It hardly seemed to matter.
♦ ♦ ♦
Without chronometer, without compass, without sextant, the geographical missionaries of the H.M.S. Joliba look at the sun and know it is noon, forever, and that they are heading north, into the desert, into the glare, into the very maw of mystery. Their hair, thick with grease and dust, trails down their shoulders, their beards reach their waists. The proud red uniforms have long since degenerated to tatters — to loincloths — and the once-glistening boots have fallen to pieces. Unwashed, undisciplined, underfed, thin of rib and cloudy of eye, their skin blotched and sunscorched, their bare feet blistered, they could be the last remnant of some ancient tribe emigrating to a new homeland, they could be cave dwellers, scavengers, eaters of offal and raw flesh. Only Amadi and his three slaves are unchanged. Alert and watchful, they sit beneath their broad-brimmed hats and throw their carved bones. They are not men of the nineteenth century, they are men of the millennia, men whose gait and gaze and quick clever hands prefigure Europe and all of written history. They know the river will bend. They know that maps and trousers and salt beef are irrelevant, and that white men are fools. They are patient. They are content. Their eyes are open.
Meanwhile, the big black canoe drifts with the current. By day there is the blinding flash of sun on water, the whole earth set ablaze, white-hot, the hills consumed in flame. At night the banks reverberate with ghostly echoes — muffled snarls, startled cries, the eerie gloating snigger of hyenas — and the water boils with heart-stopping explosions as of strange gargantuan beasts cavorting in the deeps or stretching their great horny tails across the river to trap the unwary.
One night, under a moon so brilliant it varnishes the surface of the river and throws a cool dispersed glimmer over trees and shrubs and broken tumbles of rock, they are awakened by a sudden shattering burst of shrieks and growls somewhere up ahead. Primordial, cacophonous, chilling, it is the sound of pack frenzy, of snarling snapping furious jaws, the sound of wolves fighting over scraps of meat. But not only that: there is the hint of something else too, something far more excruciating. As they draw closer, they begin to realize what it is: human voices crying out over the clamor.
Everyone is awake now — even M’Keal — staring off into the darkness transfixed with horror. The sounds of tearing flesh, bones cracking, the garbled cries for help: they flay the nerves like salt and nettles, unbearable, as inadmissible as the image of one’s own death and mutilation. Ned turns away, the explorer’s stomach churns. They can see nothing. A terrible minute passes, then another, the night enveloped in demonic snarls and torn gasping sobs, as if somehow, poor sinners, they’d passed the invisible barrier and descended the long swirling tributaries of Acheron and Lethe. Suddenly one of the men cries out: “There! On the right bank, just ahead!”
The moon shifts, everything indefinite and insubstantial, there and not there. Then the shadows begin to take on motion and life and the snarling swells to a raging crescendo that ebbs in a single breath and a sudden explosion of light: a torch flaring out against the darkness. Flickering and unsteady, it illuminates the black humped forms of a hundred frothing, toothy demons: hyenas. Claws and shoulders and raging black mouths, hyenas, kid killers, graverobbers, choking on their own spittle. Against them, a single man — a traveling merchant perhaps — backing away from the gutted carcass of his camel, flailing the torch like an archangel’s sword, while a woman and child cower at his back, caught up in a bad dream.
Hunched low, the graverobbers close in, foaming at the carcass like fish after chum, snapping down glistening gray loops of intestine, jockeying for position, while others lumber in out of the shadows, their eyes bright with greed and a hunger no amount of feeding can satisfy. The man backs off, circling, while the woman, clutching the child as if it were already in pieces, feints with a length of firewood. For a moment, the contest looks even. But then in a sudden unforgiving instant, the torch dies out and the seething wave of muzzle and mane closes over them, their torn shrieks already lost in the rising volume of contentious growls and the percussive clash of jaws.
The Joliba sails on, amidst the gnashing of teeth and the crunch of bone, heading north, into the nether regions.
♦ THE BEAST WITH TWO BACKS ♦
The Reverend MacNibbit’s voice is disembodied, a deep, sure, mellifluous presence suffusing the clerestory with power and promise, with a prick of foreboding and a balm of reassurance. “And yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” he rumbles, shaking his great shaggy head and wagging his jowls, an admonitory tremolo creeping into his voice to underscore just how black and hopeless things can be. . but Ailie isn’t listening. Nor watching. Her head is bowed, as if in prayer, but her thoughts are elsewhere. Specifically, they are on Georgie Gleg — and the trip, the jaunt, the adventure she’s about to embark on. This very afternoon. The preparations have been made, her bags are packed. She can think of nothing else.
Georgie had invited her to accompany him on a six-week tour of the Highlands, through Fife, Angus, Aberdeen, Banff and Moray, culminating in a week’s stay at Avis House in Drumnadrochit, within sight of Urquhart Castle and one of the great deep churning lochs every schoolgirl knew so well in song and legend, the grandest loch of them all. Loch Ness. Avis House was the ancestral home of the Highland Glegs, currently tenanted by Georgie’s second cousin, Fiona Gleg, a spinster in her early fifties. During her recent stay in Edinburgh, Georgie had treated her for peripractitis and gout, and to show her gratitude she’d invited him to pay her a visit and “ken the glories o’the grand old loch.” Georgie immediately thought of Ailie. How a tour such as this would lift her spirits, allow her to live her own life for a change, take the onus of the patient wife, mother and housekeeper off her shoulders for a bit. It would be just the thing for her.
It would. She’s never in her life been farther than Edinburgh, and she’s only been there twice. Never been to London, the Continent, never even been to Glasgow. Mungo just packs his bags, takes her brother by the arm and tramps off halfway round the world. Any time he pleases. And she’s stuck at home with the children like some drudge in a fairy tale. Well this is her chance, and by God she’s going to take it.
Oh, everything will be very proper of course. Both Georgie’s mother and Betty Deatcher are coming along as chaperones, and she’s decided to bring her five-year-old with her as well. There’ll be no hanky-panky, nothing scandalous. Still, her father is violently opposed to her going. He sees it as an affront to her husband, whether she’s chaperoned or not. “And what if he comes home while you’re away, lass — what’ll I tell him?” the old man had demanded, his voice raw with anger and a stinging edge of accusation.
“Tell him I’ll be back the second week in April.”
“But Ailie, ye can’t do that to the mon — he’s your husband.” In her father’s own personal hagiography, Mungo ranked right up there with Saint Columba and Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Her eyes widened till there was nothing left of them but an angry splash of green, cold and brilliant as the Firth of Forth, and her voice trembled with the effort to keep it under control. “He did it to me.”
Now, sitting beside her father on the long hard pew, his breathing harsh and righteous, the children fidgeting, she can think only of release, of escape, of turning her back on MacNibbit’s fire and brimstone and stepping into Georgie’s carriage. Above her, the stained glass is suffused with sun, radiant, bright as blood, and it seems to pulse with the quick breathless cadence beating in her veins. The Highlands! Inverness! Loch Ness! She can barely contain herself, she wants to jump up and dance round the room, shout out the news. Suddenly, the minister’s words are playing in her ears, refreshing, resuscitant, a breath of air in a drowning girl’s lungs.