The Dooty steps into his hut, returns a moment later with a dog at the end of a tether. The dog is tall at the shoulder, solid of bone. It has massive, disproportionate jaws, a smallish skull, and a mane reminiscent of the hyena. At first the explorer thinks the man means to give them the dog, and he conjures up images of those meaty haunches crisping on the spit, stuffed with yams, foundering in rice, etc. But then the Dooty does a curious thing. He reaches behind his back and produces a dart, the sort of thing you’d associate with hazy barrooms and pints of porter, a splinter of bone honed like a shiv and capped with a burst of feathers. Quick as a magician, he jabs the dog in the flank three or four times. This has the effect of instantaneously arousing the animal to a pitch of malignant hysteria, its whole being concentrated in scrambling paws and champing incisors. Only the leash restrains it from falling on Johnson and tearing him to pieces. “Two minutes,” the man shouts over the remonstrations of the dog, “and I let him go.”
Half a mile up the road, the explorer collapses beneath a tree. “I can’t go on, Johnson. I’m just too sick and too beat and too discouraged.” A hundred yards off, cloaked in reeds and rushes, is the Niger, as brown and indifferent as all the eyes in all the faces of Africa.
Touracos squawk in the trees. A red river hog grunts from the muck at the water’s edge, flushing a great crowned crane in an explosion of gold and soapstone gray. The explorer watches the bird lift into the sky, wings beating like a drumroll, spindly legs trailing behind, watches it soar until it vanishes in the clouds. As his eyes drop he is startled by a pair of vultures, circling low, humping along under their leathery necks, patient as undertakers.
“Well, as I see it we got two alternatives,” Johnson sighs, easing down beside his employer. “We can sit here and starve to death, or we can turn back.”
The explorer doesn’t answer, but this time a softer expression creeps into his eyes, less inflexible, an expression suggesting that at long last the voice of reason has begun to whisper in his ear. “If we do turn back,” he says finally, his voice nearly inaudible, “what are we going to do about food and shelter? Clothes?” He looks down at his feet, blistered and bare. “Shoes even? Am I going to walk a thousand miles barefooted?”
“What else you goin’ to do? How would you get to Timbuctoo — fly? And if you did get there — then what? No, listen. We got a much better chance getting charity from the Mandingoes back the way we come than from these people around here. That Dooty. He was no Kafir — he was a convert. A true believer — and I’m talkin’ about a blood now, a animist — he won’t let you starve. It’s these damned apostates that wouldn’t give you a stick to chew on if you was the last man on earth.”
Suddenly a whistle sounds from the forest, soft and low. The two start, ready for anything, expecting the worst. Nothing there. Canopy, shadow, a billion trunks knotted with vine. “What was that,” the explorer says, “a bird?” Unconsciously, Johnson strokes the yellow lump over his eye. “That was no bird,” he says.
There it is again: long and low, wind in a drainpipe. “Who is it?” Johnson shouts, first in Mandingo, then in Arabic.
A shadow detaches itself from the general gloom and starts tentatively for them. The explorer, starving and stinking, peers up out of eyes dulled with fatigue and resignation, almost too far gone to care, as the shadow becomes a tall black woman gliding through the foliage like an apparition.
When she gets within ten feet of them, she stops, poised for flight like a deer surprised in the garden. There is a calabash in her hand, and a disk of unleavened bread. “We won’t hurt you, sister,” Johnson says, and then she’s bending over them, offering bread and sooloo beer.
Her name is Aisha. The hair pulls back from her head in a topknot, gold hoops dangle from her ears. She looks to be about thirty, dressed in a striped tunic and sandals. She’d followed them from the village where she’d seen them turned away by the Dooty. He was a criminal. Heartless. Would they accept her hospitality?
Walking beside her, a bit dizzy from the sudden impact of the bread and beer, the explorer finds himself studying her profile: the tapering neck, jutting jaw, ears so small and delicate he wonders if they might somehow have been shrunk. While pondering this strange and absorbing phenomenon, he notices the cicatrices, faint pinkish welts that trace the line of her jaw and spiral elegantly across her cheek, and then the blue paste dabbed over her eyelids, and finally the recalcitrant hairs fanning out in an almost transparent aureole round her skull. Unaccountably, he finds himself thinking of gerenuks and gazelles. As they walk, she keeps her eyes averted, but tells them that her father has always believed that white men existed, spirits of the dead, bleached of their souls and the color of the skin, and that if ever one appeared she should treat him with courtesy and respect, for he had come a long terrible way looking for his village and the skin he had lost. Mungo, interrupted periodically by his own belches and a barrage of kicks from Johnson, assures her that all this is nonsense, and that he is as alive as she, and that furthermore he is perfectly content with the color of his skin and sees no necessity of improving on it. Her only reaction is to glance up shyly at him and grin, as if she’d heard that one before.
Aisha leads them back toward Kabba, but to a separate compound outside the walls of the town proper. It consists of three huts enclosed within a palisade of sharpened stakes grown over with thorns and flowering vines. There they are introduced to her infirm and astonished parents, a succession of sisters whose ages are difficult to ascertain as a result of wrinkles and toothlessness, a brother and his wife and a pair of sorrylooking watchdogs. Aisha herself is a presumptive widow. Her husband, a relative of the Dooty, had gone north sixteen months ago to track a band of Moors who had kidnapped his youngest sister. She understood that it was his duty to go, but felt deserted nonetheless. He hasn’t been heard from since.
But for the present there is goat’s milk and cheese. Something in a pot with spinach and fish heads. Aisha spreads mats for them in her parents’ hut. Johnson scrapes the pot. The explorer, feeling a bit under the weather, retires early. Throughout the night he is awakened at intervals by the awestruck old patriarch, Aisha’s father, who plies him with questions about the afterlife. How can a spirit hold sustenance? Will his skin blacken of itself, or must he wait for someone to die, someone old perhaps, so that he can slip into that person’s skin? Mungo looks up at the puzzled, frightened, hopeful face in the firelight, so exhausted he can barely mutter, the questions fading into dreams, mounting in his head like the rungs of a ladder, why and when and where, and how does it feel to be dead?
♦ MO O MO INTA ALLO ♦
During their week-long stay in Kabba’s suburbs, a dramatic change comes over Johnson’s guinea hen: where once there was putrid flesh and scraps of feather, now there is naked bone, bleached and dried like a goose’s wishbone hung up over the mantel. Though still a bit pink and damp in the joints, essentially the thing has been transformed into a crusted, frozen skeleton, relatively inoffensive, devoid of interest for all but the least discerning flies. “Looks pretty good,” Mungo says. Johnson glances down, running his fingers over the brittle bones, examining the joints. “Still wet in the seams. But you’re right: I may have this thing beat yet.” He beams like a kid with a lollipop. “Three or four more days, that’s all it’ll take.”