When he had packed the medicines, clothes, mosquito net, compass, torch, rag books, fruit, favourite toys and so on there was still a couple of hours before it would be tolerably cool. He hoped to find a guide in the early dusk when, according to Kwan, there was always a lot of movement in the marshes as the buffalo were brought back to the villages. Meanwhile, to distract Dinah from her physical fidgets and him from his mental ones, he got out the plastic counters. Almost the first that spilled out into the lid of the wallet was the black square with the gold hand.
He picked it up, stared at it and put it to one side. But Dinah leaned over and with a long arm snatched it back. She too stared at it for a while, panted a little and then prodded her fingers together. It was always exciting when she actually showed she wished to communicate, rather than merely demonstrating like a star pupil that she was able to, so Morris picked out the purple circle with the hole in the centre. Unhesitatingly she placed it to the right of the other:
black square with gold hand: Sultan
purple circle with hole hurt/be hurt
Morris snapped his fingers encouragingly, made a quick note and then fished out more tokens. He already had quite a bit of evidence about Dinah’s memory processes, but this mostly concerned matters which she had learnt by repetition. There was not much about single events that had made enough impression to stay firm in her mind. She had evidently been impressed by the death of the Sultan; it would be interesting to see whether this—a purely external event though involving a major figure in Dinah’s own mythology—could be linked in any way with her attack on Sparrow, Sparrow’s retaliation, or Sparrow’s death—things, one would have thought, much more deeply impressive to her mind. Morris picked out five more nouns, spread them on one side of the table, added the Sultan’s own symbol and left the single verb lying where it was. Dinah hesitated, picked up her own square and studied the remaining symbols for anything that might mean eat or food. If she had been human she would have shrugged her shoulders to acknowledge the expected disappointment; her own way of doing this was a little grunt and a hunching of her back before she returned to making a sentence that involved the single verb “hurt”.
She brought the Sultan’s token back to the centre of the table and formed the same sentence as before, but she seemed dissatisfied with it and without any encouragement from Morris returned to the remaining nouns. She almost did what he expected first go; her fingers hesitated over the yellow square “nameless object” which in this case would surely have been the dart, and then they hovered over the black square which might have meant Sparrow. But when she returned to sniff at the two symbols already chosen she seemed to make up her mind:
black square: person other than Dinah, Morris, or Sultan
purple circle with hole: hurt
black square with gold hand: Sultan
She chattered at Morris, and looked with her brown, round eyes into his face, seeking what? Confirmation? Approval of her cleverness? Morris astonished her by rewarding her with a whole bunch of grapes, and while she ate them in her nest he sat quite still, pulling his lip and thinking.
A chimpanzee can communicate. A chimpanzee can be mistaken as to the facts it communicates. Can a chimpanzee lie? With the surface of his mind Morris began to sketch out a possible series of experiments to investigate this problem, but the work did not satisfy his deeper mind, which in fits and starts insisted on rearranging the events of the last few days into a different pattern. He had already been naturally nervous about the journey into the marshes. Now he was very frightened indeed.
3
Morris and Hadiq stood by the boat-sheds under two brollies and looked at the grey reaches of water and the brown stands of reed. The retreating flood had left a long band of mud along the shore where, hidden in slimy burrows, the lungfish were beginning to croak their painful evening dirge; no scientist, as far as Morris knew, had ever investigated this particular species; he himself believed that the noise was no sort of chant or mating-song, but simply a by-product of the process of breathing; you could hear how it hurt.
“God protect you, Morris,” said Hadiq in a worried voice.
“I’ll be OK, I expect,” said Morris in English.
With a sigh he put Dinah on the ground. He had rubbed her all over with insect-repellant—a process she took for an exotic form of grooming and adored—so that she now had the tousled appearance of a dog after a bath. He too reeked of citrus.
“What must I do, Morris?” said Hadiq suddenly.
“Do? Do?” Morris felt impatient of any idea of action. There were enough activists already in Q’Kut. But with another sigh he took the brolly from the hand of the reluctant brolly-slave and walked with Hadiq along the shore. Dinah stayed where she was in the shade of the other brolly.
“Do as little as you can,” he said. “Protect yourself. Talk with the Shaikhah, your mother. Take your father’s guns and give them to the eunuchs from the marsh.”
“Why do you say this? Is my mother in danger?”
“Long ago your father and I were friends at Oxford. He left suddenly to return here, and for many years we did not meet, though we sent each other letters. Then he came to London and sent for me, and we dined together and he drank a lot of wine.
“So have many good men.”
“He had a strong head, but that night his tongue ran away. He told me why he had left Oxford. Being the son of the then Shaikhah, he was also your grandfather’s heir, but your grandmother had borne three daughters before him, so there were two sons older than him, by other wives. These two sons poisoned your grandfather, but then quarrelled as to who should rule; there were several factions among the Arabs, but the marshmen knew who was the true Sultan; when your father returned Kwan and Dyal armed the eunuchs, and with their help your father captured both brothers. He told me they took a long time to drown. Now many of these people . . .” Morris nodded towards the tents of the Arabs “. . . remember that your father became Sultan over the bodies of your uncles.”
“So I am an Arab but I must not trust the Arabs. I must trust the marshmen, though a marshman killed my father—or so they say.”
“I believe they say wrong. Anyway, my advice is that you arm the eunuchs, trust no one else, and move as slowly as you are able. I shall be back with news in very few days. If you must take action, talk first with bin Zair.”
They turned and walked slowly back towards the boat-sheds, to the ugly noise of the lungfish adapting themselves over thousands of generations to live in an altered world.
Five
1
IT WAS STRANGE how the reed-beds rustled. There was no wind, and the feathery plumes at the top of the stems stayed still against the hazy sky, as though they were posing for a woodcut. But down at water-level the fibrous leaves stirred and hissed. Morris had done a little canoeing in Europe in a featherweight modern derivative of the kayak, propelled by a double-ended paddle. The craft he was now learning to control was twice the size and ten times the weight, a marshman’s canoe made of reeds, several layers thick, tarred, and shaped into graceful upward curves at prow and stern. He had to kneel to paddle, driving the blade upright along by the fat thwart; the whole boat was slightly curved in plan, so that gliding through the water it naturally moved in a slow arc to the right; this was counteracted by the tendency of the paddle-stroke to push the prow to the left—a cunning arrangement, the result of centuries of sophistication of design, but awkward for a beginner. The kneeling position was also peculiarly tiring for the hams.