The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (16 page)

22

My courtship of Noon, which had sustained me for so many weeks, now took second place to our survival. Soon after our escape from Kagwa’s speedboat, we entered an unexpected sector of the Mallory. The river issued from a wide plateau of marsh and salt-desert, a terrain of mists and melancholy birds shrieking to each other across the solitary lagoons. Beyond the rim of the plateau we could see the foothills of the Massif du Tondou, whose secret valleys concealed the source of the Mallory.

The river, meanwhile, had changed its character. Although the volume of its waters remained the same, the main channel had divided into a maze of swamps and reed-covered islands, as if trying to conceal its identity from itself. On the third morning, within an hour of setting sail from the island where we had moored through the dark, I lost sight of the river’s banks and entered one of the huge lagoons that lay like inland lakes between the causeways of papyrus and bamboo. Fed by all this moisture, a heavy mist lay between us and the sun, and at midday this miasma turned into an amber haze, so that we seemed to be forever drifting within the mirage of a golden sea. The air was filled with unfamiliar birds which had made their home in these marshes, hunting for the snakes and small frogs which were now the sole marine life. Their unwearying cries crossed the bronze air, as their winged bodies, the cryptic letters of a stylized alphabet, whirled over our heads like fragments of a threatening message, a warning to me from the mountains of the Massif. Through the overheated light I saw the movement of another craft. A local fisherman punted his outrigger two hundred yards away, the wavering image of his black figure like a painted stroke on a Chinese scroll.

‘Noon … I need you here …’

Deliberately I cut back the engine, and allowed the ferry to drift across an island of reeds. The serrated fronds rasped against the hull, scraping away the layers of rust and mud. Noon’s head emerged from the miniature studio amidships where she spent her day under the makeshift but stylish sunshade of a photographer’s silver umbrella. She glanced at the static expanse of the lagoon, and at the narrow causeway which separated us from the river. Treating me to an impatient glare, she left the studio and made her way to the bows, stepping over the reclining figures of Sanger and Mr Pal under their Toyota awning.

I watched her as she glanced matter-of-factly into the mist and heat-haze, like an experienced housewife inspecting the stalls of a strange market. As always, I marvelled at how quickly she could orient herself. Unerringly she would pick out the best course for us to take, as if her mind was equipped with some underwater sonar, avoiding a submerged shoal of rocks or the roof of a mining company silo. At times I suspected that she knew, perhaps unconsciously, the whole course of the Mallory.

This intimacy with the hidden fathoms of the river, its longest reaches and eventual source, I took to be the reason for her attachment to me. Unlike the others, Sanger and Captain Kagwa and Nora Warrender, she accepted that the river and I were one. This awareness of the real nature of the Mallory was a foreknowledge of my own body. The fish and snakes she beguiled from the water in order to feed us were the hopes and fears that had sent me on this quest. I knew now why I liked her to bathe naked in the river, to immerse herself in that larger dream that sustained our journey. Already, as we moved upstream, my wish to destroy the river was giving way to the belief that there was some secret at the Mallory’s source, and that Noon alone would guide me towards it.

She touched the hazy air with her hand, nosing it like a wine-taster inhaling a bouquet. The contours of unseen deeps moved on the light, mapping themselves on the screen of some concealed compass behind her eyes.

She ended her survey with a flourish, glancing at the digital watch on her wrist. The gesture was for my benefit. Sanger had given the watch to Noon, bribing her to bring water to Mr Pal, and she now wore this cheap chronometer as if it were the most elegant piece of jewellery, recognizing that its liquid crystal display and press-button functions belonged to the same family of signals as the captions on Sanger’s documentaries. Was she using the watch to calculate true north? But in these marshes and lagoons the sun was scarcely visible in any direction, and seemed to emanate from a glowing haze all around us. The
Salammbo
’s crew comprised an oracular child and three men with blurred shadows.

Noon whistled to me, rousing my attention as I dozed over the helm. She pointed to the remote north-west corner of the lagoon, a waterlogged area of crumbling embankments and small islands.

‘Noon …? Is this another game?’

