Water Music

SOFT WHITE UNDERBELLY

At an age when most young Scotsmen were lifting skirts, plowing furrows and spreading seed, Mungo Park was displaying his bare buttocks to al-haj’ Ali Ibn Fatoudi, Emir of Ludamar. The year was 1795. George III was dabbing the walls of Windsor Castle with his own spittle, the Notables were botching things in France, Goya was deaf, De Quincey a depraved preadolescent. George Bryan “Beau” Brummell was smoothing down his first starched collar, young Ludwig van Beethoven, beetle-browed and twenty-four, was wowing them in Vienna with his Piano Concerto no. 2, and Ned Rise was drinking Strip-Me-Naked with Nan Punt and Sally Sebum at the Pig & Pox Tavern in Maiden Lane.

Ali was a Moor. He sat cross-legged on a damask pillow and scrutinized the pale puckered nates with the air of an epicure examining a fly in his vichyssoise. His voice was like sand. “Turn over,” he said. Mungo was a Scotsman. He knelt on a reed mat, trousers around his knees, and glanced over his shoulder at Ali. He was looking for the Niger River. “Turn over,” Ali repeated.

While the explorer was congenial and quick-to-please, his Arabic was somewhat sketchy. When he failed to respond a second time, Dassoud — Ali’s henchman and human jackal — stepped forward with a lash composed of the caudal appendages of half a dozen wildebeests. The tufted tails cut the air, beating on high like the wings of angels. The temperature outside Ali’s tent was 127° Fahrenheit. The tent was a warp-and-woof affair, constructed of thread spun from the hair of goats. Inside it was 112°. The lash fell. Mungo turned over.

Here too he was white: white as sheets and blizzards. Ali and his circle were astonished all over again. “His mother dipped him in milk,” someone said. “Count his fingers and toes!” shouted another. Women and children crowded the tent’s entrance, goats bleated, camels coughed and coupled, someone was hawking figs. A hundred voices intertwined like a congeries of footpaths, walks, lowroads and highroads— which one to take? — and all in Arabic, mystifying, rapid, harsh, the language of the Prophet.

“La-la-la-la-la!” a woman shrieked. The others took it up, an excoriating falsetto. “La-la-la-la-la!” Mungo’s penis, also white, shrank into his body.

♦ ♦ ♦

Beyond the blank wall of the tent was the camp at Benowm, Ali’s winter residence. Three hundred parched and blistered miles beyond that lay the north bank of the River Niger, a river no European had ever laid eyes upon. Not that Europeans weren’t interested. Herodotus was exercised about its course five centuries Before Christ. Big, he concluded. But tributary to the Nile. Al-Idrisi populated its banks with strange and mythical creatures — the vermicular Strapfeet, who crawled rather than walked and spoke the language of serpents; the sphinx and the harpy; the manticore with its lion’s torso and scorpion’s tail and its nasty predilection for human flesh. Pliny the Elder painted the Niger gold and christened it black, and Alexander’s scouts inflamed him with tales of the river of rivers where lords and ladies sat in gardens of lotus and drank from cups of hammered gold. And now, at the end of the Age of Enlightenment and the beginning of the Age of Imbursement, France wanted the Niger, Britain wanted it, Holland, Portugal and Denmark. According to the most recent and reliable information — Ptolemy’s Geography—the Niger lay between Nigritia, land of the blacks, and the Great Desert. As it turned out, Ptolemy was right on target. But no one had yet been able to survive the sere blast of the Sahara or the rank fever belt of the Gambia to bear him out.

Then, in 1788, a group of distinguished geographers, botanists, philanderers and other seekers after the truth, met at the St. Alban’s Tavern, Pall Mall, to form the African Association. Their purpose was to open up Africa to exploration. North Africa was a piece of cake. They had it staked out, mapped, labeled, dissected and distributed by 1790. But West Africa remained a mystery. At the heart of the mystery was the Niger. In its inaugural year the Association commissioned an expedition headed by John Ledyard. He was to begin in Egypt, traverse the Sahara, and discover the course of the Niger. Ledyard was an American. He played the violin and suffered from strabismus. He’d been across the Pacific with Cook, into the Andes, through Siberia to Yakutsk on foot. I’ve tramped the world under my feet, he said, laughed at fear, derided danger. Through hordes of savages, over parching deserts, the freezing north, the everlasting ice and stormy seas have I passed without harm. How good is my God! Two weeks after landing at Cairo he died of dysentery. Simon Lucas, Oriental interpreter for the Court of St. James’s, was next. He landed at Tripoli, hiked a hundred miles into the desert, developed blisters, thirst and anxiety, and returned without accomplishing anything other than the expenditure of £1,250. And then there was Major Daniel Houghton. He was an Irishman, bankrupt, fifty-two years of age. He knew nothing of Africa whatever, but he came cheap. I’ll do it for three hunnert pund, he said. And a case o’ Scots whisky. Houghton sallied up the Gambia in a dugout canoe, drank from fetid puddles and ate monkey meat, and through sheer grit and force of intoxication survived typhus, malaria, loiasis, leprosy and yellow fever. Unfortunately, the Moors of Ludamar stripped him naked and staked him out on the crest of a dune. Where he died.

♦ ♦ ♦

Mungo stood to hitch up his pants. Dassoud knocked him down. The ululations of the women were fanning the crowd to a frenzy. “Eat pig, Christian,” they shouted. “Eat pig.” Mungo didn’t like their attitude. Nor did he like exposing his prat in mixed company. But there was nothing to be done about it: they’d cut his throat and bleach his bones at the least show of resistance.

Suddenly Dassoud had a dirk in his hand: narrow as an ice pick, dark as blood. “Infidel dog!” he shrieked, veins tessellating his throat. Ali watched from behind the folds of his burnoose, dark and impassive. The temperature inside the tent rose to 120°. The crowd held its breath. Then Dassoud leveled the blade at the explorer, gibbering all the while, like some rabid anatomist lecturing on the eccentricities of the human form. The point of the blade drew closer, Ali spat in the sand, Dassoud exhorted the crowd, Mungo froze. Then the blade pricked him — ever so lightly — down below, where he was softest, and whitest. Dassoud laughed like a brook gone dry. The crowd whistled and shrieked. It was then that a grizzled Bushreen with straw in his beard and an empty eye socket burst through the press to push Dassoud aside. “The eyes!” he howled. “Look at the devil’s eyes!”

Dassoud looked. The sadistic gloat gave way to a look of horror and indignation. “The eyes of a cat,” he hissed. “We must put them out.”

♦ ARISE! ♦

Ned Rise wakes with a headache. He has been drinking gin — a.k.a. Strip-Me-Naked, Blue Ruin, the Curse — enfeebler and enervator of the lower classes, clear as a souse’s urine and tart as the juice of juniper. He has been drinking gin, and he is not quite sure where he is. Though he is reasonably certain that he recognizes the soleless half-boots, hairy knuckles and cinnamon-red cape that are among the first things to present themselves to his eye. Yes: that cape, those knuckles and boots, the tear in the trousers: they are familiar. Intimate, even. Yes, he concludes, they belong to Ned Rise, and thus the splintered head and staved-in eyes which perceive these phenomena, however imperfectly, must in some way be connected to them.

He sits up, and after a long pause, rises. It seems that he’s been lying in a heap of discolored straw. On his hat. He bends to retrieve it, lurches forward, then regains his balance with an assertive belch. The hat is a ruin. He stands there a moment, assuming a meditative pose, something drumming in the back of his head. Then he scans the room through half-closed lids, feeling a bit like an explorer setting foot on a new continent.

He is in a cellar, no question about it. There’s the dirt floor, mop in a bucket, walls of rough stone. Against the back wall, a double row of sealed casks: Madeira, port, Lisbon, claret, hock. In the corner, a shovel or two of coal. Could these be the nether regions of the Pig & Pox Tavern? At this point Ned discovers that he is not alone. Other forms, possibly human, occupy patches of straw scattered over the floor. There is the sound of snoring, a moan and gargle like rain in the gutter. The concurrent odors of urine and vomit hang heavy in the air.

“So ye’re up then, are ye?” A balding crone, her face a memento mori, is addressing him from behind a plank set across a pair of hogsheads. A thin gold ring rides her lower lip like a bubble of sputum. “Well. Good mornin’ to ye sir,” she says. “Ha-haaa! And ‘ow was yer sleep and will ye ‘ave a dram to start the day off proper?” Two pewter measures the size of eggcups and a terra-cotta jug stand atop the plank in still life. A sow lies on her side beneath the makeshift bar, the swell of her jaw obscured by an overturned chamberpot. Hogarth would have loved it. Ned wonders what happened last night.

Suddenly the beldam shrieks as if she’s been stuck with a dagger, a long rasping insuck of breath: “Eeeeeeeee!” The drumming in Ned’s brain becomes a series of paradiddles, thunder rolls, the booming of a big bass drum. But wait. The crone isn’t suffering a stroke after all: she’s laughing. Coughing now, hacking and pounding the plank until a long yellow taper of phlegm appears at the corner of her mouth and makes its resilient way to the countertop. “Cat. .” she chokes, “. . cat got your tongue, peach fuzz?”

A sign hangs on the wall behind her, its characters scrawled in a clonic hand:

DRUNK FOR A PENNY

DEAD DRUNK FOR TUPPENCE

CLEAN STRAW, FREE

Ned bites his thumb at her. “Screw you and your mother and your hagborn dropsical brood, you scrofulous tit-sore slut!” he shouts, already beginning to feel better.

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!” she screeches. “Ye’ve no taste for Mother Geneva’s ‘lixir, eh? Taste enough ye had for it last night. . ‘Ere, give Mother a look at yer manhood then — she’ll find a cure for ye,” lifting her skirts with a leer, the spindle legs and yellowed bush like the denouement of a Gothic tale.

Off to the left a flight of ramshackle stairs leads up to an outer door, through the chinks of which Ned can discern the chill light of dawn. He curses himself for wasting breath on the crazed hag — there’s business to tend to this afternoon — and starts up the reeling stairs to the door.

“Eeeeee!” shrieks the old woman, “Mind yer gown now, fairy quean!”

Ned gives her the finger, draws the cinnamon robe tight, and swings back the door on Maiden Lane and the light of day. Behind him, from the depths, a broken shriek like a viola gone sour: “Beware, beware, beware the hangman’s cravat!”

♦ ERE HALF MY DAYS ♦

The machine for extinguishing sight consists of two strips of brass and looks something like an inverted chastity belt. One strip circles the head at eye level, the other fits snugly over the crown. There are two screws involved: each has a convex disk attached to the working end. The device was originally fabricated in the ninth century for al-kaid Hassan Ibn Mohammed, the blind Bashaw of Tripoli. Insecure about his infirmity, the Bashaw decreed that all who desired to come into his presence must first submit to having their eyes put out. He was a very lonely man.

The machine operates on the same principle as a vise. The screws are twisted until they meet the surface of the eye, and are then tightened, crank by crank, until the cornea bursts. Simple, inexorable, final.

A hush has fallen over the crowd. A moment earlier they’d been on the brink of hysteria, razzing and gibbering like the hoi polloi at a bullbaiting or a freak show. But now: silence. Flies saw away at the hot still air, and the sound of a goat or camel making water in the sand is like the boom of a cataract. Sandals shuffle, a man scratches his beard. Many have drawn rags over their faces, as if to escape the contamination of the explorer’s gaze.

Dassoud and the one-eyed interloper stare down at him, arms akimbo, faces solemn.

Mungo has had difficulty grasping the gist of the proceedings. He is reasonably certain that he has pinned down one word at least — the word for eye, unya—which he recalls from Ouzel’s Arabic Grammar (“We lift up our unyas to heaven wherein Allah resides”). But why on earth would they be nattering about eyes? And the sudden hush — he wonders about that too. But it is hot, beastly hot, and he can hardly keep his mind on anything at all. So hot in fact that it surpasses anything in his experience, with the possible exception of the Swedish Baths off Grosvenor Square. Sir Joseph Banks, Treasurer and Director of the African Association, had taken him to the baths one afternoon to iron out some of the details of Mungo’s drive for the Niger. There they had been subjected to the emanations of baked stones, stones that glowed like molten lava — or so it seemed. An attendant thrashed them with birch switches and buffeted their kidneys and backbones with the sharp heels of his hands. Sir Joseph seemed to find the whole operation invigorating. The explorer nearly lost consciousness. He is beginning to experience the same sort of lightheadedness at the moment, in fact. And small wonder, when you consider that not only must he contend with the sun, sand fleas, dysentery and fever, but with inanition as well. The Moors have confiscated his supplies, appropriated his horse and interpreter, and apparently decided to put him on a stringent diet. Too stringent, by his way of thinking: he hasn’t seen a scrap of food in two days.

And so, despite the critical situation and the ring of strange hostile faces, Mungo begins to feel giddy — almost as if he’d drunk too much claret or gill-ale. He glances round at the furtive eyes and knitted brows, at the beards and burnooses, the prophets’ robes and pilgrims’ sandals, and suddenly all those hard minatory faces begin to melt, lose their contours, droop into vagueness like figures of wax. The whole thing is a masquerade, is what it is. Dassoud and One-Eye are tumblers or fire-eaters, and old Ali is only Grimaldi — Grimaldi the clown. But now they seem to be fitting something over his head. . a helmet? Do they expect him to go to battle for them? Or have they finally come to their senses and decided to measure him for a crown?

The explorer grins stupidly beneath his brazen cap. His eyes are gray. Gray as the tentative fingers of ice that reach out over the deep pools of the Yarrow on a frosty morning. Ailie once compared them to the lovers’ wells at Galashiels, and then shook the pennies from her purse and propped them against his eyelids as he lay back in the heather. Gloucester’s eyes, they say, were gray. Oedipus’ were black as olives. And Milton’s— Milton’s were like bluejays scrabbling in the snow. Dassoud knows nothing of Shakespeare, Sophocles or Milton. His rough fingers twist the screws.

The explorer grins. Oblivious. The onlookers, horrified at his mad composure, turn away in panic. He can hear them rushing off, the slap of their sandals on the baked earth. . but what’s this? — he seems to have something caught in his eye. .

♦ CORRECTIVE SURGERY ♦

“Stop!”

Mungo can’t see a thing (the cap seems to have a visor, and every time he goes to lift it a hand seizes his wrist), but he recognizes the voice instantly. It is Johnson. Jolly old Johnson, his guide and interpreter, come to the rescue.

“Stop!” the voice of Johnson repeats, before pitching headlong into the spillway of Arabic glottals and fricatives. Dassoud answers him, then One-Eye harmonizes with a concatenation of grunts and emphatics, his voice pitched high. Johnson rebuts. And then Ali’s voice sounds from the corner, harsh and grainy. There is the sound of a blow, and Johnson tumbles to the mat beside the explorer.

“Mr. Park,” Johnson whispers. “What you got that thing on your head for? Don’t you realize what they doin’ to you?”

“Johnson, jolly old Johnson. How good to hear your voice.”

“They puttin’ out your eyes, Mr. Park.”

“How’s that?”

“The Chief Jackal here he says you got the eyes of a cat — and apparently that don’t go down too good around here, as they is presently engaged in grindin’ them out. If it wasn’t for my fortuitous intercession I’d lay odds you’d be blind as a beggar this very minute.”

Mungo’s head clears like a hazy morning giving way to noon. As it does so he becomes increasingly agitated, until finally he leaps to his feet, tearing at the brazen cap and wailing like a lost calf. Dassoud knocks him down. Cracks the wildebeest whip a time or two and then calls out in Arabic for some further instrument of torture. There is the sound of padding feet, the swish of the tent flap, and then, close at hand, the cry of a human being in mortal agony. The cry seems to be emanating from Johnson. The explorer is alarmed, and tugs at the cap with renewed vigor, feeling very much like a ten-year-old with his head caught between the bars of an iron railing. “Johnson,” he gasps,” —what have they done to you?”

“Nothin’ yet. But they just sent out for a two-edge bilbo.”

The cap finally releases its grip, heaving up from the explorer’s head like the cork from a bottle of spumante. He blinks and looks round him. Ali, Dassoud and One-Eye are crouched in the far corner, jabbering and gesticulating. The mob is gone and the flap of the tent is drawn closed. A massive black man in turban and striped robe blocks the entrance, arms folded across his chest. “A bilbo? What does that mean?” Mungo whispers.

“Means we goin’ to be two monkeys — see no evil, speak none either.

They say I got the tongue of a shrike, Mr. Park. They goin’ to cut it out.”

♦ A.K.A. KATUNGA OYO ♦

Concerning Johnson. He is a member of the Mandingo tribe, they who inhabit the headwaters of the Gambia and Senegal rivers and most of the Niger Valley as far as the city of legend, Timbuctoo. His mother did not name him Johnson. She called him Katunga — Katunga Oyo — after his paternal grandfather. At the age of thirteen Johnson was kidnapped by Foulah herdsmen while celebrating the nubility of a tender young sylph in a cornfield just outside his native village of Dindikoo. The sylph’s name was Nealee. The Foulahs didn’t ask. Their chieftain, who took a fancy to Nealee’s facial tattoos and to other features as well, retained her as his personal concubine. Johnson was sold to a slatee, or traveling slave merchant, who shackled his ankles and drove him, along with sixty-two others, to the coast. Forty-nine made it. There he was sold to an American slaver who chained him in the hold of a schooner bound for South Carolina. The boy beside him, a Bobo from Djenné, had been dead for six days when the ship landed at Charleston.

For twelve years Johnson worked as a field hand on the plantation of Sir Reginald Durfeys, Bart. Then he was promoted to house servant. Three years later Sir Reginald himself visited the Carolinas, took a liking to Johnson, and brought him back to London as his valet. This was in 1771.

The Colonies had not yet broken away, slavery was still sanctioned in England, George III was already harboring the renegade porphyrins that would cost him his sanity, and Napoleon was storming the palisades of his playpen.

Johnson, as he was christened by Sir Reginald, began to educate himself in the library at Piltdown, the Durfeys’ country estate. He learned Greek and Latin. He read the Ancients. He read the Moderns. He read Smollett, Ben Jonson, Molière, Swift. He spoke of Pope as if he’d known him personally, denigrated the puerility of Richardson, and was so taken with Fielding that he actually attempted a Mandingo translation of Amelia.

Durfeys was fascinated with him. Not only with his command of language and literature, but with his recollections of the Dark Continent as well. It got to the point where the Baronet couldn’t drift off at night without a cup of hot milk and garlic, and the soothing basso profundo of Johnson’s voice as he narrated a tale of thatched huts, leopards and hyenas, of volcanoes spewing fire across the sky, of thighs and buttocks glistening with sweat and black as a dream of the womb. Sir Reginald allowed him a liberal salary, and after emancipation in 1772 offered him a handsome pension to stay on as valet. Johnson considered the proposal over a glass of sherry in Sir Reginald’s study. Then he grinned, and hit the Baronet for a raise.

When Parliament was in session Sir Reginald moved his establishment to town, accompanied by Johnson and a pair of liveried footmen. London was a ripe tomato. Johnson was a macaroni. He strutted down Bond Street with the best of them, decked out in his top hat, wasp-waisted coat and silk hose. Soon he was frequenting the coffeehouses, engaging in repartee, learning to turn an epigram with a barb in it. One afternoon a red-faced gentleman with muttonchop whiskers called him a “damned Hottentot nigger” and invited him to fight for his life. The following morning, at dawn and in the presence of seconds, Johnson put a bullet through the gentleman’s right eye. The gentleman died instantly and Johnson was incarcerated. He was subsequently sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead. Sir Reginald exerted his influence. The sentence was commuted to transportation.

And so, in January of 1790 Johnson’s legs were once again shackled, spoiling the lines of his hosiery. He was put aboard the H.M.S. Feckless and deposited at Goree, an island just off the west coast of Africa, where he was to serve as a private in the military. When he stepped ashore an ancient thrill went through him. He was home. Two weeks later, while on late watch, Johnson appropriated a canoe, paddled his way to shore, and melted into the black bank of the jungle. He then made his way back to Dindikoo, where he married Nealee’s younger sister and settled in to repopulate the village.

He was forty-seven. His hair was salted with gray. The trees climbed into the sky and dawn came like a blanket of flowers. By night there was the shriek of the hyrax and the cough of the leopard, by day the slow drowse of the honeybee. His mother was an old woman now, her face cracked and dried like the faces of the mummified corpses he’d seen in the desert — the corpses of slaves who hadn’t made it. She pressed him to her bones and clicked her tongue. It rained. Crops grew, goats fattened. He lived in a hut, went barefoot, wrapped a strip of broadcloth round his chest and loins and called it a toga. He gave himself over to sensuality.

Within five years Johnson was providing for three wives and eleven children — fourteen mouths — plus an assortment of dogs, simians, rope squirrels and skinks. Still, he wasn’t exactly working himself to the bone — no, he cashed in instead on his reputation as a man of letters.

Villagers would come to him with a calabash of beer or a side of kudu and ask him to scribble off a few words in return. Each wore a saphie—a leather pouch the size of a billfold — tied round his neck or wrist. These saphies were the repositories of fetishes, charms against calamity: a pickled ring finger was considered proof against the bite of the puff adder; a hank of hair guaranteed immunity from mutilation in battle; the musk gland of the civet cat prevented yaws and leprosy. But Logos was the supreme charm. The written word could bring wisdom, sexual potency, plenty in times of want. It could restore lost hair, cure cancer, attract women and kill locusts. Johnson was quick to realize the market potential of his penmanship.

He would scribble off a line or two of doggerel in exchange for three pounds of honey or a month’s supply of grain. Or he’d quote Pope and purchase a pair of gold anklets for his youngest bride:

Three catcalls be the bribe

Of him, who chattering shames the Monkey tribe:

And his this Drum, whose hoarse heroic bass

Drowns the loud clarion of the braying Ass.

She was fifteen, and demonstrative in her appreciation. Johnson lay back and relished, the whole thing sweet as a fiction. Paradise Regained, he thought.

Then one afternoon a runner came from Pisania, the British trading colony on the Gambia. He carried a letter from England sealed with the Durfeys coat-of-arms (a goat ruminant). England — the clubs, the theater, Covent Garden and Pall Mall, the sweep of the Thames, the texture of the late afternoon light in the library at Piltdown — it all rushed back on him.

He tore open the envelope.

Piltdown. 21 May, 1795

My Dear Johnson:

If this missive should reach you, I trust it finds you in good health. I must confess that the news of your elopement from Goree pleased us all immensely.

I rather suspect you’ve “gone native” with a few of those honey-complected sirens you were forever rhapsodizing, what?

But to business. This letter is by means of introducing one Mungo Park, the young Scot we’ve commissioned to penetrate to the interior of your country and discover the course of the Niger. If you will consent to act as guide and interpreter for Mr. Park, you may name your price.

Yours in Geographical Fervor,

Sir Reginald Durfeys, Bart.

Founding Member

African Association

Johnson’s price was the complete works of Shakespeare, in quarto volumes, just as they had appeared on the shelves of Sir Reginald’s library. He packed a bag, traveled to Pisania on foot, sought out the explorer and drafted an agreement of terms of service. The explorer was twenty-four. His hair was cornsilk. He was six feet tall and walked as if a stick were strapped to his back. He took hold of Johnson’s hand in his big buttery fist. “Johnson,” he said, “I am truly pleased to make your acquaintance.” Johnson was five four, two hundred ten pounds. His hair was a dust mop, his feet were bare, he wore a gold straight pin through his right nostril.

“The pleasure is mine,” he said.

They set off on foot. Upriver, at Frookaboo, the explorer stopped to purchase a horse. The horse was owned by a Mandingo salt merchant. “A real bargain,” he said, “for such a frisky colt.” They found the animal tethered behind a wattle hut at the far end of the village. It stood in a cluster of chickens, munching thistles and blinking at them. “Splendid teeth,” said the salt merchant. The horse was no bigger than a Shetland pony, blind in one eye, and emaciated in the way that very old men are.

Open ulcers, green with flies, spangled the right flank, and a yellowish fluid, like thin porridge, drooled from the nostrils. But perhaps worst of all, the animal was given to senile farting — great gaseous exhalations that swept the sun from the sky and made all the world a sink. “Rocinante!” Johnson quipped. The allusion was lost on the explorer. He bought the horse.

Mungo rode, Johnson walked. They passed through the kingdoms of Wooli and Bondou without incident, but found on entering Kaarta that the king of that country, Tiggitty Sego, was at war with the neighboring state of Bambarra. The explorer suggested a detour to the north, through Ludamar. Two days after crossing the border they were accosted by thirty Moors on horseback. The Moors looked as if they’d just cooked and eaten their mothers. They carried muskets, dirks and scimitars — scimitars as cold and cruel as the crescent moon, weapons that hacked rather than thrust: a single blow could remove a limb, separate a shoulder, cleave a head. Their leader, a hooded giant with a hyphenated scar across the bridge of his nose, trotted forward and spat in the sand. “You will accompany us to the camp of Ali at Benowm,” he said. Johnson tugged at the explorer’s gaiters and whispered in his ear. The horses stamped and stuttered. Mungo looked up at the grim faces, smiled, and announced in English that he would be delighted to accept their invitation.

♦ FATIMA ♦

A boy bursts into the tent, double-edged bilbo in hand. Dassoud leers, Johnson shudders. Mungo scrambles to his feet, pulls up his trousers and buckles his belt. “I’d like to know just what crime we’ve—” he begins. Dassoud knocks him down. At that moment a second boy darts into the tent with a message for Ali. Dassoud turns back to his companions and a frenetic colloquy ensues. Fingers are shaken, arms waved, beards pulled. Through it all the explorer can make out a single word, repeated again and again, as if it were an incantation: Fatima, Fatima, Fatima. Keeping his eyes fixed on the conferees, he snakes out a hand to tug at Johnson’s toga. “Johnson,” he whispers. “What’s up?”

Johnson’s eyes are wide. “Shh!” he says.

A moment later Ali rises. One-Eye takes up the damask pillow, Dassoud flings down the bilbo in disgust, and the three stalk out of the tent. Explorer and guide are left alone with the Nubian sentry. And the sand fleas.

“Pssst. Johnson,” Mungo whispers. “What’s this Fatima business they’re jabbering about?”

“Beats the hell out of me. But whatever it is you can bet it’s nothin’ to lose your senses over.”

♦ LEAVENING ♦

Ned Rise saunters out the door of the dram shop, brushing at his clothes and boxing the collapsed hat against his thigh, when he is suddenly leveled by a blow to the nostrils. As he ripples to the pavement like a deflated balloon, fear, pain and bewilderment cloud his perceptions. Once there, however, he finds himself admiring the rich mahogany gloss of the riding boots that scuffle and rise with choreographic precision to deliver a succession of blows to his vital organs. Then he wheezes. Hacks. Pukes. The boots are affixed to the nimble feet of Daniel Mendoza, the pugilist, the Jew, the ex-Champion Fisticuffer of London, friend and associate of George Bryan “Beau” Brummell. Mendoza is dressed to the nines: starched linen collar, scarlet waistcoat, striped trousers and boots of morocco. A dandified young prig of twelve or thirteen stands beside him, folding the blue-velvet jacket across his forearm like a maitre d’ with a napkin, Mendoza’s face is red. “So!” he shouts. “Chinee silk is it?”

From the cobblestones Ned mutters a combined apology, denial and plea for mercy.

“Dutch sateen, twelve pence the yard!” shouts Mendoza. “And you, you scum, charges Beau six pund for a pure and original unadulterated quality Chinee silk cravat straight from the looms o’ Oriental Pekin, you says. Eh? Am I royt?”

Ned stiffens for the blow. He receives it just under the left armpit.

Mendoza is leaning over him now, knife in hand. The coatboy looks like an angel of the Lord. It is beginning to snow. “I’ll just relieve you of this little trifle,” Mendoza says, slicing through the strings of Ned’s purse, “as a partial recompense for the ‘eartache me friend ‘as suffered.” The toe of Mendoza’s boot finds Ned’s spleen — an organ he didn’t even know he was possessed of — three times in quick succession. “And don’t let it ‘appen again, arseole. Or I’ll cripple you up like I crippled Turk Nasmyth in the second round at Bartholomew Fair. ‘Ear?” There is the swish of cambric against velvet, and then the tattoo of receding footsteps, two pairs. The snow sifts down like crushed bone, and the air is sharp as a bloodletter’s lancet.

Ned pushes himself up from the ground and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He is grinning. Sick from gin, smarting about the nostrils, kidneys, spleen and armpit, a victim of assault, battery and robbery, he is grinning. Grinning over the thought of Mendoza’s face when he opens the purse and finds that it contains eight ounces of river sand, two copper buttons and a pig’s tooth. He passes a hand over his crotch and grins wider: the prize is secure. A strip of muslin swaddles his privates, fixed by means of pine stickum to his belly and buttocks. Nestled within, warmed and coddled by the downy flesh of his balls, are twenty-two golden guineas, the fruit of a week’s frauds and chicaneries. Ned plans to invest them, and watch them grow.

♦ ♦ ♦

At the Vole’s Head Ned calls for rashers, mutton chops, wheatcakes, boiled eggs, tongue, ham, toast, pigeon pie and marmalade —”and a pint of bitter for lubrication.” Then he sends a boy out to one of the pawnshops across from White’s Gaming House to pick him up a suit of clothes, “as what a gentleman would wear,” from pumps to cravat to topper. The boy’s feet are wrapped in rags, his eyes, mouth and ears are running, and he’s lost all his teeth to scurvy. Ned gives him half a crown for his trouble.

The landlord at the Vole’s Head is one Nelson Smirke. Smirke is a big man, scabious, with bald patches along either side of his head and a mad electric growth of hair across the crown. The overall effect is vegetal: he looks like nothing so much as a colossal turnip. “Ah, Smirke!” says Ned over his pigeon pie. “Draw up a chair, my friend — I’ve got a proposition for you.” Smirke sits and folds his massive hands on the table. “I’ll give it to you straight,” says Ned. “I want to let the Reamer Room for tonight, from eight to maybe three or four in the morning. I’ll give you two guineas and no questions asked.”

“Wot’s it, a party then?”

“That’s right. A party.”

“Yer not plannin’ to tear up the cushings and piss in the tea service like ye done last time, is ye?”

“Smirke, Smirke, Smirke,” says Ned, clucking his tongue. “Have you got no confidence in me? This is a gathering of gentlemen.” The head of a buck hangs on the wall behind him. Coals glow in the grate. Ned lays his fork aside and thrusts a hand into his trousers, plumbing for gold. He takes a deep breath, tears the muslin (and hair) from his abdomen, and digs into the hoard.

“Gennelmen, my arse,” says Smirke. “I know the sort of turks and derelicts and ‘uman garbage wot calls you friend, Ned Rise.”

Two guineas clank down on the table, sweet music. Smirke covers them with a fat fist. Ned looks into the landlord’s eyes, then rams down a wheatcake, champing like a refugee. He folds a slice of ham and wads it in on top, then slips a boiled egg up inside his cheek. “Three,” says Smirke, “and it’s a deal.” Ned chokes briefly, something caught up the windpipe, then spins the third coin across the table. Smirke rises. Points a thick finger between the entrepreneur’s eyes and snarls: “There’ll be no trouble in my house or be Gad I’ll ‘ave yer liver out.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Seven-thirty. Ned stands at the door of the Reamer Room, decked out like a young lord. From a distance, and in the murk of the hallway, he could almost pass for a solid citizen. Up close the illusion fades. First, there is the matter of his face. No matter how you look at it, from whatever angle, in light or shade, extremity or repose, it is at bottom the face of a wiseguy. The face of the young lout who lolls in the classroom with his boots on the desk, sets fire to old ladies and drinks ink. The face of the teenager who saunters and slouches and terrorizes the fruit seller, smoking opium, bathing in gin, making a chamberpot of the world. The face of the young panderer arranging something improper, scurrilous even, outside the door of the Reamer Room at the Vole’s Head Tavern, the Strand. Then there’s the matter of his clothes. The pin-striped trousers and engage jacket droop like a tailor’s nightmare, and the collar, maculated with sherry, gravy, ketchup and Worcestershire until it resembles the hide of some howling jungle beast, has already gone limp as a bathtowel. The gold watch chain? Buffed copper. The bulge in his waistcoat pocket? A stone impersonating a pocketwatch. The stockings are cut from a pair of wool socks and the boutonniere is a scrap of colored paper. But all this is nothing when compared to the cape, white stars on a cinnamon background, which billows round the impresario’s shoulders like a gypsy encampment.

Nevertheless, Ned is doing a brisk business. Gentlemen, in pairs or trios or even individually, make their way down the narrow hallway, press golden guineas and silver sovereigns into his palm, and pass through the doorway of the Reamer Room. Ned deposits these coins in the Bank of the Bulge. And grins the grin of a burgher. Inside, the sounds of revelry: clinking glasses, squealing chairs, yar-hars and yo-hos. Smirke’s cue. He appears at the far end of the passageway, a tray of drinks hoisted in one meaty hand, a pair of barmaids sweeping along before him like bubbles riding the crest of a breaker. “Get yer merrytricious arses in there now and keep the spirits flowin’ or be Jozachar they’ll tear the fookin’ joists down, “ he roars. The girls giggle past Ned and into the room to a burst of applause, catcalls and rabid whistling. Smirke pauses at the doorway. “I’ll ‘and it to ye, Ned — ye’ve got yerself an audience of drinkin’ gennelmen wot’s already been through half a cask of Scots whisky and fifty-three bottles of the grape.”

Ned’s grin is sleek and wide. “Told you so, didn’t I Smirke? Leave it to Neddy. You’ll be rich.”

A stentorian voice, the voice of a temperamental mountain, calls from within: “Drink! Goddamn and curse the virgin for a whore, drink!” “Booza!” shouts another. “Yaaaaar!” The shouts are like hot wires applied to Smirke’s spine. He shudders, stiffens, twitches, his muscles gone clonic, the glasses teetering on the rim of the tray. Then he throws back the door like a soldier and takes the full blast of a sirocco redolent of sweat, sperm, spilled beer and urine. His eyes are like peas. “Be gad this show better be good Ned Rise or I’ll, I’ll—”

“Have me liver out?”

“Fricasseed!” he roars, and offers himself up to the din.

Ned slams the door and takes a pull at his flask. It’s been a bitch of day. First there was the business of the carpenters and the stage. Then the advertisements. Shorthanded, he’d painted up the sandwich boards himself:

FOR THE BLOOD WHAT’S BOARD WITH PATIENCE

A New Entertainment

The Vole’s Head. 8 p.m. Tonight.

TITILLATION.

The V.’s Head. Tonight.

COME TO THE VOYEER’S BALL

The Vole’s Head. 8 p.m. Tonight.

Then he had to pay Billy Boyles and two other reprobates a shilling each to display them outside the gaming houses and gentlemen’s shops. They were to answer inquiries sotto voce and fill in the details as delicately as possible.

But if he knew Boyles, the flaming ass would be coarse-mouthing it up and down the street till every Charlie and magistrate in town got wind of it. Worries on worries. But that was just the beginning. Throughout the afternoon, in the midst of placating Smirke and hounding the carpenters, he’d had to keep Nan and Sally at a fine pitch of intoxication — soused enough to stay happy and yet not too far gone to perform. And then there was the biggest headache of all: leasing Jutta Jim, the black nigger of the Congo, from his master/employer, Lord Twit. Twit wanted three guineas and a firm assurance that his precious manservant would be returned before dawn, “sweet energies intact.” Shit. The whole thing — the hassles, the tension, the long hours of enforced sobriety — it’s nearly crippled him. His head is a suppurating blister and gin is the only tonic.

And so he is standing there in the dim hallway, pulling at the flask, dreaming, caressing the golden bulge at his crotch (thirty-two new guineas so far). . when suddenly he finds himself pinned up against the woodwork.

There is a fist beneath his chin, iron fingers at his throat. A smell of lavender, ruffled shirtsleeve. Mendoza.

“The entertainment better be stimulatin’, sucker, or I’ll snap off yer legs and arms as if they was matchsticks. You see, I’ve brung Beau along with me and I’m bleedin’ anxious the boy should be uplifted and edyfied by wot ‘ee’s about to see, understand?” The fingers relax their grip, and the impresario’s chin — assisted by the gravitational pull of the planet — regains its customary plane. Ned clears his eyes and looks past the Champion Fisticuffer to where a young dandy of seventeen or eighteen stands sneering at him. The dandy’s hair is curled like a gilded poodle’s, his eyes are the color of honey. His linen is so pure it glows. “Leave the sorry turd alone, Danny,” he says in his nasal whine. He pauses to float a jeweled snuffbox from his pocket, dab a pinch on the back of his hand and inhale it with an elegant toss of his head. When he looks up his eyes cut into Ned like lamb skewers. “There’ll be no charge for friends, will there Rise?”

Ned grins till his gums ache. “No,” he says. “No charge at all.”

Mendoza throws back the door and Beau steps into the room like a swan lighting on a mountain pond. “Cocksuckers,” Ned mutters, so low and so far back in his throat he’s not even sure he heard it himself. The door slams shut. Ned pulls the stone from his pocket and glances at it. The stone is flat, smooth, two inches in diameter. Someone has painted a clockface on its surface. Eight o’clock, it reads. Showtime.

♦ ♦ ♦

Sally Sebum and Jutta Jim are onstage, performing. Nan Punt, in a broadcloth dressing gown, stands beside Ned, awaiting her cue. “Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh,” says Sally. “Uh-aah, Aaah! AAaaahhh!” Jutta Jim backs off from her, bare-assed, buck black naked, his member slick and hard in the light from the oil lamps. Spikes of etiolated bone jut from his nostrils, quills pierce his earlobes, whorled cicatrices vein his torso like a relief map of the moon. The audience is hushed. He turns to them, slow, silent, methodical, and begins to pound at the hogshead of his chest. “That’s my cue,” whispers Nan, slipping out of the gown and tripping daintily onto the stage, drunk as a sow. After parading around and rubbing her bosoms a bit for the audience, she puts Jim’s cock in her mouth. The onlookers — they who a moment before had been stomping and whistling and throwing socks, hats, napkins and silverware — suddenly fall silent. Meanwhile, Sally peels herself from the stage’s only prop — a green-velvet confidante — and staggers off into the wings. Ned holds the robe open for her. “Whew,” she puffs, “the black cannibal like to’ve swived me to death.” She’s running sweat, her makeup a swamp, the rich black curls plastered to her cheeks and throat. Her breasts are red and white. They strain at the robe like vegetables in a sack. “And his breath! Like a fookin’ chamberpot. He’s got a tool on ‘im, though — I’ll say that for the beast.”

“Glad you enjoyed it, Sal.”

“Enjoyed it?” Indignant, hands on hips. “You think I enjoys being grunted over and slobbered upon by a stink-mouth nigger bebarian?” But then she winks. “Easiest four quid I ever made since Lord Dalhousie’s milk punch got the better of ‘im and ‘ee fumbled ‘is purse down the front of me sateen dress.”

Ned laughs. “Just the beginning, Sal. I’ve got another show lined up here for Thursday and then one for Saturday at the Pig & Pox. And I’ll tell you what — if you get back out there and do your histrionical best I’ll give you another two crowns on top of it.”

She’s about to remark how her mum always wanted her to pursue a career on the stage, but peeps out at the crowd and giggles instead. “Ned,” she whispers, “come have a look at this.” Ned looks. The entire audience — lords and Garterees, naval officers, shopkeepers, footpads and clerics, even Smirke himself — is caught up in a trance, their mouths hanging open, chins and beards wet with spittle. Jim is stretched out supine now, stage front. Nan riding him like a jockey, leaping the dikes, fences and water hazards of orgasm, panting and gibbering all the way. There’s not a whisper from the patrons, not a cough or snuffle, a golly or gee — they wouldn’t have looked up if Halley’s Comet had torn the roof off the place. Some are twitching in face and limb, others grip their hats and walking sticks as if they were grasping at twigs on the brink of a precipice. Here and there a handkerchief swabs a brow, restive teeth chew at the back of a chair, feet tap and knees knock. “Yahooo!” shouts Nan at the peak of a pure gallop, and poor Smirke pitches forward in a typhoon of crunching glass. No one notices.

Sally helps herself to a pull at Ned’s flask. Then she laughs. Laughs till she has to put a hand to her ribs.

“What’s the joke?” asks Ned.

“Well,” she manages, between bursts of giggles, “either they’ve took to wearin’ codpieces again or I’ll swear somebody’s put yeast in all them trowsers out there.”

♦ THE SAHEL ♦

The Sahel is a strip of semi-arid land girding West Africa like a waistband, stretching from the Atlantic coast in the west to Lake Chad in the east. Above it lies the Great Desert; below, the rain forests of tropical Africa. Its northernmost fringes give way to steppe, baked and blanched, and then to the dunes and ergs of the Great Desert itself. To the south, the Sahel becomes savanna, lush with seas of blue-green grass from June to October, the months of the monsoon. During these months al-haj’ Ali Ibn Fatoudi moves his herds of goats and cattle, his people, tents, wives and milk-fed horses to the north, pressing the green line to its limits. From November to June he moves southward as the fierce harmattan winds shriek out of the desert with claws of flying sand, leaching the moisture from the air, the shrubs, the eyes and throats of his herds and his tribesmen. The sad truth is, Ali’s herds overgraze the northern Sahel. His cows crop the grass before it’s had a chance to germinate, his goats tear it up by the roots. Each year Ali drifts farther south, a mile here, a mile there. In two hundred years Benowm will be desert. The great ergs, Iguidi and Ehech, flow with the wind, drifting, stretching out tongues, fingers and arms, beckoning and beleaguering.

It’s no picnic, life on the Sahel, let’s face it. Talk of scarcity and want, whims of nature: welcome to them. Talk of years when the rains won’t come and the sweet bleating herds build monuments of bone to the sun. Or a well that goes salt, sandstorms that shear the whiskers from your cheeks.

Then there are the hyenas — making off in the night with kids and goats, disemboweling them and leaving the pissed-on remains for vultures and jackals. And then there’s the push south: the farther you go, the greater the risk of a sneak attack by the Foulahs or the Serawoolis. That’d be a fine thing. Your people in chains, cattle butchered, horses raped, kouskous devoured. Of necessity, life is lean. And portable. The entire camp at Benowm — all three hundred tents — could be gone in an hour, fata morgana.

Because he lives under the gun, Ali puts his stock in movable wealth, wealth on the hoof — camels, horses, goats, oxen, slaves. If you inventory his material possessions he’s practically a beggar. The Emir of Ludamar, ruler of thousands, hegemon of an area the size of Wales, man of the Book and descendant of the Prophet, actually owns fewer things than a Chelsea chambermaid. A goat-hair tent, a change of jubbah, a pot, a cookstove, two muskets, a leaky hookah and a blunt-edged saber that once belonged to Major Houghton — that’s about it. Ah, but his horses — moon-white, marbled with muscle, their tails red as an open vein (he dyes them). And his women! If Ali is to be envied, it is for his women. Any one of his four wives could launch a thousand ships — if they knew what ships were.

Chief among them — in influence and beauty both — is Fatima of Jafnoo, daughter of the shereef of the Al-Mu’ta tribe, Boo Khaloom. Fatima’s erotic charms are predicated entirely on a single feature: her bulk. In a bone-thin society, what more appropriate ideal of human perfection? Fatima weighs three hundred and eighty-two pounds. To move from one corner of the tent to another requires the assistance of two slaves. On the sixty-mile trip to Deena, in the north, she once prostrated a pair of camels and a bullock, and finally had to be transported on a litter drawn by six oxen. Ali comes in off the desert, blood and sand in his eyes, and plunges into the moist fecundity of her flesh. She is a spring, a well, an oasis. She is milk overspilling the bowl, a movable feast, green pasture and a side of beef. She is gold. She is rain.

Fatima was not always a beauty queen. As a girl she was a mere slip of a thing — big-boned and with enormous potential, yes — but nonetheless something of a slim and dark-eyed ugly duckling. Boo Khaloom took her in hand. He stepped into the tent one evening with a rush mat and a pillow. He spread the mat in a corner, set the pillow atop it, and commanded his daughter to sit. He then called for camel’s milk and kouskous. Fatima was puzzled: the remains of the evening meal — wooden bowls black with flies, an overturned pitcher — still lay in the corner. All at once she became aware of shadows playing over the walls of the tent, as if a number of people were milling around outside. She asked her father if he was planning to meet with his counselors. He told her to shut her hole. Suddenly the flap was thrown back and a man entered the tent. It was Mohammed Bello, sixty-three years old, her father’s closest friend and advisor. He was naked. Fatima was mortified. She’d never seen a man’s legs before, let alone those puckered wattles squirming against the old man’s leg like some freak of nature. She thought of the spineless struggling things caught in the muck of a dying waterhole. She was eleven years old. She burst into tears.

Mohammed Bello was not alone. The flap swished and eight other men, naked as babes, stepped silently into the tent. Zib Sahman, her godfather, was among them. And Akbar al-Akbar, the oldest man of the tribe. When they were all assembled, a slave entered with a bowl the size of a birdbath. The bowl contained camel’s milk, a week’s supply at least. He was followed by a second slave carrying an even larger bowl filled to the rim with kouskous. The bowls were set before her. Camel’s milk is sweet, and rich with nutrients. Kouskous, a sort of porridge made of boiled and pounded wheat, is the staple of the Moors’ diet. It is not at all unpalatable, but all things have their limits. “Eat,” said Boo Khaloom.

At first she didn’t understand. Surely all this food must be for her father’s guests. Did he expect her to serve them? But then she remembered that they were all naked and she began blubbering anew. Her father was shouting. “Eat, I said!” he roared. “Don’t you understand Arabic? Have you lost your hearing? Eat!”

She glanced up at the eight venerables. They sat in a semicircle, watching her. They were still naked. And then came the biggest jolt of all: her father was stepping out of his jubbah! All her life — through meals, bedtime, on the road — she never glimpsed anything more than his face, hands and toes. Now suddenly here he was — naked — and equipped with the same rubbery wattles as the others. She was terrified. “Eat,” he repeated. She was dazed. It was then that the switch appeared in his hand. He struck her twice across the face. She cried out. He struck her again. And then again. “Eat,” he said.

She put her lips to the milk and drank between sobs. She took a fistful of kouskous and forced it into her mouth. But she wasn’t hungry. She’d just eaten — and eaten more than usual. Her mother had been nagging her about her bones, her coarseness, how no husband would want her, a girl who looked like a desert ostrich. And so she had made an effort to eat more. Now she was full: another bite and she’d puke. The porridge caught in her throat.

Boo Khaloom was deranged. He whipped and shouted till his arm throbbed and his throat went raw. “No more cat’s cradle with the other girls, no more lessons, no weaving — nothing. You will sit here, on this pillow, and eat until you come of age. You will eat and you will grow. You will be beautiful. Do you hear? Beautiful!” Mohammed Bello and the others watched. From time to time one of them would nod approvingly. Fatima ate. Wept and ate. “And when you come of age you will continue to eat — day and night. That is your duty. To your father, and to your husband. He will have a rod!” her father shouted. “A rod like this one. And he will thrash you as I am thrashing you now and as I will thrash you tomorrow and the next day and the day after that!” Suddenly the venerables were on their feet, as if this were some sort of signal. Fatima looked up, her cheeks swollen with mush, and gasped: a hideous unnatural change had come over them. Where before they’d been flaccid, now they were hard. Wizened old turkey cocks, their members engorged, they closed in on her. “Thrash you!” her father shrieked and they began pumping at themselves, milking their rods with a whack and thwap, their faces strained and distant, beatific even. Fatima felt as if she were made of wax. Her head was light. She was falling, tumbling down through the eons, chasms in the earth, the abyss. It was then that she felt the first few random drops, like rain.

After that excoriating and traumatic night, she ate. She ate prodigiously, furiously, she couldn’t get enough. Sugar dates, mutton, yogurt, slabs of salt, kouskous and dried fish, kouskous and nuts, kouskous and kouskous. There was fruit in the south — tamarind, cassava, watermelon — flat loaves of bread, jars of wild honey, yams, rice, maize, butter and milk, milk, always milk. Goat’s milk, cow’s milk, camel’s milk — she even suckled like an infant at the breast of a nursing slave. She was insatiable. She ate for fear, she ate for vengeance. She ate for beauty.

♦ TANTALUS ♦

He is perishing, winding down the long tunnel of waste and death, hurtling toward completion in the dust of generations gone down. He is perishing, quite simply, of thirst. Of hunger too — but the thirst is more immediate. At night, when they remember, the Moors give him a handful of kouskous and half a cup of yellow swill. Tonight they forget. His stomach contracts on air, cells wither and die like jellyfish washed up on the beach. Then the temperature drops and he lies huddled in his jacket, shivering and sweating, the fever an internal weather valve, on and off, sun and sleet. Outside, beyond the circle of tents, jackals shriek like a knife in the heart and hyenas gather to intimidate the moon. There will be weeping and sorrowing and the gnashing of teeth, he thinks. Then he closes his eyes.

The explorer’s dream is immediate and vivid. He is out on the Great Desert in the heat of midday, the sun a torch, his mouth full of sand. There are men behind him, strangers — burned faces, beards, tattered clothes. They trail out over the horizon like ants. In his hand, a forked stick. At his side, Zander — wally old Zander — Ailie’s brother. They used to fish together. “Where is she when we need her?” asks Mungo. “At home,” says Zander. “Waiting.” A man gags and pitches forward. The explorer turns him over and then starts back: the eye sockets are empty, the gums drawn back from the teeth, the skin crusty as a glazed ham. At that moment a pewter dipper appears overhead, its belly frosted with dew — and then another, and another — a procession of them, dippers full of water, floating overhead like gulls riding an updraft. A feeble huzza goes up from the men. They stretch out their arms and smack their gummy lips — but the dippers hang there, just out of reach. Frantic, they scramble over one another’s shoulders, their fingers raking the sky. The dippers are coy, wriggling and sashaying, flirting with the outstretched fingers: but they won’t give up a drop. The men despair, dashing their heads against stones and shrubs and rocky crags. “Do something!” they implore. “Help us!” Just then the forked stick begins to twitch. Mungo cocks his ear to the wind. He hears something: faint and distant, lilting and lyrical. A wet trickle of sound, like a flute or a harp. Can it be? He is quick, firm, decisive. “Follow me!” he shouts, and begins jogging toward the swelling sound of it, the roar, the hiss, the sweet syncopation of water rushing over a bed of stones. Dazed, the men stagger to their feet and hobble after him. Across a plain, up a rise and there, there it is! The Niger, clear and cold as an October morning, neat lawns clipped along its banks, punts, coots and great silent swans coasting over the dimpled surface, salmon leaping, cool ferns and leafy elms fanning the shore. He plunges in, the men whooping at his heels, ecstatic, redeemed, alive. But when he turns round, they’ve vanished. Waves lap, swans duck their heads: he’s alone with his triumph. But no matter, he’s having such a time, churning up waves, blowing bubbles and gulping, swallowing, sucking up the smooth, tooth-chilling current till he can drink no more.

