Unexplained Death - Haitian Chronicles Of Voodoo, Sorcery, And Mystical Power

Fielding Evans was no stranger to foreign lands nor to the immanent danger of remote, savage places.  He had travelled in the footsteps of Mungo Park, 18th Century British explorer up the Niger River and along the tributaries of the Congo River into Conrad's Heart of Darkness where he had witnessed, as the fictional Kurtz had, of ritual cannibalism and live human sacrifice. 

 

He had penetrated the jungles of Borneo and encountered the aboriginal headhunters and mud men of the island, barely escaping with his life.  He had seen every variation of human excess possible, or so he thought.  Pride cometh before a fall he well knew, and the world certainly held more surprises than he could imagine. 

He was most fascinated with religious expression.  A good Catholic, he had been brought up with miracles and mystery and was well versed in the mythic aspects of the faith.  The consecration, the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ and then taken, eaten, by communicant was nothing less than a pagan ceremony no different than those of the Amazon, Africa, and Borneo.  There was a commonality to religion, he felt, some element of sacrifice and savagery that suggested more about human nature than divinity, and he was tireless in his investigation of it. 

The Aztecs, Mixtecs, Olmecs, and Zapotecs of Mesoamerica had raised human sacrifice to sublime levels.  These Indian societies worshipped the gods of nature - God was immanent in the mountains, terrifying in his angry, thunderous violence, always vigilant and in need of worship and appeasement.  A human sacrifice on an altar of one of the gods of the immediate universe was a perfect consummation of spiritual, human, and mystic power.  The sacrifice of the Catholic Mass was but a lukewarm, remote imitation of ancient Mexico. 

Kurtz, the main character in Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, dies speaking these words - 'The horror...the horror...'.  He in that final illuminating moment realizes that the cannibalistic violence of the African tribes with whom he lived was universal.  The human spirit is violent, savage, uncivilized, and uncontrolled. 

The one area of paganism that he had yet to explore was conjuring - that reported ability of shamans, medicine men, brujos, and witch doctors to cast spells, to will someone dead, to rob them of their souls. Haiti was the place where such conjuring was considered commonplace, and in the hills far above Kenscoff, the ritual voodoo drums were heard every night, echoing down the mountain and into the Victorian gingerbread neighborhoods below. 

In Port-au-Prince he inquired about these rituals and how he might participate in one; but he was told repeatedly, 'Don't go there, Sir'. Voodoo, the unofficial state religion of Haiti was not to be treated lightly, observed, recorded.  It was not like a Catholic Mass, the stations of the cross, confession, or Holy Communion.  It was a violent religion where unholy spirits were conjured and took possession of the unwary.  It was a religion where the dead walked the earth, where zombies lived and took souls like fruit from a donkey cart.  It had no saints but the living dead, and Baron Samedi, prince of darkness visited in the night. 

It was only under cover, camouflaged, and secretive to a fault did Evans make his way up the mountain, through the brambles and thick brush, past scorpions and rats' nests bitten and stung did he manage to find his way to the ceremony.  Cloaked, disguised, and well-hidden, he watched and listened.  He wrote in his journal:

I thought I was prepared, having observed many charismatic Protestant ceremonies where congregants are possessed by Jesus Christ and writhe in ecstatic agony as they are taken, channeling Christ on the cross, choking, aspirating his last breath, bleeding from his crown of thorns and from the sword wounds in his side. 

I thought witnessing exorcisms would give me some perspective on what I was about to see - the same violently tormented agony as the Devil was extracted from the possessed, a scene of torturous, impossible release.  Yet nothing prepared me for the hysteria, the pure, unadulterated, screaming savagery of demonic possession I witnessed in the Haitian mountains. 

What he saw, however, was only the immediate expression of the religion.  The real power, the true immanent sorcery of the voodoo priest, he was told was in his power to cast spells, to conjure the evil spirits to 'suck the life marrow' from an enemy afar. 

This devilish conjuring was not done incidentally, casually, or for a few dollars.  It was as detailed and complex as beatification.  Everything about the intended victim needed to be known, a detailed profile of his waking, sleeping, gait, expressions, and personality.  His effigy reproduced by the priest would have to be meticulously researched and crafted.  Bits of skin, strands of hair, scrapings of warts and moles would complete the configuration; and only then would the incantations work. 

