Water Music

GOREE (A HYMN TO CONTAGION)

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the West Coast of Africa — from Dakar to the Bight of Benin — had a reputation for pestilence and rot unequaled anywhere in the world. With its heat and humidity, seasonal deluges and galaxies of insects, it was a sort of monumental Petri dish for the culture of exotic and frighteningly destructive diseases. Beware and take care of the Bight of Benin, went a sailor’s ditty of the time. There’s one comes out for forty goes in.

Spotted fever, yaws, typhus and trypanosomiasis throve here. Hookworm, cholera and plague. There was billiarzia and guinea worm in the drinking water, hydrophobia in the sharp incisors of bats and wolves, filariasis in the saliva of mosquitoes and horseflies. Step outside, take a bath, drink the water or put a scrap of food in your mouth and you’ve got them all — bacilli, spirilla and cocci, viruses, fungi, nematodes, trematodes and amoebae — all eating away at your marrow and organs, blurring your vision, sapping your fiber, eradicating your memory as neatly as an eraser moving over the scribbled wisdom of a blackboard.

From a cosmetic standpoint, the filarial diseases — elephantiasis and loiasis (also known as wriggle-eye) — were especially unfortunate. In elephantiasis, a mosquito-borne malady, teeming roundworms dam up the lymphatic system like insidious little beavers, causing the skin to erupt in granulomatous lesions and the legs and testicles to swell up like obscene fruits. Loiasis, on the other hand, focuses its ravages above the neck, and is transmitted by the bite of certain bloodsucking flies so abundant in the area that most mammals wear a sort of dark coat of them from dawn till dusk — when the mosquitoes take over. In its final stages the disease is characterized by the appearance of the adult worms beneath the conjunctiva of the eye. The worms pulse and writhe there, active little ribbons of flesh, quietly going about their business of feeding, mating and eliminating waste.

If one managed to survive such horrors, there was always kala azar or dumdum fever. A chronic disease, invariably fatal, kala azar makes its presence known by the appearance of pustulating epidermal ulcers, marasmus and enlargement of the spleen. And then there was leprosy, the most dreaded affliction of them all. Relentless in its gross deformation of the body, malignant and hideous in its gradual abrasion of the extremities and the slow but persistent degeneration of facial tissue that leaves its victims looking like pitted prunes. Balla jou, the locals called it: incurable.

And then of course there were the more prosaic diseases, the ones that were largely responsible for saving thousands of French, English, Dutch and Portuguese colonials the expense of cemetery plots back in Paris, London, Amsterdam or Lisbon. Malaria headed the list, closely followed by dysentery and yellow fever. Their victims — tradesmen, slavers and soldiers of fortune alike — would literally sweat and shit themselves to death, often within a week of their arrival on what had become popularly known as the Fever Coast.

There were no cures. Various quacks prescribed bloodletting, calomel, laxatives, and emetics to encourage “a gentle puke.” Or Dr. James’ Powder, a talc-and borax-based product no more effective in combating disease than candied orange peel or horsehair pillows. Jesuit’s bark or cinchona had been known since the 1600’s as effective in treating malaria, but the evidence current at the turn of the nineteenth century was against it, labeling it a quack remedy like all the rest. The poor blundering star-crossed soldiers and explorers of the day didn’t have the vaguest conception of what caused the host of appalling disorders that decimated their ranks and crushed their hopes. It was generally believed that miasmata, “putrid exhalations from the earth,” brought on the ravages of these fevers and digestive cataclysms. The mosquitoes, flies and sandfleas? Why bother even to swat them.

And so it was at Goree, the little blister of volcanic rock just off the coast of Senegal that was home to the Royal African Corps. Heat, filth and disease. Inadequate supplies, beggarly broken soldiers recruited from the hulks, a scarcity of drinking water, the sickly yellow wash of the sea. Degradation, debilitation, death. Things were so bad that the garrison commander (a career soldier by the name of Major T. W. Fitzwilliam Lloyd whose improprieties [5] had so alienated his superiors that he’d been given the choice of discreetly shooting himself or taking the post at Goree) was forced to halve food rations, double the brandy allowance and issue the following standing orders: Gang No. 1 to be employed digging graves as usual. Gang No. 2 making coffins until further notice.

It was the winter of 1805. The dry, salubrious season, when there was a bloom in every wasted cheek and a faint fey smile on every pair of cracked lips. When insect populations were down and sun baked out your lungs and dried up your bowels. But already the eternal forces of meteorological change were at work, the earth spinning round the sun, tilting on its axis, winds hissing, clouds mounting in the south like celestial armies.

Before long, it would begin to rain.

♦ OH MAMA, CAN THIS

REALLY BE THE END? ♦

Ned Rise wakes with a headache. Or no. Not a headache. A sort of generalized racking misery that makes him feel as if his pores are bleeding and his brain is leaking out his ears. Weak as a nonagenarian, he props himself on an elbow in the darkened dormitory and listens to the wheezing and moaning of the others as they toss on their sweaty pallets. He recognizes the racheting gasps of Jemmie Bird, one of his mates on the work crew, the oral flatulence of Samuel Purvey and the puling intermittent whistle of Boyles, hardly distinguishable from the whine of the mosquitoes. It is dark as the grave. Two o’clock? Three? Ned turns to reach for his gourd of rum and suddenly he’s doubled up on the floor, that fiery demonic pain tearing at his guts until he can do nothing but stiffen and champ at the wooden bedpost until the spasm passes. But it doesn’t pass. It mounts in waves like a storm hitting the beach until it leaves him rocking and moaning and clutching at his stomach like a woman laboring to deliver a monster.

When he wakes again, he finds himself in the middle of the floor. He is wet with his own perspiration and his trousers are crusted with the yellowish serum he’s been evacuating these past few days. There is a stench of illness in the air — of catastrophic, all-devouring illness, of illness like a hungry, insatiable thing — and someone is whimpering softly at the far end of the room. It is then that the chill takes hold of him again, gently at first, like a dog with a rodent in its teeth. Then it comes on with a vengeance and Ned hugs his legs to his chest, teeth clacking, his head jittering at the tip of his spine like a jack-in-the-box. The cold is terrible, worse than the fire. He can feel the ice floes poking at him, the dark cold grip of the Thames, the tread of polar bears dancing on his chest, he looks up into the blackness and sees crystal igloos and Eskimos dead in the snow. He struggles to push himself up and stagger back to his pallet and the feeble warmth of his army-ration blanket. But he can’t. He can only lie there, huddled, while all around him the darkness opens like a mouth.

♦ A LOAD OF ASSES ♦

Pennants are flying, mainsails, topsails and jibs rattling in the breeze, the prow slicing the water as neatly as a scythe while whales spout and dolphins leap and a fine invigorating salt-sea spray fans out over the rails like a nimbus. Sea and sky are a matched set, blue as delftware, and the sun is nothing less than a stupendous spotlight fixed in the middle of it all — as if the world were a stage indeed and the ship and its crew approaching the denouement of some momentous command performance. The atmosphere rings with the joyous braying of the asses as their nostrils dilate round the rich and multifarious scents of landfall, with the huzzas of the sailors and the wild exuberant strains of Georgie Scott’s clarinet as he soars through “Over the Sea to Skye,” “Jolly Mortals, Fill Your Glasses” and “O An’ Ye Were Dead, Guidmen.” Bracing, is what it is.

Mungo Park stands at the rail of the Crescent, His Majesty’s military transport, and looks out over the spanking blue waves to where the island of Goree heaves up out of the sea, crenellated battlements and great stone barracks scintillating in the sun like something out of a fairy tale. At his side, Zander, Georgie Scott, and the four carpenters he’d recruited from the hulks at Portsmouth. At his back, forty-five asses. Dun-colored, with stubborn, red-veined eyes. They razz and stink, lift their tails, spatter the decks. “This is it. Zander,” the explorer shouts, throwing an arm round his brother-in-law. “There’s no stopping us now!”

♦ ♦ ♦

Perhaps not. But they were very nearly stopped on the glossy conference tables of London and Portsmouth, the expedition ground down to nothing under the foot-dragging heels of Pitt’s wartime government and Lord Camden’s somnambulist’s shuffle. Mungo had rushed down from Scotland in September — at Camden’s urgent request — expecting to leave before the month was out. He’d dodged Ailie, briefed Zander on the sly, and drawn up a detailed list of supplies and equipment necessary for the expedition. He’d even come up with a proposal that would warm the cockles of the most mercenary bureaucratic heart. At Sir Joseph’s suggestion, the explorer had emphasized the practical benefits of the proposed expedition rather than the purely scientific ones. There was gold in the Niger Valley, he asserted — more even than in Guinea or Ashanti — and a host of primitive black nations mad to trade massy lumps of it for a few beads, mirrors or pewter gravy boats. And if the British didn’t claim it, the French would. To plumb the Niger was a mandate that went beyond science, beyond national pride even — it was good sound business sense.

The government went for it. Camden agreed to underwrite the whole thing and to give the explorer carte blanche in the selection of trade goods, pack animals, equipment and manpower. Mungo was to be assigned the rank of captain, and his brother-in-law commissioned a lieutenant. Georgie Scott, an old school chum and distant relation of the poet, would serve as draftsman and third in command. The explorer would be further authorized to choose four carpenters from among the prisoners confined to the hulks at Portsmouth, and to take one officer and thirty-five soldiers from the garrison at Goree. The carpenters would assemble the longboats in which the explorer planned to cruise down the Niger; the soldiers would protect him from the Moors. As far as beasts of burden were concerned, Mungo planned to stop in the Cape Verde Islands and purchase forty-five asses — this in addition to the fifteen or twenty negroes he would hire at Pisania.

“Fine, fine, fine,” Camden had grinned from beneath his wig of office. “Splendid. Spare no expense, my son, we’re behind you one hundred percent.” He plucked a silver letter knife from his desk and began picking at his fingernails. “There is one small matter, though — how do you propose to get back?”

It was a good question. No one was quite certain where the Niger disembogued — there was even some doubt whether it gave onto the sea at all. One faction, led by Major Rennell, the most distinguished geographer of the day, insisted that the Niger either ran out of steam in the Great Desert or flowed into Lake Chad. If this were so, the entire expedition would be stranded in the middle of the continent, with no possibility of returning against the stream, and faced with a long perilous trek through uncharted territory — a prospect that smacked of death, disaster and a rotten investment. Others, however, felt that the Niger was in reality the upper tributary of the Nile or the Congo, in which case the expedition could safely — perhaps even merrily — float down to the sea. Mungo was certain that the latter was true, and he insisted that on reaching the mouth of the Congo it would be a simple matter to catch a slave boat bound for St. Helena or the West Indies. He looked Camden dead in the eye. “In any case, Sir, I am prepared to do what I must and suffer the consequences. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

The Secretary for Colonial Affairs beamed at him like a doting grandfather, and poured out two glasses of claret from the decanter that stood on his desk. “Well,” he grunted. “So be it, then. I’ll just submit your proposal to the P.M., requisition the funds, and you’ll be on your way in no time.”

That was in September. In October the requisition was up for imminent consideration. By November the explorer was distraught. It was the same old story, a repeat of the previous year’s debacle when he’d hurried down from Peebles and hung around with his hands in his pockets while Addington gave way to Pitt, Hobart to Camden, and Sir Joseph, with a face as long as a hound’s, advised him to go back home and study Arabic. Criminal, is what it was. A damned shame, a pity and a waste. But what could he do? He was powerless.

November dripped by. Mungo sat in the darkened room and stared out the window. He pounded his head against the wall, juggled inkwells, shredded paper. Then he got angry. By God, they weren’t going to do this to him again, he shouted, over and over, until the bare walls rang with it and his limbs began to twitch with purpose and determination. Action came like a release. By December the explorer was spending every waking moment lobbying for the expedition: scribbling off petitions, ingratiating himself with influence peddlers and power brokers, sprinting beside the carriages of dukes and earls like a common madman and sharing so many spots of sherry with so many officials that his brain flapped round like a windmill and his liver went into shock. All to no avail. The New Year came and went. Things seemed hopeless.

But the slow mechanism of bureaucratic process — that majestic civil clockwork that formulates what is and shall be through the accretion of accident, greed, intuition and influence — was busily at work, shaping events behind closed doors. Sir Joseph was campaigning vigorously, a nation of shopkeepers was howling for new markets, and Camden, moving with the speed and dispatch of a three-toed sloth, was finally beginning to attract Pitt’s attention. The decisive moment came one night during an intermission at the theater. Camden plopped himself down beside the P.M., offered him a pinch of Araby Spice snuff, and presented his case. Yes, Pitt agreed, the Niger should be opened up to trade — British trade — and yes, gold was highly desirable. A day later the funds were made available, the commissions drawn up and the war sloop Eugenia dispatched to accompany the Crescent to Goree as a discouragement to French privateers. Mungo summoned Zander, packed his bags and set sail, better late than never, on January 29, 1805.

♦ ♦ ♦

As the explorer stands now at the rail of the Crescent, gazing on the coast of Africa for the first time in over seven years and fired up by the cheering of the crew and the exultant braying of the asses, a disquieting thought begins to insinuate itself into the rosy reaches of his optimism. It is a meteorological thought, a thought deriving from his previous long and sorrowful association with the weather patterns in this part of the world. The date is March twenty-eighth. A date which falls very close to the end of March, which is already to say the beginning of April. The explorer thinks of Camden’s whiskered cheeks and powdered handkerchiefs, of the dilatory two-fingered courtesy of all the lords and ladies in London, of the morass of polite society and sententious bureaucracy. He has beaten the system, yes, and here he is on the very stroke of his finest hour. . but the sad fact remains that the long months of battling the government’s inertia have consumed the dry season, day by balmy salubrious day. In May — June at the latest — it will begin to rain. Then what?

But as quickly as the thought enters his head — nasty and insinuating, like those sudden barbed little intimations of one’s own mortality that well up to interrupt the progress of fork to mouth or arrest the ingenuous tapping of one’s foot at the concert hall — he dismisses it. Why dwell on niggling little unpleasantries at a time like this? Here he is, after all, returned to the scene of his greatest triumph. Here he is with a boatload of provisions and trade goods, crates of arms and ammunition, the government behind him, bosom friends at his side. Here he is about to head up an expedition on the grand scale, with porters and armed guards and the rights and prerogatives of a captain in His Royal Majesty’s service. Here he is on the deck of the Crescent, the wind in his hair, with a load of asses.

♦ GIVE ME SOME MEN WHO ARE

STOUT-HEARTED MEN ♦

It is rumored round the backrooms and bunkhouses of the fort that a celebrity has appeared on the premises. Mungo Park, the renowned African explorer and best-selling author, the only European to lay eyes on the Niger and live to tell about it, has come into their midst. The news generates a flurry of excitement.

“ ‘Oo?”

“Mungo ‘oo?”

“Nivir ‘eard o’ the bleeder.”

“Is ‘ee white?”

But as soon as the men lapse back into their customary apathy (a sort of listless downward spiral relieved only by drinking, gambling, whoring and dying), interest flares up anew: this visitor is looking for men. Men! To traipse over hill and dale with him, out in the clean open country — and at double pay! Truth. Jemmie Bird overheard the whole thing while he was waiting table for the Major. But that isn’t the best of it. The explorer carries authorization from the Colonial Department to offer a discharge to any man accompanying him — a discharge that includes a full pardon for those convicted of crimes, and return passage to England. Great God in heaven be praised, here it is, plopped in their laps like the Holy Grail — a chance to get out of this hellhole!

The rumor spreads like a brushfire fanned by harmattan winds. By 9:00 P.M. the entire garrison — all three hundred seventy-two men (or rather, three sixty-eight, four having expired during the interval) — is massed outside the Major’s quarters, each and every one — sick, debilitated, and walking dead alike — begging, wheedling, imploring, beseeching, adjuring and entreating to be taken on the mission. A tumult erupts when the Major, in full dress uniform and pressing a corsage of orchids and baby’s breath to his bosom, steps out onto the veranda, the saintly and flaxenhaired newcomer at his side.

“Men!” he shouts above the crowd. “Stalwart fellows of the Royal African Corps: hear me out!”

The roar gradually subsides to the level of isolated cursing and frothing, then to a low vicious snarling as of a pack of dogs disemboweling one another, and then finally to disgruntled muttering and a sad species of terminal wheezing.

“As you have all no doubt heard,” the Major cries, “this distinguished gentleman at my right, Captain Mungo Park—“ (here he is interrupted by a boozy voice calling for three cheers for Mungo Park and by the crazed yabbering of “ ‘Ear, ‘ear” that succeeds it). The Major takes advantage of the interval to lift Mungo’s arm aloft in the victory salute before continuing. “Mungo Park has come among us with a mission — a mission as noble and challenging as the momentous campaigns of Caesar, Alexander and Horatio Nelson—”

“Fuck noble,” shouts a man in the front of the crowd.

“Fuck speeches,” shouts another. “Take me! Take me!”

Almost instantly the crowd picks up the refrain, sniveling and slobbering, flinging up their hands like schoolchildren: “Me, me, ooh, take me!” From here on it is chaos. The sick throw away their crutches and dance like coryphees, the enfeebled strain to lift logs and boulders, the fevered recite recipes and the lyrics of popular songs to demonstrate their perspicuity. Fights break out. Imprecations rake the sky, stones and clods of earth begin to rain down over the crowd like a judgment from above. Suddenly a torch flares out against the darkness — and then another, and another. The mob presses in on the Major’s flimsy bamboo balustrade, chanting “me, me, me, me,” crazed and dangerous, disaster in the air. . and then the explorer clears his throat.

Intense and immediate, a silence falls over them. The sound of shushing is universal, like the wash of distant seas. Mungo is stirred by the spectacle, by the energy, the need, the almost worshipful clamor he’s aroused and silenced in the space of a few short moments. He steps forward with the confidence of a born orator. “Give me some men!” he rumbles, caught up in it, emotive taps open wide, every last histrionic fiber swelling him to heroic proportions, “Men who are stout-hearted men, stout-hearted men to the end!”

♦ NED THE OBSCURE ♦

The sun scorches the sky as if it were newly created, as if it were flexing its muscle, hammering out the first link in a chain of megatonic nuclear events, flaring up with all the confidence of youth and all the promise of eternal combustion. Which is to say it is hot. Damnably hot. And as quiet as the surface of some uninhabitable and forbidden planet. No bird stutters from a dusty bush, no insect hums, whines or buzzes, no lizard rasps the back of its neck with a lazy hindleg. There isn’t even a breeze to lift the vegetation and drop it back down again.

Slowly, oh so slowly, a human presence begins to obtrude on this scene of utter desolation — from over the hump of a slight incline. Gang No. 1 can be seen making its gradual way past the blinding facades of the fort’s buildings and across a field strewn with igneous rubble. The members of the burial detail, some thirty in all, are staggering under the weight of picks and shovels and the four freshly hewn coffins balanced on their shoulders. Half an hour and fourteen faintings later, they have managed to traverse the hundred yards or so of broken ground that gives onto their destination: a sandy knoll overlooking the sea and randomly disfigured with grave markers. As they set their burdens down, a number of the men can be heard to complain about the imposition of having to dig graves in the heat of day. The usual practice is to let the deceased stink a day or two — or at least until nightfall. But this morning the Major has ordered the previous day’s casualties removed for immediate burial, no doubt as a point of etiquette with regard to the explorer’s presence.

“All right, men,” barks Lieutenant Martyn, “five minutes. And then I’ll expect you up on your feet and attacking this flinty earth like it was the hide of the judge that sentenced you.” Martyn is a nineteen-year-old enthusiast. His uniform is impeccable, his posture rigid. He loves the army.

In response to his command the twenty-nine underlings fling themselves down like so many wet rags, gasping and moaning, snatching for waterbags and rum bottles. They are a sorry lot, these men, bearded and sunburned, their uniforms a disgrace, soiled rags wrapped round their heads and feet and parasite-riddled legs. They are untutored and unskilled, drunks and brawlers, second-story men and murderers, incorrigible to the core. But then, how necessary is a good attitude to the digging of a grave? How much skill or enthusiasm does it really take?. . Still, as in any large aggregation of men, there are those particularly suited to specific tasks, those who over the years have developed special skills and inside knowledge. So too at Goree. Among those assigned to the burial detail are two ex-professionals schooled in the churchyards of Islington and Cheapside: Billy Boyles and Ned Rise.

“Ah Neddy, it’s a sorrowful hot day, init? And wot a bitch to have to be out here bleedin’ from the pores just because some fancy Lunnon monkey is come round to tea with the Major, eh?” Boyles is peering slantwise at his friend from beneath the shaggy brim of a Panama hat. To all outward appearances he isn’t appreciably different from the man who bamboozled Osprey, drank Nahum Fribble’s beer and lived at the bottom of Squire Trelawney’s well. Neither dysentery nor ague has touched him, so inured is he to filth and deprivation, so hardened against the assault of microbes by a lifetime of wallowing in the shit, scum and slime of London’s foulest and most putrid holes. Suddenly, the shadow of an inspiration lifts his lower lip and depresses his nose. “Hey: you think he’d take us along wiff him?”

Ned’s eyes are bloodshot. He has lost weight and is feeling lightheaded. For the past two nights he has been unable to sleep, racked with the chills and fevers of dysentery. “You kidding?” he growls. “He’ll be wanting your spit-and-shine crew, the ones that can stand up straight and toddle off to sleep like babes. Shit. What would he want with a couple of walking corpses like us?”

Boyles’ features rearrange themselves into a slow, stubborn pout. “I’m as good a man as any here,” he says. And then immediately qualifies it. “If I gets my rum ration regular. Besides, if he don’t take us, you know as well as I we’ll be diggin’ our own graves before long.”

At that moment Martyn spins round, stamps his boot in the dust and barks out an order to the effect that the whole crew can haul their filthy lazy arses up off the ground and get to work, toot-sweet, or suffer a knock about the ears from his military-issue, one-and-three-quarters-inch parade baton.

Ned rises wearily and braces himself on the handle of his shovel. He looks at Boyles like an old streetdog pinned beneath the wheel of a cart. “That’s right, Billy, that’s right. I’ll dig yours if you dig mine.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Three hours later Boyles and Rise are propped up against the trunk of the sole acacia tree on the knoll, drinking up the bipinnate shade. Their shovels, planted to the haft, stand like sentinels over the half-filled grave before them. The heat distorts the horizon, lays a flat hand over the dead still sea. The others are long gone.

What has happened is this: too debilitated to ply his shovel, Ned stumbled to his knees and begged to be excused. Martyn accused him of shirking and rapped the small of his back with the baton. There was no response. Martyn rapped again, a little more vigorously, like a man locked out of his own house. Ned lost consciousness. As punishment for this flagrant dereliction of duty, Martyn ordered the revived Rise to remain on the knoll till the grave was filled — even if it took him till Christmas. Billy Boyles volunteered to stay on and watch over him.

So here they are, marshaling their strength to get up and complete the task. By way of refreshment, Boyles tips back a pint of rum while Ned drools into a waterbag. The heat is implacable. After awhile Ned lifts his head to scan the shore absently, splotches of color drifting before his eyes, a lone sorry gull picking at a spot of something in the sand. He is thinking of the past, of better times, of standing at the bar in the Pig & Pox and downing a long wet draught of beer, when he suddenly becomes aware of a movement down the beach. He can’t be sure, a white rippling haze draining everything of color and dimension, but there seems to be a figure making its way toward them — two figures. He squints into the sun, shades his eyes. Yes, two figures, tall and short, ambling along the shore in this dizzying heat like shell collectors out for a stroll at Brighton. Who in God’s name? And then it hits him.

Instantly Ned is on his feet, shovel in hand, flinging dirt like a prospector on to the motherlode. Alarmed, Boyles drops the bottle and scrambles up beside him. “Neddy: wot is it? An attack? Is that wot it is?” Ned neither slows down nor glances up. His voice is as taut and urgent as a strung bow: “Pick up the shovel, you idiot. Dig. Dig for your life.” Bewildered, Boyles takes up his shovel and begins pitching earth into the open hole.

A few minutes later, the work nearly complete, Boyles glances up and is startled to see two strangers standing over him. The one is short, dark and effeminately slight, a smile on his lips and a dimple creasing his chin. The other is tall and wheat-haired, erect as a pillar, a three or four days’ growth of reddish beard furring his cheeks — but wait a minute. Isn’t that—?

Mungo Park stands there in his coruscating boots and nankeen trousers, in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, the peach-colored jacket flung carelessly over his shoulder. His brother-in-law is beside him, leaning back on one leg, arms akimbo, dressed up like the most insouciant beau on Bond Street. “Well,” the explorer says, “it’s good to see that at least somebody around here is capable of exertion.” His voice is hearty as a handshake.

Ned, digging furiously, suddenly whirls round as if surprised, jerks to attention and snaps a salute. “Sir!” he barks, the response as smooth and automatic as if he were a trained seal and the explorer a man with a fish. He makes an effort to hold the explorer’s eyes and to control the hot/cold tremors rattling his knees and snatching at his elbows. Still, he can’t suppress the surprise he feels at seeing the explorer up close for the first time. He’d expected an older man — forty at least. After all, this fellow’s a celebrity, been to Africa and back, written books, hobnobbed with the cream of society. And he can’t be any older than Ned himself.

Mungo pushes a lock of hair out of his eye, barely sweating though the heat is like a hammer. “No need to be so formal, friend,” he says, and Ned relaxes. “Alexander and I were beginning to think that nobody on this island ever left sick bay.”

“Well, Sir,” Ned says, dredging up all the schooling in his voice, “the Lord has blessed us with our health, and we feel duty-bound to do what we can to repay Him by seeing that those less fortunate can at least have a decent burial.”

Mungo and Zander exchange glances, like men at a horse sale who’ve just been quoted a price so preposterously low it makes their palms crawl.

“Yes, Sir, Billy and I have been out here for three hours, seeing to the burial of the four unfortunates called to their reward yesterday in the excitement of your arrival, Sir.”

“Oh — then you men know why my brother-in-law and I have come to Goree?”

Boyles, who has to this point stood by with his mouth hanging open, begins to get the idea. “That we does, oh that we does,” he sings, a silly wet grin splitting his face in two. “It’s a great and glorious mission you’re about, init? One that’ll redound to the everlastin’ glory o’ King George and the Queen and all the proud cityzens of Merry Old, am I royt?”

The explorer has already removed his hat to get at a notepad concealed in the crown. He is beaming like a hero. “So,” he says, pen poised over paper, “I take it you fellows would like to come along with us, then?”

♦ CROSSING THE RUBICON ♦

The thick sludge of tropical air — already pregnant with humidity — is penetrated on this particular morning by the lusty jubilant cries of men who consider themselves uncommonly fortunate, serendipitous even. These are the cries of the elect, the chosen few, the lucky dogs who’ve just kissed the beauty queen and tucked the turkey under their arms: these are the cries of the winners. “Hoorah!” they cheer. “Pip-pip!” Intermingled with these cheers is another sound, a sound like celestial static — brazen, tinny, grating — the sound of musical instruments violated and abused. The source of this secondary cacophony is the regimental band, which consists of six bugles, two trumpets and a viola. Stationed just outside the main gate, the band is hammering away at “Rule Britannia” and the bourree from the “Royal Fireworks Music.” The occasion is momentous. Rank upon rank of red-jacketed soldiers stand at attention, the Major himself has deigned to rise early and straddle his dapple-gray, the band rings out like a convocation of archangels: Mungo Park’s second expedition is under way.

The thirty-five men the explorer has chosen to accompany him are prancing through the gates like peacocks, crowing out their good fortune, looking almost dashing in the new uniforms provided for the occasion. And why shouldn’t they crow? They’re escaping a hellhole, a pit, the very maw of pestilence and death, and setting off on a jaunt that will lead them through the countryside and back to England, free men and heroes to boot. The rest of the garrison isn’t so sanguine. The three hundred twenty-five men Mungo has left behind (eight more having expired in the interval) are cheering, true enough, but only for form’s sake. They are dejected, jealous, fatally disappointed. Some have turned their heads and burst into tears. Others are sniveling openly or blowing their noses on shirttails or blackened rags.

The explorer, at the head of the van, is brimming with good cheer and optimism. He’s got himself thirty-five good men, strong, stalwart and true — not to mention eager and stout of heart. He’s got his asses, the government is behind him, Zander at his side, and the band is playing. What more auspicious way to launch the greatest adventure of his life? He is grinning, grinning till his lips crack, all the while saluting the crowd and thinking: this is it, finally and at long last, this is it. There’s no turning back now, nothing to stop him. He’ll track the Niger and capture the hearts and minds of the world. Nothing less than immortality awaits.

Fifteen minutes later, on board the Crescent again and sandwiched between his cap-waving men and the throng of blaring asses, he checks his roster and conducts a quick roll call. The solid Celtic and Anglo-Saxon surnames slip off his tongue like heavy syrup and the responses snap back at him, enthusiastic, this one pitched high, the next rasping and timbreless, the next scraping bottom. There are forty-five men in all: himself, Zander, Georgie Scott and Lieutenant Martyn, the four carpenters, two sailors recruited from the Eugenia for the purpose of piloting the boats on the Niger, and the thirty-five brave lads he’s spirited away from the garrison. Of these last, he can barely match names and faces, though he does recognize Jemmie Bird, Jonas Watkins, Ned Rise and Billy Boyles, among others. Besides Martyn, all the men but one are privates first class. The exception is Sergeant M’Keal, an outstanding man, tried and true, and with a wealth of experience ranging over his thirty-one years of active service. Mungo could tell from his handshake and the look in his eye that here was a man — never mind his service record. Never mind that he’d been twelve times a corporal and nine times a sergeant and would have gone even higher but for the unfortunate attachment to the bottle that always returned him to the ranks. The man was true-blue. Any fool could see that.

Mungo looks up at the commotion on shore as the Crescent draws back from the dock. Every man in the garrison has tears of joy in his eyes. The band is blazing, the Major waving a white handkerchief, the sails bellying in the breeze. Mungo raises his clenched fists in salute, glorious moment, as the wind takes hold of the boat and the shore begins to slip away.

♦ ♦ ♦

On the way up the Gambia to Pisania, Ned Rise leans back against a crate of trade goods, lights a cigarette and gazes out on the brown wash of the river, the flights of birds, the great grasping claws of the cypresses that line the banks like decapitated sphinxes. He is feeling better, on the mend from his bout with dysentery, exhilarated by his good luck and the prospect of returning to England within the year. The explorer is all right, he thinks. A little pompous and straightlaced maybe, but a man you can work around. . yes, a man you can definitely work around. Ned closes his eyes and pictures the Thames, a clean riveting blue under the sun, the explorer beside him at the helm of the Crescent, the docks packed with grateful cheering mobs and loose women, the future secure. Ned, the explorer says, turning to him, you’ve been invaluable to me on this expedition, invaluable. I couldn’t have done it without you. He takes Ned’s hand, a soft saintly nimbus trembling round them both. Name your reward, old boy— name it and it’s yours.

He wakes gently, some uncertain space of time slipped by — a minute? an hour? — the natter of river martins and hoopoes wafting across from the near bank, and from somewhere the crazed laughter of Boyles and Bird, drunk as loons. He rubs his eyes, looks out at the line of treetops slipping serenely across the rail, and begins to sense, in a vague and incremental way, that all is not as it should be. Case in point: the shadow that looms over him, bulky, stationary, unmistakably human. Ned squints up, momentarily blinded, unable to make out the face in silhouette.

“Jonas?” he tries. “Billy?”

There is no answer. The stranger merely stands there gazing down at him, while Ned shades his eyes and tries to blink away the sunspots and shadow images. What he sees is not at all reassuring: a flexed jaw and dull porcine eyes, clumps of matted doggy hair randomly interspersed with swaths of naked scalp, the rutted face and thick ears of a born clod — and all of it set atop a tensed mass of bone, sinew and rib-cracking muscle. The composite somehow dredges up unpleasant associations — painful associations — and Ned is on the verge of making an intuitive leap to the dim worrisome past when the stranger breaks the silence.

“Well dammee, if it isn’t Ned Rise.”

In that instant, inexplicable, impossible, three thousand miles and seven long years away, Ned knows that it is Smirke standing before him. And instinctively covers himself. “The name’s Rose, friend, Edward Hilary Rose.”

The innkeeper goes down on one knee, his bristling sweaty face as struck with wonderment as a child’s. “Why — it can’t be. The divil take yer fingers if I didn’t see ye strung up for a murderer. .”

Ned gathers his feet under him and very gradually cocks his arm, wary of any sudden movement.

“But it’s you, it is — look, there’s the mark o’ the ‘angman on ye,” Smirke rasps, breathing beer and onions in Ned’s face and pointing a thick finger at the drooping neck of his shirt.

“No, friend,” says Ned, inching off in a crabwalk, “you’ve got the wrong man. I’m a soldier, career man. Born and raised in Cornwall, never been to London in my life—”

“Lunnon? ‘Oo said anything about Lunnon?” And suddenly Smirke’s hand is at his throat, the big rippled forearm jerking him to his feet as easily as if he were a bundle of rags. The innkeeper holds him suspended there for a long nasty moment — his eyes reduced to slits, the rawboned face twisted with rage and hatred — before flinging him against a wall of packing crates. “And wot about them nubbins, then—’ey, Neddy?”

Ned thrusts his hand deep in his pocket, but Smirke, powerful and reeking, takes hold of his wrist and forces the hand up against a crate of lorgnettes, where he splays the fingers across the rough pine slats. Mute and incontrovertible, the ravaged fingers tell their tale.

Smirke says nothing, his breathing deep-chested and satisfied, almost a succession of snorts. He looks Ned in the eye, so close their noses are touching, his breath coming quicker now, as if he were approaching some sort of climax. “Ye’ve been the ruin of me, Ned Rise,” he rasps, his voice as toneless as a defective’s, “and now ‘ear why.”

Ned stands there, pinned against the crates, clutching Smirke so close they could be lovers, while the big man spits curses in his face and narrates a deranged and obsessive tale of loss and woe. “You shit,” he breathes, so soft it could be a term of endearment. “You scum-suckin’ prick. You stinkin’, motherfuckin’, faggot turd. I useter to be a respectable man,” shouting now, “the proprietor of a respectable establishment — and now look at me.” Ned is looking — no choice in the matter — and thinking only of how he can escape the madman’s clutches, lure him over the rail and sink him in the festering ooze. But no such luck. Smirke tightens his hold and goes on.

He’d lost the Vole’s Head nearly six years earlier — lost it — after it had been in the family for three generations. And all because of the humilation and loss of confidence he’d suffered over the Reamer Room incident. Trade fell off. The higher class of patron began to eat and drink elsewhere and Smirke was forced to auction some of the trappings to pay his bills. Inevitably he had to close down, and within the year he was wandering the streets, a broken man. It was about that time that he ran into Mendoza. Need a quid or two, old friend? Mendoza asked, plucking a note from a fat bankroll. As usual the ex-pugilist was dressed in style, looking as prosperous as a prince, though he hadn’t had a fight in years. Down on yer luck, eh Smirke? he said with a grin. Come round and see me: I’ll fix you up. Two nights later Smirke was climbing in the second story window of Lady Tuppenham’s house, while Mendoza kept an eye out below. When Smirke backed down the ladder twenty minutes later, his arms laden and a sack of silver slung over his shoulder, the night watchman was steadying the ladder for him. Within the hour Smirke was in Newgate, and from there it was the hulks at Portsmouth. When the explorer came around looking for carpenters, Smirke, who’d done a bit of remodeling and whatnot at the Vole’s Head, stepped forward and offered his services. And so here he is. In this pesthole. “And all because of ye, Ned Rise!” he shrieks suddenly. “When I seen ye danglin’ there at the end of the ‘angman’s rope I says to myself it wasn’t near bad enough for ye, not near. I wanted to kick that black-‘ooded pansy aside and do it myself, twist the rope double tight, choke ye till ye wisht ye’d never seen the light of day!”

Desperate, the madman’s breath in his face and hands at his throat, Ned opts for the elbow in the ribs, followed by a swift knee to the crotch. One, two: uff-uff. It has no effect. Smirke is leaning over him, breaking his back, wringing his neck as methodically as a butcher throttling a Christmas goose. Ned tries to cry out but his windpipe is choked off, there’s nothing there, and he has to settle for a blind hopeless flailing while the life rushes out of him like water down a drain.

It is Lieutenant Martyn who saves him.

“Here!” the Lieutenant shouts. “You men!” And then the baton comes down across the back of the innkeeper’s skull with a sound reminiscent of chestnuts popping on the open fire.

