“The paddles!” Mungo shouts. “Take up your paddles, men!” The men ignore him, the banks grow higher, the Niger heaves and bucks like a furious animal. They hold on, spray flying, the ceaseless racket of water impacting on rock all but swallowing them, the river pitching dizzily, snags and riprap raking like claws at the bottom of the boat. And now — in a quick running blur — the clay banks give way to walls, sheer rock faces pocked with geologic acne, rough as sandpaper above, smooth as the mythic glass mountain below. The canoe angles right past a single boulder big as an atoll, then jerks left again around a pair of scoured pillars, and there, up ahead — what is it? The glancing light, the froth and mist, the roar — it could be anything from a series of riffles to a second Niagara. “Hold on!” someone shouts, and they lock their jaws, bracing for a quick flight into eternity.
But once again the Niger defies their expectations: the roar derives from neither falls nor rapids. Six hundred yards ahead the river seems to stop cold, cut off by a monolithic wall of rock that stretches across the horizon like a felled giant. The banks pull back, the current slows a notch or two, and then they see the passage — a single channel gaping like a mouth in the center of the wall. The explorer goes cold at the sight of it — they’ll be swept down like rats in a sewer, dashed against the rocks and drowned. . but no, wait. . that tunnel must be thirty feet high, forty! A sudden heady rush of elation sweeps over him: spared, spared yet again! “Look!” he calls back to Ned, “it’s big as the portals under London Bridge — we’ll clear it easy!” Yes, of course. And isn’t that daylight on the far side?
It is. And in fact the great arched vault of the tunnel, abraded through the eons, is easily lofty enough to accommodate the Joliba—or a ship twice its height for that matter. But there is another factor involved here, a crucial and perhaps decisive factor that the explorer has not yet had an opportunity to take into account. It is this: what appears at this distance to be some sort of exotic growth darkening the rock wall ahead — it could be a dense thicket, fur bristling along the spine of some Mesozoic beast, clots of algae like skin — is in fact something very different, something animate, intelligent, hostile.
“Wait a minute!” Martyn is perched in the bow of the canoe now, straining his eyes toward the oncoming monolith like a lookout in a crow’s nest. “There’s. . there’s people on those rocks!”
People indeed. Mungo looks, M’Keal looks, Ned — his heart sinking: new life, purpose — hah! — it’s Rise’s Law all over again — Ned looks. As the river bowls them closer, everything becomes clear, as clear as a verdict of guilty, a sentence of death. An army is deployed along the cliff — so thick in places that the individual warriors seem to congeal in solid black masses like lumps of tar — an army big as the Czar’s, big as Napoleon’s, endless, as if all of Holborn had turned out in blackface and armed with spears and bows and hammered knives. All along the Africans have known this moment must inevitably come, all along they’ve assuaged their disappointments, nursed their stepped-upon toes, swallowed their ravaged pride in the certainty that ultimately they would have their revenge.
Check and mate.
The river pushes them, irresistible. Paddles are useless against it, the anchor lost. As sure as gravity exerts its force and planets tug round the sun, they will be pulled through that grim stone mouth ahead, pulled — like filings to a magnet — onto the spears of their enemies, fatal appetency. The explorer can see them clearly now — the Tuareg army that had looked down on them from the bluff, the Hausa tribesmen in their jubbahs and turbans, a contingent of Maniana, ocher limbs and filed teeth. There — those are the Soorka, and there, the nameless savages from Gotoijege, hot to avenge their king. Every prerogative ignored, every snub, every wound given and drop of blood spilled, has come back to haunt them. It is a day of ironies. Even sitting here now, watching his own death played out like a pageant, Mungo can see the bleached high-water mark of a second passage that neatly skirts the cliff ahead, wide and unencumbered and dry as a bone — navigable only during the monsoon.
Dreamlike, this moment before death. Fame, glory, wife, family, ambition — they’re equally irrelevant. He is some big-horned buck in the grip of a predator, stunned beyond pain, his guts spilled in the grass, eyes glazing, the crack and drool of mastication like a dirge. He looks around him, detached, absent. Martyn is fooling with the weapons, Rise frozen at the useless tiller, M’Keal crossing himself. One hundred yards, the water sucking and seething. What can he do? Shoot one of a thousand? Take yet another life? No. Better to sit here and wait for the forest of spears, the jagged boulders, the cauldrons of bubbling oil.
But then something jolts him upright, something like anger, rage, a towering fury fed with adrenalin and hate: in all that crowd, through the thicket of weapons and limbs and jockeying torsos, he has suddenly, startlingly, isolated a single face. The face of the one man in all the fathomless universe he can hate with something approaching purity, with an absolute, implacable, merciless hatred, the one man who has thwarted him and barred his way like some cousin of the devil, unreasoning, cold and deadly, the one man he would have strangled in the cradle had he been given the chance: Dassoud. The two hissing syllables catch in his throat, slap at his face, and all at once Mungo is on his feet, lurching with the boat, dipping into the bright tatters of his shirt for the smooth ivory grip of his secret weapon, his pis aller, the gleaming silver-plated pistol Johnson had pressed on him with a parting benediction.
He’s saved it, pressed close, through all these months. The hoarder’s secret, tucked deep in the waistband of his ragged breechclout, concealed in the folds of the silly spangled shirt he’s fashioned from the tatters of the Union Jack. If it came to the worst, if the river evaporated beneath his feet or he fell into the hands of the Moors, he planned to use it on himself. One bullet, one only. The bridge of the mouth, the soft pocket of the ear. But now, in a moment arranged in heaven, he sees what that bullet has been designed for, understands why it was dug from the ground, melted down, cast and hardened, appreciates why Johnson — salt of the earth — forced the pistol on him. In three minutes he will be dead. So will Dassoud.
Seventy-five yards. Fifty. The rabble is shouting now, pink mouths like wounds in the dark pinguid faces. Ten thousand pairs of lungs, plangent, a roar that for one fraction of a second crashes over the otherworldly din of the river, only to subside almost immediately into mute gesture.
Dassoud is there, waiting, perched not over the archway with the others, but clinging to a ledge at water level, out front, the single nearest man to the onrushing canoe. A knife is clamped between his teeth, a musket leveled in his hands. The tagilmust dangles at his throat, as if he has purposely exposed his face for the occasion, a tight triumphant smile drawn across his lips, his eyes a conflagration, bridges burned behind him. He has given up everything for this moment — his elite cavalry, his hegemony over the desert tribes, the soft fecund wash of Fatima’s flesh. For four and a half months — since the day he failed at Sansanding — he has driven himself, obsessed, horses dying under him, his skin blistered and throat parched, to reach this spot. Haunting the land of the Kafirs, killing strange chattering things and sucking at the raw meat as he rode — no time to stop — inflaming the local chieftains with his news of the white men, the Nazarini, waking, eating, drawing breath for this moment, this place, this Boussa.