The Book of the Heathen

by Robert Edric

  I went with Cornelius to the quarry floor, to the outermost edge of the debris.

  ‘They cut it too sharp,’ he said. He indicated the high, sheer faces all around us.

  ‘That’s because there’s less and less to recover,’ I told him, knowing that within a year the place would be abandoned. We watched the naked men on the slope above us. There was little apparent order to their searching, but even they must have by then understood that they were digging for corpses.

  A man higher up the slope began suddenly to scream. He scrabbled in the earth at his feet, and a moment later he pulled free the lower part of a man’s leg and foot. Others scrambled up the slope to help him. Letting go of the corpse, the rescuer then cupped his hands to his mouth and let out a cry which reverberated around the enclosed space.

  ‘Now Abbot will have to go to the bother of a burial,’ Cornelius said. He started forward up the slope and I followed him.

  By the time we arrived at the top, the body had been fully retrieved. It looked flattened, tan from head to foot, both arms and both legs either dislocated or broken, or both. The man’s eyes were cleared of the red clay and it was scooped from his mouth. At our approach, the diggers stood aside and fell silent, acknowledging our greater responsibility in the matter. Both Cornelius and I were covered from head to foot in the same red mess. Cornelius told two of the men to drag the body to the quarry floor, and we waited where we stood while this was done.

  9

  It was raining as I approached the gaol, and water poured from its corrugated roof in a succession of spouts. Bone’s own quarters stood to one side of the building, and a third, equally dilapidated structure housed his small garrison. All this was at some distance from the compound, reached by a path through the scrub. In the dry season, when the vegetation died back, the foundations of other, lost buildings could be seen rising to knee height. There was some speculation as to what these had once been used for, and it was generally agreed that, like so many of the buildings across the river, they had been holding quarters for slaves, gathered here awaiting shipment to the coast, or east cross-country, wherever the demand was greatest, and I seldom failed to feel some faint, sour echo of the place and its ghosts each time I passed through it.

  Arriving at the gaol, I encountered Bone and Clayton on the building’s narrow veranda. Looking at them through the streaming water was like looking at men sitting behind a waterfall. I was by then soaked, and steam rose from my shoulders and chest. They were playing cards and made a show of stopping their game to watch me approach. Bone called out for me to identify myself, saying that he couldn’t make me out through the water. Both of them laughed at this. I passed through the water and stood beside them, squeezing the wet from my arms and waiting as it drained into a pool at my feet.

  ‘Rain,’ Bone said. ‘Only an idiot would be out in it.’

  The wet season was by then well established and parts of the compound flooded daily. The river was high, and most of the traders had left our jetties and wharves for the calmer, more reliable pools downriver until the water fell. Everything that might spoil among our dry goods was taken inside under the supervision of Cornelius and the rest was left to sit out the daily downpours.

  Bone put down his cards and stood up. Clayton insisted that they continue playing, but Bone took this to mean that the man had a winning hand and told him to go. Clayton protested, and so Bone put his foot against the packing case on which their cards and coins were spread and kicked it over, sending most of the cards and money out into the rain.

  ‘I said go,’ he said again; I knew that this small show had been for my benefit alone. Clayton went, cursing loudly as he stepped out into the rain, and we watched him run to the shelter of the garrison.

  ‘I’ve come to see Frere,’ I said.

  ‘You do surprise me.’

  ‘I have every right.’

  ‘Never said you didn’t.’

  ‘Can I go in?’

  ‘Not like that.’ He indicated the water still flowing from my clothes.

  ‘Is he well?’ I asked him.

  ‘How well does he need to be? Don’t worry, he’ll still be here when they come to get him.’

  ‘Has anyone else been to see him?’

  ‘The Old Man.’ He meant Cornelius.

  ‘Recently?’

  ‘The day he came back.’

