“I don’t know why I told you,” Sheri said. “You’ve got enough to worry about.”
“No one will know from me,” Lily answered.
Again, she heard the muffled sounds of the other woman’s attempt to gain control of herself. A moment later, Sheri sighed, apologized, and said good-bye.
6
1893
I have made my way from Cabinda to Kacongo—King Leopold of Belgium’s province—and on, until I can now say I have seen the territory. In Kacongo, the sleeping sickness and smallpox are ravaging the populace. I saw entire communities wiped out by what the Africans call the spotted death. That is bad enough, but then there are so many people—and so many of them children—in the dreadful final stages of the sleeping sickness, lethargic, without a shred of energy or will left, as if doped, looking at you with the lidded, unseeing gaze of death. And there are the lepers—awful to contemplate, human shapes in these lumpish and terrible masses of flesh. They are shunned in Africa as elsewhere, but there is a different reason for it. The Africans believe the lepers are under the spell of witchcraft; they have no idea of contagion, and nothing in their way of looking upon the world has made them ready to believe even the suggestion that these ills might have another cause, something in nature that can be outwitted, or worked with, in order to gain some relief. They suffer, and their suffering makes a terrible kind of sense to them.
In one of the smaller villages, I found five awful things stuck on sticks, in a cloud of noisy flies. This was in the very middle of the village. I stepped closer and realized quickly that these were organs—human livers and lungs. When I sought, with a distinct edge of fright, to know the reason, the guide, who had come from this village and had accompanied me through several others first, informed me that these objects were the witches that had been found inside witch doctors who had died of the spotted death. Later that same week, a woman of the village died of what I could ascertain in an autopsy was a simple aneurysm of the abdominal aortic artery; but I was told by the villagers that she had witched herself.
—She no sick, I was told. Then she go die one time. She done witch herself.
According to the best experts in this village, she had been eaten by her own familiar from the inside.
From Kacongo, as I say, I went on, stopping in villages and trading with the people, and doing some of my own wandering and collecting. My portmanteau grows almost too heavy for even the bearers to carry. I went on foot when I could, shunning the hammock that so many Europeans seem to delight in using. I think one would feel silly being carted about by others, like a fool king. I walked, and insisted on doing mostly for myself. And in my wanderings I met several Fjort, who seemed proud and quite happy and frankly to enjoy staring at me. I must report that in several ports of call I was quizzed as to my lack of a husband. I took to saying that Husband would join me later, even to some of the Europeans I met. It was simpler that way, though no less vexing for being necessary. At the Congo River, I was reunited with The Lagos, and we steamed up to Matadi. We passed through the swirl of fast waters and raving river called Hell’s Cauldron, and on the high hillsides they were burning the bush, the flames licking higher than I could ever have believed possible from those peaks, into the heavens, with a boiling black cloud. I had read of this part of the river in Stanley’s accounts, and he did not do it justice, nor, I suppose, can I. As night fell we watched the wild, throbbing glow, such a terrible shade of red, on the dark sky.
At Matadi, we rode the Congo Free State Railway, much to our fright, for it is always a risky proposition. Apparently, even in this climate, where one pays so heavily for the smallest mistake or miscalculation, riding this railway is one of the most dangerous of occupations. Aside from one harrowing hour when we were parked above a precipice of several hundred feet while a few lighthearted lunatics repaired a rail that had come loose, we had an uneventful journey. McNab and Captain Murray and I made this trip, cheerfully signing papers that relieved the railway of any responsibility for our lives.
I am heading home now.
I have walked in Africa, and I have sat in a canoe aground in an African river, waiting to be harvested by crocodiles. I have collected specimens for the British Museum, and acted as a scientist in all circumstances, even those of extremity and terror. When the terror comes, it manifests itself with a coppery taste on my tongue. When I receive that sensation and that taste, I know it’s time to act. And so I act. Or react. As I have quickly learned, sometimes it is best simply to react. Any motion, toward or from, lessens the paralyzing effects of the terror. That is science.
