Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  My first sight of the Chaga: glimpsed out of the cabin window as the aircraft banked into its final approach to the Amboseli airstrip. Half hallucinatory, half revelatory; a disc of rainbow-coloured light which broke apart into flows and eddies, a pointillist sea of colour, like a test for some new colour-blindness. Then the plane banked again and we were down, scoring an arrow of dust across the dry lake-bed.

  He was waiting for me. God, but he looked good. I scarcely noticed the Kenyan soldiers treble-checking my security clearance on their portable datalink. Ol Tukai was ten miles away on dirt roads the texture of corrugated iron: Volkswagens, apparently; the peculiar beat of the engines is transmitted through the suspension to the ground. Ten miles was the closest safe distance aircraft could come to the perimeter of the Chaga; early overflights with camera-toting tourists had come to grief when the pilots found the fuel in the tanks turning to sludge and every scrap of plastic bursting into bloom. Langrishe fed me such little morsels of data and I sat, grinning like a teenager, hanging on for grim death as the Daihatsu 4×4 took the ruts. Ol Tukai seemed to be in the process of dismantling itself into tea-chests and packing crates; both civilians and military were all check-lists and baling wire.

  ‘Getting ready for the move.’ Langrishe nodded beyond the buildings. ‘Three kilometres is close enough.’

  My first four hours in Ol Tukai I had my security clearance checked eight times. ‘They’re ashamed of it,’ Langrishe said. ‘Same goes for the Tanzanians. A kind of national disgrace. Right in the middle of their great and glorious task of nation building, this happens, like a cancer in the body politic they’d rather have kept secret from the rest of the world in case it affected their international credit-worthiness. Like trying to get life-insurance if you’re HIV positive. Want to come for a look at it before dinner, after you’ve finished interviewing, or whatever it is you do?’ Note for the book: no one in Ol Tukai ever called the Chaga by name, what was out there was a lurking, polymorphous ‘it’.

  I had never considered that it might be possible to see the Chaga advance. One hundred metres per day, just over four metres per hour, sixty-six centimetres per minute. One and two-third centimetres per second. On the botanical scale, that’s virtually relativistic. The line of advance was more subtle than I had envisaged, not so much a line of demarcation as an ever-advancing gradation, from thorn scrub and grasses through increasing echelons of polygonal fungus and pseudo-lichen to low bladder plants and gourd-like growths to tube bushes and small windmill trees and plants that sprayed water and lashed whip-like flails and spewed clouds of floating bubbles to the towering columns and fans and webs of the false-corals and sponges at which point the indigenous was totally absorbed into the full climax Chaga. From his backpack Langrishe took a squeaky plastic elephant.

  ‘Carla Bly’s kid’s,’ he explained. ‘I did ask first.’ He placed the toy in the path of the advance. Following his example, I hunkered on my heels to watch. The smiling green elephant broke out in a psoriasis of yellow spots which multiplied with appalling speed to cover the entire surface. Within fifteen seconds the toy was a mass of sea-anemone-like extrusions. I watched the green elephant collapse and dissolve into a pool of oily sludge which, even as it seeped into the ground, was generating furiously reproducing clusters of sulphur yellow crystals.

  ‘We assume they’re alien biological packages because, given a plethora of impossible hypotheses, that seems the least improbable: that the earth is on the receiving end of an alien colonisation programme. Truth is, we have no more evidence for this theory to be credible than the incredible ones: the packages appear out of nowhere on the deep-space trackers, make a couple of fast orbits and then execute an aero-braked descent. We’ve been scanning the sun’s Local Group of stars with our deep-space tracking facilities for the past five years without the slightest hint as to their point of origin. But they still keep coming; that one last month in Cameroon; the one six months back that splashed down in mid-Atlantic: submarine surveys say something’s happening along the mid-Atlantic ridge, but they don’t know exactly what. This was the first, that we know of, the second one came down in the Bismarck Archipelago, the third hit in the old Aberdare National Park up to the north, another took out a dam in the Amazon basin, another in the Ecuadoran Andes, three others in mid-ocean; but they all came down within three hundred kilometres of the Equator. Fancy a walk?’

  He indicated the advancing Chaga. I shuddered. Where the green elephant had sat smiling, a bubble of ochre polymer was expanding.

  ‘Dinner, then.’

