The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (10 page)

14

We were entering a world without time. For six days we had moved upstream, against a slow amber current that slid smoothly between the forest walls. The immense softwood trees shut out the sun, whose fierce presence floated far above us in the jungle canopy, the travelling rose window of an inflamed cathedral. The clicking of the cutwater and the steady beat of the diesel engine below the wheelhouse reminded me of clocks ticking to the same rhythm, but these were clocks without hands.

Each morning we set sail soon after dawn, casting off from an overnight mooring beside the bank. Within a few hundred yards the drumming of the engine and the unchanging green walls would erase any sense of the real passage of time, of minutes, hours or days. Noon would whistle to me from her perch in the prow of the
Salammbo
, and point to the vertical sunlight that filled the centre of the channel. Only then would I realize that it was time to boil a pan of rice and resume the hopeless task of trapping a shrike or plover. Hours had slipped by in seconds, falling like dust through the open grilles of my mind.

Since our midnight escape from Port-la-Nouvelle, we had seen nothing of Captain Kagwa, and had overtaken the two advance patrols which he had sent to explore the river by boat. The flight from Lake Kotto had been a dangerous scramble among the sand-banks and islands of waterlogged trees at the mouth of the river. I had barely learned to control the heavy diesel – changes of speed on the wheelhouse throttle, even after a week of practice, would transmit themselves only erratically to the propeller, whose huge blades continued to thump the water like the arms of a boisterous hippo long after I had disconnected the drive shaft.

From the moment she came aboard Noon had tried to guide me, but I was too excited during our escape to listen to her. Struggling with the heavy helm, I steered the ferry into the widest of the three channels that formed the delta of the river, only to run the craft on to a submerged telegraph pole. The
Salammbo
gave a sudden sheer to port and would no longer steer. Fortunately, the pressure of the current against the hull soon freed the keel. Around us raced the silver back of the river, lit from below by the reflected searchlights of the airstrip, like the floor of an open-air nightclub. Drifting trees, trunks locked together by their roots, collided with the prow. The foliage climbed the bows and swept across the car deck, brushing a pane of glass from the wheelhouse before swerving away into the darkness. Standing beside me, Noon picked the glass fragments from her lips. Already she was trying to take over the wheel. Convinced that I would soon run us aground on the gravel cliffs below the airstrip, she left the wheelhouse and ran forward to the bows.

Signalling to me with a series of guttural whoops and whistles, like those used by Port-la-Nouvelle’s pig-farmers, she steered our course past the airstrip. At first I ignored her, but when a huge sand-bar loomed towards us like the partly submerged hull of a submarine, I decided to follow her croaks and signals.

As I expected, the soldiers at the police barracks had radioed Captain Kagwa and told him of my armed theft of the ferry and the rifle shot fired over the sentry’s head. 1 had hoped that Kagwa might think we were crossing the lake and trying to escape southwards down the Kotto River, but he knew my motives too well. Floodlights blazed around the airstrip command post and the soldiers were setting flares for the helicopter. Its blades turned in the darkness as the turbine whined, throwing spears of light across the river. The noise masked the
Salammbo’s
diesel, but a soldier stumbling along the gravel cliff had seen the foam thrown up by the propeller. A ragged volley of shots was fired into the darkness, and a bullet punctured the windshield of the Mercedes and buried itself in the rear seat.

The helicopter rose from the airstrip, but we had already left the buoyed waterway, free of the sand-bars and floating tree-islands of the delta. We passed Mrs Warrender’s ruined house, its roof collapsed as the walls sank into the mud. Then we headed into the open channel, where the forest walls closed around the river, a private highway which shut out even the stars, a tunnel leading out of the night and into the dream.

Sheltered by the trees, we sailed on through the darkness, hiding beneath the boughs which extended their leaves above us, as if in thanks for this abundant watercourse at which they drank. In a sense I had saved the oaks and conifers from the advancing desert, and they now repaid me. Calm at last, I was careful not to overstrain the engine, or to alert Harare’s patrols with any excessive noise. The ferry’s cruising speed of five knots could barely match the flow of the current, and it was almost dawn when we finally left Captain Kagwa’s helicopter behind us. I could hear the drone of its engine as it scoured the river valley, and see the probing eye of its searchlight moving across the wooded hills.

