Eric McCormack - Cloud

After Dupont and I took up our places watching, the sad-eyed shaman knelt down and bent over the woman who’d given birth. He then spread his arms dramatically and shook his multicoloured cloak. It immediately burst into a clamour of screeching and chirping. I saw that it wasn’t really a cloak at all, but a piece of netting with dozens of little birds of different colours attached to it by their legs in some ingenious way. The sound they made reminded me of those noisy flocks of starlings that would nest in the infrequent, skeletal trees of the Tollgate.

Soon the birds became silent. The shaman grasped the woman’s breasts in his hands and began to suck, taking a few minutes at each. Then he straightened up and looked with his sad eyes at all of us gathered there. His mouth was open wide, milk dripping from his chin. I could see he had no teeth, only bare, pink gums.

The birds again began their shrieking and the baby, perhaps sensing the milk, howled even louder than the birds. The child was handed down to the mother. She put it to her breast and it sucked furiously.

ON OUR WAY back to the truck, Dupont asked whether the experience had been as educational for me as he’d hoped.

In fact, I’d felt queasy even from the first sight of the baby— especially that horrible slime and blood.

“All human beings enter this world covered in slime and blood — even if they’re born in palaces,” Dupont said. Then he explained the meaning of the ceremony. “In this tribe, the cloak of little birds is supposed to prevent the baby’s soul from leaving its body. But what’s particularly interesting is that mother’s milk is the only food a shaman is ever allowed. So, for him, women are the most important members of the tribe — he depends on them completely for his survival. This is very good for the women and elevates their status. For new mothers, it also has a practical benefit: the shaman makes sure the breast milk flows for their babies. Contrary to what most men think, that’s not always a simple matter.”

It was certainly news to me. What with that and the sight of the revoltingly slime-covered baby, I was curious as to why any woman in her right mind would ever want to have one.

“All it takes is the right man to talk her into it,” said Dupont with a laugh that set his beard tinkling merrily.

I was too queasy to laugh. Anyway, I couldn’t help thinking: surely it was just as important for a man to find the right woman? But hadn’t I already done that, and she’d broken my heart?

At a certain point in the journey, the truck became our private taxi. There were no other passengers and we stopped at no other villages. Trees of any kind were now rare as we drove hour after hour through great expanses of undulating grasslands. The wind was steady, bending the tall grasses before it. Then the truck crested a hill and the grasslands abruptly ended. Before us lay the desert, like an ocean that had been miraculously turned into sand, with huge waves in suspended motion.

A final check had to be done on the truck’s engine before entering a place so hostile to machinery, so Dupont proposed that we take advantage of the break.

“Let’s go for a short walk,” he said. “Your first time on foot in the desert will be something to remember.”

I didn’t at all mind getting out of the truck bed for a while, though the air was like the blast from a hot oven. We walked about half a mile, navigating sand dunes, our feet sinking deep at every step. With Dupont’s help I was able to scramble to the top of one of the highest dunes.

“Let’s sit here for a while,” he said.

We could see for miles around us.

“The hospital’s only about an hour that way,” he said, pointing to the northeast where the desert seemed to stretch to infinity. A fine powder of sand fell on us, carried by a wind that howled eerily.

“It’s called the harmattan ,” said Dupont. “Before I came here, I used to think winds made a noise only because they were blowing through trees and wires and buildings. But there are no such things in the desert, so you almost feel it’s the voice of the wind itself you hear.”

We were silent, listening to it. It had such an unsettling, mournful quality that it raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I thought back to those Upland winds Miriam and I used to listen to when we wandered the moors around Duncairn. They were bracing and often chilly, but I loved their voice because I myself was in love. Up here on the dune, the wind’s lamentation again seemed to reflect the state of my own mind.

In my feverish condition, even this amount of thinking tired me out. I could hardly get to my feet again when, after a while, Dupont said we’d better walk back to the truck.

We advanced into the desert along the vaguest hint of a road. It was now four in the afternoon. We had to swath our heads in our shirts to keep from breathing in the sand, so I felt more ill than ever.

Dupont eventually nudged my arm.

“Look,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

Over the edge of the truck I could see a compound consisting of three white-painted, modern-looking buildings glimmering and floating on the far shore of a lake of the bluest colour. I blinked several times. I’d no idea there were lakes in the desert.

“The lake’s just a mirage,” Dupont said. “You get used to them. But the buildings are real. When the hospital was built this whole area was grasslands. The desert’s been encroaching for years now. That’s one of the big problems here, but not the worst. Some of the human beings around this area are determined to outdo the havoc caused by nature.”

Feeling so ill, I was intent only on finding a less painful position in our bumpy, mobile oven. So I didn’t ask him what he meant by that last comment.

SOON WE WERE coasting along a much smoother surface — an occasional landing strip for small planes — and came to a halt in a courtyard in the midst of the three buildings we’d seen. The middle block ran east to west and was larger than the other two, which were like prongs in a fork, pointing north. All three buildings had long, shaded verandahs facing onto the central courtyard. Some beds had been pulled out onto the verandahs, and patients were propped up in them, watching our arrival. The sheltered area contained a number of garden plots full of vegetables and flowers — a welcome sight in this arid landscape.

As Dupont helped me down from the truck, a straggle of house cats that had been lying in the shade wandered out to meet us, their tails erect — for a moment, in my fever, I thought of Deirdre’s herd of cats in her house in Glasgow, and I half expected to see her here, too.

But these desert cats were accompanied by several whiteuniformed female nurses. The welcoming party, cats and nurses, appeared as delighted to see Dupont as he was to see them. He greeted each of the nurses by name and stooped to pet each cat.

The last of the nurses, the only European, was a tall, thin woman with cropped black hair that was greying a little. Her face was lined from the sun. She wore thick, wire-rimmed glasses that gave her the huge stare of an owl.

She and Dupont hugged each other for quite a few moments while the others looked on, smiling.

Dupont, holding her hand, introduced us.

“Clara, this is Harry,” he said. “He has a persistent fever, so he’ll be with us for a while till he feels better.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said to me. “I do hope you’ll enjoy your stay with us.” She sounded like an Englishwoman.

Dupont wasted no time in assigning me to a little guest room at the back of the staff quarters in the main building. The window had no glass, only a fly screen, and the bed was protected by a tented mosquito net. He immediately injected me with something and ordered me to rest.