Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  Heat prickled under his scalp. The snakes did not move from under the rocks. Neither did the jihadists. He fell over his own shadow. He had been one of those paratroopers who could kill a fighter with his bare hands. Now he could not keep up with them. He was built for structures and systems. In his stupors he saw the sun harden and arc across the sky and soften in the evening. There were the colours of petrified wood. He heard prayers in the shade. If he could only climb out of the wadi he would get onto the world.

  When his mind and breathing were clear and sober he saw that the wadi was divided between the parts where sunlight struck and the parts where it never reached. These parts were a reminder of what Danny had said, that the strangest life exists in the cracks.

  He thought in future times the great literature would be translated into a hieroglyphic script based on hexagonal forms, including that passage in Utopia where his saintly ancestor dreamt up vast deserts of the equator

  parched with the heat of the sun, the soil was withered, all things looked dismally, and all places were either quite uninhabited, or abounded with wild beasts and serpents, and some few men, that were neither less wild nor less cruel than the beasts themselves.

  The light and dark in the wadi helped him to better understand the jihadist worldview.

  ‘What is the influence of the desert on Islam?’ he asked Saif, when he was feeling better.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Saif said. ‘The desert is also true for the Christians. Jesus went to the desert.’

  He knew the damp in England’s bones. ‘Not any more,’ he said. ‘Not in England.’

  He believed the contrast in the desert helped create the Abrahamic religions and the advance and enlightenment of Christendom was an admittance of rainy days and nights. It came back to the weather. The clouds that covered up the stars in England, the seasons of drizzle there, the mists, the storms, the trees losing their leaves, all of it made a mockery of Bedouin absolutes.

  There were slender trees in the wadi, very old, hard as rock, and in their dusky hollows and roots were spiders and mice.

  One night when they were walking they came across a cormorant too weak to fly. It sat on the rock flapping its wings, like a goose in a farmyard. If it rained the cormorant would survive, but there was no sign of more rain.

  He thought about sex a lot while he walked. Not the rutting of pastoralists, not the pent-up sexual desire of the fighters; he put himself instead somewhat comically on the dance-floor in Kampala, the suck of it, a fountain of Ugandan women’s arses, gyrating, pumping, and wiggling huge breasts; the mirrors, cigarettes, bottles of Nile beer, cheap Chinese furnishings, the sweat; and all the other men at the far end of the dance-floor watching an English football match on the television, leaving him alone to satisfy all the women, each of them in turn presenting themselves, which, trudging along, he had no difficulty in doing.

  There was once a Hungarian count from Transylvania who sold a family diamond to fund an expedition to east Africa. His porters called him fatty.

  He bought his guns from Holland & Holland in London and recovered some of the costs of his expedition with the sale of ivory from the elephants he shot; the ivory which many of the piano keys in Vienna of that period were fashioned.

  One of the count’s contemporaries, a young American braggart, was said to have taken several pairs of flesh-coloured gloves when he went overland to the Tina River, with the intention of making the Somalis think he was peeling the skin off his hands, although that is hard to credit. Would the Somalis ever have fallen for it?

  It was easier to take if Africa was doing it to him. Africa was a rough mistress to pale men. If he considered his captivity in this way he could place his journey at the undistinguished end of African exploration; nothing more than an outing. He thought badly of many of the white explorers and white hunters, because of their violent acquisitiveness. He believed in being of service to others. If he had been more gentle, he really could have been Mr Water.

  The grass was tall by the lakes in Congo and the mud there was so heavy on his boots at the end of the day it could not be stamped off and had be removed with a knife or a spoon. There was maize growing in the shambas, also squash, cassava, spinach, peas, groundnuts, sometimes guava, mango, watermelon and many types of banana; stewed, and served with shreds of chicken or tilapia. The villagers hung beehives in the trees for the wild bees to colonise. These hives were barrels, fashioned of bamboo strips, and covered in mud, dung and leaves. One end was sealed with banana bark, the other netted with vines and twine. He thought of workers on the slopes of the volcanoes above the lakes. Walking home on wet paths through fields of sorghum whose red tassels swayed, hoes on their shoulders, alongside clear-flowing streams; each worker to their windowless mud huts with roofs of terracotta tiles.

