The Book of the Heathen

by Robert Edric

  According to Abbot’s own account, there had been thirty thousand of these pipes, each with an inner vitreous glaze, each a yard long, and each designed to fit tightly inside another. He frequently told us how vast an area of land might be drained when the need arose – something he alone still professed to anticipate. The rest of us considered them something of a folly, home to rats and snakes and whatever else stumbled into them.

  It took four days to move the pipes, and Abbot inspected each one of them as they were laid in their new resting place. He discarded those that were cracked or broken, surprisingly few considering how long they had been there. It was his intention to lay some of these pipes out on the quarry floor to show our visitors how he intended to better drain it. I had seldom seen him so enthusiastic – one might almost say manic – in his work. A plan all of his own making, dependent on nothing from anyone else but their labour. He even drew his own map of the proposed drainage pattern. And when the floor was drained, he said, then more of the quarry might be opened up for working, and following that the drained land might be used for building.

  This was as specific as he was prepared to be, and if any of us saw the obvious flaws in this plan, then we kept our mouths shut. We saw what he was doing and why he was doing it, but none of us, I believe, accepted his argument that our displays and achievements there would have any bearing on what now happened to Frere.

  And then, the night after the pipes had been placed ready for their use, there was a further fall in the quarry when the wall adjacent to the recent collapse, weakened by the heavy rain, gave way over an even wider area and fell. The vast majority of the stacked pipes were smashed and buried, and of all those already laid out in lines, over half were covered and the rest shaken out of their neat, promise-filled pattern and scattered.

  The fall happened during the night and the first we heard of it was when a party of workers came into the compound at dawn. They went to Abbot’s office and waited in silence for him to appear. Cornelius was the first to arrive, but when he asked them why they were there they refused to tell him, saying that Abbot had warned them to speak to no-one else of his plans. Cornelius knocked on Abbot’s door.

  I went with the two men and the workers back to the quarry, where we surveyed the damage from the far rim of the excavation. Men were already digging for the pipes as they had earlier dug for their companions. Upon realizing the full extent of what had happened, of what had been so suddenly snatched from his grasp, Abbot fell to his knees and started to groan in his despair. He asked me over and over what had possessed him to move the pipes after they had stood for so long and so safely in one place.

  Cornelius and I saw how little had been truly lost in the fall, and how much unnecessary labour was now likely to be wasted. We told Abbot that the situation was not as bad as he believed, but in response to this he simply stared at us and asked us if we knew how much each one of the pipes had cost, and how much besides they represented.

  Water continued to fall from the quarry rim in narrow spouts, silvered where it caught the sun, and feathered to spray before it hit the floor. Men used these falls to shower themselves after their labours. Abbot refused to go down into the workings and confront the disaster any more closely.

  Even from that height it was clear to us that few of the pipes survived intact.

  Abbot pressed his face into his hands. ‘What will they say?’ he said. ‘What will they say?’ And for the first time since I had known him, I felt a genuine sympathy for the man. My mother had once told me that there was no distinction to be made between cheap dreams and noble dreams in the minds of the men who harboured either.

  ‘What will they say? What will they say?’

  And my father had told me I would encounter a thousand Abbots, and that any man of worth, any decent man, might best be judged by his decency, that he would succeed or fail, live or die by it. I had never fully believed either of them, but looking at Abbot contemplating his own crushed dream beneath him, I came much closer to an understanding of what I had been told.

  ‘What will they say? What will they say?’

  Cornelius and I left him and returned to the Station.

  16

  I sought out the journal Frere had asked for.

  We had gone to Babire four months after our discovery of the lake, and only weeks before the dry season was due to end. There was some urgency in mounting the trip, and Frere undertook all the arrangements concerning our provisions, guides and porters. All he asked of me, having secured my agreement to accompany him and help map our journey, was not to disclose our final destination to our porters. He confided in me that our guides would take us only as far as the mouth of the Babire River and that they had agreed to wait there for us. I asked him why such secrecy was necessary. Both Fletcher and Cornelius, I knew, had advised him against making the journey.

  Babire, it transpired, lay between two warring tribes, and word had recently reached us that several battles – though we all understood that this was too grand a name for them – had been fought and a great many small villages destroyed and their inhabitants either killed or dispossessed of their lands and homes.

  Frere said it was his intention to visit these ruined villages before they were overgrown and lost to the forest. He wanted to record and collect whatever evidence of the recent warfare that might remain, and to examine the surrounding country in the aftermath of the conflict. We lost too much of our wild rubber in these unsettled regions. He also wanted to try and understand how these small wars were fought, what savagery was involved, and how completely the people and settlements were consumed by them.

