Pisania, The Gambia.
14 July, 1795
My Life,
A touch of the fever, some worms, emaciation, hair loss — nothing to worry over. I am fit and fine so far as outward appearances go. But oh what an ache in my heart! Leeches, flies, food fit for dogs— I endure it all gladly for the fleetingest memory of you. You who sweeten my dreams here in this place of heat and rot, you who give me courage to forge on, you who give me a reason to survive where no other could. Ailie: I’ll sniff out the Niger and be back by spring. Will you wait for me?
When I’m at my lowest ebb, when it seems as if the rains will never let up and I’ll be stuck in this hole eternally, I think of you. And then my heart stirs and I think of da Gama rounding the Cape, Balboa gazing on the Pacific, and I know this is the life!
I remain your faithful and affectionate scaler of peaks, forder of rivers and plumber of the Unknown,
Mungo
P.S. Have met and engaged Johnson, a fine stalwart fellow, intelligent and articulate, a credit to the Negro race. It is his expectation that we shall encounter no real impediment so long as we avoid Ludamar, the Moorish kingdom.
The sun is a weight. She closes her eyes. Mungo is seventeen, hair like spilled barley, muscles hammered into his shoulders, her father’s apprentice. From the far end of the dinner table she grins at him. He lifts his head from the soup, grins back. They have a secret. She’s fourteen. Her chest is flat as a child’s. In the fields, she raises her blouse for him.
When she wakes it’s nearly dark. A rabbit crouches in a pocket of grass, ears pressed back, watching her. She sits up, folds the letter with all the reverence of a votary folding up the Shroud of Turin, and slips it back into her pocket. At home they’re waiting supper. Gleg bats his eyes at her through the kidney pie, fowl, collops and pease pottage, while her father dissertates on the approved method of removing a gangrenous limb. Afterward, the old man takes her aside. “You’re a grown woman of two and twenty,” he says, “and you maun be findin’ yourself a mate. Gleg’s as good as any, by my way of thinkin’, even if he be a bit of a shit-for-brains.”
“You know I’m waiting for Mungo,” she says.
The old man stares at the floor for a long moment, the lines in his face gradually marshaling themselves into the stern, pious and pitiless expression he puts on when breaking bad news to his patients. I’m afraid it’s a cancer. Brain fever. Vitriolic liver. His eyebrows knit until he begins to look like God’s uncle. “Much as I hate to say it,” he whispers, “I’m afraid you canna count overmuch on the lad’s returnin’.”
♦ ♦ ♦
That night she finds a locket on her pillow. Gold, in the shape of a heart, Cupids jessant round the perimeter. She flips it open. There is a portrait inside. She recognizes herself, naked to the waist. Beside her, his arm stretched across her chest in a gesture of protective modesty, is Gleg. Naturally.
♦ NITTY-GRITTY ♦
They come for him in the dead of night, like demons or apparitions. Three of them. Daggers, dirks, falchions, muskets. “Get up, slave.” The voice is throaty, remorseless. “Ali wants you.” He’d been dreaming of Scotland, of emerald slopes and glacial lakes, of silver salmon cakewalking up the falls where the Gala soughs into the Tweed. And now he’s wrenched from sleep like an infant from the womb, a sudden deep primordial panic beating at his ribs. Fatima, he thinks. The jig is up. He is instantly seized with attacks of perspiration, indigestion, gas, guilt and fear. Will they try him by fire? Brand his chest with an A? No, of course not. The dark ages reign out here. Justice and retribution are synonymous, swift and sudden. No time for such niceties as peer pressure, no room in the system for rehabilitation. They cut out the tongue of a har, hack the hand from a thief. . And an adulterer?
There are hands under his armpits. He is jerked roughly to his feet and shoved through the flaps of the tent, propelling him over the supine forms of the seven narcoleptic guards in the entranceway. ‘‘Wallah!” they cry.
‘‘Shaitan!“ “Son of a bitch!” The night air is dry as an oatcake, and surprisingly cold. He finds himself trembling. Behind him, his escort joke in low tones, feet hissing through the sand, weapons jangling and clanking like an armory in motion. Should he run for it? — or buck up and face the music? When he was eight he and his brother set fire to the henhouse. Adam denied it. Mungo faced the music — and took a thrashing that would have melted iron and fused rock. Even now the memory of that thrashing tingles in his thighs and buttocks, implanted deep in the nerve fibers and knotted cords of muscle, a memory beyond words, beyond reason. All at once it hits him: he’ll run for it.
Unfortunately, however, the men at his heels are members of Ali’s elite cavalry, known for their courage, decision and quickness of reflex. Before he can so much as spring from the block a musket is introduced between his legs and he finds himself face down in the sand. The hands grope beneath his armpits again, hoist him up as if he were a drunk or a toddler learning to walk, and steer him through the still, silent camp — past tethered horses, sleeping dogs and ghostly blocks of canvas — right on up to the cookfire snarling before Ali’s tent.
Ali is surrounded by counselors and courtiers. Dassoud is there. One-Eye. The Nubian. He is squatting beside the fire, dirk in hand, toasting bits of meat. The leaping garish light plays off the hook of his nose, cuts into the cheekbones, narrows his deadly eyes. Crouching there before the fire, testy and watchful, greedily gobbling up the kill at his feet, he looks like a colossal bird of prey, something terrible and leathery left over from the Saurian Age. The explorer expects the worst.
Ali blows at a piece of meat, takes a sip of hoona tea. Then bares his teeth, drawing the morsel into his mouth. He gestures at the explorer with the point of his knife. “Saddle—” he begins, breaking off to gnash at a piece of gristle, “saddle your. . horse.” He swallows with a click and grunt, then turns back to the fire with another hunk of raw flesh, “We leave for Jarra in an hour.”
Mungo is stunned. Jarra! Why that must be sixty or seventy miles south of here! For weeks, as the monsoon season drew closer and Ali’s withdrawal to the north more imminent, the explorer had been begging Fatima to intercede in his favor — to petition for his release, or at least for the opportunity to make short forays from Benowm. He shuddered to think what would happen if he were still a prisoner when Ali gathered his herds and tents and horses for the summer migration to the skirts of the Great Desert. They’d skin and disembowel him. Cut his throat. Stake him out on the dunes to shrivel up like a fig. His bones would whiten in the sun like the sad remains of the slaves Johnson had told him of, like Houghton’s bones, shattered by the years, no longer Irish, Celtic, Caucasian — merely bones, the bones of a man, the bones of an animal. He has a quick image of his own skull, wind-burnished, half buried in sand, and the slink and shuffle of a spotted hyena, its face blank and stupid, raising an unhurried leg to piss in the empty eyesocket. The explorer blinks, shakes his head as if to clear it — and then realizes that they’re all watching him. Jarra! He grabs for the hem of Ali’s burnoose, thinking to kiss it, but Dassoud slaps his hand away. “An’ am Allah ‘alaik,” blurts Mungo, thanking the Emir profusely amid a flurry of bows and curtsies. Ali, impassive as a stone, stares into the fire, and chews.