So the church has some authority and, in this country which is officially hostile to white people, the service volunteers who come from abroad have a good deal of freedom. These are the people who have been infiltrated by the revolutionaries. The disguise is almost perfect. Both groups have the same kind of dedication; both talk about racial brotherable; both talk about the wastefulness of the rich and the exploitation of the poor; and both deal in the same stern idea of imminent punishment and justice.
The narrator is one of these infiltrators. Who the others are at this mission station he doesn’t know. They will declare themselves to him in time. Now, at this moment of arrival, shouldering his rucksack, allowing himself to be marched off as a prisoner by the boys with the bows and deadly little Indian arrows, he is concerned to act only as a religious volunteer.
He is led to a cabin in the centre of the clearing. It is a rough timber cabin, but it is on tree-branch pillars about four feet high, and it easily dominates the other, smaller cabins which are flat on the rough ground. The clearing is still littered with the finer debris of felled trees, still with the marks of bush-clearing fires, and the salty smell of those fires. On three sides the forest wall, with many tall, thin, white-trunked trees close together, looks freshly exposed.
The narrator is expecting some kind of welcome, after his long journey. But the heavy white man, in jeans and washed-out tee-shirt, who comes out of the kitchen shed at the back of the central cabin, simply says to the boys, “Take the man to his house.” It is a foreign voice, central or eastern European, overlaid by American or Canadian intonation; and the narrator doesn’t know whether the abruptness has to do with the lack of language or whether it comes out of aggression. As the narrator walks away the man calls out: “Dinner here at five-thirty. That’s the rule here.”
That gives the narrator just over an hour. The cabin to which he is taken is small and roughly floored. Four Indians are sitting or squatting on the floor, among their bundles. One is darning, one is making a toy (a tribal back-pack), and the other two are just waiting — their food is being got ready somewhere on the station — and they are as passive and un-noticing as the Indians on the river. The cabin smells of tree-bark and sawn wood and dirt and oil and rotting leaves; and just as all the colours in a paint box if run together make a dead brown, so all these smells combine with the salty smell of the dead bush-fires outside to make a very deep smell of stale tobacco.
After a wash in the river — the water is cooclass="underline" the sun is going down fast — it is time for the narrator to go to the big cabin. There are eight people there, all of them passing as service volunteers, all of them foreigners from different countries, no Amerindians. So in spite of the jeans and the beards and the casual clothes, the big cabin has a colonial feel.
They have a language problem. The heavy man with the rough manner, who is the head of the station, comes from Czechoslovakia. He doesn’t say so directly; it comes out from what other people say; there is some talk of the town of Pilsen. His wife or friend, the one woman at the table, and no doubt the mother of the boys, doesn’t speak English at all.
She is a big woman, with very blond hair. She is not good-looking, and she says nothing; but she is the only woman at the table, and there is something about her that draws attention: this big woman with the shiny high cheekbones, the heavy twisted mouth, oily now with food, the big smooth hands, the big, ugly red feet.
In this strange colonial setting where, as the narrator thinks, she has no competition, this woman radiates sexuality in a way she wouldn’t at home. There is something else. In this setting, where she is without language, the woman has become her sexuality: to look at her and her thin cotton dress is to be aware of nothing else.
The narrator recognizes that the revulsion he feels is a way of fighting his fascination. With what? With appetite: this woman, newly out of her country, with all its disciplines and narrowness, has become all appetite. The same, he thinks, is true of her husband; and when he looks up at the big man he catches his assessing gaze.
There is much talk at the table while the daylight lasts. Afterwards, in the yellow light of the hurricane lantern, which throws enormous shadows on the rough-sawn timber walls, everyone is more subdued; and the narrator feels isolated from everyone else.
The dinner ends. To step out from the house and the light of the hurricane lamp is to step out into blackness that feels for a second or so like a blow. Little yellow lights in the cabins all around. The forest is singing: the noise is like something imagined, something in the head. It is only half past six. Ten or eleven hours of darkness before it gets light again. Using his flashlight to pick his way back to his cabin, the narrator gets the smell of stale tobacco as he enters. That was the smell of the food he ate; it was the smell of the river water; it is the smell of the forest; it is his own smell now. He wonders whether he will ever get used to forest life. But then, thinking of the big silent woman, and excited by that idea of appetite, he falls asleep.
In the course of the next few days two of the infiltrators reveal themselves to him. There should be a third, the regional commander. He will not reveal himself to the narrator, but the narrator has a good idea who he is.
The narrator finally gets his orders. He is told where he has to go. It is just a name to him. Indian guides will come to take him there.
There will at the end be about a dozen agents like the narrator, and a dozen bases in the forest. On a given day there will be a dozen incidents; the rivers will be watched at strategic points; the few airstrips will be overrun; the forest area, the greater part of the country, will be effectively cut off from the African-ruled coast. The country doesn’t have the military resources to re-occupy the forest; elements of the foreign press will ensure that there is sympathy for the Indian cause, and lessen the possibility of outside intervention.
The narrator is relieved to be moving on. The mission Station is oppressive to him, because of the Czech couple, and because of the glumness of the Indians. For this the narrator blames the Czechs. There is nothing like joy in the Czechs. Authority, and being out of their setting, have only released appetite in them. It is this quality of appetite that has given them away to the narrator.
There are daily religious services for the Indians; there are regulated hours of work. On some evenings in the open space in front of the big cabin — with a smoky brushwood bonfire (to keep away the insects) adding to the stale tobacco smell — television videos are shown. American thrillers, with a black slant. Not as harmless as they appear: they are part of the anti-African indoctrination of the Indians. The Indians are shocked by the guns and the fighting and the speeding cars; they sigh and call out. Sometimes, to break the tension, someone plays a flashlight on a black face; there is laughter; then many flashlights play on black faces on the screen; and the film is made harmless, becomes a film again, and animation makes the Indians like people with possibilities again.
The guides eventually come. They are two young Indian boys, Lucas and Mateo. The narrator leaves with them one morning. One boy walks ahead of the narrator, one behind him.
Soon they come to a wide forest trail, and there they are never absolutely alone. In the forest gloom it seems that there is always someone in the distance: someone always breaking out of the camouflage of leaves and shadow. Some of them are carrying big loads in their back-packs or back-panniers, models for the toys which the Indian in the narrator’s cabin had been making: a flat timber frame with flexible woven walls at the sides and the bottom, the walls laced up over the load with forest-made twine. A further cord or rope attaches both sides of the pannier to a band over the carrier’s forehead. So head and back bear the strain of the load. The carriers’ backs are bent, and at the same time they lean forward against the pull of the band on the forehead. It seems painful; the carriers are dwarfed by their loads; but it is a posture with a balance of forces — a posture that fits the device, which must have evolved over the centuries — and it enables the carriers to walk for hours.