  Dinner was a fifty-pence romantic-novel fantasia: a table out under the enormous African night; moon, wine, candles; picking at our food and feeding each other choice morsels of biography for dessert, the wheres, whens, whos of our lives. I loved every minute of it, I’ve never said a harder goodnight in my life.

  And with the morning, we flew.

  At the sight of the flimsy film wings, the eminently snappable struts and one’s utter exposure to sky and gravity this Moon very nearly chickened. Langrishe reassured me the microlytes were equipped with smart systems that made it impossible to crash or stall them, they virtually flew themselves and if I really wanted to experience the Chaga this was the only way I could get close and because this Moon was going to impress or die that morning I said what the hell yes, why not, and while he was filing a flight plan with security I put on my helmet and waggled my feet in the steering stirrups and the solar wing fed power to the engine and the next thing I knew we had shaken ourselves free from the wrinkled skin of Africa; airborne, flying at once terrifying and liberating, I wanted to laugh and scream as we banked (flash of iridescence as our wings caught the sun) and wheeled; before us: the White Mountain, casting off its concealment of cloud, the eternal snows high and pure and holy; below us, birds and things that were not quite birds fled from the shadow our wings cast over the jumbled canopy of the Chaga; Langrishe waved, pointed; a flotilla of silver balloons bowled through the air just above the treetops, at his signal we banked our dragonfly craft to pursue—each blimp carried a passenger like a large silver octopus—banked again, Chaga, sky, mountain, all whirled into crazy juxtaposition, and I was lost. Transported. I do not know how long I flew, where I flew, how I flew, I seemed at times a fusion of woman and wing; Icarus ascending on beautiful, foolish arms; the forest, the mountain, the high, white tableland diffracting refracting dazzling hypnotising under the sun—mystical? transcendent? I cannot say what I experienced except to echo Thomas Merton’s description of God as the pure emptiness of light where the self dissolves into the cloud of unknowing of which one cannot, of necessity, speak.

  On our return to earth we did not speak, we could not speak; the sexual, spiritual tension between us was too strong for words. In his office we tore like vultures at each other, stripped each other, ecstatically, soul-naked for the long, deep, plunge into each other; kisses desperate and naïve as ancient clay cuneiforms. Under the shadow of the White Mountain, desperate, desperate love… God, Langrishe, I want you!

  It has been several hours since the last skeleton of a baby. Like the others, it was wedged in a cleft of a fan-coral, like the others it was terribly deformed. The pain was so old and eroded that I could pick through the bones with the same detachment that I would examine a dead bird. The tiny, eyeless skull, warped into a sweeping crest of bone; the jaws fused shut in one seamless ridge of enamel; the fingers, long and delicate as those of a bat—the slightest touch snapped them—terminated in rounded open sockets. Like the others I had encountered on the WaChagga pathways, it had been deliberately abandoned. Ritual infanticide. Paradise exposed; the price of compromise of Chagga with Chaga?

  Cooler now, higher. I have had to supplement my ethnic fashions with my dearly loved leather jacket. I must look like a fetish-figure from a sword ’n’ sorcery fantasy. The unremitting claustrophobia of the forest robs me of a sense of location: I find myself searching for some breach in the walls so that I can re-establish my relatio
nship with the surface of Africa. Certainly, I must be close to the heartlands; the density and diversity of the ecosystem is staggering. Writing this, I am overshadowed by stands of what I can only describe as giant toadstools crossed with oil refineries: all caps and pipes and tubes; elsewhere on today’s climb I have encountered groves of coiled cornucopias, vagina-mouths wide enough to swallow me whole (the ultimate penetration?); miniature mountain ranges of what look like bright orange wormcasts three times my height and waving feathery extrusions. Small estates of squat cylindrical pillars, an abandoned adobe, seeping a semeny froth from their open tops. Organisms as transparent and fantastic as marine radiolarin, magnified a thousand times… What that cow Dorothy Bazyn would have given for me to have brought a camcorder with me! If she was ever to know…

  Corresponding with the accelerating diversity of the flora, I am encountering new and quite alien forms of fauna. Creatures like aerial manta rays cluster around a tangle of vivid lilac intestines; the first sight of them winging through the forest towards me sent me diving to cover, two million years of instinct, but as they passed over I saw they had no mouths. How do they feed? Too many mysteries, I haven’t the time; as I have said, this is not an expedition, this is a pilgrimage. Heart of Darkness, eh, Conrad? You don’t know the half of it. Mistah Kurtz, he dead.

