Thus the white men, Europeans no doubt, his countrymen perhaps, would have passed near Jan, in the depths of Africa, without him having a chance to shake their hands. A meeting with them would have, the poor exile thought, at least tided him over until his work was done. And this stupid king...
“Wretched coward,” he cried out, “why have you brought me along? Is it so I can attest to your cowardice?”
“It is the way it had to happen, since I wished, in avoiding the situation, to make it appear as if I were accompanying you. Why, think of it in such a manner, in the eyes of my people the business which brings me here is one of devotion to you. I followed you, I did not go back.”
Jan’s thoughts returned to Kaylinkah and Hemo. Would Akayrawiro have forgotten them? The king remained patient, and again answered.
“Why yes, besides, my capital is crawling with little girls like that, even fatter ones, entirely at your disposal. As for your little gorilla, notwithstanding that you seem to attach some undue importance to having him, we’ll find him again. As for Kaylinkah, that’s the name isn’t it? you don’t care one way or the other if it’s her or another...”
“Or another!” Jan repeated incredulously before fainting.
They left the village to settle some ten leagues further away, in the opposite direction, so as to throw off the white explorers if perchance they had had the intention of having themselves led towards the court by the villagers. They camped in the forest. The meat sizzled. Mouths followed each other in rapid succession on the spouts of the large jars bearing the supreme delight of palm wine and rancid termite oils. Wild music got even the most tired among them moving, raised the drunkenness of the drunkest two-fold, as fires kept the beasts at bay. Every night, in the smoke, more exciting than the drink, the furious beat of the orchestra, or the aromatic herbs thrown on the fire to keep away the ants and flies, were the dances, running, whirling frenetically, in devilishly lascivious embraces, uniting every rank, every age, every sex in every sort of laughter, sobbing, kissing, moaning, in every wild, indulgent behavior, ending only in the morning, when the young, the adults and the elderly collapsed in hideous piles about the collapsed heaps of coals, whose last flickers, like the bulging manganese-glazed surfaces of Etruscan brown-clay pottery, were reflected outward from the sweaty curves of piled up bodies, arms barely relaxed, their anger not yet fully expended.
Soon however, the security forces announced the departure of the white men. The king reentered his liberated capital; imposed taxes which would help compensate those who had shared his hardships in exile; had those plotters who had led the defense and now bore a certain embarrassing glory impaled; softened the mob with great feasts organized in honor of his return; and busied himself trying to satisfy Jan, who was still asking him about Hemo and cursing the weakness which nailed him to his pallet, preventing him from finding out on his own.
Alas, all the accounts agreed. All the villagers interrogated stated that there had been six of the invaders. Calm at first, the king’s absence, which they claimed to have foreseen, still irked them. To punish him they had lodged in his own huts. They had one of their own black servants beaten for his negligence in having caused the fire during the very first night, to show that it was his fault, not theirs, and had pitched their tents in the open space. Stupidly, they freely handed out guns, cloth, and glass trinkets in exchange for bows, spears, head-garb, and pelts, rather than taking what was theirs by right of conquest. In vain was their barbarity concealed, for the next day it was revealed: they refused the young women, looked over everything, dirtied with black scrawlings a beautiful white material which they called paper, picked useless flowers, and finally, horrors! they broke, inside the temple of the 20-headed, 100-limbed God, and replaced it with their own fetish, the representation of a man on a cross, with only one head, bent over and crying.
As for Hemo, the pale devils had taken possession of him as follows. Yet another of their stupidities: able to acquire him for nothing, they paid for him with a magnificent revolver. Having seen him playing in the street with Kaylinkah, they were very much pleased. Why, some wondered, do the white men all have such a passion for d’ginnas? Might they be, with their faces as hairy as the apes, themselves the apes of their own countries? Hemo, no doubt believing so, allowed his legs to be bound, and expressed no anger until they tried to tie his hands together. He fought, screamed, bit, and finally leapt upon Kaylinkah’s shoulders, who ran off as fast as she could. The ferns protected them for a while. A white man, losing hope of catching them, took aim, but afraid, lowered his weapon; a Pahouin then took down Kaylinkah with an arrow, took the living d’ginna and exchanged it—see here—for this brand new revolver.
