Another evening he said, ‘Evie, there are plenty of times when I wonder how different everything could be for us if we in Africa had developed our own Enlightenment. Our own science that will suit our African tempers better than as we find them today. Then we would not have been forced to adopt the European ways, and Africa might have opened up a world of technology entirely of its own.
‘Let me give you an example that I have been thinking about for quite some time. Imagine if we Africans had not been taught to keep our history in books. Before the missionaries and that Crowther, do you think we could forget our history easily at all? Do you think our memories were very short? Not for one moment! Our memories were very very long. I am not saying that writing and books are completely at odds with what might be called a good idea. What I am saying is that, if books had been invented by Africans they would have been printed on something that will not dissolve in the rains and flake away in the dry season and give an honest man a paper cut. And let me mention as well that they would not have been so strictly ordered page by page as they are today, so that there is no changing them. And even they would somehow allow for — how shall I say it? — a kind of conversation inside them. If this had happened, English books would not be as popular as they are, and talk of throwing away our native languages would be less noisy. But more than that. Our thoughts might not be imitating Europe but might have pushed forward into territories quite of their own! Do you follow me, Evie?’
I suspected Nikolas spoke faultily, yet there was much originality in his ideas. Besides, his words were touching me in places where mere facts were unable to reach. I felt they did not circle round the true things of the world, but, like Iffe with her sonorous voice, strike to their very centre. The description of the African book had taken me by surprise, and I was silent for a while. I thought about Mrs Honeyman. She had believed absolutely in book-learning. She told me that if I did not study I would fall in with ignorance, with the natives — savages. No doubt she would have taken great pleasure in seeing me here, dressed in a loose frock of sackcloth. I let out a wicked burst of laughter. The pale deceiver was right, I had black blood running in my veins, and I had no use for the sun.
I looked up at Nikolas. ‘I follow you,’ I said.
He bent to examine me. ‘What a beautiful face you have, Evie … you are a little bit vain, like myself! There will always be porsons who are stamped underfoot and hounded underground and these porsons must be honoured either with wonder or laughter.’ He spread his mouth in a wide grin. ‘As a matter of fact you have a fundamental character with plenty of creative talent. You will go on to achieve many significant things, and I even have a wish that one day you will inform the world of what is concealed in these pits.’
‘But I have heard it already.’
And I told Nikolas what I had heard, as I lay in my hollow, before he rescued me.
— a gasping of machinery. Narrow conduits debouching on vast enclosed spaces, on subterranean halls high as cathedrals, their vaults clustered with chains, pulleys, cables, pipes, conduits, joists, with movable platforms attached to jacks bright with grease.
— and, lower, mine galleries with blind, ageing horses drawing carts filled with ore and slow processions of helmeted miners; and oozing passageways, reinforced with waterlogged timbers, that led down glistening steps to slapping blackish water; flint-bottomed boats, punts weighed with empty barrels sailing across a lightless lake.
— and, even lower, nearing the earth’s centre, I heard a world of caverns whose walls were black with soot, a world of cesspools and sloughs, a world of grubs and beasts, of eyeless beings who drag animal carcasses behind them, of demoniacal monsters with bodies of birds, swine and fish, of dried-out corpses and yellow-skinned skeletons arrayed in attitudes of the living, of forges manned by dazed Cyclopses in black leather aprons, their single eyes shielded by metal-rimmed blue glass, hammering their brazen masses into dazzling shields.
Nikolas’ eyes with their flickering rings gleamed kindly on me. ‘You are feverish,’ he said. ‘Try to stay calm and quieten the raging in your head.’ And he blew the candles out.
20. How I Found My Way Home
The fever broke this evening. For two days and nights I have been lying on my mattress in the middle of the attic, plagued by torrid dreams, dreams of the dinning earth — brought on, no doubt, by my recollection of the pits. A tempest blew through my head. My body became a mass of cramps. I felt my blood beating through my arteries, and angry drums played between my ears. I recognize this fever; it’s come from inside me; I heard those same noises decades ago, when I lived with Nikolas in his kingdom underground.
Now, after washing and eating, I am back at my desk. The attic is almost completely dark. The noise in my head has subsided, but the blood is still beating at my temples. I must have knocked over my laptop computer in my delirium, since I found it on the floor. Lifting it on to the desk, I opened it up and saw it had been damaged; a crack runs diagonally across the length of the screen. My computer is old, as thick and heavy as a volume of the Encyclopaedia. It puffs and gasps like Mr Rafferty in his sleep. A moment ago I switched it on. Thankfully, it has survived its fall. I read over the last chapter. My words seem to dissolve rather than record my time in the pits, now sunk beneath a veil of marine light and rotten air. What was I thinking? Blind, ageing horses. Helmeted miners. Cesspools and sloughs and Cyclopses in black leather aprons! I don’t remember writing any of these things. Did I really ‘see’ these strange visions? Or was it the raging in my head that led me to type out those false imaginings? I have no way of knowing, for I was quite out of my mind.
Forward!
…
It was 1960, let’s say, when I emerged from the pits. The mist of morning stung my eyes. The sky, like every sky in Lagos before dawn, in the dry season, as I recalled it, rested darkly on the horizon of water. I stood and watched a canoe emerge from the gloom, and then, a little later, etched against the half-light of the sky, its fishing net. Presently the sun broke above the horizon, and I found myself drowning in white light. I covered my face with my hands. The sun shone … that is not the word. Sunlight poured down on me, spreading and contracting behind my closed lids, and I fell on the ground.
I dragged myself forward, feeling the ground with my hands, until I came to a stretch of elephant grass. Soon I was lying in its fronds. Happily they concealed the sun from me and me from the road, and I gained control of my breathing. How much time went by I do not know. My tongue felt dry, so I sucked dew from the elephant grass. At one point I heard footsteps on the road. Fearing discovery, I crawled through the fronds, away from the road, and came out at the water’s edge. In time I was able to open my eyes. I saw the lagoon: clear and calm, it appeared no different from the days before the pits; it worked lazily against the shore, sighing as it rolled, and when I broke its surface with my hand, it felt soft and cold, and it distorted the image of my fingers, just as it had done before. I got on to my knees and washed my face. How different I looked! My features were thicker and longer, my nose sharper, and my skin appeared dark. The eyes I saw were not those I knew from childhood. I took off my rags, then walked into the water and began to wash. The filth of the pits came off me, first in small flakes, then in clods. I rubbed my skin, scooping water on to myself, and as I did I began to cry, great sobs of unhappiness and shame. When I was fully clean, I rose and stood in the shallows and watched the last traces of the pits disappear below the surface, carrying away from me what seemed the only thing that could have made me truly happy.