The Book of the Heathen

by Robert Edric

  Klein waited a moment, ensuring he was once again in control of the situation, and that Abbot and I both understood this, before going on.

  ‘You join us on a momentous occasion,’ he said to me. ‘These plans and drawings are the blueprint for my new mission. Everything is agreed. Tell him, Mr Abbot.’

  Abbot lowered his gaze to the plans, but said nothing.

  ‘Mr Abbot is too modest,’ Klein said. ‘Without his assistance, I would have been unable to proceed.’

  ‘I simply—’ Abbot said.

  ‘Without Mr Abbot and all the assistance he has been able to offer me, my plans might not even have been thought worthy of consideration in the first instance. Perhaps I shall insist on a statue being erected in honour of his endeavours. Imagine that – a statue to a humble clerk.’

  ‘Labour. I offered…’ Abbot said.

  ‘A labour-force of a size and at a price a poor man such as myself would never have believed possible.’

  ‘The men from the quarry,’ I said, wanting to end this painful performance. ‘You sold them to him cheaply?’

  ‘Oh, not to me personally,’ Klein said. He drew deeply on the cigar and released its smoke in a slow plume between us. ‘To my new benefactors across the river. To those men with a vision of the future in which accommodation is made for the Lord’s work, and in which—’

  ‘What about the mission at Kirasi?’ I said.

  ‘You didn’t hear? Of course not, you were ill. There was a fire. Such a pity.’

  ‘You had it burned, you mean.’

  ‘A very unfortunate fire, after which the place was overrun by savages. I believe there may have been some fighting, some loss of life even, one never knows with these people, so much screaming and chest-beating.’

  ‘Does Cornelius know this?’

  ‘Van Klees? I imagine so. Why? What concern do you imagine it is of his? This is what should concern us now.’ He slapped both palms onto the outline of his church. ‘This, this is where we should turn our gaze.’

  I stopped listening to him.

  ‘He’s right,’ Abbot said.

  I saw from a map at the corner of the chart that the new mission stood closer to Hammad’s home than to the river or the Belgian Station.

  ‘It will employ men for a year,’ Abbot said, as though still hoping to persuade me of something I had so far failed to grasp. ‘All the excavated stone from the quarry. Don’t you see – nothing undertaken there will be wasted. This is a perfect solution.’ He began to point out the features of the plan.

  Klein played no part in this; instead, he continued watching me, merely nodding in mocking agreement with everything Abbot said.

  When I could stand this no longer, I rose from my seat and said to Klein, ‘Perpetua and Felicity.’

  ‘What of them?’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I’ve scarcely seen them since their act of debased sacrilege on the night you became ill.’

  ‘They were doing what you had commanded them to do. Why?’

  ‘Commanded? You were ill, Mr Frasier, delirious. Ask anyone. Ask Abbot here.’

  ‘What?’ Abbot said, only then distracted from his litany of excuses and self-justification.

  ‘Are they still here?’ I said to Klein.

  ‘Who knows? Perhaps their work for the Lord is finished. Perhaps He has looked down on them and told them to rest, that they have done enough for Him. Or perhaps the new mission demands new servants to do His work. Who knows?’ He fell silent after that, waiting for me to leave. I saw the slender cane he carried hanging on the back of Abbot’s door. I wanted to take it and break it into pieces and throw it at his feet.

  He saw where I looked, and said, ‘It’s merely a cane, Mr Frasier. Even Jesus had his staff.’ He spat the stub of burning cigar onto the papers at his feet and then watched as they began to smoulder.

  * * *

  Nash eventually came to see me as darkness fell. It had been my intention to talk to him about Frere, but I asked him instead what he knew of the arrangement between Abbot and Klein. He was reluctant to discuss the matter. I saw the figures in Abbot’s ledgers juggled into their face-saving columns on the back-breaking work of others. Nash seemed tired, unwilling to prolong any of the small conflicts which had forever existed between us, conflicts born of conflict, in which the distinction between allegiance and responsibility had long since been lost. He dressed my sores and helped me to my bed. He asked me about my illness, but in a way which did not so much indicate concern for me, as suggest to me that he was a man preparing himself for his own coming suffering.