As Smirke goes limp in his arms, the great wet bulk of the man weighing on him like leviathan and forcing him to the deck while Martyn shouts commands and blasts on his whistle and footsteps come thundering up the planks, Ned Rise begins to reconsider his position, thinking with a certain regret of his pallet back at Goree, thinking that perhaps he’s made a mistake, thinking that maybe, in the final analysis, this isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

♦ DISAPPOINTMENT AT PISANIA ♦

The initial disappointment is trifling — the result of a minor accident, unforeseeable, unavoidable — and yet for all that, something of an evil portent, a bringdown, a rotten and insipid way to launch so historic an adventure as this. Even worse, it involves the first death.

Leland Cahill, like most of the men recruited from the garrison, had been drinking heavily in celebration of his reprieve from the certain doom of Goree, drinking to the success of the expedition, the honor of Mungo Park, the courage of his companions and just about anything else he could think of. Cahill was an acne-scarred eighteen-year-old, somewhat below the median in intelligence, who presented an innocuous and winning front, and who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for sacrilege, public micturition and stealing woollen clothes from tenter grounds. Sober, he was a notch above worthless; drunk, he was no more capable of pulling his weight than a cross-eyed catatonic from Bethlehem Hospital. Nonetheless, when the Crescent came to anchor off Pisania it was his task — along with Mitchell Mewshaw — to secure the gangway.

Since the river was running low at this season, the ship’s captain was forced to drop anchor some hundred and twenty yards offshore. Fortunately, Mungo had foreseen this eventuality and had sent ahead to have a raft constructed for the purpose of transporting men, animals and equipment from ship to shore. The raft was waiting for them as they rounded a bend in the river and drew within sight of the outbuildings of the factory.

By unanimous consent of the officers, the asses — whose stench was terrific in such close quarters and high temperatures — were to be evacuated first. As if aware of their prerogative, the asses became increasingly animated as the two sleek Pisanian negroes positioned the raft alongside the ship. Unfortunately, Cahill and Mewshaw, passing a bottle of gin and swapping dirty stories, took no notice of the situation. When the raft was properly secured they merely backed up a step or two, fastened the ropes and guided the wooden gangway over the side of the ship and into position. A mistake. As the gangway breached the bulwarks the asses began to stamp and snort, impatient with the crowding and the swaying of the ship; the instant it touched down they stampeded. A dun blur shot over the rail and down the narrow walkway in a fury of crashing hoofs, pandemonious braying and hellish kicking. Eighteen asses plunged directly into the water. The remainder managed to make the raft — shaken and wild-eyed — scrambling hard to escape the push from behind. Inevitably they spooked the negroes and capsized the raft. In all, six asses were lost. As for Leland Cahill, private first class, he was last seen pitching headlong down the sloping ramp of the gangway, one hundred and eight individual hoofs making their separate imprints in his flesh.

♦ ♦ ♦

The second disappointment is less tangible, more a mental and spiritual letdown than the first. More a disappointment in the true sense of the word — a betrayal of expectation rather than a sudden tragic turn of events.

After the explorer had straightened out his men and asses and assigned a crew to grapple the river for Cahill’s body, his first thought was of Dr. Laidley. It had been nearly eight years. And yet when he thought of Africa, he thought of Laidley. The old man had equipped and instructed him in preparation for that first mission — had taught him Mandingo, filled him in on native customs and introduced him to Johnson. While Mungo lay back in bed, nearly eviscerated from his first bout with jungle fever, Laidley had nursed him, brought him cup after cup of stiff, cleansing native tea, read to him from Donne, Milton and Shakespeare in a voice as serene and assured as the Bank of England. He was the last to see the explorer off and the first to congratulate him on his return — and the first white man to hear the historic news of the Niger. He was the center in a chaos of colors, dialects, tattoos and nose rings, the single fixed point in an ever-shifting pattern of bizarre needs, wants and practices. He was Mungo’s mentor.

As the explorer made his way through the tumble of reed huts — each with its barking dog and naked children framed in the entranceway — and up the dusty street to the doctor’s rambling residence cum fortress cum factory, he broke into an anticipatory grin as he thought of the pleasure of seeing him again, shaking his hand and introducing him to Zander, telling him of the phenomenal success of the book and the effect his discovery was having on the cartographers of Europe. He could already picture the congenitally flushed cheeks, the white tonsure, the nodding head and pursed lips, the sideways contemplative glance of the old man as he sat in his cane rocker absorbing all the news of England before exploding in a flurry of hospitality. “Yes, yes, yes,” he’d say, fatherly, Franklinesque, trotting round the room till the tails of his jacket caught the wind, “but here, have some palm wine, some goat’s cheese, a dish of kouskous. Or how about a steak? Cigar? Brandy?” Mungo would inscribe a copy of his Travels for him, and they’d sit back on the veranda and immerse themselves in a connoisseur’s palaver about the countryside, the flow of words laving him, washing out the lint of seven years’ absence, conjuring up half-forgotten truths about meteorology and geography, about royal succession and tribal boundaries. If the truth be known, the explorer was in sad need of a refresher course.

All this ran through his head as he and Zander ascended the familiar rough-hewn steps of the piazza, but a nagging question kept intruding itself as well: why hadn’t the old man come out to greet them as they landed? Was he indisposed? Away in the bush?

The answer waited for him just behind the open door, in the lank-haired, unshaven person of D. K. Crump, the doctor’s former assistant and temporary successor. Crump was slouched in a wicker chair, a bottle of gin on the desk before him and a reefer of mutokuane fuming in his hand. His eyes were latticed with red. Beside him, her heavy lids half shut in ecstasy or stupor, a black woman in a striped shift languidly rotated a fan while Crump, his hand thrust through the armhole of her dress, manipulated her breasts as if they were potatoes in a sack.

It took a moment for the explorer’s eyes to adjust to all this. The factory was dark and immense, strewn with articles for barter. There were knives, muskets, kegs of powder, bolts of cloth, mirrors, demijohns of wine and brandy, kegs of nails, axes, saws, jacks-in-the-box and penny candies by the barrel. And up against these, a mountain of local products taken in exchange — elephant tusks, teeth and feet, amorphous mounds of beeswax, birds’ feathers of every hue and description, baskets of peppercorns and peanuts, great twisted tangles of ebony, the limp pelts of leopard, lion and zebra. It looked like the aftermath of some natural disaster, the leavings of a flood, driftwood and jetsam, piled in a dusty heap that lost itself in the dim reaches of the warehouse. The explorer took in the sweep of it, and then turned back to this bare-chested man with the stringy biceps who seemed to preside over it all.

“I’m Mungo Park,” he said, bowing, “and this is Alexander Anderson, my second-in-command. Is Dr. Laidley about?”

The man looked up at him for a long moment, as insouciant as a lizard on a rock. He took a drag on his reefer, and then laughed, as short and sudden as the single bark of a dog.

Mungo shifted uneasily on his feet. Crump jiggled the black woman’s breasts. Zander took a step forward. “See here,” he said, “you’ve been asked a civil question — do you know the whereabouts of the factor here, or don’t you?”

Crump’s eyes were dead blue, emotionless to the core. He set the reefer on the edge of the desk and took a drink of gin. Then he laughed again. “Ha!” he growled finally. “The old geek’s gone and kicked off then, near a month back.”

Prying the details from him was like drawing splinters from flesh. But after ten minutes of patient questioning, the two geographical missionaries were able to establish that Laidley’s death had been accidental. It seemed that the doctor had just returned from an extended collecting trip in the interior, during which he’d survived the onslaught of a dyspeptic lion, the strike of a black mamba and a Foulah raid, when he strolled out into the courtyard to inspect his roses, was stung in the right nostril by a honeybee and died gasping twenty minutes later. Crump — Dirk Crump, a London lowlife and ne’er-do-well who’d convinced the company he was the man for the job — had been sent out a month earlier to replace Laidley’s former assistant, who had succumbed to the climate. He supervised the funeral arrangements (“a bunch of bollocky wogs muckin’ about in the earth”), said a few words over the mound of yellow clay that swallowed up the good doctor, and notified his superiors in London of the changed circumstances at the factory. It would take four months for the news to reach the offices of the West African Company in London, another six or seven before the company could act on it. Until then, Crump was in charge.

The explorer was deflated. There would be no reunion, no hospitality, no reassuring chitchat about the state of the surrounding countryside. There was only this grinning degenerate, this hyena with his feet propped up on the doctor’s desk. Mungo turned to leave.

“ ‘Ere, Mr. Explorer, ain’t you forgettin’ somethin’?” Crump rasped, his eyes glittering. Some sort of weird excitement had come over him — he was on his feet now — swaying back and forth like a snake about to strike.

The explorer paused in the doorway. “Yes?”

“The raft. The bloody raft you ordered. Wot you think, they grows on trees?” Crump began to laugh — a sick, soughing sound — at his own joke.

“What of it?”

“Well we expects to be paid, we does. The West African Trading Company don’t give no credit to nobody. As far as I’m concerned, pal, you’re no different from any of these bush niggers out here.” Crump was no more than a foot away now, hands folded under his biceps. “So pay up, Jack.”

Mungo sighed. “All right, I’ll write up a draft on the Colonial Department— “

“Uh-uh, friend — all transactions in cash. My boys — and you can see a few of ‘em out there now—”

The explorer looked. Seven or eight wildly painted savages with spears, pistols, muskets and longswords slouched against the pillars of the veranda, looking as if they hadn’t heard a good joke in years.

“—as I was saying, my boys worked their arses off on that raft, includin’ three days’ worth of overtime at time-and-a-half, and they expects their just deserts, if you see what I mean.”

“Very well,” Mungo said, all business. “What do we owe you?”

“Five hunnert guineas.”

The explorer was stunned. “Five hundred—?”

“We won’t pay it,” Zander snapped.

The little group stood there at the doorway for a moment. Zander’s words sucked up in the humid sponge of the air as if they’d never been spoken. It was hot, and the explorer could feel the sweat coursing down his temples and salting the corners of his mouth. Suddenly, one of the painted men grunted and everyone turned to him. He was made up in black and white, the paint dividing his face in two, ribbing it like a xylophone. He pointed a finger at the oil palm on the far side of the clearing. A small colobus monkey was perched on one of the grooves, nibbling at something and periodically reaching over its shoulder to groom the even smaller monkey which clung to its back. Slowly and deliberately, with a total absence of emotion or flutter of concern, the xylophone man raised his musket and squeezed the trigger, pinning both animals to the tree for a single agonizing moment detached from time and process, before they fell like rags to the earth.

Mungo reached for his purse.

♦ ♦ ♦

The final disappointment is merely rankling — and puzzling. And yet at the same time it is somehow more deeply disturbing than the others, more a blow on the gut level, more the sort of thing that stalks dreams and tightens the bowels.

After a brief conference with his officers, Mungo determined to leave Pisania the morning following his confrontation with Crump. The new factor was clearly hostile, his associates potentially dangerous. There was nothing to be gained by extending their stay at Pisania, and each day brought them closer to the onset of the rainy season. The only essential matter of business — recruiting some eighteen or twenty blacks to serve as porters, guides and interpreters — would involve no more than an hour or two. The explorer was confident. From long experience, he knew only too well how to inflame the native heart with material lust. He would offer half a bolt of scarlet cloth and the price of a prime slave to any man willing to accompany him into the interior. All he need do was breathe the rumor and his tent would be inundated by eager volunteers, hordes of them, jabbering away like futures speculators, pushing forward to spit in their palms and shake hands with the white man to seal the bargain. He could sit back and take his pick.

But something went wrong.

Though he’d announced his offer just after noon, dusk came and went and still there were no takers. Had the headman kept the news to himself, hoping to fill all the available positions with his own relatives? Had the explorer, whose Mandingo was admittedly a bit rusty, failed to make himself clear? By eight o’clock he began to feel concerned. Without blacks to manage the asses and haul supplies and equipment, the onus would fall on the soldiers, who would be hard put looking out for themselves when the rains began. Even worse, there would be no one capable of communicating with distant tribes or even of searching out the right road. “No,” the explorer finally said to his brother-in-law as they sat beside the oil lamp in his tent, “there’s no way around it. We’ve got to have blacks, even if we have to offer them double pay, an estate in the Cotswolds and the Bang’s underdrawers thrown into the bargain.”

Outside, the air was thick with smoke from the men’s cookfires. Largely unconcerned about such trifles as Leland Cahill, Dr. Laidley, the going rate for rafts and the availability of black porters, the men were instead applying themselves assiduously to the tasks at hand: roasting chickens, draining gourds of sooloo beer and introducing the native women to venereal disease. The explorer could hear them cursing softly in the bushes as he strode through the darkened little shanty town on his way to the headman’s hut. From the river, faint but unmistakable, there was the eerie whine and wheeze of crocodiles mating in the muck.

The headman, a sinewy, middle-aged fellow in a beaver hat and a French cambric shirt with the sleeves removed, was just sitting down to his evening repast as the explorer stepped from the shadows and into the unsteady circle of light cast by the cookfire. The man’s name was Damman Jumma. His hut, a triumph of contemporary mud-and-wattle architecture, shared a common wall with the stockade erected round the factory, and the firelight lit the tips of the pointed timbers till they glowed like a row of filed teeth. A number of stripped and blanched logs were arranged round the cookfire in front of the hut. Damman Jumma’s wives, children, cousins, uncles and dogs were lounging on and against these logs as if they were so many sofas and loveseats, chattering and joking, spooning up bowls of hot kouskous and gnawing away at slabs of salt beef from the explorer’s stores. When Mungo appeared, the group fell silent.

“Greetings,” Mungo said, the Mandingo dialect thick and leaden on his tongue. There was no response. The explorer buttoned and unbuttoned his jacket, licked his lips and made a stab at conversation. “Enjoying the salt beef?”

A fat woman with stretched and knotted earlobes glanced up at him, her face smeared with grease. Bony children, suspicious-looking dogs and salt-haired old men stared up at him so fixedly he began to feel as if they expected him to start dancing or juggling or something. Damman Jumma said nothing, but looked up at the explorer out of eyes that rolled back on themselves till they looked like hard-cooked eggs.

Mungo cleared his throat. “Uh, Damman, uh the reason I’ve stopped by is to ask if you’ve uh, you know, spread the word about the expedition and the top wages I’m offering.”

The headman inserted a slab of beef in the pocket of his cheek and began masticating noisily. Everyone watched him, silent. It took him three or four minutes to break down the rubbery meat, swallow it and lubricate his throat with a long pull at the calabash. When he looked up at the explorer again he was shaking his head. ‘‘Baharram wo dodoto,’’ he said. “No one will go.”

The explorer was incredulous. “What do you mean no one will go? I’m offering half a bolt of red cotton cloth direct from Birmingham and the price of a prime slave. That’s more than you’d make in two years sitting around here hauling crates for Doctor — I mean, Mr. Crump.”

All eyes were on the headman. Using only his teeth and a splinter of wood, he was slowly prizing the cork from a bottle of Chateau Latour that Mungo recognized as having come from his own private stock. Damman Jumma spat out the cork and took a long swig before passing the bottle to his favorite wife. “Listen,” he said finally, speaking in colloquial Mandingo, “you can offer this and that till you’re blue in the face, but nobody is going to go with you. The feeling around here is that you’re kokoro kea, a bad risk. And that’s all she wrote.”

Shaken, the explorer returned to his tent to talk things over with Zander. They decided to offer a bolt and a half of cloth, a case of Whitbread’s beer and the value of two prime slaves to any able-bodied man who would accompany the expedition. The next morning they hired a jilli kea to canvas the countryside, singing out the offer at every village within an eight-mile radius. There was no response. The explorer waited two days more. Finally, on the morning of the third day he called in Zander, Martyn and Scott and told them that the men would just have to shoulder the load. The asses were packed, the troops inspected and provisioned, and the expedition set off on the road to the Niger.

As they marched out of Pisania, the overloaded asses already bucking and complaining, the locals watched wide-eyed, some shaking their heads, others clutching at saphies and scribbling in the dust. They watched with the sort of grim and dumbstruck fascination that might have welcomed the early Christians to the lion pit or assailed the barefooted children of the Middle Ages as they gathered in droves to march across Europe and drive the infidels from the Holy Land. They watched with prayers on their lips and a certain lurking prescience of man’s mortality in their hearts. They watched, solemn as priests, as the crazed and stinking wild-eyed white men drove their asses through the gates and up the long tortuous road to nowhere.

♦ IN SADNESS ♦

Ailie clenches her teeth, her breath torn in gasps. She is thinking, through a trembling pink delirium of pain, about things eschatological and generative, about childhood, adolescence and old age, about budding and parthenogenesis, about trees and sunlight, food for the body, decay. Her mind is suddenly blooming and philosophical, as if she were sitting at her desk reading Locke or Galileo or Saint John the Divine, instead of lying here on the verge of shouting out the filthiest epithets she knows. Meanwhile, the birds have started in again and the windows are beginning to soften with the light of dawn. She bites her finger. There is something inside her, vital and impetuous, crowding her bones, fighting to get out.

This is her fourth, and still the pain is enough to make her jump and writhe like a spider on a burning log. In sadness shalt thou bring forth children, she thinks, and then, more bitterly: Thy desire shall be for thy husband, and he shall have dominion over thee. From somewhere, as if through a haze and at a great distance, the voice of Dr. Dinwoodie, soothing and gentle. And then the answering murmur of Mary Ogilvie, the housemaid, and the clatter of spoon and cup. There is something in this simple domestic music, something that speaks of normalcy and release, something catalytic. Suddenly she finds herself bearing down, the flow and process growing familiar, natural and automatic, the pain on hold, her heart and lungs and muscles clicking along in conjunction, locked now in athletic fervor, pushing to win, break the tape, drive the ball home. There. She can feel the head between her thighs, Dinwoodie’s fingers, the hitch of the shoulders and then the final purgative rush toward release. It comes like an explosion, with a sucking, scouring sound, as if the whole thing were the climax of a stupendous bowel movement. She swells her lungs. It is out.

Drained, she sinks back into the pillow and closes her eyes. There is the snip-snip of the doctor’s scissors, a splash of water, the cry of an infant. From somewhere below she can hear her father berating his apprentice, something about poultices and plasters. Then, close at hand, Dinwoodie’s voice, sussurant and reverential. “It’s a boy, Ailie. A fine strapping laddie, feisty as his father.”

And now it’s in her arms, red and wet, stinking of inner secrets and the must of the womb. She doesn’t care. Boy or girl, child or monster, she doesn’t care. What does it matter? she thinks, something coppery and bitter in her throat. Her husband’s deserted her. Tired and alone, she’s given birth to an orphan.

♦ SOMEBODY TO LEAN ON ♦

She has visitors, people coming and going, grinners and well-wishers. What a darlin’ bairn. Coochie-coo. Hello, goodbye. Through it all, she lies there propped up against the pillow like a suffering saint, feeling odd, odd to be the object of so much pity and admiration, odd to be back in her girlhood room, back in the bed she’d slept in alone for twenty-five long years. Odd to be alone again.

Almost from the beginning it had been clear that things weren’t going to work out at Fowlshiels. Ailie saw the move back to her motherin-law’s as an implied criticism, as Mungo’s way of telling her she’d failed at Peebles. Accustomed to managing her own household and making independent decisions regarding everything from the composition of the kitchen garden to how often the dog needed worming, she inevitably came into conflict with her mother-in-law. Things went from bad to worse when Mungo deserted her. It seemed almost as if the old woman blamed her for Mungo’s rashness and irresponsibility, as if it was glaringly obvious that Ailie had failed as a homemaker and driven her man out into the wilds to face cannibals and ravening beasts. In the kitchen, on the porch, out at the well, Ailie could feel her mother-in-law’s censorious eyes on her, and through each of the hundred little domestic motions of each day, she seethed with a growing resentment of her husband and the intolerable situation he’d forced her into. A month dragged by, then another. Ailie was pregnant, exhausted, the children ran around the cramped cottage like gypsies and red Indians, her mother-in-law retreated behind a wall of glacial and imperious silence. When her father invited her to move in with him at Selkirk, Ailie jumped at the chance.

And so, she’s come home. Home to deliver her baby and lick her wounds, home to raise the children under her father’s sheltering roof. Now, the baby asleep, her father out on his rounds, the children visiting at Fowlshiels till she can get her strength back, the house whispers with quiet. She’s home all right, free from the turmoil at her mother-in-law’s, but the hours hang on the face of the clock and the windows are perpetually gray. She is bored. Dispirited and anxious. She tries to read an article on asexual reproduction in the green hydra. She starts a letter to Mungo, then tears it up in frustration. What’s the sense? He’ll never see it anyway. Finally she gets up — painfully, slowly — to look at herself in the mirror. And is startled by what she sees: a woman of thirty, small-boned, with delicate features, snarled hair and a look of hurt and anger indelibly stamped across her face. A woman whose jaw is set, and whose eyes cut like a knife, fierce and unforgiving.

The day wears on. Katlin Gibbie, grown fat and matronly at twenty-six, comes to visit, her fidgeting grabby children in tow. Betty Deatcher stops by, the Reverend MacNibbit. Half the town it seems. And each one with an offering: something for the baby, a bundle of flowers, a loaf of bread, a cup of broth. But Zander isn’t there. Nor Mungo either.

The thought of them is enough to makm her stomach go hollow with a dread that aches like hunger. She tries to focus their faces in her mind — husband and brother — but can picture only Seedy, grinning, licking his chops, a bone thrust through his nose. As she reaches for the miniature on the night table, her brain is suddenly swamped with evil recollections, images long suppressed springing up like toadstools out of the damp grist of her unconscious, images Mungo had conjured in the quiet of their bed, the darkness hanging over them like a blotter, his disembodied voice pushing, pushing, pushing, until she could see every line of Dassoud’s face, smell the spoor of lion and hyena, taste the soothing muck of dried-up watercourses in her aching throat. Could they be in trouble? Sick? Injured? Something is tingling at the tips of her fingers and toes, playing round the periphery of her consciousness, something vague and unsteady, something like a premonition. But no, she’s worked up, that’s all. Just a morbid fantasy, they’ll pull out of it, what can happen with a whole troop of armed soldiers there to protect them?

Sharp and sudden, the downstairs bell assaults the silence like a scream. More activity in the foyer. A murmur of voices, footsteps on the stairs. She doesn’t want to see anyone. Not in this state. Mary’s knock. “Who is it?”

“You’ve a visitor, ma’am.”

“Send them away, I’m exhausted.”

Sounds of shuffling in the hall, an importuning whisper.

“He says he’s come a long way, ma’am — all the way out from Edinburgh.”

Edinburgh? Who—?

At that moment the door cracks open and Mary sidles into the room, apologetic, as the visitor shows himself. A tall man, tall as the doorframe, hair combed back over his ears and gathered in a knot, silk stockings, buckled shoes — could it be?

“Ailie, I—”he stammers, and then steps forward with a package in his hands. “I mean, congratulations.”

“Georgie Gleg?” She doesn’t know what to say. Her first impulse is to pull the covers up over her head, so stricken is she with guilt and mortification. The last time she saw his face was that gray December morning seven winters ago, the morning they were to be married.

Uninvited, Gleg pulls a chair up to the bed and eases into it with a crack of his bony knees. “I was up at Galashiels,” he says by way of explanation, “visiting my mother and stepfather, when I heard the good news — this is your fourth?”

Ailie nods.

“—and so I just had to stop round and, and pay my respects.”

What can she say? Here he is, the man she’s humiliated, the man she’s abused worse than any slave, sitting before her twisting a gaudily wrapped package in his hands, looking as if he were to blame for the whole thing. She suddenly feels herself going out to him. “Would you care for some tea?”

Gleg stays for three hours that first day. Draining cup after cup of tea, as if he were taking part in some sort of contest, crossing and uncrossing his great gangling legs. He fills her in on his past, cocks a sympathetic ear as she tells him of her hopes and fears. “What, what happened between us,” he says finally, and she can’t look him in the eye, “was good for me in a way. I went out and tried to make something of myself. Edinburgh was an oyster waiting to be cracked, and with my uncle’s help I’ve cracked it, Ailie, in these seven years and four months I’ve gone right to the top of my profession.”

He had. After matriculating first in his class at Edinburgh University, he went to study at Surgeon’s Hall under the second Alexander Monro. Driven by an obsessive need to prove himself worthy in some abstract way, Gleg devoted himself slavishly to his studies, excelling at anatomy, chyma and materia medica, sacrificing social life and recreation for papers and books, hoarding his pennies to buy the finest French surgical instruments.

He was rabbinical, monkish, withdrawn. He quoted Boerhaave and Morgagni verbatim, improved on Monro’s paracentesical procedures, wrote treatises on the spleen and sphenoid bone, and for his M.D. thesis he definitively described the sphincter ani. Two years later he was appointed professor of anatomy, and at the same time set up a small private practice in a walk-up just off the Canongate High Road. He was soon driving a coach and sporting au courant London fashions. He’d even found time to take up fox hunting and golf, and to publish a series of articles in the Philosophical Society’s journal.

All this he reveals gradually, over the course of the afternoon, while sucking at a sugar cube or flailing his geometrical elbows as if they were featherless wings. Finally, he comes to the end of his recitation, and the room falls silent. Ailie has brushed out her hair. The infant lies sleeping beside her, still as a portrait. Ailie clears her throat. “And your wife?” she asks.

Gleg looks down at the floor. “I’ve never married.”

♦ ♦ ♦

During the course of the next two weeks. Gleg visits her daily. Ailie is glad for the company. Gleg amuses her — eternally ridiculous — and yet there’s something else there too. She can’t quite pin it down at first, but in a moment of revelation she realizes what it is: gratitude. Gratitude for the fact that he worships her. Still. After all these years and all that’s happened, he worships her. And for her part, a little worship is just what she needs about now. She’s been down in the dumps, hurt to the quick by Mungo’s rejection of her, feeling worthless, unappealing, a woman who can’t keep her man. And then along comes Gleg, almost like a pilgrim approaching a shrine. His eyes tell her that she’s a goddess. That he’s kept her portrait by his bedside through the long lonely years. That he has been, is now, and always will be her slave.

She can’t help but feel guilty, leading him on, consenting to see him, accepting his gifts and attentions. But she’s bored and lonely, and he makes her feel good. What’s the harm in it?

“Listen,” he tells her one day toward the end of his stay at Galashiels, “I know what you’re going through and I’m sure things will work out. . I mean, he’s a fine man, Mungo, and as sure as he came back to you that first time he’ll be back again — I know he will.” Gleg has been turning a book over in his hands, a parting gift, La Vie Réduit by Pierre Menard. He is struggling with his emotions, the words backing up in his throat as if he were trying to speak and swallow dry saltines at the same time. “What I mean is, uh—”

Ailie is embarrassed. The look on his face as he stood outside her bedroom door on that fateful morning suddenly comes back to her. She tries to rise from the chair but he takes hold of her arm.

“—if anything should happen, you know, and you need help — money, emotional support, anything at all — you can always come to me, because I, I—”

She’s touched. Who wouldn’t be? “That’s very kind of you, Georgie.”

“You can lean on me,” he says.

♦ PUBLIC RELATIONS ♦

No one really has any idea how much an ass can take.

A hundred pounds? Two hundred? Three? Half a dozen sacks of rice? Three kegs of gunpowder and a crate of walnut-framed mirrors in the Queen Anne style? A roll of baft the size of a giant redwood? There is no question that the creature is a beast of burden, that it exists to haul things as surely as a mosquito exists to draw blood. But then why is the animal so ill-tempered, so bristling and recalcitrant?

Even the Foulani assmasters would have to shake their heads over that one. And certainly no one connected with the coffle has even a passing acquaintance with the finer points of an ass’s nature. Least of all Ned Rise. Born and raised in the city, what does he know of solipedous quadrupeds? Or blobber-lipped blackamoors for that matter? Or hundred-and-ten-degree temperatures that bake the brain inside your head as neatly as kidneys in a pie?

What he does know is that the expedition is a shambles. Already. Seven days out of Pisania and confusion is the order of the day: soldiers bitching, negroes pilfering, asses collapsing under the weight of panniers loaded with lead shot. Right from the beginning Ned has had his doubts. First off, they were forced to leave five hundred pounds of rice behind at Pisania because the asses couldn’t handle it. Five hundred pounds. Of food. And yet they loaded up every last scrap of trade goods — red flannel nightcaps, beads and stones, India baft, glass marbles, linen napkins and French crystal — and dozens of sacks filled with tiny white seashells. Loaded it all up so the asses could barely stand. And then there was the curious little problem with the guides and porters: not a single wog, blind, beggared or lame, would go with them. Not for all the beads and baubles in the world. So who has to haul all the excess baggage and drive the asses? You guessed it. Add to that the fact that the great white hero has about as much idea where he’s going as Jemmie Bird, and it’s no wonder you’ve got men straggling all over the road, footsore and pissed through with their own sweat, hollering for double rum rations and red meat for dinner.

So it’s gone ever since they left Pisania. Up at dawn, haggling with splay-nosed harridans over the water at this well or that, loading up the bucking, biting asses and hobbling off down the road, the heat like a fist in the face, like a prizefighter backpedaling and jabbing away at you every step you take. Walk till you drop, then get up and walk some more. When the sun goes down you pitch your tent outside the walls of some mud-and-wattle shithole, and boil up a blackened kettle of rice. If you’re lucky, the white hero haggles with the local niggers and comes up with an emaciated goat or a couple of senile chickens. And then, before you know it, the sun is up and you’re back on the road again.

Ned’s chief responsibility in all this is ass #11. The number is painted in red on the animal’s flank, and again on the double load of opera glasses and Birmingham knives lashed to its back. Across the dusty plains and through the drooping forests pullulating with biting, stinging insects, down ravines and up rises, through the baked and blasted streets of squalid little shanty towns — Samee, Jindey, Kootaconda, Tabajung — up to his neck in river mud, sweat and red dust, still lightheaded from his bout with dysentery and keeping an eye out for Smirke, Ned Rise finds himself following ass #11, step for step and movement for movement, as if he were surgically attached to it, as if he were a suckling babe and this great hairy lop-eared beast were his mother. He plods along, his hand on the ass’s flank, near to fainting with the heat, the stench and the exertion, dodging ass turds and swatting flies. Every once in a while he looks up through a film of sweat to see one of the officers riding by on a fine sturdy Arabian, uniform pressed, a canteen held to his lips.

On this particular day — the seventh day out — it looks as if there’ll be a break in the routine. About four, a rumor goes up and down the length of the coffle: they’re heading into a big town, Medina, capital of Wooli. A thousand huts, somebody whispers. Women, beer and meat. Park’s going to give them a full-day stopover. Though the coffle is spread out in either direction as far as he can see, Ned can sense the effect this rumor has on the men. There’s a lightness in their step, the ass switches fall with a studied regularity, somewhere up ahead someone laughs. Inspired, Ned begins to drive his own ass with a vengeance, anxious to lay his bones down in the shade of a mud-walled hut, take his shoes off and maybe find himself a little negress to massage his feet and groin.

The trail at this juncture winds through a grove of thorn and fig. It is dry, tinder dry, the wood brittle, a fine patina of dust spread over everything. Lions cough in the bush, antelope skitter through the trees like a fall of leaves. As Ned rounds a bend, he spots Boyles up ahead, halfheartedly slapping at his ass’s haunches and poking along like an errant schoolboy. “Hey Billy,” he calls, “wait up a minute, will you?”

Boyles turns to look over his shouder, squinting into the styptic sun, and then flags a hand over his head. “Neddy, hey!” he shouts, subsiding into the bush like a deflated balloon while his ass—#13—pokes at the stiff hastate leaves in the hope of finding something palatable. As Ned comes up, Boyles reaches out a thin wrist to hand him a canteen of rum and water. “Did you hear, Neddy?” he says. “Stick-up-the-arse is going to give us a two-day layover at Medea. Five thousand huts. Cold springs bubbling up out of the ground. And there’s so much sooloo beer they slosh it into the cattle troughs to fatten up their goats and bullocks and the like.”

Sooloo is the only native word in Boyles’ lexicon. But at each village they pass — even if it consists of only three or four brittle bleached-out shacks — he makes good use of it, repeating the word endlessly, in all its permutations of pitch, timbre and syllabic emphasis, all the while pantomiming the libatory sequence from first drink to elation, stupor and collapse. Black faces crowd round him. Smiles break out on fleshy pink lips, teeth flash in the sun. The white man is a traveling circus, a fool, a zany. Kakamamie kea, they laugh. He’s crazy. Before long someone appears with a calabash of beer or mead or palm wine. Boyles puts it to his lips, drains half of it at a gulp and then wobbles his legs and rolls his eyes. The audience roars. Pretty soon a second calabash appears, and then a third. Someone strums a simbing or raps out a rhythm on the tabala, the women begin a shuffling dance, and Boyles helps himself to the liquor. No matter where they are, Billy Boyles, like a thin taper guttering in the wind, manages to stay lit.

During the course of the next two hours, impelled by high hope and rising expectation. Rise and Boyles slowly succeed in passing one man after another until they’ve made their way very nearly to the head of the coffle. Immediately ahead of them is Sergeant M’Keal, striding alongside his ass like a man half his age, stone drunk of course, and roaring out snatches of some obscure regimental song or other. Beyond M’Keal are two other eager beavers — Purvey, it looks like, and can it be? — yes, Shaddy Walters, the cook. Neck and neck, their switches moving like metronomes across the buttocks of their respective asses, panting, wheezing and drooling, existing only for the promise of Medina, that obscure object of desire looming over the hill before them like a vision in a dream. And way up there, halfway to the high, baked, red walls, Park and Scott, drifting along on their chargers, the lovely liquid melodies of Scott’s clarinet hanging in the air like an invitation.

Ned and Billy step up their pace, hungry for surcease. Thwack-thwack, echo the switches. Clotta-clot, answer the asses’ hoofs. Down a long slow incline and into a basin of green, the road slicing through a cluster of cultivated plots sectioned off by rows of stakes driven into the ground. These are the early crops, nurtured drop by precious drop from the trickle of thirsty wells, emergent leaves pinned to the earth and waiting to burgeon in the driving rains of the monsoon — swaths of sprouting peanuts, yams and sorghum flanked by still, silent fields of maize. Here it is suddenly, a conspiracy of water, chlorophyll and cellulose standing erect and viridescent in the sun, here it is after all those interminable miles of yellowed grass and dehydrated forest, the sight of it reassuring, anodynic, as cool as a compress held to the eyes. Beaming, Boyles turns to his companion: “Pretty, ain’t it, Neddy. Almost like—” He is about to say, “Almost like home,” but doesn’t have the opportunity to round out the sentiment because ass #13, perhaps as wistful and aesthetically gratified in its own asinine way as he himself is, has suddenly veered off the road and made a beeline for the green nirvana trembling before its aching eyes. The defection is duly registered by Ned’s ass, which immediately kicks up its heels and dances round the road as if it’s been stung in the flank. A moment later the animal throws back its bead, bucks off the double load of opera glasses and knives, and lurches after the first with a lusty bray.

“Hey!” Ned shouts. “You come back here!”

“Heel!” Boyles roars.

But to no avail. The asses are already two hundred yards off, up to their withers in greenery and munching away with as little thought or compunction as milch cows set out to pasture.

Mungo is there in a trice. As are about three hundred Medinan farmers with hoes, pitchforks and spears. There is a tumult of voices, hysterical shouts and vehement curses, a confusion of flying feet. The explorer is in the thick of it, lashing out at the errant asses with his riding crop, trampling row upon row of carefully nurtured, irreplaceable and life-sustaining plantlings. Ned and Billy too, running pell-mell through the wide slashing leaves, calling out hopelessly to their asses, frantic to put an end to it, exonerate themselves, pull the world up on its axis and crank it back to the composed misery of five short minutes ago.

But the line’s been breached, the damage done. Swarming like insects, the farmers converge on the first of the asses, inundating the hapless animal in a flurry of flailing hoes and bloody spears. Killer bees, locusts, army ants, they break open the crates and fight over the trade goods, rip the ass’s limbs from the sockets, strip off the skin and butcher it on the spot, already rising up in group frenzy to seek out the rest of the malefactors, equine and human alike. They make short work of the second ass, a thicket of spears sprouting from its hide like the quills of a porcupine, then turn their attention to the mounted explorer. He is thirty yards off, shouting out soothing phrases in Mandingo (“Forgive me for I know not what I do”; “Name your price”; “Looks like rain. .”), while his horse stamps and whinnies. The immediate reaction is disappointing: a deluge of stones, spears and hoes clatters down around him.

