Mansong’s scepter was capped with a human skull. He adjusted his proud fat belly and repeated his demands. It was at this point that the soothsayer had interceded. (Here the old man becomes violently animated, flailing the twigs of his arms and pounding his chest.) He had shoved his way angrily through the crowd and hobbled up beside Yambo. Then he raised his fists in the air and began castigating the Bambarran king. If Sego was a tyrant, the old man had squawked, then Mansong was an ogre conceived of queers and jackals. Mansong smeared himself in dung and sucked the seed from his warriors. He was a thief and a woman — only look to his great sagging tits for proof. For a moment, both parties were stunned silent. Then, with a shout, Mansong’s army fell on the defenseless Jarrans. Two hundred were killed, mostly women and children. The rest were led off in shackles.
“And how did you manage to escape?” the explorer asks in his halting patois.
The old man glances up, his features lost in a grin. A noiseless laugh shakes at the bones of his chest. “Mojo,” he says.
The explorer looks at Johnson.
“The man says he’s got his mojo workin’,” says Johnson, twirling the meat on the skewer. “You know: magic, black arts, hoodoo and voodoo. Nobody messes with a witch doctor.”
“Witch doctor?”
“Of course — what do you think he’s doin’ runnin’ around with that chicken tucked under his chin?”
The explorer leaps to his feet. “Can he — can he tell fortunes?”
Johnson’s lids are thick as a crocodile’s. He looks up at the explorer and sighs. “Well he’s no gypsy, if that’s what you mean. . But listen, you sure you want your signs and portents conjured with, Mr. Park? Here and now? I mean, it’s one thing to have some old white lady take a look at your tea leaves in her front parlor up in Edinburgh or London or someplace — but hey, this is Africa, man. The eye of the needle, mother of mystery, heart of darkness. And this old naked black man here with his feet all crusted up and his penis danglin’ in the mud — he don’t fool around.”
“Don’t be silly, Johnson. I’ve got the luck of the Scots with me. There’s renown in my future, I know it. Laurels, and a book. And Ailie. Are you kidding: I’ll die in front of the hearth with a cat in my lap.”
“All right. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Overhead, lightning tesselates the sky until it glows like an illuminated map of some celestial river and its tributaries. Off in the distance, harsh dyspeptic rumbles of thunder can be heard. Johnson turns to the old man and mumbles something in Mandingo. The effect on Eboe (or Aboe) is instantaneous. The grin vanishes, crow’s-feet rush out from the eyesockets and corners of the mouth, furrows drop and lines vein the cheeks and chin until he’s transformed, unrecognizable, a great drooping bloodhound, a ball of wax, an unthrown pot. He rises shakily and takes hold of the explorer’s hand, scrutinizing it as if it were a text or a painting. His leathery old fingers play over the knuckles and joints, a wild bolt lights the sky, thunder steps down like a giant walking the earth. The soothsayer spits in Mungo’s palm, then pricks his finger with a vulture’s talon, blending blood and spittle and now a bit of clay, all the while working it into the lines of the palm and muttering some antediluvian formula over and over, mojo-mojo-mojo, his eyes pinched shut, the thunder beating like tribal drums. Finally he looks down into the huge white palm and his eyes go wide. He is stung, stricken. Utters a cry like a wounded beast and clutches at his breast.
A hyena laughs in the night. The wind tastes of sand. Mungo is frightened. “Well?” he says, his voice a pinched vibrato. “What do you see?”
But the old man doesn’t answer. Already he’s edging away from the explorer, hands held up to his face, his stooped black form a shadow among shadows. CRACK! Lightning blanches the clearing and the old man is a ghost. CRACK! Johnson is pale as milk. ‘‘Obi-lo-hojóto,’’ the seer intones. ‘‘Obi-lo-hojóto.”
“Johnson! What’s he saying?”
Johnson stares into the fire.
“Johnson!”
The guide’s head cranks round, slow as a plant turning to the sun. All the beasts of the plain are howling in unison and the sky is lit like a ballroom. “He says you got nice hands.”
“Nice hands!? What the—“
Question or exclamation, it remains forever unformed. Because at that moment the heavens part, the first fat drops plummeting like stones, pounding at the parched earth and withered trees.
The rains have begun.
♦ EUREKA! ♦
Four days later, in the drool and drizzle of an intermittent rain, explorer, guide and soothsayer — closely tailed by nag and ass — can be found plodding along the road to Segu, capital of Bambarra. Actually they are headed for Segu Korro, westernmost of the four towns that comprise Segu proper (the others being Segu Boo, Soo Korro and Segu See Korro).
According to old Eboe, who twice visited the city in his youth, it’s a wide-open place, awash in palm wine, mead and sooloo beer, the streets ringing with wanton laughter, snatches of song, the shriek of cockfights, the alleys packed full of whores with brass rings round their necks and skin like the bottom of a well. There are jugglers and dwarfs and acrobats, men who bite the heads from chickens, marvels untold. Water flows uphill in Segu. People speak backward. There is lewdness in the streets, in the alleys, in the dens of iniquity. Jewels are like gravel. They pave their streets with marble, tradesmen eat from gilded plates, food is for the asking: fowls and poached fish, eggs, mutton, rice. And the bazaar — the bazaar is boundless, infinite, a catalogue of human needs, human dreams, inhuman desires. “Get anything you want,” the old man croaks, licking his lips. “Daggers, slave girls, talking monkeys, hashish.” The explorer’s palms are sweating. Yes, after so many dead dull months in the desert, the prospect of a town — a negro town — excites him. But that’s only part of it. Cities he’s seen. What makes his blood race and organs palpitate is that this city — unlike any other known to Western man through all recorded history — this city sits squarely on the west bank of the river of legend, the River Niger.
The Niger! It stuns him to think of it. Caesar, Alexander, Houghton, Ledyard — none of them even came close. He’s suffered for it, denied himself, ruined his digestion and deserted the woman he loves. The Niger. It fills his dreams, sours his morning tea, etches its course in his imagination. And now, at long last, it’s within reach.
Or almost. For the moment though, things are pretty bleak. All three of them are starving, bone-tired, chilled — and limping like a charity ward in motion. The seer with his cracked feet, arthritic knees; the explorer with blisters and bunions and rotted boots; Johnson with fat brown leeches between his toes and up his toga. Nag and ass are hobbling too, all but useless. Behind them the landscape rises and sinks, rough and broken, pitted as a cheek ravaged with acne. Up ahead: more of the same. There are sudden declivities, hills and valleys, ridges, gullies. Stands of ciboa darken the valleys, and massive tabbas, wide around as Big Ben, transfix the hilltops. Underfoot, wilted guinea grass and a furze thick with burr and briar. Snakes lie in wait, scorpions, spiders the size of omelets. Wild dogs howl behind banks of layered succulents, while vultures, bald-headed and black-winged, hunch in the trees like graverobbers at a concert. The road, if you can call it that, isn’t much more than a cowpath.