The rain, falling harder now, drills at them. When it first began, they were ecstatic. They cut capers and did cartwheels. They rolled in it, opened their mouths and shirts to it, clapped and hooted and danced like pardoned criminals. They slept in muck, woke laughing, rain in their faces, the sweet scent of it in the trees. When they slipped and fell on the rainslick road, they laughed. Suddenly the universe was benign. They were in love with it.
But that was five days ago. Enough is enough. The puddles are up to their knees in places. Mud sucks at their feet. Their chests are congested, noses running, ears plugged up. The mornings are blotted out by mist and fog, everything indistinct, dreamlike, the air dank and fetid. Great gray phantoms spring up before them and clatter off into nothingness — whinnying and squealing, hissing, roaring. The strain is beginning to tell on them. At one point, late in the afternoon, the explorer cannot summon the strength to go on. After struggling for half an hour to drag his horse through a ravine neck-deep in foaming yellow water, he throws himself down, exhausted, at the side of the road. The old man drops beside him, and Johnson, hawking up a ball of sputum, follows suit. Nag and ass collapse like paper bags.
“Much — farther?” Mungo chokes, his voice thick with catarrh.
Johnson spits again, then blows his nose in the soggy folds of his toga.
“Don’t ask me — I never been here before neither.”
The two turn to Eboe. He sits there, lined, sagging and naked, hunched like a gargoyle under a bush. The guinea hen, one of its wings lost to deterioration, still hangs from his neck, its feathers heavy with wet and maggots. ‘‘Woko baba das,’’ he croaks.
“Ten miles,” Johnson grunts. “Be there in the mornin’.“
♦ ♦ ♦
The morning comes like a slap in the face, harsh and brilliant. Johnson is already up, gathering berries and mushrooms, when the explorer suddenly jerks awake to a cloudless sky and the slow drift and wheel of a pair of kites. He is puzzled at first, disoriented, but then it hits him: today is the day! Instantly he’s on his feet, gathering up his things, swatting the horse’s flank with a stick, calling out to Johnson, shaking Eboe’s spindly shoulders. “Wake up, Eboe — time to hit the road!”
The old man, nestled beneath his bush, sleeps on. Deathly still. His mouth hangs open, the pink bud of his gums and palate an hors d’oeuvre for the huge green flies that hover round the putrefact chicken. A column of ants has been using his foot as a highway, mosquitoes tattoo his cheeks and eyelids. Looking down at him, so frail and motionless, his bones in stark relief against the yellow muck, a terrible realization comes over the explorer. Old Eboe, last of the Jarrans, is dead.
Mungo backs away, still crouching, and calls out to Johnson again — his voice pitched higher this time. Up the road, Johnson emerges from the bush, his jaws working, a pouch full of herbs, nuts, berries and fungi swinging at his waist. In his arms: half a dozen gnarled tubers. “It’s the old man,” shouts Mungo. “I think he’s had it.”
The tubers fall to the road with an obscene plop, and Johnson takes off at a trot, chest and belly heaving beneath the toga. He drops to his knees beside the old man, pressing his ear to the fissured chest. When he looks up, his expression is glum. “ ‘Fraid you’re right, Mr. Park,” he says. “You want to bury him or leave him for nature’s sanitation squad?”
The explorer is shocked. “Why — bury him of course.”
Johnson, still kneeling, squints up at him. “Goin’ to be a scorcher today. Humid. Ten miles up the road is that river you been pissin’ and moanin’ to get to. And a big town full of marvels and wonders, nubile women and alcoholic beverages. You sure?”
But the explorer hasn’t time to answer, as Johnson, reaching out to cut the dead bird from the old man’s neck, is arrested by a bony clasp. Slow as syrup, the old man’s lids pull back. He stretches, yawns, sits up. Then wags an admonishing finger at Johnson. “Eboe thinks we are friends,” he says. “Yet you try to steal his mojo-hen?”
