Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  They come to the brow of the last hill, overlooking the many-shaded viridity of the final stretch of uncultivated land before the Remboue River. Beyond the river basin are more hills, rising in the blue-hazy distance of the late morning, wreathed in wisps of thin fog, and littered with outcroppings of white stone that look like parts of the same creamy substance, some aspect of the center of the mountain itself pushing through the crust of earth. All of this under the bluest sky—a sky so richly blue, unlike any English sky, in any weather of the year.

  I do not want to go back. I do not wish ever to go back.

  6

  SHE CAN’T SAY EXACTLY when it came to her to leave all her research, her work on fish and fetish and specimens of flora and fauna, to take a small group of men—“my men,” she has come to call them, whoever they happen to be, and of whatever kind—and climb to the peak of Mount Cameroon, Mungo Mah Lobeh, as the Africans call it: Throne of Thunder.

  When, back from Congo Français and the Fang, she sees it again from the deck of The Niger, a German trading vessel which has brought her north to the Cameroon River, some obscure region of her soul is prepared to believe that the will to climb it stems from the first time she ever saw it, sailing south on the 1893 trip, half-frightened and in breath-stealing wonder at its height and strength, a massive, craggy fastness of innumerable shadow shapes and colors, the peak disappearing into a screen of plum-colored twilight clouds, and its rocky west face spotted with deep glooms of green and brown.

  From the deck of The Niger, she resolves to make the attempt, and immediately sets about trying to convince Obanjo and the others to accompany her. Obanjo tells her he’s not interested in climbing any mountains, nor in any new expeditions, at least for a time. He wants to sit on a veranda somewhere, smoke an English pipe, drink French brandy, and watch the sun go down over the sea. No one else on The Niger is even slightly interested.

  This is the luxury ship of the southwest coast, and she and her party are among Bible readers and tribal members, African traders from the Fjort and the Ajoumbas; and she’s discovering that Africans are generally unwilling to face the cold air of the higher altitudes. Some of the Africans stare at her as if the last stage of her madness has set in—these are the ones who consider her as fairly lunatic in the first place.

  The Cameroon Mountain has two peaks. The smaller of them, only a little under six thousand feet, is a sheer cliff. The Throne of Thunder is more than twice that high, and no woman, African or European, has ever climbed it, as far as anyone knows. Very few men have climbed it. Several have ascended to the peak from the west. No one has scaled it from the east. If she reaches the top, she’ll see the African coast from the point of view of the sky itself. She’ll stand on one of the highest peaks of the continent. She feels the rush of her own will, and imagines the feeling, the soaring pride and pleasure, to look upon the country she has been traveling, the country she has been exploring and living in, from the height of the sailing clouds.

  The Niger makes a brief stop at Corsica, and she prepares to go into port to trade for some supplies for the climb. There’s little that she has left to trade, but she loads her reticule with English soap and a few samples of fetish she’s collected, along with the razor given her by the Fang chieftain. The sun is bright and hot and the humidity is terrible; it will be rainy season soon enough. The smell of the oil rivers is heavy on the air, and mosquitoes form dark clouds of themselves in the swells of the harbor water. In port, there has been an attack of driver ants, and people are roiling about in the streets. At one hut, a man and a woman are screaming as if in great grief, and their gestures convince her that they have left something of immeasurable value inside the hut. She looks in and sees an infant covered in driver ants. No feature of the child is visible through the millions of dreadfully eating insects. She throws herself into the furiously busy mass of them and hauls the baby, still completely enveloped in ants, out into the open air, getting bitten several times in the process. The baby is quite heavy and dead feeling, cold. Mary watches in horror as the child’s mother seizes it and pushes it immediately into a trough of water, holding it under. Both she and her husband give Mary grateful, though vaguely suspicious, looks. Mary stands there and soon she’s demanding that they bring the baby up. They speak Kru, and they understand her, and even so they stare at her with bewilderment.

  —No, ma, says the man at last. Dis no baby, ma.

  And he holds it up out of the water. The ants have drowned, and fallen off. It is no baby, but a fair-sized ham. The man gives her a nod, and then begins to laugh, as does the woman. Soon others join in, and she recognizes the timbre of one laugh, turning in the crowd, in the talk that she knows perfectly well is about this farce she has played out over the ham. She turns, and sees James Henley Batty, standing with two Fulanis, looking ten pounds heavier than when she saw him last, and a lot hairier—but it is James. She walks up to him and abruptly feels the pain of realizing that he hasn’t recognized her. There is no recognition at all in his face.

  —James Batty, she says.

  He speaks through his laughter.

  —Miss Kingsley.

  —You didn’t seem to recognize me.

  —I could never forget you, Miss Kingsley.

  His breath reeks of rum and tobacco, and he hasn’t shaved for days. She steps back a little, and he turns in a small circle before her, as if to allow her to examine him fully. When he faces her again, he says:

  —You have been well, I trust? I hear all sorts of things about you.

