T. Boyle - Water Music

Llandaff has been waiting for this. “Yes, Twit,” he grins, ever so slowly whitening his palm with salt from the shaker, “we’ve all had occasion to read of your rigorous excursions into the blacker holes of Africa — incidentally, how is the nigger slave getting on these days?”

Pultney sniggers.

“Hear, hear!” shouts Edwards. “A blow for the Ancients!”

“Gentlemen, please.” A bulky, florid form has risen at the far end of the table. Sir Reginald Durfeys, Bart., now on the threshold of his eighth decade, has yet to begin the long slide toward the grave that has crabbed and disfigured so many of his coevals. At sixty-eight, he is as pink and fat as a baby, ingenuous as a teenager. He gives to charity, loves a glass of port, takes his postprandial exercise on the boulevard each evening. He has never married. “While I cannot agree with our distinguished confrere that the Niger is merely imaginary,” he begins, the great silver bush of his head all but blotting Desceliers’ map from view, “neither can I accept with any sanguinity the Bishop’s asseverations that the information gathered by the Greeks is our most reliable. No. I feel we must look to our modern cartographers — to Major Rennell and D’anville.” He leans forward, pressing his fists to the table. “Gentlemen: it is my belief that the Niger flows eastward , toward the heart of the continent—”

“Oh piffle, Durfeys — it flows to the westward and disembogues along the Pepper Coast.”

“—flows eastward , I repeat, and feeds the great lake called Chad, where its waters are given to evaporation in the blistering temperatures of the mid-Sahara.”

“Come off it, old man,” Edwards interjects. “If it flows to the eastward, then Llandaff and Herodotus must be vindicated — what else could it then do but join with the Nile in the Nubian foothills?”

“Rubbish!” shouts Twit, his eyes watering from an excessive dose of snuff. “It’s all a fantasy, I tell you. A dream. No more substantial than Atlantis or the land of the sugarplum fairy.”

Durfeys, still standing, begins to stammer from confusion. “But, but gentlemen… I had it. . had it from Johnson—”

“Pfffff, Johnson.” Llandaff’s face is slashed by the line of his nose, cut in two like a halved apple; his ears look as if they’re about to flap up off his head. “Another voice of obfuscation from the Dark Continent. Triggerhappy and swell-headed. A black nigger cannibal in a two-guinea wig. Let’s all consult our charwomen and gardeners next time we need a cartographer.”

“Yes, Reginald — what of your precious Johnson?” says Edwards. “What’s he accomplished for us thus far — the loss of yet another explorer?”

At that moment Sir Joseph Banks clears his throat. Durfeys, reddening, sinks back into his seat. Six pairs of eyes fasten on the Director. “The term, Mr. Beaufoy, is ‘geographical missionary,’ and yes, I am chagrined to report that we must now begin to think of casting about for another man to undertake the illumination of the Niger region. There has been no word from the young Scot for nearly eight months now.” The Director stares down at his glass, running a thoughtful finger round its rim. “In point of fact, gentlemen, the indications are a good deal worse than you might imagine. I have before me a recent communication from our factor on the Gambia, Dr. Laidley.” Sir Joseph breaks off, and then slowly raises his head. His eyes are distant and unfocused, as if he were just then waking from a dream. On the far wall, dancing under the lamplight, Desceliers’ figures seem to swell and recede, twitching their multiple arms and headless shoulders, beckoning, teasing, mocking.

“Yes?” Llandaff prompts.

Sir Joseph snaps to attention, focuses on Durfeys. “It’s all up, I’m afraid. Park has fallen into the hands of the Moors.”

♦ LIKE A CLOUD SWALLOWING

A FLOCK OF IBIS♦

As Johnson limps through the gates of Segu Korro, trailing flies, a nag and an ass, a walking stick in his hand and a revitalized Eboe at his side, he is astonished to find the streets all but deserted. Windows shuttered, stalls left unattended, pack animals — still laden with swollen guerba s and panniers of produce — calmly dipping their heads into baskets of onions, yams and cassavas. A smithy’s forge sputters and roars beneath a spreading fig, lumps of wet clay harden in the sun beside finished pots. Tools lie where they’ve been dropped, goats call out to be milked, a monitor lizard, staked out for sale, stubbornly thrashes round and round its cord. From somewhere, the smell of burning bread. Johnson feels uneasy. It’s strange, eerie: like something out of a fairy tale. Red Rose and Snow White. Sleeping Beauty. When he spots a pair of eyes glaring out from behind a bamboo screen, he turns to Eboe. “What you suppose is goin’ on here?”

The old man, buoyant and oblivious, is strutting along like a teenager on his way to a dance. He stops in his tracks. “Going on?” he says, slapping Johnson’s back and exploding in a burst of harsh wheezing giggles. “It’s a holiday, is what it is. Wine, women and song.”

Johnson merely stares.

“Can’t you feel it?”

“Feels more like a cholera epidemic to me.”

Eboe winks. “Follow me,” he says.

They turn down a street lined with tamarind and raffia palm. The houses, built of whitewashed clay, are almost picturesque. There are patches of vegetables, trellises, even a flower or two. No paradise on earth, perhaps, but pleasant — very pleasant — all the same. It occurs to Johnson that this is the biggest town he’s seen since leaving London. Pisania was a sink compared to it, and Dindikoo, for all its charm, is just a hamlet in the sticks. Suddenly he finds himself thinking of sooloo beer — and mutton.

Round the next corner they stumble over a drunk stretched out in the road. “Baaaa,” says the drunk. “Urp.” Johnson bends over him, the guinea hen describing a wide arc and coming to rest, at a dangle, just under the drunk’s chin. “What’s goin’ on here?” Johnson asks.

The man looks up at him, eyes red, lips slack. “Drunk,” he mutters.

“No. I mean in the town. What’s goin’ on in this place? Where is everybody?”

“White,” slurs the drunk. “White as. “ he chokes off to tap his sternum and spit in the dirt. “White as a salted ghost. White, white, white. Like a cloud swallowing a flock of ibis.”

Johnson has begun to get the idea. “Where is he?”

“White as cotton, white as day. White as fangs and bones and moonlight in a clearing.” The drunk is sitting up now, his voice a nursery-school rhyme, vapid, singsong, endless and repetitive.

Johnson staggers up, breathing hard. The explorer is an innocent, a holy fool. They’ll cook him alive, crucify him. He’s got to find him. “Eboe!” he shouts, whirling around. “We got to find Mr. Park.”

But Eboe is already half a block away, standing stock-still, nostrils flared, snuffing the breeze. Then all at once he’s grinning and stamping, waving his arms like a juggler with nine plates in the air. “This way,” he motions. “Hurry!”

Johnson tugs at the leather strap, and nag and ass mechanically plod off at his heels. “White as teeth!” the drunk shouts. “Whiter than a dead mud turtle!”

Eboe drifts like a somnambulist, following his nose. Two blocks to the left, then back to the right, through the abandoned marketplace, down a street shabby with garbage and yellowed reed huts that could pass for outhouses. There are rats and snails in the gutters, snakes in the eaves. “Eboe!” Johnson calls, struggling to catch up, but the old man hurries on as if he hasn’t heard. The ground is soggy underfoot, banks of bamboo rise from between the huts now, birds flit through the trees. Finally the old man stops across from a sprawling, ramshackle hut propped up on stilts. Johnson, bringing up the rear, can make out the dim form of three or four women in the deep shade beneath the house. He is puzzled. He’d been under the impression that Eboe, recognizing the emergency, had been leading him to the explorer. Now he sees that he’s been misled.