The Day of Creation
Page 15
I moved between the trees towards a water-tower that leaned across the shallows. At its feet a spur of the railway line from Saliere ran through the sand and vanished into the river. A metal ladder ran up to the tank, and the steel pylon shielded me from the sergeant keeping a look-out on the bridge of the landing-craft.
Dropping into the drained chamber, I pulled aside one of the rusty plates and took stock of the expeditionary force now pursuing us. Despite the impressive bulk of the French landing-craft, I could see that this military unit was little more than a private posse. There were some sixty soldiers, with their families and hangers-on, and the same weapons, stores and radio equipment I had last seen at the Port-la-Nouvelle airstrip.
So the Captain still kept the River Mallory a secret, carefully wrapped inside his dream of a green Saharan kingdom, Kagwana. My confidence rose. The effort of climbing the steps to the water-tank had left me breathless. Our daily food ration had fallen to a handful of boiled rice and a few pieces of snake. Sanger and Mr Pal had brought nothing with them – after escaping from the unguarded police barracks at Port-la-Nouvelle they had exhausted their own supplies within days. Now that we had entered the upper reaches of the river, Noon found it more difficult to hunt the abundant fish in the faster running waters, and had little bait with which to tease them on to her spear.
I looked down at my calves and arms, at the balls of muscles that hunted beneath the thinning skin. I had lost at least twenty pounds in weight, and my hip bones jutted above my shorts like the rim of our empty rice basin. I imagined my once plump mesentery as a fraying clothes line, on which was strung an ever-more hungry intestine. Nonetheless, I felt stronger than at any time since leaving Port-la-Nouvelle, and eager to cope with the exhausting task of steering the ferry and moving the oil drums to the fuel manifold.
Scanning the mildewed road-map, I estimated that we were some ten miles to the west of the rail terminal at Saliere, and perhaps half-way across the central plain of Northern Province. Beyond the margins of the river the once green savanna was already turning to desert, a terrain of abandoned farms and villages picked over by a few nomads heading for the forested river valleys of the south. We had now covered almost a hundred miles in our northward journey from Port-la-Nouvelle, and I calculated that we would need another month to find the source of the Mallory, perhaps eighty miles upstream in the foothills of the Massif du Tondou.
However difficult it became to plan ahead, to think in terms other than the next few minutes, some care would be needed to get us there. Our small reserve of rice barely covered the bottom of the hessian sack, and now had to be divided between the four of us. Already, for some reason, I discounted Sanger and Mr Pal, as if certain that they would soon be leaving us. Noon objected to my system of rationing, putting it down to some blindness on my part to the needs of the present. In her eyes the Mallory would provide all, its cool waters assuaging our hunger and soothing the overheated plates of the Salammbo.
I assumed that, like a child, she found it difficult to count more than three days ahead. Beyond the fourth day lay infinity. Meanwhile, a resplendent present was waiting to be seized. I appeased Noon by passing much of my own ration to her, which she treated to a snooty gaze and then gobbled down with gusto. Half-consciously, I wanted her to grow for me, to become the young woman I saw waiting in the wings of her child’s slim body …
Thinking of Noon, I lay on the shadowy floor of the water-tank, and massaged the blood back into my thighs. I listened to the river drumming against the rusty pylons of the tower, and began to count the soldiers unloading their equipment across the lowered ramp of the landing-craft.
There was no sign of Kagwa or the helicopter. No further reconnaissance flights had taken place, and I could well imagine the Captain’s annoyance on finding just how much fuel the machine consumed. Besides, Kagwa was fully aware that the car ferry was ahead of him, that sooner or later our own fuel would run out and he would find us waiting for him on a convenient beach with our backs to the desert.
A series of sharp snaps crossed the air. Parties of soldiers were moving along the bank. Blades flashed in the sunlight, as they cut down the bamboo saplings around their camp, gathering firewood for the galley stoves on board the landing-craft. Again I felt a pang of regret, as if pieces of my own body were being cut down, my nails crudely pared to the quick. I allowed Noon to gather only dead wood and underbrush, and never to kill the birds or the small mammals who drank at the water’s edge. The fish were the one order we could cycle through our appetites, returning them in due course to the passing stream.
