by Robert Drewe
‘Look,’ she interrupted, and pointed at animals—impala, wildebeest, zebra. Circling, moving, displaying, spraying. Staking out their backyards on the dun plain. She had little interest in geological features or the background of things. She liked a figure in the foreground to give the scene perspective. An animal would do.
‘The examination and reading of dung holds the secret of Africa,’ she said.
‘Who says so?’
‘Those Rhodesians last night. They also said wild animals have bad eyesight. That’s why everyone here wears khaki, so they think you’re a bush. If several people stand close together they believe it’s one big animal and think twice about attacking.’
‘It’s where we are going that holds the secret of Africa. One of the wonders of the world.’
‘I’m looking forward to it.’
‘Angelica, this is one of my great ambitions.’
On the leg to Bulawayo he read out David Livingstone’s own description:
Of these Falls we had often heard since we came into this country. They were called by the natives Mosi-oa-tunya (The Smoke that Thunders) or Shongwe (A Seething Cauldron). After twenty minutes sail in a canoe from Kalai we came in sight of the columns of vapour rising exactly as when large tracts of grass are burned in Africa …
Half a mile above the Falls, I left the canoe and embarked in a lighter one, with men well acquainted with the rapids. By passing down the centre of the stream—in the eddies and still places caused by many jutting rocks—they brought me to an island in the middle of the river, and on the edge of the lip over which the water rolls.
There was danger of being swept down by the fierce streams which rushed along on each side of the island, but the river was now low and we sailed where it is impossible to go when the water is high. Though we reached the island, and were within a few yards of the spot, I could not perceive where the vast body of water went. It seemed to lose itself in the earth …
A yellow-haired passenger drinking from a flask began to sing ‘The Rose of Tralee’ in Afrikaans. A phalanx of African waiters, including a man wearing a huge red sash saying WINE WAITER, wobbled down the corridor with trays of English cuisine.
He looked across at her and spoke.
‘At the very edge of the precipice Livingstone lay on a jutting rock to lean over the abyss below. He carved his initials on a tree which is still standing. He said: “This is the only instance in which I indulged in this piece of vanity.” ’
‘You would need to be vain and obsessed to be an explorer.’
‘He was a very practical man but when he saw the falls he became gushy. He wrote, “On sights as beautiful as this, angels in their flight must have gazed.” ’
‘I like him more after hearing that.’
‘Peering over the precipice can be a great thing.’
‘Didn’t his wife give her life to water, too?’
On the way from Hwange, when the train stops at night for water at some pan known only by its number, they insist on getting down with a grumbling guard and stretching their legs beside the carriages.
In the darkness everything compounds the intense and suspenseful feeling of walking in Africa. Their explosive footfalls on the quartzite railbed. The glowing eyes of spring hares caught in the swing of the guard’s lamp. The unknown stars of the southern hemisphere; the Southern Cross lying on its side, far away down the night sky toward the Cape of Good Hope. Lions coughing in the mid-distance. And, fifty yards ahead of the engine, a small sand river, a gleaming channel of fine white quartzite sand and, in it, the huge luminous skull of an elephant.
Made alert and silent by the night and the deliciously increased fear of wild animals in the dark, they feel brave and skittish back on board. After two nights spent apart in the Beira & Mashonaland & Rhodesia Railways’ regulation ladies’ and gentlemen’s sleeping compartments, they are frisky with lust.
‘I blame Africa,’ she says. ‘All the ruttish life out there.’ She chatters like a vervet monkey and her hands under the travelling rug are as cheeky as one.
‘Then we could as well be eating each other.’
‘Have you noticed the main urge, even ahead of sex or hunger, is territory? While the leading gnu or greater kudu—the big boy—spends all his time patrolling the fences, the shrewd number two chap gets the ladies.’
‘Then I know where I want to be in the pecking order. Not the greater greater kudo but the lesser greater kudu.’
