The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (20 page)

‘Fanny … Louise …! We’ve slipped the anchor!’ Confused, Mrs Warrender gripped the bar counter in both hands, trying to steady the
Diana
. The chairs and tables were beginning to slide across the white planks. The lanterns rattled, and a second fell on to the deck. In their cages the macaques and marmosets chittered in alarm, scrambling frantically across their bars.

‘Fanny, we’re sinking! Poupée!’

The rifle propped against the bar toppled across Mrs Warrender’s feet. A deep judder ran through the ship, and its ancient keel let out a reedy cry, the bones of a corpse racked in torment.

I looked out at the lagoon, waiting for its waters to wash across the deck. The grass towered above us on all sides, exposing the darker roots in the glistening mud of the embankment. Far from engulfing us, the surface of the lagoon had fallen. The
Diana
was now stranded on the floor, its antique hull no longer supported by its own buoyancy. Already the first sand-bars had broken through the surface, and I could see the submerged banks of the deeper channel down which Mrs Warrender and the women had steered the
Salammbo
into the centre of the lagoon before abandoning her.

I walked through the sliding tables, pushing them out of my way as I climbed the slight gradient to the port rail. Behind me, Mrs Warrender was leading her rescue of the
Diana
. Still under the impression that the vessel was sinking, she and her companions were trying to tether the craft to the bank.

I listened to them shouting to each other, a party of confused sea-wives no longer trusting their own feet. The surface of the lagoon had fallen by little more than eighteen inches. Somewhere in the maze of waterways a containment wall had given way, a silt embankment had dissolved and allowed the levels within the system to balance themselves.

Nonetheless, this meant that the Mallory was falling. The great flow of water which I had summoned from its mysterious source had at last begun to falter, as if anticipating my death at these women’s hands.

‘Doc Mal …’

Noon stood behind me, the Lee-Enfield in her small hands, hidden from the women by the animal cages. I remembered her first prodding me on the beach of the drained lake at Port-la-Nouvelle. She was looking at me in the same determined but wary way. I remembered, too, the snap of the bolt within the breech. Had she been given another bullet by Mrs Warrender?

She raised the heavy rifle and aimed the barrel towards the
Salammbo
, jerking her head as if puzzled by my slow response.

‘Right, Noon …’ I took her arm and lifted her to the rail. Below us the water was little more than knee-deep. I could hear Mrs Warrender beyond the starboard rail, reassuring Sanger as he bleated in alarm from the window grille of his cabin.

I placed my hands around Noon’s waist, smelling the strong odour of her adolescent body that I had missed for so many days. Revived by her, I remembered Mrs Warrender’s idle talk of a barrage. Perhaps a dam had been built, trapping the stream, and the Mallory itself had not failed …

I lifted Noon over the side and lowered her into the water, then handed the rifle down to her. I followed her into the warm yellow liquid, and pointed to the ripples already running from our bodies towards the
Salammbo
.

‘Come on, Noon. We’ll get there before Mrs Warrender. Someone is trying to steal my river …’

26

Change had overtaken the river, bringing with it the threat of unforeseen dangers. For the first time my footprints remained in the soft sand of the river-bed, giving me away to any sentry or sniper. As I hid behind the trunk of a fallen palm tree, searching for the signs of a guerilla patrol, the imprints of my feet emerged clearly from the shallow water, following the shadow that scuttled between my heels like a thirsty bat. The Mallory had fallen by at least my own height, revealing the roots of the trees along the shore. Baked by the sun, the exposed river-bed had begun to revert to desert.

Fifty yards to my right was the main channel of the Mallory, now little more than half its original width. The sand-bars lay like dunes in the open sun, the first couch grass growing from their crests. A warren of small pools and inlets separated the river from its former banks, and in one to these the
Salammbo
was now moored, with Noon at watch from the wheelhouse roof.

The detached enamel door of an old refrigerator jutted from the sand, its manufacturer’s medallion gleaming like a chromium cipher in the sunlight. The exposed bed of the Mallory was covered with debris washed downstream from the former French airbase at Bonneville – old tyres, pieces of beach furniture, ammunition boxes and radio spare parts. A few minutes earlier, as I waded ashore, past an aerosol can and a plastic hair-dryer, I had cut my right heel on the broken neck of a wine bottle lying in the shallows.

Limping across the white sand, I left the scanty cover of the palm tree and ran towards the hulk of a small saloon car embedded in the soft slope. Resting against the fender, I listened to the steady rumble of a truck moving along a desert road, and watched the smoke of driftwood fires beyond the palm-covered shoulder of the next river bend. Scores of the white plumes rose into the air, and confirmed that Noon and I had at last reached the centre of Harare’s domain.

