In his companion collections of short stories. The Sleepers of Roraima and The Age of the Rainmakers, Wilson Harris reaches through time and presents to the contemporary reader legends of the Amerindian people. It is not his intention merely to record such legends as the superstitious mythopoetic rationalizing of a "primitive" people; rather, Harris uses these legends to explore and activate the original and timeless quality of the imagination, a quality which twentieth-century man has nullified by his obsession with totalities or fixed perspectives of time, history and race. Through his stories, Harris demonstrates the error of such limited perception, which may be overcome if the imagination is reactivated as the original and vital human force. It is the imagination which destroys the limiting concepts of past, present and future, unifying all that has been, is and will be, in the moment now, the eternal present. (p. 218)

An examination of "Arawak Horizon," the final story of The Age of the Rainmakers, will serve as an introduction to the method employed by Harris in adapting Arawak legend to expand the limitations of contemporary man's imagination. Using the numerals 0 through 9 as a basis, he reveals that to the twentieth-century consciousness such numerals are no more than static symbols, capable only of mechanistic or economic interpretation. However, when he, or his narrator counterpart, allows himself to be taken back in time across the Arawak horizon, he views the numerals from a primal viewpoint: in this story, that of an Arawak child. This child sees in the numerals not mathematical codes, but abstract symbols "illuminated by consciousness." In this way the numeral 0 becomes the "first prisoner to creep through the walls of fire" …, and when freed from preconceived interpretation, appears to the Arawak child as as symbol of unlimited potential,…

The numerals serve the function of a concrete twentieth-century corelative to the working of the "primitive" mind, and because of their contemporary connotation as easily comprehended mathematical symbols, they provide a simpler starting point for an analysis of the companion stories than the ancient abstract rock paintings which evoke a similar imaginative metamorphosis in the first volume, The Sleepers of Roraima. (p. 219)

The stories of this first volume, The Sleepers of Roraima, "Couvade," "I, Quiyumucon" and "Yurokon," each describe an attempt to preserve the pure bloodline of the Caribs as the tribe progresses through migration and invasion to its final assimilation into the multi-racial population of twentieth-century Guyana. In their obsession with preserving purity of race, the Caribs find themselves threatened; initially, in "Couvade," by their own local tribesmen, in "I, Quiyumucon" by assimilation into the tribes of the Arawaks, and finally in "Yurokon," by the infiltration of the Spanish and the Christian influence of Europe. (pp. 219-20)

[In] contrast to the dominant threat of human incursion found in The Sleepers of Roraima, in the second collection of legends natural phenomena, rain and drought, are the principal forces against which the Amerindian must struggle if he is to survive. Harris employs these physical elements to symbolize the barren psychic outlook of the contemporary Amerindian. The imaginative stasis of the people is revealed in their continued rebellion against invasion, real or imagined, which may be interpreted as a period of drought. In order to overcome this psychic and physical calamity, the Amerindian must reach back to the legendary age of the rainmakers, and rediscover, through legend, the fertile imagination.

The first story of The Age of the Rainmakers, "The Age of Kaie," focusses on Paterson, a half-caste twentieth-century revolutionary who is also the reincarnation of Kaie, an ancestral figure of legend. Yet, as is typical of Harris, this ambivalent figure may separate to create a pair of contemporary/ancient freedom fighters. In this guise Paterson and Kaie lie wounded on a modern battlefield and "loss of blood gave them this sensation—as if they shared the same interior, the same echoing body of fragmentary particulars, and the elements were hallucinated within them and without."… There is, however, a fundamental difference in the two figures. Kaie, the older and wiser, is aware that Paterson fights because the Amerindians have always felt threatened by invasion and loss of identity; Paterson's fighting spirit is the "naiveté of revolutionary fatherhood."… an adherence to the principle of the "creation of the enemy" as demonstrated in "Couvade," where such an enemy may in fact be his "own fierce nostalgic creation."… This concept is fundamentally static and therefore self-negating. In death, his voice rising and falling with flippancy, Paterson becomes aware of his error: "And Paterson had the curious ironic sensation that in the hollow pit of his body—ancestral Indian enemy—Kaie's breath had been caged for centuries instinctive to the residue of legend—betrothal of opposites."… The "hollow pit of his body" is symbolic of the drought which should be broken by the rainmakers. It has been an age of historical and imaginative stasis for Paterson's people, a period of empty rebellion signifying nothing, a time of reliance on the residue of legend left by the great age of Kaie. Thus Paterson, alias Kaie, relives the age of the rainmakers and finds a "new maiden architecture of place" and the "distances of history melt or multiply with each convertible echo."… (pp. 222-23)

The idea of cyclical regeneration takes a dramatic conceptual change in "The Laughter of the Wapishanas." Here, a legendary girl, Wapishana, sets out to find a means of diverting her tribe's attention from the rigours of drought. She searches for the source of laughter, which she is determined to restore to the lips of her people. Harris uses this search to develop the significance of the decoy in diverting mankind from reality. Wapishana finds that each landmark she gains is "less a question of marching time than of alterations of horizon—legs or scissors into decoy of space or reality of the game."… Each tribe or age has its own method of disguise to avoid extinction. Thus, on reaching the "pool of laughter" Wapishana finds the fish symbolizing the "ironic lifeline of Christ,"… the decoy of Christianity. By this method Harris exposes the more abstract "decoy of space," the trickery of time which can alter historical derivations to a non-compassionate, static conception. Again the story stresses the significance of the eternal present; contemporary man may adopt physical or spiritual disguises (sunglasses or Christianity) to avoid "the true game of reality … down the arch of the road through and beyond the purchase of extinction."… (p. 225)

It is now possible to view in context the universal conception of the eternal present in the final story, "Arawak Horizon," with a more compassionate sensibility. As the ancient Arawak child plays with and interprets static twentieth-century numerals, they become living things. With his original imagination, "milestone of Arawak survival across the seas of soul,"… he can make what was doomed to mathematical or economic formulation span the decoy of space and recreate the age of the rainmakers…. There is, therefore, no Arawak horizon, only a decoy of space, which is as limitless as the creative imagination of all mankind. (p. 226)