By this time a number of the soldiers have come running up the road brandishing muskets and bayonets. M’Keal is roaring threats and racial slurs, and now Martyn is charging over the hill, his horse frothing, sword drawn. Ned manages to make it back to the road, where Walters and Purvey and some of the others have formed a protective circle, but Boyles is tackled and pinned to the earth by two irate little black men in baggy shorts and white toques. “Hold your fire!” Mungo bellows as his horse emerges from the ravaged field, leaves and tassels strewn across its back as if it’s been decorated for a wedding parade.

Ultimately, it’s a standoff. The gathering force of the Royal African Corps on one side, the enraged farmers on the other. Mungo’s men hold their ground, worry written into their faces. The Medinans jeer and pelt them with clods of earth. One man waves a bloody ass haunch as if it were a weapon, while others sport red flannel caps confiscated from Boyles’ baggage. The rest, to a man, are gesticulating with spears and hoes and middle fingers held aloft. “Up yours, white man!” someone shouts in Mandingo, and the whole crowd takes it up, a chant, a slogan, a promise and a platform.

The explorer sits astride his mount, looking out over the massed black heads, the swarms of reinforcements pouring from the city gates. He can’t help feeling that somehow relations with the natives could have got off to a better start. Yes, something’s gone wrong here, he thinks — definitely — as he watches the crowd swell like a blister, new arrivals taking up the chant, the pale flash of Boyles’ face swallowed up in the black mass like a feather in an inkwell.

♦ REQUIEM FOR A DRUNK ♦

“Well, Zander, I guess this is the proof of the pudding, eh? — we’ve got to have a guide. If only to smooth things over. We certainly can’t afford another unfortunate incident like this corn thing.” Mungo draws on his pipe, contemplative. “That was a bad show,” he says after awhile. “For a minute there I thought we were going to have a pitched battle on our hands.”

Zander’s eyes are rimmed with red. He looks worn out, emotionally as well as physically. “But what they did to him — it was worse than barbaric.

It was, it was—”

“They’re savages. Zander. No getting around it.” The explorer is bent over a map, the wall of the tent pink with the setting sun, a dish of lentils and salt beef cooling in the dust beside him. “That’s why we’ve got to get us a dependable black who knows these people and their habits and where the road goes and what village is next and who the headman is. I say we make for Dindikoo, Johnson’s old village. They know me there. Maybe we’d even run across some relative of his — a cousin or a nephew maybe — who’d be willing to go with us.”

Zander is staring down at the knot of his hands. He hasn’t touched his food. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know.”

♦ ♦ ♦

The coffle is camped at Barraconda, five miles up the road from Medina. Even by West African standards, Barraconda’s a pretty sorry place. Forty or fifty huts huddled behind a wall of stakes and thorns, a grassless, shrubless, treeless perimeter pockmarked with the cloven hoofprints of kids and goats, a plethora of bloodsucking flies, a total absence of water. Having got word in advance from Medina, the Barracondans have mewed themselves up in their huts and drawn all the water from their wells. For the soldiers, it is pure hell. Nothing to cook with, nothing for the asses, not even a drop to moisten the lips. Worse: they’ve had to forgo sooloo beer, loose women and a holiday in Medina.

But nobody’s complaining. Not after last night’s sobering encounter and the gut-wrenching horror of the morning.

♦ ♦ ♦

Typically, things had gone from bad to worse in the cornfield the preceding evening. The ranks of the farmers had been almost immediately reinforced by platoons of snarling, frenzied women holding up their wasted infants and shrieking about hard times and loss of faith, the earth dried to powder, barren granaries and empty stomachs. Cripples slithered to the front of the press where they could shake their crutches in the white men’s faces, while local orators set up bamboo platforms and began to denounce everything under the sun in shrill querulous tones. And through it all, the fearful doomsday howling of the town’s dogs.

The combination was too much for Mungo’s stout-hearted men: they were getting nervous. M’Keal was blustering, Martyn within a hair’s breadth of spitting eight or nine skinny farmers on the point of his saber. And the asses, scenting ass blood and squinting out of their big flat eyes at the carcasses of their late companions, began to back off, ears pressed flat, on the verge of stampede. It was Scott who saved the day. He reined in his horse, bumped and jerked his way over to the beleaguered explorer and suggested that they withdraw to the hill behind them and worry about Boyles later. Under the circumstances, Mungo couldn’t help but concur. He gave the order, his voice cracking, and the men fell back in a hail of sticks and stones.

They spent a miserable night, waterless and riceless, their stomachs growling, the sentries jumpy, hyenas stealing into camp to plague the asses and make off with two sacks of salt beef and M’Keal’s leather hat. At eleven-thirty, Whulliri Jatta, the king of Wooli, sent out an emissary to discuss compensation and payment for the privilege of traversing his domain. The emissary was a shrewd-looking fellow of about forty-five, dressed in lion skins and a red-flannel nightcap. He strolled into the explorer’s tent as if he owned it, sat down and refused to open his mouth until he had been presented with twenty-two hundred cowries, three yards of scarlet cloth, eighteen linen napkins, six knives, a pair of scissors and a mirror. Up to his neck in gifts, the emissary began to smile. “I be Sadoo Jatta,” he said, “third son of Whulliri, and I am speak de King’s English.” Apparently satisfied at this, he clammed up and began sprinkling mutokuane leaves into a ceremonial pipe fashioned from the skull of a potto.

Mungo, Zander, Martyn and Scott leaned toward him. He gazed steadily at them, as relaxed and content as if he were sitting in his own bedroom. Finally Mungo cleared his throat, apologized at length for the damage to the cornfield, and asked what Sadoo’s father might want in recompense.

Sadoo listened attentively to the explorer’s recitation, from time to time nodding his head sagely. But when Mungo was finished the prince looked up at him blank as a wall. “Fadda?” he said.

The explorer repeated himself in Mandingo and Sadoo’s features rushed with the joy of comprehension. He nodded furiously, then broke into a wide grin. “My fadda want,” he said, “everyt’ing.”

Six hours later the negotiations ended. Whulliri would get one third the party’s amber and coral, forty thousand cowries, thirty yards of baft, a pair of silver-plated fowling pieces and Scott’s tam o’shanter, in return for which the damages would be considered paid in full and the party would be allowed to traverse Wooli from border to border. No mention was made of Boyles. The explorer offered to ransom him for an additional forty thousand cowries and a portrait of King George III. Sadoo held up his hand. “No can do,” he said, grinning amiably. And then in Mandingo: “You can come get him at dawn.”

The prince’s meaning became clear some two hours later when one of the sentries, awakened by the first rays of the sun, spotted something dangling from the wall beside the town’s main gate. Something white against the red clay. Ever alert, the man screwed out his telescope and held it to his eye for a full fifteen seconds before dropping it with a startled cry.

“My God,” he gasped. “Cap’n Park! Leftenant!”

♦ ♦ ♦

It was Ned Rise who cut Billy down.

The city was silent, the gates shut tight. While the men formed ranks and sighted down their muskets, Ned and Jemmie Bird approached the forbidding walls. A row of mute black faces looked down from above. Two vultures, suspended in the sky, began their descent in a slow wide helix. Somewhere a dog began to bay.

Boyles was dangling by one foot, about halfway down the wall, his arms hanging limp over his head. There was a silly grin on his face, as if the whole thing were the crowning moment of some superlative routine to hustle another drink. But he wasn’t hustling another drink: he was dead. Ned could see the long purpling scar running from Billy’s ribcage to his waist and disappearing into the folds of his trousers. They’d cut him open is what they’d done. Cut him open and stuffed him like a partridge. With sand.

Jemmie Bird cupped his hands and boosted Ned up the wall. Ned clung to the hard-baked clay like a cat, his fingers clawing for purchase, as he ground his pelvis into the wall and slowly made his way up. The sun was like a razor slash across the eyes. There was the low steady hum of swarming flies. In the silence and the heat, under the sky that fell back to the verges of deep black space and hid all that terror and emptiness beneath a specious screen of blue, Ned was undergoing a transformation. With each inch he rose, each crease and depression his fingers and toes sought out, he felt it charging him, this new sense of himself and the bleak bitter universe, as if the wall were some oracle, some Grail, some radiator of cosmic reality.

He thought of Billy, poor flat-headed sot, poor innocent, come to this. He thought of Fanny, Barrenboyne, his own miserable childhood that was a joy compared to what he’d come to now, in this instant, creeping up a rough stinging rock face on the far side of the earth, surrounded by savages and criminals and mooncalves, risking his life to cut down the mutilated corpse of the only friend he’d ever known. At any moment one of the blacks could drop a stone or a spear. They could pin him to the wall like a cockroach. Stream out of the gates and massacre the lot of them. Well, good. Let them. He would welcome it.

Creeping, clinging, fifteen feet above the ground now. Billy’s fingertips, curled in rigor mortis, brushing his face as he takes hold of his friend’s cold rigid forearm and hefts himself higher, higher, the weird strained grin, blowflies creeping from the dead man’s mouth and nostrils. What had Billy ever done to hurt anyone? For that matter, what had he, Ned Rise, ever done to hurt anyone? Who was keeping score? What did it matter? Ned reached out and hacked at the rope in a fury. I don’t deserve this, I don’t deserve this, I don’t — he repeated over and over, as if he were praying. He wanted to die, he wanted to live. Then it came to him, hard and sudden, in a flash of recognition — he had a mission on earth. He could almost hear the trumpets of the archangels, the crackle of ancient scrolls. Ned Rise, elected in a burst of radiance. He had a mission and this was it: to eliminate Smirke, seduce Park and take charge of the expedition. Or they were all doomed. Like Billy.

The rope tore with a whisper, and Boyles’ corpse, set free, fell to the earth like a side of beef. The black faces vanished over the lip of the wall. Dust rose. Ned didn’t move a muscle, just clung there under the vicious sun with the stink of death and hopelessness in the air, his body slimed with sweat, sticky as some half-formed thing jerked from the womb. He clung there, a man with a purpose, a man who would fight and scratch, manipulate and maneuver — a man who would survive.

♦ A.K.A. ISAACO ♦

The road to Dindikoo is long, dusty and dry. It takes the expedition along a well-beaten route, through Wooli, Tenda and Sadadoo, across the rainstarved Nerico and Falemé rivers, from regions where white men are no cause for concern to vast territories where they are no more than rumor, chimeras to frighten children and subdue recalcitrant slaves. As they straggle into this village or that, footsore and weary, their tongues thick with dust, eyelids locked in a sunblasted squint, Mungo and his geographical missionaries never know what to expect. Will the villagers turn tail and run as if they’d just seen the devil himself? Will they avert their eyes and go about their business as if oblivious to the fact that their front yards are congested with thirst-crazed asses and ragged white freaks just stepped down from another planet? Will they automatically reach for spears and quivers? Or will they come forward with a chicken or a goat, the women tall and bare-breasted and smelling of palm oil, the men as reassuring as parsons and squires? Each village is a cipher. Sometimes the explorer finds the key, sometimes he does not.

At any rate, he’s been able to avoid a repetition of the incident that cost him Boyles, a pair of asses and a small fortune in trade goods and cowries. A little timely diplomacy — consisting largely in showering Dooties with gifts and compliments and keeping men and animals under a tight rein — has even allowed him to purchase water and provisions along the way, and to replace asses as they wear out. What’s more, he’s been lucky with the weather as well — thus far the rains have held off and the men seem relatively healthy. Though they gripe and moan ceaselessly. They want to turn round and head back, they’re sick of rice, they want triple rum rations, immediate discharges, hazard pay. Their feet hurt, the heat is intolerable, their throats are dry, brains frying, stomachs rumbling, they have earaches, headaches and toothaches, they feel dizzy and don’t want to turn out in the morning. The explorer has begun to wonder about some of his choices — especially Bird and M’Keal, both of whom have been consistently crapulent since they left Goree.

But if he’s been disappointed in the majority of them, Ned Rise has been a godsend. Sober and industrious, looking out for his fellows’ asses as well as his own, volunteering to scout ahead, palaver with the natives, strike tents, chop wood, haul water. He’s the sort of man who’s not afraid to step in and take charge when something goes wrong and the rest of them are milling around and wringing their hands like schoolgirls or seeking the solution in a bottle of rum, the sort of man who’ll never say die, a scrapper who’s out to conquer Africa rather than lie down and let it devour him. All this, and he’s got a head on his shoulders too. He can read, write and do sums, and he’s had some training in the Classics. Already he’s picked up enough Mandingo to help smooth relations with the locals, sitting in on lengthy bargaining sessions over tolls, right of ingress, routes and distances, tokens, gifts and outright bribes. And there’s no doubting his pluck — just look at the way he scaled that wall at Medina. No, if they were all like Ned Rise, Mungo could rest easy at night.

What with breakdowns of various sorts — asses expiring, soldiers shirking, missing the road and marching for half a day in the wrong direction — the expedition has fallen behind schedule. Held up and let down, it’s taken them nearly a month to reach Dindikoo, gateway to the trackless waste of the Jallonka Wilderness. As they approach the village — a grid of shadow and light cut into a densely wooded hillside — the explorer becomes increasingly agitated. He repeatedly raises himself in his stirrups, fixing on the distant huts and granaries with an intense and exclusive concentration, as if he were afraid they might disappear if he were to look away. His heart is pounding at his ribcage. Superstitious, he crosses his fingers behind his back and utters a short prayer.

They’ve reached an impasse and he alone knows it. Up to this point they’ve been lucky — getting on without a guide, miraculously avoiding further conflict with the natives — but from here on it will be different. If they can’t hire a guide at Dindikoo it’s all over. Because Mungo has decided to trace a new route — along the ridge of the Konkadoo mountains — rather than bear north for the fanatical realms of Kaarta and Ludamar, or risk going south through the Jallonka Wilderness. At least to this point he’s been traveling a famihar road, though it’s been almost eight years and he’s made his share of navigational errors. But to head due east over the mountains. . Mungo doesn’t even want to think about it.

Suddenly he’s swinging round in his saddle and calling out to Zander. “I’m going ahead,” he shouts. “Take charge and bring the coffle into that village in the glen.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Dindikoo. It’s just as he remembered it. Tilled fields jostling with deep umbrageous forests, shade trees spread like parasols over the neat thatched huts with their conical roofs and hard-baked circular walls. Wild begonias and ferns along the road, stumps choked with purple and white convolvuli, a kurrichane thrush massaging the shadows with long liquid glides and quick curt mordents. And the sweet sound of water, a trickle and a rush, from one of the rare magical springs that survives the dry season. Is that hibiscus he smells?

The first person Mungo encounters is a boy of ten or twelve, chubby, dressed in a mini-toga and with a maddeningly familiar expression on his face. Could it be? “You, boy!” he shouts, but the child, surprisingly agile despite his tendency toward endomorphic excess, has vanished into the bush as nimbly as a chevrotain. Odd, the explorer thinks. Must have frightened the bugger. And then dismisses it from his mind as he continues on into town.

A moment later he’s dismounting in a dusty courtyard strewn with palm fronds and woodchips, amid a circle of naked children and broad-beamed women. He smiles. Distributes beads and hard candy. “Remember me?” he asks in his nicest Mandingo. “Mungo Park? The explorer?”

If they remember, no one gives the faintest sign of it. They just press round, hands extended, thirty or forty of them now. Patiently, grinning and bowing to each matron and enthusiastically patting the head of each child, he passes out another round of bead necklaces and all-day suckers. After ten minutes or so his bag of tricks is just about depleted and the women have already turned their backs on him, giggling and chattering among themselves, trading a garnet necklace for a coral, dashing for their huts to gauge the effect of their new jewelry against an old gown. The final customer, Mungo realizes with a start, is the pudgy boy he’d seen on the way in. The short blunt fingers dart out, envelop the sucker and neatly deposit it in a dangling wrist saphie, the boy already glancing away as if to duck a blow. “Wait,” Mungo gasps, catching his arm. ‘‘Kontong dentegi — what’s your name, son?”

The boy stares down at his feet. Mungo can’t get over how much he looks like Johnson, right down to the cut and texture of his hair, the lay of his ears, the pouting underlip and ironic eyes of the born comedian. “Oyo,” the boy says finally. “Woosaba Oyo.”

Oyo. The name makes the explorer’s blood race. “And your father?”

The boy points to a hut at the far end of the courtyard — yes, of course, the explorer thinks with a sense of déjà vu — it’s Johnson’s hut. Just as he left it. The neat baked half-wall, the high cone of thatched fronds like a Chinaman’s hat, and out back, the fenced alleyways of the wives’ compound and the smaller cones, like a series of volcanic peaks in miniature, that mark the roofs of their huts. Mungo shuffles toward Johnson’s hut as if in a daze, memories flooding back on him, something catching in the back of his throat.

There’s a woman out front, a slave, pounding millet with a pestle the size of a cricket bat. Beside her, splayed out in the dust, a dog the color of ripe banana, its whiskers gently rising and falling with each somnolent breath. The explorer pauses to feed his memory on the rich sensuous detail of the place — on the sights and sounds and especially the smells, isolate and distinct: wild honey, flowers in bloom, hasty pudding with shea butter, fish and oil and woodsmoke. Sodden togas flash on a hemp line, a gray parrot perches nonchalantly on a T bar beside the door. And there, in the shade of the raffia palm — isn’t that Johnson’s youngest wife? Yes. The one he broke the news to, couldn’t have been more than fifteen at the time. He remembers the way she simply turned and ducked into the hut, no sign of emotion, and then kept the town awake through the night with her racking sobs of grief and incomprehension. And here she is, hardly a day older, sitting in the shade at her loom. “Amuta?” the explorer whispers at her back.

She turns to look up at him, no change whatever in her expression. Cicadas drone in the forest. A pair of hornbills clack and honk at one another in the branches overhead. “We’ve been expecting you,” she says, saying it not as if it were a greeting, but a valediction, her voice weary and resigned, giving and taking at the same time. Mungo feels like an interloper, a criminal, bringer of bad tidings and blighter of crops.

Suddenly she’s on her feet and motioning for him to follow. She pauses at the door of the hut, sad and beautiful, her hair bound up in tight corn-row plaits, her eyes like ripe olives. “Go ahead,” she murmurs, and gestures for him to enter.

It is cool and dark inside, a funnel of milky light sifting down from the smoke hole at the top. The floor has been swept clean, the beaten earth smooth as tile. In the center of the hut, a circle of stones and three or four twists of the slow-burning liana the Mandingoes use in place of a lantern at night. To the left, a king-size bed consisting of a bamboo frame and a tightly-stretched bullock’s hide. There are some wicker chairs and a bench, saphies and calabashes dangling from the center pole, a few earthenware vessels grouped in the corner. Just about what you’d expect from any native hut.

But what makes this one different, what makes it extraordinary and special, unlike any other hut in the whole of Africa, what makes it Johnson’s hut, is the bookshelf, bathed in overhead light until it looks ghostly and illusory: the bookshelf neatly constructed of bamboo and hemp and lined with the complete works of Shakespeare, quarto volumes, bound in leather. The sight of it somehow overloads the explorer’s glandular system and he feels like crying, a deep ache in his throat and chest. He takes up one of the volumes at random—Othello—and reads:

If virtue no delighted beauty lack,

Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.

Jolly old Johnson, he thinks, shaking his head slowly and deliberately, as if it suddenly weighed two hundred pounds.

He replaces the volume and then notices Johnson’s writing desk — no more than a leaf really — squeezed up against a square shutter cut into the thatch. Slips of papyrus paper, an earthenware jar of quills and a pot of indigo ink: tools of the trade. Never underestimate the power of the written word, Mr. Park, he would say if he were here now, grinning and shuffling and holding up something for the pot. The explorer idly strokes the ink jar, touches a sharpened quill to the tip of his tongue. Lost in reminiscence, he’s only vaguely aware that Amuta has left him alone in the hut, too preoccupied to give much thought to her odd greeting (“We’ve been expecting you.” We who?), oblivious to everything but the sad sweet sensation of fingering Johnson’s artifacts and resurrecting the past.

When he turns round he is almost startled by the figure in the doorway. Backlit, the face in shadow, too squat and wide for Amuta. A man. The stranger steps forward, light on his feet for so squat a fellow, the botanical fringe of his hair silhouetted in the light from the doorway, and for one wild moment — trompe l’oeil — the explorer thinks it is Johnson himself come back from the grave.

“E ning somo, marhaba,’’ Mungo says, the traditional greeting.

The voice that comes back at him is so hauntingly familiar it makes his scalp creep and his throat go dry: “E ning somo, marhaba Park.’’

Uncanny. The inflection, timbre, tone. But what with the size of the village and all the inbreeding that goes on, who can say? The explorer clears his throat. “Are. . are you a relative of John — I mean of Katunga Oyo’s?”

Black in shadow, black in light, the figure steps deliberately forward until bathed in the golden glow of the smoke hole, at once illuminated and realized, the leading man gliding from the wings to a burst of applause. Suddenly he’s speaking in English: “Relative? No, I wooden say dat.”

Mungo edges closer, the quill still clutched in his hand, blood pounding, adrenalin up, all the voices of rationality, all the sonorous schoolteachers and African Associates and pedantic scientists in safe and sane Great Britain shouting no, no, no. But it is. Yes, yes, yes: it is. Johnson. Johnson in the flesh.

The explorer’s reaction is purely instinctual — he flings himself at the fat little man before him with all the enthusiasm of a freshman home for the holidays. “Johnson!” he cries, vigorously pounding his back and pinching the fleshy shoulders in a crushing embrace, “you should have written, you should have at least. . but you don’t know how good it is to see you, old boy, how good. . but tell me,” stepping back now, “how did you, I mean, I thought—?”

The Mandingo remains perfectly rigid through all of this, making no effort to return the explorer’s embrace, no effort at even the most rudimentary of social signals — he does not smile, he does not offer his hand. He seems so unmoved, so emotionless, that the explorer begins to doubt himself for a minute. Could this be a twin brother? First cousin? But no: it is Johnson. Unmistakably. Past sixty now but looking twenty years younger, his hair sprinkled with salt, fatter than ever. There’s the gold straight pin through his nostril, and there, the look of mock dignity on his face, the look that says you’ve ruffled my feathers, friend, but I’ll consider the case closed if you come up with a calabash of palm wine and maybe a leg of lamb to sweeten my kouskous. He’s seen that look a thousand times. Of course it’s Johnson. “Johnson,” the explorer says, sharp and impatient, as if he were trying to wake someone from a deep sleep, “Johnson: don’t you recognize me?”

The black man looks him dead in the eye. “The name’s Isaaco.”

“Isaaco? What do you mean? Johnson — it’s me, Mungo.” It is then that the explorer realizes what is lacking, the missing element in the composition of Johnson so permanently embedded in his memory: the toga. Spindly-legged and potbellied, his former guide is wearing nothing but a single piece of linen — immaculate as a buck’s neckcloth — swaddled round his loins. Above it — and this is a shock — the great hard ball of his belly is seamed with two ragged horizontal scars, the first clamped across his ribcage like a high-waisted belt, the second obliterating his navel and then skewing off at an angle into the folds of his loincloth, only to reappear, pink and ugly, along the outside of his thigh. Toothy, angular, the scars could have been cut with a stupendous pair of pinking shears.

A wave of pity and revulsion washes over the explorer and he reaches out a tentative consolatory finger, as if to smooth the line of the upper scar.

“I–I didn’t know. I would have done anything, you know that.”

The Mandingo’s eyes are fixed on the smoke hole.

“Johnson—”

The eyes dropping, no hint of amusement, jaw set. “The name is Isaaco.”

♦ FIRST EDITIONS ♦

Johnson/Isaaco is seated on a bullock-hide stool. He is wearing a crimson and indigo toga patterned over with pairs of leering yellow eyes, and he has assumed the lotus position. A cap of the sort worn by British sailors perches on his head. It is made of silk and has been nattily embroidered with gold thread. At his side, Amuta and a steatopygous twelve-year-old in a striped shift. Ranged behind him, alike as bowling pins, a host of retainers and slaves. Johnson, world traveler, wise man and saphie-scribbler, has grown wealthy.

On the other side of the fire, seated in the dirt, are Mungo, Zander, Scott, Martyn — and Ned Rise. The remains of a feast — a rack of lamb, plantain leaves, empty calabashes and yam skins — are scattered round them. Insects and amphibians chirr in the darkness of the surrounding forest, many-voiced, an electric current, and then some higher form of life silences them with a sudden desolate howl. The fire leaps.

“Well, John — er, Isaaco,” Mungo says, hearty as a solicitor with an investment portfolio in his lap, “just what would induce you to come along with us as guide and interpreter?” The explorer raises a cup of hoona tea to his lips. “You can name your price.”

Johnson belches softly into his fist. “You know,” he observes, either by way of non sequitur or homily — the explorer can’t tell which, “when a man finds hisself in dire straits, let’s say clamped ‘tween the jaws of a crocodile like a prime chop. .” (he pauses here to wave down Mungo’s pained objection) “. . he has two options, the way I see it. Abandoned like a worn-out shoe by his friend and employer and left entirely to his own devices, he can either sink or swim. I mean he can give it up and drift off to his eternal reward as a pile of crocodile shit or he can use his brain, know what I mean? Maybe, down there in the crawlin’ ooze with blind grubs and leeches and things already sniffin’ him out and the old croc thinkin’ he got himself one tasty big piece of beef, maybe then he takes his two thumbs like this,” viciously stabbing at the firelight with his erect thumbs, “and maybe he drives ‘em deep into them lidless old eyes, thumbs like daggers, right down to the core of that tiny lizard brain, and then tears back like he was pickin’ apples off a tree. Huh? Now what kind of crocodile is goin’ to hold on after that?”

No one knows quite what to say. Mungo is red with shame and guilt and frustration, and the crocodile reference is too arcane for the others — nothing more than idiosyncratic gibberish, the crazed mutterings of an old black bushman. The fact that Isaaco speaks English is surprise enough — who would have thought to hear anything but mumbo jumbo this far into the interior? Ned Rise, in particular, is struck by it. There is something in the old savage’s manner that brings the nasty buried past heaving to the surface of his consciousness like a moldering log belched up by an eddy in a placid river. That belly, those eyes, that voice. They make him think of a day years ago when he stood beside the Serpentine and watched his future bleeding into the turf. They make him think of Barrenboyne. They make him think of revenge. But no. It’s absurd. A London dandy — the first negro he’d ever seen — translated out here into the asshole of nowhere? No. These blacks all look alike, that’s all. Or do they?

“Johnson,” the explorer is saying, and then immediately corrects himself—”Sorry: Isaaco. What’s past is past. But this time we’ve nothing to worry about, not crocodiles or Moors — we’ve got an armed guard with us.”

Without blinking Johnson throws it back at him. “You think a handful of men is goin’ to intimidate Mansong or Ali? Or Tiggitty Sego for that matter? You think they goin’ to sit still for a whole platoon of white men stormin’ ‘cross their borders and insultin’ the populace? Hah. Armed guard. Mansong could raise three thousand men for every one you got.”

Mungo looks down into his cup as if it contained some fascinating new species of animal life. He has nothing to say.

“And what about Dassoud? What happens when he gets wind of you traipsin’ through Bambarra again?”

Scott and Zander have begun to eye one another uneasily. Martyn squats over his heels, unconcerned, picking at the leftovers with his knife. “For old time’s sake, Johnson,” Mungo pleads. “For friendship. For what we went through together.”

Johnson’s face seems to soften. He takes a long reflective sip of tea, then tips the cap back on his head and puckers up his lips as though stifling a grin. “It’ll cost you dear,” he says finally. “I want Milton, Dryden and Pope. Leather-bound, gilt titles.”

It takes a moment for this to sink in. The explorer sits there, his mouth working, and then leaps to his feet so suddenly he startles two of Johnson’s elderly retainers and sends a dog yipping off into the bushes. “You mean you’ll go?”

The soul of decorum, Johnson rises with a sigh and holds out his hand. Amuta and the twelve-year-old have produced calabashes of palm wine and are busy pouring out healthy drams into the cupped hands of black and white alike. Everyone is smiling. The startled retainers have rejoined the group and the insects and amphibians have started up again, raucous and celebratory.

Johnson takes the explorer’s wrists and pulls him forward. “Listen,” he says, his voice low, confidential, “the Pope I want signed.”

♦ THE BEGINNING OF SORROW

(PLISH, PLASH) ♦

This time of year, bleak, blistered and relentless, when the wells are dry, trees wilted and granaries barren, when the savanna is like a shaven cheek and the dust devils dance in your face, when you eat dirt till your tongue is thick with it and your tears run black, this time of year you pray for rain. Mandingo, Serawooli, Foulah, Moor, Maniana and Ibo, you pray for rain. In each parched village the witch doctor purses his lips, serious business, and sows the fields with rat embryos or sloshes buckets of fetal blood on the cracked blanched faces of graven idols. Dogs go hungry, goats pull up their stakes and attack bamboo, wicker and thatch. The villagers tighten their belts and cook up a paste made from the yellow powder of the nitta pod and then turn their expectant faces to the sky. At sundown, when the moon is a bloody eye on the horizon, the women gather to strip naked and haul plows through the crusted fields while the local hyetologist chants his rain song in a piercing clamorous falsetto:

Burst heaven, bleed water,

Borongay.

Swell melon, plump kernel,

Borongay.

Hey-hey, hey-hey,

Borongay.

Born to the cycle, Johnson is as much attuned to it as the sheep of the field and the jackals panting in the bush. But this year, for the explorer’s sake, he’s hoping the rains will hold off just a bit longer — at least till they get through the mountains. Of course it’s going to be bad whenever the clouds let loose, but up here pussyfooting along the perimeter of toothy cirques and dead drops of anywhere from eighty to three hundred feet, it would be a disaster. No two ways about it. Categorically a mess. And so, model of prudence and preparedness that he is, Johnson has taken measures to insure against an untimely deluge: that is, he has concocted a potent antipluvial fetish consisting of the chucked scales of a small dune-dwelling lizard, a square inch of camel tripe, a pinch of sulfur and six lines of Milton’s “L’Allegro.”

As he rides now at the head of the coffle, however, the saphie dangling from a cord round his neck and his four manservants following immediately behind on their respective asses, he is beginning to have misgivings about the efficacy of his charm. The reason is simple: he smells rain in the air, a scent as rich and unmistakable as the aura hanging over a lake at dawn. He sniffs twice more to be absolutely certain, then wheels his horse round and works his way down the line of the coffle in search of the explorer. He finds him at the base of a rock-strewn hill, bent over an expiring ass. The ass is lying on its side, ribs heaving, forelegs jactitating. Sacks of nails, a pair of two-man saws, a wadded canvas sail and barrels of pitch and oakum are scattered over the stiff yellow grass beside the dying animal, looking as if they’d been dropped from a great height. “Come on, twenty-one,” the explorer coaches, “come on old girl. Get up. You can do it.” Behind him, looking sheepish, arrogant and stupid all at once, is the massive ginger-haired carpenter, the one called Smirke, his nose and cheekbones sunblasted to a slick tender strawberry.

“Mr. Park,” Johnson calls, his voice sharp and urgent, “I got to have a word with you.”

The explorer straightens up, rubbing his hands together like a floury baker, and turns to his dragoman with a smile. “Why certainly. . Isaaco. What’s on your mind, old boy?”

“In private, Mr. Park, sir, if you don’t mind.”

Smirke looks up sharp, either glaring or shading his eyes, Johnson can’t tell which. The ass moans like a bedridden grandmother.

“Carry on here, Smirke, will you?” the explorer says, slipping into his saddle and setting his horse in motion with an easy flick of his wrist.

As they amble off, Johnson’s smooth silken bellies rippling under his toga, the explorer turns to him, amiable and expectant. “Well?”

“Well, it’s just this, Mr. Park—”

“Call me Mungo, old boy.”

“Mr. Park, I think it’s goin’ to blow up one hell of a fierce thunderstorm within the hour and I say you better give the order to pitch camp right here and now or half these white boys’ll be puking bile before nightfall.”

The explorer cranes his neck to scan the sky. It is a deep, transparent blue from horizon to horizon, no speck of moisture in sight. The heat is so intense it seems to lift him off the horse and hold him suspended, like a bit of ash floating on the thermal currents above an open furnace. “You’ve got to be joking.”

“No joke. I can smell it. Rain. Within the hour.”

“But there isn’t a cloud in the sky.”

“Listen, Mr. Park, I got no time and no energy to argue. Right this minute my boys are throwin’ together a shelter up top of this hill, behind that granite outcrop up there — the one that looks like a duncecap. If you got a brain in your head, you’ll do the same.”

The explorer’s face is tentative and quizzical, as if he’s just been told a joke he doesn’t get. “Don’t be ridiculous, Johnson — Isaaco — whatever the hell you want me to call you. It’s nine-thirty in the morning. We’ve got a full day’s march ahead of us. If you think I’m going to stop the men in their tracks and set up camp because you’ve got a feeling it might rain, I’m sorry but you’re a Banbury cheese.“

Johnson has already turned his mare away. He pauses a moment to glance over his shoulder, fixing the explorer with a look of weary resignation, like a schoolteacher standing over a student who has just subtracted ten from twenty-five for the third time and come up with eighteen. “You know somethin’, Mungo — you just as big a ass as you was eight years ago.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Forty-five minutes later the sky is the color of oiled steel and the wind is gusting at sixty miles an hour, kicking up clouds of dust that obliterate the horizon, far and near. Thunderbolts shatter the swirling haze of the sky and steaming funnels of wind deracinate big-boled trees as if they were stalks of celery. And then the rain comes. Roaring like Niagara, stinging, drenching, diluvian, it rushes across the flatlands and up the valleys, bowing trees and bushes, spewing leaves, spattering dust, blasting the bare rocky slopes of the mountains like salvos from a man of war. In an instant every crate and sack is soaked through, the men bucket-drenched, the asses running water like drainspouts. Boiling and brown with tons of suspended dust, the water comes rushing down the slope at them, a brook, a stream, a river, the rain glancing off the hard-baked shingle and sucked downward with a terrifying whoosh.

Shaddy Walters is the first casualty. When the wind comes up, sudden and fierce, the expedition’s chief cook is working his way over a slab of coarse reddish granite humped and huge as the back of a whale. To his immediate left, a drop of two hundred feet; to his right, a sheer wall going up another hundred. Almost immediately his wide-brimmed straw hat lifts off and vanishes over the upper wall as if it were a bit of cannon wadding, and the dust lashes his eyes like a cat-o’-nine-tails. Then, with a clatter of pot and pan, his ass sits back on its haunches, whinnying. A sack of rice tears under the pressure and the individual grains flail the cook’s face like gunshot, caught up in a rattling gust and whirled into the troposphere to be sown on barren ground hundreds of miles to the north. He is suddenly alarmed. Frantic, he tugs at his ass’s halter as Mungo thunders by on his charger, shouting something into the teeth of the wind. The ass is in a panic, the eyes rolling back into its head, its knees slipping toward the edge of the precipice, tail beating back on nothing.

“Every man for himself!” shrieks Jemmie Bird, scrambling past, slipping, running on all fours — up and over the granite hump and bolting for a clutch of withered leafless trees on the plateau ahead. Suddenly, with an electrifying clatter, one of the big regimental cookpots flies over the ass’s back, tears its cord, rebounds off the upper wall and clangs back over the escarpment ringing and ringing and still faintly ringing like a cymbal tossed down the side of Ben Nevis. The thought of abandoning his ass as Jemmie had looms powerfully in the cook’s mind, but he suppresses it. If nothing else, Shaddy Walters is a stubborn man. A man who’ll serve rice and onions three times a day for a week. A man who’ll boil India tea till it tastes like gunmetal. A man who’ll clutch an obdurate ass’s halter from now till doomsday.

Which is precisely what he does. Two minutes later the rain hits with a slap, turns the ledge into a skating pond, and Shaddy and ass #27 plunge to their eternal reward locked in terror and tenacity, bearing down on the scree below like stupendous hailstones. If they cry out, thin mortal voices in the howling void, no one hears them.