He bribes a porter to give them a sleeper together. The porter is nervous being part of such a proposition but eventually pockets the five shillings and leads them to a tiny staff compartment near the guard’s van. By the time the train starts around the high and zigzagging basalt gorge of the Zambezi they are slithering down in the humidity of the dark woods.
A faint mildew smell rises from the sheets like a mist of algaes from damp sand. When he is over her, one of her fingers gripping his damp chest scrapes his nipple. In the rocking moonlit booth he investigates this rasping finger, rolls it between his own thumb and forefinger. She is wearing the ring made of reeds.
Later she says, ‘Tell me nice things.’
He makes up a story of her white horse flying them over the falls. The horse sees things through the excited eyes of Dr Livingstone. This is the island in the river. See the tumult of the Zambezi, the flowering orchids sprouting from the constantly dripping trees, the permanent double rainbows, the thundering chasm.
She easily becomes a child and receives his fantasies seriously. When his Livingstone data runs out he takes the images framed by the carriage window, like the green and yellow shooting star just flaring by, and presents them to her. That comet up there is for you, those wild animal eyes burning green and red out there.
He tells many tales of the horse, and finally acts it while their bodies meet and grip in tears and sweat, until they are as drenched and snorting as coursers. She rides him as if she could wrench both his character and the spirit of Africa from him.
They are still awake at sunrise, giggling and murmuring like children, in awe of the noise they have made. The moon is still high in the west as the first birds wake—silver parrots sweeping like gusting leaves through the river trees, shrieking in the strange moonset over the steaming falls.
He would remember the portentous feeling that swept over him when they first walked along the path to Devil’s Cataract, towards the boom of falling water, the dense clouds of spray, the great jets of vapour shooting into the sky and hanging over the falls like a pall.
For once he shared his feelings with her. This sunny day he was more open, more moved than she had ever seen him. They stood there saturated by spray while ferns and evergreens dripped and dragonflies swarmed and metallic-crested and hornbilled birds flapped away. Even when he was silent his thoughts shone on his wet face, the open secret that as far as he was concerned here was the start of things.
‘I wanted it to be like this,’ he said. He meant, but couldn’t say: here is the volatile spirit of life.
And to have you here in this sequence of our lives.
He had hoped for just these emotions. He’d hoped for once not to be disappointed, to be simply awestruck, and was satisfied.
His hand glanced her arm as he murmured, unnecessarily, ‘Old African legends say these are the primeval waters of myth, containing the seeds of millions of beings.’
She raised a quizzical eyebrow. On the slippery, waterlogged path she had to support herself for a moment against a big ebony tree, its dark, crenellated leaves a thick canopy over their heads. The tree prevented much light from reaching the ground and, instead of the usual dry tangle of undergrowth, a rich humus lay under their feet. Between the tree’s mossy buttressed roots a pink orchid shone out of the rot, and she bent and picked it and rose again quite slowly.
‘Are you all right?’
She was sniffing the orchid. ‘It doesn’t have a smell.’
No khaki colonial-wear today; she wore a simple blue cott
on dress. He thought how pale she looked against the suddenly bright material, and took her damp wrist.
‘Not enough sleep,’ she said, and smiled. ‘Look—footprints!’
The tracks in the mud were of waterbuck and baboon, hippo and leopard and little scratchy tracks that could have been mongoose. They had been told to expect these prints but not, by day, the actual leopard or hippo.
Amid rainbows, they walked on by the falls and stopped again in wonder at the water leaping clear of the rocks and falling in a thick unbroken fleece into the deep fissure. As the water plummeted, it broke into huge separate pieces of water, all rushing in the same direction, each shooting off sparking rays of foam all the way to the bottom of the chasm.
She was thinking, How momentous it all is, how heroic—and how, suddenly, she craved a landscape with less drama.
Now they were on a drier path, walking arm-in-arm past the Main Falls and Livingstone Island—where the intrepid doctor had hung over the lip of the abyss to view the tumult below—and Horseshoe Falls, and Rainbow Falls, to Danger Point. Approaching the point, they saw more smallish tracks, like human handprints, a scuffle of them in the sand, and round a bend in the bushy path a troop of baboons squatted in the sun.