  ‘I saw no reason not to sanction the use of the quarry labour-force,’ he said eventually. ‘Abbot will act in some supervisory role while the thing is being constructed.’

  ‘Is there so little for him to do here?’

  Earlier, there had been unverified and scarcely believable reports of what sounded to be an approaching flotilla of traders, and our wharves had been made ready for them. But the vessels had passed us by without any signal to us. Some of our canoes put out to them, but returned empty.

  Afterwards, there was no talk of what had happened.

  Several hours later, a dozen porters and guides arrived from Lado with a cargo of Egyptian blue glass, gum and amber. And with news of what had happened to Dhanis and his thousands of mutineers ransacking the country.

  Fletcher and Cornelius went to inspect the trade goods and told the men who carried them to take them elsewhere. The glass, Fletcher said, was plunder, and the guides carried rifles which, in all likelihood, had come from Dhanis’s insurgents. The traders complained at being treated like this, insisting Cornelius accept the cargo. Fletcher sent for Bone and his men, and following an uncomfortable stand-off lasting most of the day, the traders left us. One man took out a dozen of the precious glass bowls and smashed them at the centre of the compound.

  Nash told me he had spent much of the day gathering together and packing his belongings, awaiting his own departure a week hence. I wondered at his caution, and it occurred to me later that he might have lied to us about the steamer coming for Frere and himself, and that the vessel would arrive earlier, under cover of darkness perhaps, and that he and Frere would be gone from us before we knew it.

  ‘He was asking after you,’ he said upon my mentioning Frere.

  ‘I want to see him. Before he goes.’

  ‘He knows that. He asked me to arrange it.’

  ‘I doubt I can walk that far,’ I said.

  ‘I can bring him here to you.’

  ‘He’ll probably offer to be tied and hobbled,’ I said.

  ‘He did.’

  We both fell silent at this, acknowledging our shared responsibilities towards the man, responsibilities now as destructive as they had once been sustaining.

  The night around us lay brooding and largely silent, and he remarked on this, saying it was not what he had expected. I remembered my own thwarted expectations. I remembered the game I had played with my sisters of the endlessly beating drums, the roaring beasts and the strangled screams which would forever rent the jungle darkness.

  * * *

  ‘Will he tell me what he told you?’ I asked him eventually.

  ‘I imagine that is the purpose of him wanting to see you before he goes.’

  ‘He may just wish to say goodbye. Will you stay with him at Stanleyville?’

  ‘A day or two, perhaps. A week.’

  ‘But not until the end?’

  ‘No, not until then.’

  ‘If you were given the choice would you stay?’

  He thought about this. ‘No.’

  I had earlier considered asking permission to go with him and Frere and to wait with Frere while he was tried and while I recuperated, but I knew the request would only raise higher his guard against me, and that any other, lesser concessions might also be lost.

  ‘The Company will most likely appoint someone through one of their agents there,’ he said.


  ‘To present his case fairly?’

  ‘To see that all the proprieties are observed; to ensure that everything is done in the correct manner.’

  ‘Is it true about Hammad?’ I said.

  ‘That he has his expectations? Yes.’ He looked around at my now empty walls. ‘We don’t know the tiniest part of it, you or I,’ he said. ‘Not the tiniest part.’

  It was the first time I had heard him talk with such resignation or uncertainty, and I saw that he too had finally been betrayed by his expectations. His last few days among us were nothing more to him than a void to be crossed, something worthy of endurance only because it was within sight of whatever lay ahead of him.

  ‘I’ve made a list of all the maps I took from your office,’ he said. ‘I’m obliged to let you see it so that you can confirm what I’ve taken in connection with the trial.’