This was one area of mystical religion that Evans abjured.  He understood and appreciated every immediate expression of faith no matter how pagan or inhuman, but this was beyond anything is rational mind could accept.  There could be no such thing, and any death presumed to be the result of sorcery would have to be explained by logic. 

How was the premise to be proven or validated.? Hearsay is the currency of the realm in matters such as these. Only the unthinkable - if the victim were someone Evans knew, a healthy young person whose premature death could not ever be attributable to natural causes would do. 

Why not? was his first thought.  It's all nonsense, abracadabra, and pagan idolatry anyway.  There is no way that such sorcery could possibly exist and if it did, wouldn't that mean the existence of another spiritual world, a message of hope even out of its infinitely diabolical intent?  It wouldn't be murder, at least the blood would not be on his hands, for he would not be the one boiling up the blood of newt and salamander bladders.  

Yes, hate has a role to play, explained a Haitian colleague who had studied Haitian voodoo and its Dahomey African origins.  'It is not a parlor game', he said. 'It works - or so they day - only when virulent hatred is added to the mix.  Someone must want the person dead out of morbid spite, vengeance, or retribution'. 

There had been a case, Evans was told by the Haitian ethnographer, where a man was unexpectedly found dead in his apartment and that a coroner's inquest could find nothing that had killed him.  No one but Haitians knew where to look - he was blindly hated by the family of the woman he had raped, murdered, and left in a ditch along Dessalines.  Somewhere, somehow, and someone had engineered his sudden death. It might not have been one of the aggrieved family but a sympathetic friend with underground connections to the voodoo inner circle. 

Evans could arrange the sorcery on behalf of someone else who hated.  That would exonerate him and still test the theory.  And so it was that this ordinarily recondite, honest, and principled man went overboard.  Was it a matter of faith? A willingness to suspend disbelief in order to probe the improbable? An intellectual fraud?

He squared the circle.  He identified the victim and the man who wanted him dead; and he found a way into the inner circle of mystical voodooism.  The fee would be substantial, and Evans was prepared to lose it all, for up until the last, he was diffident at best and skeptical at worst.  This simply couldn't be. 

The obituary in the Washington Post said that the victim, much beloved by friends and family had died of natural causes, but his death was not without suspicion.  'But he was so healthy...a man in the prime of life...a man with his whole life ahead of him...'  A special coroner's inquest found nothing unusual, and the forensic pathologist hired by the family concurred.  Although the specific cause of death would have to remain undetermined, foul play was definitively ruled out. 

'You see, it works' said the anonymous postcard postmarked Port-au-Prince; and with that, as he had promised himself, with proof now that God existed - or at least some form of divinity, divine force, or immanent power - he applied for and was accepted at the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps, a monastery of silence, simplicity, and devotion. 

Ayahuasca And The Secret Of The Rainforest - The Lost Amazon Journal Of Edson Pereira

Edson Pereira was a 19th Century Brazilian botanist and explorer who had heard of the hallucinogenic qualities of certain Amazonian plants, and he planned to mount an expedition into the forest to try to find incidences of the drug and report on its effects. Rumor had it that the drug produced consistent visions - all those who took the drug, ayahuasca, reported the presence of 'the goddess of death'. 

The Brazilian Journal of Botany says only this:

Ayahuasca visions are vivid, often transformative experiences that occur during a ceremony.  Participants report encountering intricate visual patterns, ethereal entities, and profound symbolic scenarios with deep personal and spiritual significance. 

In the cosmovision of its users, the ayahuasca is the vine that allows the spirit to wander detached from the body, entering the spiritual world, otherwise forbidden for the alive.

The Journal entry was considered to be part myth, part rumor, part exaggerated colonial curiosity. The origins of the account were unclear and indistinct, but Pereira was fascinated.  This might be the psycho-pharmacological find of the century and a boon for the new one soon to come. 

At around the same time that Pereira was planning his expedition, a tribal Amazonian Indian wandered through the jungle up the Napo River and disoriented, euphoric, and naked stumbled upon the camp of a small contingent of white colonial traders in the town of Misaualli. 

