The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (21 page)

27

My hands tied behind me with the shreds of the Toyota flag, I sat naked on the sun-baked boards of the open truck. Noon and a soldier leaned against the back of the driving cabin, the chalky dust of the broken road swirling around their shoulders. As we struck the ridges of an abandoned railway line Noon squatted on the floor, too tired to hold the heavy Lee-Enfield. Clasping the rifle between her bare knees, she watched me with the resigned eyes of a farmer’s daughter taking to market an animal she had grown to like, and for which she had once held hopes higher than the nearest meat-hook.

Had Noon always meant to betray me to Harare, or had she disowned me out of expediency? Refusing to meet her eyes, I stared over the rattling tail-gate at the waterway beside the road. We were driving towards the former airbase along the western bank of the diverted channel, through a strip of primitive farms and allotments. The heroic attempt to reverse the advance of the Sahara and make the desert bloom seemed far more modest at close quarters. The farms were meagre patches of open ground between the trees, separated from each other by creeks and irrigation ditches, and dominated by the earthen-walled tanks of standing water. Hundreds of these pits had been sunk into the ground, as the farmers hoarded their booty, and immense care had been taken to pound the walls to a tile-like hardness. By comparison, their small dwellings were hovels thrown together from sheets of asbestos and galvanized iron looted from the airbase.

This sense that a huge act of theft had taken place, that an illicit prize was being hoarded among the rows of banana plants, was reinforced by the listless and guilty character of the stolen waterway. Steadying the tail-gate with my elbow, I looked down at the slack surface that lay against the banks of mud. Half the Mallory was flowing through the revivified desert, but this substantial stream, some fifty yards wide, was as lifeless as an abandoned canal. The flat water had lost all trace of the zest and authority of the great river I had created at Port-la-Nouvelle, and whose course I had followed for the past months. The Mallory had cut its way boldly through the landscape, scoring its firm banks deep into the subsoil, but this diverted channel had left no imprint on the terrain, for all the green life it nourished.

Watching it dissipate itself through the creeks and ditches, I could see that the fishermen and nomadic farmers who had stolen this arm of the Mallory had little confidence in their booty. The truck slowed to avoid a gang of women digging a large pit beside the road. They packed the walls with stones and broken glass, aware that this reservoir, like all the others, would soon vanish if the watertable fell.

They paused over their hoes, peering into the truck and its dishevelled prisoner. Despite my thirst, I was too exhausted to ask them for water. By stealing part of the Mallory, these impoverished people had been bleeding me. I remembered the goats tethered behind the Chinese pharmacies in the back streets of Kowloon, whose exposed carotid veins were tapped by customers paying for a cup of hot blood. I resented the damage they had done to the Mallory, which now lay stolen and dismembered in these mosquito-infested pits. Flies covered my chest and legs, vibrating in a cloud that hovered above the truck. I guessed that my own end was near – as soon as Harare recognized me he would complete the execution interrupted at Lake Kotto by Sanger’s arrival.

However, the condition of these people was little better than my own, as if they had drunk too much of the Mallory’s poisoned waters. For all the crops growing in their allotments, the children were spindly and undernourished, their bony faces flicked over by flies. The anaemic women seemed affected by the slack water in the channel and slapped the walls of their tank in a monotonous way. A distasteful smell hung between the palms, rising from the rank soil of the allotments, twitching the nostrils of the bored men playing cards in the doorways of their shacks.

As we moved along the road the stench gathered strength, and I realized that these desert nomads lacked the experience to deal safely with these huge volumes of water. The earth tanks and ponds beside their shacks were filled with a brackish fluid and were home to myriads of fever-carrying flies and mosquitos, and contaminated with the human wastes with which they fertilized their crops. The watertable that sustained this irrigation of the desert was freighted with disease, which had begun to poison even the stolen branch of the Mallory that sustained it.

The main waterway began to divide, the black arms separating into a series of oily shallows divided by refuse-covered mudflats. Following the largest of the channels, we turned on to a strip of metalled road. A quarter of a mile ahead we reached the gatehouse of the former French airbase, where two of Harare’s soldiers lounged by their weapons, surrounded by a lake of mud. The entire airfield was now a waterlogged marsh covered with waist-high grass where a hundred creeks and canals ran out into the desert. Two metal aircraft hangars stood in the grass, their curved, pockmarked roofs like the hulls of collapsed Zeppelins.

