Dark Memory

by Jonathan Latimer

  “Mine is very pretty,” Jay said.

  “Oh, do be serious,” said Eve Salles. “This is terribly interesting.”

  The professor said, “I don’t think it’s so much souls as specialization.”

  “Specialization?”

  “I’ll try to explain. Or Bill can. He has a gift for popularizing science.”

  “No, you explain,” Eve Salles said. “Please.”

  “Well,” the professor said, “the specialization began a long time ago, when apes and men were much alike. During the Miocene, for instance, apes roamed over Europe, living about the way men did. In fact there are remarkable similarities between early man and Dryopithecus fontani, an extinct ape that inhabited what is now Spain.”

  He waited while thunder, sounding like horses crossing a wooden bridge, came from the mountain. The wind was steady now, and cold. At last the thunder died away.

  “In that era,” he went on, “the gorilla began to specialize in strength. He became large and strong in the course of his evolution. Soon he was one of the masters of the world, far too big to be menaced by anything. But early man did not follow him. He remained small, living in terror of all sorts of animals. He had to find another way of surviving.”

  Jay had heard Bill talk about this. It was part of his and the professor’s theory of accidental evolution, based on a study of the lungfish. It was interesting, but he was worried about Mr. Palmer. Had the storm caught him? He hoped he hadn’t run into trouble. He wondered if he should have gone back with Nygano. He felt a little guilty.

  “Man, fortunately, had a taste for meat,” the professor was saying. “But he was not strong nor quick enough to kill with his hands. So he devised traps and made spears and clubs and bows and arrows and, finally, guns. And his brain grew with his weapons, and in time he beame the master of the world.”

  Bill said, “When the gorilla decided to grow as big as two Primo Cameras, he never thought his puny relatives, Jay and Mr. Palmer, would someday bump him off with a gun.”

  “He was stupid,” Lew Cable said. “He let himself grow into a blind alley.”

  The thunder was much closer, the sound of it higher pitched. Over the gorilla mountain came the clouds, bulky and dark against the violet lightning. Rain beat for an instant on the fly of the dining tent. The cold wind had increased.

  “It’s going to be a bad storm,” Jay said.

  The professor was looking impatiently at Cable. “Do you really think he was stupid, Lew?” he asked. “If you’d lived in the Miocene, which would you have been: a strong warm-coated creature, afraid of nothing, or a naked cold animal hiding from his enemies in a damp cave?”

  “I’m glad the sisters can’t hear me,” Eve Salles said, “but I’d have been the gorilla.”

  “Of course you would.”

  “It all comes to this,” Cable said. “Some force led man forward.”

  “Sunday-school hooey!” Bill said.

  “You deny man is going forward?” Cable asked.

  “Which way is forward?” the professor inquired.

  One of the Totos came to the table. “They come, bwana” he said to the professor. He pointed up at the gorilla mountain.

  Just above the bamboo was a cluster of yellow lights, looking as though it was suspended in the sky. The porters were coming down the mountain with torches. When the lightning came, the yellow lights disappeared. They were moving very slowly.

  Jay felt relieved. “They’re by the deserted village,” he said.

  “How much longer?” Bill asked.

  “An hour.”

  Eve Salles exclaimed, “If only they can beat the rain.”

  Cable’s voice broke in loudly. “Certainly the conquest of nature is a step forward, Professor?”

  “The gorilla conquered nature, too,” the professor said. “Until man invented gunpowder. That, as we know, put the gorilla into his blind alley. But man may also be in one. I rather suspect he is.”

  “How can you say that?”

  The professor’s voice was impatient for the first time. “Even you will admit that man seems to degenerate, a sign that the evolutionary process is at an end. Certainly he has not developed intellectually in the last three thousand years. His store of knowledge has increased, but that is all. The hallmarks of his degeneracy are lust for power, a desire to kill his fellows, blind unreasoning tribal rages. He stands a good chance of destroying himself in war. Everywhere nations are inventing new methods of destroying other nations. Bombs, gas, fire, disease; what new and more terrible things will come into being?”

