♦ ♦ ♦
Long after the dust has settled, the explorer makes his grand entrance. On foot. He is limping slightly, and leading his horse by the rein. During the course of the journey the animal has drooled steadily, bled from the anus, vomited, pitched forward into the dirt twice, and gone lame in three of its four legs. The upshot is that the explorer has had to hoof it himself for the last twenty miles or so. As he hobbles into town, the Jarrans come out to line the streets and scrutinize him. Colorful people: faces like licorice, big hoop earrings, strings of beads and cowrie shells winking in their hair, skirts and sashes pulsing red, yellow and orange like a thousand flags. Colorful, but quiet. There’s not a stir through the entire crowd, not a whisper, not a grin. The meditation room at a Carthusian monastery would have been noisy by comparison. The explorer, thinking he may have overawed them, does his best to look harmless and unassuming. At his side, Johnson bobs along on the blue ass, fat and serene as a potentate. From time to time he raises a chubby palm to salute one of the sirens in the crowd or swat at a fly. Bringing up the rear is Dassoud, strutting along on a charger the size of a park statue. Keeping an eye on things.
The explorer’s immediate desires are pretty basic: a mug of water, a plate of mush, a mat on which to throw his weary bones. Under normal circumstances he would have been provided with all this and more. For the Mandingoes of Jarra are a friendly and hospitable people — they’ve already groomed and watered Ali’s thundering herd, and slaughtered eight bullocks for his dinner. But just as Mungo draws into town, the wind begins kicking up. Kicking up violently in fact. The coattails fly up over his head, his hat lifts off like a kite on an updraft and his ears begin to roar as if someone has suddenly clapped seashells to them. Behind him, the horse whinnies and farts, its mane foaming round its ears. Suddenly a wall collapses with a groan, and a thatched roof takes off like a flock of vultures flushed from the kill. This is wind!
“Whooo!” he says, turning to Johnson. But Johnson, along with Dassoud and everyone else in sight, is bolting headlong in the opposite direction. He stands there, puzzled. “What’s the rush?” he shouts. “It’s nothing but a little breeze.” The wind whistles. The sky goes dark. A hut skitters by. And then he hears it — a harsh sibilance, a spitting ticking release of air, as if all Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Borderlands had turned out to hiss the villain in a melodrama. All at once he’s terrified. He takes to his legs — but too late! WHOMP! The horse blows down. And then he is himself knocked to his knees, suddenly stung in every pore of his body as if he’d blundered into a hive of bees. Sand! It’s a sandstorm!
He scrambles to his feet, the jacket beating round his head like the wings of the devil and all his legions. There is sand in his eyes, his ears, up his nose, down his throat. Suddenly an airborne goat cracks him across the shoulderblades and down he goes again. He fights up, staggering, and an empty calabash rebounds off his head like an asteroid, and then — SLAP! — a guinea hen catches him flush in the face and he’s down for the count.
Up again, down again. This is getting serious. “Help!” he screams. SSSSSS-SSSShhhhhhhhhhhhh! hushes the sand. He can’t breathe, his lungs are filled with it; he’s gone blind, crawling over wind-strewn refuse, minidunes, kettles and spoons, tattered blankets, the corpses of goats or milch cows. Where to go? Is this the way it ends? But then he feels a pressure on the back of his neck, a hand there, an arm. He grabs at the hand and follows it along the ground, creeping like a rodent, the shriek in his ears, things batting at his head, the wild wind clutching at his lungs like a pair of hot tongs. .
♦ ♦ ♦
“Hey, Mr. Park,” rumbles the voice of Johnson, “don’t you know enough to come in out of the sand?”
The explorer, fighting the dry heaves, does not respond. His eyes are crusted over and someone has been building sand castles in his ears. He has no idea where he is.
“You coulda had the hide confricated right off you, you know that? I mean a sandstorm is nothin’ to fuck around with.”
The explorer is groggy. He doesn’t know where he is or how he got here, and he can’t see a damned thing. Is it night already? There is the sound of wind, the hiss of sand. “Johnson,” he says, “—is that you?”
Instead of answering, Johnson’s voice slips into Mandingo, and the explorer is startled to hear laughter blooming in the darkness around him.
What is going on here? “Johnson?”
‘‘Obo weebojalla ‘imsta, kootatamballa” says Johnson, and the laughter bursts out afresh. And then: “Don’t you worry, Mr. Park — we’re in safe hands.”
“But where are we? And how did we get here?”
“Root cellar. I walked, you was dragged.”
So that’s it. He must have been unconscious all this time. But whose voices are these, and why this impenetrable, godawful darkness? He detects a whisper, somewhere close by, followed by a giggle. And then the maddening swish and tinkle of liquid swirled in a jar. “Johnson,” he calls. “Couldn’t we do with a little light in here?”
“I think it can be arranged,” says Johnson, whose voice abruptly changes direction, and in resonant, jocular tones wades through a muddle of Mandingo m’s and k’s and long smooth double o’s. Other voices — grunts really — answer from the void. After a moment or two the explorer becomes aware of a low, barely distinguishable sound from the far side of the room: a murmur, a rustle, the gentle soughing of treebranches rubbing in the wind. He is puzzled at first, but then it comes to him: sticks. They’re chafing sticks! A second later there’s a spark, and then a hungry flame swelling from a handful of shavings to illuminate the room.
What he sees is this: five men, black and knobby, sitting against the earthen wall passing a calabash and holding it to their lips. One of them is Johnson. The others are Jarran Mandingoes, feet splayed, baggy knees, noses pushed back into their heads. Each wears a white toque set atop his crown like a mushroom, and a variegated sash that runs from shoulder to crotch and back again. The soles of their feet are the color of smoked salmon. The gentleman closest to the explorer, a toothless relic with a concave chest, offers up the calabash. Mungo takes it gladly. As he tips his head back, the fire winks out — but no matter, he’s more concerned with the business at hand than with peering into crannies. He gulps and guzzles, flushing the sand out from under his gums and between his teeth. He rinses, gargles, drinks deep, the dark a comfort, his thirst boundless, all thought, sensation and reflex held in abeyance to this single-faceted ecstasy, this pouring of liquid into the buccal cavity and down the esophagus. But then a weathered hand makes contact with his own, and he’s forced to give up the calabash. “Damned good stuff, Johnson,” he murmurs, addressing the darkness and hiccoughing between syllables. “Reminds me of a good Irish stout.”
From the corner, the voice of Johnson, muttering. “Good as anythin’ them potato pluckers ever come up with. Better. That’s Sooloo beer you drinkin’ there, Mr. Park. Sooloo beer. Black-roasted sorghum malt and the purest spring water, aged and krausened in strict accord with a ancient and closely guarded tribal formula. Hey — this is the cradle of civilization here, Mr. Park. Who you think was around this planet first anyway — us — or them bleached-out Hibernians? This is beer, brother.”
There is something unfamihar in Johnson’s delivery. His words are sluggish and chewed-over, his tone combative. And his pitch deeper than ever — the sort of thing you’d expect from the banks of a pond on a summer’s night. Could it be that he’s had one pull too many at the calabash? “Are you drunk, Johnson?”