The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (13 page)

18

A reverie of great rivers had overwhelmed me, moments marked by the measures of dream and myth. I sat under the canvas awning in the bows of the ferry, as the hours and days slid towards us through the copper haze that lay over the distant channel of the Mallory. Even the progress of the
Salammbo
failed to disturb the river. Behind the slow beat of the propeller the wake of bubbles soon dissolved and the water smoothed out any memory of our passage. Around us the river flowed between its ever wider banks, the surface as cool as green chrome. The reflected trees hanging below the beaches seemed more real than the feather-palms and desert lavender that had sprung from the dusty savanna along the margins of the channel. I watched the fish jump as they caught the hovering dragonflies. Bitterns and black herons dived through the surface, moving freely through a realm where air and water had merged into each other. A broader sun lay over us, its warm hand pressing upon the air, which had become thicker and heavier, muffling the sounds of the engine and the distant cries of the birds.

I had lost all sense of how many days had passed, or of how far we had travelled since the helicopter attack. We had rested through the night under the roof of the hangar, where the wounds to my head and ear had dried again. But the torn muscles of my scalp set it askew on my skull, and in turn seemed to tilt my mind, so that it perceived the world at an odd angle, like a misaligned camera.

Noon had kept away from the circle of oil drums where I lay on the mattress, not wishing to be present if I were to die in the night. But at dawn, when I returned to the wheelhouse, I found that she had swept away the glass and pulled the wooden splinters from the bullet hole in the helm, laid the rifle on the bunk and tidied everything like the servant of a wounded warrior.

However, within minutes of casting off I was already too exhausted to hold the helm. The pressure of the current against the ferry’s rudder almost forced me on to my knees as I steered the
Salammbo
between the submerged telegraph poles that marked the northern limits of the military base. Noon stood beside me, and when I faltered she pressed her strong hands over my own. She tugged at the helm with the same grunts with which she had first driven me on to the beach at Port-la-Nouvelle. Clicking to herself, she caught sight of an approaching sand-bank. She pushed my hands aside and spun the helm to starboard, then released the clutch and disconnected the propeller shaft.

Dead in the water, the ferry stopped fifty feet short of the sand-bank, around which a school of excited fish darted to and fro as if waiting for us to run aground. Once we had drifted out into the deep channel, Noon reengaged the propeller, and we set off again, scarcely disturbing the green lacquer of the surface. As she snapped the spring-loaded clutch lever, Noon mimicked my own gestures and fumbles. She spat on her hands, pretending that the throttle was red hot, and reproved herself in a bass voice that partly imitated my own and partly the cassettes from whose instruction I would clearly benefit.

‘Are you in charge, Noon?’ I patted her head, aware how much she had grown in the three months that I had known her. She was still a child, but her legs were longer and less bony, and her hips had begun to swell. In a gesture of annoyance she butted my hand with the back of her head. Glad to leave her to it, I stepped from the wheelhouse and made my way to the bows. There I sat in one of the ferry pilot’s canvas chairs. Bathed in the cool air funnelled through the anchor housing, I listened to the clicking of the cutwater, and watched the passing parade of the green world that I had created.

I had intended to sit in the bows for only an hour until my head had cleared, but in fact I was to spend several days in that canvas chair. Noon had already recognized the combined effects upon me of exposure, fatigue and the infected wound in my head. I found that I could no longer smile at her, for fear of tearing at my scalp. In the wheelhouse locker she found a cotton flag bearing the Toyota emblem. She tied lengths of cord to its corners, fastened them to the bow-mast and to the door pillars of the limousine, and set up a small awning to protect me from the heat.

There I sat like a totem, propped in the bows of this strange ship piloted by a child on its journey towards the sun. As my mind drifted into a shallow fever, I was already convinced that Noon’s presence at the ferry’s helm would in some way shelter us from any further act of treachery by the river. After our escape from Captain Kagwa I had become aware that a duel was taking place between myself and the Mallory.

Since its birth from beneath the root of the oak tree, springing to life between the tracks of the bulldozer, the river had done everything to survive. It had tried to trick, evade and kill me, it had set traps for me, and given me delusions of grandeur by showing me ever more lavish parades of flora and fauna that were no more than cunning decoys.