Johnson backs off, his face slack. “But we thought—”
The old man is on his feet now, tottering slightly, a fly caught in the bubble of saliva on his lip. He staggers toward the guide, body quivering with rage or infirmity, his crabbed fingers picking at the leather thong until finally he grasps it and eases the bird up over his head. It dangles from his fingers, slack, drooling, coated with insects. “You want?” The old man’s Mandingo is thick as a sleeping potion.
“No!” pleads Johnson. “No!”
Then, suddenly, “with a motion so quick and smooth it defies the eye, Eboe loops the grisly thing through the air. A flutter of feathers, and it catches Johnson’s neck like a noose. FOOMP! The bird strikes his chest, and dangles. Maggots wriggle in the folds of his belly. Flies orbit his head. His face makes the Pietà look like a portrait of joy.
The explorer is mystified, mouth agape, witness to some primitive rite. “Johnson,” he says, astonished. “Cut it loose. Toss it in the bushes.”
Old Eboe is grinning ear to ear.
Johnson hangs his head. “I can’t,” he whispers.
♦ ♦ ♦
The mud crusts underfoot, remugient beasts stir up the undergrowth, Johnson attracts flies: greenflies, blowflies, blackflies, crutflies. The road has begun to widen now, and from time to time habitations can be seen crouching beneath trees or perching atop mounds of red clay. Outside the huts: bare-breasted women, men in baggy shorts, striped shirts and conical hats, apathetic dogs. The men suck on long-stemmed pipes, the women chew roots and spit from between blackened teeth. Palms wave overhead. Goats shuffle about in pens. The scent of urine curdles the air.
As they reach the crest of each hill the explorer darts on ahead, stretching his neck like a sightseer, unable to contain himself. He shouts and waves his hat against the horizon, gesturing frantically toward a white blur in the distance. “Is that it?” he calls, dancing in place. “Is that it?”
At the top of the eighteenth hill old Eboe pauses to sniff the breeze. Mungo catches his breath. There is certainly something out there, towers maybe, the sudden flash of a window catching the sun. The shrunken soothsayer stoops to pluck a round white stone from the mud. He rubs it briefly between his leathery fingers, then slips it into his mouth. The gerontic eyelids drop like curtains, the lips purse, sucking reflectively. Eternities pass, the world cranks round on its axis, constellations heave in the firmament. “Well?” Mungo demands. Eboe lifts his lids. Spits out the stone. The buzz of Johnson’s flies is loud as a drumroll. “Well?” Slow and deliberate, Eboe raises his arm, points a crooked finger. “Segu Korro,” he croaks.
For one brief fraction of a second the explorer stands transfixed, and then he’s off like a sprinter. Starvation, weakness, disease, nails pricking through the soles of his boots, the sun scorching the water from his eyes — none of it matters: his goal is in sight. His feet pound the yellow clay, erasing the footsteps of those who came before him, as Johnson, Eboe, nag and ass recede in the distance and the glorious golden walls of the city come into focus before him. Huts flash by, traffic on the road. Women balancing jugs, boys driving goats with long supple switches, laden asses, litters of produce, spangled birds in wicker cages. All a blur. He stops for no one, dashing through the massive gates now, shoving his way past astonished faces, down congested streets, alleyways, frantic for the river, feet pounding, stunned Bambarrans gathering at his back like children at a parade, dirt streets, a dead dog, hawkers and tradesmen, a flash of color and movement — and there, there it is! Wide across as the Thames, brown as a gutter, cluttered with rafts and dugouts, the shore a riot of splashing children, rooting pigs, washerwomen in white caps. He doesn’t turn at the roar behind him — doesn’t even notice — leaping crates and cages, bowling over children and old women, stiff-arming farmers and fishermen, a strange primordial squeal of triumph burning in his throat. The bamboo dock sways under his feet, a boatman ducks out of the way, flinching as if to ward off a blow, and the explorer is airborne. His legs and arms flail for a brief delicious instant, suspended there in all his glory, mindless as a hatter, shouting out some Greek exclamation until the dark steaming water envelops him like a mother’s embrace.