  (You damn well better not be, Langrishe. You hear me?

  No, I do not think you can be dead. I would know, I would feel it in my heart, as if a part of it had stopped beating, as if a part of me had withered and died. Love it, loathe it, Langrishe, we are bound together: God, Eros, Kismet: we are one. You are out there. I will find you. Moon promises.)

  One thing I have noticed: nature here has learned a trick Mother Earth never mastered in two billion years of evolution: it has invented the wheel. Yesterday I encountered impossibly cute little creatures like a cross between a lizard and a Dinky toy, revving and rodding around my feet along the twining plastic footpaths on tiny wheels. Today, the Chaga had a further delight. At first I thought they were over-large dragonflies; ignoring my attempts to shoo them away, they danced closer and I saw that they were, in effect, tiny helicopters; all eyes and whirring vanes. They even possessed tiny tail rotors to prevent spinning. The delightful little creatures accompanied me for the rest of that day’s journey. Life in the Chaga takes to the air with enthusiasm and ingenuity. From simple gliders (some the size of T.P.’s lamented microlyte) through a bewildering array of gas bags, blimps and balloons to the helicopters and the mantas, whose means of propulsion seems to be jet-power.

  There are others in this new land, like the WaChagga, they have adapted. As I progress towards the cloud layer their presence becomes more and more evident: rafts of birds struggling to take wing weighed down by sponge-like encrustations about their heads and legs, others ridden piggyback by objects like diseased organs. The vervet monkey I saw, with the parasitic dorsal ridge, is no freak here. Some monkeys possess octopus tentacles in addition to their own arms and legs, some sport antlers of green coral studded with hundreds of tiny blue abalone eyes. Some are carpeted in a green mould that I assume must enable them to photosynthesise like plants, for their mouths have fused shut under whorls and ridges of raw bone. Some of the young I have seen clinging to their mothers’ backs bear the same deformities I saw in the abandoned children of the WaChagga. Yet none seems in distress from the mutilations, and all are obviously thriving. Is this their absorption into the symbiotic life of the Chaga? Is the law of the jungle being rewritten?

  More than monkeys and birds have come to terms with the aliens. A sudden crashing approaching through the understorey, a stand of tall, brittle umbrella trees trampled down, an elephant entered the clearing. It raised its trunk to test taste touch the air, around its neck was a red, veiny mass of flesh reaching down along the tusks to elongate into two prehensile tentacles, each terminating in something shockingly like a human hand. I remained hidden in the cover of a grove of translucent cistern-plants. Scenting the presence of its ancestral enemy, the elephant turned and withdrew into the bush. Another pact with the Chaga.

  When I heard the movement in the hooting, trilling dark that night, I feared it was another visit of the long-legged tripod creature that had reconnoitred my camp two nights before; stroking my few intimate possessions with long feathery cilia. I have a deep and entirely proper dread of all things clicking and chitinous. I held my breath.

  ‘Greetings to you in the name of the Lord Jesus…’

  I almost screamed.

  ‘Peace, sister, I am only a humble servant of my Lord. Pastor Hezekiah, minister to the lost and light to the found. Tell me, sister, do you love the Lord?’

  He moved into the range of my biolights.

  Hezekiah: bifurcated man; your right side is flesh and blood, your left a garden of tiny white flowers, trumpet-mouths opening and closing flicking forked tongues to taste the air. Hezekiah: your left eye observes the world from a half dome of blossoms and roots, your left arm is a swollen club of green flesh fused shut upon a decomposing black Bible. Too strange to terrify me, Hezekiah. To me you were almost…beautiful.

  He was dressed in a memory of old Anglican vestments. His speech was deeply beautiful, enriched by decades of exposure to the towering cadences of the Authorised Version. I did not feel any threat or darkness about him, rather, a sad holiness that made me move my little jars of biolight into a circle as an invitation to enter.

