As if aware of this, Noon squatted on the wheelhouse roof, keeping watch on the passing banks, and on the pursuing Diana. At times I would hear her teeth clicking as she pointed to the coils of black smoke, like the circlets of a wreath, visible beyond the dusty scrub. In the evening, when we moored for the night and Noon swam for fish in the dark pools, I would climb on to the wheelhouse and see the widows’ white ship three miles behind us, a spectre of bone in the dusk.
But I was no longer afraid of them. The water-world of swamps and papyrus screens, their hunting-ground of lost soldiers, memories and murder, had given way to the clearly defined channel ahead, and the sharp sand cliffs which the Mallory had cut through the dry ochre soil. We were crossing the southern edges of the Sahara, and the desolate terrain seemed barely aware of the river. Stronger after my rest in the Diana, I steered the Salammbo towards its final berth.
*
The harsh beat of an outboard motor drummed against the rusty door panels of the car. I crouched in the back seat, and watched the guerilla patrol-craft push tentatively around the river bend. Two canoes lashed side by side to bamboo poles, it carried a crew of three soldiers. Armed men haunted the region. But these soldiers had lost interest in the drained river, and were watching the banks twenty feet above my head.
After a wary inspection, they turned back and moved upstream, soon lost among the sand-bars and rock spits. I left the car and crossed the sloping flank of white sand that reached to the exposed roots of the fan-palms along the bank. Hand over hand, I climbed the ladders of entwined roots. Already their brittle leaves were streamed with serrated yellow fibre that rasped against my arms. An overgrown path ran from an abandoned water-hoist and wound its way to the crest of a small rise.
I lay in the mossy saddle between two outcrops of rock that formed its summit, my face shielded by the fronds of a tamarind. In the distance, through a haze of sun-lit dust, the broad channel of the Mallory wound its way towards me from the blue mountains of the Massif. It flowed in a westerly course, skirting the great plain of the desert that extended to the horizon. This featureless landscape of scrub and creosote bushes was broken only by the fading runways of the former French airbase at Bonneville that lay a mile to the north.
At the edge of the plateau, the Mallory reached a series of shallow cascades, broad steps of basaltic rock that marked the navigable limits of the river. The eastern arm flowed into a calm pool some three hundred yards in width, and then emptied into the main channel where the Salammbo was now moored. However, the western arm, carrying half the abundant headwater, ended at a makeshift barrage which the local fishermen had thrown from the central island to the bank a hundred feet away.
After driving a line of bamboo piles into the sandy floor, they had stretched their nets across the stream to form a retaining curtain, and then filled this with logs, palm fronds, and metal debris taken from the ruined hangars and barrack-rooms of the airbase. This sling of timber and rotting vegetation contained a mass of trapped silt filtered from the flowing water. Embedded in the wall were sections of galvanized iron, metal doors and panels, lengths of radio antenna and telegraph poles. As it bulged forwards, the rope and earth barrage resembled a gigantic brassiere, whose enclosed breasts of caking silt were decorated with a lost treasure of western technology.
Water streamed through a hundred fissures in the garbage dam, spurting downwards to join the open pool, where scores of fishing craft, skiffs and rafts were moored to makeshift jetties along the beach. Diverted by the barrage, the stolen channel of the river had been turned northwards by the fishermen, and flowed out across the desert through a network of canals and creeks, finally forming a shallow pond that stretched towards the ruined hangars of the airfield.
I gazed down at this green coast, with its tracts of manioc and sorghum. I remembered my first sight of the lower Nile from the aircraft carrying me to Cairo, and its narrow bands of cultivated land lying between the river and the desert. Thanks to the theft of the Mallory, the Sahara had begun to bloom again. The nomadic farmers and herders who for decades had been driven southwards by the sun had at last begun to turn back the green line. Helped by the fishermen and by Harare’s soldiers, several of whom were washing in the shallow waters of the pool, they had recolonized the desert. Despite the modest success of their strip farms and small allotments, they had turned their backs for ever on the lower reaches of the Mallory.
