31
The Death of the Diana
A heavy blow rocked the Diana, as if the bows had been butted by a bull elephant who had strayed into the pool. The painted nymphs on the cabin ceiling wept a cloud of white plaster on to the bed where I slept. The concussion wave of an ordnance round drummed through the hull, rattling its aged bones. A spray of water lashed the wooden shutters of the window. Roused from a cold sleep, I lay alone on the mildewed mattress, listening to the intermittent tapping of a machine-gun, the clatter of a circling helicopter and the distant throb of a large marine diesel. Soldiers were running on the path beyond the gangway, their bare feet slapping the worn mud, part of the din of battle that drowned the murmur of the river leaking through the barrage wall.
So Captain Kagwa’s attack, threatened for so many weeks, was at last taking place. I pushed my legs on to the floor, and tried to steady myself, brushing the white dust from my shoulders. The fever had passed, but my body felt calm and curiously passive. For all my fear of Kagwa, I was detached from my likely fate at his hands.
A signal flare shone through the doorways of the empty cabins on the port side. I stepped into the corridor, tripping over a sequined gown discarded by one of the girls, as a tower of hissing light descended into the pool. Its vivid glare illuminated the pale dawn mist, filling the upturned faces of the fishermen in the boats and rafts beside the Diana with a melancholy sheen.
A stray mortar shell had struck a landing-stage twenty feet from the Diana, drenching the vessel and waking me from my sleep. The broken bamboo smouldered in the shallows, its green smoke joining the plumes that rose from the burning tamarinds on the ridge above the pool. An iron warehouse of weaponry, the landing-craft edged through the disturbed surface, almost too large for the shrinking mirror that reflected its massive plates. Nervous of stranding himself, the helmsman hesitated over his tiller, and the helicopter came down through the smoke and small-arms fire and hovered above its ramp. Captain Kagwa sat in the observer’s seat, battle-jacket open around his bare chest, urging the French pilot to drive the landing-craft forward with the helicopter’s propeller.
Hidden behind the shutters, I watched this sharp skirmish turn itself into a battle. Harare’s men were digging themselves into the beaches that overlooked the pool. As the landing-craft advanced towards them, it seemed appropriate that the final struggle between Kagwa and Harare should take place on the draining bed of the river which I had created for them, beneath the huge breasts of the retention dam with their cargo of rusty refrigerators and beer coolers. Already I took for granted that Captain Kagwa would win this battle, reopen the Mallory and seize his kingdom …
A mallet-like blow chopped into the deck above my head, a stray round from the machine-gun firing from the stern of the landing-craft. A marmoset let out a scream of terror that rang the bars of its cage.
‘Noon …!’ Alarmed for the girl, I began to search the empty cabins, waving aside the mist of plaster that fell from the ceilings. In the cracked mirrors I could see disjointed sections of myself, a naked man coated with talc in some brothel prank, playing blind man’s buff as he searched for the hiding women. The mirrors shook to the noise of the helicopter, preparing to withdraw into their illusory world, and the mist trembled around me in the gunfire.
I sat on the bed in my cabin, feeling the imprint of a young woman’s body among the stains of fever that soaked the mattress. I could smell her skin on my hands, the odours of a dream remembered. Had Noon slept with me, or had I confused her with one of the young widows I had seen entertaining the soldiers? I had held Noon or her double in the darkness, tasted the lips and eyes that I had watched each day as we sailed the Mallory towards its source. I had embraced the same thighs that had clasped the pail of headless frogs, tasted the same saliva that Noon had left on the tips of her fishing spears. In the trembling dark of this dusty cabin I had felt the same care, impatience and regret to which Noon had treated me since our first meeting at Port-la-Nouvelle.
I pressed the mattress with my hands, half-hoping to find the contours of an older woman in the rotting fabric. My fingers touched a darker stain beneath the talc, a patch of blood-stained saliva, and I remembered the infected wound in Noon’s mouth.
Then a second signal flare exploded above the Diana. Its cyanide glow illuminated the breech and barrel of the Lee-Enfield rifle propped against the wash-basin.
