The Expedition to the Baobab Tree (10 page)

My ears helped me. I heard the thump of oars and concentrated on listening very carefully. I thought I could recognize human voices. Tatters of speech came to us where we lay quiet as wild animals, waiting for danger to pass. Later I saw through jagged cracks in the reeds several hollowed-out tree trunks sailing past in pairs in a kind of formation from left to right, each with a team of rowers rowing upstream with great effort. The oars came up dripping and sank rhythmically. Their progress was very leisurely. Probably the speed of the current was badly against them here. In about the middle of the formation one hollowed-out tree trunk larger than the rest glided past alone, with, it seemed to me, a larger crew wearing tufts of animal tails around their upper arms, and in the stern there seemed to be a kind of throne on which a man sat with a silvery apeskin cloak around his shoulders, and next to him stood someone holding an object like an umbrella plaited from palm leaves or grass or both over him to protect him from the sun.

It was not fragments of speech I was hearing, I realized. It was the groaning of the rowers as they labored.

The giant heron cocked his head. He took one step, another, made sure that his shadow was not falling on the water, and stiffened. The
ducks, on the other hand, drifted blandly, quacking, rocking, wagging their tails. The kingfisher had disappeared. Against the pale green background of the wild figs only the tree trunk fleet stood out, edging forward in painfully slow motion.

I began to get a cramp from lying so still and wished that the warriors, if that was what they were, would hurry up. Also I wanted to sneeze. I doubted that they would hear me so far across the water, but held out for safety’s sake. If they were warriors and if they were hostile to us, then all would be up with us. And before I was caught – this I had vowed to myself – before I was caught I would snatch the stranger’s dagger that he carried in a girdle around his waist and kill myself. Warriors or not, it looked like a show of force of some kind passing us on the way upriver. From where? Where to? It had been a long time since we had seen a village or one of the ruins, or cultivated lands with platforms on which boys sat making a great noise to scare away the swarms of red-beak finches, or herds of sanga cattle with their child herders, or women come to fetch water or to bathe sitting on flat rocks and scouring their soles with stones and joking and laughing boisterously.

We had long since left the beaten track of the gold and slave routes and followed a course determined by the stories of those seafarers and the desire to be the first to discover a shorter, easier way to their cities and open trade possibilities. The first to discover. To be first. At the forefront of innovation. First to return with an impressive report. What would we sell? Slaves? Ivory? Tortoiseshell? Gold? First find out, before anyone else, before all competitors, what commodities these
people needed and what they could offer in exchange, and find out on the spot so that you could speak with authority and be the first to celebrate the victory of big easy profits. That was what it meant to play the discoverer.

I think the two of them had underestimated the game. It also seemed to me that they realized this but were absolutely refusing to acknowledge it. Now it was a matter of pushing on, pushing through. It was a fact that somewhere in the distance lay cities that carried on commerce. It was known that the earth was ultimately ringed around with water. One day, one day, suddenly, unexpectedly, there would loom up before our eyes a blueness which, as we approached, would grow distinct from the blue haziness of the sky and announce itself as a separate entity, as being composed of water, as being water, as being water in motion with waves with foam backs and splashing foam flakes. As being the water firmament on the edge of eternity. And we would hear a pounding and perhaps seabirds. And the last stretch we would all run.

Ah, how pleasant to meditate ahead, to listen, see, smell, feel ahead. To imagine experiences.

Our stock of food was diminishing and gave cause for concern. We grew dependent on the skill of the slaves and the knowledge of the wilds they had acquired as children to supplement our food. Thus, for example, they picked out a round orange fruit full of big pips with a thin layer of nice sweet flesh. And they picked out edible grubs: they pulled them off the leaves and pinched their heads off and baked what was left – which was not much – in the hot ashes.

I was imprudent enough to compliment them foolishly and long-windedly. I looked them boldly in the eye, created a relationship of familiarity, then cupped my hands and got a share of their fruit, berries, grubs, roots. Then I went and sat down with my gift halfway between them and the stranger and the eldest son. After a while the stranger came to join me and I gave him some of what I had. Then he shared his little with the eldest son. A complicated system. But the situation was not yet critical.

