T. Boyle - Water Music

“Johnson! What’s he saying?”

Johnson stares into the fire.

“Johnson!”

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

“Nice hands!? What the—“

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

The rains have begun.

♦ EUREKA!♦

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

♦ ♦ ♦

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

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

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

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

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

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

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