Arcs of blue phosphorus were falling from the sky, dripping into the disturbed waters of the pool. Terrified by the landing-craft, the fishermen and raft-dwellers moored beside the Diana were cutting their lines. They pushed off towards the scanty cover of the beach, where Harare’s guerillas were making their last stand.
Stray bullets were striking the superstructure of the Diana, ringing against the iron rails and scattering the furniture on the restaurant deck. I held the Lee-Enfield, nervous of Noon’s scent on the wooden stock, and stepped into the corridor. The hatch had been pulled across the stairway, and I heard Mrs Warrender and her women dragging the animal cages to the starboard rail.
‘Nora …!’
Kneeling on the upper rungs of the ladder, I drove the rifle stock at the hatch. My shouts were lost in the blare of the helicopter. The down-draught from its propeller blades drove through the deck planks and turned the corridor into a whirlwind of dust. The white mist of the disintegrating murals seethed around me, the ghosts of these tempera nymphs lost in the corridors of this abandoned brothel.
Above the noise of gunfire came the snarl and cry of a macaque. Claws raced across the deck in a deranged skittering. There were shouts from the women, and a broom thudded against the planks. I realized that Nora Warrender was freeing her animals and driving them ashore. I tried to raise the hatch, scarcely able to move the heavy cage that lay across it. Through the dust and spray thrown up by the helicopter I saw that the women were leaving the Diana. Rifles slung over their shoulders, they carried suitcases and bedding rolls like members of an armed theatrical troupe leaving a besieged city at the end of the season. Between them they steered Professor Sanger, who clutched his camera like a mendicant clasping his begging-bowl.
An acrid smoke hung in the corridor, seeping through the wooden bulkhead that separated the cabins from the engine compartment. The bows of the Diana were smouldering, and the oil-soaked timbers gave off a foul vapour that choked my throat. Within minutes the engine and its fuel tanks would be overrun, and the bridge would collapse into a pit of burning charcoal.
Abandoning my attempts to move the hatch, I drove the rifle stock into the soft decking above my head. On the third blow I struck an ancient knot from the soft pine, forced the barrel into the aperture and wrenched the plank from its joists. Like a talcumed corpse springing through the lid of a coffin, I burst between the bone-white planks and clambered on to the deck.
Smoke swirled across the dance floor, uncoiling among the restaurant tables. Swaying there, I braced myself with the rifle like a tightrope walker, and ran forward on to the face of the barrage. I clung to the sisal nets that held the retention wall and climbed across the earth and metal debris.
Below me, the Diana was ablaze. Hidden by the clouds of black smoke that shrouded the bridge, the first flames rose from the engine-room, and transformed the floating brothel into a gaudy lantern. The mooring lines had parted, and the blackened cords smoked against the white cutwater, fuses lit beneath the skirts of the gilded princess of the bowsprit. The stern swung against the barrage, crushing the abandoned rafts and pontoons of the fisher-folk. The gangway collapsed below me, its planks tumbling into the pool.
Smoke enveloped the west wall of the barrage. The splitting timbers of the Diana, a ripple of fire-crackers, sounded above the drone of the helicopter and the noise of gunfire from the sand-bars beyond the pool. Rifle in hand, I searched through the smoke for Noon or Mrs Warrender, and then ran along the path to the east wall where the Salammbo was entombed.
After its long journey from Port-la-Nouvelle, Captain Kagwa’s lan
ding-craft now presided over the pool. The ramp fell into the shallow water beside the smouldering jetties, and a reserve platoon of teenage soldiers hesitated in the spray. Berated by their sergeant, they plunged into the water and ran along the beach towards the sand-bars, ready to flush out the last of Harare’s men.
The fire had reached the cabins of the Diana. Jets of flame, like a score of gas mantles, lifted through the decking. Tinted by the metal salts in the mural pigments, the flames darted among the tables, gaudy geysers of zinc and copper light, as the ghosts of these nymphs put on their last performance. The entire ship was now alight and leaning against the barrage, its bows burned down to the water-line, and exposing the antique engine in the glowing debris of the bridge.
