The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (25 page)

34

Six days later, sustained by these desperate stratagems, we at last reached the source of the Mallory.

During our final passage through the misty gorges of the river, I lay beside the silent outboard at the stern of the raft, paddling with one hand as I listened to Sanger describe landscapes of imaginary splendour. In its ambiguous way, the broken camera of this blind filmmaker had kept us going. Its cracked lens supported us both in the illusion that we were making a lasting record of our hunt for the Mallory. I was happy to collude in this, aware that I could distance myself from that other person I had known, a physician at Port-la-Nouvelle who had allowed a grand obsession to capture him.

The day after my brawl with Sanger, on whom I soon became almost wholly dependent, we entered an area of chilling rain cloud. The fluted cliffs which had lined the gorges of the Mallory now fell back, leaving the river to meander through a wide valley. Here we rested, and I was at last able to start the engine. On all sides there were traces of recent volcanic activity. Igneous rocks and pumice were mixed with coarse-grained gneisses marked with bands of granular material like the symbols of some stratified alphabet. On the cold shore-line there grew only a few ferns, and the empty slopes were covered with a green glaze of lichens and stunted grasses. The river, little more than fifty feet in width, flowed between small islands of red mud, and the water was opaque with a thick russet silt. The sluggish wavelets that swilled across the raft left a copper scum across the wooden frame. As a bleary sunlight shone through the mist we seemed to dissolve in this primordial soup, at one with the trilobites and ammonites washed on to the deck.

On the fifth afternoon the outboard engine failed for the last time, and I then discovered that I was too weak to help Sanger with his rowing. However, the endless archipelagos of waterlogged islands allowed us to keep up with Noon. She squatted with the punt pole in the stern of the steel shell, like a fatigued acrobat, wearily testing the maze of channels. At times she seemed to lose interest in us altogether, for hours moving away into the mist in search of that secret treasure which I now knew lay at the source of the Mallory.

On the next morning the mist was suddenly dispelled by a strong and unbroken sun, whose beams probed around us like the gaze of a friendly sentry. We had spent the dawn in a frozen sleep, adrift among the islands of mud. As the air cleared we woke to find that the mountains had receded almost to the horizon. We had entered a vast plateau, covered with red laval mud and shallow pools, the floor of a huge lake some twenty miles in width.

‘Sanger … we’re home.’

He was already awake, lying across the raft with his blistered face to the sky. Without thinking, he reached one hand into the water and paddled feebly.

The raft had grounded on the bank of a shallow pool. I eased myself into the warm sulphurated water, and looked out at the damp vistas of this marine world, the bed of an immense lake that had once covered the plateau. I assumed that at some time in the recent past a tectonic shift along a deep plate-line had fractured its floor and walls. The displaced waters of this lake had formed the Mallory, first flowing through the subterranean conduit which surfaced at the Port-la-Nouvelle airstrip, and later in the channel of the Mallory itself. Nonetheless, I still believed that I had created the river. By dislodging the stump of the ancient oak 1 had allowed a current to flow which in turn had encouraged the waters of the lake to burst their banks.

‘Sanger … it’s still flowing.’ I waded around the raft, feeling the faint southward tug of the current, moving across the plateau from the secret headwaters of the river. Somewhere beyond these shallow pools, in the northern slopes of this drained lake, lay the source of the Mallory.

I released the raft and let it drift on to the muddy bank. Sanger was fretting at the water with one hand, still testing the current. He had now become more determined than I was to hunt down the Mallory to its end. He had slept fitfully through the night, constantly waking to see that I was still alive, and trying to revive me with his commentary on the shifting darkness, part delirium and part imaginary travelogue.

With his free hand he shielded his face from the vivid sun, and then launched again into his rambling exposition.

‘A primaeval lake, Mallory, the original mud world, covered by a strange light … our lens won’t care for it, so we picture you in close-up, an aggressive mammal answering a deep migratory call … can you see the source?’

‘Ahead of us – perhaps half a mile.’

‘Prepare yourself, Mallory … now we reach our climax, returning to that primitive fount from which all the rivers of the earth have sprung, the moment when consciousness moved into the daylight, from the reptile to the mammalian brain … now God exists, Mallory, perhaps you have returned to Eden to destroy Him … a messiah for the age of cable television.’