He wakes with a stone in his throat. His tongue is dry. His palate is dry. His uvula. What he needs is a drink. Water. Ice. Blood. A cup of tea. Glass of milk. Mug of beer. He tiptoes to the entranceway and peers out. The three guards are asleep, chewing at their beards and snoring like drunken lords. But here’s the rub: they’re stretched out across the entrance, shoulder to shoulder, the near man flush with the flap of the tent. He’d have to broad-jump the three of them to get clear — and even assuming he could make it, there’s still the thump of his descent to contend with. Why they’d be up like starved wolves at even the hint of a sound, cursing and clutching at their daggers. He hesitates.

But then, miracle of miracles, the man in the center rolls over, exposing a few inches of open ground. It’s now or never. The explorer eases out of his boots, takes a deep breath, and steps over the first man. The air is still. Somewhere a bird cries out. But the guard sleeps on, stertorous, lips smacking and lids twitching. Mungo shifts his weight to the front foot and begins to swing the left leg over when suddenly he feels a bit woozy, his mind for some reason flashing on the high-wire artist at Bartholomew Fair. It was years ago. The young explorer stood in the crowd, Kewpie doll under his arm, and watched the man negotiate a wire strung two hundred feet from the ground. The man was in the process of balancing a barge pole in one hand and juggling half a dozen apples in the other, when a pigeon landed at the tip of the pole. The man fell.

Mungo blinks his eyes and finds himself seated on the chest of the first guard. The guard mutters something in Arabic, slow as syrup, and then begins rubbing the explorer’s hand against his bristling cheek. The sensation, considering the circumstances, is not at all unpleasant. ‘‘Yummah,’’ groans the guard, as passionately as a lover, ‘‘Yibhah!’’ But then he drops the explorer’s hand and segues into the stertor of sleep while Mungo steals off into the night.

♦ ♦ ♦

For more than a month now the explorer has been a captive of the Moors. He is held in solitary confinement. His horse and goods have been appropriated. He has not been charged with any crime. The question of snubbing out his eyes has, praise to Allah, been shelved for the time being. It seems that Fatima, Ali’s principal wife, has sent word from Deena that she insists on examining the freak intact — evil eye and all. (In London they flock to see the human caterpillar and the man with three noses; in Ludamar it’s albino mutants.) Still, the explorer’s life has been anything but idyllic. He’s been held against his will, harassed as an infidel, threatened with death and mutilation, starved, bullied, tormented, bored, deprived of conversation, intellectual stimulus and water. And he hasn’t laid eyes on his interpreter for a week. When he last saw him, Johnson was still keeping a tongue — civil or otherwise — in his head. Ali had found that flap of muscle and fatty tissue a sine qua non when interrogating the explorer about the arcana of his dress and baggage: the shoes and stockings, the buttons of his coat and trousers, his compass, watch and razor. “How does this work? And this?” Ali inquired, directing his questions to Johnson while his sullen dark eyes fixed on the explorer’s face. Eventually, he made the explorer step in and out of his clothes thirty-seven times so that successive groups of rubberneckers could marvel at the ingenuity of it. After the thirty-seventh demonstration, Ali expressed a curiosity as to why Mungo had come to the Sahel in the first place: if he wasn’t a trader he must be a spy. “I’m looking for the River Niger,” Mungo told him. Ali studied his great toe for a moment and then looked up. “There are no rivers in your country?”

♦ ♦ ♦

Down a gentle rise from the encampment — no more than three hundred yards — are the wells. Mungo can hear the lowing of the cattle as they crowd round the troughs for their nightly irrigation. When he gets closer he can make out the rounded humps and the wild spiked horns jabbing at the sky like a forest in motion. The cows — more like overweight gazelles than beef on the hoof — stamp and push and bellow for water. He could bellow along with them. He could cry and screech and out-howl all the demons in hell he’s so thirsty. But what’s this? Something moving in the stand of acacias up ahead. The explorer sidles up for a closer look.

Six or seven slaves, muffled in their burnooses, are lounging around an open fire, passing a pipe and laughing. Every once in a while one of them dips a bucket in the well and sloshes its contents into a trough, where the cattle snort and shove to get at it. Mungo steps out of the shadows and goes down on his knees to them. “Water,” he begs. “Give me water.” And then in English: “A drop, a taste, a spoonful!”

At first they’re startled. But then, looking down at the wasted wretch prostrating himself in the cowshit, they begin to laugh. Their eyes are glossy and veined with red. They stagger, whoop, hold their sides, their laughter echoing into the night—”Yee-ha-ha-ha-haa!”—laughter like the throttling of birds. Then one of them steps forward, pipe in hand. His eyes are tiny, pig’s eyes, and his brow swells out over his face like an eroded riverbank. “Water!” cries Mungo. The man bends, drawing on the pipe, and blows a lungful of smoke in the explorer’s face. The odor is strong, aromatic, viscous: are they smoking incense? Mungo coughs. Then the man rocks back on his heels and calls out to his companions: “Nazarini wants water?” They laugh. “Give him water, Sidi!”

Sidi turns back to the explorer and hisses: “La illah el allah, Mahomet rasowl Allahi.” Mungo recognizes the phrase: There is only one God, and Mohammed is his prophet. They make him repeat it a hundred times a day. “Okay,” he says. “Okay,” and mutters a quick Lord’s Prayer, begging extenuating circumstances. Sidi kicks him. “La illah el allah, Mahomet rasowl Allahi” says Mungo. “Water!” shout the others. “Give the Nazarini water, Sidi. Give him holy water!”

The hocks of the cattle rise and fall. Dust settles on the explorer like a parched snow. It is up his nose, down his throat. He can hear them, the stupid beasts, drooling over the troughs in mindless contentment, the precious silken droplets tumbling from their muzzles, catching like jewels at the tips of their whiskers. “You want water?” Sidi says. Mungo nods. And then suddenly, without warning, the slave throws back his jubbah and pisses on him — quick and salt, the hot urine runs down his collar, through his fingers, soaks deep into the fabric of his waistcoat. The explorer leaps up in a frenzy, desperate and homicidal, but Sidi has backed off, laughing, and now the others are bending for stones and bits of wood. Mungo stands there, weak and stinking, as the herdsmen begin to pelt him. “Drink piss, Christian!” they jeer. He turns heel and jogs off into the night.

It is quiet. The stars fan out across the heavens like spilled milk; mosquitoes whine in the trees. He is turned away from the next three wells in succession, pummeled with fists and sticks. At the last well, an ancient brackish pit set apart from the others, an old slave and his son, a boy of eight or nine, are watering their master’s herd by torchlight. Mungo begs them for a drink. The old man eyes him suspiciously for a moment, then dips a bucket of water from the well. “Salaam, salaam, salaam,” says Mungo, reaching out for it, when the boy tugs at his father’s sleeve. ‘‘Nazarini,’’ says the boy. The old man hesitates, looking first at the bucket, then at the well. He is concerned about contamination, hexes, a well gone dry in the night. “Please,” the explorer says, “I beg you.” The old man shuffles to the trough, empties the bucket and points a weathered finger. Mungo doesn’t have to be asked twice. He throws himself forward, wedging his head between the big horned skulls of a pair of heifers.

The trough looks like a gutter on a rainy day, the water like sewage, twigs and straw and bits of offal swirling on the surface. The explorer buries his face and drinks, but the competition is fierce, the stream already a puddle, cattle slavering, their great pink tongues like sponges lapping up the last few drops. He turns to the old man. “More!” he shouts. “More!” A piebald cow, its eyes big as pocketwatches, bowls him over. And then suddenly a gunshot barks out, loud as a thunderclap. Then another. The cattle fall back, confused, butting shoulders, snouts and flanks, panicky, running blind. Ka-bomb, Ka-bomb, Ka-bomb, they boom off into the night.

When the dust settles, Mungo finds himself looking up at three horsemen. One of them is Dassoud, the hyphenated scar glistening in the torchlight. There is a pistol in his hand. He steadies his mount, levels the pistol at the explorer’s head and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. Mungo sits there in the dust and cattle droppings, his heart frozen, nerves shot, wondering how on earth to conciliate this madman with the gun. ‘‘La illah el allah, Mahomet rasowl Allahi,’’ he says, taking a stab at it. Dassoud is pouring a fresh charge into the priming pan, all the while growling like a dog at an intruder’s pantleg. The horses stamp and whinny, the old man and his son cower. Then Dassoud raises the gun a second time, shouts something in Arabic, squeezes the trigger. A flash of light, a sound like hot coals dropped in a tub of water. The pistol has misfired. “What have I done?” the explorer pleads, edging away. Dassoud curses, flings down the pistol, and calls over his shoulder for another. “Hua!” shouts the man at his back, tossing him a fresh weapon. Dassoud snatches it out of the air, cocks the hammer, and aims at a constellation of freckles just to the left of the explorer’s nose.

“Mr. Park!” Johnson, skirts aflap, bursts into the circle of light like a character out of the commedia dell’arte. His chest is heaving and his jowls are streaked with sweat. “Mr. Park, you crazy? Get up on your feet and double-time it back to that tent before they shoot you dead on the spot. You got the whole place in a uproar. They think you tryin’ to escape.”

Mungo looks up. Fires blaze on the hillside. Horsemen ride off into the night with torches. There are shouts and curses, random gunshots. Mungo rises. Dassoud lowers the pistol.

♦ NAIAD ♦

Outside, beyond the lace curtains and leaded windows, a lazy fat-flake snow settles over the trees and gardens of Selkirk, smoothing corners, blurring distinctions, inundating the mileposts along the Edinburgh road. There are no footpaths, no flowerbeds, no lawns; the azaleas are bowed and the evergreens stagger at the edge of the field. It has been snowing for two days now. Drifts darken the lower panes and lean against the door, saddle horses go without exercise and wagons lose their bones in soft sculpture. There is ice in the well. Up on the rooftop the weather vane grinds round its axis.

Here in the kitchen, it’s another world. Thick and sultry, the atmosphere steams like an island in the Pacific. The windows perspire and drip, the hand mirror fogs over, bath towels go heavy with damp. In the hearth: a holiday fire. Mounds of glowing coals, a crosshatch of split oak and the low sucking moan of the flames. Two blackened cauldrons hang over the fire, suspended from hooks driven into the stone a century ago. Vapor spews from them, thick as a mist over the moors. On the table, dark leafy ferns glow with wet, and dace and shiners flash at breadcrumbs behind the beaded glass of the aquarium. From the corner, lost somewhere in the banks of rising steam, the turtle doves imitate a flute caught in the lower register.

It is February second, the anniversary of her engagement to Mungo Park. Ailie Anderson is commemorating the occasion with a bath — a rare luxury in these pinched times. She glides round the room, arranging her bath things, humming, occasionally fanning the fire with a blast from the bellows. Dr. Philby’s green soap stands ready on the table, beside her comb and tortoiseshell brush; the Bain des Fleurs dangles from her fingertips. Luxury or no, she’ll have her bath today. She’ll lie back in the steamed-up kitchen surrounded by her menagerie and the sounds and scents of nature, and dream of Mungo fighting his way through the dripping jungles of the Dark Continent. Her father allows but one bath a month. “I canna spare the hardwood and the coal,” he says. No matter. She’ll have her bath today and stink till March. After all, this is no mere rub and scrub, this is ritual purification.

Ailie is twenty-two, and patient as Penelope. She was fourteen when she first met Mungo Park. He came to live with them, her father’s apprentice. Eight years ago. When he left for the university he asked her to wait for him. Leaves were turning in the trees. She cried for joy and confusion. After two years at Edinburgh he kissed her brow and signed on as ship’s surgeon on a spicer bound for Djakarta. She waited. When he returned he was morose and restive. They were to be married. But then, out of nowhere, there was a letter from London, from Mungo’s brother-in-law. Would he accept a commission from the African Association to explore West Africa with the object of locating the Niger River? She could read the answer in his eyes. Two weeks later, his bags packed, he stood at the door of the London coach. “I’m going to make a mark in the world, Ailie,” he said. “Wait for me?”

She’s been waiting ever since.

Of course, there isn’t a man in the Borderlands can hold a candle to him. They’re all a bunch of plowboys and fops, with about as much adventure in them as a sick housedog. Look at Gleg — her father’s current apprentice — he’s no more than a tadpole compared to Mungo. He wouldn’t know adventure if it took hold of one of his great flapping ears and bit into it. Ailie sighs, sets the bath oil beside the hairbrush, and then calls out to her brother. “Zander! Help me haul the tub out, would you?”

Alexander Anderson is in the parlor, alternately staring down at Southey’s Joan of Arc, which lies open in his lap, and gazing out at the languid feathery flakes drifting past the window. He is savoring the storm, and the quiet, glad for the respite from the comings and goings of medicine. Glad too for the presence of Gleg. Ever since the spring, when he left the university, his father has been dragging him along on housecalls, thrusting splints and scalpels at him, blustering, cajoling, imploring him to take up the standard of a country physician. “What’s with ye, lad?” the old man would boom. “Ye plan to loll about lickin’ yer hinder parts like ye was some sheep o’ the field for the rest o’ yer days? — or are ye going to find yerself some God’s work for yer idle hands as befits a mon and an Anderson? Eh? Speak up, lad — I canna hear ye for all the anger and puzzlement belaborin’ the runnels o’ me brain.”

But Zander has no desire to set up as a country doctor. He loathes the smell of the sickroom, the blackened lips and foul breath. There’s a man pinned beneath a cart, the ribs like pink stakes driven into his chest; an infant hacking in the night, blood on her chin; bones breaking, vessels rupturing, hearts seizing. He wants no part of it. Mortality is a cancer, a running sore — does he need to stare it in the face ten times a day? Drunken men, pregnant women and filthy children with their ruptures and boils, their poxes and plagues — they strike him with terror, not compassion. He doesn’t want to probe wounds or let blood or tamp poultices round tumors and lesions — he wants to vomit, he wants to run.

Thank God for Gleg. He may be awkward and two-faced, gangling and graceless, an alien and obtrusive presence in the house, but he lives and breathes, walks on two feet and provides a clear and unmistakable target for the old man’s enthusiasm. Since Gleg arrived, the pressure’s been off. When there are horses to be hitched, bones to be set, herbs to be gathered and pounded, it’s Gleg who gets the call. When there’s moralizing to be listened to, or carping about prices, weather, powdered hair or the “grate Kraut King,” it’s Gleg who must bow his head and look attentive. This is not to say that the good doctor has been neglecting his only son — not by any means. He still scolds and lectures, berates him for his dreaminess, his lack of ambition, his clothes and hairstyle and opinions, and he still drags him out into the cutting winds to make the odd housecall. No, that will never change — so long as Zander is under his father’s roof. But at least Gleg has diverted the old man for the time being. Zander can breathe. He can sit back and sip sherry before the fire. Play patience, read a book of poetry. Or wrap a scarf round his throat, wander the blighted hills and wonder what in God’s name he’s going to do with his life.

“Zander!” Ailie is in the doorway, a bathtowel in her hand. “Help me with the tub?”

Zander looks up from his book. Outside the snow has begun to change to sleet. “A bath?” he says. “In this weather?”

♦ ♦ ♦

The tub is an heirloom. Dark and massive, smelling of the sea, of rancid soap, of wet hair and mold and age. Euan Anderson, Ailie’s grandfather, bathed in it after the battle of Culloden. Her great-grandmother, Emma Oronsay, was kicking up a fine froth of soap bubbles as Handel coasted down the Thames on a barge, and Godfrey Anderson, great-uncle on her father’s side, was found dead in it, the water gone red, his wrists cut through to the bone. Ghosts and echoes. Ailie’s last memory of her mother is bound up in the feel and smell of the thing. A warm light from the candles, kettles singing, she and Zander kicking and splashing, and that woman with the sad and suffering eyes, with the hair like a field in bloom, that woman, her mother, reaching out soft hands to scrub their backs and ears and the spaces between their thighs. She disappeared one day. Left for a weekend in Glasgow and never returned.

Euphemia Anderson, née St. Onge, was a devotee of astrology. She charted the heavens, spoke of stars in ascendancy and planets in conjunction. “Buy into the grain market, James,” she would tell her husband, “the time is ripe.” Or: “The mare will foal tonight. It’ll be a bay stallion with a bad hind leg.” She was a Gemini. “My twin is an Arabian Princess,” she would say. “Out in the wide world. I will never know her.”

Her daughter was born in June, nine and a half minutes before her son. Alice and Alexander. Twins. She dressed them identically, now in short pants, now in skirts. She would stop people on the street to introduce her darlin’ little daughters one day, and her bold little sons the next. Obsessed with the concept of twins — twin bodies, twin minds, twin fingers and toes and ears and eyes — she was incapable of accepting the momentous and wrenching disparity indicated by so trifling a thing as a cleft or a wrinkled flap of skin no bigger than her thumbnail. It offended her sense of proportion. When she left for Glasgow, Dr. Anderson took the twins in hand. Zander was sent to boarding school and Ailie fell into the lap of a governess.

She was six when Mrs. Alloway arrived. Mrs. Alloway explained to her that ladies were meant for hoops and finery, for accomplishment in verse and music and other anodynic arts, that ladies above all else were ladies, the fleece and plumage of society. Ailie cut her hair at the shoulder in protest. She’s worn it that way ever since.

But now her mother is a memory, indistinct, loose at the edges, and Mrs. Alloway has shrunk into insignificance, an old woman, her bulk loose on the bone, death’s pensioner in a leaking cottage. There’s always an homage to pay to this old tub, memories caught in a scent or the feel of the roughened wood, but today is a celebration of life, and she squeezes her eyes shut and summons Mungo, his face drifting in a thousand guises, smiling, winking, the pitch of his upper lip as he begins a funny story, the look of befuddlement as he steps in a bucket or tumbles from his horse. The water is hot, comforting and sensuous. It flushes her skin. She’s in Iceland, Norway. A hot spring, snowflakes melting on the water and a figure looming through the mist, naked and athletic, her name on his lips — but dammit, she’s forgotten the washcloth. It crouches on the table, just out of reach.

The water sucks back as she rises, her breasts boyish and tight, body glowing with wet, the dark bush like a hole cut through her. At that moment the door swings back and her father bursts into the room, dogged by his apprentice, Georgie Gleg. She freezes for an instant, then drops into the water like a stone. Incidental waves break over the lip of the tub to slosh the floorboards.

“Bairns!” her father shouts, blustering to hide his embarrassment.

“Bairns, bairns, bairns! They maun crawl out of the womb in a blizzard.” He is at the closet already, shrugging into his mackintosh and boots. “The third call! Third! Two months it’s been since I’ve delivered a child and now Beelzebub himself has got hold of the weather they’re birthing all over the county.”

She is up to her neck in hot water. Her ears are red. Gleg, lank and unctuous, two years her junior, his teeth like the teeth of a horse, stands mooning at a spot over the tub as if he’d just caught a glimpse of a burning bush or a ladder dropped from the sky. His mouth hangs open, his nostrils quiver.

“Gleg!” her father roars. “Stop gaping like a hyena and get into your coat, boy. We’ve got a housecall to make!”

Gleg flings himself at the closet as if he were flinging himself over a cliff, fumbles into his greatcoat and begins grappling with the doorlatch. Impatient, Dr. Anderson sweeps the door open and shoves him through. The door slams. There is the sound of scuffling on the back porch, then the wheeze of the outer door, and they’re gone.

The fish stir in their tank. The turtle doves preen their wings. The fire hisses. And Ailie, buoyed up by the penetrating warmth of the bath, begins to rub at her legs with the washcloth, her mind gone blank, rubbing and scrubbing, working at the process of purification.

♦ NOT TWIST, NOT COPPERFIELD, NOT FAGIN HIMSELF ♦

Not Twist, not Copperfield, not Fagin himself had a childhood to compare with Ned Rise’s. He was unwashed, untutored, unloved, battered, abused, harassed, deprived, starved, mutilated and orphaned, a victim of poverty, ignorance, ill-luck, class prejudice, lack of opportunity, malicious fate and gin. His was a childhood so totally depraved even a Zola would shudder to think of it.

He was born out back of a twopenny flophouse in what the wags called “The Holy Land”—cribs of straw that went for a penny a night. The year was 1771, the month February. His mother didn’t have the price of a bed, and so she crept into the outbuilding, the labor pains coming like blows to the groin, a bottle of clear white Knock-Me-Down clutched in her fist. The straw was dirty. Pigeons dropped excrement from the rafters. It was so cold even the lice were sluggish. She selected a crib in the rear because of its proximity to the horses and what little warmth they generated. Then she settled down with her bottle.

She was a souse, Ned’s mother. A sister in the great sorority of the sorrows of gin. At this time in British history, the sorority — and its brother fraternity — were flourishing. When gin was first introduced in England at the close of the seventeenth century (some claim it was brought over from Holland by William III, others say it was distilled from bone and marrow by the Devil himself), it became an overnight sensation among the lower classes. It was cheap as piss, potent as a kick in the head. They went mad for it: after all, why swill beer all night when you can get yourself crazed in half an hour — for a penny? By 1710 the streets were littered with drunks, some stripped naked, others stiff as tombstones. When Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls, introduced legislation to curb the pernicious influence of gin through licensing and taxation, a mob gathered to stone his house and chew the wheels from his carriage. There was no stopping it. Gin was a palliative for hard times, it was sleep and poetry, it was life itself. Aqua vitae. Ned’s mother was a second-generation ginsoak. Her father was a tanner. He drank two pints a day and flayed hides. He sold her into service at nine, she was out on the streets at thirteen, a mother at fourteen. She died of cirrhosis, brain fever, consumption and green sickness before she reached twenty.

There were three other lodgers in the Holy Land that drear winter’s night. The first was a tribeless patriarch who coughed like dice in a box and died before first light. The landlord discovered him next morning: clots of blood frozen to his lips, his neck, buried deep in the sere white nest of his beard. Then there was the stone mason — granite monuments and markers — on the tail end of a three-day drunk. He retched in the straw and lay down to sleep in it. Lastly, there was the old woman wrapped in tattered skirts like a dressmaker’s dummy, who scraped in after midnight and pitched headlong into the next crib over from the pregnant girl. She lay there, the old woman, her breathing like the friction of rusted gears, listening to the moans of Ned’s mother. Moans. They were nothing new. She closed her eyes. But then there was a cry, and then another. The old woman sat up. In the next crib lay a girl of fourteen or fifteen. Her brow was wet. The neck of a bottle peeked out from her jacket. She was in labor.

The harridan crept closer, snatched up the bottle and held it to her lips.

“ ‘Ere,” she keaked. “Wot’s the trouble, little cheese: birfin’ a babe, is it?”

The girl looked up, heart in mouth.

“Eeeeeee!” screeched the old woman, scattering the pigeons in the rafters. “I’ve done it meself, done it meself, oh yes. There was a time the babbies dropped from these old loins like pippins from a tree.” Her face was a shed snakeskin, ageless. Who could say how much flesh she’d molded within her? Or count the years she’d languished in a Turkish seraglio or a Berber hut? Who could guess what twisted paths and dark alleys she’d been down, or what she was thinking when that ring of hammered gold was struck through her lip?

“ ‘Elp me,” the girl whispered.

♦ ♦ ♦

It was a breech birth. First the wrinkled legs and buttocks, then the shoulders and chin, the smooth slick dome of the head. The hour of the wolf came and went, and the old woman yanked Ned from his mother’s womb. Her fingers were dry and crabbed. She tied off the cord and slapped him. He wailed. Then she wiped the blood and mucus from his body with the hem of her skirt and tucked him inside her coat. She glanced round, sly and secretive, then made for the door. Babysnatch!

Ned’s mother propped herself on one elbow and felt round her, first for the child and then for the bottle. Both were gone. She focused on the pinched shoulders of the old woman receding into the gloom at the far end of the barn and then she began to scream, scream like sandstorms on the desert, like the death of the universe. The crone hurried for the door, the girl’s screams at her back, the horses kicking blindly in their stalls. The bearded patriarch did not wake. But the stonecutter did. He was in his mid-twenties. He flung slabs of granite about as if they were newsprint, day in and day out. “Stop ‘er!” the girl cried. “She’s got my baby!”

He vaulted the railing and jogged the length of the stable just as the harridan was squeezing through the door. She spun around on him, a rusted scissor in hand. “Get back!” she hissed. The blow came like a seizure, secretive and brutal. He caught her in the shoulder and she collapsed like a bundle of twigs. Beneath her, there was the sound of shattering glass. And the keen of an infant.

♦ ♦ ♦

The stonecutter’s name was Edward Pin. They called him Ned for short. He took the girl and her child to his lodgings in Wapping, a fierce hangover raging behind his eyes. She’d washed him in tears and he felt like a hero, no matter how much his head ached. The infant, it seemed, had been gashed across the chest when the bottle broke. Pin lit a few sticks of wood and a handful of coal to take the chill off the room. The girl’s hair hung loose as she bent over the baby to dress his wounds. Her name was Sarah Colquhoun. She was drunk. “I’m going to name ‘im Ned,” she slurred. “After ‘is deliverer.” Pin beamed. But then a change came over his face and he took hold of her hair. “Don’t you go callin’ ‘im Pin, you slut. ‘Ee’s none of mine.”

“Rise I’m callin’ ‘im!” she shouted back. “Ned Rise, you son of a bitch.” It was the metaphoric expression of a hope. “You know why?. . Cause he’s going to rise above all this shit ‘is mother has had to eat since I could barely say me own name.”

“Ha!” he sneered. “Baptized in blood. And gin. And with a ginswill of a whorin’ mother. I bleedin’ doubt it.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Ned’s memories of his mother are sketchy. A drawn face, all cheekbone and brow, the skin stretched tight as leather on a last. A persistent hacking in the night. Phthisic pallor. Too much green round the gills. She was dead before he was six. Pin, needless to say, was a violent drunkard with the temperament of a cat set afire. When he worked, he came home white with stone dust, his eyes bleeding alcohol. Then he would settle down to torture the boy for the sheer joy of it, like a ten-year-old with a frog or rat. He tied Ned’s feet together and hung him out the third-story window like a pair of wet pants. He clamped the chamberpot over Ned’s ears, stropped a razor on his back, submerged his head in a tub of water for sixty seconds at a time. “Drown you like a rat, I will!” he growled.

When the boy was seven the stonecutter decided it was time he earned his keep. He appeared in the doorway one night with a fistful of baling twine, caught the boy round the neck, pinned him down and trussed up his leg at the knee. Then he cut Ned’s trousers high up the shin, fashioned a crutch from a broomstick, and set him out on the street to beg. It was cold in the wind, and the bindings chewed at the boy’s flesh. No matter. Seven years old, shrink-bellied and filth-faced, he teetered like a drunken stork and pleaded for pennies in Russell Square, Drury Lane, Covent Garden. But mendicity was a popular profession in those days and the competition was fierce. An army of amputees, lepers, pinheads, paralytics, gibberers, slaverers and whiners lined the streets shoulder to shoulder. There was the legless man planted in a chamberpot who hopped round on his knuckles like an ape; the limbless woman who polished boots with her tongue; the man-dog with a withered tail and spiked yellow teeth hanging over his lip. Ned didn’t have a chance.

There were twenty shillings in a pound, twelve pence in a shilling, four farthings in a penny. When Ned came home with two farthings the first day. Pin thrashed him. The following day, after sixteen hours of entreating, imploring and beseeching, Ned had nothing to show but a bit of string, three chestnuts and a brass button. Pin drubbed him again, this time giving special consideration to the nose, mouth and cheekbones. As a result, Ned’s face took on the color and consistency of a fermenting plum. This development improved the take somewhat, but then there was always the necessity of raising fresh welts each day. After a month of it. Pin pulled something in his thrashing arm. There’s got to be a better way, he thought.

Then he hit on it. “Ned,” he called. “Come over ‘ere.”

Pin was sitting at the table with a tumbler of gin. The floor was ankle-deep in rags and papers, the bones of chops and chickens, scraps of wood, fragments of glass, smashed earthenware, feathers. Ned was in the corner, feigning invisibility. The stone mason jerked his head round.

“Come over ‘ere, I said.” Ned came. A meat cleaver lay on the table, cold and tarnished. When Ned saw it he began to blubber. “Shet yer ‘ole!” roared Pin, forcing the boy’s right hand down on the table. His own grimy fist smothered it like a hood. Trembling, vulnerable, the boy’s fingers lay there on the block, pale as sacrificial lambs. There were black semicircles under the nails. The cleaver fell.

With his arm in a sling to display the mutilated hand to advantage (Pin had excised the first joint of each finger, thumb included), Ned’s take began to improve. In a month or two he was pulling in seven or eight shillings a day: a small fortune. Pin gave up the lapidary profession to sit through long afternoons in taverns and coffeehouses, bolting duck with orange sauce, swilling wine and laying his broad callused palms across the bosoms and backsides of women of pleasure. Ned froze his ass off on the street, choked on crusts and cabbage soup, the loss of his fingertips an ongoing horror to him, a waking nightmare. He wanted to run off. He wanted to die. But Pin kept him tractable with blows to the back of the head and threats of further mutilation. “Like to lose the rest of them nubbins? Or the ‘and maybe? Or ‘ow bout the ‘ole arm, eh?” Then he would laugh.

One grim afternoon, as the ex-stonecutter was reeling across the street from the Magpie and Stump to inspect his ward’s pockets, a landau drawn by four handsome bays dashed him to the pavement. He became involved in the rear spring mechanism and was dragged about a hundred yards up the street. A woman screamed. He was dead.

♦ ♦ ♦

For the next several years Ned lived on the streets: begging, filching, eating garbage, occasionally finding shelter with a loon or pederast or axe murderer. It was a tough life. No hand to comfort, no voice to praise. He grew up like an aborigine.

Then when he was twelve, his luck turned. He was at Vauxhall Gardens one morning, picking pockets and stripping bark from the trees, when he was arrested by a sound trembling on the warm still air, an unearthly fluting like something out of a dream. It seemed to be coming from beyond the fountain, near the flowerbeds. When he got there he found a scattering of parkgoers — rakes and gallants, ladies and tarts, nurses with infants, fops, cutpurses, itinerant hawkers — all gathered round a man blowing into a wooden instrument. The man was bald, his face and crown red as a ham, his cheeks puffed. Jollops of flesh hung over his collar and quivered in sympathetic response to the keening vibrato of the instrument. He was dressed like a gentleman.

Ned watched the clean athletic fingers lick up and down the keys, lighting here, pausing there, lifting, darting and pouncing like young animals at play. The pansies and jonquils were in bloom. Forget-me-nots and peonies. He sat in the grass and listened, the music reedy and sweet, like birds gargling with honey. The man's foot tapped as he played. Some of the listeners began to tap along with him, the buckled pumps and slippers and wooden clogs rising and falling in unison, as if manipulated by a string. One woman swayed her head in a soft glowing arc, almost imperceptible, the sun firing an aureole of curls round her face. Ned's foot began to tap. He couldn't remember a happier moment.

When the musician took a break, the crowd dispersed. Ned lingered to watch him. The man twisted the mouthpiece from his instrument, unfastened the reed and balanced it like a wafer on the tip of his tongue. From a leather-bound case he produced a brush, with which he swabbed first the mouthpiece and then the hollowed body of the instrument itself. The keys flashed in the sun. "You find all this stimulating, do you?" the man said. He was addressing Ned.

Ned sat there, chewing at a blade of grass, ragged as a field gone to seed. He'd lived his life in the muck of the streets, pissed in the Thames, scavenged his clothes from dustbins, comatose drunks, the stiffened corpses stacked like firewood beneath the bridges. He couldn't have been wilder and filthier had he been raised by wolves. "What of it?" he spat.

The man drew the reed from his mouth, examined it, then slipped it back between his lips. There were ten thousand shit-faced orphans like this one out on the streets. They were at his elbows everywhere he went, insinuating themselves, offering their mouths and bodies, whining for coppers, bread and beer. But something in this one appealed to him: what it was he couldn't say. He made an effort. "I don't know — it just seemed as if you appreciated my little performance. . the tunes, I mean."

Ned softened. "I did," he admitted.

The man held up the instrument. "You know what this is?"

"A fife?"

"Clarinet," said the man.

Ned wanted to know how the sound was made. The man showed him. Could he learn to play? Ned asked. The man stared down at Ned's hand, then asked him if he was hungry.

♦ ♦ ♦

Prentiss Barrenboyne owned a block of houses in Mayfair. He was in his mid-fifties. He'd never been married. His mother, a fierce and acerbic empiricist with whom he'd lived all his life, had died a month earlier. He brought the boy home that night and let him sleep in the coal cellar. In the morning he instructed his housekeeper to wash and feed him. It was a foot in the door. By the end of the week Ned Rise had become a habit.

Officially he was established in the house as a servant, but Barrenboyne, won over by the lad’s ingenuous and consuming enthusiasm for the clarinet, came to treat him more like a member of the family. He bought him clothes, gave him milk and chops and drippings, taught him to read and how to balance a teacup on his knee. There were trips to the concert hall, the theater, the shipyard and the zoo. A tutor was engaged. Ned acquired the rudiments of orthography, geometry, piscatology, a phrase or two of French, and a profound loathing for the Classics. He was no Eliza Doolittle. His progress — if the bimonthly absorption of a date or sum merits the appellation — was as leisurely as the drift of continents. The tutor was beside himself. He looked at Ned’s face and saw the face of a wiseacre. He accused him of drinking ink and flogged his backside as he flogged his memory. Ned bore it with patience and humility. There were no tantrums, no fits, no funks. He did what was expected of him, sang hosannas to his redeemer and polished his prospects. He knew a good thing when he saw one.

Seven years passed. In France they were sending out invitations to a beheading, across the Atlantic they were knocking down forests and bludgeoning Indians, in the East End they nabbed the misogynist known as “The Monster” who for two years had been goring women’s backsides in the street, and in Mayfair Ned Rise was eating three meals a day, sleeping in a bed, bathing at least once a fortnight, and stepping into clean underwear each and every morning. Seven years. The memory of the streets had begun to fade. He’d never eaten offal, witnessed perversion, theft, arson and worse, never huddled over ash pits with ice crusting his lashes and a cold fist clenching at his lungs — not Ned Rise, pride of the Barrenboynes.

Over the years Ned and his guardian had grown as close as palate and reed, wedded by their love for music. A week after the old man took him in the music lessons began. His face and crown suffused with blood, the hoary mutton chops bristling, Barrenboyne grinned his way into the room one night, a wooden case in hand. Inside was an ancient C clarinet, the one he himself had played as a boy. He handed it to Ned. Within the year Ned was playing passably in spite of his handicap, capable of sight-reading practically anything by the following summer, and in five years’ time proficient enough to accompany his mentor to the park for his public debut. They sat there on the very bench on which Ned had first seen the old man, he with his C clarinet, Barrenboyne with his B-flat, and played airs from Estienne Rogers’ tunebook. People gathered round, tapped their feet, swayed their bodies, while Mozart, dying in Vienna, composed his great Requiem Mass. Ned rose to the occasion.

♦ ♦ ♦

One morning, just before dawn, Barrenboyne stepped into Ned’s room and shook him by the shoulder. “Get up, Ned,” he whispered. “I need you.” His voice trembled. His face and jowls were redder than Ned had ever seen them, red as tomatoes, flags, the jackets of the King’s Hussars. Ned was nineteen. “What’s the matter?” he asked. No answer. Birds began to whistle from beyond the windows. The old man was breathing like a locomotive. “Get dressed and meet me out front,” he said.

Barrenboyne was waiting at the gate. He was dressed in the suit he’d bought for his mother’s funeral, beaver top hat, silk surtout. Under his arm, a leather case, the rippled skin of some exotic reptile. A new clarinet? thought Ned. He’d never seen it before. They walked at a brisk pace: through Grosvenor Square, down Brook Street, across Park Lane and then into the soft green demesne of the park itself. The place was deserted. Fog, like milk in an atomizer, hung low over the wet grass. A crow jeered from a treebranch. “You know what a second is?” Barrenboyne said.

It was a slap in the face. “A second? You’re not—?”

The old man took hold of his sleeve. “Just take it easy now,” he said. “You’re a grown man, Ned Rise. Prove it.”

Two men — figures out of the gloom — were waiting for them by the edge of the Serpentine. One of them was a blackamoor, short, fat as a sow. He wore a feather in his hat, doeskin breeches, lisle hose and an iridescent waistcoat. A real buck. Barrenboyne strode up to them, bowed, and presented the leather case. It was seventy degrees at least, but the negro was shivering. His second, who kept inhaling snuff from an enamel box and sneezing into his handkerchief, took the leather case and opened it, between sneezes, for the negro. The negro selected a pistol. There was liquor on his breath. Then the sneezer offered the case to Barrenboyne. The old man lifted the weapon from its case as gently as if he were unpacking his clarinet for a breezy concert on the green. It began to drizzle.

The sneezer was snuffing snuff in a paroxysm of nervous energy, snapping open the box, pinching a nostril, gasping and slobbering into his handkerchief, all the while jerking his limbs and shuddering like an epileptic. The negro dropped his gun. The drizzle turned to rain. Barrenboyne’s wattles began to vibrate as if he were exploring the upper register of the clarinet, and Ned found himself trembling in sympathetic response. Finally the sneezer managed to walk off twenty paces and set the principals on their marks. “Ready!” he bawled. Two harsh metallic clicks echoed over the field, one in imitation of the other. “Take aim!” Barrenboyne and the negro slowly raised their arms, as if saluting one another or taking part in the opening movement of a revolutionary new dance routine. Ned could picture them, jetéing over the greensward to leap through one another’s arms. “Ffff—” came the aborted command, tailed by a septum-wrenching sneeze. There was a flash and a snap. Birds cried out at the far end of the field. The negro’s pistol was smoking and his eyes were still buried in the crook of his elbow. Barrenboyne lay on the ground. Dead as a pharaoh.

♦ LAYING IT ON THE LINE ♦

Dawn. The sun breaks over the Sahel like a cracked egg and takes up where it left off the day before — scalding, incinerating, searing the life from everything within its compass. Carrion sniffers and night-roving reptiles creep back to their dens, and the big battered Nubian vultures sail out over the plain to check out the leavings. Rocks begin to expand, stunted shrubs dig deeper into the earth, mimosas fold up their leaves like parasols. By eight in the morning the horizon is shirred.

Mungo Park lies motionless on his back, watching a millipede trace a series of blind circles across the roof of his tent. Since the night of his “attempted escape” things have gone hard on him. Six men now doze outside his tent each night, and his food and water ration has been cut by half. It begins to occur to him that he may not make it after all, that he might just lie here and waste away, dauntless discoverer of the interior walls of a Moorish tent. He will join Ledyard, Lucas and Houghton in the ranks of failure and ignominy. He will never again lay eyes on Ailie, nor his mother, nor the bonny banks of the Yarrow. His bones will dry and crack and fall to dust under the alien sun and the wheeling strange colossi of misplaced constellations. He begins to feel daunted.

Suddenly the flaps part and Johnson ducks into the tent. In his hand a goatskin waterbag, known as a guerba in these parts. The explorer lies there, racked with fever, riddled with worms, his stomach shrunken, sphincter open wide, barely able to raise his eyes. He is weak and stinking, tabescent, at the far edge of hope. Johnson kneels beside him and feeds the leather nipple into his mouth. His lips grope, pulse quickens. It is water, cold and clear, water dipped from the shifting porous depths of the earth. It stirs the roots of his hair, firms his toenails, sings to his brittle bones. “I’m saved!” he gasps, and then vomits.

“It’s all right, Mr. Park. Take it easy: you got the whole thing to yourself.”

“Wha?” The explorer’s eyes are crusted and yellow, cheeks drawn, his beard a playground for ticks, fleas, lice and maggots.

“You heard me right. Chief Jackal, he tells me to come in here and give you the waterbag and then a pan of milk and kouskous.”

“Milk? Kouskous?” Johnson might just as well have announced haggis, finnan haddie and sheep’s-head soup. Mungo goes into peristaltic shock, then jerks himself up, clutching at the guerba and ransacking the tent with his eyes. “Where?” he pants, struggling to his feet. “Where? Tell me for God’s sake!”

At that moment a boy enters with a wooden bowl. Milk and kouskous. The boy makes as if to lay it at the explorer’s feet, but Mungo snatches it from him and buries his face in the thick ropy paste with all the desperation of a man stranded on the desert for forty days and forty nights. Which is precisely what he is.

Afterward, he pats his abdomen. “Johnson,” he says. “Oh-ho, Johnson, Johnson, Johnson, how I needed that. .” But wait! What has he done? The bowl’s been scraped clean and here’s his faithful guide and interpreter languishing before his eyes! “Johnson,” he stammers, staring down at the ground, “. . can you ever, can you ever forgive me? I’m afraid I went into a bit of a frenzy there. . I–I forgot all about you.”

Johnson holds up his palm. “Oh they been feedin’ me right along, don’t you worry about that. Got to. Else how am I goin’ to bust my ass for them?

Fetch this, mend that. Scrub this pot, milk them goats, oil up Akbar’s sandals and skim some cream for the horses. Shit. It’s like bein’ back on the plantation again. Sometimes I wish they’d just let me lie here and languish along with you.”

Mungo strokes the soggy grain from his beard and systematically licks the kernels from his fingers, then takes a long pull at the waterbag. Color trickles back into his cheeks. “So what’s up?” he says. “What’s made the bloody camel drivers so charitable all of a sudden?”

“Fatima.”

Fatima. The syllables flow like wind on water. First she’d saved his eyes, and now the rest of him. Hope glimmers. “She wants to see me?”

Johnson nods. “Ali says you got to be fed, washed up and made presentable. He won’t have his wife examinin’ a unwashed Christian. And he gave me this too,” handing the explorer a pale folded garment.

“What is it?”

‘‘Jubbah. Ali says you got to cover up your legs — he finds your trousers objectionable, high-quality nankeen or no.” Johnson laughs. “You ever get back to London you can sweep all the beaux and noodles under the table, start a craze: skirts for gentlemen.”

Mungo laughs along with him, drunk on food and water. The two chuckle and wheeze, wiping tears from their eyes. Then Johnson looks up, suddenly serious. “She’ll be here tomorrow night,” he says. “Don’t blow it.”

♦ PLANTATION SONG ♦

On this sub-Saharan evening awash with pale light and tapering shadow, Mungo Park, for the first time in nearly three months, finds himself out of the tent and back in the saddle again. His horse has been restored to him (cachectic as ever, looking like one of the gutted nags the Druids used to impale for decoration), his beard, locks and loins cleansed and anointed, his rags exchanged for a spanking white jubbah. On his head, a battered top hat; round his shoulders, the blue velvet jacket he wore while addressing the African Association at St. Alban’s Tavern, Pall Mall. Ali and Dassoud flank him on their chargers. Ali’s mount is white, Dassoud’s so absolutely black it cuts a hole in the horizon (an illusion he enhances by blackening the animal’s hoofs and anus, and staining its teeth). Johnson brings up the rear on an Abyssinian ass.

They are bound for Fatima’s tent at the far edge of the encampment, a distance of perhaps six or seven hundred yards. Ali and Dassoud are silent, while Mungo, sotto voce, rehearses phrases from his Arabic grammar: “I am honored to bask in your presence.” “Allow me to make obeisance to the undersides of your feet.” “Hot, isn’t it?” As they pass through the heart of the camp, dogs dart out to yap at the Christian’s stirrups, children gather to bombard him with nuggets of camel dung, adults step from their tents to squint up at him and denigrate his race, creed and color. “I piss in your mother’s hole!” a man yells. But then Ali holds up his hand and the voices fall silent, the children run to their mothers, the dogs vanish.

“Thanks,” says Mungo. Ali’s face is impassive. His gesture has had nothing whatever to do with compassion or fellow feeling — he just doesn’t want his wife inspecting a washed Christian in a shit-stained jubbah, that’s all.

♦ ♦ ♦

Fatima’s tent is two or three times the size of any of the others in camp, and distinguished by broad bands of color: gray, beige, indigo. Mungo recognizes the huge Nubian out front. The Nubian stands there, on guard, flexing the black bulges between his elbow and shoulder. Off to the right a woman squats in the dust, busily milking four or five she-goats. The explorer observes the pale soles of her feet, the yellow torpedoes of the goats’ teats. A fly lands on the explorer’s nose. The sun touches the horizon.

“Dismount!” shouts Ali, as he and Dassoud spring from their steeds like a pair of Russian tumblers. Johnson, ambling up on his ass, relays the command to his employer, while the Nubian steps forward to take charge of the animals.

It should be said that the explorer’s mind is laboring under a Sisyphean strain at this juncture: he is keyed up, jittery, aquiver with apprehension and doubt. The success of his mission — yea, his life itself — may depend on the impression he makes in his forthcoming interview with the Queen.

His stomach sinks with the same nauseated, socked-in-the-kidney feeling that used to assail him at school before end-of-term exams. Butterflies, they used to call it. Stage fright. Heebie-jeebies. The Choke.

And so, sweating like a marathon runner, he steps down out of the saddle, catches his left foot in the stirrup and slaps to the ground in a storm of dust and goat hair. He lies there a moment, thinking Christ in Heaven what have I done now, while Dassoud and Ali exchange glances and Johnson rushes to his aid. After steadying the horse, loosening the stirrup and finally thinking to remove the explorer’s boot, Johnson succeeds in extricating him. But this is just the beginning. The ground here, it seems, is a mecca for the costive denizens of the Sahel, an unspoiled latrine for Mother Nature and all her feathered, furred and squamate creation. Goat turds lie here, cheek by jowl with hyena ordure; grainy bars of camel dung, dogshit, cowshit and sheepshit coil round the withered ropy leavings of adders and skinks; there’s even a stray ibex turd or two. Mungo rises from this morass, brushing at his jubbah and dusting his hat. “Sorry about that,” he says. Ali shrugs. Then gestures for him to follow, and disappears through the soft contiguous flaps of Fatima’s tent and into the mystery beyond. Mungo, reeking like a zoo, his back an abstract collage of mauves, siennas and dun yellows, the representative of King George III and all of England, follows the Emir of Ludamar into the sanctum of the Queen.

♦ ♦ ♦

It is dark inside, a pair of oil lamps burning fitfully. There are tapestries, mats, urns, a perch on which two birds of prey — saker falcons — are calmly disemboweling a jerboa. The explorer glances up just as one of them finds a long strand of intestine and begins to tug at it, like a robin with a worm. ‘‘Salaam aleichem,’’ says Ali, and there she is, seated on a pillow the size of a double bed. The explorer is stunned. He’d expected a big woman — but this. . this is impossible! She is gargantuan, elephantine, her great bundled turban and glowing jubbah like a pair of circus tents, her shadow leaping and swelling in the uncertain Light until it engulfs the room. Her attendants — two girls in billowy pantaloons and a hoary old woman — sit at her feet like olives flanking a cantaloupe in a surreal still life.

Mungo cannot make out her face, which is concealed behind a yashmak—the double horsehair veil worn by Muslim women in public — but he is immediately struck by her feet and hands. Petite and delicate, they float at the tips of her bloated extremities like ducks on a pond. He is fascinated. Each of her digits is ornamented with a ring, and for some reason — perhaps to draw attention to their charms — her hands and feet have been stained saffron. The effect is dazzling. When finally she turns her head toward him she gasps, and gives out a faint squeal. Ali rushes to her, jabbering in Arabic. When she answers him, her voice is soft and sensual as a sunshower.

Mungo nudges his interpreter.

“She says she’s afraid,” Johnson whispers.

“Afraid? I’m the one whose giblets are on the line here.”

“You’re a Christian. To her that’s like bein’ a cannibal or a werewolf or somethin’.”

“What about you?”

“Don’t look at me, brother — I’m a Animist. Shhh. . now she’s bitchin’ about the smell. . ‘Do they all smell like that?’ “

Suddenly Ali barks out a command. “He wants us on our knees,” says Johnson, easing himself down and burying his forehead in the sand. The explorer follows suit. They pose like this for a long while (“I’m beginning to feel like a ostrich,” Johnson quips), until a high nasal voice begins yodeling out the evening prayers. It is the muezzin, stationed somewhere outside the tent. Ali and Dassoud likewise prostrate themselves, and Fatima comes down off her throne like a thundercloud rolling down the side of a mountain. As she tilts her forehead to the earth, the explorer can feel her rich black eyes upon him.

When the prayers are finally finished, Fatima lumbers back to her pillow, settles herself primly, and softly dismisses Dassoud and her husband. She then turns to Mungo and his interpreter, and asks them to be seated. Behind them, the Nubian edges into the tent, scimitar in hand. For a long while the room is silent, Fatima and her attendants ocularly feasting on this blond apparition in the blue velvet jacket. Finally the Queen addresses him, a single sentence, her voice rising as if on the crest of a question.

Mungo looks at Johnson.

“She wants you to stand up and take your jacket off.’*

Mungo complies, and one of the girls slips up to take the garment from him and deliver it to the Queen. Fatima regards the jacket silently, running her hand over the material against the nap, taking one of the brass buttons between her teeth. The explorer stands there in his jubbah like a child in a nightgown. “Give it to her,” Johnson whispers.

The explorer clears his throat, and in his best Arabic offers her the jacket. She looks up at him and politely declines, but does appropriate two of the brass buttons. “For earrings,” she explains, holding them up to the corners of her yashmak. From the shadows one of the falcons begins to crow: ca-ha! ca-ha! Fatima wets her lips. “Does he want any pork?” she asks.

“Tell her no,” says Johnson.

At that moment One-Eye appears with a bushpig on a leash. The bushpig has an elongated snout randomly disfigured with lumps and ridges, several yellowed tusks, and a nasty look in its eye. With a leer, One-Eye offers Mungo the pig. “Snark-snark,” says the pig.