  He had also begun a collection of the totems and fetishes left behind at the scenes of such savagery and he wished to add to this. He confessed to me that he had been waiting for news of just such a recent battle before pushing for a visit to its site. Normally, word of these affairs did not reach us until months afterwards – some boatman or other complaining of a delay or the absence of promised goods – and equally often these reports were vague in their details, and of events too far distant for us to be able to reach them quickly enough to satisfy Frere’s curiosity.

  He had already calculated that, following our journey by river, two days’ walking would bring us to Babire. He allowed a further two to three days to examine the site and then to explore the surrounding countryside for whatever he might find there.

  I asked Cornelius if he had cautioned us against going because he thought the fighting might still be taking place, but he said this was unlikely. They would not have been lengthy encounters anyway, and relatively few men would have been involved. The brief clashes might have been savage by our own standards, but it was unlikely that anyone now remained to threaten Frere or myself. He said he objected because he felt the journey was of no value other than to Frere personally – he had already accused Frere of dilettantism following our visit to the lake – and because, with the onset of the wet season, there was more than enough work to be undertaken at the Station. I could not refute this, and everything he said made me regret having agreed to accompany Frere. I knew that I had again succumbed to his enthusiasm, and that, despite wanting to again experience something of the sense of achievement I had felt upon locating the lake, I had been given no real choice in the matter; the credit of our friendship had again been drawn upon.

  On the morning of our departure, Fletcher asked to look at the rifle I was taking, and when I showed him it – a weapon loaned to me for a price from Bone – he took it from me and insisted on exchanging it for one of his own, his treasured Martini-Henry. I objected, but he would not listen, and then stood with me as I practised loading it and turning the bolt.

  When Frere learned of this, he laughed and gently accused Fletcher of over-reacting. Over-reacting to what? I asked him. He took me beyond the hearing of our porters and told me that Fletcher was concerned that one of the tribes involved in the fighting at Babire were again reputed to be cannibals. Before I could ask him
if this were true, he reminded me of the tales we had been told concerning the people of the lake country and how little we had suffered there, at twice the distance from the Station, how much we had achieved there. Though he did not say it, I was being accused of the same alarmism I had been accused of then. Our conversation on the subject was ended by him saying that a single shot from Fletcher’s rifle would send anyone within a five mile radius running screaming back into the forest. It was rare that he resorted to such easy and evasive answers. I asked him if he anticipated there would still be anyone there – cannibal or not – to be scared away, and he finally lost his patience with me and told me that if I no longer wished to accompany him then he would go alone and that he would not hold my decision against me. As before, my choices evaporated around me.

  We paddled and walked to Babire as planned, and left our guides and porters at the mouth of the river. Frere offered good wages, but none wanted to accompany us further. Some of the porters he paid off and they left us the instant the money was in their hands. We learned later that, of the six men left with the guides, a further two absconded during the first night of waiting.

  Frere and I entered the disputed territory alone. We had no accurate idea of where Babire lay, and we came upon the ruined village unexpectedly, following a stream into the plundered fields and charred remains of the dwellings that had once stood there. At seeing the place so suddenly before us, we withdrew briefly and unburdened ourselves.

  I followed Frere in a wide circle around the perimeter of the clearing, searching for the other paths which led to it. We found four of these, evenly spaced, and Frere followed each of them outwards for an hour in every direction, searching for whatever it was he sought.

  He found the well-trodden path by which the attackers had come and then afterwards withdrawn. He found the marks on the trees he was looking for. He found a small, white-skulled doll made of clay and grass set into the path to deter pursuit. And all the time he searched, I kept my eyes and ears open for sight or sound of anyone remaining in the trees around us, and everywhere I looked I saw shapes and movement in the dappled light and shade, and in every silence I heard the whispering voices of watching men. As usual, Frere made a joke of my concern.

  The forest around Babire was as dense as any I had previously encountered and our voices penetrated only a few feet on either side of us.

  Frere insisted on following this main path even further from the village, and it was not until darkness started to fall and we were two hours from our loads, that I was able to persuade him to return with me. He suggested that I should return alone, light a fire, and that he would join me later. I refused to do this, and seeing that I was angry at the suggestion, he returned reluctantly with me to the ruins of Babire, eventually apologizing to me and admitting that it was in the ruins of the village itself that he hoped to make his greatest discoveries.

  Having seen the empty space and its scattered wreckage I asked him what he could possibly hope to find there, and it was then, in his shrug of an answer, that I understood, despite his protestations to the contrary, we were again on the trail of cannibals.

  ‘Anthropophagy, James, anthropophagy.’ As though this added an immediate cachet and veneer of scientific respectability to what we did; as though the word itself conferred upon us some protection.

  I was repulsed by the thought, but even as I considered it, I knew he was unlikely to be successful in his search. By my estimation, any fighting there had taken place over twenty days previously, and there were enough scavengers in the forest to ensure that nothing would remain. I mentioned none of this to him as we made our return to Babire in the darkness.