Yet my wariness of the river soon dissolved in its dividing glass. At nightfall, as a mauve light lay over the water, we moored beside a grove of fan-palms whose foliage would shelter us from Kagwa’s helicopter. When I woke in the canvas chair the next day, my fever had passed and with it all my fears of the Mallory. As Noon slept in the Mercedes, I gazed out at the green channel that I had created, now almost three hundred yards in width. Once again I was struck by the richness of the vegetation that sprang from the desert’s edge, and by the abundant birds and flowering plants, as if an army of aviarists and florists had moved downstream in the night, casting their blossom over the shrubs and saplings, perching the colourful birds among the fragrant nectaries.

Even Noon was impressed by the transformation brought about by this immense flow of water. Child-woman, but still a child, Noon slept late in the rear seat of the limousine. She woke, rubbing her eyes as she sat up, and gazed at the vivid orchids that had fallen across the windshield of the car, like a young actress surprised by the bouquets left outside her bedroom door by an invisible admirer.

The rifle slung over my shoulder, I stood on the roof of the wheelhouse, and scanned the long reaches of the river behind us. During the night, moving in and out of my fever, I had seen lights flickering a mile or so behind us, perhaps Harare’s men signalling from one bank to the other. But the morning channel was as smooth as an unremembered past, and the sky rose in a cobalt wall towards the sun, unmarked by the exhaust fumes of Kagwa’s helicopter.

I watched the water coursing along the bank, overrunning the narrow beach and swilling round the roots of the tilting palm trees. The Mallory was still growing, fed by that primal Saharan river that I had woken from its subterranean sleep. Already I resented others sharing the river with me, and wanted to keep it to myself and Noon. However, destroying or at least diverting the Mallory was now closely bound up with our survival. Kagwa and his soldiers would have their hands full for the next few days – I guessed that the military camp at the estuary had been inundated – but sooner or later the Captain’s imperial expedition would resume. Once Kagwa had established a forward base and fuel depot for the helicopter, the machine would attack us again.

Noon had begun to housekeep, washing the decks with water to keep them cool, gathering kindling for the stove. She carefully measured our ration of morning rice from the sack that she kept in the trunk of the Mercedes. From the small fraction removed each day she seemed to estimate that our journey would end in five or six weeks – either that, or we would have moved to a realm beyond hunger. Tapping her strong teeth, she cast an expert eye over my paint-smeared body, pleased to see that I had recovered. Then she turned to inspect the fish drawn to the cinders which she scattered overboard.

Still modest with me, she stripped behind the limousine, then dived into the green current. 1 knew that she preferred not to let me see her naked, so I sat on the edge of the steel deck and lowered myself into the chest-deep water. Carrying the rifle over my head – despite its lack of ammunition, the weapon would chase away any roaming deserters – I reached the narrow beach, which was little more than a rim of polished silt below the palms. Along its slope was scattered an exhibition of washed stones and smooth limestone fragments, a palaeontology waiting for its future, laid out like the elements of a kit from which a creator might select the fossil bed of a new world.

Noon dived and plunged beside the forward anchor of the ferry, trailing the precious rice grains through the water. She cajoled the fish towards her spear, using a tone of voice similar to that with which she induced me to start the engine each morning, or hunt for firewood for her stove. Her head ducked through the foam, and long legs kicked the air. Her childhood and adult life were merging into each other, as they had done for a few dangerous moments when she first tried to shoot me.

Rifle raised, I stepped between the trees. Groves of small tamarinds had sprung from the damp soil, but I could see the open savanna a hundred yards away, a wilderness of scrub and dust. The bank shelved steeply below my feet, leading me down into a narrow valley that seemed to emerge from the shoulder of the channel.

I looked down at the rounded stones and striated boulders, and realized that I was standing on the floor of a broad wadi, the dried skeleton of a river that had flowed towards the south-east from the Chad border. The Mallory had overrun this ancient water-course, crossing it at right angles, and the shoulder of silt along its banks had filled in the gully through which the current might have escaped.

I heard the ring of the anchor chain, and Noon’s triumphant cry as she speared a fish. Usually I made a point of being present when she caught our lunch, so that I could give her that praise she had never received, but now I ignored her call. I drove my feet into the soft bank. If I dug through the damp wall I would literally pull the plug on the Mallory, breach its western banks and disperse its great watery mass into the waiting desert.

I listened to the current, hesitating before I searched for a spade in the ferry’s tool locker. For the first time the future of this great waterway and its abundant life lay within my hands. I felt nervous of harming them, and yet uncertain about the whole purpose of this strange adventure. I remembered my first appointment after graduating, when I had hesitated in the same way, before deliberately turning down a much sought-after fellowship in the United States. My friends and family had seen this as a self-destructive act, a wilful refusal to accept the possibilities that my own talents had earned. But my refusal, like so many others in my childhood and adult life, had been designed almost consciously to resist the over-warm embrace of the world. Even the smallest nod of approval, like those my father gave me when I passed my first school examinations, filled me with a special kind of irritation. Surprisingly, these refusals opened the door to other possibilities, and at least I stood on my own ground.