  He had evolved a complex and curiously satisfying theology around the Chaga in which God had cast him in the role of a latter-day John the Baptist; the voice crying in the wilderness, prepare ye the Way of the Lord! With reverential fervour he expounded his credo that, in the shape of the Chaga, the millennium was at hand, the Kingdom of Heaven come down to Earth: ‘Is it not written, sister, that a star shall fall from heaven, and its name shall be Wormwood, and that one third of all the growing things and creeping things upon the earth shall be destroyed? Does it not say that the New Jerusalem itself shall come down out of the heavens?’ His brother preachers had been blinded to this truth by Satan and had denounced it as ungodly; to him alone had been granted the vision, and in obedience he had come out from the midst of the scoffers and unbelievers, left his small parish near Kapsabet, and walked the five hundred kilometres to the mountain of God. In the towns he passed through he had preached his new revelation and called the orphans of Babylon to the slopes of Mount Zion and the advent of the Second Adam and Eve. ‘Eden!’ he declared, including the singing forest with a wave of his Bible-hand. ‘The new Eden; the Earth redeemed and cast in the perfect image of God. What we had seen previously as in a glass darkly, we shall now see clearly and without distortion.’ His pilgrimage followed a divinely ordered spiral around the mountain, each level corresponding to a new degree of spiritual grace and enlightenment: as he reached the summit and the pinnacle of transfiguration his own personal transfiguration would be completed, changed from glory into glory, into the likeness of Christ his master. It was a mark of God’s grace that he was half transfigured already. He touched his mantle of flowers, eyes shining with ecstasy.

  I envied him his fine madness. I asked him were the WaChagga disciples of his. ‘Degenerates,’ he denounced them. ‘They would not receive the Lord, so I have shaken their dust off my feet. God has spit them out of His mouth, they shall not see the glory.’ I asked him had he seen a white man, a m’zungu, in the forest. ‘Yes, many months ago, a m’zungu from the Research Facility.’ When I asked where the m’zungu had been headed, he pointed up into the mists. He prayed a blessing over our sleep and in the morning he was gone, moving from glory to glory. But I could not rid myself of the sensation that he shadowed all that day’s march: a half-glimpsed suggestion of a figure that could as easily have been a delusion of the prismatic perspectives of the forest. I stopped, called his name, waited for him, several times during today’s climb, but the Chaga kept silence.

  Hezekiah?

  T.P. knew it. Mrs Kivebulaya knew it. Phyll
is at the Irish Embassy who let me have her day-old copies of the Cork Examiner knew it. The entire office from venerable tea-lady to junior runner knew it.

  Moon was in love.

  The Celts invented the concept of romantic love.

  He actually left messages for me pinned to the Thorn Tree in the café of the New Stanley Hotel, a thing no one has in any seriousness done since the shadow of Hemingway stalked the bars and country clubs; dates and arrangements for champagne breakfasts overlooking the Rift Valley, the night train to Lake Victoria (a teak and brass time machine focused fifty years in the past), hiking expeditions in the N’gong Hills, camera safaris to Lake Turkana, microlyting over the Masai Mara. Impossibly romantic. Horrendously expensive. Moon loved every second of it. T.P. found it simultaneously hilarious and pitiable.

  Suddenly the three hundred pages of notes, the hundred and twenty-two hours of taped interviews, the twelve box files full of associated documents that I had been avoiding like a persistent creditor seemed to spontaneously combust under my fingers. T.P. watched in dumb amazement from his Captain Kirk chair as the spirit of the Chaga reached out and possessed me. Finally, to save me from myself, and his afternoons of contemplative crossword-solving and street-watching, he ordered me out of his office and sent me to pursue my demonic muse in the sultry climate of the coast. He obtained an indefinite lease on a beach-edge banda half an hour’s drive north from Mombasa and sent me off on the overnight train with a ream of A4 and a Remington portable that barely qualified for the description.

  Silence and solitude unbroken. I drove that Remington portable into the ground; well after dark, homeward-wending shell-sellers were surprised to see me working chthonically on the veranda by the light of oil lamps. At two o’clock I would tumble through the mosquito nets into bed and sleep until dawn when I would rise and run, or swim, before breakfast in the hotel up the beach. Then I would plunge into the book and not surface until dinner time. By Friday I would be exhausted but glowing and waiting eagerly for the headlights of the Ol Tukai 4×4 to come weaving through the palm trees, the herald of two days of swimming, sunbathing, sleeping with Langrishe.