Then Mungo came home from the Niger, scintillating, heroic, huge with success, and Zander no longer doubted what he would do with his life. There would be a second expedition, and Zander would be part of it. What more daring occupation was there? Not Nelson, not Napoleon himself could match it. The thrill of pitting oneself against the unknown, the delicious risk, the heady exhilaration of victory over nature itself: it was too good to be true. How could he have thought of anything else these past few years? Of course, he thought to himself, of course, the idea of it sprouting in him like a tough clinging vine, like ivy, burgeoning till it sought out and filled every crack and crevice of his being. He would wade through bogs, hack his way through scrub and nettle, scouting out the trail for his brother-in-law, small and quick and lithe, probing at all the deep-buried secrets of the Dark Continent. It was a revelation. Alexander Anderson, explorer. This is what he’d been saving himself for.
Little did he realize he would have to wait seven years for his chance.
Seven long torturous years, years that wore on him like an indeterminate prison sentence, no time off for good behavior. He killed time with drink, riding, a flirtation here and there. He hunted, smoked cigars, took up boxing to build his endurance. And he shadowed Mungo. Made him repeat his stories over and over till he could quote them word for word, till they ran through his head like the stuff of legend. He puttered away at the only trade he knew — doctoring — as a way of distracting himself from this thing that had become an obsession. At night, or on the long gray afternoons when he couldn’t muster the energy to lance a boil or apply a clyster, he devoured everything available on the subject of Africa and exploration. He read Moore and Bruce and Leo Africanus; he wore out three copies of his brother-in-law’s Travels, carrying a battered volume with him at all times, muttering over the dog-eared pages, quoting it to startled patients and half-witted farmers as if it were a holy book. Then one afternoon Mungo took him aside and told him to get ready. He was elated. When the bottom fell out three months later he sank into despair. A year passed — the longest, bleakest year of his life — before Mungo came to him again. This time it was no false alarm. He packed his bags in a trance, all his hopes and dreams realized, all the years of waiting come to an end. He was going to Africa.
♦ ♦ ♦
Now, the rain lashing at the walls of the tent like a Biblical plague, his guts turned to ice and his face on fire, he lies back on a sweat-soaked litter suspended between a pair of battered crates while a raven caws in the distance and black beetles crawl up his legs and whir in his face. He is dying. Sapped, wasted, down to just over a hundred pounds, he cannot — will not — go on. In disgrace, he’s allowed himself to be carried— carried like a woman or child — by men nearly as weak as he. Mungo has dosed him with calomel, let blood, hunted up snakes and tiny antelope and eyeless white grubs the size of a man’s forearm so that he could have fresh meat. All to no avail. He is dying. And glad of it.
Suddenly the flap swishes back and Mungo slips into the tent. His eyes are pits of concern, raw with doubt and worry, his face as gaunt and yellow as a deflated football. A drop of water clings to the tip of his nose. “How you feeling?” he asks.
Zander wants to lift his own weight from the explorer’s shoulders, wants to lie to him and say It’s all right — don’t you worry about me. But he can’t. When he opens his mouth to release the words there’s nothing there, no sound at all.
Mungo isn’t listening for the reply. He strides across the room, turns his back and shrugs out of the drenched greatcoat, then flings himself down on a crate beside his bed. There’s a whiff of sulfur as he lights a tallow candle, and then the rustle of paper. A moment later he’s scribbling away in his notebook with an almost frantic urgency, as if the act of putting words on paper could soften a blow or breathe life into a corpse.
Outside, the rain-slick village of Bambakoo bows under the weight of the deluge: tamarind, mahogany, fig, a freckling of bright tropical birds in a huddled wall of green. Beyond the glistening huts and thick cluster of riverine forest, the Niger punishes its banks, flaying the earth to its metamorphic bones, vocalizing its authority, swishing and sucking as it drinks in the rainfall like a bottomless hole. Zander can hear it from his bed, rain falling in the hills behind him, rushing past the tent in a throbbing network of brown tentacles, driving, caroming, leaping, until finally it breaks through to enlist in the stream for the long inexorable drive to the sea.
“It’s a pity,” Mungo is saying over his shoulder. “The loss of life, I mean. If I had it to do over I wouldn’t leave England till I was damned good and sure the rains were finished down here.” He pauses, the quill pen scratching away in the interlude. “It was the weather that did it — no doubt about it. We Scots and English just don’t have the constitution to take all this rotten air, this constant soaking, this—” He throws the pen down and presses his fingers to his eyes. Back turned, he begins again, his words choked with pain and disappointment, some fresh piece of bad news sticking in his teeth like gristle. “I may as well tell you now,” he groans, swinging round in his seat. “Scott’s dead. He—” The explorer glances up at his brother-in-law and then turns away again, as if ashamed to look him in the eye. “He gave in to the fever two nights ago. The Dooty just sent word by special messenger.”
Zander says nothing in response. He’s having trouble keeping his eyes open, and he can’t quite catch his breath. It’s like the first time he went into a football match at school and found himself in the dirt, his senses jarred, the wind knocked out of him.
There is a moment of silence, lingering and dull, underscored by the background hiss of the rain and the roar of the Niger. “Zander?” Mungo says. And then, almost a bark: “Zander!”
He’s there in a flash, leaping across the room and snatching at his brother-in-law’s wrist as if to prevent him from slipping over the edge of a precipice. The pulse is nothing, as faint and intermittent as the rattle of a broken pocketwatch. Panicked, the explorer grabs him up in his arms — a bundle of sticks in a sack — and fumbles a vinegar-soaked rag to his nostrils. Zander’s eyes flutter twice, the irises fixed under the upper lids as if staring back into themselves. There’s a red welt on his throat, and a cold flat pallor has crept into his face.
Dying, he looks like Ailie.
♦ THE END OF THE ROPE ♦
The Spanish use a single verb, esperar, to express both waiting and hoping. So too in English: there is no wait without expectation. One waits for spring, a table, death.
wait, to stay in a place or remain inactive or
in anticipation until something expected
takes place.
Ailie is waiting. Staying in Selkirk, at her father’s house, remaining inactive and expecting — what? The letter that tells her to wait no more, that she’ll never see husband or brother again? Or the hastily scrawled missive bringing news of Mungo’s reemergence on the coast of Africa, alive and well and embarking that day, a hero a thousand times over? Neither. Both. At this point she hardly cares: she’s at the end of her rope. All her life she’s waited for Mungo, waited for him to finish school, come home from Djakarta, Africa, London. She can wait no more. Really, sincerely, she’d rather know that they were dead — he and Zander both — than to live in this limbo of suspense, in this agony of living for someone else, out of one’s body, drawing each breath, day by day, in morbid anticipation of events in a place so distant it could be mythical.