The water rushed past, sliding confidently along the bank. I picked up the rifle, slinging it over my shoulder. Already I had begun to resent the river, and realized that in the Mallory I had created a dangerous rival.

19

Death, so eagerly invited, for once failed to keep its appointment. Three hours later, under Noon’s disapproving eye, I had cut a narrow ditch through the bank, and watched the first water tumbling towards the white floor of the wadi. As I lifted my spade and removed the last section of dripping sand, the thin stream raced between my legs, eager to escape from the confines of the Mallory and find a new life in the desert.

I stood back, exhilarated by the work. My fever had returned, but I had managed to harness the waves of nausea and delirium. My arms and legs were smeared with silt that overlaid the earlier layers of oil, rust and paint. Resting on the spade, I watched the narrow stream course past and kept careful watch on the level of the river, almost expecting to see it sink like the contents of a drained swimming-pool. By evening the wadi would be filled. An immense lake would lie across the arid savanna, and there within a few days the body of the Mallory would expire …

Irritated by all this, Noon gnawed the nail of her thumb, tapping her foot against the rifle stock, as if wondering how to shoot me. I left her to the problem, and walked down the sloping ground, following the stream. I stumbled, and slid among the dry stones and remnants of bone. Far from forming a pool, the bright fluid failed to reach the floor of the wadi, sucked into a porous earth as waterless as the clinkers in a firebox.

‘Noon! Come and help! You can shoot me later!’

I threw the spade towards her, knelt in the sand beside the gully and scooped the water with my hands, driving it down the slope. The bright fluid fell on to the dry soil, the drops hissing like miniature bombs, as if setting off the fusing mechanism of life itself. I watched the wadi below me, waiting for the first sheet of water to form.

‘Noon …!’

She stood on the bank, sunk in a depressive slouch, staring at me like a disapproving bride. Already the gully had been blocked. The soft walls had collapsed in on themselves, and the sand was drying in the sun. Bored with me. Noon’s eyes moved to the great green back of the Mallory.

I drove the spade into the wet sand, deliberately spattering Noon’s legs and feet. Happy to explore the wadi, the water raced down the slope, tumbling cheerfully among the dust and bones.

At dusk I was forced to stop. I sat naked in the bows of the
Salammbo
, under the Toyota awning, as a soft haze of cerise light lay like a quilt over the sleeping river. The fever which had spurred me on now bathed my body in a chilling sweat. The moisture soaked the canvas chair and stained the shabby fabric with the oil and paint that engrained my arms and chest. Like a snake unable to shed the skins of its previous incarnations, I bore these layers of dirt that marked out the earlier chapters in this serial of futile efforts. All I had to show for the hours of useless work were a recurrent fever, my guilt at abusing Noon, and a wasted afternoon which might well have put another ten miles between the ferry and Captain Kagwa’s helicopter.

Below me, across the thirty feet of dark water, was the narrow cut through which I had hoped to empty the contents of the Mallory. By late afternoon it was six feet wide. When Noon took the spade from my exhausted hands and broke through the last wall of dissolving sand the river had burst forwards in an unexpected cataract, and cascaded down the ravine into the wadi. The mass of exuberant water threw up a cloud of dust and insects, but within minutes the flow had ceased. Like an immense arterial system, the Mallory was able to seal any wounds in its own walls, and this small haemorrhage was quickly blocked by silt and sand swept into the cut, by dead foliage and clumps of leaves and sudd.

Confused by all this, I slapped Noon when she tried to return to the ferry. Shaking with fever, I hurled the spade into the wadi, and was forced to watch as Noon, without being asked, stoically climbed into the ravine and retrieved the tool. When I tried to thank her she levelled the ragged blade at my face.

