What? Come into Sansanding flat out on his back? Never. Fever or no fever. Zander or no Zander, he had to get up and lead his men. He slapped the hand away like an irate child and jerked himself clumsily to his feet amid a tumult of cries, fore and aft. He heard the squawk of a startled bird somewhere up ahead, and then the canoe was lurching violently, left, right, left again, and he was pitched headlong into the inky soup of the night and the cold quick fastness of the Niger.
There were shouts and curses, some in English and some in the Somonie dialect of the boat people. The canoe in which Mungo had awakened was twenty-five feet long. It had contained bundles of equipment, two Somonies, Johnson, Ned Rise and Jemmie Bird. When it capsized, passengers and boatmen alike were flipped into the river. Jemmie, who had lashed himself to the cookpots, floated briefly, buoyed up by the big iron cauldrons; when moments later they tipped and filled with water, he sank like a stone. Ned, meanwhile, had managed to get hold of the explorer’s shirt collar and dog-paddle him toward the denser blackness of the shoreline. Johnson, floundering, happened by purest chance to blunder into the canoe, and hang on while it spun downriver, the sopping Somonies attempting to swim it ashore.
An hour later, the whole thing was history. The other canoes had converged on the spot with a torch, and had picked up the floating paddles. The canoe was steered to shore and righted, the explorer and Ned Rise located by means of hoots and whistles, and the equipment — which had been firmly lashed round the hull of the canoe — saved. Two kegs of gunpowder were ruined by the soaking, and a sack of rice had split. As for Jemmie Bird, he too was history.
♦ ♦ ♦
At Sansanding, the explorer was alternately lucid and delirious. Against Johnson’s advice, he set up a stall in the marketplace — the Mussulmen gathered around like dogs, snarling and baying, shouting about infidels, white demons and cut-rate prices — and sold off nearly all the excess beads, baft and baubles. The proceeds went into purchasing provisions for the great voyage downstream to the ocean. These mounted steadily in the dark recesses of the explorer’s hut, guerbas of beer and calabashes of palm wine, chickens in wicker baskets, strings of onions, desiccated fish, eggs, yams, millet and maize. Bundles of dried figs peeked out from beneath his pillow and lumps of goat cheese depended from the ceiling struts, redolent as an entire regiment’s unwashed socks. There was something in that smell that cleared his head, and waking in the midst of it one morning, the explorer shook off the fever long enough to write Mansong again, begging for his help in coming up with a seaworthy craft. The Munificent One’s response was ambiguous. The King smiles upon your enterprise, his messenger said, and will protect you as Mansong’s strangers in all territories under his jurisdiction, from west to east. But you must wait until the annual sacrifice to Chakalla before he can do anything for you. Wait, the messenger repeated, and Mansong will see that you are taken care of.
Mungo waited.
The days fell together, end to end, like dominoes. It was October already, and the rains had begun to slacken. Time was wasting. Finally, after repeated attempts to impress Mansong with the urgency of his request, the explorer decided to act on his own, and sent Johnson and Ned Rise down to the river to purchase the largest canoe they could find. But no one, it seemed, would provide them with a means of leaving the country unless Mansong himself gave the word. Johnson held up clicking sacks of cowries — a king’s ransom — but the boatmen just ducked their heads and looked away.
The explorer was in a quandary. Should he wait on Mansong’s pleasure while the river sank and the Muslim merchants agitated against him? Should he up the bribe? Hire the Somonies to take him to Djenné and try his luck there? Swim for it? Unfortunately, the strain of it all brought on the fever again and he was incoherent for two days, jabbering about the Baroness’ cleavage and Lady Banks’ pug, about the strength of his arm and the accuracy of his kick on goal, and how the name of Park would live on in history, greater than any other. When he came round again, he dosed himself so heavily with calomel he was unable to eat or sleep for a week. It was during this rushing, whirling period of acceleration and intense stimulation that he hit on the idea of reverting to the original plan and constructing his own vessel, despite the obvious limitations imposed on him by lack of materials and skilled artisans.
Seized by the idea, he sprang out of his bed like a mastiff and strode into the tent where the surviving carpenter lay in his delirium. “Joshua Seed,” the explorer boomed like a god, “get up from your sickbed and build me a boat.”
The sick man held out a little packet of bony knuckles and Mungo helped him from his cot. In the hulks at Portsmouth, Seed had impressed the explorer with his work-hardened frame and the clarity of his eye. Now he looked and moved like an elderly gentleman with bowel problems. Slack-shouldered, yellow of eye and drawn in the cheeks. Seed shuffled out of the tent and into the blistering sunshine that had succeeded the rains. He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders and hobbled resolutely to the mound of nails, rusted saw, hammers, adzes and chisels that had survived the trip, and began pounding away at the scraps of wood that were scattered about.
He was at it all afternoon, periodically calling for more lumber. The explorer was delighted. He returned to his tent, fed the chickens, scribbled in his notebook and spat on the floor. At six, he stepped outside to see how Seed was progressing and was surprised to see that the carpenter had attracted a sizable crowd of inquisitive natives with his hammering and sawing, his meticulous measuring and planing and fitting. Mungo elbowed his way through the crowd, careful to avoid trampling any native feet, and was about to call out cheerfully to Seed — something like ‘How’s it coming, old boy?’—when he stopped dead in his tracks, choked with incredulity. Seed was working all right, whistling away as if he didn’t have a care in the world, smoothing a corner here, shaving back a splinter there. He was working, but he wasn’t building a boat. He was building a coffin.
Seed was gone by sundown. The explorer eased the late carpenter into his casket, paid a pair of Kafir Mandingoes to dig a hole, and buried him without ceremony. Boatwise, things looked pretty bleak. But it was at that moment — that very moment when Mungo pitched the first spadeful of earth into the grave — that Ned Rise waltzed into camp preceded by the dark, glistening, water-burnished hulls of two sleek native canoes that seemed to float on the air like gifts from the gods. With a grunt, the eight black porters flipped the big dugouts from their shoulders and set them down on the ground as lightly as if they’d been made of pasteboard. The explorer was ecstatic. He embraced Ned as if he were a long-lost son, slapping his back with both hands and smothering him with praise and promises of medals, plaques, awards and pecuniary largesse on their return to England. Then he looked at the canoes.
They were rotted through, both of them. Mud, river plants and expiring minnows lined the insides of their hulls, and a gargantuan bite had been taken out of the gunwale of the smaller craft, testimony to some historical confrontation with an irate hippo. In sum, the canoes looked as if they’d been constructed sometime during the reign of Charles I, and had been left to rot ever since. The calomel twitched Mungo’s salivary glands, his lower lip fell, and he began to drool. “What is this, Ned?” he choked, unable to contain his disappointment. “Any fool can see that these are worthless hulks.”
Ned was grinning. He’d found the canoes in a heap of river-run lumber at the edge of town. They were half submerged, waterlogged and rotting. No one owned them. He dragged them from the river, inspected them closely and decided they were worth a try. For fifty cowries apiece, he was able to hire the eight local flaneurs who balanced the boats on their broad flat heads and hauled them into camp. “Maybe we could fix them,” he said finally. The explorer looked doubtful. “No, I mean it,” Ned said. “Look,” bending now to the slippery green hull of the larger boat, “the front half of this one isn’t all that bad. . and take a look at that one with the toothmarks. The back of that one seems pretty sturdy, no?”