“Vile wretch! it is then you who slaughtered my poor little Kaylinkah!”
“Not exactly. Having fallen near the river with my arrow in her lower back, she cried out for help.”
“And you didn’t run to her assistance?”
“Why, yes, to retrieve my arrow!”
“And Kaylinkah?”
“What do you expect? She might have remained alive, but crippled. But don’t feel bad, she didn’t suffer much. She was screaming so loudly that the crocodile soon heard her. One bite took her to her grave. Well now! enough chatting or I’ll be reprimanded. Lord, cousin to the king, please grant that I may leave you now. The nobles are astir, and I am the one to cook the stew.”
The nervous collapse which tortured Jan for a full hour had, overall, a two-fold benefit: he was cured of his pernicious fever, and a sort of crack opened in his mind through which the remembrance of his difficulties, his aborted work, his vanished glory were lost. He no longer complained of them but in a vague manner, accidentally, as if sympathizing with the misadventures of an old friend. He hiked around, devoured his meals, slept—he the eternal dreamer—12 dreamless hours, silent and only opening his mouth to repeat the last words of the Pahouin who had told him of Kaylinkah’s death: “grant that I may leave you now.” Akayrawiro, in spite of his indulgent nature, ended up finding his behavior rather dull, and in a spontaneous moment, such as even the most considered of leaders has, he ended up granting him his wish, to the joy of the courtiers, jealous of his friendship with this vile white man, but to the chagrin of the people, who, with their base mundane concerns, were taken with affection for this sort of crazy man who never did them any harm, protected them from soldiers, and babysat the infants whose parents were off in the fields or hunting.
CHAPTER X
With his luggage packed, a notebook and a few fruits wrapped in a kerchief at the end of a stick, Jan Maas tied on his bark leggings, and left with an air of resignation; the good king, regretting his quick decision to leave, forced him to accept an escort of ten sturdy men, veterans of extended expeditions, who knew how to prepare for such things.
Half a league away, to these warriors were added another 30, encountered along the road where they were working off their taxes. In vain did Jan object to their accompanying them; with their sickles they hewed a sort of shield upon which they hoisted him with a portion of his luggage, handed him a fern-frond parasol, and took him away at a brisk pace.
The pleasure of being useful was not their only motivation. The explorers who had taken Hemo had preceded them along this same road, tearing asunder obstacles. The fiercest of regions, terrified, would open up their gates, chicken coops, and silos at the approach of this second caravan, which they thought was a continuation of the first. Jan, on his throne, appeared as a bold white chieftain. Happily taking advantage of the circumstances, the Pahouins, to better abuse the neighboring tribes, spoke with authority, ravaged crops, torched villages and raped women; and if Jan, shaking off his torpor tried to calm them down, they answered the inhabitants’ pleas by saying that the pale-faced chief was ordering them to ravage, burn and rape even more. At each stop, a fresh orgy, and those taken from each location, in turn, joined the takers in the next day’s skullduggery.
Jan threatened the killers wit
h his rifle; they might well have strangled him and thrown him to the crocodiles, but his presence among them was their safeguard, his pale face the flag before which all disagreements were silenced, any attempt at defending a village or hint of revolt was brought to its knees. They contented themselves with shrugging their shoulders at his reprimands, whistling derisively at his morals, and grating into his soup bark of the icaja bush, whose strange narcotic effect kept him in a mummy’s sleep for several consecutive days. Once, the dose being too large, the poison had the opposite effect; instead of falling asleep, the poor Jan, shaken by a terrible drunken frenzy, rushed among the dancers and behaved so lewdly that, though at first amused, they quickly found his behavior more embarrassing than when free of drugs and enjoining them to behave sensibly.