On one of my last nights in the bush, I went walking, keeping to the path and feeling the strong sensation of the danger one is always in at night in such places, and thrilling to it. I wanted to test the quality of light on the river from a height of a few feet into the trees. But there was a path. I had gone some way down it when I came upon several Africans in some kind of ritual costume: animal skins and beads and chains of lion’s teeth. I was immediately aware of that taste in my mouth as I turned around and strove to make a hasty and soundless retreat, since if this was what I suspected it was—that is, a secret society—I knew that the chances were very good that I would have walked my last in the African, or any other, forest. Secret societies do not relish visits from strangers, especially of the female variety, and they treat intrusions with a quick death—or, in some instances, a not-so-quick death. So I scrambled as quietly as I could in the other direction from these gentlemen. But I was followed and accosted, and made to walk with them deeper into the bush; two of them held me by my arms, walking on either side of me. “Gentle firmness” is the phrase that best explains how I was held. I did not protest. Silence, I intuited, was required. One of them uttered commands, in whispers. I was unable to make much sense of it. Then they began to emit the strangest noises, sounds that I knew had to have come from their throats but which had an inhuman quality: clicks and clucks and barks, whooping howls and whines. When this ceased, we were the only quiet in the whole of night. We came to a clearing, and were still. I was held still, and remained so, and after a long, excruciatingly slow passage, monkeys came from the trees to look at these curious shapes in the darkness, and were then captured. I came to realize that I had been drafted by a company of monkey hunters. Their mode of operation was to appear bizarre to the monkeys, to excite their curiosity. And of course I was very much the most bizarre thing these men had ever seen. They were quite kind to me after they’d made their catch. It was as though I were their mascot now, and I feared they might want to keep me.
Soon I will be boarding another ship—the SS La Rochelle, bound for Britain. I almost said home, friend.
In Libreville, in the Congo Français, she finds herself among English-speaking people for the first time in months—she revels in the sounds, and makes an effort to get others to talk, merely to talk at her, so she can bask in the comfort of it: her own language. She has been moving among Africans, Dutch, French, and Portuguese, and finding a way to communicate with them. It is only when she is again among the English that the mental strain of all that becomes apparent to her. It is as if some part of her consciousness has been at a sort of rigid attention for so long that relaxing the muscles provides her with a sensation of profound rest at last. She finds herself thanking people for the smallest things, sometimes for a simple gesture of speech, a hello, or a wish that she have a good morning.
The SS La Rochelle steams north to Cameroon, with its white-capped mountain showing from a far distance. They speak German in Cameroon, and she goes ashore with the captain, a man named Harrison, whose narrow features and high-pitched voice and drawing-room manner toward her she finds unnerving. The air is warm, windless, and blue in the distances, without the slightest haze. A clarity that gives her a small ache at her heart, because she knows that in England now the winter is coming on.
In port, she sees a nun approaching others coming from the vessel, with a look of disquiet and worry on her face. The nun’s c
heeks are pitted and scarred, and her eyes appear to be drained of all color. Coming closer, Mary sees that they are a pale blue, and that one of them is blind. There is a membranous something, also blue, over the iris. The nun turns to her, and says:
—English?
—Yes, Mary says.
—Missionary?
She shakes her head, and starts to move past the other woman, but something in the blue eyes stops her.
—I have some knowledge of medicine, Mary tells her.
—We have sickness nearby. A settlement. Fever.
Captain Harrison is standing a few feet away, but he has heard them. He gives the nun a small bow and then faces Mary.
—We’ll be in port for a couple of weeks, Miss Kingsley.
—Lead on, Mary says to the nun.
