instruction. Orderly presentation of material and homespun teaching techniques were called into play. This was all in complete contrast to the spoken language where systematic help could not be had.

For the language learner it had many advantages, helping clearly to pick out the different tones in a tongue that -- to the Western ear -- made distinctions almost impossible to hear. Since the boys would be using the surrogate language extensively as a sort of insulating device against excessively direct contact, it was wise to seek further instruction in it as they would themselves.

Gift-giving, however, can humiliate the man to whom the gift is given. The pose of magnificent benefaction thrust upon me by fieldwork sat rather ill with my own self-image; moreover, if the gift were too great the man could be embarrassed.

Progress was rapid. My teacher was genial and knowledgeable. He had never asked for any reward for the extra time he took in helping me. A gift was in order. The giving of gifts, in any culture, requires a certain lightness of touch. It has to be appropriate. One does not give men flowers in our own culture. Gift-giving also has to be done in the proper way. To give a Dowayo man a public gift of tobacco is to give him nothing at all as it will be immediately taken, as of right, by others.

Being fundamentally still a Westerner, I had always felt a slight social disquiet that the man who washed my shirts at the mission seemed to have none of his own. The gift of a shirt would be appropriate, I thought. There was one that had been particularly admired in Dowayoland, a gift to me, a somewhat vivid creation in purple. That would do nicely. I would pass it on.

The washerman put on the shirt and seemed to glow with pride in his new acquisition. He flashed a smile of unalloyed joy that brooked no charge of ethnocentric misunderstanding. He left in a state of surprised delight. I felt the satisfaction that comes to one entirely sure that he has done a good deed. It was only when the next batch of shirts was brought back, however, that the effects of my gift became clear. Each was now slightly imperfect. Small tears had been carefully made in sleeves, collars, pockets.

The deception was one I had used earlier on my assistant who was similarly of eccentric wardrobe but prone to mortification. On that occasion, he had accepted the allegedly imperfect shirt and put it away as too good to wear. Thus, he had no benefit from it. Perhaps this time things would go better.

A solution presented itself. A few weeks earlier, I had caught the sleeve on a thorn and produced a minute tear. The next time that the shirt was returned I simulated its discovery with cries of horror. The shirt was spoiled! Perhaps, I suggested, the washerman would like to have it for himself. The tear was small. It would not show.

Receiving gifts can similarly lead to difficulties. Not running a large establishment, I had always managed to do all necessary cooking in two saucepans. These similarly served as coffee-pot or teapot. It would anyway have laid one open to charges of deliberate eccentricity to possess a teapot in such a remote spot. This situation was perfectly satisfactory to all save Matthieu. Somewhere, probably at the mission, he had seen tea served as it would be by a butler, with tray, sugar-bowl and teapot. Since his own status -- of which he was very much aware -- was dependent on my own he bitterly objected to tea being served to visiting dignitaries poured from the side of an aluminium saucepan. He pined for a teapot.

One day, he appeared clutching a very battered aluminium specimen. He had acquired it from one of the schoolteachers who had been posted down to the south -- a land where teapots, it seemed, were plentiful. Disdaining to take this teapot with him, the teacher had presented it to Matthieu.

Matthieu presented it to me with pride. I confess that I was deeply touched. The lid no longer fitted. It sported dents all over its surface as though used as a football. But it made Matthieu happy. I admired it and thanked him. He carried it away and scrubbed it with sand until it shone like silver.

I was astonished to be woken very early by Matthieu banging on the door. He scowled at me horribly. 'Am I not a Christian?' he enquired. 'Am I a man of crooked words? I have been thinking about it all night. If I had wanted to kill you could I not have done it many times?' I confess to being a little slow-witted at five in the morning. I simply gaped.

That afternoon, we had a lengthy session with the healer, discussing different sorts of diseases. As usual, a visit to him involved climbing halfway up a mountain, much talking and smoking. By the time we returned, in the late afternoon, we were both exhausted and thirsty.

Strangely, all evening, Matthieu was taciturn in the extreme. By late evening, he was showing signs of distinct bad temper. Whatever it was, I hoped that it would blow over by the morning.

