‘Then use the river against Kagwa.’
‘How can I? The river has been Kagwa’s main weapon, a highway that will deliver him right to our door.’
‘Then close it off! Build the barrage across both channels. Already the water-level is falling – if you extend the dam to the east bank you will sink Kagwa and his landing-craft on to the river-bed.’
Through a nearby window one of the auxiliaries tipped a pail of faecal waste into the water below. The stench drifted through the dispensary, for a moment subduing even the flies. Harare took the orderly’s arm and rose on to his sound leg. Grimacing at the chicken on the floor, he moved to the open porch at the rear of the hut. As I stood beside him I could see him staring across the swamp grass and creeks of the airfield. He was gazing towards the south, to the hazy mist and green light that marked the southern course of the Mallory. Following his raised arm, I saw a faint plume of smoke, not from Kagwa’s landing-craft, but from the funnel of the bordello-boat, the white ship of the widows.
Suppressing my fears, I turned and looked away, to the mountains in the north-east and the headwaters of the river. Under the weight of our feet the black mud oozed forwards, seeping into the clear water of the stream beyond the harbour. Already I could imagine the Mallory ligatured, its last artery tied down, and the poison flowing upwards into the trapped headwaters.
I hesitated, unsure whether to seize my chances with Harare. By completing the barrage, even though it served my purposes, I would virtually seal the fate of these impoverished people. For their sake, and for the river’s, I should do my best to destroy the existing barrage, even if this sped the time of Kagwa’s arrival. Yet this would be to yield to the Mallory. My own obsession, which had carried me so far, was all that I had.
Noon stood beside me, and began to undo the bonds around my wrists. She seemed business-like and confident, already refreshed after the rigours of our voyage. She met my eyes, in the shared glance of the conspirator, and then stared at the upper channel of the river, waiting for me to resume our journey. The pontoon tilted under her weight, pumping a further increment of black mud into the stream, reminding me of all the wastes that the people of this green Saharan garden would generate together, enough poison to infect the river and pursue it to its source.
I pointed to the distant plume of the Diana, remembering that Sanger’s equipment was on board.
‘By the way. General, I have contacts with a visiting television producer. I can easily arrange for you to be filmed – your interview would appear in every Japanese living-room …’
28
Doctor Mal
As always each afternoon when I went out to examine the river, I saw Noon sitting in her metal skiff by General Harare’s jetty, waiting for me to set off again on our journey. It was already late when I woke in the wheelhouse of the Salammbo, and I could hear Noon striking the water with her punt pole in a bored way. But I had been unsettled by a return of my fever, and by the distant sounds of mortar fire from the hills to the east.
All night the flashes of gunfire had crossed the darkness, reflected in the broken glass of the wheelhouse like flickers of lightning deep in the forest valleys. Around me, as I lay on the sweat-soaked mattress, I could see the flashes reflected in the chromium trim of the metal debris embedded in the barrage, the refrigerators, photocopiers and air-conditioners scavenged from the airbase. The huge brassiere of the dam, on whose left breast I and the Salammbo rested, glittered like the corsage of a carnival queen. The escaping waters of the Mallory spilled through the flesh of the barrage and poured into the pool below, jets of noise that even the gunfire failed to drown.
When I roused myself and stepped on to the deck I found that Noon had lost interest in me. She had moored her skiff by the jetty reserved for General Harare’s escape on the upper waters of the Mallory, above the barrage and the rocky cascade. There she flirted with the two sentries guarding Kagwa’s limousine – the grimy vehicle was now Noon’s home – and tried to teach them a few words of her primitive English. For my benefit she pretended to entice these youths from their post, urging them to give up the fight against the Captain’s forces and to take my place in the search for the river’s source.
However, as I walked down the inner face of the barrage, following the pathway towards my raft, she immediately turned from the sentries and paddled into the centre of the stream. Her metal skiff was the lower half of an aircraft drop-tank, which she had retrieved from the debris as I supervised the construction of the barrage. In its way this was a small flourish of defiance, a reminder that she could still rescue some hope for our stalled expedition from the preposterous structure which now blocked the waters of the Mallory.