“Look disgusted,” Johnson coaches.

The explorer does his best to express horror and loathing, knowing full well how deeply the Moors abhor pork. He backs away, fingers atremble, slapping his forehead and tugging at his lip while the bushpig, squealing like an accordion, stamps and stutters and jerks at its leash. The performance seems to be reassuring Fatima, and so the explorer gyrates even more wildly — really hamming it up — until he accidentally stumbles into the falcons’ perch. This, he immediately realizes, is a mistake. At the touch of his elbow the birds rear up and shriek in his face, their beaks and talons like scissors, wings beating round his ears. Then the larger of the two springs onto his shoulder. He is terrified. In his anxiety to brush it away he ducks directly into the path of the bushpig, who has been waiting for just such a chance. In a flash the pig lurches forward and savagely bites the explorer six or seven times in rapid succession. During the panic that ensues, the explorer somehow manages to collapse half the tent and wind up spread-eagled across the Queen’s voluminous lap. The Nubian eunuch intercedes to behead the pig with one swipe of his scimitar, while One-Eye and the pantaloon girls try to dislodge the shit-caked and bleeding explorer from the Queen’s person. Through it all, Mungo can hear the strains of Johnson’s voice raised in song — it seems almost as if he’s singing a dirge, downhearted and mournful, one of the old plantation songs Johnson likes to call “the blues.”

“You done blowed it now,” he’s singing. “Blowed it now. Lord God Almighty, you done blowed it now.”

♦ O THAT SINKING FEELING ♦

February, 1796. Wordsworth has been in and out of France and Annette Vallon, Bonaparte has put the screws to Babeuf and is vigorously pounding at Joséphine’s gate, Goethe is living in sin with Christiane Vulpius, and Burns is dying. In Edinburgh Walter Scott fights a losing battle for the hand of Williamina Belches, while in Manchester a snot-nosed De Quincey wanders the streets and wonders what a whore is. In Moscow it’s snowing.

In Paris they’re plugging holes with assignats for lack of anything better to do with them. And in Soho, at the Vole’s Head Tavern, they’re sucking and fucking. Onstage.

Ned couldn’t be more pleased. Jutta Jim’s been going strong for better than an hour now (if you discount the two brief intermissions during which he chanted tribal lays and quaffed a pint of chicken’s blood to keep his spirits up). Nan and Sally have enlarged their roles admirably, and the audience has been too preoccupied to wreak mayhem or piss on the carpet. What’s more, Ned’s throat, limbs, liver and lights haven’t been threatened in over an hour (Smirke’s been running round with a hard-on all night, peddling drinks like an oasis owner in Araby, and Mendoza hasn’t said boo since Jim strutted out onstage), and his gross take has far exceeded his rosiest estimate (nearly thirty-six pounds against an outlay of twenty-three and two, which includes a new suit of clothes, tips, and refreshment for himself and his cast). And all of it tucked snugly away in the Bank of the Bulge.

So why all this anxiety? He’s been through a flask and a half of gin already, smoked three pipes and paced the room twenty-two times, and he’s still jittery as a case of rat-bite fever. He can’t understand it. He’s even starting to develop an itch in the missing joint of his pinky. Of course, deep down, he already knows the answer — things are going too well. And that means he’d better dodge, duck and flinch, because when things start going too well that’s when the Powers That Be swoop down on you like a dozen hurricanes and leave you buried under half a ton of flotsam and jetsam.

It reminds him of the time at Bartholomew Fair when he and Billy Boyles just couldn’t lose at the gaming tables, had themselves a couple of tarts for nothing, then fell into the way of a champion fighting cock worth fifty quid easy. And then, as they were skulking off the fairgrounds with their booty, there it was — Zeppo the Eleusinian’s star-spangled cape — just hanging out to dry like a gift from the gods. On the way back Boyles led him down a lampless lane, and sure enough, a pair of dacoits pounced on them. “Stand and deliver!” a voice growled, and Ned found that the barrel of a pistol had been inserted in his ear. “I’ll jest disburden yer of yer loose coin,” the voice rasped, “while me accomplice ‘ere bleeds yer pal.”

The accomplice was a dwarf, no more than three feet high, with a carroty mass of hair flaming round his cheeks and crown like a brush fire. Ned handed over his purse and watched as the dwarf limped from the shadows, ordered Boyles to sit in the road, and began probing his rags with the point of a dagger. “ ‘Ere!” the dwarf exclaimed. “Wot’s this then?” It was the fighting cock, nestled in Boyles’ breast, its legs and beak bound with strips of blue ribbon. The dwarf plucked the bird from its cachette, throttled it with a twist of his knotty hands, and held it up for the gunman to admire.

“A bit of somefin for the pot, then, ‘ey Will?”

“Good show, Ginger,” growled the gunman. “Now strip the beggar raw and see if ‘ee’s got any coin of the realm about ‘im.” Down with the trousers, up with the shirt: Billy Boyles was naked as a jay inside of ten seconds. “Now you, pretty boy,” the gunman said.

Ned appealed to the gunman’s compassion and sense of fair play. “But I already gave you my purse,” he sniveled, “—have a heart, will you?”

“Ha!” the gunman laughed. “Think I doesn’t know river sand when I feels it? Wot yer take me for, a dyspeptic baboon or somefin? Off with yer drawers, sucker!”

The game was up. Ned dropped his trousers and there it was, glowing in the moonlight like a luminescent diaper — the strip of muslin stuffed with the day’s winnings. The dwarf tore it from his abdomen and coins rained to the ground. “Hoo-hoo!” he sang. “We’ve ‘it the buggerin’ jackpot this time, ‘asn’t we. Will?”

Just as the dwarf was scooping up the last of the coins, a coach-and-four rumbled round the corner and the muggers vanished. Boyles crouched against the wall in puris naturalibus, while Ned wrapped the magician’s cape around his bare legs and flagged down the coach. “Ho!” bellowed the driver. The coach came to a stop with a rattle and screech. “We’ve been robbed!” Ned shouted. The door shot back. Inside was Sir Euston Filigree, magistrate and gamecock fancier. Beside him sat an officer of the law with a cocked pistol. “What a coincidence,” said Sir Euston. “I’ve been robbed too.”

“Get in,” said the officer.

“Three months at hard labor,” said the judge.

It never fails. Whenever things start to look up, whenever fantasy begins to jell into possibility, the Hand of Fate intercedes to slap you back to your senses. Frightening. Enough to make you paranoid. Ned takes another pull at the bung and glances round him like a lamb at a convocation of wolves. Up onstage Jim, Sally and Nan are approaching the climactic finale — an impossible, multi-limbed, sinew-straining, tour de force feat of sexual acrobatics — heads, tongues and hips undulating in a quickening tempo, allegro di molto, the audience spilling from chairs, upsetting tables, panting like a dogshow in mid-July. The moment suspends here, ticking along at the edge of release, sublimely attuned to the functions of the body and the sway of the planet — when suddenly the door flies back and the voice of authority booms through the chamber: “CEASE AND DESIST IN THE NAME OF GOD ALMIGHTY AND ALL YE HOLD DECENT!”

The gilded youth is the first to react. “Holy shit! It’s the constabulary!”

“It’s a raid!” someone shouts, and the room erupts in confusion.

Regimental commanders trip over their swords, baronets and shopkeepers collide, clergymen hit the floor, while rogues, rakes, noodles, beaux, bucks and bloods make for the rear exit, Ned Rise leading them by a length. Up onstage Jim vacates Sally and Sally strips herself from Nan who in turn releases Jim and reaches for her gin and water. “SEIZE THE PROPRIETOR!” bellows an officer, and Ned, already at the door, looks back to see poor Smirke in the grip of two burly Charlies. “‘Ee’s the one!” roars Smirke, pointing a thick finger at the entrepreneur as he squeezes through the door. “The clown in the cape!”

“AFTER HIM LADS!” booms the coordinating officer.

Ned is in the alley already, off like a fox at the first woof of the hounds, passing bucks and bloods as if they were standing still, the gin coming up in him, feet flying, the cape beating round his shoulders like the wings of the Furies. Unable to flee in their high-heeled pumps, the bucks and bloods fall easy prey to the pursuing officers — the dread Bow Street Runners — and shout curses at Ned’s retreating back. “You slimy weevil, Rise — you’ll pay for this!”

“Gallowsbait!”

“Clystermonger!”

Ned pays them no mind. He is caught up in the pure frenzied ecstasy of flight, in the astonishing coordination of heart, lungs, joints and feet, in this fearsome momentum fueled by alcohol and driven by panic. Down the street to his left, over the cobbles — just a blur — and into the dark close on the far side. The shouts and curses receding now, almost safe. But what’s this? Footsteps at his back, regular as a drumbeat. He turns to look over his shoulder and an icy dagger punches at his ribs: two grim and athletic Runners pad along the alley, barely winded, confidently working into the easy loping stride of marathon men. Good God, he doesn’t stand a chance. These Bow Street Runners are relentless, tireless. Word has it they’ve even run down men on horseback.

He gives it all he’s got, heading for the river. His chest is heaving, there’s a fire in his lungs, the coins dig at his crotch. “STOP IN THE NAME OF THE LAW!” Never. The law’s a joke and only losers get nabbed. His feet slap on the pavement. Now he’s rounding the corner into Villiers — and there’s the river! If he can just make the cover of the docks or jump one of the boats. . but they’re gaining on him, the bleeding jocks, and chink-chink, there go the first two coins. He grits his teeth. Churns harder. And then suddenly the boards of Charing Cross Pier resound under his feet, nowhere to go, the jocks thumping at his heels — a hand on his collar — and then he’s free, plummeting through the dank night air. There’s a crust of ice, the coins like a ship’s anchor, the water an icy cudgel. SLOOSH! And he’s gone.

The Runners stand at the edge of the pier, plumbing the shadows. The ice is the color of slate, the water black. Nothing moves. “Well Nick, I guess that’s that,” says the grimmer of the two.

“Right you are, Dick,” comes the reply. “Case closed.”

♦ NEW CONTINENTS ANCIENT RIVERS ♦

But he hadn’t blown it. Not by a long shot. In fact, as things turned out, the Queen didn’t seem at all indisposed by the presence of a porcipophagic albino infidel in her lap — perhaps, in a strange way, she even welcomed it. The explorer’s first intimation of this came almost immediately. As he lay there, stunned and bleeding, cradled in the trembling aqueous flux of her lap like a ship come to harbor, he felt he detected a movement deep within her. A ripple, a swell. An undulation as soft and inevitable as the rings which fan out over the waters of a pond after a stone has broken its surface. Was she laughing? Tittering deep in the omphalos of that magnificent flesh factory? Was he a hit, after all? Unfortunately he had no chance to find out, for Dassoud, murder in his eye, was already hacking at the deflated wall of the tent. Mungo sprang from the Queen’s nave and planted his brow in the earth, following Johnson’s example. “La illah el allah,’’ he chanted by way of amends, “Mahomet rasowl Allahi.’’

There was the shriek of rending goat hair—zit! zat! zoot! — and Dassoud leaped into the tent, inflamed with the notion that the Queen was in danger, thirsting to exact a hasty and savage retribution. “Aaarrrr!” he growled, whirling his terrible swift sword — but then he stopped in his tracks. What was going on here? The handmaidens were in hysterics, tent poles shattered, blood spewed and feathers strewn from one end of the place to the other. . and yet there sat Fatima, just as he’d left her, while the Nazarini and his slave lay quailing on the ground, One-Eye and the Nubian standing over them like executioners. “What in the name of Allah is going on here?” he demanded.

The Nubian, who had never spoken a word in his life, said nothing.

The pig sprawled in the corner, still quivering, gouts of blood issuing from its severed throat. Its head lay at the Nubian’s feet.

“Lord have mercy!” whimpered Johnson, addressing the sand.

Finally the handmaidens’ lamentations wound down to an easy gagging mewl, and One-Eye launched a rapid-fire narration of what had transpired, playing down his own involvement as best he could and emphasizing the reckless and irresponsible behavior of the Nazarini and his slave. Dassoud listened impatiently, rocking on his feet, twisting the saber in his hand, until finally he cut the story short and insisted that the transgressors be led out into the dunes and disemboweled. At this point Fatima cleared her throat. Dassoud fell silent. Her tone was firm, her diction spare. The sense of it blew right by the explorer, but the upshot of the whole thing was that he and Johnson were led back to his tent, where a seventh comatose guard was summoned to complement the six men tried and true who were already dozing before the entranceway.

An hour later an unwonted aroma charged the air. It was lingering and piquant, redolent of hearths and basting and relishes. It was the smell of meat. The explorer swallowed twice. “Johnson — do you smell what I smell?”

“Prime rib. I’d know it anywhere.”

Just then the flaps parted and the savory rich aura filled the tent. It was one of the pantaloon girls. In her hand, the haunch of an addax, still hissing from the spit. She gave it to the explorer. “For you,” she said. “From Fatima.” Then she winked and disappeared into the night.

Mungo tore a mouthful from the bone, then passed the joint to his interpreter. He was laughing. “We’re home free now, old fellow — guess I must have done something right after all.”

“Maybe she’s big on slapstick,” Johnson suggested.

“Who knows? But one thing’s for sure: she’s an angel. First the guerba, then the milk and kouskous — and now this!”

“Yeah,” said Johnson, chewing. “It was big of her.”

♦ ♦ ♦

The next morning she sent him a dish of yogurt and bittersweet hoona berries; in the evening it was scrambled brains and rice. He was astonished. After two months of water and mush, here was something he could sink his teeth into. And this was only the beginning. In the ensuing days Fatima’s girls brought him sheep’s liver, camel’s hump (braised), a stew of chickpeas and sweetbreads, buttermilk pudding, three dozen bustard giblets and a whole roast kid. “Soul food,” Johnson called it. “It’s your inner man that’s got her worked up — never mind your disreputable and shit-caked outer man.” Inner man, outer man — what difference did it make? Red meat fed them both. Why, he must have dropped a good four stone since he left Portsmouth. He glanced down at his yellowed toes and drawn ankles, the sticks of his forearms: couldn’t weigh much more than ten right now. But then he grinned, and muttered a little prayer. If this kept up he’d put it back on in no time. And then — who knows? — maybe he’d be strong enough to make a run for it.

There were other changes too. He was allowed to wander round the camp at will (shadowed by his seven keepers, of course), spend as much time as he liked with Johnson, and even have a firsthand look at some of the Moors’ customs and ceremonies. This last, above all else, lifted his spirits. After all, he was an explorer — and here he was, exploring. He witnessed two circumcisions, a funeral, the death of a dog that had lifted its leg against Ali’s tent. He watched the slaves pounding millet, tanning hides, churning butter in a guerba suspended between two sticks; he watched them reciting prayers, defecating, throwing pots, chewing roots, tattooing infants and dogs. It was all very illuminating. But ephemeral. He couldn’t keep track of things from one day to the next.

Then one morning, as he sat watching a slave tie up the nipples of a camel to keep its calf from suckling in the heat of day, an idea hit him like a blow to the back of the head: he’d write a book! He’d write a book and be famous like Marco Polo or Gulliver or Richard Jobson. Why not? Here he was, seeing and smelling and tasting things no white man had ever dreamed of — it would be criminal to miss his chance to document it. He marched back to the tent, tore the leaves from his pocket Bible, and began writing, filling sheet after sheet with his impressions of the climate, the flora, the fauna, the geological formations, the habits and physiognomies of the blackamoors, Mandingoes, Serawoolis and Foulahs. He described Ali’s beard, Dassoud’s scowl, the heat of midday, the solitude of the baobab. Talked of Fatima’s graciousness, the tang of the hoona berry, woodsmoke on the night air. He filled thirty sheets that first day, and secreted them in the crown of his hat.

One evening he witnessed a wedding. It was strikingly similar to the funeral he’d attended: keening hags, howling dogs, a solemn procession. The bride was a walking shroud, veiled from head to foot, even her eyes invisible. He wondered how she was able to see where she was going. The keening women followed her, their stride measured by the beat of a tabala. The groom wore slippers with upturned toes. He was accompanied by a retinue of Mussulmen in embroidered burnooses and a cordon of slaves leading goats and bullocks, and carrying a tent. At an appointed spot the tent was struck, the goats and bullocks slaughtered, a fire ignited in a depression in the earth. There was a feast. Beef and mutton, songbirds, roasted larvae and other delicacies. There was dancing, songs were sung and tales told. And then there was the pièce de résistance: a whole baked camel.

BAKED CAMEL (STUFFED)

Serves 400

500 dates

200 plover eggs

20 two-pound carp

4 bustards, cleaned and plucked

2 sheep

1 large camel

seasonings

Dig trench. Reduce inferno to hot coals, three feet in depth. Separately hard-cook eggs. Scale carp and stuff with shelled eggs and dates. Season bustards and stuff with stuffed carp. Stuff stuffed bustards into sheep and stuffed sheep into camel. Singe camel. Then wrap in leaves of doum palm and bury in pit. Bake two days. Serve with rice.

A regular feature of this expansive period were the explorer’s daily meetings with the Queen. Each afternoon — immediately following the dhuhur or midday prayers — he was summoned to Fatima’s tent for a question-and-answer period. She questioned, he answered. Insatiable, she never tired of quizzing him. She was an anthropologist, a sociologist, a comparative anatomist. She wanted to dissect and absorb his habits, thoughts and beliefs; she wanted to taste his food, wear his clothes, sit at his box in the theater. England, Europe, the vast and uncertain oceans — she wanted them built of words, words supple and evocative, words that would calcify in her imagination. She wanted visions. She wanted the memories behind his eyes. She wanted to digest him. Why had he come to Ludamar? How did his father manage the herds without him? Why did he wear so asinine (jalab) a covering on his head? Did all Christians have cat’s eyes? What was the sea like? Had he ever been crucified? The explorer, grinning like a monkey and trying his clumsy best to radiate wit and charm, answered her questions as fully and patiently as he was able.

One afternoon she asked if the Nazarini practiced circumcision. “Certainly,” Mungo replied. She wanted to see for herself. The explorer looked at Johnson. “What do I do now?” he whispered.

“Tell her you’ll be more than happy to demonstrate — but it’ll have to be in private. Then toss your eyebrows a couple of times.”

Mungo told her. He tossed his eyebrows. For a moment the tent was as silent as the dark side of the moon. The Queen’s black eyes burned over the fringe of her yashmak. Then she slapped her thigh and tittered.

That night the explorer ate leg of lamb.

♦ ♦ ♦

On this particular morning, three and a half weeks since his first meeting with Fatima, the explorer is sitting in the shade of an acacia, writing. The Moorish women, he writes, wear their hair in nine plaits, which they divide as follows: two on either side of the face, six thinner braids over the crown, and one stout coil at the base of the neck. The hair is washed and oiled once a month, dressed and replaited weekly. For sanitary reasons, and because it tends to bleach the hair somewhat, the women prefer a rinse of camels urine, which is collected for this purpose. (One can always see a slave or two, cup in hand, pursuing a micturating camel about the camp.) The urine is a powerful astringent, and serves to destroy vermin and other parasites. Indeed, I have had the opportunity to assess its efficacy personally, as my pubes, axillae, side-whiskers and locks were infested with lice and desert mites. I found it refreshing, if somewhat mephitic. .

There is a bloom on the explorer’s cheek. A clarity in his eye. Worms, grippe, scabies, the fever and racheting cough — they’re things of the past. Nasty memories. He’s a meat eater now, a man of broth and blood, as befits a Scotsman, and gaining strength day by day. The heat enervates him, of course, and he still suffers attacks of confusion — but all in all the change in diet and the fresh air have gone a long way toward resurrecting him. And the peace and quiet have had something to do with it too. Just a month ago it would have been impossible for him to sit here: the very sight of him drove the average Mussulman into a frenzy. Within seconds he would have been beleaguered by a stinking, spittle-spewing mob of Moslem zealots. Now it’s different. They know he’s under Fatima’s protection, and aside from isolated incidents (some unseen adversary walloped him in the side of the head with a pig’s pizzle not more than twenty minutes ago), he is left to himself.

The Moorish men, on the other hand, never bathe. They do, however, have a biannual ceremony known as asíla má, during which they bury themselves in hot sand for some forty-five minutes to an hour just prior to sunset. They are then disinterred, rubbed down with the sweat of an estruating mare and thrashed with the underbranches of the serif bush. I am told that the operation is congenial to long life and sexual vigor.

As the explorer looks up to wet his quill, he is startled to discover that he is not alone. Standing there before him, her chocolate eyes following the dip and rush of the pen, is the plumper of the pantaloon girls. “What is it?” he says.

“Fatima says you must come to her.”

Come to her? At ten a.m.? What could she possibly want with him at this hour? “All right,” he says, getting to his feet. “I’ll fetch Johnson.”

“No,” says the girl. “Fatima says he will not be needed.”

The explorer shrugs. “Lead the way,” he says.

♦ ♦ ♦

As he pushes through the flaps and into the tent he is instantly engulfed in darkness. Blue spheres pulsate before his eyes, yellow cartwheels drift off into space. He can see nothing. There are the familiar odors of frankincense and camel urine, and from the corner, the rasp of the saker falcons chewing at their wings. But why hasn’t she lighted a lamp? And where’s that damned girl gone off to? Ah, well. No matter. May as well ride with the current. ‘‘Salaam aleichem,’’ he says, addressing the shadows.

‘‘Aleichem as salaam,’’ comes the reply, soft as the beat of a moth’s wing.

He jumps. She’s sitting right beside him — he could have stumbled over her. . Christ it’s dark. Can’t very well move for fear of upsetting something. “Braaaaak!” says one of the falcons. Maybe he should ask her to light a taper — but then how in the name of God do you say “taper”? He settles for “Kaif halkum?”—how are you?

‘‘Bishára,” she answers, which he takes to mean she has no complaints.

Silence.

He shuffles his feet, picks his ear and jerks at his knuckles, wondering if he should risk taking a seat. It’s an awkward moment. After ten or twenty seconds of ear picking, he makes a stab at conversation, hoping to express how pleasant it is to see her again — though he can barely make her out.

Unfortunately, what he actually says is: “My sight is rabid pleasure.”

Fatima titters.

Encouraged, he goes on, addressing the shadowy bulk before him. Battling case endings, syntax, verb tenses and a spotty vocabulary, the explorer waxes eloquent as Antony, Demosthenes and the Speaker of the House all rolled into one, telling her how much he’s appreciated the attention she’s given him, not to mention the jellied calves’ feet and puréed mung beans. At that moment, however, the elderly attendant enters with a taper and the explorer discovers that he’s been addressing a hand loom. The Queen is actually seated on the far side of the tent, rising up out of her enormous pillow like an Alp rising from the foothills. The explorer is bewildered. “Come over here,” she says.

At the sound of Fatima’s voice the old woman starts, then hurries about her business. She fixes the candle in the upturned palm of an ivory figurine, gathers her skirts and sweeps past the explorer with a lickerish grin. Mungo starts forward, but then hesitates. Something is wrong here — but what? Suddenly it hits him: Fatima’s head is bare, the thick braids fanning out over her shoulders like the runners of a plant. He’s never glimpsed so much as a single hair before — unless you count her eyebrows. “Come here,” she repeats.

The explorer steps up to her and bows, trying to think of something witty to say. She pats the pillow. “Up here,” she motions. Mungo shrugs. Then scales the pillow and sinks into its vastness. The old woman is nowhere to be seen. Nor is there any trace of the pantaloon girls. It occurs to him that he has never before been alone with the Queen. But now the pillow has begun to quake, flowing along its length like a wind-driven sea. He looks up. The Queen is pulling the jubbah up over her head, grunting daintily as she labors with the flashing fields of cloth. Beneath the jubbah: naked flesh. The explorer begins to get the idea.

“Help me,” she moans, the gown smothering her head and upper torso. Mungo leans forward and seizes the nape of the stupendous garment, thinking of sheets and flags and circus tents He tugs, she grunts. Her arms ripple beneath the cloth like animals in a sack, she gasps, and then suddenly her breasts jog free, shuddering mightily with the concussion, colossal orbs, heavenly bodies. They come to rest over the multiple folds of her abdomen like the twin moons of Mars. The explorer is suddenly stung with hurry and necessity. He jerks at the recalcitrant cloth with all the meat-eating fervor he can rouse, panting and moaning, until all at once the jubbah gives as if it were made of paper. He falls back, and there she is — the Queen — naked and ineluctable as the great wide fathomless sea.

“Yudhkul,”she whispers. ‘‘Yudhkul alaiha.’’

He flings the boots, paws at the buttons, jerks at his jubbah. Moist and mountainous, she waits for him, eyes aglow, veil lowered, her flesh smoldering like Vesuvius. He wheezes with haste and anticipation. It’s a dream, an attack of fever: no mere mortal could approach this magnificence! He scrambles atop her, feeling for toeholds — so much terrain to explore — mountains, valleys and rifts, new continents, ancient rivers.

♦ GLEGGED ♦

She’s a fortress under siege, is what she is. Ramparts manned, oil hot to scathe, gates shut tight as a drum. Since the day he surprised her in the tub she hasn’t had a moment’s respite. It’s been Gleg to the right of her. Gleg to the left. Gleg at the window. Gleg at the door. Gleg in the closet when she reaches for her wrap, Gleg in the garden when she goes out for a stroll. He’s inescapable, inexorable. In the morning he brings her flowers — great bundles of dead men’s fingers and pepperwort, then waits on the stairs while she dresses. At breakfast she finds love lyrics tucked between her oatcakes or folded into her napkin:

How should I love my best?

What though my love unto that height be grown,

That taking joy in you alone

I utterly this world detest,

Should I not love it yet as th’ only place

Where Beauty hath his perfect grace.

And is possest?

She can’t crack an egg without hearing about the “Blushing Mom” of her cheeks or the “Foaming Billows” of her breasts. Lovelorn sighs punctuate each sip of tea, while the scraping of her toast is, he protests, like the rasp of a file along the ridges of his heart. As the chairs shriek back and Zander and her father shuffle out of the room, Gleg leans toward her and whispers: “Had we but World enough, and Time, / This coyness Lady were no crime.” And then adds with a wink, “But we haven’t. And it is.”

Gleg, Gleg, she’s been Glegged to the gills. He is ubiquitous, unshakable, a flea under the collar, a fly in the ointment. In the evening he sits beneath her window, alternately dribbling into a recorder and howling at the treetops like a cat in heat. During the intervals between “airs” he composes poetry and tosses pebbles at the windowpane. One morning she stepped out of her room to find him mooning over the chamberpot she’d left in the hall. Another time she caught him stuffing his pockets with bits of fat and gristle in the hope of ingratiating himself with Douce Davie, her border terrier. She was adamantine. The dog was a pushover.

For today, though, she can let down the drawbridge and air out the battlements — she’s free of him till supper. Just after breakfast he and Zander went off with her father to roam the countryside draining pustules, letting blood and applying leeches to lumps and goiters and yellowing contusions. She watched them amble up the lane on their horses. Zander rhythmic and graceful, Gleg as ungainly as a mantis astride a beetle. At the top of the lane he turned to wave his handkerchief at her. The simp. She wanted to thumb her teeth at him, but he was so relentlessly absurd she actually found herself grinning. Which encouraged him all the more. The handkerchief flapped like a jib in a crosswind. He was a beaming boy, she was a blushing beauty. No doubt about it, there’d be poetry at supper tonight — “My heart’s a red running ulcer, / Putrefact, till your love’s sweet lance / Should cauterize and console her”—but it’s a small price to pay to be rid of him for a whole afternoon.

The first thing she does is throw open the window. Outside the grass has gone from yellow to green, feathers flash in the trees, and the rich raw odor of sodden earth hangs in the air. “Cheep-cheep,” call the mavises, chaffinches and whinchats, anathematizing one another from the rooftops and hedges. A breeze bellies the curtains and the sun throws rhomboids on the floor. Behind her the fish stir in their tank. She begins to feel restless.

She feeds her doves and dace, waters her plants. Starts a book, walks the dog, pulls out her sketchpad. Makes a tongue sandwich, bakes some scones. Sits at her spinet and tears through an up-tempo version of “Edom O’Gordon.” Stares at the clock. Finally she goes to her desk, unlocks the drawer, removes a letter and tucks it into her dress. Then slips out of the room like a thief. Into the vestibule, down the front steps, across the morass of the lane and into the wood beyond.

Ferns line the path like sentinels, clots of shadow gather beneath the bushes. The air is a transfusion. From the pond, the falsetto trill of the spring peepers calling for creeks-creeks-creeks. She’s seen them there, bug-eyed and blistered, trailing coils of mucus, crawling atop one another, foaming, seething, humping. Her feet pad over coupling earthworms, sprouting seeds, the hem of her dress tousles wild geranium and saxifrage, toadflax and meadow rue, gathering pollen, dispersing it. The letter is from Mungo. His last. She’s read it through a dozen times, and she’ll read it through again, on a bluff above the Yarrow, slugs and bugs and grubs mounting one another at her feet, larks twittering overhead, doing it on the wing, the whole world going at it in the slow persistent grind of beating blood and thirsting tissue.

Pisania, The Gambia.

14 July, 1795

My Life,

A touch of the fever, some worms, emaciation, hair loss — nothing to worry over. I am fit and fine so far as outward appearances go. But oh what an ache in my heart! Leeches, flies, food fit for dogs— I endure it all gladly for the fleetingest memory of you. You who sweeten my dreams here in this place of heat and rot, you who give me courage to forge on, you who give me a reason to survive where no other could. Ailie: I’ll sniff out the Niger and be back by spring. Will you wait for me?

When I’m at my lowest ebb, when it seems as if the rains will never let up and I’ll be stuck in this hole eternally, I think of you. And then my heart stirs and I think of da Gama rounding the Cape, Balboa gazing on the Pacific, and I know this is the life!

I remain your faithful and affectionate scaler of peaks, forder of rivers and plumber of the Unknown,

Mungo

P.S. Have met and engaged Johnson, a fine stalwart fellow, intelligent and articulate, a credit to the Negro race. It is his expectation that we shall encounter no real impediment so long as we avoid Ludamar, the Moorish kingdom.

The sun is a weight. She closes her eyes. Mungo is seventeen, hair like spilled barley, muscles hammered into his shoulders, her father’s apprentice. From the far end of the dinner table she grins at him. He lifts his head from the soup, grins back. They have a secret. She’s fourteen. Her chest is flat as a child’s. In the fields, she raises her blouse for him.

When she wakes it’s nearly dark. A rabbit crouches in a pocket of grass, ears pressed back, watching her. She sits up, folds the letter with all the reverence of a votary folding up the Shroud of Turin, and slips it back into her pocket. At home they’re waiting supper. Gleg bats his eyes at her through the kidney pie, fowl, collops and pease pottage, while her father dissertates on the approved method of removing a gangrenous limb. Afterward, the old man takes her aside. “You’re a grown woman of two and twenty,” he says, “and you maun be findin’ yourself a mate. Gleg’s as good as any, by my way of thinkin’, even if he be a bit of a shit-for-brains.”

“You know I’m waiting for Mungo,” she says.

The old man stares at the floor for a long moment, the lines in his face gradually marshaling themselves into the stern, pious and pitiless expression he puts on when breaking bad news to his patients. I’m afraid it’s a cancer. Brain fever. Vitriolic liver. His eyebrows knit until he begins to look like God’s uncle. “Much as I hate to say it,” he whispers, “I’m afraid you canna count overmuch on the lad’s returnin’.”

♦ ♦ ♦

That night she finds a locket on her pillow. Gold, in the shape of a heart, Cupids jessant round the perimeter. She flips it open. There is a portrait inside. She recognizes herself, naked to the waist. Beside her, his arm stretched across her chest in a gesture of protective modesty, is Gleg. Naturally.

♦ NITTY-GRITTY ♦

They come for him in the dead of night, like demons or apparitions. Three of them. Daggers, dirks, falchions, muskets. “Get up, slave.” The voice is throaty, remorseless. “Ali wants you.” He’d been dreaming of Scotland, of emerald slopes and glacial lakes, of silver salmon cakewalking up the falls where the Gala soughs into the Tweed. And now he’s wrenched from sleep like an infant from the womb, a sudden deep primordial panic beating at his ribs. Fatima, he thinks. The jig is up. He is instantly seized with attacks of perspiration, indigestion, gas, guilt and fear. Will they try him by fire? Brand his chest with an A? No, of course not. The dark ages reign out here. Justice and retribution are synonymous, swift and sudden. No time for such niceties as peer pressure, no room in the system for rehabilitation. They cut out the tongue of a har, hack the hand from a thief. . And an adulterer?

There are hands under his armpits. He is jerked roughly to his feet and shoved through the flaps of the tent, propelling him over the supine forms of the seven narcoleptic guards in the entranceway. ‘‘Wallah!” they cry.

‘‘Shaitan!“ “Son of a bitch!” The night air is dry as an oatcake, and surprisingly cold. He finds himself trembling. Behind him, his escort joke in low tones, feet hissing through the sand, weapons jangling and clanking like an armory in motion. Should he run for it? — or buck up and face the music? When he was eight he and his brother set fire to the henhouse. Adam denied it. Mungo faced the music — and took a thrashing that would have melted iron and fused rock. Even now the memory of that thrashing tingles in his thighs and buttocks, implanted deep in the nerve fibers and knotted cords of muscle, a memory beyond words, beyond reason. All at once it hits him: he’ll run for it.

Unfortunately, however, the men at his heels are members of Ali’s elite cavalry, known for their courage, decision and quickness of reflex. Before he can so much as spring from the block a musket is introduced between his legs and he finds himself face down in the sand. The hands grope beneath his armpits again, hoist him up as if he were a drunk or a toddler learning to walk, and steer him through the still, silent camp — past tethered horses, sleeping dogs and ghostly blocks of canvas — right on up to the cookfire snarling before Ali’s tent.

Ali is surrounded by counselors and courtiers. Dassoud is there. One-Eye. The Nubian. He is squatting beside the fire, dirk in hand, toasting bits of meat. The leaping garish light plays off the hook of his nose, cuts into the cheekbones, narrows his deadly eyes. Crouching there before the fire, testy and watchful, greedily gobbling up the kill at his feet, he looks like a colossal bird of prey, something terrible and leathery left over from the Saurian Age. The explorer expects the worst.

Ali blows at a piece of meat, takes a sip of hoona tea. Then bares his teeth, drawing the morsel into his mouth. He gestures at the explorer with the point of his knife. “Saddle—” he begins, breaking off to gnash at a piece of gristle, “saddle your. . horse.” He swallows with a click and grunt, then turns back to the fire with another hunk of raw flesh, “We leave for Jarra in an hour.”

Mungo is stunned. Jarra! Why that must be sixty or seventy miles south of here! For weeks, as the monsoon season drew closer and Ali’s withdrawal to the north more imminent, the explorer had been begging Fatima to intercede in his favor — to petition for his release, or at least for the opportunity to make short forays from Benowm. He shuddered to think what would happen if he were still a prisoner when Ali gathered his herds and tents and horses for the summer migration to the skirts of the Great Desert. They’d skin and disembowel him. Cut his throat. Stake him out on the dunes to shrivel up like a fig. His bones would whiten in the sun like the sad remains of the slaves Johnson had told him of, like Houghton’s bones, shattered by the years, no longer Irish, Celtic, Caucasian — merely bones, the bones of a man, the bones of an animal. He has a quick image of his own skull, wind-burnished, half buried in sand, and the slink and shuffle of a spotted hyena, its face blank and stupid, raising an unhurried leg to piss in the empty eyesocket. The explorer blinks, shakes his head as if to clear it — and then realizes that they’re all watching him. Jarra! He grabs for the hem of Ali’s burnoose, thinking to kiss it, but Dassoud slaps his hand away. “An’ am Allah ‘alaik,” blurts Mungo, thanking the Emir profusely amid a flurry of bows and curtsies. Ali, impassive as a stone, stares into the fire, and chews.

♦ ♦ ♦

It is said that when a Sahelian Moor dies and finds himself amidst the searing fires of hell, his spirit invariably returns to earth — for a blanket. Mungo can believe it. They’ve been on the road for nearly eight hours now, and the sun is directly overhead. It must be a hundred and forty degrees in the shade — if there were any shade. The creatures who live here — the golden gopher, the white lady spider, various beetles, bugs and stinging things, scorpions, skinks and mole rats — are of course buried deep in the sand. Mungo, in his beaver top hat, nankeen trousers and blue frockcoat, is out in the sun, traveling, the swollen bundles of his restored tradegoods rattling at his back. He is hemmed in by scrub and cactus, sandbur and euphorbia, a landscape of the palest green and a thousand shades of brown, from khaki to ecru to russet. The hills are pale and scoured, ribbed like the remains of antediluvian beasts stretched across the horizon. There are baboons in these hills, purple-assed, crew-cut, short of brow, long of tooth. “Yeek-a-yeek-a-yeek!” they screech. “Chip-chip-chip!”

In a month it will be green here. There will be rivers, ponds, puddles. Deadly cobras will part the grass side by side with three-step adders and the crested lizard called tomorrow-never-comes. Duikers will appear, skirting from shade to shade. Pangolins, guibas, caracals and chamas. Wood storks, gaunt as refugees, secretary birds with their ragged braids and hawk’s legs and partiality for cold-blooded lunches. Addax, puku, eland and oribi. Aoudads, korins, mhorrs and mambas. Hartebeests. Wild asses. Rats the size of piglets. .

But for now, it’s pretty bleak. And dry. So dry the saddles crack with a groan, hairs fall like leaves, a stream of urine evaporates in mid-arc. This is where the business of exploring gets down to the nitty-gritty.

Sitting at the foot of the big mahogany table in St. Alban’s Tavern and gazing up into the rapt, florid and bewhiskered faces of the African Association, the explorer never dreamed it would be like this — so confused, so demeaning. And so hot. He had pictured himself astride a handsome mount, his coat pressed and linen snowy, leading a group of local wogs and half-wits and kings to the verdant banks of the river of legend. Yet here he is, not at the head, but somewhere toward the rear of the serpentine queue wending its way through all this parch, a prisoner for all intents and purposes, his horse wheezing and farting, his underwear binding at the crotch. Is there no sense of proportion in the world?

Half a mile ahead, spatters of white and black, Ali and Dassoud undulate over the plain on their chargers. The two hundred members of the elite cavalry, mounted on equine panthers and lions, fan out behind them for nearly a mile. Some of the younger and more enthusiastic horsemen make forays into the scrub to run down the occasional monitor or skink, lop a bush here, a succulent there. For the others, despite the heat, the whole thing is nothing more than a party on the hoof. They’re busy passing pipes and guerbas, telling dirty tales about camels and veils and virgins, jolting the solemn hills with explosions of laughter.

The explorer turns to survey the scene behind him, trying to decide whether he’s part of a military expedition or a foxhunt, when a sudden flash of light catches his eye in the far distance. It is Johnson, mounted on his doleful blue ass (an animal remarkable for its lugubrious length of muzzle and ear), just now making his way over the lip of the horizon. The explorer raises his arm and waves. And there! — a movement inveigled by the distance and the rippling corrugations of the air — Johnson is waving back!

♦ AEOLIAN ♦

Jarra is a town of a thousand wattle huts, give or take a few. It lies just south of the Sahel, on the border of Ludamar, Kaarta and Bambarra. One approaches the town through a series of gentle yeasty hills rising out of the plain like bubbles in batter. This time of year the hills are pocked with blackened stubble, a consequence of the villagers’ burn-and-bloom philosophy. Fires raged here a month ago. Bands of flame coruscating along the dark line of the earth, roiling billows darkening the sky. It went particularly hard on the rats. Legions of them, like migrant lemmings, foaming out of the holocaust and into the path of the entire assembled village. The Jarrans lifted rakes and hoes and cudgels, bursting rats like so much wet pottery. They harvested blood.

These are the grazing lands, broken here and there by close stands of wood — karite, kapioka and two-ball nitta, doum palm and acacia. Beyond them, cultivated fields fan out round the village walls like the upturned palms of sleeping giants, etched and furrowed, patiently waiting to snatch up the first random drops from the sky. There is a river too — the Woobah — now just a succession of puddles seething with tails and scales. It slinks out of the woods as if ashamed of itself, meanders through the village like a drunk, then disappears in the grassland beyond. The rest is just about what you’d expect. Dusty streets, consumptive cattle, women with haunted eyes and children with distended bellies and hunger-bleached hair. These are the hard times, the long lingering days before the rains. Udders dry, grain reserves shot — even the insipid nitta pods in short supply.

Ali and his retinue boom onto the scene in a storm of white dust, scowling and black-bearded, fierce and vain. Villages like this are fair game for the Moors — for Kafirs live here, unbelievers, and not only is it the sacred duty of all good Muslims to spread the word of Allah, but Kafirs are notoriously feeble at defending themselves. Hence: fair game. The illiterate blacks of Jarra — Mandingoes for the most part — fall conveniently into the Kafir category, though nearly all of them have informally adopted the tenets of Islam. The Moors glance down at the prayer rugs, sandals, jubbahs, and then up at the flat black faces. They’re not fooled. To them the Jarrans are a sort of inferior subspecies, nonhuman really, a race designed by Allah to milk the goats and butter the bread of the Chosen People, namely themselves. Thus, Kafir cattle, Kafir children, Kafir women, grain, jewelry, huts, the very clothes on their backs, are considered as properly belonging to the Moors. When Ali’s boys thunder into town, you can be sure it’s not just to see the sights.

On this occasion, however, rapine and plunder are not foremost in Ali’s mind. He has long since established a system of extortion with Jarra and other Kafir towns within his compass. He sells them protection, assessing so much produce and so many bolts of cloth in return. If he gets what he asks, he leaves them alone. If not, he hacks half the villagers to pieces and takes twice as much. The reason for the present visit has nothing to do with protecting the Jarrans from himself, but with protecting them from the Kaartans. A simple case of power politics. Yambo II, the headman of Jarra, had sided with Bambarra in the ongoing conflict between Tiggitty Sego of Kaarta and Mansong of Bambarra. At the time it seemed the expeditious thing to do: Mansong was really tearing them up, hewing to the right, gouging to the left. But since then there had been a number of reversals, the Bambarrans had fallen back, and Tiggitty Sego, mothermurdering mad over the Jarrans’ defection, was now advancing on the town to chastise them. And so Yambo, at the cost of three hundred head of cattle and nineteen virgins under the age of twelve, had hired Ali to bail him out.

♦ ♦ ♦

Long after the dust has settled, the explorer makes his grand entrance. On foot. He is limping slightly, and leading his horse by the rein. During the course of the journey the animal has drooled steadily, bled from the anus, vomited, pitched forward into the dirt twice, and gone lame in three of its four legs. The upshot is that the explorer has had to hoof it himself for the last twenty miles or so. As he hobbles into town, the Jarrans come out to line the streets and scrutinize him. Colorful people: faces like licorice, big hoop earrings, strings of beads and cowrie shells winking in their hair, skirts and sashes pulsing red, yellow and orange like a thousand flags. Colorful, but quiet. There’s not a stir through the entire crowd, not a whisper, not a grin. The meditation room at a Carthusian monastery would have been noisy by comparison. The explorer, thinking he may have overawed them, does his best to look harmless and unassuming. At his side, Johnson bobs along on the blue ass, fat and serene as a potentate. From time to time he raises a chubby palm to salute one of the sirens in the crowd or swat at a fly. Bringing up the rear is Dassoud, strutting along on a charger the size of a park statue. Keeping an eye on things.

The explorer’s immediate desires are pretty basic: a mug of water, a plate of mush, a mat on which to throw his weary bones. Under normal circumstances he would have been provided with all this and more. For the Mandingoes of Jarra are a friendly and hospitable people — they’ve already groomed and watered Ali’s thundering herd, and slaughtered eight bullocks for his dinner. But just as Mungo draws into town, the wind begins kicking up. Kicking up violently in fact. The coattails fly up over his head, his hat lifts off like a kite on an updraft and his ears begin to roar as if someone has suddenly clapped seashells to them. Behind him, the horse whinnies and farts, its mane foaming round its ears. Suddenly a wall collapses with a groan, and a thatched roof takes off like a flock of vultures flushed from the kill. This is wind!

“Whooo!” he says, turning to Johnson. But Johnson, along with Dassoud and everyone else in sight, is bolting headlong in the opposite direction. He stands there, puzzled. “What’s the rush?” he shouts. “It’s nothing but a little breeze.” The wind whistles. The sky goes dark. A hut skitters by. And then he hears it — a harsh sibilance, a spitting ticking release of air, as if all Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Borderlands had turned out to hiss the villain in a melodrama. All at once he’s terrified. He takes to his legs — but too late! WHOMP! The horse blows down. And then he is himself knocked to his knees, suddenly stung in every pore of his body as if he’d blundered into a hive of bees. Sand! It’s a sandstorm!

He scrambles to his feet, the jacket beating round his head like the wings of the devil and all his legions. There is sand in his eyes, his ears, up his nose, down his throat. Suddenly an airborne goat cracks him across the shoulderblades and down he goes again. He fights up, staggering, and an empty calabash rebounds off his head like an asteroid, and then — SLAP! — a guinea hen catches him flush in the face and he’s down for the count.

Up again, down again. This is getting serious. “Help!” he screams. SSSSSS-SSSShhhhhhhhhhhhh! hushes the sand. He can’t breathe, his lungs are filled with it; he’s gone blind, crawling over wind-strewn refuse, minidunes, kettles and spoons, tattered blankets, the corpses of goats or milch cows. Where to go? Is this the way it ends? But then he feels a pressure on the back of his neck, a hand there, an arm. He grabs at the hand and follows it along the ground, creeping like a rodent, the shriek in his ears, things batting at his head, the wild wind clutching at his lungs like a pair of hot tongs. .

♦ ♦ ♦

“Hey, Mr. Park,” rumbles the voice of Johnson, “don’t you know enough to come in out of the sand?”

The explorer, fighting the dry heaves, does not respond. His eyes are crusted over and someone has been building sand castles in his ears. He has no idea where he is.

“You coulda had the hide confricated right off you, you know that? I mean a sandstorm is nothin’ to fuck around with.”

The explorer is groggy. He doesn’t know where he is or how he got here, and he can’t see a damned thing. Is it night already? There is the sound of wind, the hiss of sand. “Johnson,” he says, “—is that you?”

Instead of answering, Johnson’s voice slips into Mandingo, and the explorer is startled to hear laughter blooming in the darkness around him.

What is going on here? “Johnson?”

‘‘Obo weebojalla ‘imsta, kootatamballa” says Johnson, and the laughter bursts out afresh. And then: “Don’t you worry, Mr. Park — we’re in safe hands.”

“But where are we? And how did we get here?”

“Root cellar. I walked, you was dragged.”

So that’s it. He must have been unconscious all this time. But whose voices are these, and why this impenetrable, godawful darkness? He detects a whisper, somewhere close by, followed by a giggle. And then the maddening swish and tinkle of liquid swirled in a jar. “Johnson,” he calls. “Couldn’t we do with a little light in here?”

“I think it can be arranged,” says Johnson, whose voice abruptly changes direction, and in resonant, jocular tones wades through a muddle of Mandingo m’s and k’s and long smooth double o’s. Other voices — grunts really — answer from the void. After a moment or two the explorer becomes aware of a low, barely distinguishable sound from the far side of the room: a murmur, a rustle, the gentle soughing of treebranches rubbing in the wind. He is puzzled at first, but then it comes to him: sticks. They’re chafing sticks! A second later there’s a spark, and then a hungry flame swelling from a handful of shavings to illuminate the room.

What he sees is this: five men, black and knobby, sitting against the earthen wall passing a calabash and holding it to their lips. One of them is Johnson. The others are Jarran Mandingoes, feet splayed, baggy knees, noses pushed back into their heads. Each wears a white toque set atop his crown like a mushroom, and a variegated sash that runs from shoulder to crotch and back again. The soles of their feet are the color of smoked salmon. The gentleman closest to the explorer, a toothless relic with a concave chest, offers up the calabash. Mungo takes it gladly. As he tips his head back, the fire winks out — but no matter, he’s more concerned with the business at hand than with peering into crannies. He gulps and guzzles, flushing the sand out from under his gums and between his teeth. He rinses, gargles, drinks deep, the dark a comfort, his thirst boundless, all thought, sensation and reflex held in abeyance to this single-faceted ecstasy, this pouring of liquid into the buccal cavity and down the esophagus. But then a weathered hand makes contact with his own, and he’s forced to give up the calabash. “Damned good stuff, Johnson,” he murmurs, addressing the darkness and hiccoughing between syllables. “Reminds me of a good Irish stout.”

From the corner, the voice of Johnson, muttering. “Good as anythin’ them potato pluckers ever come up with. Better. That’s Sooloo beer you drinkin’ there, Mr. Park. Sooloo beer. Black-roasted sorghum malt and the purest spring water, aged and krausened in strict accord with a ancient and closely guarded tribal formula. Hey — this is the cradle of civilization here, Mr. Park. Who you think was around this planet first anyway — us — or them bleached-out Hibernians? This is beer, brother.”

There is something unfamihar in Johnson’s delivery. His words are sluggish and chewed-over, his tone combative. And his pitch deeper than ever — the sort of thing you’d expect from the banks of a pond on a summer’s night. Could it be that he’s had one pull too many at the calabash? “Are you drunk, Johnson?”

“Drunk?” he repeats, his basso scraping bottom. “Hell, yes. Drunk as a emir.”

At that moment an exceptionally virulent gust rattles the cane-and-earthen floor above them, and a quantity of sand explodes across their faces like buckshot.

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” bellows Johnson. “Rage! Blow!”

An idea had been forming in the explorer’s head — something to do with the fact that this was the first time in nearly six months that he’s been left unguarded. But the sudden gust and Johnson’s exclamation have driven it right out of his head. Besides, someone has just passed him the calabash.

♦ YOU CAN’T KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN ♦

When they first spotted him they thought he’d been dead for days. His hands and chin were fast-frozen to a block of ice and the fluid in his eyes had turned to slush. He was bobbing there like a piece of driftwood, the black waters of the Thames lapping round his shoulders and ears.

“Wa’ is it, Liam?”

“Doan’t know, Shem: looks like a dead mon, and drownded.”