  He thought of the mattered water of the lakes, their rock formations and the old steamer ships fallen on their sides on the shore. Of the bars on the Congolese side – the Zebra bar and the Sir Alex bar – and the soldiers leaving, stumbling out of them in the early morning, still in wellington boots, still armed, taking with them girls pushed by their families to sleep with them in the hope of securing better rations and protection.

  He thought especially of the thundering afternoon rain, a child selling tomatoes one by one at the roadside through the downpour, the steaming land that followed, the monkeys sprinting up the trees, and a man sitting on a stool outside his hut, reading the Bible in the last light of the day.

  There was a town on a lake between Congo and Rwanda where the wind blew stiffly, but produced no waves. There was a Soviet-built hospital on the hill of the town and a beacon behind it which brightened in the dusk, and there was a boy selling sticks of chewing gum who, as he ambled by, glanced at the sky and said: ‘Look! The moon is taking the light away from the sun.’

  They drove up out of the wadi. It was Martian, but there was movement; impala springing away, rock pythons and poisonous frogs. They passed a grave where the body was laid above the ground with stones piled on it. The headstone commended a herder’s life to the Almighty. There were a few wild people who paid them no attention, but took shelter from the sun and the wind in round huts made of paper, plastic and cloth.

  They arrived at a place no satellite image can do justice to. There was a plain of volcanic clinker, like on the slopes of the terrorist’s island, then the lorry drove down below sea level onto a Greenlandic whiteness. Even close up it had the look of pack ice, with those same veins of green. All the shades of white were visible and there were roseate floes far out to sea. It crunched under their feet when they jumped down onto it. But it was illusory. It was not the life-giving ice of the north that melts and freezes, under which the beluga whale swims. It was a salt flat. The mists were chlorine vapours. There were no birds in the sky. It was littered with the bones of animals which had strayed there and died and been covered in salt. He picked up what he took to be the skull of a gazelle. It looked frozen, the sockets hoary, but the salt broke apart at the slightest touch, leaving only the bone.

  Saif ordered the group to smash up slabs of salt and load them onto the lorry that they might trade later in their journey for charcoal and whey. He helped wrap them in sisal. He brushed salt from his hair and face. It formed on all of them. They began to look frosted to each other: it was impossible to live under the rim of the world.

  The ground was flat as a billiard table. It had been underwater in the last pluvial period. When he looked more carefully he saw the scattered teeth of prehistoric fish and crocodiles.

  The arrival of a soul in heaven is like a sailing ship discovering the harbour whereunto it saileth. But the truth of Danny’s voyage was that she sailed to no harbour. They had left Iceland behind, Akureyri, with its fjord and green hills and glaciers, and steamed north into the Greenland Sea, Grønlandshavet. She was bound for the largest uncharted hydrothermal vent field in the world, far below the plunging icebergs and the blue-black top, in a part of the Hadal deep whose un
lit clock ticked at an incalculably slower speed.

  It was the most important summer cruise she had been on. It held the chance, she believed, to reckon the extent of life in the fissures of the rock underlaying the Hadal deep. She had been one of those who discovered the vent field the previous summer. She had been asked to name it and had called it the Enki field.

  She was aboard the French oceanographic research vessel Pourquoi Pas? which carried also the French Navy submersible, Nautile. The preparations had gone well. Her lab equipment was in place. Thumbs was along for the ride. The scientists were French, British, German, Swiss, Italian and Norwegian. She was inclined to stereotype nationalities. There were enough Brits to guarantee showings of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in the evenings. The French, she thought, would take care of wine at meals and hand around cigarettes on deck. The Italians would surprise. She was happy anyway not to be on an American boat. The Americans were more self-congratulatory, with less bon viveurs, with people in the fluorescent-lit galley reading airport novels, sipping iced water through the evenings. There was a pressure on American boats to purchase ugly expedition T-shirts, even sweatshirts, as if a badge was needed to prove that you had touched the ocean and partaken in your own profession. She refused to buy the items. Even when she was given them she never wore them, except for a cap. She offended those American women who habitually covered themselves in such loose-hanging cotton garbs, who seldom wore high heels in their lives, and who felt she was a snob and an ice maiden.