  The professor became silent. Jay watched the yellow lights on the mountain. There were many torches. He felt very tired. The tragedy of mankind did not have the immediate effect upon him the deaths of the gorillas had. He felt very bad about the gorillas, and he did not really care what happened to mankind. He supposed that was a sign of the degeneracy the professor was talking about.

  “There’s still another possibility, Lew,” Bill said. “We don’t even have to destroy ourselves. When we gave up fins for hands we may have been as shortsighted as the gorilla. What if floods should cover the earth again? What would we do for fuel or food or drinking water? Or what if the chemistry of the air changed through some accident? We would die and possibly some small underground animal with lungs suited to the new air would inherit the earth.”

  “So don’t feel too superior to the gorilla, Lew,” the professor said.

  “I don’t at all,” Eve Salles said. “You two make me feel frightened.”

  Cable said stubbornly, “I believe man will survive.”

  “There’s a thought to sleep on,” Bill said.

  It had begun to rain, the drops pattering on the canvas fly of the dining tent. The boys came to move the table and the chairs inside. A crooked line of lightning appeared above the gorilla mountain, but the thunder came far behind. The yellow lights were well down the mountain.

  “I’m going for a coat,” Eve Salles said.

  “We’ll all need coats,” Bill said. “Come on, Prof.”

  Jay went to the supply tent and found his green slicker. The rain was loud on the roof of the tent. He put on the slicker, buttoning it up to his neck, and then sat on the edge of the cot. He felt very lonesome, a cold, heavy, unhappy feeling deep in his stomach.

  Bill put his head inside the tent. “Coming?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’ll soon be here.”

  Bill went away. What the hell, Jay thought. If man was only an animal, so was a gorilla. The female would probably have died violently anyway. The shooting didn’t seem to worry Mr. Palmer. It was a matter of not thinking about it. He just wouldn’t remember he had killed the female. He hoped to hell that worked better than not remembering Linda. He got up from the cot and went out of the tent. The rain was coming down hard, the drops biting his face. The sky was full of thunder.

  He looked for the yellow lights, but he could not find them. He supposed the porters had reached the plateau of bamboo. Then he saw a faint glow on the low clouds above the elephant path. They were making good time. It was too bad they hadn’t been able to beat the storm. He took a few steps along the elephant path. A zigzag streak of lightning appeared above the mountain and he saw Eve Salles near him. He moved towards her.

  “Can you see them?” she asked in a low voice.

  “I think they’re on the path.”

  They watched in silence, facing the gorilla mountain. The glow above the elephant path was brighter now, and it was moving in the direction of the camp. Thunder came in a heavy roll after a flash of lightning. The air was restless with thunder.

  “The glow is from the torches,” he said.

  “Was it really so bad to kill them?” she asked.

  “They were damn human.”

  “One I saw in a cage looked brutal,” she said.

  “These were frightened and, at the end, very sad.”

  A change in the wind sent the rain in their eyes. Sh
e stood close to Jay and he could smell her perfume. The rain came at an angle, sharp and cold. She was wearing a raincoat with a hood for her head. When the lightning was in the sky he could see she was very beautiful. He looked away from her. Above the elephant path the glow of the torches was changing from yellow to red. The wind shifted and they heard men singing. The sound came to them downwind, strong and deep; then the wind turned again and it was gone, leaving the roar of the rain in the bamboo.

  “How strange!” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “Why do they sing?”

  “The Mountain King is dead.”

  She tried to look into his face. “Do you really think that’s it?”

  “Wait until you see him.”

  The boys threw wood on the fires. The flames rose, lighting the tents and the bare trees and the mounds of supplies. The red glow came on steadily. The rain hissed in the fires and wind whipped the smoke through the camp. Black shadows moved behind the tents. Eve Salles shivered.

  “You don’t like this, do you?” she said.

