Darkness

by David Fletcher

  Dan already knew this, but it was really depressing to hear it from somebody else’s mouth, especially when it was stated as a fact and without any hint of humour whatsoever. And worse still, nobody cared. Certainly none of the locals did, and they were undoubtedly pretty unconcerned about the way their rubbish dump was run. Or more accurately, that it wasn’t run at all. It was just left to fester – and to grow bigger by the day. The two minibuses were now within its bounds, and its bounds could not be discerned. It was like being in the middle of an infinite ocean of waste, and waste of all sorts. There were countless plastic bags, of course, numerous sacks of who-knew-what, assorted pensioned-off domestic appliances, various piles of putrefaction and the odd recognisable piece of a beast that had yet to embark on its road to putrefaction. It was disgusting – but, at the same time, very attractive to certain birds, albeit not quite as many as promised. As far as Dan was concerned, the morning hadn’t in any way got any better.

  Fortunately, it was coming to an end. It had just been announced that it was time for some lunch, and as this lunch was to be consumed back in the urban part of the desert, they would have to move off and leave the rubbish dump to fester on its own. Dan, for the first time today, felt a little optimistic. After all, lunch was to be served in a real restaurant, and it was impossible that it could be quite as dismal as that restaurant in which the previous day’s lunch had been served. And there might even be beer on offer. His optimism then surged when the restaurant came into view. It was a distinctly respectable-looking eatery forming one side of a paved square, and it was even presented under a sparkling blue sky. That unending blanket of grey clouds had finally moved away, and this was allowing a midday sun to now inject some much-needed warmth into the atmosphere, which was just as well, as lunch was to be taken on an open terrace…

  The birding party had entered the restaurant, there to be guided immediately onto a large impressive terrace at its rear that afforded views of the Dadès River. Not the river itself, as this was embraced, if not smothered, by a narrow strip of verdant vegetation and more of that ribbon development. But one could at least see the course of the river, and it made for a fine backdrop for what Dan hoped would be a redeeming feast. There were, after all, some tables on the terrace that were already occupied by presumably local diners, and what they were tucking into looked far better than anything that had been on offer on this trip so far.

  However, it soon became clear that redemption was on hold. Not only did this establishment not serve beer, but it would not be serving food to the birders either! Instead, in exchange for the opportunity to flog a few coffees and teas to these visiting foreigners, the owners of the restaurant were allowing them to use the terrace and a few of its tables to dine off their very own bring-your-own picnic. It was already on a small table to the rear of the terrace, and it was housed in a collection of Tupperware-type containers. As Dan reluctantly approached it, he could see that the containers held a selection of salad items (all diced into granule-sized pieces), some protein in the form of mashed-up sardines, and some wedges of bread – but nothing as interesting as butter or cheese.

  It had been prepared earlier – possibly lovingly – by one of the minibus drivers, and in this part of Morocco, it might well have constituted an elaborate lunch. However, Dan could not that easily slough his selfish, spoilt Western expectations, or indeed his craving for some sort of dairy product, and cheese in particular. Consequently, he was desperately disappointed, and in due course was obliged to assuage his disappointment by overdosing on the picnic’s large cache of olives – which only he and Kim seemed to fancy.

  ‘Shit,’ he observed at the end of their meal. ‘I’m not sure I can take much more of this. And they do have cheese in Morocco, don’t they? Or is it regarded as some sort of Western plot? You know, “eat cheese, and you stand a very good chance of developing liberal thoughts”…’

  ‘Shush,’ advised Kim. ‘You’ll get us deported.’

  ‘Great! Get me a megaphone at once. There’s no time to lose.’

  ‘Shut up. And don’t be so stupid. You know the only megaphones around here are on the minarets.’

  Dan immediately burst out laughing and then chastised his wife.

  ‘Eh. Careful. You’re only a woman, remember. It’s not your place to be funny.’

  Kim blew a raspberry at her husband and then made an announcement.

  ‘I am supposed to be taking some photos though, aren’t I? And I’ve left my camera on the bus.’

  ‘Well, use mine.’

  ‘No, yours is for the wildlife. We agreed. Mine’s for the hotels and restaurants…’

  ‘You want to take a picture of this place?’

  ‘Yeah. Why not? And the view’s pretty good.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘Right. So I’ll just go and get it.’

  ‘The bus’ll be locked.’

  ‘Well, if it is, it is. But I can’t see the drivers around, so they’re probably out there somewhere. And anyway, I need the loo. So I won’t have a wasted journey.’

  ‘Well, good luck and good luck with the loo. It might be a challenge.’

  ‘Good. I’m up for a challenge.’

  ‘I doubt that sort of challenge…’

  But Kim was already on her feet and responded to this observation with just a smile. Then she was on her way out through the restaurant’s enclosed dining room and towards the nearby parked buses. Dan, meanwhile, rose to his feet to have one last gaze at the course of the Dadès River before he too steeled himself for a visit to the loo. In doing this he chose to approach the wall of the terrace at its extreme left end. This meant that he had the restaurant’s dining room in sight to his own left and therefore saw the pulse of red flame that burst through it before he heard or felt the blast. For a split second after this terrible noise and the rush of air that nearly knocked him over, he froze. Then he was running towards the source of the blast and at the same time feeling as though he was in a dream.

  twenty-one

  Dan had slept for five hours. He awoke to the smell of wood-smoke and to the sound of buzzing. As he opened his eyes, he saw a large wasp flying out of the shelter, and as he followed its flight he saw David squatting outside near a small fire. Above the fire was a pot. David was clearly cooking breakfast – although it was coming up to midday – and it was no doubt breakfast for two. Dan immediately realised it was time to get up.