  We retrieved our loads and lit a fire. I gathered wood from the ruined buildings to ensure that the blaze would be fed until dawn. I had expected to be kept awake by the usual noises, but the forest around that lost village was a peculiarly silent place, and following the day’s exertions I was the first to succumb to sleep and the last to wake.

  I woke alone, to find our fire a mound of glowing ash. The sun was already above the canopy. At first I was alarmed, imagining that Frere had gone back along his path, but then a motion caught my eye and I saw him come out of the trees at the far side of the clearing. He was carrying a club and a piece of animal skin. He saw me watching and raised his trophies to me.

  He came to me and showed me what he had collected. He told me how all the surrounding small cultivated plots had been plundered and their crops taken. He had been searching since before dawn. The club he held was weighted with a band of iron at one end. He could not identify the skin, but showed me the holes where it had once been stitched. He poured from his satchel the few other pieces he had found. It was a disappointing lot, but he remained enthusiastic.

  He joined me for breakfast and explained that, according to his calculations, three hundred people had once lived there. I did not ask him if he had yet found any sign of the atrocities believed to have taken place in the village. He showed me the pieces of cooking pots he had collected. All had been smashed beyond use.

  ‘And your cannibalism?’ I finally asked him, wondering if he was prepared to keep further discoveries from me.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing whatsoever.’

  He asked me to make a plan of the ruined village, to plot where its huts had once stood, where the hearths in these had been located, to examine the surrounding forest for track-ways and other cultivated clearings, and to mark on the chart anything I found that he himself had not already come across. He intended making a more thorough search of the surroundings, admitting for the first time that he hoped to find the body or the remains of someone killed or mortally wounded in the fighting, who had crawled away and died alone and unnoticed amid the trees. He did not imagine that he would be successful in this, but he was determined to make the attempt having come so far.

  I expressed my reluctance to be separated from him in such an isolated place, but he merely reminded me of Fletcher’s rifle and the faith I had earlier placed in the weapon, and remarked that we would achieve twice as much in the time left to us if we worked separately. He showed me the abundant notes he had already made during the night.

  I worked through the day making a plan of the village. It was an accurate map and I was pleased with the result. Every few hours, Frere would reappear and show me what he had found. He showed me a small, broken shield, a snakeskin bracelet and a finely woven grass quiver. He complimented me on my map, and I felt encouraged to add to it. I showed him the few unremarkable pieces of pottery and wood-working I had found. One of these pieces, a ball of ebony, excited him as much as his doll. He said it was broken from another club, a weapon designed specifically for crushing skulls. But the highly polished surface of the black wood disappointed him and he asked me if I had wiped it clean before showing it to him. I disappointed him further by saying I hadn’t.

  We ate together and then he left me again.

  I searched through the surrounding perimeter of trees for signs of once-cultivated plots. I could not be certain in my identification of these and I shaded the areas on my map accordingly. I occasionally heard him working further out among the trees. He sang and spoke aloud to himself as he went.

  Later in the afternoon, he returned to the clearing. He carried two sacks of further findings, and he tipped one of these out for me to examine. There was nothing that I hadn’t already seen elsewhere, and I sensed that he too was disappointed by the haul. I asked if the second sack contained more of the same and he said it did. I asked him to let me see, but this time instead of tipping the contents out, he reached into the sack and brought them out piece by piece.

  First among these pieces were several small bones, and it was not until he had arranged these on the ground that I understood I was looking at a small human arm. I asked him to confirm this and he nodded. He told me where he had found the bones, and that a fire had been lit near by. He took another bone from the sack, this one blackened and broken. Yet another still had som
e flesh and sinew attached to it. It was clear that they were not the bones of an adult, and the vanished inhabitants of Babire had not been pygmies.

  ‘They are the bones of a child,’ I said bluntly.

  He held the largest of the bones at arm’s length, and when I took it from him to examine it more closely I caught the faint but distinctive odour it still possessed. He took the bone back and sniffed deeply at it, as though wanting to commit the smell to memory.

  I asked him what he intended doing with the bones, and he said he wanted to keep them. He did his best to mask the excitement in his voice.

  He reached carefully back into the sack and took out something else – something which I could not at first identify, and it was only when he held the thing between his finger and thumb and clear of his palm, that I was able to make out a small black hand with its thumb and one of its fingers missing. I looked from this trophy back to Frere’s triumphant grin, the look on his face one of wonder, awe almost, the look of a man who might have found a diamond of the same size.

  I told him to put it back in the sack, but either he did not hear me or he had become oblivious to my words, for he went on staring at the small black hand, turning it one way and then another as though to get a better impression of what it represented, of its great value to him.

  My revulsion at seeing this was equal to that I felt at seeing the thing itself, and I made my feelings known to him, but he was either unconvinced of these or remained oblivious to them, and I left him alone with his prize, painfully conscious of this unexpected and unwelcome distance so suddenly between us.