Henderson's Spear

by Ronald Wright

  He did however release the promised bullocks for food along the way, but my men and I saw precious little of the meat, our Sofa guards regaling themselves upon the gluttons share. I resolved that once I reached civilization I should not again eat biscuits and jam for a long time. And I haven’t.

  At night the distant cloud formations flickered and flashed as if lit up by a titanic artillery battle below the horizon, and far-off detonations of the Thunder Fetish rolled towards us through the stifling air. It is hard to say which was worse, the airlessness of the hours without wind, or the scorching harmattan, which blew steadily each day, drying up the waterholes, cracking lips, filling the ears and eyes with a fine dust, corrosive as Portland cement. After three days I was too ill to ride. The bloody flux had returned and with the chafing of the saddle I became mindful of Dr. Part’s dire warnings of rectal gangrene. How I longed to see that good medico with his pince-nez and black bag of tricks—notably his opium digestive powders!

  The carriers put me in a hammock and I passed the hours on my side. The sweat streamed down their backs, whilst their feet, calloused and spreading like the feet of camels, sank rhythmically into sand and alkali. For long hours I kept my eyes closed against the sun. The only sensation of travel was the cradle-like rocking of my hammock and a procession of smells that for me will always be Africa: dust, cow dung, wild bees, acacia resin, and dead things here and there in the dry grass.

  The drought was now severe. Anything that could move had gathered at the waterholes, where crocodiles lurked in the mud, and vultures jostled like mad priests on every leafless branch. Thirst had banished natural fears: the gazelle and baboon came down to drink beside the leopard, running off no more than a few yards when one of their kind was suddenly seized and torn to bits. For the first time ever I saw baboons with blood on their hands. Desperation had made them carnivores, and they too were taking a share of the weak.

  There is something unmistakably kindred about baboons. Their lively golden eye is the most intelligent of any animal I know, and their mischievous, snatching, sometimes vicious nature so much like that of small boys—or grown men.

  During the twelve days it took to reach Bontuku—the last town of any size in Samory’s domain, and the midway point to Kumasi—we passed through a number of villages, all drought-stricken. My men found little enough to eat. One night, while dining, I became strongly aware of a disgusting stench emanating from my attendants. They were consuming what is commonly called “stink meat”—the decomposing carcass of some animal, in this case a lion. Next morning a local fellow came to me with the lions skin to sell. I did not want a skin, but he looked so dejected that I offered him half a sovereign for it. This he wouldn’t accept, saying that the lion was worth at least a whole sovereign, because it had eaten his wife!

  At another village we had a lamentable encounter with a bull elephant, heard trumpeting and rollicking about all night. The great beast came early in the morning, attracted by the smell of water which women were drawing in leather buckets from a well. I was leaning against the hut in which I’d slept. Several villagers ran up with nothing in their hands, as if to welcome him. Then one of the Sofas fired a flintlock and hit him above his eye. The elephant came on at the same slow walk, seemingly calm and unprovoked, until he reached the riverbed. There we saw him standing in a garden, breaking down the palms.

  About forty more shots were poured into him. Blood ran down his wrinkled hide from dozens of small holes, but he did not stir, except to flap his enormous ears. Then a village boy crept up behind with a knife and, taking hold of the tail, started to cut a piece off. With extraordinary speed, the elephant bundled the boy up in his trunk, threw him down and trod upon him. Some Sofas opened fire again, but the elephant walked softly to the riverbed until he came to some mud, where he lay and rolled to salve his wounds.

  After a little while in the river, he approached a house and knocked down a wall. Now the shooting was resumed, until at last—it must have taken an hour from start to finish—the great beast went down slowly, in stages, like a sinking ship whose bulkheads rupture one by one.

  Soon waking and sleeping ceased to be separate states for me. I became oblivious of the country travelled, and at night I felt as if I were still on the move. The creak of the hammock poles and the fetor of bush and carriers never ceased, except for episodes of blankness that I can’t call rest.

  The cowardly slaughter I’d just witnessed ran through my mind obsessively, mingling with the sight of poor Ferguson’s ruined but still noble head.

