The Sky And The Forest (27 page)
It was a deeply interesting discussion; the father and son went on with it while darkness fell, and they hardly noticed the passage of time. Only a sharp shower of rain eventually broke into their deliberations, and made them seek shelter in the house Loa had appropriated to himself. It was here that Maku addressed them, herself wet and glistening after running up the street in the rain.
“Musini sends a message to her Lord,” she announced, at the threshold.
“What is it?”
''Musini says” -- the message did not come easily from Maku's lips -- “that now she lies awake. She lies with her children beside her, hoping that perhaps Loa her Lord would come and visit her.”
Loa could not think on the spur of the moment how to reply to such a remarkable request, so he temporized.
“Go back to Musini,” he ordered, “and say that Loa will consider the matter.”
With Maku gone, Loa turned the notion over in his mind. It was quite inconceivable that a god should walk the length of the street merely to visit a wife in childbed. He might look in upon her tomorrow if, as was to be expected, business regarding the reorganization of the town led him that way. Musini would be up and about in a couple of days at most. Meanwhile she was of no use whatever as a wife, incapable even of laying a plantain on a grid. But on the other hand the rain had stopped, and there were a few minutes left before complete darkness began. He could step outside to stretch his legs after so much squatting. A breath of air at least -- Loa had not been under a roof for a year, and it felt strange to him. Lanu followed him when he rose and stretched and walked outside. Loa breathed with pleasure the sudden coolness resulting from the rain and the disappearance of the sun. The mud was soothing under his bare toes.
“My mother is here,” said Lanu suddenly, beside him.
Inside the house it was quite dark, as was to be expected, but Musini had heard their approach.
“That is you. Lord,” she said gladly. “I hoped you would come.”
A thin wail arose from the dark interior, to be instantly matched by another.
“See, Lord,” went on Musini's voice. “Your children greet you. They are fine boys, worthy of their father. Lord, it was good of you to let them live. I -- I did not want them to die. Lord -- no devil was the father of either of them. There has been no thought in my mind but for you all this time. You knew that, Lord, and so you spared them, the children of my old age. Lord, I am grateful.”
Musini's hand, reaching out in the darkness, found Loa's knee. She stroked his calf and pressed his ankle eagerly.
“It is nothing,” said Loa, but Musini continued feverishly.
“Lord, you have led us home. You have killed Soli. The people put their faces to the ground before you again. You will always eat your fill, and many women will attend to your wants. But none of them were with you in the forest, to find you white ants when you were hungry. None of them pillowed your head when the rain fell and the lightning flashed, or listened for the tread of the little people with you when all the forest was full of enemies. I have shared all this with you. Perhaps you will never pay attention again to an old woman like me, but I have had what no woman ever had before me or will ever have again, and that will be mine for always. Never again shall I be able to speak to you like this, Lord, but I have said what I wanted to say. I am grateful. Lord.”
It was a tactless speech to address to a god. Loa resented, uncomfortably, being reminded of being hungry and of being frightened by the lightning. Whatever Musini might say, it was Loa who owed a debt of gratitude to Musini, and that was not a pleasant thing to think about. Besides, it was unconventional, to say the least, for a woman to speak her mind to any man, let alone to him. Loa could remember the days before the raiders came when Musini evinced a shrewish sharpness that had not conduced to his dignity -- that in fact had nearly sent her to serve his ancestors -- and the fanatical possessiveness underlying her recent speech warned him that the same thing might happen again, easily, if similar circumstances ever arose. He must make sure that they did not, that Musini's position as senior wife should be so defined in future as to give her no such opportunity.
All this his brain or his instincts, his infinite experience of wives, told him. He shied away from his love for Musini as a wild animal shies away from a trap, and yet he was moved inexpressibly by that urgent whisper, by the feverish touch of the woman's hand upon him. He inclined more and more towards melting, towards making a host of rash promises. He had to summon up all his resolution to tear himself away, to free himself from the magic hold this old woman, his earliest wife, had upon him. He withdrew himself from her reach, yet even then did not have all the moral strength necessary to end their relationship once and for all. Instead he temporized again.
