OBSERVATIONS OF AFRICA

The deathlike impression of Africa grew upon me.

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

Onward chugged the Mayumba , courting the shore breezes, though these were rare, and so hot they were more like the exhalations of hell. Doyle marveled at the sameness of the view, the breakers, the shore, the bush, and at night the fires, which the captain informed him were set by natives intent on “burning the grass,” to what end he didn’t know and couldn’t imagine. Miss Fox alighted at Grand Bassam, a miserable hole where her father, a stooped, wizened figure dressed all in white with a pith helmet cocked back on his head, eyes the color of water, and the complexion of a Morocco leather chair, awaited her on the flimsy dock. Doyle watched from the deck as she approached her progenitor. He was curious to witness the manner of their greeting. It was a handshake, brief, courteous, the elbows pressed into the sides, and then they turned away from the shore and the intellectual lady followed her father into the jungle.

To live how? To do what? Doyle mopped his brow with his sodden handkerchief. Near an open‑air shed perched with its back to the bush, an anthill of half‑naked natives suddenly dispersed, marching in a loose formation toward the stern of the Mayumba to receive the cargo already being dropped down by the sailors. Captain Wallace, restless and cantankerous, joined the doctor at the rail. “Fancy doctoring that lot, eh Doyle?” he said, indicating the porters at their work.

Doyle, having looked over but not at the men, who were making a noisy fuss about unloading a pallet of heavy burlap bags, concentrated his attention on a pair of tall, muscular fellows engaged in posturing and angrily baring their teeth. “They look healthy enough,” he observed. “They certainly have white teeth.”

“It’s veterinary work, sir,” the captain crudely attested. “They’re animals and no more. They don’t even know they’re sick until they drop. And they contract all manner of evil from the ground, because they sit on it and sleep on it and even eat it. Every kind of worm and parasite known to man and some as none has heard of is out there. I’ve seen yaws open the flesh of a leg to the bone. And elephantiasis. I don’t suppose you’ve seen what that does to a man. Scrota the size of melons.”

A burst of wild glee broke out from the natives. The two men, who had seemed about to come to blows, leaned into each other, laughing so heartily they plopped down on a pallet, while their coworkers shouted the joke to each other.

“Do you understand them?” Doyle asked the captain, meaning their language.

“There’s nought to understand,” Wallace replied. “Poor, stupid brutes. What in thunder are they laughing about?” And with that he left the doctor and called out to one of the sailors as he approached the loading platform, “Latimer, what are they up to? We’ll never get out of here at this rate.”

Doyle watched the men a while longer, thinking about parasites. He had a treatise on tropical medicine in his berth. He had read in it an article about tiny worms that burrowed into a man, depositing their eggs deep beneath the epidermis. When the eggs hatched, the larvae gnawed their way out. Unthinkable.

His gaze wandered listlessly over the scene. There was a dog lying in the shade of the shed, some mad bird shrieking from the impenetrable bush beyond. Nature here was virulent, producing all manner of venom, not to mention large, carnivorous beasts and people as black as coal. The heat alone, he thought. The poleaxing heat.

A prickling sensation called his attention to his wrist, where he discovered a large mosquito tilted back on its rear legs the better to gorge itself on exotic blood. Case in point, he thought, as he squashed the life out of the insect. He might stroll out to the shed and back, just to have solid ground under his shoes. But between the dock and the shed was only a stretch of unwelcoming, baked, shadeless, dun‑colored dirt.

The heat alone, he thought.

* * *

“Beware, beware, the Bight of Benin, for few come out, though many go in.”

The first officer delivered this cheerful advice as the Mayumba swung listlessly on her anchor chain in the oily brown water off the coast of Lagos.

“And why do few come out?” asked Doyle.

The mate drew closer, lowering his beard toward the doctor’s ear with a confidential air. “Why,” he said. “Presumably.” A pause, a deeper register. “Because they die there.”

The doctor grinned; gazing out at the long swells rolling into the inevitable strip of sand. Another port not fit for human habitation, another infernal pit of hell where black demons fed the flames with bits carved from unwary travelers. A buzzing near his ear provoked him to clap his hand against his head. Was it worth it, he asked himself, this place? Men didn’t last long and women not as long as that. And all to extract palm oil and rubber.

And of course to extend a sorely needed civilizing influence, which might, in a hundred years, beam a few rays of light into this universal moral darkness. The mate wandered away in pursuit of his duty. The doctor patted his pockets, in search of his pipe.

At dinner the remaining passengers were preoccupied with their packing arrangements, as all but two were departing at Lagos. Doyle noted the downcast expression on the habitually resolute face of Mrs. Fairfax, who must surely look upon her destination as a death sentence. Her sickly boys picked at their plates, the younger one taking up his napkin at frequent intervals to cover his mouth while he coughed. His father studied him distantly. The man of God, and his good woman, Doyle thought. What poor luck to be born that man’s son.

Though at least the Reverend Fairfax did, in a manner of speaking, provide for his family. At least he did that.