Meanwhile, of the forty-one men remaining, excluding Mungo, thirty-eight are on their knees vomiting within minutes after the rain commences. Yellow Jack, dysentery, rash, fever, black vomit. The explorer has seen them before. Clutching their stomachs as if they’ve been gutshot, the men come straggling into the little clutch of naked thorns about which Mungo is frantically trying to throw up some sort of canvas shelter for the gunpowder, rice and rust-prone muskets. Some have managed to hold on to their asses, others have not. Nearly all of them collapse, gasping and shivering on the puddled and puked-over patch of level ground the explorer has managed to roughly enclose. One of them, an eighteen-year-old by the name of Cecil Sparks, is crying. The sound of it is nearly lost in the cacophony of flapping canvas, thunderous rainfall and bowel-wrenching grunts and groans, but it is there all the same, a whimper in the interstices, a full-throated sob, the sound of hopelessness, the sound of failure, self-pity and annihilation.

♦ DUMMULAFONG ♦

“Told you so.” Johnson says it without malice, flat and simple, no inflection whatever, telling it like it is. He is stretched out sumptuously on a bullock-hide recliner, a la Madame Recamier, in tarboosh and red silk dressing gown, his feet nestled in a leopard-skin rug. His camp, half a mile back from the explorer’s, is tucked behind a monolithic slab of rock, facing north. Though the rain has continued through the night, beating down with such relentless ferocity that the explorer has begun to wonder if he should build his boat here and float down to the Niger, Johnson’s tent is as dry as Benowm in February. The floor has been lined with acacia branches to take up any creeping moisture and the canvas walls have been reinforced with slats of the same. A hearty fire is licking at the thighs of six or seven gamebirds — partridges? — as Mungo steps through the flap, soaked to the skin, and Johnson delivers his apothegm.

The explorer hangs his head, shamefaced and repentant. His sodden greatcoat tugs at him in a forlorn, round-shouldered sort of way. “I’ll never doubt you again,” he chokes.

Johnson inserts a pinch of Virginia tobacco in the bowl of his pipe and delicately tamps it with his thumb. “Buck up, Mr. Park — it was bound to happen sooner or later. The rain, I mean.” He gestures toward the fire. “Sit yourself down and dry out a bit, have a bite of squab and a spot of hot tea and tell me all about it.” A snap of his fingers and one of the servants emerges from the shadows to help the explorer to a piece of fowl and pluck a yam from the coals, golden-brown and oozing sugary juices. Dark, aromatic, the spiced tea hisses from the spout of a silver teapot. “So,” Johnson says, a swell sitting down to dinner at his club and discussing a trifle tossed away at cards or the track, “how many did you lose?”

Mungo stares down at the food in his lap. The toll over the course of the last twenty-four hours has been high. Too high. And there’s no one to blame but himself. First, there was Cecil Sparks, poor kid — some sort of seizure took him off just before dawn. He thrashed round the floor for five minutes or so, like a fish hauled up on the dock, then bit off the front half of his tongue, locked his jaw and died. Then, when it was light, Martyn reported that Shaddy Walters had been found at the base of the precipice, crushed beneath the carcass of his ass, and that he had been partially eaten by wild beasts. The cookpots, battered but serviceable, and fifty pounds of rain-bloated rice were recovered. H. Hinton — the explorer never knew the man’s first name — had disappeared, along with his ass.

After a moment Mungo raises his head and focuses on a dark spot in the canvas just over Johnson’s left shoulder. “Three,” he croaks, as miserable as if he’d pushed them over the ledge himself.

“Hey, it ain’t the end of the world, Mr. Park. You still got what, forty left?”

“Thirty-nine, not counting myself. Or you.”

“So you made it through with none last time, right?”

Mungo looks away, and then, despite himself — the aroma is driving him crazy — tears into a dripping drumstick.

“The way I figure it,” Johnson is saying, blowing smoke rings, “the rain should let up about three or so. It’ll probably drizzle itself out for awhile, but if we’re lucky we can make it to Boontonkooran by dark, drizzle or no. It’s just a hole in the wall, but the Dooty’s no fiend or anything, and if you willin’ to put up a little scratch — say five thousand cowries or so — he might be able to find you a dry hut or two and you can get yourself back together. What do you say?”

Heartsick, his lips glistening with grease, the explorer is slowly nodding his head. “You’re the boss,” he says.

♦ ♦ ♦

Boontonkooran is a way station, unremarkable but vital, given the circumstances. For sixty-five hundred cowries the explorer is able to rent three leaking, bug-infested shacks and purchase two day’s provisions — milk, corn and millet — for men and animals. For an additional sixty-five and three buttons from his greatcoat, he persuades a robust octogenarian woodcutter to give up a pair of matched asses and go into retirement. On the negative side, there is no meat available — at any price — and the rains, having set in with a vengeance, force the beleaguered explorer to extend their stay through three bleak days and nights, during which the soldiers — damp, yes, but not dripping — sprawl in ragged heaps on the earthen floors of the rented shacks, sniffling, scratching, huddled in mildewed blankets and dipping their snot-crusted tin cups into a bottomless pot of broth concocted by the new cook, Jemmie Bird, from salt beef, rice and a handful of wilted native vegetables. It tastes exactly like seawater, something you’d gargle with eight fathoms down, but at least it warms the innards. Outside, the rain beats down with unremitting intensity, like nothing in any man’s experience, not M’Keal’s, Mungo’s or Johnson’s. Even the sailors recruited from the Eugenia—the elder of whom once rode out a typhoon off the Marquesas — have to concede that this takes the cake.

The weather has the explorer concerned. It’s not so much the immediate problems of impassable roads, swollen rivers and slick precipices that worry him, but the long-range effects of the damp air on the men’s health. Well he knows how pernicious the climate can be, how the putrid exhalations from swamps, flooded streams and pools of standing water can undermine one’s health in the blink of an eye, how a host of mysterious diseases can reduce a man from a bruiser to a death’s head in a matter of days. He himself, long inured to it, has been feeling a bit under the weather lately. And if even he is affected, what of scarecrows like Bird or consumptives like Watkins? Will he have to carry them to the Niger? And if so, who’ll drive the asses and haul the supplies? Worse: who’ll fight off the Moors?

On the second night of their confinement at Boontonkooran, hunched in the command tent they’ve set up beneath the sievelike roof of one of the rented huts, he confides his fears to Zander.

At first his brother-in-law doesn’t answer. Just sits there, an open book in his lap, staring vacantly at the cold canvas wall. The explorer is struck by how drawn and wacted he looks, the skin pulled tight as a mask over his cheekbones, feverish eyes fled to the dark recesses of their sockets as if they’d gone into hiding. “Zander.” the explorer says, alarmed. “Are you all right?”

Zander sighs. “A little feverish, I guess. Runny stool. When I stand suddenly I feel lightheaded, as if I’d had too much to drink. Nothing really.” The explorer is staring at him, mouth agape, a look of dawning horror twisting his features askew. Zander snaps the book shut. “You were saying?”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure of what?”

“That you’re all right? No sore throat, vomiting, pins and needles in the fingertips?”

Zander’s laugh is feeble, tailed with a cough. “I may be a shrimp,” he says, coughing still, “but I’m tough. After all,” making a joke of it, “I come from good stock.”

The explorer attempts a smile but manages only a weird grin.

“Don’t you worry about me,” Zander says, his voice breaking on the final vowel to suppress a cough, “—just a cold, that’s all. Now: tell me what’s on your mind. Go ahead, shoot.”

Momentarily mollified, but with a new worry to add to the list, Mungo vents his fears and uncertainties, admits as he could admit to no one else but Ailie his self-doubt, the terrible burden that leadership has become, lives in his hands like grains of sand in an hourglass.

Zander’s reassurance is bland, rote. “You’ve done it before,” he sighs, “you’ll do it again.”

“But I haven’t. . don’t you see that? Eight years ago I had no one but myself to look out for. If I didn’t make it, so much the worse. But now I’ve got thirty-nine souls in my pocket, not to mention the horses and asses and thousands of pounds worth of supplies and equipment. My whole reputation’s on the line.” He is on his feet now, pacing. Suddenly he whirls round, almost shouting: “And the men — what if they can’t make it? What if the climate gets to them and deadens their spirit — what if they can’t go on?”

♦ ♦ ♦

It is no rhetorical question.

Sure enough, when the time comes to roll out and hit the road under lowering skies and a hint of light so vague even the birds are uncertain whether they should be chirping or not, three of the men refuse to obey the order. Or rather they are unable to. Unable even to stand. Rome, Cartwright and Bloore. Martyn has gone so far as to beat a quick tattoo on the bare soles of each of the malingerers, but without success.

“Sir!” he snaps at Mungo as the explorer is puttering over the arrangement of his saddlebags and cinching a load to one of the command asses. “Three of the men refuse to obey a direct order to roll out. Sir!” Martyn clicks his heels and jabs a salute into his forehead.

Won’t roll out? Damn. It’s just what he was afraid of. Jolted into martial consciousness by the towel-snapping tones of Martyn’s voice, the explorer throws back his shoulders and marches directly toward the hut in which the shirkers lie. Most of the asses have been loaded, and the men are standing about in the light drizzle, impatient, red-eyed, hawking up balls of vileness on the sodden earth. Mungo stalks into the hut, already bristling, ready to vent all his frustrations in a single outburst. The words are on his lips—“How dare you, you slackers!”—when he is pulled up short by the sight of them — the sight of them, and the smell of them.

The three lie huddled in the corner of the hut, too far gone to lift their eyes or even to brush away the festering hordes of mosquitoes that have mysteriously appeared with the onset of the rains, blackening hands and faces and sunscorched collars like smudges of dirt. Cartwright appears to be asleep, his cheek pressed flat to the ground in a puddle of his own vomit, Old Rome is gibbering away sotto voce, and Bloore, supine, staring at the thatch like a catatonic. The smell is worse than any sickroom. . there is the disagreeable odor of human functions gone awry, disordered by illness, but something more too, something earthy and essential; the sad stink of mortality.

“Ask them if they’re ready to turn out, go ahead,” Martyn sneers from the doorway. And then adds, in a kind of yip: “Sir!”

Mungo kneels beside Bloore and flicks a hand over his face to unsettle the feasting insects. The man’s eyes never blink. “Bloore,” the explorer says, his voice subdued, “can you walk?”

Old Rome, a man in his fifties who claims to have seen action against the Yankees at Saratoga, has been muttering to himself since the explorer walked in the door. Now he raises his voice, as if he were desperate, as if he were trying to placate some unseen deity, the God of Gibberish or the Lord of Limericks: “There was a young lady of worth,” he begins, his voice growing increasingly stronger with the roll of the syllables until he’s shouting, “Excessively proud of her birth, / I crept up behind her, / As if to remind her, / That. . that. .”

“Bloore,” the explorer shouts, raising his voice to compete with the madman’s ravings, “Do you want me to fix up a litter for you?” The sick man stares at the ceiling, the breath racheting through his nostrils.

“That. . that. .” Old Rome roars.

The explorer takes Bloore’s callused hand. “Is there anything I can do?”

Finally Bloore turns his unshaven cheek and wild eyes to the explorer. A cord stands out in his neck as his head lolls to the side: no other muscle stirs. He looks as if he’s deliquescing, sinking into the earth. The explorer can feel the sick man’s breath on his face, ghastly, meat left out to rot.

Bloore’s lips are working.

“Yes?” Mungo says, bending closer. “Yes?”

“That a goose don’t always have to honk!” cries Old Rome triumphantly.

Bloore gasps. His voice is the rustle of a feather in a windstorm. “Ain’t you done enough as it is, Mr. Hexplorer?” he croaks. “ ‘Ave an ‘eart and leave us die in peace.”

♦ ♦ ♦

So it goes. The steady wash of the rain, the tardigrade progress, the inexorable attrition. Roger McMillan, soldier, and Wm. Ashton, seaman, are drowned when a native canoe overturns while crossing the raging Bafing River; J. Bowden, carpenter, falls behind and is stripped and murdered by thieves; Christopher Baron is torn to pieces by wild dogs while vomiting in the undergrowth. Each day men collapse by the side of the road, asses are lost, equipment dumped in the bush or pilfered by blacks.

That’s the worst of it: the thievery. The rest Mungo could live with — man against nature and all that — but this unremitting assault by the natives — the very people who would most benefit by his opening the region to British trade — it’s exasperating, heartbreaking. Instead of looking on each successive village with relief, as a place of refuge and respite, the explorer has come to dread the approach to any civilized area. The word has gone out: the coffle is dummulafong, fair game. Up and down the road, from Doogikotta to Kandy, the rumor flies like something on wings: a party of sick white men is on the way, men so debilitated they can hardly hold up their weapons or drive their asses laden with beads and gold and things so exotic and wondrous that no names exist for them in the Mandingo tongue.

And so the villagers turn out like flies, like jackals, like hyenas. To steal something from these pale, puking, shit-stinking white men becomes a matter of honor with them, like counting coup on the Great Plains or standing erect and motionless before the crashing onslaught of an enraged bull in the Sierra Morena. They are ubiquitous, merciless. On one occasion, having dismounted to assist a soldier whose ass was mired to the whiskers in muck, Mungo turns back to his horse to watch a native built like a greyhound streaking off with his saddlebags. Another time, two reedlike old men emerge from the bush in front of him, and as he cautiously raises his musket, the one leaps forward to jerk it from his hands while the other snatches the greatcoat from his back. And all this in a driving rain.

“The only way to put a stop to it,” Johnson says, heaving along on his mare in a pocket of mist, “is to shoot all thieves on sight. Listen to me, Mr. Park: I know these people.” The near trees are gray with haze; farther back they recede into the belly of the clouds. Leaves drip, strange creatures call out from the forest, frogs mount one another and sing about it. “This is Africa, brother,” Johnson says, echoing something he’d said a long time ago, when old Eboe peered into the explorer’s palm and the heavens split open, fracturing the sky from pole to pole. “It’s dog eat dog out here. If you weak, they goin’ to knock you down and strip your ass bare.”

The order goes out, up and down the coffle: shoot on sight.

♦ ♦ ♦

The immediate result of the explorer’s get-tough policy is that Martyn and M’Keal, self-appointed watchdogs of the van, enthusiastically cut down a pair of elderly egg women as they teeter up the road, their fragile burdens perched atop their heads in great coiled snake charmer’s baskets. Mungo inspects the slack tangled bodies, arms and legs splayed, neat holes through chest and eye, the blood mingled with running yolk and albumen until it looks protoplasmic, ageless, some essential jell of life festering to the surface of an antediluvian swamp. “Bury them,” he says.

Ten minutes later, while leading his horse through a maze of immense rounded boulders tumbled over the grass like heaps of dead elephants, the explorer suddenly becomes aware of a commotion up ahead. One of the men. . it looks like Ned Rise. . is struggling with a pair of blacks. Mungo drops the reins and charges through the narrow cleft between the boulders, crying “Stop thief!” as if he were on a crowded thoroughfare in London or Edinburgh The black men, naked to the rain, glance up quickly, coolly gauging the distance between the explorer and themselves, and turn back to the business at hand. One of them is dancing round in circles with Rise, both hands locked on Ned’s musket and jerking it back and forth as if it were a two-man saw, while the other methodically hacks at the leather-bound bundles lashed to Ned’s ass. By the time the explorer arrives on the scene, the first man is sprinting away with Ned’s hat, the second vanishing into the bush with a fifty-pound sack of rice. Ned, still clutching the musket, lies sprawled in the mud, a victim of his own momentum and the thiefs unexpected release of the gun.

Cursing, Mungo draws a bead on the first man. “Take that!” he shouts, squeezing the trigger. Nothing happens. The thief stops in his tracks, hands on hips, no more than a hundred and fifty feet off. And then, incredibly, he begins wagging his hips and thrusting his pelvis forward, obscene, taunting, contemptuous.

Mungo flings down his musket in disgust (wet powder, no doubt, damn it) and snatches up Ned’s. But the thief, like a rabbit on the lip of his warren, has disappeared. The explorer is about to explode, the multiple frustrations pricking at him until what’s left of his composure is like some raw bleeding wound, when he whirls at Ned’s shout. He cannot beheve his eyes. Some nigger son of a bitch is scrambling atop the charger he left in the defile no more than thirty seconds ago. This has gone too far.

Trembling with righteous indignation, he jerks the musket to his shoulder, sights down the muzzle and lets fly. BOOM! The blast of smoke, a quick piercing shriek and Ned’s excited cry: “You got him!”

Sure enough, there he is, knocked to the ground like a winged partridge. Mungo drops his weapon and breaks into a run as he watches the little thief lift himself from the wet earth and skitter off between the boulders, his leg torn open, some small bright object clutched in his hand. “After him!” Mungo roars, the thrill of the chase on him. A moment later he’s back in the saddle and hurtling off after the wounded man, his alerted lieutenants — Johnson, Martyn and Scott — hard on his heels. They burst through the rocks just in time to see the thief struggle into a thicket ahead. In an instant they’re there: but where is he?

“Come out of there, you bleeder!” Martyn shouts.

The horses crash through the brush, shattering saplings, wheeling to and fro in confusion. “Where’d he go?” Scott cries, his voice nearly a whinny, eyes fixed on the ground like a fox hunter’s.

The frustration is boiling over. Voices call out, the horses snort and blow, reinforcements rush up on foot. But again, magically, the thief seems to have eluded them. The explorer turns to Johnson with a shrug, but Johnson is paying no attention to him, merely sitting there astride his mare, silently pointing a stick at the baobab above them. There, like a treed animal, is the thief, cowering against a gouty limb some twenty-five feet from the ground. He hangs his head, trembling, and drops the object clenched in his fist. One of the men picks it up. It is a compass, set in cork, the compass Ailie had given Mungo when they parted. To help you find your way back to me, she’d said.

“Shoot, Mr. Park.” Johnson’s voice.

Martyn, his blood up, makes it a chant. “Shoot. Shoot.”

Ever so slowly, inch by inch, the explorer raises his pistol until he is looking down the length of it at the wretched little man quaking in the tree. The moment seems eternal, predator and prey, winner and loser. Small and hungry-looking, his skin purple with wet, the thief gazes down at him out of hopeless eyes, eyes gone dead already, a milkiness, a glaze there, as of butchered calves or dogs run down in the road. The man’s thigh looks no bigger around than Mungo’s forearm. On the inside of it, just below the groin, the flesh is shredded as if it had been ground up in a machine, and there are bits of hair and dirt and leafmold clinging to the edges of the wound. The rain is playing a threnody in the leaves.

“Shoot!”

The explorer thinks of Sir Joseph Banks, of his book, of London and the whirl of celebrity, Ailie, the children, sun on the Yarrow.

What am I doing? he thinks. What in God’s name am I doing?

Then he pulls the trigger.

THE LAST SMIRK

The report is terrible, awesome, rebounding off the rainslick boulders like the boom of dynamite in a concert hall, like the angry blast of a mountain blowing its top. It is tailed almost immediately by a piteous screech and one, two, three more rumbling gunshots. Ned Rise, standing alone in the defile, thinks of men at attention, flags waving, ceremonial salvos you can feel in your feet, the ushering in of a new era. He listens to these gunshots with a mixture of aversion and relief. Aversion at the thought of some poor wog cut down in his tracks, relief that the great white hero has finally come to his senses. Because things have been bad, very bad. What with the men dropping from fever and shits, the rain bogging them down and the niggers robbing them blind, it’s begun to look as if none of them will lay eyes on the Niger — not Park, not the Leftenant, not the little sap of a brother-in-law. And where does that leave Ned Rise, survivor? In a heap with the rest of them, stripped naked by the natives, vultures spinning overhead. Unless Park toughens up and shows a bit of muscle. The gunshots are a good start.

Ned has been standing there the whole while, motionless, listening to the last distant hue and cry, waiting for the echo of the coup de grace. Now he turns back to his ass, recinches the saddle and tightens the lashings on the various sacks and trunks strung over the animal’s back. The rain, if anything, has begun to fall harder. As he stoops for the all but useless musket Mungo threw down in the mud, his eye catches a movement in the glade ahead. More thieves? Wild beasts with a taste for ass flesh — or human? Instinctively, Ned reaches for his knife.

There it is again. A movement in the undergrowth. “Hey!” Ned calls out, nervously fingering the hangman’s welt under his collar. The trail ahead dips through the glade — a single massive baobab, a cluster of saplings, savanna grass, wildflowers, thick clots of briar — and then descends a long rocky path flanked by another tumble of gargantuan boulders. At Ned’s shout the movement stops abruptly. There is something back there, no doubt about it, and there’s no way in the world Ned is going to move within range of it. He’ll just wait till the others come up, he’s thinking, when the briars begin to quake violently, as though some large animal were trying to uproot them.

Losing patience, Ned bends to shy a stone into the bushes and is surprised to hear the soft unmistakable thud of stone on flesh, a sound he’d learned to distinguish while winging pigeons as a boy. An instant later a pair of black hands part the leaves, and a disgruntled face appears — but what a face! As black and wild as a gorilla’s. No: blacker and wilder, because it is a human face. The eyes glaring out from sockets reddened with ochre, deep vertical scars like terrible wounds creasing forehead and cheeks, the hair pulled back in a topknot and a tight necklace of cobra heads drawn round the neck like a warning, as if to say I am venomous and I will not hesitate to bite. This fellow makes the local thieves look like babes — even the savages at Pisania pale by comparison. Hopelessly, Ned raises the dripping musket, the knife clenched under his arm, pis aller.

Nothing happens. For a long moment Ned and the wildman face one another at a distance of perhaps fifty feet, the rain slanting down, Ned trying his best to look formidable and self-possessed. Then, suddenly, inexplicably, the wildman is grinning. A wild wet obscene grimace of a grin, big lips distended, teeth filed to points. And then he’s gone. Poof. Like a degenerate elf.

♦ ♦ ♦

That night they camp in the open, rain beating on the tents like aboriginal drums. There are brilliant flashes of light, the hollow ghostly calls of animals wandering in the night. Around two the watchfire is doused by a sudden driving downpour, and a pack of hyenas — chinless, ears pinned back — slink into camp and eviscerate a pack ass.

The following night they are again camped in the open, and again it is raining. So too the next night, and the next. As near as Ned can figure, it is around mid-July, a month past the time the great white hero said they’d be coasting down the Niger. Two more weeks, he tells them. Another hundred fifty, hundred sixty miles. Hang in there men, he coaches.

Ha. Hang in there. This morning Ned watched Jonas Watkins cough his lungs up and then pitch face forward in the bloody muck. They got him to his feet, but he just reeled round and collapsed again. His face was splotched red and white and his eyes were like milk. Park came by and asked if he could go on. Jonas couldn’t answer. After awhile the great white hero remounted and told Jemmie Bird to leave some salt beef and ammunition for Watkins. Come along when you feel better, Park said. Another joke. If the expedition was a man going bald, poor Jonas was just another hair fallen to the carpet. But what really rankles is that skinny little wimp of a leftenant — the brother-in-law. He gets dragged along on a litter like he was royalty or something while Jonas gets dumped beside the road for the vultures. Who does Park think he’s kidding?

Ned grits his teeth — and hangs in there. The month wears on. They climb ridges, traverse plains, pass through a succession of identical shit-stinking villages. Strange birds fly up in their faces, carnivores rush out at the asses in a tawny blur, herds of huge lunging deer with striped flanks and twisted horns fly off at the sound of their voices. They eat honey badger and woodrat, bathe in puddles infested with leeches, bilharzia and guinea worm. The world stinks of humus and creeping mold.

In one miserable two-day period they ford three rain-whipped rivers: the Wonda, the Kinyaco and the Ba Lee. Each booms along like an angry god, prickling with uprooted trees and tangled nests of brush, hiding snags and snakes and crocodiles, the water brown as a turd, ribbed and rushing. At the first one — was it the first? — Jimmy M’Inelli, a decent sort who could handle a deck of cards better with one hand than most people could manipulate a knife and fork with two, was gobbled up by a crocodile as if he were a bit of cheese and cracker. Ned was standing right next to him at the time, waist-deep and not ten feet from the far bank, when the thing plowed into the poor fool like a log coming down a sluiceway, flipped open its jaws in an awesome mechanical way, and sank into the brown stew of the current. One second he was shouting to M’Inelli to take his hand, the next he was looking at a ripple in the water. Ned never hesitated. He was an acrobat, he was an eagle. As he shot through the air he let out a short sharp bark of surprise, and then found himself on the bank, dripping and shuddering, heaving for breath like a steam engine. His mind was racing. He saw Billy’s face, Shaddy Walters’, Jonas’, M’Inelli’s. Fear seized him like a pincer: somehow, by force or persuasion, he had to circumvent Park.

♦ ♦ ♦

One night, just outside a town called Bangassi, Ned is crouched beside the watchfire drying his shirt on a stick and tootling dreamily on Scott’s clarinet. (A note on the clarinet: the explorer thought a little music would be a good idea, sweet melodies to soothe the local negroes and beckon to the coffle’s stragglers, guiding them in like lost sheep. When he found that Scott was too sick to stand, let alone tongue a reed or sustain a half note he asked for volunteers. The men groaned. Ned, always on the lookout for a chance to ingratiate himself, stepped forward.) The night is dank, a light drizzle feathering down like the breath of fallen angels. Jemmie Bird, assigned to the second watch, is sleeping soundly at Ned’s feet; the others are whimpering and snoring in their sodden tents.

It is preternaturally still. So still Ned fancies he can hear the individual droplets as they coast down through the haze. He has just finished a moving rendition of his old standby, Greensleeves—the last sad crystalline note still hanging in the air — when he is startled by a low insistent rasping, repeated at intervals, and coming from the direction of the tents. He turns his head, eyes straining: is someone calling him?

The firelight is unsteady, rising and falling like the slow chop of waves against a pier, but yes, there is someone back there, on the far side of the command tent. He rises to his feet and starts forward, silent and inquisitive. But wait. It could be Smirke, that son of a bitch, out to waylay him again. He brings his feet together and leans forward, searching the shadows. “Hello?” he calls, half-expecting one of the boys to spring out at him with a laugh. . but then the boys are a bit too sapped to be playing games — they’ve got to save their energy for dying. He’s about to call out again when in a sudden flash of apprehension he sees it — that face — the same one that had stared out at him from the briars a fortnight ago. But now there are two, no, three of them. And that sound again, a sort of hsssst: are they calling him?

“Jemmie,” he whispers, kicking out at his sleeping companion.

“Ma!” Jemmie bellows suddenly, “Mama!”

When Ned glances up again the faces have vanished, and Jemmie Bird is rubbing his eyes, muttering “damnedest dream,” over and over. “Thought I was back ‘ome in Wapping, suckin’ at me mum’s tittie — frightenin’ is wot it was.” There is a moment of reflective silence, the flames snapping at the air, and then Bird laughs out loud—”Ha!”—as if he’d just played a joke on himself, his head already dipping back toward his chest, the first of a mounting series of snores catching in his throat.

Jittery, Ned lays down the instrument and picks up his musket. He’s about to step into the shadows and confront his demons when suddenly someone lays a hand on his shoulder and he whirls round in a panic to find himself staring into the astonished face of Serenummo, one of the nigger guide’s servants. But where’d he come from?

E ning somo, marhaba, the slave says.

Ned returns the greeting. He and Serenummo have become chums of a sort, sharing an occasional pipe and chatting in Mandingo, Ned to improve his command of the language, Serenummo to probe the cat-eyed white man about the wonders of Enga-lond and the great salt sea. But now, before the slave can settle himself beside the fire, Ned takes him by the elbow. “Did you see anything out there a minute ago?”

Serenummo is tall and rigidly muscled, the veins standing out in his arms like lianas choking a tree. His face is keen and inquisitive, and when he talks, he talks in spate, tugging at his right ear for emphasis. Like most Mandingos he has only a vague idea of how old he is, but Ned guesses he must be about thirty-five. “See anything?” Serenummo echoes.

“Faces. I’m not even sure if I saw them myself.”

The black man eases down beside the fire and draws a calabash from the folds of his toga. He waves the stoppered neck vaguely, offering a drink.

“Wildmen,” Ned says, ignoring the calabash. “Naked and painted, with filed teeth. I think they’ve been following us.”

“Ah,” says Serenummo, “you mean the Maniana.”

“Maniana?”

The black man nods. “Nothing to fear,” he says, “they’re just hoping to conduct a little business with you.”

Ned is stung to the bone with doubt and apprehension. Business? What kind of business could he possibly have with these kinky monsters? Garroting and transfixion? Rape, torture and dismemberment? Like a street cat he’s always managed to land on his feet — whether as fisherman, entrepreneur, resurrected Christ, grave robber or convict — but this African nonsense has him stumped. The filth and savagery of it — sometimes he wishes he were back in London dodging Osprey, Banks and the hangman. At least they’re not going to slit you open and fill you with sand. Before he realizes it, he’s shouting: “Well why don’t they come out and show themselves then? Why hide in the bushes like a bunch of painted devils?”

“Not their style. You see,” Serenummo says, pausing to tip back the calabash and search Ned’s face, “not many tribes will trade with them, so naturally they’re a little shy. What they want is, well — they like to consume their fellow man: heart, kidney, brain. We call them Maniana.”

“Cannibals,” Ned whispers, breaking into English.

Serenummo is lecturing now, tugging at his ear, eyes bright: he hardly notices the interruption. “They live far off to the east along the Joliba. When they fight a war, they gather up the dead and wounded and consume them. In times of peace their king sends out parties to ambush solitary travelers along the road, or failing that, to purchase a slave or two for the pot.”

Ned has crouched down beside the black man, as rapt and horrified as a child drinking in tales of witches and hobgoblins. He can’t help thinking about the men left beside the road, about the stragglers out there now. In the night.

“Of course,” Serenummo adds, a nervous smile on his lips, “no one would ever actually do business with them — I mean sell them a slave. That would be too cruel,” he whispers, glancing sideways at Ned, “too cruel. A fate worse than death.”

At that moment a sudden sharp clamor swoops at them out of the utter desolation of the night. It is immediately succeeded by a bitter curse, a burst of grumbling and tooth gnashing, the rattle of asses’ hoofs. “Damn me if I didn’t bust me fookin’ leg just now. Goddamnit. Curse that son of a bitch Park and the cunt of a whore that give him suck.”

Smirke’s voice.

Serenummo rises quickly, pats Ned’s arm and slips off toward his master’s tent as the commotion draws nearer. A moment later Smirke staggers into the puddle of firelight, four hollow-cheeked stragglers beside him, their eyes narrowed with fever and fright. The flanks of their asses are stippled with blood, the muzzles white with foam. “Christ,” one of the men barks as he flings himself down beside the fire, “we was nearly eat alive back there!” Ned recognizes the man as Frair, a sack of bones and tired complaints, a real blue-ribbon whiner.

“Couldn’t go on no more,” adds another, weaving on his feet. “So we laid up by this big black tree and soon as the sun goes down these slinkin’ wolves come up — Jee-sus — sniffin’ at me feet they was.”

Smirke sits heavily beside Frair, glowering at Ned as if he were personally responsible for all their troubles, while the others — as drawn and dazed as survivors of a shipwreck — lurch off toward the tent, asses in tow. Without a word, Smirke leans forward and digs into the pot of rice and onions the explorer has put aside for latecomers. He eats with his hands, chewing noisily, grunting and belching, sucking the mucilaginous gop from his fingers like a big henna lion lapping at its paws. Frair ducks in behind him, a thin-faced little jackal snapping up the scraps.

Smirke has grown thinner over the past months, his bulk reduced by disease and exhaustion. Most of his twisted coppery hair has fallen out, and his skin, where it isn’t burned, is the color of tallow. He is still big, brawny and stupid — and hence dangerous — but he hasn’t given Ned much trouble in recent days. Ned, favored by Park with a lighter load, is generally near the front of the coffle, while Smirke, saddled with an extra ass and two thirds of the carpentry equipment, invariably brings up the rear. After a ten-hour march in the rain, Smirke just doesn’t seem to have the energy to settle his accounts.

Which is as it should be — because the time has come for Ned to settle his own. Forget that Smirke had beaten him lustily, stolen his hard-earned cash and ruined his chance with Fanny. Forget that he’d perjured himself to see Ned sent to the gallows those long years ago. It’s of no consequence.

What matters is that the madman is here, waiting his chance: it’s kill or be killed. Just three weeks back, as they were saddling their asses on a grim sodden morning, Smirke had come for him without provocation. It seemed the canvas girth had snapped in his hand as he attempted to tighten it, and his temper snapped along with it. Hulking and enraged, he kicked the ass, flung down the useless strap and threw himself on Ned. The attack was brutal, calculated to stun and kill. He hit Ned in the lower spine without warning, drove him forward into a shallow pool reeking of urine and forced his face down. If Park and Martyn hadn’t been on them in an instant, Ned would have drowned. As it was he got a lungful of fluid and a deep bone bruise that kept him stooped over for days. Smirke, raving and gibbering, had to be bound up like a bale of hay and slung across an ass’s back. “I’ll kill you for this, Rise!” he bellowed, again and again, till someone put a sock in his mouth.

Looking at him now, hunched over his meal like a slobbering beast, the close-set pig’s eyes gone dead with fatigue and malarial asthenia, Ned has an inspiration. He holds his breath till Smirke and Frair are snoring in unison, the two of them splayed out before the fire like hounds after a hunt, and then leans over Jemmie Bird to check for signs of consciousness. Bird is dead to the world. Heart slipping, throat dry, Ned checks the priming pan of his musket and slips Jemmie’s pistol into his belt. Then tiptoes away from the campfire, gradually melding with the shadows back of the tents. “Hsssst,” he calls. No response. He tries again. Still nothing. And then, thin as a bristle, the call comes back.

The Maniana are there, fragments of the darkness. He can smell them — sweat and grease and the musk of some wild animal — a smell that startles him with its pungency and pervasiveness, a smell that dredges up ancient racial memories, at once atavistic and sematic. Then he sees them, grinning, their teeth hanging in the emptiness as if independent of jaws and faces. As they draw closer he backs toward the circle of firelight, the musket leveled at the nearest set of sharp gleaming teeth.

They emerge from the shadows as if from a pool, the dark sucking back at them. There are five of them, young and lean and wild-eyed. The smell grabs at his stomach. He motions them forward, and the nearest savage, the one with the cobra-head necklace, edges closer. Ned points down at the sleeping Smirke. “Trade?” he says in Mandingo. The cannibal looks down appraisingly at the big sunburned man, and then glances up at Ned. His teeth seem to champ and he snatches at his shoulders to suppress a tremor of anticipation. Suddenly his face becomes a question, a prayer, and he holds up three fingers.

Ned is puzzled at first. . and then it hits him. He’s asking if all three are for sale — Bird and Frair as well as Smirke. One of the others has come forward now, lean and hungry-looking, peering down at the sleeping men like a housewife at the poulterer’s. No, Ned motions emphatically, and holds up a single finger before pointing again to Smirke. The first man looks a bit disappointed, the wolfish grin flickering momentarily, but then the second says something, sharp and flat, and both nod their heads quickly, like carrion birds dipping into a carcass: it’s a deal.

Ned watches from the shadows as the five silently bind the slumbering Smirke with hemp cords, wrapping him like a mummy. When they’ve got him secure, the man in the cobra-head necklace slaps the big whiskered face awake, simultaneously plugging the pink bud of the blooming mouth with a wedge of cotton and beeswax. Smirke struggles against the cords as they haul him off, trussed like a pig, a string of mad protestations and cries for help mired deep in his throat. “Mmmmmmmm,” he grunts, “mmmmmmmmm,” as if he were sitting down to a candlelit supper.

Electrified, Ned has drifted closer, fatally drawn like moth to taper, until he catches himself with a jolt — if he doesn’t watch it he’ll wind up in the pot alongside Smirke. Suddenly Cobra-head whirls round, one eye twitching, lips pulled back in a lewd unholy grin, the grin of one conspirator to another. Ned flinches as the savage holds out his hand. The smell of him, this close, is unbearable: Ned wants to tear his clothes off, run whooping through the trees, drink blood. There is something in the Maniana’s hand, a black leather purse, small and smooth as a pear. Take it, he gestures, dipping his head and extending his arm. Ned reaches out for the soft black bag, wondering, and then realizes with a rush of giddy joy that this is his payment — Judas Iscariot — and he laughs deep in his head as he slips the bag into his pocket. He feels evil, powerful, exhilarated. A partner to demons and devils and things of the night.

He steps forward and looks Smirke square in the eye. The big man lies there like a whiskered baby, his mouth squawling against the gag, neck craning, arms drawn tight to the body as if swaddled in linen. Tendons ripple in his jaw, his throat swells with wasted breath. And the eyes: beating wildly from face to face, stark and terrorized, until they settle on Ned with a look of wrath and hatred and utter hopelessness. Ned responds with a wink, snapping a hand to the side of his head and waving a pair of fingers like an old maid seeing a crony off at the docks. And then, slow as the sun rising over the hills, the corners of his mouth begin to lift, in a smirk.