  At last we descried Bontuku’s defensive walls quavering in the heat, rustic minarets rising gauntly above them like termite hills, and it seemed a fabled Eastern city. For the first time in weeks I felt that I might be within reach of deliverance, that I might yet return to the soggy island of my birth, hear church bells and steam engines, and see Jersey cattle eating fresh green grass.

  We entered at sunset, the thin Arabian stream of a muezzins cry cutting through the drumming of Africa and the braying of skeletal donkeys. My Hausas soon made contact with kinsmen of theirs, finding a clean room where I could rest before continuing. They also found a runner willing to take a dispatch to end-of-telegraph at Kumasi. I kept the message to essentials: for myself I asked that a doctor be sent to meet me at the frontier of Ashanti, as my strength was failing fast; to the Governor I said simply, “Ferguson is dead.”

  I well knew what effect those words would have when they reached Sir William, and, worse, when he carried out the sad duty of communicating them to George’s widow, son, and two little girls. But knowing also the swift and crooked wings on which rumour flies through the bush, I thought it right that they should have reliable word from a friend at the first opportunity.

  The sky was a vast bruise when we pressed on, the air so heavy and foul that the lungs derived little benefit from it. Breathing was like trying to slake one’s thirst on thick, turned cream.

  That night the weather broke with a deafening barrage.

  The following days march was a new trial for the men. Every gully was a torrent, every low-lying spot a khaki lake. Cakes of mud lifted with their feet, exposing the dust and hard-pan underneath.

  On the third day my fortunes took a sudden turn for the worse. The rain had stopped about eleven, the sun showed itself, and steam rose from the earth like smoke after a grass fire. The mens spirits lifted, and they began to sing. We had a quick lunch at noon, and carried on while the going was good. At about three, dark tongues licked across the sky in minutes, and we were pounded by raindrops fat as musket balls, which danced on the ground.

  We had been approaching a village. Not far off, outside the main fence beside an old baobab (known in West Africa as the “upside-down tree,” because its branches, when leafless, look like upended roots), was a small round hut with a conical roof and an abandoned air. My hammock-men had been relieved by Sofa guards, as was often the case when we entered a town. These were Mohammedans from Mandingo country. Spying the shelter of the hut, they trotted there as quickly as they could, unaware of its peculiar nature. Blinded by rain, they failed to notice the skulls beside the door and the frieze painted in mimicry of a python’s reticulations around the top of the wall. It was the lair of a fetish priest.

  These practitioners may be of either sex, and range in their arts from healers and black magicians to high-class fortune tellers. Like the table-rappers of Mayfair, they question their familiar spirit upon all matters relating to a client’s future, convey the answer of the oracle, and call the attentions of the dead to questions asked by their relations left behind on Earth.

  My men, who understood very well the taboo nature of the place, ran up and began to shout, but I was halfway across the threshold by then. There now ensued a tug-of-war: those in the van trying to enter; those in the rear trying to pull hammock, white man, and bearers out. In the confusion I was shoved up near the overhanging thatch, where a long, stiff straw pierced my left eye.

  At my shou
t the men dropped me and fled. I was alone in the intimate tholos of the Python Fetish.

  I became aware of an old half-naked woman bending over me, her lined, toothless face; and the fanged face of a large snake, its tongue testing the air and its tail coiled around the withered breasts of its attendant. There was a stench of sour milk and rotten meat from offerings given to the sacred reptile. Then the pain was on me like fire, my sight failed altogether, and I blacked out.

  I came awake in a stifling hut inside the village. A bandage was around my head. The men were murmuring with worried voices, and someone was making me drink from a gourd. They asked me what to do. I said we must press on, faster than before.

  We travelled for another week. Gradually, the savannah became more overgrown as our bedraggled column was swallowed by outlying patches of woodland. These thickened by degrees into the primaeval forest of Ashanti. The pain in my eye came and went in waves, seeming to alternate with the pangs of dysentery. I could see only a little with my good eye but could smell familiar resins, leaves and blooms—a greenhouse scent I knew from the Ashanti campaign—welcome as the scent of home to a horse. It cheered me to picture the bosky tunnels down which we marched, the sunbeams and blue orchids, the towering bombax and mahogany rigged with monkey-ropes, the roof of glossy foliage on which the rain drummed now and then like hail.

