‘Dr Mallory … do you wish to run us aground, sir?’
I was still staring at the soldiers in their customs post. The Salammbo drummed its way across the breaking waves, heading directly for the wooden jetty. The soldiers stood on the bank, shouting and waving their machetes. The look-out in the watch-tower adjusted the sights of his machine-gun. We were now less than fifty yards away, and I could see their wide-eyed expressions when they recognized Captain Kagwa’s limousine, puzzled why he should have chosen to deliver the vehicle to this small advance-post. I felt equally confused – it had never occurred to me that Kagwa would order his men to leave the river and drive around it. In some way this broke the rules of the contest between us, and denied the unspoken agreement that we would act out our duel within the river alone.
‘Dr Mallory!’ Mr Pal reached through the door to seize the helm. ‘Sir, this is not a time for going mad!’
I swung the helm to starboard, throwing Mr Pal to the deck. The alarmed soldiers ran from the beach to the nest of rifles stacked beside the truck. The ferry slewed across the water, its rudder handicapped by the weight of the patrol launch lashed to its side. The bows struck the end of the pier and dragged the piles from the river-bed. The concertina of green saplings sprang like a bow, and then collapsed into the shallows, chopped to pieces by the propeller.
The Salammbo veered away from the bank, rolling in the confused current, and tossed a heavy brown wave across the beach. The soldiers raised their rifles, still uncertain whether to fire at the Mercedes and the shabby European seated under the awning with a film camera in his hands. I crouched over the helm, and steered the ferry into the centre of the channel. Below the wheelhouse Mr Pal was grappling with a 50-gallon oil drum that had broken loose from its ropes, like an exhausted instructor trying to waltz with an overweight pupil. Noon had abandoned her television studio and retreated to the safety of the limousine. We passed the rubber inflatable, where the sergeant who had once ordered Noon’s execution stood thigh-deep in the water, his strong fist pulling at the outboard motor’s starting cord. As Noon ducked into the Mercedes he pointed to her, like a wildfowler spotting a rare bird across his sights. Open-mouthed, he pushed away the rifle levelled at the girl by the excited soldier staggering in the foam beside him.
We were four hundred yards upstream when I heard the sound of the outboard. Already I knew that they would catch us within a few minutes. The sergeant stood amidships, legs braced against the wooden frame-boards, loudhailer raised to his chin. Mr Pal had returned to the bows, where he squatted under the awning beside Sanger, regaling him with a vivid commentary on my foolishness and our imminent capture. Noon sat in the front passenger seat of the limousine, watching me in her nerveless way. Did she imagine that the sanctuary of Kagwa’s Mercedes would save her when the sergeant stepped on to the deck?
The rubber speedboat was alongside, throwing up huge plumes of spray as its flat hull struck the bow waves of the ferry. The sergeant exchanged his loudhailer for a light carbine handed to him by the soldier in the bows. We sped along together, the inflatable leaping from crest to crest, the Salammbo’s funnel pumping out a plume of black smoke that uncoiled across the river.
Balancing on his stocky legs, the sergeant surveyed the ferry, taking in Sanger and Mr Pal huddled beneath the protective ensign of the Japanese car company, latter-day non-belligerents under the world’s most neutral flag. He shouted to the helmsman, then raised the carbine and fired a shot at my head through the open window of the wheelhouse.
I heard the bullet whine across the open water towards the far shore, a harsh whoop drowned by the crack of the cartridge in my ear. I swung the wheel, trying to drive the inflatable into the bank, but the helmsman had already cut his speed. The rubber craft rolled in the ferry’s wake, but the sergeant was already bracing himself for a second shot. I reversed the wheel, deciding to run for the opposite bank, where Noon would have a chance to flee through the forest, and perhaps make her way back to the mountains.
The untethered oil drum slid along the deck and collided with the cargo of film equipment. The ferry sheered across the stream, and a huge wave rolled against the wheelhouse. The motor-launch lashed to the port side rose over the gunnel, crushing the metal rail. As the mooring lines parted, the craft fell back, shipping half the ferry’s wake. Still moving, it began to capsize and almost ran down the speeding inflatable.