The way is more arduous, and is farther than the nun had indicated. They climb for a few hundred feet away from the harbor, into deeper and deeper forest. Mary is short of breath. The air has grown hotter, and more densely moist. Eventually, after many stops to rest and after being joined by another, younger nun who nevertheless takes the climb with more trouble than any of them, they descend for an exhausting period, swatting at thousands of flying insects, and mosquitoes, and at last emerge into a flat, open plain, a clearing that stretches widely away to the south, and is bordered on one side by a tributary of the Congo River. The settlement is not much more than a few rows of thatch-roofed huts built on stilts. The sick are lying in these huts, separated by yards of matted earth and by the ladders necessary for egress and entrance from one to the other. There are twenty-three men, ages varying from twenty to fifty-one, each of them quite ill, racked with fever and dysentery-like symptoms. Lying on a cot alone in one hut, is Deerforth. Mary says his name, and he doesn’t recognize it, or her. He’s raving. He hallucinates snakes crawling all over him. She holds him down with the help of the blue-eyed nun. It dawns on Mary that she hasn’t even remembered to ask the other woman’s name.
She orders all of the victims to be moved to the central building, which is large enough to house them, and contains some supplies of quinine and other agents with which to fight fevers. The movement of the sick allows the nuns to keep a better watch on them, and to remove the dead with more safety and efficiency. Two of the men die in the first night. Mary keeps a vigil by Deerforth’s bed. His fever is so high that she fears for his life every minute. But the hours pass, and he drowses, mutters, moans, going on. She keeps putting a cool, damp cloth on his forehead, and in only seconds the cloth is hot, a clammy heat in it. She keeps putting it back in the water and replacing it. By morning, he begins gasping for air. She calls for the nuns, and stands by his bedside, exhausted, while a nun administers the last rites.
—Deerforth, Mary says. We saw each other again. I’m ’ere. You are not dying, Deerforth, and you are not alone. Talk to me. I wonder where you went after we landed in Saint Paul de Loanda. I would like you to tell me now. Please tell me.
—I fear it’ll be soon, the nun says. God have mercy.
—Shut up, Mary says. Please.
She sits on the bed and takes his hand. It is burning. She feels the heat in his blood, and now she begins, quietly, to weep.
—Deerforth.
The nun drenches a rag in water and places it, again, on his forehead. He begins to thrash, and suddenly his eyes open wide.
—Ah, he says. God.
Then he lies back and is quite awfully still.
After a time, Mary reaches up to close his eyes, still weeping. The nun watches her.
—Did you know him well?
Mary doesn’t answer.
—Who was he?
—A friend, Mary says, low.
—Someone close.
—Yes. No. I didn’t know him well.
—Such a terrible effort it takes to pass on, the nun says. One’s body doesn’t want to let go of the spirit.
—Leave us, says Mary. Please.
The nun goes out. And in the silence, Mary crosses Deerforth’s hands, and wraps his jaw shut in the soggy rag that she had been using to cool his forehead. She prepares him for the grave, working alone in the silence—or in the only silence that ever obtains in a place like Africa. She sobs through the whole process, remembering her father and mother, and wondering at the tremendous mystery of it. Life seems so savagely not what the polite society of her growing up had ever suggested it was.
Before the week is out, four more men die of the fever. She and the nuns take turns keeping bedside vigils, and digging graves. The insects are unbearable, and Mary has taken to calling the house Centipede Villa. The others, the nuns, and two others, doctors, who have come from the port to help, all marvel at her strength, her refusal to rest, and her bravery. They use the word, and to her face.
—I have never been in the company of someone truly brave, says one of the doctors, a man with the rough look of a veteran coaster, and the bearing of a sad, tired, elderly curate. He is indeed a priest; his health is precarious, and has been for more than a decade. He has recurring fevers, and there is a jaundiced something in his eyes. The bones of his skull are visible in his face and forehead. His name is Empson. The nuns, of course, call him Father. He has a way of staring at Mary, as if he can’t quite believe his eyes. He tells her that he had been on the verge of losing his faith, and that finding her has changed his life.
Mary deflects this with a joke about the heat and the constant sodden conditions and the biting insects. Only this morning, she killed a scorpion.
—I say it simply and in all truth, he tells her. I have never been with a truly brave human being, anywhere. I have been with fools and idiots and braggarts and killers, but never anyone truly brave. The experience has shaken me.
