No matter. It doesn’t require magnification to see that that blemish on the horizon is a party of hostile Moors. The men, their faces flat with panic, are ready to take their leader at his word. Martyn and M’Keal are already counting out the muskets — twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five — while Frair scuttles back and forth from the enclosure with barrels of powder, ramrods and wadding in the event that reloading should be necessary. Only Ned Rise, at the tiller, seems composed. With sextant and compass, and the makeshift sail he’d rigged up during the night, he steadies the Joliba in the slackening current, running for Timbuctoo, Hausa and beyond, running for London.
The explorer, meanwhile, has gone rigid, poised in the bow like a prize pointer. Dripping sweat, squinting till his facial muscles begin to quiver, he stares off at the horizon as if he could set it afire from the sheer force of ocular concentration. A long moment ticks by, then another. And then, in a sudden dark moment of revelation, he realizes that a fearful conjugation is taking place out there on the perimeter: not one dot but three! Three slick and swift native canoes packed to the waterline with bloodthirsty Moors!
“Three of them,” Martyn says at his shoulder, and his voice is cold as a lancet. Yes. Bloodthirsty Moors. Savages. Animals. He can see them now — can’t he? — their headgear flashing in the sun. Suddenly a feeling of calm comes over him, the feeling ascribed to soldiers in the heat of battle. Firm and fatalistic, he lifts the musket to his shoulder and sights down the tapering barrel. “Prepare to fire,” he hisses.
Twenty minutes he stands there, a drawing-room actor in a tableau vivant. The three canoes, in formation, draw closer, closer, cutting an angle that will inexorably intersect the path of the Joliba. He can see them quite clearly now, their black hulls in relief against the great ball of the sun rising like a tired old beast from the lake behind them. When they drift within range, he gives the order to fire.
The first barrage overturns the lead canoe with a sudden sharp slap. Distant arms flail in the air, there are confused cries, shrieks of pain. Eight muskets fire, are, flung down and replaced by eight more. Another roar, another flash of light, and the second canoe is blasted from the water. What with the sun and the smoke the explorer can barely make them out, but certainly they’re Moors — in jubbahs and baggy trousers — little matter that their faces are black and the cries those of women and children.
After the second barrage, the occupants of the final canoe take to the water, abandoning their craft to its fate. It is then that the crew — Amadi Fatoumi and his blacks included — begin firing at random, blazing away at a featureless head in the glitter of sun on water, cutting loose at the merest suggestion of a swimmer’s wake. In the heat of it, the explorer draws a bead on a dark form clinging to the side of an overturned canoe, only to have his arm arrested as he squeezes the trigger. He whirls round on Ned Rise. Guns pop and roar, smoke hangs over the Joliba like a thunderhead touching down. “Tell them to hold their fire,” Ned shouts, “it’s a mistake — can’t you see that?”
It is as if Mungo has been wakened from a dream. He drops the musket and looks up and down the line of men, shocked by the transformation in their faces. Even Frair, feeble though he is, looks like some sort of ravening beast, every muscle strung tight, his mouth twisted and teeth bared. Amadi’s eyes are glazed and the tip of his tongue protrudes from the corner of his mouth, while his slaves are rapt as bumpkins at a shooting gallery. And the career men — Martyn and M’Keal — are in their glory. This is what they were born to, trained for, this is the moment for which they keep their bayonets honed and muskets oiled. Faces blackened with smoke, they take aim, fire, and snatch up the next weapon in a single fluid motion, merciless and implacable as machines. In his distraction, the explorer follows the line of Martyn’s rifle over the chop and past the foundering canoes, to where a woman’s head shows above the surface. A woman? — no, it can’t be. But it can, and is. A woman, her jubbah billowing around her, copper earrings catching the sun, a woman struggling to tread water and keep an infant afloat at the same time. “Cease fire!” Mungo shouts. “Desist!”
But the command goes unheeded. For the next fifteen minutes Dibbie rings with excited shouts and the frenzied popping of gunfire till the canoes are splintered, the muskets emptied and the atmosphere is still but for the wash of the waves, the hell’s breath of the wind and the slowly diffusing pools of gore that well up to darken the dull sudsing surface.
♦ ♦ ♦
Two days later, having left the vacant immensity of the lake and returned to the main channel of the river, the crew of the Joliba is witness to a very foolish act on the part of Fred Frair. Suffering from a multiplicity of unspecified ailments, suppurating infections and mysterious tropical diseases, Frair has been languishing for the past several days, dispirited and dull, his wasted form pressed flat to the hull as if at any moment he might subside into the slick dark wood like some sort of insect. No one likes to see him there, but what can they do? M’Keal, the old veteran, white beard against a plum-red face, sits watching him by the hour, now and again offering him a slug of rum or palm wine as a cure for what ails him. Martyn, having watched forty companions kick off already, is unconcerned. He squats beneath the canopy, cleaning the muskets, reloading them, whistling. Ned never cared much for the little man anyway — he was a pal of Smirke’s — and is too busy keeping an eye on the explorer, the compass, maps and tiller to worry about it in any case. And Mungo, brooding over the prospect of failure and the nasty character and habits of the Sahelian Moor, has no time for any of them. Still, no one wishes Frair any harm — they’d love to see him pull through. After all, if he goes, who’s next?
On this particular afternoon — sometime in mid-December of 1805—they are drifting with the current down a broad flat stretch of water under an incinerating equatorial sun, birds loud in the trees, insects in their ears, their eyes, their nostrils, when suddenly Frair sits up and begins shrieking like a drunk in delirium tremens. He can take it no more, he shouts. The heat, the fever, the stink of death. Amadi and his men look away. M’Keal bends over the thrashing private and tries to quiet him. But to no avail.
Of all the horrors he’s experienced, in prison, at Goree, along the road, and all the diseases that gnaw away at him, what has finally pushed Frair over the line is an infestation of guinea worm, Dracunculus medinensis. Painful, nauseating, but normally no big deal. The explorer himself is currently suffering through his second infection, and Martyn worked one out of his leg two weeks earlier. But to Frair, the thought of this blind living thing — this worm — thriving inside him, eating away at his flesh, crapping and pissing in his blood, is insupportable.
The previous day a blister had broken in the hollow of his left knee and the explorer, after bracing him with a killing dose of fou, cleaned the wound and treated it. Within the moist bud of the sore, pale as the flesh of a man’s belly, was the nether end of a female guinea worm, doing what nature expected of her: swelling, breeding, releasing millions of minuscule larvae with the amniotic wash of pus. Mungo carefully took hold of the visible portion of the parasite and wound a bit of it round a twig; then he bent to wash his hands in the river. And that was that: he’d done all he could to ease Frair’s predicament. He could neither remove the worm, nor eliminate it. Two to four feet in length, it was embedded deep in the connective tissue of Frair’s lower leg, wound tight as thread on a spool. Slowly, day by day, the worm had to be withdrawn by reeling it up on the twig, an inch or two at a time. If it were to break off and die in the leg, it would rot there, inextractable, and Frair would die of gangrene.