Bakalay, Fawn, Bulu, Shaykiany, and Mpongos augmented the numbers of the troop by some ten-fold, creating a great moving horde, stretched out helter-shelter, blazing tangled trails through the old growth forest. The stragglers and laggards had not finished sacking one place, when those in the lead were already receiving gifts from the next village, the inhabitants having run out to meet them in the hope of buying themselves off from being pillaged. Jan no longer left his litter. The clever Pahouins kept him prisoner within it, served him, prostrated themselves to him like priests before an idol, and, in order to maintain the preeminence of their companions, boasted of his strength, declaring him to be a powerful missionary from the white civilization, who had chosen their tribe as allies, and did not deign to entertain a direct interchange with them.
Day by shortened day the dark bacchanal nonetheless advanced, finally reaching the estuary of the Gabon. The river dwellers, less gullible given their frequent contact and traffic with Europeans, smelled a rat, searched the litter and unmasked the leader. Finding the one they thought so fearsome in such a pitiful state, the Bakalay understood that they had been duped by the Pahouins; the ancient hatred was rekindled and argument then fighting broke out, which opportunity Jan availed himself of to escape from his protectors.
On the shore of the river widened into a sea inlet, he came down from the awful Calvary which he had climbed upon his arrival in Africa. Already alone back then, carrying munitions, his cartridge belt, his coat, a well-stocked pharmacy, bearing weapons and especially having faith in his work, confidence in the future drawing him forward, insensitive to the cruelest agonies, laughing at the greatest dangers, certain that the hour of his death would not toll until he had accomplished his mission. Comparatively speaking, he was now sick, worn out, had lost everything, and though still disdainful of the savages, the beasts and the climate, it was because he was getting farther from his goal, returning to the disgust of a mundane life, and he knew that the tomb was never ready for the poor cowards who pined for it like him, for they had been left with only one certainty: that of the ultimate mercy of death.
And in a sign of ultimate derision he saw the Nature which surrounded him stricken with the very death he sought in vain. The mangrove zone: neither breeze nor sunbeam penetrated the immutable night of the motionless coppery green canopy. Beneath its prop roots, hideous black crabs stirred the mulch like a horde of monstrous spiders. In the steamy air the slightest noise reverberated as through a solid medium, and when they disturbed one of the rare nests in the branches, the raucous, lugubrious, strangely extended cry of the turaco sounded like an invisible finger tearing the thick shroud of fog. He ate the crabs and the filthy oysters stuck on the rotting roots which emerged from the waters. Having fallen into a bottomless marsh, he hoped at last to never rise again, when the nuns of a nearby French convent, spying him from the dugout in which they were fishing, paddled from midstream towards him. Their devotion, their practical experience in treating the fevers prevalent in the region quickly rid him of his symptoms. He thanked them in their tongue, which he remembered from his youth at the side of the old Parisian painter who had taken up residence in Haarlem, and these good folk, thinking they had saved a countryman were all that much happier. They continued to lend him a hand even when, undeceiving them, he confessed part of the truth, that he was Dutch and a naturalist, but keeping quiet with respect to his experiments on animal hybridization. His severely compromised health precluding his further stay among them, their superior paid his way on a mail-ship headed for Marseilles. From France it would be easy for him to get home.
