♦ ON A FIRST-NAME BASIS ♦
The rivers are pregnant, jumping banks, fanning down trees, giving birth to torrents. The rain falls in sheets like panes of glass, splintering into shards and nuggets as it hits the ground. Monsoon winds howl, trees hang their heads. Where before there was a gully, now there’s a river, rushing and brown, studded with splintered trunks, drowned livestock, the stavedin roofs of native huts. Fields are inundated, waist-deep in water, swamps are bottomless. The frogs think they were meant to inherit the earth.
After a long wet day of wading through swamps and gagging on soggy peanuts, the explorer and his interpreter have been stopped at what once was a fording place on the River Toolumbo, a minor tributary of the Niger. A cluster of miserable, waterlogged huts crouches on a barren hillock at the juncture of the two rivers. This is Bammako, or Wash-A-Crocodile, and the name seems appropriate, as the Toolumbo sweeps along near the crest of the hillock, tickling the timbers of the crude fences thrown up round each hut. The two mendicants are turned away from the first three huts in short order, but at the fourth they are advised by a toothless teenager sucking at a pipe that the far hut is temporarily unoccupied. Its owner, a goatherd, can be seen in the distance, mechanically beating his head against a rock in an attempt to assuage the loss of his goats to the rising waters.
There is firewood inside, neatly stacked in the corner. After half an hour of chafing and puffing, Johnson manages to get a blaze going. Then he borrows the explorer’s quill pen and a sheet of paper, secretes them in his toga, and ducks out into the rain. Ten minutes later he’s back, grinning, a calabash of beer in one hand, a shriveled, cancerous-looking chicken in the other.
♦ ♦ ♦
Later, the two share a pipe of the local tobacco, a heady sweet stuff that makes the eyes fix and the mind wander. For the first time since they left Kabba their clothes are dry and their stomachs full.
“You know,” Mungo says finally, “after all we’ve been through together I don’t really see the necessity of your calling me Mr. Park any longer, do you?”
Johnson shakes his head. “Force of habit, Mr. Park.”
“Please.” The explorer stretches out his hand. “Call me Mungo.”
A shy smile steals over Johnson’s lips. He looks immensely pleased with himself as he takes the explorer’s hand and murmurs, “Okay. . Mungo.”
♦ CROCODYLUS NILOTICUS ♦
The Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) is pandemic over the African continent, found from Madagascar to South Africa in the east, and throughout the Niger basin in the west. It is one of the largest and most feared of crocodilians, swift, savage and inexorable. The largest specimens are known to reach twenty feet in length and two thousand five hundred pounds. Young crocodiles, under optimum conditions, will grow a foot a year, but as the animal reaches its upward age of fifty years, its constant growth is directed toward an increase in girth and overall body weight rather than length. Thus, the difference in weight between the average fifteen-and sixteen-foot specimens is about two hundred and eighty pounds, or the full weight of a nine-foot specimen.
Characteristically, Crocodylus niloticus feeds on fish, but it is an active hunter and will devour anything it can catch, including baboons, gazelles, waterbirds, other crocodiles, leopards, turtles and men. Smaller prey is swallowed whole. Larger animals are seized and held beneath the surface until drowned, then dismembered and devoured at leisure. Like other reptiles, the crocodilians are incapable of mastication.
The Egyptian fear of the crocodile grew over the centuries into a fetishistic worship — the cult of the crocodile — and large specimens were mummified and interred in the tombs of pharaohs. A ritual among the Igbo Ukwu tribe was the regular sacrifice of goats to the river deities, combined with the semiannual feeding of virgins to a pair of slack-bellied crocodiles kept for that purpose in a walled enclosure. In the fourth century B.C., Perdiccas’ troops were decimated by crocodiles while crossing the Nile at Memphis — nearly a thousand men were lost. A century later, the Greek poet Callicles is said to have lost a lyre to a crocodile one afternoon while extemporizing verses on a barge in the Nile. The following day, hearing music, he went down to the shore and was astonished to see a gargantuan green head rise up from the water with the instrument lodged in its mouth.
He leaned forward to retrieve it. Foolishly.
IN MEMORIUM, K.O.J
The world is a shock of green, as brilliant and intense as a tennis lawn artificially lit against the night; the morning sky, dirty and lowering, gives no hint of the sun. From the trees comes the doleful cry of the blackfaced dioch, and the weary rustle of galagos creeping back to their nests after a meticulous night’s prowl. The odor of fish hangs in the air like a tale of waste and carnage.
Mungo rolls off his mat, shivering, and steps outside to survey the scene. The river sweeps along, unimpressed, still scraping away at the village’s perimeter, its waters choked with uprooted trees, swollen carcasses — roots, hoofs and antlers stabbing at the surface, veering off, swirling on themselves and vanishing as if jerked under by some invisible force. As he stands there pissing against the outer wall, a section of it suddenly leans back and tumbles into the river, hitting the water with a slap that flings froth in his beard, resaturates his toga and rinses his feet to the knee. And then it’s gone — like a cracker in a cup of café au lait. Wet member in hand, he continues standing there, half-awake, a bit befuddled, his eyes scanning the quick, muscular surface of the Toolumbo. But wait — there it is, lurching up from the depths, eight feet across, dipping, bobbing, uncertain as an adolescent eagle trying its wings. He watches as it spins out into the current, rough-hewn palisades still bound together with thorn and creeper, watches as finally it steadies itself and begins to float. . float like. . like a raft!
♦ ♦ ♦
Half an hour later, equipped with long supple poles hacked from a stand of bamboo, explorer and guide are assiduously punting their way across the angry Toolumbo, sky threatening to inundate them from above, snags and obstructions from below. It’s a nightmare. Like trying to conquer the Himalayas on roller skates or swim the English Channel lashed to a cannon.
The moment they push off from the bank the current seizes them with a jolt and sends the raft spinning crazily from the brink of disaster to the edge of annihilation. A twisted black branch sweeps up on them like a claw and nearly rakes the explorer into the seething flood, two logs the size of Corinthian columns kiss just off the bow with a volcanic crush while three of the palisades suddenly part company with the rest and shoot off under their own initiative, and an out-of-sorts baboon, soaked through and champing his incisors, tries to climb up out of the torrent while Johnson frantically plunges at him with the bamboo pole. . leaving the raft open on the left to the onslaught of a drowning leopard with two mongeese and a monitor lizard clinging to its back and a single black slab the size of Mont Blanc rushing up on them like a runaway carriage. . which the explorer at the last minute deftly avoids by thrusting his pole forward with a crack of splintering bamboo and a violent lurch of the raft that sends baboon, leopard, mongeese, monitor and Johnson reeling off into the current, heads dashed and bobbed, the baboon gone, Johnson fighting his way to a passing logjam, the raft ramming it from behind and Mungo bending to haul him aboard. . only to be assaulted an instant later by a school of tiny, slick, leaflike fish that crests over the floorboards like an attack of the falling sickness, upending explorer and guide and putting an end to any further pretense of piloting the craft, the two of them clinging helplessly to the hoary palisades while the raft hurtles from one dunking to the next. .