Accordingly, the coffle left Worumbang at dawn and marched until nightfall without a break. The slaves carried bundles of trade goods on their heads, the sun was like a whip, the whip like a bad dream. One of them, a middle-aged woman whose facial cicatrices indicated that she had once aspired to a higher station in life, constantly fell out of line. At one point she lay down and refused to go any farther until Suleiman applied the lash to the soles of her feet and she staggered up and continued on in a sort of trance. The explorer was appalled — but knew he was powerless to do anything about it. He was excess baggage himself, and besides, given his debilitated condition it was all he could do to keep up with even the weakest of the slaves.
When the coffle stopped at a stream called Co-meissang for the night, Mungo shuffled over to where the slaves had been confined and looked for her among the sullen black faces. He found her at the end of the queue, stretched out on her back. Her eyes were wide, staring up at nothing, and she was breathing as if she’d just broken the tape in a footrace. The explorer bent over her and offered her a drink of water. She said nothing. Just lay there, staring at the sky, breathing hard. He asked her name, his voice hushed and sympathetic. Somehow he felt a need to comfort her, tell her it would all work out, though he knew it wouldn’t.
“Her name is Nealee,” whispered the slave beside her. A crude iron band pinched his ankle to hers. “She’s got a sickness, her blood won’t warm her feet.”
Nealee. The explorer looked down at her. Where had he heard that name before?
“You going to eat her?” the voice rasped.
“Eat her? What do you mean?”
The man’s lips were cracked. There was a rope burn across his adam’s apple. “Maddummulo,” he said. “The black man puts his slave to work, the white man eats him.”
Mungo was astonished at the misconception, offended by the accusation. “Nonsense.”
“No one ever comes back.”
“Well that’s because they put you in a boat to take you to another land, a land like this one, where you work in the fields and—”
“Tobaubo fonnio,” the slave said, “a white man’s lie.” His voice was flat and emotionless. “There is no other land. They take you to where the water goes on forever and hack you to pieces. The fires flare through the night, the kettles boil. They pick at your bones.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Nealee wouldn’t eat the following morning. It was cold, gray, half an hour before sunrise. Quick piliginous things flashed through the undergrowth, birds nattered, a breath of stagnation soured the air. Karfa Taura intoned a general benediction, after which everyone in the party was given a cup of watery gruel. Nealee sat up painfully, took the cup from Suleiman’s domestic, and flung it in his face. When Madi Konko laid into her with his switch, she rolled over and began vomiting. Someone cursed. She’d been eating clay. “Eating clay?” the explorer said.
“She wants to die,” said the man shackled to her.
After morning prayers the coffle reassembled. Nealee refused to stand and Suleiman was forced to uncoil his braided whip. She lay there, face down in the dust, and bore the first two or three strokes patiently, then rose shakily and started off. It was immediately apparent that something was wrong: she lurched forward and reeled back again, as if she were being tugged apart by some invisible force. Suleiman ordered one of his men to cut her from the tether and take up her load. The slatee then marched behind her himself, prodding her from time to time with the butt of his spear.
Just before noon there was a minor disaster. One of the singing men blundered into a hive of fierce, irascible West African bees — killer bees, as the locals called them. Through the millennia these insects had developed a swift, effective and inexorable means of dealing with the honey badgers and sweet-toothed hominids that assaulted their nests: at the slightest provocation they swarmed out en masse and stung the offender to death. Each bee was programmed to fly into a suicidal stinging frenzy at the release of an alarm chemical, which also served to direct the bee to its target. If a man was stung within a hundred yards of the nest, he could expect to be inundated by a foaming mass of insects in less than a minute. Needless to say, the encounter more often than not proved fatal.
In the case of Geo, the singing man, it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. The first sting prompted him to drop his flute and plunge headlong into a bog beside the path, where he burrowed into the muck like an amphibian. Two or three of his quick-witted companions followed suit, while the rest — free men, slaves and slatees alike — took to their heels. The bees, confused over the loss of the primary target, divided their forces in pursuit of the seventy-two secondary targets. Strategically, it was a mistake. As it turned out, no one in the party took more than fifteen or twenty stings, and some — the explorer included — escaped unscathed. But when the coffle was regrouped it was discovered that Nealee was missing. Immediately the slatees broke out the irons and shackled the slaves together, while armed guards ran off to track her down. After setting fire to the brush in order to drive off the bees, they found her beside a shallow stream, swollen with scores of beestings. She had apparently attempted to elude the insects by splashing water over herself. It hadn’t worked.
This time the whip was ineffective: she could not get up. Karfa Taura shook his head. “Strap her to the ass,” Suleiman shouted. The panniers were removed from one of the asses and Nealee was laid across the animal’s back, her hands and feet lashed together underneath. From the first the animal was intractable. It bucked and kicked until finally the straps gave way and Nealee was tossed into the bushes where she lay like a rag doll.
Over two hours had been lost. The members of the party, spooked by the wildness of the place and the hair-raising legends surrounding it, were anxious to move on. A cry went up and down the length of the coffle: “Kang-tegi, kang-tegi.” Cut her throat, cut her throat. The sun scraped across the sky. A man stepped forward with a knife. Suleiman nodded at him, then ordered the coffle forward. Half an hour later the man rejoined the party, Nealee’s dress tied round his waist.
♦ ♦ ♦
The remainder of the journey was uneventful. The coffle proceeded in a series of forced marches, from dawn till dusk. Twenty miles a day, over mounds of splintered rock and hills haunted with shadow, through copses cluttered with fallen trees and strangling lianas, bogs that sucked the shoes from your feet, silt-clogged rivers darkened by clouds of insects and churning with fish and reptiles. It was all Mungo could do to keep up, weakened as he was by his bout with fever and starvation. He threw away his spear, his water gourd, the bone knife Aisha had given him. The straps of his sandals bit into his feet like wire and the sun crashed down on his head until all he could hear was the frenzied pshh-pshh-pshh of cymbals slashing away at the denouement of some opera or other. But he made it. First to Dindikoo, where he broke the bad news to Johnson’s three wives and eleven children, and then to Pisania, where he drifted up the front steps of Dr. Laidley’s log piazza like a ghost.
Dr. Laidley was fat and florid. He wore a dress shirt in one-hundred-tendegree heat and ninety-nine-percent humidity. With his tonsure and wire-rimmed spectacles he looked like a caricature of Ben Franklin. “Park?” he shouted, thundering across the floorboards, his pudgy hand outstretched in wonder and greeting. “Mungo Park?”