Through the clouds of illuminated smoke the helicopter appeared, the grand finale of this firework spectacular. An ugly genie, it descended to within fifty feet of the Diana. The pilot directed the draught of his propellers against the burning ship, trying to drive it away from the landing-craft. Bows submerged, the Diana drifted back against the barrage, as the lanterns and television tubes on the restaurant deck began to explode in a last display.
In the wheelhouse of the Salammbo I felt the barrage shift. The earth wall slackened, as if a tendon had snapped. The restraining nets of the west wall were now alight, and revealed the huge, rounded breasts of the dam in a fiery striptease. Like the straining brassiere of an overweight madame, it peeled back through the smoke to expose the unsupported bulk of overflowing earth, liquid jetting from a hundred nipples, ready to spill its wealth of metallic rubbish.
The Diana sank in the shallows, its fuel oil burning among hundreds of floating beer bottles. Above it the right breast of the barrage slewed round. This vast organ strained forward, as if offering its riches to the men fighting among themselves in the pit below.
Then the barrage exploded. It toppled in a rush of poisoned water, an avalanche of earth and debris that swept past in a rumbling cloud of spray, the last stricken roar of the Mallory.
32
The Poisoned Valley
At last I was alone with the dying river. I stood in the bows of the Salammbo, looking down at the empty valley. A veil of smoke and steam lay over the silent pool. Through the breach in the western wall of the barrage flowed a thin stream of black water, making its way past an overturned truck and the cabinet of a cold-store that lay face-up like a metal coffin dislodged from a tomb.
Draining from the creeks and canals of the desert strip, the stream ran across the floor of the pool, a garbage pit littered with the debris that had once helped to consolidate the barrage. At the centre of the pool, like the fossil remains of an ancient saurian, rested the wreck of the Diana, only its ribs and engine showing through the mud. Around it lay the rafts and pontoons, sections of landing-stage carried down from the farms, and the crushed barrack huts of the field hospital.
The clouds of dispersing steam seeped along the empty channel of the river between the exposed sand-bars, covered with aerosol cans and beer bottles, fuel drums and tyres. Six hundred yards away was the grey hull of the landing-craft. It rested on its starboard side, landing ramp open to the sky.
I steadied myself against the foremast of the Salammbo, and searched the river-bed for any sight of the rival armies. All trace of these warring men had vanished, swept aside by the flood of poisoned water as the Mallory discharged its last task. Yet for all the weapons that littered the banks, the rifles, mortars and ammunition boxes, not a single corpse remained.
So Mrs Warrender and her women had taken their revenge on Captain Kagwa, Harare and their soldiers, bringing to an end the uncertain mission that had set them on their course up the Mallory. I hoped that Noon was with them, and had survived the collapse of the barrage. Her steel skiff lay moored on the upper waters of the river above the cascade, beside the soot-stained hulk of the old Mercedes.
The ferry stirred in its earth embankment, still trapped within the eastern span of the barrage. Under my feet I could hear the garbage wall moving, the dim scraping of some buried air-conditioner against the keel plates, urging the Salammbo to resume its voyage.
Reluctant to leave my command, the one safe haven I had known in the past months, I stepped from the bows on to the soft earth at the edge of the barrage. Carrying the Lee-Enfield, I clambered down the broken wall of the dam, a dangerous slide of charred earth, knife-sharp debris and the still smouldering skeins of the retention nets. Rifle raised, despite the empty breech, I waded through the knee-deep water towards the opposite bank. As I reached the open cold-store a dying rat trembled in the current and struck my knee, then swirled away, followed by a trio of dead fish.
I climbed to the west wall of the barrage and rested in the doorway of the deserted sentry post.
‘Noon …! Doc Mal …!’
Below me the last water was running from the stolen channel of the Mallory. The oily bed was now a glistening gutter, fed by the water draining from the creeks and reservoirs. Hundreds of dead fish lay on the banks, their silver carcases giving out a speckled light. Already a few crows picked at the bodies, moving among them like members of a burial party.