Shem Leggotty and Liam McClure were fishermen. Six days a week they set their gill nets for salmon and sturgeon coming upriver with the tide. The fish would blunder into these nets, catch their gills in the three-inch mesh, thrash about and drown. Sometimes they would thrash about and escape. It was all in the cards. This night, as the men tugged at the net, it felt somehow different, peculiar. It wasn’t the weight — a good sturgeon could go ten feet long and five hundred pounds — it was just the feel of the thing. A bitter wind stabbed at the back of their throats. Their hands were raw. Was it an ice floe? A log? When Shem lit a lantern to investigate, there he was, riding the swell like a man three days dead.

“So it’s a drownded mon, then. And froze.”

“That it is.”

“Well then. Let’s cut the poor beggar loose and be on with it. He’s no consarn of ours.”

They tugged at the net. As the drowned man came into contact with the bow of the boat, his head knocked against the planks with a crack, wood on wood. “Ik,” he said.

“Wa’ was that, Liam?”

“I didna say nothin’, Shem.”

The drowned man bobbed at their feet as they worked to disentangle him. His mouth was frozen open and the tongue welded to his teeth. “Ik,” he said.

“Sweet Jaysus, the mon’s aloive! Here, help me get him into the boat, Shem.” Liam’s breath hung in the air in clumps. He was a monument of sinew and brawn, case-hardened by years of hauling nets and brawling on the docks. He bent his back to the drowned man and heaved him up into the skiff, ice floe and all. The drowned man was naked from the waist down and wrapped in a sodden cape.

“Get some blankets round him, Shem. And hand me the usquebaugh.”

“The usquebaugh? That’s as like to kill him off as bring him round.”

It was a home brew, potent as fire. Liam poured it down the man’s throat while Shem pried his chin and fingers from the block of ice. The effect was almost instantaneous — the dead man lifted his head, vomited and fell unconscious. “Ik-ik,” he said.

♦ CHICHIKOV’S CHOICE ♦

Fishstink. For the past three months it’s been fishstink, day and night. The oily stink of eels taken from the green water among the pilings, the salt-stench of skate and mackerel, the cold mud reek of pouters and perch and carp. He’s snuffed them all — tench and bream and saury pike, bearded ling, gouty blowfish, alewives, hake and haddock — plucked out their entrails, whacked off their heads, set the air afire with their flashing translucent scales. It’s a grim, stinking, thankless job.

But safe. And safety is everything. That and invisibility. He’d made a lot of enemies that fateful night — Smirke, who was fined and sentenced to three hours in the pillory; Mendoza, Brummell and the others, whose names appeared in the paper the following afternoon; Nan and Sal, who wound up in Bridewell until they were bailed out by the Forlorn Female Fund of Mercy; and Lord Twit, who was publicly upbraided for consenting to the moral corruption of his black nigger servant. A lot of enemies — but none of them suspected he’d risen from the dead. And Ned Rise was not about to disabuse them.

So here he is, in the Leggotty Brothers’ fish shop, Southwark, breathing fishstink, hacking away at cold bloodless flesh in a welter of dumb-staring eyes. They pulled him from the river, Shem and McClure, three-quarters dead, and then nursed him for a week till he came round. He was penniless, having jettisoned pants, boots and bulge in a frantic effort to stay afloat. They offered him a job and a place to sleep. Fish chowder and black bread twice a day. Liam loaned him a pair of trousers. “All right,” said Ned.

It’s not that he’s ungrateful — he just isn’t cut out to be a fisherman. The nets slip through his hands, the oarlocks have a mind of their own, he’s afraid of the water, boats, oars, docks, the smell of fish turns his stomach. He can hardly swim. What’s more, he’s fed up with their dull talk and duller lives (“Aye,” says Liam, sucking at his pipe like a sage, “a storm’ll either take ‘em or bring ‘em”), and he longs for the gaming tables, the coffeehouses, the Pig & Pox and the Vole’s Head. Southwark is nothing but a festering slum, the hind end of the earth. How can you expect to rise in the world if you’re stuck in a fish shop in Southwark? He hacks at the heads and fins. He grows despondent.

Then one afternoon, as he’s stripping the scutes and hide from a shortnose sturgeon, an idea hits him. A modest idea, but one that combines invisibility and profit both. He looks round for someone to break the news to. Shem and Liam are out back in the alley, passing a jug and spitting in the dirt.

“You know wha’ they got over there in Africa, Liam?”

“Hamadryads?”

“Nope. They got river perch six hunnert pund.”

“Go on.”

“It’s true. Ned read it to me out of the Evenin’ Post.”‘

“Six hunnert pund?”

“In the River Nigel. There’s this young Scotsman disappeared up there tryin’ to bring one back.”

“Go on.”

Ned wipes the blood and fishslime from his hands and steps through the doorway. “I’ve got an idea,” he says.

Liam salutes him with the jug. “Well then lad, have yerself a snootful o’ mother’s finest and tell the old graybeards all about it.”

Ned takes a slug, pounds his breastbone and asks them if they’ve ever heard of caviar.

“That’s Latin, isn’t it?” says Liam.

“What I’m talking about is fish roe — sturgeon’s eggs. Here we are throwing away fistfuls of the stuff, when all the nobs over in the West End are paying the Russians three pounds a jar for it.”

“Three pund a jar? For offal?”

“It’s na offal, Liam — the Swedes eat it.”

“Bah, the iggorant squareheads. They gobble up pickled heering too, doan’t they?”

“Leave it to me,” says Ned. “I’ll strain it and salt it myself, undercut the Empress by half and peddle it door-to-door from Tottenham Court to Mayfair. You watch: we’ll be rich inside of a month.”

♦ ♦ ♦

A month later, Ned Rise strolls across Westminster Bridge in false nose and spectacles, white periwig, silk hose and brocaded waistcoat, a rich man. Or comparatively so. Chichikov’s Choice (named after a whaling companion of Shem’s brother Japheth) is selling like lemonade at a track meet. Gentlemen’s clubs, coffeehouses, taverns, inns and even private residences are buying up Ned’s caviar as fast as he can bottle it. “The finest Russian caviar,” he tells them, his voice lingering over the double s and the final rumbling r, “—at half the price.” It gets them every time. From parlormaids to head cooks to the white-capped chefs at Brooke’s or White’s. He pitches, they buy. Within the month, half the haut monde is spreading its crackers with Chichikov’s Choice.

And the beauty of the whole thing, Ned reflects, as he strides along with a basket of fish roe under his arm, is that the stuff is practically free to begin with. It’s like bottling air and selling it for one and ten the bottle. There is an outlay, it’s true — he gives Liam and Shem two shillings a fish out of gratitude, pays a penny the dozen for terra-cotta jars and labels, and sixpence a day to a pair of street kids who strain and salt the stuff for him. But that’s nothing. A good fish will hold twenty or thirty pounds of roe — so for an outlay of a few shillings here and there he’ll recoup thirty or forty quid. It’s like a dream. Of course, he can’t count on its lasting forever — he knows that. For one thing, sturgeon only breed for two months out of the year — April and May — and so his egg supply will be tapering off soon enough. Then too, Shem and Liam are bound to wise up and ask for a bigger cut. . But for now, Ned Rise is riding an updraft: the Bank of the Bulge is solvent again, and under the bed of his new lodgings in Bear Lane an iron chest is slowly turning to silver.

On this particular morning — a morning struck through with sun and birds and bloom — Ned is off to try his luck on some of the households round Berkeley and Soho squares. As he traverses the grim dark line of the bridge, he breaks into an energetic whistle and begins twirling his cane.

The wind off the river ruffles his wig. A gull coasts by overhead. “Ah! The glory of life!” he thinks, striding along like a young lord on his way to an afternoon at croquet. But when he reaches the far side of the bridge, a sudden change comes over him. It’s as if the God of the Spastics has touched him with his crooked wand: his limbs contort, tongue goes awry, neck falls loose. Suddenly he’s round-shouldered and stooped, dragging his leg as if it were cut from a tree — and now there’s a tic under his left eye and his shoulder has begun to buckle. Is it an attack? Convulsions? Tic douloureux? Ned smirks with satisfaction as passersby back away from him in alarm. “Gah,” he says to them, chewing at his tongue and holding up his mutilated hand like a badge. “Gah,” he says, lurching up the street like a dog with a broken back. All this of course is part of his design to escape detection — he likes to think of it as his “mantle of invisibility.” The false nose and spectacles, the outmoded dress, the tics and twitches, the palsied walk — why he’s just another harelipped cripple peddling fish eggs in the street. God Himself, come Judgment Day, wouldn’t recognize him in this getup.

He crabwalks up Great George Street, through St. James’s Park and across the Mall, limping and scraping like a terminal syphilitic, when suddenly he hears a voice call out behind him. “Ned Rise! Ned Rise! Wait up a minute there!”

It’s Boyles, the ass, his face flushed with drink and hurry. “Ned!” he puffs, jogging up to him. “We thought you was dead. Drownded in the river. Why, when I seen you roundin’ the corner back there I couldn’t hardly believe me eyes.”

Ned shrinks into his jacket and pulls the three-cornered hat down over his brow. His head and limbs are flapping like wash in the wind. A battery of tics surges across his face.

Boyles has a hand on his sleeve. “But wot’s the anty-quated weeds for? And all this limpin’ and cringin’? Did you catch the ague or is it just a bit of playactin’?”

The world is coming down round his ears, a piece of the sky has broken off and clapped him in the back of the head. He can’t think. His hands are trembling. Twit, Smirke, Mendoza — they’ll be down on him like hounds.

“Ohhhhh — I gets it. You’re in disguise, then. Am I royt? Eh, Ned? Am I royt? Layin’ low, is it?”

Ned glances round, takes hold of Boyles’ arm and leads him down a back alley. A dead dog lies in the dirt beside a broken parasol. Out on the Mall, people of ton clip by in carriages. “How did you know it was me, Billy?”

“You kiddin’? I’d spot you a mile off, Ned Rise. A little foot-draggin’ and a false nose isn’t goin’ to help you any. I conned you plain as day.”

So much for the mantle of invisibility. “Listen, Billy. You can’t let on that you’ve seen me. If Mendoza and Smirke and the rest found out about it—”

“They’d eat you alive, Neddy. Mendoza come lookin’ for you the next mornin’, and Smirke cursed you up and down for a week after his public yoomiliation. Ha! You should of seen that, Ned — Smirke in the pillory. I let him have it with half a dozen rotted turnips and a dead cat. Gorry, it was good fun.”

But Ned’s not listening. He turns his back preoccupied, and digs deep in his knee breeches, fumbling about for crown and shilling, fishing for hush money.

“I’ll say this for him, though,” Boyles coughs, blowing a wad of bloody sputum into a rag of a handkerchief,” he felt heartsore about cursin’ you after he found out you was drownded. He set up the house for you, Ned — three times! And Nan and Sal — you should of seen ‘em carry on.

The two of ‘em went out and nicked black bonnets and screens and all to sorrify their faces, and then they threw a armful of geraniums into the river for memory of you. . no, you didn’t go to your grave unmourned, be assured of that, Neddy.”

Ned swings round and holds up a coin. “For you, Billy,” he says. “For your discretion. You never saw me, right? I’m dead and gone, right?”

“You can count on me, Ned. I won’t breathe a word.”

♦ ESCAPE! ♦

Mungo wakes with a headache. He has been drinking sooloo beer — a.k.a. bobootoo das—juggler of legs, scrambler of minds. He has been drinking sooloo beer and he is not quite certain where he is. A cellar certainly. He recognizes the yellow earthen walls, the roots and rhizomes, the cane ceiling, the ladder. Yes. No doubt about it. A cellar. He raises himself wearily to his elbows and discovers an empty calabash between his legs and a flocculent head across his ankle. The head belongs to Johnson, who is sprawled over the floor with his cronies in a farrago of limbs and feet, his great belly rising and falling like some elemental force of nature. All five are snoring serenely, teeth whistling, lips vibrating, tonsils flapping in the breeze.

It occurs to him that it must be morning, since the blackness he experienced earlier has now given way to the sort of soupy crepuscular light one expects of crypts, wine cellars and other damp and unsalubrious places. He rubs at a spot on his neck where something has bitten him during the night, and glances up as a glossy black scarab struggles across the floor with a ball of dung the size of an apple. He is sitting there, propped on his elbows, watching the beetle and waiting patiently for his head to clear, when the first cry sounds from above. It’s more a gasp actually, an insuck of surprise, tailed almost immediately by a prolonged wail, plaintive and despairing. Then a hurried exchange of voices — monosyllables thrown back and forth like tennis balls — the sound of feet rushing on the bamboo floor above, silence. The explorer cocks his head and gradually becomes aware of a whole undercurrent of noise emanating from beyond the house, out in the streets. A hum, building now to a roar — it seems as if the very earth is alive with it. He’s puzzled. Is it an earthquake? Stampede? Another sandstorm?

Ever curious, the explorer rises and crosses to the ladder, Johnson’s head slapping down behind him with a dull thump. Just as he steps on the first rung, however, a flap opens in the ceiling above and he finds himself confronted with a bony posterior and a pair of naked soles, descending. The explorer backs off as a shrunken little man makes his way down the ladder, slow and oblivious, dangling in the air like an arthritic spider. At the base of the ladder the little man plants his feet, turns round, and then starts back violently at the sight of the explorer.

He is old, this little man — ancient, antediluvian. His hair is white and corrugated, his face lined like a river delta. He is five foot nothing, ninety-five pounds, looks as if he’s been carved from a shadow. Around his neck a throttled chicken, stiff with rigor mortis, dangles from a cord. There is an awkward moment as explorer and gnome stand there toe to toe, the little man turning his big slow rolling eyes to the explorer, then looking away again, something between astonishment and indignation caught in the web of his face. He looks up once more, then turns away as if dismissing an apparition, bends to one of the sleeping men and begins piping in his ear. ‘‘M’bolo rita Sego!” he hoots. ‘‘M’bolo bolo Sego!”

The effect is instantaneous: Johnson and his retinue start up in unison, clutching at their chests and bugging their eyes, while the old man claps his hands and narrates a shrill tale of doom (Mungo is no linguist, but he can pick up repeated phrases like “cannibal,” “child-skinner” and “Tiggitty Sego”). An instant later the five beer-drinkers are wringing their hands, running into one another and fighting for the ladder.

In his anxiety to escape, Johnson brushes past the explorer, who takes the opportunity to seize his arm. “What’s up, Johnson? Is it Sego?”

The others are licking up the ladder like ants on a stick, while the old man teeters round the room scattering feathers. From above: the roar of cumulative panic.

“Quick!” shouts Johnson, tearing away like a crazed beast and clambering over the old man. “He’s going to put Jarra to the torch!” Johnson hesitates at the top of the ladder. “No prisoners,” he whispers.

♦ ♦ ♦

Outside, it’s a scene from Milton or Dante: weeping and wailing, self-flagellation, misdirection, panic, loss of faith. Mothers run childless, children motherless. There is smoke and dust in the air, the rush of blood. One old man stands in the street whipping his ancient milch cow because it cannot heave up from the ground under the weight of the panniers slung over its shoulders. Another carries his wife, who carries her dog, who carries a scrap of cloth in its mouth. All over people are running and shouting, a mad urgency in the atmosphere, kicking through the drifts and rubble left by the storm, gathering sacks of grain, driving cattle: fleeing the little mud-walled village on the Woobah, the village where they were born.

The explorer, always somewhat slow to react (something in the genes), stands in the midst of all this sorrow and confusion wondering what to do. He can’t very well join the exodus, as his horse and bags (restored to him at Fatima’s insistence) were lost in the storm — and how far could he get on foot? Besides, Johnson’s disappeared, and the Moors certainly wouldn’t. . but wait a minute — where are the Moors? It suddenly occurs to him that he hasn’t laid eyes on a Mussulman in the last twelve hours at least. . and then, even more suddenly, an insidious thought begins poking at the periphery of his brain — the very thought that was about to step out of the wings and announce itself last night when a weathered hand passed him the calabash: here at long last is his chance!

♦ ♦ ♦

What has transpired in Jarra is really quite elementary as the politics of war go. Ali, at some time during the night, experienced a crisis of divided priorities: his own best interest came into conflict with that of the Jarrans, who are, after all, merely Kafirs. After an evening of feasting and good-natured raping and extorting, he ordered ten of his men to select the three hundred fattest cattle from among the Jarran herds and to drive them into the wood where they’d be sheltered from the storm. This, he reasoned, was in his own best interest — merely protecting his investment. The Jarrans felt that Ali’s move was ultimately in their best interest as well, as it constituted his acceptance of their payment in advance for his services. Three hundred cattle are alot to lose, but not when you consider the alternative — i.e., losing the entire herd, as well as your goats, crops, huts and daughters to the raging and mindless Tiggitty Sego, known far and wide for his bloodlusting and vindictive nature.

But late that night, after the storm had abated, another factor entered the equation: Ali learned that Sego’s armies, taking advantage of the weather, had marched to within striking distance of Jarra, and that from there they planned an early morning attack. This intelligence precipitated Ali’s crisis of priority. Since he’d already collected his virgins and his cattle, he reasoned that he was satisfied — and that by fighting the Kaartans he would certainly derive no further satisfaction, and in fact ran the risk of losing what he’d already gained. He didn’t agonize long over the decision.

Within minutes the tents were struck, his men mounted. They rode through the night, nineteen ex-virgins under their arms, driving the cattle before them. By the following evening they would be back at Benowm.

♦ ♦ ♦

“Free at last!” thinks the explorer, jubilant in a slough of despond. A woman scuttles by, her life balanced in the earthen jar perched on her forehead. Mungo wants to dance with her, sing a song of deliverance, roar like a lion burst from his cage. “Hee-hee!” he laughs, tossing his hat as a group of stunted children dart past, swift, dark and furtive as rats. He kicks up his heels and begins whistling “Oh whare hae ye been a’ day, my bonnie wee croodlin’ dow?” as an old woman claws at the door of her hut, sobbing and pleading with the two men who tug at her arms. He flows along with the crowd, a silly grin on his face, as children cry for their mothers, cripples grope in the dust and women frantically snatch up provisions for the road. His plan is to head east with the refugees — horse or no horse — toward Bambarra. And the Niger.

On the far side of the village his conscience catches up with him, and he suddenly finds himself hoisting children, loading litters, pounding grain, prodding goats. The Jarrans, too harried and distraught to think twice, accept his hands and shoulders and then look up at him as if he were transparent. A cow here, a lost child there, wives and husbands reunited on the road, they begin to move — passing the eastern gates, fording the Woobah, struggling up the distant rise, the town lying desolate at their backs. Things are beginning to run smoothly, the stragglers closing ranks, the whiners and shriekers running short of breath, when suddenly a fearsome rumor shoots through the crowd: Sego is coming! Sego! The crowd falls silent, momentarily stunned, while a heavyset woman in a babushka pushes her way through, broadcasting the news: “He burned Wassiboo during the night! Roasted children! Drank blood!”

This information is followed by a series of gasps and moans, and then finally by a long generalized screech like the screech of hogs scenting the butcher’s block. Then they’re off like the start of a marathon: heels and hoofs flying, dust rising in billows till it filters out the sun. “So this is mass hysteria,” thinks Mungo, drawing back from the scene, until suddenly, as if he’d just wakened from a dream of falling, it seizes him. His pupils dilate, his breath comes in bursts. And then all at once he’s running, bolting like a spooked mare, throwing aside the lame and halt, kicking at livestock, clawing for position. When he thinks to look back the field is already behind him and he’s steaming up a hill past the fleetest of the teenage boys, loping athletes and spear carriers, running for his life, running for his liberty, running for all he’s worth.

But then he rounds a bend and stops dead in his tracks — there, mounted astride his stallion like a colossus, is Dassoud, the reins of the explorer’s horse in his hand. Beside him, perched dolefully on the doleful blue ass, is Johnson. Johnson shrugs his shoulders.

Dassoud gestures toward the waiting saddle, then slips the scimitar from his belt and points northward — in the direction of Benowm.

“Better climb aboard,” says Johnson.

The explorer hesitates, crestfallen. The cries of the refugees echo round him; he can’t seem to catch his breath.

“I’m tellin’ you, Mr. Park, he means business.”

As if on cue, Dassoud cuts the air with a titanic swipe of his sword.

Something like a grin creases his lips.

Mungo mounts the horse.

♦ ♦ ♦

An hour later, and miles from the road to Bambarra, the three horsemen are picking their way down a rocky slope littered with the remains of oryx and bushbuck, when suddenly Johnson reaches into his toga, produces a silver-plated dueling pistol and shoots Dassoud’s charger in the left eye. The horse rears back, beating its head from side to side as if it were trying to clear its ears, and collapses atop the Chief Jackal. “Let’s make tracks!” shouts Johnson, frantically lashing the backside of his ass as Dassoud heaves up from beneath the dead horse. The explorer doesn’t have to be asked twice. He kicks his heels deep into Rocinante’s flanks and the animal breaks into a halfhearted canter, its lungs heaving like a bellows filled with water. Meanwhile, Dassoud strips off his sandals and jubbah, touches his toes four or five times, and takes off after them, scimitar clenched in his teeth.

Johnson jogs over the rocks on his balky blue ass, Mungo bears down on his stumbling nag. Ahead, an unbroken plain studded with scrub. Behind, Dassoud, leaping hazards like a panther. “If we can m-m-make the p-plain we’ll hav-have him!” Johnson cries. Mungo holds on, and prays. Dassoud is no more than twenty feet away, running like a bandit. Ten feet, five — but now the smooth, hard-packed earth of the plain drums under hoof and they begin to draw away from him. He falls back twenty feet, then fifty, and Mungo begins to cheer. Johnson looks worried. “Why so glum?” the explorer calls.

“You see the way that sucker is runnin’?”

Mungo glances over his shoulder. Dassoud has dropped back nearly a hundred yards now. His face is set, the light fixed in his eyes. He is a naked man, muscled like a statue, running against his heart and lungs, the sun and the plain. “What of it?”

“He goin’ to catch up with us, that’s what.”

The explorer’s horse gears down from a canter to a walk, staggering from one lame leg to another, the saddlebags clacking like maracas. The ass cranes its neck to snap at Johnson’s knee. Mungo is suddenly alarmed.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “We’re mounted.”

They jog along in silence. Dassoud pumps his arms, holding steady at a hundred yards. The sun, of course, is like a freshly stoked smelting furnace.

Johnson squints up at him, a sad and suffering look in his eye. “You mean to tell me you never heard the stories about this maniac?”

“Unnhhhh,” says the horse, slowing to a brisk amble. The ass sways along beside it, ears in motion. Clotta-clot, clotta-clot, clot.

“No,” says Mungo, something tightening in his groin. “I never heard.”

♦ DASSOUD’S STORY ♦

He was born at Az-Zawiya, on the Mediterranean coast of Libya, third son of a Berber sultan. When he was six he was caught in a stampede. Sharp black hoofs pounded over him for a quarter of an hour. He wasn’t even bruised. At fourteen he joined his father in a punitive expedition against a party of Debbab Arabs. The Arabs were camped at the oasis of Al-Aziziyah, fires strung across the plain like a fallen constellation. Dassoud, at fourteen, was already over six feet tall. The firelight was lurid, there were the screams of the women. A man came at him with a pike. He disengaged the man’s leg with a swipe of his scimitar, then crushed his collarbone and severed his head. The man retaliated by spurting blood in his face. Dassoud leaped back, shocked and dazed, his pulse pounding, the raw salt taste of blood on his lips. . then went looking for more. Two days later his father was murdered. Sixteen Debbab renegades rode off across the desert for the bleak plateau of Al-Hammada al-Hamra. Dassoud followed them. One by one they died in the night.

When he was twenty he led a caravan across the Great Desert. Their destination was Timbuctoo, on the River Niger, sixteen hundred miles to the south. It was a difficult crossing. Sandstorms swallowed them, camels evaporated, wells ran dry. By the time they reached Ghat they’d lost nearly half their number. The sun rippled the horizon, dunes rolled off into the sky like waves on an iron sea. When the wells at Tamanrasset failed them, they fell on one another. Dassoud stood six feet four inches tall, two hundred thirty-five pounds. He was one of the survivors. The other twelve crowded round him. “We’ll make for Taoudenni, in the northern reaches of Ludamar,” he said. “It’s our only chance.”

The oasis of Taoudenni was set in a pocket of basaltic hills that rose up out of the sands like the molars of a half-buried giant. It had been the principal watering stop on the trip from Tamanrasset to Jarra since the days of the Prophet. Its wells were said to be inexhaustible. When the caravan drew within sight of the oasis they had been without water for three days, their eyelids swollen, throats raw. The trade goods — Persian rugs, salt, muskets, kif — trailed out behind them over the dunes, still lashed to the backs of rotting animals. As they approached the wells, the sole surviving camel stumbled and fell, its hoofs pedaling the void. One of the men cried out: impaled on the animal’s foreleg was a human ribcage. The bones clacked and rattled, dice in a cup. The merchants looked round. There were hummocks in the sand — hundreds of them — a hand reaching out here, the back of a skull glistening there. Taoudenni was dry.

Dassoud claimed the camel. Two men challenged him. He killed them both. Then he bled the animal, drinking deep from the open artery and draining the excess into a guerba. He ate the inner organs, the lining of the stomach, moist and raw. When he last saw the others, they were huddled round a crack in the rock where there had once been water.

He traveled by night, unearthing insect larvae, scorpions and beetles by day. He crunched them like nuts, scanning the wind-scrawled dunes, his head gone light, his life at the far end of its tether. This amused him. The more hopeless it became, the stronger he felt. One night, alone in the universe and hopelessly lost, the guerba empty, his tongue sucking at the shell of a scorpion, he realized that he was enjoying himself. The desert was hard. He was harder. If the whim had taken him, he could have turned round and strolled back to Libya.

Two weeks after leaving Taoudenni, Dassoud stumbled across the well at Tarra. He drew a guerba from the depths and drank till he vomited. While vomiting he became aware of a shadow which had fallen over him, a shadow cast by three of Ali’s elite horsemen. They were pointing their muskets at him as he knelt in the sand. Poaching from a well was as heinous a crime among the Moors as kidnapping or having sex with one’s neighbor’s livestock. The penalty was death. Dassoud listened to the click of the hammers. He was starved, dehydrated, exhausted, unarmed. The first man shot him through the elbow, the second brought a scimitar down across his face, the third was easy. When he finished with them he tore the leg from one of the horses, devoured it, and lay down to sleep. The following morning he rode into Benowm, thundered up to Ali’s tent, and offered his services as henchman and human jackal.

ESCAPE! (CONT.)

“Well Jesus Christ, Mary, Joseph and All the Saints,” says Mungo, glancing over his shoulder, “couldn’t you have aimed a little higher?”

“Against my principles.” Johnson is pounding along beside the ass now, his toga soaked through with sweat. “Shot,” he wheezes, “a man once. . back in London. Broke a boy’s heart, uff-uff, never. . forgive myself.”

“Principles?” the explorer echoes, wondering how far principles go toward meliorating an early death.

Behind them, Dassoud shows no sign of letting up. In fact, for the past hour or so he’s been hurling epithets at the explorer’s back, his blade slashing in the sun as if to underscore his meaning. “Uncircumcised!” he roars. “Pig eater!”

Mungo pulls the hat down over his eyes, and has a vision of the kitchen at Selkirk: fresh-cut flowers, cold ham, Ailie smiling up at him, “You ever notice that fellow seems to have it in for me?”

“Ha!” says Johnson, rumbling along. “He hates you. Hates you the way a. . beard hates a. . razor or a balloon hates a. . pin. It’s nature. You. . come onto the scene with your. . your wheaty hair and catty eyes, a freak and a wonder,” he puffs, gasping for breath. “Where you think that leaves him? You might just as well. . expect a trash-yard cur to put up with a lapdog.”

“Oh,” says Mungo.

♦ ♦ ♦

The day wears on, Johnson silent and morose, the muzzle of the explorer’s horse flecked with blood, Dassoud padding along with the grim determination of a wolf running down its quarry. The horse is a problem. The explorer has been sparing it as much as possible by periodically dismounting and jogging the odd mile or two, but for all his effort the animal has been teetering on the verge of collapse for the better part of the afternoon — at one point he had to set its tail afire to keep it going. And Johnson’s ass hasn’t done much better, feigning lameness, bucking and biting, braying like a calliope. No doubt about it — it’s only a matter of time before one animal or the other gives out and Dassoud overtakes them. And then: goodbye Niger, goodbye Africa, so long mortal coil.

But then, just when things look bleakest, Johnson sings out like a shipwrecked sailor descrying a mast on the horizon. “Look!” he crows. “Up there, through the trees!” The explorer looks. There, winding over the wooded hill before them like an erratic seam, is the road to Bambarra. But what’s this? A funnel of dust seems to be hugging the road, the tapered end narrowing away from them. The explorer’s first thought is dustmen — thousands of them — sweeping along the road, but then, like an epiphany, it comes to him: the refugees! They’ve doubled back! “Johnson!” he cries. “You’re a genius!”

This new development, however, has not been lost on Dassoud. The Chief Jackal begins pouring it on, surging at them like a sprinter making for the tape. The gap closes to fifty yards, then forty, Johnson beats the ass, Mungo whips his horse, the gap closes to thirty yards. Then Johnson does a peculiar thing. “An old Mandingo trick,” he shouts, stuffing the ass’s right ear into his mouth and champing down as if he were lashing into an overcooked chop. The ass lets out a screech, bucks twice and then takes off like a three-year-old at the start of the steeplechase. Mungo follows suit, the horse’s ear like a strip of felt laid against his tongue, biting down till he tastes blood. And sure enough, the nag comes to life, galvanizing its last inner resources in a furious scramble of fetlock and hoof.

Johnson and Mungo, ass and nag, rocket over the stony ground through a stand of trees and up onto the road, Johnson shouting out in Mandingo to the ghostly figures emerging from the gloom. Then the ass slashes into the thick of it, neck and neck with the explorer’s mount. Weary refugees leap aside, the hoofs rain on the road, chickens take to the air. A moment later the riders emerge on the far side, galloping along parallel to the roadway. Johnson kicks at the ass, his elbows flapping as if he were trying to take off, the trees a blur, the explorer fighting to keep up. “Now!” shouts Johnson, and they plunge back into the talcum gloom. This time they upset a litter and bowl over a village dignitary with a graven idol tucked under his arm, Johnson all the while jabbering away at the astonished faces: “Slow him down! Stop the Moor!” Twice more they skew from side to side at breakneck speed, pebbles flying, dust raveling out behind them, until Johnson rattles off the road and plunges into the woods, the explorer hot on his heels.

“Shhhh!” warns Johnson, dismounting in a tangle of burrs and glossy black thorns. The explorer’s heart is drumming at his ribs. He climbs down from the wheezing nag and crouches in the vegetation. “Think we lost him?” he whispers.

Out on the road the slow fuliginous procession rumbles past. The explorer makes out a leg here, a head there, the back end of a goat or sheep. The din is steady, broken now and again by a curse or shout. There is no sign of Dassoud. And then suddenly — a bogey leaping out at a sleeping child — there he is! Tireless, fixated, trotting along the roadway and peering into the dustcloud, his eyes so swollen with rage they look like hard-cooked eggs. His shins seem battered and bruised, his calves veined with blood. He never even turns his head.

Deep in the bushes, Johnson holds out his hands, palms up.

The explorer looks him in the eye, a silly euphoric grin creeping across his face, then reaches out and brushes the upturned palms with his own.

♦ THE STREETS OF LONDON ♦

At this time in history the streets of London were as foul, feculent and disease-ridden as a series of interconnected dunghills, twice as dangerous as a battlefield, and as infrequently maintained as the lower cells of an asylum dungeon. It was pretty rough. Drunks lay sprawled across the footpaths, some dead and stinking and blanketed with crows. Whole families squatted on streetcorners and begged for bread. Murders were committed in the alleys. There were yellowed newspapers clinging to the lampposts, smashed crocks and bottles underfoot, bits of produce and the bones of gamebirds and fowls moldering in the corners. There was pigeonshit. Mud, coal dust, ashes, dead cats, dogs, rats, scraps of cloth stained with excrement, and worst of all, open sewers. “We live. Sir, like a colony of Hottentots,” complained Lord Tyrconnel, addressing the House. “And our streets abound with such heaps of filth as even a savage would look on with amaze.” Others agreed. A society for Civic Salubrity was formed, a Clean Air Club. They held regular meetings, followed Bledsoe’s Rules of Parliamentary Procedure, aired complaints, accomplished nothing.

There were a few private nightsoil collectors, it’s true, and a handful of dustmen. But the nightsoil collectors built festering mounds of muck in their backyards and the dustmen merely created smoldering dumps. And this still left the overwhelming majority of the city’s residents with no means of sewage disposal save their own backyards and the choked gutters which bisected the streets like running wounds. Grim shopkeepers trudged out into the roadway to dump their chamberpots, barmen limed the walls outside their establishments to deaden the reek of urine, housekeepers flung buckets of nightsoil from second- and third-story windows. “Gardy loo!” the chambermaid would shout, and a dark clot of it would arch out over the walkway to slap down in the street, there to ooze inch by inch toward the fetid gutter. Of course, this was inconvenient for the passerby, who might already be limping and brushing at his clothes as a result of tumbling into an open cellar or blundering across one of the several thousand mad dogs that roamed the city at will. And as if that weren’t enough, the gutters were generally clogged with horsedung, pigs’ ears and other offal, causing the sewage to back up in dark rills and steamy swamps — not only was the pedestrian up to his ankles in human waste, he also found himself dodging the airborne clods thrown up by the wheels of passing carriages.

Because the streets were so unpleasant, people of means took to traveling from place to place by coach or sedan chair. The sedan chair was particularly well adapted to its time and place, providing comfort and security for the privileged and a means of employment for some few of the starving masses. It consisted of an enclosed compartment attached to a pair of parallel bars. These bars were hoisted on the shoulders of the chairmen, one fore and one aft. The chairmen, impoverished inbreeds with harelips and misshapen heads, made a few pennies; the lady going out to tea could arrive with a petticoat free of shit smears. Advantages all around. But there was a further advantage to the sedan chair: once inside, one was invisible. Merely pull the curtains and peep through the cracks. See, and remain unseen.

What better means of conveyance for an invisible man?

♦ THE BALLAD OF JACK HALL ♦

With a sinking feeling, Ned watches Boyles’ pinched shoulders and flat-bottomed head recede into the crowd. He looks round furtively, feeling naked and vulnerable, a crab without a shell. Up the street, a chairstand. Ned hobbles up to the first chair, hands the chairman a coin and disappears within. The curtains are drawn. It is dark as a womb. Ned’s mind rushes with schemes and ruses and counterschemes. His own voice surprises him. “Monmouth Street,” he calls. “Rose’s Old Clothes.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Rose’s Old Clothes is a secondhand shop specializing in women’s attire and highly recommended by Sally Sebum (“She’s got the keenest bargains in town. Rose does”). It is one of a dozen shops of the rag-and-bone variety squeezed into a two-block span, all of which cater to the servants of the rich (selling), the wives of frugal burghers (buying), and the poor (just looking). The grimy bow windows out front are heaped with the strata of fashion: hoops, hats and whalebone corsets; petticoats, parasols, caps, bonnets and bustles. A cockeyed sign hangs over the door:

WE LAWNDERS ALL GARMINTS

PRIOR TO SELLING

Ned’s chair scrapes down outside the shop. “Monmouth Street,” announces the chairman, swinging back the door.

In the dark, jostling through the crowded streets, Ned’s mind has been active. Boyles, he realizes, is totally untrustworthy. As soon as he gets a few drinks in him he’ll blab the whole thing: Ned Rise is alive! I talked to him. Had me hand on his arm! The rumor spreads like ink in water, passes round barrooms, served up with the soup, until finally it whispers in the ears of Mendoza, Smirke, Twit and the rest. Two weeks. That’s all he needs. If he can get through two weeks more he’ll have cleared five hundred pounds on Chichikov’s Choice and he can get out of town altogether. Try his luck on the Continent maybe. Paris, The Hague, Leghorn.

“Monmouth Street,” the chairman repeats.

Ned straightens his nose and adjusts his wig, then limps out into the street. He hands the chairman half a crown. “Wait here,” he says, “and keep an eye on my basket of fish eggs, will you?”

♦ ♦ ♦

An anemic bell murmurs over the door as Ned steps into the shop. He finds himself in a foul-smelling room lit only by the odd strands of light that seep in through the avalanche of ladies’ apparel heaped up round the windows. The smell is of clothes tight at the groin and under the armpit, clothes worn without washing for years on end, clothes harboring all the vermin and disease known to man. He looks round for the proprietor.

“Shopkeeper!” he calls. The place seems deserted.

But then, in the far corner, a bundle of rags disengages itself from the general disarray and begins shuffling toward him. The bundle of rags turns out to be an old woman wrapped in a moth-eaten cloak. She looks as if she feeds on nothing but thousand-year-old eggs. “Yes?” she cackles, her voice full of rust. “Wot’ll it be? Buyin’ or gapin’?”

“A woman’s outfit,” Ned says. “The whole works: skirts and gloves and shoulderknots, a cap that ties under the chin and the biggest bonnet you’ve got.”

“EEE-ee-eeeee!” cackles the proprietress. “A bit o’ finery for the littul mistress, ‘ey?” She nudges him with her elbow and winks.

Ned is suddenly seized with a sense of déjà vu.

“Ye’ve got ‘er nekked up in some garret then, ain’t ye? Tore the threads right off ‘er, didn’t ye, ye wicked beast? Eeeeeeeeee!” she laughs, nudging him again.

Ned steps back a pace. The woman’s face is fleshless, skin stretched over bone. She is half bald. Something glitters on her lower lip.

“ ‘Ow’ll this be, then?” she puffs, bending to pluck a bundle of flowered skirts from the floor. “And this?” She reaches up for a veiled bonnet piled high with artificial fruit and gilded dromaderies.

“F-fine,” Ned stutters, his arms heaped with cotton, muslin, wool and chintz. He seems to have lost command of the situation, taken aback by the old slut, wrestling with the feeling that he’s been through all this before.

“Petticoats?” the old woman leers. “Undies?”

Ned heaps his clothes atop the makeshift counter — a plank stretched between two barrels. The proprietress produces a filthy scrap of paper and a pencil, and begins scrawling figures across the page. She is humming. No: singing. He recognizes the tune. The Ballad of Jack Hall.

“Oh, it’s a swingin’ I must go, I must go,” she moans, scraping away at the octaves like a saw cutting through a wet log. “It’s a swingin’ I must go-o-o.” Then she leers up at him. “Four shillin’s, tuppence, Lothario,” she cackles. “Eeeeeee!”

“Have you got a back room?” Ned asks.

“Back room? Can’t ye wait till ye gets ‘ome to yer own mizzable lodgin’s? Wot are ye, anyway: one o’ them perverty types wot runs around jackin’ off on ladies’ garmints like a cat in ‘eat? Eh? Eh? That wot it is, peach fuzz?”

Ned lays another shilling on the counter. “Just point it out, will you?”

The old woman points, then looks down to count her money. “Takes all kinds,” she mutters. “Eeeeeee!”

♦ ♦ ♦

Ten minutes later he steps from the back room, a blushing beauty. The skirts are soiled, and they reek a bit, but you’d never know it from a distance. He’s tied a white cap under his chin, letting his own hair fall down his back, and crowned the whole thing with the foot-high bonnet.

The old woman perches on a stool behind the counter, a pewter cup and a jug before her. When she throws back her head with the cup, she catches sight of him and begins gargling out her weird laugh. “Ye didn’t tell me it was ‘alloween,” she chokes, pounding the plank and hooting. “Or is it the faggots’ ball ye’re going to? Hee-eeee! Eeeeee!”

Ned draws up his skirts and swishes past her, too uneasy to trade insults. There’s something about the old slut that rushes back to his earliest memories, pokes at him like a nightmare in the womb. He shudders as he hurries out of the shop, the splintered old voice ringing in his ears:

Oh, it’s a swingin’ I must go, I must go,

It’s a swingin’ I must go-o-o;

I must hang until I’m dead, dead, dead,

I must hang until I’m de-e-ad;

I must hang until I’m dead, ‘cause I killed a man,

And I left him layin’ on the cold, cold ground.

♦ INBREEDING ♦

“Soho Square,” says Ned.

The chairman eyes the bonnet, skirts, flounces. He is a tall and singularly ugly fellow, his head close-cropped and disproportionately small. There are tufts of hair growing out of his ears. “Oy’m sowwy, Madame, but this conweyance is spoken for,” he says.

“You stupid ass,” growls Ned. “Can’t you see it’s me?”

The man takes hold of Ned’s arm, preventing him from stepping into the compartment. “Me ‘oo?”

“Me. The gentleman what owns them fish eggs on the seat there.”

The chairman looks hard at Ned’s bustline, the frilly ribbon tied under his chin, the curls trailing down his back. Then he glances at the basket of fish eggs and back again. He looks confused. “ ‘Ey Bob,” he calls, and his co-worker peeks out from behind the rear of the conveyance. “Was it a gennelman we ‘auled over ‘ere from St. James’s, or am Oy in fear of me sanity?”

Bob is short and moonfaced, with high-set ears and a fringe of orange hair that gives him the look of a neutered cat. “That’s royt,” he says. “An elderly gent, somewhat lame. ‘Ee was all decked out in a three-corner ‘at and wig and such — like they useter wear in me granddad’s day.”

“Ye see?” says the crophead. “It’s like Oy told ye, Madame — the conweyance is otherwise occupied.”

A carriage rattles up the street and splashes the side of the compartment with dung. Two blocks down a baby falls from a window.

“But that’s what I’m trying to tell you!” shouts Ned. “That gentleman is me.”

Bob looks suspicious, crophead puzzled.

“I’ve changed my clothes in the shop, don’t you see?”

No response.

“Look: think of it this way. A man is invited to a costume ball. He hires a sedan chair—”

“Aye,” says crophead, nodding vigorously.

“—in St. James’s Square, and takes it over to Monmouth Street — Rose’s Old Clothes, to be exact — gives the chairman half a crown to mind his basket, then enters the shop, purchases a lady’s outfit, changes into it, and hops back in the sedan chair ready to shoot off to the costume ball — disguised as a lady.”

“Gawn!” scoffs Bob.

“Yeah,” adds crophead. “ ‘Oo’d do a thing like that?”

“All right: fuck you both, then,” Ned snarls, lashing out with his parasol and springing into the compartment.

“But Mistress,” pleads the crophead, “Oy appeals to yer sense o’ fair play. A gennelman give us arf a crown to ‘old the chair for ‘im and to mind ‘is basket o’ fish eggs. Now wot are we going to tell that gennelman should ‘ee come out o’ the shop and see that ye’ve ‘propriated ‘is eggs and ‘is conweyance both?”

Ned motions the man closer, takes hold of his elbow and whispers in his ear. “I’ll level with you,” he says “ — this is a very delicate situation here. You see, I’m the lady friend of the gentleman in the shop, and we don’t want to be seen together for fear his wife should hear of it. Now: he’s left these fish eggs as a special present for me and he’s slipped on out the back way to meet me at his flat for what the French call an assignation.”

The man scratches his head.

“We call it ‘dipping the wick.’ “

The man breaks out in a grin. “Woy didn’t ye say so?. ‘Ey Bob — she says she’s ‘is konkabine then.”

Bob’s voice is distant and faint, emanating from somewhere on the far side of the chair. “Well, I guess it’s all royt then.”

“Aye,” says crophead. “Guess it’s all royt.”

“Soho Square,” says Ned.

♦ THE HEART OF DARKNESS ♦

The woods. Dark and deep. Two figures squat over an anemic flame, roasting meat. Lions roar, and lightning plays over the horizon like the flicker of ideas.

“So tell me, Mr. Park, if I ain’t gettin’ too personal, just what it is you see in this explorin’ business anyhow? I mean you been starved and abused, sick with the ague and the fever, your clothes is in rags, half your goods is gone and your horse is layin’ over there in the bushes like it ain’t never goin’ to get up again.”

“I’m glad you asked me that, Johnson. You see — my lord that smells good. What did you say it was?”

“Paw pads of the jackal. Only thing the vultures won’t touch.”

“Hmp. Learn something new every day. . Anyway, I’m the eighth of thirteen. Know what that means?”

Johnson looks up from the skewered bits of meat. “You’re consumed with a almost demonic obsession to prove yourself?”

“Exactly.”

“And all the regular avenues is closed — you bein’ a Scotsman and your father only a crofter. So you can’t enter politics or take a commission in the army or hobnob with the elite in their drawin’ rooms and clubs—”

“Uh-huh.”

“So what else is there? You rely on your courage and stamina and you go off to fathom the unknown and then come back a hero. Right?”

“Yes — but there’s more to it than that. I want to know the unknowable, see the unseen, scale mountains and look behind the stars. I want to fill in the maps, lecture the geographers, hold up a torch for the academicians.

The Niger. . think of it, Johnson. No white man has ever laid eyes upon it. I’ll have seen what none of them have — not the Laird of Dumfries, nor Charles Fox, nor the King himself.”

“All well and good,” shouts Johnson over the protestations of a nearby lion. “But you got to get to it first, and then you got to backtrack all this long way we come already — with all your notes and faculties intact, not to mention your lights and limbs. .”

But wait: what’s all this noise in the bushes? They’ve been so engrossed in their discussion they haven’t paid it any mind — but yes, come to mention it, bushes have been swaying and leaves rattling — steadily — for the past few minutes now. The realization grips them like a seizure: words choke in their throats, their limbs go heavy, ears leap. A twig snaps, the leaves rush, and suddenly explorer and guide are on their feet, the one clenching a thorny cudgel, and the other brandishing an engraved dueling pistol. There’s a moment of silence, and then the movement begins again — unmistakable — coming right for them. Leopard, lion, wolf, they think. Or worse: Dassoud! “Come on out of there!” Mungo shouts. “Be you man or hyena!”

Lightning breaks the sky, thunder rolls in the hills. Johnson swallows hard and tries to steady the pistol. And then, with a sudden dramatic swish, the bushes part — to reveal the stooped and wizened old soothsayer from Jarra. The dead guinea hen still hangs from his neck, half plucked, limp and stinking. ‘‘Wamba reebo jekenek,’’ he says, his bags and wrinkles attempting a sort of grin. ‘‘Bobo keemboo.’“

A moment later the old man is squatting between explorer and guide, bony knees and cracked feet, snuffing the skewer and jabbering like an ape come down from the trees. “What a night! Lions trying to chase the moon. Hear that one? Close by, eh? Hee-hee. Hm, meat smells good. I know how to cook meat, bet your life. Used to, anyway. Now I’m alone and friendless, terrible calamity. Did you know? Going my way by any chance?”

“What calamity?” Johnson asks, and the old man, waiting his opening, launches a windy narrative embellished by the geriatric gesture and punctuated by the creak of rusted joints. His name, it seems, is Abah Eboe — or Ebah Aboe — the explorer can’t decide which. He had been separated from the other refugees during a skirmish with Mansong’s army. On hearing that the fugitive Jarrans had crossed into Bambarra seeking asylum, Mansong had apparently decided that the time was ripe for collecting a little tribute — a squatter’s fee. He appeared around a bend in the road, enormous, mounted on a baby elephant and surrounded by eighty or a hundred potbellied warriors in leopard skins and ostrich plumes. A jilli kea, or singing man, preceded him, howling out his demands. The long queue of refugees came to a halt. Yambo, the Jarran chieftain, made his way to the front and protested that his people had been loyal to Mansong during the war with Tiggitty Sego and that the loss of their village and all their goods was calamity enough. They threw themselves on the mercy of the wise and charitable potentate of Bambarra.

Mansong’s scepter was capped with a human skull. He adjusted his proud fat belly and repeated his demands. It was at this point that the soothsayer had interceded. (Here the old man becomes violently animated, flailing the twigs of his arms and pounding his chest.) He had shoved his way angrily through the crowd and hobbled up beside Yambo. Then he raised his fists in the air and began castigating the Bambarran king. If Sego was a tyrant, the old man had squawked, then Mansong was an ogre conceived of queers and jackals. Mansong smeared himself in dung and sucked the seed from his warriors. He was a thief and a woman — only look to his great sagging tits for proof. For a moment, both parties were stunned silent. Then, with a shout, Mansong’s army fell on the defenseless Jarrans. Two hundred were killed, mostly women and children. The rest were led off in shackles.

“And how did you manage to escape?” the explorer asks in his halting patois.

The old man glances up, his features lost in a grin. A noiseless laugh shakes at the bones of his chest. “Mojo,” he says.

The explorer looks at Johnson.

“The man says he’s got his mojo workin’,” says Johnson, twirling the meat on the skewer. “You know: magic, black arts, hoodoo and voodoo. Nobody messes with a witch doctor.”

“Witch doctor?”

“Of course — what do you think he’s doin’ runnin’ around with that chicken tucked under his chin?”

The explorer leaps to his feet. “Can he — can he tell fortunes?”

Johnson’s lids are thick as a crocodile’s. He looks up at the explorer and sighs. “Well he’s no gypsy, if that’s what you mean. . But listen, you sure you want your signs and portents conjured with, Mr. Park? Here and now? I mean, it’s one thing to have some old white lady take a look at your tea leaves in her front parlor up in Edinburgh or London or someplace — but hey, this is Africa, man. The eye of the needle, mother of mystery, heart of darkness. And this old naked black man here with his feet all crusted up and his penis danglin’ in the mud — he don’t fool around.”

“Don’t be silly, Johnson. I’ve got the luck of the Scots with me. There’s renown in my future, I know it. Laurels, and a book. And Ailie. Are you kidding: I’ll die in front of the hearth with a cat in my lap.”

“All right. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Overhead, lightning tesselates the sky until it glows like an illuminated map of some celestial river and its tributaries. Off in the distance, harsh dyspeptic rumbles of thunder can be heard. Johnson turns to the old man and mumbles something in Mandingo. The effect on Eboe (or Aboe) is instantaneous. The grin vanishes, crow’s-feet rush out from the eyesockets and corners of the mouth, furrows drop and lines vein the cheeks and chin until he’s transformed, unrecognizable, a great drooping bloodhound, a ball of wax, an unthrown pot. He rises shakily and takes hold of the explorer’s hand, scrutinizing it as if it were a text or a painting. His leathery old fingers play over the knuckles and joints, a wild bolt lights the sky, thunder steps down like a giant walking the earth. The soothsayer spits in Mungo’s palm, then pricks his finger with a vulture’s talon, blending blood and spittle and now a bit of clay, all the while working it into the lines of the palm and muttering some antediluvian formula over and over, mojo-mojo-mojo, his eyes pinched shut, the thunder beating like tribal drums. Finally he looks down into the huge white palm and his eyes go wide. He is stung, stricken. Utters a cry like a wounded beast and clutches at his breast.

