This was no ordinary crocodile, but one of nature’s great criminals, as unruled in its own place and time as the tyrannosaur. A creature, a beast, a monster. Fully sixteen feet long, I reckoned it. The top of its massive head at rest was parallel with the mid-point of my thigh, and its open jaws could have accommodated an oil drum. With its scales gilded by the firelight, its pupils cored with orange brilliance, it would have been at home by Cerberus’s side, an idol of pure menace guarding a portal into hell—that was my first thought (if I can call those chill lancings of affrighted, garbled language that shot through my brain “thoughts”). It seemed that beyond the portcullis of stained and twisted teeth, deep in its hollow tube of a belly, lay a gateway opening onto some greater torment.
The largest branch of the burning tree broke off and fell with a hiss into the river. In the diminished light, the croc’s aspect changed from that of demiurge to the purely animal. A bloated grayish green lizard with a pale, thick tongue and cold mineral eyes and corrosive, rotting breath, a creature that would chew through my torso as though it were an underdone strip of bacon, then lift its head and, utilizing its powerful throat muscles, shift me down into its stomach, where—coated in sticky acids—I would quietly dissolve over a period of days, sharing the ignominy of a partly consumed river bass, its glazed eyes contemplating me with doting steadfastness as we lay together in our cozy, messy little cave.
To this point, disorientation had dominated my fear, but now my uncertainty as to what had happened was washed away by a single horrid certainty, and the disabling weakness that accompanies deep terror infused my limbs. My instinct was to throw myself into the water, but there I would be totally helpless. Instead, I tried to prepare for a quick sprint, a leap. If I jumped toward the bank at an angle from the middle of the rock, I might be able to gain a foothold and scramble up and make my escape. The odds of success were not good, but then the odds favoring any other course of action were far worse. It would have been helpful if the crocodile had bellowed, made a violent noise that out-voiced the wind—that might have acted upon me like a starter’s pistol and given me a boost of energy. But crocs only bellow when their territory is threatened, and I was no threat, I was mere prey. Its baleful regard was more enfeebling than any sound could have been, and I knew that at any second it would lunge forward and take me.
In the moment before I jumped, I had an incidence of perfect clarity. It was if I were receding from the world, leaving the body behind. I saw myself, a black, insignificant figure, a human scrap on a splinter of rock above turbulent water, facing a slightly less tiny creature with a tail, and the entire dark geography of the flats, with its one torched tree and a few smaller, flickering lights in the distance that might have been lanterns in the windows of shanty bars. I saw stitchings of lightning fencing the river valley, casting the hills in brief silhouette, bringing up the boxy shapes of Mogado from the shadows. I did not see my life pass before my eyes, but rather saw the sum of my life imprinted upon that unimportant landscape, and understood that in this cunning design with its drear prospect and trivial monster, all the wastage and impotence of my days, all my misused intellect and defrauded ambitions, all my torpid compulsions and arousals, all my puerile dreams and dissipated hopes and contemptible passions had found their proper resolution. And it was this sorry recognition, this abandonment of last illusions, that bred in me a liberating fatalism and freed my limbs from the grip of fear and let me jump.
I hit the side of the bank hard and slipped back. My feet touched the water, but I managed to claw out a handhold in the mud and haul myself up onto level ground. Lightning strobed as I rolled away from the water’s edge, and in those bright detonations I caught sight of the crocodile. Just a glimpse. It was in the process of turning toward me, jaws agape. I flung myself away, and came to my feet running. Thunder obscured all other sound, but I could have sworn I felt the croc close behind, the awful gravity of the beast swinging its head round to bite. As I ran, as it became apparent that I was not going to die, I began to laugh. I stumbled, I fell half a dozen times, I tore my skin on stones, on dead branches, but I continued to laugh until I was too exhausted to do more than breathe. It seemed ridiculous that I should have survived. Silly. Life itself seemed silly, when there was so much death to be had. The average human activity in Africa was dying, or so I perceived it then, and to be spared in this situation abrogated at least the law of averages, if not other, more consequential laws.
I burst through the hotel doors, somehow failing to wake the African teenager behind the reception desk, and went into the bar, empty and lightless now, and helped myself to a bottle of whiskey; I sat down at one of the tables and had a restorative drink. Then I had another. I started laughing again, and this served to wake the kid at the desk. He peeked in the doorway, a startled look on his face; then he vanished, and I heard his footsteps moving away. Not long afterward, Dillip—wearing a fetching bathrobe of embroidered green silk—made his appearance. His manner was at first stern, but on seeing my condition—all but naked, streaked with mud, bleeding, wild of countenance—he stopped short of rebuking me. He went behind the bar, picked a glass from the rack and with an air of prim disappointment, brought it to me. I thanked him and poured the glass half full.
“What can have happened to you, sah?” Dillip asked, hovering by the table.
I did not know how to tell him and only shook my head.
He drew up a chair and sat opposite me, adjusting the fall of his robe to cover his bony knees. From his expression, I gathered that he had not yet decided whether to be reproving or indulgent of my curious behavior.
“Do you require medical assistance?” Dillip asked.
“No,” I said. “No, just a drink or two.”
This did not sit well with him. “Sah, you must tell me what has happened. If something has happened to you in the hotel, I must report it.”
“Nothing happened in the hotel.” I pointed with the whiskey bottle. “Out there.”
“Ah!” said Dillip. “You have been robbed, then. Bandits!”
I considered accepting this judgment; it would be easier than trying to explain the events of the evening. But when I put everything together in my head—my sleepwalking, the storm, the crocodile, Buma—I did not arrive at an American conclusion, but an African one.