  —I’ve written you, Mary says. Care of Goldie’s company. I’ve met Goldie. I saw ’im the night you saw ’im, in London.

  —Just so. I sent my greetings, as I recall. I was about to head down to Sierra Leone.

  —Goldie delivered the message. I would like to ’ave seen you myself.

  He bows at the waist.

  —Here I am.

  He escorts her to the market pavilion, which is all but deserted as a result of the driver ants. He tells her that there’s trouble brewing in South Africa, and that he’s going back to England for good.

  —Ever get the feeling you can see the future? he says.

  —Only when my expectations are dire, she tells him, and realizes that this is the truth. She almost comments on the strangeness of it.

  —Well, I know what’s coming to this place, he says. This whole, poor, beautiful, bloody continent. It’s like an enormous pie, and all the big boys want a piece of it, and I can’t stay here and watch ’em carve it up in these people’s blood. I never wanted to share a bath with these blokes, mind you, but I like them. I like trading with them. I like the back and forth and the sly little tricks and the games and the humor. And their biggest trouble is they trust the bastards who’re going to take it all away. Bloody Bible-reading bastards.

  —They’ll fight, Mary says. The ones I have met will fight.

  —They’re too divided up into factions themselves. Too many separate tribes. And the big boys know it, too. These chaps don’t have an empire for nothing.

  —Still, they will resist.

  He nods, looking off, musing, and wavering slightly with what he’s had to drink.

  —Then they’re bigger fools for that. It’ll be their blood. The ones on the coastline, they’ve learned to adapt, and speak the language. It’s already their dignity. Now it’ll be their blood.

  —You are in a darker mood than usual, Mary says.

  —But the trouble in South Africa isn’t the blacks. It’s the whites. Dutch and French Huguenots. Boers.

  —Yes, I know of them.

  He smiles, and shakes his head slightly.

  —Afrikaners, she says.

  —Yes, he says. Well, war is brewing. Transvaal and the Orange Free State against the crown. Gold has been discovered in the Transvaal, Miss Kingsley. The whole crowd of buggers will be killing each other over it soon enough.

  —I can’t be as discouraged as all that, says Mary.

  —Well,
one of us is right. I hope it’s you.

  They are quiet for an interval. He waits while she tries to trade two bars of soap for a water canteen. The woman she’s trading with is coal black, and tall, with large flaring nostrils and sensuous, heavy lips. Mary finally offers the razor, and the woman takes it, and gives her the canteen.

  —You no want ham? she says, smiling with those enormously fleshy lips.

  —No, Mary says with exaggerated dignity.

  Batty laughs. Both he and the tall woman have a good laugh together over the whole affair, and they speak of it in a language Mary can’t quite translate fast enough. She knows they are talking about the look on her face, hurling herself out of the hut with the “baby” in her arms.

  —So, Batty says, gaining control of himself. Where are you off to, now?

  —I’m going to climb Mount Cameroon.

  He stares at her for the amount of time it takes to understand that she hasn’t spoken facetiously.

  —The east face of it, she says.

  Solemnly he raises one hand over her head, then makes a sign of the cross, and intones the Latin: In nomine patrias et filie et spiritu sancti, amen.

  She smiles at him and nods.

  —Even for you, he says.

  —I don’t understand.

  —It’s too big a thing, Miss Kingsley. Even for you.

  —I suppose I’ll find that out.

  —Pride goeth before a fall.

  He accompanies her back to the harbor. Their conversation, in this last hour, is very stilted and formal; they speak of the various societies in England, and mutual friends: poor Dolokov, with his packet of love letters and his gravid liver; Goldie and his wife; the MacDonalds, whom he knows only slightly. She tells him how good she has felt in the company of Mrs. Goldie, and he relates, with a certain stiffness, his plan to go to work for the Geographical Society in some capacity or other. His plans, he says, are vague at present, certainly nothing as definite as climbing a bloody mountain on the most inhospitable coast in the world.

  He stands on the sweating boards of the dock, waving sadly at her as the ship pulls away.

  —Who dat be, ma? Gray Shirt asks her.

  She looks back at her friend, who is still waving.

  —Dat be my first friend outside, she says.

  —Good man all one time, ma.

  —Yes, Mary tells him, feeling abruptly, and to her enormous surprise, that she might begin to cry. Good man all one time.

  She stays there on the deck of The Niger with Gray Shirt, and in a while the folds of cloud to the east unveil the massive shape of Mount Cameroon.

  —I’m going up there, she says to Gray Shirt. No matter what any of you say. I will see this place where we’re presently standing, this spot on the ocean, from up there.

  He nods at her as if to say that he believes she means it, but there is a quality of tolerance in it, too.

  —Will you come with me? she asks. Please.

  She has the shaken sense that it is the first time she has ever used that word with another human being. Surely this isn’t so. She stands there seeking to recall some other occasion.

  Gray Shirt shakes his head.

