T. Boyle - Water Music

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.