  “Would you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The wind again brought them the singing, slow and mournful, like the singing in a Negro church. The voices rose above the rain in the bamboo. They rose above the thunder. All the porters were singing. It was weird. The wind shifted, but the voices did not fade. The singing was as deep as the roar of surf. The torches were close now, and sparks flew over the bamboo. There was a moment of silence and then a single deep voice sang a line. The chorus, deep too, but heavy with the many voices, repeated the line. The voice sang it again. Then, while thunder rattled, the final line came, the voices rising together, charged with emotion, full throated and sad.

  The elephant path was filled with red light. Mr. Palmer, Mulu and Nygano, black against the glowing torches, appeared around the last bend, walking head down in the rain. Behind them came two porters with torches. The flames lit the wind-tossed bamboo. Mulu carried the baby gorilla. Mr. Palmer went by them, dragging his feet in the mud. His face looked haggard. The baby gorilla was a ball of fur in Mulu’s arms. Its face was hidden.

  “Poor little thing,” Eve Salles whispered.

  The three hunters went on to the camp. The rain hissed in the bamboo. Now the main body of torchbearers rounded the bend, the flames and the pitchy smoke of the torches flowing up into the night. They were all singing. Back of them, his bulk half obscured by smoke and moving shadows, sitting upright on his litter, black and ugly, was the male gorilla. The men were singing words that sounded to Jay like:

  OOO MOUBA JAH; OOO MOUBA JAH

  The voices died away. The porters came on silently. It was the end of a chorus. Thunder muttered in the mountains. Eve Salles grasped Jay’s arm. Now the male gorilla was lit up by the flames. Vines held him on the litter the porters carried, his head nodding with the steps, his shaggy arms, hands clasped, dangling below the long poles. The hair on his arms and shoulders was matted from the rain. Suddenly a single voice sang:

  Ula-oom UNGAI eh umbey

  And the massed voices roared:

  ULA-OOM UNGAI EH UMBEY

  The gorilla looked all chest and belly and shoulders and head. The flames showed the nipples on the chest; the circle of fur that was like a garment over the belly; the ears, twisted and deformed-looking, the cone-shaped head, the yellow fangs. The rain made the black leather face glisten. The gorilla’s expression was sad. Twelve porters carried him. The single voice sang:

  Ula-oom UNGAI eh umbey

  Deeply, the voices roared:

  OOO MOUBA JAH; OOO MOUBA JAH; OOO MOUBA JAH

  Then they were silent. Violet lightning flared in the sky, catching the torchbearers and the men with the litter, showing gleaming eyes and teeth and ivory ornaments, white against the black skins, and torches suddenly gone pale and rain and wild bamboo and smoke and walking men and above them, on his bier, the gorilla, nodding and solemn and gigantic, and above and behind him the mass of his mountain home, silhouetted now by the lightning against dark, angry, moving clouds.

  “He’s simply incredible!” Eve Salles gasped.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s like a monster. He’s like a pagan god.”

  The single voice took up the song again. The litter went past them. Jay could smell the porters’ sweat, the smoke of the torches. The flames were all around the gorilla. The voices roared: ULA-OOM UNGAI EH UMBEY. Now more torches and the second litter were coming. The rain made the men’s skin shine. Jay saw the female, a black, bent-over mass on her litter. She was not sitting up. Jay looked the other way. He saw the porters with the male halt in the center of the camp. Lew Cable and the professor were waiting there. The porters raised the litter high above their heads, roared a final chorus and put the gorilla on the ground. He sat facing the professor, not nodding at all now. Wind shook the bamboo.

  “I think I’ll get a drink,” Jay said.

  “But here’s the female,” Eve Salles said.

  “The hell with her!”

  Her face was shocked. He left her and went to the dining tent and found the brandy. He drank from the bottle, not bothering to look for a cup.

  CHAPTER 9

  THEY WATCHED MR. PALMER EAT in the dining tent. He was drinking whisky and eating stew and bread. He was looking better. The whisky had revived him. Outside the air was full of the storm’s noise. The rain beat down on the bamboo and on the canvas roof of the tent. The professor sat by Mr. Palmer, questioning him about the trip down the mountain.

  “Very slow going,” Mr. Palmer admitted.

  “We thought you might have had an accident.”

