But of course the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. At that moment the scene is lit by the flash of a pistol, inundated by the report. There is an instant of revelation — the carcass of the horse, its stiffened leg in his hand, the searing venomous eyes and curled lips of the beast dissolving into the night — and then the black pall drops again, the gunshot echoes in the trees.
“Mr. Park — you okay?”
What can he say? Naked, bludgeoned, beggared and horseless — yet not mauled and devoured? Lost, but not alone? “Johnson,” he says.
Johnson’s voice comes back at him from nowhere, disembodied. “You got any bones broke?” It’s like playing hide-and-seek in a coal cellar.
“Where are you?”
He starts at the touch of Johnson’s hand. “Right here, Mr. Park. Right here.”
Now he says it like a lover: “Johnson.” And then: “What about you — you all right?”
There is a concatenation of violent respiratory sounds — throat clearing, spitting, hacking and drooling — followed by a series of groans and wheezes. “I am about as tore up as it is possible to be without being laid out for the undertaker — and that’s no lie.”
A wave of depression crests up out of the void and washes over the explorer. His shoulders are slumped, his privates chilled, ribs shrieking for attention. And his left knee. It seems to be out of joint. When he speaks, his voice is nearly inaudible: “What now?”
“Say what?”
“What do we do now?”
“Find a tree.”
“A tree?”
“Climb up and wait for light. You don’t want to be hanging around down here when that cat comes back for his horsemeat, do you?”
Mungo considers this for a minute. Things have begun to chirrup a bit, crickets or frogs or something. “Actually,” he says finally, “I don’t know. At least it would be quicker down here.”
♦ HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE DEAD? ♦
In the morning Mungo wakes with a start, and finds a tiny bald-headed monkey staring at him out of eyes the size of golf balls. When he moves to shoo it away the branch dips violently, then springs back to jar him loose. There is a moment of pure weightlessness — ethereal, almost exhilarating in its detachment — immediately succeeded by a gut-wrenching panic and a quick but focused image of the high-wire artist at Bartholomew Fair. The first branch slaps him in the face, the next gives way; but finally, after a drop of twenty feet or so, he manages to ram a projecting limb into his armpit and stabilize himself. Grunting, cursing his mother, his Maker and the African Association, he works his way along the length of the branch until he reaches the trunk. Which he embraces like a lost lover. But then he detects a movement out of the corner of his eye — just above him, dangling by its left arm, is the monkey. The wizened little creature gives him a quizzical look, then reaches out a cautious finger and touches him, soft as a kiss, on the brow.
The explorer works his way, limb by limb, to the ground. Johnson is sitting there beneath the tree, waiting for him. He is wrapped in his toga, but his sandals are missing. It is, given the fact of the rainy season in the rain belt, raining. Mungo stands there a moment in his shirt — feet, legs and buttocks bare. His pubic hair is the color of mashed turnips. “I was going to say good morning,” he says, “but under the circumstances it would be an obscenity.”
Johnson grunts. His right eye is swollen closed and there is blood caked in the hair over his ear. “You look terrible,” Mungo observes.
“I feel like I been dragged behind the London mail from Bristol to Covent Garden — and then pounded with mallets on top of it.” He licks his split lip and spits between his teeth. The spittle is red. “Here,” he says, producing the crushed top hat from behind his back. “They left this behind. Wasn’t worth the trouble.”
“Worth the trouble? All my notes are crammed in here.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“I see they left you your toga.”
“It ain’t worth nothin’ either. Took my sandals though, the bastards. And my ass.”
At the mention of the ass, the explorer wheels round, a look of disbelief on his face. “But — where’s the horse?”
Johnson shakes his head.
“You don’t mean to tell me that one leopard put away a whole horse — in a single night?”
“Look close, Mr. Park. You can see where he drug it away.”
The explorer looks. A swath has been cut through the vegetation, as if someone had dragged a rowboat across it: shoots and tendrils crushed, branches snapped off, plants flattened. “Well don’t just sit there, man — let’s go after it. I haven’t had a joint to gnaw on for days, weeks.”
“Can’t. He’s gone and hauled it up a tree someplace. Common practice with leopards. They eat what they can hold, then stash the rest way up high where the dogs and hyenas and such can’t get at it. When I was a kid we was asleep in the hut one night when a leopard carried off my aunt Tota. Next day we went out lookin’. Nine years old, I found her. She was stuffed up a tree, half-eat away, her eyes all covered over with flies. It was her head I saw first — hangin’ there like a melon or somethin’.”
“All right, I get the picture. So what do we do — starve?”
“What we do is we get on down that road to Kabba and beg us some alms, then decide how we are goin’ to get ourselves back to Dindikoo.”
“Back? Without completing my mission?”
“Hey, let’s face it. You almost finished it right here. With the rains it’s goin’ to be about three shades of impossible to travel anywhere — shit, we might not even be able to get back. Plus you got the Moors to contend with the farther up you go. Sansanding’s a Moorish town, from what Eboe says. And Timbuctoo too. They’ll Nazarini you alive up there. That what you want?”
The explorer’s jaw is set. His voice is shot through with emotion. “I’ll chart the course of this river if I have to dance naked in hell first.”
“Uh, forgive my mentionin’ it, Mr. Park — but you already are naked, and this is about as close to hell as you better hope you ever get.” Johnson pauses to grin till his molars show. “So start dancin’.”
♦ ♦ ♦
In Kabba, a collection of fifty or so clay huts whitewashed to a dazzle, Johnson approaches the Dooty,[2] throws himself on the ground and begins pouring handfuls of dust over his head. The explorer, totally naked save for his hat and the strips of shirt-cambric swaddling his privates like a colossal diaper, stands off at a distance. “Alms!” cries Johnson in a piteous voice. “We are respectable merchants set upon by dacoits, raped of our goods and clothing and left for dead in the forest.” The Dooty looks doubtfully at Mungo, his gaze riding up the splotched white legs to the diaper, the bare chest, tangled beard and freakish eyes, and then finally coming to rest on the accordioned top hat. Johnson catches at the man’s robe, and drives his voice down to a quaking, heartrending rumble: “We-we haven’t had anything but bark and grass for two weeks. A crumb, I beg of you, a crumb.”