As well as euphoric, the man was incomprehensible, not only because his language was not yet translated but because of his behavior, at times vacant and staring, at others with a beatific smile and embracing gesture.  He seemed a man possessed - not of demonic forces but of spiritual animation.  

He seemed insistent on telling the white men something, urgently in fact, and realizing that they could not speak to each other, he drew a series of primitive outline pictures in the sand along the riverbank. As far as the tradesmen could make out, it was some animist, goddess-like figure.   

The man pointed to the pictures and then to the sky and then to each of the men gathered around him and said 'Nungui....Nungui'. 

The tradesmen were nonplussed, curious and interested; but for them as for most Europeans of the era, the Amazonian Indians were savages, barely human, and indistinguishable from the wild animals of the forest.  Yet there was something unsettling about this Indian, his behavior, and his drawings. 

The traders had only incidental contact with the Jivaro and other Amazonian tribes - they had preferred to stay in the altiplano and trade with the Quechua and Aymara.  This had been their first trip down the torturous but passable road down 3500' to the river - they like the Spanish explorers centuries before were hoping to find gold deposits along with jade, topaz, and diamonds.  

The sight therefore of this wild Amazonian Indian, a species rarely emerging from their deep forest enclaves, was startling and enigmatic.  This was not simply a cross-cultural contact, but a more profoundly affecting experience. 

The traders had no idea what to do with the man, but it was a moot point because the next morning he was gone, returned to the jungle.  The image of him, however, was not easily shaken, and when the traders returned to to Quito, they shared it with their colleagues.  No, their friends replied, they had no idea who the man was, where he came from or from which tribe, let alone about his unsettling behavior. 

Word, however, travelled to a senior botanist at the Ecuadorian Institute Of Bio-Pharmacology who thought there was something to the story.  He for one had spent years hoping to find natural pathways to spiritual evolution. He published a short article in the Institute's journal which was read by Edson Pereira who immediately travelled to Quito to meet him. 

Would the Ecuadorian Institute finance a small expedition down the Napo River?  There might be a chance that it would come upon the Jivaro Indian settlement from which the itinerant man had come, and there scientists could explore what might likely be ayahuasca. 

The scientist agreed and a small grant was afforded to Pereira who would be expected to write up his experiences and publish them in the Institute's journal with full credit given to his sponsors. 

Pereira insisted on traveling alone - this was both because of his proprietary interests and for cross-cultural propriety. The Indians in the rainforest, unused to white men, might react violently to what they considered an invasion if there were more than one. 

Pereira was a good scientist, a well-trained botanist, and a responsible journalist; and he kept a running, detailed log of his journey into the jungle. 

The trip down the Napo from Misaualli on the swift current is fast, and a small dugout canoe can easily navigate the upstream rapids.  The small outboard motor is not needed on the outbound trip but would be the only way of getting back to port. 

They stopped at a number of small fishing villages along the way inhabited by altiplano Quechua who had intermarried with the few Indians who had come upriver.  Pereira picked up useful information about the Jivaro and the powerful brujos, the medicine men found in each Indian settlement.  These brujos were curanderos, herbal medicine healers, but also were thought to draw on the spirits of the forest for divine healing.  

After traveling many more miles downriver, and after what was said to be the last civilized outpost on its banks, the boatmen said they would go no further.  From there onwards was uncharted, unexplored, frighteningly primitive regions, and they would not risk their lives. 

So Pereira went on foot, hacking his way through the forest tangle, finding animal paths which had been worn down enough to make walking easier, and slogging hour after hour deeper into the jungle. 

His journal is illustrative:

I have never seen such trees, reaching fifty meters into the sky, creating a canopy so thick and complete little sunlight can filter through.  At the base of these giants are tangles of undergrowth, dense and impenetrable but with a surprising plethora of tropical flowers, shoots, and richly colored vines.  I have seen no wildlife, but I hear it - birds in particular, and at times the wild cry of an animal  

Finally, and at long last, exhausted, hungry, and relieved he came upon a simple hut no more than fifty meters from the river's edge, and there sitting akimbo on a straw mat in front of it was an old man, dressed in a ragged, torn shirt and a loin cloth fashioned as shorts.  He was smoking a pipe and remained seated as Pereira approached. 