Funny incidents, like the time the eldest son caught a freshwater turtle and tried to roast it in the shell. It gave off such an intolerable stench that we all retired and no one would let it pass his lips, including the catcher and roaster.

Less amusing the incident with the sable antelope hit by lightning. Looking back I can in fact laugh bitterly. I can still see the stranger bringing out his elegant little dagger with the handle inlaid with jewels – emeralds and carnelians polished till they glittered – and trying to slice through the skin of the antelope’s belly. He must have begun there because he thought the skin would be thinner in the groin.

Some distance away the slaves stood grimly looking on after unanimously deciding not to touch what seemed to us a lavish gift. A first sign of mutiny, perhaps? I don’t know. The eldest son contributed by holding the antelope fast by the horns. The animal anyhow had no kick left in it. The stranger gave up the struggle. No one thought of looking for butchering equipment among the goods we were carrying. Or an axe or a spear or something of the kind.

The antelope’s glassy eyes were looking at me wherever I circled around him, I thought fearfully. Perhaps the lightning bolt had merely stunned him. But no, he was really dead. We had chased pied crows away from him. These had not yet gone. They were hobbling about here self-righteously. Waiting. Waiting. Till the tedious human left. When I looked up I noticed a vulture in a treetop. The stranger gave a snort of laughter when I approached and asked why he did not look for equipment in the supplies.

Both he and the eldest son had from the very beginning pushed their weapons into one of the packs because it was too much trouble to keep them continually at hand. They were simply in the way. What prevented the slaves from overpowering the two of them, doing away with them, and making off? Were they then so unmanned? I thought I detected a glint in the slaves’ eyes. They were watching like the crows were.

From the tiny slit the stranger had made with his dagger in the belly a slow dark fluid oozed on to the white hair. The air smelled wonderfully fresh after the rain. I wished we would leave. One could see a rainbow. There, far away at its foot slept the lightning. I wished a lightning flash would make the sable jump up and storm us.

Summer was starting to grow full and ripe. It was in winter that we had last seen the sea. Vague salty damp memory. Grown so used to this routine.

After an evening’s consultation the two leaders decided we should cross the great river along whose bank we had been walking for a
while now, so as not to lose our course yonder towards the sunset. Their joint fright at the prince or commander and his subjects or troops in the hollowed-out tree trunks had moderated the discord between them. This nearly flared up again when the stranger teasingly asked the eldest son whether he would be able to pick out a hissing tree for the building of a vessel.

Would you? asked the eldest son sullenly. Then they both laughed with embarrassment. Here, so far from home and hearth and from the sea, they sensed their relative powerlessness and saw only too well that they did not always have the situation under control. The eldest son slapped his calf with his cane, but listlessly, as if confessing impotence. I saw in their eyes that they did not know what to do. Men look so funny, like disappointed children, when they lose control of something but dare not openly acknowledge it. And I in my peculiar position as parasite hoped fervently that they would find a solution and get us shortly to those cities that were our ostensible goal. Every morning I blossomed at my most beautiful, for them to admire my orchid-like nature for its colorfulness. I gave no less attention to my appearance than in town. My private torments were increasing too. I was utterly dependent on him to whom I was joined by deeds of sale as well as (I hoped to myself) by affection. But utterly dependent like a parasite.

Time passed and the plan of crossing the river was not carried out. Neither of the two had the inner strength to stand up, call the slaves together, and track down a hissing tree and set to work. In spiritless
silence we lingered on the nearside bank. The food supply was now rapidly becoming dangerously low, spurring the slaves to set game traps of raisinwood and one festive day to cook a bustard for us.