After the passengers had departed and the blasting sun had set, the ship was quiet and still as the inside of a sleeping whale. In his narrow cabin the doctor sat down at his table to begin an overdue letter to his mother. Dearest , he wrote, and put down the pen. What to tell her? That he detested Africa, its heat, its smells, its people, and longed for a breath of cool, fresh air? He gazed at his porthole. It made no difference if it was opened or closed; it was suffocating inside and out. He drew in a slow breath and released it. Hotter going in than out, or so it seemed. An insect’s dizzy buzzing came closer, drifted away, came close again. He picked up his pen. Here is my carcass stewing like a fowl. Never was there such a pesthole of a place as this, good for nothing but swearing at. I shall not.… The buzzing came close, sounding oddly fierce, as if the creature had turned up its own volume, but he determined to ignore it. He felt the infinitesimal thud on the nape of his neck, the tentative tickling like loose threads unraveled from a collar, and then the sharp sting. His moist hand had smeared the ink on the page. He set down the pen, slapped his palm across his neck, dragged it free, and glowered at the smashed insect, a black smudge in a streak of bright blood.

The image of the Fairfax boy pushing his fork through the mush he’d made of his dinner, languishing beneath the indifferent eye of his righteous father, recurred in the doctor’s imagination, striking a moody, somber chord, definitely in a minor key. He couldn’t escape the conclusion that the boy was trapped and perhaps doomed by the single‑minded zealotry of a parent who cared more for the souls of benighted savages than the health of his own family. If the boy survived he would certainly have some tales to tell, though he might prefer to close them away, to condemn his childhood as a prisoner to a prison.

Unbidden another image rose. The tall gentleman, rolling over on his side in the gutter, howling gibberish at the jeering boys who pelted him with pebbles, and the lady, fabricating an excuse about the urgent necessity of a conversation with the draper, gently steering her son into a byway; the son who knew his mother had seen the gentleman, and also knew she would never admit it.

And another, the lady again, one hand pressed against the kitchen table, the other covering her mouth, keeping in what she might say, what she must be thinking. Before her, uncapped, cast aside by the desperate, trembling fingers of the gentleman, the empty bottle of furniture varnish. The boy was there, in the doorway, but he didn’t speak, and the lady didn’t know he was there, not then, not to this day. She didn’t know the boy watched her as she buried the bottle in the trash bin, and she couldn’t know that later, when she went out to her ladies’ educational meeting, the boy had fished the bottle out and sat for some moments puzzling over the meaning of it. Until he grasped the meaning of it.

The voice of the captain in conversation with the mate drifted in from the passageway. Doyle crumpled the smeary page, used it to wipe away the mess in his palm, and went out to join his fellow officers in the saloon.

There the drink was gin; the atmosphere was masculine, smoky, and amiable. The talk was all sea tales, some as tall as the mainmast, of survival against impossible odds, dereliction of duty, cannibalism in extremity and as accepted practice, madness on board and on shore, ships cursed, ships derelict, ships on which the crew was found all dead, or all dead save one man, raving at the helm, collisions on dark stormy nights and in strange ports, ships sailed purposely into reefs or shoals in order to defraud insurance companies, ships rammed by enraged whales. At the close of the whale story, Doyle would have offered his adventure on the ice, in which he had fallen through a hole and saved himself by clinging to the flipper of the seal he’d just clubbed to death, but the occasion didn’t present itself. As the evening wore on, his brain fogged over and he could no longer follow the conversations. A queasy rumor stirred in his gut. He stopped drinking the captain’s gin and switched to tonic water. Something was definitely amiss in the waist, he thought, amusing himself with his pun. He wasn’t feeling entirely seaworthy.

He excused himself from his companions, pleading fatigue, and went out onto the deck for a breath of fetid air. The night was black. The ship rocked gently at anchor in the black water. Even the stars appeared to have been dimmed. Looking up hurt his eyes. His head was throbbing, his throat dry and constricted. No, he was not well. His legs had gone rubbery, and from somewhere in his core a chill commenced, washing up to his face and down his limbs, so fierce and abrupt that his teeth chattered. How curious to be cold in the broiling African night.

He knew what must come next and steadied himself at the rail, then, with decision, pushed off and made his staggering way, clutching the boom, careening into the housing, down the hatch to his berth. He drank water from the pitcher, pulling the sheet off the thin mattress, feeling about the storage space in the bunk for the heavy socks and woolen muffler he’d worn on the trip from Edinburgh to Liverpool; when was that? A world ago. With trembling fingers he pulled on the socks, wrapped the plaid round his neck, crossing the ends over his chest, folded the sheet, pulled it tight across his shoulders, and sat there on his bunk, shivering like a man in a blizzard. His thoughts were disordered, darting from hypothetical diagnosis of his condition, malarial fever being the most likely, to anxiety about the state of his intestinal tract, which had a seismic feel to it, to regret that he hadn’t told the seal story, interspersed with the repeated observation that it was passing strange to be shivering in a broiling cabin, and a vague premonition, distant now but beckoning, like that tall, wan gentleman standing in the corner there, insistently wagging a bony index finger, that he was entering an entirely different order of consciousness, one that would preclude attendance upon his medical duties. He wasn’t afraid – he was never afraid – but he was helpless. The cadaverous gentleman closed his fingers in a fist, narrowing his watery eyes in a theatrical glare. Something familiar about the fellow, though he clearly wasn’t really there. Doyle rubbed his fists into his eyes, clamped his jaw against the appalling clatter of his teeth. Damn this gentleman, in his woolen vest and frock coat; absurd attire for a specter. He lowered his fists and blinked his eyes at the man, who had the temerity to bare his rotting teeth in a fiendish grin.