He was a mestizo of mixed race, but not of the usual Quechua-European combination.  He was part Quechua and part Jivaro and because of his altiplano roots could speak a rudimentary Spanish.  Pereira let him know the reason for his visit, and the old man gave him fermented manioc root to drink and a river fish to eat.  

Pereira stayed with the old man for days without anything happening, but he felt that this was simply an anticipatory period, a preface, a preamble, and patience was required. 

Then one night, a group of Indians assembled in the small courtyard of the brujo's shack while he brewed a thick, dense liquid in a large cauldron over a wood fire.  As it grew late, the brujo invited each tribesman to come up and take some of the brew, Pereira included.  This was the ayahuasca he had heard about!

His journal entry written at some point during the ceremony told of the experience.  It was never narrative nor perfectly coherent.  It was fragmentary, without chronology or cause and effect.  It was amazing that he had the composure and the will to write at all

I am afraid...the jungle is collapsing, the vines are alive, wrapping me, choking the breath out of me but a wind from the river fills my lungs, turning me into a vinous plant as tall as the forest canopy...I look down and see the river on the face of the moon flowing upstream carrying baskets of something...children, food, earth, fire...

The journal entry ended abruptly. In the last words the fear had been replaced by calm, a sense of intimacy, and quiet. 

He stayed for at least a week with the brujo, and on another night like the first, the ceremony was repeated - the natives, the brew, and the visions.  This time his journal entry was only a scrawl, barely legible, almost indecipherable, words punctuated by lines and dashes and swirls, crude silhouettes that were very much like those etched into the riverbank sand at Misaualli.  

The journal entry, if it can be called that, ended with nothing but crude drawings, inchoate visual musings that recalled the Candomblé myths of Dahomey the African country from which most slaves were brought to Brazil, and the voodoo zombies of Angola. 

'We all saw her', was the last scribbled entry in his journal found a year later by a Spanish missionary who had come to the forest to evangelize the natives.  The journal hung by a leather thong from the thatch of the brujo's roof had become a talisman, a gri-gri, a source of native spiritual power; but there was no sign of the white man who had come before.  The brujo was still there, alive but more old and feeble, but he had nothing to say except that the man had disappeared into the forest.

The missionary returned to Quito many months later and thanks to an inscription written on the inside cover citing the Ecuadorian Institute Of Bio-Pharmacology, he was able to deliver it to the senior scientist who had authorized Pereira's expedition.  

The scientist published an article about the voyage and included an edited, assembled, and readable version of Pereira's journal, all of which generated increased interest in the Amazon, tribal medicine, witchery, and of course ayahuasca. 

Despite many subsequent trips down the Napo River to the area where Pereira had set foot in the forest, he remained without a trace.  The jungle had simply swallowed him up. 

Hoax, Fraud, Trickery, And Scams - The Marvelous, Magnificent Soap Opera Of America

Most Americans would like to think that their country, 'A Shining City On A Hill' as Ronald Reagan put it, is a place where exceptionalism is ordinary, where good faith is the currency of the land, and where the ancient Roman values of honesty, courage, respect, honor, justice, and compassion are universal. 

After all, we won WWII and freed the world from the perils of Nazism and Japanese imperialism and have stood tall before the world, unmatched as a model of democracy and free enterprise. 

America would be a bloody dull place if all that were true, 365 days of Sunday Mass, faithful husbands, dutiful wives, well-behaved children, consideration and compassion for the elderly, and tight, unbreakable family units. Ivan's Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov says it well:

So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what's irrational because I am commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce as something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of course ... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it? It would be transformed into an endless church service; it would be holy, but tedious 

Dostoevsky’s Devil is a vaudevillian, a comedian who serves to spice things up.  What would life be without me? he asks. “It would be holy, but tedious”.

The Devil is abroad in America, for there is no end to the foul play, devilishly plotted murders, vice, corruption, jealousy, suspicion and endless con games.

The old caricature of the used car salesman is back as the adman who promises health, wealth, and good fortune, the butcher who keeps his thumb on the scale, the travel photographer who knows all the angles, light, and positioning to show the Tuscan dump as a Renaissance gem, the scammer who sneaks up on you and steals your files, your bank account, and your credit. 