'Let us,' I suggested, 'christen that new teapot.' Matthieu looked puzzled but fetched his treasure and we used it. It became clear that the spout was blocked but we rapidly gained the knack of pouring the tea out of the side with minimum spillage. Matthieu had given me a present. I had shown how much I appreciated it. This would certainly improve and cement our relations.

Only gradually, did the enormity of my crime emerge. The fault lay in my unthinking use of the term 'christen' for 'to use for the first time'. Matthieu had clearly imagined my desiring to engage in some rite of exorcism for the teapot, so that whatever hostile spell he had caused to be placed on it would be undone. I had effectively accused him of trying to kill me.

Yet again, weeks were slipping by. My work with the healers was progressing well but this was still second best. What I really wanted was the circumcision festival in all its gory intimacy, the good red meat of ethnography.

Finally, I got him to sit down while I made some tea. The sight of the teapot seemed to enrage him further. He shook with fury.

Having no one else to bother, I decided to track down my 'wife'. After a deal of searching, we found him, squatting pettishly under a tamarind tree. A heavy shower was unleashing itself in short but intense unpleasantness. We all sheltered together under the inadequate foliage. His finery looked decidedly weathered. The horse tails, once erect and feathery, were soggy and matted. The long gowns were streaked with mud, beer, oil and perspiration. My leopard-pattern Fablon had stood up well as far as the front surface was concerned, but the sticky coating of the rear had fared less well. A thick mat compounded of hair, mosquitoes and the red soil of West Africa adhered glue-like to its surface. The bright headscarf had sagged sluttishly down over one eye. He pouted perceptibly. It was clear that this period, vaunted as a time of licence and indulgence, bright in the minds of old men, had become tedious to him. His kinsmen, it appeared, no longer welcomed him with beer and rejoicing. Rather, he had visited them so often in his festive gear that they had taken to making excuses or rushing off to their fields so as to be conveniently absent when he called. The maids who should be eyeing him with lascivious favour were all wielding hoes under the supervision of eagle-eyed mothers. Young love was a fine thing but getting the crops in took precedence. The ultimate insult had come the other night. Driven to visit ever more distant relatives of ever more tenuous kinship, he had missed the film-show of the hirsute German.

It was now evident that the timetable of circumcision was gravely askew. Ideally, the cutting would already have taken place and the boys would now be in seclusion in the bush. It is ritually important that the heavy bleeding of the wounds should coincide with the first heavy showers of rain. The healing and drying of the wounds should coincide with the increasing dryness of the weather. Thus, there would be harmony between men and the world they lived in, both subject to a common rhythm. It did not seem that this pairing could now be preserved.

Even Matthieu was moved. We pooled our resources in an attempt to provide adequate consolation. The best we could manage was a bottle of beer and a Superman comic in French. We pressed these comforts upon him, urging that he not give way to the sin of despair. We would take it upon ourselves to find out what had happened.

Since the joint scheduling of human and cosmic change required that the boys would return from their seclusion in the bush on the first day of the harvest, the rest of the rituals would have to be indecently compressed if they were all to be squeezed in and I would again be in trouble with my visa before they could be completed. There is no one person who organizes such things in an acephalous society, no one person with the power and authority to impose his will. Matters of major public concern are allowed to drift until action is forced upon all by press of circumstance or until the moment for action is past so that nothing is ever done. It is comforting that this works so well, a proof that much of the frenzy and purpose of the world is otiose.

There was, however, one person who was indispensable to the completion of the ceremonies who would at least be fully in touch with what had and had not been done in the outlying villages -- the rain-chief. It was time for another climb up the mountain where he lived.

After the visit to the nippleless Ninga, mountaineering had lost much of its appeal. Dowayo mountains are oddly uncomfortable things. They have not the bracing appeal of hill-climbing as it is known in Europe. On the other hand, to take them as seriously as the Alps would be ridiculous. You are left with the sort of object that can quite easily tumble you several hundred feet on to granite rocks below but somehow has to be approached without even proper boots. At the bottom, they are soggy and full of huge, jagged boulders that involve a deal of scrambling and sliding. In the middle they are full of disconcerting clefts of great depth but no great width. These have to be simply leapt over while hanging on in one's mind to the memory of feats of long-jump performed at school. At the top, they are bare and chill.

