The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (14 page)

20

All morning the warm sunlight had pressed upon the river, drawing from its surface a vivid mist that blurred the trees on the distant shore and turned the company of soldiers into a wavering phantom army. Four hundred yards upstream, I sat on the floor of the steel tank above the railway water-tower, and watched Captain Kagwa’s expeditionary force preparing to make camp. As the river moved around a sand-bar that lay on its inner curve, a stream of colder water came to the surface. For a few seconds the haze dissipated in the cool air, and Kagwa’s spectral soldiers turned into a force of strong-backed men busily erecting their tents and unloading their weapons from the grey-hulled landing-craft.

Soon after sunrise I had left Noon in command of the
Salammbo
, and set off with Sanger and Mr Pal in the patrol launch, retracing our journey in the hope of identifying the exact size of Kagwa’s private army. In the three days since our meeting at nightfall, Sanger’s estimate of the force’s strength had grown geometrically by the hour, and I began to fear that the Captain had at last called in the central government and notified them of the birth of the third Nile. If so, my quest for the source of the Mallory had already run aground. At night, as I lay in the wheelhouse, listening to Mr Pal’s soft sing-song commentary on the stars, I could hear the distant mutter of the landing-craft’s auxiliary motor, and see the bonfires reflected in the underbellies of the cumulus clouds, another army of ghosts that haunted the night air.

The
Salammbo
was moored in a quiet inlet on the western bank of the Mallory, protected by a shingle bar that almost blocked its entrance, and by the overhanging fan-palms. At dawn Noon watched us go, standing among the sections of film equipment like the adolescent curator of a futuristic museum.

She had been annoyed by the arrival of Sanger and Mr Pal, and the prospect of more mouths to feed, but the sight of the television screens had soon pacified her. She immediately took charge of this mud-covered cargo, eagerly helping me to transfer the cabinets and aerials to the car-deck of the ferry.

Leaving her behind, we set out in the launch, sustained by Mr Pal’s eternal wild-life commentary.

‘… wild magnolias and many small tamarinds, with comfortable footing for passerine birds.’ Exhausted by the ordeal of the past weeks, Mr Pal murmured away, shielding his tired eyes from the overlit water. ‘The river is some eight metres in depth, moving through an ample basin of washed granitic marl, well-stocked with aquatic life. The warm waters offer a friendly refuge to snakes and lizards …’

‘Mr Pal …’ I cut the throttle in protest. ‘For God’s sake – you sound as if you’re stocktaking on the last day of creation …’

‘Well put, doctor, that describes it exactly …’ Nodding sagely, Sanger leaned against Mr Pal as they sat propped together against the engine locker. Sanger nudged the Indian, urging him to continue. His sun-blistered face lay against Mr Pal’s shoulder, eyes hidden behind the dark glasses. For the first time 1 suspected that this documentary film-maker was almost blind, and accepted his whole world through the reassuring cliches of his handyman-scientist.

But before Mr Pal could go on, we heard the blare of Captain Kagwa’s loudhailer across the water. We were now two miles downstream of the ferry. I steered the launch into a shallow creek that ran into a grove of palms. After mooring the launch to a pair of waterlogged trunks, I set off down the beach. Sanger stood upright, almost sitting on Mr Pal’s head, mentally filming my imminent capture by Kagwa.

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 …

‘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?’