However, in the week since our escape from Mrs Warrender and her widows, we had seen only a single armed river-patrol, as if some shift in strategic priorities had moved the centre of conflict away from the Mallory to the surrounding arid scrub. The fishing rafts and trading canoes which we passed had all been abandoned, lying against the exposed stilts of disused landing stages. The small migrant population drawn to the upper reaches of the river in the four months since our departure from Port-la-Nouvelle had mysteriously lost interest in this benign channel. We sailed between the raised banks, now higher than the
Salammbo
’s wheelhouse, and lined with forgotten windmills and water-hoists, as if the people who had once fished and bathed here had sensed in advance that the river was about to die.

Nonetheless, I regarded the Mallory with caution. Perhaps it was preparing the ultimate trap for me, destroying itself so that Noon and I would perish of thirst. But fortunately the river was still a substantial waterway, a hundred yards wide even in its shrunken form. The current pressing against the bows of the ferry showed no signs of flagging, and there was nothing stagnant or brackish in the clear, cold liquid that flowed from the mountains of the Massif, whose blue flanks were now only five miles to the north-east. For all my determination to reach the source of the river, I was glad to see that my great rival was still in good heart.

Noon, too, was as determined as ever. At first she had seemed distanced from me, and I regretted the absence of those television images that had so intrigued her earlier in our voyage. Their simplistic fictions would have helped to sustain both of us. But within hours of our escape from the
Diana
we were working together, the eccentric team that had propelled the ferry all the way from Lake Kotto. As we swam the last yards to the vessel, fallowed by a single shot from the tilting dance floor of the
Diana
, Noon again became the young woman I had courted from the helm of the
Salammbo
. Her pale body seemed to draw strength from the leprous yellow water. Ten feet ahead of me, she lifted herself easily on to the car deck, the slim breasts and shoulders of a child transformed into a woman’s. She took the rifle from my hands and hauled me on to the deck with a workmanlike grunt. As she guided me into the wheelhouse I felt the
Salammbo
sway under our weight, and knew that there were still a few feet of clear water below its keel.

Staying within the deeper channel, whose submerged banks we could see beneath the shallow water, we sailed through the inlet which had first admitted us to the lagoon. An hour later, after threading our way among the creeks and waterways, we at last reached the main channel of the Mallory. The warm air rushed to greet us, its soft breath whispering like a lover upon my naked skin.

Within a day we left behind the marshes and lagoons, and began to cross an area of desert savanna. Free of its cargo of film equipment, and with only the mud-spattered Mercedes amidships, the
Salammbo
made strong progress against the modest current. Our only fuel consisted of the few gallons which the women had failed to siphon from the tank – enough, I calculated, for another twenty miles. Yet the falling level of the river, and some scent in the wind, convinced me that this would take us to our goal.

As if aware of this, Noon squatted on the wheelhouse roof, keeping watch on the passing banks, and on the pursuing
Diana
. At times I would hear her teeth clicking as she pointed to the coils of black smoke, like the circlets of a wreath, visible beyond the dusty scrub. In the evening, when we moored for the night and Noon swam for fish in the dark pools, I would climb on to the wheelhouse and see the widows’ white ship three miles behind us, a spectre of bone in the dusk.

But I was no longer afraid of them. The water-world of swamps and papyrus screens, their hunting-ground of lost soldiers, memories and murder, had given way to the clearly defined channel ahead, and the sharp sand cliffs which the Mallory had cut through the dry ochre soil. We were crossing the southern edges of the Sahara, and the desolate terrain seemed barely aware of the river. Stronger after my rest in the
Diana
, I steered the
Salammbo
towards its final berth.

*

The harsh beat of an outboard motor drummed against the rusty door panels of the car. I crouched in the back seat, and watched the guerilla patrol-craft push tentatively around the river bend. Two canoes lashed side by side to bamboo poles, it carried a crew of three soldiers. Armed men haunted the region. But these soldiers had lost interest in the drained river, and were watching the banks twenty feet above my head.

After a wary inspection, they turned back and moved upstream, soon lost among the sand-bars and rock spits. I left the car and crossed the sloping flank of white sand that reached to the exposed roots of the fan-palms along the bank. Hand over hand, I climbed the ladders of entwined roots. Already their brittle leaves were streamed with serrated yellow fibre that rasped against my arms. An overgrown path ran from an abandoned water-hoist and wound its way to the crest of a small rise.