  I had not yet investigated the missing charts; there seemed little point in knowing. All that mattered was that I had plotted Frere’s wanderings and now he possessed that map. What was the map of our shining blue lake against that?

  ‘I ought to have destroyed them all before you arrived,’ I said.

  ‘You would have confessed to it.’

  ‘Or Frere would.’

  ‘What do you imagine you would have been hiding from me? Burning them would have made no sense. You had no idea.’

  I said nothing to disabuse him of this – of everything that had passed through my mind when it became clear to me that Frere had chosen not to include me on his final journey – and he left me soon after.

  * * *

  I woke the following morning and knew that the worst of my fever had passed and that my strength would now slowly return. I felt weary, as though after a long journey or struggle. I woke from a dream in which Frere and I had been together on the Alpha. I knew I had called out, but whether in the dream or in waking, I was uncertain, and the instant I woke I listened intently, as though for some faint echo of this cry. My door and shutters were open. Fires burned in the compound outside and the usual restless figures – as though dreaming men themselves – passed ceaselessly among these.

  In my dream I had been standing with Frere at the prow of the Alpha. The vessel had been diverted and we stood becalmed in the roadstead off Badagry. The impassable surf stretched in an unbroken white line a hundred yards from us, and the water rolled and burst on the barely submerged reef there. Canoes came and went from us through the few narrow openings. We were there for five days, and each night we stood on the deck to watch the impressive display of rockets fired from the shore into the night sky. We tried to determine the function of these fireworks, but could not, knowing only that they were not fired in celebration.

  While we waited, we heard from an official brave enough to venture out to us that a week earlier a vessel had foundered on the reef, lodged there and been battered to torn planking and lengths of rope over the three days she had taken to break up. With the exception of seven men who abandoned the ship soon after she struck, the remaining crew of twenty had all perished on the reef, which was notorious for its patrolling sharks.

  I had seen all this – the sea, the surf, the calmer water and the land beyond, in my dream. And I had seen too the caught ship and the men on its battered deck running back and forth in their useless attempts to save themselves, eventually one by one throwing themselves into the water and the waiting sharks, creatures so voracious in this dreamed assault that they leaped wholly out of the ocean to seize the falling and jumping men before those fish waiting submerged could launch their own attacks. I recalled how Frere had applauded these leaps, standing with his telescope and notebook, in which he wrote and sketched the day’s dramas. He had already tried to photograph the disintegrating ship, but knew that little would be revealed at such a distance. He spoke with rising admiration for the creatures. For him, the doomed crew were nothing more than the vital part of some experiment.

  In my dream, the whole of the surrounding ocean turned red with the blood of the savaged men, and the sharks came in even greater numbers, it seemed, merely to indulge themselves in the pleasure of swimming through this blood. I saw creatures here and there carrying torn limbs; I saw men scrambling along the reef to where they believed they might be safe only to have the sharks become birds and seize them where they crawled; I heard the screams of men in the water attacked from below by a dozen of the creatures at once; I saw men themselves thrown clear of the water by sharks twice their length.

  And throughout all this, Frere, beside me at the rail, had become more and more excited, almost yelling with joy at the spectacle before us, applauding some particularly dramatic or entertaining effort on the part of the men or the fish. Some of these men, seeing us anchored so close, grasped at the salvation we offered and swam towards us through this bloody feast, and some, I saw, even managed to clear the immediate carnage before they were seized and drawn back into it.

  Others among the Alpha’s crew stood alongside us and chorused Frere in his cheering. I was entirely alone in the disgust and revulsion I felt at the spectacle, and I had woken from the nightmare at the sight of a man almost reaching one of the Alpha’s ropes, but who, even as he reached out to grab it, was seized by two of the sharks, shadows beneath him all the way as he came, one for each leg, and slowly drawn beneath the water in their grinning maws, his waving arms and screaming mouth long visible to us as he was taken down and torn to pieces, and as the calm, clear water above him turned red with his blood.

