J. Ledgard - Submergence

Heat prickled under his scalp. The snakes did not move from under the rocks. Neither did the jihadists. He fell over his own shadow. He had been one of those paratroopers who could kill a fighter with his bare hands. Now he could not keep up with them. He was built for structures and systems. In his stupors he saw the sun harden and arc across the sky and soften in the evening. There were the colours of petrified wood. He heard prayers in the shade. If he could only climb out of the wadi he would get onto the world.

When his mind and breathing were clear and sober he saw that the wadi was divided between the parts where sunlight struck and the parts where it never reached. These parts were a reminder of what Danny had said, that the strangest life exists in the cracks.

He thought in future times the great literature would be translated into a hieroglyphic script based on hexagonal forms, including that passage in Utopia where his saintly ancestor dreamt up vast deserts of the equator

parched with the heat of the sun, the soil was withered, all things looked dismally, and all places were either quite uninhabited, or abounded with wild beasts and serpents, and some few men, that were neither less wild nor less cruel than the beasts themselves.

The light and dark in the wadi helped him to better understand the jihadist worldview.

‘What is the influence of the desert on Islam?’ he asked Saif, when he was feeling better.

‘What do you mean?’ Saif said. ‘The desert is also true for the Christians. Jesus went to the desert.’

He knew the damp in England’s bones. ‘Not any more,’ he said. ‘Not in England.’

He believed the contrast in the desert helped create the Abrahamic religions and the advance and enlightenment of Christendom was an admittance of rainy days and nights. It came back to the weather. The clouds that covered up the stars in England, the seasons of drizzle there, the mists, the storms, the trees losing their leaves, all of it made a mockery of Bedouin absolutes.

There were slender trees in the wadi, very old, hard as rock, and in their dusky hollows and roots were spiders and mice.

One night when they were walking they came across a cormorant too weak to fly. It sat on the rock flapping its wings, like a goose in a farmyard. If it rained the cormorant would survive, but there was no sign of more rain.

He thought about sex a lot while he walked. Not the rutting of pastoralists, not the pent-up sexual desire of the fighters; he put himself instead somewhat comically on the dance-floor in Kampala, the suck of it, a fountain of Ugandan women’s arses, gyrating, pumping, and wiggling huge breasts; the mirrors, cigarettes, bottles of Nile beer, cheap Chinese furnishings, the sweat; and all the other men at the far end of the dance-floor watching an English football match on the television, leaving him alone to satisfy all the women, each of them in turn presenting themselves, which, trudging along, he had no difficulty in doing.

There was once a Hungarian count from Transylvania who sold a family diamond to fund an expedition to east Africa. His porters called him fatty.

He bought his guns from Holland & Holland in London and recovered some of the costs of his expedition with the sale of ivory from the elephants he shot; the ivory which many of the piano keys in Vienna of that period were fashioned.

One of the count’s contemporaries, a young American braggart, was said to have taken several pairs of flesh-coloured gloves when he went overland to the Tina River, with the intention of making the Somalis think he was peeling the skin off his hands, although that is hard to credit. Would the Somalis ever have fallen for it?

It was easier to take if Africa was doing it to him. Africa was a rough mistress to pale men. If he considered his captivity in this way he could place his journey at the undistinguished end of African exploration; nothing more than an outing. He thought badly of many of the white explorers and white hunters, because of their violent acquisitiveness. He believed in being of service to others. If he had been more gentle, he really could have been Mr Water.

The grass was tall by the lakes in Congo and the mud there was so heavy on his boots at the end of the day it could not be stamped off and had be removed with a knife or a spoon. There was maize growing in the shambas, also squash, cassava, spinach, peas, groundnuts, sometimes guava, mango, watermelon and many types of banana; stewed, and served with shreds of chicken or tilapia. The villagers hung beehives in the trees for the wild bees to colonise. These hives were barrels, fashioned of bamboo strips, and covered in mud, dung and leaves. One end was sealed with banana bark, the other netted with vines and twine. He thought of workers on the slopes of the volcanoes above the lakes. Walking home on wet paths through fields of sorghum whose red tassels swayed, hoes on their shoulders, alongside clear-flowing streams; each worker to their windowless mud huts with roofs of terracotta tiles.

He thought of the mattered water of the lakes, their rock formations and the old steamer ships fallen on their sides on the shore. Of the bars on the Congolese side — the Zebra bar and the Sir Alex bar — and the soldiers leaving, stumbling out of them in the early morning, still in wellington boots, still armed, taking with them girls pushed by their families to sleep with them in the hope of securing better rations and protection.

He thought especially of the thundering afternoon rain, a child selling tomatoes one by one at the roadside through the downpour, the steaming land that followed, the monkeys sprinting up the trees, and a man sitting on a stool outside his hut, reading the Bible in the last light of the day.

There was a town on a lake between Congo and Rwanda where the wind blew stiffly, but produced no waves. There was a Soviet-built hospital on the hill of the town and a beacon behind it which brightened in the dusk, and there was a boy selling sticks of chewing gum who, as he ambled by, glanced at the sky and said: ‘Look! The moon is taking the light away from the sun.’

They drove up out of the wadi. It was Martian, but there was movement; impala springing away, rock pythons and poisonous frogs. They passed a grave where the body was laid above the ground with stones piled on it. The headstone commended a herder’s life to the Almighty. There were a few wild people who paid them no attention, but took shelter from the sun and the wind in round huts made of paper, plastic and cloth.

They arrived at a place no satellite image can do justice to. There was a plain of volcanic clinker, like on the slopes of the terrorist’s island, then the lorry drove down below sea level onto a Greenlandic whiteness. Even close up it had the look of pack ice, with those same veins of green. All the shades of white were visible and there were roseate floes far out to sea. It crunched under their feet when they jumped down onto it. But it was illusory. It was not the life-giving ice of the north that melts and freezes, under which the beluga whale swims. It was a salt flat. The mists were chlorine vapours. There were no birds in the sky. It was littered with the bones of animals which had strayed there and died and been covered in salt. He picked up what he took to be the skull of a gazelle. It looked frozen, the sockets hoary, but the salt broke apart at the slightest touch, leaving only the bone.

Saif ordered the group to smash up slabs of salt and load them onto the lorry that they might trade later in their journey for charcoal and whey. He helped wrap them in sisal. He brushed salt from his hair and face. It formed on all of them. They began to look frosted to each other: it was impossible to live under the rim of the world.