♦ FROM THE EXPLORER’S NOTEBOOK ♦

Bamhakoo on the Niger

19 August, 1805

At long last, after all our trials and tribulations, we’ve made it: thanking the Lord for His guidance and protection, I’ve lived to duck my head in the Niger a second time and thrill once again to the soft swirl of its music as it rushes past my ears. And what a glorious stream it is, bursting with the precious cargo of the monsoon, black with silt, as expansive and majestic as any river on earth — even here in its extreme upper reaches.

The one lesson this arduous trek has taught us is this: that a party of Europeans, bearing trade goods, can penetrate to the interior with a minimum of friction, thievery and native antipathy, and the loss of no more than three or four out of fifty men, if proper precautions are observed and seasonal vagaries taken into account. As it is we’ve made it through with six stout-hearted and brave lads from among the soldiers at Goree— Martyn, M’Keal, Bird, Rise, Frair and Bolton — and a fine skillful carpenter come all the way with me from Portsmouth, one Joshua Seed, who is currently delirious. Unhappily, we lost the big fellow, Smirke, to noctivagant predators some days back, and Mr. Scott, feeling a bit under the weather, was forced to stay behind at Koomikoomi — a picturesque alpine village not forty miles distant — until such time as he should feel well enough to rejoin us.

Johnson — i.e., Isaaco, as he now mysteriously prefers to be called — has proven as invaluable to the current expedition as he was to the first. Devoted, knowledgeable, humble and intelligent, this true-blue African homme des lettres who once plucked cotton in the Carolinas and ministered to Sir Reginald Durfeys’ sartorial needs at Piltdown and in London, has devoted himself heart and soul to extending the boundaries of geographical knowledge, forsaking the comforts of home and family to help us forge a new road from the Gambia to the Niger. Just this morning he appeared outside my tent with the humble but politic suggestion that we send word ahead to Mansong of Bambarra to the effect that we have entered his realm and ask his blessing for our enterprise. “A capital idea!” I cried, and immediately dispatched two of Johnson s black servants for Segu, bearing gifts for Mansong and his son Da, along with a letter detailing our object in once again visiting his country. It is my fervent hope that this munificent potentate will provide us with the vessels to prosecute our endeavor, as without carpenters it may prove ticklish to construct our own craft.

In the meanwhile, I have decided — again at Johnson’s suggestion — to float down the river past Segu to the city of Sansanding (conveyed by a curious tribe who make their living at transporting goods and people to and fro in their dugouts, rather like the gondoliers of Venice), where we would dispose of our trade goods in barter and launch the H.M.S. Joliba for parts unknown. I quite agree with my faithful dragoman that etiquette requires us to bypass Segu, so as not to force ourselves once again on the bountiful and truly Christian charity of Mansong, who was of course so concerned for our first expedition. And while Sansanding is said to be a predominantly Moorish town, we should be able to get a better price there for our wares, and in any case, should be well off in the broad lap of the Niger before the Moors’ ingrained fanaticism and unreasoning prejudices might work us any harm. Once afloat, I have determined to have no truck whatever with the local tribes, in the event that they should prove hostile, especially as we follow the river northward into the heart of the Moorish domain. I shall bargain with no one till we have reached the sea. God willing, the journey will be as tranquil as it is revealing. I have heard no word of the devilish Dassoud. I trust he has long since paid the price for his sins.

River of Mystery, River of Legend, River of Gold! How good it is to be back under its spell, to gaze out over the broad back of its churning waters, to ladle up a long cooling draught of its health and invigoration. Alexander Anderson, my own dear brother-in-law and second in command, seems much heartened by the spectacle of it. This courageous Scotsman, struggling against the effects of the climate and the violent exertions of our march, has stood by me through thick and thin, a comfort and an example. His fever seems much abated, and the healing waters of the Niger have brought such a flush back to his pale cheeks that I find myself thinking invariably of roaring hearths and the brisk gentle snowfalls of the Borderlands. I have every hope of his imminent and complete recovery, and of Mr. Scott’s rejoining us before the week is out. And then, our minds and bodies refreshed, we shall set forth to conquer the Niger.

♦ O THE HEAVY CHANGE ♦

He was a born dreamer. A born fool, his father would have said, a brattlin’ gowk, a randie gangrel, good for nothing but drainin’ whisky bottles and liftin’ a fork to his face. Sent off to school at the age of six, he drew into himself, a devourer of mythologies and travelers’ tales, a solipsist who found refuge from the harsh physical world of boarding school in the soothing pages of a book or a solitary walk through overgrown woods and abandoned churchyards. Home for the holidays, he wandered the hills round Selkirk, a stranger to the crofters’ sons who ignored him in the streets and then called him a snob behind his back. His sister was his only friend.

He was a boy, slight and unathletic, and then he was a man. He hardly noticed the change. It was as rhythmic and unremarkable a process as the movement of the seasons, grass greening, leaves falling, snow, rain, sun, boarding school, public school, university. From the moment his mother left till the day he took his degree at Edinburgh, his existence was calibrated, the path clearly marked, the pace easy, and there was no reason to ask himself what he wanted to do in life — he knew, with the bland assurance of the untried, that whatever it was it would be spectacular.

But then, back under his father’s roof, degree in hand, Alexander Anderson was at a loss. For the first time in his life he was free to make a choice, run where his legs took him, do as he pleased. The responsibility was crushing. Horace, Catullus, Aristotle’s Physiology—what good did they do him now? He didn’t want to go into medicine, despite his father’s pressuring — too belittling, disgusting even. Nor would he practice law or take up the cloth like so many of his unsettled classmates. He toyed briefly with the idea of making a name for himself as a poet — the glorious Southey, intrepid Burns, astonishing Anderson — but gave it up after filling six or seven copybooks with lugubrious, self-pitying tripe after MacKenzie’s The Man of Feeling and coming to realize in an equable and matter-of-fact way that he hadn’t a shred of talent. The military occurred to him next — the flashing red jacket, the drum and fife, bringing the French to their knees and all that — but no, that was where all the athletes wound up — on the battlefield, their heads staved in — and how could he, at five feet four and nine stone on the nose, possibly hope to compete with them?

And so, halfheartedly making the rounds with his father, he stayed on at Selkirk, infused with vague yearnings, bowed down like a snow-covered sapling with anomie and self-contempt, eating and dressing well enough on the interest from his modest trust fund, drinking to kill time, and dreaming, always dreaming.

Then Mungo came home from the Niger, scintillating, heroic, huge with success, and Zander no longer doubted what he would do with his life. There would be a second expedition, and Zander would be part of it. What more daring occupation was there? Not Nelson, not Napoleon himself could match it. The thrill of pitting oneself against the unknown, the delicious risk, the heady exhilaration of victory over nature itself: it was too good to be true. How could he have thought of anything else these past few years? Of course, he thought to himself, of course, the idea of it sprouting in him like a tough clinging vine, like ivy, burgeoning till it sought out and filled every crack and crevice of his being. He would wade through bogs, hack his way through scrub and nettle, scouting out the trail for his brother-in-law, small and quick and lithe, probing at all the deep-buried secrets of the Dark Continent. It was a revelation. Alexander Anderson, explorer. This is what he’d been saving himself for.

Little did he realize he would have to wait seven years for his chance.

Seven long torturous years, years that wore on him like an indeterminate prison sentence, no time off for good behavior. He killed time with drink, riding, a flirtation here and there. He hunted, smoked cigars, took up boxing to build his endurance. And he shadowed Mungo. Made him repeat his stories over and over till he could quote them word for word, till they ran through his head like the stuff of legend. He puttered away at the only trade he knew — doctoring — as a way of distracting himself from this thing that had become an obsession. At night, or on the long gray afternoons when he couldn’t muster the energy to lance a boil or apply a clyster, he devoured everything available on the subject of Africa and exploration. He read Moore and Bruce and Leo Africanus; he wore out three copies of his brother-in-law’s Travels, carrying a battered volume with him at all times, muttering over the dog-eared pages, quoting it to startled patients and half-witted farmers as if it were a holy book. Then one afternoon Mungo took him aside and told him to get ready. He was elated. When the bottom fell out three months later he sank into despair. A year passed — the longest, bleakest year of his life — before Mungo came to him again. This time it was no false alarm. He packed his bags in a trance, all his hopes and dreams realized, all the years of waiting come to an end. He was going to Africa.

♦ ♦ ♦

Now, the rain lashing at the walls of the tent like a Biblical plague, his guts turned to ice and his face on fire, he lies back on a sweat-soaked litter suspended between a pair of battered crates while a raven caws in the distance and black beetles crawl up his legs and whir in his face. He is dying. Sapped, wasted, down to just over a hundred pounds, he cannot — will not — go on. In disgrace, he’s allowed himself to be carried— carried like a woman or child — by men nearly as weak as he. Mungo has dosed him with calomel, let blood, hunted up snakes and tiny antelope and eyeless white grubs the size of a man’s forearm so that he could have fresh meat. All to no avail. He is dying. And glad of it.

Suddenly the flap swishes back and Mungo slips into the tent. His eyes are pits of concern, raw with doubt and worry, his face as gaunt and yellow as a deflated football. A drop of water clings to the tip of his nose. “How you feeling?” he asks.

Zander wants to lift his own weight from the explorer’s shoulders, wants to lie to him and say It’s all right — don’t you worry about me. But he can’t. When he opens his mouth to release the words there’s nothing there, no sound at all.

Mungo isn’t listening for the reply. He strides across the room, turns his back and shrugs out of the drenched greatcoat, then flings himself down on a crate beside his bed. There’s a whiff of sulfur as he lights a tallow candle, and then the rustle of paper. A moment later he’s scribbling away in his notebook with an almost frantic urgency, as if the act of putting words on paper could soften a blow or breathe life into a corpse.

Outside, the rain-slick village of Bambakoo bows under the weight of the deluge: tamarind, mahogany, fig, a freckling of bright tropical birds in a huddled wall of green. Beyond the glistening huts and thick cluster of riverine forest, the Niger punishes its banks, flaying the earth to its metamorphic bones, vocalizing its authority, swishing and sucking as it drinks in the rainfall like a bottomless hole. Zander can hear it from his bed, rain falling in the hills behind him, rushing past the tent in a throbbing network of brown tentacles, driving, caroming, leaping, until finally it breaks through to enlist in the stream for the long inexorable drive to the sea.

“It’s a pity,” Mungo is saying over his shoulder. “The loss of life, I mean. If I had it to do over I wouldn’t leave England till I was damned good and sure the rains were finished down here.” He pauses, the quill pen scratching away in the interlude. “It was the weather that did it — no doubt about it. We Scots and English just don’t have the constitution to take all this rotten air, this constant soaking, this—” He throws the pen down and presses his fingers to his eyes. Back turned, he begins again, his words choked with pain and disappointment, some fresh piece of bad news sticking in his teeth like gristle. “I may as well tell you now,” he groans, swinging round in his seat. “Scott’s dead. He—” The explorer glances up at his brother-in-law and then turns away again, as if ashamed to look him in the eye. “He gave in to the fever two nights ago. The Dooty just sent word by special messenger.”

Zander says nothing in response. He’s having trouble keeping his eyes open, and he can’t quite catch his breath. It’s like the first time he went into a football match at school and found himself in the dirt, his senses jarred, the wind knocked out of him.

There is a moment of silence, lingering and dull, underscored by the background hiss of the rain and the roar of the Niger. “Zander?” Mungo says. And then, almost a bark: “Zander!”

He’s there in a flash, leaping across the room and snatching at his brother-in-law’s wrist as if to prevent him from slipping over the edge of a precipice. The pulse is nothing, as faint and intermittent as the rattle of a broken pocketwatch. Panicked, the explorer grabs him up in his arms — a bundle of sticks in a sack — and fumbles a vinegar-soaked rag to his nostrils. Zander’s eyes flutter twice, the irises fixed under the upper lids as if staring back into themselves. There’s a red welt on his throat, and a cold flat pallor has crept into his face.

Dying, he looks like Ailie.

♦ THE END OF THE ROPE ♦

The Spanish use a single verb, esperar, to express both waiting and hoping. So too in English: there is no wait without expectation. One waits for spring, a table, death.

wait, to stay in a place or remain inactive or

in anticipation until something expected

takes place.

Ailie is waiting. Staying in Selkirk, at her father’s house, remaining inactive and expecting — what? The letter that tells her to wait no more, that she’ll never see husband or brother again? Or the hastily scrawled missive bringing news of Mungo’s reemergence on the coast of Africa, alive and well and embarking that day, a hero a thousand times over? Neither. Both. At this point she hardly cares: she’s at the end of her rope. All her life she’s waited for Mungo, waited for him to finish school, come home from Djakarta, Africa, London. She can wait no more. Really, sincerely, she’d rather know that they were dead — he and Zander both — than to live in this limbo of suspense, in this agony of living for someone else, out of one’s body, drawing each breath, day by day, in morbid anticipation of events in a place so distant it could be mythical.

She’s had three letters. One from Zander, addressed at Goree, and two from Mungo, addressed respectively from the Cape Verde Islands and Pisania. The Pisania letter came last week. It lay flat as a dagger in the postman’s palm, and the sight of it, sharp-edged and white, nearly cut her heart out. She thrust the envelope into her bag and hurried up the street in a nervous little jog trot, blood singing in her ears. She went through the front gate in a daze, the stairs echoed under her feet with a hundred insinuating creaks and groans, and then she was alone in her room. For a long while she just sat there at the edge of her bed studying the familiar handwriting scrawled across the envelope, fighting the impulse to chuck the whole thing in the fire. A quarter of an hour passed. And then, calm and deliberate as the tax collector, she slit the envelope with a paper knife and extracted the folded letter.

It said nothing.

Like its predecessor it was full of bravado and self-congratulation, talk of sturdy asses and stout-hearted men. He would lay the Niger flat, Mungo would, tape-measure and chart it end to end and be home in plenty of time to carve the Christmas goose. There were a few words of solicitude for her and the children toward the end. He hoped that the new baby was healthy and happy and that it was a boy. The letter was dated April 29: nearly five months ago.

She is waiting for another. She is waiting for Mungo to come back to her. She is waiting to resume her life. In the meantime, there are the children. Thomas, child of the century, is five, Archibald, born in April, has been weaned to applesauce and oatmeal mush. Together with Mungo junior and little Euphemia, they raise a persistent whining clamor that either soothes her with its substance and immediacy or drives her to distraction, depending on her mood. She hasn’t touched her microscope since spring. She is bored. It’s the same old story.

With one exception: Georgie Gleg. He spent the summer at Galashiels, away from the university and his practice. Each day he called on her in Selkirk with some offering, a bundle of flowers, box of sweetmeats, a three-volume novel. He took her out into the country in his carriage, brought her to dinner at what was left of the family estate at Galashiels. He entertained her. Distracted her from her brooding, her waiting, the stark gut-wrenching fears that clouded her days and haunted her nights.

Eyebrows were raised around town. Her father lectured her. She was a married woman, after all, and married to a saint and hero at that. She knew it, and felt a prick of conscience. But she felt just as strongly that she no longer owed Mungo anything, that he’d deceived and betrayed her and that she would do as she pleased, propriety be damned. Besides, her seeing Georgie was simply a reflection of her need for companionship — at worst no more than an innocent flirtation. The very fishwives who were so ready to cluck their tongues could be found out back of the inn on a Saturday night rolling and grunting in the bushes like sows in heat. No: they could all be damned. They had no idea what she was going through, no idea what it was like to be at the end of your rope.

♦ THE LETTER ♦

Segu. A rainy afternoon in mid-September, 1805. Beneath the high whitewashed walls of Mansong’s compound, a huddled queue of supplicants awaits the call to enter and pay obeisance to the potentate. They are a motley crew: tribal officials from the west in soggy sarongs and limp feathers, petulant-looking Moors with slabs of salt wrapped in antelope skin, old men in rags crouched over sorry goats, bullocks and monkeys. There are lepers and wastrels, singing men, beggars, slaves. And then there are the women. Big, broad-beamed village scolds with rolls of spun cloth, wicker baskets, caged songbirds and serval cats on leashes, ancient hags clutching baskets of wild tamarind to their withered dugs, barefoot girls, bright and nubile in indigo gowns and copper bracelets, lined up for inspection like birds of paradise.

At the far end of the queue, footsore and soaked to the skin, stand the forlorn figures of Serenummo and Dosita Sanoo, servants of Isaaco the scribe and emissaries of the tobaubo Park. The asses beside them are laden with rare and exquisite gifts intended for Mansong and his son Da. Gifts that range from the purely practical (silver tureens, double-barreled guns and kegs of black powder), to the epicurean (a case of Whitbread’s beer and a string of blood sausage), to the merely fanciful (six pairs of velvet gloves, a pince-nez on a gold chain and a music box that grinds out the first eight bars of the “Ombra mai fu” aria from Xerxes). More importantly these humble envoys have been entrusted with a letter from explorer to potentate, a letter written and conveyed with the utmost secrecy, three slips of paper the explorer seemed to consider as precious as gold, as potent as a saphie.

This letter. It was to be delivered only into the hands of Mansong himself, the explorer had insisted, his pupils shrunk to pinpoints of furious intensity; under no circumstances were its contents to be revealed to anyone else — not Wokoko, not the towering praetorian guardsmen, especially not to the Moorish merchants of the bazaar and most especially not to Dassoud or any of his henchmen. There was a strange, almost mystical look on the white man’s face as he handed over the letter and repeated his instructions for the fifty-seventh time. Serenummo will never forget it. The tobaubo looked like a tribal necromancer perched high above the trees on some stony pinnacle, his arms spread wide, steeling himself for the leap into faith. Or oblivion.

Bambakoo, the River Joliba

10 September, 1805

To Mansong the Magnificent, Liquidator of Lions and Tamer of Topi, Mansa of Bambarra, Waboo, M’butta-butta, Wonda, Etc.

Your Royal Highness:

I am that white man who nine years ago came into Bambarra. I then came to Segu, and requested Mansong’s permission to pass to the eastwards; your Highness not only permitted me to pass, but magnanimously presented me with fifty thousand cowries to purchase provisions along the road. This generous conduct has made Mansong’s name much respected and revered in the land of the white people. Accordingly, the king of that country has sent me again into Bambarra, as his ambassador in good will, and if your Highness is willing to again grant me a hearing, I shall outline my reasons for returning to your great country.

Viz., your Grace well knows that the white people are a trading people, and that all the articles of value which the Moors bring to Segu are made by us. If you speak of a good gun, who made it? The white people. If you speak of a good piece of scarlet or baft, or beads or gunpowder, who made them? The white people. We sell these goods to the Moors; the Moors bring them to Timbuctoo and sell them at a higher price. The people of Timbuctoo sell them to you at a still higher price. Now, the king of the white people wishes to find a way by which we may bring our own merchandise to you, and sell everything at a much cheaper rate than you now pay. For this purpose, if Mansong will permit me to pass, I propose sailing down the Joliba to the place where it mixes with the salt water; and if I find no rocks or danger in the way, the white men’s vessels will come and trade at Segu, if Mansong so desires.

Mungo Park

P.S. I hope and trust that Your Majesty will not reveal what I have written herein except to your own counselors; for if the Moors should hear of it I shall certainly be stopped before I reach the sea.

After two interminable hours in the rain, Mungo Park’s emissaries leap to attention as the enormous gate suddenly creaks back on its hinges and a short heavyset man in a scarlet toga emerges and begins making his way down the line, pausing now and again to question a dripping chieftain or banter with a giggling coquette. The ambassador is accompanied by a pair of feathered and breechclouted giants with nasty flat-headed spears, quivers of poisoned arrows and great slashing bows with pull enough to pin an elephant to a tree. “Kokoro killi shirruka,” Dosita whispers, lowering his eyes. “Savages from the east.”

Serenummo steps back a pace when the ambassador stops before him. The fat man glances shrewdly at the bundles lashed to the sagging asses, then looks Serenummo in the eye. “You’ve been sent by the white men, no? Doing the bidding of demons, yes?” Serenummo nods. The giants stare off into the trees, as if contemplating some rarefied spectacle beyond the ken of mere earth dwellers. “Follow me,” the ambassador snaps.

They are led into a central courtyard overshadowed by a rambling mud-and-timber structure, a sort of longhouse divided into individual dwellings, some neat and symmetrical and roofed with stone, others so misaligned as to suggest the full range of geometrical possibility. In the near distance they can see the ancient sycamore fig that presides over the place like a protective deity. “Wait here,” the ambassador commands, at the same time motioning to a pair of cowering servants who come forward to lead the asses off for inspection. Then he ducks into a passageway that seems to open up before him like a mouth, and Serenummo and Dosita are left standing in the muddy courtyard under the watchful eyes of the two giants. They’ve come a long way, and they’re hungry, thirsty, tired and wet. No one offers them food or drink. No one invites them in out of the rain or asks them to take a load off their feet.

Half an hour later the ambassador appears at the entrance of a dark twisting passage at the far end of the courtyard. He motions to them with his index finger, then turns and flaps off in his sandals. They have to hurry to keep up, turning first right and then left, heading east, west, north, south, passing through room after room, courtyards, walkways, corrals and stables, led by the red flash of the fat man’s toga as if it were unraveling, thread by thread, the secrets of the labyrinth. Finally they are shown into a dark mud-walled room lit only by a brazier and smelling of sweat and incense.

At the ambassador’s command they go down on their knees, touch their foreheads to the earthen floor in submission. When Serenummo looks up, he sees that he is indeed in the throne room, in the presence of the potentate himself. Mansong is seated on his gilt stool, enormous, like a park statue. He is wearing a dirty periwig and earrings fashioned from silver spoons. Beside him, his son Da, a miniature version of the king; at his feet, a white dog. Wokoko, witch doctor and chief counselor, sits on Mansong’s right hand, dressed in his hyena skins and ostrich plumes, and the shadows are swollen with the big shifting forms of the bodyguards. But what is surprising is the presence of the two Moors. A one-eyed man drawing on a pipe, and his companion, a big man, hard as stone, with black messianic eyes and a hyphenated scar across the bridge of his nose. What would Mansong be doing with Moors in his council room?

“Mansong the Magnificent finds your gifts acceptable,” the ambassador announces. “Have you any message for the king?”

Serenummo rises slowly, loosening the strings of his saphie bag in order to extract the letter. But then he hesitates, remembering the explorer’s injunction. He can feel the Moors’ eyes on him.

“Well?” the ambassador snaps. “Mansong is waiting.”

Serenummo fumbles in his pouch and produces the letter. He bows, and steps forward to hand it to the king, but suddenly the big Moor is on his feet, quick as some pouncing beast. The royal hand is outstretched, the letter raised and proferred, when the Moor intercedes. “I’ll take that,” he growls in Arabic, brushing back the extended hand of Mansong the Puissant as if it were the importuning hand of a beggar, snatching the letter from the air and depositing it in the folds of his jubbah with a look of rage and contempt.

No one, not even the fiercest of the guards, says a word.

♦ DASSOUD’S STORY, PART II ♦

A nobleman, as proud as he was fierce, representative of a culture light years in advance of the tabala-thumping, goat-sucking Sahelian Moors, a man who had gazed on the Mediterranean and traversed the Sahara, Dassoud was not the sort to be long content in the role of henchman and human jackal. Second fiddle might be all right for a young man, someone footloose and untried, but as Dassoud matured he came to expect a bigger slice of the pie. Where before he’d been content, now he began to chafe in his subsidiary role. He found himself resenting Ali’s authority, coveting his prerogatives, criticizing his tactics on the battlefield and at the peace table alike. But the real key to his dissatisfaction, if the truth be known, was Fatima. As she grew in years, so she grew in bulk. She blossomed, tucking away kouskous and seedcakes, twenty meals a day, waking in the night to call for milk and honey. By the time she reached her late twenties, the queen had put on another eighty pounds. At four-sixty, she was irresistible. Dassoud decided to make his move.

He came for Ali in the night, just as sixteen years earlier Ali had come for his own predecessor. Dispatching the Nubian guard and separating Ali’s head from his body was nothing, the work of a minute — the real trick had been locating Ali in the first place. For the Emir, reasoning that the night would inevitably come when the new usurper would stalk Benowm with scimitar or garrote, had made it his practice to postpone retiring until the latest possible hour, and to tell no one — absolutely no one — whose tent he would grace with his recumbent presence. One morning he might emerge from Mohammed Gumsoo’s tent, the next from Mahmud Imail’s. It was a game of musical tents, and a practice of such long standing that the Emir’s people found it as natural a part of waking as the smell of cooksmoke.

For two weeks, Dassoud had quietly visited each of the tents from which Ali had appeared in the morning, remarking the servants who bundled the Emir’s bedclothes, rolled up his rugs and carted off his hookah. The servants varied from day to day, but one — an old woman whose jubbah hung on her like a winding cloth — was there to clean up nearly every morning. Dassoud took her aside and threatened her: betray Ali or he would crush her like a dung beetle. She was a twisted thorn root, her skin almost pale, one eye as cloudy as a puddle of semen. A tarnished ring glinted on her lip as she threw her head back and laughed. “I’ll betray him,” she hissed, “gladly.” Later, after mounting Ali’s head on a stake in the center of camp, Dassoud went to his queen, the blood still wet on his hands.

With Fatima’s support, Dassoud was able to establish a broad base of power. As the widow of Ali, she lent him legitimacy in the eyes of the Moors of Ludamar; as daughter to Boo Khaloom, she gave him a blood tie to the Al-Mu’ta tribe of Jafnoo. It was a beginning, and Dassoud pursued it for all it was worth. Where Ali had been satisfied with rapprochement, Dassoud pushed for an active alliance; where Ali had overlooked encroachment on his borders, Dassoud sought to extend them. He went to great lengths to assure himself of Boo Khaloom’s allegiance, and then, dealing from a position of strength, he approached the fierce Il Braken and Trasart tribes of the northwest and challenged their leaders to single combat. Remorseless, mechanical, he hacked them down one after another.

Within the year Dassoud was able to command a force of some fifteen hundred horsemen; from among these he picked two hundred men to serve as his elite cavalry. They were the best the desert had to offer. From Jafnoo and Ludamar and Masina, from the Il Braken and Trasart and Al-Mu’ta tribes, they came to Dassoud’s tent, savage and skillful, quick lithe athletes, crack shots, superlative horsemen. No one could stand up to them. With Dassoud in the van like some hellish apparition, like a black shaitan, they ranged the length and breadth of the western Sahel, from Gedumah to Timbuctoo, pounding the earth to dust and terrorizing Foulah, Mandingo and Wolof alike. Even the mighty Mansong was cowed.

Dassoud was content. He was Emir of Ludamar, lord and husband to Fatima, commander of a private army and conciliator of the desert tribes. He had consummated his dreams, achieved his ambitions. What more was there? Before long he had settled into a comfortable routine of aggression and extortion, of raiding to the east and west and south, raiding to pacify recalcitrant villages, to acquire slaves and cattle, raiding for the sheer joy of it. It was a good life. He was content.

Until the sleepy afternoon he was sequestered in Fatima’s tent, awash in the rich ferment of her flesh, soft music playing, the harsh sun and the cries of the battlefield a distant memory, until that afternoon when his idyll was shattered by the news that white men—Nazarini—were back in the Sahel. It was Ahmed, the one-eyed Bushreen, who stood respectfully before the tent and called to him in a low urgent voice. Dassoud parted the flaps almost instantly, a scowl on his face, weapon in hand. Ahmed could barely catch his breath. White men, an army of them, had just entered Bambarra at Bambakoo, he gasped. They had firearms, they were killing blacks, taking slaves, pillaging the countryside.

The news hit Dassoud like a quick savage blow from the hoof of a camel. He stood there, stupefied, until surprise turned to anger. White men: Nazarini. He hated them to the bottom of his soul, hated them as he had never hated anything in his life. The one white man he’d ever laid eyes on — that groveling sneak of a cat-eyed explorer — had escaped him. Outwitted him. Beaten him. It was the only contest Dassoud had ever lost, and the memory of it was an open sore, as wet and raw as the day it first erupted. He clenched his teeth, remembering the humiliation it had cost him, remembering how he’d ridden into camp, empty-handed, in rags, and how, though no one dared say a word, a thousand eyes told him what they were thinking. And then there was Fatima — the way she’d coddled the freak, sitting by the hour and listening to his gibberish as if he were a marabout or a sage or something, while he, Dassoud, son of a Berber sultan and terror of the battlefield, was nothing. The thought of it, even now, so many years later, galvanized him with rage and hatred. He turned to the nearest thing at hand — Ahmed’s camel — and knocked it flat with a single blow of his balled fist. Then he sprang on his horse and thundered off for Segu.

Two weeks later he was the happiest man alive, giddy with joy. Of all the Nazarini in the world, it was Mungo Park himself who had come back within reach of the Emir’s long arm. And the letter. He laughed to think of it, even then circulating among the tribes of the north, stirring them to blind and irrational peaks of fury, fanning up the sort of deadly, implacable, bloodlusting rage that no assault on religion, cattle — even women and children — could so instantaneously arouse: the Nazarini were striking at their pocketbooks. What could be more perfect? He didn’t care how big the white man’s army was — he, Dassoud, Scourge of the Sahel, would have fifteen hundred frenzied horsemen at his disposal before the month was out.

And then, at Sansanding, he would greet Mungo Park once again.

♦ SANSANDING ♦

There are faces in the night, grimacing, leering, the faces of naked savages with serpent coils for hair, staring eyes and filed teeth. They close in on him, incisors champing with a hiss, there’s a wild shout, spears and stones and poison-tipped arrows raining down, the suck of the current, the roar of the rocks. . and he wakes, sweating, beneath the fine mesh of mosquito netting and a splash of stars. The explorer is at Sansanding, and he has been delirious on and off for a fortnight, a month — who knows? There was the death of Zander — yes, that set it off — and then the letter to Mansong. Beyond that, he can’t remember what was real and what phantasmagoric, what occurred in the eyes and memories of other men and what transpired only in his own. There was something with Jemmie Bird, something bad, an argument with Johnson, a period of drifting, floating on the river, it seemed, and then the whirling scents and colors of the marketplace at Sansanding and Mansong’s delay about providing a canoe. Yes, the fever subsiding, it begins to come back to him.

♦ ♦ ♦

Walls collapsed and volcanoes erupted the night Zander died. The sky split asunder and the earth lashed to and fro like a runaway wagon, pitching and lurching until the explorer had to get down on his knees and turn his intestines inside out. He retched, eyes tearing, a torrent of rice, tamarind, half-digested fish and bitter yellow bile spewing from his lips, while Zander lay there on his litter, dead. Mungo cursed. Bit his tongue. Pounded the dirt floor with his fists. When the earth finally stopped trembling he found that he couldn’t get up, there was no strength in his arms, his legs had gone dead — he was like an ocean-run salmon that frantically lashes its way up the Yarrow, impelled by some ancient implacable force, leap after coruscating leap, only to flounder in a shallow pool, its back out of water, tail twitching feebly. He was spent.

The night wore on. There was a cry like that of a nightjar, the sound of rushing wings. Why was he beating his way up the Niger? he asked himself. Why was he risking life, taking life? What kind of man was he, Mungo Park, to drag a narrow-shouldered little parlor-sitter like Zander out into the teeth of the wilderness? To desert a wife and four children? To lead thirty-six men to their deaths and blow a cringing old negro to Kingdom Come as if he were nothing more than an insect or toad? What had he come to? The answer was something he didn’t want to face. Not now. Not ever. At dawn, he pushed himself up and uncorked a keg of rum.

He was drunk for three days. Blind drunk. Johnson took charge in the interval, arranging for Zander’s burial, organizing the equipment for the trip to Sansanding, dispatching Serenummo and Dosita Sanoo with the letter for Mansong. When Mungo finally came around, he found himself in a pirogue, stretched out like a Viking on his way to Valhalla. It was night, starless and black as the void. He heard the swish of the paddles, a low murmur of voices. He heard the hooting and buzzing and gibbering of night things, a sound that rose in volume until it was as loud and undifferentiated as the boom of a heavy surf, and then he saw shapes in the night, faces and colors, animals with the heads of eagles and tails of serpents, and he knew the fever was on him. He’d been miraculously spared during the overland trek, but now, what with the drinking bout and the night he’d spent on the damp ground, it had stolen a march on him. Suddenly he sat up in the dark. “Zander!” he cried. “Johnson!”

A warm hand spread itself across his chest. “It’s all right, Mr. Park. A touch of the fever, that’s all. You on the river now. Hear it?”

He heard it. But he couldn’t just lie there — he was head of this expedition, after all. He had to get up and lead his men, steer the canoes, spy out the landfalls and come up with names for all the salient geographical features. There were maps to be drawn up, whole regions to be charted, botanical specimens to be plucked and dried.

The hand lay on his chest like an enormous weight. It was pushing him down, firm and persuasive. “Lie back, Mr. Park — everything’s under control,” Johnson whispered. “We hit Sansanding in the morning.”

What? Come into Sansanding flat out on his back? Never. Fever or no fever. Zander or no Zander, he had to get up and lead his men. He slapped the hand away like an irate child and jerked himself clumsily to his feet amid a tumult of cries, fore and aft. He heard the squawk of a startled bird somewhere up ahead, and then the canoe was lurching violently, left, right, left again, and he was pitched headlong into the inky soup of the night and the cold quick fastness of the Niger.

There were shouts and curses, some in English and some in the Somonie dialect of the boat people. The canoe in which Mungo had awakened was twenty-five feet long. It had contained bundles of equipment, two Somonies, Johnson, Ned Rise and Jemmie Bird. When it capsized, passengers and boatmen alike were flipped into the river. Jemmie, who had lashed himself to the cookpots, floated briefly, buoyed up by the big iron cauldrons; when moments later they tipped and filled with water, he sank like a stone. Ned, meanwhile, had managed to get hold of the explorer’s shirt collar and dog-paddle him toward the denser blackness of the shoreline. Johnson, floundering, happened by purest chance to blunder into the canoe, and hang on while it spun downriver, the sopping Somonies attempting to swim it ashore.

An hour later, the whole thing was history. The other canoes had converged on the spot with a torch, and had picked up the floating paddles. The canoe was steered to shore and righted, the explorer and Ned Rise located by means of hoots and whistles, and the equipment — which had been firmly lashed round the hull of the canoe — saved. Two kegs of gunpowder were ruined by the soaking, and a sack of rice had split. As for Jemmie Bird, he too was history.

♦ ♦ ♦

At Sansanding, the explorer was alternately lucid and delirious. Against Johnson’s advice, he set up a stall in the marketplace — the Mussulmen gathered around like dogs, snarling and baying, shouting about infidels, white demons and cut-rate prices — and sold off nearly all the excess beads, baft and baubles. The proceeds went into purchasing provisions for the great voyage downstream to the ocean. These mounted steadily in the dark recesses of the explorer’s hut, guerbas of beer and calabashes of palm wine, chickens in wicker baskets, strings of onions, desiccated fish, eggs, yams, millet and maize. Bundles of dried figs peeked out from beneath his pillow and lumps of goat cheese depended from the ceiling struts, redolent as an entire regiment’s unwashed socks. There was something in that smell that cleared his head, and waking in the midst of it one morning, the explorer shook off the fever long enough to write Mansong again, begging for his help in coming up with a seaworthy craft. The Munificent One’s response was ambiguous. The King smiles upon your enterprise, his messenger said, and will protect you as Mansong’s strangers in all territories under his jurisdiction, from west to east. But you must wait until the annual sacrifice to Chakalla before he can do anything for you. Wait, the messenger repeated, and Mansong will see that you are taken care of.

Mungo waited.

The days fell together, end to end, like dominoes. It was October already, and the rains had begun to slacken. Time was wasting. Finally, after repeated attempts to impress Mansong with the urgency of his request, the explorer decided to act on his own, and sent Johnson and Ned Rise down to the river to purchase the largest canoe they could find. But no one, it seemed, would provide them with a means of leaving the country unless Mansong himself gave the word. Johnson held up clicking sacks of cowries — a king’s ransom — but the boatmen just ducked their heads and looked away.