I lay in the mossy saddle between two outcrops of rock that formed its summit, my face shielded by the fronds of a tamarind. In the distance, through a haze of sun-lit dust, the broad channel of the Mallory wound its way towards me from the blue mountains of the Massif. It flowed in a westerly course, skirting the great plain of the desert that extended to the horizon. This featureless landscape of scrub and creosote bushes was broken only by the fading runways of the former French airbase at Bonneville that lay a mile to the north.

At the edge of the plateau, the Mallory reached a series of shallow cascades, broad steps of basaltic rock that marked the navigable limits of the river. The eastern arm flowed into a calm pool some three hundred yards in width, and then emptied into the main channel where the
Salammbo
was now moored. However, the western arm, carrying half the abundant headwater, ended at a makeshift barrage which the local fishermen had thrown from the central island to the bank a hundred feet away.

After driving a line of bamboo piles into the sandy floor, they had stretched their nets across the stream to form a retaining curtain, and then filled this with logs, palm fronds, and metal debris taken from the ruined hangars and barrack-rooms of the airbase. This sling of timber and rotting vegetation contained a mass of trapped silt filtered from the flowing water. Embedded in the wall were sections of galvanized iron, metal doors and panels, lengths of radio antenna and telegraph poles. As it bulged forwards, the rope and earth barrage resembled a gigantic brassiere, whose enclosed breasts of caking silt were decorated with a lost treasure of western technology.

Water streamed through a hundred fissures in the garbage dam, spurting downwards to join the open pool, where scores of fishing craft, skiffs and rafts were moored to makeshift jetties along the beach. Diverted by the barrage, the stolen channel of the river had been turned northwards by the fishermen, and flowed out across the desert through a network of canals and creeks, finally forming a shallow pond that stretched towards the ruined hangars of the airfield.

I gazed down at this green coast, with its tracts of manioc and sorghum. I remembered my first sight of the lower Nile from the aircraft carrying me to Cairo, and its narrow bands of cultivated land lying between the river and the desert. Thanks to the theft of the Mallory, the Sahara had begun to bloom again. The nomadic farmers and herders who for decades had been driven southwards by the sun had at last begun to turn back the green line. Helped by the fishermen and by Harare’s soldiers, several of whom were washing in the shallow waters of the pool, they had recolonized the desert. Despite the modest success of their strip farms and small allotments, they had turned their backs for ever on the lower reaches of the Mallory.

But the river still flowed. I traced the winding course of the channel across the blue landscape of the plateau, its silver back striking sparks against the rocky outcrops. Somewhere in the dark hills lay its source – we would sail the ferry into the harbour below the barrage, beach it there and press on up the Mallory in one of the many canoes moored in the pool. I looked up at the wooded face of the mountains, whose lower slopes ran down to the eastern bank of the river. The abandoned conveyors of a French mining company ran up the hillside to the silent lift towers, standing among the trees like signal pylons.

Still struck by the beauty of the greening desert, I made my way back to the river. I lowered myself through the web of roots and jumped on to the sandy bed. I followed my heel prints, in which flies now sipped at my drying blood, past the aerosol can and the hair-dryer, lying in the sand like objects displayed in a museum of consumer archaeology. As I strode into the cool stream I could see the bows of the
Salammbo
in its quiet inlet between the sand-bars. I waded into the deep water and swam towards the vessel, waving to Noon when I paused for breath by the anchor chain.

‘Noon! The Mallory – it’s still there!’

She leaned on the rail, and rewarded me with a brief smile, as if tolerant of my strange doubts in the river and myself.

However, when I gripped the rear bumper of the Mercedes and lifted myself on to the deck I noticed that Noon was wearing her camouflage jacket. She carried the Lee-Enfield in her strong hands, shoulders squared as she pointed the rifle at me. In her stance was a memory of Sanger’s warrior queen.

Behind her, two of Harare’s soldiers were examining the controls of the limousine. Their boots and trousers were soaked with the wet sand of the narrow beach behind the ferry. Raising their weapons, they stepped into the sun and beckoned me against the mud-caked car. They stared at me with evident surprise, confused by my naked and bearded figure, by my scarred thighs and oil-smeared chest, and by the bloody heel marks on the deck.

‘Noon …?’ I waited for her to explain to the soldiers that this wild man of the Mallory was once the physician who had treated them at Port-la-Nouvelle. But Noon watched me without comment, her young woman’s body hidden inside the baggy camouflage. Had she tricked me all along, drawing me into a dream of the river which would deliver me as her prisoner to the custody of Harare?