  —No chance, ma.

  7

  SHE’S FORCED to gather an entirely new group of men in Victoria, and the effort depletes her energy and resources so much that on the day of her scheduled departure she wakes in the predawn with a terrible migraine. But something else is bothering her, some element of the last few days on The Niger, and her brief time with Batty. Can she have been so lonely, all these weeks and months? There was such a sharp pang when Gray Shirt said no—an ache, deep down. And later, when he took his gear and lifted one dark hand to wave good-bye to her, she felt the same hard knot of pain below her chest bone. It seems to her that she is always saying good-bye.

  Her whole life is a farewell of a kind.

  The mission house in Victoria, where she has been given a room, is run by the Wesleyans, and its pastor is a man named Dennis Kemp. He has a burnished look, ruddy skin and high brow, with soft green eyes and auburn hair swept back on either side of his head. She first encounters him that morning when, blue and downhearted and suffering her migraine, she comes out on the veranda to get her new chief guide to wake the others, for the assault on the mountain. The new chief guide is a Christianized Fulani who calls himself Thomas, after Aquinas, whom he’s reading slowly in German. He speaks English as well, and several of the African dialects. With her, and with the men under his charge, he’s rather imperious and even surly at times.

  She tells him to get the others ready, and he goes off without a word, so that she wonders if he heard her.

  —Thomas? she says.

  —I go do it, ma.

  Kemp walks up to her from the other side of the entrance, having come around the building, following the progress of several young boys carrying wood. He sees her, and bows.

  —Miss Kingsley.

  She bows in response, wondering if he can see the crease she feels in her own forehead.

  He introduces himself, then turns to follow the progress of the boys again. They’re crossing the road, and heading up a side street, each with his own handful of wood. The light is a flat, dim gray; it is still more night than morning, and everything is streaming with mist.

  —You’re becoming rather a legend, you know, Miss Kingsley. One hears tales about you from every quarter. Especially one hears of your low opinion of missionaries.

  —I ’aven’t any reply to that, she says.

  —I mean no offense.

  —Nor I. And I take none.

  He smiles, and she has the thought that this must be his best gesture, the winning gesture he possesses, like a gift, to disarm anybody: a beautiful, transforming expression; it alters everything about him. His face becomes very much like a guiltless boy’s face.

  —I’m sorry I wasn’t here to greet you on your arrival last night.

  —I spent most of yesterday trying to put a party of men together for an expedition. She indicates the shape of the Cameroon peaks in the distance.

  —Yes, that got around, too.

  —Well, you’re well informed. She starts down the steps, and has to pause, holding on to the wooden rail.

  —Are you all right?

  She puts one hand to her head.

  —Here, he says. And before she can do anything about it, he has grasped her by her arms, and is guiding her back up onto the veranda. There are four wooden chairs ranged across the front, and with his help—her legs won’t support her—she sits down in the first one, a rocker, whose initial swaying with her feels like a part of her swooning. His strength is surprising. She closes her eyes, realizing that it’s been a long, long time since she has felt the touch of another person. She can’t recall how long. She thinks the word please, and she puts her hands to her eyes, making an attempt to remember life before she left it for these journeys. It seems abruptly very important to remember. But then she’s drifting away inside, feels the memory of a child’s embrace in Calabar; the handshake of the captain of The Niger. The nerves of her skin contract, it is so real. But then everything is melting in the sense of failing consciousness and fever. Quite suddenly she’s awake, he’s holding her upright in the chair, and she can’t find the memory of the last time she was held in this way, supported by anyone, or so close in proximity to a grown man. It is all very alarming.

  He sits down in the chair next to hers, and for a few minutes says nothing. Her men are stirring in the yard, making ready, Thomas standing with his hands on his hips, watching. People are coming out into the streets. The day is starting, light coming to the edges of things, the easternmost sky turning the color of a glowing coal. Kemp remains at her side, perfectly quiet, as if they’ve both simply come out here to observe the preparations, and the sunrise.

  —Thank you, she says. You’re very kind. I’m feeling somewhat better now.

  —You’re ashen, if you’ll forgive my saying so.


  She doesn’t respond to this.

  —I think you should put this off for a day or two, he says.

  From somewhere, as always, she draws the strength to rise. Stabbing pains seem to come from the very center of her brain. She blinks, and finds herself sitting down again. She hears him instructing Thomas to tell the men to put things back, to wait, and she hears Thomas doing that, in the tone of a man who knew all along it would happen. But she lacks the energy to protest.

  After a time, Kemp helps her inside, and up the stairs to the entrance of her room. He says he’ll have some water brought to her, and asks if there is anything else she might need. There is a doctor in the mission house.

  —I could have him here in a minute. I’m sure he’s not awake yet.

  They are standing in the upstairs hall, at the open door of her room. The hall is long and dim and the wood is polished and she’s aware of paintings ranked along the one wall, of men in vested suits, with large mustaches and the dignified air of rectitude.