After Port Gabon13 the ship put in at Saint Louis.14 Jan remained aboard, keeping to himself for the entire crossing. As silent and isolated in the dining room as in his cabin, his favorite spot was a corner of the between-deck lounge; with his elbow on the back of a bench, he could follow, through the narrow opening of the portholes, the ever changing passage of the coastline, now near, now distant. What he saw of it in this manner sufficed, he neither shifted his head to follow a particular point beginning to disappear to the rear, nor tried to anticipate what new shores would present themselves towards the front. In front of the Bay of Arguin,15 a group to whom an English tourist, as voluble as the English are when they wish to be, was telling of the wreck of the Medusa, rushed onto the bridge to sound the horizon open with their glasses, and a Parisian clapped as if, in his sights, he had rediscovered the magnificence of Jericho. Jan stayed put. At the edge of the great desert, which began at the White Cape, the more placid, the curious, driven to distraction by the monotony of the show on the right, lost themselves on the other side in a contemplation of the immensity of the open sea, awestruck as if they could breathe the heady aromas of the West Indies and Mexico. Still at his porthole, he took pleasure in his solitude. These 300 leagues of unchanging cliffs lulled him into a soothing forgetfulness from which he seldom awoke, except to envy the land spread out behind the endless rocky ramparts: the bare Sahara, almost as lifeless as a lunar landscape, flatter than the ocean, without a wisp of grass, without a sound, without movement save for the tigering of its surface by a cloud as it moved in from offshore, and having barely made an appearance, dissipated in the vast shimmering of a mirage. He would like to walk there. In the silence he would be free to proclaim his despair. Or better yet, no! he would not trace even the narrowest of furrows for his bed, he would lay down upon it, his face up, eyes wide: it would not be enough for all this sun to eat away at his retinas, to search his chest, to dry his tears and warm his anguish; not enough of all this death to symbolize the one he felt in his soul. At Cape Noon, a milestone the ancient navigators had not crossed, he sighed a goodbye to the last of the granite upon which the ceaseless surf of the waves struck. But his imagination, once again free to roam, was his solace. Beyond the slim past of the Babylons, Memphises and Troys, whose histories did not appear much different to him than the stories told in yesterday’s big city newspapers, he followed the geological eras back, and turning towards the ocean, looked for the Atlantis of Tertiary times which cemented together two worlds and carried a torrent of silt in huge rivers whose deltas one could recognize in Spain by the very thickness of their silt deposits.
A few days later, in the small Marseille hotel where he waited for the money he had requested from his relatives in Haarlem to finish his trip, he continued to daydream in this manner in his room beneath the roof. At night, the street which narrowed between the double row of whitewashed facades became a chalky ravine upon whose cliffs, in a long ago epoch, he dwelt; the tramway passing below, its two large headlights lit, was a mastodon with huge eyes; and if the car stopped to let off a passenger, he imagined the animal crouching, ridding himself of one or another of its excrements, which hardened into coprolites in the ensuing centuries, enough for the scientists to reconstruct the intestines, the stomach, the teeth, the head, and finally the entire original creature.
Having received his money, his clothing purchased, he went to the railway station. An employee showed him, upon his humble request, to a car which would not be too full and wherein one could be comfortable. Only one other passenger, but what a passenger! what luggage! Jan could well push himself into a corner and pretend
to sleep, but the packages overflowed onto his knees, pressed into his hip, and their owner forced him to listen to his adventures, the battles he had recently fought with the lions of the Atlas range. Bing! bang! the rifle shots, the roars of the injured beasts, marvelous stalking in the dead of night, the leaps, the battles, the horrors of thirst in a dried up wadi16 transformed into thickets of cacti and gladioli, whose spines were like darts and edges like sabers. Jan heard, saw everything, suffocating, barely occupying a quarter of the space in the corner of the compartment, where the frightening gestures with which the intrepid hunter accompanied his no less frightening accounts, pushed him, brought him to bay, flattened him.
“So friend, where are you coming from, yourself?”
Directly interrogated, Jan, who had remained silent throughout, was forced to answer.
“From Gabon.”
“From Gabon! And this is all you are bringing back?” With a laugh that could crack the window had they been up, the friend weighed with his hand, dangling from the nail of his little finger, the kerchief which bore the entirety of Jan’s possessions, a spare shirt given to him by the nuns in Libreville. Jan, embarrassed, picked up his pitiful bundle and sat upon it to hide it. The Provencal, a good man in spite of his bragging, fearing he had hurt his feelings, ended his playfulness and adding “my good mans” one after another, took up once again his bing! bangs! and exuberant mimicry. Jan’s ears were buzzing, the blood was going to burst forth under the din of this voice wherein the death rattle of lions, which it had provoked, rumbled. At this moment the conductor announced: “Tarascon, Tarascon!” The mad hunter, having reached his destination, ran to the carriage door, into the arms of all of Tarascon’s delirious citizenry, who, clapping excessively, awaited his return.
“Hurrah for Tartarin! Hurrah for the lion slayer! Hurrah for Tartarin of Tarascon!”17
The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men Page 11
