The two have agreed, after hours of debate, that the only course of action left to them is to turn back, tracing the line of the Niger to the southwest, and then angling up through the Jallonka Wilderness to Dindikoo. Aisha has provided the explorer with a toga of some coarse material (banana yellow with splashes of red and aniline orange), a pair of sandals and a bag of peanuts for the road. Her father, who hasn’t left his side since he stepped through the front gate, presents him with a walking stick, intricately carved to represent the changing of skins after death. When Mungo asks what he can do to repay them, the old man begs for a lock of hair for a charm; Aisha averts her face and tugs nervously at her earring, then turns to him, her eyes dark and full, lips trembling.
This time, Johnson doesn’t have to nudge him.
♦ ♦ ♦
On the day of their departure, Johnson borrows a scrap of paper from the explorer, dashes off some couplets from Herrick and Donne, and distributes them to Aisha’s family for their saphies. Mungo looks on, incredulous, the right half of his head cropped to the roots. “ ‘Julia’s Clothes’? You mean. . all you have to do is scratch off a couple lines of nonsense in exchange for a week’s food and lodging — and they’ll settle for it?”
“You’d be amazed at the power of the written word, Mr. Park.”
Aisha has prepared a dish of raw eggs, millet and yogurt for their final breakfast, with bits of tamarind added for acid and bamboo seeds for bulk. As the explorer eats, she sits beside him, holding his hand, running her fingers through the remains of his hair. The old man sits nearly as close, gaping at him as if he were all seven wonders of the world wrapped up in one and the grandson of the demiurge to boot. In a voice like last year’s cornshucks the old man pursues his eschatological inquiry: Where does this world end and the other begin? Why must we die? Is the soul, once removed from the body, still hungry for sex? Between mouthfuls, the explorer answers the old man as patiently and imaginatively as he can, until finally, the meal finished, he rises to leave.
But then, just as he and Johnson are gathering their things, one of Aisha’s sisters leads a blind woman into the hut, a woman so crabbed and blasted by age she makes Aisha’s father look as if he’s just been pulled from the womb. The woman is Djanna-geo of Djenné, and she has come to consult the explorer about Tobaubo doo*[3] and the afterlife, and to tell him of the geography and society of the eastern Niger. The explorer had offered hanks of his hair to anyone who could give him information concerning the course of the lower Niger and the inhabitants of its banks — and there had been plenty of takers. One man told him that the river ran to the world’s end. Another that it ended in a violent whirlpool that sucked all things down into the waiting maw of a sea-beast called Karib-dish. Still another that it enclosed the Mountains of the Moon and had its tributaries in the Kingdom of Kong, a land interdicted for its cannibals and the giant apes that roam its cloud-hung massifs.
Others, notably a pair of brothers in the salt trade, gave him what seemed more reliable information. Past Sansanding, they said, was a town called Silla, twelve days’ journey from Timbuctoo. It was a Mandingo settlement, but Moors congregated there for commerce. To the north of Silla was the kingdom of Masina, inhabited by Foulah herdsmen. Downriver, to the northeast, was a swampy lake — Dibbie, or the dark water— so immense that while traversing it you lost sight of land for an entire day.
Beyond this, on the north shore, was Timbuctoo, a place where noblemen lived in palaces and shat bars of gold. The king of Timbuctoo was Abu Abrahima, and he was a Mohammedan zealot. On their first trip to his city the brothers had taken a room in a sort of public inn, and the landlord, on showing them to their hut, had produced a length of rope. If you are Mussulmen, he said, sit down and make yourselves comfortable — but if you’re Kafirs you are my slaves and with this length of rope I will lead you to market like a pair of heifers. La illah el allah, Mahomet rasowl Allahi, the brothers chanted.
Still, no one has yet been able to give him anything concrete about the progress of the Niger — or Joliba, as they call it — once it leaves Timbuctoo. His final hope totters before him in the person of this deformed and very probably deranged old blind woman. He poises, pen in hand, and waits for her to speak. With difficulty, her legs like sticks, the right side of her body withered from some nameless disease, the old woman settles herself on the mat. Aisha brings her a cup of sooloo beer, which she quaffs as if she were a coal miner coming off an eight-hour shift. She smacks her lips, casts her empty eyes round the room, and announces that she has to relieve herself.
When she hobbles back into the hut, clutching at the dress of Aisha’s sister with all the desperation of a child abandoned on the edge of a cliff, she calls for another beer in a stentorian voice, then shouts that she wants to smell the white man and feel his hair before she’ll strike a bargain to reveal her secrets. The explorer crouches beside her, the cool dry fingers roaming his scalp, the busy nostrils snuffing at the side of his face. Finally, after three or four minutes of kneading and snuffing, she appears satisfied. ‘‘Tobaubo,’’ she says, and lets out a sort of giggle.
She talks for an hour, her voice as clear and resonant as a carnival barker’s. Born in Djenné, she was abducted by slavers and sold to a merchant from the kingdom of Hausa, which lies beyond Timbuctoo, far beyond — beyond Kabara and Ansongo and a dozen other places neither Aisha nor her father has ever heard of. After eight years in the merchant’s seraglio she escaped along with a man named Ibo Mmo, a Mandingo from Kaarta. Two weeks later he was killed and sectioned by a party of maddummulo—man-eaters — while she lay in the bed of a shallow stream buried in mud and breathing through a reed. It took her six years to work her way back to Djenné, supporting herself by exchanging favors for food and shelter.
Periodically during the course of this recitation, Djanna-geo stops abruptly, releases two or three booming eructations and shouts for more beer. At one point she lifts her dead cracked face to the explorer and lowers her voice to a hiss. “There is a place on the river called Boussa,” she says, her index finger gliding before her face as if to reconstruct it in the air. “A place of jagged rocks and white water, where the river forks like the tongues of a thousand snakes. It is a very dangerous place. Beware it.” Then she sits back and demands a hank of hair.
The explorer, able to follow most of what she’s told him, is quaking with excitement, hardly capable of gripping the pen, his mind flooded with the course of the Niger and the names of faraway places: Kabara, Yaour, Boussa. Here, at last, is the voice of experience. He clumsily hacks off a lock of hair with the bone knife Aisha has given him as a going-away present, and presses it into the old woman’s hand, the ultimate question trembling on his lips. “But where does the Joliba flow from there — below Boussa, beyond Hausa?”
The glabrous old head cranks round on him, stiff and slow, until the clouded eyes draw level with his own. He can feel her breath on his face. “Mo o mo inta allo,’’ she whispers.
“What was that?” The explorer’s voice leaps out at her. “I don’t understand.”
She grins, silent, the cat that swallowed the canary, belching softly to herself. The explorer turns to Johnson. “What did she say?”
“She said ‘mo o mo inta allo’—no man knows.”