But the river still flowed. I traced the winding course of the channel across the blue landscape of the plateau, its silver back striking sparks against the rocky outcrops. Somewhere in the dark hills lay its source – we would sail the ferry into the harbour below the barrage, beach it there and press on up the Mallory in one of the many canoes moored in the pool. I looked up at the wooded face of the mountains, whose lower slopes ran down to the eastern bank of the river. The abandoned conveyors of a French mining company ran up the hillside to the silent lift towers, standing among the trees like signal pylons.
Still struck by the beauty of the greening desert, I made my way back to the river. I lowered myself through the web of roots and jumped on to the sandy bed. I followed my heel prints, in which flies now sipped at my drying blood, past the aerosol can and the hair-dryer, lying in the sand like objects displayed in a museum of consumer archaeology. As I strode into the cool stream I could see the bows of the Salammbo in its quiet inlet between the sand-bars. I waded into the deep water and swam towards the vessel, waving to Noon when I paused for breath by the anchor chain.
‘Noon! The Mallory – it’s still there!’
She leaned on the rail, and rewarded me with a brief smile, as if tolerant of my strange doubts in the river and myself.
However, when I gripped the rear bumper of the Mercedes and lifted myself on to the deck I noticed that Noon was wearing her camouflage jacket. She carried the Lee-Enfield in her strong hands, shoulders squared as she pointed the rifle at me. In her stance was a memory of Sanger’s warrior queen.
Behind her, two of Harare’s soldiers were examining the controls of the limousine. Their boots and trousers were soaked with the wet sand of the narrow beach behind the ferry. Raising their weapons, they stepped into the sun and beckoned me against the mud-caked car. They stared at me with evident surprise, confused by my naked and bearded figure, by my scarred thighs and oil-smeared chest, and by the bloody heel marks on the deck.
‘Noon …?’ I waited for her to explain to the soldiers that this wild man of the Mallory was once the physician who had treated them at Port-la-Nouvelle. But Noon watched me without comment, her young woman’s body hidden inside the baggy camouflage. Had she tricked me all along, drawing me into a dream of the river which would deliver me as her prisoner to the custody of Harare?
27
The Stolen Channel
My hands tied behind me with the shreds of the Toyota flag, I sat naked on the sun-baked boards of the open truck. Noon and a soldier leaned against the back of the driving cabin, the chalky dust of the broken road swirling around their shoulders. As we struck the ridges of an abandoned railway line Noon squatted on the floor, too tired to hold the heavy Lee-Enfield. Clasping the rifle between her bare knees, she watched me with the resigned eyes of a farmer’s daughter taking to market an animal she had grown to like, and for which she had once held hopes higher than the nearest meat-hook.
Had Noon always meant to betray me to Harare, or had she disowned me out of expediency? Refusing to meet her eyes, I stared over the rattling tail-gate at the waterway beside the road. We were driving towards the former airbase along the western bank of the diverted channel, through a strip of primitive farms and allotments. The heroic attempt to reverse the advance of the Sahara and make the desert bloom seemed far more modest at close quarters. The farms were meagre patches of open ground between the trees, separated from each other by creeks and irrigation ditches, and dominated by the earthen-walled tanks of standing water. Hundreds of these pits had been sunk into the ground, as the farmers hoa
rded their booty, and immense care had been taken to pound the walls to a tile-like hardness. By comparison, their small dwellings were hovels thrown together from sheets of asbestos and galvanized iron looted from the airbase.
This sense that a huge act of theft had taken place, that an illicit prize was being hoarded among the rows of banana plants, was reinforced by the listless and guilty character of the stolen waterway. Steadying the tail-gate with my elbow, I looked down at the slack surface that lay against the banks of mud. Half the Mallory was flowing through the revivified desert, but this substantial stream, some fifty yards wide, was as lifeless as an abandoned canal. The flat water had lost all trace of the zest and authority of the great river I had created at Port-la-Nouvelle, and whose course I had followed for the past months. The Mallory had cut its way boldly through the landscape, scoring its firm banks deep into the subsoil, but this diverted channel had left no imprint on the terrain, for all the green life it nourished.