Mackintosh Peters was a snake oil salesmen in the Arizona Territory in the 1870s, and made a good living selling worthless gum Arabic and corn syrup mixtures to the Piute and Navajo.  'Works like a charm', Mack told the Indians, 'take a swig in the morning and one in the evening, and it'll cure what ails you'. 

Which was arthritis, impotence, scabies, catarrh, and suppuration and anything else he could conjure up.  He was long gone before the Indians knew they had been had, but the placebo effect has been around for centuries, so many of his customers told their friend and families how good they felt after only a day's dosage.  If for some reason he found himself back in the same village and was accosted by the Indians he had duped, he had a ready reply. 'Ahh, of course', he said.  'I said two swigs in the morning and two at night, not one.'

'What's a swig?' asked an elder of the tribe. 

'Why, like this', Mack said, swilling a half-bottle down in one gulp. 'Ya see, ya wasn't takin' nearly half as much', and with that, he lit out of town, his racks of phials and bottles clinking and rattling in the back seat of the wagon as he drove. 

'There's a sucker born every minute', said the circus impresario, P.T. Barnum, and with that under his belt, he made millions off the rubes who wandered into his tents.  His freak show was the most popular - two headed babies, bearded dwarves, and half-man, half-woman giants.  The gawkers always came back, sometimes the same day to see the unbelievable creatures assembled in Barnum's side show. 

Along the trail with Mack Peters were scores of shell game wizards and con artists of every kind, fleecing unsuspecting rural folk out of their money.  There were get-rich-quick schemes, virility potions, games of 'chance', temptingly easy card games, and more inventive scams you can imagine.  It seemed that the business of rural America in the early years was the scam. 

At the same time as the nation industrialized, there was plenty of room for bamboozling. Real estate agents, mortgage lenders, horse traders, and used car salesmen all made a bonanza.  It was remarkably easy to bilk money out of consumers in those days, and even at the highest level of finance, trickery and chicanery was rife. Property owners inflated prices, hid structural defects, paid off inspectors and politicians and ran off with thousands.  When the buildings sold collapsed or rotted, they were long gone. 

'Let the buyer beware' was the meme of the times, and beware he certainly had to be in an environment of endemic corruption, fraud, and larceny.  It was a free-for-all where if you were canny and deftly underhanded, you could become wealthy. 

Evangelism was another classic American scam.  Itinerant preachers, following in the footsteps of Macintosh Peters and his lot, bilked thousands from naive farmers who filled their revival tents hoping to find Jesus.  These preachers were masters at oratory, drama, and duplicity; and since they were dealing with a product which could never be examined or returned, their job easy. 

'Prayer', shouted Isaiah Jones. 'Prayer is the answer'.  Here he paused, wiped his brow, looked to the' billowing folds of the tent, and went on.  'And Jesus will listen.  He, the magnificent, the forgiving, the loving, and the merciful will come to you only if you ask him.  Get down on your knees...go ahead, get down right now and ask his forgiveness, pray for his intercession, ask him to come down to this very place and save your souls...'

Hundreds of worshipers flocked in the aisles, raising their arms in supplication as they made their way forward to the Reverend Jones.  Some shouted that they had found Jesus, that he had come among them, and that they were saved.  Others simply cried and shouted thanks and welcome.  It was a jamboree, a parade, a marvelous event and when it was over, Jones counted his reward. 

Today is no different, nor why should it be?  Scamming is part of the American ethos, our way of life, the rough edges of our competitive free market.  Con men use the same entrepreneurial energy as the honest businessman, only with subterfuge and underhandedness. 

You've got to hand it to Bernie Madoff who bilked $17 billion out of wealthy investors, many of whom were his Jewish friends, in a Ponzi scheme the likes of which federal investigators had never seen. When he was finally caught, there was no money found at all. 

Madoff orchestrated the largest Ponzi scheme in history, operating it for over 17 years. His firm initially functioned as a legitimate brokerage but later became a front for his fraudulent activities. Madoff promised consistent annual returns of ten-twenty percent regardless of market conditions, which attracted a wide range of investors, including wealthy individuals, hedge funds, and charities.

Madoff claimed to use a 'split-strike' conversion strategy to generate steady returns.  However this was largely a facade.  In reality he was not making the trades he reported.  Instead he used the money from new investors to pay returns to existing investors - the classic Ponzi operation. 