“Sleep well, Musini,” he said, with a kindly note that he could not keep out of his voice. “Feed your children well, and rest in peace.”
Walking back from the house he was perturbed, a little sore and resentful. But there was one easy way in which at least he could forget Musini, there was one specific opiate which could at least temporarily negative the sting of his feelings.
“Nadini!” he called as he approached his house.
“Lord, I come,” said Nadini.
For a thousand years at least, perhaps for many thousand years, the forest and its people had lain in torpor and peace. There had been food for all who could survive disease and cannibalism; there had been room enough for all, there had been materials enough to satisfy every simple need, and there had been no urge, either economic or temperamental, to wander or to expand. There prevailed an equilibrium which was long enduring even though it bore within itself the potentialities of instability, and it was the Arab invasions, pushing southwards from the fringes of the Sahara, westwards from the valley of the Nile and from the coast opposite Zanzibar, which first destroyed the equilibrium of the life in the deep central recesses of the forest. On the Atlantic coast, where the great rivers met the sea, the disturbance began somewhat earlier as a result of the activities of Europeans. Hawkins on the Guinea Coast first bought from local chieftains the victims who otherwise would have gone to serve the chieftain's ancestors, and sold them at a vast profit on the other side of the Atlantic. More and more white men arrived, seeking gold and ivory and slaves, and willing to pay for them with commodities of inestimable desirability like spirits and brass and gunpowder; and the demand raised a turmoil far inland, for where local supplies were exhausted the local chiefs soon learned to make expeditions into the interior in search of more. Soon there was no more gold; the supply of ivory died away to the annual production when the accumulated reserves of ages were dissipated; but the forest still bred slaves, and slaves were sought at the cost of the ruin and the depopulation of the coastal belt.
But no effect was evident in the deep interior of the forest. The cataracts on all the rivers, where they fall from the central plateau, the vast extent of the forest, and, above all, the desolation of the intermediate zone, hindered for a long time the penetration of the deep interior either by the native chiefs of the coastal fringe or their white accomplices. The Napoleonic wars delayed the inevitable penetration, and when they ended the diminution and eventual suppression of the slave trade delayed it yet again. Towards the coast the strains and stresses of the slave-raiding wars had brought about the formation of powerful kingdoms -- especially in the areas whither Mohammedan influence had penetrated from the Sahara -- which subsequently had to be destroyed by the Europeans to gain for themselves free passage beyond them. The Hausa empire, Dahomey, Ashanti, and innumerable other native states, rose and later fell, built upon a foundation of barbarism cemented by European and Moslem influences. In the same way the intrusion of the Arabs from the east set the central part of the forest in a turmoil, so that war raged and no man's life was safe in his own town; and these developments occurred at the moment when Arab influence ebbed away as a result of events elsewhere, leaving the central forest disturbed and yet not further disturbed; as if the highest wave had swept the beach and none of its successors ever reached as high.
And so Loa was able to build up his little empire undisturbed. Those moments of vision -- blurred though the vision might be -- of his first conversation with Lanu were never succeeded by anything comparable, and yet they proved to be all that was necessary. There can have been few statesmen in the world who have ever carried out so completely a scheme conceived at the beginning of their careers. As time went on, Loa saw every step of his vague plan carried through. He saw Lanu develop from a lively thoughtful boy to a bloody-minded warrior. The raiding parties that Lanu led rarely if ever came back empty-handed. There was the first notable occasion when, having set out on foot, he returned by water, with his men in three big canoes paddled by prisoners. He landed on the river-bank, naturally, at the practicable beach below the site of the vanished town which Nasa, thirty years before, with less vision than Loa, had utterly destroyed. Equally naturally there grew up on the site in time a new little town, the port of Loa's capital, populated largely by the captives taken in the various raids; for Loa, partly from necessary policy, and partly from something resembling good nature, did not send all his prisoners to serve his ancestors.