Across the river, in the trees above the beach, lights glowed from the undergrowth like the eyes of a dozing cheetah. A camouflaged jeep reversed on to the beach, turned sharply and sped along the water’s edge. Two armed men in the combat fatigues of General Harare’s guerilla force stood behind the driver. They steadied themselves against a machine-gun mounted on the roll-bar above the driver’s head, and trained the weapon on the rubber inflatable.
Already Kagwa’s sergeant had lost interest in us. He sat in the bows of the speedboat, and signalled to the helmsman to turn back. In his panic the young soldier stalled the engine and the craft slumped into the water. Over my shoulder I watched it wallowing in the ferry’s wake, the sergeant lying between the frame-boards as the machine-gun in the racing jeep tapped out a brief burst of fire.
Although these were Harare’s men, I stupidly expected them to offer us their protection. The jeep kept pace with us, its wheels sending up fans of spray as they cut the water’s edge. Then the machine-gun turned towards us, and I saw the soldiers prepare to fire.
I eased back the throttle, idling the engine so that the Salammbo was stationary, its propeller keeping pace with the current. The jeep stopped where the beach petered out between the exposed roots of the palms growing in the water. Its wheels half submerged, it sat in the shallows, the driver waiting as the two gunners readied their weapon. Through the door of the wheelhouse I looked down at the bright water below the starboard rail, and hoped that I was strong enough to swim the hundred yards to shore.
A door of the Mercedes slammed in the quiet air. Noon stepped from the passenger seat. She had taken the combat jacket from the windowsill, and now wore this man’s garment whose bulky shoulders swamped her own. She crossed the open deck, buttoning the lapels over her small breasts, and then puffed out the sleeves, so that the camouflage pattern of Harare’s army stood out clearly in the sun.
The soldiers in the jeep watched her over their gun-sights. From a distance her face must have seemed calm and expressionless, but as she approached the wheelhouse her mouth and cheeks were crimped like those of a child too terrified to scream. Ignoring me, she reached into the wheelhouse and picked up the rifle, then raised her left palm to the sun, knuckles touching the shoulder-flash of her jacket, in Harare’s characteristic salute.
The ferry moved away under the uncertain sights of the machine-gun, gaining speed as the channel widened and the current slackened. A quarter of a mile of open water separated us, and the guerillas seemed to lose interest. The driver began to reverse along the beach.
‘Noon …?’
I held her shoulders when she placed the rifle behind the door. She was staring at the guerillas, the expression of fear on her face slowly giving way to disgust. Watching them coldly, she spat between my hands on to the deck.
I tried to embrace her, and felt her sternum throbbing with fear against my ribs, a hammer pumped by her heart, but she slipped through my arms, shrugging off the jacket. Holding the mud-caked garment, I watched her walk across the deck to the cargo of film equipment. She squatted down in this electronic bower, tapping her teeth with her nails. She switched on the small monitor screen, and stared raptly at the image of her face that swam towards her through the dusty glass, with the gaze of an old woman seeing once again the lost world of her childhood.
22
Into the Lagoons
My courtship of Noon, which had sustained me for so many weeks, now took second place to our survival. Soon after our escape from Kagwa’s speedboat, we entered an unexpected sector of the Mallory. The river issued from a wide plateau of m
arsh and salt-desert, a terrain of mists and melancholy birds shrieking to each other across the solitary lagoons. Beyond the rim of the plateau we could see the foothills of the Massif du Tondou, whose secret valleys concealed the source of the Mallory.
The river, meanwhile, had changed its character. Although the volume of its waters remained the same, the main channel had divided into a maze of swamps and reed-covered islands, as if trying to conceal its identity from itself. On the third morning, within an hour of setting sail from the island where we had moored through the dark, I lost sight of the river’s banks and entered one of the huge lagoons that lay like inland lakes between the causeways of papyrus and bamboo. Fed by all this moisture, a heavy mist lay between us and the sun, and at midday this miasma turned into an amber haze, so that we seemed to be forever drifting within the mirage of a golden sea. The air was filled with unfamiliar birds which had made their home in these marshes, hunting for the snakes and small frogs which were now the sole marine life. Their unwearying cries crossed the bronze air, as their winged bodies, the cryptic letters of a stylized alphabet, whirled over our heads like fragments of a threatening message, a warning to me from the mountains of the Massif. Through the overheated light I saw the movement of another craft. A local fisherman punted his outrigger two hundred yards away, the wavering image of his black figure like a painted stroke on a Chinese scroll.