The explorer was in a quandary. Should he wait on Mansong’s pleasure while the river sank and the Muslim merchants agitated against him? Should he up the bribe? Hire the Somonies to take him to Djenné and try his luck there? Swim for it? Unfortunately, the strain of it all brought on the fever again and he was incoherent for two days, jabbering about the Baroness’ cleavage and Lady Banks’ pug, about the strength of his arm and the accuracy of his kick on goal, and how the name of Park would live on in history, greater than any other. When he came round again, he dosed himself so heavily with calomel he was unable to eat or sleep for a week. It was during this rushing, whirling period of acceleration and intense stimulation that he hit on the idea of reverting to the original plan and constructing his own vessel, despite the obvious limitations imposed on him by lack of materials and skilled artisans.

Seized by the idea, he sprang out of his bed like a mastiff and strode into the tent where the surviving carpenter lay in his delirium. “Joshua Seed,” the explorer boomed like a god, “get up from your sickbed and build me a boat.”

The sick man held out a little packet of bony knuckles and Mungo helped him from his cot. In the hulks at Portsmouth, Seed had impressed the explorer with his work-hardened frame and the clarity of his eye. Now he looked and moved like an elderly gentleman with bowel problems. Slack-shouldered, yellow of eye and drawn in the cheeks. Seed shuffled out of the tent and into the blistering sunshine that had succeeded the rains. He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders and hobbled resolutely to the mound of nails, rusted saw, hammers, adzes and chisels that had survived the trip, and began pounding away at the scraps of wood that were scattered about.

He was at it all afternoon, periodically calling for more lumber. The explorer was delighted. He returned to his tent, fed the chickens, scribbled in his notebook and spat on the floor. At six, he stepped outside to see how Seed was progressing and was surprised to see that the carpenter had attracted a sizable crowd of inquisitive natives with his hammering and sawing, his meticulous measuring and planing and fitting. Mungo elbowed his way through the crowd, careful to avoid trampling any native feet, and was about to call out cheerfully to Seed — something like ‘How’s it coming, old boy?’—when he stopped dead in his tracks, choked with incredulity. Seed was working all right, whistling away as if he didn’t have a care in the world, smoothing a corner here, shaving back a splinter there. He was working, but he wasn’t building a boat. He was building a coffin.

Seed was gone by sundown. The explorer eased the late carpenter into his casket, paid a pair of Kafir Mandingoes to dig a hole, and buried him without ceremony. Boatwise, things looked pretty bleak. But it was at that moment — that very moment when Mungo pitched the first spadeful of earth into the grave — that Ned Rise waltzed into camp preceded by the dark, glistening, water-burnished hulls of two sleek native canoes that seemed to float on the air like gifts from the gods. With a grunt, the eight black porters flipped the big dugouts from their shoulders and set them down on the ground as lightly as if they’d been made of pasteboard. The explorer was ecstatic. He embraced Ned as if he were a long-lost son, slapping his back with both hands and smothering him with praise and promises of medals, plaques, awards and pecuniary largesse on their return to England. Then he looked at the canoes.

They were rotted through, both of them. Mud, river plants and expiring minnows lined the insides of their hulls, and a gargantuan bite had been taken out of the gunwale of the smaller craft, testimony to some historical confrontation with an irate hippo. In sum, the canoes looked as if they’d been constructed sometime during the reign of Charles I, and had been left to rot ever since. The calomel twitched Mungo’s salivary glands, his lower lip fell, and he began to drool. “What is this, Ned?” he choked, unable to contain his disappointment. “Any fool can see that these are worthless hulks.”

Ned was grinning. He’d found the canoes in a heap of river-run lumber at the edge of town. They were half submerged, waterlogged and rotting. No one owned them. He dragged them from the river, inspected them closely and decided they were worth a try. For fifty cowries apiece, he was able to hire the eight local flaneurs who balanced the boats on their broad flat heads and hauled them into camp. “Maybe we could fix them,” he said finally. The explorer looked doubtful. “No, I mean it,” Ned said. “Look,” bending now to the slippery green hull of the larger boat, “the front half of this one isn’t all that bad. . and take a look at that one with the toothmarks. The back of that one seems pretty sturdy, no?”

The explorer looked. He was wired and jumpy with the tasteless white powder he’d taken to scourge himself of the fever. A tentative leg snaked out to thump the hull of the smaller craft. He went down on his knees, smoothing his hand over the wood like a furniture appraiser. Then he turned to squint up at Ned. “You mean. . we could join the two of them?”

♦ ♦ ♦

Ned snapped a hand to his brow and clicked his heels. “Splendid idea, Captain.”

The H.M.S. Joliba, flying the British colors, was loaded and ready to sail by the fifteenth of November. In a short month, the increasingly lucid explorer, aided by Ned Rise, Fred Frair and Abraham Bolton, had managed to put together a reasonably seaworthy craft, forty feet long by six wide, flat-bottomed and drawing no more than twelve inches of water when fully loaded (Martyn and M’Keal declined to help, reasoning that they’d signed on as military men—”men o’ the sword”—rather than laborers). A rusted spike projected from the front of the Joliba’s bow like a rugbyman’s stiff-arm, and a canopy constructed of bent branches and a double layer of tanned bullock hide stretched half the length of the craft. The canopy would provide shade and shelter, and the hide was impervious to any of the slings and arrows that might come Mungo’s way as he cruised down the mighty Niger into the unknown and almost certainly hostile regions to the east.

In addition, the explorer had taken some offensive measures as well, ordering windows cut at intervals in the bullock hide so that his men could fire from cover if necessary, and providing each of his remaining soldiers with fifteen new Charleville muskets which were to be kept primed, cocked and loaded day and night. This time, Mungo Park would stop for no one — neither Moor nor Maniana, nor any other disagreeable characters he might encounter along the way. No, if the watchword of the first expedition was to turn the other cheek, the motto this time around would be guerra cominciata, inferno scatenato: war commenced, hell unchained.

It was at about this time, when the boat was caulked, battened and provisioned, and the explorer clearing up his affairs at Sansanding, that he had his falling out with Johnson.

♦ YOUR OWN GOOD SENSE ♦

“I don’t like it,” Johnson had said when they reached Sansanding. “You sure you want to go through with this?” he asked as the boat began to take shape. And finally, when the Joliba was ready to set sail, he took the explorer aside and said: “You’re crazy.”

Now, on the eve of their departure, he stepped into Mungo’s tent and announced that he was turning back. “This is it,” he said. “The last time I ever lay eyes on you. No more shit, Mungo. No more Isaaco, no more Mr. Park. This is Johnson speaking — your old friend and companion, your advisor — and I say you ought to reconsider. I say don’t go.”

The explorer was seated at his makeshift desk, a welter of half-written letters, journal extracts and crude maps heaped up around him. Apart from the clutter of the desk, the interior of the tent was arranged with an Essene precision. In the corner, packed and ready, was the knapsack containing the explorer’s personal effects; beside it lay the leather-bound trunks that protected his sextant and thermometers and the sheafs of dried stems, leaves and buds he planned to bring back to England for classification.

All the foodstuffs had been removed and stowed away neatly in the hull of the Joliba, a lingering odor of goat cheese and chicken excrement testimony to their recent removal. Even the floor had been swept clean.

A moment passed — eight hammering heartbeats. Johnson’s hortatory words hung in the air like the memory of something dead, while the explorer, dressed only in his underwear, squinted through the eye of a needle and moistened a strand of thread with the tip of his tongue. He never even looked up.

“I mean it, brother,” Johnson said. “I’m takin’ Serenummo and Dosita and the two Dembas and headin’ for Dindikoo — tomorrow. If you got any sense at all — and by now I’m pretty well convinced you don’t — you’ll come with me.”

Mungo was trying to close up a six-inch tear in the seat of his nankeen trousers, but his hands shook so he couldn’t seem to thread the needle. This was frustrating. It was bad enough that he had to run around and get the boat loaded and the men ready, not knowing whether he was going off to triumph or defeat, but this damned sewing took the cake. He flung the needle down in disgust and glared up at Johnson. “Listen,” he said, his voice thick and harsh, “don’t you come around here trying to pressure me at the last minute because it’s just not going to work. You’ve been a naysayer all along, and I’ll tell you, I don’t need it. Just get your things together and climb into that boat. Period. End of discussion.”

Johnson was slowly shaking his head. He looked a great deal older than he had just a few months earlier at Dindikoo, more worn and frayed. He’d lost one of his chins, and the great bulge of his abdomen seemed to have receded. With his hair getting progressively whiter and his limbs stiff, he’d begun to look like the sixty-two-year-old he was. “You don’t need me,” he said, “you got Amadi Fatoumi.”

It was true. Johnson had never been farther east than Sansanding, and knew absolutely nothing of the geography, the peoples or the languages of the lower Niger. And Mungo had engaged a new guide — an itinerant merchant named Amadi Fatoumi, who’d been as far as Kong, Badoo, Gotto and Cape Coast Castle to the south, and Timbuctoo, Hausa, Maniana and Bornou eastward. But still, the idea of going on without Johnson was insupportable. It chilled Mungo to the bone, frightened him to the soles of his feet. Without Johnson he was totally on his own. “All right,” he said, pushing himself up from the table. “I’ll triple your wages, send you crateloads of books, paintings — anything you want.”

“No,” Johnson said, still shaking his head in that weary, resigned way. “You’ll never send me anythin’, Mungo. Because if you launch that boat tomorrow you’ll never live to see England again.”

“Bullshit!” Mungo shouted, hammering his fist against the tent-pole until the canvas began to quake and billow.

“Turn back,” Johnson whispered. “For me. For your wife and your children. Turn back now before it’s too late.”

The explorer was stalking up and down in his underwear, flailing his arms like some great waterbird lifting itself from the swamp. “You know I can’t do that, old boy.” He was trying to control his voice. “I’ve spent a fortune — all government money— and I’ve lost nine out of ten men that came with me. Georgie Scott is dead, and Zander. And you expect me to tuck my tail between my legs and turn back now? How would I face Sir Joseph? Camden? Even Ailie? No: it’s impossible. I’ve got to go on.”

“Hey,” Johnson’s voice was soft, still soft, as if he were whispering to Amuta in the night, “stuff your ego, swallow your pride. You made a mistake, let’s face it. You dragged all these sick dogs and all this excess baggage out here with you in the middle of the monsoon — what do you expect? Go back. Go back now and mount another expedition. You’re a young man. You can do it.”

Self-doubt was something new to Mungo, something that had crept up on him like a growth, a malignancy, during the course of this second expedition. Self-doubt, and guilt. Every word out of Johnson’s mouth struck him with all the force of his own convictions, every word jabbed him like a needle. But he was stubborn. He threw his head back. “I leave at dawn.”

“I won’t be there,” Johnson said. It was a simple statement of fact. He held the explorer’s eyes as he reached into his toga and produced a silver-plated pistol: sleek and long-nosed, it was engraved with the initials of the only man he’d ever killed, an Englishman like this one, with his fair hair and red face. “Take it,” he said, his voice rumbling so low as to be barely audible. “It’s brought me luck.”

Lit by a late-afternoon shaft of light, the gun flashed in the explorer’s hand as if it were charged, as if it were some magical instrument capable of hurling thunderbolts and spewing brimstone. He tucked it in his belt, confused, searching out his words. “Johnson,” he began, “you mean there’s nothing I— “

The older man cut him off. “Watch out for Amadi Fatoumi,” he said. “I don’t like him. I don’t like what I hear about him.”

In these last days of uncertainty and apprehension, the explorer had become as volatile as a case of Scots whisky. A moment ago he’d been moved; now, at the mention of Amadi’s name, a hot sudden rage grabbed hold of him and shook him till he trembled. “What do you mean?” he demanded. “Because he isn’t fat and old he’s no good? Because he doesn’t wear a gold straight pin through his nose he can’t be trusted?”

Johnson merely looked into his eyes, cold and steady. What he meant was that Amadi Fatoumi was about as trustworthy as a cobra with a toothache, and that Mungo was no judge of character. Fatoumi was a merchant all right — he sold guns and drugs and West Indian rum to the tribes in the interior and brought back slaves in return. He was a Mandingo — from Kasson — but his head was shaved to the skin and he wore an oily black beard that fanned out to his shoulders after the Moorish fashion. There was an unfathomable blackness to his eyes — pupil and iris nearly indistinguishable — and he had a habit of rubbing his hands and ducking his head as he spoke.

He’d turned up one afternoon with Martyn and M’Keal. They’d found him in the marketplace — or rather he’d found them. They were drunk, as usual, on sooloo beer and a clear hard liquor distilled from tomberong berries and known to the natives as fou, when he sidled up to them with a grin. Amadi had about twenty-five words of English — words like fouter and kill and whore—and he regaled lieutenant and sergeant with them for half an hour, playing the fool, until he escorted them down a back alley, provided them with the services of two pliant females and a ball of black hashish. “Captain, Sir,” Martyn had said to the explorer some hours later, “this is a capital fellow.” Amadi stood between the drooping Martyn and the wild-eyed M’Keal, in sandals and jubbah. He took the explorer’s hand and pumped it. “Please to see you,” he murmured. Half an hour later he was signed on with the expedition at triple wages and the promise of one quarter of the stores remaining on reaching Hausaland.

It was obvious to Johnson that the man was a backstabber and a cheat, quite possibly a murderer, and certainly a consort of the Moors. But no matter what he said, the explorer dismissed it. “You’re jealous, that’s all,” Mungo said, “because Amadi Fatoumi’s half your age and he knows twice as much. He can speak Maniana, Hausa, Tuareg and Arabic, and he’s been to Timbuctoo and back.”

Now, at the eleventh hour, the red-faced explorer trembling before him as if he were ready to grapple to the death, Johnson felt it useless to press his case, useless to point out that his informants had told him that Amadi had been raised as a slave of the Il Braken tribe, had stabbed a man over a game of quoits and had cheated three quarters of the merchants in Sansanding. No, Mungo was half-sick with guilt and fear and uncertainty, and he clung to Amadi Fatoumi and his putative knowledge as he might have clung to a lifebuoy in a rough sea. There was no sense in arguing: Johnson could only plead. “Don’t go,” he said.

Mungo looked as if he were on the verge of a seizure. “Why the bloody hell not?” he roared.

Johnson took his arm, but Mungo jerked away and turned his back. “All right,” Johnson said. “Don’t go because I care about your pigheaded bones, don’t go because you won’t come back. Remember Eboe?”

Mungo whirled round as if he’d been stung. There was a look of pain and bewilderment on his face, a look of terror.

“Remember?” Johnson repeated. “And how about that old blind lady — the one at Silla — the one that sniffed the white man’s smell of you and took hold of your hair? You remember what she said?”

He remembered. Johnson could see it in his face. The old woman had paused and turned her dead eyes to him, muttering the name of a far-off place, a name that hung on her lips like the secret name of the devil, a strange barbaric incantatory name: Boussa. Beware of Boussa, she’d croaked. Beware.

Mungo’s face drained. For a long while he stood there facing Johnson, his arms raised, as if he were fighting some sort of ritual duel with him. Finally his lips began to move, in silence, as if he were praying.

“Don’t go,” Johnson repeated, and the spell was broken. Mungo’s face contorted, ugly as a mask. Quick and violent, he took hold of Johnson’s toga, bunching it under his chin and forcing his head back. “Traitor!” he shouted. “Filth, scum. You’re the one who’s evil, you’re the one who’s out to undermine me — not Amadi Fatoumi.” Then, with a single explosive thrust of his arm, he shoved the older man down in the dirt. “Get out!” he screamed, his voice broken with rage. “Get out, nigger!”

Johnson’s face showed nothing. He pushed himself up, brushed off his toga, and stepped out of Mungo Park’s life. Forever.

♦ BON VOYAGE ♦

Somewhere a cock is crowing and a muezzin yodeling out the morning prayers. There is the scrape and shuffle of sandals outside the tent as townswomen bend to collect dung for their breakfast fires, and from the wild tangle of bush at river’s edge, birdsong. Already, with the first light, a fierce parching heat has set in, and the tumescent air pours over the explorer as if it were slag. Wearily, with a puff of resignation, he rises from his sweaty blankets and head-splitting dreams to stagger outside and micturate against a wall of baked clay. Overnight the weather has changed, the seasons turned: just after midnight the wind shifted to the north and the harmattan began to hiss in off the great desert, bringing with it a feeling of enervation and depression that settles over him like a lead blanket. Standing there, half-awake, pud in hand, he feels washed out and hungover, though he hasn’t touched a drop in weeks.

The dark stain blossoms against the pale wall, now a winged dragon, now the head of a stag, and he is staring down at it in dull fascination when he suddenly becomes aware of a presence at his back, the muted sounds of foot shuffling and throat clearing. Turning his head with the slow abstraction of a sleepwalker, he discovers that the remnant of his army is lined up behind him, in rough formation, their tattered uniforms glowing in the pale light. Martyn and M’Keal, Ned Rise, Fred Frair and Abraham Bolton. Their bags are at their feet, muskets in hand. Behind them, Amadi Fatoumi and his three villainous-looking slaves, dressed in jubbah and tagilmust, like Moors. Looking over his shoulder he sees that all nine men are staring at him, silent, respectful, as if peeing against a wall in his underwear were comparable to consecrating the host or changing water to wine.

“Captain, Sir,” Martyn barks, breaking the silence. “The crew of the Joliba, reporting for duty as ordered.”

Of course. This is the morning of their departure, the morning they cast their fate to the wind — or rather the water. Yes, in the moment of waking it nearly slipped his mind, the air so heavy and oppressive, a touch of the fever creeping up on him again: yes, of course. The great adventure begins anew!

“All right, Leftenant,” Mungo croaks, tucking himself in and swinging round on his men. “Break down this tent, stow away my gear and prepare to shove off.” Woozy on his feet and bleary of eye, he scans the frightened, hopeful faces of the men and wants to tell them it’ll be all right, that the Niger doesn’t dry up in the middle of the desert or end in Lake Chad, that from here on in it’s smooth sailing. But he can’t. Because for all his hopes and prayers, suppositions and gut feelings, he can’t be sure that he isn’t leading them to a watery death in the godforsaken omphalos of a godforsaken continent. All he can add, by way of inspiration and comfort is a supererogatory order: “And be quick about it.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Unbeknownst to explorer, guide or crew, the hills outside Sansanding are at that very moment thundering with the sound of hoofbeats: the harmattan wind is not the only thing rumbling down out of the north. No: Dassoud, Scourge of the Sahel, is on his way into town with twelve hundred wild-eyed horsemen burning to engage the white men’s army. His intention is to hack the Nazarini to pieces — no matter how many they are or how well armed — and to impale Mungo Park’s head on the tip of his spear as an offering to his lady, Fatima of Jafnoo.

Dassoud, it will be observed, is some two and a half months behind schedule with his current campaign. He had planned to annihilate the explorer before the month of September was out, but during the long dilatory days of late September, October and early November, he came to discover that he was not quite the scourge he thought himself to be. The root of his troubles lay in internecine squabbling between the various tribes under his leadership. Though fanned to frenzy by the explorer’s letter and the intentions expressed in it, they were nonetheless reluctant to unite under Dassoud’s banner — or anyone’s for that matter. It was as simple as this: the timing was bad.

First, a blood feud had erupted between the Trasart and the Al-Mu’ta of Jafnoo. Mubarak of the Trasart had executed three of Boo Khaloom’s serfs for poaching at one of his wells; in retaliation, Boo Khaloom himself stole into the Trasart camp, pissed in Mubarak’s porridge and made off with his prize charger, which he held for ransom. After the ransom was paid in full, Boo Khaloom sent the horse back — in eight pieces, each neatly bundled in goat hide. Meanwhile, Mahmud Bari of the Il Braken had forgotten his chastising at the hands of Dassoud, and refused to participate in the jihad against the Nazarini unless he himself were to lead it. Exasperated, Dassoud was forced to waste two precious weeks in riding out to Gedumah, splitting Mahmud Bari open like a sausage and quelling the incipient rebellion. And then, as if this weren’t enough, the Foulahs chose that precise moment for a sneak attack on Jafnoo.

Dassoud had met each of these challenges in his own fierce and summary way, but in the process he had lost valuable time. Each distraction maddened him to the point of frenzy as it deflected him from his goal. Each annoyance — whether it was the obligation to turn aside and slaughter three hundred Foulah men, women and children or the fact that his goat was overcooked and his kouskous mushy — so enraged him he felt his skull would burst, and he chalked up another strike against the explorer. To eradicate the Nazarini became a seething obsession, an obsession that broiled his soul day and night with a fire that burned all the hotter for each obstacle thrown in his way. But now, after two and a half months of maddening delays, Dassoud was on his way, roaring through the streets of Sansanding like a demon possessed.

♦ ♦ ♦

There are coots on the water, and spur-winged plover. The surface heaves and boils with the last furious runoff from the monsoon, and a few attenuated native dugouts glide like the wind through lingering patches of morning fog. “Is everybody in?” Mungo shouts, feeling like a boy on the Yarrow, as he and Ned Rise wade into the current, their shoulders flush with the hull of the H.M.S. Joliba. And then, merry as a bridegroom proposing a toast, he breaks a calabash of fou over the prow and gives the order to shove off.

Martyn, looking twice his nineteen years with his beard and drink-debauched eyes, is at the tiller; the rest, including Amadi Fatoumi and his three retainers, are lounging about, their paddles in a casual heap. With the river in flood, propulsion should be no problem: heavily laden though it is, the Joliba bobs like a twig and maneuvers like a sailor’s dream.

Ned Rise hops nimbly aboard as the current catches the elongated craft and swings it round, but Mungo lingers a moment, officious, the water to his chest, steadying the boat after it is no longer necessary. It is at that moment that the first gunshot echoes over the water. Startled and confused, the explorer looks first at Martyn — the lieutenant’s mouth is hanging open, gaping as if to swallow an orange or an egg— and then over his shoulder at the dusty roadway leading down to the river’s edge. The sight rivets him like a nightmare come to life. Bearing down on him, weapons held aloft, jubbahs flapping, is a countless host of Moors, their sweat-slicked horses pounding over the earth in furious stampede.

None of this has been lost on the others. Whereas a moment previous they’d been lounging about like hemophiliac princes, they are suddenly up and working furiously at the paddles, as the explorer, feet streaming in the wake, clambers aboard. Inspired by the grim prospect of their own imminent demise, the men have burst into swift, concentrated action — even the whiskery M’Keal, slick Fatoumi and frail Frair stroking away as if they were trying out for the Oxford crew. Mungo has suddenly caught fire too. Unable to locate a paddle in the confusion, he crouches low to the water and begins churning at it with his cupped hands, as if he were trying to part the waves or dig a watery burrow. “Heave!” Ned shouts beside him, and the Joliba begins to pick up speed.

They are less than a hundred yards out when the first Moor hits the water, a big fellow in black, lashing at his charger’s muzzle and shrieking obscenities in Arabic. Within seconds the water is alive with Moors, hundreds of them, firing the odd musket, flinging spears and yabbering their war cry. Mungo, splashing wildly, risks a look over his shoulder at his arch enemies, their horses swimming like seals, their eyes on fire and nostrils dilated with the scent of blood, weapons flashing red in the rich meaty light of dawn. And then suddenly the strength goes out of his arms. The nearest Moor — sixty yards off, his horse nearly exploding with exertion — he knows him. He knows the blocky shoulders straining at the seams of the jubbah, he knows those eyes, that scar, that maniacal leering mask of hatred. .

Dassoud’s pistol is extended, his horse flailing, the Joliba drawing away. Desperately, the Moor sights down the gun barrel and fires, one more puff of smoke in the confusion of whirling jubbahs, clattering spears, shouts and billows of dust rising from the shore behind him. The smoke and dust are so thick and the noise so all-enveloping that the explorer can’t be sure whether the Moor has fired or not, until all at once there is something warm and wet on his arm and a weight forcing itself down on him. Whirling round, he looks up into the stricken face of Abraham Bolton, who had been making his way to him with the missing paddle. Now, his right eye shot away, the private lurches over him, wagging the paddle in mid-air and fighting for balance. Mungo’s reaction is instinctive: he ducks his shoulder, and Bolton, poor sot, tumbles past him and into the river like a sack of stones dropped from a bridge.

When Mungo looks up again he’s staring into Dassoud’s eyes across an ever-narrowing stretch of water, the Moor gaining, so close now his charger’s agonized gasps tear at the explorer’s lungs until he can barely catch his breath. Vaguely — as if in a dream — Mungo reaches for Bolton’s paddle, but the Moor’s eyes lock on him like grappling hooks and he can feel the walls of his throat constricting, all he can do to keep from bursting into tears at the unfairness of it all. Mesmerized, he cannot think of the ninety loaded muskets beneath the canopy or the silver-plated pistol tucked inside his shirt. He can only think of failure, ignominy and death.

But then Ned Rise’s voice sweeps up out of the din, muscular and hortatory—”Pull boys! Pull!”—and the tableau begins to dissolve. Dassoud drops back and the Joliba is suddenly rushing with the current, far out into the cleansing river, far from the blood and terror and the grim grasping fingers of captivity, far out onto the broad back of the Niger. Transfixed, Mungo kneels there like a supplicant, unable to move or think, as he watches his bitterest enemy recede in the distance until the black spot of his head is lost in the pulse of the waters.

♦ AND QUIET FLOWS THE NIGER ♦

It is like descending into the body, this penetration of the river, like passing through veins and arteries and great dripping organs, like exploring the chambers of the heart or reaching out for the impalpable soul. Earth, forest, sky, water: the river thrums with the beat of life. Mungo feels it — as steady and pervasive as the ticking of a supernal clock — feels it through the searing windless days and the utter nights that fall back to the rim of the void. Ned Rise feels it, and even M’Keal. A presence. A mystery. A sense of communing with the eternal that drops a pall over everything, silencing the long-necked birds, the river horses, cicadas, crocodiles, coots, kingfishers and snipe, the great silver fish that leap clear of the water and fall back again without a splash. It is almost as if they’ve fallen under a spell, the explorer and his men, as if their blood were flowing in sympathetic confluence with the river and the river washing them clean of all the guilt and horror and hardship of the overland journey. Persuasive, gentle, the current pulls them through those first hushed weeks with a force and logic all its own.

But then the crew wake one morning under a sky like dried blood and it is as if their ears have been newly opened. Sounds boom at them, unbearable, from the squeak of the tiller to the rattle of the bullock hides in the cruel hot wind that seems to have snuck up on them during the night. Great Nubian and griffon vultures wheel overhead, and the men can hear the flutter of the wings. Hippos snort like blaring cannon and crocodiles bark like dogs. Suddenly the whole universe is shouting at them.

Mungo rolls out of his damp blankets, wincing at the roar, and is shocked to see that they are no longer gliding through the endless tangled groves of arching trees and clawing vines that have walled in both banks of the river since they left Sansanding. Stunned, he looks round him full circle, then pulls out his telescope and looks again. There is no hint of green over the water, no vegetation, no shoreline in fact. Then it hits him: during the night they must have passed into Lake Dibbie, that vast inland sea reputed to lie between Djenné and Kabara. He gazes out over the shifting surface, happy in his surmise. Immense, shoreless, the lake slaps at the hull beneath his feet, its waters churned to brown sudsing waves in the hot wind.

The explorer consults his compass. They are heading north by northeast. Toward Timbuctoo — and the great desert. He swallows hard, hoping that what old Djanna-geo and Amadi told him is true, that thereafter the river loops toward the south. But he looks down at the insistent needle of his compass, and doubts assail him. Could Rennell and the others have been right? Does the river in fact run out of steam in the Sahara? Does it roar down an endless hole in the earth? Evaporate in Lake Chad?

Disturbed by these reflections, Mungo makes his way toward the front of the canoe, where Amadi Fatoumi and his retainers are seated. The four men are hunched down over their ankles, feet splayed, tossing bits of carved bone against the concave hull of the canoe and redistributing piles of cowries according to the outcome. As the explorer comes up, Amadi ceremoniously pours a thin stream of black tea into a cup the size of a thimble and hands it to him with a nod and a smile.

“So,” Mungo says, swaying with the boat, “we’ve made Dibbie, have we?” Hunched in the prow, Fred Frair fixes him with a brief vacant look and then gazes dolefully out over the water. Amadi looks up at the explorer as if he hasn’t heard.

“I say: Dibbie, isn’t it?” All at once the explorer realizes he’s shouting. He can’t help himself, what with all this noise. There is the maddening tinkle of spoon and plate somewhere in the rear of the boat, M’Keal’s drunken snores booming out from beneath the canopy, the screech of distant gulls, hum of gnats — all of it as loud as if it had been amphfied a hundred times. Exasperated, he bends to his guide. “What is all this bloody racket?”

Amadi looks surprised. He points to the sky. “The wind,” he says. “Very dry.” In answer to the explorer’s next question — a rhetorical one: does the Niger move southward past Timbuctoo and is he quite certain? — the guide merely points again, but this time to a spot just off starboard.

It must be said that the attack at Sansanding — led as it was by his archenemy — has had an unsettling influence on the explorer. He’s been jittery, his stomach has gone sour on him, a mysterious nervous rash has settled in his groin and between his toes. Like the hypochondriac who discovers a tumor under his arm with a surge of fatalistic joy, he has had his worst suspicions confirmed: they are out there, lurking behind every tree, camouflaged by the meanest village hut, out there lying in wait, just as he always knew they would be. And so, more than ever and with a single-mindedness that verges on monomania, he has determined to avoid any and all human contact. Against the protestations of his crew, he eschewed the cities of Silla and Djenné as if they were the abode of demons and basilisks, coming to anchor just above the farthest cluster of outlying huts and coasting down under cover of darkness. The men wanted to stop for fresh supplies — milk, produce, bread — but he wouldn’t hear of it. No: he wouldn’t stop at even the rudest native village hacked out of the bush, wouldn’t stop for beer, fresh meat, to feel solid ground under his feet for five precious minutes. He wouldn’t stop for anything.

Now, the sight of this spot on the horizon, this black speck, this nothing, fills him with terror. Out here in the middle of this oceanic lake, it can mean only one thing: people. Renegades, fanatics, murdering Moors. His first cry is stifled by the shock and disavowal that catches in his throat like a ball of phlegm. But then he shouts out like a sentry taken by surprise in a cold black night: “Attack! We’re under attack!”

The response is instantaneous. Amadi and his men leap up from their piles of cowries, and Fred Frair, languishing just a moment before, springs to his feet as if someone had spilled a bowl of hot soup in his lap. Martyn is there in an instant, and M’Keal, in boots and underwear, is up and cursing. “Moors!” Mungo cries, raising the telescope to his eye at the very moment that Fred Frair, galvanized by the first terrible call to arms, shoots past him howling like a dog. The result, viewed in scientific terms, is as simple as action and reaction, force and counterforce: the explorer’s elbow is jostled and the telescope flies from his hand to vanish instantly in the brown murk at his feet.

No matter. It doesn’t require magnification to see that that blemish on the horizon is a party of hostile Moors. The men, their faces flat with panic, are ready to take their leader at his word. Martyn and M’Keal are already counting out the muskets — twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five — while Frair scuttles back and forth from the enclosure with barrels of powder, ramrods and wadding in the event that reloading should be necessary. Only Ned Rise, at the tiller, seems composed. With sextant and compass, and the makeshift sail he’d rigged up during the night, he steadies the Joliba in the slackening current, running for Timbuctoo, Hausa and beyond, running for London.

The explorer, meanwhile, has gone rigid, poised in the bow like a prize pointer. Dripping sweat, squinting till his facial muscles begin to quiver, he stares off at the horizon as if he could set it afire from the sheer force of ocular concentration. A long moment ticks by, then another. And then, in a sudden dark moment of revelation, he realizes that a fearful conjugation is taking place out there on the perimeter: not one dot but three! Three slick and swift native canoes packed to the waterline with bloodthirsty Moors!

“Three of them,” Martyn says at his shoulder, and his voice is cold as a lancet. Yes. Bloodthirsty Moors. Savages. Animals. He can see them now — can’t he? — their headgear flashing in the sun. Suddenly a feeling of calm comes over him, the feeling ascribed to soldiers in the heat of battle. Firm and fatalistic, he lifts the musket to his shoulder and sights down the tapering barrel. “Prepare to fire,” he hisses.

Twenty minutes he stands there, a drawing-room actor in a tableau vivant. The three canoes, in formation, draw closer, closer, cutting an angle that will inexorably intersect the path of the Joliba. He can see them quite clearly now, their black hulls in relief against the great ball of the sun rising like a tired old beast from the lake behind them. When they drift within range, he gives the order to fire.

The first barrage overturns the lead canoe with a sudden sharp slap. Distant arms flail in the air, there are confused cries, shrieks of pain. Eight muskets fire, are, flung down and replaced by eight more. Another roar, another flash of light, and the second canoe is blasted from the water. What with the sun and the smoke the explorer can barely make them out, but certainly they’re Moors — in jubbahs and baggy trousers — little matter that their faces are black and the cries those of women and children.

After the second barrage, the occupants of the final canoe take to the water, abandoning their craft to its fate. It is then that the crew — Amadi Fatoumi and his blacks included — begin firing at random, blazing away at a featureless head in the glitter of sun on water, cutting loose at the merest suggestion of a swimmer’s wake. In the heat of it, the explorer draws a bead on a dark form clinging to the side of an overturned canoe, only to have his arm arrested as he squeezes the trigger. He whirls round on Ned Rise. Guns pop and roar, smoke hangs over the Joliba like a thunderhead touching down. “Tell them to hold their fire,” Ned shouts, “it’s a mistake — can’t you see that?”

It is as if Mungo has been wakened from a dream. He drops the musket and looks up and down the line of men, shocked by the transformation in their faces. Even Frair, feeble though he is, looks like some sort of ravening beast, every muscle strung tight, his mouth twisted and teeth bared. Amadi’s eyes are glazed and the tip of his tongue protrudes from the corner of his mouth, while his slaves are rapt as bumpkins at a shooting gallery. And the career men — Martyn and M’Keal — are in their glory. This is what they were born to, trained for, this is the moment for which they keep their bayonets honed and muskets oiled. Faces blackened with smoke, they take aim, fire, and snatch up the next weapon in a single fluid motion, merciless and implacable as machines. In his distraction, the explorer follows the line of Martyn’s rifle over the chop and past the foundering canoes, to where a woman’s head shows above the surface. A woman? — no, it can’t be. But it can, and is. A woman, her jubbah billowing around her, copper earrings catching the sun, a woman struggling to tread water and keep an infant afloat at the same time. “Cease fire!” Mungo shouts. “Desist!”

But the command goes unheeded. For the next fifteen minutes Dibbie rings with excited shouts and the frenzied popping of gunfire till the canoes are splintered, the muskets emptied and the atmosphere is still but for the wash of the waves, the hell’s breath of the wind and the slowly diffusing pools of gore that well up to darken the dull sudsing surface.

♦ ♦ ♦

Two days later, having left the vacant immensity of the lake and returned to the main channel of the river, the crew of the Joliba is witness to a very foolish act on the part of Fred Frair. Suffering from a multiplicity of unspecified ailments, suppurating infections and mysterious tropical diseases, Frair has been languishing for the past several days, dispirited and dull, his wasted form pressed flat to the hull as if at any moment he might subside into the slick dark wood like some sort of insect. No one likes to see him there, but what can they do? M’Keal, the old veteran, white beard against a plum-red face, sits watching him by the hour, now and again offering him a slug of rum or palm wine as a cure for what ails him. Martyn, having watched forty companions kick off already, is unconcerned. He squats beneath the canopy, cleaning the muskets, reloading them, whistling. Ned never cared much for the little man anyway — he was a pal of Smirke’s — and is too busy keeping an eye on the explorer, the compass, maps and tiller to worry about it in any case. And Mungo, brooding over the prospect of failure and the nasty character and habits of the Sahelian Moor, has no time for any of them. Still, no one wishes Frair any harm — they’d love to see him pull through. After all, if he goes, who’s next?

On this particular afternoon — sometime in mid-December of 1805—they are drifting with the current down a broad flat stretch of water under an incinerating equatorial sun, birds loud in the trees, insects in their ears, their eyes, their nostrils, when suddenly Frair sits up and begins shrieking like a drunk in delirium tremens. He can take it no more, he shouts. The heat, the fever, the stink of death. Amadi and his men look away. M’Keal bends over the thrashing private and tries to quiet him. But to no avail.

Of all the horrors he’s experienced, in prison, at Goree, along the road, and all the diseases that gnaw away at him, what has finally pushed Frair over the line is an infestation of guinea worm, Dracunculus medinensis. Painful, nauseating, but normally no big deal. The explorer himself is currently suffering through his second infection, and Martyn worked one out of his leg two weeks earlier. But to Frair, the thought of this blind living thing — this worm — thriving inside him, eating away at his flesh, crapping and pissing in his blood, is insupportable.

