The explorer was deflated. There would be no reunion, no hospitality, no reassuring chitchat about the state of the surrounding countryside. There was only this grinning degenerate, this hyena with his feet propped up on the doctor’s desk. Mungo turned to leave.
“ ‘Ere, Mr. Explorer, ain’t you forgettin’ somethin’?” Crump rasped, his eyes glittering. Some sort of weird excitement had come over him — he was on his feet now — swaying back and forth like a snake about to strike.
The explorer paused in the doorway. “Yes?”
“The raft. The bloody raft you ordered. Wot you think, they grows on trees?” Crump began to laugh — a sick, soughing sound — at his own joke.
“What of it?”
“Well we expects to be paid, we does. The West African Trading Company don’t give no credit to nobody. As far as I’m concerned, pal, you’re no different from any of these bush niggers out here.” Crump was no more than a foot away now, hands folded under his biceps. “So pay up, Jack.”
Mungo sighed. “All right, I’ll write up a draft on the Colonial Department— “
“Uh-uh, friend — all transactions in cash. My boys — and you can see a few of ‘em out there now—”
The explorer looked. Seven or eight wildly painted savages with spears, pistols, muskets and longswords slouched against the pillars of the veranda, looking as if they hadn’t heard a good joke in years.
“—as I was saying, my boys worked their arses off on that raft, includin’ three days’ worth of overtime at time-and-a-half, and they expects their just deserts, if you see what I mean.”
“Very well,” Mungo said, all business. “What do we owe you?”
“Five hunnert guineas.”
The explorer was stunned. “Five hundred—?”
“We won’t pay it,” Zander snapped.
The little group stood there at the doorway for a moment. Zander’s words sucked up in the humid sponge of the air as if they’d never been spoken. It was hot, and the explorer could feel the sweat coursing down his temples and salting the corners of his mouth. Suddenly, one of the painted men grunted and everyone turned to him. He was made up in black and white, the paint dividing his face in two, ribbing it like a xylophone. He pointed a finger at the oil palm on the far side of the clearing. A small colobus monkey was perched on one of the grooves, nibbling at something and periodically reaching over its shoulder to groom the even smaller monkey which clung to its back. Slowly and deliberately, with a total absence of emotion or flutter of concern, the xylophone man raised his musket and squeezed the trigger, pinning both animals to the tree for a single agonizing moment detached from time and process, before they fell like rags to the earth.
Mungo reached for his purse.
♦ ♦ ♦
The final disappointment is merely rankling — and puzzling. And yet at the same time it is somehow more deeply disturbing than the others, more a blow on the gut level, more the sort of thing that stalks dreams and tightens the bowels.
After a brief conference with his officers, Mungo determined to leave Pisania the morning following his confrontation with Crump. The new factor was clearly hostile, his associates potentially dangerous. There was nothing to be gained by extending their stay at Pisania, and each day brought them closer to the onset of the rainy season. The only essential matter of business — recruiting some eighteen or twenty blacks to serve as porters, guides and interpreters — would involve no more than an hour or two. The explorer was confident. From long experience, he knew only too well how to inflame the native heart with material lust. He would offer half a bolt of scarlet cloth and the price of a prime slave to any man willing to accompany him into the interior. All he need do was breathe the rumor and his tent would be inundated by eager volunteers, hordes of them, jabbering away like futures speculators, pushing forward to spit in their palms and shake hands with the white man to seal the bargain. He could sit back and take his pick.
But something went wrong.
Though he’d announced his offer just after noon, dusk came and went and still there were no takers. Had the headman kept the news to himself, hoping to fill all the available positions with his own relatives? Had the explorer, whose Mandingo was admittedly a bit rusty, failed to make himself clear? By eight o’clock he began to feel concerned. Without blacks to manage the asses and haul supplies and equipment, the onus would fall on the soldiers, who would be hard put looking out for themselves when the rains began. Even worse, there would be no one capable of communicating with distant tribes or even of searching out the right road. “No,” the explorer finally said to his brother-in-law as they sat beside the oil lamp in his tent, “there’s no way around it. We’ve got to have blacks, even if we have to offer them double pay, an estate in the Cotswolds and the Bang’s underdrawers thrown into the bargain.”
Outside, the air was thick with smoke from the men’s cookfires. Largely unconcerned about such trifles as Leland Cahill, Dr. Laidley, the going rate for rafts and the availability of black porters, the men were instead applying themselves assiduously to the tasks at hand: roasting chickens, draining gourds of sooloo beer and introducing the native women to venereal disease. The explorer could hear them cursing softly in the bushes as he strode through the darkened little shanty town on his way to the headman’s hut. From the river, faint but unmistakable, there was the eerie whine and wheeze of crocodiles mating in the muck.
The headman, a sinewy, middle-aged fellow in a beaver hat and a French cambric shirt with the sleeves removed, was just sitting down to his evening repast as the explorer stepped from the shadows and into the unsteady circle of light cast by the cookfire. The man’s name was Damman Jumma. His hut, a triumph of contemporary mud-and-wattle architecture, shared a common wall with the stockade erected round the factory, and the firelight lit the tips of the pointed timbers till they glowed like a row of filed teeth. A number of stripped and blanched logs were arranged round the cookfire in front of the hut. Damman Jumma’s wives, children, cousins, uncles and dogs were lounging on and against these logs as if they were so many sofas and loveseats, chattering and joking, spooning up bowls of hot kouskous and gnawing away at slabs of salt beef from the explorer’s stores. When Mungo appeared, the group fell silent.
“Greetings,” Mungo said, the Mandingo dialect thick and leaden on his tongue. There was no response. The explorer buttoned and unbuttoned his jacket, licked his lips and made a stab at conversation. “Enjoying the salt beef?”