Then, as the river widened to form a long, elliptical lake, I almost ran the
Salammbo
on to the sand-bar that divided the shallow channel. Cutting the engine, I let the craft drift backwards with the stream, only to find that an unexpected current was carrying us towards the western bank. We plunged through the overhead branches, snapping the steel hawsers that supported the mast and loosening the stove-pipe funnel from its mounts. We sat there in the darkness while the current swirled past us, whispering its little warnings against the hull, as if confiding to Noon. We were trapped by the heavy boughs, the propeller embedded in the narrow beach that ran below the trees.

Noon clambered down from the prow. She squatted beside the radiator grille of the Mercedes and thoughtfully strummed one of the guy ropes that secured it to the deck, curious to see how I would set us free.

I throttled back the engine, but as I stepped from the wheelhouse a violent blare of noise and light filled the air. A siren wailed through the flashes of a rotating beacon, and a cold down-draught drove the dark surface of the water into a series of concentric waves. The helicopter settled above the river, like a visiting spacecraft descending from the sky. The huge machine hovered ten feet from the surface, its searchlight racing across the trees. The veering light and the shadows of the leaves threw a dappled camouflage across the ferry, but before I could hide behind the wheelhouse the helicopter had moved away, at the centre of its tornado of noise. It climbed over the hills, following its shadow across the forest canopy. We waited in the seething darkness as the sound of its engine faded into the night, and fell asleep in the firm embrace of the waterside oaks.

I woke into a brilliant riverine light. Reflected in the stream, the sun shone through the awning of leaves that formed a green marquee over the wheelhouse. The surface of the water gleamed like warm lacquer as it slid past the forest walls. The whoop of a strange bird sounded from the canopy above me, answered by the chittering hoot of a small arboreal mammal.

I climbed through the branches that pinned the
Salammbo
to the bank. Noon slept in the rear seat of the Mercedes, thumb in her mouth, her shoulders wrapped in a quilt of green leaves that had fallen through the open window. As she lay asleep, one eye wide open, her cheek rested against the bullet hole in the black upholstery.

Careful not to wake her, I looked up at the forest slopes of the river valley, listening for any sounds of Harare and his guerillas. But the trees were packed so tightly together that the green walls shut out everything but the birds. The river had revived the dying rain forest, and the trees crowded towards the bank like a herd of animals standing shoulder to shoulder at a water-hole.

While Noon slept I took stock of the fuel and supplies aboard the ferry. Brushing the broken glass to one side, I examined the contents of the wheelhouse. The wooden cabin had been the pilot’s combined bridge, shipping office, pantry and sleeping quarters. A straw mattress lay on a shelf along the rear wall, and above it hung a collection of time-tables, bills of lading, fuel dockets and military passes, together with a display of sun-bleached pin-ups.

Among the rubbish on the floor lay a Renault road-map dating from the colonial days of the former French East Africa. I spread the mildewed pages across the desk, trying to gain some idea of the terrain that separated us from the mountains of the Massif du Tondou. From Port-la-Nouvelle the original road had cut through the rain forest to a mining settlement thirty miles to the northwest, following the course of a jungle river long since erased by the southward march of the desert. From there the road set out through the open savanna that stretched across the central basin of Northern Province. Little more than a dust track, the road linked the small farming communities with their vanished French names, crossing a single-track railway line from the south where the latter reached its terminus at Saliere, a trading post and military depot. Fifty miles to the north and west lay tracts of marsh and salt desert which the road avoided, circling eastwards to reach the now abandoned airbase at Bonneville, on the edges of the open Sahara below the foothills of the Massif.

All in all, a journey of some two hundred miles. Although covered with warnings of flash floods, treacherous viaducts, scarcity of fuel and spare parts, the map carried no contour lines, and I could only guess that my new river, assuming it flowed from the mountains of the Massif, followed a course close to the lost road.