Around us lay the silent streets of the garrison town. There was a galvanized-iron cinema, its faded posters advertising a French tough-guy thriller, a launderette, married quarters and maternity unit, a ruined telephone exchange and even a travel agency. As the palms grew through the rusting roofs there was a sense that the late twentieth century had arrived in this remote desert site, stayed briefly and then left without looking back.

We crossed the town and approached a group of floating barrack huts. Joined by wooden catwalks, they sat in a harbour of shallow mud irrigated by the seeping waters of the river.

Prodded by Noon’s rifle, I climbed down from the truck, and followed the two soldiers along a pathway that led through the high grass. Leaving Noon to guard me, the soldiers set off towards the largest of the floating huts. I stood in the hot sun, ignoring the mosquitos that festered on my naked skin. I watched the brackish water shiver under the soldiers’ heels as they crossed the catwalk. The ripples reached the channel of open water fifty yards away where a small arm of the Mallory still maintained its forward flow. But beyond the marshy perimeter of the airfield the river was dying in the desert wastes. I imagined my own life running out into the dusty scrub, taking with it all memory of my duel with the river.

‘Mal …’

Noon nudged me, brushing the flies from my chest. From a woman soldier in a nearby hut she had brought a camouflage jacket and a tattered pair of fatigue trousers. She hung the jacket over my shoulders, and then helped me to step into the trousers, fastening them around my waist with a length of cord. I leaned my bound wrists against her strong back, trying to read some sort of fellow feeling in her pursed lips. Her slim nostrils jumped as the flies crawled across her face, searching every orifice in a way my eyes had done so many times during our voyage.

Would she shoot me if I tried to run for it? I remembered that her rifle was unloaded. I searched for an escape path through the islands of marsh grass, and then looked for a last time at the remnants of the river, dying here in the desert as if aware of my own end. Pumped by the pressure of my feet on the catwalk, the black bilge-water was oozing a few yards upstream, as if this gangrene at the tip of the Mallory was advancing up its limbs to poison the main body …

One of the soldiers leaned from a door, and whistled sharply to Noon. I followed her across the catwalk into the largest of the barrack huts. The tilting houseboat, mounted on its raft of kerosene drums, formed part of a floating field hospital. Injured soldiers lay on French army coats, gunshot wounds to their elbows and shoulders wrapped in blood-stained plaster, enveloped in a stench of pus and competing gangs of voracious flies. Most of the patients, like the women auxiliaries who shuffled about in a listless way, were suffering from that same swamp malaise I had seen in the people beside the road, poisoned by the foul waters of the diverted river.

Beyond the ward was a small dispensary. A trussed cockerel lay on the floor, eyes blinking ferociously at the male orderly, who stood beside a trestle table decorated tastefully with a selection of empty medicine jars. He was dressing a lanced boil on the cheek of a grey-faced guerilla officer who submitted with squeamish distaste. Behind the lint square, plaster and thinning beard I recognized the sometime student at the Lille Dental College, General Harare.

He frowned at me, too frayed to make the effort of remembering who I was. and then beckoned me forward.

‘Doctor …? Lake Kotto, you were at Port-la-Nouvelle … with the French company, drilling for oil …?’

‘Water, General. I was drilling for water.’

‘That’s right – water. Quite hopeless. You can squeeze blood from the African stone, but never water. Doctor …?’

‘Mallory. I looked after your teeth, General. I treated many of your men. The sergeant …’

‘Of course – you syringed his ears. You must treat him again, he can never catch my orders. Dr Mallory … we heard about you and one of my women soldiers. You shot two of Kagwa’s men and stole a ship.’

‘The car-ferry
Salammbo
– we’ve sailed it here.’ As Harare nodded sagely I realized that he assumed I had defected to them. ‘I brought a Mercedes for you, General – it’s on the ferry. Captain Kagwa’s personal limousine.’

‘The village policeman’s Mercedes? No wonder Kagwa wants to kill you … he’s across the Chad border, buying gasoline for his helicopter, or perhaps selling his memoirs. They say he has his own television unit with him …’

Harare looked up at me, as if envying Kagwa this instrument of power and fame, and hoping that I might be able to offer him some comparable facility.

‘General, he’ll be back. He’s brought a landing-craft and about sixty men – they’re fifteen miles south of here.’