Dowayos, being profoundly social, will seldom do anything alone that can be done together. As usual, the preparations for our trip had not gone unobserved. As we left the village, we were joined by a rather shamefaced man who was bound for the rain-chief's village for a medical consultation. Everyone knows that the rain-chief is the master of male fertility, so consulting him was probably a tacit declaration of his sterility or impotence. There was much giggling. As we walked along the narrow paths, we picked up various other people, who had decided that they would use our journey to conduct business with the rain-chief. One of his thirteen wives was there with a huge bundle on her head. Most surprising of all, there was Irma.

The rain-chief occupied what might elsewhere be viewed as a prime site, a sheltered valley at the top of one peak but in the lee of another. It was green, being blessed with year-round, pure water, cooler than the sweltering plains, well stocked with dwarf cattle (how?) and far from road access for government officials. Even the cross-country motorbikes of the police could not penetrate there, so that apart from one cursory visit by a determined French colonial officer forty years before, the rain-chief dwelt in calm, patriarchal isolation. He had seen, or more accurately been almost unaware of, the decline of the Fulani slavers in the valleys, the passage of the Germans, their replacement by the French, the change to independence. Immutable and granite-like as his mountain, he had survived the many vicissitudes of the century and still sat undisturbed under the rain-cloud that constantly hovered over his village and conveniently designated his own specialization as the man who controlled the weather.

This was not the Irma of before. She was chastened and serious, the dross of flirtation burnt off in the fires of true passion. At her feet lay a large, polythene sack of ground millet that was to be repaid to the rain-chief by her father in settlement of some old debt. On top of this were balanced the blue plastic shoes she would only put on to make a grand entrance to the village after scaling the mountain in her bare feet. She strode manfully ahead, looking neither to right nor left. She did not even look behind for glances admiring her athletic prowess, though there was no shortage of those.

Evidence, if such were needed, of the advanced state of the rainy season was furnished by the high level of the rivers gushing down the mountain. They were no longer the friendly, refreshing trickles of the dry season that licked around your feet like puppies. They roared and gushed and tumbled boulders. I, of course, fell in.

There is no surer way of breaking the ice than for someone to fall in the water -- to mix metaphors. Our previous silence was ended and the impotent man began to tell stories. One of the inevitable subjects of conversation on this path was a man who dwelt at the foot of the mountain. He and his wife were notorious for enticing in male travellers who would then be caught in compromising circumstances with the woman. Demands for compensation would be made. The husband would declare himself hugely wronged. He was very large.

Our jolliness abated somewhat when we came across the carcass of a large, horned goat rotting in the stream at a crossing point. Smashed and bloody, it had clearly tumbled from one of the paths higher up. Dowayos are much concerned with omens. It appeared that this was a particularly bad one. Their interest centred not on the fact that one who had been high was now laid low, nor in the poignant contrast between a buck in rampant sexuality and his impotence in death. It focused rather on the all-too-obvious fact that the event had occurred so long ago that the flesh was too putrid for the Dowayos to eat -- even though they are inured to consuming meat that could only with polite understatement be termed 'high'.

Such incidents assail the anthropologist at all points. Could this be the bridge that would lead to some fundamental discovery about an alien culture or the basic nature of the human mind? Almost certainly not but it is impossible to predict in advance what may be important. Flashes of insight have, after all, come to anthropologists in bathrooms, while playing croquet or when dissecting octopuses. The safe response is to file it away in a notebook where it may be found years later, the ink having run from splashes of stream water, the letters smeared with brown thumbprints. The infuriating feeling is 'now that's something an anthropologist could certainly explain'. This almost always is associated with, 'I haven't a clue what that could mean.'

The death of the goat caused a good deal of foot-shuffling. It seemed in doubt that we would attempt to scale the mountain at all. It was only when Irma and I had reiterated our resolve to continue, grudgingly backed up by Matthieu, that the party agreed to start up the path. The atmosphere was tense and oppressive, rather like one of those omen scenes in Shakespeare where comets are crashing and earthquakes heaving the dead from their graves. Every time someone stubbed a toe there was a deal of exchanging of glances and nervous looking around. Down below us, vultures had settled on the goat, ripping at its flesh and watching us with tax-inspector's eyes, hostile and speculative. It suddenly occurred to me that this stream was the main source of water for the village and that we should at least move the body away from the flow. Doubts about a major water project for the good of others were one thing. This was the water I drank. No one seemed in the least enthusiastic to touch the cadaver so we left it in a swirl of fetid water.