As she sailed across the tarry surface of the river in the afternoon light, this grey tank resembled a silver slipper bearing the princess of every fairy tale. She stood up and casually displayed herself to me, and I found it difficult to believe that this handsome young woman with her feverish but elegant pose, a high-temperature Venus borne by her aircraft shell, was only six months older than the lock-jawed child who had paddled in her coracle around the waters of Lake Kotto.
‘Noon … come with me!’ There was a small, four-horsepower outboard on my raft which could easily outrun Noon’s skiff, though for some reason I could never catch her. ‘You look tired today – let me examine you …’
But she made no reply, snorting with laughter when I slipped in the greasy scum along the rubble bank. A dead snake lay in the shallows, hidden among the rotting timbers and the oil leaking from the bilges of the Salammbo.
I watched Noon punt herself upstream, dismissing the young soldiers with a haughty wave while watching me over her shoulder. Before following Noon I needed to inspect the barrage. Buffeted by the left shoulder of the Mallory as it turned to irrigate the desert settlements, the mass of scrap metal, soil and rubbish was constantly shifting. The barrage was held together by the retaining nets secured to the hull of the Salammbo, and this precarious dam threatened at any moment to collapse and spill itself into the pool below.
Soon after my first meeting with Harare, six weeks earlier, I had persuaded the ailing guerilla leader of the need to complete the Mallory barrage, partly as a strategic blow against Kagwa – we would steal the river literally from under the keel of the approaching landing-craft – and partly as a means of extending the Saharan settlements, and attracting more nomadic farmers from whose ranks Harare could recruit his fighters.
Though fuddled by the side-effects of a discontinued brand of sulpha drug, Harare had assigned me a platoon of convalescent soldiers, who in turn rounded up a workforce of some thirty village women. They assembled by the cascade, and stared listlessly at the eastern arm of the Mallory, eager to seize these free-flowing waters but hopelessly daunted by the task.
Our first efforts to construct a containment wall of earth and masonry were washed aside by the swift current, the waters of the river escaping through our legs like spawning salmon. The villagers’ ragged fishing-nets were too short to span the cascade. Soon discouraged, they began to walk back along the beach, returning to the stagnant, malarial waters of their allotments and reservoirs.
I had brought the Salammbo alongside a wharf in the pool below the barrage, where the soldiers off-loaded Captain Kagwa’s limousine. As they pulled away the wooden ramp I stood in the wheelhouse, my hand on the throttle. I could feel the current tug at the ferry’s bows, as if the Mallory were teasing me with the notion of shooting the cascade.
The last of the village women were climbing between the frayed nets, throwing their loads of stone into the water. Exasperated with them, I throttled up the engine and set off across the pool towards the lowest steps of the cascade. Behind me I heard Noon shout out in alarm. She ran along the beach after the mooring line, convinced that in my typically eccentric way I was trying to continue our journey.
Twenty feet from the cascade, the Salammbo ran aground on the gravel bed, almost midway between the eastern
bank and the central island. Ignoring the soldiers’ shouts, I held the throttle forward, as the propeller churned up a fountain of spray that brought the work-gang back to the water’s edge. Wrench in hand, I lowered myself through the engine hatch. As I fumbled in the dark bilges, I felt the Salammbo’s keel slipping on the gravel, borne back by the rushing roar of the Mallory against the craft’s hull. Then water drenched me from the stern-cock, boiling off the exhaust manifold in a cloud of steam that filled the engine compartment and enveloped the startled faces of the soldiers peering into the hatch.
Within ten minutes the Salammbo had embedded itself securely in the gravel bed. Impressed by the sight of this metal caisson, the women returned to the task of stealing the Mallory. Less than a month later the barrage across the river was complete, and the Salammbo, which had carried us so untiringly from Port-la-Nouvelle, sat in its last anchorage, surrounded by a refuse tip of freezers and enamel stoves, water coolers, aircraft tail-planes and radio antennae, together forming a terminal moraine of modern technology.