‘We know – they are waiting in the papyrus swamps, killing my poor fishermen. You’ve had a fight to get here, doctor.’ He pointed to the rags of the Toyota flag, assuming that the red stripes were the blood stains of a wrist injury. ‘Are your arms broken?’

‘Kagwa’s helicopter machine-gunned us.’ I held my hands as if they were tightly bandaged. ‘Luckily I’ve recovered.’

‘More lucky than you think – there are no medicines here. This hospital doesn’t cure its patients, doctor, it kills them.’ His pallid face flushed with blood, he gripped the orderly’s shoulders, trying to straighten his left leg. ‘Useless – from now on all I can do with this leg is kneel. And with Kagwa coming it’s time to say a few prayers.’

‘He’ll hold off as long as he can, General. He’s a cautious man.’

‘Of course. He doesn’t want to waste his gasoline. We’re small beans to him. He’s thinking about his Mercedes. That country policeman is going to be Governor of Northern Province.’

‘Then move into the mountains, General. Follow the river to its source.’

Harare pushed the orderly from him. ‘These people won’t leave. Every soldier has his family and a little farm. They have water now, doctor, their precious see-through gold.’

‘But the Sahara is blooming again. General, it’s a lost dream come to life.’

‘At what cost? Our desert revolutionaries have become docile gardeners. This river has been a curse, doctor. I warn you, it’s a poisoned paradise. Half these people are sick.’

‘Then use the river against Kagwa.’

‘How can I? The river has been Kagwa’s main weapon, a highway that will deliver him right to our door.’

‘Then close it off! Build the barrage across both channels. Already the water-level is falling – if you extend the dam to the east bank you will sink Kagwa and his landing-craft on to the river-bed.’

Through a nearby window one of the auxiliaries tipped a pail of faecal waste into the water below. The stench drifted through the dispensary, for a moment subduing even the flies. Harare took the orderly’s arm and rose on to his sound leg. Grimacing at the chicken on the floor, he moved to the open porch at the rear of the hut. As I stood beside him I could see him staring across the swamp grass and creeks of the airfield. He was gazing towards the south, to the hazy mist and green light that marked the southern course of the Mallory. Following his raised arm, I saw a faint plume of smoke, not from Kagwa’s landing-craft, but from the funnel of the bordello-boat, the white ship of the widows.

Suppressing my fears, I turned and looked away, to the mountains in the north-east and the headwaters of the river. Under the weight of our feet the black mud oozed forwards, seeping into the clear water of the stream beyond the harbour. Already I could imagine the Mallory ligatured, its last artery tied down, and the poison flowing upwards into the trapped headwaters.

I hesitated, unsure whether to seize my chances with Harare. By completing the barrage, even though it served my purposes, I would virtually seal the fate of these impoverished people. For their sake, and for the river’s, I should do my best to destroy the existing barrage, even if this sped the time of Kagwa’s arrival. Yet this would be to yield to the Mallory. My own obsession, which had carried me so far, was all that I had.

Noon stood beside me, and began to undo the bonds around my wrists. She seemed business-like and confident, already refreshed after the rigours of our voyage. She met my eyes, in the shared glance of the conspirator, and then stared at the upper channel of the river, waiting for me to resume our journey. The pontoon tilted under her weight, pumping a further increment of black mud into the stream, reminding me of all the wastes that the people of this green Saharan garden would generate together, enough poison to infect the river and pursue it to its source.

I pointed to the distant plume of the
Diana
, remembering that Sanger’s equipment was on board.

‘By the way. General, I have contacts with a visiting television producer. I can easily arrange for you to be filmed – your interview would appear in every Japanese living-room …’

28

As always each afternoon when I went out to examine the river, I saw Noon sitting in her metal skiff by General Harare’s jetty, waiting for me to set off again on our journey. It was already late when I woke in the wheelhouse of the
Salammbo
, and I could hear Noon striking the water with her punt pole in a bored way. But I had been unsettled by a return of my fever, and by the distant sounds of mortar fire from the hills to the east.

All night the flashes of gunfire had crossed the darkness, reflected in the broken glass of the wheelhouse like flickers of lightning deep in the forest valleys. Around me, as I lay on the sweat-soaked mattress, I could see the flashes reflected in the chromium trim of the metal debris embedded in the barrage, the refrigerators, photocopiers and air-conditioners scavenged from the airbase. The huge brassiere of the dam, on whose left breast I and the
Salammbo
rested, glittered like the corsage of a carnival queen. The escaping waters of the Mallory spilled through the flesh of the barrage and poured into the pool below, jets of noise that even the gunfire failed to drown.