I swung the wheel to starboard and eased forward the throttle. Smoke pumped from the funnel as the
Salammbo
pushed through the shallow water. Noon squatted in the bows, now and then scowling at Sanger and Mr Pal, who sat slumped together under their awning. We approached a palisade of tall reeds that grew from the submerged banks, the air around them festering with flies and mosquitos. A host of small frogs filled the water, feeding on the algae that turned the surface of the lagoon into a translucent jelly. A nervous egret plunged through the haze, hunting the small snakes that in turn fed upon the frogs. It burst from the water and screamed across the ferry. The wriggling form in its beak covered the air with a calligraphy of pain.

Looking down at these primitive creatures, I realized that we had left behind for ever the domestic realm of the small mammals in the lower reaches of the Mallory, the passerine birds and flowering plants. We had returned to the more primitive world of the amphibians and raptors hunting among the walls of reeds that stood like bronze spears in the humid light of a younger sun. Here, the car ferry with its limousine and television equipment seemed as exotic as a visiting spaceship.

The helm spun through my fingers, as the bows of the ferry sheered to port. We were about to run aground on a causeway of mud that formed the northern wall of the lagoon. The reeds rasped against the hull, thrusting at my face through the broken windows of the wheelhouse.

‘Noon … get down!’ I began to reverse the engine, but at the last moment a breach appeared in the palisade. The ferry slid through the gap, its propeller thrashing the yellow spears into a trail of crushed basketwork. We entered a wide and silent channel, a wandering arm of the river which Noon had identified from the centre of the lagoon, in some way reading the scents of fresh water among the screaming birds.

At the mouth of the channel, where the great back of the Mallory swept past through the haze, I saw the remains of a military bivouac. A squad of Harare’s soldiers had camped on a small island, whose grass they had burned back to give them tent-space.

I uncoupled the propeller, letting the ferry drift into the reeds. While Sanger and Mr Pal watched me glassily from beneath their awning, I jumped into the water and waded ashore through the scorched grass. Around me were the remains of the soldiers’ camp – the baked shards of an earth stove, beer cans lying in the ashes, a rusty ammunition box filled with spent cartridge cases, ragged rubber boots. I searched among the debris, hoping to find a single round for the Lee-Enfield.

As the smoke lifted from the ferry’s funnel I kept careful watch for this passing patrol. I assumed that the river now emerged from a zone controlled by Harare’s forces. Our supplies of food were almost exhausted – barely six cupfuls of rice remained in the sack, and we would run out of both food and fuel within three days, long before we reached the headwaters of the Mallory. The strain of serving as the ferry’s captain, chief engineer and stoker, the effort needed to decant the diesel oil into the fuel manifold, and the unending pressure of the helm against my arms had together drained half the blood and muscle from my body. Exposure sores covered my face and forehead, flourishing in my beard like fungi in a damp meadow.

Despite these handicaps, I was determined to press on. My own fever and light-headedness, and Noon’s guile, had carried us to within sight of the Mallory’s source.

*

‘Doctor! Mr Pal’s eyes—!’ Sanger crouched under the awning, swaying feebly against the guy ropes. Burning tinder crackled in the stove on the deck beside the wheelhouse, warming up a pail of frogs, and Sanger coughed on the green smoke. I returned to the ferry, climbed past the mud-spattered limousine and went forward.

‘Mallory, I’m concerned for Mr Pal – his eyes are troubling him.’ Sanger snatched at my hand and squeezed the wrist-bones, again making sure that I was not some imposter. ‘Try to remember your other self …’

The two men sat together under the awning, the remains of several meals scattered at their feet. The set of once-elegant department store mess-tins were caked with burned rice and fish scales. All day they huddled side by side in their deckchairs, shabby-genteel passengers who had taken one tramp steamer too many. Sanger’s face was hidden by the brim of his straw hat, but I could see that his lips and cheekbones were pocked with insect bites that had festered for weeks, his neck inflamed by a sun-induced viral response. He placed an arm around Mr Pal’s shoulder, and listened impatiently to his heart.

‘The birds, doctor – I can’t hear a thing. Call away your birds!’

Beside him, Mr Pal lay slumped in his chair. He had bruised his abdomen while wrestling with the fuel drum, and an ascending liver infection had given his face the pallor of tarnished copper. He sat back with closed eyes, but then began a gabbled description of the lagoons and reed-islands, the commentary on a dream.

