All at once the door swings back and the servant, shrunken with worry, gestures for them to enter. Guide and explorer step through the gate and into a walled courtyard bristling with armed guards. Giants, six and a half or seven feet tall, pectorals like iron, knives, spears, darts and arrows glinting out from the black shadows of their bodies. They wear loincloths of leopard skin, plumes and anklets of ostrich feathers. Any one of them could clear the floor of Parliament in thirty seconds flat.
But as the explorer brushes by, he notices that they avert their eyes and clutch at their saphies, thick lips moving as if in prayer. “Hot dog,” Johnson whispers, falling back on one of his arcane colonial expressions. “You’ve got them awestruck.”
Wringing his hands and tugging at lip and ear, the servant leads them through a succession of identical rooms, walkways and courtyards. The rooms are uniformly low of ceiling, decorated with a Persian rug or tapestry, reed mats on the floor, a tumble of earthenware pottery; the courtyards feature wispy palms, water troughs alive with weed and insect, caged birds, goats, chickens, lizards, dust. It seems as if they’ve been walking for miles. In and out of rooms, down pathways so narrow the explorer has to hug his shoulders. Through a courtyard with six palms, another with two. Eight chickens here, four there. Here a goat, there a cow. Finally, the servant, who has begun to quake like an epileptic at the onset of a seizure, motions for them to wait at the entrance of a long narrow walkway. They watch the pale flash of the soles of his feet as he hurries toward the point at which the walls seem to converge. They watch as he falls to his knees, presses his forehead to the earth. They hear themselves announced: white demon and black sorcerer.
The explorer stumbles twice and finds himself in an expansive courtyard, two or three times the size of the others. The whole is brooded over by an enormous snaking fig tree that casts a bit of shade in even the farthest corners. As he looks closer, the explorer is chilled to discover that the tree is festooned with human skulls, and a number of carved figures depicting unnatural acts: autofellatio, pederasty, the eating of excrement. The most arresting statue, its features greedily distorted, shows a pregnant woman with the multiple dugs of a dog either swallowing or regurgitating a serpent, which is in turn either swallowing or regurgitating the head of an infant.
At the base of the tree, obscured in deepest shadow, there is a sort of throne, rough-hewn wood with a glitter of paint. Beside the throne, a white dog lies asleep in a cloud of flies. When he turns to look behind him, the explorer sees that the narrow walkway is choked with armed guards, black giants identical to those who barred the front gate. He begins to feel somewhat ill at ease.
Suddenly a masked figure springs out from behind the tree with a primordial shriek. “Wo-ya-ya-yaaa!” the figure screams, pounding bare feet in the dust and brandishing a scepter topped with a polished skull. Mungo, taken by surprise, steps back a pace or two and finds himself standing in a low trough filled with a dark, nasty-looking liquid. There are splashes of it on his boots and the legs of his pants. Wet and red. Bloody red. And now suddenly the dog is on its feet, howling, yabbering, foam on its muzzle. “Wo-ya-ya-ya-yeee!” the masked man thunders, apocalyptic, whirling toward him in a blur of feather and bone, and now all at once the sound of drumming, doom-baba-doom, doom-baba-doom, and the guards taking up the refrain: “ya-ya, ya-ya, YEEE!” The explorer is stricken, paralyzed, his legs and feet encased in lead, inner voices screaming for self-preservation, exhorting him to run, flee, bolt, scratch, bite, kill.
But then a familiar hand closes round his elbow. “Stay cool,” Johnson whispers. “They’re terrified of you.”
Terrified? he thinks. Of me? Yet already the din has begun to subside, the guards chanting under their breath, the dog easing back on its haunches, the drumming a whisper. The masked man, swathed in fur and feather, settles into the throne and with a wave of the scepter commands silence. The explorer takes advantage of the lull to step from the trough, and Johnson, bowing low to the ground, approaches the man in the mask and spreads the gifts before him. Sunlight dapples the dust beneath the tree. The gifts, chosen in London by Sir Joseph Banks and calculated to win the savage heart, glow like the treasury of the gods. An appreciative gasp escapes one of the guards, but the man in the mask remains impassive, arms folded across his chest.
Johnson bows again, and then launches his presentation speech. “O Mansong, terror of mountain and plain, widowmaker, grappler with spirits and demiurges, vanquisher of eland and elephant, I present these strange and wonderful gifts to you in the name of my liege and protector, this mild, inoffensive and saintly white man, who has traveled immeasurable distances in order to prostrate himself before your eminence.” At the word “prostrate,” Johnson turns to the explorer and indicates the ground. Mungo falls to his knees, then stretches himself prone in the dust.
While lying there, nose to the ground, he becomes aware of an intermittent movement in the farthest recess of the courtyard. He concentrates on the movement, a blur of shuffling feet, and from the corner of his eye observes this: a screen of woven grass, black feet, fleshy toes wriggling beneath it. And there: the servant, looking harried, ducking behind the screen and then jerking back again, as if his head were on a string. He seems to be conferring with someone, a hidden presence, the articulator of those curled and bloated toes. Here’s another mystery, thinks Mungo, slightly feverish, somewhat fearful, totally lost in reverie. But then he becomes aware of Johnson’s voice, in English now, floating above him like a nest of hornets. “Okay,” a sting in the tone. “Okay, already. Get up.”
The explorer rises, dusting at his clothes. He adjusts his tattered collar, fingercombs his beard and slicks back his eyebrows with spittle. But then he realizes that no one is paying the slightest bit of attention to him — all eyes are fixed on a new cynosure: the presents. The servant is hunched over them now, reverentially handing piece by precious piece to the masked man for his examination. First the silver salver. Then the table service for ten, a pair of ivory cufflinks. An umbrella. Ten plugs of tobacco and a jar of orange marmalade. A dozen inkwells, a corset, a wig. And finally, the pièce de résistance: a miniature of King George.
So taken is the presumptive monarch by the glitter and novelty of these gifts that he lets his defenses down: in a single fluid motion he slips the mask up over his head in order to enjoy a better perspective of them. The explorer is stunned. He’d expected a monster, but this fellow, with his quick sharp eyes and sleek little bulb of a head, is more like a ferret, a chicken thief, a sneaky skulking thing of tall grass and shadows. As the little man gingerly bites down on the silver salver, Mungo can’t help wondering about Eboe’s description of Mansong as a brute of a man with chins and bellies and a head like a melon. Could this fellow be an imposter?
It is then that the explorer becomes aware of the traffic between the throne and the screen in the corner. The original servant, abetted now by a smaller, shrunken, and if possible even more tentative colleague, is scurrying between throne and screen with the treasures. For the explorer, it is an epiphany. “Johnson,” he whispers. “You see that screen back there?”
“Shhhh.” Johnson looks edgy. “Don’t pay it no mind,” he hisses. “And whatever you do, don’t stare at it. Don’t even glance at it. That screen don’t exist. Get me?”