A high squeal pierced the air, the cry of a forest pig trapped by the soldiers in a pit. I winced at this, and was about to lower my eyes, when a strange vessel emerged from the shadow of the landing-craft. A shallow steel lighter rounded the curve of the river, a police patrol boat lashed to its side and providing the motive power. Roped to the deck was Captain Kagwa’s helicopter, its yellow floats anchored between four fuel drums of aviation spirit. The young French pilot lounged in a canvas chair beside the bubble canopy, reading a newspaper like a tourist. Kagwa stood in the stern of the lighter, signalling to the helmsman to moor alongside the landing-craft. He had exchanged his police uniform for army camouflage jacket and trousers, and wore a small beret in place of his peaked cap.
When the mooring had been completed to Kagwa’s satisfaction, he strode to the bows of the lighter and gazed across the river. His eyes swept the wooded banks, examining every beach and inlet, and then came to rest on the sunlit water-tower. He stepped forward, staring at the steel tank in which I knelt, as if he had guessed that I was spying on him. In that chilling moment I knew, not only that he was determined to kill me, but that I felt a strong sense of guilt for all that I had done, for the death of the Japanese photographer and for this entire military operation.
Confused by the sight of the helicopter, and by Captain Kagwa’s threatening stare, I closed the steel plates. I shut out the sunlight, and crouched in the metal cell thirty feet above the water, listening to the rapid beating of my heart, as it thrust itself against my ribcage like a creature frantic to escape its pen. I was giving way to my own panic like a trapped animal, but I could scarcely control myself. The long journey up the Mallory, the hunger and exposure, and the inundation of my mind by the simple paradise I had helped to create, together left me unable to rally myself against anything but a direct physical assault. The unspoken threat in Kagwa’s gaze, the promise of retribution to come, belonged to the punitive world of my childhood, and had confused me like a schoolboy faced with the abstract symbols in his first algebra class. I was now moving into a realm of unthought responses to pain and thirst, to the sun and the air.
Against my thighs, I felt the smooth rush of water between the pylons of the tower. The river was trying to reassure me. Calming myself, I stood up and watched Kagwa climb the gangway into the landing-craft. Clearly he was after bigger game than the car ferry – any action he took against me for firing a bullet through the helicopter’s pontoon would be in the margins of his concern. According to Sanger, the southern reaches of the river were filled with fishing craft of every kind that had crossed Lake Kotto, with scores of smugglers’ rafts and trading skiffs.
I lowered myself down the ladder and jumped into the waist-deep water, then waded ashore to the cover of the palms. When I returned to the launch Sanger and Mr Pal were still sitting together against the engine-locker, two Alice-like figures stranded in this backwater of the wrong dream. As I stepped on to the beach Mr Pal noticed me and began to speak to Sanger. The dark glasses rose, a semaphore of light reflected from the black lenses, as if Sanger were in some kind of secret communication with the world beyond the river. His explanation of his escape from the police barracks, that Mr Pal had bartered both his release and the use of the launch in exchange for a video camera, seemed wholly suspect, assuming a remarkably developed taste for the home movie among Kagwa’s illiterate rural policemen …
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�Mallory—?’ As we slid from the mouth of the creek, following the foliage along the western bank, Sanger leaned forward and gripped my arm. He was forever fondling my wrists and hands, confirming those changes to my physique and character that Mr Pal had quietly confided. ‘You saw the soldiers? Are they troops of the central government?’
‘No, he’s still keeping it to himself – there’s not much more than the gendarmerie unit at Lake Kotto.’ I listened to my matter-of-fact voice, so at variance with my real feelings, a layer of response I wanted to shuck. ‘About sixty soldiers, a French pilot and the helicopter.’
‘Good …’ Sanger seemed relieved, and allowed himself to sink back into his fatigue. ‘So, doctor, it remains your river.’
