When Mungo looks up again he’s staring into Dassoud’s eyes across an ever-narrowing stretch of water, the Moor gaining, so close now his charger’s agonized gasps tear at the explorer’s lungs until he can barely catch his breath. Vaguely — as if in a dream — Mungo reaches for Bolton’s paddle, but the Moor’s eyes lock on him like grappling hooks and he can feel the walls of his throat constricting, all he can do to keep from bursting into tears at the unfairness of it all. Mesmerized, he cannot think of the ninety loaded muskets beneath the canopy or the silver-plated pistol tucked inside his shirt. He can only think of failure, ignominy and death.
But then Ned Rise’s voice sweeps up out of the din, muscular and hortatory—”Pull boys! Pull!”—and the tableau begins to dissolve. Dassoud drops back and the Joliba is suddenly rushing with the current, far out into the cleansing river, far from the blood and terror and the grim grasping fingers of captivity, far out onto the broad back of the Niger. Transfixed, Mungo kneels there like a supplicant, unable to move or think, as he watches his bitterest enemy recede in the distance until the black spot of his head is lost in the pulse of the waters.
♦ AND QUIET FLOWS THE NIGER ♦
It is like descending into the body, this penetration of the river, like passing through veins and arteries and great dripping organs, like exploring the chambers of the heart or reaching out for the impalpable soul. Earth, forest, sky, water: the river thrums with the beat of life. Mungo feels it — as steady and pervasive as the ticking of a supernal clock — feels it through the searing windless days and the utter nights that fall back to the rim of the void. Ned Rise feels it, and even M’Keal. A presence. A mystery. A sense of communing with the eternal that drops a pall over everything, silencing the long-necked birds, the river horses, cicadas, crocodiles, coots, kingfishers and snipe, the great silver fish that leap clear of the water and fall back again without a splash. It is almost as if they’ve fallen under a spell, the explorer and his men, as if their blood were flowing in sympathetic confluence with the river and the river washing them clean of all the guilt and horror and hardship of the overland journey. Persuasive, gentle, the current pulls them through those first hushed weeks with a force and logic all its own.
But then the crew wake one morning under a sky like dried blood and it is as if their ears have been newly opened. Sounds boom at them, unbearable, from the squeak of the tiller to the rattle of the bullock hides in the cruel hot wind that seems to have snuck up on them during the night. Great Nubian and griffon vultures wheel overhead, and the men can hear the flutter of the wings. Hippos snort like blaring cannon and crocodiles bark like dogs. Suddenly the whole universe is shouting at them.
Mungo rolls out of his damp blankets, wincing at the roar, and is shocked to see that they are no longer gliding through the endless tangled groves of arching trees and clawing vines that have walled in both banks of the river since they left Sansanding. Stunned, he looks round him full circle, then pulls out his telescope and looks again. There is no hint of green over the water, no vegetation, no shoreline in fact. Then it hits him: during the night they must have passed into Lake Dibbie, that vast inland sea reputed to lie between Djenné and Kabara. He gazes out over the shifting surface, happy in his surmise. Immense, shoreless, the lake slaps at the hull beneath his feet, its waters churned to brown sudsing waves in the hot wind.
The explorer consults his compass. They are heading north by northeast. Toward Timbuctoo — and the great desert. He swallows hard, hoping that what old Djanna-geo and Amadi told him is true, that thereafter the river loops toward the south. But he looks down at the insistent needle of his compass, and doubts assail him. Could Rennell and the others have been right? Does the river in fact run out of steam in the Sahara? Does it roar down an endless hole in the earth? Evaporate in Lake Chad?
Disturbed by these reflections, Mungo makes his way toward the front of the canoe, where Amadi Fatoumi and his retainers are seated. The four men are hunched down over their ankles, feet splayed, tossing bits of carved bone against the concave hull of the canoe and redistributing piles of cowries according to the outcome. As the explorer comes up, Amadi ceremoniously pours a thin stream of black tea into a cup the size of a thimble and hands it to him with a nod and a smile.
“So,” Mungo says, swaying with the boat, “we’ve made Dibbie, have we?” Hunched in the prow, Fred Frair fixes him with a brief vacant look and then gazes dolefully out over the water. Amadi looks up at the explorer as if he hasn’t heard.
“I say: Dibbie, isn’t it?” All at once the explorer realizes he’s shouting. He can’t help himself, what with all this noise. There is the maddening tinkle of spoon and plate somewhere in the rear of the boat, M’Keal’s drunken snores booming out from beneath the canopy, the screech of distant gulls, hum of gnats — all of it as loud as if it had been amphfied a hundred times. Exasperated, he bends to his guide. “What is all this bloody racket?”
Amadi looks surprised. He points to the sky. “The wind,” he says. “Very dry.” In answer to the explorer’s next question — a rhetorical one: does the Niger move southward past Timbuctoo and is he quite certain? — the guide merely points again, but this time to a spot just off starboard.
It must be said that the attack at Sansanding — led as it was by his archenemy — has had an unsettling influence on the explorer. He’s been jittery, his stomach has gone sour on him, a mysterious nervous rash has settled in his groin and between his toes. Like the hypochondriac who discovers a tumor under his arm with a surge of fatalistic joy, he has had his worst suspicions confirmed: they are out there, lurking behind every tree, camouflaged by the meanest village hut, out there lying in wait, just as he always knew they would be. And so, more than ever and with a single-mindedness that verges on monomania, he has determined to avoid any and all human contact. Against the protestations of his crew, he eschewed the cities of Silla and Djenné as if they were the abode of demons and basilisks, coming to anchor just above the farthest cluster of outlying huts and coasting down under cover of darkness. The men wanted to stop for fresh supplies — milk, produce, bread — but he wouldn’t hear of it. No: he wouldn’t stop at even the rudest native village hacked out of the bush, wouldn’t stop for beer, fresh meat, to feel solid ground under his feet for five precious minutes. He wouldn’t stop for anything.
Now, the sight of this spot on the horizon, this black speck, this nothing, fills him with terror. Out here in the middle of this oceanic lake, it can mean only one thing: people. Renegades, fanatics, murdering Moors. His first cry is stifled by the shock and disavowal that catches in his throat like a ball of phlegm. But then he shouts out like a sentry taken by surprise in a cold black night: “Attack! We’re under attack!”
The response is instantaneous. Amadi and his men leap up from their piles of cowries, and Fred Frair, languishing just a moment before, springs to his feet as if someone had spilled a bowl of hot soup in his lap. Martyn is there in an instant, and M’Keal, in boots and underwear, is up and cursing. “Moors!” Mungo cries, raising the telescope to his eye at the very moment that Fred Frair, galvanized by the first terrible call to arms, shoots past him howling like a dog. The result, viewed in scientific terms, is as simple as action and reaction, force and counterforce: the explorer’s elbow is jostled and the telescope flies from his hand to vanish instantly in the brown murk at his feet.