The small farms and allotments had lost their bloom. Blanched by the heat, the leaves of the banana trees hung above the crusting soil. The air was filled with a dark, vibrating cloud, a weatherfront of mosquitos thirty feet high, leaving behind their last larval pools.
There was a stir of movement in the shabby trees along the road. I picked my way along the blackened shoreline, stepping between the streams of waste. I heard a faint murmuring, passive but insistent. The branches trembled, as if the farmers’ tethered beasts had been left to die in the shade.
I crossed the road, concerned only to find Noon. Then I saw the dark forms of these creatures following me behind the foliage. A dozen ailing women, sick children tied to their backs, were resting in the shade. They stepped into the insect-filled air and raised their hands to me, a walking misery of fever and disease.
‘Noon? Where is Noon?’
Appalled by what I had done to these people, I waved them away with the rifle, pushing aside the outstretched hands. The women clutched at my arms, pointing to their stricken infants, hoping that I might find some medicine for them.
I broke away from the women and ran towards the pool, losing myself in the smoke that rose from the smouldering nets. Without protest, the women shrank back into the trees, hiding themselves beneath the branches like the stunned people of a fungal forest.
I stood on the western wall of the barrage. A narrow waterway still ran from the mountains towards the once wide river valley, but the Mallory was dying, the flow barely strong enough to push through the breaches in the dam. My long struggle against the river had at last come to an end, but I felt no sense of pride or triumph. I had poisoned the Mallory, but I had also poisoned Noon and these destitute nomads. Solely by accident, I had created a great river that had brought life to the waiting desert. But I had become so obsessed by myself that I had seen the Mallory as a rival, and measured its current against my own ambition. Like a child, I had wanted to destroy the river, afraid that I could not keep all of it to myself.
I looked down at the skin of my arms and legs, covered with sores and scars. From the very start, from the earliest days at Port-la-Nouvelle, I had been wounding myself, and my attempt to kill the river was no more than a surrogate suicide.
I slid down the crumbling face of the barrage and stepped into the shallow water. In a fuddled way I was determined to save the river. Using the stock of the rifle, I began to clear away the heavy stones and pieces of metal debris. I dragged a section of steel fencing through the water, pulling with it a knot of blackened ropes wrapped around the trunk of a small palm.
Already the water flowed more freely. I slung the rifle across my shoulders and waded to the cold-store which lay open to the smoke-stained sky. As I gripped its handles, rocking the cabinet from side to side, a startled monkey leapt through my arms. One of Nora Warren
der’s macaques, it landed in the shallow water behind me, from which it sprang as if it had scalded its paws. It jumped to the central island of the barrage, scrambled up the rocky face and sat on the rim of an old truck tyre. Cluttering into its paws, it consoled itself by licking the end of its tail, large eyes gazing dolefully at the desolate valley that was its new home.
I remembered Nora Warrender’s dream of clearing the river plain of the Mallory and repopulating the empty meadows with new species of animals. I felt committed to this small mammal, which would soon perish when the land turned to desert again. Above all, I wanted to fill the draining channel with clear water. If I could reach the river’s source I could rekindle its springs, send it coursing once again between its broad banks.
As the last of the smoke drifted across the pool, I carried the rifle back to the Salammbo, ready to lay the weapon aside. The barrage was shifting, and the bows of the ferry pointed towards the west. The partly crushed shell of a portable telephone booth had emerged from the debris, and lay beside the stern rail. Squatting inside the inverted kiosk, like a tramp taking refuge from an upended world, was Professor Sanger. He sat with his knees against his chin, eyes hidden behind his sunglasses, still clutching his cine-camera to his chest. He was wiping the dial of a white watch on his left wrist, as if he expected a telephone call from his Japanese sponsors at any moment. Then I saw that he had burned the back of his hand while crawling across the smouldering guy ropes. He had wrapped the blister in a strip of cotton torn from his jacket, but the pain of the wound made him consult the dial every other second.
The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Page 24