A hyena laughs in the night. The wind tastes of sand. Mungo is frightened. “Well?” he says, his voice a pinched vibrato. “What do you see?”

But the old man doesn’t answer. Already he’s edging away from the explorer, hands held up to his face, his stooped black form a shadow among shadows. CRACK! Lightning blanches the clearing and the old man is a ghost. CRACK! Johnson is pale as milk. ‘‘Obi-lo-hojóto,’’ the seer intones. ‘‘Obi-lo-hojóto.”

“Johnson! What’s he saying?”

Johnson stares into the fire.

“Johnson!”

The guide’s head cranks round, slow as a plant turning to the sun. All the beasts of the plain are howling in unison and the sky is lit like a ballroom. “He says you got nice hands.”

“Nice hands!? What the—“

Question or exclamation, it remains forever unformed. Because at that moment the heavens part, the first fat drops plummeting like stones, pounding at the parched earth and withered trees.

The rains have begun.

♦ EUREKA! ♦

Four days later, in the drool and drizzle of an intermittent rain, explorer, guide and soothsayer — closely tailed by nag and ass — can be found plodding along the road to Segu, capital of Bambarra. Actually they are headed for Segu Korro, westernmost of the four towns that comprise Segu proper (the others being Segu Boo, Soo Korro and Segu See Korro).

According to old Eboe, who twice visited the city in his youth, it’s a wide-open place, awash in palm wine, mead and sooloo beer, the streets ringing with wanton laughter, snatches of song, the shriek of cockfights, the alleys packed full of whores with brass rings round their necks and skin like the bottom of a well. There are jugglers and dwarfs and acrobats, men who bite the heads from chickens, marvels untold. Water flows uphill in Segu. People speak backward. There is lewdness in the streets, in the alleys, in the dens of iniquity. Jewels are like gravel. They pave their streets with marble, tradesmen eat from gilded plates, food is for the asking: fowls and poached fish, eggs, mutton, rice. And the bazaar — the bazaar is boundless, infinite, a catalogue of human needs, human dreams, inhuman desires. “Get anything you want,” the old man croaks, licking his lips. “Daggers, slave girls, talking monkeys, hashish.” The explorer’s palms are sweating. Yes, after so many dead dull months in the desert, the prospect of a town — a negro town — excites him. But that’s only part of it. Cities he’s seen. What makes his blood race and organs palpitate is that this city — unlike any other known to Western man through all recorded history — this city sits squarely on the west bank of the river of legend, the River Niger.

The Niger! It stuns him to think of it. Caesar, Alexander, Houghton, Ledyard — none of them even came close. He’s suffered for it, denied himself, ruined his digestion and deserted the woman he loves. The Niger. It fills his dreams, sours his morning tea, etches its course in his imagination. And now, at long last, it’s within reach.

Or almost. For the moment though, things are pretty bleak. All three of them are starving, bone-tired, chilled — and limping like a charity ward in motion. The seer with his cracked feet, arthritic knees; the explorer with blisters and bunions and rotted boots; Johnson with fat brown leeches between his toes and up his toga. Nag and ass are hobbling too, all but useless. Behind them the landscape rises and sinks, rough and broken, pitted as a cheek ravaged with acne. Up ahead: more of the same. There are sudden declivities, hills and valleys, ridges, gullies. Stands of ciboa darken the valleys, and massive tabbas, wide around as Big Ben, transfix the hilltops. Underfoot, wilted guinea grass and a furze thick with burr and briar. Snakes lie in wait, scorpions, spiders the size of omelets. Wild dogs howl behind banks of layered succulents, while vultures, bald-headed and black-winged, hunch in the trees like graverobbers at a concert. The road, if you can call it that, isn’t much more than a cowpath.

The rain, falling harder now, drills at them. When it first began, they were ecstatic. They cut capers and did cartwheels. They rolled in it, opened their mouths and shirts to it, clapped and hooted and danced like pardoned criminals. They slept in muck, woke laughing, rain in their faces, the sweet scent of it in the trees. When they slipped and fell on the rainslick road, they laughed. Suddenly the universe was benign. They were in love with it.

But that was five days ago. Enough is enough. The puddles are up to their knees in places. Mud sucks at their feet. Their chests are congested, noses running, ears plugged up. The mornings are blotted out by mist and fog, everything indistinct, dreamlike, the air dank and fetid. Great gray phantoms spring up before them and clatter off into nothingness — whinnying and squealing, hissing, roaring. The strain is beginning to tell on them. At one point, late in the afternoon, the explorer cannot summon the strength to go on. After struggling for half an hour to drag his horse through a ravine neck-deep in foaming yellow water, he throws himself down, exhausted, at the side of the road. The old man drops beside him, and Johnson, hawking up a ball of sputum, follows suit. Nag and ass collapse like paper bags.

“Much — farther?” Mungo chokes, his voice thick with catarrh.

Johnson spits again, then blows his nose in the soggy folds of his toga.

“Don’t ask me — I never been here before neither.”

The two turn to Eboe. He sits there, lined, sagging and naked, hunched like a gargoyle under a bush. The guinea hen, one of its wings lost to deterioration, still hangs from his neck, its feathers heavy with wet and maggots. ‘‘Woko baba das,’’ he croaks.

“Ten miles,” Johnson grunts. “Be there in the mornin’.“

♦ ♦ ♦

The morning comes like a slap in the face, harsh and brilliant. Johnson is already up, gathering berries and mushrooms, when the explorer suddenly jerks awake to a cloudless sky and the slow drift and wheel of a pair of kites. He is puzzled at first, disoriented, but then it hits him: today is the day! Instantly he’s on his feet, gathering up his things, swatting the horse’s flank with a stick, calling out to Johnson, shaking Eboe’s spindly shoulders. “Wake up, Eboe — time to hit the road!”

The old man, nestled beneath his bush, sleeps on. Deathly still. His mouth hangs open, the pink bud of his gums and palate an hors d’oeuvre for the huge green flies that hover round the putrefact chicken. A column of ants has been using his foot as a highway, mosquitoes tattoo his cheeks and eyelids. Looking down at him, so frail and motionless, his bones in stark relief against the yellow muck, a terrible realization comes over the explorer. Old Eboe, last of the Jarrans, is dead.

Mungo backs away, still crouching, and calls out to Johnson again — his voice pitched higher this time. Up the road, Johnson emerges from the bush, his jaws working, a pouch full of herbs, nuts, berries and fungi swinging at his waist. In his arms: half a dozen gnarled tubers. “It’s the old man,” shouts Mungo. “I think he’s had it.”

The tubers fall to the road with an obscene plop, and Johnson takes off at a trot, chest and belly heaving beneath the toga. He drops to his knees beside the old man, pressing his ear to the fissured chest. When he looks up, his expression is glum. “ ‘Fraid you’re right, Mr. Park,” he says. “You want to bury him or leave him for nature’s sanitation squad?”

The explorer is shocked. “Why — bury him of course.”

Johnson, still kneeling, squints up at him. “Goin’ to be a scorcher today. Humid. Ten miles up the road is that river you been pissin’ and moanin’ to get to. And a big town full of marvels and wonders, nubile women and alcoholic beverages. You sure?”

But the explorer hasn’t time to answer, as Johnson, reaching out to cut the dead bird from the old man’s neck, is arrested by a bony clasp. Slow as syrup, the old man’s lids pull back. He stretches, yawns, sits up. Then wags an admonishing finger at Johnson. “Eboe thinks we are friends,” he says. “Yet you try to steal his mojo-hen?”

Johnson backs off, his face slack. “But we thought—”

The old man is on his feet now, tottering slightly, a fly caught in the bubble of saliva on his lip. He staggers toward the guide, body quivering with rage or infirmity, his crabbed fingers picking at the leather thong until finally he grasps it and eases the bird up over his head. It dangles from his fingers, slack, drooling, coated with insects. “You want?” The old man’s Mandingo is thick as a sleeping potion.

“No!” pleads Johnson. “No!”

Then, suddenly, “with a motion so quick and smooth it defies the eye, Eboe loops the grisly thing through the air. A flutter of feathers, and it catches Johnson’s neck like a noose. FOOMP! The bird strikes his chest, and dangles. Maggots wriggle in the folds of his belly. Flies orbit his head. His face makes the Pietà look like a portrait of joy.

The explorer is mystified, mouth agape, witness to some primitive rite. “Johnson,” he says, astonished. “Cut it loose. Toss it in the bushes.”

Old Eboe is grinning ear to ear.

Johnson hangs his head. “I can’t,” he whispers.

♦ ♦ ♦

The mud crusts underfoot, remugient beasts stir up the undergrowth, Johnson attracts flies: greenflies, blowflies, blackflies, crutflies. The road has begun to widen now, and from time to time habitations can be seen crouching beneath trees or perching atop mounds of red clay. Outside the huts: bare-breasted women, men in baggy shorts, striped shirts and conical hats, apathetic dogs. The men suck on long-stemmed pipes, the women chew roots and spit from between blackened teeth. Palms wave overhead. Goats shuffle about in pens. The scent of urine curdles the air.

As they reach the crest of each hill the explorer darts on ahead, stretching his neck like a sightseer, unable to contain himself. He shouts and waves his hat against the horizon, gesturing frantically toward a white blur in the distance. “Is that it?” he calls, dancing in place. “Is that it?”

At the top of the eighteenth hill old Eboe pauses to sniff the breeze. Mungo catches his breath. There is certainly something out there, towers maybe, the sudden flash of a window catching the sun. The shrunken soothsayer stoops to pluck a round white stone from the mud. He rubs it briefly between his leathery fingers, then slips it into his mouth. The gerontic eyelids drop like curtains, the lips purse, sucking reflectively. Eternities pass, the world cranks round on its axis, constellations heave in the firmament. “Well?” Mungo demands. Eboe lifts his lids. Spits out the stone. The buzz of Johnson’s flies is loud as a drumroll. “Well?” Slow and deliberate, Eboe raises his arm, points a crooked finger. “Segu Korro,” he croaks.

For one brief fraction of a second the explorer stands transfixed, and then he’s off like a sprinter. Starvation, weakness, disease, nails pricking through the soles of his boots, the sun scorching the water from his eyes — none of it matters: his goal is in sight. His feet pound the yellow clay, erasing the footsteps of those who came before him, as Johnson, Eboe, nag and ass recede in the distance and the glorious golden walls of the city come into focus before him. Huts flash by, traffic on the road. Women balancing jugs, boys driving goats with long supple switches, laden asses, litters of produce, spangled birds in wicker cages. All a blur. He stops for no one, dashing through the massive gates now, shoving his way past astonished faces, down congested streets, alleyways, frantic for the river, feet pounding, stunned Bambarrans gathering at his back like children at a parade, dirt streets, a dead dog, hawkers and tradesmen, a flash of color and movement — and there, there it is! Wide across as the Thames, brown as a gutter, cluttered with rafts and dugouts, the shore a riot of splashing children, rooting pigs, washerwomen in white caps. He doesn’t turn at the roar behind him — doesn’t even notice — leaping crates and cages, bowling over children and old women, stiff-arming farmers and fishermen, a strange primordial squeal of triumph burning in his throat. The bamboo dock sways under his feet, a boatman ducks out of the way, flinching as if to ward off a blow, and the explorer is airborne. His legs and arms flail for a brief delicious instant, suspended there in all his glory, mindless as a hatter, shouting out some Greek exclamation until the dark steaming water envelops him like a mother’s embrace.

♦ HERODOTUS BE HANGED ♦

“What, Sir? You doubt Herodotus?”

“Herodotus be hanged. And Pliny along with him. How can you actually sit there and expect a rational being to accept all this folderol about tribes that squeal like bats and outrace horses? Or pygmies, leprechauns — whatever you call them — tripping about the jungle like nursery children in Mayfair? It’s myth I tell you. Folklore. Timbuctoo no more exists than the land of the Laestrygonians.”

Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, Treasurer and Director of the African Association for Promoting Exploration, sits at the head of the mahogany table in his library at No. 32, Soho Square. Before him, a glass of Madeira. It is July, the windows are open, moths bat about the lamps. On the back wall, Desceliers’ sixteenth-century map of Africa. Sir Joseph regards it glumly, barely attentive to the debate going on around him. A pretty piece of work, Desceliers’ map. Colorful. Imaginative. But it is of course nothing more than an outline, a perimeter pricked with place names — the vast uncharted interior artfully concealed behind a dribble of imaginary rivers and a host of mythical beasts, six-armed maidens and limbless Cyclopeans. Sir Joseph sighs, takes a lugubrious sip at his wine. Now, two centuries later, children of the Enlightenment, he and his colleagues know little more than Desceliers.

“You forget, my good fellow, that while Homer may have been enamored of Euterpe, Herodotus was an historian. His object was not to divert us with fictions, but to edify us with facts.” The Bishop of Llandaff, though a charter member of the Association, is tonight attending his second meeting since its inception eight years ago. He is chiefly remarkable for the salience of his cartilaginous features, and the coldness of his tiny, misaligned eyes (his family, the Rathbones, have been heralded since the fourteenth century for their sloping foreheads, majestic beaks and pale fleshy ears — beaks so majestic and ears so fleshy as almost to suggest the development of new species and keener functions). For the better part of an hour he has been defending the sacred and unshakable authority of the Ancients. Sir Reginald Durfeys, William Fordyce and Lord Twit, soured by their public school experience, have opposed him, while Edwards and Pultney have for the most part remained silent.

“And what is history, pray tell, if not a fiction?” Twit, known in the Lords for his reedy, lisping orations, pauses for effect. “You presume to call Herodotus’ suppositions fact? How were these ‘facts’ obtained? Thirdhand? Fifthhand? I ask you, Sir.”

Llandaffs ears are suffused with color. He begins to pull on his white calfskin gloves, thinks better of it, downs a glass of brandy instead. “You dare to impugn the Ancients? Why, our whole system of Modern Thought—”

Twit holds up his palm. “Excuse me. I haven’t finished. I mean to say that all our cherished histories — from those of the Greeks to that of our late departed colleague Mr. Gibbon — are at best a concoction of hearsay, thirdhand reports, purposeful distortions and outright fictions invented by the self-aggrandizing participants and their sympathizers. And as if that weren’t enough, this hodgepodge of misrepresentation and prevarication is then further distorted through the darkling lens of the historian himself.” Twit, lips painted and cheeks rouged, is in his glory — he revels in his reputation as iconoclast, intellectual outlaw and assailer of priggery. Twit the Wit, they call him. After a pause for the application of two pinches of snuff, he continues. “What happened at Culloden — do you know, Sir? And what then of Tangier and Timbuctoo? At least my own knowledge of the African continent is no worse than secondhand.”

Llandaff has been waiting for this. “Yes, Twit,” he grins, ever so slowly whitening his palm with salt from the shaker, “we’ve all had occasion to read of your rigorous excursions into the blacker holes of Africa — incidentally, how is the nigger slave getting on these days?”

Pultney sniggers.

“Hear, hear!” shouts Edwards. “A blow for the Ancients!”

“Gentlemen, please.” A bulky, florid form has risen at the far end of the table. Sir Reginald Durfeys, Bart., now on the threshold of his eighth decade, has yet to begin the long slide toward the grave that has crabbed and disfigured so many of his coevals. At sixty-eight, he is as pink and fat as a baby, ingenuous as a teenager. He gives to charity, loves a glass of port, takes his postprandial exercise on the boulevard each evening. He has never married. “While I cannot agree with our distinguished confrere that the Niger is merely imaginary,” he begins, the great silver bush of his head all but blotting Desceliers’ map from view, “neither can I accept with any sanguinity the Bishop’s asseverations that the information gathered by the Greeks is our most reliable. No. I feel we must look to our modern cartographers — to Major Rennell and D’anville.” He leans forward, pressing his fists to the table. “Gentlemen: it is my belief that the Niger flows eastward, toward the heart of the continent—”

“Oh piffle, Durfeys — it flows to the westward and disembogues along the Pepper Coast.”

“—flows eastward, I repeat, and feeds the great lake called Chad, where its waters are given to evaporation in the blistering temperatures of the mid-Sahara.”

“Come off it, old man,” Edwards interjects. “If it flows to the eastward, then Llandaff and Herodotus must be vindicated — what else could it then do but join with the Nile in the Nubian foothills?”

“Rubbish!” shouts Twit, his eyes watering from an excessive dose of snuff. “It’s all a fantasy, I tell you. A dream. No more substantial than Atlantis or the land of the sugarplum fairy.”

Durfeys, still standing, begins to stammer from confusion. “But, but gentlemen… I had it. . had it from Johnson—”

“Pfffff, Johnson.” Llandaff’s face is slashed by the line of his nose, cut in two like a halved apple; his ears look as if they’re about to flap up off his head. “Another voice of obfuscation from the Dark Continent. Triggerhappy and swell-headed. A black nigger cannibal in a two-guinea wig. Let’s all consult our charwomen and gardeners next time we need a cartographer.”

“Yes, Reginald — what of your precious Johnson?” says Edwards. “What’s he accomplished for us thus far — the loss of yet another explorer?”

At that moment Sir Joseph Banks clears his throat. Durfeys, reddening, sinks back into his seat. Six pairs of eyes fasten on the Director. “The term, Mr. Beaufoy, is ‘geographical missionary,’ and yes, I am chagrined to report that we must now begin to think of casting about for another man to undertake the illumination of the Niger region. There has been no word from the young Scot for nearly eight months now.” The Director stares down at his glass, running a thoughtful finger round its rim. “In point of fact, gentlemen, the indications are a good deal worse than you might imagine. I have before me a recent communication from our factor on the Gambia, Dr. Laidley.” Sir Joseph breaks off, and then slowly raises his head. His eyes are distant and unfocused, as if he were just then waking from a dream. On the far wall, dancing under the lamplight, Desceliers’ figures seem to swell and recede, twitching their multiple arms and headless shoulders, beckoning, teasing, mocking.

“Yes?” Llandaff prompts.

Sir Joseph snaps to attention, focuses on Durfeys. “It’s all up, I’m afraid. Park has fallen into the hands of the Moors.”

♦ LIKE A CLOUD SWALLOWING

A FLOCK OF IBIS ♦

As Johnson limps through the gates of Segu Korro, trailing flies, a nag and an ass, a walking stick in his hand and a revitalized Eboe at his side, he is astonished to find the streets all but deserted. Windows shuttered, stalls left unattended, pack animals — still laden with swollen guerbas and panniers of produce — calmly dipping their heads into baskets of onions, yams and cassavas. A smithy’s forge sputters and roars beneath a spreading fig, lumps of wet clay harden in the sun beside finished pots. Tools lie where they’ve been dropped, goats call out to be milked, a monitor lizard, staked out for sale, stubbornly thrashes round and round its cord. From somewhere, the smell of burning bread. Johnson feels uneasy. It’s strange, eerie: like something out of a fairy tale. Red Rose and Snow White. Sleeping Beauty. When he spots a pair of eyes glaring out from behind a bamboo screen, he turns to Eboe. “What you suppose is goin’ on here?”

The old man, buoyant and oblivious, is strutting along like a teenager on his way to a dance. He stops in his tracks. “Going on?” he says, slapping Johnson’s back and exploding in a burst of harsh wheezing giggles. “It’s a holiday, is what it is. Wine, women and song.”

Johnson merely stares.

“Can’t you feel it?”

“Feels more like a cholera epidemic to me.”

Eboe winks. “Follow me,” he says.

They turn down a street lined with tamarind and raffia palm. The houses, built of whitewashed clay, are almost picturesque. There are patches of vegetables, trellises, even a flower or two. No paradise on earth, perhaps, but pleasant — very pleasant — all the same. It occurs to Johnson that this is the biggest town he’s seen since leaving London. Pisania was a sink compared to it, and Dindikoo, for all its charm, is just a hamlet in the sticks. Suddenly he finds himself thinking of sooloo beer — and mutton.

Round the next corner they stumble over a drunk stretched out in the road. “Baaaa,” says the drunk. “Urp.” Johnson bends over him, the guinea hen describing a wide arc and coming to rest, at a dangle, just under the drunk’s chin. “What’s goin’ on here?” Johnson asks.

The man looks up at him, eyes red, lips slack. “Drunk,” he mutters.

“No. I mean in the town. What’s goin’ on in this place? Where is everybody?”

“White,” slurs the drunk. “White as. “ he chokes off to tap his sternum and spit in the dirt. “White as a salted ghost. White, white, white. Like a cloud swallowing a flock of ibis.”

Johnson has begun to get the idea. “Where is he?”

“White as cotton, white as day. White as fangs and bones and moonlight in a clearing.” The drunk is sitting up now, his voice a nursery-school rhyme, vapid, singsong, endless and repetitive.

Johnson staggers up, breathing hard. The explorer is an innocent, a holy fool. They’ll cook him alive, crucify him. He’s got to find him. “Eboe!” he shouts, whirling around. “We got to find Mr. Park.”

But Eboe is already half a block away, standing stock-still, nostrils flared, snuffing the breeze. Then all at once he’s grinning and stamping, waving his arms like a juggler with nine plates in the air. “This way,” he motions. “Hurry!”

Johnson tugs at the leather strap, and nag and ass mechanically plod off at his heels. “White as teeth!” the drunk shouts. “Whiter than a dead mud turtle!”

Eboe drifts like a somnambulist, following his nose. Two blocks to the left, then back to the right, through the abandoned marketplace, down a street shabby with garbage and yellowed reed huts that could pass for outhouses. There are rats and snails in the gutters, snakes in the eaves. “Eboe!” Johnson calls, struggling to catch up, but the old man hurries on as if he hasn’t heard. The ground is soggy underfoot, banks of bamboo rise from between the huts now, birds flit through the trees. Finally the old man stops across from a sprawling, ramshackle hut propped up on stilts. Johnson, bringing up the rear, can make out the dim form of three or four women in the deep shade beneath the house. He is puzzled. He’d been under the impression that Eboe, recognizing the emergency, had been leading him to the explorer. Now he sees that he’s been misled.

Meanwhile, Eboe stands there, gazing into the shadows: still snuffing. The women are large, middle-aged at best. Their dugs are pendulous, gravid, balloons filled with water. If they can boast twenty teeth between them, they’re lucky. “Eboe!” shouts Johnson, but the women are doing fascinating things beneath their skirts, then holding up their fingers and licking them. The old necromancer can stand it no longer. He cracks a withered grin, gives Johnson the thumbs-up sign, and saunters into the shadows.

Johnson is stunned. Disappointed. Disgusted. Envious. He wants a beer, a plate of meat and rice, a woman, a bed. Here he is, a man of dignity and education, well past the age of retirement, a man with wives and children and a happy home — and what does he do? Wanders all over the continent, risking life and limb to bail out some half-witted, glory-hungry son of a crofter. He heaves a great wet sigh of despair and resignation, and turns to mount the balky blue ass, trying his level best to ignore the big flat-faced woman who dances out into the street and lifts her skirt for him.

♦ ♦ ♦

Fifteen minutes later (after following his hunches first, and then, as he draws closer, his ears), Johnson finally manages to locate the explorer. Emerging from a maze of narrow earthen streets into a sort of square fronting the riverbank, he is all at once confronted with an extraordinary scene. People — packed in like bees in a hive — as far as the eye can see. There must be three or four thousand of them, hanging from windows, treetops, roofs, perched on shoulders, the backs of camels, straining on tiptoe. The banks of the river are black with them, scores in water up to their ankles, knees, necks, scores more bobbing in pirogues and coracles. All gathered to stand hushed and appalled while this impossible, inexplicable presence, this man in the moon fallen to earth, this white demon from hell chants, screeches, laughs, gibbers and sings, churning up the water, cursing the crops, bringing the sky down, and who knows what else.

Johnson, lost somewhere in the rear of the press, steadies the blue ass and gingerly raises himself atop the washboard of its back until he is able to stand erect. From his eminence he can see the woolly expanse of four thousand heads. Closer to the river (the Niger — how about that? he thinks), the heads are more congested, like thick stands of papyrus reed. Way up front, just off the lip of a rickety bamboo dock, Mungo Park is kicking up a froth and singing “God Save the King” at the top of his lungs. The Bambarrans seem mesmerized, stunned — as silent and sober as the awestruck crowds that slowly filed past the bier of George II.

But then, as is often the case in a world of action and reaction, things begin to lose their center. The explorer, totally oblivious to the audience gathered round him, suddenly slashes toward the dock in a moment of enthusiasm. His object is a yellow gourd attached to a fishing net; his intention, to set it adrift and thereby determine for the western world and all the generations of posterity the true direction of flow of the River Niger. Unfortunately, however, those Bambarrans closest to him misinterpret his motive and fall back with a shriek. In an instant the shriek is universal: the panic has begun.

Johnson is knocked from the ass and trampled. Lepers drop fingers and toes, the blind run into walls. There are shouts and curses, cries of pain and surprise, the drum of footsteps and the wail of lost children. The crowd surges against the mud-walled buildings like a river in flood, gushing through into streets and alleys, washing off with the undertow. Two minutes later the square is deserted, the banks empty, the river stripped of boats. All that remain are Johnson, a crumpled ass and nag, and the amphibious explorer. In the distance: the sound of hubbub and turmoil, voices raised, doors slammed.

Meanwhile, the yellow gourd has been drifting — inexorably and beyond a doubt — to the eastward. The explorer, momentarily distracted by the clamor of the Bambarran withdrawal, turns back to his experiment with a shout of exhilaration. “Pip!” he shouts. “Pip-pip!”

Johnson raises himself from the dust with a groan and wearily hobbles down the the water’s edge. “Mr. Park,” he calls. “Come on out of there and let’s pay our respects to Mansong the Potentate before he sends his army out after us.”

The explorer looks up, dripping, mats of algae caught in his beard and hair. The river parts round his waist, the current sluggish. He focuses on Johnson like a man waking from a deep sleep.

Straddling the dock now, arms akimbo, Johnson presents his case. “Look: if we get it together and offer him some gifts and trinkets and whatnot, he could just treat us like visitin’ dignitaries. And that means food and drink, a roof, maybe even some female companionship. I don’t know about you, but I’m damn sick and tired of sleepin’ on the ground, eatin’ thistles and makin’ love to my hand.”

The explorer sloshes toward him, his eyes gone buttery, arms outstretched in a wide, vacant embrace. “Johnson — we’ve done it! The Niger, Johnson.” He pauses to flail his arm in the direction of the far bank. “Look at it, will you? Wide across as the Thames at Westminster. And to think: through all the ages, from the time of Creation till this very minute, it’s tumbled along in ignorance and legend. It took me, old boy. It took me to uncover it.”

Johnson glances back over his shoulder at the ranks of whitewashed buildings clustered on the hillside, the bamboo docks ranged along the shoreline, the dugouts bobbing at their tethers. “I can appreciate that, Mr. Park, and I extend my sincere congratulations. But if we don’t get our asses over to the Mansa’s palace and start grovelin’ at his feet, we just might not live to tell about it.”

The sun beats at them like a fist, the baked earth of the square throws up a shimmer of heat, somewhere a dog whimpers. Everything seems to steam and stink. Malignant odors hang in the air, corrosive, thick with rot. They tell of fishheads, human waste, blackening leaves, muck. All at once the explorer begins to feel queasy. Overpowered, actually. Things are slowing down, anticlimactic, and his senses are gradually reawakening to the realities of hammering sun, putrid water, festering riverbank. He reaches for Johnson’s hand and pulls himself from the river.

“You’re right, Johnson. We can celebrate when we get back to Pisania. But for now we’ve got a job to do.” The explorer’s voice catches and stutters, his body seized with a sudden shiver. The blue velvet coat hangs limp, black and shapeless, duckweed spots his shirt, his boots are fishponds. A huge water strider, enmeshed in the tangle of his beard, waves its ungainly legs.

Behind him, the beaver top hat — stuffed with notes on manners and mores, distances, temperatures and topographic curiosities — perches on the edge of the dock like some strange fungal growth. High and dry. Johnson dusts it against his leg.

“Mansa’s palace?” suggests Mungo.

Johnson hands him the hat. “Mansa’s palace.”

♦ MANSONG ♦

The potentate of Bambarra, having just finished an enormous breakfast (baked plantain, four varieties of melon, boiled rice with spinach, fried cichlids, sorghum pudding, palm wine), is in the process of slaking his lust with the aid of two prepubescent boys singled out from among the Jarran refugees, when news of the explorer’s arrival reaches him. His initial reaction is a protracted belch. Naked, big-bellied, indolent, he is stretched out beneath the sycamore fig in the inner courtyard of his townhouse, still as a sunning crocodile. Sandalwood sweetens the air, caged birds warble of peace and solitude, the cool of the rain forest. The royal flyswatters, scrawny old men in loincloths, are busily at work, the soft swish-swish of their whisks like footsteps in a dream. Mansong sucks meditatively at the hookah, its bowl glowing with mutokuane[1] thinking “Ah, ah,” while his twenty grim and devoted bodyguards, each manipulating a long-stemmed fan, stir up a bit of a breeze. His senses reel. The younger of the boys is gently fellating him, while the other licks at his face, running a stiff probing tongue over his lips and nose and eyelids, as if he were lapping milk from a bowl. The whole thing is so blissful and sensual, such an orgasm of neuron and synapse — such a trip — that at first the runner’s words don’t register. Blanched demon? Cat’s eyes? Mass hysteria? But then, like pinpricks, the words begin to penetrate: outside the gate, white horror, begging admittance. This. Very. Minute.

Mansong jerks up, slapping the boys aside. “What?” he roars. The fans drop with a hiss as the bodyguards snatch up their spears, the birds fall silent, the royal swatters redouble their efforts. Mansong is up out of his hammock now, huge, terrible, champing his jaws like a river horse startled up from the muck. One bulbous fist is already closing round the messenger’s throat, the other poised to deliver a blow. “What are these lies?” he bellows.

“No lies — truth,” says the messenger, prostrating himself. “A demon, white as mother’s milk, burst through the gates of the city and threw himself into the river, curdling its waters. Then he hounded the people from the streets, chanting and jabbering in a harsh alien tongue. And now he has come to speak with you, Mansa.”

Mansong removes his foot from the back of the man’s neck. He suddenly looks as if he’s about to cry. “With me?” he whispers.

The prostrate messenger strains his eyes upward, as if consulting a note pinned to his forehead. “That’s what he says.”

“Jackal! You’re lying!” The foot comes down again, grinding the messenger’s cheek into the dirt. “You just got through telling me this demon speaks in a harsh alien tongue. How then can he ask to see me?”

The runner’s face is twisted out of proportion by the weight of Mansong’s foot, his lips puckered like the lips of a fish. “He speaks Mandingo.”

Mansong staggers back as if he’s been shot. Speaks Mandingo? It’s all up. They’ve sent a zombie from the nether world to take his throne. They’ll chain his ankles and lead him down through caverns in the earth, through the festering holes where the walking dead gibber and moan, down, ever deeper, to the world of shadows. He scans the faces of his bodyguards, men who could pull charging lions inside out, and sees terror in their eyes. He wants to run, hide himself, leave the country, burrow into the ground. “You say. . he’s out there. . now?”

“Yes, Mansa. Out there now.”

The potentate backs away, eyes rushing. The sun is gone, the fig tree, his guards — he can see nothing but the transparent figures of his victims, legions of them, disemboweled warriors, charred women, children holding out their severed limbs to him. “No!” he whispers, backpedaling still, his lips and tongue working, on the verge of crying out — shrieking till his throat goes raw, howling like the hidden hopeless things that die night after night in the black fastness of the jungle.

But at that moment a calm dignified little man steps into the courtyard, walking briskly. Businesslike, each step a minute lost, he strides up to the chief, a huge black object tucked under his arm. There is an air of expectancy about him, of intrigue, of upper-echelon wheelings and dealings. He could be a high-powered attorney, Secretary of Foreign Affairs, the Prime Minister. “Calm yourself, Mannie,” he says. “I’ll take charge here.”

His name is Wokoko, the tribal necromancer. He is dressed in a costume composed of the spare parts of a pack of hyenas — claws, teeth and matted yellow fur — and the feathers from a flock of marabous. The object under his arm is a carved wooden mask so relentlessly hideous in every detail as to put any ten demons in their place. With a snap of his fingers he orders half the guards to the front gate, then addresses the still-prostrate messenger. “Tell the demon,” he says, in his judicious tones, “that the omnipotent Mansong, throttler of the lion and tamer of the bull, cannot see him now. . he has a headache.”

♦ FIFTY THOUSAND COWRIES ♦

Mansong’s palace is a rambling, haphazard structure built of notched timber and the rocklike red clay from which termites construct their mounds. The flow of the building is interrupted by an involuted series of walled walkways and courtyards. Tapering palms sway over these courtyards like antennae, and the crown of a huge sycamore fig can be seen rising in canopy from the center of the compound. Each of the buildings and interior walls has been whitewashed with a mixture of bone powder, starch and water. Inadequate to the task, the wash has left the walls a soft pastel pink; in places the red glares through in streaks like clawmarks in the flank of a sacrificial cow. The whole is enclosed behind a ten-foot wall of clay and pointed stakes surmounted by blue-black thorns an inch in length. There is only one gate. The door is made of fasces of bamboo lashed tightly together. It is three feet thick.

Explorer and guide have been standing before this gate for nearly three hours. At periodic intervals Johnson cups his hands to his mouth and delivers a stentorian plea to the effect that he is but a humble Mandingo from Dindikoo who has brought with him a harmless white man (hon-kee) from beyond Bambouk, the Jallonka Wilderness and the great salt sea, and that this white man has come expressly to pay obeisance to Mansong, slayer of lions and throttler of bulls, whose fame has blossomed like the spreading lotus until it has come to incorporate the wide world.

Thus far there has been no response.

The heat of course is oppressive. Nag and ass lie in the shade of the wall, bundles of bone. The explorer has been alternately shivering and sweating, his nose is running and his joints feel as if spikes have been driven into them. Johnson bats at flies.

“Tell me, Johnson,” the explorer begins conversationally, squatting now in the dust, “why is it that you feel compelled to wear that damned bit of carrion round your neck?”

The guinea hen has by this time lost its head and the remaining wing. Ribs, stippled with bits of pink flesh and blue vein, have begun to emerge from the mat of feathers, and maggots foam from the body cavity like paste squeezed from a tube. It would be redundant to talk of flies.

“Convention,” says Johnson.

“Convention?”

Johnson sighs. “It’s no big deal. When the Jarrans heard that Tiggitty Sego was advancin’ on them they went to Eboe. As village necromancer it was his duty to appease Chakalla, god of violated taboos, by assumin’ all the sins of the townspeople in the hope that Chakalla would then turn back Sego’s army. So Eboe he mixes his potions and mutters his incantations until all the sins of the village are transferred to the guinea hen. From there it’s child’s play: bleed the hen and hang it round your neck until the flesh drops off. And voilà: Sego is stopped in his tracks.”

The explorer looks as if he’s just swallowed a fork. “But you’re joking.

You don’t mean to say you believe all that mumbo jumbo?”

“No more unreasonable than believin’ in virgin births or ladders to heaven.”

“You mean — you question the Bible?” Mungo is shocked to his roots. Lord, they’re savages, he’s thinking. Dress them up, educate them, do what you will. Their minds are in the jungle.

Johnson remains silent, arms folded, eyes fixed on the gate.

“All right. If it’s so bloody effective, all this damned guinea hen business, then what happened at Jarra?”

“See for yourself: the hen ain’t rotted yet. Eboe was too late, that’s all. Simple as that.” He grins. “You know the old saw: a stitch in time—”

Mungo waves the back of his hand at him. “Okay. I’ll grant it all — black magic and witchcraft and the whole works. But you still haven’t answered me: why should you have to go around wearing the bloody thing?”

Johnson’s face falls. He looks like a hound caught slipping a chop from the table. “Well, I figured — well, you know, we was starvin’—”

“You don’t mean—?”

Johnson nods. “I was goin’ to cook it up with the mushrooms and tomberong berries and all. Shit: I thought he was dead. What harm would it have done?”

“So now — you’ve got all those sins on your head?” Despite himself, somewhere deep in his superstitious soul, the explorer is beginning to feel the clutch of a nameless dread. Ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night.

“ ‘Cause I reached for it. Like a fool. And Eboe was just lyin’ there waitin’, holdin’ his breath — playin’ possum, the old artificer.” Johnson fiddles with his toga, sighs. “So now I’ve got to answer to Chakalla for every little broken taboo in the history of that godforsaken backwater hamlet. Every time a pregnant woman eats a egg or a boy copulates with a pangolin. Every time a young girl walks backward under a crescent moon, rubs her face with hoona sap or plucks her pubic hair with her right hand. And that’s just the start. Then there’s the bird taboos, the fecal taboos, the mandibular taboos. Did you know you’re not allowed to touch your chin with the index finger while sittin’ on the north side of a campfire?

“It all devolves on me now. Chakalla’s out to flay the sin out of my hide. If I can stay out of trouble till there’s nothin’ left of this damned bird but desiccated bone, I’ll live to dance on Eboe’s grave. If not — well, bury me deep.”

Their conversation is interrupted at this juncture by a shuffling sound on the far side of the gate. A moment later the gate cracks open and a servant pokes his head out. “Mansong can’t see you now. Come back next year.” And that’s that. The head disappears, the massive door begins to creak shut.

Mungo is dumbfounded, immobilized by surprise. But Johnson, always alert, springs forward and jams his foot in the door. “Look,” he says, fighting for ground, “we got to see the Mansa right away. This minute. It’s been a long, hard road and we figure we’re entitled to a little hospitality. Besides: we got presents for him.”

The servant’s head reappears. “Presents?” Lines break across his brow. “One minute, please,” he says before vanishing again. From behind the door, the sound of conferring voices. Minutes tick by. A pair of opalescent lizards chase one another up the wall. The explorer picks a bit of duckweed from his coat and looks forlornly at the sack of trade goods lashed to the nag’s concave back. “Lavish presents,” Johnson calls. “Exotic, magical things — fit for a god and a emperor.”

All at once the door swings back and the servant, shrunken with worry, gestures for them to enter. Guide and explorer step through the gate and into a walled courtyard bristling with armed guards. Giants, six and a half or seven feet tall, pectorals like iron, knives, spears, darts and arrows glinting out from the black shadows of their bodies. They wear loincloths of leopard skin, plumes and anklets of ostrich feathers. Any one of them could clear the floor of Parliament in thirty seconds flat.

But as the explorer brushes by, he notices that they avert their eyes and clutch at their saphies, thick lips moving as if in prayer. “Hot dog,” Johnson whispers, falling back on one of his arcane colonial expressions. “You’ve got them awestruck.”

Wringing his hands and tugging at lip and ear, the servant leads them through a succession of identical rooms, walkways and courtyards. The rooms are uniformly low of ceiling, decorated with a Persian rug or tapestry, reed mats on the floor, a tumble of earthenware pottery; the courtyards feature wispy palms, water troughs alive with weed and insect, caged birds, goats, chickens, lizards, dust. It seems as if they’ve been walking for miles. In and out of rooms, down pathways so narrow the explorer has to hug his shoulders. Through a courtyard with six palms, another with two. Eight chickens here, four there. Here a goat, there a cow. Finally, the servant, who has begun to quake like an epileptic at the onset of a seizure, motions for them to wait at the entrance of a long narrow walkway. They watch the pale flash of the soles of his feet as he hurries toward the point at which the walls seem to converge. They watch as he falls to his knees, presses his forehead to the earth. They hear themselves announced: white demon and black sorcerer.

The explorer stumbles twice and finds himself in an expansive courtyard, two or three times the size of the others. The whole is brooded over by an enormous snaking fig tree that casts a bit of shade in even the farthest corners. As he looks closer, the explorer is chilled to discover that the tree is festooned with human skulls, and a number of carved figures depicting unnatural acts: autofellatio, pederasty, the eating of excrement. The most arresting statue, its features greedily distorted, shows a pregnant woman with the multiple dugs of a dog either swallowing or regurgitating a serpent, which is in turn either swallowing or regurgitating the head of an infant.

At the base of the tree, obscured in deepest shadow, there is a sort of throne, rough-hewn wood with a glitter of paint. Beside the throne, a white dog lies asleep in a cloud of flies. When he turns to look behind him, the explorer sees that the narrow walkway is choked with armed guards, black giants identical to those who barred the front gate. He begins to feel somewhat ill at ease.

Suddenly a masked figure springs out from behind the tree with a primordial shriek. “Wo-ya-ya-yaaa!” the figure screams, pounding bare feet in the dust and brandishing a scepter topped with a polished skull. Mungo, taken by surprise, steps back a pace or two and finds himself standing in a low trough filled with a dark, nasty-looking liquid. There are splashes of it on his boots and the legs of his pants. Wet and red. Bloody red. And now suddenly the dog is on its feet, howling, yabbering, foam on its muzzle. “Wo-ya-ya-ya-yeee!” the masked man thunders, apocalyptic, whirling toward him in a blur of feather and bone, and now all at once the sound of drumming, doom-baba-doom, doom-baba-doom, and the guards taking up the refrain: “ya-ya, ya-ya, YEEE!” The explorer is stricken, paralyzed, his legs and feet encased in lead, inner voices screaming for self-preservation, exhorting him to run, flee, bolt, scratch, bite, kill.

But then a familiar hand closes round his elbow. “Stay cool,” Johnson whispers. “They’re terrified of you.”

Terrified? he thinks. Of me? Yet already the din has begun to subside, the guards chanting under their breath, the dog easing back on its haunches, the drumming a whisper. The masked man, swathed in fur and feather, settles into the throne and with a wave of the scepter commands silence. The explorer takes advantage of the lull to step from the trough, and Johnson, bowing low to the ground, approaches the man in the mask and spreads the gifts before him. Sunlight dapples the dust beneath the tree. The gifts, chosen in London by Sir Joseph Banks and calculated to win the savage heart, glow like the treasury of the gods. An appreciative gasp escapes one of the guards, but the man in the mask remains impassive, arms folded across his chest.

Johnson bows again, and then launches his presentation speech. “O Mansong, terror of mountain and plain, widowmaker, grappler with spirits and demiurges, vanquisher of eland and elephant, I present these strange and wonderful gifts to you in the name of my liege and protector, this mild, inoffensive and saintly white man, who has traveled immeasurable distances in order to prostrate himself before your eminence.” At the word “prostrate,” Johnson turns to the explorer and indicates the ground. Mungo falls to his knees, then stretches himself prone in the dust.

While lying there, nose to the ground, he becomes aware of an intermittent movement in the farthest recess of the courtyard. He concentrates on the movement, a blur of shuffling feet, and from the corner of his eye observes this: a screen of woven grass, black feet, fleshy toes wriggling beneath it. And there: the servant, looking harried, ducking behind the screen and then jerking back again, as if his head were on a string. He seems to be conferring with someone, a hidden presence, the articulator of those curled and bloated toes. Here’s another mystery, thinks Mungo, slightly feverish, somewhat fearful, totally lost in reverie. But then he becomes aware of Johnson’s voice, in English now, floating above him like a nest of hornets. “Okay,” a sting in the tone. “Okay, already. Get up.”

The explorer rises, dusting at his clothes. He adjusts his tattered collar, fingercombs his beard and slicks back his eyebrows with spittle. But then he realizes that no one is paying the slightest bit of attention to him — all eyes are fixed on a new cynosure: the presents. The servant is hunched over them now, reverentially handing piece by precious piece to the masked man for his examination. First the silver salver. Then the table service for ten, a pair of ivory cufflinks. An umbrella. Ten plugs of tobacco and a jar of orange marmalade. A dozen inkwells, a corset, a wig. And finally, the pièce de résistance: a miniature of King George.

So taken is the presumptive monarch by the glitter and novelty of these gifts that he lets his defenses down: in a single fluid motion he slips the mask up over his head in order to enjoy a better perspective of them. The explorer is stunned. He’d expected a monster, but this fellow, with his quick sharp eyes and sleek little bulb of a head, is more like a ferret, a chicken thief, a sneaky skulking thing of tall grass and shadows. As the little man gingerly bites down on the silver salver, Mungo can’t help wondering about Eboe’s description of Mansong as a brute of a man with chins and bellies and a head like a melon. Could this fellow be an imposter?

It is then that the explorer becomes aware of the traffic between the throne and the screen in the corner. The original servant, abetted now by a smaller, shrunken, and if possible even more tentative colleague, is scurrying between throne and screen with the treasures. For the explorer, it is an epiphany. “Johnson,” he whispers. “You see that screen back there?”

“Shhhh.” Johnson looks edgy. “Don’t pay it no mind,” he hisses. “And whatever you do, don’t stare at it. Don’t even glance at it. That screen don’t exist. Get me?”

At that moment the second servant, a youngish man with a face as puckered and wrinkled as the foreleg of an iguana, sidles up to the explorer. Clenched in his hand, the umbrella. Shrinking back, he holds it out to Mungo at arm’s length. Then says something in Mandingo that sounds like “rub-a-dub-dub.” Mungo stares at him, blank.

“They want you to open the thing up for them,” Johnson prompts.

The umbrella is pink and nacreous, like the stuff of ladies’ underwear. An artist has rendered the Tower of London, in red and black, across the top. The explorer releases the catch, and unfurls the parasol with a flourish. This, he realizes too late, is a mistake. At the first rustle of silk, the servant backs off with a gasp; when the umbrella bursts into flower, pandemonium erupts. The guards drop their spears and bolt for the exit, the presumptive monarch grabs frantically for the mask and the white dog lunges for the explorer, while perhaps worst of all, there is a stricken cry from the corner as the screen topples with a rush of air. Behind the screen, now exposed for all to see, is a titanic bull of a man seated in the lotus position, his stomach like a medicine ball, broad skull bowed as he scribbles furiously in the dirt. Though the explorer has no way of realizing it, the big man’s scribbling represents the frantic geometry of voodoo — vectors and tangents, catenaries and triangles — charms to ward off evil. The potentate is terrified.

In the confusion, the explorer collapses the umbrella, more as a means of defending himself from the dog than as a gesture of conciliation. The effect is immediate and tranquilizing: the guards pause, elbow one another, grin sheepishly; the imposter calls off the dog with a single harsh command; the servants hurriedly reerect the fallen screen. Johnson has all the while been chattering away in Mandingo, too fast for the explorer’s grasp, but in a tone that seems reassuring, jocular even. Now he puts together a string of six or seven phrases, the whole thing timed as if leading up to a punchline. He breaks off with a hearty laugh, then nudges the explorer. “Heh-heh,” Mungo says.

The imposter, mask in hand, ducks his head twice and shows his teeth in a weird, strained facial expression partway between grimace and grin. He looks as if he’s just been punched in the bladder after watching a hundred fat women slip on banana peels. After donning the mask once again, he commands the servant to bring him the parasol. The servant handles it as if it were a sleeping cobra.

Five minutes later, the masked man is busily engaged in dipping his finger into the marmalade and emitting short cries of epicurean delight as he licks the goo from his fingertip, while from behind the screen can be heard the soft rustle of silk. From time to time the pink flash of the parasol shows itself coquettishly over the top of the screen. The dog is asleep, its muzzle buried in the portrait of King George, as if in olfactory contemplation of that great and distant monarch.

Finally, after a lengthy conference with the man behind the screen, the imposter steps forward and begins a rambling acceptance speech. The voice emanating from behind the mask is crisp and animated, but for all that the explorer finds the dialect difficult to follow. At first he makes a concerted effort at interpretation, pinning the words down one by one, translating them in his head, coming to understand that his homage has been accepted by the gracious and puissant Mansong, Mansa of Waboo, M’butta-butta, Wonda, and about two hundred other places. But he soon begins to develop a migraine from the sheer force of concentration all this requires, and after awhile simply assumes an interested expression and lets his mind wander. Ten minutes into the speech he is distracted from his mental peregrinations by a series of odd, muffled sounds which seem to be coming from the adjoining courtyard. Sounds of a scuffle perhaps, stifled cries, a sussurus that recalls a barnyard in Selkirk and the butchering of chickens for the pot. He taps Johnson’s shoulder. “What’s going on next door?“

Johnson’s eyes are pinned deep in their sockets. “Better you don’t know.”

“—the magnanimous Mansong—” drones the man in the mask.

“Tell me. That’s an order.”

“Well, they’re impressed.” Johnson glances up quickly, then looks down at his feet. The masked man drones on. “Mansong is disembowelin’ thirty-seven slaves in your honor.”

“Mother of God.” Nothing could prepare him for this. Nothing. He grits his teeth and tries to think of Scotland, of barbered hills, open white faces, safety and sanity. But there’s no time to think, the worry-worn servant at his elbow, holding out some sort of sack and a cup of dark liquid, wine or beer — and what do they want with him now?

“Take it,” Johnson hisses.

Shaken, the explorer reaches out for sack and cup.

“Fifty thousand cowrie shells,” Johnson whispers. “That’s enough cash to support a village like Dindikoo for the next ten years. Smile, you fool.

Nod and grin. That’s it.” Johnson is rubbing his hands together like a shopkeeper sitting down to his evening meal. “Now we can buy bed and board in any village up and down the river. Women. Beer. Meat. No more sleepin’ in the bushes.”

“But. . those damned bloody heathen aborigines are taking thirty-seven lives right under our noses — in our honor nonetheless. Thirty-seven rational beings. . Take the money and we condone it.”

“Hey, Mr. Park. This is no time to get sanctimonious. So long as we don’t wind up as number thirty-eight and thirty-nine I figure we’re doin’ just fine.”

The masked man seems to be winding down now, his phrases growing long and languorous; the explorer, shuddering at each gag and wheeze from the adjoining courtyard, picks up random phrases: “prosperous journey,” “too bad you can’t stay longer,” “riches untold — downriver.” Finally the little man throws off the mask. There is a cup in his hand. He raises it, as if saluting the explorer.