  It was then, seeing him finally consumed and his suffering ended, that I woke, pushing away my tangled sheets as though they too were waves from which I needed to escape.

  The dream was as vivid to me in its waking aftermath as it had been while I slept, and my wet brow and shaking hands registered the last of its passing tremors.

  I sat for several minutes until I grew calmer. I had seen nothing of what I dreamed, and yet it seemed more real to me then, in those first waking moments, than the empty room in which I found myself and the restless figures outside.

  I closed my eyes, but nothing of the sunlit ocean remained.

  In the distance I heard the chapel harmonium being played, and I remembered then that it was Sunday, still a day of obligation and devotion amid a waste of days where no other beacon was ever now in sight. The instrument suffered in that humidity, and its mournful, discordant melody sounded like nothing more than the breathless crying of a child, lost notes providing the briefest clicks of silence into which all this surrounding melancholy, dreamed and real, now ebbed.

  27

  ‘Do you still imagine that even the smallest part of all this has been left to chance? Is that what you want to believe?’

  Frere walked beside me across the garrison yard, pausing every few paces to allow for my slowness. We came to a balk of cut timber and sat on it. He had asked me about the arrival of the steamer sent to take him to Stanleyville, and I had tried to make my answer reassuringly vague – ‘A week, perhaps,’ – but he told me again not to make the effort on his behalf. He knew better than any of us that the vessel was due to reach us in three days, and that after that he would be as lost to us as he was already lost to himself.

  He laid a hand on my arm.

  ‘I had hoped one of us might accompany you,’ I said. His grip tightened.

  ‘I cannot imagine Nash took to that idea. I am a dish best served unaccompanied by any sauce of outrage or pickle of extenuating circumstances. Forgive me. I know this apparent flippancy offends you. Perhaps I’m just a man laughing in the face of—’ He stopped abruptly. Not because he did not want to say the word ‘Death’, but because he did not want me, sitting there beside him, to have to consider it. I saw what final weight this confession to me lifted from his shoulders.

  Neither of us spoke for a few moments. We looked out together over the empty parade ground. Women pounded grain somewhere beyond the wall, and the double rhythm of their drumming came to us like a heartbeat.


  ‘I had been sick for ten days,’ he said unexpectedly. He took back his hand.

  I looked at him, but he had already half turned himself away from me.

  ‘What was it?’ I asked him.

  ‘It makes no difference. The symptoms of these things are invariably the same. Who knows? Perhaps yellow fever, perhaps dysentery. I took what medicines I had. Imagine your own recent suffering.’

  ‘But you were alone and lost, unsought.’

  ‘I was never lost. I had gone to the confluence of the Lomami and Pitiri for a purpose.’

  ‘To hopefully witness an act of cannibalism?’

  ‘To witness it at the very least.’

  ‘Then what? Are you saying you hoped to go further – to participate in it?’

  ‘I can’t answer you honestly, though I suspect that was always my unconfessed and uncertain intention. You might say circumstances made that decision easier for me to make. I suppose you – particularly you, James – might even say I was conspired against in my enthusiasm, my need to know. As you know, it has always been the abnormalities and not the divinities of men that have fascinated me.’

  ‘What circumstances?’

  ‘When I woke one morning I found I was in the company of three men. I imagined at first they were there to strip me of my belongings. This was on the banks of the Pitiri.’

  ‘Where you were eventually found.’

  ‘Where I was eventually found. I recognized them immediately by their markings and their stature: they were Aruwimi, renowned for their cannibalism, a long way from their usual haunts, but Aruwimi savages all the same. I tried my best to communicate with them, but other than acknowledge my presence, they made no attempt to approach me closer or to take anything from me. One of them even gave me clear water to drink. I offered him what little I had with me, but nothing I possessed was of any interest to him. I believe he communicated something of my plight to the others, neither of whom made the slightest advance on me. Perhaps if I had been more in control of my senses, then I would have feared them more.