‘… these lagoons support an extensive marine life, amphibians and gravel feeders … the nutrient-filled waters also provide a home for estuarine crocodiles—’

‘Crocodiles? We are far from any estuary … but crocodiles would be useful, Mr Pal. Keep an open eye …’

‘… in addition, certain species of salamander bask in the afternoon sun … at dusk the phoenix flies …’

Already the commentary was touched with fantasy, but as I knelt in front of Mr Pal he placed his hands on my chest and forced me away, fixing me with a sudden grimace.

‘… a highwayman approaches, sir, an evil dacoit who will abduct your daughters …’

‘Quiet, Mr Pal.’ Sanger restrained him, holding his hands like a mother calming a fractious child. ‘You see, Mallory, you must do something for Mr Pal’s eyes. Remember that you were once a doctor.’

‘Noon is cooking a meal. Afterwards he can lie on my bunk in the wheelhouse.’ I peered briefly at the blanched inner lids of Mr Pal’s eyes. ‘In the mountains it will be cooler.’

‘Mountains? That is mirage-talk. We should turn back, doctor. Mr Pal is clearly very ill.’

Looking down at the jaundiced Indian, I decided to give him half my ration. I knew that I had neglected the botanist. In a curious way, my moral standards and sense of responsibility had declined, although I had become a more generous and a happier man. And, for the moment, I needed him alive. Recalling Harare’s vanity, it occurred to me that Sanger and his television unit might at last prove useful. The film camera was probably the one passport that would allow us through the guerillas’ lines.

‘Doctor? Bring your mind to some kind of focus!’

‘He’ll recover. It’s a transient fever.’

‘There’s an epidemic of them on this ship. We can cure the entire outbreak by altering course for Port-la-Nouvelle.’

‘No – we’ll go on.’

‘You’re still obsessed with this absurd dream? To reach the source of the river? Look at yourself, doctor!’

‘Think of the documentary, Sanger. I know it will astound the Japanese.’

‘Foolishness, Mallory. We must turn back now.’

‘We’ve come too far.’ I looked out at the broad stream, its surface tinted gold by the hazy sun. ‘We’ll reach the source – it’s a point of honour.’

‘It’s a point of lunacy – you’re a small man, Mallory, and a small man’s madness can take dangerous forms.’

Sanger stood up, trying to guide me back to the wheelhouse, his head lost in the Toyota awning. Behind the mud-spattered glasses his weak eyes flinched from the sun. As he fumbled with the canvas flag I realized that Sanger would soon be wholly dependent on me.

‘Noon! Bring water!’ I pushed Sanger into his seat. Noon was squatting by the stove, pulling the legs off the hundreds of small frogs she had caught, and tossing them into the frying-pan. She left the stove and came forward, carrying a video-cassette in her hand. Tapping her teeth in her substitute for speech, she rattled it in front of the two men.

Mr Pal revived at the sound, and reached down to the leather bag which lay on the deck beside his chair. This held a small library of cassettes, the most valuable currency on board the ferry. He and Sanger loaned the cassettes to Noon in return for various favours. She would bathe them, carry water, clean the deck around their feet, wash their clothes, and then retreat to her electronic den with a fresh cassette.

To my surprise, glancing over Noon’s shoulder as she sat before the monitor screen, I noticed that many of the cassettes consisted of extracts from old-fashioned commercial documentaries, sequences of elephants rolling logs, warriors stamping at the coronation of a paramount chief, bare-breasted women carrying water-pitchers on their heads, and other clichés of the earliest days of the wild-life film. These, Sanger had explained, supplied a useful model for his own films, and a stream of pseudo-authentic footage consonant with the images deeply implanted in the minds of their audiences. I had strongly disagreed, and pointed out that the West’s image of Africa was now drawn from the harshest newsreels of the civil wars in the Congo and Uganda, of famine in Ethiopia, and from graphically explicit films of lions copulating in close-up on the Serengeti or dismembering a still-breathing wildebeest. But Sanger claimed that these were merely another stylized fiction, a more sensational but just as artfully neutered violence, and that an authentic firsthand experience of anything had long ceased to be of meaning in the last years of the century. “The truth is merely the lie you most wish to believe,’ he liked to opine. ‘After all, your creation of the river has sprung from a familiar repertory of childhood clichés. I even suspect that your wish to destroy it is really an attempt to destroy television’s image of the world …’