  I urged the men to be punctilious about changing the dressing on my eye, but this was difficult to do on the march. The wound leaked fluid constantly, attracting flies, which had hatched in large numbers with the wet. After some days it was maggoty, and I knew I should not have sight there again.

  On the tenth day from Bontuku, at a small village within three days of Kumasi, I was greeted by my deliverer, Dr. Part. By great good luck he had been in the Ashanti capital when my message arrived. His was the first white face I had seen in months, and what a shock it was! I had forgotten how we Europeans look: eyes like water, skin like bloody milk. In native belief, ours are the hues of death; and in those first moments—I was delirious much of this time—Dr. Part appeared to me as a strange, colourless being, come from the spirit world to fetch me thither.

  He cleaned the wound (relieving me of the eyeball, which could not be saved), gave me opium, fed me beef tea, and made me as comfortable as it is possible to be in the bush once the rains have begun. In short, he saved my life, for without his timely arrival I doubt I should have lasted to Kumasi.

  In the long half-year since Ferguson and I had passed through that famous town at the start of our mission, the Royal Engineers had completed the new fort. Telegraph had been established to Cape Coast Castle, and from there to Accra. Kumasi no longer seemed abandoned. Trade, the all-important factor, was coming back; Ashanti was beginning to feel the benign embrace of the World Market.

  After some time at Kumasi, Dr. Part pronounced me fit to be carried with him to the coast, where the Governor, Sir William, took one look at me and booked me aboard the next steamer to England. He insisted I postpone my official report until I felt well enough, and that I send it straight to the Colonial Office. I was at least able to pass on the details I’d gathered of Ferguson’s death, and to impress on him the bravery of the Hausas at Dawkita. No troops could have behaved better under fire, and their discipline was all that could be wished. I ventured to suggest that the West African medal might fairly be awarded them.

  The passage home, via Freetown on the Carthage, was not the most pleasant. The steamer’s black hull soaked up the midsummer sun, releasing heat all night into the cabins, to say nothing of more heat and mephitic vapours from the boiler-room. My stateroom (as it was grandly styled) was an oven. I awoke many times each night drenched in perspiration. Dr. Part, who had taken passage on the same vessel for some overdue leave, swore he could hear me “rambling” in my sleep through the bulkhead.

  One day he came aft to stand beside me at the taffrail, where we could speak privately, and asked who exactly I thought was trying to kill me.

  “Not you,” I told him. “You’re off duty, anyhow. Leave me to the ship’s M.O.”

  “You’re still my patient, man,” he replied in his reassuring Glaswegian. “This has been going on since Kumasi. You keep crying out, ‘My God, they mean to kill me!’ Easy enough to account for, given what you’ve been through. But it seems—don’t be alarmed—as if your recent experience has loosened other things more deeply buried in your mind. Who’s ‘Eddy’?”

  “No idea. One of my best men was named Idi. Had to leave him behind with the Sofas, poor chap.”

  “I think you should be prepared,” he answered gently, “for it being a good while before these troubles leave you. They’ll keep returning from time to time. Mainly in dreams, but you may also experience dreamlike conditions when awake. You mustn’t be alarmed or ashamed. I’ve known chaps—men with much less to get over than you have—who needed years.”

  I did not reveal to Part that these troubles had begun soon after I arrived at Haramonkoro, when Samory had offered me a “wife” on easy terms, and that they had plagued me, on and off, throughout my delirious journey to Kumasi.

  After I’d refused the cicatriced girl, Siraku had entered my hut the following afternoon with a sleek boy, equally young. The creature had parallel scars on his cheeks (symbolic leopard scratches, I was told) that did nothing to dignify an insolent, debauched expression. He was carrying an ostrich feather cushion, which he placed on the foot of my cot, and sat down like a debutante before I could get over my astonishment.

