♦ ♦ ♦
Much later, and some distance downstream — far beyond the juncture of the Toolumbo and the Niger — the raft runs aground in the upper branches of a grove of tabba trees. The time has come to abandon ship.
Explorer and guide slip into the water and dog-paddle from treetop to treetop until they close in on the river’s outer verge, where flotsam-plastered trunks begin to emerge from the swirling yellow current. Finally, weary and waterlogged, they find their feet and start wading toward higher ground. Neither has spoken a word for the last hour or so — it was all they could do to hang on, grim, fighting for survival, no initiative left for such an extravagance as forcing air through the larynx. The explorer is the first to comment on the situation. “I think we made it,” he pants.
Johnson, belly-deep in fetid water, is about to reply, but doubles over and vomits instead. The guinea hen, so nearly exsiccated a few days earlier, dangles limp once again, as wet as if it had been freshly slaughtered.
They wade on. The forest hangs round them like a theater curtain, mist rising from the water, halfdrowned things — jackals, monkeys, pottos, bushpigs — wading along with them, looking dazed and bearish. As they slosh on, avoiding arrow-headed snakes and poisonous tree frogs, their hips begin to emerge from the water. Then their thighs, their knees, and finally their ankles. “Hallelujah,” Johnson mutters.
They’ve reached a rise of sorts, so closely overgrown with bamboo they have to hack their way through it to make any headway. A grim sodden line of honey badgers, rats and hairy-legged spiders follows in their wake. Suddenly Johnson stops hacking and stands frozen for a moment, sniffing the air. “Stew,” he says, and begins laying into the foliage with renewed vigor.
Five minutes later they are standing before a cookpot crammed to the rim with choice bits of drowned herbivore. A family of flood refugees — a narrow-shouldered little man with disks in his earlobes, his pregnant wife and six sticklike children — are gathered round the pot, feeding the fire and gnashing away at ribs and joints. The man gestures for them to have a seat and help themselves. “There’s plenty here,” he grunts, nodding at the bloated carcasses of two hartebeests and a sitatunga. “They’ll be rotted past all use in a day or so.”
Johnson rubs his hands and starts for the pot, thinking to warm himself with a cup of broth for starters — but instead of fragrant steam, a thick black smoke has begun to rise from the pot. “Hey, you need some more water here,” he observes, fanning at the smoke.
The little man, sitting cross-legged against a stump, asks Johnson if he would mind fetching a calabash of water from down below. Johnson turns round and sees that this side of the hill is relatively clear — a few big-boled trees and hothouse plants, the river no more than forty or fifty yards away. “My pleasure,” he says, snatching up a calabash and heading down the slope, his mood dramatically improved by the prospect of a hot meal.
“Need any help, old fellow?” the explorer calls.
“No — you just take it easy, Mr. Park — Mungo — and I’ll be back in a trice.”
Unknown to any of the participants in this scene, however, is the very crucial fact that a colossal old riverine crocodile — nearly eighteen feet in length — has followed the rising waters deep into the recesses of the jungle in the hope of picking up an easy meal at the expense of some halfdrowned, warm-blooded creature making its miserable way to higher ground. He lies concealed in a tangle of flood-run debris at the base of the hill, in water no more than a foot or two deep. He has been lurking here for better than three hours now, the scent of the tainted carcasses and stew and tender little children whetting his appetite, his dead-keen saurian eyes fixed on the group gathered round the cookpot. Things have gone splashing past him — easy marks — wretched, wet, vomiting things creeping out of the water unawares — but he’s ignored them. A mandrill dragging a broken leg and a buttery fat bushpig that normally would have made an exquisite entrée were especially hard to pass up, but he has his heart set on the pregnant woman, a sort of two-in-one treat. Or the stringy little man. Or that strange, pale newcomer. And he knows, as he’s known all along, that sooner or later one of them will come fumbling down that bank to fetch a calabash of water.
As Johnson steps into the stream the beast is ready for him. There is no warning — no reverential hush of the parrots, touracos and weaverbirds — just an explosion. The bush parting to reveal eighteen feet of brute ravenous power, the children shrieking, Mungo dumb with horror, the calabash in orbit and Johnson, poor Johnson, snapped up like a cocktail olive and wedged between the awesome snaggle-toothed jaws. Without hesitation the explorer is on his feet, leaping down the hill with his knife drawn, a hero to the core. . but the croc, its great jagged tail and dragon’s claws churning up the muck, is already bolting for deeper water, Johnson clamped firmly in its jaws. The explorer flies through the water like a hurdler, self-sacrifice pounding at his ribcage, but it’s too late, too late, and he watches, helpless, as Johnson’s eyes cry out to him and the grim Mesozoic beast sinks into the ooze.
NEWGATE
The walls are of stone, blocks of granite smudged and scrawled over with paint and ink and the imprints of a hundred thousand chapped and hopeless hands.
ROGER PEMBROKE, 1786.
Nan Featherstone, Slut, Buried Her
Soar Heart Under the Wait of
These Unyeelding Walls
VENI, VIDI, VICI. TOM THUMP.
Ned Rise has a good close look at these walls in the dawn’s early light. An intimate look, in fact. For he is chained to them, the impossible crushing weight of the shackles cutting off the circulation in his ankles and feet. His feet feel as if they’ve been thrust into a bucket of ice, while his ankles, traumatized by the pressure, seem to have been pinned beneath the cornerstone of some monumental edifice — Westminster Abbey or the Great Pyramid at Giza. But that’s not the worst of it. Unable to pay garnish or to bribe even the lowliest turnkey, he has been stripped naked and pushed into this, the deepest, darkest, foulest hole in Newgate Prison. There are no flagstones here, no straw, no sawdust even — nothing but mud. One part soil, two parts human excrement. Mud. The stink is appalling. There are rats of course, and fleas, lice, protozoans, bacteria, molds, viruses. Things that breed in secret holes and thrive in corruption, things that fester the life from you and gnaw you down to a convenient, digestible form. Half of those awaiting trial in this chamber never survive to see the inside of a courtroom. Typhus claims them, or smallpox, dysentery, pneumonia, consumption, inanition, exposure. This is it, thinks Ned. This is it.
Suddenly there is a rattling of chains beside him, and what he at first took to be a sort of low bench or heap of rags begins to compose itself into a fallen chest, ratty beard and luminous eyes. “Wot ye in for?” rasps a voice in the gloom.
“Nothing,” says Ned. “Except being an honest businessman, maybe. Trying to get ahead. Live decent.”
“Ye’re the murderer they drug in last night, ain’t ye? Killed a lord, wasn’t it? Didn’t give ‘im no quarter, neither, the way I ‘ears it.”
“Wait a damned minute, friend — I’m innocent. It was an accident.”
“All I can say is more power to ye. I’d like to kill a lord meself. Ten of ‘em. A thousand. Bring ‘em in ‘ere right now, all the lords and ladies in the county, and I’d choke ‘em to death one by one and take as great a pleasure in it as if I was banqueting on Portugee wine and oysters, I would.”