But now, at dusk, I could hear her swimming in the dark water below the ferry’s stern. The glimpses of her naked body, partly hidden from me by the vessel’s after-peak, reminded me of other confusions, and of the great stream with which she had identified herself, that river in my own name which I had created and still meant to destroy. Figment of a dream, she had little or no idea of the larger dream that lay around her. I needed to destroy the Mallory, but at the same time I wanted to enlarge it, to encourage it to inundate the Sahara before it died. Digging my pathetic canal, I had pushed myself on with a feverish vision of refilling all the wadis in Africa, of seeing the ancient fossil channels of the desert run with rivers in my own name …

The smell of simmering rice crossed the evening air from the stove beside the wheelhouse. Noon had swum to the starboard side of the ferry. She lay on her back in the dark water, her legs breaking the surface as she lifted her knees, admitting the river like a lover between her thighs. The platinum foam, the soft teeth of this black admirer, played across her small nipples. Was she, in her child coquette’s way, trying to draw me back to the river, to ease my fever for ever in that cool draught between her legs?

I heard the water drip from her body as she stood on the car-deck. I pushed aside the awning and rose unsteadily from the canvas chair, slipping in my own sweat. Trying not to frighten Noon, I leaned against the body of the limousine. From the rear seat rose the faint odour of her skin, which had sustained me that afternoon as I laboured over my canal.

She saw me in the darkness, and moved defensively towards the wheelhouse. I wanted to apologize to her, and reassure her how much I admired her skills, and play her one of the instructional cassettes, perhaps one devoted to the harmony of the sexes.

The sweat from my arms and chest formed oval pools on the black paintwork of the Mercedes, the glistening imprint of a suitor’s body. Deciding that I had no need to hide from Noon, I stepped around the car and walked between the oil drums.

‘Doc Mal …!’

Lights flickered across the water, blue and ruby bars reflected in the dark surface. A river craft was approaching, its hull hidden in the shadows over the water. Trying to remember where I had left the rifle, I watched them emerge from the misty air. A quarter of a mile downstream, the lights swung together like Chinese lanterns, the eyes of a pantomime dragon, perhaps a waterborne shrine with which some superstitious member of Kagwa’s advance-guard was trying to placate the spirit of the Mallory.

Noon had not yet dressed, and watched this strange apparition from the door of the wheelhouse, one hand over her mouth as if stifling the few western sounds that might emerge inappropriately. With the other hand she reached inside the door and passed the rifle to me.

The lights floated on the water, rectangles of red and emerald blinking like traffic signals in the darkness. As they drifted towards us I could see the dark curve of a wooden prow, and then more clearly the bows of a motor launch, a gleam of brass around its anchor. An engine was beating slowly, a tired rhythm that rocked the vessel and tilted its small cargo of lights towards the water. Hidden behind this array of lanterns was a freight of packing-cases swathed in canvas, a dark cargo about to be tipped into the water. The launch was almost awash, and on the port side only a few inches of freeboard separated this clumsy freight from the night stream.

‘Mal …’ Noon gripped my elbow with her sharp fingernails, making certain that I woke from my fever. The moribund vessel passed within fifty feet of the ferry, and we could see its helmsman sitting with his back to the tiller. Slumped against the wooden seat, he steered the launch with his slim shoulders, each twinge of weariness giving the vessel a tilt to port or starboard.

How long this navigation by ordeal had lasted I could only guess, but as the launch passed the stern of the
Salammbo
I recognized the decrepit figure of the young Indian botanist slumped across the tiller.

‘Mr Pal …!’

Its gunnels awash, the launch headed towards the beach. The prow ran on to the sand, and the engine raised its voice for the last time, the propeller screwing wearily into the wake before lying dead in the water. The cargo shifted, leaning over the side, and I realized that the magic lanterns had in fact been the reflections of the setting sun and the forest wall in two dust-caked monitor screens.

Mr Pal sat back against the tiller, staring stiffly at this beach on which he had come to rest. Even in the dim air I could see his emaciated arms and the exposure sores on his forehead and cheeks. His hands rested limply on the wooden seat, legs outstretched between the empty food cans and plastic bottles.

Embedded in this collection of rubbish, as if he had been tipped from a dustbin, was the launch’s passenger. Like an old rat in a safari suit, he scrummaged about in the debris, and then heaved himself against the tiller beside Mr Pal, who spoke a few words of reassurance. The passenger pressed the sunglasses over his eyes. He gazed at the stern of the ferry above his head, where Noon and I stood together, our naked bodies lit by the last bars of sunset. The light glowed in the mud-streaked television screens, as if reminding these inert tubes of the long-lost images of the forest and river bank that now played upon our bare skins in the camera obscura of dusk. Together they seemed to bring his mind to a momentary focus.

‘Dr Mallory …’ Professor Sanger gestured reassuringly from the rubbish on the deck around him. ‘Mr Pal tells me that we have saved you once again …’