The three lie huddled in the corner of the hut, too far gone to lift their eyes or even to brush away the festering hordes of mosquitoes that have mysteriously appeared with the onset of the rains, blackening hands and faces and sunscorched collars like smudges of dirt. Cartwright appears to be asleep, his cheek pressed flat to the ground in a puddle of his own vomit, Old Rome is gibbering away sotto voce, and Bloore, supine, staring at the thatch like a catatonic. The smell is worse than any sickroom. . there is the disagreeable odor of human functions gone awry, disordered by illness, but something more too, something earthy and essential; the sad stink of mortality.
“Ask them if they’re ready to turn out, go ahead,” Martyn sneers from the doorway. And then adds, in a kind of yip: “Sir!”
Mungo kneels beside Bloore and flicks a hand over his face to unsettle the feasting insects. The man’s eyes never blink. “Bloore,” the explorer says, his voice subdued, “can you walk?”
Old Rome, a man in his fifties who claims to have seen action against the Yankees at Saratoga, has been muttering to himself since the explorer walked in the door. Now he raises his voice, as if he were desperate, as if he were trying to placate some unseen deity, the God of Gibberish or the Lord of Limericks: “There was a young lady of worth,” he begins, his voice growing increasingly stronger with the roll of the syllables until he’s shouting, “Excessively proud of her birth, / I crept up behind her, / As if to remind her, / That. . that. .”
“Bloore,” the explorer shouts, raising his voice to compete with the madman’s ravings, “Do you want me to fix up a litter for you?” The sick man stares at the ceiling, the breath racheting through his nostrils.
“That. . that. .” Old Rome roars.
The explorer takes Bloore’s callused hand. “Is there anything I can do?”
Finally Bloore turns his unshaven cheek and wild eyes to the explorer. A cord stands out in his neck as his head lolls to the side: no other muscle stirs. He looks as if he’s deliquescing, sinking into the earth. The explorer can feel the sick man’s breath on his face, ghastly, meat left out to rot.
Bloore’s lips are working.
“Yes?” Mungo says, bending closer. “Yes?”
“That a goose don’t always have to honk!” cries Old Rome triumphantly.
Bloore gasps. His voice is the rustle of a feather in a windstorm. “Ain’t you done enough as it is, Mr. Hexplorer?” he croaks. “ ‘Ave an ‘eart and leave us die in peace.”
♦ ♦ ♦
So it goes. The steady wash of the rain, the tardigrade progress, the inexorable attrition. Roger McMillan, soldier, and Wm. Ashton, seaman, are drowned when a native canoe overturns while crossing the raging Bafing River; J. Bowden, carpenter, falls behind and is stripped and murdered by thieves; Christopher Baron is torn to pieces by wild dogs while vomiting in the undergrowth. Each day men collapse by the side of the road, asses are lost, equipment dumped in the bush or pilfered by blacks.
That’s the worst of it: the thievery. The rest Mungo could live with — man against nature and all that — but this unremitting assault by the natives — the very people who would most benefit by his opening the region to British trade — it’s exasperating, heartbreaking. Instead of looking on each successive village with relief, as a place of refuge and respite, the explorer has come to dread the approach to any civilized area. The word has gone out: the coffle is dummulafong, fair game. Up and down the road, from Doogikotta to Kandy, the rumor flies like something on wings: a party of sick white men is on the way, men so debilitated they can hardly hold up their weapons or drive their asses laden with beads and gold and things so exotic and wondrous that no names exist for them in the Mandingo tongue.
And so the villagers turn out like flies, like jackals, like hyenas. To steal something from these pale, puking, shit-stinking white men becomes a matter of honor with them, like counting coup on the Great Plains or standing erect and motionless before the crashing onslaught of an enraged bull in the Sierra Morena. They are ubiquitous, merciless. On one occasion, having dismounted to assist a soldier whose ass was mired to the whiskers in muck, Mungo turns back to his horse to watch a native built like a greyhound streaking off with his saddlebags. Another time, two reedlike old men emerge from the bush in front of him, and as he cautiously raises his musket, the one leaps forward to jerk it from his hands while the other snatches the greatcoat from his back. And all this in a driving rain.
“The only way to put a stop to it,” Johnson says, heaving along on his mare in a pocket of mist, “is to shoot all thieves on sight. Listen to me, Mr. Park: I know these people.” The near trees are gray with haze; farther back they recede into the belly of the clouds. Leaves drip, strange creatures call out from the forest, frogs mount one another and sing about it. “This is Africa, brother,” Johnson says, echoing something he’d said a long time ago, when old Eboe peered into the explorer’s palm and the heavens split open, fracturing the sky from pole to pole. “It’s dog eat dog out here. If you weak, they goin’ to knock you down and strip your ass bare.”
The order goes out, up and down the coffle: shoot on sight.
♦ ♦ ♦
The immediate result of the explorer’s get-tough policy is that Martyn and M’Keal, self-appointed watchdogs of the van, enthusiastically cut down a pair of elderly egg women as they teeter up the road, their fragile burdens perched atop their heads in great coiled snake charmer’s baskets. Mungo inspects the slack tangled bodies, arms and legs splayed, neat holes through chest and eye, the blood mingled with running yolk and albumen until it looks protoplasmic, ageless, some essential jell of life festering to the surface of an antediluvian swamp. “Bury them,” he says.
Ten minutes later, while leading his horse through a maze of immense rounded boulders tumbled over the grass like heaps of dead elephants, the explorer suddenly becomes aware of a commotion up ahead. One of the men. . it looks like Ned Rise. . is struggling with a pair of blacks. Mungo drops the reins and charges through the narrow cleft between the boulders, crying “Stop thief!” as if he were on a crowded thoroughfare in London or Edinburgh The black men, naked to the rain, glance up quickly, coolly gauging the distance between the explorer and themselves, and turn back to the business at hand. One of them is dancing round in circles with Rise, both hands locked on Ned’s musket and jerking it back and forth as if it were a two-man saw, while the other methodically hacks at the leather-bound bundles lashed to Ned’s ass. By the time the explorer arrives on the scene, the first man is sprinting away with Ned’s hat, the second vanishing into the bush with a fifty-pound sack of rice. Ned, still clutching the musket, lies sprawled in the mud, a victim of his own momentum and the thiefs unexpected release of the gun.
Cursing, Mungo draws a bead on the first man. “Take that!” he shouts, squeezing the trigger. Nothing happens. The thief stops in his tracks, hands on hips, no more than a hundred and fifty feet off. And then, incredibly, he begins wagging his hips and thrusting his pelvis forward, obscene, taunting, contemptuous.
Mungo flings down his musket in disgust (wet powder, no doubt, damn it) and snatches up Ned’s. But the thief, like a rabbit on the lip of his warren, has disappeared. The explorer is about to explode, the multiple frustrations pricking at him until what’s left of his composure is like some raw bleeding wound, when he whirls at Ned’s shout. He cannot beheve his eyes. Some nigger son of a bitch is scrambling atop the charger he left in the defile no more than thirty seconds ago. This has gone too far.