  This surprised me, and he saw this. ‘Thought you had him all to yourself, did you, your own little lost cause?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Yes, you did. You going to save him, are you? The Old Man came, stayed ten minutes and then went. Probably just here to tell him to keep his mouth shut and take what he’s got coming to him.’

  I refused to rise to the remark.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ I said.

  ‘And perhaps I’m not. But, either way, it won’t make any difference to him, will it?’

  Unwilling to delay any longer, I left him.

  ‘Door’s open,’ he called after me.

  The outer room was filled with old furniture, possibly gathered up long ago from those other abandoned buildings, and most of these pieces had been eaten by termites, leaving mounds of dust beneath them. The heat in the room was unbearable beneath its tin roof.

  The door to Frere’s cell was open. Someone had lined chairs along the wall, and upon several of these stood mounds of books.

  Frere sat at a desk beneath a barred window. He was writing as I entered; other books lay open all around him.

  ‘Am I interrupting you?’ I said, expecting him to look up at me and smile at the remark.

  Instead, he motioned impatiently for me to enter and wait. He then finished what he was writing, read it through and blotted the ink, all as calmly and as precisely as though he were a conscientious clerk interrupted at his labours. I half expected him to ask me what he could do for me.

  ‘I heard you,’ he said. He indicated the small window, through which Bone remained a third presence. He touched a finger to his lips, and then said loudly, ‘I have a plan to kill Bone in his sleep and escape.’

  The top of Bone’s head appeared at the window. He called in to us that he’d like to see Frere try, and then we heard as he left the veranda and ran splashing through the downpour to his own quarters.

  ‘He’s a Philistine,’ I said.

  ‘He needs to be. And perhaps if the rest of us were, then all this might at least be tolerable.’ He rose and moved stiffly, flinching at a succession of small pains. There was still a bruise across his forehead from the beating he had been given on his return.

  ‘I tried to stop it,’ I said.

  ‘Cornelius brought me some sulphur powder and bandages.’ He raised his shirt to show me his strapped chest.

  ‘I should have thought to bring you some more,’ I said.

  He pulled a chair from the side of the room up to his desk.

  I had with me a satchel filled with other medicines – mainly vitriol and tartar emetic – and with writing materials, although I saw that he was well provided with these, too.

  ‘For my confession?’ he said as I carefully took these out and wiped them dry.

  ‘For whatever you want. Did Bone tell you about the papers he was asked to sign?’

  ‘Twenty times. A lifetime of signatures. What else do you imagine he can write?’

  ‘Is that what you were writing? Your account of what happened?’

  ‘You make it sound as though it all somehow took place independently of me, as though I were merely watching and not participating.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ I said. I resented his abruptness, these probing remarks.

  ‘Of course I do. I just wish you were able to say it more directly.’

  ‘No, you don’t. Every time I ask you something directly, you become evasive, you protect me, push me further and further away from the truth.’

  He made no attempt to deny this. He said nothing for several minutes, during which there was a brea
k in the downpour and the drumming above us ceased, followed by the hiss and splatter of running water. My hands still left wet imprints where I rested them. It was common during these breaks in the rain for men to fall silent, listening, knowing only that the rain would return and fall for its allotted span, occasionally timing these periods of relative calm as though they were something hard-won, silent reprieves, islands of dry amid the ocean of the rain.

  And it was during these periods of short-lived unreality that I felt most intensely that we there were all players on a small, eagerly observed stage, and that the stillness and silence was only a precursor to the events which were inevitably to follow.

  Several minutes passed like this, and then Frere said, ‘Tell me honestly, is this what you expected, all this, is it what you truly expected to find? Is your part in it all truly the part you expected to play?’

  I knew that he was referring to the whole of our time there, and not merely to his own recent abandonment of us.