Watching it dissipate itself through the creeks and ditches, I could see that the fishermen and nomadic farmers who had stolen this arm of the Mallory had little confidence in their booty. The truck slowed to avoid a gang of women digging a large pit beside the road. They packed the walls with stones and broken glass, aware that this reservoir, like all the others, would soon vanish if the watertable fell.
They paused over their hoes, peering into the truck and its dishevelled prisoner. Despite my thirst, I was too exhausted to ask them for water. By stealing part of the Mallory, these impoverished people had been bleeding me. I remembered the goats tethered behind the Chinese pharmacies in the back streets of Kowloon, whose exposed carotid veins were tapped by customers paying for a cup of hot blood. I resented the damage they had done to the Mallory, which now lay stolen and dismembered in these mosquito-infested pits. Flies covered my chest and legs, vibrating in a cloud that hovered above the truck. I guessed that my own end was near – as soon as Harare recognized me he would complete the execution interrupted at Lake Kotto by Sanger’s arrival.
However, the condition of these people was little better than my own, as if they had drunk too much of the Mallory’s poisoned waters. For all the crops growing in their allotments, the children were spindly and undernourished, their bony faces flicked over by flies. The anaemic women seemed affected by the slack water in the channel and slapped the walls of their tank in a monotonous way. A distasteful smell hung between the palms, rising from the rank soil of the allotments, twitching the nostrils of the bored men playing cards in the doorways of their shacks.
As we moved along the road the stench gathered strength, and I realized that these desert nomads lacked the experience to deal safely with these huge volumes of water. The earth tanks and ponds beside their shacks were filled with a brackish fluid and were home to myriads of fever-carrying flies and mosquitos, and contaminated with the human wastes with which they fertilized their crops. The watertable that sustained this irrigation of the desert was freighted with disease, which had begun to poison even the stolen branch of the Mallory that sustained it.
The main waterway began to divide, the black arms separating into a series of oily shallows divided by refuse-covered mudflats. Following the largest of the channels, we turned on to a strip of metalled road. A quarter of a mile ahead we reached the gatehouse of the former French airbase, where two of Harare’s soldiers lounged by their weapons, surrounded by a lake of mud. The entire airfield was now a waterlogged marsh covered with waist-high grass where a hundred creeks and canals ran out into the desert. Two metal aircraft hangars stood in the grass, their curved, pockmarked roofs like the hulls of collapsed Zeppelins.
Around us lay the silent streets of the garrison town. There was a galvanized-iron cinema, its faded posters advertising a French tough-guy thriller, a launderette, married quarters and maternity unit, a ruined telephone exchange and even a travel agency. As the palms grew through the rusting roofs there was a sense that the late twentieth century had arrived in this remote desert site, stayed briefly and then left without looking back.
We crossed the town and approached a group of floating barrack huts. Joined by wooden catwalks, they sat in a harbour of shallow mud irrigated by the seeping waters of the river.
Prodded by Noon’s rifle, I climbed down from the truck, and followed the two soldiers along a pathway that led through the high grass. Leaving Noon to guard me, the soldiers set off towards the largest of the floating huts. I stood in the hot sun, ignoring the mosquitos that festered on my naked skin. I watched the brackish water shiver under the soldiers’ heels as they crossed the catwalk. The ripples reached the channel of open water fifty yards away where a small arm of the Mallory still maintained its forward flow. But beyond the marshy perimeter of the airfield the river was dying in the desert wastes. I imagined my own life running out into the dusty scrub, taking with it all memory of my duel with the river.
‘Mal …’
Noon nudged me, brushing the flies from my chest. From a woman soldier in a nearby hut she had brought a camouflage jacket and a tattered pair of fatigue trousers. She hung the jacket over my shoulders, and then helped me to step into the trousers, fastening them around my waist with a length of cord. I leaned my bound wrists against her strong back, trying to read some sort of fellow feeling in her pursed lips. Her slim nostrils jumped as the flies crawled across her face, searching every orifice in a way my eyes had done so many times during our voyage.