Mungo stares numbly at his own hand. He is almost surprised to see that he is holding an identical cup. “Raise the cup,” Johnson coaches. There is a burbling sound from beyond the wall, a flatulent groan, as if the air had been forced from a mammoth bellows. “Drink!”

The explorer raises his cup as if toasting the little man in hyena skins. He puts it to his lips, the smell of it firing his nostrils, gamey, somehow reminiscent of moor and wood, out shooting with his father, the taste of it now, warm and faintly salt, roast beef, liver and duck: he doesn’t think, doesn’t want to think. Just drains the cup and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

♦ DIMINISHING RETURNS ♦

Ailie Anderson lifts the teacup to her lips, vapor rising, the dark earthy aroma of pot-brewed coffee firing her nostrils. Like steamed acorns, she thinks, sipping. Or a good black stout. Some of the church elders have gotten up tracts against coffee, tracts that show how it leads to moral decay while it upsets the body’s equilibrium and tampers with the Lord’s design for the regulation of appetite, but she doesn’t pay them much mind. She likes her cup of a crisp morning. Likes the smell and the bitterness and the lift it gives her.

Gleg and her father, traditionalists, take tea with their bannocks and brose. The two of them are strangely silent this morning, as if they’ve been conspiring — they sit there, slumped over their saucers, champing at their oatcakes like horses in a stable. The resulting lipsmack, and the ring of a spoon in a cup, are the only sounds. Zander’s place is empty. He was up before sunrise, restless, out wandering the hills somewhere.

Gleg, as usual, had showered her with “good mornings” and semilascivious compliments on the fit of her dress, the color in her cheeks, the trim of her waist. But now, sleep in his eye, he’s settled down to the steady, serious business of cramming his maw. Her father, shaggy and unkempt, has emitted six syllables since taking his place at the table: “The bannocks is burnt, lass.” His head is bent to fork and plate in a way that strikes her as common, inappropriate to his station. A streak of scalp shows naked and pink through the white mass of his hair.

Yes, the bannocks are burned. She’ll be the first to admit it. She was distracted — and it’s his fault really. Two months back, when the sun was strewing wildflowers over the hills, he’d brought her back a present from Edinburgh. Something to amuse her, take her mind off the deeps of Africa and the tedious progression of days and weeks and months. He slipped through the front door, a smirk on his face, his right hand buried deep in the pocket of his greatcoat. She was a child again, his little girl. What is it, tell me?

It was a microscope. Wooden stand, brass cylinder, glass lens. Nothing to wear, nothing to eat. He hadn’t brought her a scarf, or a pendant, or a box of pralines. No news of fashions, no perfumes, not even a copy of The Lady’s Magazine or The Monthly Review. A microscope. She couldn’t hide her disappointment.

It sat in the front vestibule for two weeks. Gleg simpered after her, while her father seemed to encourage him. Her closest friend, Katlin Gibbie, married and moved to an outlying farm, and Zander became increasingly withdrawn, absorbed in his own problems. There had been no news of Mungo. She was bored. One afternoon she magnified a piece of newsprint and was astonished to see that each letter was composed of myriad black specks. A bit of thread was a boatman’s cable, the dog’s hair a thicket, a flea a monster. She ransacked the house, exploring everything she could lay her hands on — the weave of her skirts, the topography of a piece of rag paper, the impossible, delicate tension that held a drop of milk in suspension. Then she turned to the yard. Leaves, bark, the petals of roses, insects. She marveled at the grid of a fly’s wing, the downy froth that beads a moth’s antennae, the cruel cusp of an ant’s mandible. She tore spider webs from the eaves, plucked feathers from her doves. One morning she took a dace from the aquarium and pinned it down to examine the fine mesh of its scales, overlapping like waves on a beach. She was enthralled. The void Mungo had left began to diminish as the objects of her scrutiny grew beneath the lens. There was a center to her days. She watched it expand.

Her sketches, charcoal and ink, banished the walls. Here the veins of a leaf, there the whorls of a fingerprint. An eyelash like a spar, the minatory serrations of a beetle’s leg. She found a copy of Hooke’s Micrographia in her father’s library and devoured it as if it were a three-volume novel. Hooke had magnified a bit of cork and discovered its hidden superstructure: it was composed of tiny interlocking units, cubicles invisible to the eye, unsuspected by the imagination. Cells, he called them, because they reminded him of the compartments in a monastery. Ailie took the stopper from a bottle of port, sliced a wafer-thin shaving from it with her father’s razor, and screwed it into focus. She saw nothing but pits and fissures. That night she went to bed deflated, dreaming of worlds beyond the scope of the eye, beyond the scope of screwbarrel and lens, worlds ever smaller, worlds within worlds within worlds.

Then she discovered van Leeuwenhoek.

She came across a reference to his work in one of her father’s medical journals. Nearly a hundred years earlier, with the aid of the extraordinarily powerful lenses he ground himself, Leeuwenhoek had debunked the Aristotelian notion of spontaneous generation. He described the life cycles of the flea and the grain weevil, asserting that they arose from fertilized eggs rather than sand or grain itself, as had been previously supposed. As Francesco Redi had connected the growth of maggots and the eggs of houseflies, so Leeuwenhoek demonstrated that even the lowliest creatures, hardly visible to the naked eye themselves, similarly arose from creatures that had preceded them. For Ailie, who had labored for days making crude sketches of the fleas she plucked from beneath her dog’s collar, it was a revelation.

Her father’s library was spotty, but his old friend and colleague, Dr. Donald Dinwoodie of Kelso, had a complete set of the Royal Society’s Philsophical Transactions, to which Leeuwenhoek had contributed for the last fifty years of his life. Ailie packed her microscope and sketchpads, saddled the mare and rode the thirty miles to Kelso. She boarded with Dinwoodie for a month, poring over his books. Leeuwenhoek, she discovered, had seen “animalcules” teeming in a drop of water, the trembling globular components of human blood, the thrashing swarm of spermatozoa in the semen of insects, cattle and men. Worlds within worlds. Quaking with excitement, she went to the rain barrel, removed a vial of water and examined a drop of it beneath her lens. She saw nothing. Her simple apparatus didn’t have the power. She pricked her finger and scrutinized a drop of blood. Again, nothing. For the semen, she thought, she would wait for Mungo.

Back at Selkirk, she continued her studies, but her enthusiasm was waning. What was the sense? No one knew Leeuwenhoek’s secrets — how he had managed to grind lenses that magnified an object from fifty to three hundred times its actual size, or how he had enhanced that magnification with mirrors and lights to attain an even greater amplification. Her screwbarrel scope was a toy. She was disgusted. But then, one morning, Gleg had sidled into the kitchen, grinning like a frog, hands hidden behind his back. “I missed you,” he said, lingering over the syllables as if each were a slice of toast to be buttered. “My heart bled each morn at your absence, and swounded each even when the sun set without you.”

She was kneading dough. She glanced up at him and was startled at the expression on his face. His head was bobbing, his ears wagging, while his impossible slippery grin hoisted his cheeks, dropped his nose and exposed his yellowed teeth like a row of tombstones. Suddenly it hit her: he was having an attack. She started up from her stool, hands white with flour: “Georgie — are you all right?”

He stood there, beaming, stuffed to bursting with the news and the rustle of paper behind his back. “Here,” he said, producing a package wrapped in brown paper, “for you. With all my love and esteem.”

She wiped her hands on her apron, grinning despite herself, and reached out for the package. “For me?” she said, tearing at the paper. She caught her breath. It was a book, leather cover, gilt lettering. Essays on the Microscope by George Adams the Younger, 1787. The latest word on microscopy. She threw her arms out for pure joy — but Gleg held up his lank palm.

Grinning still, trembling, bursting, an otter with a fish in his mouth, he produced a second package from behind his back. She tore off the paper.

A wooden box. Heavy. She took it to the counter and pried it open with a kitchen knife — the gleam of metal — could it be?

It was a new W. & S. Jones microscope, three times as powerful as her screwbarrel. “But Georgie, how—?”

“My aunt,” he said. “Auntie MacKinnon. She’s dead of the dropsy and left me a modest inheritance. Or rather,” his face was flushed, “left it to you — to do with as you wish. All I have is yours.”

Drums, there were drums beating in her chest. She spun round the room, skipping, then took hold of his frayed flapping sleeves and kissed him.

♦ ♦ ♦

And so, the bannocks are burned. It’s the fault of both of them really. She’d been up at first light, peering into the gilded aperture, overseeing a ballet of animalcules, hundreds to the head of a pin, whirling things, translucent, their edges furred with the shades of chromatic distortion. There were cylindrical things, and oblong things that propelled themselves with hairs or tails, things that joined and split and joined again. And then there were the amorphous things, looking as if they’d been dropped from a height, their boundaries crenellated, a great dark spot hovering over them like the yolk of a frying egg. How could they expect her to think of oatcakes and milk brose when she was lambent with the thrill of discovery?

Even now, at the breakfast table, Gleg patting his lips with the napkin and throwing her lovelorn glances, her father belching over his tea, she can’t put down her dog-eared copy of the Adams book. She wants one thing only: for them to get up and go off to their doctoring so she can be at peace with her sketchpads and her tools of surveillance.

Her father clears his throat, pushes his chair back from the table.

“Gleg,” he mutters, his voice thick with catarrh, “get out and harness the horses, will ye? We’ve got a call to make out Fowlshiels way.”

Gleg stands, awkward, his knee cracking the table like a hammerblow, then shuffles out the door.

There is sun now, tapering blades stabbing in over the curtains, setting the old man’s head afire. He sips at his tea, noisily. Then clears his throat again, a sound like the dredging of rivers. “I see Katlin Gibbie’s got herself nuptialed, eh?”

Ailie looks up from her book. “That’s right, father. It wasn’t two weeks ago that you yourself washed the bride’s feet, broke bannocks over her head, finished off a jug of whisky and danced a Highland reel atop her dining table singing ‘Hey tuttie taitie’ at the top of your lungs — if I’m not mistaken.”

The old man is grinning — gentle, paternal and boyish all at once. “I seem to recall something of the like.”

“So why do you ask?”

“Well —” he scratches at the bristle under his chin, locks his fingers and stretches, then looks her dead in the eye. “She was sixteen, wasn’t she?”

Ailie nods.

“You’re no gettin’ any younger, lass.”

“I know it, father.”

“There’s a young mon round here that dotes on every breath that passes your lips.”

She looks away, closes her book and lays it on the sideboard. When she turns back to him he’s still staring at her, sage and slow, patient and persuasive. Her voice catches in her throat. “I know it, father.”

♦ FROM THE EXPLORER’S NOTEBOOK ♦

Immediately following the discovery of this storied and magnificent river, which is to my way of thinking in all respects superior to the Thames or even the Rhine, my factotum and I made our way to the palace of the local sovereign, Mansong of Bambarra. There we were greeted with a warmth and civility that made our hearts glad after grappling so long with inanition and the merciless depredations of the desert Moor. Though Mansong kept no lions on gilded chains, nor were his streets paved with that precious metal, his rooms and grounds were nonetheless the very picture of opulence. There were open courtyards in the Iberian style, flowing fountains and exotic gardens laden with every sort of fruit and bud imaginable. We were led through a succession of these courtyards to the inner sanctum itself, where Mansong awaited us.

The potentate was a big-boned man of cheerful countenance, seated on a golden throne and surrounded by his fierce elite guard, savages built like racehorses and standing six and a half or seven feet from the ground. I made my obeisance, and then presented him with the gifts I had carried with me from England. Of these, he seemed most taken with the portrait of his counterpart on the far side of the world, our own son of Hanover, His Majesty King George III. He sat and contemplated the face and figure of that august monarch for some time, his own features glowing with the incandescence of enlightenment.

After thanking me profusely, Mansong made me a munificent present in return, with his heartfelt hope that it would aid me in the pursuit of my quest for knowledge. He rose heavily from his throne, embraced me like a lost son, and handed me a leather sack filled to bursting with cowrie shells — over fifty thousand in all. Imagine my gratitude at so selfless a gesture on the part of this rude but true prince of the jungle, who had just given over a small fortune to me — a fortune that would allow me to pursue my journey upriver to Timbuctoo, and from thence to the termination of the mighty Niger itself!

Though he urged us to stay, offering up the most princely accommodations and a feast of loaves, viands and local delicacies his servants had prepared in anticipation of our coming, we were anxious to press on, and left that very night, after sharing a firm handclasp and a ceremonial drink.

♦ ALL THE KING’S MEN ♦

“But this is the purest of bullshit,” says Johnson, handing the slip of paper back to the explorer. “A distortion and a lie. About the only thing that’s accurate is the seven-foot guards. And the cash.”

Mungo rides on in silence, something like a superior smirk tugging at his lip. He and Johnson have just passed the last sagging hut along the road out of Segu. They are headed for Kabba, four miles downriver, where they plan to purchase food and lodging for the night, and from there to make their way to Sansanding, a Moorish trading town on the road to Timbuctoo.

The immensity of the forest broods over them, dense and thick-ribbed, close as a glove. Colossal dripping leaves hang out over the path like greatcoats draped over sticks, there is a stench of decay, of muck, of slow heat and decomposition. Hidden things rush off in the vegetation as they approach. A hyrax screeches from its perch, leopards cough. It has begun to get dark.

The explorer twists in his saddle to look back at Johnson. “Exactly,” he says, folding up the scrap of paper and working it under his hatband. “Can you imagine how unutterably dull it would be if I stuck strictly to bald bare facts — without a hint of embellishment? The good citizens of London and Edinburgh don’t want to read about misery and wretchedness and thirty-seven slaves disemboweled, old boy — their lives are grim enough as it is. No, they want a little glamor, a touch of the exotic and the out-of-the-way. And what’s the harm of giving it to them?”

Johnson weaves along on his ass, parting leaf and stem like a swimmer parting the waves. He is shaking his head. “But you’re suppose to be an explorer. The first white man to come in here and tell it like it is. A myth-breaker, iconoclast, recorder of reality. If you ain’t absolutely rigorous, down to the tiniest detail, you’re a sham, and I’m sorry to say it.” Johnson’s voice is raised. He swats angrily at the festering guinea hen, and a bit of it drops to the path beside him. “A sham,” he repeats. “No better than Herodotus or Desceliers or any of them other armchair heroes that charted out the interior of Africa from behind the four walls of their book-lined studies.”

“Now Johnson, you’re not being fair at all. I’m giving them facts — of course. About the geography, the culture, the flora and fauna. Of course I am. That’s what I’m here for. But to stick to facts and nothing but — why the English reading public wouldn’t stand for it. They can read Hansard if they want facts. Or the Times obituaries. When they read about Africa they want adventure, they want amaze. They want stories like Bruce and Jobson gave them. And that’s what I intend to give them. Stories.”

“All right, look Mr. Park: sorry I mentioned it. Actually, it’s no skin off my ass what you do with your book. No chance I’ll ever see it anyway. All I care about right now is that we’re ploddin’ along here jawin’ away while the sun is sinkin’ into the trees and there sure as hell ain’t no place to spend all them cowries out here in the bush — so maybe we ought to concentrate on the road and gettin’ to the next town up the line, huh?”

“No need to get huffy about it. Just thought you’d like to see what I’d been scratching away at the last mile or so, that’s all.”

After this exchange, a raw nagging silence sets in, full of bitter sniffing and aggressive flyswatting, as the two jostle along the weed-choked path in growing darkness. Soon a dreary insistent rain begins to fall, as if the hunger, discomfort and general irritation weren’t enough. They plod on, the silence rankling. Trees drift by, trees upon trees, as they work their way deeper into the green maw of the forest. Up ahead a towering vine-draped ciboa looms in the mist, and the explorer is just about to suggest that they take shelter beneath it when suddenly a violent blow catches him under the chin and he is catapulted from his horse into a sodden welter of leaves.

He lies there a moment, taking stock of the situation, while predatory insects scoot up his pantleg and down his collar. Then he hears Johnson’s cry. It begins as a screech that could curdle milk, modulates down through six or eight octaves and ends in an abrupt gasp. At this point, the explorer is not overly anxious to discover what it was that hit him, but he stands up anyway, fumbling in a vague way for the knife he sometimes keeps at his belt. What he sees is this: a clutch of six-and-a-half or seven-foot giants pounding away at Johnson’s inert form with cudgels the size of railway ties, while another of their party drops the nag with a single bone-crunching blow. There is a surprised, interrogatory whinny, and then the thundering crash of the animal’s fall.

Then one of the cudgel wielders suddenly looks up, points a finger at the explorer and shouts: ‘‘Tobaubo!” At this, the man who’d dispatched the horse starts up violently from the carcass (where he’d been plundering the saddlebags). Mungo is no more than ten feet from him. He can see the sweat on the man’s upper lip, the points of his filed teeth, the black leather sack of cowries clenched in his fist. Almost as a reflex the explorer draws his knife, and the man is on him like a great leaping mastiff, a blow to the solar plexus, another to the crotch and then a stunning crack just beneath the left ear, and now there are hands under his armpits, on his boots, hands tugging at the buttons of his trousers. .

♦ ♦ ♦

It is dark and still. Rain sifts through the trees with a whisper. The horse is dead, the ass gone. There is no sound from Johnson. Mungo is lying supine in the ooze of the forest floor, naked as the day he was born, broken it seems in any number of places, and feeling very weary indeed. Very weary of exploring, very weary of Africa. And very weary of being alone here in the dark, defenseless and afraid. He props himself on his elbows, wincing with the effort, and looks around. Nothing. The dark is so absolute and impenetrable it’s as if the earth has been turned inside out. But what was that? A movement in the bush, a rustle of leaves. “Johnson?”

No answer.

He tries again. “Johnson — is that you?”

This time he gets a response, but not what he’d hoped for. A snarl, low and ominous, punctuates the night. A snarl as savage and arbitrary as the forest itself, rasping and harsh as the birth of evil.

♦ FANNY BRUNCH ♦

One grim afternoon, as the rain slashed across the panes at No. 32, Soho Square, and Sir Joseph Banks, his spine still leaping from the thrashing he’d taken at the Swedish baths, wearily ascended the front steps, the upper house parlormaid — a thick-ankled old bird of a woman who had been in his employ for twenty-seven years — succumbed to a swift and sudden attack of brain fever. She was serving tea to Lady Banks and Miss Sarah Sophia in the drawing room. The tea had been brewed in a silver pot, which rested on a silver salver. The cups and saucers were of Sèvres china. As poor Betty Smoot bent over her mistress with the teapot, she suddenly jerked up as if she’d been bitten in the rear, sang two verses of a filthy drinking song at the top of her lungs, and keeled over dead.

Two days later Lady Banks was well enough to discuss the situation with her husband. “Jos,” she said, “what we need is a new upper house parlormaid.”

Sir Joseph was scanning the newspaper for word of the Portuguese expedition in the Bight of Benin.

“Cook has a cousin in Hertfordshire. Or a sister or something. They’ve got a girl there who’s anxious for a place. I believe she’s Cook’s cousin’s daughter. Or sister’s. Well, she’s young. Seventeen. But as I said to Cook, a little youth wouldn’t hurt around here.“

Sir Joseph glanced up. “The girl’s name?”

“Brunch,” said Lady B. “Fanny Brunch.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Fanny Brunch was fresh from the creamery. Her breath was hot with the smell of milk, and it whispered of cribs and nipples and the darkness of the womb. Her skin was cream, her breasts cheeses, there was butter in her smile. When she was fifteen two country louts hacked one another to death over her. With hoes. The following year the local squire abducted her and bound her to his bed. They found him in his nightshirt, the bed a sea of feathers, red welts stippling Fanny’s buttocks. It was then that her parents, hardworking paupers who believed in the goodness of man and the kingdom of God on earth, decided that she should be put into service for her own protection. The death of Betty Smoot was a godsend.

Fanny was good-natured and ingenuous. She grinned like wheatfields in the sun, stole round the house on soft celestial feet. Lady Banks, after twenty-seven years of Smoot, called her a breath of springtime. Sir Joseph, occupied as he was with the African Association and the latest of his vanished explorers, hardly noticed her. Which was just as well — the last thing she needed was to have to do battle with an old satyr in his lair. Cook worshipped her. The butler, Byron Bount, tried to lick her forearm one afternoon when she had her sleeves rolled up, but Cook cured him by saltpetering his fried tomatoes. There was one unfortunate incident: a houseguest of the Banks’, a melancholy young poet with black circles round his eyes, threw himself from the third-story window for love of her. He broke nine ribs, both legs and lost an ear. But aside from that, things had been quiet, and Fanny Brunch was well on her way to becoming an institution at No. 32, Soho Square.

Then she met Ned Rise.

♦ THE SEVEN CITIES OF GOLD ♦

It was fated. Or so she thought looking back on it. How else explain the combination of circumstances that found her strolling up Soho Square on the very June afternoon that Ned Rise was peddling his caviar? As it happened, Sir Joseph was expecting a luncheon visit from one of his African associates, Sir Reginald Durfeys. On his previous visit to No. 32, Soho Square, Durfeys had been so taken with Fanny that he’d torn her dress in three places, destroyed a pair of Ming vases and suffered a mild dropsical fit that left him speechless for the better part of a week. Sir Joseph, a man known in Parliament for his good cigars, sound judgment and foresight, felt that on the present occasion it might be prudent to remove the source of temptation. “Fanny,” he said, pressing a coin into her palm, “why don’t you take the afternoon off and enjoy yourself?”

She was thrilled. Her first half day in better than three months with Sir Joseph and Lady B. She looked in at shop windows, bought herself a tart, watched a man juggle half a dozen hedgehogs while his sidekick, a ginger-headed dwarf in short pants and turban, played nose flute, contrabassoon and ‘cello in unison. She ate saltwater taffy, tumbled into a cellar, narrowly avoided a mad dog and sat in the park brooding about the lack of poignancy and sweet surrender in her life. When the sun dipped into the trees, she headed home.

♦ ♦ ♦

Ned on the other hand thinks of fate as a purely negative force. In accordance with Rise’s Law (all things that rise must contain yeast), he’s been expecting a fall. Little does he realize, as he settles back in the soothing clasp of the sedan chair, secure in his disguise and reapproaching equilibrium for the first time since Boyles howled out his name in the street, that he is about to soar. Nor does he have an inkling, as he hawks his wares up and down Soho Square, that he is teetering on the verge of a momentous discovery. No: his thoughts are purely mercenary. Debits and credits, pounds and shillings. Jars sold against passage to Amsterdam and a fat nest egg. Yes, Amsterdam, he’s thinking — canals and tulips and frazzle-headed fräuleins. Dutch genever. Hans Brinker. Paris is definitely out. What with all the beheadings and Jacobins and reigns of terror. . he’s had enough terror right here in London. No, Paris is out. The celebrated whores and full-bodied wines (or is it the other way around?) will have to stay corked — for the time being, anyway.

At No. 14 the cook takes three jars and invites him in for a cup of tea. The cook compliments him on his bonnet. He compliments the cook on her pans. Two doors up a scullerymaid shuts the door in his face. At No. 19 a dog bites him in the thigh. But the sun is sitting atop the trees like a big round cheddar, the breeze is full of petal and blossom, and in spite of being dead, depressed and exiled, trussed up in a woman’s foundations and haunted by shadows, Ned Rise throws back his head and bursts into song:

As I was going to Derby,

Upon a market day,

I saw the biggest lamb, sir,

That ever was fed with hay,

That ever was fed with hay.

The lamb was fat behind, sir,

The lamb was fat before—

But then, right in the middle of the verse, the world stands him on his ears and rearranges his senses: a voice, pitched high and pure and ringing with the conviction that there is after all peace and plenitude on earth, has suddenly joined him:

She measured ten yards round, sir,

I think it was no more.

Ned wheels around, his skirts crepitating like a hidden audience. There before him, wicker basket tucked under her arm, stands a girl of seventeen or eighteen. White mobcap, blond ringlets. A chocolate frock over her white stiff tucker. A parlormaid, thinks Ned, as she launches into the next verse as casually as if she were singing before the hearth:

The wool grew on her back, sir.

It reachéd to the sky.

And there the eagles built their nest,

I heard the young ones cry.

The wool grew on her belly, sir,

And reached to the ground,

‘Twas sold in Derby town, sir.

For forty thousand pound.

He’s amazed. Staggered. She’s something out of a Renaissance painting. Mary the milkmaid, sun firing the nimbus of her ringlets, a basket of fresh eggs and a jar of cream cradled like an infant Messiah in the crook of her arm. Innocence, beauty, sweetness and light: the combination is breathtaking. Without thinking he leaps right into the next verse and plays his tenor against her wavering contralto:

And all the boys in Derby, sir,

Came begging for her eyes,

To kick about the streets, sir,

As any good football flies.

The mutton that lamb made

Gave the whole army meat,

And what was left, I’m told, sir,

Was served out to the fleet.

And now she’s laughing, her teeth perfect, head thrown back, a little dollop of flesh under her chin. “Quite a voice you’ve got there, Mistress,” she laughs.

Ned is grinning like a shark. “I may not be all that I seem. Mistress.”

“A wolf in sheep’s clothing?”

“Not exactly,” replies Ned, tearing off cap and bonnet.

She claps her hands and giggles. “A Mister-Mistress!”

“Actually,” says Ned, “I’ve just come from a costume ball. Very elaborate affair. Glass punchbowls cut in the shape of elephants, melon balls, iced caviar.”

“Oh!” she says, “what fun!”

Ned clicks his heels and nods his head. “Ned Rise, at your service.”

Her name is Fanny Brunch. She’s house parlormaid at No. 32, the residence of Sir Joseph and Lady Dorothea Banks. She doesn’t mind if he walks her home.

The street is deserted. Sun dapples the trees, birds flit from branch to branch. Ned takes her arm and shuffles off down the avenue, his skirts massaging hers. “You know,” he says, “I’m beginning to feel like Pizarro when he stumbled across the Seven Cities of Gold.”

♦ FALLING ♦

What could he do? His life was transformed.

He woke with Fanny on his mind, hawked fish eggs and thought of nothing else, tumbled into bed with an ache like hunger gnawing at him, swollen and empty at the same time, and dreamed of Fanny, Fanny, Fanny. Women he’d had. Dozens of them. Whores and barmaids, farmgirls, shopgirls, flowergirls, the daughters of fishmongers and tinkers, nurses, nannies, souses and sluts — the Nan Punts and Sally Sebums of the world. A matter of exercising his organ, as simple as that. You put it in, you take it out. But this, this was different. This time his heart was involved. And his mind.

The day after he met her he haunted Soho Square — disguised as a piano tuner. It was raining. Drizzling, actually. His false mustache drooped, the dye ran out of his hair, his sack of tuning forks, pewter hammers and whisk brooms grew sodden. Sir Joseph glanced out the library window and saw him leaning against the iron pickets, soggy and forlorn. Lady Banks passed him by on her way to Mrs. Coutts’ for whist. A stray cat urinated on his stockings. At one point a scowling clerk from J. Kirkman & Sons, Piano Forte Makers, stepped from the shop at No. 38 and asked him to move along. Fanny never knew he was there.

The following day was no better. He hired a coach, set the driver in back, took the reins himself and trotted up and down the square from dawn till dusk. His eyes strained to catch a hint of movement behind the windows at No. 32, but aside from two partial glimpses of Byron Bount and a full frontal of Lady B.’s pug, he saw nothing. On ensuing days he dressed as a seaman, bellows mender, furmety woman, floorwipe, terminal syphilitic and King’s guard. Fanny hadn’t been out of the house in over a week. Pounds were slipping through his fingers. The caviar business was languishing.

Then one evening, as he skulked about the shadows arrayed in the torn and soot-blackened weeds of a chimney sweep, the front door swung open and a female form — jerked by a pug on a silver leash — descended the steps. Ned moved in, heart pounding, simultaneously formulating a greeting — should he whistle a few bars of “The Derby Ram”?—and an inspired excuse for the way he was dressed. “Fanny,” he whispered, his voice hoarse with passion.

“ ‘Ey? Wot’s ‘at?” came the reply in a voice that could scour the streets. He was staring into a face crusted over with eczema, and a milky, leering eye. The pug growled.

“Begging your pardon, Mistress,” he said, bowing. “I thought you would be Fanny Brunch.”

“ ‘Oo? Fanny ‘oo? Nivir ‘eard of ‘er.”

He was speaking with Barbara Dewfly, the scullery maid. Half a crown later she recalled that Fanny was “ ‘at young trollop wot warshes ‘is Lordship’s socks,” and added that “there’d be ‘ell to pay if ennybody was seen bringin’ ‘er a message or the like.” Ned pressed another coin into her palm along with a hastily scrawled note: Meet me out back at Midnight, Yr. Hmble. &. Obdt. Servt. Who Wishes To Know You Better, Ned Rise. The dog dropped a turd in the walkway, Dewfly gathered her stained skirts, mounted the stairs and was gone.

It should be remarked at this juncture that the life of a servant in Georgian England was not one that allowed for a wide range of social intercourse. Servants, if they were fortunate enough to pass muster, were taken on for life. They were expected to give up their families, interests and former ties, their sex lives and the expectation of marriage. From the moment they were hired they lived entirely for the comfort and benefit of their employers, worker bees fussing round idle drones and swollen, helpless queens. The reward? Six or seven pounds per annum, a warm grate, a dry bed, and — most importantly — three square meals a day. At a time when the streets were lined with thieves and beggars, prices were soaring as a result of the war with France, housing was inadequate or nonexistent, and truckloads of spindly hollow-chested men and women were dropping dead of hunger each day, a position as chambermaid or footman was nothing to sneeze at. And a loss of self-determination seemed a small price to pay.

So it was with Fanny. She’d gone from a hand-to-mouth existence in the country (milking cows, shoveling shit, gruel three times a day) to a life of relative ease and plenty, from her parents’ dominion to Lady B.’s. On her first day in the Banks household she was taken aside by Lady Banks, warned of the horror and degradation of the sex act and the slavery of motherhood, given a prayerbook and told that she must now devote herself to higher things. She had a position to maintain. From now on she was upper house parlormaid to Sir Joseph Banks, one of the truly great men of his time, and she must do nothing to embarrass him or his household. When she was finished. Lady B. had smiled a grandmotherly smile and asked Fanny if she understood. Fanny had nodded solemnly.

Still, when the crier cried twelve, she was out in the garden all the same.

♦ ♦ ♦

After that first furtive assignation (during which hands were pressed and vows exchanged), Ned Rise prowled Sir Joseph’s garden nightly. Sometimes he and Fanny would sit there whispering and necking for hours, other times they’d sneak off to an inn for a meal and more comfortable lovemaking. They ate caviar on toast. They drank wine. Fanny told Ned of her days on the farm, of Squire Trelawney and the hoe duel. Ned told her of his own miserable beginnings and his struggle to rise above it and establish himself in the world of commerce. Which he had done, finally and brilliantly. He was a businessman of independent means, he told her, privileged to move among the aristocracy and their hangers-on, a familiar to the likes of Lord Twit and Beau Brummell. Her eyes widened at the mention of these exalted names. She pressed him for details. He invented them. Then, one night, as they lay in the long plush grass beneath Sir Joseph’s lime, he asked her to run off with him. The moon hung in the branches like an ornament. Soft and low, a bird began to sing. She agreed.

Ned was moved. Here was a beginning, a center, a new key to which he could tune his life. He thought of his clarinet. Of buds opening in dark places. Of a little inn in Holland or Switzerland maybe, a stone hearth, a dog, Fanny at his side. The following morning he retrieved his clarinet from the pawnbroker and booked passage for two to The Hague, via Gravesend. Later he took Fanny out to Lamb’s Conduit Fields and played her a clarion version of “Greensleeves” while Venus rode across the sky. In two weeks they would be gone.

Still, he was troubled. All this heartbreak and ecstasy, delicious though it was, had deflected him from his work. Sixty-three jars of Chichikov’s Choice were backed up on him in the cellars at Bear Lane. The sturgeon had quit on him long ago, all bred out for the season, he’d laid off his street urchins and given Shem and Liam five-pound bonuses — but he hadn’t sold a jar of caviar in nearly a month. Yes, the iron chest under his bed was brimming — nearly three hundred and fifty pounds — but he’d gone through quite an outlay wooing Fanny and it would be a shame, a criminal shame to let those last sixty-three jars go to waste. Besides, they’d need every farthing to set themselves up in the Netherlands what with all those sharp-nosed Hollanders running around.

He went back to the streets, peddling his caviar with an evangelical fervor, wheeling and dealing. Two for the price of one, one for the price of two. Catherine herself eats it, he told the head chef at White’s. Washes it down with frozen vodka and steins of kvass. He held up a jar for the little man’s inspection. The label featured an amorphous building identified in block letters as “The Kremlin,” and a wolfhound that looked like an epileptic seal. The chef took six jars. Lord Stavordale, profoundly drunk outside Boodle’s Club after dropping eleven hundred pounds at whist, bought a jar and consumed it on the spot. Lady Courtenay sent two jars to her maiden aunt in Bath; Messieurs Grebe and Parsley of Bond Street had a jar with crackers for luncheon; Rose Elderberry, companion to the P.M.’s wife, used it as a facial restorative. Apparently the chic of Chichikov’s Choice had grown in proportion to its scarcity. Ned sold out his stock inside of a week.

He tallied up his earnings, minus expenses (disguises, jars, labels, salt, sedan chairs and the like), and found that he’d added over a hundred pounds to his nest egg. He was elated. But why stop here? Herring were running. Shem and Liam were hauling them out of the river by the cartload. He’d salt up the eggs, darken them a bit with shoe blacking, bottle and label them and who’d know the difference? And what if they did? — he’d be in Holland in a week. He concocted twenty-six jars of the stuff, falling back on frog’s eggs when the herring supply ran short, got himself up as a Russian balalaika master and sold them in an afternoon. Fifty-two pounds more went into the iron chest, and every penny of it for Fanny.

But then one night, with less than a week to go, Fanny failed to show up at the hour appointed for their liaison. Ned was stunned, distraught, buried under a weight of suspicion and gloom. He paced beneath the darkened windows for three hours, stomach churning, oaths and resolutions and speeches running through his head, until finally he vented his frustration on a bed of peonies and clambered up over the back wall, defeated. As he reached the top, however, he became aware of a sound emanating from the direction of the house. A sort of hiss or rasp, the sound of a fly trapped against a windowpane. He held his breath. There it was again: pssssssssst.

He dropped back down into the garden and warily approached the house. It loomed above him: shutters drawn, dark as a grave, three stories and an attic. Clumps of shadow designated bushes, rock gardens, benches and birdbaths. When he reached the lime tree he saw that the shutters of a second-story window were slightly ajar. “Fanny?” he whispered.

Her voice came back, pinched and susurrant. “Ned, Ned — where are you, Ned?”

“Here,” he whispered, stepping out of the shadows. “What’s the matter?” He could see her face now, a pale oval set against the deep black of the interior like an inverted egg.

“Shhhhh! Lady B. is on to us. Or at least she suspects something. She’s locked all the doors and taken the key to bed with her.”

“But no. She couldn’t.” The news manifests itself as a sharp stab to his groin, the hopeful erection that had sprung up with the sound of her voice already fading, giving way to a bottomless ache of longing and disappointment. “The bitch,” he mutters, and suddenly finds himself clawing at the thin wisps of ivy that striate the lower wall of the house. He’ll climb up to her, that’s what he’ll do.

“Ned!” she hisses. “You’ll wake the house.”

She’s right. Sixty or seventy limp strands of ivy droop round him, and he hasn’t got a foot off the ground yet. He brushes the leaves from his face, steps back a pace or two and demands an explanation — what’s gone wrong?

She tells it as quickly as she can, her voice pitched low. It was her lack of sleep that gave her away. Lady B. commented on her sluggishness, the slowness of her smile — was she getting enough to eat? Feeling ill? Then Sir Joseph caught her dozing in the library, feather duster in hand. He asked her if she wasn’t staying up late, giggling with the other girls and reading those scandalous novels by Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe. She denied it. But then the next evening she nodded off while serving at table and scalded his Lordship with the hare soup. Lady B. ordered her from the room. Later, she was called into the parlor for a full-scale interrogation. No, there was no man in her life, she asserted tearfully. No assignations. Please ma’am, what you must think of me! It’s just that she was restless at night, homesick for the country, and had taken to sitting in the garden till all hours, listening to the crickets and the nightingale. She didn’t know there was any harm in it. Lady B. looked like an executioner with indigestion. She called Fanny’s behavior “irregular” and prescribed a week in the kitchen, fixing vegetables and trimming meats. That ought to tire you out, dear, she said, and then ordered Alice to go round and lock the doors.

Ned cursed at the thought of it. Fanny in the kitchen. A prisoner. “All right,” he said. “We’ll fix her. Tomorrow night, two a.m., I’ll be here with a ladder. You can come stay at my place till Saturday, and then we’ll catch the boat for Holland.”

“Ned,” she whispered, her voice soft as a featherbed. “I love you.”

He was about to give her the standard lovers’ reply, con gusto, when all at once the pug started yapping somewhere in the darkened house, yapping as if its tail had been yanked out by the roots. The shutters closed with a click. Ned took to his feet but there was someone at the back door with a lantern — Bount or Sir Joseph — and now the pug was out the door, flying across the lawn like a puff of hair in a gale, a shrill insistent yip-yipping at his heels. There was a flash and the sound of a gunshot, then he was over the wall and gone.

♦ ♦ ♦

Ned slipped through the dark side streets and back alleys with the slow grace and intuitive assurance of a cat. The streets were unlighted and dangerous at this hour, haunted by footpads, cutpurses, drunks and murderers. Ned kept a low profile. Dodging in and out of shadows, keeping to the base of walls, cutting through yards where possible, he scrupulously avoided all human contact as he made his way back to Southwark. He’d had a close shave back in the garden — if old Sir Jos hadn’t been such a rotten shot, who knows? Anyway, it was a bad sign. They could be waiting for him tomorrow night when he came round with the ladder. He wondered if he should borrow Liam’s rusted harquebus.

When he finally turned up Bear Lane, nearly an hour later, he was beat. An afternoon of peddling fish eggs and a long and frustrating night in Sir Joseph’s garden had taken their toll. He would sleep till dark, see about a coach, a ladder and maybe a pistol, then go and fetch his Fanny. The thought exhilarated him as he mounted the steps to his room: tomorrow night he’d have her beside him — in his bed — secure, safe and private. No more sneaking about in the dark, no more abbreviated lovemaking, no more wet grass and thorny hedges. There was a stirring in his trousers as he turned the key and stepped into the room.

He didn’t even bother to light the taper. Just shrugged out of his jacket, tore off the false beard and flung himself down on the bed. But wait — what was this? There was someone in his bed! His first glancing thought was of Fanny, but then a far more likely and chilling explanation came to him. .

At that moment a match flared on the far side of the room and illuminated the ruddy acromegalic features of Smirke — then the taper took hold and the room rushed with light. Ned shrank back. The room, he saw, was crowded. Twit and Jutta Jim were leaning against the chest of drawers; Mendoza sat on the washstand beside the angelic young prig who’d held his jacket for him on a day Ned would prefer to forget. Then there was Smirke. Towering, round-shouldered, grinning a tiny expectant grin like a black bear in heat. In the bed, snoring soundly, was Boyles.

“Well, well, Ned,” Twit began in his reedy nasal tones, “what a pleasure and a surprise it is to see you again.”

Mendoza was slapping a stocking full of sand against the base of the washstand: thwack. . thwack. . thwack. .

“Yes, a real pleasure. But why you didn’t invite us over sooner, I’ll never know. We could have capitalized on your miraculous ascension from the dead. The Papists would have eaten it up.” His voice dropped to a snarl. “The thieves they hung alongside Christ should have been so lucky.”

“I’ll fookin’ tear yer face off,” Smirke rumbled.

It was then that Ned noticed the iron strongbox. It was sitting on the table, the lock ravaged, lid twisted back on its hinges. Empty. “What have you done with my money, you bastards?” Ned was on his feet. Boyles, very drunk, sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes.

“Let’s call it compensation for the yoomiliation wot ye’ve cost us, ye scum,” Mendoza hissed.

“Neddy!” Boyles had hold of his sleeve. “I didn’t mean to tell ‘em — they forced it out o’ me.”

Ned felt the rage rising in him. There would be no elopement now, damn them, and he was going to take a beating. A savage beating. Suddenly he snatched up the iron box, flung it in the face of the young prig and broke for the door. Mendoza was there. The blackjack caught him across the cheekbone, twice in quick succession — and then it was Smirke’s turn.

Smirke hit him as he was rebounding from Mendoza’s blow. The first punch staggered him; the force of the second drove him back toward the window, Smirke in pursuit, arms flailing, another blow and another, and then he was going down, reeling back into someone — Twit? — there was the sound of splintering glass and a cry followed by a sort of hopeless, unbelieving, enraged shriek — the sound a pig makes when the sticking knife pierces its throat.

Ned was on the floor in a sea of glass. Smirke and Mendoza were hanging out the window. The young prig sat in the corner, wiping the blood from his cheek and sniveling. “I’m scarred,” he whimpered. “I’m scarred.” Then Mendoza’s voice, shaken. “Sweet Jesus, ‘ee’s stuck ‘imself.”

Ned staggered to his feet and took a look. Twit lay contorted below, impaled on the iron pickets. A crowd was gathering. Two men bent over him with a torch. “ ‘Ee’s dead,” one of them said.

Mendoza’s face was ashen. Suddenly he had hold of Ned’s arm. “It’s murder then,” he shouted. “Call out the watch.”

♦ A SHOT IN THE DARK ♦

For a moment there is nothing, no sound at all, the black of the forest and the slow drip of the rain. The dark is so absolute and impenetrable, so much an absence, he might as well be blind. This is what it’s like to live in a cave, he thinks, to live without fire and candlewax, this is what it’s like when you reach the seventh circle of hell. And then it begins again: a branch displaced, the tentative footfall, the low soughing snarl like a tocsin: I am afraid but I will kill.

In the leaves and mold, Mungo frantically casts about for a rock or treebranch, a bit of root, the jawbone of an ass, anything he could lift up to his face when the growling thing comes at him in a rush of tooth and claw. The loam beneath his fingers is rich and saturated, like coffee grounds or the black muck at the bottom of a grave; wormlike things slip through his fingers, a spider runs up his arm. But there, he has something, a stick certainly — no, it’s thicker and heavier, the size of a club. He tugs to dislodge it, but it seems to be stuck. And now all of a sudden the snarling grows more animated, as if his reaching for the stick were a provocation. Coming closer, warning, threatening, cursing, the hot breath of it, the spitting and hissing. He jerks at the stick for his very life, in a fever, the snarling thing nearly beside him now, growls turned to roars, bloodstarved, maddened, raaaaaaaaoowwwwwwww!

But of course the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. At that moment the scene is lit by the flash of a pistol, inundated by the report. There is an instant of revelation — the carcass of the horse, its stiffened leg in his hand, the searing venomous eyes and curled lips of the beast dissolving into the night — and then the black pall drops again, the gunshot echoes in the trees.

“Mr. Park — you okay?”

What can he say? Naked, bludgeoned, beggared and horseless — yet not mauled and devoured? Lost, but not alone? “Johnson,” he says.

Johnson’s voice comes back at him from nowhere, disembodied. “You got any bones broke?” It’s like playing hide-and-seek in a coal cellar.

“Where are you?”

He starts at the touch of Johnson’s hand. “Right here, Mr. Park. Right here.”

Now he says it like a lover: “Johnson.” And then: “What about you — you all right?”

There is a concatenation of violent respiratory sounds — throat clearing, spitting, hacking and drooling — followed by a series of groans and wheezes. “I am about as tore up as it is possible to be without being laid out for the undertaker — and that’s no lie.”

A wave of depression crests up out of the void and washes over the explorer. His shoulders are slumped, his privates chilled, ribs shrieking for attention. And his left knee. It seems to be out of joint. When he speaks, his voice is nearly inaudible: “What now?”

“Say what?”

“What do we do now?”

“Find a tree.”

“A tree?”

“Climb up and wait for light. You don’t want to be hanging around down here when that cat comes back for his horsemeat, do you?”

Mungo considers this for a minute. Things have begun to chirrup a bit, crickets or frogs or something. “Actually,” he says finally, “I don’t know. At least it would be quicker down here.”

♦ HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE DEAD? ♦

In the morning Mungo wakes with a start, and finds a tiny bald-headed monkey staring at him out of eyes the size of golf balls. When he moves to shoo it away the branch dips violently, then springs back to jar him loose. There is a moment of pure weightlessness — ethereal, almost exhilarating in its detachment — immediately succeeded by a gut-wrenching panic and a quick but focused image of the high-wire artist at Bartholomew Fair. The first branch slaps him in the face, the next gives way; but finally, after a drop of twenty feet or so, he manages to ram a projecting limb into his armpit and stabilize himself. Grunting, cursing his mother, his Maker and the African Association, he works his way along the length of the branch until he reaches the trunk. Which he embraces like a lost lover. But then he detects a movement out of the corner of his eye — just above him, dangling by its left arm, is the monkey. The wizened little creature gives him a quizzical look, then reaches out a cautious finger and touches him, soft as a kiss, on the brow.

The explorer works his way, limb by limb, to the ground. Johnson is sitting there beneath the tree, waiting for him. He is wrapped in his toga, but his sandals are missing. It is, given the fact of the rainy season in the rain belt, raining. Mungo stands there a moment in his shirt — feet, legs and buttocks bare. His pubic hair is the color of mashed turnips. “I was going to say good morning,” he says, “but under the circumstances it would be an obscenity.”

Johnson grunts. His right eye is swollen closed and there is blood caked in the hair over his ear. “You look terrible,” Mungo observes.

“I feel like I been dragged behind the London mail from Bristol to Covent Garden — and then pounded with mallets on top of it.” He licks his split lip and spits between his teeth. The spittle is red. “Here,” he says, producing the crushed top hat from behind his back. “They left this behind. Wasn’t worth the trouble.”

“Worth the trouble? All my notes are crammed in here.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“I see they left you your toga.”

“It ain’t worth nothin’ either. Took my sandals though, the bastards. And my ass.”

At the mention of the ass, the explorer wheels round, a look of disbelief on his face. “But — where’s the horse?”

Johnson shakes his head.

“You don’t mean to tell me that one leopard put away a whole horse — in a single night?”

“Look close, Mr. Park. You can see where he drug it away.”

The explorer looks. A swath has been cut through the vegetation, as if someone had dragged a rowboat across it: shoots and tendrils crushed, branches snapped off, plants flattened. “Well don’t just sit there, man — let’s go after it. I haven’t had a joint to gnaw on for days, weeks.”

“Can’t. He’s gone and hauled it up a tree someplace. Common practice with leopards. They eat what they can hold, then stash the rest way up high where the dogs and hyenas and such can’t get at it. When I was a kid we was asleep in the hut one night when a leopard carried off my aunt Tota. Next day we went out lookin’. Nine years old, I found her. She was stuffed up a tree, half-eat away, her eyes all covered over with flies. It was her head I saw first — hangin’ there like a melon or somethin’.”

“All right, I get the picture. So what do we do — starve?”

“What we do is we get on down that road to Kabba and beg us some alms, then decide how we are goin’ to get ourselves back to Dindikoo.”

“Back? Without completing my mission?”

“Hey, let’s face it. You almost finished it right here. With the rains it’s goin’ to be about three shades of impossible to travel anywhere — shit, we might not even be able to get back. Plus you got the Moors to contend with the farther up you go. Sansanding’s a Moorish town, from what Eboe says. And Timbuctoo too. They’ll Nazarini you alive up there. That what you want?”

The explorer’s jaw is set. His voice is shot through with emotion. “I’ll chart the course of this river if I have to dance naked in hell first.”

“Uh, forgive my mentionin’ it, Mr. Park — but you already are naked, and this is about as close to hell as you better hope you ever get.” Johnson pauses to grin till his molars show. “So start dancin’.”

♦ ♦ ♦

In Kabba, a collection of fifty or so clay huts whitewashed to a dazzle, Johnson approaches the Dooty,[2] throws himself on the ground and begins pouring handfuls of dust over his head. The explorer, totally naked save for his hat and the strips of shirt-cambric swaddling his privates like a colossal diaper, stands off at a distance. “Alms!” cries Johnson in a piteous voice. “We are respectable merchants set upon by dacoits, raped of our goods and clothing and left for dead in the forest.” The Dooty looks doubtfully at Mungo, his gaze riding up the splotched white legs to the diaper, the bare chest, tangled beard and freakish eyes, and then finally coming to rest on the accordioned top hat. Johnson catches at the man’s robe, and drives his voice down to a quaking, heartrending rumble: “We-we haven’t had anything but bark and grass for two weeks. A crumb, I beg of you, a crumb.”

The Dooty steps into his hut, returns a moment later with a dog at the end of a tether. The dog is tall at the shoulder, solid of bone. It has massive, disproportionate jaws, a smallish skull, and a mane reminiscent of the hyena. At first the explorer thinks the man means to give them the dog, and he conjures up images of those meaty haunches crisping on the spit, stuffed with yams, foundering in rice, etc. But then the Dooty does a curious thing. He reaches behind his back and produces a dart, the sort of thing you’d associate with hazy barrooms and pints of porter, a splinter of bone honed like a shiv and capped with a burst of feathers. Quick as a magician, he jabs the dog in the flank three or four times. This has the effect of instantaneously arousing the animal to a pitch of malignant hysteria, its whole being concentrated in scrambling paws and champing incisors. Only the leash restrains it from falling on Johnson and tearing him to pieces. “Two minutes,” the man shouts over the remonstrations of the dog, “and I let him go.”

Half a mile up the road, the explorer collapses beneath a tree. “I can’t go on, Johnson. I’m just too sick and too beat and too discouraged.” A hundred yards off, cloaked in reeds and rushes, is the Niger, as brown and indifferent as all the eyes in all the faces of Africa.

Touracos squawk in the trees. A red river hog grunts from the muck at the water’s edge, flushing a great crowned crane in an explosion of gold and soapstone gray. The explorer watches the bird lift into the sky, wings beating like a drumroll, spindly legs trailing behind, watches it soar until it vanishes in the clouds. As his eyes drop he is startled by a pair of vultures, circling low, humping along under their leathery necks, patient as undertakers.

“Well, as I see it we got two alternatives,” Johnson sighs, easing down beside his employer. “We can sit here and starve to death, or we can turn back.”

