The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (8 page)

‘Everything’s changed. This is a third Nile. Strangling it will take more than a few drums of gasoline.’

‘Why try? Strictly speaking, you didn’t create the river. According to Mr Pal, an earthquake in the Massif du Tondou has shifted the watersheds. It’s simply coincidence.’

‘No. That’s the one thing it isn’t.’ In the doorway one of the women stood in the shadows, her sullen eyes watching me. I gazed at the far bank two hundred yards away, where a patrol of soldiers was pulling a tree trunk from the water. Ignoring the women, I spoke softly, ‘I created this river, Nora. It’s named after me. I own it.’

She stepped back and fastened the dressing-gown tightly around her waist, regarding me with a sympathetic but distant eye, as if I were an exotic primate which she and her husband might breed for some eccentric keeper of mammals at a fashionable zoo. ‘So you will try again? All this water to waste. I can think of better uses.’

‘Irrigating the Sahara?’ The gendarmerie helicopter passed overhead, the down-draught from its blades denting the surface. ‘Think of it, Nora – thanks to the River Mallory this area is about to become a war zone. Already Harare calls it the Red Nile. Kagwa thinks he’s going to be the proconsul of a new Saharan province with secessionist ambitions. Any moment now a Pan-African commission will arrive and the bickering will start. The mineral concessions will be carved up, the multi-nationals will start recruiting mercenaries …’

‘Men must play their dangerous games.’ Mrs Warrender spoke with offhand but bitter tones as the water splashed across the veranda. She stared at a drop that glistened on her finger like a diamond, and for a moment resembled a child wondering how to preserve it. ‘I’d let the river run free. Then it might sweep them away. All of them, Harare and Kagwa and the mercenaries, and you, too, doctor. I could open the station again. I’d like to breed leopards and impala, not these toy macaques for petting zoos in California. That’s something to dream of … A new game reserve in the Sahara, populated by every living species – except one.’

She sat on the cot, like a widow in an almoner’s office, forced to accept the sympathy of others, but only sustaining herself by a desperate dream of better times to come. I held her shoulders, hoping to comfort this still numbed woman. ‘Nora, you can build another station. And you’ll breed leopards there – but first you have to leave. Where will you all go?’

‘Captain Kagwa says we can move into the
Diana
. His engineers claim the hull is sound.’

‘The oil-company brothel …?’ When she frowned and pushed my hands away, I asked: ‘Tell me – why did you decide to look after me? You could have left me in the truck.’

‘I thought you might help us. You’re so totally possessed.’

‘But how? To do what?’

She stood up, lips pursed as she stared at the brown channel. ‘I don’t know … yet. To enlarge the river, doctor. Think hard, I want you to draw all the water from the mountains, make it wider and deeper, so wide that it overruns its banks …’

She spoke softly, but her small fists drummed on the chromium rail at my feet.

12

The helicopter soared low across the river, the young French pilot intrigued by the breeding station and its women. I stepped from the terrace on to the narrow silt beach that ran between the river and the abandoned kitchen garden, fastening Alan Warrender’s faded silk bath-robe around my waist. Did his widow imagine that I had conjured this vast channel from inside my head? I felt the warm water run at my heels. The small waves lassoed my ankles, trying to draw me into the deeper stream. The river fished for the fisherman. As the spray flicked at my calves I again remembered that liquid, gravel-filled crypt in which I had almost died. Already, part of my mind believed that the river would never harm me, any more than my own bloodstream would try to drown me.

Raising my eyes from the hot, sunlit surface, I deliberately forced back my head, feeling the bruised disc and the pinched cervical nerves that pricked my shoulders. For a few seconds the pain held back the river. I strode along the shore, kicking the waves out of my way.

A group of shaggy palms leaned from the bank, their roots exposed by the water. I stepped between the trunks and found myself in a narrow inlet of calmer water, where the forest wall leaned over a beach of yellow sand.

Squatting beside her plastic coracle was the girl whom I had last seen being whipped by Poupée’s willow branch. The dark skin of her shoulders and arms was scored with blue blisters. She rocked to and fro on her knees, crooning to herself as she arranged a set of glass and metal objects on the beach.

Beside her, at the edge of the forest, was a miniature hutch built from driftwood and bamboo, the palm leaves on its roof held down by a rusty bicycle wheel. Through the doorway of this little kennel I could see an old blanket on which I assumed she slept each night, but the den was otherwise filled with small pieces of glass and scraps of electrical equipment she had found in the looted stores of Port-la-Nouvelle.

A selection of these she was arranging on the sand – a broken light-bulb, a plastic washing-machine dial, a piece of printed circuitry from a transistor radio, and several lengths of copper wire. She knelt over these, whistling and grunting as she moved them about like chess pieces on a board, trying to urge them into some kind of life.

I watched from the trees, a few steps behind her, guessing that she hoped with her guttural hoots to reproduce the sound and colour of Sanger’s monitor screens. When they lay inertly on the beach she gave a cry of disgust and flicked the damp sand across them.