‘It always has been. If you remember, you registered it in my name.’
‘I remember. Little did I know what a genie would spring from your head.’ Sanger leaned over the gunnel and dipped a hand into the speeding stream, then fingered the drops as if testing their vintage. He splashed the water over his sore-infested skin. ‘The Mallory … Are you still hoping to destroy our third Nile?’
‘No, Sanger …’ I was wary of revealing myself to this likeable but sly opportunist, particularly as I was still unsure of my own motives. He and Mr Pal clearly regarded me as some wild man of the woods. They almost welcomed my slide into eccentricity, aware that this would make useful footage for the documentary they were filming inside their heads. My ambiguous relationship with Noon, my periodic nakedness and bouts of fever, and my still infected head-wound, for them spelt out a clear physical and moral decline, since they failed to grasp the real changes that were taking place. ‘I’ve never wanted to destroy it. I’m only concerned with the irrigation project at Lake Kotto – all this water is simply surplus to requirements.’
‘Nobly absurd.’ Sanger leaned back, sighing to himself as if this alone justified all that he had suffered. Undernourished and showing the first yellow tint of infective jaundice, he had lost the porcelain crown of his left canine, and his derelict figure more and more resembled the decaying stump. ‘This river may well be the most important African waterway since the Suez Canal – another Nile sprung upon the people of this doomed province by scarcely less than an act of God, with a little help from an erratic country doctor. It can drive the Sahara back to the 15th parallel. Is that not so, Mr Pal?’
‘Quite correct, sir.’ Mr Pal emerged from his fever to parrot his statistics. With its swollen eyelids and fungal skin infection, his youthful face resembled that of a starved apprentice in a backstreet tannery. ‘Estimated flow-rate is some 10,000 cubic feet per second, capable of irrigating 10 million hectares, and together make it the 57th greatest river in the world …’
‘Only the 57th—? These figures are vital, Mr Pal, they carry authority. I hope you can revise them upwards for the commentary. However, doctor, you can see that you are conducting your private duel with a mighty opponent.’
From the tiller I gazed at this derelict pair, held together only by their bogus documentary. Like Captain Kagwa, Sanger had kept all news of the river’s existence to himself. His original scheme for a filmed record of the Mallory had been given several added layers of interest – the irrational quest of its self-styled creator, and Captain Kagwa’s heroic attempts to arrest him before he could divert or destroy this life-giving channel.
How many feet of film had Mr Pal already shot? Whenever we moored, the botanist would wade shakily to the nearest beach and drive a calibrated stick into the sand, set up his camera and then shoot across it as soon as Noon or I filled the background, hunting for water-snakes or fuelling the diesel engine. My menage with this under-age girl (under-age in Düsseldorf or Osaka, though not within 2,000 miles of the Mallory), and my absent-minded tendency to go about naked, together convinced Sanger that he had found the perfect centre-piece for his film. Meanwhile, my clear dislike of his documentary would give his armchair viewers a gripping sense of authenticity.
Moreover, my hostility involved a strong element of rivalry – each of us was trying to impose his own image upon the Mallory. I had helped to create this unique waterway, and filled it with an Eden of birds and flowers, which Sanger was now smothering beneath his cheap commentary. His pseudo-scientific prattle assumed that television’s flattering revision of nature was an act of creation as significant as the original invention of this great river and its abundant life. Both, to Sanger, were equally plausible and equally meaningful. By conjuring the Mallory into existence, I had merely imposed a fiction of my own upon the desert. The feather-palms and wild lavender, the scented groves and thrilling bird-song were simply images on my retina searching for a commentator. I stared at the exposure sores on Sanger’s jaundiced skin, wondering how in due course he would explain his own disease away in a set of reassuring cliches … I only hoped that I would be able to help him.
Noon, to my annoyance, the former child-guerilla and freedom fighter, adored the transparent flattery of the lens. As we tied up alongside the ferry I could see her among the cabinets and control panels stacked beside the Mercedes, playing the film cassettes on the battery-powered monitor and miming to her own images on the screen. The audio-tapes in the dashboard of the limousine had been cast aside. Having discovered vision, the sound-world palled. Speech bored her, and the alphabet and syntax of the film were all she needed.
