In his misery, in his loathing, in his horror, the foolish thing that Frair does is to tear back the little finger of wood fixed to his knee, thereby severing the worm. For a moment, no one reacts, and the din that has assailed them since Lake Dibbie screams through the silence. Then M’Keal whistles — sharp and sudden, as if he were calling a dog or exclaiming over the size of a fish — and one of Amadi’s men spits into his hands for luck. Mungo, drawn by Frair’s outburst, merely stands over him, watching the open sore glisten like a mouth. Then he shakes his head and turns his back.
There is of course no question of stopping to bury him. On Christmas Day (or thereabout: the explorer has lost track of the exact date in the haphazard jumble of his notebooks) Frair, swathed head to toe in a blanket of flies, is declared officially dead. As captain and head of the expedition, Mungo murmurs a few words over the corpse before committing it to the yellow ripples of the Niger, to the tiger fish, the turtles and the crocodiles.
That night, as he consults his watch by moonlight, the explorer finds that it has unaccountably stopped. German-made and set in an initialed silver case, the watch was a gift from Ailie’s father in another age and another lifetime, when the young explorer first packed his bags and set off for the East Indies, a wellspring of hope and ambition. Now, sweeping along on the dark flood, that time seems as remote as the Age of Dinosaurs. He slaps the watch in his palm, holds it up to his ear. Raucous, derisive, the invisible forest howls at him with a thousand voices. Mungo looks up at the sky, at the shifting stars and the planets in their loops, and drops the silent timepiece into the flat black soup of the river.
♦ THE NETHER REGIONS ♦
Days flit past, strung tight as a crossbow through the long sere afternoons, and then released, in the shank of the evening, with a whoosh of falling sun and rising mist. The New Year comes and goes, undocumented, in a blanket of sameness and a stench of decay. Silent and inevitable, the Joliba drifts past deserted villages, sandbars heaped with sunning reptiles, flocks of birds so numerous their plucked feathers could stuff every pillow in Europe. The river is always the same, never the same.
At Kabara, port of Timbuctoo, the explorer makes a miscalculation. He comes to anchor too early, and instead of hanging back to skulk past this most ominous of all obstacles in the dead of night, finds himself drawing even with its congested banks and mobbed water lanes in the broad gaze of mid-morning. His first reaction, as the city draws into sight round a bend in the river, is to fault his eyes. It’s an illusion, that’s all. A phantasm bred of an overtaxed mind, of fever and anxiety. But there it is, undeniable, clustered mudhuts and open warehouses, a spill of canoes clinging to the distant surface like a black film. Suddenly he turns on Amadi and begins berating him in bad Arabic, shrill as a dowager scolding her pug. The guide merely shrugs.
Mungo knows one thing only: that they must avoid Kabara at all costs. Timbuctoo is the nexus of the Moorish trade, the hub that links Sahara, Sahel and Sudan. If they’ll resist him anywhere, they’ll resist him here. He turns his back on Amadi in disgust and orders the men to their paddles, snatching the tiller from Ned Rise and swinging the canoe round 180°. “Dig!” he exhorts through his clenched teeth, and slowly, painfully, the overloaded Joliba begins to crawl upstream. After an hour, however, Kabara is still in sight, the men are sapped, and the canoe, at full steam, can merely hang in the current like an obstruction. M’Keal is the first to see the futility of it. “Cor, Cap’n,” he calls over his shoulder to where the explorer sits at the tiller, “you expects us to ‘old the barge ‘ere till Gabriel blows ‘is trumpet or wot?” The old soldier’s words chuff from his lips: he’s breathing hard, his hands tremble at the paddle, he glows with his own juices like a suckling pig over the spit. Mungo considers a moment, and then, hardening as he had on Lake Dibbie, he pulls the tiller full right and the Joliba swings back round on Kabara. “Prepare to repel any boat that approaches within fifty yards,” he hisses. Bluebeard couldn’t have put it any better.
This time, canoes do come out to intercept them. Long, whippet-like dugouts full of irate Mussulmen, Mussulmen who want to behead and dismember Nazarini for the glory of Allah, to avenge the failure at Sansanding and the slaughter on Dibbie, to reassert their born and sworn right to a trade monopoly and to sorely chastise these whey-faced infidels who have neither asked nor paid for the privilege of traversing their borders. Hopping mad, the Moors fill eighteen canoes with beards, teeth and spears.
What the Moors lack, however, is firepower. Though their canoes, craftily piloted by Somonies and riparian Soorka, fan out to converge on the Joliba from all directions, they are unable to make even the darkest of dark-horse approaches to spearchucking range. Mungo and his boys, each armed with fifteen single-shot muskets, are blazing away like an army, sending a screaming sheet of lead out over the water to strip the flesh from Moorish bones and convert jubbahs to perforated winding sheets. Cursing through their beards, the Moors retire from the field and the Joliba whirls on down the river, uncontested.
♦ ♦ ♦
A week later the explorer observes that while they have passed Timbuctoo, they are still heading north — into the desert. The riverine vegetation, always lush, has begun to thin out a bit, and beyond the trees the hills are sparse and arid, prickling with euphorbia, desert rose and whistling thorn. The heat is profound, appalling, all-consuming. There is no escape from it. Beneath the canopy, as enervated as gutshot survivors of Austerlitz, Martyn and M’Keal play cards, doze, sip fou from a gourd, occasionally snaking out a hand to splash their shirts and faces with tepid river water. Ned Rise has erected a sunscreen over the tiller, and Amadi and his men, stripped to loincloths, squat in the shade of the canopy, rolling their bones and counting up their cowries. There is no thought of swimming. Not when crocodiles — some of them half as long as the boat — line the bank like spectators at a parade, or river horses beat the surface to a froth with a thundering, sucking, splashing display of pique or playfulness or whatever.
The sun rises and sets, time uncharted and undocumented, days strung together until another week is gone and still the river carries them north. There is no more beer or fruit or butter or bread, and the men are grumbling over a diet of salt beef, rice, yams and onions. Mungo looks at his compass forty times a day. He is concerned. So is Ned Rise. Ned questions the explorer, the explorer questions Amadi, Amadi shrugs. The suspense is killing. Not to mention the heat, the boredom, the doomed hopeless stir-craziness of men eternally at sea. This is what Columbus must have felt like, teetering on the rim of the world.
At a place identified by Amadi as Gouroumo, seven canoes dart out in pursuit of them, and the men, stripped down to shorts now like Amadi and his slaves, snap out of their lethargy long enough to pot a few luckless natives and strike terror in the hearts of the rest. Given the sameness of their days, given the boredom, the exercise is almost welcome, it is almost fun. What else have they got to do but lie around and sizzle like so many strips of bacon? Besides, cutting down the odd nigger or two keeps the old reflexes honed, steadies the hand and sharpens the eye against the day when some real trouble crops up. And it’s not as if they were going out of their way to pick a fight or anything. No, these naked cannibals put out after them like crocodiles, just drooling for the chance to pop a white man in the pot. After all the black crow they’ve been eating, it’d probably be like veal or something.