‘Don’t give up yet …’

Still on her knees, she sprang round, staring up at me as she protected the weals on her shoulders. My gifts of food had not yet won her approval, but at least she had not bolted into the forest.

‘Yes, me – N’doc … It’s all right. You’re as nervous as a bird.’

When I knelt beside her she moved back but watched me in a level way. She treated me to a close scrutiny, running her eyes over my bruised arms, thinner thighs and calves, as if assessing my prospects as a work-horse.

I brushed the wet sand from the light-bulb. ‘Let’s see what we can do with this. What do they call you?’ Close to her, and without a rifle barrel to separate us, I could see that the girl was a primitive from some northern mountain tribe, her black skin lit by a faint blue sheen.

Her solemn and elegant features were marked with old scars around her brows and lips, and I guessed that she had been abused as a child, driven away after her mother’s death and left to fend for herself. Somehow she had enrolled herself into Harare’s guerilla unit. She was either mute or autistic, or had suffered slight brain damage after a beating. However, she seemed alert enough as she pursed her lips in a sceptical way, confident that I could not reconstitute these pieces of glass and wire into one of Professor Sanger’s monitor screens.

I picked up the broken light-bulb and pulled away the brass socket. ‘I’ll try to get Mrs Warrender to take you on. Now, what about this?’

I broke off the brittle fragments of the bulb’s stem, and then slid a bottle-top into the bulb, pressing it against the underside so that the red letters of the medallion glowed through the frosted glass.

‘Good?’

Refusing to be impressed, the girl gave a vigorous snort through her small nostrils. However, she kept a discreet eye on the bulb, intrigued by this simple ruse. For all her primitive background, there was a stylishness about her neat movements, the small flourishes with which she opened her hands and knees, as if she were endlessly rehearsing the elements of a richer and more elegant life.

‘Shall we see Mrs Warrender?’ I stood up and offered to take her elbow, but she withdrew from me, and crouched in the door of her hutch. ‘All right. I’ll put some food out for you tomorrow.’

I was about to leave when she sat up on her knees. She raised a hand to her throat, preparing her damaged vocal cords for some sustained effort.

‘… N’oon.’ With a faint smirk, evidently pleased by this odd noise, she turned her head in a shy profile.

‘Noon—? Fair enough. I’ll tell Mrs Warrender.’

I walked towards the palm trees, but after two steps heard a race of feet across the sand. The girl ducked behind me, half-hidden in the trees. Her over-lit eyes set in a fierce warning, she pointed to the police launch that was heading across the river towards us, a brown spray slicing into the hot sunlight. Captain Kagwa stood beside the helmsman, a black waterproof over his police tunic.

‘It’s all right, Noon. The Captain won’t harm you.’

But she had slipped away through the underbrush, leaving me a last glimpse of her intense face, with its expression of concern like that of a teenage mother whose child is threatened.

I walked along the beach to greet Captain Kagwa. I realized that it was not I who had befriended Noon, but this simple child of the waterways who, for whatever reasons of her own, was protecting me.

*

The police launch approached the terrace, a constable reaching to the tiled steps with his boat hook. I stood beside Mrs Warrender and her women, and looked up at the imposing figure of Captain Kagwa silhouetted against the sun, aware of how much the river had risen. The swells that undulated across its surface gave its back a marked camber, as if even the present channel was too confined for its immense body.

Hand on holster, Captain Kagwa grandly surveyed the river, like a mahout placed in charge of a magnificent but unpredictable elephant. With the growth of the river there had been a corresponding rise in the Captain’s fortunes. He now controlled a force of a hundred men, a landing craft and helicopter, and had put on both weight and authority. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that by creating the river I had given Captain Kagwa and everyone else at Port-la-Nouvelle a new sense of purpose. The river had cured them of their malaise, and irrigated their arid lives.

‘Wake yourself up, doctor. Then you can get dressed.’ He stepped ashore, almost catapulting his constable into the stream. ‘Mrs Warrender, bring your women together. My sergeant will collect you in one hour.’

‘But, Captain—’ Mrs Warrender looked over her shoulder at the vibrating house. ‘You said next week. We have to pack up the laboratory.’

‘No sentimental packing, no last-minute farewells. This is evacuation – you leave Port-la-Nouvelle tomorrow. Look!’

He pointed to the kitchen garden behind the house. The large pools of water that lay among the vegetable beds had coalesced into a stream ten feet wide, a small arm of the river which crossed the gravel drive and then rejoined the main channel. The breeding station now stood on an island of waterlogged mud no larger than a football field. The Dutch gable at the eastern end of the house was already leaning forwards from its joists. The softening foundations had begun to split the wooden frame, and I could see daylight through the attic roof and between the loosened boards of the balcony.

‘You come back now, doctor,’ Kagwa told me. ‘Two of my men are injured in a motor accident. This river—’ He stared at the channel, inhaling deeply as if to synchronize his own breath with its great measures. While Mrs Warrender and her women returned to the house, he remarked with a touch of his old humour: ‘All your obsessions, doctor. They cause a lot of trouble …’

Ten minutes later, as the launch swung out into the stream, I looked back at the tilting house on its dissolving rostrum of mud. Mrs Warrender stood on the terrace, her small figure veiled by the spray. I waved to her, hoping to raise her spirits, but she ignored me, quietly dreaming of the deluge that would spread southwards from the Sahara, after ten thousand years of drought, to drown the race of men.

