“In private, Mr. Park, sir, if you don’t mind.”
Smirke looks up sharp, either glaring or shading his eyes, Johnson can’t tell which. The ass moans like a bedridden grandmother.
“Carry on here, Smirke, will you?” the explorer says, slipping into his saddle and setting his horse in motion with an easy flick of his wrist.
As they amble off, Johnson’s smooth silken bellies rippling under his toga, the explorer turns to him, amiable and expectant. “Well?”
“Well, it’s just this, Mr. Park—”
“Call me Mungo, old boy.”
“Mr. Park, I think it’s goin’ to blow up one hell of a fierce thunderstorm within the hour and I say you better give the order to pitch camp right here and now or half these white boys’ll be puking bile before nightfall.”
The explorer cranes his neck to scan the sky. It is a deep, transparent blue from horizon to horizon, no speck of moisture in sight. The heat is so intense it seems to lift him off the horse and hold him suspended, like a bit of ash floating on the thermal currents above an open furnace. “You’ve got to be joking.”
“No joke. I can smell it. Rain. Within the hour.”
“But there isn’t a cloud in the sky.”
“Listen, Mr. Park, I got no time and no energy to argue. Right this minute my boys are throwin’ together a shelter up top of this hill, behind that granite outcrop up there — the one that looks like a duncecap. If you got a brain in your head, you’ll do the same.”
The explorer’s face is tentative and quizzical, as if he’s just been told a joke he doesn’t get. “Don’t be ridiculous, Johnson — Isaaco — whatever the hell you want me to call you. It’s nine-thirty in the morning. We’ve got a full day’s march ahead of us. If you think I’m going to stop the men in their tracks and set up camp because you’ve got a feeling it might rain, I’m sorry but you’re a Banbury cheese.“
Johnson has already turned his mare away. He pauses a moment to glance over his shoulder, fixing the explorer with a look of weary resignation, like a schoolteacher standing over a student who has just subtracted ten from twenty-five for the third time and come up with eighteen. “You know somethin’, Mungo — you just as big a ass as you was eight years ago.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Forty-five minutes later the sky is the color of oiled steel and the wind is gusting at sixty miles an hour, kicking up clouds of dust that obliterate the horizon, far and near. Thunderbolts shatter the swirling haze of the sky and steaming funnels of wind deracinate big-boled trees as if they were stalks of celery. And then the rain comes. Roaring like Niagara, stinging, drenching, diluvian, it rushes across the flatlands and up the valleys, bowing trees and bushes, spewing leaves, spattering dust, blasting the bare rocky slopes of the mountains like salvos from a man of war. In an instant every crate and sack is soaked through, the men bucket-drenched, the asses running water like drainspouts. Boiling and brown with tons of suspended dust, the water comes rushing down the slope at them, a brook, a stream, a river, the rain glancing off the hard-baked shingle and sucked downward with a terrifying whoosh.
Shaddy Walters is the first casualty. When the wind comes up, sudden and fierce, the expedition’s chief cook is working his way over a slab of coarse reddish granite humped and huge as the back of a whale. To his immediate left, a drop of two hundred feet; to his right, a sheer wall going up another hundred. Almost immediately his wide-brimmed straw hat lifts off and vanishes over the upper wall as if it were a bit of cannon wadding, and the dust lashes his eyes like a cat-o’-nine-tails. Then, with a clatter of pot and pan, his ass sits back on its haunches, whinnying. A sack of rice tears under the pressure and the individual grains flail the cook’s face like gunshot, caught up in a rattling gust and whirled into the troposphere to be sown on barren ground hundreds of miles to the north. He is suddenly alarmed. Frantic, he tugs at his ass’s halter as Mungo thunders by on his charger, shouting something into the teeth of the wind. The ass is in a panic, the eyes rolling back into its head, its knees slipping toward the edge of the precipice, tail beating back on nothing.
“Every man for himself!” shrieks Jemmie Bird, scrambling past, slipping, running on all fours — up and over the granite hump and bolting for a clutch of withered leafless trees on the plateau ahead. Suddenly, with an electrifying clatter, one of the big regimental cookpots flies over the ass’s back, tears its cord, rebounds off the upper wall and clangs back over the escarpment ringing and ringing and still faintly ringing like a cymbal tossed down the side of Ben Nevis. The thought of abandoning his ass as Jemmie had looms powerfully in the cook’s mind, but he suppresses it. If nothing else, Shaddy Walters is a stubborn man. A man who’ll serve rice and onions three times a day for a week. A man who’ll boil India tea till it tastes like gunmetal. A man who’ll clutch an obdurate ass’s halter from now till doomsday.
Which is precisely what he does. Two minutes later the rain hits with a slap, turns the ledge into a skating pond, and Shaddy and ass #27 plunge to their eternal reward locked in terror and tenacity, bearing down on the scree below like stupendous hailstones. If they cry out, thin mortal voices in the howling void, no one hears them.
Meanwhile, of the forty-one men remaining, excluding Mungo, thirty-eight are on their knees vomiting within minutes after the rain commences. Yellow Jack, dysentery, rash, fever, black vomit. The explorer has seen them before. Clutching their stomachs as if they’ve been gutshot, the men come straggling into the little clutch of naked thorns about which Mungo is frantically trying to throw up some sort of canvas shelter for the gunpowder, rice and rust-prone muskets. Some have managed to hold on to their asses, others have not. Nearly all of them collapse, gasping and shivering on the puddled and puked-over patch of level ground the explorer has managed to roughly enclose. One of them, an eighteen-year-old by the name of Cecil Sparks, is crying. The sound of it is nearly lost in the cacophony of flapping canvas, thunderous rainfall and bowel-wrenching grunts and groans, but it is there all the same, a whimper in the interstices, a full-throated sob, the sound of hopelessness, the sound of failure, self-pity and annihilation.
♦ DUMMULAFONG ♦
“Told you so.” Johnson says it without malice, flat and simple, no inflection whatever, telling it like it is. He is stretched out sumptuously on a bullock-hide recliner, a la Madame Recamier, in tarboosh and red silk dressing gown, his feet nestled in a leopard-skin rug. His camp, half a mile back from the explorer’s, is tucked behind a monolithic slab of rock, facing north. Though the rain has continued through the night, beating down with such relentless ferocity that the explorer has begun to wonder if he should build his boat here and float down to the Niger, Johnson’s tent is as dry as Benowm in February. The floor has been lined with acacia branches to take up any creeping moisture and the canvas walls have been reinforced with slats of the same. A hearty fire is licking at the thighs of six or seven gamebirds — partridges? — as Mungo steps through the flap, soaked to the skin, and Johnson delivers his apothegm.
The explorer hangs his head, shamefaced and repentant. His sodden greatcoat tugs at him in a forlorn, round-shouldered sort of way. “I’ll never doubt you again,” he chokes.
Johnson inserts a pinch of Virginia tobacco in the bowl of his pipe and delicately tamps it with his thumb. “Buck up, Mr. Park — it was bound to happen sooner or later. The rain, I mean.” He gestures toward the fire. “Sit yourself down and dry out a bit, have a bite of squab and a spot of hot tea and tell me all about it.” A snap of his fingers and one of the servants emerges from the shadows to help the explorer to a piece of fowl and pluck a yam from the coals, golden-brown and oozing sugary juices. Dark, aromatic, the spiced tea hisses from the spout of a silver teapot. “So,” Johnson says, a swell sitting down to dinner at his club and discussing a trifle tossed away at cards or the track, “how many did you lose?”