  “Had several.” Mr. Palmer grinned. “Fell eleven times, to be exact. Lost my rifle once. And once we dropped the old lady.”

  “That was too bad.”

  “No harm done.” Mr. Palmer poured himself another peg of whisky. “She fell in a bush.”

  Jay could see the storm through the open fly of the tent. A sheet of lightning lit the sky, followed close by thunder like a dynamite blast. He saw lightning strike the gorilla mountain. Up there the storm was worse.

  “Really quite careful of them, though,” Mr. Palmer said.

  Eve Salles sat under one of the safari lanterns, watching Mr, Palmer. “Did the baby make trouble?” She looked very young.

  “Cried,” Mr. Palmer said.

  “Poor thing,” she said.

  Bill and Cable came to the tent. Jay pulled aside the flap to let them in. Water ran off their raincoats.

  “Both gorillas are in the lab,” Cable told the professor.

  “Good.”

  Bill said, “We can do it alone, Prof.”

  “I want to help,” the professor said in a gentle voice.

  “It’s going to be a four-hour job.”

  “I don’t care. Why do you think I came along?”

  “Well,” Bill said, “don’t blame me if you get pooped out.”

  “What are you going to do?” Eve Salles asked.

  “Embalm the gorillas,” Lew Cable said.

  “Can’t they wait until morning?”

  “It must be done as soon as possible,” the professor said.

  Eve Salles looked at him. “Really, do you think you should?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” The professor smiled at her. “Ready?” he asked Bill and Cable.

  “Before you go,” Mr. Palmer said, looking up from his stew, “I’d better tell you about the baby gorilla. Before I stop believing it myself.” He hesitated, and then said, “It talked a bit on the way down.”

  “Talked?” the professor said.

  “Not English.” Mr. Palmer’s face was red. “Got an impression, though, it was saying something.”

  “Saying something to whom?”

  “Don’t know. All very silly.” Mr. Palmer obviously wished he had not mentioned it. “But several times we thought we heard something answer it.”

  Lew Cable laughed. “It was the whisky we sent
up.”

  “Possibly,” Mr. Palmer said.

  “Could the three gorillas have followed you down?” Bill asked.

  “Don’t know,” Mr. Palmer said.

  “They’d be afraid of the torches,” said Lew Cable.

  “You probably heard some other animal,” the professor said.

  “Probably,” said Mr. Palmer. He was relieved that it was all over. “Thought I’d mention it, though.”

  The professor went out with Bill and Cable. Jay held the fly for them. He had offered to help with the embalming, but he had been relieved when the professor said he would be in the way. He was very tired. Rain fell on his face as he stood by the open fly. Mrs. Salles looked out over his shoulder. He could smell something that was like lilac. The cold rain splattered them both. Jay could see rain coming down on the gorilla mountain in a white curtain.

  “Nasty, isn’t it?” she said.

  “It’s going to be worse.”

  “I’m afraid so,” she said. “I hate storms. I think I’ll go to bed.”

  “Can I take you to your tent?”

  “Herbert’s here.” She said, “Herbert!” and he came to the front of the tent. He had been standing beside the tent in the rain, waiting for her. Jay wondered how long he had been there. He was certainly faithful.

  “Good night, everyone,” she said.

  “Herbert can use my tent,” Mr. Palmer said. “No night to sleep out.”

  “Thank you. I’ll tell him.”

  When the flap was closed the storm did not sound so loud. Jay poured himself a drink of Mr. Palmer’s whisky. He was dead tired. It had been a hell of a day. He would be glad to get to bed.

  “Good-looking girl,” said Mr. Palmer.

  “She’s very beautiful,” Jay said.

  “Odd she should marry a Frenchman.”

  “What’s wrong with Frenchmen?”

  “Don’t know. Odd to think of a girl marrying one, though.”

  “Not if he’s rich enough.”

  “I suppose,” Mr. Palmer said.

  They both took more whisky. The wind was strong. It tore at the tent, pushing cold air inside. The rain made the roof of the tent translucent. It was possible to see the lightning flashes through it. The lightning was all over the sky. In the bamboo the wind and the rain sounded wild.