T. Boyle - Water Music

At first they’re startled. But then, looking down at the wasted wretch prostrating himself in the cowshit, they begin to laugh. Their eyes are glossy and veined with red. They stagger, whoop, hold their sides, their laughter echoing into the night—”Yee-ha-ha-ha-haa!”—laughter like the throttling of birds. Then one of them steps forward, pipe in hand. His eyes are tiny, pig’s eyes, and his brow swells out over his face like an eroded riverbank. “Water!” cries Mungo. The man bends, drawing on the pipe, and blows a lungful of smoke in the explorer’s face. The odor is strong, aromatic, viscous: are they smoking incense? Mungo coughs. Then the man rocks back on his heels and calls out to his companions: “ Nazarini wants water?” They laugh. “Give him water, Sidi!”

Sidi turns back to the explorer and hisses: “ La illah el allah, Mahomet rasowl Allahi .” Mungo recognizes the phrase: There is only one God, and Mohammed is his prophet. They make him repeat it a hundred times a day. “Okay,” he says. “Okay,” and mutters a quick Lord’s Prayer, begging extenuating circumstances. Sidi kicks him. “ La illah el allah, Mahomet rasowl Allahi ” says Mungo. “Water!” shout the others. “Give the Nazarini water, Sidi. Give him holy water!”

The hocks of the cattle rise and fall. Dust settles on the explorer like a parched snow. It is up his nose, down his throat. He can hear them, the stupid beasts, drooling over the troughs in mindless contentment, the precious silken droplets tumbling from their muzzles, catching like jewels at the tips of their whiskers. “You want water?” Sidi says. Mungo nods. And then suddenly, without warning, the slave throws back his jubbah and pisses on him — quick and salt, the hot urine runs down his collar, through his fingers, soaks deep into the fabric of his waistcoat. The explorer leaps up in a frenzy, desperate and homicidal, but Sidi has backed off, laughing, and now the others are bending for stones and bits of wood. Mungo stands there, weak and stinking, as the herdsmen begin to pelt him. “Drink piss, Christian!” they jeer. He turns heel and jogs off into the night.

It is quiet. The stars fan out across the heavens like spilled milk; mosquitoes whine in the trees. He is turned away from the next three wells in succession, pummeled with fists and sticks. At the last well, an ancient brackish pit set apart from the others, an old slave and his son, a boy of eight or nine, are watering their master’s herd by torchlight. Mungo begs them for a drink. The old man eyes him suspiciously for a moment, then dips a bucket of water from the well. “Salaam, salaam, salaam ,” says Mungo, reaching out for it, when the boy tugs at his father’s sleeve. ‘‘ Nazarini ,’’ says the boy. The old man hesitates, looking first at the bucket, then at the well. He is concerned about contamination, hexes, a well gone dry in the night. “Please,” the explorer says, “I beg you.” The old man shuffles to the trough, empties the bucket and points a weathered finger. Mungo doesn’t have to be asked twice. He throws himself forward, wedging his head between the big horned skulls of a pair of heifers.

The trough looks like a gutter on a rainy day, the water like sewage, twigs and straw and bits of offal swirling on the surface. The explorer buries his face and drinks, but the competition is fierce, the stream already a puddle, cattle slavering, their great pink tongues like sponges lapping up the last few drops. He turns to the old man. “More!” he shouts. “More!” A piebald cow, its eyes big as pocketwatches, bowls him over. And then suddenly a gunshot barks out, loud as a thunderclap. Then another. The cattle fall back, confused, butting shoulders, snouts and flanks, panicky, running blind. Ka-bomb, Ka-bomb, Ka-bomb , they boom off into the night.

When the dust settles, Mungo finds himself looking up at three horsemen. One of them is Dassoud, the hyphenated scar glistening in the torchlight. There is a pistol in his hand. He steadies his mount, levels the pistol at the explorer’s head and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. Mungo sits there in the dust and cattle droppings, his heart frozen, nerves shot, wondering how on earth to conciliate this madman with the gun. ‘‘ La illah el allah, Mahomet rasowl Allahi ,’’ he says, taking a stab at it. Dassoud is pouring a fresh charge into the priming pan, all the while growling like a dog at an intruder’s pantleg. The horses stamp and whinny, the old man and his son cower. Then Dassoud raises the gun a second time, shouts something in Arabic, squeezes the trigger. A flash of light, a sound like hot coals dropped in a tub of water. The pistol has misfired. “What have I done?” the explorer pleads, edging away. Dassoud curses, flings down the pistol, and calls over his shoulder for another. “Hua!” shouts the man at his back, tossing him a fresh weapon. Dassoud snatches it out of the air, cocks the hammer, and aims at a constellation of freckles just to the left of the explorer’s nose.

“Mr. Park!” Johnson, skirts aflap, bursts into the circle of light like a character out of the commedia dell’arte. His chest is heaving and his jowls are streaked with sweat. “Mr. Park, you crazy? Get up on your feet and double-time it back to that tent before they shoot you dead on the spot. You got the whole place in a uproar. They think you tryin’ to escape.”

Mungo looks up. Fires blaze on the hillside. Horsemen ride off into the night with torches. There are shouts and curses, random gunshots. Mungo rises. Dassoud lowers the pistol.

♦ NAIAD♦

Outside, beyond the lace curtains and leaded windows, a lazy fat-flake snow settles over the trees and gardens of Selkirk, smoothing corners, blurring distinctions, inundating the mileposts along the Edinburgh road. There are no footpaths, no flowerbeds, no lawns; the azaleas are bowed and the evergreens stagger at the edge of the field. It has been snowing for two days now. Drifts darken the lower panes and lean against the door, saddle horses go without exercise and wagons lose their bones in soft sculpture. There is ice in the well. Up on the rooftop the weather vane grinds round its axis.

Here in the kitchen, it’s another world. Thick and sultry, the atmosphere steams like an island in the Pacific. The windows perspire and drip, the hand mirror fogs over, bath towels go heavy with damp. In the hearth: a holiday fire. Mounds of glowing coals, a crosshatch of split oak and the low sucking moan of the flames. Two blackened cauldrons hang over the fire, suspended from hooks driven into the stone a century ago. Vapor spews from them, thick as a mist over the moors. On the table, dark leafy ferns glow with wet, and dace and shiners flash at breadcrumbs behind the beaded glass of the aquarium. From the corner, lost somewhere in the banks of rising steam, the turtle doves imitate a flute caught in the lower register.

It is February second, the anniversary of her engagement to Mungo Park. Ailie Anderson is commemorating the occasion with a bath — a rare luxury in these pinched times. She glides round the room, arranging her bath things, humming, occasionally fanning the fire with a blast from the bellows. Dr. Philby’s green soap stands ready on the table, beside her comb and tortoiseshell brush; the Bain des Fleurs dangles from her fingertips. Luxury or no, she’ll have her bath today. She’ll lie back in the steamed-up kitchen surrounded by her menagerie and the sounds and scents of nature, and dream of Mungo fighting his way through the dripping jungles of the Dark Continent. Her father allows but one bath a month. “I canna spare the hardwood and the coal,” he says. No matter. She’ll have her bath today and stink till March. After all, this is no mere rub and scrub, this is ritual purification.