Matthieu had by now stubbed his foot so many times that he was convinced that the journey would be in vain and that we should arrive to find the rain-chief out. 'Though,' he added, 'my left foot sometimes lies to me.'

The rain-chief sat, like a beatific tortoise, under the awning before his sleeping-hut. This was his favourite spot. From here he could look out across the lush valley that was his exclusive preserve, watching his wives labouring in the fields, his sons herding his cattle, and smoke his brass pipe while warming his chronically cold feet at the fire. From here he savoured the comforts of wealth and respect, keeping a wary eye on his huts crammed with burial-cloth payments and the young men who sidled dangerously around his thirteen nubile wives.

His foot indeed proved sinisterly mendacious, for the chief was at home. Inevitably, the fact that Matthieu's foot had lied increased his gloom. In itself, the lying of the foot had now become an omen of doom.

After suitable greetings, we were divided up. The impotent man was subjected to a whispered interrogation with much casting down of eyes on his part and many reassuring pats on the arm from the rain-chief. Irma, to her obvious disgust, was sent off to talk to the wives.

With a beckoning arm, the rain-chief called me over to his patient. Had my prowess in Dowayo herbal medicine been recognized? Was I to be invited to comment on an interesting case? Apparently not. It was a matter of change. The man had only a large banknote. The rain-chief would accept this as his fee but could give no change. I should, therefore, offer the man his change and the rain-chief would reimburse me in due course. We both knew that I should never hear any more of the change. It was simply one of the ways I paid him for his help with none of the crude blatancy of being charged.

Fair enough, but I would get my money's worth. I launched into a little speech Matthieu had helped me prepare for such occasions. It was a masterpiece of the copywriter's craft. While disclaiming all pretension to personal skill in using plant remedies, it placed my wide experience in working with recognized Dowayo healers at the disposal of the afflicted. The major problem in Dowayoland was in knowing whether an illness was 'just' an illness or rather a manifestation of supernatural displeasure or witchcraft. In the latter case, the treatment would be quite different. A few innocent questions from a beginner such as myself would almost always lead to a passionate discussion of fundamental Dowayo notions of causality, morality and classification. What was the trouble? The man's penis was no good. Was he sure it was not because of his brothers? He shook his head. He had used the zepto-rubbing oracle with three different diviners. All had said the same thing. This was 'just' an illness. What had the rain-chief prescribed? More zepto plant that the man would boil in water and drink.

A recent concern of anthropology has been with plant classifications, seeking to determine how far other cultures deal in species and sub-species that are comparable to our own and what criteria they use to distinguish between different sorts of 'the same' plant. I had expended much effort collecting leaves and fruits of certain basic plants such as zepto in order that I might prompt a discussion on how to recognize one kind from another. Was it from the shape of the leaf, the formation of the fruit? As before, in the case of the rain-stones, the chief floored me with his positivism. It was not on account of any of these features that they distinguished one type from another. It was simply that one plant cured one disease, another plant cured another. One could not tell which was which in advance of a cure effected by it. He smiled cherubically. I thought of all the hours I had wasted collecting plant samples and drying them in presses so that I could haul them back to the experts of Kew Gardens.

The man set off back down the mountain, clutching the few shoots of zepto that had been cut for him. I sulked with Matthieu while the rain-chief insisted on preparing for us food that we did not want.

He sighed and shook his head. It was a bad, bad business. He, for his part, had done all that could be demanded of him. He had taken the omens. The appropriate medicines had been sealed inside a spherical calabash and thrown into the stream at the top of the mountain beside the stones that controlled the weather. In due course, it had been recovered intact at the base of the mountain, a sure sign that the festival should proceed. But now the whole thing was off. I gaped. It could not be done this year. It could not be done next year because that was a female year. Only in two years' time could they proceed. It was bad, bad. The boys would continue to be children, to smell bad. It was shameful to the whole country.

Only after several hours of tedious social niceties, was it fitting for Matthieu, the rain-chief and myself to withdraw into the bush for 'men's talk'. Even here, we conversed in the usual whispers, the old man constantly looking around like a nervous deer.