‘Noon … I need you here …’
Deliberately I cut back the engine, and allowed the ferry to drift across an island of reeds. The serrated fronds rasped against the hull, scraping away the layers of rust and mud. Noon’s head emerged from the miniature studio amidships where she spent her day under the makeshift but stylish sunshade of a photographer’s silver umbrella. She glanced at the static expanse of the lagoon, and at the narrow causeway which separated us from the river. Treating me to an impatient glare, she left the studio and made her way to the bows, stepping over the reclining figures of Sanger and Mr Pal under their Toyota awning.
I watched her as she glanced matter-of-factly into the mist and heat-haze, like an experienced housewife inspecting the stalls of a strange market. As always, I marvelled at how quickly she could orient herself. Unerringly she would pick out the best course for us to take, as if her mind was equipped with some underwater sonar, avoiding a submerged shoal of rocks or the roof of a mining company silo. At times I suspected that she knew, perhaps unconsciously, the whole course of the Mallory.
This intimacy with the hidden fathoms of the river, its longest reaches and eventual source, I took to be the reason for her attachment to me. Unlike the others, Sanger and Captain Kagwa and Nora Warrender, she accepted that the river and I were one. This awareness of the real nature of the Mallory was a foreknowledge of my own body. The fish and snakes she beguiled from the water in order to feed us were the hopes and fears that had sent me on this quest. I knew now why I liked her to bathe naked in the river, to immerse herself in that larger dream that sustained our journey. Already, as we moved upstream, my wish to destroy the river was giving way to the belief that there was some secret at the Mallory’s source, and that Noon alone would guide me towards it.
She touched the hazy air with her hand, nosing it like a wine-taster inhaling a bouquet. The contours of unseen deeps moved on the light, mapping themselves on the screen of some concealed compass behind her eyes.
She ended her survey with a flourish, glancing at the digital watch on her wrist. The gesture was for my benefit. Sanger had given the watch to Noon, bribing her to bring water to Mr Pal, and she now wore this cheap chronometer as if it were the most elegant piece of jewellery, recognizing that its liquid crystal display and press-button functions belonged to the same family of signals as the captions on Sanger’s documentaries. Was she using the watch to calculate true north? But in these marshes and lagoons the sun was scarcely visible in any direction, and seemed to emanate from a glowing haze all around us. The Salammbo’s crew comprised an oracular child and three men with blurred shadows.
Noon whistled to me, rousing my attention as I dozed over the helm. She pointed to the remote north-west corner of the lagoon, a waterlogged area of crumbling embankments and small islands.
‘Noon …? Is this another game?’
I swung the wheel to starboard and eased forward the throttle. Smoke pumped from the funnel as the Salammbo pushed through the shallow water. Noon squatted in the bows, now and then scowling at Sanger and Mr Pal, who sat slumped together under their awning. We approached a palisade of tall reeds that grew from the submerged banks, the air around them festering with flies and mosquitos. A host of small frogs filled the water, feeding on the algae that turned the surface of the lagoon into a translucent jelly. A nervous egret plunged through the haze, hunting the small snakes that in turn fed upon the frogs. It burst from the water and screamed across the ferry. The wriggling form in its beak covered the air with a calligraphy of pain.
Looking down at these primitive creatures, I realized that we had left behind for ever the domestic realm of the small mammals in the lower reaches of the Mallory, the passerine birds and flowering plants. We had returned to the more primitive world of the amphibians and raptors hunting among the walls of reeds that stood like bronze spears in the humid light of a younger sun. Here, the car ferry with its limousine and television equipment seemed as exotic as a visiting spaceship.