The explorer doesn’t answer, but this time a softer expression creeps into his eyes, less inflexible, an expression suggesting that at long last the voice of reason has begun to whisper in his ear. “If we do turn back,” he says finally, his voice nearly inaudible, “what are we going to do about food and shelter? Clothes?” He looks down at his feet, blistered and bare. “Shoes even? Am I going to walk a thousand miles barefooted?”

“What else you goin’ to do? How would you get to Timbuctoo — fly? And if you did get there — then what? No, listen. We got a much better chance getting charity from the Mandingoes back the way we come than from these people around here. That Dooty. He was no Kafir — he was a convert. A true believer — and I’m talkin’ about a blood now, a animist — he won’t let you starve. It’s these damned apostates that wouldn’t give you a stick to chew on if you was the last man on earth.”

Suddenly a whistle sounds from the forest, soft and low. The two start, ready for anything, expecting the worst. Nothing there. Canopy, shadow, a billion trunks knotted with vine. “What was that,” the explorer says, “a bird?” Unconsciously, Johnson strokes the yellow lump over his eye. “That was no bird,” he says.

There it is again: long and low, wind in a drainpipe. “Who is it?” Johnson shouts, first in Mandingo, then in Arabic.

A shadow detaches itself from the general gloom and starts tentatively for them. The explorer, starving and stinking, peers up out of eyes dulled with fatigue and resignation, almost too far gone to care, as the shadow becomes a tall black woman gliding through the foliage like an apparition.

When she gets within ten feet of them, she stops, poised for flight like a deer surprised in the garden. There is a calabash in her hand, and a disk of unleavened bread. “We won’t hurt you, sister,” Johnson says, and then she’s bending over them, offering bread and sooloo beer.

Her name is Aisha. The hair pulls back from her head in a topknot, gold hoops dangle from her ears. She looks to be about thirty, dressed in a striped tunic and sandals. She’d followed them from the village where she’d seen them turned away by the Dooty. He was a criminal. Heartless. Would they accept her hospitality?

Walking beside her, a bit dizzy from the sudden impact of the bread and beer, the explorer finds himself studying her profile: the tapering neck, jutting jaw, ears so small and delicate he wonders if they might somehow have been shrunk. While pondering this strange and absorbing phenomenon, he notices the cicatrices, faint pinkish welts that trace the line of her jaw and spiral elegantly across her cheek, and then the blue paste dabbed over her eyelids, and finally the recalcitrant hairs fanning out in an almost transparent aureole round her skull. Unaccountably, he finds himself thinking of gerenuks and gazelles. As they walk, she keeps her eyes averted, but tells them that her father has always believed that white men existed, spirits of the dead, bleached of their souls and the color of the skin, and that if ever one appeared she should treat him with courtesy and respect, for he had come a long terrible way looking for his village and the skin he had lost. Mungo, interrupted periodically by his own belches and a barrage of kicks from Johnson, assures her that all this is nonsense, and that he is as alive as she, and that furthermore he is perfectly content with the color of his skin and sees no necessity of improving on it. Her only reaction is to glance up shyly at him and grin, as if she’d heard that one before.

Aisha leads them back toward Kabba, but to a separate compound outside the walls of the town proper. It consists of three huts enclosed within a palisade of sharpened stakes grown over with thorns and flowering vines. There they are introduced to her infirm and astonished parents, a succession of sisters whose ages are difficult to ascertain as a result of wrinkles and toothlessness, a brother and his wife and a pair of sorrylooking watchdogs. Aisha herself is a presumptive widow. Her husband, a relative of the Dooty, had gone north sixteen months ago to track a band of Moors who had kidnapped his youngest sister. She understood that it was his duty to go, but felt deserted nonetheless. He hasn’t been heard from since.

But for the present there is goat’s milk and cheese. Something in a pot with spinach and fish heads. Aisha spreads mats for them in her parents’ hut. Johnson scrapes the pot. The explorer, feeling a bit under the weather, retires early. Throughout the night he is awakened at intervals by the awestruck old patriarch, Aisha’s father, who plies him with questions about the afterlife. How can a spirit hold sustenance? Will his skin blacken of itself, or must he wait for someone to die, someone old perhaps, so that he can slip into that person’s skin? Mungo looks up at the puzzled, frightened, hopeful face in the firelight, so exhausted he can barely mutter, the questions fading into dreams, mounting in his head like the rungs of a ladder, why and when and where, and how does it feel to be dead?

♦ MO O MO INTA ALLO ♦

During their week-long stay in Kabba’s suburbs, a dramatic change comes over Johnson’s guinea hen: where once there was putrid flesh and scraps of feather, now there is naked bone, bleached and dried like a goose’s wishbone hung up over the mantel. Though still a bit pink and damp in the joints, essentially the thing has been transformed into a crusted, frozen skeleton, relatively inoffensive, devoid of interest for all but the least discerning flies. “Looks pretty good,” Mungo says. Johnson glances down, running his fingers over the brittle bones, examining the joints. “Still wet in the seams. But you’re right: I may have this thing beat yet.” He beams like a kid with a lollipop. “Three or four more days, that’s all it’ll take.”

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.”

♦ 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. .

♦ ♦ ♦

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.”

“I tell you: I didn’t do it. They bore false witness against me — my enemies did.”

“No sir, ye’re a desperado and a true ‘ero of the people. I can tell by the lay of yer ears. No sense in denyin’ a crime of passion — a savage and courageous one at that — by Jesus I wisht I’d a killed me a lord or two when I ‘ad the chance. . Nope. They’ll ‘ang ye as sure as linen gets gray and a gin bottle empty, ‘ang ye high. My advice to ye, young bucko, is to take it like a man and drop yer drawers in their prissy, lavender-scented faces just as they goes to hoist yer up. That’s the ticket.”

“Shut up, you old loon. Shut up or I’ll—”

“Tell me. ‘Ow’d ye do it? Throttle ‘im? Stick ‘im in the ribs? Or’d ye just blarst the inbred degennerit in the back of the ‘ead? ‘Ey?”

Ned doesn’t answer. The full realization of all that’s transpired in the past few hours has begun to seep into his consciousness, depress his stomach and worry the moisture from his throat. There will be no elopement now, no Dutch inn, no Fanny. . there won’t even be another court of sessions for six weeks so he can plead his case. By then he’ll be dead of the stink. With a little money, prison doesn’t have to be all that bad. You can have a private room, a fire, irons as light as drawstrings — and then only at night. You can send out for your meals, a bottle, a big-bosomed whore, have your cronies in to dine and play at cards, hire jugglers and musicians, keep a cat, sniff snuff, drink geneva and sleep between silken sheets. But come to prison penniless and they’ll strip the clothes from your back and mew you up in the dungeon, where day and night meld into one and dinner consists of a stale crust washed down with a cup of standing water that looks and smells like cow’s piss.

“I think I woulda drowned ‘im in a pig trough,” the loon says. “Or maybe just tie the bleeder to a pole and ‘orsewhip ‘im till the bones poke through ‘is haristycratic ‘ide.”

Mendoza. He’s the one. He got Smirke and the young prig to give depositions against him, then talked and bribed, talked and bribed, until the magistrate agreed to march the prisoner across the river and over to Newgate—”Southwark Prison isn’t foul enough for the likes of ‘im,” Mendoza had argued. “Besides, why make ‘is late lordship’s ‘igh-placed friends and relations travel all the way over ‘ere to see the filthy beggar get ‘is deserts?” And so, after Ned’s pockets had been picked and his mouth stopped with a dirty rag, the magistrate had laid half a ton of chains on him and remanded him to Newgate.

“Lords. Bah. Leeches is wot they is. Never done me a bit of good in me ‘ole life — and plenty of ‘arm, I’ll tell ye. Lookit Jock over there—’Ey Jock! Jock! — hee, hee, ‘ee’s been dead three days, and don’t nobody know it yet but me. And you. Know wot Jock was in for?”

Ned shakes his head.

“Nipped tuppence from the waistcoat pocket of one of yer lords out on King’s High Street. Tuppence. Can ye believe that? ‘Ee was a cobbler, Jock was. I knew ‘im well. Three babbies squawlin’ in their craddle all night and day for an empty stomach and so Jock goes and dips ‘is fingers into the precious pocket of some addle-’eaded lord. And wot does ‘ee get for it? Tuppence. And tuppence ain’t no capital offense, as well ye knows, me bucko. But ‘ee paid capital for it, din’ee?”

“Yeah,” says Ned, distant. His ankles have gone to sleep. He tries to shift position, but the shackles won’t budge. “So what did he die of then?”

“Die of? Why ye young ass, don’t ye know?”

“Know? How should I?”

The old loon snorts. “Ye’ll know soon enough, I warrant. Jock died of the cholerer.”

♦ SHOCK AND OUTRAGE ♦

Sir Joseph Banks drops the afternoon paper with a shout and springs to his feet, upsetting a decanter of sherry and a humidor packed with Virginia tobacco. “Dorothea!” he bellows, lunging through the library at the expense of an elephant’s foot umbrella stand, the tea tray and a japanned cabinet half buried in stationery, envelopes and sealing wax.

Fanny, who has been dusting in the hallway, is nearly bowled over as her employer bursts from the library and leaps at the stairs like a wounded stag, bellowing “Dorothea! Dorothea!” as if it were a battlecry. Startled, she turns to gaze after him as he slams up the steps and vanishes round the corner, the sound of his footsteps hammering overhead, another shout, and then the curt rap of his knuckles on Lady B.’s door.

He’d caught her daydreaming, Fanny, staring into space and rubbing away at a bust of Lycurgus as if she were a cog in a machine. She’s been like this all day. Bount attributed it to the excitement of the previous night (“what with the burglar and all”), while Cook took her aside and asked if her monthly flow might be especially troublesome owing to the new moon. To think of their simplicity! Fanny smiles, filled with a delicious sense of anticipation, intoxicated with the thought of the coming night and her elopement with Ned. Holland! She can barely believe it. She’ll buy herself a collar of Dutch lace, and one of those white mobcaps with the little wings and a pair of wooden clogs. They’ll live in a windmill, maybe, or on a barge — hah! She’ll be mistress of her own household, with a servant to bring her tea and cut flowers. . no more kowtowing to Lady B. or wiping up pug’s turds in the foyer.

From upstairs, Lady B.’s voice: “Jos — what is it?”

“It’s Graeme! Graeme Twit. They’ve killed him!”

“Killed him? Whatever are you talking about?”

Sir Joseph’s voice is pinched with emotion. “It’s an outrage, is what it is.

A shock and an outrage. By God—”

Absently, already losing interest in the turmoil upstairs — Twit? Where has she heard that name? — Fanny turns to the open library door and the chaos within. Muttering to herself, she rights the japanned cabinet, and squats to pluck fragments of china from the carpet. The newspaper and humidor lie on the floor too, at the base of Sir Jos’ armchair.

“—no, Dorothea, don’t try to calm me!” Sir Joseph thunders from above. “I don’t want to be calmed.”

Fanny cups the loose tobacco in her hands and restores it to the humidor, then picks up the paper, smooths and folds it, and is about to lay it across the arm of the chair when she is arrested by the headline:

LORD TWIT MURDERED IN SOUTHWARK

She reads on, strangely compelled, stumbling over the words. Suspect in custody, reconstructing a dark night in a poor section of London and the darker motives of the criminal mind, willful, premeditated and unprovoked act of savagery. And then she comes to the two words that stop her heart: Ned Rise. Ned Rise, the assassin.

Upstairs, like a vengeful, triumphant horn sweeping up the scale to conclude an allegro furioso in a burst of power and vituperation, Sir Joseph’s voice rings out: “I’ll see him flayed alive and strung up for the dogs to piss on — by God I swear an oath I will.”

♦ QUID PRO QUO ♦

At this juncture in the history of manners, it was considered de rigueur for a heroine to faint dead away when confronted with so sudden and devastating a turn of events. But Fanny was made of sterner stuff. After a short but cathartic cry, she retired to her closet at the rear of the kitchen — pleading illness — and began racking her brain for a means of helping her lover out of his predicament. It seemed hopeless. She had no more than a pound or two herself (and that hoarded up over a period of months, penny by penny), her parents were ragged paupers, her friends milkmaids and servants — and clearly she couldn’t turn to Sir Joseph. She thought of extorting money from Cook’s household funds or of making off with Lady B.’s plate and silver. . but no, she couldn’t do that. What then? Innocent or not, Ned had to be saved — no matter what it took. All at once it hit her: Adonais Brooks! Of course. She remembered the look on his face when he goosed her in the hallway and threatened to throw himself from the window if she spurned his advances. Sallow, round-shouldered, something sick in his eyes. Go ahead and jump, she’d said. He jumped. Adonais Brooks. Walks with a cane now. She smiled a grim and calculating smile. Adonais Brooks. Horny as a tomcat.

She tiptoed from her room. The house was quiet. Sir Joseph had roared off to his club in a storm of threats and imprecations, and Lady B. was confined with a headache. Fanny stole a look at Lady B.’s address book, wrapped herself up in a shawl and slipped out the front door.

♦ ♦ ♦

For a time, when he was eighteen or nineteen, Adonais Brooks had insisted that his friends call him Werther, so affected was he by Goethe’s portrayal of that sad and neurotic youth. During the ensuing years he had discovered Collins, Smart, Cowper and Gray. The Oriental Eclogues sat on his shelf beside Macpherson’s Ossian poems and Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. He cultivated ballads and cultural primitivism, sported red trousers and black velvet jackets. At the bimonthly meetings of the West End Poetry Club, of which he was then secretary, he championed passion over precision, sensibility over wit. One evening, in the middle of “Demitasse and Spoon,” an elegant satire by Blythe Bender, he rose to his feet and shouted: “Enough of Pope, Addison and Steele! Enough of wit and urbanity and the heroic couplet! Where is life, where is blood, where is the grave?” A shocked silence fell over the hall — never before had a reading been interrupted, never before had there been such a breach of taste and decorum. He was shouted down by his fellow members, and later asked to resign from the club.

Now, at twenty-six, he wandered the dismal foggy streets with tears in his eyes, thrived on electrical storms and blasts of wind, dreamed of mountains, wounds, derring-do and sex — thrilling, voluptuous and morbid sex. Sex in churchyards and catafalques, sex in shackles, galleys, dungeons. He kept four servants and a carriage. He believed in witches and revenants, and lived in decadent splendor on Great George Street. There was still a lingering pain in his ribs — especially when he coughed or breathed too deeply — and the shattered bones of his right leg, though healed, hadn’t quite knit properly. He secretly thrilled at the loss of his ear.

When Fanny came to the door he was toiling away at his “Elegy on the Demise of Our Afric Explorers” (“O Ledyard, O Lucas, O Houghton and Park, / Must I count you among the dear departed, /And Timbuctoo still languishing in the dark?”). Bellows, his manservant, announced her in stentorian tones. “Fanny Brunch, Sir.”

He was stunned. How many times had he pictured her here? How many times, alone in his bedchamber, had he. . et cetera? He leaped to his feet, shaking like a wet spaniel, licked his palms and smoothed back his hair — and then she was there, standing before him like a vision in a dream. “Fanny!” he ejaculated, rushing forward to offer her a chair. But what was this? Tears on her cheeks?

“I’ve come, begging your pardon, Sir, to entreat a favor,” she began, her breast palpitating. He listened, sucking at the vision of her like a vampire: her ankles, hips, hair. The sound of her voice was an aphrodisiac, apples and oysters, a feather tickling at his crotch. He wanted to plunge at her, sink himself into her — but he listened, twitching, an uncomfortable projection straining against his trousers. When she was finished he took hold of her hand. “I’ll help you,” he said, his voice so strained it was almost a whistle. “God knows I’ll help you, do anything you ask, anything. . mortify my flesh, tear out my eyes, open a vein — do you want proof of it? Right now? I’ll do it, I will. Anything you ask.” Then he looked her in the eye, cold as a knife. “But you must understand. . there has to be a quid pro quo.”

“A what. Sir?”

“An exchange. A tit for tat.”

Fanny lowered her eyes. “I knows that. Sir — what else has a poor girl got to offer? But you don’t have to get vulgar about it.”

♦ ♦ ♦

The next morning Fanny visited Newgate. She held a scented handkerchief to her nose and followed the turnkey down the winding stairwell to the dungeon, her footsteps echoing like gunfire in a well. When the massive iron door swung back on its hinges, the stink nearly knocked her to her knees. Inside the atmosphere was rank and caliginous: fumes rose from puddles, groans sifted through the shadows. She started forward gingerly, her pupils widening in the gloom. Muck pulled at her shoes, twisted claws reached out for her, the reek of urine stung her eyes. “Hey Mistress big-arse, come sit on me face,” growled a voice. “Titties,” called another, “titties, titties, titties.” A stark animal terror came over her — a fear of being buried alive, mewed up in a wall, sucked down through the hole in the latrine, down, down to the slick and steaming intestines of the earth where demons picked the flesh from your bones and howling beasts snuffed up your soul and shat it out in hard black pellets. Fanny pulled back with a cry, but the turnkey took her by the elbow. “It’s all right. Mistress,” he said. “Don’t mind them. . look now, there’s yer friend up ahead.”

Ned was delirious, gibbering about fish heads and pots of gold, lying in his own waste, naked and shivering. An old man, the gums drawn back from his teeth, lay dead beside him. Fanny pressed a half crown into the turnkey’s hand and he unshackled Ned’s legs, wrapped him in a blanket and carried him from the room. Later, in a private cell, Fanny sponged her lover down with vinegar and made him a hot broth. She held the steaming cup to his lips and kissed him. He vomited. Looked into her eyes and didn’t seem to recognize her. By the time the surgeon arrived he was running sweat and beating his head against the wall. “What is it. Sir?” Fanny begged. “What’s wrong with him?” The surgeon was seventy or eighty years old, dressed in the tight trousers and periwig of a young rake. His nostrils flared as he opened a vein in the patient’s leg and drew blood until Ned lay still. “Gaol fever,” the surgeon said matter-of-factly. “He’ll either pull through it or he’ll die like a dog. Flip a coin if it’ll make you feel any better.”

♦ ♦ ♦

The following day Lady B. demanded an explanation of Fanny’s failure to answer the bell. Byron Bount stood on the carpet before her, heels locked, staring down at his feet. “Well, speak up Bount — is the girl still indisposed? Should I have the medico come round?” Bount answered, begging his ladyship’s pardon, that Fanny was not in the house. “Not in the — did you say not in the house?” That’s what he’d said. But where was she then? Bount cleared his throat. “It’s anybody’s guess. Ma’am.” Lady B.’s face hardened past simple petrification, through the igneous phase, the metamorphic and beyond.

The upshot of all this is that when Fanny returned from the prison that evening, her dress smudged and heart heavy, she found Byron Bount waiting for her on the front steps. Beside him lay two bundles of clothing and a crude oil portrait of Fanny’s mother. Bount folded his arms and looked down on her like a carrion bird.

Did she really have a choice?

“Great George Street,” she said to the cabbie.

♦ APOSTASY ♦

Alexander Anderson was at war with himself. His father had been pressuring him to have a talk with Ailie about her marital status, and he couldn’t decide which side he was on. “There’s nobody in the world closer to her than you are lad, not even her old Da’,” his father coaxed. “Talk some sense into her.” There had been no word of Mungo in nearly two years: the old man wanted her to marry Gleg.

The idea would have been anathema to him at one time. But now he wasn’t so sure. Gleg was still something of an ass — but an infinitely more tolerable ass than he’d been when he first came to Selkirk. And there was no question that he was devoted to Ailie — he’d been fawning at her feet and showering her with gifts and poems and off-key ballads ever since he’d laid eyes on her. The thing that hung Zander up was that by embracing Gleg he’d be turning his back on Mungo — worse, he’d be admitting that Mungo had failed, that he was dead and gone, buried in a shallow grave or stewing in the intestines of some slow-haunching beast. And yet, painful as such an admission might be, was there really any doubt? What was the sense of nurturing false hopes? Could he stand to see his sister pining away interminably, waiting on, hope curdling until it tasted of despair, her back humped with disappointment, the barren years aging her prematurely as she shuffled in and out of the kirk muttering over a string of prayer beads?

Gleg wasn’t so bad. He had his faults — he ate like a drayhorse and laughed like a hyena, his teeth were bad and his breath worse. . he was clumsy, long-nosed, ugly as a dog. . and yet his heart was good and he’d doubtless make something of himself in the world. .

Zander poured himself a whisky and ambled into the parlor, where Ailie was bent over her microscope and notepad. Gleg and the old man were out on a housecall, doing what they could to relieve old Malcolm McMurtry, who was dying of the bloody flux. Christmas was two weeks off. Wreaths of holly and groundpine hung in the windows. Outside the wind tore through the trees.

Zander sat on the edge of the table and studied his sister’s profile for a moment: the slope of the neck, the retrousse nose, the clipped black hair. “Ails,” he said finally, “I’ve been mulling it over, trying to be rational, and I don’t think — well, I don’t think you can count on Mungo coming back.” She didn’t look up from her work. “I mean — isn’t it about time we faced up to it and began to think of a future without him?” He took a sip of whisky; she was sketching something, going from microscope to notepad and back again. “I haven’t told you this. . but I’ll be leaving Selkirk before too much longer, you know — as soon as I can get myself together. I can’t stay here till the cows come home, mooching off the old man.” Still she didn’t respond. “And what about you? The old man isn’t going to live forever. Shouldn’t you be making plans?”

Ailie turned and looked up at him. “Et tu, Zander?”

He laughed. “Yes, me too. The old man wants you to marry Georgie. He asked me to talk to you. And you know, really, I don’t think it’s such a bad idea.”

“You don’t want me to be a spinster.”

“Something like that.”

“And Mungo?”

Zander left his drink and stirred up the coals m the hearth. Ailie’s doves started up a mournful duet, a sort of threnody, and then abruptly cut off in midnote. “We’ve got to face up to it, Ails,” he said, his back to her. “Two years and no word. What other conclusion is there?” When he turned round, she was peering into the microscope again. “Well?” His voice was gentle, a whisper. “Do you think there’s any hope?”

“I do not love Georgie Gleg,” she said.

♦ ♦ ♦

Two weeks later, on Christmas Day, after they’d drunk a toast and exchanged presents, there was dancing. (Ailie had been inundated with gifts from Gleg — a box of sweetmeats; three yards of green muslin store-bought in Edinburgh; the two volumes of Pierre Menard’s new study of protozoan life, Le Monde Secret; a dipnet and half a dozen sketchpads; scented handkerchiefs; a bottle of lilac water. She gave him a pocketknife in return.) Neighbors and cousins tramped over the floorboards, Kathy Kelpie and uncle Darroch, Nell Gwynn, Robbie Campbell and all the Motherwell Andersons. Godfrey MacAlpin shrieked and moaned through his pipes. Zander struck in with a fife and old man Deans sawed away at a fiddle. There was milk punch and spiced whisky, a smell of goose and maukin roasting on the spit. Katlin Gibbie came in late, cheeks flushed, her new husband on her arm and a conspicuous bulge beneath her coat. Gleg asked Ailie for a dance.

Later, when everyone had settled down for the meal. Dr. Anderson raised his glass and shouted that Ailie had an announcement to make. She rose unsteadily from the table, Gleg beamed up at her, Zander looked puzzled. “You all know,” she began, “that I’ve lost my betrothed in the wilds of Africa. I have every hope that he will one day walk through that door. . every hope. . but the days and minutes and hours are like venom to me and I. .” she was sniffling. Old man Deans offered her his handkerchief. “Another man, kind and gentle, has been growing in my esteem. .” She fumbled for her glass, drained it in a gulp. “What I mean to say is this: if there has come no word from Mungo to stop it, I will give my hand to Georgie Gleg in this very room one year from today, so help me God.”

♦ HORRIPILATION ♦

Days became weeks, weeks months. Ned, miraculously recovered but with a tendency to fall asleep in midsentence, drank gill ale in his private cell and toasted kidneys over the grate. Outside it was snowing. He could see the hard white pellets swirling beyond the bars of his window like gravel in a stream.

Billy Boyles sat on a stool in the corner, a pot of ale in his hand. Visiting. He crossed his bony legs, took a long swallow and wiped his mouth.

“Gettin’ nervous, Neddy?”

“Nervous? Why should I? I’m innocent, ain’t I?”

“That’s right, Neddy. I was there.”

The court of assizes met in the Old Bailey (a courthouse conveniently adjoining the prison) eight times a year, or every six weeks or so. Ned had been arrested in early August, but his barrister, Neville Thorogood of the high-powered firm of Jaggers & Jaggers, had managed to procure three postponements on the grounds of ill health. Thorogood was one of the premiere criminal lawyers of his day, retained for Ned on the strength of Adonais Brooks’ bank account. But good as he was, he was no miracle worker. Ned Rise was to stand in the dock at ten o’clock the following morning.

♦ ♦ ♦

Fanny was so keyed up she couldn’t eat her dinner. “But Fanny,” Brooks protested, “you’ve got to keep your strength up. Have a bit of raw veal — or an onion and porridge at least.” No: she couldn’t touch a thing. Really. Brooks arched his eyebrows and gestured toward the bedroom. “A bit of a tumble, then? To take your mind off it?”

The months at Great George Street had been a trial. Not that Brooks hadn’t been kind — and more than generous. It was his sexual demands. They were implacable. Never-ceasing. Strange and bestial. He’d dismiss the servants and strap her to the bannister in the downstairs hallway, take her from the rear and use her upturned buttocks for an ashtray. Or he’d lash her to the cook’s worktable — spread-eagled — and probe her orifices with carrots, cucumbers, zucchini, sausages. Then scramble half a dozen eggs in her navel and lap them up raw, take impressions of her breasts for gelatin molds, bury her in cole slaw. One afternoon he pinned her down and branded his initials in her left buttock; another time he came home with a terrier and a box of rats, and made furious love to her while the dog scrambled about the room throttling rodents and growling like a two-man saw. Terrified rats sprang onto the bed, clicking and squealing, burrowing into the bedclothes, the mute insistent snap, snap, snap of their companions’ necks driving them like a whip. Fanny went into shock. Adonais never missed a stroke.

It was difficult. But it was either submit, or watch Ned die a lingering death in the muck of Newgate. The history of love was full of such sacrifices — Pyramus and Thisbe, Venus and Adonis, George and Martha Washington. If they could do it, so could she. As she lay in Ned’s arms behind the cold stone walls of Newgate, too sore and exhausted to move, her lips swollen and eyes wet with tears, she felt herself lifted into the airy solitudes of the Christian martyrs, into the realm of Ignatius, Polycarp, Joan of Arc — of Christ Himself. This was martyrdom. This was love.

Ned did his best to lighten the load. He soothed her, massaged her welts and bruises, tried to smooth away the calligraphic blot on her backside with creams and unguents — all the while swearing he’d get revenge, make it up to her, take her off to some island in the Mediterranean and raise an altar to her. She let him talk on, his voice an anodyne. The walls were of granite, the gate of cast iron. He was penniless, powerless, emasculated by a system that crushed the downtrodden and rewarded perjurers and thieves. She never reminded him. Never undermined his hopes, never burdened his flights with the ballast of reality, and above all, never alluded to the trial that hung over their heads like the wicked flashing blade of a guillotine.

But now the moment was at hand. Ned would be acquitted and she could turn her back on Brooks to live with her lover in poverty and ecstasy. Or else—

She steeled herself. Thisbe’s example had not been lost on her.

♦ THE BLACK CAP ♦

The day of the trial dawned like an infection, the sky low and pus-colored, the sun a crusted eye. A few sickly pigeons flapped over the prison walls like newspapers lifted on the wind. From the street below came the pathogenic roar of the mob gathered outside the courthouse. Ned Rise felt sick to his stomach.

The mob was a ruly one for the most part, composed of shopkeepers, clergymen, budding industrialists and the wives of M.P.’s — the very heart, lungs and marrow of the middle class. They had been convened largely through the efforts of Sir Joseph Banks. Tirelessly, throughout the fall and early winter, he had led a campaign in the press and in the drawing rooms of Soho and Mayfair to make a public example of this case, to “lay its bloated carcass before the public eye and nostril till the very sight and stink of it drives them to rise up and exterminate the human vermin that infest our streets and threaten the life, liberty — and yes, property — of our good citizens.” He was stung by the wanton act of violence against his old friend and African associate and maddened to the brink of aneurysm by the revelation that his own ex-servant was connected — in the most odious way — with the evildoer. One thing and one thing only had brought him to the Old Bailey: to see Ned Rise sentenced to hang.

Inside, the gallery was packed. Charles Fox was there, Sir Reginald Durfeys, the Duke of Omnium and Lady Bledsoe. Countess Binbotta, Twit’s sister, was in from Leghorn with her husband Rudolfo. The African Association was out in force. Cariotta Meninges was there, and Bishop Erkenwald. So too was Beau Brummell, now an intimate of the Prince of Wales, and well on his way to becoming the preeminent cravat folder of the age. Twit’s death had come as a jolt to all of them, nagging as it did at the heels of their own vulnerability. Who hadn’t lost a purse in the street or been robbed at gunpoint in one’s own coach? Or come home to find his rooms ransacked and jewelry absconded with? But this — this was something else again.

There were nearly two hundred capital offenses on the books during that winter of ‘96-’97, including such heinous crimes as: stealing linen from a bleaching ground; shooting at a Revenue Officer; pulling down houses, churches, etc.; cutting hop binds; setting fire to corn or coal mines; stabbing a person unarmed if he die in six months; sending threatening letters; riots by twelve or more, and not dispersing in one hour after proclamation; breaking down a fish pond where fish may be lost; stealing woollen clothes from tenter grounds; stealing from a ship in distress; privy councillors, attempting to kill, etc.; sacrilege; turnpikes or bridges, destroying. With so many felonies to choose from this poor idiot had to go ahead and murder a nobleman. It was more than a crime. It was an outrage, a violation of the rules, a challenge to the system. Let them murder a Lord today, they’ll be raping a Lady tomorrow. It was unthinkable. Burghers and haut monde alike had turned out in protest. They’d come to see the prisoner get his deserts. They’d come to see the judge put on his black cap.

♦ ♦ ♦

The entire cast was assembled when Ned Rise was led into the courtroom, chains tintinnabulating at his wrists and ankles. The jurors had taken their oaths, kissed the ancient lip-blackened Bible and settled themselves in their box; the counselors were shuffling papers and grinning over some private joke; the judges — the Lord Mayor, the alderman, the sheriffs and the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas — were arranging their robes and coughing into their fists, the ebb and flow of their plethoric wigs like a flock of sheep on the run. Clank-clank, echoed the chains. The faces in the gallery looked up from newspapers, knitting, flasks of brandy, keen as weasels on the scent of a stricken bird. Ned, shoulders slumped, looking apologetic, clanked into the dock.

The Chief Justice wiped his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose while Ned scanned the room for a friendly face. None was readily apparent. The judges looked bilious and sour, as if just awakened from naps; the members of the jury sat stiff as fence posts, some wigged, others not, their faces hammered from granite; the prosecutor gnashed his teeth. Ned’s glance shot from face to face in the gallery, lighting on Sir Joseph Banks’ Vesuvian cheeks and brow, the Countess Binbotta’s rapierlike nose, Reginald Durfeys’ fluff of silver hair, and then finally, with a sigh of relief, on Fanny’s sad and wistful smile. At least she was here, thank God. But who was that beside her, in the scarlet jacket and beestung lips? Was that Brooks? And even worse, who was that tattered hag in the front row — the one with the ring struck through her lip? There was something about her that made his blood run cold, something strange and terrible, something that reached back to his earliest memories and whispered lost, lost, all lost.

“Clerk!” thundered the Chief Justice. “Read the indictment.”

The clerk’s voice was pitched like a bassoon, deep and meUifluous. “It is charged,” he read, “that the prisoner, one Ned Rise, did willfully and with malice aforethought take the life of Lord Graeme Eustace Twit in a violent manner on the night of August 11, 1796, after having lured his late lordship to the prisoner’s own foul and disreputable lodgings in Southwark, and there defenestrating him to his great bodily harm and subsequent demise.”

“The indictment has been read,” observed the Chief Justice in his sonorous tones. “How does the prisoner plead?”

Something caught in Ned’s throat. “Not—” he choked, seized by a sudden coughing spasm, drooling and wheezing for breath while the bailiff thumped his back and the spectators sniffed at jars of vinegar and crumbled sprigs of rue to ward off contagion. Finally, eyes tearing, Ned managed to squeak out his plea. “Not guilty. Your — Worship.”

There was a hiss from the gallery. The Chief Justice pounded the table with his gavel. “Call the first witness!” he roared.

The first witness was Mendoza. The Champion Fisticuffer strode across the room to a murmur of approval, resplendent in a pristine cravat, charcoal-gray jacket and black velvet trousers. His hair, lightly powdered, was tied back at the nape with a bit of ribbon that coordinated with his pants in the most delicate and felicitous way. He told his story in a clear, forthright voice, occasionally choked off by a flood of emotion when forced by the prosecutor to dwell on the more unpleasant details of the crime.

Everyone agreed that he acquitted himself well.

Ned felt a rush of relief when his counsel, Neville Thorogood, rose to cross-examine the witness. Thorogood was bland and corpulent, a man whose reputation rested as much on the fact that he had once consumed thirteen roasted hens in one sitting as on his juridical prowess. He stepped forward impressively, a stern and commanding look ironed into his bloated features, the immensity of his black-robed figure blotting half the room from view. Unfortunately, his voice had the high thin pitch of a choirboy’s, and there were titters from the gallery as he began his questioning. “Mr. Mendoza,” he piped, “can you tell the gentlemen of the jury just what you were doing in the defendant’s lodgings at four o’clock in the morning on August eleven of this year?”

Mendoza didn’t bat an eye. “The prisoner went and advised us that ‘ee ‘ad some silver plate and certain hancient paintin’s and hairiooms for sale, Yer Honor, and knowin’ that Lady Tuppenham ‘ad lately been deprived of such, we agreed to rondyvoo with the prisoner for the purpose of recoverin’ the property and ‘oldin’ ‘im till the authorities could be called.”

There was a flurry of applause from the gallery.

The Lord Mayor congratulated the witness on his keen sense of civic duty.

Ned was stunned. “But that’s a lie!” he shouted. “A barefaced lie!”

The Chief Justice thumped his gavel and ordered the bailiff to restrain the prisoner. A sharp blow to the kidneys doubled Ned over, and he began to cough again. When he recovered he lifted his head and gazed steadily at Mendoza. “You were there to rob me,” he said.

At this point the prosecutor rose from his seat. “Your Honor,” he began, “I beg you to consider that at the time of his apprehension the accused was a fugitive from justice, implicated as the prime mover in the sordid Vole’s Head Tavern affair that so shocked us all a few months back.

Furthermore, I submit that it is a patent absurdity to accuse a man who left an estate valued at some sixty thousand pounds of attempting to. . rob a wretched Southwark pauper.” Here he paused gravidly. “And beyond its inherent absurdity, this wild and desperate tale constitutes a callous profanation of the memory of a great and noble Englishman who, but for the hand of that blackguard there, would be among us today to defend himself from the sting of such calumny.”

“Bravo!” called Rudolfo Binbotta.

The Chief Justice, ignoring Binbotta’s outburst, looked down at the prisoner as if he were examining a bit of offal. “I quite agree, Counselor.”The gavel came down. “Next witness!”

The next witness was Smirke. He lumbered up to the stand, all feet and thumbs, and told his tale. Ned Rise was a thief and a liar. A scoundrel who had tricked him into besmirching the good name of the Vole’s Head, and then ducked out of sight to avoid “payin’ the piper.” On the night of August eleven, Smirke testified, he had gone over to Southwark with “the majestic pugilist, ‘is late lordship and the black nigger slave to recover wot properties the prisoner ‘ad nipped from an ‘igh-placed lady and to see that ‘ee got wot was comin’ to ‘im. There I witnessed ‘im backin’ up like a cornered rat and viciously shovin’ ‘is late lordship out the window to ‘is untoimely death.”

When Ned protested, the bailiff stuffed a rag in his mouth.

Jutta Jim was called in next as a corroborative witness. Because his English fell somewhere in the range between nonexistent and prerudimentary, he conveyed his recollections by means of sign language and pantomime. While describing his performance at the Vole’s Head, for instance, he made a circle of the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, through which he repeatedly thrust the stiffened index finger of his right.

“Mojo-jojo,” he grinned. “Scroo.” When it came to depicting the fatal night, he crept round the courtroom with his teeth bared to indicate the stealth and savagery of the prisoner, then flopped over on his back in imitation of his dead employer. He ended the performance in tears.

The prosecutor rested his case and Neville Thorogood rose to call his first and only witness: Billy Boyles.

Boyles, the back of his head flat as a book, lurched into the courtroom from the hallway beyond. His clothes were limp and shredded, his face and scrag of a beard plastered with dirt; he stank of halfpenny gin. For a long moment he stood there in the center of the room, dazed and uncertain. All eyes were upon him. He shook his head twice, as if to clear it, took a step forward and stumbled over the court recorder. “Bailiff!” boomed the judge, “help this man to the witness stand.”

Thorogood demurred. “But Your Honor — the witness is inebriated. ”

“Nonsense.”

By this time Boyles had been helped from the floor, and was clutching at the sides of the witness stand as he dragged himself up into the box. “Are you inebriated, sir?” asked the Chief Justice.

Boyles found his seat and looked up at him. “Wot was ‘at?”

“Are you inebriated, sir?”

No response.

The Lord Mayor whispered in the ear of the Chief Justice. The Justice rephrased his question. “Drunk, sir. Are you drunk?”

This seemed to register, and Boyles’ face blanched. “Who, me? Not a bit of it. I may have had a drop or two in my day, but for a sacred event like this one I wouldn’t. .” (here he paused to fight back a belch and pound at his breastbone) “. . wouldn’t dream of it.”

The Chief Justice sat back in his chair. “The witness is yours, Counselor.”

Thorogood blew out a long exasperated breath, then turned to the witness and asked him if he knew Ned Rise to be an honest man.

“Honest?” Boyles barked. “Why he’s honest as a rogue could be wot must live by his wits.”

Someone laughed in the gallery. Boyles winked at Ned.

The counselor then asked Boyles for the particulars of the encounter in Southwark on the night of August eleven.

Boyles seemed perplexed. “August eleven? Why I can barely remember back a week — how am I supposed to know wot went on five, six months ago, eh?”

“The night of Lord Twit’s demise,” piped Thorogood.

“Ohhhhh,” said Boyles, as if this cast a whole new light on things. “That was the night, was it? August eleven? You sure?” He picked his nose thoughtfully for a moment, and then began his story. “Well, I tells you. I was present for the whole thing and I says that Neddy Rise is innocent as a babby.” (This prompted a protest from the gallery, to which Boyles responded with an obscene gesture.) “You see they got me drunk,” he continued, “and forced me to find out Neddy’s lodgin’s for ‘em, though Neddy was dead and drownded five months before. So we goes up to his lodgin’s and waits for him, me and Twit and the rest. . and the rest. .”

“Yes,” shrilled Thorogood, “go on.”

But Boyles could not go on. His head had come to rest on the rail before him and he had begun to breathe through his nose with a low racheting sound. The Chief Justice ordered the bailiff to shake him, but it was no use: he was out cold. “Remove the witness!” boomed the judge. And then: “Have you any more witnesses to call, Mr. Thorogood?”

“No, your honor,” whined Ned’s counselor, “but—”

“Mr. Prosecutor — you may address the jury.”

In his summation, the prosecutor drew on the Classics, Shakespeare and the Bible. He quoted poetry, marshaled evidence, spoke of sin and corruption, the sad state of London’s streets, of inbreeding and the criminal mentality. He spoke glowingly of torture and the gallows, of the deterrent effect of public execution. Ned Rise, he asserted, was a fiend and a libertine. A Jack the Ripper, an Ethan Allen, a Robespierre. He was filth, vermin, disease. To stamp him out would be patriotic, Christian — as close as the English public could come to asserting their identification with Jesus of Nazareth and their loathing for Satan and his vile minions on earth. “I implore you,” he concluded, “no — I command you in the name of King George and the Lord in Heaven to eliminate this cancerous growth, this bubo, this Ned Rise, before he swells up to consume us all!”

The prosecutor was bathed in sweat. His final words rang out like the trumpets of the archangels warming up for Judgment Day. The gallery burst into spontaneous applause.

And then it was Ned’s turn. The rag was removed from his mouth, and he prepared to make his final plea to the jury. (At this point in the history of English jurisprudence, counsel for the defense was prohibited from addressing the jury — that privilege was reserved for the defendant alone. Often as not the defendant was half-starved, ignorant, intimidated by the proceedings, incapable of weighing evidence or of reasoning clearly. But that was his lookout.)

Ned took a deep breath, turned to face the jury, and gave it his best shot. “Gentlemen of the jury,” he began, “there are two sides to every story, and I beg you now to take heed of mine. First, everything you have heard here today is a lie.” There were boos and catcalls from the gallery; the judge rapped for order. “All I wanted was to live decent. I put aside a few pounds so I could be married and open a tavern or some other respectable business. I worked hard and saved my money. But these men came in the dead of night to beat and rob me — Smirke, Mendoza, and yes, Lord Twit, God rest his soul.”

“Infamy!” shouted Sir Joseph Banks.

“It’s a lie!” shrieked the Countess Binbotta.

Ned held up his shackled hands for silence. “Where would the likes of me get the near five hundred pounds that was stole from me that night?

Simple. It was I, who by the sweat of my brow, bottled — er, imported — the renowned caviar, Chichikov’s Choice—”

There was an angry rumble at the mention of the brand name; Ned began to feel he’d made a mistake, but blundered on nonetheless.

“Chichikov’s Choice, which I sold at a sacrifice so the good people of London could enjoy the finest—”

“Frog’s eggs and shoe blacking!” shouted an angry juror.

“Poison!” shouted another.

“String him up!”

The bailiff had to restrain one of the jurors, red in the face, who was attempting to climb over the rail and assault the prisoner. The gallery was in riot, Ned ducking shoes and bits of rotten fruit, the Chief Justice and Lord Mayor pounding the table with their gavels. “Order!” called the clerk. “Order!”

When the courtroom had settled down, the Chief Justice glared angrily at Ned. “Bailiff,” he roared, “the prisoner is inciting to riot. Muffle him.” The rag was reinserted in Ned’s mouth and the Chief Justice charged the jury to deliberate and pronounce their verdict.

The foreman rose. He was a rangy, dyspeptic-looking fellow whose face was creased with scowl lines. “There is no need for deliberation, your honor. Our decision is unanimous. We find the defendant guilty as charged.” He made as if to sit, but then thought better of it. “And if I may say so, Your Honor, I think hangin’s too good for him.”

The Chief Justice looked down the row of his colleagues — the sheriffs, the alderman, the Lord Mayor — while the court held its breath. Then, with a grim terrible look, he reached beneath the table, produced the black cap and set it atop his wig. “Ned Rise,” he called in a voice that would wake the dead. “Face the court and hear our doom.” He paused to blow his nose mightily. “After weighing the evidence we find you guilty as charged and sentence you to hang by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead.”

As the Chief Justice delivered the sentence, the bailiff slipped a string about the prisoner’s thumb and pulled it tight to illustrate his words. Ned was dazed. He looked round him and saw that the entire courtroom was on its feet, people were applauding and whistling, razzing and jeering — Fanny was nowhere to be seen. The bailiff took him by the arm and led him across the room toward the door that communicated with the prison. Through all the noise of the crowd one sound rang in his ears, filled his being, made his flesh crawl as if all the corpses in the world had risen up to rake their nails across a monstrous blackboard: “Eeeeeee!” it grated. “Eeeeeee! Eeeeeeeeeeeee!”

♦ HEGIRA ♦

The loss of Johnson hit the explorer like a hammerblow. If before the situation was grim, now it was desperate. Not only was he half-naked, starved, febrile, nauseated, penniless and lost, he suddenly found himself on his own in an alien and hostile environment — without guide, companion or fellow sufferer. Life with the Moors was a lark by comparison.

As he watched Johnson’s brow sink into the muck, he lost control of himself, carrying on like a Greek housewife at the funeral of her eldest son, or a federalist, forced by luck of the draw to inscribe his name last on a historic and revolutionary document. Purely and simply, he gave way to despair. Sat down in the water and began tearing at his hair, wailing, sobbing and moaning, gnashing his teeth, rending his skin, flailing at the water with his useless knife and cursing, blaspheming, crying out against the senseless mechanism of the universe and the black arbitrary heart that oversees it. This went on for ten minutes or so, until he felt a hand on his arm. It was the refugee. Behind, up to their knees in water, stood the little man’s wife and stunted children, their faces stung with anxiety. “Come on,” the man said. “There’s nothing you can do here — except maybe attract another crocodile.”

The man’s name was Jemafoo Momadoo. Like many of the Mandingoes of the region he was a Moslem, having converted to Mohammedanism under pressure from the Moors. He bowed to Mecca twice a day, abstained from pork and named his first son Ismail — but he was no fanatic. Until the deluge he had been a tenant farmer in the village of Sooha, scraping away at the dusty soil from dawn till dusk, yanking at the desiccated yellow teats of his goats, boiling the meat from the bones of snakes, toads and rats. A week of steady rain flooded the fields around Sooha to a depth of three and a half feet. He and his wife and their wisps of children were asleep in their cane hut when the Niger swept down on them, seething and booming. The flood waters took his goats, two sons, his hut, tools and meager stock of dried legumes and rice. In return it gave him the bloated carcasses of two hartebeests and a sitatunga.

He led the explorer back up the rise to where the pot was once again simmering over the fire. The clearing was so green it ached. “Would you like a cup of broth?” he asked.

♦ ♦ ♦

Mungo accompanied the Momadoos to the village of Song, where Jemafoo’s father-in-law was the Dooty. It was a two-day trek. Jemafoo was hoping to participate in the reduction of his father-in-law’s larder, while Mungo, still reeling under the shock of Johnson’s sudden demise and shaken with the onset of fever, welcomed the opportunity to travel anywhere, so long as it was in the right direction. (He had discovered, much to his dismay, that the failed attempt to cross the Toolumbo had resulted in his landing on the far side of the Niger, twenty miles downriver from the point at which he’d started. The discovery came as no surprise, actually — it was just another link in a concatenation of major setbacks and bitter disappointments that had begun with the disappearance of his seatrunk ten minutes after landing at Goree, and that had continued unabated ever since.)

The Momadoos, en famille, trooped into Song just after dawn, the explorer bringing up the rear. Cook fires smoldered under the light drizzle, dogs yapped, guinea hens pecked in the dirt. There was no one to be seen. Madame Momadoo, eight-and-a-half months pregnant and a native of the village, was puzzled. She peered into this hut or that, called out a time or two, and then turned to her husband and shrugged her shoulders. But then she caught her breath and stood stock-still, listening. Her broad face broke into a grin. “Mola lave akombo,” she said. “They’re singing. Listen.”

The sound was faint and distant, a static in the air, a hum of the sort that announces a massing of insects — or a gathering of armies. The explorer strained his ears: it seemed to be coming from the direction of the river. He started toward it automatically, without thinking, almost as if he were under a spell. Human voices, raised in song. How long had it been? Bass and contralto, counterpoint, soaring sopranos — the sweep of voices took him back to the cavernous cathedrals of Edinburgh and the simple oak-beamed chapel of his boyhood at Fowlshiels. He found himself returning Madame Momadoo’s grin.

The muddy path wound through a series of vegetable plots already burgeoning with yellow gourds, incipient watermelons, yams, cassavas, Indian corn and peanuts, then dipped down a short incline to follow an earthen levee across what appeared to be a flooded rice paddy. The children scampered on ahead, thin as featherless birds, while Madame Momadoo hurried after them, her great belly jogging in time to the flash of her elbows. Mungo picked his way along carefully, quizzing Jemafoo about the local power structure, agricultural techniques, initiation rites. The music swelled in his ears.

They passed through a dark clot of vegetation that hemmed them in on all sides, then came round a bend and caught their breath — there was the Niger stretched out before them, oceanic, gray with mist. Trees stood in the water like women lifting their skirts, and the riverbank was crowded with people. Brooding over the scene were masses of shrieking, squabbling birds. Jemafoo’s face lit up. “The akeena are running!” he shouted, bounding forward like a hound on the scent.

No one even glanced up when the explorer joined the crowd on the riverbank. They were too busy hauling at ropes, collectively drawing a huge seine across the bay before them — and singing their hearts out.

“Wo-habba-wo!” chanted the men in a basso that shook the earth, dipping forward on the ‘‘habba,” leaning back into the rope on the upbeat. “Weema-woppa, weema-woppa,” sang the women and children, while an old man, ribby but muscular, wove a snaking melody above it with all the fire and ice of a tenor at the Royal Opera.

Mungo looked round. Madame Momadoo had joined one of the rope gangs behind her eldest son. Jemafoo stood by a mound of silver fish, each the size of a sardine, and flailed a stick at the terns and pelicans that plunged toward the seething mass and then shot off into the sky. Each villager had his task — from the old women who tended the bonfires to the boys who ran off dogs and jackals with a barrage of stones — and yet each was attuned to the other through the rhythmic insistency of the song. Order and harmony, sang the voices, cooperation and prosperity, heave and ho. The explorer stood there like a mannequin, intent on the struggle with the net, until he began to detect a change in the intensity of the music. It seemed as if the voices were about to explode, rumbling away like a stampede, when a woman’s voice rushed up the scale in a burst of Dionysian energy, searing and triumphant, the rhythm pulsing quicker now, driving toward a climax, thunderous — and suddenly Mungo was at the rope, tugging for all he was worth, oblivious to fever, hunger, sorrow, caught up in the emotional sweep of the thing.

The net was closing like a throat, squeezing off into a U, then a V, and all at once the water was alive with thrashing fish. Thousands leaped the net, hundreds of thousands more went deep, tangled in the mesh, and pounded the water to foam. Men waded in up to their waists, clubbing at the escaping fish, children scooped the stunned transgressors from the surface, the crowd pulled, and then it was over. The net was beached, colossal, a river of flesh.