  I knew how great and unbearable his own disappointment had become. Not immediately upon our arrival, perhaps, but certainly in the months which followed, as our routines were established and as the never-ending considerations of commerce and moneymaking usurped all else. In truth, it was not what I had expected, but my expectations had never been so high as his. He had expected a wilderness in which to wander, but instead he found only a place already long since sacrificed to the gods of profit and loss. This is to simplify it too greatly, but it was something commonly understood between us. It was why, during those months following our arrival, we had planned and gone on our own short expeditions – all under the flimsy guise of commercial exploration, and fooling only ourselves into believing that we were going where no others had already gone before us.

  Frere was the instigator and planner of these expeditions, and though I was at first keen to accompany him, I became less enthusiastic later. The others complained of our time away. Frere always brought something back to appease them – specimen goods, the knowledge of a new route, new sources of hired labour – but they quickly saw through these subterfuges.

  After a year of such expeditions I had pleaded that I was too busy with my maps to accompany him, and he had started going alone, hiring porters to accompany him. These short absences were tolerated only so long as his work at the Station remained unaffected. They were not long journeys, the longest lasting only five or six days. It was why, when he finally decided not to return to us, almost a fortnight elapsed before any of us became suspicious.

  ‘I expected to serve some useful purpose,’ I conceded. ‘I expected something different, something far removed from anything else I had ever known. I expected to be able to make some genuine and lasting contribution.’

  ‘And this place? Is it what you expected it to be?’

  ‘I certainly don’t share your disappointments.’

  ‘And therefore life here remains tolerable for you.’

  ‘Was it so intolerable for you? I don’t believe you. You were given considerable freedom. It wouldn’t have been tolerated, say, of Abbot.’ It was a poor comparison to make, and thinking of the man, both Frere and I smiled. ‘You know what I mean,’ I said.

  ‘I do. And I regret the fact that I cannot contain my disappointments, and that even now I am still forcing you – you, of all people – to confront them with me.’

  ‘You force me to do nothing. You’re my friend; I admire you. You don’t need to endlessly tell me of the things I already know. You don’t need to tell me how noble and misplaced my own goals or ideals were – are – compared to your own. You don’t need to remind me of all the compromises and allowances I make.’ I paused. Apart from which, I cannot say that I entirely believe you.’

  ‘Oh?’ This turn in our discussion amused and encouraged him.

  ‘When you say your own expectations were so thwarted. You knew far better than I did what to expect. You might have pretended otherwise, you may not have disabused me of my own grand notions on the voyage out, but you knew all the same.’

  ‘And so I am now fooling only myself, making excuses for myself alone?’

  I could not deny that this was part of what I felt.

  He signalled for me to say nothing more. He inspected the medicines I had brought him. I asked him what else he needed. He asked me if all his journals and notebooks were safe and I told him that they were, and that no-one had yet remarked on the fact that I had retrieved them from his quarters.

  ‘Whoever comes, they’ll want to see them,’ he said.

  ‘Not all of them.’

  ‘No, not all.’

  ‘I can send the remainder home,’ I suggested.

  ‘Afterwards.’

  I stopped myself from saying, ‘After what?’

  ‘And don’t forget,’ he said, ‘anything you do might be regarded as perverting the course of justice. These things must be considered.’ He told me which journals he would like to see and I promised to bring them to him. He asked me about his collections and I assured him they remained intact where he had left them. He was concerned that some of them might be stolen. He told me which cases contained his fetishes. ‘Take them out – it doesn’t matter which – and spread them around the cases and jars. Put one in each drawer of my desks.’

  ‘Will they keep thieves away?’

  ‘It will keep away the men who believe in them. Tell Cornelius I would be grateful if he would return to see me.’

  Above us, the rain resumed its clamour, forcing us to raise our voices.

  * * *

  I was with Fletcher the following day when he was called to the river. A small steamer and a dozen attached canoes, some no more than over-laden rafts, had just then arrived and some argument had arisen. A master at a neighbouring jetty had complained that the new arrival had no right to be there, and that his own unloading was being delayed. We went to the boat and its canoes.

  Fletcher recognized it immediately. ‘Zoo collectors,’ he told me, but whatever the vessel held was hidden from view by tarpaulins.

