Justin unbuckles himself and goes to the window. This is the journey you made. This is the spiel they gave you. This is what you saw. Below him lies emerald Nile swamp, misted by heat, pierced with Jigsaw-shaped black holes of water. On higher ground cellular cattle pens are packed tight with animals.
"Tribesmen never tell you how many cattle they've got!" Jamie is standing at his shoulder, yelling in his ear. "The food monitors' job is to find out! Goats and sheep get the center of the pen, cows outside, calves next to them! Dogs go in with the cows! At night they burn the cow dung in their little houses in the perimeter! Wards off the predators, keeps the cows warm and gives them God-awful coughs! Sometimes they put the women and kids in there as well! Girls get good food in Sudan! If they're well fed, they fetch a better marriage price!" She pats her stomach, grinning. "A man can have as many wives as he can afford. There's this incredible dance they do — I mean honestly," she exclaims, and puts her hand over her mouth as she bursts out laughing.
"Are you a food monitor?"
"Assistant."
"How did you get the job?"
"Went to the right nightclub in Nairobi! Want to hear a riddle?"
"Of course."
"We drop grain here, right?"
"Right."
"Because of the north-south war, right?"
"Go on."
"Big part of the grain we drop is grown in North Sudan. That's whatever the U.S. grain farmers don't dump on us from surplus. Work it out. The aid agencies' money buys Khartoum's grain. Khartoum uses the money to buy arms for the war against the south. The planes that bring the grain to Loki use the same airport that Khartoum's bombers use to bomb the South Sudanese villages."
"So what's the riddle?"
"Why is the U.N. financing the bombing of South Sudan and feeding the victims at the same time?"
"Pass."
"You going back to Loki after this?"
Justin shakes his head.
"Pity," she says, and winks.
Jamie returns to her seat among the soya oil boxes. Justin stays at the window, watching the gold sunspot of the plane's reflection flitting over the twinkling marshes. There is no horizon. After a distance, the ground colors merge into mist, tinting the window with deeper and deeper tones of mauve. We could fly for all our lives, he tells her, and we'd never reach the earth's hard edge. With no warning the Buffalo begins its slow descent. The swamp turns brown, hard ground rises above the water level. Single trees appear like green cauliflowers as the plane's sunspot whips across them. Edsard has taken the controls. Captain McKenzie is studying a brochure of camping equipment. He turns and gives Justin a thumbs-up. Justin returns to his seat, buckles up and glances at his watch. They have been flying three hours. Edsard banks the plane steeply. Boxes of toilet paper, fly spray and chocolate shoot down the steel deck and thump against the raised dais of the cockpit close to Justin's feet. A cluster of rush-roofed huts appears at the end of the wingtip. Justin's headset is full of atmospherics like classical music being played at the wrong speed. Out of the cacophony he selects a gruff Germanic voice giving details of the state of the ground. He makes out the words "firm and easy." The plane starts to vibrate wildly. Rising in his harness Justin looks through the cockpit window at a strip of red earth running across a green field. Lines of white sacks serve as markers. More sacks are strewn over one corner of the field. The plane straightens and the sun hits the back of Justin's neck like a douche of scalding water. He sits down sharply. The Germanic voice becomes loud and clear.
"Come on down here, Edsard, man! We made a fine goat stew for lunch today! You got that layabout McKenzie up there?"
Edsard is not so easily wooed. "What are those bags doing out in the corner there, Brandt? Has someone made a drop just recently? Are we sharing space with another plane up here?"
"That's just empty bags, Edsard. You ignore those bags and come on down here, you hear me? You got that hotshot journalist with you?"
McKenzie this time, laconically. "We got him, Brandt."
"Who else you got?"
"Me!" yells Jamie cheerfully above the roar.
"One journalist, one nymphomaniac, six returning delegates," McKenzie intones as calmly as before.
"What's he like, man? The hotshot?"
"You tell me," says McKenzie.
Rich laughter in the cockpit, shared by the faceless foreign voice from the ground.
"Why's he nervous?" Justin asks.
"They're all nervous down there. It's the end of the line. When we touch down, Mr. Atkinson, you stay with me, please. Protocol requires I introduce you to the Commissioner ahead of everybody else."
The airstrip is an elongated clay tennis court, part overgrown. Dogs and villagers are emerging from a clump of forest and heading toward it. The huts are rush-roofed and conical. Edsard makes a low pass while McKenzie scans the bush to either side.
"No bad guys?" Edsard asks.
"No bad guys," McKenzie confirms.
The Buffalo banks, levels out and rushes forward. The airstrip hits it like a rocket. Clouds of flaming red dust envelop the windows. The fuselage sags left, then farther left, the cargo howls in its moorings. The engines scream, the plane shudders, scrapes something, moans and bucks. The engines die. The dust subsides. They have arrived. Justin is staring through the falling dust at an approaching delegation of African dignitaries, children, and a couple of white women in grubby jeans, dreadlocks and bracelets. At their center, clad in a brown homburg hat, ancient khaki shorts and very worn suede shoes, strides the beaming, bulbous, gingery and undeniably majestic figure of Markus Lorbeer without his stethoscope.
* * *
The Sudanese women clamber from the plane and rejoin a chanting cluster of their people. Jamie the Zimbabwean is hugging her companions to whoops of mutual pleasure and amazement, and hugging Lorbeer also, stroking his face and pulling off his homburg and smoothing his red hair for him while Lorbeer beams and pats her bottom and chortles like a schoolboy on his birthday. Dinka porters swarm into the rear of the fuselage and unload to Edsard's instructions. But Justin must remain in his seat until Captain McKenzie beckons him down the steps and leads him away from the festivities, across the airstrip, up a small mound to where a cluster of Dinka elders in black trousers and white shirts sit in a half circle of kitchenchairs under a shade tree. At their center sits Arthur the Commissioner, a shriveled, gray-haired man with a hewn face and intense, sagacious eyes. He wears a red baseball cap with Paris embroidered on it in gold.
"So you are a man of the pen, Mr. Atkinson," says Arthur, in faultless archaic English, when McKenzie has made the introductions.
"That's correct, sir."
"What journal or publication, if I may make so bold, is fortunate enough to retain your services?"
"The Telegraph of London."
"Sunday Telegraph?"
"Mostly the daily."
"Both are excellent newspapers," Arthur declares.
"Arthur was a sergeant in the Sudanese Defense Force during the British mandate," McKenzie explains.
"Tell me, sir. Would I be correct in saying you are here to nourish your mind?"
"And the minds of my readers, too, I hope," says Justin, with diplomatic unction, as out of the corner of his eye he sees Lorbeer and his delegation advancing across the runway.
"Then, sir, I pray that you may also nourish the minds of my people by sending us English books. The United Nations provides for our bodies but too seldom for our minds. Our preferred authors are the English master storytellers of the nineteenth century. Perhaps your newspaper would consider subsidizing such a venture."