The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (15 page)

‘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

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—’

‘Men? Military …?’ Sanger turned and waved to the wheelhouse, then ordered Mr Pal to warn me.

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?’

I was still staring at the soldiers in their customs post. The
Salammbo
drummed its way across the breaking waves, heading directly for the wooden jetty. The soldiers stood on the bank, shouting and waving their machetes. The look-out in the watch-tower adjusted the sights of his machine-gun. We were now less than fifty yards away, and I could see their wide-eyed expressions when they recognized Captain Kagwa’s limousine, puzzled why he should have chosen to deliver the vehicle to this small advance-post. I felt equally confused – it had never occurred to me that Kagwa would order his men to leave the river and drive around it. In some way this broke the rules of the contest between us, and denied the unspoken agreement that we would act out our duel within the river alone.

‘Dr Mallory!’ Mr Pal reached through the door to seize the helm. ‘Sir, this is not a time for going mad!’

I swung the helm to starboard, throwing Mr Pal to the deck. The alarmed soldiers ran from the beach to the nest of rifles stacked beside the truck. The ferry slewed across the water, its rudder handicapped by the weight of the patrol launch lashed to its side. The bows struck the end of the pier and dragged the piles from the river-bed. The concertina of green saplings sprang like a bow, and then collapsed into the shallows, chopped to pieces by the propeller.

The
Salammbo
veered away from the bank, rolling in the confused current, and tossed a heavy brown wave across the beach. The soldiers raised their rifles, still uncertain whether to fire at the Mercedes and the shabby European seated under the awning with a film camera in his hands. I crouched over the helm, and steered the ferry into the centre of the channel. Below the wheelhouse Mr Pal was grappling with a 50-gallon oil drum that had broken loose from its ropes, like an exhausted instructor trying to waltz with an overweight pupil. Noon had abandoned her television studio and retreated to the safety of the limousine. We passed the rubber inflatable, where the sergeant who had once ordered Noon’s execution stood thigh-deep in the water, his strong fist pulling at the outboard motor’s starting cord. As Noon ducked into the Mercedes he pointed to her, like a wildfowler spotting a rare bird across his sights. Open-mouthed, he pushed away the rifle levelled at the girl by the excited soldier staggering in the foam beside him.

We were four hundred yards upstream when I heard the sound of the outboard. Already I knew that they would catch us within a few minutes. The sergeant stood amidships, legs braced against the wooden frame-boards, loudhailer raised to his chin. Mr Pal had returned to the bows, where he squatted under the awning beside Sanger, regaling him with a vivid commentary on my foolishness and our imminent capture. Noon sat in the front passenger seat of the limousine, watching me in her nerveless way. Did she imagine that the sanctuary of Kagwa’s Mercedes would save her when the sergeant stepped on to the deck?

The rubber speedboat was alongside, throwing up huge plumes of spray as its flat hull struck the bow waves of the ferry. The sergeant exchanged his loudhailer for a light carbine handed to him by the soldier in the bows. We sped along together, the inflatable leaping from crest to crest, the
Salammbo
’s funnel pumping out a plume of black smoke that uncoiled across the river.

Balancing on his stocky legs, the sergeant surveyed the ferry, taking in Sanger and Mr Pal huddled beneath the protective ensign of the Japanese car company, latter-day non-belligerents under the world’s most neutral flag. He shouted to the helmsman, then raised the carbine and fired a shot at my head through the open window of the wheelhouse.

I heard the bullet whine across the open water towards the far shore, a harsh whoop drowned by the crack of the cartridge in my ear. I swung the wheel, trying to drive the inflatable into the bank, but the helmsman had already cut his speed. The rubber craft rolled in the ferry’s wake, but the sergeant was already bracing himself for a second shot. I reversed the wheel, deciding to run for the opposite bank, where Noon would have a chance to flee through the forest, and perhaps make her way back to the mountains.

The untethered oil drum slid along the deck and collided with the cargo of film equipment. The ferry sheered across the stream, and a huge wave rolled against the wheelhouse. The motor-launch lashed to the port side rose over the gunnel, crushing the metal rail. As the mooring lines parted, the craft fell back, shipping half the ferry’s wake. Still moving, it began to capsize and almost ran down the speeding inflatable.

Across the river, in the trees above the beach, lights glowed from the undergrowth like the eyes of a dozing cheetah. A camouflaged jeep reversed on to the beach, turned sharply and sped along the water’s edge. Two armed men in the combat fatigues of General Harare’s guerilla force stood behind the driver. They steadied themselves against a machine-gun mounted on the roll-bar above the driver’s head, and trained the weapon on the rubber inflatable.

Already Kagwa’s sergeant had lost interest in us. He sat in the bows of the speedboat, and signalled to the helmsman to turn back. In his panic the young soldier stalled the engine and the craft slumped into the water. Over my shoulder I watched it wallowing in the ferry’s wake, the sergeant lying between the frame-boards as the machine-gun in the racing jeep tapped out a brief burst of fire.

Although these were Harare’s men, I stupidly expected them to offer us their protection. The jeep kept pace with us, its wheels sending up fans of spray as they cut the water’s edge. Then the machine-gun turned towards us, and I saw the soldiers prepare to fire.

I eased back the throttle, idling the engine so that the
Salammbo
was stationary, its propeller keeping pace with the current. The jeep stopped where the beach petered out between the exposed roots of the palms growing in the water. Its wheels half submerged, it sat in the shallows, the driver waiting as the two gunners readied their weapon. Through the door of the wheelhouse I looked down at the bright water below the starboard rail, and hoped that I was strong enough to swim the hundred yards to shore.

A door of the Mercedes slammed in the quiet air. Noon stepped from the passenger seat. She had taken the combat jacket from the windowsill, and now wore this man’s garment whose bulky shoulders swamped her own. She crossed the open deck, buttoning the lapels over her small breasts, and then puffed out the sleeves, so that the camouflage pattern of Harare’s army stood out clearly in the sun.

The soldiers in the jeep watched her over their gun-sights. From a distance her face must have seemed calm and expressionless, but as she approached the wheelhouse her mouth and cheeks were crimped like those of a child too terrified to scream. Ignoring me, she reached into the wheelhouse and picked up the rifle, then raised her left palm to the sun, knuckles touching the shoulder-flash of her jacket, in Harare’s characteristic salute.

The ferry moved away under the uncertain sights of the machine-gun, gaining speed as the channel widened and the current slackened. A quarter of a mile of open water separated us, and the guerillas seemed to lose interest. The driver began to reverse along the beach.

‘Noon …?’

I held her shoulders when she placed the rifle behind the door. She was staring at the guerillas, the expression of fear on her face slowly giving way to disgust. Watching them coldly, she spat between my hands on to the deck.

I tried to embrace her, and felt her sternum throbbing with fear against my ribs, a hammer pumped by her heart, but she slipped through my arms, shrugging off the jacket. Holding the mud-caked garment, I watched her walk across the deck to the cargo of film equipment. She squatted down in this electronic bower, tapping her teeth with her nails. She switched on the small monitor screen, and stared raptly at the image of her face that swam towards her through the dusty glass, with the gaze of an old woman seeing once again the lost world of her childhood.