They were feeding on fruit from a large Cape Fig tree which overhung the path. Some sat in the tree eating and shaking figs down on those below. Others were grooming. Nine or ten young ones rolled green figs about like toys and played recklessly on the rocky edge of the point itself.
Most of the baboons jumped into the tree when they saw them. Three big adults, however, remained squatting on the path, munching figs with an incurious air, their supercilious heads only half-turned towards the interlopers. A big female continued to groom the biggest, most imperturbable male while he ate.
‘I need to sit down,’ Angelica said.
‘Not here.’ He took her hand and turned back along the path. A hornbill shrieked in the spray ahead. Behind them the fig tree sagged and thrashed with its loosely clinging harvest of baboons. The roaring of the falls registered on him again, the clouds of rainbowed mist, the surging force, and they had gone perhaps thirty feet when she screamed.
Things moved so fast he saw the recent past. The big male baboon was scuttling like a spider. It was on her back, hands gripping, feet clinging to her hips, rocking up and down.
Will’s own roar surprised him. The way he loomed, snarling, over Angelica and the ape. The fact he would have bitten its throat out. And that she stood there and did not fall. But the baboon slid off her almost immediately and stood upright for a moment, showing its fangs and—its fingers regretfully caressing the hem—reluctantly releasing a handful of blue dress, its shiny red skewer bobbing indecisively, before sauntering in several insouciant, face-saving stages back to the tree.
She wasn’t harmed, not even scratched, and seemed to quickly recover her equilibrium. But her cheeks were flushed and he noticed how prominent her pupils appeared.
All his own nerves and muscles were twitching and his heart was thundering. Snapping a branch against his knee, he swung it in his hand, and his eyes glaring back along the path as he hefted it were mad and almost hopeful.
Her voice was so thin and dry it was hard to make herself heard against the booming of the falls. She had no moisture or resonance in her throat.
‘At least it wasn’t a leopard,’ she said. ‘But he thought you were.’
Under two lunar rainbows they drank champagne by the Zambezi.
Will had thought she would be on edge but she was surprisingly languid. She seemed to him to be seduced that night by the lunar rainbows of the full moon. How could such a strange and lovely phenomenon not lead you to believe that underneath its fierce bluster nature was indeed reverie and languor?
‘They’re very otherworldly,’ she said, sipping champagne. ‘Like rainbows in a dream.’
‘You said once the otherworld was your cup of tea.’ He leaned over and kissed her bare shoulder.
Her skin was cool and fragrant and densely female against his lips. Her unfamiliar dreamy mood aroused him, the flowing lines of her shoulders and back and upper arms. Moonrays arched over them, and he thought of light eternally refracting and reflecting through the exploding droplets. All this dramatic son et lumiere sparked off by a crack in a sheet of basalt
‘And my experience of the exotic was rather more limited then,’ she said.
There was no hotel at Victoria Falls, but during the monthly incidence of the lunar rainbows the railway company prepared an ‘African supper’ for its passengers. Consomme of impala, crocodile cocktail, roast of wart-hog or Egyptian goose served at sunset on a raised landing by a quiet creek and reed bed of the Zambezi. A champagne toast to the vivid sunset, another to herald the arrival of the night-rainbows and, between these events, the bravado of dining on some of the same wild creatures filing down to the river’s edge before them.
As the moon rose, vervet monkeys used the moonlight to dart across the deck, snatch from plates and upset sugar bowls. Natives topping up champagne glasses threw shadows across the tables. The river flowed only feet away. He was drinking champagne with gusto, and in the optimistic warmth of the evening it seemed to him not impossible that all living forms could rise up out of that deep, heavy water.
As Angelica slowly sipped her champagne, however, she felt her mood changing with the miasmal humidity settling in the dark ferns and blood lilies. This creek was only a mile above the falls, but so subtle and slow it could have been a hundred miles upriver. Damp mud and algal smells, the mineral rot of driftwood came to her.