  She was a snob. She detested what was vulgar; vulgarity was something else. Thumbs had it best when he said she was two cats in one: a Persian and an alley cat. For inasmuch as she dressed carefully and stylishly on the boat, and expended her mind in the lab, she had drunk, punched and screwed her way through science cruises over the years with a dirtiness beyond the suspicions of her detractors.

  They rattled up into the green hills.

  ‘We’re going to where the water is,’ said one of the boys.

  His Somali was improving; he understood.

  In the clouds there was a hut tended by a shepherd in a ski jacket. Geese flew overhead and one of the fighters covered his ears to their honking. There was grazing. Water trickled from the rock into a pool green with algae.

  It was easier out of the heat. Even the mad boy, the snake, became more reasonable and did not strike so often. Down there in the badlands were those who did not know any more where to dig for water, and so tied up a cow to the point of death, then cut its rope and let it go smell the water out.

  The shepherd made extra money by harvesting frankincense. It was not clear whether his connection with Yusuf was related to that trade, or whether they shared a shepherding past, but the nicks in the boswellia trees, and how carefully the shepherd attended them, stood in contrast to the boiling down of a whale for perfume.

  The hut had two rooms with a cement floor. The doors and windows were gone and there was a thickness of dust and dead flies throughout, but he could picture a Calabrian shepherd once hiding out here to escape the law. It must have been an Italian who planted the cypress tree at the back of the property. It was tall and cast a tapering shadow up the hillside. James would not have believed a cypress could have so prospered there, but it was well planted, in a shady spot.

  It was different from the coast. The wind ripped through in the mornings, and there was a stillness at the end of the day: the land seemed to sigh with the fleeing light.

  It was a new, soft, blown-apart hill. The spring water attracted all kinds of thirsty animals. There were dik-diks, of course. They made only the slightest disturbance, their tiny hoofs staying a second in the dust. Three elephants walked through. They had climbed the hill for a drink. They moved cautiously, snapping the branches. They were small, with short tusks. It was improbable, yet that was how nature was. Hippos appeared at waterholes from nowhere. Tilapia fish eggs attached themselves to the legs of water birds and spread from one pool to another. Life clung to life.

  James had met an old Serbian poet in New York City. The man was always living hand to mouth, on the edge, and bitter that his Yugoslav neighbourhood had turned Haitian.

  There was a basketball court beside his tenement where the youths came to play.

  ‘Cocksucking blacks. They shout. They’re rude, you know. I’d whip them with my fists … But look at me, I’m so old I want to go to church, know what I mean?’

  What sounded like vot. W was a v, t was sometimes tz.

  It was a small room. The man gave him a glass of clear alcohol and told him about observing the faces of Ustashe soldiers during the Second World War, even though James had come to him on a matter related to the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

  The poet said that as a young man he was standing off to one side under an oak tree on an October day.

  ‘It couldn’t have been November, no, it was October, you know, it was one of those days that ain’t summer and ain’t winter, with mushrooms, with berries. When the Ustashe was shot there was a kind of a cloud from their face, you know, or it was from the back of the head, yeh, like a breath, yeh. I remember the ground was wet, my boots were wet. It wasn’t warm. It was in the mountains, around Plitvice.’

  The poet had left Yugoslavia in 1960; his poems in exile had made him a figurehead for some Serbian paramilitaries.

  ‘It came I couldn’t stand Tito. He sold us out. Anyway, I was brought forward, I was asked to shoot one of these Ustashe in the head. I couldn’t do it. I mean, I could think about doing it any number of times, yes, but a real gun, a real man, uh-uh.’