Meanwhile I had stolen my own river. Interrupted in its passage south, the Mallory now followed the westward course of the first detour towards the greening desert, briefly cleansing the stagnant tanks and irrigation ditches, and setting off a flurry of digging and hoarding. Ironically, the increased supply of water had led, not to an increase in the cultivated land, but to a fierce competition among the ditch and reservoir builders. Networks of irrigation channels ran between the allotments to the wells and standby tanks, but not a single new maize or banana plant was to benefit. Elaborate rituals sprang up among these debilitated people to celebrate the transfer and barter of blocks of stagnant water and all their energies went into disputes of ownership of this disease-infested fluid. The intense rivalry led to bitter brawls, through which I moved unscathed, regarded by these people as their rain-king. Harare was too ill and too concerned with the threat of Captain Kagwa to care that I was becoming the shabby sultan of these impoverished nomads. I patted the sore-infested pates of their children, injected out-of-date sulphonamides into the arms of the old men and in general lorded it over my moribund domain.
However, I had more urgent concerns at hand. The level in the pool below the barrage fell by some four feet, but enough water sprang through the earth retention wall to sustain a narrow but navigable channel downstream. Following its course from the deck of the Salammbo, I watched the wounded river wind its way to the south between the great silt banks, now white as death, that rose into the sun from the retreating shallows.
As expected, the sudden fall in the Mallory had given pause to Captain Kagwa. In the weeks of the barrage’s construction the sounds of gunfire had drawn ever nearer. The bursts of mortar shells and the flames from the burning trees trembled in the mountain valleys two miles to the south-east. Twice the helicopter flew over the pool before being driven away by rifle fire, the French pilot photographing the broad sweep of the Mallory as it turned westwards down its new channel.
Harare had offered to me the private quarters of the former French commander at the airbase, but I had decided to stay aboard the Salammbo. There were unstated bonds between myself and this antique vessel. The metal debris in which it was embedded set up a constant wailing and groaning, and in my fever I almost believed that I was embarked on an even stranger voyage across the garbage pits of the planet.
A week after the completion of the barrage Nora Warrender’s floating brothel appeared in the pool. Silhouetted against the dark hills to the east, its white hull appeared to float on the sunset, a gliding sepulchre of polished bone. It arrived soon after dusk, under the wary guns of the sentries who guarded the barrage. I could see Mrs Warrender and her sisters on the bridge, Fanny holding the helm in her strong arms. They attempted to moor against the barrage, but were sent away by a patrol boat and forced to anchor by the southern exit from the pool two hundred yards away. As darkness settled, a line of lanterns glowed from the awning of the restaurant deck. The soft lights framed the bar and dance floor, illuminating the waters of the pool. The ruby and turquoise beams shone on the drab uniforms of the guerillas who went out to inspect the Diana, and transformed them into actors in a harlequin pageant. Within an hour, Louise and Poupee were pushing the first beer bottles across the bar, and the soldiers hung their webbing across the restaurant chairs. Even Sanger fumbled about the dance floor, setting up a television screen for the amusement of the customers. Watching his blind, scurrying figure, barely tolerated by the women, I could scarcely remember the sly entrepreneur I had met at Port-la-Nouvelle.
During the days that followed, the Diana remained moored on the far side of the pool, its lantern doused but the bar open for business, and parties of soldiers rowed out to the ship. As the men drank the stale beer at the restaurant tables and jigged across the dance floor to a scratchy pop record, I wondered if they were about to have their throats cut, or if the cabins below deck had reopened for business. So contemptuous were the women of the men who had killed their husbands that they could sleep with these drunken soldiers without any care.
Whatever the women’s motives for mooring in the pool, I was careful to avoid them. In their eyes, dreaming of death, I could see reflected only the leprous yellow spears of the papyrus swamps.