The previous day a blister had broken in the hollow of his left knee and the explorer, after bracing him with a killing dose of fou, cleaned the wound and treated it. Within the moist bud of the sore, pale as the flesh of a man’s belly, was the nether end of a female guinea worm, doing what nature expected of her: swelling, breeding, releasing millions of minuscule larvae with the amniotic wash of pus. Mungo carefully took hold of the visible portion of the parasite and wound a bit of it round a twig; then he bent to wash his hands in the river. And that was that: he’d done all he could to ease Frair’s predicament. He could neither remove the worm, nor eliminate it. Two to four feet in length, it was embedded deep in the connective tissue of Frair’s lower leg, wound tight as thread on a spool. Slowly, day by day, the worm had to be withdrawn by reeling it up on the twig, an inch or two at a time. If it were to break off and die in the leg, it would rot there, inextractable, and Frair would die of gangrene.

In his misery, in his loathing, in his horror, the foolish thing that Frair does is to tear back the little finger of wood fixed to his knee, thereby severing the worm. For a moment, no one reacts, and the din that has assailed them since Lake Dibbie screams through the silence. Then M’Keal whistles — sharp and sudden, as if he were calling a dog or exclaiming over the size of a fish — and one of Amadi’s men spits into his hands for luck. Mungo, drawn by Frair’s outburst, merely stands over him, watching the open sore glisten like a mouth. Then he shakes his head and turns his back.

There is of course no question of stopping to bury him. On Christmas Day (or thereabout: the explorer has lost track of the exact date in the haphazard jumble of his notebooks) Frair, swathed head to toe in a blanket of flies, is declared officially dead. As captain and head of the expedition, Mungo murmurs a few words over the corpse before committing it to the yellow ripples of the Niger, to the tiger fish, the turtles and the crocodiles.

That night, as he consults his watch by moonlight, the explorer finds that it has unaccountably stopped. German-made and set in an initialed silver case, the watch was a gift from Ailie’s father in another age and another lifetime, when the young explorer first packed his bags and set off for the East Indies, a wellspring of hope and ambition. Now, sweeping along on the dark flood, that time seems as remote as the Age of Dinosaurs. He slaps the watch in his palm, holds it up to his ear. Raucous, derisive, the invisible forest howls at him with a thousand voices. Mungo looks up at the sky, at the shifting stars and the planets in their loops, and drops the silent timepiece into the flat black soup of the river.

♦ THE NETHER REGIONS ♦

Days flit past, strung tight as a crossbow through the long sere afternoons, and then released, in the shank of the evening, with a whoosh of falling sun and rising mist. The New Year comes and goes, undocumented, in a blanket of sameness and a stench of decay. Silent and inevitable, the Joliba drifts past deserted villages, sandbars heaped with sunning reptiles, flocks of birds so numerous their plucked feathers could stuff every pillow in Europe. The river is always the same, never the same.

At Kabara, port of Timbuctoo, the explorer makes a miscalculation. He comes to anchor too early, and instead of hanging back to skulk past this most ominous of all obstacles in the dead of night, finds himself drawing even with its congested banks and mobbed water lanes in the broad gaze of mid-morning. His first reaction, as the city draws into sight round a bend in the river, is to fault his eyes. It’s an illusion, that’s all. A phantasm bred of an overtaxed mind, of fever and anxiety. But there it is, undeniable, clustered mudhuts and open warehouses, a spill of canoes clinging to the distant surface like a black film. Suddenly he turns on Amadi and begins berating him in bad Arabic, shrill as a dowager scolding her pug. The guide merely shrugs.

Mungo knows one thing only: that they must avoid Kabara at all costs. Timbuctoo is the nexus of the Moorish trade, the hub that links Sahara, Sahel and Sudan. If they’ll resist him anywhere, they’ll resist him here. He turns his back on Amadi in disgust and orders the men to their paddles, snatching the tiller from Ned Rise and swinging the canoe round 180°. “Dig!” he exhorts through his clenched teeth, and slowly, painfully, the overloaded Joliba begins to crawl upstream. After an hour, however, Kabara is still in sight, the men are sapped, and the canoe, at full steam, can merely hang in the current like an obstruction. M’Keal is the first to see the futility of it. “Cor, Cap’n,” he calls over his shoulder to where the explorer sits at the tiller, “you expects us to ‘old the barge ‘ere till Gabriel blows ‘is trumpet or wot?” The old soldier’s words chuff from his lips: he’s breathing hard, his hands tremble at the paddle, he glows with his own juices like a suckling pig over the spit. Mungo considers a moment, and then, hardening as he had on Lake Dibbie, he pulls the tiller full right and the Joliba swings back round on Kabara. “Prepare to repel any boat that approaches within fifty yards,” he hisses. Bluebeard couldn’t have put it any better.

This time, canoes do come out to intercept them. Long, whippet-like dugouts full of irate Mussulmen, Mussulmen who want to behead and dismember Nazarini for the glory of Allah, to avenge the failure at Sansanding and the slaughter on Dibbie, to reassert their born and sworn right to a trade monopoly and to sorely chastise these whey-faced infidels who have neither asked nor paid for the privilege of traversing their borders. Hopping mad, the Moors fill eighteen canoes with beards, teeth and spears.

What the Moors lack, however, is firepower. Though their canoes, craftily piloted by Somonies and riparian Soorka, fan out to converge on the Joliba from all directions, they are unable to make even the darkest of dark-horse approaches to spearchucking range. Mungo and his boys, each armed with fifteen single-shot muskets, are blazing away like an army, sending a screaming sheet of lead out over the water to strip the flesh from Moorish bones and convert jubbahs to perforated winding sheets. Cursing through their beards, the Moors retire from the field and the Joliba whirls on down the river, uncontested.

♦ ♦ ♦

A week later the explorer observes that while they have passed Timbuctoo, they are still heading north — into the desert. The riverine vegetation, always lush, has begun to thin out a bit, and beyond the trees the hills are sparse and arid, prickling with euphorbia, desert rose and whistling thorn. The heat is profound, appalling, all-consuming. There is no escape from it. Beneath the canopy, as enervated as gutshot survivors of Austerlitz, Martyn and M’Keal play cards, doze, sip fou from a gourd, occasionally snaking out a hand to splash their shirts and faces with tepid river water. Ned Rise has erected a sunscreen over the tiller, and Amadi and his men, stripped to loincloths, squat in the shade of the canopy, rolling their bones and counting up their cowries. There is no thought of swimming. Not when crocodiles — some of them half as long as the boat — line the bank like spectators at a parade, or river horses beat the surface to a froth with a thundering, sucking, splashing display of pique or playfulness or whatever.

The sun rises and sets, time uncharted and undocumented, days strung together until another week is gone and still the river carries them north. There is no more beer or fruit or butter or bread, and the men are grumbling over a diet of salt beef, rice, yams and onions. Mungo looks at his compass forty times a day. He is concerned. So is Ned Rise. Ned questions the explorer, the explorer questions Amadi, Amadi shrugs. The suspense is killing. Not to mention the heat, the boredom, the doomed hopeless stir-craziness of men eternally at sea. This is what Columbus must have felt like, teetering on the rim of the world.

At a place identified by Amadi as Gouroumo, seven canoes dart out in pursuit of them, and the men, stripped down to shorts now like Amadi and his slaves, snap out of their lethargy long enough to pot a few luckless natives and strike terror in the hearts of the rest. Given the sameness of their days, given the boredom, the exercise is almost welcome, it is almost fun. What else have they got to do but lie around and sizzle like so many strips of bacon? Besides, cutting down the odd nigger or two keeps the old reflexes honed, steadies the hand and sharpens the eye against the day when some real trouble crops up. And it’s not as if they were going out of their way to pick a fight or anything. No, these naked cannibals put out after them like crocodiles, just drooling for the chance to pop a white man in the pot. After all the black crow they’ve been eating, it’d probably be like veal or something.

The explorer doesn’t like it. The people who attacked him at Gouroumo were negroes, and he’s got no quarrel with negroes. But they really leave him little choice. Whether they’ve been put up to it by the Moors, or whether they’re rankled because he hasn’t followed protocol with regard to gifts and permissions, he can’t say. All he knows is that they come out on the attack like a prizefighter lurching out of his corner, belligerent and determined, all he knows is that they want to stop him. And once he stops, he’s at their mercy. He can picture them rifling his stores, breathing in his face, punching at his breastbone with their blunt cracked forefingers, all the while chattering away in some muddled troglodytic language that’s like a barnyard flatulence, like pigs wheezing and kine passing wind. They could extort food and weapons, they could rob him, burn his notebooks, hand him over to the Moors. The thought of it throws a switch in his mind, case closed. Negroes will die, but he will not stop, come hell or high water. Repercussions be damned.

Unfortunately, the repercussions come sooner than he might have imagined, and in the form of canoes — sixty of them — just off a place called Gotoijege. It is late in the afternoon, two days after the incident at Gouroumo, and the Joliba is hugging a sheer rock wall that juts out into the river like a crooked elbow. Everything is still, stultified by the heat. The men are drowsing, caloric waves ripple over the rocky promontory, a lone vulture rides the convection currents high overhead. Gradually, like a waterborne leaf or twig, the Joliba works its way around the point and into the open river beyond. It is at this juncture that the explorer has his first intimation that all is not well: there seems to be something out there, obscured in the deep shadow of the promontory. Half a second later, which is to say half a second too late, he gets the picture.

It is a trap.

So many canoes crowd the cove it looks like a logjam. Up ahead, stretched across the river like a Stone Age armada, twenty more canoes hold the current. Hundreds of angry black faces, painted in various configurations of doom. Bulging black arms at the paddles, grids of swollen black vein and flexed muscle, flinty black hands clenched round bows and quivers, the nasty tapered shafts of long-nosed spears. No doubt about it: the word is out. Someone has let these people know that there are white men on the river, strange pale ghostly creatures running amok, creating havoc, murdering tribesmen up and down the shoreline, refusing to pay tolls or tribute or even to prostrate themselves before the high and mighty, the lordly and god-chosen, to plead for permission to pass through tribal lands. White men, begging to be chastised.

Suddenly, with a shout that could bring down all the snowfields in the Alps, the tableau erupts in violence. Where an instant before there had been sun and silence and the slow drowse of the drifting boat, there is now a frenetic seething wash of hostile humanity up and down both banks of the river. The promontory behind them is like a trampled anthill, swarming with stirred-up naked savages yabbering threats and insults and jabbing their pigstickers at the sky. Troops of women have emerged from nowhere, big-boned and bottom-heavy, cutting the air with calliope shrieks and pounding at great booming kettle drums as if they were flailing the hides of hapless explorers. Men and boys — hundreds of them — rush to the water’s edge flinging spears and stones and flaming torches, riddling the ship with poisoned arrows and crude iron knives. At the same time the canoes shoot into action, slipping behind the Joliba as snugly as shadows, big black athletes at the paddles, painted warriors crouching down behind them to hone their spears and limber up their thrusting muscles. And all of them — men, women, children, paddlers, thrusters, bowmen, spearchuckers and chiefs— hooting like butchers on a three-day drunk.

It is awesome. Terrifying. Overwhelming.

Could this be the end? the explorer is thinking, his vital organs curling up like hedgehogs, while Martyn reaches for his musket and Ned Rise rams the tiller hard right to send the canoe angling out from the spit. Arrows hit the canopy with a thunk-thunk-thunk, a rock cuts Martyn’s cheek. They are staring into the faces of five hundred enraged savages, and another two hundred are hurtling toward them in quick low-slung canoes. They’ve been caught with their pants down, and it looks bad, looks as if they’re whipped before they started.

But then things begin to fall into place: Ned gives them some breathing room, the sweet stink of the gunpowder fires their nostrils and before you know it they’re rising to the occasion. Snatching up their weapons like the true-blue stout-hearted fighting men they are, saturated to the very clefts of their chins with true grit, blazing away like champions, like murderers. Once the boat is out of arrow range, it is easy. A shooting party. Potting ducks in the Cotswolds. They fire on their adversaries with a modulated rage, with the no-quarter-given, absolutely merciless absorption that possessed them on Lake Dibbie; they fire until the flotilla is destroyed, and then turn on the fine of dugouts blocking their path downriver.

The blacks hold their ground. A hundred yards out, Ned swings the Joliba broadside and the men line up like a firing squad — Mungo, Amadi and the slaves on one end, Martyn, M’Keal and Ned on the other — and pour volley after volley into the dark line ahead of them as they drift down to meet it. One of their antagonists, in ostrich plumes and coral, looks to be a chief or a king maybe. He stands firm in the bow of the foremost canoe, a scepter clenched in one hand, the other solemnly raised in a commanding gesture, a gesture that says lay down your weapons and give up hope, lay down your weapons and surrender in the face of royal omnipotence and superior numbers. When Martyn knocks him flat with a single shot, it seems to take the heart out of the opposition. A moment later Ned brings the Joliba round again, rams the final canoe barring their way, and that’s that. Child’s play.

The only casualty is M’Keal. In the heat of the action, someone fired a musket at him — yes, a musket. A Moor, it looked like, seated in the prow of one of the pirogues—”a big sucker, in black.” The ball excised the upper portion of his left ear and trimmed back his hoary locks an inch or two. A minor wound, by all accounts. But when he was hit, something snapped. He went berserk. Frothed like a rabid dog, wrote a new book of racial epithets, stamped and stammered and shook his fist. Then, muttering all the while, he began to fling things at the astonished black faces across the water. First he flung muskets, six or eight of them, then a keg of powder. The battle raged round him: no one noticed. He heaved a sack of rice overboard, a regimental sword, the sextant. The bloody aborigine buggers, he’d show them. Next to go was a box of ammunition, and then the explorer’s duffel bag: compass, notebooks, half-finished letters to Ailie and all. Cursing, growling, beating his breast, the red-faced old soldier chucked over his shoes, his underwear, his Panama hat, the teapot, a barrel of salt beef and a crate of rotting yams. By the time the danger was past and they were able to subdue him, the stringy old veteran of the West Indian campaign had lightened their load by half, and put an end to any further plotting of latitude and longitude or worries about alignment with magnetic poles.

It hardly seemed to matter.

♦ ♦ ♦

Without chronometer, without compass, without sextant, the geographical missionaries of the H.M.S. Joliba look at the sun and know it is noon, forever, and that they are heading north, into the desert, into the glare, into the very maw of mystery. Their hair, thick with grease and dust, trails down their shoulders, their beards reach their waists. The proud red uniforms have long since degenerated to tatters — to loincloths — and the once-glistening boots have fallen to pieces. Unwashed, undisciplined, underfed, thin of rib and cloudy of eye, their skin blotched and sunscorched, their bare feet blistered, they could be the last remnant of some ancient tribe emigrating to a new homeland, they could be cave dwellers, scavengers, eaters of offal and raw flesh. Only Amadi and his three slaves are unchanged. Alert and watchful, they sit beneath their broad-brimmed hats and throw their carved bones. They are not men of the nineteenth century, they are men of the millennia, men whose gait and gaze and quick clever hands prefigure Europe and all of written history. They know the river will bend. They know that maps and trousers and salt beef are irrelevant, and that white men are fools. They are patient. They are content. Their eyes are open.

Meanwhile, the big black canoe drifts with the current. By day there is the blinding flash of sun on water, the whole earth set ablaze, white-hot, the hills consumed in flame. At night the banks reverberate with ghostly echoes — muffled snarls, startled cries, the eerie gloating snigger of hyenas — and the water boils with heart-stopping explosions as of strange gargantuan beasts cavorting in the deeps or stretching their great horny tails across the river to trap the unwary.

One night, under a moon so brilliant it varnishes the surface of the river and throws a cool dispersed glimmer over trees and shrubs and broken tumbles of rock, they are awakened by a sudden shattering burst of shrieks and growls somewhere up ahead. Primordial, cacophonous, chilling, it is the sound of pack frenzy, of snarling snapping furious jaws, the sound of wolves fighting over scraps of meat. But not only that: there is the hint of something else too, something far more excruciating. As they draw closer, they begin to realize what it is: human voices crying out over the clamor.

Everyone is awake now — even M’Keal — staring off into the darkness transfixed with horror. The sounds of tearing flesh, bones cracking, the garbled cries for help: they flay the nerves like salt and nettles, unbearable, as inadmissible as the image of one’s own death and mutilation. Ned turns away, the explorer’s stomach churns. They can see nothing. A terrible minute passes, then another, the night enveloped in demonic snarls and torn gasping sobs, as if somehow, poor sinners, they’d passed the invisible barrier and descended the long swirling tributaries of Acheron and Lethe. Suddenly one of the men cries out: “There! On the right bank, just ahead!”

The moon shifts, everything indefinite and insubstantial, there and not there. Then the shadows begin to take on motion and life and the snarling swells to a raging crescendo that ebbs in a single breath and a sudden explosion of light: a torch flaring out against the darkness. Flickering and unsteady, it illuminates the black humped forms of a hundred frothing, toothy demons: hyenas. Claws and shoulders and raging black mouths, hyenas, kid killers, graverobbers, choking on their own spittle. Against them, a single man — a traveling merchant perhaps — backing away from the gutted carcass of his camel, flailing the torch like an archangel’s sword, while a woman and child cower at his back, caught up in a bad dream.

Hunched low, the graverobbers close in, foaming at the carcass like fish after chum, snapping down glistening gray loops of intestine, jockeying for position, while others lumber in out of the shadows, their eyes bright with greed and a hunger no amount of feeding can satisfy. The man backs off, circling, while the woman, clutching the child as if it were already in pieces, feints with a length of firewood. For a moment, the contest looks even. But then in a sudden unforgiving instant, the torch dies out and the seething wave of muzzle and mane closes over them, their torn shrieks already lost in the rising volume of contentious growls and the percussive clash of jaws.

The Joliba sails on, amidst the gnashing of teeth and the crunch of bone, heading north, into the nether regions.

♦ THE BEAST WITH TWO BACKS ♦

The Reverend MacNibbit’s voice is disembodied, a deep, sure, mellifluous presence suffusing the clerestory with power and promise, with a prick of foreboding and a balm of reassurance. “And yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” he rumbles, shaking his great shaggy head and wagging his jowls, an admonitory tremolo creeping into his voice to underscore just how black and hopeless things can be. . but Ailie isn’t listening. Nor watching. Her head is bowed, as if in prayer, but her thoughts are elsewhere. Specifically, they are on Georgie Gleg — and the trip, the jaunt, the adventure she’s about to embark on. This very afternoon. The preparations have been made, her bags are packed. She can think of nothing else.

Georgie had invited her to accompany him on a six-week tour of the Highlands, through Fife, Angus, Aberdeen, Banff and Moray, culminating in a week’s stay at Avis House in Drumnadrochit, within sight of Urquhart Castle and one of the great deep churning lochs every schoolgirl knew so well in song and legend, the grandest loch of them all. Loch Ness. Avis House was the ancestral home of the Highland Glegs, currently tenanted by Georgie’s second cousin, Fiona Gleg, a spinster in her early fifties. During her recent stay in Edinburgh, Georgie had treated her for peripractitis and gout, and to show her gratitude she’d invited him to pay her a visit and “ken the glories o’the grand old loch.” Georgie immediately thought of Ailie. How a tour such as this would lift her spirits, allow her to live her own life for a change, take the onus of the patient wife, mother and housekeeper off her shoulders for a bit. It would be just the thing for her.

It would. She’s never in her life been farther than Edinburgh, and she’s only been there twice. Never been to London, the Continent, never even been to Glasgow. Mungo just packs his bags, takes her brother by the arm and tramps off halfway round the world. Any time he pleases. And she’s stuck at home with the children like some drudge in a fairy tale. Well this is her chance, and by God she’s going to take it.

Oh, everything will be very proper of course. Both Georgie’s mother and Betty Deatcher are coming along as chaperones, and she’s decided to bring her five-year-old with her as well. There’ll be no hanky-panky, nothing scandalous. Still, her father is violently opposed to her going. He sees it as an affront to her husband, whether she’s chaperoned or not. “And what if he comes home while you’re away, lass — what’ll I tell him?” the old man had demanded, his voice raw with anger and a stinging edge of accusation.

“Tell him I’ll be back the second week in April.”

“But Ailie, ye can’t do that to the mon — he’s your husband.” In her father’s own personal hagiography, Mungo ranked right up there with Saint Columba and Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Her eyes widened till there was nothing left of them but an angry splash of green, cold and brilliant as the Firth of Forth, and her voice trembled with the effort to keep it under control. “He did it to me.”

Now, sitting beside her father on the long hard pew, his breathing harsh and righteous, the children fidgeting, she can think only of release, of escape, of turning her back on MacNibbit’s fire and brimstone and stepping into Georgie’s carriage. Above her, the stained glass is suffused with sun, radiant, bright as blood, and it seems to pulse with the quick breathless cadence beating in her veins. The Highlands! Inverness! Loch Ness! She can barely contain herself, she wants to jump up and dance round the room, shout out the news. Suddenly, the minister’s words are playing in her ears, refreshing, resuscitant, a breath of air in a drowning girl’s lungs.

“Surely,” he exclaims, his voice rich with piety and exaltation, the good word melting on his tongue like a thick pat of butter, “surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. .”

Ailie looks up, as if the promise were meant for her alone, as if it were a blessing for the road, a sign that she’s made the right choice. The sermon is over, the parishioners rustling in their seats. She can’t help smiling. Amen, she thinks. Amen.

♦ ♦ ♦

Georgie’s diligence carries them as far as Leith, where they take ship for Kinghorn and pick up the post chaise. From there they work their way up the east coast, through Cupar, St. Andrews, Ellen, Fochabers and Cawdor, stopping at inns and country houses for refreshment, taking time out to reflect on such curiosities as Dunbuy Rock and Gordon’s Castle. Ailie presses her face to the window, rapt, gazing on the windswept coast with its stunted spruce and fir and heaps of rounded boulders. Thomas, child of the century, is almost six. He clings to his mother’s sleeve and whines, uneasy with the pitch and yaw of the coach, or interrupts Georgie’s delirious monologue with aboriginal screams and resounding raspberries. He looks, absolutely, precisely, and in every detail, the image of his father. Mrs. Quaggus, in widow’s weeds (“Poor Tyrone: his heart failed him as he was tossin’ off a sillabub with Archbishop Oughten one night — it was a sort of contest, a wager, you know — and Tyrone he woulda won it hands down because the Archbishop dinna have the stomach for more than six or seven and my dear departed was already into his twelfth — his twelfth—when the good Lord called him to his reward. .” [a sigh] “I guess he shoulda knowed better than to bait an Archbishop.”), sits against the far window, erect as a hatrack. From time to time she bathes her son in a smoldering look of maternal regard, as if he were nothing short of Molière for wit and a veritable Hippocrates for skill and accomplishment. Betty, in her late twenties now, still unmarried and with a nose like a garden implement, tries her best to be gracious and to respond to Georgie’s nonstop barrage of words, while Georgie, for his part, is so exhilarated by the very fact of Ailie’s presence that he is unable to shut his mouth, even when it’s stuffed full of onion and oatcake, all the long way from Selkirk to Drumnadrochit.

At Inverness, like Boswell and Johnson before them, they put up at Mackenzie’s Inn, and Ailie is in such a state of anticipation she hardly notices the rough-hewn furniture and the desiccated flies in the corners, or that the haggis tastes like stewed leather. All she knows is that the loch, the glorious loch, is no more than three miles off. She tucks her son in, then throws open the windows and looks out on the darkening treetrunks, the raw wet smell of the loch in her nostrils. There is the distant cry of an embergoose, and then the moon slips up out of the grasp of the trees. Pocked and scoured, it is the very same moon that squats over Selkirk, but here it looks different somehow, as if it were newly created, as if it were something magical, a sign in the sky. She sleeps like a drugged princess.

In the morning they take the road for Drumnadrochit, winding through stands of birch and scotch pine, the loch stretched out below them like a great glittering arm of the sea. Ailie feasts her eyes, a strange sense of fulfillment, of rightness, coming over her. Finally she’s making her own expedition, doing a bit of exploring for herself. She laughs out loud at the thought of it — the explorer’s wife exploring — and Mrs. Quaggus lifts her eyebrows, as if she too would like to be let in on the joke. Ailie can’t remember a happier moment.

At Avis House they are greeted by an ebullient and talk-starved Fiona Gleg, a red-haired woman in a bulky wool cardigan who sweeps past her servants to embrace them, one by one, on the front steps. They’ve barely had time to catch their breath before she knots them up in a concatenation of questions, opinions, observations and suppositions, touching on everything from Uncle Silas’ eczema to the egregious food at Mackenzie’s, from the stonework at Cawdor Castle — shoddy, isn’t it? — to the disappointing size of Dunbuy Rock and the odd color of little Thomas’ eyes. In the wainscoted vestibule, servants scuttling to and fro with trunks and bags and hatboxes, Cousin Fiona turns to Ailie with a wide wet motherly smile. “Mrs. Park,” she says (it sounds as if she’s saying Mrs. Paddock), “I’ve heard so much about you — it seems the young physician here can talk of nothing else — and I’d like to say it’s a pleasure, it is, and that ye’re unco welcome at Avis House.”

The red-haired woman has taken her hand. Georgie Gleg, distinguished professor and doctor of medicine, is shuffling his feet and looking down at his shoes. “And of course,” Fiona adds, “I’ve enjoyed your husband’s book.”

♦ ♦ ♦

During the next few days, Avis House hums, roars and squeaks with activity, as if someone had loaded it on a colossal wagon and set the wheels rolling. The doors are wide open, the groaning board groaning, and every ambulatory, morally unobjectionable, semi-rational soul up and down both sides of the loch has been invited to pay a visit. Kilted men and women in tartan shawls show up for tea, for dinner, for cards or quoits. The Reverend this, the Doctor that, the Honorable Mister and odd Sir. Ailie can hardly keep track of the faces. There are Macdonalds in the parlor and Dinsdales on the lawn, beaming Camerons come for a look at the Edinburgh physician and the wife of the renowned explorer, soberfaced Ramsays eager to discuss Cave’s Lives of the Fathers and Ogden’s Sermons. Evenings are consecrated with vast bowls of punch and cider and bottles of port wine, nourished with mutton, herrings, fricasseed moorhens, beef collops, frothed milk, tongue and bread pudding, and consummated with conversation and tobacco, music, dancing and parlor games. It could be Christmas, Michaelmas, the harvest feast. The whole county seems to have gone on holiday.

Ailie can’t get enough of it. She feels like a girl of sixteen, light on her feet, witty, attractive, appreciated. For the first time in years she’s the center of attention, whether jigging round the parlor with a young buck in kilt and argyles or talking fashion with the ladies or horses and dogs with a cross-eyed country doctor. Despite the odd position she’s been placed in — wife to Mungo, jilter of Georgie — she couldn’t feel more relaxed — or more welcome. She’d thought at first that Fiona’s reference to Mungo was a subtle dig at her — and God knows Georgie’s cousin and mother and all the rest of his clan had a right to resent her — but now she’s certain the remark was innocent, a way of making conversation and nothing more. If anything, in fact, Fiona and Mrs. Quaggus have gone out of their way to foster a relationship between her and Georgie. They’ve taken Thomas off her hands, occupying him with Erse songs and tales of taibhs and goblins and the beastie that lives in the loch, stuffing him with cake, running him round the meadows. And Betty too. Less than an hour after their arrival a young, smooth-faced clergyman sat down to tea with them and hasn’t left her side since. The whole thing is very strange. It’s almost as if the two older women were matchmaking, as if Ailie were truly sixteen, free and unattached, the chosen mate for an exemplary son and sterling cousin. Either that. . or a widow.

A widow. The thought comes to her, cold and insidious, as she’s dressing for tea one afternoon, and it stops her dead for a moment. Do they really think—? No. She’s a married woman, mother of four. . her husband’s gone away for a bit. On business. Like a traveling solicitor or a circuit judge. And then suddenly, as if a wet sheet had been thrown over her, the truth of the matter strikes her. Mungo is out there somewhere, suffering, injured maybe, racked with disease, beleaguered by hideous grinning black faces and howling beasts, and here she is running around as if he didn’t exist, like a schoolgirl or something, like a widow. Widow. The two evil syllables box round her head, insupportable, unacceptable: Ailie Anderson Park, Widow of the Late Great Explorer.

That’s it. That’s what this thing is all about, that’s why old Quaggus and simpering Fiona are knocking themselves out to be so gracious. They’ve buried Mungo already, and they’re softening her up — like a piece of meat — for Georgie. For a moment she just sits there, staring down at the shoe in her lap, humiliated, frightened, resentful of the scheming old biddies, resentful of Georgie. But then she leaps up off the bed and flings the shoe at the wall, as sore and hurt and angry as she’s ever been. It’s not Georgie’s fault — he’s been a saint, a savior — nor Mrs. Quaggus’s or Fiona’s. It’s Mungo — Mungo’s the one to blame. Would she be up here at the loch if he hadn’t deserted her? Would she so much as look at another man if he hadn’t broken his marital vows? No. Dead or alive, he’s made her a widow, condemned her to solitary confinement. Well, he’s asked for it. He has. And she’ll be damned if she’ll sit at home and wait for him till her hair’s turned gray.

Ten minutes later she’s sitting over a cup of tea, laughing till her sides hurt over some little joke Georgie’s made. Her son, barely able to see over the edge of the table, glances up at her with Mungo’s startled eyes and the laugh catches in her throat. There is a moment of silence, awkward, Betty and her preacher, Fiona and an assortment of Macdonalds and Ramsays staring down at their cups, until Mrs. Quaggus shoots out a hand to tickle the boy, and he subsides in giggles.

Fiona is tapping the edge of her saucer with a spoon, grinning broadly. “Ahem,” clearing her throat, fluffing her hair. “If I can get a word in amidst all this hilarity, I thought perhaps you and Georgie might want to take a ride out to one o’ my tenants, Ailie — see some o’ the quaint side o’ Highland life. Very picturesque, I assure you.”

“Yes, let’s.” Georgie meets her eyes, then looks away.

“We’d be more than happy to look after the young gentleman,” Mrs. Quaggus adds.

“To be sure.” Fiona is still smiling, lips drawn back to show her teeth.

♦ ♦ ♦

Outside, the sky presses down on them like a weight. Clouds obliterate the hilltops, mist creeps up the glens. Where before there were early flowers, ferns, leafing bushes, there is now only a low band of fog billowing upward to join earth and sky. Ailie and Gleg lead the way, mounted on a matched pair of chestnuts, while Thomas — he threw a tantrum until Ailie relented and agreed to take him along — brings up the rear on a pony led by Rorie Macphoon, Cousin Fiona’s bailiff. They pause at the top of a rise to watch a lone collie work his flock down the slope, white paws blurred as he dashes in and out of a bank of mist after strays. A big broad-faced ewe, just in front of them, glances over her shoulder like a nervous grandmother, hurriedly tearing up great streaming mouthfuls of heather and grass before the dog can discover her. Georgie, in rare form, quotes from Macbeth: “By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked this way comes,” and old Rorie laughs as if his head would split.

The sky has darkened perceptibly and a light drizzle begun to thicken the air by the time they reach the little cottage on the hillside. Quaint, Ailie thinks, oh yes indeed, and then calls to Thomas to hurry and come have a look. The boy wears a rapt expression, awestruck by the romance of the scene, something out of the pages of a storybook. The hut is of turf, with a crude, blistered wooden door and a square cut out of the front wall to serve as a window. A stream courses through the yard with a sound of gargling fish and mermen, the naked black trunks of pines reach up into the smoking atmosphere like great solid beanstalks, there is a delicious frightening cackle of voices mingled with the smoke rising from the chimney. Georgie, riding crop in hand, raps at the door.

After a moment the door swings back and a bewildered-looking old man pokes his head out. He gapes at Georgie as if he’d just dropped down from another planet, inclining his cross-hatched face to one side and squinting an eye shut to get a better look at him. Georgie is holding out his hand, hearty and condescending at the same time. “Gleg,” he says. “Georgie Gleg. We’ve stopped by to pay you a visit.”

If the words register they have no visible effect, except that the old fellow tilts his head to the opposite side, as if he were contemplating a listing ship or chinning an invisible violin. His lips are compressed, his eyes shuttered windows. Slowly, hesitantly, like a man who’s answered a knock only to find no one there, he begins to pull the door closed. To this point, Rorie Macphoon has remained in the background, holding the pony’s bridle; when he steps forward, the old cottager’s face undergoes a transformation: where before he’d looked puzzled or merely obtuse, now a whole range of human emotions plays across his features. Ailie watches his initial look of enlightenment realign itself into something harder, an expression of anger and resentment, which is in turn succeeded by a sly glimmer of avarice and finally a sort of hangdog look of obsequious resignation. Georgie Gleg, the Edinburgh physician, presses half a crown into the old man’s palm, and they enter the cottage.

Inside, an enormous brindled cat gazes up at them from the hearth, its eyes the color of cheddar cheese. Beside the animal, so still she could be made of wax, an old woman dozes in a chair carved from a treestump. A slab of oak balanced on two piles of paving stones serves as a bench, and a bedframe, set on the floor and heaped with heather, sags against the far wall. There is no other furniture in the room. In the glimmer from the hearth and the bleak gray light of the window Ailie can make out the shabby accouterments of the place: a crutch and a rusted hoe in the corner, sheaves of barley stacked on the floor, a mound of peat, string of onions, wooden washbasin. A wicker curtain cordons off the low cavelike back room, from which emanates a caustic stench of urine and the occasional unsteady caprine bleat. Sad, Ailie thinks. Pitiful. Better call it sordid than quaint. She shifts uneasily from foot to foot, listening to the goats make water and wondering why in God’s name Fiona sent them to this hole.

“So,” Georgie booms, warming his hands over the peat fire and turning to the old man, “you live here, do you?”

Startled, the cottager dips his head and steps back a pace. The turkey flesh under his neck has begun to quiver and Rorie is attempting some sort of explanation beginning with the phrase “Mr. Gleg” repeated three or four times and interspersed with “ums” and “ahs” and a good deal of foot shuffling and trouser tugging, when suddenly a discordant stream of language is washing over them from down below. The old woman, hunched and crippled, one eye dead, has come to life, treating them to a disquisition in Erse, the native tongue of the Highlands. And disquisition it is — she goes on and on, wound up like a mechanical gargoyle, her good eye leaping about its socket, delivering a regular lecture, every last word of which is entirely unintelligible. Finally, after what seems like a good five minutes, she ends with a wild stinging laugh like wind in the gutter, and then subsides in a spasm of coughing.

“What was that?” Georgie asks, turning to Macphoon.

Thomas, intimidated by the whole scene — the dimness, the stink, the unspoken threat — clings to his mother’s skirts, while Ailie bites her lip to keep from laughing. The idea of it: Fiona thinks this quaint?

Rorie, hat in hand and shy as a sinner at the gates of heaven, clears his throat and looks at the ground. “She says she’s the happiest woman in the world.”

That does it. She can’t hold it any longer. Suddenly Ailie loses control, laughing out loud, beginning with a barely suppressed titter and building to a series of breastbone-pounding whoops. Nodding and grinning, the old housewife takes a pinch of snuff and laughs along with her, hysterical, high and keening, a laugh like knives grating against a whetstone. “Happiest. .” Ailie gasps, holding her sides, unable to complete the phrase.

And then the old woman is jabbering away again, her voice rasping and harsh, the strange musical language like something inexpressibly ancient and exotic, some Ur language, something you’d expect to find in Mesopotamia or Luxor or in the crumbling leaves of a faded parchment. When she falls silent, Ailie turns to Macphoon with an anticipatory grin: “Well? What did she say this time — more words of wisdom?”

Rorie goes through the same routine again — the foot shuffling, tugging at his trousers, turning the hat over in his hands — and then looks Ailie dead in the eye. “She says she’s got her husband right here by her side, and that’s all a woman could ever want.”

The words drive home like separate blows from a mallet, a stake sinking into her heart. The old man is nodding his head and smiling — an obscene, wet-lipped parody of a smile that shows his yellowed teeth and the dead white tip of his tongue. And his wife, the old hag, is cackling like an overworked clock and struggling to get up out of the chair. Ailie feels as if she’s caught in a dream, feels as if someone’s played a bad joke on her, feels the bad breath of the universe whistling in her face and is frightened. The smile is gone.