But I no longer needed his commentary. A shadow wavered across the surface of the lake; the mist had lifted, taking with it the watery, confused light. Through the clear air Noon’s silver craft slid through a narrow neck of water into the larger lake to the north. She sat upright in the stern, hips pivoting as her frail arms swung the punt pole. She had recovered her strength now that the river’s source was in sight.

Leaving the raft, I waded through the water, following a bank of viscous mud. I strode through the shallows, my hands warding off the hot spray that leapt into my face.

When I reached the inlet Noon had already crossed the adjacent lake. Exhausted, I sank into the warm water. My feet had dislodged part of the isthmus of laval mud that separated the two pools. As I rinsed the water across my legs, the warm mud dissolved and flowed across me, a soothing quilt that tempted me to rest for ever beneath its balmy covers.

Released now, the water slid past, a brief tidal rush that raced across the surface. The quickening current carried Sanger and the raft for fifty feet, and then beached them on a shelf of copper silt.

Upstream, the next lake was emptying itself. Stranded by the falling water-level, Noon stepped from her craft. She threw the pole aside and strode through the water towards a narrow cleft in the bank. Here the last remnants of the Mallory flowed from the lava flats that formed the northern rim of the plateau.

The tepid water slid past my ankles as I followed her across the lake. Silhouetted against the lava dunes, her strong shoulders emerged through the steaming air. Watching her confident stride, I could see that Noon was now a young woman. Somewhere in this maze of pools, we would lie together and conceive a second Mallory.

I waded past her steel skiff, and approached the narrow stream that vented itself from the bank. Only three feet wide, this was all that remained of the river. Noon, however, was undismayed. Following the stream, she strode with the jaunty step of a returning traveller at last in sight of her home village.

The prints of her feet, the scarred right instep like a diagonal arrow, moved in front of me along the edge of the stream. Marooned by the falling river, islands of water lay in the sand-pits. The Mallory moved among the dunes, a faint thread only a few inches deep.

Clumsily, I scattered the drying sand into the water. I knelt down and scooped away the wet grains, trying not to disturb the stream, and hoping that in some way Noon’s arrival might revive it.

In the silence of the valley floor I heard Noon’s footsteps fade among the caking hills. Losing my bearings, I climbed to the crest of a dune beside the stream, and saw her fifty paces ahead. She stared at a dark scar in the sand. When she looked back at me for the last time, her eyes were those of a woman of my own age.

‘Noon …!’ As I ran towards her, the Mallory shrank into a spur of water no wider than my hand. Head down, I traced it around the base of a large shoe-shaped rock. The thin groove ran back to a basin drying under the sun.

I knelt down, trying to separate the sand grains from the winking vein. A last trickle ran between my hands as I fell to my knees and clasped it.

The Mallory died in my arms.

*

When I roused myself and began to search for Noon, I found no trace of her. The shallow hills of crusting lava ran for a further mile towards the northern edge of the plateau. I wandered into the hollows between them, but the scum of algae and water-weed was unmarked. A few paces from the grave of the Mallory her footprints vanished into the sand.

For an hour I blundered among the hills, calling out her name as the lake-bed dried around me. A few islands of water surrounded the draining pool in which Noon’s skiff lay stranded. Kicking away their walls, I released the water in a last attempt to revive the Mallory. As I reached the skiff and collapsed into its metal shell there was a brief race of water. The wave turned the bows of the craft towards the south, then swept me into the next pool where Sanger’s raft was coasting towards the gates of the valley below.

Steered by his demented monologue, we sailed into the gorge together, carried between the warning rocks and the mourning beaches, as the Mallory set out on its last journey to the sea.

35

The desert is closer today. Standing beside the abandoned airstrip at Port-la-Nouvelle, on the eroded shoulder of the dam which I once hoped would halt the waters of the Mallory, I can see the dust advancing from the northern horizon. The sharp grains slip between the stumps of the dead trees that stand along the banks of the river. An immense white dream flows silently across the land, spreading over the drained surface of the lake.