29
The Blue Beaches
For the time being, I had a far more important death on my mind. Turning my back on the pool, and the white ship with its sinister lanterns, I kicked aside the poisoned snake that lay at the foot of the barrage. The wake from Noon’s skiff sent a sluggish eddy across the river. Backed up above the rocky cascade, the waters of the Mallory had almost ceased to flow, their dark surface covered with an opaque scum. Damped by this satin cloak, the ripples from Noon’s craft reached my feet like a series of vague afterthoughts, as if the damming of the Mallory, the containment of a dream, had held back time itself.
Even Noon, dulled by the fever that had returned to us all, moved more slowly, paddling her silver shell with offhand strokes, her handsome but gaunt shoulder exposed to the light in a pose imitated from Sanger’s travel films. I watched her lose her footing as she passed the jetty where the young sentries leaned against the radiator grille of the Mercedes. She raised her punt pole and drew a cryptic message on the musky air, and then stumbled deliberately, sending a silken tremble through the brackish water. Was she mimicking the death of the Mallory, and the failure of my own will? As the soldiers laughed good-humouredly, Noon sat in the skiff and worked the bolt of the Lee-Enfield with a dramatic flourish. She frowned magisterially, though Harare, suspicious of her long absence, had refused to supply any ammunition for the elderly rifle.
With an effort I lowered my eyes from Noon. At my feet, beside the pontoon raft, was a dead coucal, its blackened plumage barely visible among the oil-covered reeds and rotting vegetation. I hated to see these creatures killed by the Mallory, but as I gazed along the shore line, through the blur of dung flies and mosquitos, the success of my devious scheme was more apparent every hour.
Groups of women sat by the water’s edge, guarding the entrances to their irrigation ditches but too tired to operate the water-wheels with which they topped up their precious reservoirs. Around them their crops grew strongly, a blaze of green foliage and yellow blossom. Their Eden, however, was poisoned. As I had guessed, the completion of the barrage, and a doubling of their water supply, had only added to the insecurity of these impoverished people. Hundreds of nomads had flocked to the desert strips, staking out their allotments and hacking their irrigation ditches through the dusty soil. Every spare plot of ground had been excavated and filled with water. Whey-faced children and older men armed with sticks sat beside the stagnant tanks, a feast for the malarial mosquitos and fever-fly as they guarded these parcels of water from their neighbours. At their feet the Mallory flowed between its greasy banks. Doubting its will to survive, they stared at the black mudflats, at the bodies of snakes, birds and fish.
I was their physician and I did e
verything I could to care for them but, despite myself, I needed these sick people, their fever and their wastes. This foetid paradise was an engine generating the poisons that would at last kill the river. Already there were signs that the Mallory was faltering, as the poison seeped up this flagging artery to its head. When I pushed the raft away from the barrage, and started the outboard motor, the whirling propeller spattered the rubble wall with globs of oily waste.
I set off across the stream, moving between rocky banks on which grew a few withered palms. Narrow beaches of blue pebbles paved the shore, as if cyanosed by the lack of oxygen in the polluted water. Few fish swam below the surface, and the birds kept their distance.
Noon had slipped ahead of me, hiding behind the sharp bends in which the Mallory uncoiled itself through the foothills of the Massif. I cut the engine, and let the raft drift on the faint current. I was now half a mile from the barrage, and had entered the silent reaches of the river. Here the Mallory had erased all sound in its passage. As if dismantling itself sense by sense, it had unpacked the fish from its depths, and stripped the birds from the trees, cancelling itself as its dream died in my head.
For all the silence, this was a zone of some danger. Bandits and deserters from the rebel forces haunted the mountain valleys, and I could imagine Noon being seized by a wounded guerilla wading out to her skiff.
Over my shoulder I heard the ripple of a punt pole, the grating of a keel on shingle. Noon stood naked in her metal shell, the pole held horizontally across her breasts. While she watched me, with the same curious but calm gaze that I had first seen at Port-la-Nouvelle, the water dripped from the pole, ticking off the seconds.
‘Noon … you’re still waiting for me to go on. First we’ll return to the ferry. You can rest there.’
The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Page 22