♦ ♦ ♦
It is said that when a Sahelian Moor dies and finds himself amidst the searing fires of hell, his spirit invariably returns to earth — for a blanket. Mungo can believe it. They’ve been on the road for nearly eight hours now, and the sun is directly overhead. It must be a hundred and forty degrees in the shade — if there were any shade. The creatures who live here — the golden gopher, the white lady spider, various beetles, bugs and stinging things, scorpions, skinks and mole rats — are of course buried deep in the sand. Mungo, in his beaver top hat, nankeen trousers and blue frockcoat, is out in the sun, traveling, the swollen bundles of his restored tradegoods rattling at his back. He is hemmed in by scrub and cactus, sandbur and euphorbia, a landscape of the palest green and a thousand shades of brown, from khaki to ecru to russet. The hills are pale and scoured, ribbed like the remains of antediluvian beasts stretched across the horizon. There are baboons in these hills, purple-assed, crew-cut, short of brow, long of tooth. “Yeek-a-yeek-a-yeek!” they screech. “Chip-chip-chip!”
In a month it will be green here. There will be rivers, ponds, puddles. Deadly cobras will part the grass side by side with three-step adders and the crested lizard called tomorrow-never-comes. Duikers will appear, skirting from shade to shade. Pangolins, guibas, caracals and chamas. Wood storks, gaunt as refugees, secretary birds with their ragged braids and hawk’s legs and partiality for cold-blooded lunches. Addax, puku, eland and oribi. Aoudads, korins, mhorrs and mambas. Hartebeests. Wild asses. Rats the size of piglets. .
But for now, it’s pretty bleak. And dry. So dry the saddles crack with a groan, hairs fall like leaves, a stream of urine evaporates in mid-arc. This is where the business of exploring gets down to the nitty-gritty.
Sitting at the foot of the big mahogany table in St. Alban’s Tavern and gazing up into the rapt, florid and bewhiskered faces of the African Association, the explorer never dreamed it would be like this — so confused, so demeaning. And so hot. He had pictured himself astride a handsome mount, his coat pressed and linen snowy, leading a group of local wogs and half-wits and kings to the verdant banks of the river of legend. Yet here he is, not at the head, but somewhere toward the rear of the serpentine queue wending its way through all this parch, a prisoner for all intents and purposes, his horse wheezing and farting, his underwear binding at the crotch. Is there no sense of proportion in the world?
Half a mile ahead, spatters of white and black, Ali and Dassoud undulate over the plain on their chargers. The two hundred members of the elite cavalry, mounted on equine panthers and lions, fan out behind them for nearly a mile. Some of the younger and more enthusiastic horsemen make forays into the scrub to run down the occasional monitor or skink, lop a bush here, a succulent there. For the others, despite the heat, the whole thing is nothing more than a party on the hoof. They’re busy passing pipes and guerbas, telling dirty tales about camels and veils and virgins, jolting the solemn hills with explosions of laughter.
The explorer turns to survey the scene behind him, trying to decide whether he’s part of a military expedition or a foxhunt, when a sudden flash of light catches his eye in the far distance. It is Johnson, mounted on his doleful blue ass (an animal remarkable for its lugubrious length of muzzle and ear), just now making his way over the lip of the horizon. The explorer raises his arm and waves. And there! — a movement inveigled by the distance and the rippling corrugations of the air — Johnson is waving back!
♦ AEOLIAN ♦
Jarra is a town of a thousand wattle huts, give or take a few. It lies just south of the Sahel, on the border of Ludamar, Kaarta and Bambarra. One approaches the town through a series of gentle yeasty hills rising out of the plain like bubbles in batter. This time of year the hills are pocked with blackened stubble, a consequence of the villagers’ burn-and-bloom philosophy. Fires raged here a month ago. Bands of flame coruscating along the dark line of the earth, roiling billows darkening the sky. It went particularly hard on the rats. Legions of them, like migrant lemmings, foaming out of the holocaust and into the path of the entire assembled village. The Jarrans lifted rakes and hoes and cudgels, bursting rats like so much wet pottery. They harvested blood.
These are the grazing lands, broken here and there by close stands of wood — karite, kapioka and two-ball nitta, doum palm and acacia. Beyond them, cultivated fields fan out round the village walls like the upturned palms of sleeping giants, etched and furrowed, patiently waiting to snatch up the first random drops from the sky. There is a river too — the Woobah — now just a succession of puddles seething with tails and scales. It slinks out of the woods as if ashamed of itself, meanders through the village like a drunk, then disappears in the grassland beyond. The rest is just about what you’d expect. Dusty streets, consumptive cattle, women with haunted eyes and children with distended bellies and hunger-bleached hair. These are the hard times, the long lingering days before the rains. Udders dry, grain reserves shot — even the insipid nitta pods in short supply.
Ali and his retinue boom onto the scene in a storm of white dust, scowling and black-bearded, fierce and vain. Villages like this are fair game for the Moors — for Kafirs live here, unbelievers, and not only is it the sacred duty of all good Muslims to spread the word of Allah, but Kafirs are notoriously feeble at defending themselves. Hence: fair game. The illiterate blacks of Jarra — Mandingoes for the most part — fall conveniently into the Kafir category, though nearly all of them have informally adopted the tenets of Islam. The Moors glance down at the prayer rugs, sandals, jubbahs, and then up at the flat black faces. They’re not fooled. To them the Jarrans are a sort of inferior subspecies, nonhuman really, a race designed by Allah to milk the goats and butter the bread of the Chosen People, namely themselves. Thus, Kafir cattle, Kafir children, Kafir women, grain, jewelry, huts, the very clothes on their backs, are considered as properly belonging to the Moors. When Ali’s boys thunder into town, you can be sure it’s not just to see the sights.
On this occasion, however, rapine and plunder are not foremost in Ali’s mind. He has long since established a system of extortion with Jarra and other Kafir towns within his compass. He sells them protection, assessing so much produce and so many bolts of cloth in return. If he gets what he asks, he leaves them alone. If not, he hacks half the villagers to pieces and takes twice as much. The reason for the present visit has nothing to do with protecting the Jarrans from himself, but with protecting them from the Kaartans. A simple case of power politics. Yambo II, the headman of Jarra, had sided with Bambarra in the ongoing conflict between Tiggitty Sego of Kaarta and Mansong of Bambarra. At the time it seemed the expeditious thing to do: Mansong was really tearing them up, hewing to the right, gouging to the left. But since then there had been a number of reversals, the Bambarrans had fallen back, and Tiggitty Sego, mothermurdering mad over the Jarrans’ defection, was now advancing on the town to chastise them. And so Yambo, at the cost of three hundred head of cattle and nineteen virgins under the age of twelve, had hired Ali to bail him out.