It was about circumcision. He nodded. He knew I had come far from my village to see the circumcision because I had heard that the Dowayos would do it. I had left my wives and my fields. I had suffered much and spent much money to see the festival. He nodded again. What had happened? What preparations had already been completed? Why had the boys not been cut although the heavy rains had started?

But what was it that had happened? In explanation, he uttered a word that was new to me. I looked questioningly at Matthieu who groped unsuccessfully for the French equivalent. With his usual positivist zeal, the rain-chief led us into the fields and just pointed. The millet plants literally boiled with fat, black caterpillars. The young leaves had been completely devoured. The drooping stems were visibly diminishing before our eyes as the beasts munched on. Apparently, all the fields this side of Kongle were similarly afflicted. There would be no harvest worthy of the name this year. If the caterpillars ate all the plants and died, there was hope that a second crop could be planted. But many had no seed left and the yield would be small. Probably the rains would not continue late enough in the next year for the crop to ripen. But what would people do? He shrugged. Some would borrow grain from kin. Others would have to sell their cattle or get into debt with the traders. All the reserves for brewing beer would be needed just to get by. The transformation of boys into men might be a wonder but wonders ran on beer not good intentions. Circumcision would be put back. The scandal of wet, smelly boys would get worse. Even the Ninga would laugh at them.

What if someone imported the millet? I did a quick calculation. It would cost thousands of pounds. It was hopeless. The rain-chief, sensitive to my disappointment, patted my arm. It would do no good anyway. No one would start the ritual now -- the omens were bad. The caterpillars too had now become another omen.

Having raised funds and come so far to document a ceremony that would not, it seemed, occur, I was understandably upset, annoyed -- even embarrassed. Accounts have to be kept, justification -- real or imagined -- has to be given. Soon there would come a point where I would have to write a report to the somewhat stern guardians of the research-funding body who had financed the investigation of the ceremony that would not take place. It was unlikely to go down well.

In anthropological research, as in other areas of academic endeavour, little credit is ever gained for negative conclusions, for false trails exposed, dead ends conclusively demonstrated, festivals not witnessed. The whole thing was decidedly awkward. Personally, I had no feeling that the trip had been unproductive. I felt I had learnt just as much during this short visit as I had in the longer previous one. Somehow, the fact of coming back had made the Dowayos, themselves, take me more seriously, as if they had a long history of disappointment through the fickleness of researchers. Whatever their own perception of the matter, they had been much more open and trusting than before.

The chief reaction throughout Dowayoland was a deep surge of embarrassment. Blushing youths were left marooned in their finery like jilted brides at the altar. Quietly divesting themselves of incriminating leopard-skins or fablon, slipping leg-bells into their pockets, those big enough stole away to the fields and resumed hoeing as if they had never put on their dancing costumes. The smaller ones reappeared, shamefaced, in classrooms to be mocked by comrades from other tribes. Wherever men met, it was a subject not to be talked about. For women, it became a new theme in the battle of the sexes, a subject to be used to scorn the uselessness of males. For men, it was a new reason to beat the women. My 'wife' made huge detours around the village to avoid meeting me. Occasions when we inadvertently bumped into each other led to downcast eyes and mumbled salutations. Since the ceremony had not been completed, we were stuck in a ghastly limbo where no one knew how to behave. Were we supposed to joke with each other, show mutual respect, return to our former unconnected state? No one knew. No one had the authority to decide for all, just as no one had been able to organize the ceremony in the first place.

In the expectant hush that settled on Dowayoland, it was time to go home. I wondered if that would seem like an omen too.

In Dowayoland, cattle fell down wells -- an omen. One of Zuuldibo's wives was bitten on the breast by a large bush-rat when she opened her granary -- an omen. On the granite paths, knots of swarming red insects were found -- an omen. No Shakespearean comets plunged across the heavens but there was a small whirlwind.

A frenzy of omens swept across the country. Suddenly everything seemed topsy-turvy and every event was an omen of bad times coming. It was rather like the way, in our own culture, that a particularly nasty murder seems to focus attention on similar crimes. Suddenly the newspapers are full of them. It seems that the whole of civilization is quite abruptly coming to an end.