Mary lifts her shoulders slightly, not quite a shrug. It is night; there are groans coming from the trees, animal sighs and growls. A monkey screams, shrill as a woman. Mary kills a centipede, and sweeps it from the table. She begins to tell him about her first day in Africa, being chased by the dog-faced monkey and falling through the ceiling of a cotton-processing factory. She attempts to make him laugh, but he only stares, solemnly, almost lugubriously, a man gazing upon an ideal in which he had long ago ceased to believe. That is the expression on his face.
—Dr. Empson, you’re making me uneasy, she says.
—Forgive me.
A little more than a week later, the fever has passed, those who live are leaving or are well enough to talk about it, and the dead are buried. The storm of illness is over. She packs her things, pays a visit to the displaced earth where she knows Deerforth is buried, and then, saying good-bye to the doctors and the nuns, she heads alone back to the port at Cameroon, and the SS La Rochelle. It will be Christmas soon. There’s a fine soft rain falling, and it soaks her to the skin. She trudges along, with a sense of herself as coming to the end of this journey, and wanting it not to end. The thought of England is strangely without effect for her; she feels nothing about it. That small, wintry island, with its cities and its empire, and the whole broad, blood-soaked continent of Europe take on a sort of unreality for her, as if it were all something hinted at in dreams, unattainable and finally undesirable, too.
She doesn’t want to leave.
The SS La Rochelle steams north to Calabar, and the offices of the British Niger Coast protectorate. While the ship takes on tons of palm oil for the journey back to what Captain Harrison calls The Home Island, Mary goes through everything she has gathered and packed, her specimens in their jars of preserving fluid, her collections of charms and beads, and carved figures. She rewrites her catalog of artifacts, and composes a few letters. It is still difficult to believe that she is going back to England. The minutes draw out, and she can almost believe this is the rest of the life she will lead.
In the evening, she takes the dinghy with Captain Harrison, and two others, into port. Calabar is soaking under a fine rain. She makes her way to the offices of the protectorate, and Captain Harrison is gallant, walking al
ong beside her, holding an umbrella over her, and talking about the savages, as he calls them, that they encounter in the streets. Mary receives his alarmed consideration of her in tolerant silence. The offices are housed in the center of a high-walled courtyard. Captain Harrison introduces her to a man named MacDonald, the head administrator of the protectorate. He’s a tall, barrel-chested man with a graying beard, trimmed so close to his face that it appears from a distance to be coloration rather than whiskers.
—I have heard of you already, Miss Kingsley, he says in a rich baritone. I know Captain Murray of The Lagos. I saw him only last week.
—How is Captain Murray? she asks.
—He’s bound for England. I expect he’s reached the Canaries by now. He spoke of you with great wonderment.
—As you see, I’m hardly a wonder of any kind.
—Consider it an opinion, then, which I’m reluctant to contradict.
Mary nods, smiling. This is the sort of talk she habitually dismisses, and is always annoyed by, since it singles her out for being a woman in the circumstance, and her qualities as therefore appreciable only because of this: no man, undergoing the same things she has undergone, is ever considered anything at all but average. Yet this Mr. MacDonald has such a light of humor and even irony in his eyes; it is as if he’s perfectly aware of her feelings, and is speaking for the benefit of Captain Harrison. It is like a joke between them. She says:
—If you find me so wonderful, I suppose it should be no surprise to you that I am determined to return to Africa as soon as possible. I ’ave only begun, ’ere.
—Just so. We must stay in touch, he says. I’ll make an introduction for you to my wife, in England. Lady MacDonald. Well, Ethel is her name. Awful name, Ethel, but a marvelous woman. You’ll find her very agreeable.
—I’ve no doubt of it.
They have tea, and Captain Harrison talks about the failed efforts of missionaries to inculcate Christian values into the savages. In his mind, the prospect is fruitless, doomed to failure from the start. He favors trade, yet sees it only in terms of plunder for the Empire. He has no interest in preserving anything of the life he encounters in these rivers and estuaries; it all looks benighted to him, a region of hellish vapors and feral people. He wants ever so badly to get back to The Home Island.
Hello to the Cannibals Page 55