The stove was cold, and a pan of half-cooked rice sat on the embers of a few sticks. Noon had done no housekeeping or fishing while we were away.
‘No fish, Noon? No snake? We have to leave now.’ When I reprimanded her she shrugged like any teenager. ‘Captain Kagwa’s coming – big guns, they’ll catch Noon.’
When Mr Pal found the cut-off switch and dimmed the screen she promptly elbowed him aside and pressed the toggle, throwing up again the pictures of herself emerging bare-breasted from the river with a fish impaled on her spear. I remembered her primitive autistic drawings on the beach at Port-la-Nouvelle. As a child Noon had possessed almost no image of herself, and these cassettes had allowed her to describe herself for the first time. I imagined her becoming a princess of the river and the forest, ruling the leopards and the giant oaks with an authority and allure modelled entirely on the poses in Sanger’s tawdry films. In many ways Noon’s progress charted the future of a special kind of self-consciousness, pandered to but constrained by the limitations of this small screen. In a few months she had stepped from the Stone Age and crossed from the spoken to the visual realm in a single stride, dispensing with language on the way.
But I was happy to let her play these games of hide-and-seek. As I stood behind the helm and steered the ferry into the main channel I felt the powerful shoulder of the Mallory press against the vessel’s hull. The steady surge of darker water beneath the veneer of light reminded me of my real purpose. Below the wheelhouse, Noon hopped from one foot to another, as she discovered the stop-frame and the fast forward, playing games with time and space like any child in a western suburb. Around her the river preserved a more real world.
21
The Skirmish
Even Mr Pal’s everlasting commentary failed to upset my good humour. An hour later, when we were five miles safely upstream of Kagwa’s bivouac, I was at last able to relax and again become the captain of the Salammbo. Sanger and Mr Pal sat together under the awning in the bows of the ferry, too tired to chop the firewood, extemporizing a child’s guidebook to the surrounding terrain. Mr Pal’s voice floated back over the drumming of the diesel, the sing-song patter of a salesman selling the world.
‘… already we see the first ferns and bromeliads happily filling their ecological niches. The alkaline soils have encouraged a host of species to enjoy the welcoming micro-climate.’
‘Very good, Mr Pal … but what about the river?’
‘Still enlarging, sir, flowing comfortably between ample banks. Rails and heron are present on the shore, and two men in military uniform are washing in the warm waters, whose dissolved minerals—’
However, I had already seen the soldiers. Dressed in the uniforms of Kagwa’s expeditionary force, they stood on a narrow beach a hundred yards ahead. They had cut down the young bamboo to provide a small clearing. Parked in its centre was Kagwa’s seven-ton truck, from which the soldiers were unloading the sections of a metal hut. A wooden watch-tower rose above the trees, and a soldier on duty lounged behind his light machine-gun. On the beach below the tower was a rubber inflatable with an outboard motor. A second group of soldiers were trimming the branches from the saplings and using the bamboo stakes to build a landing-stage. Waist-deep in the water, they drove the spears into the soft silt of the riverbed.
Gripping the helm, I gazed at this scene of activity. I realized that Kagwa’s men were setting up a customs post, with a toll house, inspection jetty and gun emplacement. The truck and its platoon of ten men had debarked from the landing-craft several days earlier. They had then driven on ahead, picking this point where the river’s banks were constricted by a granite outcrop. Across its worn shoulder the water foamed and leapt through the hoops of vivid rainbows.
‘Dr Mallory! There are soldiers here! Change course, sir!’
Mr Pal had left the bows and was clambering over the television equipment stored amidships. He pushed past Noon, who sat in her electronic den surrounded by images of herself, and disconnected the battery leads. He scrambled back to the wheelhouse and pressed his exhausted face to the broken glass.
‘Dr Mallory … do you wish to run us aground, sir?’