  “The Almamy savvy,” Siraku said with a smirk, in his atrocious English. “Englishman, Arab man, same thing. Woman good! Boy better! His name Amadou.” He let out his usual cackle, making with his hands a repulsive gesture, the meaning of which was ineluctable. Largesse of this kind is hardly rare in warm places where the chilling breath of Christendom has yet to blow, but it was the first time I’d been offered it. I didn’t know what to do. Given the paramount importance, when dealing with a potentate such as Samory, of avoiding any offence against the local code of hospitality, there seemed only one solution.

  “This Englishman,” I said to Siraku in my best Ashanti, stabbing a finger at my chest, “does not like boys in the way you suggest. No doubt this boy you’ve brought me is a fine boy, an excellent boy. But in my country a boy is not a fitting wife. Please tell the Almamy that if his generous offer of yesterday still stands, it will not be refused.” Siraku seemed crestfallen at this; doubtless he had hoped to retail some gossip at my expense around the town.

  While I waited to see what would happen next, recollections of the late Prince Eddy swam into my mind. Eddy would not have been so fastidious. Indeed, there was no escaping the view that Samory’s second offer might have been to Eddy’s taste. I then felt horribly shabby—shabby as old Siraku himself—in entertaining such thoughts about someone far above my station who had treated me as a friend, and who was no longer alive. Only five years had passed since his untimely death at Sandringham in 1892, when pneumonia took him soon after his twenty-eighth birthday.

  Of course, should the girl reappear, it would be a simple matter, so I thought, to avoid conjugal duties on grounds of ill health. She would merely stay in my hut as a companion. I need only say that in this resolve I was mistaken, for I had not reckoned with the girls initiative and considerable erotic talents.

  During the relatively tranquil interlude while Samory was trying to mend fences with me, and the girl Fatouma shared my hut, I began to sink (so I see now) into what Part would call a melancholic decline. My career—indeed my whole life—appeared to me as nothing but a catalogue of disaster. Far worse, my failings were not merely private (that I might have endured); they had led to death and untold suffering for people entrusted to my care.

  No doubt the melancholy had been building for weeks, but it was precipitated, I think, the moment I ceased to resist Fatouma, allowed myself to be seduced by her (tho’ it was only twice), debauched a woman little more than a child, however worldly she may have b
een, and in so doing debauched myself.

  The thoughts of Prince Eddy brought to mind a strange meeting I’d had in London about three years after his death—shortly before my posting to the Gold Coast as Sir Williams ADC.

  One February morning in 1895 a letter on Home Office stationery had arrived at Tilehouse Street. The sender was someone I knew from my midshipman days. He had always struck me as just the type who might go into Government—a thin-lipped fellow with a calculating, aspiring nature, and not a whit of fun or genuine good humour. We had messed together for a year, yet I couldn’t recall him doing a single spontaneous thing. He’d been a middle-aged man at sixteen.

  This man (I think it better not to name him, though he could be traced if need be) summoned me to London on “official business.” He met me at Kings Cross, where we got into into a yellow motorcar of French manufacture, the first I ever sat in. I was startled by the noise it made and the way the coachwork rattled from the gas engines vibration, even while the machine was standing. When the driver made it move off there was none of the breathy ease of steam; it leaped into the traffic like a snarling greyhound, frightening horses right and left.

  I was impressed that my erstwhile shipmate should have such a vehicle at his disposal. Yet it all seemed rather pointless, as a man with a red flag had to precede us on foot the whole way.

  We lunched at his club, during which we drank rather a lot of claret—at least, I did. He hadn’t changed a bit. Still the same crashing bore, with the preening self-importance of mediocrity.

  He then took me to a large, modern office building off Whitehall, where we entered a panelled boardroom blue with cigar smoke. Three others—of much the same stamp as my escort, differing only in the style of whiskers, the degree of baldness, etc.—were seated at the table, where they had evidently taken lunch. The room overlooked a lane with a slim view of the Thames, the window admitting a grey pallor and a draft. My escort made no introductions.