♦ HERODOTUS BE HANGED ♦
“What, Sir? You doubt Herodotus?”
“Herodotus be hanged. And Pliny along with him. How can you actually sit there and expect a rational being to accept all this folderol about tribes that squeal like bats and outrace horses? Or pygmies, leprechauns — whatever you call them — tripping about the jungle like nursery children in Mayfair? It’s myth I tell you. Folklore. Timbuctoo no more exists than the land of the Laestrygonians.”
Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, Treasurer and Director of the African Association for Promoting Exploration, sits at the head of the mahogany table in his library at No. 32, Soho Square. Before him, a glass of Madeira. It is July, the windows are open, moths bat about the lamps. On the back wall, Desceliers’ sixteenth-century map of Africa. Sir Joseph regards it glumly, barely attentive to the debate going on around him. A pretty piece of work, Desceliers’ map. Colorful. Imaginative. But it is of course nothing more than an outline, a perimeter pricked with place names — the vast uncharted interior artfully concealed behind a dribble of imaginary rivers and a host of mythical beasts, six-armed maidens and limbless Cyclopeans. Sir Joseph sighs, takes a lugubrious sip at his wine. Now, two centuries later, children of the Enlightenment, he and his colleagues know little more than Desceliers.
“You forget, my good fellow, that while Homer may have been enamored of Euterpe, Herodotus was an historian. His object was not to divert us with fictions, but to edify us with facts.” The Bishop of Llandaff, though a charter member of the Association, is tonight attending his second meeting since its inception eight years ago. He is chiefly remarkable for the salience of his cartilaginous features, and the coldness of his tiny, misaligned eyes (his family, the Rathbones, have been heralded since the fourteenth century for their sloping foreheads, majestic beaks and pale fleshy ears — beaks so majestic and ears so fleshy as almost to suggest the development of new species and keener functions). For the better part of an hour he has been defending the sacred and unshakable authority of the Ancients. Sir Reginald Durfeys, William Fordyce and Lord Twit, soured by their public school experience, have opposed him, while Edwards and Pultney have for the most part remained silent.
“And what is history, pray tell, if not a fiction?” Twit, known in the Lords for his reedy, lisping orations, pauses for effect. “You presume to call Herodotus’ suppositions fact? How were these ‘facts’ obtained? Thirdhand? Fifthhand? I ask you, Sir.”
Llandaffs ears are suffused with color. He begins to pull on his white calfskin gloves, thinks better of it, downs a glass of brandy instead. “You dare to impugn the Ancients? Why, our whole system of Modern Thought—”
Twit holds up his palm. “Excuse me. I haven’t finished. I mean to say that all our cherished histories — from those of the Greeks to that of our late departed colleague Mr. Gibbon — are at best a concoction of hearsay, thirdhand reports, purposeful distortions and outright fictions invented by the self-aggrandizing participants and their sympathizers. And as if that weren’t enough, this hodgepodge of misrepresentation and prevarication is then further distorted through the darkling lens of the historian himself.” Twit, lips painted and cheeks rouged, is in his glory — he revels in his reputation as iconoclast, intellectual outlaw and assailer of priggery. Twit the Wit, they call him. After a pause for the application of two pinches of snuff, he continues. “What happened at Culloden — do you know, Sir? And what then of Tangier and Timbuctoo? At least my own knowledge of the African continent is no worse than secondhand.”
Llandaff has been waiting for this. “Yes, Twit,” he grins, ever so slowly whitening his palm with salt from the shaker, “we’ve all had occasion to read of your rigorous excursions into the blacker holes of Africa — incidentally, how is the nigger slave getting on these days?”
Pultney sniggers.
“Hear, hear!” shouts Edwards. “A blow for the Ancients!”
“Gentlemen, please.” A bulky, florid form has risen at the far end of the table. Sir Reginald Durfeys, Bart., now on the threshold of his eighth decade, has yet to begin the long slide toward the grave that has crabbed and disfigured so many of his coevals. At sixty-eight, he is as pink and fat as a baby, ingenuous as a teenager. He gives to charity, loves a glass of port, takes his postprandial exercise on the boulevard each evening. He has never married. “While I cannot agree with our distinguished confrere that the Niger is merely imaginary,” he begins, the great silver bush of his head all but blotting Desceliers’ map from view, “neither can I accept with any sanguinity the Bishop’s asseverations that the information gathered by the Greeks is our most reliable. No. I feel we must look to our modern cartographers — to Major Rennell and D’anville.” He leans forward, pressing his fists to the table. “Gentlemen: it is my belief that the Niger flows eastward, toward the heart of the continent—”
“Oh piffle, Durfeys — it flows to the westward and disembogues along the Pepper Coast.”
“—flows eastward, I repeat, and feeds the great lake called Chad, where its waters are given to evaporation in the blistering temperatures of the mid-Sahara.”
“Come off it, old man,” Edwards interjects. “If it flows to the eastward, then Llandaff and Herodotus must be vindicated — what else could it then do but join with the Nile in the Nubian foothills?”
“Rubbish!” shouts Twit, his eyes watering from an excessive dose of snuff. “It’s all a fantasy, I tell you. A dream. No more substantial than Atlantis or the land of the sugarplum fairy.”
Durfeys, still standing, begins to stammer from confusion. “But, but gentlemen… I had it. . had it from Johnson—”
“Pfffff, Johnson.” Llandaff’s face is slashed by the line of his nose, cut in two like a halved apple; his ears look as if they’re about to flap up off his head. “Another voice of obfuscation from the Dark Continent. Triggerhappy and swell-headed. A black nigger cannibal in a two-guinea wig. Let’s all consult our charwomen and gardeners next time we need a cartographer.”
“Yes, Reginald — what of your precious Johnson?” says Edwards. “What’s he accomplished for us thus far — the loss of yet another explorer?”
At that moment Sir Joseph Banks clears his throat. Durfeys, reddening, sinks back into his seat. Six pairs of eyes fasten on the Director. “The term, Mr. Beaufoy, is ‘geographical missionary,’ and yes, I am chagrined to report that we must now begin to think of casting about for another man to undertake the illumination of the Niger region. There has been no word from the young Scot for nearly eight months now.” The Director stares down at his glass, running a thoughtful finger round its rim. “In point of fact, gentlemen, the indications are a good deal worse than you might imagine. I have before me a recent communication from our factor on the Gambia, Dr. Laidley.” Sir Joseph breaks off, and then slowly raises his head. His eyes are distant and unfocused, as if he were just then waking from a dream. On the far wall, dancing under the lamplight, Desceliers’ figures seem to swell and recede, twitching their multiple arms and headless shoulders, beckoning, teasing, mocking.