Sometimes he was ferocious and terrible. There were days when the ceremonial axe was hard at work, when his own people and not merely the slaves spoke with hushed voices in fear lest upon them should fall Loa's choice, when from the grove which sprang up in the accursed spot at the far end of the town there came the shrieks of men and women in agony. But this happened only when Loa's instincts told him it was time to assert his majesty afresh, for often prisoners were too valuable to be sacrificed when they could be incorporated into his own population, as wives for his men or as skilled workmen for his enterprises; and the children could soon be trained into devoted soldiers and subjects. Skilled slave labour built for him the canoe fleet that swept the whole long reach of the river between the rapids; captives taught his men how to handle paddles; and captives, in addition, actually manned the paddles in great part -- it did not take long to convert, by plunder and victory, the slave of yesterday into the enthusiastic warrior of today. Lanu, having led armies from boyhood, soon became a skilled and then a famous warrior, and as the years went by his much younger twin brothers began to make a name for themselves as soldiers too, but the ultimate power was wielded by Loa, who never went out on a raid, but who lived in mysterious state in his own town, sometimes weaving plans, but always, according to the frightened reports of both his friends and his enemies, weaving spells that brought him inevitable victory. In twenty years Loa had spread his rule over a wide circle of the forest, so that his boundaries came into touch on the one side with the waning Arab dominion extending from the Great Lakes, and on the other with the new power from Europe which was slowly extending from the sea.
The battle for the mastery of Central Africa had already been fought, and the Arabs had been defeated by the Europeans, before the European tide began to flow finally towards Loa's kingdom. Loa knew of the European victory; he knew of the advancing European tide. He knew about the rifles, and about the devil-driven canoes, ten times the size of the biggest war canoe, which could make their way up the river by reason of the fire in their bellies. He had no superstitious fear of these things. He had been a god himself, and he was a god of a different kind now. The rifles were merely an improvement on the firearms he had seen in Arab hands -- in his own hands, for that matter, for one or two of his campaigns had resulted in the capture of smooth bore muskets whose locks had ceased to function even before their ammunition had been spoiled. Similarly the devil-driven canoes were merely an unexplained improvement on the dugout. Loa had no superstitious fear of them, but he feared them, all the same. He thought the invaders from down the rivers would conquer him when the clash came. But Loa was a very old man now, well into his fifties, and loath to accommodate himself to changed circumstances. By yielding to the advancing power he might be able to make terms; he knew vaguely of other chiefs who (some of them out of fear of him) had submitted to the new power, and who had been allowed to continue to live, as tax gatherers and chief executioners, but Loa did not want to live on those terms even if they should be granted him. He did not want to live on those terms.
Captain Victor Augustus Talbot of the Army of the Independent State of the Congo sat sweltering outside his tent beside the river. Today the weather seemed hotter and steamier than he had ever known it, and fever had brought him down to a state of the lowest depression of mind. Feverish images came unsummoned into existence in his mind's eye. He thought of iced claret cup, deliciously cold, with sections of lemons and oranges floating in the great silver bowl of it, with an attentive mess-steward standing by it ladle in hand eager to dip out any quantity demanded. There would be cold food, too, salmon and cucumber -- he would never taste Wye salmon again -- and chicken in aspic and lobster with mayonnaise. Talbot found himself smacking his sore lips at the thought of it. Instead of sitting outside a sweltering shelter tent that a big dog could hardly crawl into, he would be in the cool and shady marquee at the edge of the cricket ground. Discreetly in the background there would be the regimental band playing sentimental airs, not loud enough to drown the pleasant sound of ball against bat, and the languidly appreciative cries of “Well hit, sir!” His friends, straw-hatted and striped-blazered and white-flannelled, would lounge through the big marquee with the unhurried elegance of English gentlemen, trained to exhibit no emotion, unobtrusive and yet with shoulders drilled straight in the finest regiment in the English Army, congratulating each other on the fine weather for the cricket festival and perhaps even venturing a mild protest against the July heat -- the
heat
, by God! Talbot shifted in the pool of sweat which had accumulated in his camp chair and swore filthily. He thought of the claret cup again, and of the muddy warm river water which was all he had to drink, of the salmon and cucumber in the past and of the few tins of beef -- the contents quite liquid when taken out -- which alone stood between him and a pure African diet.