Snakes and eels slithered for the water, fish flapped across the mudbank like acrobats. But for every potential escapee there was a quick scrawny Mandingo boy with a club. Thud-thud went the clubs, and a new song began, less insistent in its beat, slower-paced, methodical: a killing song. Not a fish escaped. Already the drying fires were roaring as women strung the little silver fish on lines and hung them out to toast. There was a perch in the catch that must have weighed over a hundred pounds, and a catfish-looking thing that could have swallowed it whole. Two men held up a terrapin the size of a wagon wheel, another dragged a twelve-foot python up the bank and headed off in the direction of the village. Within minutes the terrapin was shelled, dismembered and bubbling away in a pot; the perch and catfish were gutted, wrapped in leaves and tossed into a smoldering pit while a pair of marabou storks fought over the remains. Jemafoo tapped the explorer’s shoulder. “Here,” he said, offering one of the three-inch fish that flashed and writhed in his hand. ‘‘Akeena.’’ He was grinning encouragement, having learned from experience that all distress is food-related. “Watch — like this,” he demonstrated, putting his lips to the fish’s vent and squeezing it lengthwise to draw out the roe. “Go ahead, try it.”

Birds were shrieking, a thick greasy smoke hung in the air. The voices of the chorus swelled and sank. Mungo lifted the fish to his lips, but when he tried to squeeze it he found that he didn’t have the energy. His temples were pounding, his legs gone to rubber. He sat down and dreamed of blackness.

♦ ♦ ♦

The fever came on with a vengeance. It left him enervated and delirious, and it was accompanied by an excoriating diarrhea that so debilitated him he couldn’t even muster the energy to clean himself. For two weeks he lay on a mat in the father-in-law’s hut, sweating and stinking, waking from jarring nightmares to the stark actuality of four walls on an alien planet. At intervals someone bent over him with a damp cloth, or put a wooden spoon in his mouth. An old woman offered him a potion of hammered bark: her face was Dassoud’s. Demons howled, strange melodies chanted in his ears. He saw the net that holds up the stars, dug to the center of the earth, floundered about the icy black depths of the sea. Rain hissed at the thatched roof, centipedes and crimson spiders crept over him, sucked at his organs, nested in his eyes. He screamed until he was hoarse. And then — as suddenly as it had come on — it left him. He could see and hear. He knew who he was.

The hut was crowded: children and adults, dogs, poultry, an old leper. Sheets of rain obscured the doorway, there was a smell of gutter and bilge. Jemafoo and his father-in-law were arguing.

“You throw all your burdens on me.”

“What choice do I have? Starve your daughter and grandchildren?”

“What about him?”

“You can’t turn your back on a guest.”

“I didn’t invite him. Nor you for that matter.”

The explorer stirred, raised himself to his elbows. “I’m better now,” he croaked. “Really.” He stood shakily. There was nothing left of him but eyes. “If you could just give me a bite for the road. .”

At that moment there was a cry from the far corner, an unearthly screech, a protest from another world. Madame Momadoo was surrounded by women. One of them held up a newborn infant, slick and red. It was a boy. He screeched again, a strange primal squeal compounded of terror, rage and bewilderment. But there was something else in it too: a demand.

“I can give you nothing,” the father-in-law said.

The explorer gathered up his things — the top hat stuffed with notes, his walking staff, a water gourd and battered compass — and started for the door. Jemafoo stopped him and handed him a bag of dried fish, grain and tobacco.

“Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” shrieked the baby, as if his teeth had been pulled.

The explorer stepped out into the rain.

♦ ♦ ♦

Half a mile up the road he began to feel dizzy, sought out shelter in a lean-to fashioned from leaves the size of overcoats, and fell asleep. When he woke, the sun was shining. He’d been told that the next town over was called Frookaboo, and that for twenty cowries you could get a Frookabooan to paddle you across the river in a dugout. So he had a choice. He could lie there in a heap of rotting leaves, or force down some dried fish and hobble up the road to Frookaboo. Indomitable, he chose to hobble.

At Frookaboo he applied to the Dooty for food, shelter and passage across the river. He was a scribe, he said, and could pay for his lodging by inditing potent and efficacious safies. Then he fell asleep. The Dooty shook him and asked him if he was a Moor. Mungo considered the question a moment, his lids at half-mast. His beard hung below his breastbone, he was dressed in a tattered toga and sandals, his skin was yellow from sun and jaundice. He squinted up at the Dooty. “La illah el allah,” he said, “Mahomet rasowl Allahi.”

The explorer spent three days at Frookaboo, a guest of the Dooty. He ate well, slept in a dry hut, bowed to Mecca. The fever drew off a pace or two, and he began to regain some of his strength. He even found energy, for the first time in weeks, to take some notes. I repaid the Dooty, he wrote, by scribbling out the Lord’s Prayer for him on a bit of slate. The man was a strict Mohammedan, and thought I was writing in Arabic. I felt it expedient not to disabuse him. When I had finished, he wiped the slate clean with a wet cloth, wrung the cloth out over a cup and drank down its contents, thereby assuring himself of the maximum benefit of my words. Afterward he offered me a pipe of mutokuane and a peep beneath his wife’s veil.

On the afternoon of the third day Mungo thanked his host, scribbled off a final blessing, and limped down to the river, where he found a number of ferrymen perched like water spiders in the prows of their canoes. He struck a bargain with a sloe-eyed Bobo whose skin was the color of a Concord grape: six lines of inspired calligraphy in exchange for passage to Sibidooloo, on the far side of the river. The explorer felt that something out of Virgil might be appropriate — inscribed to the Charon of the Niger — but he couldn’t remember a word of Latin and wound up giving him an abridged version of “The Owl and the Pussycat” instead.

There were four goats, a parrot and a cage full of monkeys in the canoe, in addition to six other passengers and a dozen earthenware jars of produce. When Mungo asked what the monkeys were for, the ferryman grinned to display a gleaming mouthful of teeth. “Bake them,” he said. “Make monkey bread.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Sibidooloo lay directly across the river from Frookaboo. It was, according to the ferryman, a trading town of about a thousand people. From there, he said, it was perhaps seventy-five miles to Kamalia, a slave market situated on the edge of the Jallonka Wilderness. If the explorer could make Kamaha he might be able to hook up with a slave coffle heading for the coast. It was a hope. He would have preferred a coach and four back to Pisania, but at least now he knew that there was a way back. The explorer landed at Sibidooloo in high spirits. His plan was to spend the night and leave the next morning for Kamalia. If the fever held off and the road wasn’t too muddy, he should be able to make it in three or four days.

But first to the business at hand: finding some shelter for the night. The sky had begun to darken, clouds scudding low and smoky over the thatched roofs and whitewashed walls of the town. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the air had suddenly cooled. It was probably raining in Frookaboo already. The explorer hurried up a narrow street of well-kept mud-and-wattle huts, occasionally looking in at a doorway and asking for shelter. After two or three rebuffs, he stopped before a hut where a woman in kerchief and hoop earrings was suckling an infant and preparing kouskous with bits of akeena. He greeted her, then pulled a slip of paper from his hat, dashed off a couple of lines from Abercrombie’s Art of Divine Converse, and handed it to her. She glanced up suspiciously. “You a marabout?’’

He didn’t know what to say. Marabouts were Moslem holy men who traveled from town to town, dispensing learning. It seemed like a good thing to admit to, yet why the strange look? He opted for insincerity. “That I am,” he said.

She put the infant down, and called to someone in the hut. “Flancharee,” she said. “Come here.”

A tall Mandingo in a pair of baggy shorts stepped from the hut, flanked by two Moors. Mungo’s heart sank. The Moors were dressed in dirty white jubbahs and tagilmusts. Somehow, one of them looked familiar.

“This man claims to be a marabout,” the woman said. “Look what he wrote on this paper.”

Flancharee and the Moors squinted at the quotation from Abercrombie. Then one of the Moors looked the explorer dead in the eye and said something in Arabic. Mungo didn’t know what to answer. The Moor repeated himself. It sounded as if he were saying “Your mother eats pig.”

“He’s no marabout,’’ Flancharee said in Mandingo.

The second Moor stepped forward. His skin was baked to leather, his nose twisted like a scythe — but worst of all, the explorer realized with a cold shock of recognition, his left eye socket was empty. “No Mussulman,” the Moor hissed in broken Mandingo. “Nazarini!”

“Imposter!” rumbled the woman.

Flancharee took hold of the explorer’s arm.

“He’s a thief,” the first Moor said. “He stole from Ali and crawled off in the night like a dog. Dassoud is offering four prime slaves for him, enough to make a man rich.”

“Nazarini!” shrieked One-Eye.

Flancharee looked at the explorer as he might look at a snake that had just lashed out at his ankle. “Chain him up,” he said.

♦ ♦ ♦

That night the rain came like an explosion in a glass factory. It tore the leaves from the trees, the trees from the ground. Light fractured the sky, thunder thrashed the hills like an open hand. The explorer was not without shelter through all of this, though it was less than he could have hoped for. His cage sat in the middle of a square of sorts, exposed on all sides to the violence of the storm. Sometime during the night there was a sudden heart-stopping crack as of a hundred muskets fired in unison, and a raffia palm, its leaves the size of canoes, slammed down beside the cage, lifting the wooden box three feet in the air and startling the explorer from a despondency that bordered on the catatonic. After all his triumphs, narrow escapes and quickening hopes, falling back into the hands of the Moors has been too much for him. He’d gone into shock.

He sat up and looked round him. What he saw was no cause for joy: wooden bars, insects, a crazed sky, and a dark silent bank of huts. The cage in which he found himself had been built of hardwood and bamboo to accommodate a rogue lion that had burst through the roof of a hut, killed and devoured the occupants, and then apparently found himself too bloated to abscond. The villagers found him sleeping atop a pile of half-eaten corpses the following morning. While a pair of daredevils stood at the door with their spears, others hastily constructed the cage, which was then forced against the opening. On awakening, the lion had breakfasted briefly and then lumbered out the door and into the cage before he realized that something was amiss. For a month or so the man-eater had been the drawing card of Sibidooloo, but had recently been presented to Moosee, King of Gotto, as a peace offering. When One-Eye and Flancharee found that all the irons available were already employed in restraining slaves collected for the trek to Kamalia, they hit upon the cage as a convenient place to shut up the explorer. And so he had spent the evening there, in a heap of lion dung, thinking the blackest thoughts.

The collapse of the tree came as something of a blessing. It jolted him from his torpor, and he began to probe the enclosure for a means of escape. He crept round on his hands and knees in the dark as dry scuttling things backed away from his fingers and the rain slashed through the bars to awaken the dormant odor of lion piss. Smelling salts couldn’t have cleared his head more effectively. He gasped and gagged, his eyes tearing, hands frantically pawing over every nook and joint of his cell. The first time round he found nothing — the native joiners had done their work well. But then, on closer examination, he discovered a rough spot in the upper right-hand corner where the planks of the ceiling met the cornerpiece. The wood was abraded where the lion had persistently gnawed at it during the weeks of his captivity. Mungo’s blood pressure rose: here was a chance! But how to take advantage of it? Instinctively he applied his teeth to the gnawed wood, but managed only to collect the odd splinter in his lips. Then he gouged at it until his fingernails began to bleed. Still nothing. Finally, he frisked the ground outside the cage until he came up with a sliver of stone that chewed away at the weak spot like a saw.

Three hours later the first of the bars gave way with a snap of protest. He held his breath and glanced round. The rain beat down with a steady mechanical roar. There was no light anywhere. He went back to work, bent over the wooden struts like a huge sedulous rodent. It took him two hours more to carve himself free. The final bar snapped and he slipped out into the deluge, working the hat down over his brow. Nothing stirred in Sibidooloo — not even a dog — as he leaned into the storm and headed up the road for Kamalia.

♦ ♦ ♦

It took him six days to get there. He traveled by night, holing up in the forest during the day, drinking from puddles, chewing at roots, picking leeches from his skin. He was startled awake on the afternoon of the second day by the clatter of hoofs, and peered out from his cover to observe One-Eye and his companion hurrying up the road. At dawn on the fourth day he came across a tiny cluster of huts beside the road. He hadn’t eaten in days: what little strength he had was ebbing. Desperate, he woke the Dooty and offered to write charms in exchange for a bite to eat. The Dooty said that there was no food in town for the likes of him, a common thief. “All right,” the explorer said, squatting outside the door. “I’ll sit here until I’ve starved to death. And I’ll curse you and your crops and your descendants and their crops through all eternity and in the name of Mansa King George III of England.” Twenty minutes later the Dooty’s wife appeared in the doorway with a bowl of kouskous.

At Kamalia he traded a half-written letter to Ailie for a cup of milk and a platter of boo, a dish which was made from corn husks and tasted like sand. When he asked his host about the possibility of joining a slave coffle for the coast, the man directed him to Karfa Taura’s house on the far side of town. The month was September. Mist rose from the streets and everywhere there was the insidious clank of chains as slavers gathered their wares against the end of the rainy season and the march to the sea. The explorer kept his head down.

Taura’s house, a four-or five-room affair built of clay and stone, dominated a hill in the center of town. There was a well, a shade tree or two and an expanse of muddy red earth pocked with goat tracks. Out back were a number of cane huts and a corral fenced round with thorn. The explorer presented himself at the door, suffering from fatigue, starvation, mental duress, emaciation, jungle rot, blisters, hemorrhoids, various local infections, hepatitis, diarrhea and a febrile body temperature of one hundred and one degrees. His toga had degenerated to a web of knotted strips, his hat looked like a byproduct of cat-skinning, and he was barefooted. Twenty-five years old, he could easily have passed for sixty. “Tell your master,” he croaked at the incredulous black face at the door, “that I am a white man desirous of traveling to the Gambia with one of his slave coffles. Tell him. .” here he lost his train of thought, “tell him. . I. . I failed Greek but could kick a football the length of the field.”

A moment later he was led through the house to the baloon, a large airy room reserved for guests. There he found Karfa Taura sharing a pipe of tobacco with a number of slatees[4] who had come to join his coffle. Taura was wearing a tarboosh and a lustrous blue robe. A gray parrot perched on his shoulder, peeling a berry. “So,” he said, “you claim to be a white man from the west. I have never seen a white man, though as a boy I once saw two Portugee in Medina.” Taura was Mandingo by birth, Muslim by conversion. He was also filthy rich. “It’s funny,” he continued after a pause, “but you don’t look white. I expected something, well — brighter. Like the belly of a frog.”

One of the slatees spoke up. He was a murderous-looking character with corrosive eyes. “He’s no white man.”

“Never,” spat another. “I’ve seen white men at Pisania and Goree, and their skin is as white as the pages of this book.” He held up a copy of the Koran.

The explorer felt woozy. He found it difficult to remain standing. “Give me a football,” he shouted, lapsing into English, “and I’ll show you who’s white.”

This outburst seemed to startle his interrogators for a moment, and they stared up at him with renewed interest. “What’s that he said?” But then the first slatee growled, “Aaaah, he’s just a pariah Moor down on his luck, coming round here on false pretenses in the hope of getting a handout.”

“Mad is what he is,” his cohort said. “Mad as a hyena. Look at his rags — and that hat!”

Karfa Taura held up his palm. “Suleiman,” he said to the man with the book, “give the newcorner your book.”

Suleiman handed the book to the explorer.

“Can you read the Koran?” Taura asked.

Mungo tried, straining to remember Ouzel’s Grammar and how those arcane dots and slashes related to letters and words. After staring at the book a moment he raised his head and mumbled, “No, I can’t read it.”

“Illiterate!” shouted the first slatee.

“Kafir!” muttered another.

Taura whispered something to his servant and the man left the room to return again in a moment with a second book in his hand. As the servant handed it to the explorer, Taura’s voice, calm and patient, purred over the prickling silence: “Perhaps you can read this?”

The leather binding was splotched with mold, there were fingerprints in the dust on the cover. The explorer opened the book and tried to concentrate on the black printed letters that swam before his eyes like sunspots. He couldn’t focus. The slatees were shouting out insults. “You cannot?” Taura asked.

Then all at once the letters came into focus and he was reading, reading like a man at the breakfast table with a copy of The Monthly Review spread out before him:

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.”

♦ ♦ ♦

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!”

♦ ♦ ♦

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.

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?”

♦ ♦ ♦

Mungo was in luck. He arrived in Pisania on June 12, 1797, with one thought in mind: booking passage to England on any boat that would have him. But the monsoon season was settling in with its rot and pestilence, and he was afraid he’d have to wait it out before another boat landed on the Gambia. It could be months. He drew a bill on the African Association through Dr. Laidley, paid Karfa Taura handsomely, and settled in for a long, anticlimactic wait. But on the third day of his vigil, by purest coincidence, an American slaver sailed up the river to exchange a cargo of rum and tobacco for men, women, and children. The Charlestown was bound for South Carolina, departing on the seventeenth. Without hesitating, the explorer signed on: better to take a circuitous route home than wait out the rains in a leaky back room in Pisania. After two years on the Dark Continent, he was aching for some light.

On the morning of the seventeenth the explorer shaved, slipped into the clothes Dr. Laidley had provided him, and climbed aboard The Charlestown. The deck creaked under his feet as he set his valise down and tried to ascertain where his cabin might be located. He could see nothing. Fog hovered over the water like the underside of a dream, catching at the rigging, dissolving the quarterdeck. Vague forms glided ghostlike through the haze, mosquitoes whined. It was hot as an iron foundry. Puzzled, the explorer stood rooted to the deck and watched two figures gesticulating like Punch and Judy through a curtain of mist.

“We got to wait till the soup clears off, Cap’n,” said the shorter of the two.

“Draw the anchor, Mr. Frip. We sail immediately.”

“But—” (there was the sound of mosquito slapping and a guttural, heartfelt curse).

“But me no buts, Mister. Stay here in this fetid shithole another ten minutes and half the crew’ll be down with the shivers and the black vomit.

Haul that anchor, I say!”

The smaller figure drew off into the gloom, mumbling and swatting: “Can’t even find the fuckin’ thing in this shit. . Ouch! Sonofabitchin’ moskeeters. .”

It took two weeks to get down the river to Fort Goree, held up as they were by heavy fog, snags and contradictory winds. Four seaman, the ship’s surgeon and three slaves died of fever along the way. At Goree the Captain informed Mungo that the ship would be unavoidably detained because he was unable to obtain provisions for the crossing. “Detained?” said Mungo, his heart sinking. For two months now — lying at Kamalia, struggling through the Jallonka Wilderness — he had been sustained by visions of the eager, attentive faces ranged round the conference table in Soho Square, of Ailie in her underwear, of his book and burgeoning celebrity. He’d survived disease, humiliation, exhaustion and despair, and now he was ready to reap his reward. “For how long?” he asked.

The Captain pulled on his dogskin gloves and offered the explorer a Raleigh cigar. “There’s a relief boat due in at Goree in mid-September,” he said. “We can stock up then and be on our way.”

Mid-September! He couldn’t believe it. Three months more in this pest-ridden hole, three months more bobbing in a rotten berth off of a last-chance garrison maintained by the dregs of London. He may as well have stayed at Pisania, with Dr. Laidley. There at least he could have had a glass of wine, some intelligent conversation, a room to himself. Here he had convicts for companions, a hold full of moribund black faces, cockroaches longer than a man’s finger, and the incessant creeping rot that made Goree one of the world’s more pestilential spots. So near and yet so far. He gave way to depression, lay in his berth and watched the ship rot around him.

The Charlestown finally set sail on October first, the explorer having been pressed into assuming the role of the late surgeon. He hadn’t made much use of his medical knowledge in the interior, but summoned up all Dr. Anderson had taught him in order to deal with the frightening conditions aboard ship. The American slavers, because their crews were smaller, were far less humane than the British. For fear of mutiny the slaves were kept in irons throughout the voyage. They lived in the dark, damp and cold, wallowing in their own waste, prey to consumption, typhus, hepatitis, racked with malarial fevers. The irons wore the flesh from wrists and ankles; maggots hatched in the wounds. Mungo did his best. He let blood, applied leeches, forced vinegar down their throats. Eight died at Goree, eleven more at sea. The stiffened corpses were dragged from their irons and tossed into the spume, where quick pelagic sharks fought over the remains.

The crew didn’t fare much better. Three died at Goree, another two at sea. But as it turned out, this was the least of the Captain’s worries. A far more pressing problem was the leaks that had developed in the hull while the ship sat at anchor off Goree. Now, on the high seas, these leaks had become critical. So critical in fact that the most able-bodied slaves were released from their irons in order to man the pumps. Fourteen-hour shifts, the whip cracking over their heads. They pumped, fainted from exhaustion, were lashed to consciousness, and pumped again. Still, the boat was taking on so much water it became clear that it would never make South Carolina. It became clear to some, that is.

“Cap’n — you’ve got to make for the West Indies or before you know it we’ll be treading water in the company of them sharks out there.”

“You’re an educated man, Mr. Frip. Take a look over the gunwale and read me what’s writ along the bow: I think you’ll find that it says The Charlestown, does it not? Well, Sir, that’s where I’ve been paid to take her and that’s where she’ll go.”

“Begging your pardon, Cap’n, Sir, but me and the crew has been talking amongst ourselves, Sir, and we’ve unanimously decided to break out our seamen’s dirks and ventilate your domineering hide till you look like one of them fountains in downtown Richmond, Sir, if you don’t change course for Antigua within thirty seconds by my pocketwatch, with all due respect, Sir.”

♦ ♦ ♦

From Antigua, the explorer was able to catch the Chesterfield Packet, which had stopped at St. John’s for the mail on the return voyage from the Leeward Islands. The ship sailed on the twenty-fourth of November, and drew within sight of Falmouth on the morning of December twenty-second, 1797. Shorebirds wheeled in the sky, the wind flung spray over the decks. There was ice on the rail, and a thin watery snow added sting to the gusts. The crew was invisible, the Captain in bed, the cook’s terrier huddled beneath the stove. But Mungo Park, after two years and seven months in exile, stood beside the helmsman with a grin on his face as the distant rocky isle rode up over the waves.

♦ COLD FEET ♦

A year is nothing: a feather in the breeze, a breath of air. Turn around and it’s gone. Ice, bud, leaf, twig. Geese on the pond, stubble in the field. Three hundred sixty-five mornings, three hundred sixtyfive nights. Minor lacerations, a sprained ankle, runny nose, the death of a distant relative. There’s a squirrel in the attic, a tree down in a storm. The clock in the hallway cranks round seven hundred and thirty times. Windows are raised, shades drawn, dishes, cups and spoons dirtied and scrubbed, dirtied and scrubbed. Thunder hits the hills like a mallet, snow climbs the fenceposts, sunlight burnishes the windows like copper. A year. One of how many: fifty? sixty? The days chew away at it, insidious.

♦ ♦ ♦

Ailie huddles in the corner of her bed, head buried in her hands. The window is gray with dawn and the cold slashing rain that began just after dark. Katlin Gibbie lies beside her, breathing easily, her nine-month-old boy curled into her breast. Betty Deatcher, a cousin from Kelso, snores on a pallet in the corner. The coals in the fireplace have turned to ash.

Christmas morning, but Ailie feels no leap of the spirit or good will toward men. The year is out, and today she redeems her promise: by nightfall she’ll be Ailie Gleg. Something tightens in her at the thought of it. She never imagined she’d have to live up to her vow, never doubted that Mungo — like some galloping cavalier out of a medieval romance — would turn up to save her from the dragon. A year had seemed so far off — he could have been back by New Year’s or Easter. How was she to know? She had settled in and waited. Waited with a sinking in the pit of her stomach, through spring planting, Whitsuntide, Midsummer’s Eve, through Michaelmas, Martinmas, the harvest ball, and right on up until the night before Christmas, when she finally gave in and let the bridesmaids stain her feet with henna and throw the traditional cow’s hide over her and Georgie. But even now, at the eleventh hour, she’s still not resigned to it. And she still hasn’t given up hope. She’s got till three p.m., hasn’t she? Maybe he’ll burst through the door as she stands before the altar, tall and commanding, his face sunburned, a wild look in his eye. .

But stop. How could she even think it? She’s given her word, her father has killed a calf and a pig and sent out the invitations and white kid gloves, her friends and relations have come miles through bitter winds, ice and sleet — how could she rob them of their pleasure? Worse: how could she steal Georgie’s heart and run off with it? No: she should prepare herself, wake up, accept the way of the world. One man has been taken from her, and another offered in his place. So what if he isn’t perfect? So what if he’s lop-eared, oafish, as sexless as a plucked rooster? He loves her, that’s all that counts. And he’s got a good heart. .

Her reverie is suddenly broken by the sound of whistling: pitched high and lively, it echoes eerily through the still house. The tune drifts in and out of hearing, she can’t be certain, but yes — yes, it’s a tune Mungo used to sing to her years ago, the words as much a part of her memory of him as the drift of his voice:

Now a’ ye that in England are,

Or are in England born,

Come ne’er to Scotland to court a lass,

Or else ye’ll get the scorn.

They haik ye up and settle ye by.

Till on your wedding day,

And gie ye frogs instead of fish,

And play ye foul, foul play.

Could it be? Mother of God, could it? She leaps from the bed, still in her dressing gown, her feet the color of Valencia oranges, blood beating quick, the whistling louder now, just outside the door, oh Mungo, Mungo, Mungo, she whispers, flinging the door back in a paroxysm of blind hope — and there he is — Georgie Gleg. In fresh linen, top hat, silk coat. His eyes are butter-soft. “Good morning, love,” he says, handing her a holly wreath molded in the shape of a heart. “Today’s the big day.”

Disappointment creases her face. “Thank. . you,” she stammers, a bit confused and embarrassed, awkward in the role of sacrificial lamb. When she reaches out to take the wreath, she pricks her finger. A spot of blood wells up almost instantly.

“Here,” he says, snatching up her hand. “Let me suck it.”

And so she stands there, feeling foolish in her orange feet and rumpled dressing gown, while the rain gargles in the gutters and her husband-to-be bends over her and sucks at her thumb like a baby at his mother’s breast.

♦ ♦ ♦

Ten minutes later, the door closed and latched, she tiptoes around the room, stuffing things into a black leather satchel. Her mouth is set, her movements fluid and furtive. When Katlin turns over in bed she freezes in midstep and waits a long silent moment for her friend’s breathing to settle back into the gentle soughing rhythm of sleep. In the hallway she digs out her gloves, hat, scarf. She can hear her father and uncle snoring like a gristmill in the back room as she eases through the kitchen and out the door.

The rain is steady and sonorous. There is a smell of purity and renewal in the air, as if the earth has been washed clean. Up ahead the slick bare trunks glow with wet; behind, the house sinks into the mist. Bent low, she fades into the trees like a thief.

♦ HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO ♦

Should he get down on his knees and kiss the earth? No. Too theatrical. But what a rush it is to tread the old sod once again! What a thrill to hear the English tongue, gaze on English faces, bonnets, churchtowers and shingled cottages! Overwhelming! He can’t resist, he must. . get down on his knees this. . instant. .

As the repatriated explorer dodges down to buss the earth — or rather the slick, weed-strewn planks of the Falmouth docks — he is so thoroughly caught up in the rhapsody of the moment that he fails to take account of the traffic behind him. The other passengers, anxious to disembark and be on their way, pile up at his back — one of them. Colonel Messing, colliding with the man in front of him and dipping awkwardly to one knee. The Colonel, just returned from an inspection of his estates in the West Indies, is a man of unimpeachable personal dignity. He rises to his feet, dusts his stockings and raps his cane smartly across the explorer’s upturned buttocks.

“Out of the way, you impudent young dog.”

♦ ♦ ♦

An inauspicious homecoming, to say the least — but then all of Great Britain thinks he’s gone the same route as Houghton and Ledyard and the rest. No one recognizes him, no one expects him. At the Dog & Duck Tavern, Falmouth, he glances up from his eggs and drippings to scan the ruddy faces and long noses at the bar, pregnant with his secret, savoring the quiet incubation of his celebrity. If they only knew. He stifles a sudden impulse to shout it out, dance on the tables, set it to music and sing it to them, emblazon it on great drooping banners like bellying sails: I DID IT. I ALONE. I’VE BEEN WHERE NO OTHER MAN HAS BEEN AND I’VE SEEN WHAT NO OTHER MAN HAS SEEN AND I’M HERE TO TELL ABOUT IT. But no, let them read it in the London papers and crowd round this very bar, stunned and amazed: “Gorry—’ee was ‘ere. In this very room. The chance of lifetime and Oy nivir so much as lifted me ‘ead. But ‘oo was to know?”

Who indeed? But there’s one who should know — and without a moment’s delay. The explorer calls for pen and paper and scratches off the good news, as excited as the day he won his first football match:

Dog & Duck, Falmouth

22 December, 1797

My Love:

I am alive and well and my mission has been an unqualified success. Know that the great and glorious Niger flows eastward and that I am rushing home to your arms.

M.

The following morning he books a place on the packet boat to Southampton, and from there finds himself squeezed into the tiny compartment of a coach-and-four bound for London. His fellow passengers turn out to be a Mrs. Higgenbotham, on the rebound from a visit to her niece in Portsmouth, a pair of disreputable-looking drummers selling “the latest in stickless frying pans and guaranteed runless hose for gennelmen,” and Colonel Messing, of the short temper and long cane. Another three passengers are perched atop the convex roof: two young girls and a cleric in formal dress. Fortunately, Colonel Messing does not seem to recognize the explorer. After an hour or so of jostling along in silence he leans forward confidentially and tells Mungo that he shouldn’t mind the tear in the knee of his breeches. “You see,” he explains, “I’m just back from Antigua and all my things are gone ahead in the wagon. And damn me if I didn’t have a bit of an accident before I ever set foot on shore. Some histrionic young ass was bent over double kissing the bleeding dock, if you can believe it, as if we’d been at sea three years instead of a month — and it cost me a good tumble.”

Mungo makes a sympathetic noise in the back of his throat, and the Colonel suddenly stiffens up and gives him a penetrating stare.

“That’s quite a skin color you got there, lad. If I didn’t know you was English by the sand of your hair, I’d swear you was a Chinaman. Where you coming from, anyways?”

♦ ♦ ♦

One night at an inn along the way, and the next — Christmas Eve— jostling through the dark countryside, through Newington, St. George’s Fields and Southwark, across the Blackfriars Bridge and right on up to the White Swan on Farringdon Street. Christmas morning, 6:00 a.m., a cold drizzle hangs on the air like a washcloth, the Colonel snoring over a pint of brandy. The explorer steps down from the coach, his legs stiff, shoulders his satchel and starts off down the street. But then stops short, as if jerked by a rope. Where to? His sister Effie’s? But she’d be asleep at this hour. If it were ten or eleven he could take a cab to Soho Square and astonish Sir Joseph. Walk in as blithely as if he’d just strolled round the block and rewrite the map of Africa. “Well, Sir, I’m back. Back from the Niger. I’ve seen it, tasted it, swum in it. It’s no myth, believe me. Magnificent. Dwarfs the Nile, the Thames, the Mississippi. . riches untold. . a thriving civilization crowding its shores. And oh yes: it flows, most decidedly, to the eastward.’’

But at 6:00 a.m., on a holiday?

Suddenly it hits him. Effie’s husband, Charles Dickson. He’ll be at the British Museum at this hour, tending the plants. It was Dickson who’d launched the whole Niger venture in the first place, through his botanical association with Sir Joseph. Of course. He should be the first to know — especially since he’s the only one likely to be stirring at this hour. The explorer turns around and starts off for the museum. But then stops dead again. Will he be there on Christmas Day? Mungo pictures his brother-in-law bent over mounds of dried specimens in a white smock; feeding, watering and pruning his indoor collection; winterizing the arboretum; pinching off stamens and anthers; living and breathing horticulture till it must burgeon in his dreams like the thickest Gambian rain forests. . and knows he’ll be there.

There are no cabs at this hour, but it’s a short walk up to High Holborn and from there to Great Russell Street and Montague House, where the museum had been relocated six months before he left for Africa. Fingers of light are beginning to take hold of the eastern sky. There are wreaths on the doors, pine cones and red ribbon. The explorer feels as if he’s just been handed a million pounds. He flings the satchel in the air, claps his hands twice and catches it on the way down without breaking stride. Then launches into a hearty whistle, a Christmas carol. The wet cobblestones echo with it, glad of heart, soaring, heroic, until he modulates into another key and slides into “Now a’ ye that in England are,” thinking of Ailie.

He turns into Great Russell Street, and the dark imposing building springs up before him, a monument to the stone quarry. At that moment the drizzle begins to whiten, changing to snow. The wet crystals fly into his jacket and dissolve, the soles of his boots tap at the pavement, pigeons rustle their wings. All is silence, the streets deserted. It’s as if the entire world were holding its breath.

The arboretum gate is unlatched. Mungo slips in like a cat, playing for the surprise. Round a corner, through a stand of dwarf fruit trees — and what’s this? Up ahead, bent over a mulberry with strips of protective sacking, is a form in cloth coat, gloves, fur cap. A Dicksonish form. “Dix,” is all the explorer needs to say.

Charles Dickson turns around on a ghost. His breath hangs in the air, snow whitens his shoulders. A figure stands before him, eerie and incongruous in this place, on this day, at this hour. A figure out of the past — wasted, sallow, the gray of his eyes flecked with red— a figure dead and buried, so long hoped for that hope has become a habit. The botanist drops the sacking and wipes his spectacles on the sleeve of his coat before breaking into a wide wet grin. “Is it really you,” he stammers, “or some wraith come back to haunt us?”

♦ PEACE ON EARTH, GOODWILL TO MEN ♦

Prior to 1784, public executions in London were held at a place called Tyburn Tree, opposite the Marble Arch. An elaborate ritual was involved, and a good deal of hoopla as well. The condemned prisoners would ride through the streets on a cart, their elbows pinioned, the plain pine caskets beside them. Thousands turned out for the parade, bleachers were erected round the gallows, and makeshift stalls sold everything from small beer to gin, mackerel, muffins, gingerbread and tongue sandwiches. Hawkers did a brisk business in lurid confessions detailing the prisoners’ crimes, or tear-jerk letters ostensibly written to their sweethearts at the eleventh hour. All too frequently the condemned were small fry — sniveling forgers, starving women convicted of shoplifting, fifteen-year-old pickpockets— and when this was the case the crowd was merciless, jeering and spitting, pelting them with stones and offal. But when a highwayman was executed — particularly a striking and notorious one — they were in ecstasy. Invariably he would be decked out in silks, his hair fluffed and curled, the gold buckles of his pumps flashing defiance. He would bow to the women, shake hands with the boys who ran beside the cart, even sign autographs. He went to the gallows a hero, a martyr, and when the cart trundled off and left him swinging, his friends would rush forward to hang on his legs, anxious to expedite the inevitable and spare him the pain and ignominy of the slow process of strangulation.

But in 1784, despite the protests of a throng of people, not the least of whom was Dr. Johnson himself, the “Tyburn March” was done away with, and criminals were subsequently hanged just outside the walls of the prison itself. The idea was to eliminate the carnival atmosphere surrounding the executions, in the hope of intensifying their deterrent effect. The crowd that gathered for the first Newgate hangings was shocked and dismayed — the prisoners were led out, a short prayer was said, and they were hanged. No parade, no fanfare, no glory, no dignity. Just meat, twisting slowly round the rope in the cold glare of the sun.

♦ ♦ ♦

Ned Rise isn’t particular about the details. Fanfare or no fanfare, he doesn’t want to die. But it seems that now, after nearly a year of delays and hard-won postponements, he is going to do just that — die, croak, kick the bucket, part the pale — and there’s nothing anyone short of the King can do about it. And the King, as everyone knows, is mad as a hatter. Thorogood, backed by the Brooks fortune, had performed feats of prestidigitation — stretching days to weeks, weeks to months, months to a year. And he’d fought tenaciously for yet another postponement, but Sir Joseph Banks had fought just as tenaciously to see the thing consummated.

“But on Christmas Day, my lord?” Thorogood had squeaked at the Lord Mayor.

“Christmas falls on a Monday, Counselor — a regular hanging day.”

“What about ‘Peace on Earth’ and all of that?”

Banks was in the background, pulling strings. He’d talked to Pitt, the Prince, the Lord Chamberlain, protesting that so long a delay in so heinous a case was unconscionable, reprehensible — the courts were derelict in their duty. In their majestic, inscrutable, planetary way, these luminaries were moved to agree. The word came down from on high, and the Lord Mayor was deaf to further pleas. He squinted down at Thorogood. “We have two thieves and a murderer to hang, Counselor — I should think that their extermination will give the honest citizens of this nation a great deal of peace indeed.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Ned is alone, pacing off the final minutes in his cell. It is Christmas morning, gray, the drizzle turning to snow. The night before, Boyles had been in to pay his last respects, drunk as a hoot owl. He sang a couple of maudlin Irish tunes in a quavering baritone, took hold of Ned’s hand and told him he hoped to see him in a better world, then passed out in the corner. And Fanny had been in too — for the final farewells. Bruises like fermenting plums maculated her thighs, chafe marks gnawed at her wrists. There was a tattoo behind her ear (a Jolly Roger, in green), a fresh welt across her cheekbone, the lingering impressions of human teeth perforating her buttocks. She looked worn. Ned no longer cared. He flung himself into her with all the desperation of the doomed, his every cell crying out for survival, for the wedding of sperm and egg, for the sweet posthumous incubation of life. She left him at dawn, her face puffed with despair.

Quarter of seven. Fifteen minutes to go. He smokes his thirtieth pipe — panic beating at his ribs, his hand shaking — takes another pull at the bottle of gin Boyles left him, and bends to wipe a speck of dust from his shoes. Outside in the courtyard, the other prisoners are taking their exercise, huddled forms pressed to the walls and gathered in the corners like conspirators. Lucky bastards, he thinks, choked by a wave of self-pity. Absurdly, the strains of a Christmas carol keep pulsing through his head—”All is calm, all is bright”—and though he’s nearly polished off the bottle he feels as sober as a. . a judge. He laughs at the thought, a booming belly laugh that somehow gets out of control and pinches off into a shriek, crazed and bloodcurdling, the wail of an animal caught in a trap. “AAAaaaa-aaaaaaah!” he shrieks, “AAAaaaa-aaaaaaah!” But wait: what’s this? Footsteps?

They’re coming for him.

All at once he goes loose — his limbs heavy as wet mortar, spine slumping, eyehds drooping, feet splayed. A soothing serenity creeps over him, gripping him like a warm mitten. Now that the moment has actually come, he feels as calm as the average butcher or bootblack waking from his bed to the smells of holiday goose and figgy pudding. Got to die well, Ned Rise, he tells himself.

The turnkey stands at the door, flanked by two men with muskets. Ned throws his shoulders back and steps forward with all the composure of a prince gliding off to his coronation. Apart from an incipient pallor about the cheeks, he looks fit and trim, almost bubbling with health — thanks to Fanny he’s been well provided for. His hair is tied back with a bit of silver galloon, and he is dressed with panache in a blue velvet jacket, white silk hose, buckled pumps. Stay calm, he tells himself — don’t give in. But then another voice starts up in his head, a voice that keeps repeating, “But I’m going to die / But I’m going to die” like a litany. Die, die, die, echoes the blood pounding in his temples.

♦ ♦ ♦

A spotty crowd is gathered outside the wall for the executions — mainly hyenas and degenerates, and agents for dissectors hoping to claim the corpses. There is a small contingent of the gentility as well, fronted by Sir Joseph Banks and the Countess Binbotta. They sit in coaches parked along the street, or stand discreetly in the rear, lured from their hearths and wassail bowls by the grim logic of an eye for an eye. If any of them see any incongruity in attending an execution on Christmas Day, their faces — stern and wire-jawed — don’t show it.

By now the snow is coming down in earnest: nearly two inches of fine white powder smooths the muddy earth, softens the harsh lines of the gallows. The empty nooses are frosted like cakes, liveried footmen hurry to throw blankets over the backs of their masters’ horses, the spectators pull shawls and mufflers tight round their throats and close in on the gallows for better visibility. Thick as paste, the big wet flakes swirl out of the sky.

His elbows pinioned and knees unsteady, Ned stands at the main gate waiting for the ceremony to begin. Beside him, dressed in rags, are the two thieves condemned to hang with him. One of them is a tall, brutal-looking character, his hair cropped close, nose broken. There are tears on his face and he seems to be muttering prayers under his breath. He clutches a prayerbook in his sweaty fist as if it were a life preserver. The other unfortunate, Ned realizes with about as much surprise as a prospective hangee can muster, is a dwarf. Three feet high, with a carroty mass of hair flaming round his cheeks and crown like a brushfire. Without warning the dwarf suddenly turns and delivers a vicious kick to the lower leg of his companion.

“Cut yer blubberin’ and ‘ail Maryin’, arse’ole. Die like a man.”

“Lay off me, Ginger,” the big man pleads. “Ye’ve ‘ounded me into a life of crime — ain’t that damage enough?”

The dwarf turns his head away to spit on the cold stone floor. “Me ‘ounded you, eh? And ‘oo was it wanted to roll Lord Lovat when ‘ee come out of White’s gamblin’ ‘ouse, eh? And wot about the brilliant idea of peelin’ the gold-leaf paper off the inside of the Duke of Bedford’s coach? I don’t ‘ear you, pea brain,” the dwarf snarls, kicking the tall man a second time.

“Ye twisted little ‘omunculus!” the big man explodes, dropping his prayerbook and snatching at the dwarfs coiffure with both hands, “I’ll show ye ‘oo corrupted ‘oo.” Though the pinions severely restrict his maneuverability, he manages to come up with two fistfuls of bright orange hair, one on each side of the dwarfs head. “Son of a bitch!” he roars, shaking the little man as if he were a sack of feathers, while the dwarf in his turn tries to get a purchase on his antagonist’s groin.

At that moment however the gates draw back with an apocalyptic screech and the two combatants go limp, looking sheepish as the chaplain appears from a back stairway to lead the solemn procession out into the blue-white glare of the street. The driven snow rakes at Ned’s face, harsh and stinging, but he doesn’t turn his head or narrow his eyes, welcoming this little prick of sensation, this wonderful automatic quirk of the organism. In a few minutes there will be a final and absolute end to all sensation — to pleasure and pain, taste and smell, the soft pressure of Fanny’s lips, to hunger, bitterness, cold. Behind him the thieves have fallen silent, absorbed in their own reflections, awed by the shadowy prospect of death. As soon as they’d opened their mouths a corresponding channel had opened in Ned’s brain, and he recognized them as the bastards who’d robbed him and Boyles after the Bartholomew Fair. Somehow, the fact that they’ll soon get what’s coming to them seems a small consolation.

The sight of the three gibbets looming up out of the storm is a shock: save me, Ned prays, save me. I haven’t lived yet. Give me one more chance — just one more chance. But then he focuses on the immense black-hooded figure standing silent beneath the apparatus, and he knows it’s no use praying. The hangman’s grip is like a vise as he helps Ned up onto the box, center stage. A special high-rise platform has been built to accommodate the dwarf — he curses when the hangman hoists him under the armpits and sets him atop the box as if he were a mannequin. The big man is whimpering like a puppy: at the first sign of his weakness the rabble comes alive, spewing taunts and epithets. He has to be prodded before he’ll mount the box, and when the hangman secures the noose he cries out as if he’s been burned. The spectators seem to find this amusing, and a nervous titter works its way through their ranks.

“You men, poor sinners,” begins the chaplain, “bow your heads and beg forgiveness of Jesus Christ Our Lord. You will soon appear before the judgment seat of your Creator, there to give an account of all things done in this life, and to suffer eternal torment for your sins committed against Him, unless by your hearty and unfeigned repentance you obtain mercy—”

The chaplain’s words are lost on Ned. They’re nothing but random noises that prolong his life a precious moment more: he doesn’t even hear them. Nor does he have any clear perception of the crowd before him. He doesn’t notice Banks, Mendoza or Smirke, nor Billy Boyles, Adonais Brooks’ footman or the old harridan who’s haunted him since he drew his first breath in a cold crib of straw. He is looking back at his tracks in the snow, the last physical evidence of his willed existence, already filling with fresh white powder.

“—through the merits and death and passion of Jesus Christ—”

Ned closes his eyes, fighting for control. He thinks of Fanny, Barrenboyne, the clarinet. Music, color and movement. Of running, bursting his bonds, leaping a horse and charging off down the street, the wind in his hair. .

“—Lord have mercy upon you, Lord have mercy upon you all.”

. . where is he now? They’ve cut the horse down, their hands round his throat, but Boyles — yes, Boyles — fires into the crowd and Ned is up again, legs pumping, carrying him up and away from the dismal walls of Newgate and the shadow of the gibbet. .

But Ned Rise is not running. He is hanging. Choking on his own vomit as it rises, catches in his throat and drops back to constrict his lungs. Below him, sorrily, futilely, Billy Boyles swings from his legs, crying like a baby, while somewhere off to the left the dwarf shouts out: “Fuck the Virgin Mary!” And then all is calm, and all is dark.

♦ WATER MUSIC ♦

Christmas, 1797.

It’s been a year of victory and defeat, of bold offensives and timely retreats. Thus, Napoleon has whipped the Austrians and annexed the major part of Italy, while Walter Scott has thrown in the towel with Williamina Belches and nuptialed Margaret Charpentier on the rebound. In Hampshire, Jane Austen, disappointed by the rejection of “First Impressions” (should she retitle it?), has churned out a gothic tale, “Northanger Abbey,” and begun a little didactic romance called “Eleanor and Marianne.” Horatio Nelson has been knighted and promoted to the rank of admiral for his part in the crippling of the Spanish fleet at Cape St Vincent, and John Wilkes, the fire breather, is succumbing to the weight of the world and will be dead inside of twenty-four hours. The Dutch have been prevented from landing a French army in Ireland, but the Irish are insurrecting nonetheless, and Pitt, desperately trying to effect a consolidation of England and Ireland, is exciting his monarch’s ire over the question of Catholic emancipation. In the midst of all this, Coleridge and Wordsworth are quietly putting together a book that will break the back of neoclassicism as neatly as a gourmand breaks a breadstick.

But this evening, despite the turmoil of the times, the beau monde has gathered at Covent Garden for a Christmas concert featuring selections from Handel’s Messiah. Outside, the snow lies thick on the cobblestones, in the gutter, in the branches of the trees; inside, the nobs of London bask in the glow of their own sunny faces. King George is there of course, accompanied by Queen Charlotte and their daughters. He has not been looking well of late, and his ministers fear that he may once again be falling prey to the madness that put him out of commission in ‘88 (a madness that prompted him at one point to attempt to throttle the Prince of Wales over the question of succession to the throne). In another box, the Prince is entertaining one of his father’s greatest antagonists, Charles Fox, and the young arbiter of fashion, Beau Brummell. Behind them, the hall is packed. Fanny Burney is there, the Duke of York, Peg Woffington, Lord Hobart. Wilberforce the Abolitionist settles himself in the back row, along with the Bishop of Llandaff, member in absentia of the African Association, while the Countess Binbotta, as sleek and smug as a full-bellied shark, makes a show of offering her heartfelt thanks to William Pitt and the Lord Mayor. Throughout the hall there is a rustle of silks and ornamental swords, the sound of subdued chatter, sniffling, discreet coughs. The scents of lilac water and eau de cologne thicken the air.

Mungo Park, seated at the right hand of Sir Joseph Banks, is feeling a bit giddy. From the moment he took his brother-in-law’s hand in the predawn quiet of the museum gardens, he has been thrust into a vortex of activity, a constantly accelerating round of good cheer, congratulations, beefy faces and raised glasses. Roast goose with Dickson and Effie, punch, Yorkshire pudding and rum cake with Sir Reginald Durfeys, a tree full of candles, snatches of forgotten song, three slices of mince pie and brandy at Sir Joseph’s, a welter of parties, coaches, snowy streets, slapped backs and extended hands — and now this. He is delighted, upset, comforted, dyspeptic, exhausted, exhilarated. As soon as the word got out, the members of the African Association had flocked to him, eager as schoolboys at a rugby match, probing with their animated faces and thousand-and-one questions. Did the negroes slice steaks from living cattle and eat them on the spot? Were the cities made of gold or dung? How wide was the river? Was it commercially viable? Were the hippogriffs a problem?

This is what he’s wanted, this is what he’s dreamed of. He’s the talk of London, a sensation, the cynosure in this galaxy of pole stars. But he is tired, bone-tired. Banks is at his elbow with yet another introduction, and he can barely hold his head up. “Oh Mungo, have you met the Duke of Portland?” the languid aristocratic tones bathing the name in syrup, “This is the fellow I was telling you about, Duke — been to the Niger and back. . this morning. . east! Flows east!”

But then, mercifully, the lights dim, the conductor mounts his podium and the opening strains of the “Sinfonia” sift through the hall. The effect on the explorer is instantaneous. The sound of strings, organ and trumpet is an anodyne, washing him in the sweetness and light of civilization, whispering of precision and control, of the Enlightenment, of St. Paul’s and Pall Mall, of the comfortable operation of cause and effect, statement and resolution. He is back, at long last he is back. Back in a society where the forms are observed and love of culture is a way of life, a society that nurtures Shakespeares, Wrens, Miltons and Cooks. Hail Britannia, yes indeed.

When he looks up, the bass soloist is fulminating against “The people that walked in darkness,” and Mungo thinks of Ali, Eboe, Mansong, the chaos and barbarity of Africa. But then the chorus comes in like a thunderbolt to drive back the darkness with the joy and intensity of “For unto us a child is born” and he feels that he’s never heard anything so beautiful. And now the soprano is opening up, soaring like an angel, the pageant unfolding, a venerable old story of shepherds in their fields and the glad tidings of mankind’s redemption. When the alto steps forward to begin her recitative, “Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened,” Mungo finds himself thinking of Ailie. The soloist is slight, built like a boy, her black hair coiled in a chignon. Mungo’s eyes are closed, there are children on the undersides of his lids, a stone house, Ailie at the door — but then he’s jolted back to consciousness by a grating cacaphony, some disturbance in the front row, someone. . someone shouting down the soloist!

It is the King, on his feet, calling out the name of a composition like a drunkard in a tavern. The audience is stunned; the courageous little alto falters but continues, her voice ringing out over the harsh persistent cries of the King. His Royal Highness seems to be calling for an earlier piece, a favorite of his great-grandfather, and now the Queen is on her feet tugging at his sleeve, and Pitt is running down the aisle, the orchestra losing heart as the red-faced man in the silver wig keeps shouting for “Water Music, Water Music, Water Music!”