  There was the screeching of the last elevated train, the Jamaica line, the poet said, then a single bird on the street outside, then nothing; the basketball court was empty. There was an open notebook on the table and a sharpened pencil.

  ‘It’s funny,’ the poet said, ‘how things go around in your mind. Whirligigs they call them, in them toy shops uptown. Here I am in New York City, but I ain’t in New York. I was born in a kingdom, the KINGDOM of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Yes, I seen a war, I come to America, how to explain, I float, the baseball seasons come, they finish, the snow comes, goes, never money, but time is standing still for me, like I was every day stamping a time clock.’

  He threw his hands in the air. His body language was all New York.

  ‘You come ask me about the future. These men in hiding. This Bosnia. What do I know, I’m the wrong guy, I just can’t move.’

  According to the Koran, Allah created angels from light, then created jinn from smokeless flame. Man was made of clay and breathed into only when the jinn disappointed Allah by climbing to the top of the sky and eavesdropping on the angels there. But Allah did drown the jinn or otherwise destroy them. He allowed them all to live in parallel, coexisting in the world.

  It is possible for jinn to see men and take possession of their bodies. It is more difficult for men to see jinn; their country is oblique to ours. In certain traditions, anyone who glimpses the real face of a jinn dies of fright.

  There are a few telltale signs of jinn among us. In the eyes and speech patterns, or in the feet, which are often set backwards. Jinn have a freedom of choice like man does. They can choose to believe or not, to be good or bad. ‘And among us jinn there are those who are righteous and those who are far from that. We are sects, having different rules,’ says the Koran.

  The weapons against malign jinn are religious certitude and education, both of which produce a roaring of thought that the jinn cannot stand. So those jinn who choose to step into our country prefer to occupy bodies which are in a liminal state: a menstruating or pregnant woman, a lunatic, someone incoherent with anger, or a man and a woman having sex, when consciousness is a sheet of copper beaten down, mirroring only the moment.

  The serpent in the Garden of Eden is said to be a shape-shifting jinn. They are blamed for the manias of the night. There is no agreement among Muslim clerics on whether jinn are physical or subtle. Some clerical accounts have them as giant and h
ideously ursine, with matted hair, long yellow teeth; they are the abominable snowmen of the Hindu Kush and the Himalaya. This kind of jinn can be slain with plum pips or other fruit stones fired from a sling. Scholarly clerics prefer to describe jinn as an energy, perhaps a pulse responsive to the laws of physics, which are alive at the margins of sleep or madness, and expand themselves into other semiconscious states of existence. An extension of this thinking is that jinn are the continuance of thoughts that were in the world before man.

  He was no closer to Saif. He did not care for the man’s gap teeth, his outbursts, and he was determined also to avoid any suggestion of Stockholm syndrome, in which the captive develops an affection for his captor. Yet when they cooked legs of mutton, it was Saif who made sure he ate, and gave him tea. It was Saif who came and spoke to him. They sat together and looked out over Somalia. In the day it was possible to see all the way to the salt flats, but at night all of this disappeared to a blankness, with no lights at all.

  He was marched with Saif and the foreigners to a cave at the top of a hill. Saif insisted on walking into the cave. The other fighters were too frightened to follow.

  ‘Come with me,’ Saif said to him.

  So he went inside too.

  There was a pit in the centre of the cave.

  ‘It goes all the way to hell,’ Saif whispered.

  They got down on their bellies and inched their way to the edge. Saif threw a stone in and it was lost, there was no sound of it at all.

  ‘Let us see,’ Saif said.

  A coolness flowed up from it. Somewhere in the earth’s mantle, or in another province of existence, or present in one of the diatoms on the walls, Saif believed, was a city of jinn. James saw a glistening in the pit, water dripping, or perhaps something else. What would happen if he threw himself in? In what part of the world would he find himself? As soon as he thought this he was overcome with dizziness. Saif, for his part, was shaking uncontrollably. Without a word to one another, they crawled back.