THE ABORIGINAL ENCOUNTERS THE CONQUISTADOR


conquistador's words become "like a poisonous cloud of vapour- swallowing
up everything in their path" (79). In this scenario is the cumulative effect of
our centuries'-long destruction of the earth, all taking place in a few instants.
The European is oblivious to, or more accurately, uncaring of his destruction.
Ironically, he uses the pulp from one hundred and ten trees to prepare the
document that is intended to dishonour the Aboriginal.
 The veins of gold and precious stones that are prevalent in this Eden have
been of no concern to the inhabitants before Europeans made landfall: "What
can I do with all that I am surrounded by? I can fashion for myself bracelets,
necklaces, crowns. I can make kingdoms, I can make civilizations, I can lay
waste. But I can see the destruction of my body, and I can see the destruction
of my soul" (78). The material success of the West is weighed against the
Aboriginal's symbiotic relationship with the earth and the West is found
wanting, for progress will result in its dissolution.
 We learn that "Ovando has conquered the ages and placed them in me-
dallions he wears around his neck, his waist, his wrists, his ankles" (81). The
knight believes that "conquering the ages," i.e., vanquishing peoples and
usurping their homelands for centuries, gives him control over time. When
he presents the sheet of paper he has made from trees that have been grow-
ing for ten millennia, the Amerindians recognize that he is confident that he
actually holds the ten thousand years themselves between his fingers. Re-
called here are the colonisers' efforts to erase their subjects' genuine heri-
tage and to create linear histories that marginalised them, but the Aborigi-
nal apprehension of time highlights Ovando's error. The temporal frame of
the story is synchronic; it "collapses past, present and future" (Ferguson,
Where 140). The narrative opens in the 1500s, but the Amerindians make
references that imply that they have witnessed the entire sweep of history,
from 1492 to today. For instance, the description of the destruction of the
planet obviously portrays its destruction over centuries. Also, as we have
seen, Ovando arrives wearing metal plates covered in blood. The blood
presages the decimation of the native, but because it is "in various stages of
decay" (75), all of the blood on Europeans' hands, from their arrival in the
New World to today, is evoked. Slavery and colonisation in the West Indies,
but also the myriad practices of conquerors, colonisers, and neo-colonials
that have caused others to suffer. The Amerindians also see the distant fu-
ture: the image of decay looks ahead, even beyond the present, to foreshadow
the dissolution of the power of the West. The Aboriginals' worldview gives
them the wisdom to "prevent [themselves] from entering the dungheap that
is history" (79). Their understanding that time is not diachronic keeps them
free from the prison of linearity and, thus, free from the history that has
erased them. This conceptualization of time resembles that of Wilson Harris's
Palace of the Peacock. The almost primal landscape the travelers must navi-
gate is Amerindian territory, and in its synchronic temporality, the men per-
ceive that this is an archetypal journey that they have infinitely repeated.