The helm spun through my fingers, as the bows of the ferry sheered to port. We were about to run aground on a causeway of mud that formed the northern wall of the lagoon. The reeds rasped against the hull, thrusting at my face through the broken windows of the wheelhouse.
‘Noon … get down!’ I began to reverse the engine, but at the last moment a breach appeared in the palisade. The ferry slid through the gap, its propeller thrashing the yellow spears into a trail of crushed basketwork. We entered a wide and silent channel, a wandering arm of the river which Noon had identified from the centre of the lagoon, in some way reading the scents of fresh water among the screaming birds.
At the mouth of the channel, where the great back of the Mallory swept past through the haze, I saw the remains of a military bivouac. A squad of Harare’s soldiers had camped on a small island, whose grass they had burned back to give them tent-space.
I uncoupled the propeller, letting the ferry drift into the reeds. While Sanger and Mr Pal watched me glassily from beneath their awning, I jumped into the water and waded ashore through the scorched grass. Around me were the remains of the soldiers’ camp – the baked shards of an earth stove, beer cans lying in the ashes, a rusty ammunition box filled with spent cartridge cases, ragged rubber boots. I searched among the debris, hoping to find a single round for the Lee-Enfield.
As the smoke lifted from the ferry’s funnel I kept careful watch for this passing patrol. I assumed that the river now emerged from a zone controlled by Harare’s forces. Our supplies of food were almost exhausted – barely six cupfuls of rice remained in the sack, and we would run out of both food and fuel within three days, long before we reached the headwaters of the Mallory. The strain of serving as the ferry’s captain, chief engineer and stoker, the effort needed to decant the diesel oil into the fuel manifold, and the unending pressure of the helm against my arms had together drained half the blood and muscle from my body. Exposure sores covered my face and forehead, flourishing in my beard like fungi in a damp meadow.
Despite these handicaps, I was determined to press on. My own fever and light-headedness, and Noon’s guile, had carried us to within sight of the Mallory’s source.
*
‘Doctor! Mr Pal’s eyes—!’ Sanger crouched under the awning, swaying feebly against the guy ropes. Burning tinder crackled in the stove on the deck beside the wheelhouse, warming up a pail of frogs, and Sanger coughed on the green smoke. I returned to the ferry, climbed past the mud-spattered limousine and went forward.
‘Mallory, I’m concerned for Mr Pal – his eyes are troubling him.’ Sanger snatched at my hand and s
queezed the wrist-bones, again making sure that I was not some imposter. ‘Try to remember your other self …’
The two men sat together under the awning, the remains of several meals scattered at their feet. The set of once-elegant department store mess-tins were caked with burned rice and fish scales. All day they huddled side by side in their deckchairs, shabby-genteel passengers who had taken one tramp steamer too many. Sanger’s face was hidden by the brim of his straw hat, but I could see that his lips and cheekbones were pocked with insect bites that had festered for weeks, his neck inflamed by a sun-induced viral response. He placed an arm around Mr Pal’s shoulder, and listened impatiently to his heart.
‘The birds, doctor – I can’t hear a thing. Call away your birds!’
Beside him, Mr Pal lay slumped in his chair. He had bruised his abdomen while wrestling with the fuel drum, and an ascending liver infection had given his face the pallor of tarnished copper. He sat back with closed eyes, but then began a gabbled description of the lagoons and reed-islands, the commentary on a dream.
‘… these lagoons support an extensive marine life, amphibians and gravel feeders … the nutrient-filled waters also provide a home for estuarine crocodiles—’
‘Crocodiles? We are far from any estuary … but crocodiles would be useful, Mr Pal. Keep an open eye …’
‘… in addition, certain species of salamander bask in the afternoon sun … at dusk the phoenix flies …’
Already the commentary was touched with fantasy, but as I knelt in front of Mr Pal he placed his hands on my chest and forced me away, fixing me with a sudden grimace.
‘… a highwayman approaches, sir, an evil dacoit who will abduct your daughters …’
‘Quiet, Mr Pal.’ Sanger restrained him, holding his hands like a mother calming a fractious child. ‘You see, Mallory, you must do something for Mr Pal’s eyes. Remember that you were once a doctor.’
The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Page 16