Twenty-five yards. Martyn firing a musket into the sea of faces, spears like a forest in motion, M’Keal down, the boulders tipped back on their fulcrums. Mungo dips into his shirt and whips out the pistol in a fluid burst of light, the weapon flashing like a sword drawn from stone. He levels it at Dassoud’s face, both arms steady, but the boat is lurching, difficult to draw a bead, swirling closer, the roar. . a stone grazes his cheek, spears begin to sprout from the deck, somewhere behind him Martyn cries out over the thunder in his private agony. .
In the rear of the boat, stunned and disbelieving, Ned Rise is frantically turning over the alternatives: should he jump and risk the current or wait to be battered to death, squashed like an insect against the hull? Breathing hard, his eyes dissolved in his head, he clings to the tiller out of habit, postponing the moment, staring up into the massed black faces and seeing the hangman all over again. Jump! he shouts to himself. Jump! But he can’t, the water like the teeth of a saw, chopping and grinding at the rocks with a fierce frenzied buzz. . and then the first arrows begin to strike the canoe, M’Keal hit again and again, mouth open in a silent scream, blood like a surprise. . and still Ned sits there. Milliseconds tick by, the boat heaving and rocking: Ned Rise, former clarinetist, ne’er-do-well, hangee and African explorer, dead man. He is fevered, panicky, in the mouth of the beast, every muscle frozen. And then he sees Mungo in the bow of the boat. Mungo, drawing something from his shirt in a storm of spears, arrows and stones. Long-nosed, slender, silver barrel, something out of a distant nightmare: a dueling pistol. Tumblers click in his mind. Barrenboyne. Johnson. His wasted life. And then, in a daze, he’s up and dodging the spears and arrows, rushing for the bow of the boat, mad, mad, mad, struggling into the thick of it.
Fifteen yards. The boat dips violently and then rides up clear of the water, suspended for one giddy lingering instant, and Mungo has it, a clear shot, Dassoud’s face big as a wagon wheel — but suddenly his hand is arrested, the pistol jerked from his grip. Ned Rise is there, soaked, insane, spear-grazed, clutching at the pistol as if it were the key to the universe, the Holy Grail, the deus ex machina that could lift him up out of the doomed boat and hurtle him to safety. “Give it to me!” Mungo shrieks over the pounding furious roar of the river, frantic, a fraction of a second left. He snatches the pistol, Ned wrestles it back, the boat spinning for the abutment, the world coming down round their ears. . “Barrenboyne!” Ned shouts, as if it were a battlecry, his features contorted, wet hair splayed across his face. Ten yards, five, all the explorer’s hopes riveted on a silver cylinder, a fragment of lead: “Give it to me!”
“Poison!” Ned cries. “Anathema! A bad joke, it’s a bad joke!”
“Eeeeee!” call the vultures, swooping low. “Eeeeeeee-eeeeeee!”
“What?” The explorer is shouting — bawling — a damp dismal wind howling through the tunnel in breathless sobs. “What?”
And then they’re over the side.
It is like leaping into the teeth of a hurricane, dancing with an avalanche. They are buried, instantly, under the crashing countless tons of water, the very rocks quaking with the force of it. Dassoud’s shot goes wild, the Joliba founders and in the next instant is dashed to splinters on the near abutment, Martyn and M’Keal, corpses already, are tossed briefly into the air and then sucked down the throat of the gorge as if they’d never existed.
Above, on the rocks, ten thousand voices whoop in triumph and exaltation. Barefooted, naked, their faces disfigured with ritual scars and gashes of paint, black faces, black bodies, the tribesmen embrace, kiss their sworn enemies, dance in one another’s arms. The shout goes up, again and again, and the bonfires burn late into the night.
And the Niger, the Niger flows on, past the tumult of Boussa, past Baro and Lokoja, through rolling hills and treeless plains, playing over the shallows like fingers on a keyboard, stirring the reeds with a strange unearthly music, flowing on, all the way to the sea.
CODA
Disquieting rumors began to trickle back to the coast toward the end of 1806, rumors of Mungo Park’s demise and the disintegration of his expedition. By January of 1807 they reached England, and shortly thereafter — like wind-borne microbes — they began to spread through Scotland. Ailie confronted these rumors — every last wild word — and refused to believe them. Mungo dead? It was impossible. A mistake, that’s all, the upshot of giving the least particle of credence to the irresponsible jabber of those black aborigines, those abhorrent little Seedys with their disfigured faces and rotten teeth: what would they know of her husband’s courage and resihence? After all, he’d been gone nearly three years the first time, and no one — not even her father, not even Zander — had believed he would survive. No. The rumors were foundless, ridiculous.
But as 1807 became 1808, and there was still no conclusive word of husband or brother, she began to hunger for rumors, rumors that might reinforce what she so passionately believed: somehow, somewhere, Mungo was out there. In 1810 the Colonial Department contacted the guide Isaaco through Lieutenant Colonel Maxwell, Governor of Senegal, and delegated him to look into the circumstances surrounding the explorer’s disappearance. Twenty months later the elderly Mandingo emerged from the bush with a document inscribed in Arabic: it was the journal of Amadi Fatoumi. The white men, Fatoumi wrote, had been killed at Boussa, though he had done all he could to prevent it. Mungo Park was dead. He had drowned when the H.M.S. Joliba capsized in the rapids while under native attack.
Ailie repudiated the document. It was a lie. Mungo was alive — certainly he was — and Zander too. Her father tried to reason with her: “It’s a sad fact, but ye maun face it, gull. Ye’re a widow, and as much as it gars me to say it, ye’re bereft of a brother too.” His words had no effect. She’d heard it all before — fifteen long years ago, when the whole world was crying in its beer for the “daring young Scotsman swallowed up in the shadow of the Dark Continent,” when her friends and relations flocked round to pat her back and her own father tried to force her into a marriage she didn’t want. And now it was the same thing all over again. Each new rumor brought them to her door like crows. Betty Deatcher with her brimming eyes, the Reverend MacNibbit with a face like a gravestone. Poor thing, they said, watching her greedily, watching her with something like hunger in their eyes. Is there anything we can do?
Georgie Gleg wrote her from Edinburgh just after Amadi Fatoumi’s journal was released. The letter was long and exhaustive — some thirty pages of exquisitely formed characters and precisely ruled margins — offering consolation, hope, money, a shoulder to cry on, a proposal of marriage. She never answered it. Instead, she gathered together all the mementos of Mungo’s first expedition — the battered top hat, the ebony figurine with its cruelly distorted belly and limbs, the three editions of his Travels—and set up a sort of shrine in the corner of the parlor. Five chairs were ranged round the display, and she spent long hours sitting in one or another of them, the children at her feet, reading aloud from the Travels or from Mungo’s letters, or just staring off into space, hoping, praying, waiting for the next rumor to make its way to her.