Good Christian People, I bid your prayers for Christ’s Holy Catholic Church, the blessed company of all faithful people. .
It was The Book of Common Prayer.
“Niyazi,” Taura called out to the servant, “sweep out the back hut for the white man.”
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The next time the explorer became fully cognizant of his surroundings it was November, and the sere harmattan winds had begun to sweep in off the desert. In the interval, he had tossed on his pallet in the back hut, sweating and hallucinating. Karfa Taura had seen him through the worst of it, spoon-feeding him chicken broth and hot milk and garlic, rubbing his body with healing herbs, letting blood. During one of his lucid moments Mungo had promised Taura the value of one prime slave in return, deliverable upon reaching Pisania and the factory of Dr. Laidley. Taura thought it a pretty good deal, as he would have nursed the explorer in any case, fascinated as he was by this strange mythical being whose hair grew blonder and skin whiter by the day.
At Taura’s table one evening, as they were sharing a bowl of kouskous and mashed chickpeas, the explorer brought up the subject of the slave coffle: when would it depart for the Gambia? Outside, the crickets suddenly left off their cheeping. A host of faces looked first at the explorer, and then at Taura, seated at the head of the mat which served as a table. (There were many more slatees present now, most of them dependent upon Taura for their current expenses — he would be reimbursed when the slaves were sold at Medina.) Taura smiled at the explorer as he might have smiled at a six-year-old who’d asked why the stars didn’t fall from the sky. “Well, my friend,” he began, “I’ll tell you. There are six swollen rivers to cross between here and Dindikoo on the far side of the Jallonka Wilderness. In between there are seas of grass, taller than a man’s head. If we wait a month or so — till late December or early January — the rivers will have subsided and the villagers will have burned away much of the grass. I know you are anxious to get back to Tobauho doo, but to travel now would be impossible.”
On December nineteenth Taura collected all his local debts and set out up the Niger to the town of Kancaba, in order to purchase slaves for the trip to the Gambia. He returned a month later with a new wife (his fourth) and thirteen reasonably marketable slaves, all of whom had the requisite number of limbs and eyes. The explorer was overjoyed when his benefactor stepped through the door. He’d been counting the days, impatient, his every waking moment devoted to thoughts of Ailie and the African Association. He pictured himself dressed to the nines in a sparkling muslin cravat and a new sergdusoy jacket, lecturing Sir Joseph Banks and Durfeys and the rest, a legend in his own time. The suffering and privation were over. In two months he’d be the toast of London. Karfa Taura wrapped an arm around his shoulder. “The rivers are down,” he said, “the grass burned off, the slatees have gathered their wares. We depart on the first of February.”
But the first of February came and went. Suleiman had gone off to Sibidooloo to collect some trifling debt; Hamid and Madi Konko didn’t have their dry provisions ready; the moon was in the wrong corner of the sky. Excuses. The month wore away with them. And now, with March coming on, the slatees argued that they should postpone traveling until Rhamadan was over. March became April, the fast moon prevailed. Then one night in the middle of the month all of Kamalia turned out at the open-air mosque to watch for the new moon, the appearance of which would signal the end of the Rhamadan fast and offer an auspicious omen for travelers. The explorer stood amidst the throng of chanting Mandingoes and looked up with disgust at the clouded night sky. Hours passed. A number of villagers gave up and returned to their huts, determined to fast another day. But then, at midnight, the clouds began to pull back in shreds and the new moon poked its horns through to a chorus of hoots, cheers and pistol shots: Rhamadan was ended.
Like everyone else, Karfa Taura was caught up in the excitement. He threw dignity to the wind, jogging up and down like a cheerleader. Fires lit the sky, pandemonium crested like a wave. Karfa took the explorer by the arm and shouted in his ear: “We leave at dawn tomorrow!”
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Light was working its way across the night sky in a series of barely perceptible leaps when the coffle began to gather outside Karfa Taura’s house. Seventy-three people and six asses shuffled their feet in the dust, waiting for the sun to break over the hills. Thirty-five of these were slaves, bound for sale on the coast. The rest were itinerant merchants, slatees, their wives and domestic servants. Rounding out the group were Mungo and six jilli keas (singing men), whose vocalizing came in handy as a diversion from the hardships of the road and in smoothing the coffle’s reception at villages along the way. As the first pale rays illuminated the treetops there was a flurry of cinching and uncinching, coughing into fists, rechecking of final details and idle ear-pulling. Then they were off, leaving Kamalia in an orderly line of march, preceded by Karfa Taura, Suleiman and the singing men. When they reached the summit of a hill two miles from town, all the travelers were ordered to sit down, half the group facing westward, half looking back on Kamalia. Suleiman then delivered a solemn, nasal and interminable prayer, after which two of the other slatees circled the coffle three times, making impressions in the earth with the butts of their spears and muttering something uninteUigible by way of a traveling charm.
When they got under way again, the explorer noticed that some of the slaves were having trouble walking. They staggered under their loads, bow-legged and uncertain, tottering from foot to foot like worn-out drunks. Karfa Taura shook his head. It was a pity, he said, but some of them had been in shackles for years, and the unwonted exertion of taking a full stride wrought havoc on disused muscles, tendons and joints. It was a pity, he repeated, but an accident of the trade. Slaves had a tendency to run off, and so the accepted manner of confining them was to bind the ankles of two of them together, making it impossible for either to move independently. In order to merely scrape about like the losing entry in a threelegged race, one of the slaves had to raise the heavy shackles above the ankles by means of an attached chain. Then, with mincing deliberate steps, the pair would rattle forward. While traveling to market the leg shackles were removed, and the slaves were bound together in fours by a rope looped round their necks. A man armed with a spear marched between each group of four, to discourage any thoughts of wandering. When the coffle settled down for the night the leg irons were refastened, along with a heavy-link chain that replaced the rope round each slave’s neck.
‘‘But these are human beings,” the explorer said.
Karfa Taura adjusted his tarboosh. “True,” he said. His tone was matter-of-fact, as if he were discussing nuts and bolts or a herd of sheep. “But they are also trade goods.”
Despite the limping and groaning of the slaves (which was lessened from time to time by the application of the lash), the coffle made the walled village of Marraboo by midafternoon, rested briefly, then marched on to Bala, where they spent the night. The following day’s trek brought them to Worumbang, on the border of Manding and Jallonkadoo. It was the last outpost of civilization for a hundred miles — beyond Worumbang lay the Jallonka Wilderness.
The Jallonka Wilderness was an atavism — ten thousand square miles of uninhabited jungles, hills and grasslands, as pristine and primitive as the worid before man. Within its reaches were six rivers that had to be forded, three of them upper tributaries of the Senegal. There was no food to be had along the way, nor any shelter. Predators roamed the brakes and forests as they had for eons, and bandits lay in wait along the borders. It was a dangerous and inhospitable place — a place of shadow and legend, of bad luck and sudden death — and Karfa Taura, his fingers crossed, was anxious to get through it as expeditiously as possible.