I folded the map and placed it on the pilot’s shelf beside the helm. An enamel pail stood on a metal stove by the door, and served as washing-up bowl, hand-basin and saucepan. On the floor under the mattress were two ancient canvas deckchairs, and an almost empty hessian sack stamped with a familiar cipher: ‘Africa Green’.

I opened the sack and ran my hand through the dry rice grains – there were some five pounds in all, enough to feed us for a week, and longer if we could learn to trap the birds and small mammals.

The Lee-Enfield rifle leaned against the helm. I pulled back the bolt, ejecting the spent cartridge I had fired the previous night. I touched the one round left in the magazine, then drove it into the breech. The last bullet was to be saved for an emergency, but already I was reluctant to shoot any of the creatures in the forest.

The river swept by, enveloped in its great calm, fingers tapping against the steel hull of the
Salammbo
, reassuring me that all was well. I swayed against the rail, still light-headed after my night’s sleep. I was hungry, bruised and nervous, my ears tuned to the trees and the river with an almost amphetamine sharpness. Stealing the ferry had been a stupid and dangerous act. I knew that Kagwa would try to kill me, tracking down his precious Mercedes. In every way I was now a hunted animal, but I felt more confident than at any time since arriving at Port-la-Nouvelle. I had begun to shed the hard core of misanthropy, often masked by a professional dedication to good works, that is more common among physicians than their patients realize. My sense of failure and lack of purpose had vanished in the night, replaced by a keen pride not only in the great waterway I had created, but in its abundant flora and fauna. In a giddy way I felt the first hints of certain delusions of grandeur – already I imagined the Mallory irrigating the Sahara and saw myself as the third world’s greatest benefactor …

At the same time, my duel with the Mallory had still to be settled. Roped together below the wheelhouse were six 50-gallon drums of diesel oil, enough to power the crafts engines for at least 300 miles, and carry us safely to the river’s source in the Massif du Tondou. Reminding myself of all I had risked, I stared at the sleek, swollen surface of the river, like the fleshy body of a sleeping woman. In my mind I saw a rocky burn bubbling from a remote cavern among the peaks. I would use the last of the fuel as an explosive cap, and drive the icy spring down into the deepest veins of the mountain. Only then would I seal the mouth of the underground aquifer that I had opened, and close the door upon the great fossil river that had once irrigated the Sahara.

However, for the moment these dreams belonged to the night. When Noon woke half an hour later, roused by the green smoke from the stove, I was preparing a bowl of boiled rice. Her scalp covered with leaves, she watched me gravely through the rear window of the Mercedes, frowning as I stirred the rice with a greasy screwdriver. Once again I was puzzled by the way in which she had attached herself to me, making no attempt to hide her disapproval, like a serious-minded child watching a clumsy adult. I could almost believe that some invisible power had assigned her the task of steering me to the river’s source. Or, more prosaically, was she under Harare’s orders, using me and my obsession as a decoy that would lure Captain Kagwa across the border …?

She was still watching me as she stepped through the passenger door of the limousine. When she lowered her right foot to the metal deck I noticed that the infected wound had at last drained. The scar, like a small red snake, curled around her heel, emerging from its lair within her instep.

‘Comfortable, Noon? The girl-friends of gangsters and police chiefs have slept in that car.’

She squatted by the stove and gazed without expression at the sunlight on the river and the forest walls that enclosed us. Using the pilot’s clasp-knife, I cut twigs from the branches overhanging the deck and fed them to the stove. The green smoke lifted through the trees, merging with a mist that rose in the morning heat.

As I fanned the hissing flames, she reached out and picked a handful of rice from the pot.

‘Hold on – that isn’t cooked yet.’

I tried to take her wrist, but she snatched the knife from the deck and backed away from me like a nervous animal.

‘It’s all right – I won’t hit you. Noon, you’re safe with me.’

She ducked through the branches and slipped behind the limousine. I waited for her to return, decided not to pursue her through the tangled foliage that lay across the deck. One false step, and this odd child would stab me through a kidney.