To maintain an illusion of a successful investment operation, Madoff instructed his employees to create fake trading records and account statements.  These documents suggested that his firm was engaged in extensive trading activities when this was not the case at all. 

One of the finest conmen in recent memory was Rudy Kurniawan, a young man who bilked credulous wine investors out of millions, selling them dreck in fancy, falsely aged bottles and convincing them it was the finest of Baron de Rothschild's personal collection.

Rudy had one of the finest wine palates ever, and it was this special talent which gave him the credibility he needed to fool others.  He included some very fine wine in his offerings, and often a legitimately great bottle of wine for future investors - all as cover for the scam which prosecutors called the spawn of Bernie Madoff. 

There is one inalterable rule of corruption - the more government spends on infrastructure and social programs, the more that will be siphoned off.  Before any completion of roads and bridges or before any brick in child welfare centers has been laid, contractors, municipal employees, program managers have taken their cut. 

The city council, Office Of Public Works, of major metropolitan city, authorized a $725 million contract to rebuilt perfectly good sidewalks in certain residential areas of the city.  These sidewalks were torn up and replaced with new ones of no better quality, and both contractor and city officials.  They followed it up with a Make Our Neighborhoods Safe program to tear up the city's alleys - the crisscrossing back ways that had characterized the residential neighborhoods since they were built - and made millions in kickbacks from it. 

The fraud recently discovered in Minnesota where Somali organizations took millions in federal COVID-era monies earmarked for childcare centers, and sent it back to Mogadishu.  The Biden Administration, so ineptly and venally interested in showing its sensitive response to the epidemic, poured non-accountable millions into municipal coffers monthly.  There was no oversight, no well-established record-keeping procedures.  All was done as a matter of faith; and only now is the extent of the fraud being unearthed. 

 

The Justice Department, waking up to the fact that if this happened in Minnesota, it probably happened in other states as well and has begun investigations in California which was a recipient of some of the largest federal grants. 

Now, every scam has a scammer and a scammee - it takes two to tango, and the network of corruption starts with an administration which is only looking for political returns and cares little for accountability. It only mattered that Joe Biden looked presidential and caring, treating his electoral base to millions in walkin' around money.  Such administered largesse is by nature corrupt, facilitating corruption on the other end. 

Washington DC Mayor Marion Barry was renowned for his municipal largesse - billions of white taxpayer money poured into the all-black wards of the city in return for their votes.  'Get over it', he told the voters of wealthy, white Ward 3 after he won an election hands down despite zero votes from it. 

Government is the only agency of a free market system which is never held financially accountable for its actions.   Billions go out the door and little is ever shown for it.  Worse, nothing by way of performance is asked.  If the principle of the thing was good, no questions about results need to be asked.  They are assumed. 

Is America a more corrupt country than others? Probably not although few countries have such an inbred, native tendency to scam, con, and trick.  What started in the Wild West, matured in the East, went up and down the socio-economic scale, and became endemic. 

If scamming is not quite the ethos of America, it comes close; and to look on the bright side, what would a life of universal honesty, fidelity, dignity, and compassion be like?  A thudding bore, that's what.  Politics without Mark Sanford who claimed he was hiking the Appalachian Trail while courting his Argentine mistress in Buenos Aires? Or without John Edwards who had an illegitimate child by his mistress and then asked his Chief of Staff to be the fall guy?  Or without Newt Gingrich who brought flowers to his dying wife in the hospital then hailed a cab to the Mayflower where he met his mistress for their weekly tryst?

Presidents from Washington to Trump have been caught napping in the crib of illicit lovers.  Sex is the ultimate aphrodisiac, said Henry Kissinger, and every politician takes advantage of it. 

Black Lives Matter, at the forefront of protests against white police murder of innocent black men, the organization which spawned lawn signs in every liberal neighborhood, which raised millions in donations, turned out to be one of the most venal, corrupt, and rotten items in Washington, a bigger than life channeling of the President of the DC Teachers' Union who bilked thousands out of the members' till to buy wigs and high heels. 

We live a marvelous, magical soap opera here in America. There is no place like it, no big top, no freak show, no vaudevillian act, no Borscht Belt tummler can possibly match the reality of what goes on.  We are the Devil's unwitting handmaidens, doing his tricky business every waking hour of the day.