Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

Then:

The Ituri again, clack-clack in the trees; around me, in the netting of lianas and creeping vines that crosshatch the woods, and off the branches of the surrounding trees, femurs and rib cages, spines and clavicles — human bones of every variety — hanging everywhere, like clock pendulums or Chinese wind chimes. Worse is the undergrowth, for with every step, I feel the ground beneath my feet oozing with blood, the syrupy mud rising up onto my boots with every step. The leather of my shoes coming apart like soaked, mealy bread… such disagreeable things I ascribe to bad digestion and a very severe headache before turning into bed….

Or:

On the trail came across a dying native, his head cracked open by a rifle butt, the side of an eyeball visible through a split in the forehead of the skull, his smooth belly expanding ever so slightly with his last breaths — the oddity of it all, not a drop of blood issuing from the gaping wound, as if the blood had been stopped like mud in his veins… had no choice but to discharge my pistol into his head, to put the poor fellow out of his misery, the crack of the gun, the body writhing for a final moment… a nightmare, to be sure.

And his journals go on and on: with opinions about his officers, reports of the dead and wounded, and counts of deserters in his caravan.

WITHIN THE HUNDREDS OF PAGES of his journals, there exist these scant references to Huckleberry Finn :

September 20, 1887

My eyes are slowly going bad… have been reading Clemens’s novel again, in my tent, before sleep; some parts I have found less than what he is capable of, some of it strictly picaresque, but some parts profoundly moving. I particularly find Jim to my liking and not unlike my good-natured man Uledi… The river of freedom is an idea I enjoy, but an illusion, no doubt, especially given the reality of the river that exists in this place. A river of death… But I find that just thinking about the Mississippi and my old life does wonders for my spirit, even when I know it is just a made-up story.

October 8, 1887

On a reconnoitering excursion across the black lake of [illegible] when, because of a heavy and sudden fog, we could not see far into the darkness or take our bearings by the stars, I had no choice but to light a torch, even though that light might well have brought a hail of poison arrows from the shore toward our canoe. But I had no torch, so I asked Hoffman to hand me my knapsack, wherein were contained several books, including the Bible and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , as I had thought to burn one of them for light — but which one? Though it troubled me to use the Bible, I could not bear the thought of tearing to pieces and making ashes out of Clemens’s gift to me, so putting it aside and begging Providence’s forgiveness, and bearing in mind that I had another Bible back in camp, I ripped from my Bible’s binding clumps of its pages, which I put to a lucifer match, its sudden glare giving us a sense of where we were in relation to the shore, which we shortly could make out was to our right. We were fortunate to find some of our party (Lieutenant Stairs and well-armed Somalis) awaiting us there, for seeing our light, they set afire some of their own torches, and we were saved.

IN A PHOTOGRAPH taken in a Cairo studio, circa January of 1890, Stanley is posed with the surviving four officers of his expedition (Jephson, Stairs, Nelson, and Parke) against the painted backdrop of an African plain, potted palms surrounding them. These gentlemen — in their dapper, high-collared white Victorian shirts and walrus mustaches — are either seated, canes and bowler hats set on their laps, or standing, at ease, looking bemusedly into the camera, as if they had still not gotten reaccustomed to the trappings of normal modernity. Stanley, his face gaunt and his expression weary, seems by far the eldest; with his hair turned completely white, he could have been an uncle posing with his nephews or a schoolmaster with his teachers instead of an intrepid explorer who’d just turned forty-nine.

Dearest Samuel,

How are you, my old friend? As for me, I fear the best years of my life are gone, and now, at fifty, whatever glories might await me, my personal circumstances remain as solitary as before, but with the difference that I am now feeling my age — Africa will do that to a man.

I mention this because it is you who tried to dissuade me from undertaking the whole business during my last visit with you in Connecticut, in the winter of ’86. As we talked about Africa one night, you doubted the value of the mission, calling it an excuse for “wholesale colonization” of the region, and as you, dear Samuel, by the example of your happy home life, made me think heavily about the prospect of spending endless months in the wilderness without the ordinary comforts of domesticity, I nearly changed my mind. But the eyes of my peers were upon me, and besides, I did not think the mission would be as difficult as it turned out to be.

As you may recall, certain extenuating emotional circumstances were at work on my spirit at the time — I am speaking of my misbegotten attachment to Dorothy Tennant, the London society dame whose initial romantic attentions had been a great surprise to me. To have been lulled into a dream of love, only to be rejected, perhaps clouded my judgment at a crucial moment: In the end, I welcomed the distraction and am still convinced that I was the best man for the job. I expect that all the parties who had diligently persuaded me to do so — King Léopold of Belgium and Mr. Mackinnon — have been quite satisfied with the results, for central equatorial Africa is now better known and will be portioned off, to mutual satisfactions, among the Europeans, and the strange and mercurial pasha was brought to safety.

And remember how much of Europe was in an uproar over the fate of one Eduard Schnitzer, or the Emin Pasha, as was his title after the khedive of Egypt elevated him? A bookish and quite brilliant man, a linguist and naturalist assigned to the governorship of Equatoria, he had been stranded with a contingent of Sudanese forces in a garrison near the Albert Nyanza — Lake Albert — and apparently surrounded by the forces of the Mahdi, bent on his extinction. As you know, nothing had been heard from him in several years, and in Europe there was the fear that he would surely suffer the same fate as did my old friend Gordon of Khartoum — which was to be hacked to pieces by Islamic swords. As you know, I was “retired” from explorations and missions, etc., having grown weary of such challenges. Nevertheless, it was during the second week of my American tour — as it happened, I was visiting with you in Hartford on that leg (and a most pleasant one it was) of the tour arranged by Major Pond — when I received the summons to lead the expedition. Both King Léopold of Belgium and shipping magnate William Mackinnon, of the British India Steam Navigation Company, had been after me for some time to undertake that journey, and though I had my reservations, my sense of civility and duty prevailed. Once the funds, some twenty thousand pounds or so, were raised by subscription and I received the summons, it was a matter of honor and integrity that compelled me to accept the assignment.

No doubt there will be much talk about the loss of life and the necessary measures we had to take in subduing hostile villages to ensure our survival, but in the end, given the sheer magnitude of my accomplishment — tracking through a previously unknown region the size of France to rescue the pasha and recording the geographical discoveries that resulted — I can take some pride. In addition, I hope to break up the slave trade of Africa; and eventually to expose villagers in the Congo to a more modern and enlightened state of existence. Rarely can any man (or men) lay claim to have actually entered into Dante’s dark wood, as I can now: For one hundred and sixty days, we marched through the immense Ituri Forest without ever seeing a bit of greensward the size of a cottage chamber floor. Nothing but endless miles and miles of forest, and never as much as a patch of sunlight, the gloom of being in such a godless place so great that, indeed, the small emotional troubles that come to a man in the discharge of ordinary life seemed hardly of consequence; even one’s own name in such conditions hardly matters, only survival. My dear friend, to say that it was like a dream, and often like a bad one, is no understatement.