Georgie, sensing that something has gone wrong, takes her arm and leads her to the door, nodding to the old man and pressing another coin into his hand. Alarmed, Thomas clings to his mother as if someone were trying to snatch him away, and Rorie, flushing, concentrates on his shoes. Shaken, angry, bewildered, Ailie steps out into the rinsed gray air and takes a deep breath, wondering just what is going on and why she’s let an old crone’s banter upset her so.

All at once there’s a tug at her elbow. She turns. The old woman, bent over her crutch like an errant question mark, is looking up at her out of a sharp sly raptor’s face. The dull light is blinding. Something wrong with the hag’s lip, scarred, as if… as if had once been pierced through, like Seedy’s. Ailie draws back instinctively, and the woman’s hand snakes out to pat Thomas’ head, pinch his cheeks, the cracked grating voice having its final say.

Ailie’s face is burning. She looks at Rorie framed in the doorway, the white bulb of the old man’s head at his shoulder.

The bailiff wets his fingertips, smooths the cap across his crown. “She had a boy like him once, she says. Run off on her.” There are no trees, no bushes, the sky gone dark, the invisible loch in the deep glen roaring with a thousand voices. The old woman is rocking on her crutch, leering, rubbing the white bristle of her chin. “She says you ought to keep a watch on him.”

For a long while, wending their way through the darkening forest, saddles creaking, the silent mist tugging at their elbows and knees, they can hear the knife edge of the old woman’s laugh, cutting the night in two.

♦ ♦ ♦

The final day of their sojourn at Avis House dawns like an intimation of July, bright and cloudless, the air gravid with a slow penetrating warmth, as if somehow the seasons had advanced, the earth pitched forward on its axis, the sun flared up like a bundle of twigs set atop a mound of glowing coals. Ailie is up at first light, intoxicated by the texture of the air, by the odor of daffodils and the sound of honeybees. Standing at her window and looking out over the loch, she can’t help feeling a tug of regret, a resistance to the idea of leaving, of going back to the humdrum and the quotidian. Certainly she misses the children, and her father, and even in a way the staid domesticity of day-to-day life in Selkirk — but she’s not ready to go back yet. This is adventure, this is living, this is what she’s been looking for all her life. At home she has only her duty to husband, children, father, and her role as the constant wife of the absent saint and martyr.

There are sparrows and starlings on the lawn. Out over the loch a golden eagle coasts in the high thin air, luminous in the morning sun. She wants to go, she wants to stay. Wants to look into her children’s faces, and at the same time she wants to travel farther, to the Hebrides, the Arctic, up over Russia and down to Tibet. At that moment she comes closer to understanding her husband than she ever will: the adventure, the surprise, the frisson of chasing down the permutations of possibility, the purity of doing and experiencing — how could looking on the same bit of yard, the same black mare, the same four walls even touch it? It is the sixth of April. Mungo has been gone a year and a half. Today is hers and hers alone.

At breakfast, Fiona throws open the windows to birdsong, golden Light, an eariy hatch of mayflies. Tim Dinsdale is there, Donald MacDonald, half a dozen repentant Ramsays, Ewan Murchison, Sir Adolphus Beattie, Miss Mary Ogilvie, Betty and her preacher, Mrs. Quaggus, Fiona and Georgie. Everyone — even Reelaiah Ramsay — seems to be smiling, feeling chipper, talking about a ride or a walk around the grounds, a picnic or a match of croquet. The only topic of general concern is the weather. “Oh, it’s a real pippin of a day,” Mrs. Quaggus says, buttering her bannocks. “Wally,” offers Sir Adolphus, looking up from his eggs and rashers, “really first-rate.” Tim Dinsdale says he hasn’t seen it this warm in April since ‘81, the year it snowed in July. “It’s a blessing, is what it is,” Fiona sighs. Ailie couldn’t agree more.

Afterward, Georgie takes a seat beside her on the porch. In his simple brown suit, silk shirt and riding boots he almost looks elegant, uncoiling his long frame, throwing back his head and crossing his legs with an easy, self-confident air, proprietary and unassuming at the same time. His ears still stick out, his wrists insist on protruding from the jacket sleeves, his nose is like something you’d carry into battle — but does it matter anymore? Aren’t those the things that a child would notice?

Georgie shifts in his chair. “Well, Ailie,” he says after a moment, “it’s your last day. Would you like to take a turn on the loch?”

“Rowing?”

He nods.

Fiona and Thomas are marching around the parlor, beating on kitchen pots and singing Haytin foam, foam eri at the top of their lungs, Betty and her preacher are strolling through the garden arm in arm, and Mrs. Quaggus, surrounded by Ramsays, is eulogizing her late husband over her sixth cup of tea.

Georgie is studying the side of Ailie’s face. She turns to look him in the eye. “There’s nothing I’d rather do.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Beached at the mouth of Divach Burn, oars poised in the locks, the rowboat could be the remains of some fantastic form of life, a colossal insect washed ashore or the hollow exoskeleton of a prehistoric crab — but for the fact that Fiona has painted it cherry red — for visibility— and whimsically christened it The Kelpie. The boat lies there in the undergrowth, an advertisement for civilization, while birds flit in and out of the reeds and midges hover over the water. Georgie hops from one leg to the other to remove his boots, drags the boat into the whisky-stained water and gallantly hands Ailie into the stern. Then he lifts in the picnic hamper (three bottles of wine, smoked salmon, sliced tongue, cheese, bread, radishes and linen napkins), gives the boat a reasonably athletic shove and they’re off.

There’s barely a breeze, and the air — it must be seventy-five or eighty degrees — melts over them like butter. Ailie throws off her scarf and hat, loosens her collar, and watches the reeds fall back in the distance and the great battered tower of Urquhart Castle loom up on her right. It’s glorious. The day, the scenery, the company. She feels girlish and silly, the blood gone light in her veins. Georgie strains at the oars. She wants to reach out and tweak his nose.

“Shall we move in close for a look at the ruins from down here?” he puffs, swinging the boat toward the castle promontory. He is facing her, three feet away. Their legs are touching.

“Yes,” she laughs, everything funny, everything perfect. She’s drunk already and they haven’t even uncorked the wine. “Yes,” she repeats, and then, just as quickly, “no.” Georgie, obedient as a dray horse, drops the oars. “I mean, we’ve seen the castle. Let’s strike out for the middle of the loch, make the shore a speck, have an adventure. We could just drift along out there, drift all day.”

He grins a big horsey pleased grin. There is nothing he’d rather do than ferry her around the lake — take her anywhere she pleases, drift till the sun goes down. He leans into the oars with a vengeance, gobbling up the feast of her eyes.

The boat rides out over the waves, the sound of the oars rippling like wind chimes, and Ailie throws back her head, eyes closed, feeling like the heroine of a medieval romance, like Una or Iseult the Fair. Here’s Georgie, the sweating hero, there’s the castle and here the lady in distress: all they need is a dragon. She laughs out loud at the thought of it and Georgie joins in, his grin as wide as the horizon.

An hour later they’re riding the loose abdomen of the lake, dead centetv shore to shore, the boat gently lifting and swaying with the almost imperceptible breath of the great still body of water. The sun falls over them like eiderdown, hot and luxurious. Georgie’s jacket is draped over the bow seat, his shirt has fallen open to the waist; Ailie has removed her shoes and stockings, trailing her feet in the water like a country maid. Tongue and bread and radishes are spread out on the perfect blanched field of the linen tablecloth, and two empty wine bottles he on the floor, softly rocking with the rise and fall of the loch. They are laughing, Ailie and Georgie, over old times.

‘Those poems you used to write me! The Blushing Morn of your Cheeks / The Foaming Billows of your Breasts’. . they were so, so ridiculous.” She chokes on her laughter, gasping for breath, the mechanism gone autonomous, laughter like hiccoughs.

Georgie is laughing too. He was ridiculous. He admits it.

“And, and — the way you used to play that recorder, and, and sing—”

Her face is flushed with wine and blood, two points in the back of her skull throbbing from the force of her laughter.

“I admit it,” Georgie laughs. “I was preposterous, pimply-faced, a moonstruck adolescent.” Suddenly he’s not laughing anymore. “But I mean it, Ailie. I loved you. I loved you then and I love you now.”

It is as though someone has suddenly dropped the curtain, changed the script. She was laughing half an instant before, in control, the joke on Georgie; now she’s tense and riveted. His words dig at her like fingers in clay, softening her, making her blood beat like a parade of drums. Stop, she thinks, stop. And then: go on, go on.

He’s on his knees now, between her legs, his lank knuckly hands rubbing fitfully at her thighs as if she’d drowned and he was trying to revive her. “From the first time,” he says, “I swear—” but she puts a hand over his mouth, cradles his head, strokes the stiff yellow spectacle of his ears. The sun, the wine, the romance of the loch, the hoary castle, a year and a half of celibacy, she is on fire.

Worshipful, reverential, without a hint of clumsiness or uncertainty, he presses himself to her, a votary, the secret ceremony as smooth and proper as if it had been rehearsed. Her skirts, the undergarments, the buttons of his trousers. And Ailie: her mind has gone dead on her, she’s a creature of sensation, of electricity, of stroking and smoothing and caressing, her eyes closed, caught up in the rhythm of it, the boat swaying, Georgie’s shoulders trapped in her palms, his face in hers, his tongue. .

Her eyes blink open, close, open again. Over his shoulder: what is that? Screened by his hair, the stiff geography of his ear. She’s delirious. Delirious. He moves in her, but her eyes are open, she’s craning her neck. It arches over the boat, rearing up, slick and muscular and wet — impossible, it can’t be — a face at the tip of it, serpent’s eyes, the shadow falling across her flushed cheeks like a swift stinging slap.

No. It can’t be.

She shuts her eyes and holds on tight — as if her life depended on it.

♦ WATER MUSIC (REPRISE) ♦

It is sometime in early April — the fifth? the sixth? — he can’t be sure.

Time has become an irrelevance. There is only the sun and the inexorable slide of the river, the long running slope to resurrection. And resurrection it will be: he is certain of it. Forget despair, futility, self-doubt. The cards are on the table, and they’re all aces: the Niger has swung southward. Just as he’d hoped and prayed it would, just as Amadi had predicted. For two months now they’ve been heading south, and it’s like an inoculation of confidence. South. To the Atlantic. To vindication. To glory.

A simple turn of the river. It’s done wonders for everyone’s attitude. Ned Rise has loosened his grip on the tiller, Martyn has begun to talk and even smile a bit, and M’Keal — though still troubled in his mind — has shown signs of coming around. And why not? They’re like prisoners on death row whose sentences have suddenly been commuted. Two months ago they were staring doom in the face; now they’re home free. All they have to do is hold on a bit longer — and who knows, it could be no more than a month, a week even — hold on and bask in a hero’s welcome in London, maybe even pick up a government pension. They’ll be drinking porter and punch before you know it, diddling the girls, sinking their teeth into great dripping pots of bubble and squeak, wheels of Cheshire cheese and craggy mounds of oysters. Oh yes: they’re going home.

Of course, it hasn’t been all singing around the campfire and Pollyanna at the dress shop. Even after the river began pulling them southward they had scare after scare, crisis on top of crisis. Hostile tribes lined the riverbanks — the Juli, the Ulotrichi, the Songhai and Mahinga — and squadrons of canoes regularly shot out to intercept them. One morning they woke to see an army of Tuareg — kissing cousins to the Moors — gazing down on them from a bluff. There must have been three thousand of them, mounted on camels, their indigo jubbahs rattling in the wind, beards bristling, double-edged swords glinting in the sun. They never moved. Not a one of them. It was as though they’d been carved from stone. And yet how terrible this silent presence was, how heinous, how insupportable — what were they doing there, what did they want? Another time, after a skirmish with a flotilla of native canoes, two black fanatics managed to board the Joliba in the confusion, and were about to rupture the blond bulb of the explorer’s skull when Martyn wheeled round and dispatched them with a flurry of saber strokes. For days afterward Mungo went round fingering his head as tentatively as a man stacking eggs in a basket.

But by far the most disturbing event of the meridional leg of the journey was the defection of Amadi Fatoumi. It had been agreed that Amadi was to be released from any further obligation on reaching Yaour in Hausaland. There he would be given the balance of his wages in muskets, powder and tradegoods (he’d been paid the first half, in cowries, at Sansanding), and he would attempt to hire a Hausa tribesman to guide the expedition the rest of the way. Fine. That was the agreement. No one liked it — what if they couldn’t find another guide? how could they land Amadi at Yaour without exposing themselves to attack? — but they would just have to live with it. That he would leave them was a given, but it was the way in which he was to do it that left them cold.

One evening four weeks back, Amadi and his slaves rose in a group, tucked away their carved bones, cowries, teapots and pipes, and shuffled their way to the stern, where Mungo stood beside Ned Rise, reminiscing about Bond Street and Drury Lane. Amadi spoke in Mandingo. They were three days out of Yaour, he said, but they would have to anchor for the night because there was a dangerous rapids just ahead. He would guide them through the rapids in the morning, and then begin making preparations for a landing at Yaour. Could he, he wondered, look through the things the explorer meant to give him in payment?

The slaves watched Mungo’s face as if it were something to eat. He didn’t want to think about Amadi’s leaving him, didn’t want to deal with it. He even thought of welshing, of holding a pistol to the guide’s head and forcing him to go on. But no, he couldn’t do that. His relations with the natives — insofar as he had any — had always been based on mutual trust. Amadi had fulfilled his part of the bargain, Mungo would stick by his. “All right,” he said finally, “we’ll hate to see you go, but I suppose there’s nothing to be done about it.” He looked at the guide hopefully, but Amadi’s face was signed, sealed and delivered. “Well. There’s no harm in your picking out what you want now — but remember, when we get to Yaour you’ve promised to find us a guide. Right?”

Amadi made a sign of obeisance, and then, shadowed by his slaves, ducked beneath the canopy to sort through the things that had survived M’Keal’s fit at Gotoijege. For a long while the explorer could hear them mumbling over this object or that, whistling in awe, debating in a low murmurous dialect he couldn’t understand. After an hour or so Mungo ordered Ned to drop anchor, and Amadi and his men retired to their customary spot in the bow of the boat. As it grew dark, the slaves huddled beneath their jubbahs and dozed off, but Amadi sat there, still as a corpse, his eyes scanning the shore, the glowing bowl of his pipe like a beacon in the gathering night.

In the morning he was gone.

Mungo couldn’t beheve it. He awoke to mist, the discourse of birds, M’Keal’s snores, and made his way to the front of the boat to heat some water for tea over the brazier they’d erected there. But something was wrong. The bow of the boat was empty, the curled black forms that had been propped there these past four and a half months until they seemed a part of the ship — knots in the wood, human anchors, furled sails — were gone. Vanished. As if someone had taken an eraser to the corner of a familiar portrait. It was disturbing. Deeply disturbing. Frantic, Mungo roused the men and hurriedly inventoried the supplies.

Three-quarters of the muskets had disappeared. Kegs of powder, bullets, every last scrap of broadcloth, every trinket and trifle — about the only thing they hadn’t taken was the clarinet Ned had inherited from Scott. Martyn was seething. “Damned aborigines, black coon Hottentot nigger thieves. They’ve swum off with it all, haven’t they?”

They had. Crocodiles or no crocodiles. And now the men of the Joliba were left without a guide, without goods for barter, and very nearly defenseless, their arsenal decimated and their number reduced by half. It looked bleak, but not so bleak as it would look five minutes later. Because by then a carefully orchestrated attack would be under way, an attack that would feature tooth-champing Maniana cannibals and weapons rendered useless by sabotage (Amadi had wet the powder in each of the muskets he was unable to carry off, and had almost certainly made some sort of nefarious compact with the Maniana). Later, Mungo would think back on the incident and realize that the guide must have planned it from the first, must have been communicating with the ghouls all along, must have sold them out as casually as one might auction off goats or chickens. Amadi was cold-blooded. Wicked. He’d stabbed them in the back.

Fortunately, however, at the first gastronomic howl from the bush, Ned Rise had had the presence of mind to sever the anchor rope, and the Joliba—wet muskets and all — was able to drift down out of danger just as the ochre-painted savages stormed out of the bushes with their skewers and carving knives.

♦ ♦ ♦

And so, here they are — guideless, cowryless, goodsless, anchorless, their clothes in rags and bodies devastated with disease, sunburn and culinary fatigue, the current carrying them where it will, the water level dropping as the dry season advances, sandbanks lapping at them like tongues, humped white rocks protruding from the sickly wash of the current like picked ribs, mites, flies, ticks, chiggers and mosquitoes biting, the odor of dead fish and exposed muck so rancid and oppressive they can hardly breathe — here they are, overjoyed, celebrating, heading south.

Perhaps Amadi’s betrayal has been good for them in a way, the explorer is thinking as he holds a match to his pipe and gazes out over the coruscating surface of the river. It’s brought them together as nothing else could — four stalwart never-say-die Britishers rallying to confront a slippery treacherous world of blackamoors, cannibals and backstabbing, two-timing negro lackeys. And they’ve done it. They’ve succeeded. Amadi’s treachery was the straw that didn’t break the camel’s back, didn’t even bow it. They can handle anything, they know that now. Rain, disease, open warfare, perfidy, the loss of friends and brothers and companions at arms, the heart-sinking uncertainty of following the river northward into the desert — they’ve been through it all. The rest will be nothing, a piece of cake.

It is at this juncture that the first shadow drifts across the explorer’s face — skirting the periphery of his consciousness like an insect hovering over a plate of pudding, and yet not quite intruding on it. His mind has made the associative leap from heading south to piece of cake to London, glory, Selkirk and Ailie, and he is scratching meditatively at his ankles, stuck on this last little imaginative nugget. Ailie. He wonders what she’s doing with herself, if she’s bored, angry, disappointed. She has every right to be disappointed, he’ll admit that. It’s been twenty months already, and how many more only God can tell. Poor thing. He can picture her pining away for him, haunting the post office, reading and rereading his Travels till the leaves dissolve. Well he’ll make it up to her. He will. She can come down to London while he writes the new book — dedicated to Zander, and to her of course — and he’ll give her anything she wants: a coach, jewelry, gowns, menservants, microscopes. . It is then that the second, third and fourth shadows flit across his face and he raises his eyes reflexively to scan the sky.

Ned has already seen them. Vultures. Eight, ten, twelve of them already, and more coming. Dispersed like leaves, they hang in the still air, wings stiff and mute, gliding, rocking, spinning over the boat as if they were part of some towering mobile. It is a convocation, a synod of scavengers. Black wings against white torsos, eyes like talons, the pedestrian Egyptian vultures circle beneath the big regal griffons, wings spread seven and a half feet across, and the even bigger Nubians that scrape the roof of the world like something left over from the age of reptiles. And now, rushing to them like remoras to sharks, like flying hyenas, are flocks of crows and kites and great gangling marabou storks with their beaks like butcher’s knives. In ten minutes the sky is dark with them, wheeling, silent, dozens upon dozens of hot yellow eyes intent on the blistered canopy and chiseled hull of the Joliba.

Ned cranes his neck to watch them. And Martyn, stiff-backed as ever though girded in rags and pockmarked with insect bites, has emerged from his nest beneath the canopy to shield his eyes and gaze solemnly at the black suspended forms, at the rigid wings and clamped beaks. Even M’Keal, sodden with drink and still half-crazed from the loss of his ear, the heat, fever, monotony or whatever, is standing there motionless, gawking up at the sky like a rube at the big top. The shadows swoop over them, eclipse them. Ned is uneasy. Whatever it means, it can’t be good. He grits his teeth and spits into the river in disgust. Since they passed Yaour things have been looking up. There’s been no rough water, they’ve seen no one, and the river, as far as he can tell from his observation of sun, moon and stars, is taking them due south. It’s a pity something like this has to come along and spoil it. A real pity.

These last three weeks or so have been peaceful, pleasant, the steady wash of the river like the pulse of the womb, eternal, lulling, reassuring. He’s begun, in a perverse way, to wish it would go on forever. London. What’s London to him anyway? A place where he’s been hounded, abused, persecuted, condemned. He has no relatives, no friends, nothing but enemies — Ospreys, Mendozas, Bankses. Billy’s dead, Fanny’s a memory. What’s the use? Though the others talk of nothing else, Ned has begun to lose interest in going back — why kid himself? Medals, rewards: what a joke. It’ll be the same old story. Pain and sorrow, loss and deprivation. Would the high and mighty Mungo Park even give him a second glance on the streets of London?

Homeless, fatherless, with neither prospects nor hope, Ned has begun to see this bleak, stinking, oppressive continent in a new light, as a place of beginnings as well as endings. All he’s been through these past two years, all the heat and stink and disease, all the suffering and strangeness — it must have some purpose, some hidden meaning, some link to his life. He is thinking that maybe he won’t return to London when they reach the coast. He’ll stay on as a trader, or maybe he’ll rest up and then work his way back into the interior, explore on his own, search for whatever it is he’s been spared to find. .

Of course the whole thing is just wishful thinking, daydreaming, mystic and elusive. The important thing — the bottom line — is still survival. He hasn’t given up his post at the tiller, hasn’t stopped battling the explorer for control of his own destiny, though the battle is as masked and subtle as it’s been from the beginning, from the blistering day he and the blond hero first crossed paths over an open grave at Goree. No, he hasn’t given an inch, and yet the issue is almost dead at this point. Perhaps it’s the sun, the vestiges of fever, the lulling serenity of the past three weeks, but Ned has softened a bit toward his employer and fellow traveler. He is certain now that he will survive, that the worst is over, that there is nothing more this mad ass of an explorer can do to endanger him — and that certainty takes the defensive edge off his relationship with the man. Besides, Mungo trusts him so implicitly he’s begun to confide in him, just as Ned had dreamed back at Goree; for what it’s worth, he has become the right-hand man — superseding Martyn, Johnson, Amadi or any of them — as close to the great white hero as the puny brother-in-law had been.

They’ve talked, man to man. Still nights, mist on the water, forty-one men dead and the equatorial moon sitting on their shoulders like an immovable weight, they’ve talked. Mungo bared his heart, told him of his marriage, his children, of the pain of separation, of his ambitions. He talked as if he were talking to himself, for hours at a time, and then, apropos of nothing, he would turn to Ned and ask him how he’d lost his fingers or acquired the scar at his neck—”You know,” he’d say, “it almost looks like a rope burn.” Ned, his face frank and open, his gaze steady, would lie. “Butcher shop,” he’d say, “cutting out steaks.” Or, fingering the scar at his throat, “Oh, this. Nothing really. Got my head caught in an iron fence when I was a kid. No more than five or six. They had to fetch the blacksmith to loosen the bars.”

No, worming his way into the explorer’s confidence was barely a challenge. The man was easy, a self-centered fool. If Ned hadn’t got a grip on the reins long ago they’d all be dead by now. Still, he bears the man no malice. In fact, he’s all right in his own way — at least he’s committed himself to something. That’s more than Ned can say for himself. Mungo Park may be conceited, mad with ambition, selfish, blind, incompetent, fatuous — but at least he’s got a focus for his life, a reason for living. That’s the kernel of truth Ned has dug out of the motherlode of the past three weeks of drifting in the sun: there must be a reason, an organizing principle, to each man’s life. For M’Keal it’s booze, for Martyn weapons and bloodshed, for Park it’s risking his fool hide to open up the map and get his name inscribed in history books. And for himself, Ned Rise? Mere survival isn’t enough. A dog can survive, a flea. There must be something more.

But these birds. They cloud the picture, they complicate things. Suddenly a gunshot snaps out behind him, and he wheels round at the quick sharp surprise of it. It is Martyn, nearly on top of him, a musket smoking in one hand, the other clenched in a fist. Almost instantaneously a vulture slaps down on the deck. Stunned, bleeding, one wing askew, the bird scrambles to its feet and lifts its gleaming beak with a hiss. The lieutenant is grinning. He closes in, swinging the stock of his gun like an executioner’s axe, M’Keal cheering him on. The bird leaps once, twice, like a rooster dodging a cart, and then Martyn catches it across the back. Bones crack, the claws rake reflexively at the floor of the canoe, and Martyn hits it again. There is a moment of silence, the bird motionless, and then M’Keal plucks up the carcass, a splash of feathers, blood and excrement, and presses it to his chin. “Look at me,” he crows, “look at me. I’ve sprouted feathers!”

No one is looking. Something far more arresting than a swarm of carrion birds has suddenly caught their attention. A distant, moaning roar, the sound of white water beating at rock, the sound of waves and surf and the dead man’s tide. Rapids. Mungo glances down at the crude map Amadi had etched for him in the burnished wood of the hull, then looks up at Ned with a cold flat helpless expression, the expression of a fettered prisoner in the hands of his enemies. His voice is hushed, barely audible over the approaching roar — one word, a whisper: “Boussa.”

♦ ♦ ♦

It closes in on them, this din, it boxes them in, booming with a hollow deep-throated resonance, exploding with sudden startling claps and peals, until it seems as if they’re being swept into a battle at sea. Within minutes the river’s surface has begun to tilt forward, stretching its neck, tapering, while the high-walled banks are suddenly askew, out of plumb, rearing back at a crazy angle. Ahead the channel is seething and white, great strips of rock moving beneath the surface like bone under skin. And almost imperceptibly, a new sound has begun to emerge from the muddled roar, a sucking, rushing sound, as of some unfathomable volume of water — a lake, a sea — sucked down a drain.

There is no time to fight it. No question of easing into shore, no hope of backing out. The only recourse is to lash down the movables — guns, powderkegs, foodstuffs — and ride the chute. Meanwhile, the river gets rougher by the second, tearing at them from every direction, tossing the boat like a twig, hauling it back down as if it were petrified. Ned jerks the tiller right and left, impossible to see over the bow, the flimsy stick all but useless in his hands, while Mungo scrambles up and down the deck, lashing things across the gunwales, muttering to himself, shouting out unheeded commands. Martyn, the tough and unshakable twenty-year-old, the bloodspiller, looks frightened, and M’Keal — buffoon, drunkard, madman — has flung down the dead bird in favor of lashing himself to the nearest canopy strut. High above, safe, placid, patient, the vultures hover like a swarm of monstrous gnats, like harpies, keeping watch.

“The paddles!” Mungo shouts. “Take up your paddles, men!” The men ignore him, the banks grow higher, the Niger heaves and bucks like a furious animal. They hold on, spray flying, the ceaseless racket of water impacting on rock all but swallowing them, the river pitching dizzily, snags and riprap raking like claws at the bottom of the boat. And now — in a quick running blur — the clay banks give way to walls, sheer rock faces pocked with geologic acne, rough as sandpaper above, smooth as the mythic glass mountain below. The canoe angles right past a single boulder big as an atoll, then jerks left again around a pair of scoured pillars, and there, up ahead — what is it? The glancing light, the froth and mist, the roar — it could be anything from a series of riffles to a second Niagara. “Hold on!” someone shouts, and they lock their jaws, bracing for a quick flight into eternity.

But once again the Niger defies their expectations: the roar derives from neither falls nor rapids. Six hundred yards ahead the river seems to stop cold, cut off by a monolithic wall of rock that stretches across the horizon like a felled giant. The banks pull back, the current slows a notch or two, and then they see the passage — a single channel gaping like a mouth in the center of the wall. The explorer goes cold at the sight of it — they’ll be swept down like rats in a sewer, dashed against the rocks and drowned. . but no, wait. . that tunnel must be thirty feet high, forty! A sudden heady rush of elation sweeps over him: spared, spared yet again! “Look!” he calls back to Ned, “it’s big as the portals under London Bridge — we’ll clear it easy!” Yes, of course. And isn’t that daylight on the far side?

It is. And in fact the great arched vault of the tunnel, abraded through the eons, is easily lofty enough to accommodate the Joliba—or a ship twice its height for that matter. But there is another factor involved here, a crucial and perhaps decisive factor that the explorer has not yet had an opportunity to take into account. It is this: what appears at this distance to be some sort of exotic growth darkening the rock wall ahead — it could be a dense thicket, fur bristling along the spine of some Mesozoic beast, clots of algae like skin — is in fact something very different, something animate, intelligent, hostile.

“Wait a minute!” Martyn is perched in the bow of the canoe now, straining his eyes toward the oncoming monolith like a lookout in a crow’s nest. “There’s. . there’s people on those rocks!”

People indeed. Mungo looks, M’Keal looks, Ned — his heart sinking: new life, purpose — hah! — it’s Rise’s Law all over again — Ned looks. As the river bowls them closer, everything becomes clear, as clear as a verdict of guilty, a sentence of death. An army is deployed along the cliff — so thick in places that the individual warriors seem to congeal in solid black masses like lumps of tar — an army big as the Czar’s, big as Napoleon’s, endless, as if all of Holborn had turned out in blackface and armed with spears and bows and hammered knives. All along the Africans have known this moment must inevitably come, all along they’ve assuaged their disappointments, nursed their stepped-upon toes, swallowed their ravaged pride in the certainty that ultimately they would have their revenge.

Check and mate.

The river pushes them, irresistible. Paddles are useless against it, the anchor lost. As sure as gravity exerts its force and planets tug round the sun, they will be pulled through that grim stone mouth ahead, pulled — like filings to a magnet — onto the spears of their enemies, fatal appetency. The explorer can see them clearly now — the Tuareg army that had looked down on them from the bluff, the Hausa tribesmen in their jubbahs and turbans, a contingent of Maniana, ocher limbs and filed teeth. There — those are the Soorka, and there, the nameless savages from Gotoijege, hot to avenge their king. Every prerogative ignored, every snub, every wound given and drop of blood spilled, has come back to haunt them. It is a day of ironies. Even sitting here now, watching his own death played out like a pageant, Mungo can see the bleached high-water mark of a second passage that neatly skirts the cliff ahead, wide and unencumbered and dry as a bone — navigable only during the monsoon.

Dreamlike, this moment before death. Fame, glory, wife, family, ambition — they’re equally irrelevant. He is some big-horned buck in the grip of a predator, stunned beyond pain, his guts spilled in the grass, eyes glazing, the crack and drool of mastication like a dirge. He looks around him, detached, absent. Martyn is fooling with the weapons, Rise frozen at the useless tiller, M’Keal crossing himself. One hundred yards, the water sucking and seething. What can he do? Shoot one of a thousand? Take yet another life? No. Better to sit here and wait for the forest of spears, the jagged boulders, the cauldrons of bubbling oil.

But then something jolts him upright, something like anger, rage, a towering fury fed with adrenalin and hate: in all that crowd, through the thicket of weapons and limbs and jockeying torsos, he has suddenly, startlingly, isolated a single face. The face of the one man in all the fathomless universe he can hate with something approaching purity, with an absolute, implacable, merciless hatred, the one man who has thwarted him and barred his way like some cousin of the devil, unreasoning, cold and deadly, the one man he would have strangled in the cradle had he been given the chance: Dassoud. The two hissing syllables catch in his throat, slap at his face, and all at once Mungo is on his feet, lurching with the boat, dipping into the bright tatters of his shirt for the smooth ivory grip of his secret weapon, his pis aller, the gleaming silver-plated pistol Johnson had pressed on him with a parting benediction.

He’s saved it, pressed close, through all these months. The hoarder’s secret, tucked deep in the waistband of his ragged breechclout, concealed in the folds of the silly spangled shirt he’s fashioned from the tatters of the Union Jack. If it came to the worst, if the river evaporated beneath his feet or he fell into the hands of the Moors, he planned to use it on himself. One bullet, one only. The bridge of the mouth, the soft pocket of the ear. But now, in a moment arranged in heaven, he sees what that bullet has been designed for, understands why it was dug from the ground, melted down, cast and hardened, appreciates why Johnson — salt of the earth — forced the pistol on him. In three minutes he will be dead. So will Dassoud.

Seventy-five yards. Fifty. The rabble is shouting now, pink mouths like wounds in the dark pinguid faces. Ten thousand pairs of lungs, plangent, a roar that for one fraction of a second crashes over the otherworldly din of the river, only to subside almost immediately into mute gesture.

Dassoud is there, waiting, perched not over the archway with the others, but clinging to a ledge at water level, out front, the single nearest man to the onrushing canoe. A knife is clamped between his teeth, a musket leveled in his hands. The tagilmust dangles at his throat, as if he has purposely exposed his face for the occasion, a tight triumphant smile drawn across his lips, his eyes a conflagration, bridges burned behind him. He has given up everything for this moment — his elite cavalry, his hegemony over the desert tribes, the soft fecund wash of Fatima’s flesh. For four and a half months — since the day he failed at Sansanding — he has driven himself, obsessed, horses dying under him, his skin blistered and throat parched, to reach this spot. Haunting the land of the Kafirs, killing strange chattering things and sucking at the raw meat as he rode — no time to stop — inflaming the local chieftains with his news of the white men, the Nazarini, waking, eating, drawing breath for this moment, this place, this Boussa.

Twenty-five yards. Martyn firing a musket into the sea of faces, spears like a forest in motion, M’Keal down, the boulders tipped back on their fulcrums. Mungo dips into his shirt and whips out the pistol in a fluid burst of light, the weapon flashing like a sword drawn from stone. He levels it at Dassoud’s face, both arms steady, but the boat is lurching, difficult to draw a bead, swirling closer, the roar. . a stone grazes his cheek, spears begin to sprout from the deck, somewhere behind him Martyn cries out over the thunder in his private agony. .

In the rear of the boat, stunned and disbelieving, Ned Rise is frantically turning over the alternatives: should he jump and risk the current or wait to be battered to death, squashed like an insect against the hull? Breathing hard, his eyes dissolved in his head, he clings to the tiller out of habit, postponing the moment, staring up into the massed black faces and seeing the hangman all over again. Jump! he shouts to himself. Jump! But he can’t, the water like the teeth of a saw, chopping and grinding at the rocks with a fierce frenzied buzz. . and then the first arrows begin to strike the canoe, M’Keal hit again and again, mouth open in a silent scream, blood like a surprise. . and still Ned sits there. Milliseconds tick by, the boat heaving and rocking: Ned Rise, former clarinetist, ne’er-do-well, hangee and African explorer, dead man. He is fevered, panicky, in the mouth of the beast, every muscle frozen. And then he sees Mungo in the bow of the boat. Mungo, drawing something from his shirt in a storm of spears, arrows and stones. Long-nosed, slender, silver barrel, something out of a distant nightmare: a dueling pistol. Tumblers click in his mind. Barrenboyne. Johnson. His wasted life. And then, in a daze, he’s up and dodging the spears and arrows, rushing for the bow of the boat, mad, mad, mad, struggling into the thick of it.

Fifteen yards. The boat dips violently and then rides up clear of the water, suspended for one giddy lingering instant, and Mungo has it, a clear shot, Dassoud’s face big as a wagon wheel — but suddenly his hand is arrested, the pistol jerked from his grip. Ned Rise is there, soaked, insane, spear-grazed, clutching at the pistol as if it were the key to the universe, the Holy Grail, the deus ex machina that could lift him up out of the doomed boat and hurtle him to safety. “Give it to me!” Mungo shrieks over the pounding furious roar of the river, frantic, a fraction of a second left. He snatches the pistol, Ned wrestles it back, the boat spinning for the abutment, the world coming down round their ears. . “Barrenboyne!” Ned shouts, as if it were a battlecry, his features contorted, wet hair splayed across his face. Ten yards, five, all the explorer’s hopes riveted on a silver cylinder, a fragment of lead: “Give it to me!”

“Poison!” Ned cries. “Anathema! A bad joke, it’s a bad joke!”

“Eeeeee!” call the vultures, swooping low. “Eeeeeeee-eeeeeee!”

“What?” The explorer is shouting — bawling — a damp dismal wind howling through the tunnel in breathless sobs. “What?”

And then they’re over the side.

It is like leaping into the teeth of a hurricane, dancing with an avalanche. They are buried, instantly, under the crashing countless tons of water, the very rocks quaking with the force of it. Dassoud’s shot goes wild, the Joliba founders and in the next instant is dashed to splinters on the near abutment, Martyn and M’Keal, corpses already, are tossed briefly into the air and then sucked down the throat of the gorge as if they’d never existed.

Above, on the rocks, ten thousand voices whoop in triumph and exaltation. Barefooted, naked, their faces disfigured with ritual scars and gashes of paint, black faces, black bodies, the tribesmen embrace, kiss their sworn enemies, dance in one another’s arms. The shout goes up, again and again, and the bonfires burn late into the night.

And the Niger, the Niger flows on, past the tumult of Boussa, past Baro and Lokoja, through rolling hills and treeless plains, playing over the shallows like fingers on a keyboard, stirring the reeds with a strange unearthly music, flowing on, all the way to the sea.