The explorer doesn’t like it. The people who attacked him at Gouroumo were negroes, and he’s got no quarrel with negroes. But they really leave him little choice. Whether they’ve been put up to it by the Moors, or whether they’re rankled because he hasn’t followed protocol with regard to gifts and permissions, he can’t say. All he knows is that they come out on the attack like a prizefighter lurching out of his corner, belligerent and determined, all he knows is that they want to stop him. And once he stops, he’s at their mercy. He can picture them rifling his stores, breathing in his face, punching at his breastbone with their blunt cracked forefingers, all the while chattering away in some muddled troglodytic language that’s like a barnyard flatulence, like pigs wheezing and kine passing wind. They could extort food and weapons, they could rob him, burn his notebooks, hand him over to the Moors. The thought of it throws a switch in his mind, case closed. Negroes will die, but he will not stop, come hell or high water. Repercussions be damned.
Unfortunately, the repercussions come sooner than he might have imagined, and in the form of canoes — sixty of them — just off a place called Gotoijege. It is late in the afternoon, two days after the incident at Gouroumo, and the Joliba is hugging a sheer rock wall that juts out into the river like a crooked elbow. Everything is still, stultified by the heat. The men are drowsing, caloric waves ripple over the rocky promontory, a lone vulture rides the convection currents high overhead. Gradually, like a waterborne leaf or twig, the Joliba works its way around the point and into the open river beyond. It is at this juncture that the explorer has his first intimation that all is not welclass="underline" there seems to be something out there, obscured in the deep shadow of the promontory. Half a second later, which is to say half a second too late, he gets the picture.
It is a trap.
So many canoes crowd the cove it looks like a logjam. Up ahead, stretched across the river like a Stone Age armada, twenty more canoes hold the current. Hundreds of angry black faces, painted in various configurations of doom. Bulging black arms at the paddles, grids of swollen black vein and flexed muscle, flinty black hands clenched round bows and quivers, the nasty tapered shafts of long-nosed spears. No doubt about it: the word is out. Someone has let these people know that there are white men on the river, strange pale ghostly creatures running amok, creating havoc, murdering tribesmen up and down the shoreline, refusing to pay tolls or tribute or even to prostrate themselves before the high and mighty, the lordly and god-chosen, to plead for permission to pass through tribal lands. White men, begging to be chastised.
Suddenly, with a shout that could bring down all the snowfields in the Alps, the tableau erupts in violence. Where an instant before there had been sun and silence and the slow drowse of the drifting boat, there is now a frenetic seething wash of hostile humanity up and down both banks of the river. The promontory behind them is like a trampled anthill, swarming with stirred-up naked savages yabbering threats and insults and jabbing their pigstickers at the sky. Troops of women have emerged from nowhere, big-boned and bottom-heavy, cutting the air with calliope shrieks and pounding at great booming kettle drums as if they were flailing the hides of hapless explorers. Men and boys — hundreds of them — rush to the water’s edge flinging spears and stones and flaming torches, riddling the ship with poisoned arrows and crude iron knives. At the same time the canoes shoot into action, slipping behind the Joliba as snugly as shadows, big black athletes at the paddles, painted warriors crouching down behind them to hone their spears and limber up their thrusting muscles. And all of them — men, women, children, paddlers, thrusters, bowmen, spearchuckers and chiefs— hooting like butchers on a three-day drunk.
It is awesome. Terrifying. Overwhelming.
Could this be the end? the explorer is thinking, his vital organs curling up like hedgehogs, while Martyn reaches for his musket and Ned Rise rams the tiller hard right to send the canoe angling out from the spit. Arrows hit the canopy with a thunk-thunk-thunk, a rock cuts Martyn’s cheek. They are staring into the faces of five hundred enraged savages, and another two hundred are hurtling toward them in quick low-slung canoes. They’ve been caught with their pants down, and it looks bad, looks as if they’re whipped before they started.
But then things begin to fall into place: Ned gives them some breathing room, the sweet stink of the gunpowder fires their nostrils and before you know it they’re rising to the occasion. Snatching up their weapons like the true-blue stout-hearted fighting men they are, saturated to the very clefts of their chins with true grit, blazing away like champions, like murderers. Once the boat is out of arrow range, it is easy. A shooting party. Potting ducks in the Cotswolds. They fire on their adversaries with a modulated rage, with the no-quarter-given, absolutely merciless absorption that possessed them on Lake Dibbie; they fire until the flotilla is destroyed, and then turn on the fine of dugouts blocking their path downriver.
The blacks hold their ground. A hundred yards out, Ned swings the Joliba broadside and the men line up like a firing squad — Mungo, Amadi and the slaves on one end, Martyn, M’Keal and Ned on the other — and pour volley after volley into the dark line ahead of them as they drift down to meet it. One of their antagonists, in ostrich plumes and coral, looks to be a chief or a king maybe. He stands firm in the bow of the foremost canoe, a scepter clenched in one hand, the other solemnly raised in a commanding gesture, a gesture that says lay down your weapons and give up hope, lay down your weapons and surrender in the face of royal omnipotence and superior numbers. When Martyn knocks him flat with a single shot, it seems to take the heart out of the opposition. A moment later Ned brings the Joliba round again, rams the final canoe barring their way, and that’s that. Child’s play.
The only casualty is M’Keal. In the heat of the action, someone fired a musket at him — yes, a musket. A Moor, it looked like, seated in the prow of one of the pirogues—”a big sucker, in black.” The ball excised the upper portion of his left ear and trimmed back his hoary locks an inch or two. A minor wound, by all accounts. But when he was hit, something snapped. He went berserk. Frothed like a rabid dog, wrote a new book of racial epithets, stamped and stammered and shook his fist. Then, muttering all the while, he began to fling things at the astonished black faces across the water. First he flung muskets, six or eight of them, then a keg of powder. The battle raged round him: no one noticed. He heaved a sack of rice overboard, a regimental sword, the sextant. The bloody aborigine buggers, he’d show them. Next to go was a box of ammunition, and then the explorer’s duffel bag: compass, notebooks, half-finished letters to Ailie and all. Cursing, growling, beating his breast, the red-faced old soldier chucked over his shoes, his underwear, his Panama hat, the teapot, a barrel of salt beef and a crate of rotting yams. By the time the danger was past and they were able to subdue him, the stringy old veteran of the West Indian campaign had lightened their load by half, and put an end to any further plotting of latitude and longitude or worries about alignment with magnetic poles.