Swept along by the current, we entered the faster water of the central channel. Caught beam-on, the craft drifted on the heavy, sun-filled swells. The engine stalled, and in the silence we floated backwards while the Corporal at the helm struggled with his throttle and starter. The banks slipped past, carved by the river out of the red earth. The trees leaned over the water, their roots exposed like chandeliers, the boughs dipping their leaves into the stream. A road ended abruptly at the bank, and a steel fence ran along the perimeter of a tobacco field, the line of wire vanishing into the flood. On both sides the dense forest crowded against the water’s edge. The overhead canopy was richer and more luminous, islands of green light about to float away into the sky. The huge trees advanced towards the water like an army of knights, happy to be cut down while wearing their full caparison of boughs and foliage. As we approached the airstrip I watched a giant beech lose its hold on the eroding banks and topple into the water, an immense cathedral drowning itself before me.

I sat in the stern among the flares and ammunition boxes, enjoying the cool rainbows that lifted from this continent of water. But Captain Kagwa, eager to get on, stepped forward and worked the ignition.

‘These village boys,’ he confided when we were under way. ‘They can polish a guard-room floor, but anything else confuses their minds … I need trained men now.’

‘Why, Captain? There’s no point in trying to build dykes around the tobacco fields – I’m afraid they’re lost.’

‘Tobacco fields? Port-la-Nouvelle is under water now, the town only exists in a technical sense. I’m thinking of larger matters, doctor. Northern Province is now a strategic zone. We can hold back the desert, and begin our advance against the Sahara.’

‘So you think the river will last?’

‘Of course! When the hour of a dream has come who can stop it?’ Kagwa seemed to have forgotten my own abortive attempts. ‘We caught two of Harare’s deserters, they came on a raft after sailing for three days. They say that this may be only one branch of an even bigger river flowing from the Massif du Tondou.’

‘The Red Nile? I’m told Harare already calls it that.’

‘The Black Nile, doctor – carried by this river, black Africa will move north against the Arab world.’

He sat back, arms outstretched to touch the river, a black conquistador sailing up his private Amazon, with one eye alert for the nearest television lens. As we approached the airstrip, however, I noticed that all trace of Sanger’s film equipment had vanished from its site beside the control tower. I had expected that the newsreel footage of the dam fiasco and Miss Matsuoka’s death would have placed Sanger’s face on television bulletins across the globe. Yet, for all the military activity along the banks, there was no sign of that second army of bureaucrats, agronomists and World Bank advance men whom I expected to see swarming around this vast new waterway.

‘A grand vision. Captain – is it shared by the provincial governor?’

Kagwa loosened his holster belt before replying. ‘Not yet, doctor – it’s too early to inform him. Everything is in a state of flux.’

‘And too much information might confuse him?’

‘Of course. I’ve explained that your drilling project has been a success and persuaded him to lend me a helicopter. Soon I will carry out a reconnaisance across the Chad and Sudan border. Hot pursuit, in search of Harare and his dangerous bandits. While there, to save expense, I will also make a geological survey, to define any matters of territoriality and ownership.’

‘I thought the ownership was established, Captain.’

‘In what way, doctor?’

‘The River Mallory – it is my river.’

‘Doctor …’ Although angered, Kagwa placed his large hand on my shoulder with surprising gentleness, as if soothing a fractious patient. ‘My dear fellow, you must separate dream from truth.’

‘I have a lease, Captain. I paid you a thousand dollars. The river is even gazetteered in my name.’

‘But …’ Kagwa gestured to the broad expanse of water. ‘This is not the same river – its headwaters lie in the Massif du Tondou, two hundred miles away. That little stream sprang from your head.’

‘Perhaps – but it remains the same river. I could insist that you honour the lease, Captain.’

‘So that you can try to destroy it? You are not being practical.’

‘On the contrary, I was only concerned with the drilling project.’

‘And you succeeded!’ Kagwa shouted, alarming the young helmsman. ‘You succeeded beyond all your dreams. Beyond my dreams, too. Your project is a triumph, you will be honoured throughout Africa, you will often be interviewed by
Newsweek
and
Paris-Match.’

‘I thought you were keeping the news to yourself. Captain.’

Kagwa sighed to himself, and directed a less than friendly smile towards me. ‘Doctor, the world is full of rivers. If you want to fight a duel with a river, choose one in your own country.’

We were nearing the mouth of the channel, where it emptied into Lake Kotto. To our right was a ragged cliff-face of earth and gravel, marking the point at which the airstrip ended abruptly at the water’s edge. The soil had stained the water a milky yellow, and formed smooth sand-bars that rose above the surface. In the shallows lay what seemed to be the head of a black bison, the submerged root of the oak from which, in my imagination at least, the river had been born. Washed by the current, it lay among the drifting logs and tree trunks, not far from the original spring.