  David had brought him to a ready-made shelter, a small Pygmy-style refuge constructed out of leaves and stripped branches. On its floor there were more leaves, and Dan recalled how as soon as he had lain on them he had fallen asleep and become oblivious of the world around him. The journey through the night had been exhausting but also conducive to a deep and restorative sleep. And now, just these few hours later, he felt remarkably well, and he even had an appetite for whatever David was cooking.

  It was porridge, something Dan hadn’t eaten since he was a child, and even then he hadn’t liked it. He had found both its taste and its consistency far from appetising and had only consumed it under duress. However, he had never been presented with it in the middle of a tropical forest. Nor when he had a hunger to assuage and when he needed to take on a full tank of fuel before his body was called upon to exert itself once again. In this case, he thought, he might even enjoy it.

  David grunted a greeting to his charge as he crawled out of the shelter, and Dan responded with a smile and with a, ‘Good morning – just about.’

  ‘Yes. Just about,’ confirmed David. ‘We’ll need to be moving again soon.’

  ‘In daylight?’

  ‘We’re far enough away now. We’ll be fine.’

  ‘What about… you know, hunters and… erhh…’

  ‘Nobody comes here. We’ll be fine.’

  David had delivered that last statement as an undeniable fact and as a full stop to the discussio
n on daylight movement through the forest. Dan acknowledged this with an enthusiastic nod of his head and then with a question on a different topic. It concerned something that he’d noticed wasn’t around.

  ‘Where are all the sweat bees, David?’

  ‘Waiting for us down the track. They don’t like it here. Too much musa.’

  ‘Musa?’

  ‘These plants.’ He gestured towards the surrounding vegetation. ‘They give off something that the sweat bees don’t like. That’s why I built the shelter here.’

  ‘Wow!’ observed Dan. ‘I’m impressed.’

  David ignored this comment and began ladling out some porridge into a dish. He then passed this to Dan together with a small wooden spoon. When he’d done this, he then revealed a pot of coffee that had been obscured from Dan’s view, and poured some of its contents into an enamel mug. This he also handed to Dan – but without an offer of either sugar or milk. Dan wasn’t unduly surprised. The order of the day was “essential and workmanlike”, and embellishing or sweetening any of the staples of this meal would have been an act of heresy. And from a completely practical perspective, it would have required more “stuff” to have been brought along and more weight to be carried, not a good idea when one was carrying this weight through a tropical forest for mile after mile.

  Dan was therefore simply reassured by the plainness of the food and drink on offer and, what’s more, he did enjoy both. He was hardly conscious of it, but it appeared that he was quickly adapting to the demands of his new existence – and those demands were now about to intensify. Breakfast having been consumed and their rest-camp having been stripped of any evidence of occupation, it was time to move on. And this time it would be in the heat of the day and maybe with a few sweat bees for company.

  In the event, despite David’s forewarning that they would be waiting down the track, sweat bees did not put in an appearance. They were no doubt around in numbers, but Dan and David were walking briskly and were outpacing them. As was apparent on that gorilla-tracking expedition – which seemed to Dan to have happened days ago – sweat bees are very weak flyers and cannot keep up with determined striders, and certainly not with any adhering to David’s regime of striding. As Dan had expected, David was making no allowances for his elderly companion or for the impact of the heat and humidity on a human metabolism. Once again Dan was having to dig deep to keep up, but once again he was keeping up. It made him feel more invigorated than he’d felt for years.

  There were stops again, and they were welcome, even if it meant that the head-nets had to be deployed. Because as soon as striding was abandoned in favour of a static situation, those sweat bees did appear, and they were intolerable without the protection the head-nets afforded. Dan found their presence understandably irritating but also somewhat amusing. Indeed, it quite pleased him to think that such an insignificant beast, no doubt equipped with an equally insignificant brain, could get the better of the most intelligent animal on the planet, and that this apex organism called man was reduced to having to resort to a clumsy veil to retain its sanity. Sweat bees, he decided, were up there with mosquitoes in their ability to remind all humans on Earth that they weren’t quite the masters of the universe they liked to think they were. Probably indefinitely, these same humans would have to rely on the efficacy of devices made from mesh to guard themselves against the attentions of this pair of puny but potent little critters, and that really wasn’t something for the species of Homo sapiens to be proud of.