When I roused myself and stepped on to the deck I found that Noon had lost interest in me. She had moored her skiff by the jetty reserved for General Harare’s escape on the upper waters of the Mallory, above the barrage and the rocky cascade. There she flirted with the two sentries guarding Kagwa’s limousine – the grimy vehicle was now Noon’s home – and tried to teach them a few words of her primitive English. For my benefit she pretended to entice these youths from their post, urging them to give up the fight against the Captain’s forces and to take my place in the search for the river’s source.

However, as I walked down the inner face of the barrage, following the pathway towards my raft, she immediately turned from the sentries and paddled into the centre of the stream. Her metal skiff was the lower half of an aircraft drop-tank, which she had retrieved from the debris as I supervised the construction of the barrage. In its way this was a small flourish of defiance, a reminder that she could still rescue some hope for our stalled expedition from the preposterous structure which now blocked the waters of the Mallory.

As she sailed across the tarry surface of the river in the afternoon light, this grey tank resembled a silver slipper bearing the princess of every fairy tale. She stood up and casually displayed herself to me, and I found it difficult to believe that this handsome young woman with her feverish but elegant pose, a high-temperature Venus borne by her aircraft shell, was only six months older than the lock-jawed child who had paddled in her coracle around the waters of Lake Kotto.

‘Noon … come with me!’ There was a small, four-horsepower outboard on my raft which could easily outrun Noon’s skiff, though for some reason I could never catch her. ‘You look tired today – let me examine you …’

But she made no reply, snorting with laughter when I slipped in the greasy scum along the rubble bank. A dead snake lay in the shallows, hidden among the rotting timbers and the oil leaking from the bilges of the
Salammbo
.

I watched Noon punt herself upstream, dismissing the young soldiers with a haughty wave while watching me over her shoulder. Before following Noon I needed to inspect the barrage. Buffeted by the left shoulder of the Mallory as it turned to irrigate the desert settlements, the mass of scrap metal, soil and rubbish was constantly shifting. The barrage was held together by the retaining nets secured to the hull of the
Salammbo
, and this precarious dam threatened at any moment to collapse and spill itself into the pool below.

Soon after my first meeting with Harare, six weeks earlier, I had persuaded the ailing guerilla leader of the need to complete the Mallory barrage, partly as a strategic blow against Kagwa – we would steal the river literally from under the keel of the approaching landing-craft – and partly as a means of extending the Saharan settlements, and attracting more nomadic farmers from whose ranks Harare could recruit his fighters.

Though fuddled by the side-effects of a discontinued brand of sulpha drug, Harare had assigned me a platoon of convalescent soldiers, who in turn rounded up a workforce of some thirty village women. They assembled by the cascade, and stared listlessly at the eastern arm of the Mallory, eager to seize these free-flowing waters but hopelessly daunted by the task.

Our first efforts to construct a containment wall of earth and masonry were washed aside by the swift current, the waters of the river escaping through our legs like spawning salmon. The villagers’ ragged fishing-nets were too short to span the cascade. Soon discouraged, they began to walk back along the beach, returning to the stagnant, malarial waters of their allotments and reservoirs.

I had brought the
Salammbo
alongside a wharf in the pool below the barrage, where the soldiers off-loaded Captain Kagwa’s limousine. As they pulled away the wooden ramp I stood in the wheelhouse, my hand on the throttle. I could feel the current tug at the ferry’s bows, as if the Mallory were teasing me with the notion of shooting the cascade.

The last of the village women were climbing between the frayed nets, throwing their loads of stone into the water. Exasperated with them, I throttled up the engine and set off across the pool towards the lowest steps of the cascade. Behind me I heard Noon shout out in alarm. She ran along the beach after the mooring line, convinced that in my typically eccentric way I was trying to continue our journey.

Twenty feet from the cascade, the
Salammbo
ran aground on the gravel bed, almost midway between the eastern bank and the central island. Ignoring the soldiers’ shouts, I held the throttle forward, as the propeller churned up a fountain of spray that brought the work-gang back to the water’s edge. Wrench in hand, I lowered myself through the engine hatch. As I fumbled in the dark bilges, I felt the
Salammbo
’s keel slipping on the gravel, borne back by the rushing roar of the Mallory against the craft’s hull. Then water drenched me from the stern-cock, boiling off the exhaust manifold in a cloud of steam that filled the engine compartment and enveloped the startled faces of the soldiers peering into the hatch.