She thought abruptly of Kate. She saw Kate suddenly as an Edgar Allan Poe character. Poe favoured water that was deep, dormant and still—full of black suffering. She thought: death associated with water is more dream-like than death associated with land. The pain of water is infinite.
Poe’s water images usually followed his main preoccupation, a reverie of death dominated by the image of a dying mother. The fact that this had occurred to her gave her a start.
It had been a long while since she had allowed herself to think of her mother.
She stared into the bush and drank more champagne without tasting it. When she was little, her father was always quoting the raven nevermore. ‘Mr Poe’ was his funny lugubrious voice. She thought of Ham rampant and full of claret at the Sunday lunch table. Oozing roast meats, hooting guests. Her mother laughing gaily, hanging on his performance. Her mother confiding to her in the kitchen in waves of gin: ‘You know during The School for Scandal he rogered Ellen Terry.’
Will said, ‘I bet the natives don’t eat crocodile. I think there is a rule: Don’t eat anything that eats you.’
‘It tasted like lobster cocktail,’ she said. She heard her voice as if it were someone else’s. ‘Surprisingly mild.’
He watched the moonlight softening the strong planes of her face.
‘The wart-hog was the same as pork,’ he said. ‘Crackling, apple sauce and all.’
Shapes moved just within the limits of her vision. Elephants silently materialising. Rows of zebras without fuss. Little sidling jackals. Giraffes angling down to drink. Sorry, elephant, zebra, jackal, giraffe singular. When I was a little girl I had two dog and three cat. Countless guineapig. Three Shetland pony. The aviary was full of bird.
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he said.
Beyond her range of vision things buzzed and occasionally trumpeted in the waterberry and monkeybread trees. Nearer lay the shape of a hippo carcass, swollen mauve in the moonlight. It was a female, she knew, stranded like a seaside toy on a sandbank. Bile-lemon crocodiles sinking down to feed on her.
She felt the pulling-away sensation, the rush.
‘We’ll never forget this,’ he said, stroking her arm. ‘Do look at those rainbows.’
She felt a gush of blood.
In their compartment they slept most of the way to Bulawayo. She slept on to Salisbury, too, and when they made love on the Salisbury-Umtali le
g she lay damp and still, not passive so much as pulpy and dormant, a continuous framed rectangle of prickly tree-crowns, buzzards, steely clouds streaming past her eyes while he jerked and shuddered inside her.
He apologised for the haste. ‘It’s been three days.’
‘My boy,’ she said, patting him. She was able to slide out from under him, glad of the quick end to it. His body as he self-consciously washed himself from the carafe was giving off an odour like the cargoes of salted sharks on the way to Zanzibar.
A hundred miles from Umtali, her senses were far beyond acute. She noticed she was still spotting, and she was shocked by the hot gun-metal smell of her brown blood.
The water in the carafe smelled acrid and swampy, the dust on the varnished windowsill seemed as rich as loam, and she had to keep the window closed against the impossible proximity of animal spray and dung dust and carcass rot. She ached for boiling water and disinfectant. She could hear the smells and stains of Africa, their high sour whine and guttural buzz.
The crumpled ball of cloth wrapped in a copy of the Rhodesia Herald reverberating under the seat.
The opaque smear of baboon drops on the blue fabric.
She paced and fretted with her churning thoughts: leave me alone, take notice of me. He was calmly reading a book called The Matabele at Home. It was when she looked up at him with pink-rimmed eyes and asked, like a strange child, ‘Could you please tell them to drive the train more slowly?’ that he took notice.
He watched her open the window and throw the blue dress from the train. Into Africa. Saw it catch on the gesturing branches of some thorny African acacia and disappear.
‘We’re leaving far too many fingerprints,’ she said, closing the window quickly. She wet her handkerchief from the carafe and rubbed at those prints on the latch whose whorls seemed about to lasso and choke her. Her eyes glittered as they glanced about for more things to clean.