Blanched by the sun, the landscape has become a fossil of itself. Although abandoned only two years ago, Port-la-Nouvelle seems as remote as Pompeii. The police barracks, the tobacco factory and the Toyota agency are all covered with the same dust. Out on the lake the towers of the drilling project loom through the strange light like memories dressed in their shrouds. The roof of the clinic has collapsed, but the trailer is still serviceable, and on my visits to Port-la-Nouvelle I sleep on that same mattress from which I first heard the waters of the Mallory stealing across the lake.

For the past two years, since my recovery, I have worked at the WHO unit thirty miles to the south-west, but every weekend I drive here and camp beside the trailer in the car park of the clinic. Ostensibly I am still exploring the possibilities of an irrigation project, but this is no more than an excuse. As I search the sandy bed of the river I am really thinking of Noon, and waiting for her to appear again.

Below the shoulder of the dam I can see the footprints of nomads who have camped on the river-bed beside the earth rampart. I am always careful to examine the prints, and on several occasions have seen Noon’s scarred instep and curious toes. I remember my final glimpse of her, and the crazed journey down the Mallory, as it flushed me away with its last waters.

Sharing Noon’s skiff with Sanger, it took us three weeks to reach Lake Kotto. As we lay in the metal shell we saw the whole process of creation winding down to its starting point like a reversed playback of Sanger’s imaginary documentary about my quest for the Mallory’s source. The green desert had faded again when we reached the cascade at Bonneville, and below the pool the groves of tamarinds resembled pineapples run to seed. The papyrus swamps where Mrs Warrender had hunted for men were now a grass wilderness of white basins and dried-out lagoons, covered with the skeletons of millions of frogs. I almost believed that the
Diana
had reassembled its timbers and sailed southwards, casting its white death on the land.

Later, during our convalescence in the provincial capital, I knew that Sanger suspected that the entire expedition to the source of the river had been an invention. Distancing himself from me, he regaled the governor’s press officer with a graphic account of the comeuppance of the renegade country policeman, the would-be secessionist Captain Kagwa. When I protested, he informed me that he was concerned with a more interesting project, and at the first opportunity flew to Nairobi. I had served my purpose for him, and he could never forgive me for having learned to take his dubious profession with complete seriousness. I last heard that he had arranged for the Mallory to be deleted from the National Geographic Society’s gazetteer.

However, Sanger’s insistence that I was no more than a bystander in the attempted coup saved me from suspicion. At times, as I rested in my hospital bed, I too felt that I had invented the entire adventure. The irony is that, in many ways, I remember our journey to the Mallory’s source in terms of Sanger’s imaginary travelogue. That alone seems to give meaning to all that took place.

Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the journey was real, as I have confirmed on two modest safaris twenty miles up the drained bed of the river. I have been shown aerial photographs of the
Salammbo
still embedded in its rubbish tip by the cascade at Bonneville. Yet I have never seen any corpses of Kagwa, Harare or their men, though their abandoned military equipment is strewn along the 200-mile course of the river, and the rusting hulk of the landing-craft still lies on its side half a mile south of the barrage.

Kagwa and Harare have vanished into the nothingness of their ambitions, just as Mrs Warrender and her women have disappeared into their mountain dream of a new nature reserve, somewhere in the rain valleys of the Massif. Each of us had abused the Mallory, trying to use it for our own ends, and only Noon remained true to our first dream.

I had not invented the river and our journey, but had I invented Noon? She has a distinct physical presence that is ever more real, the smell of her hands and breasts, the endless clicking of her teeth. But was she a figment born from a river itself sprung from my imagination? Had I invented her to draw myself to the river’s source, and in their references to Noon were the others merely humouring my obsession?

Fifty feet from the rampart there are fresh footprints in the river-bed, but I will explore them later. Above the dusty roofs of Port-la-Nouvelle I can hear the government helicopter. It moves over the town, its propeller sending up whirlwinds of dust that hunt the empty streets. The new district officer is keeping his eye on me. He is suspicious of my hanging about this drained river-bed, and guesses that I may be waiting for a secret plane to land here at this remote airstrip, carrying the emissaries of another secessionist movement.

I am waiting, but not for a plane. I am waiting for a strong-shouldered young woman, with a caustic eye, walking along the drained bed of the Mallory with a familiar jaunty stride. Sooner or later she will reappear, and I am certain that when she comes the Mallory will also return, and once again run the waters of its dream across the dust of a waiting heart.