“Dismount!” shouts Ali, as he and Dassoud spring from their steeds like a pair of Russian tumblers. Johnson, ambling up on his ass, relays the command to his employer, while the Nubian steps forward to take charge of the animals.
It should be said that the explorer’s mind is laboring under a Sisyphean strain at this juncture: he is keyed up, jittery, aquiver with apprehension and doubt. The success of his mission — yea, his life itself — may depend on the impression he makes in his forthcoming interview with the Queen.
His stomach sinks with the same nauseated, socked-in-the-kidney feeling that used to assail him at school before end-of-term exams. Butterflies, they used to call it. Stage fright. Heebie-jeebies. The Choke.
And so, sweating like a marathon runner, he steps down out of the saddle, catches his left foot in the stirrup and slaps to the ground in a storm of dust and goat hair. He lies there a moment, thinking Christ in Heaven what have I done now, while Dassoud and Ali exchange glances and Johnson rushes to his aid. After steadying the horse, loosening the stirrup and finally thinking to remove the explorer’s boot, Johnson succeeds in extricating him. But this is just the beginning. The ground here, it seems, is a mecca for the costive denizens of the Sahel, an unspoiled latrine for Mother Nature and all her feathered, furred and squamate creation. Goat turds lie here, cheek by jowl with hyena ordure; grainy bars of camel dung, dogshit, cowshit and sheepshit coil round the withered ropy leavings of adders and skinks; there’s even a stray ibex turd or two. Mungo rises from this morass, brushing at his jubbah and dusting his hat. “Sorry about that,” he says. Ali shrugs. Then gestures for him to follow, and disappears through the soft contiguous flaps of Fatima’s tent and into the mystery beyond. Mungo, reeking like a zoo, his back an abstract collage of mauves, siennas and dun yellows, the representative of King George III and all of England, follows the Emir of Ludamar into the sanctum of the Queen.
♦ ♦ ♦
It is dark inside, a pair of oil lamps burning fitfully. There are tapestries, mats, urns, a perch on which two birds of prey — saker falcons — are calmly disemboweling a jerboa. The explorer glances up just as one of them finds a long strand of intestine and begins to tug at it, like a robin with a worm. ‘‘Salaam aleichem,’’ says Ali, and there she is, seated on a pillow the size of a double bed. The explorer is stunned. He’d expected a big woman — but this. . this is impossible! She is gargantuan, elephantine, her great bundled turban and glowing jubbah like a pair of circus tents, her shadow leaping and swelling in the uncertain Light until it engulfs the room. Her attendants — two girls in billowy pantaloons and a hoary old woman — sit at her feet like olives flanking a cantaloupe in a surreal still life.
Mungo cannot make out her face, which is concealed behind a yashmak—the double horsehair veil worn by Muslim women in public — but he is immediately struck by her feet and hands. Petite and delicate, they float at the tips of her bloated extremities like ducks on a pond. He is fascinated. Each of her digits is ornamented with a ring, and for some reason — perhaps to draw attention to their charms — her hands and feet have been stained saffron. The effect is dazzling. When finally she turns her head toward him she gasps, and gives out a faint squeal. Ali rushes to her, jabbering in Arabic. When she answers him, her voice is soft and sensual as a sunshower.
Mungo nudges his interpreter.
“She says she’s afraid,” Johnson whispers.
“Afraid? I’m the one whose giblets are on the line here.”
“You’re a Christian. To her that’s like bein’ a cannibal or a werewolf or somethin’.”
“What about you?”
“Don’t look at me, brother — I’m a Animist. Shhh. . now she’s bitchin’ about the smell. . ‘Do they all smell like that?’ “
Suddenly Ali barks out a command. “He wants us on our knees,” says Johnson, easing himself down and burying his forehead in the sand. The explorer follows suit. They pose like this for a long while (“I’m beginning to feel like a ostrich,” Johnson quips), until a high nasal voice begins yodeling out the evening prayers. It is the muezzin, stationed somewhere outside the tent. Ali and Dassoud likewise prostrate themselves, and Fatima comes down off her throne like a thundercloud rolling down the side of a mountain. As she tilts her forehead to the earth, the explorer can feel her rich black eyes upon him.
When the prayers are finally finished, Fatima lumbers back to her pillow, settles herself primly, and softly dismisses Dassoud and her husband. She then turns to Mungo and his interpreter, and asks them to be seated. Behind them, the Nubian edges into the tent, scimitar in hand. For a long while the room is silent, Fatima and her attendants ocularly feasting on this blond apparition in the blue velvet jacket. Finally the Queen addresses him, a single sentence, her voice rising as if on the crest of a question.
Mungo looks at Johnson.
“She wants you to stand up and take your jacket off.’*
Mungo complies, and one of the girls slips up to take the garment from him and deliver it to the Queen. Fatima regards the jacket silently, running her hand over the material against the nap, taking one of the brass buttons between her teeth. The explorer stands there in his jubbah like a child in a nightgown. “Give it to her,” Johnson whispers.
The explorer clears his throat, and in his best Arabic offers her the jacket. She looks up at him and politely declines, but does appropriate two of the brass buttons. “For earrings,” she explains, holding them up to the corners of her yashmak. From the shadows one of the falcons begins to crow: ca-ha! ca-ha! Fatima wets her lips. “Does he want any pork?” she asks.
“Tell her no,” says Johnson.
At that moment One-Eye appears with a bushpig on a leash. The bushpig has an elongated snout randomly disfigured with lumps and ridges, several yellowed tusks, and a nasty look in its eye. With a leer, One-Eye offers Mungo the pig. “Snark-snark,” says the pig.
“Look disgusted,” Johnson coaches.
The explorer does his best to express horror and loathing, knowing full well how deeply the Moors abhor pork. He backs away, fingers atremble, slapping his forehead and tugging at his lip while the bushpig, squealing like an accordion, stamps and stutters and jerks at its leash. The performance seems to be reassuring Fatima, and so the explorer gyrates even more wildly — really hamming it up — until he accidentally stumbles into the falcons’ perch. This, he immediately realizes, is a mistake. At the touch of his elbow the birds rear up and shriek in his face, their beaks and talons like scissors, wings beating round his ears. Then the larger of the two springs onto his shoulder. He is terrified. In his anxiety to brush it away he ducks directly into the path of the bushpig, who has been waiting for just such a chance. In a flash the pig lurches forward and savagely bites the explorer six or seven times in rapid succession. During the panic that ensues, the explorer somehow manages to collapse half the tent and wind up spread-eagled across the Queen’s voluminous lap. The Nubian eunuch intercedes to behead the pig with one swipe of his scimitar, while One-Eye and the pantaloon girls try to dislodge the shit-caked and bleeding explorer from the Queen’s person. Through it all, Mungo can hear the strains of Johnson’s voice raised in song — it seems almost as if he’s singing a dirge, downhearted and mournful, one of the old plantation songs Johnson likes to call “the blues.”