Within ten minutes the
Salammbo
had embedded itself securely in the gravel bed. Impressed by the sight of this metal caisson, the women returned to the task of stealing the Mallory. Less than a month later the barrage across the river was complete, and the
Salammbo
, which had carried us so untiringly from Port-la-Nouvelle, sat in its last anchorage, surrounded by a refuse tip of freezers and enamel stoves, water coolers, aircraft tail-planes and radio antennae, together forming a terminal moraine of modern technology.

Meanwhile I had stolen my own river. Interrupted in its passage south, the Mallory now followed the westward course of the first detour towards the greening desert, briefly cleansing the stagnant tanks and irrigation ditches, and setting off a flurry of digging and hoarding. Ironically, the increased supply of water had led, not to an increase in the cultivated land, but to a fierce competition among the ditch and reservoir builders. Networks of irrigation channels ran between the allotments to the wells and standby tanks, but not a single new maize or banana plant was to benefit. Elaborate rituals sprang up among these debilitated people to celebrate the transfer and barter of blocks of stagnant water and all their energies went into disputes of ownership of this disease-infested fluid. The intense rivalry led to bitter brawls, through which I moved unscathed, regarded by these people as their rain-king. Harare was too ill and too concerned with the threat of Captain Kagwa to care that I was becoming the shabby sultan of these impoverished nomads. I patted the sore-infested pates of their children, injected out-of-date sulphonamides into the arms of the old men and in general lorded it over my moribund domain.

However, I had more urgent concerns at hand. The level in the pool below the barrage fell by some four feet, but enough water sprang through the earth retention wall to sustain a narrow but navigable channel downstream. Following its course from the deck of the
Salammbo
, I watched the wounded river wind its way to the south between the great silt banks, now white as death, that rose into the sun from the retreating shallows.

As expected, the sudden fall in the Mallory had given pause to Captain Kagwa. In the weeks of the barrage’s construction the sounds of gunfire had drawn ever nearer. The bursts of mortar shells and the flames from the burning trees trembled in the mountain valleys two miles to the south-east. Twice the helicopter flew over the pool before being driven away by rifle fire, the French pilot photographing the broad sweep of the Mallory as it turned westwards down its new channel.

Harare had offered to me the private quarters of the former French commander at the airbase, but I had decided to stay aboard the
Salammbo
. There were unstated bonds between myself and this antique vessel. The metal debris in which it was embedded set up a constant wailing and groaning, and in my fever I almost believed that I was embarked on an even stranger voyage across the garbage pits of the planet.

A week after the completion of the barrage Nora Warrender’s floating brothel appeared in the pool. Silhouetted against the dark hills to the east, its white hull appeared to float on the sunset, a gliding sepulchre of polished bone. It arrived soon after dusk, under the wary guns of the sentries who guarded the barrage. I could see Mrs Warrender and her sisters on the bridge, Fanny holding the helm in her strong arms. They attempted to moor against the barrage, but were sent away by a patrol boat and forced to anchor by the southern exit from the pool two hundred yards away. As darkness settled, a line of lanterns glowed from the awning of the restaurant deck. The soft lights framed the bar and dance floor, illuminating the waters of the pool. The ruby and turquoise beams shone on the drab uniforms of the guerillas who went out to inspect the
Diana
, and transformed them into actors in a harlequin pageant. Within an hour, Louise and Poupee were pushing the first beer bottles across the bar, and the soldiers hung their webbing across the restaurant chairs. Even Sanger fumbled about the dance floor, setting up a television screen for the amusement of the customers. Watching his blind, scurrying figure, barely tolerated by the women, I could scarcely remember the sly entrepreneur I had met at Port-la-Nouvelle.

During the days that followed, the
Diana
remained moored on the far side of the pool, its lantern doused but the bar open for business, and parties of soldiers rowed out to the ship. As the men drank the stale beer at the restaurant tables and jigged across the dance floor to a scratchy pop record, I wondered if they were about to have their throats cut, or if the cabins below deck had reopened for business. So contemptuous were the women of the men who had killed their husbands that they could sleep with these drunken soldiers without any care.

Whatever the women’s motives for mooring in the pool, I was careful to avoid them. In their eyes, dreaming of death, I could see reflected only the leprous yellow spears of the papyrus swamps.