Would she shoot me if I tried to run for it? I remembered that her rifle was unloaded. I searched for an escape path through the islands of marsh grass, and then looked for a last time at the remnants of the river, dying here in the desert as if aware of my own end. Pumped by the pressure of my feet on the catwalk, the black bilge-water was oozing a few yards upstream, as if this gangrene at the tip of the Mallory was advancing up its limbs to poison the main body …
One of the soldiers leaned from a door, and whistled sharply to Noon. I followed her across the catwalk into the largest of the barrack huts. The tilting houseboat, mounted on its raft of kerosene drums, formed part of a floating field hospital. Injured soldiers lay on French army coats, gunshot wounds to their elbows and shoulders wrapped in blood-stained plaster, enveloped in a stench of pus and competing gangs of voracious flies. Most of the patients, like the women auxiliaries who shuffled about in a listless way, were suffering from that same swamp malaise I had seen in the people beside the road, poisoned by the foul waters of the diverted river.
Beyond the ward was a small dispensary. A trussed cockerel lay on the floor, eyes blinking ferociously at the male orderly, who stood beside a trestle table decorated tastefully with a selection of empty medicine jars. He was dressing a lanced boil on the cheek of a grey-faced guerilla officer who submitted with squeamish distaste. Behind the lint square, plaster and thinning beard I recognized the sometime student at the Lille Dental College, General Harare.
He frowned at me, too frayed to make the effort of remembering who I was. and then beckoned me forward.
‘Doctor …? Lake Kotto, you were at Port-la-Nouvelle … with the French company, drilling for oil …?’
‘Water, General. I was drilling for water.’
‘That’s right – water. Quite hopeless. You can squeeze blood from the African stone, but never water. Doctor …?’
‘Mallory. I looked after your teeth, General. I treated many of your men. The sergeant …’
‘Of course – you syringed his ears. You must treat him again, he can never catch my orders. Dr Mallory … we heard about you and one of my women soldiers. You shot two of Kagwa’s men and stole a ship.’
‘The car-ferry Salammbo – we’ve sailed it here.’ As Harare nodded sagely I realized that he assumed I had defected to them. ‘I brought a Mercedes for you, General – it’s on the ferry. Captain Kagwa’s personal limousine.’
‘The village policeman’s Mercedes? No wonder Kagwa wants to kill you … he’s across the Chad border, buying gasoline for his h
elicopter, or perhaps selling his memoirs. They say he has his own television unit with him …’
Harare looked up at me, as if envying Kagwa this instrument of power and fame, and hoping that I might be able to offer him some comparable facility.
‘General, he’ll be back. He’s brought a landing-craft and about sixty men – they’re fifteen miles south of here.’
‘We know – they are waiting in the papyrus swamps, killing my poor fishermen. You’ve had a fight to get here, doctor.’ He pointed to the rags of the Toyota flag, assuming that the red stripes were the blood stains of a wrist injury. ‘Are your arms broken?’
‘Kagwa’s helicopter machine-gunned us.’ I held my hands as if they were tightly bandaged. ‘Luckily I’ve recovered.’
‘More lucky than you think – there are no medicines here. This hospital doesn’t cure its patients, doctor, it kills them.’ His pallid face flushed with blood, he gripped the orderly’s shoulders, trying to straighten his left leg. ‘Useless – from now on all I can do with this leg is kneel. And with Kagwa coming it’s time to say a few prayers.’
‘He’ll hold off as long as he can, General. He’s a cautious man.’
‘Of course. He doesn’t want to waste his gasoline. We’re small beans to him. He’s thinking about his Mercedes. That country policeman is going to be Governor of Northern Province.’
‘Then move into the mountains, General. Follow the river to its source.’
Harare pushed the orderly from him. ‘These people won’t leave. Every soldier has his family and a little farm. They have water now, doctor, their precious see-through gold.’
‘But the Sahara is blooming again. General, it’s a lost dream come to life.’
‘At what cost? Our desert revolutionaries have become docile gardeners. This river has been a curse, doctor. I warn you, it’s a poisoned paradise. Half these people are sick.’
The Day of Creation Page 21