  Dan had been conscious of the hubris of his fellow mortals and the need to puncture it for some time, but it wasn’t until he’d been yomping through the forest for nearly three hours that he realised that it wasn’t only sweat bees and mosquitoes that might facilitate this essential act of deflation. It was the forest itself, or at least a long walk through a forest…

  Up to now, his dealings with all sorts of forests had been as an observer, as a visitor to the forest to absorb its character and to relish both its fauna and its constituent flora. And these had been relatively fleeting visits, involving only short expeditions and encompassing only a limited expanse of woodland. However, he was now immersed in a forest and he was here not as a visitor but as almost a tenant, as an occupant of the forest, somebody who moved through it but was not about to leave it. Indeed, it had become essentially his whole world, and it was immense. It just went on and on. And this immensity – combined with the forest’s majesty and the forest’s “aura” – served to underline just how insignificant and inconsequential he was in such a remarkable environment. Perhaps, he thought, it was why David was the way he was: taciturn and even a little severe, but also decidedly humble in his manner – and calm. Perhaps the forest had already schooled this long-term tenant in the art of modesty, and taught him to have the sort of respect for life that was now difficult to find elsewhere.

  Dan realised he was smiling. As he was making headway along an endless track through the vegetation, it had finally occurred to him that his thoughts were not on the discomfort of his progress or even on where his progress would be leading, but instead on philosophical matters concerning the agency of insects and forests in educating his kind. It was really funny, he thought, that the demands of a physical test and even the prospect of imminent events could be so comprehensively overtaken by musings that were at best, irrelevant, and at worst, perverse. After all, no amount of thinking about the intractable failings of Homo sapiens and possible remedies for these failings was ever going to produce any results, but it had been successful in distracting him entirely. He was certainly barely aware of the challenge of putting one foot in front of the other for hours on end, and he was even able to blot out the pain of what could only be some nicely developing blisters. Clearly, where the will was strong, the ancient skin on his ancient feet was indisputably weak. And his calf and hips might soon be signalling their distress as well.

  But it didn’t matter. At the third stop of the day, David informed Dan that they were already in Gabon. They had crossed the border between the Congo and this country over an hour ago, in the sense that they had crossed an invisible line in the deep forest, which in reality only existed on maps and represented no sort of barrier to their progress. Nobody had asked to see a passport or inspect their baggage, and nobody was in the least aware that they were no longer in one construct of colonial times but now in another. And that was something to relish: the subversion of the established order, the contravention of the insistence that one went through specified procedures in the conduct of one’s life, particularly when one was conducting this life on the move. Furthermore, it meant that Dan was now closer to his goal. Indeed, he was so close that he could not imagine that the river they sought wouldn’t be reached tomorrow. But he thought he should confirm this. He’d ask David before he was putting those blisters to the test again.

  ‘David,’ he began, ‘will we be at this Lodié River tomorrow? Or am I being a little optimistic?’

  ‘We will be there. Two more hours now. Then a rest. Then the river by noon.’

  ‘How long a rest?’

  David actually laughed. It was the first time he’d done this in Dan’s company.

  ‘Oh, I think you might deserve quite a long one. For somebody so old, you’ve done really well. And there are another two hours.’

  Dan was taken aback. First by the display of laughter and then by the display of unalloyed honesty. David clearly didn’t subscribe to the principle of tact. Nevertheless, Dan was not at all offended but instead highly delighted. Not only had he received what amounted to praise from this man of the forest, but he had also received the confirmation he’d hoped for. He would be at the river – and on his own – in less than twenty-four hours. Now all that remained was to bank this package of good news and steel himself for another two hours of an increasingly painful passage through the forest. Even philosophical musings couldn’t keep at bay indefinitely the discomfort of aching limbs
and joints or the soreness of blistered feet, and Dan knew that he would not enjoy this final stage of the day.

  He was right to be concerned. He did make it – to the second of David’s insubstantial shelters – but when he arrived there he felt not just truly exhausted but also damaged. He was wracked with pain and his feet, in particular, were a source of distress. They burnt and they throbbed, and they seemed to burn and throb even more when he relieved them of their shoes. David saw this, and before he began to prepare some hot food, he passed Dan a small canvas bag that he’d had in his rucksack. He then instructed Dan to take from this bag two or three of the leaves that were hiding within and to rub these leaves on his feet – until his feet felt distinctly oily. This would help, he assured Dan. In the same way that the food he went on to prepare would help Dan’s body, and the discussion he initiated after the food was eaten would help Dan’s resolve…

  twenty-two

  Although he had known him for only two days, Dan had nevertheless formed a very firm view of David’s character and he knew exactly into which pigeonhole to put him. After all, their relationship, whilst brief in duration, had been indisputably intense and it had shone a very bright light onto both David’s capabilities and his personality. So, in Dan’s mind, David was first and foremost a product of his domain, a man who had been moulded by the environment within which he’d grown up and a man who was at one with this environment. Although not called upon in his present role or in his work at Ngaga, he was almost certainly an accomplished hunter. One had to be to stand any chance of becoming a proficient tracker of gorillas. David also knew the forest. He knew how it worked, what it contained, how it had to be respected and what it had to offer. His life had been one long survival-skills course – albeit in his own mind, he would probably have had some difficulty understanding why anybody would need to go on a course to understand what was no more than how he and his companions lived. He might just comprehend that there were people beyond his forest who might need a little guidance, but he would probably struggle to believe that they were so ignorant of what, to his community, was no more than second nature.