  ‘Do they have any right being here?’ I asked him.

  ‘None whatsoever. They’re waiting. Those canoes won’t survive twenty miles with the river running this fast. They want to tie up here and wait.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Get rid of them.’

  We walked the length of the jetty and leaped down onto the small steamer. The owner came out to us. He was an Arab. He lied to us about having problems with his engine and needing time to repair it. He spoke in a way which suggested he did not expect to be believed, and Fletcher obliged him in this by saying, ‘You’re a liar.’

  The man pretended to be offended. He offered to pay for the use of the jetty for the few hours he would be forced to remain.

  ‘No,’ Fletcher said, already walking away from him. He lifted the canvas on the piled cages to reveal the creatures they held, all brought to life by the sudden light shining in on them. The man pleaded with Fletcher to keep the tarpaulins fastened, but Fletcher ignored him and went from one mound of cages to another, throwing back their covers.

  The creatures were mostly small apes, chimps and gibbons, crowded together until they were forced to cling to each other and sit one upon another for want of space. There were some small cats, ocelots and civets, and a variety of antelopes and gazelles. The larger of these were trussed and laid on the floor of their cases. Some of the apes threw themselves screeching and howling at the wooden bars as we looked in at them.

  We moved on and the owner followed us, pulling down and securing the covers. He prodded the animals with the cane he carried, provoking even louder outbursts from them. In several cages, the animals were already dead. In one cage of small monkeys, all no bigger than cats, more seemed to be dead than alive, and those that were living looked close to death.

  I followed Fletcher to the stern of the vessel, where a solitary large cage was roped to the deck.

  ‘Gorilla, probably,’ he said to me. We
had seen them before. ‘Fetching double what they did a year ago.’

  Because the cover of this cage was more securely fastened than the others, Fletcher told the owner to untie it himself. He protested, offering us the money he was willing to pay. Other men stood in the canoes and looked up at us. Most of these lesser vessels rocked precariously each time the men on them moved. The river rolled in close, sudden waves along its bank.

  When the Arab again refused to do what Fletcher told him, Fletcher took out his knife and cut the ropes securing the cage. The man became even more agitated and called for him to stop, pushing himself in front of Fletcher.

  ‘Then get on with it,’ Fletcher said.

  The man set about unfastening the many knots, until the last rope fell limp and he stood back from the cage. Fletcher told him to remove the tarpaulin. There had been no sound from the cage while all this was happening, and it occurred to me – as it must already have occurred to Fletcher – that instead of holding a living creature, the box contained contraband of some sort – arms, perhaps, or unmarked ivory.

  Eventually, the owner pulled the tarpaulin clear, and in the cage before us we saw a fully grown giraffe, trussed at its knees and feet and with its neck tied down in a tight, awkward curve to the floor of the cage in order that it might be fitted into it. The creature’s mouth was also bound with cloths. Its tongue protruded and its nostrils flared and closed rapidly. It looked out at us with dark eyes the size of cricket balls. I had seen others, but none so large or so close as this one. The animal’s tail was fastened to one of its feet. The slats of the cage pressed into its sides, and the bars across the roof bore down behind its shoulders.

  ‘It’s a female,’ Fletcher said.

  I asked him how he knew and he prodded its swollen belly, causing the animal to flare its eyes.

  ‘And it won’t even get beyond the Lulindi, let alone to whatever zoo is waiting for it.’

  ‘How can you be so certain?’

  ‘Because it was never meant to lie down or even sit. They sleep standing up. The minute it tries to struggle to its feet – especially one in this condition – its heart will give out and it will die. It won’t be able to do it. And even if they do manage to hoist it up in a sling, which is what they’ll attempt with something so valuable, then it’ll stand for an hour, perhaps even a day, miscarry and then buckle, fall and die. I’ve seen it happen. It won’t even have been fed or watered for the past week.’