ESCAPE! (CONT.)
“Well Jesus Christ, Mary, Joseph and All the Saints,” says Mungo, glancing over his shoulder, “couldn’t you have aimed a little higher?”
“Against my principles.” Johnson is pounding along beside the ass now, his toga soaked through with sweat. “Shot,” he wheezes, “a man once. . back in London. Broke a boy’s heart, uff-uff, never. . forgive myself.”
“Principles?” the explorer echoes, wondering how far principles go toward meliorating an early death.
Behind them, Dassoud shows no sign of letting up. In fact, for the past hour or so he’s been hurling epithets at the explorer’s back, his blade slashing in the sun as if to underscore his meaning. “Uncircumcised!” he roars. “Pig eater!”
Mungo pulls the hat down over his eyes, and has a vision of the kitchen at Selkirk: fresh-cut flowers, cold ham, Ailie smiling up at him, “You ever notice that fellow seems to have it in for me?”
“Ha!” says Johnson, rumbling along. “He hates you. Hates you the way a. . beard hates a. . razor or a balloon hates a. . pin. It’s nature. You. . come onto the scene with your. . your wheaty hair and catty eyes, a freak and a wonder,” he puffs, gasping for breath. “Where you think that leaves him? You might just as well. . expect a trash-yard cur to put up with a lapdog.”
“Oh,” says Mungo.
♦ ♦ ♦
The day wears on, Johnson silent and morose, the muzzle of the explorer’s horse flecked with blood, Dassoud padding along with the grim determination of a wolf running down its quarry. The horse is a problem. The explorer has been sparing it as much as possible by periodically dismounting and jogging the odd mile or two, but for all his effort the animal has been teetering on the verge of collapse for the better part of the afternoon — at one point he had to set its tail afire to keep it going. And Johnson’s ass hasn’t done much better, feigning lameness, bucking and biting, braying like a calliope. No doubt about it — it’s only a matter of time before one animal or the other gives out and Dassoud overtakes them. And then: goodbye Niger, goodbye Africa, so long mortal coil.
But then, just when things look bleakest, Johnson sings out like a shipwrecked sailor descrying a mast on the horizon. “Look!” he crows. “Up there, through the trees!” The explorer looks. There, winding over the wooded hill before them like an erratic seam, is the road to Bambarra. But what’s this? A funnel of dust seems to be hugging the road, the tapered end narrowing away from them. The explorer’s first thought is dustmen — thousands of them — sweeping along the road, but then, like an epiphany, it comes to him: the refugees! They’ve doubled back! “Johnson!” he cries. “You’re a genius!”
This new development, however, has not been lost on Dassoud. The Chief Jackal begins pouring it on, surging at them like a sprinter making for the tape. The gap closes to fifty yards, then forty, Johnson beats the ass, Mungo whips his horse, the gap closes to thirty yards. Then Johnson does a peculiar thing. “An old Mandingo trick,” he shouts, stuffing the ass’s right ear into his mouth and champing down as if he were lashing into an overcooked chop. The ass lets out a screech, bucks twice and then takes off like a three-year-old at the start of the steeplechase. Mungo follows suit, the horse’s ear like a strip of felt laid against his tongue, biting down till he tastes blood. And sure enough, the nag comes to life, galvanizing its last inner resources in a furious scramble of fetlock and hoof.
Johnson and Mungo, ass and nag, rocket over the stony ground through a stand of trees and up onto the road, Johnson shouting out in Mandingo to the ghostly figures emerging from the gloom. Then the ass slashes into the thick of it, neck and neck with the explorer’s mount. Weary refugees leap aside, the hoofs rain on the road, chickens take to the air. A moment later the riders emerge on the far side, galloping along parallel to the roadway. Johnson kicks at the ass, his elbows flapping as if he were trying to take off, the trees a blur, the explorer fighting to keep up. “Now!” shouts Johnson, and they plunge back into the talcum gloom. This time they upset a litter and bowl over a village dignitary with a graven idol tucked under his arm, Johnson all the while jabbering away at the astonished faces: “Slow him down! Stop the Moor!” Twice more they skew from side to side at breakneck speed, pebbles flying, dust raveling out behind them, until Johnson rattles off the road and plunges into the woods, the explorer hot on his heels.
“Shhhh!” warns Johnson, dismounting in a tangle of burrs and glossy black thorns. The explorer’s heart is drumming at his ribs. He climbs down from the wheezing nag and crouches in the vegetation. “Think we lost him?” he whispers.
Out on the road the slow fuliginous procession rumbles past. The explorer makes out a leg here, a head there, the back end of a goat or sheep. The din is steady, broken now and again by a curse or shout. There is no sign of Dassoud. And then suddenly — a bogey leaping out at a sleeping child — there he is! Tireless, fixated, trotting along the roadway and peering into the dustcloud, his eyes so swollen with rage they look like hard-cooked eggs. His shins seem battered and bruised, his calves veined with blood. He never even turns his head.
Deep in the bushes, Johnson holds out his hands, palms up.
The explorer looks him in the eye, a silly euphoric grin creeping across his face, then reaches out and brushes the upturned palms with his own.
♦ THE STREETS OF LONDON ♦
At this time in history the streets of London were as foul, feculent and disease-ridden as a series of interconnected dunghills, twice as dangerous as a battlefield, and as infrequently maintained as the lower cells of an asylum dungeon. It was pretty rough. Drunks lay sprawled across the footpaths, some dead and stinking and blanketed with crows. Whole families squatted on streetcorners and begged for bread. Murders were committed in the alleys. There were yellowed newspapers clinging to the lampposts, smashed crocks and bottles underfoot, bits of produce and the bones of gamebirds and fowls moldering in the corners. There was pigeonshit. Mud, coal dust, ashes, dead cats, dogs, rats, scraps of cloth stained with excrement, and worst of all, open sewers. “We live. Sir, like a colony of Hottentots,” complained Lord Tyrconnel, addressing the House. “And our streets abound with such heaps of filth as even a savage would look on with amaze.” Others agreed. A society for Civic Salubrity was formed, a Clean Air Club. They held regular meetings, followed Bledsoe’s Rules of Parliamentary Procedure, aired complaints, accomplished nothing.
There were a few private nightsoil collectors, it’s true, and a handful of dustmen. But the nightsoil collectors built festering mounds of muck in their backyards and the dustmen merely created smoldering dumps. And this still left the overwhelming majority of the city’s residents with no means of sewage disposal save their own backyards and the choked gutters which bisected the streets like running wounds. Grim shopkeepers trudged out into the roadway to dump their chamberpots, barmen limed the walls outside their establishments to deaden the reek of urine, housekeepers flung buckets of nightsoil from second- and third-story windows. “Gardy loo!” the chambermaid would shout, and a dark clot of it would arch out over the walkway to slap down in the street, there to ooze inch by inch toward the fetid gutter. Of course, this was inconvenient for the passerby, who might already be limping and brushing at his clothes as a result of tumbling into an open cellar or blundering across one of the several thousand mad dogs that roamed the city at will. And as if that weren’t enough, the gutters were generally clogged with horsedung, pigs’ ears and other offal, causing the sewage to back up in dark rills and steamy swamps — not only was the pedestrian up to his ankles in human waste, he also found himself dodging the airborne clods thrown up by the wheels of passing carriages.