What I could not understand was that the leaders’ obvious lack of resolve did not make the slaves think of quitting us. Every night they meekly allowed the eldest son to chain them together, a measure taken after the one with the money in his hair had escaped. Every night I would hear the rattle of their shackles as they turned over in their sleep. In the mornings the chains would be removed, and no longer neatly rolled up and stored away – no, they were simply thrown in a heap. It was as if we had all become dream beings in a transition to we knew not what. The days unfolded and closed again one after another.

The river remained a joy to the eye. We were in a place where there were saf-saf willows growing. The eldest son, or perhaps the stranger, had remembered that this was an indication of firmness underfoot should one wish to wade through the river. For such an undertaking we should most certainly have had to wait for winter, even the end of winter. I say so because one of the slaves was ordered to enter the water and see how deep it was. He walked unenthusiastically in till the water reached to below his armpits, then began to swim, and shortly thereafter we heard him cry out and saw the current bearing him along and fellow slaves of his running downstream to keep up with him, calling to him to struggle towards the bank. I saw his head bobbing further and further off on the surface of the water, and the
further off the more it looked as if he were floating at his ease. Later his fellow slaves returned. Precisely where he drowned they could not say with certainty.

It was nice to observe the bee-eaters as they shot across the water after flying insects. The water itself was a brownish green and muscular, and lapped at the banks where rocks or tree stumps protruded. Of the willows only the tops stuck out. The limp branches hung half-drowned. I felt like the willows and let time flow through me. It was nice to hear the bush shrike whistle and never see him. We also grew accustomed to the cicadas.

The eldest son and the stranger recited poems to each other in solemn tones and asked each other riddles, me too, and once the eldest son sang in a wonderfully deep, rich voice. The stranger wanted to clap him on the shoulder in sincere admiration, but it was as if he did not like being touched, and jerked his shoulder away. He told of yearning for his bride. He called her name over and over like someone throwing a jewel from one hand to the other.

The stranger said: If the sky were now to smash down on us, we would scarcely make a dent in the turf.

He plucked a handful of lush grass from where he sat and chewed on it, and his eyes closed. He was dreaming. I put my arm around him. It no longer disturbed me that the eldest son could see our caresses. The slap of water soothed me like a refrain. I touched my ivory bracelet. Luck bringer. I kissed it. I had a swelling on my heel that was very painful, and of course mosquito bites all the time. What was that
lonely bride left behind doing with her days where she sat without any tidings? What were people doing now in that city? Was there anyone besides the bride who remembered how we had departed?

Yet we did get to the far bank, and perfectly easily. A day’s journey upstream we floated a roughly carpentered raft out from among the reeds and finch nests, and seeing that an island divided the river into two courses at this point, neither flowing so fatally strongly, we arrived without loss of life or goods first on the island and then on the far bank, where we spent a day to get everything properly in order, to inspect and check over everything. One of the slaves killed an oribi, throwing a knobkerrie that he had carved for himself during our halt from the light yellow wood of the bush willow. With this welcome addition to provisions the expedition once again got into its stride.

Our pace was quickened. There was a noticeable air of urgency about the two leaders, an alertness long last seen, as if they had undergone a personality change under the effect of the scrap of news about the city in the red desert retailed to us by the hungers. Both now walked at the head of the procession, each taking longer steps than the other, striding more smartly than the other; one even heard them laugh. Their good humor infected all of us. It encouraged industry among the slaves, who, dividing the work more readily in an atmosphere of co-operation rather than supervision, in no way fell behind their owners. We felt jointly attracted by that promised city at the foot of the rose quartz mountain.

Still, I could not help notice how untidy we looked. From above, from my litter, last of all in the line, I was struck by our slovenliness.
It could not be disguised that we looked dirty, worn down and shabby, dusty, our clothes full of fat stains. One of the slaves was no longer even carrying a pack on his head. How was that? What did he think he was doing here? Another had tied rattling round yellow seeds around his ankles that made suru-suru as he walked and one revealed himself to be a notable imitator of bird language, so that sometimes, after hesitating a while, birds whistled back to him in response to his call. It was funny to hear him talk.