“The hell you say,” Doyle cried, lurching from the bunk, shoulders hunched, fists drawn in close to his chest, legs buckling. He made two steps and toppled headlong into the empty corner. Determined to fight, he rolled onto his side, raising himself on one arm, but someone slipped a warm, wet, black bag over his head and he went down again without a struggle.

He awoke, fully clothed in his bunk, which was on fire. Or so it seemed, until amid a mighty but unsuccessful effort to rise and flee, he realized the flames were inside him. It wasn’t surprising; one didn’t need a medical certificate to know the bone‑rattling chill of the night before must be succeeded by a fever. But how had he gotten back to his bed, and what was to be done about the unbearable, suffocating weight of his clothes, which he was too weak to remove? His fingers, unbidden, pushed away the muffler, fumbled at the buttons of his shirt; his feet flailed together, working the horrid socks down to his ankles. Why was he wearing woolen socks?

The chill. The wan gentleman. He attempted a groan, but what issued from his dry lips was a croak. If only he had the strength to reach the water pitcher. He could see it in the bowl on the stand. The pinkish light glinting from the lip informed him that it was early morning. Again a furious effort to rise, resulting in a sudden gush of water from every pore, a fog descending from somewhere, thick as porridge. If only. Water.

* * *

When next he opened his eyes and took in the ordinary aspect of things – the afternoon light playing over the compact furnishings of the room, the deep, sonorous pulsing of the ship’s engines, the sound of cheerful voices exchanging courtesies outside his door – a convalescent gratitude swelled in his chest. He was soaked in sweat; the pillow was a sodden rag but when summoned his limbs obeyed the call. No, more than that, they gathered force in a valiant, glorious effort, and in the next moment he was sitting with his feet on the floor, swaying but upright, weak, stunned, ravenous. His tongue, dry and heavy in his mouth, felt like a desiccated toad.

The doctor’s appearance in the officers’ saloon was greeted with a round of applause and the alarming news that three days had passed since the evening he had staggered forth, having failed to relate the seal story. The next morning the steward had discovered him in his bed, unconscious and burning with fever. As the doctor was himself the patient, there was no one to attend him, and he had been left to recover or not. Or not had been the case of a luckless sailor who had come down with the same malady on the same evening and whose earthly remains had been solemnly committed to the Bight of Benin that very dawn. It was more information than the invalid could comprehend, and he sank beneath it into an armchair, mumbling apologies. “Still a bit unsteady.” The captain spoke to the steward, who bustled off to his galley to prepare a tray.

“It’s well we have so few passengers,” the captain observed. “When the doctor himself is ill, it makes them anxious.”

Doyle raised his eyes. Was the man implying that he had failed in his duty by succumbing to a near fatal illness? But no, Wallace’s regard was moist with an indulgent sympathy. “You have had a close call, sir,” he said. “I feared we might lose you, and that would have been a woeful conclusion to your African adventure.”

Doyle nodded. The telegram sent to his mother, what would it say? Your son, Arthur Conan, dead of fever, buried at sea, yours truly . No one for her to turn to, no help but her damnable lodger, Dr. Waller, who would take over, as was his damnable way. His poor sisters, Lottie, Connie, and Annette, condemned to drudgery as governesses for the rest of their lives. Unbearable.

“I’ll be fine,” he assured the captain. “I’ll be up and about in no time.”

He took a light meal, for his stomach was tender, and drank a great quantity of water. His fellow officers urged him to return to his bunk, and as he was too weak to be of use to anyone, he agreed. Lifting his water glass was a heroic effort. He made his way out to the deck and stood at the rail, looking at the sea.

While he was spooning in his soup, Captain Wallace had told him about the dead sailor, an elderly fellow named Wentworth. Wentworth hailed from Liverpool and had been at sea since he was a lad. He had a wife and children; the officers couldn’t agree on how many. He would be missed in the fo’c’sle, as he was something of a practical joker. Once he’d caught a water snake and put it in the empty kettle. With much snoring and muttering, all hands had feigned sleep, waiting for the riotous moment when the cook opened the kettle lid in the morning.

Wentworth’s illness had run the same course as the doctor’s, but he hadn’t the strength to withstand the fever. Presumably his heart gave out under the assault of the microbe.

Doyle leaned over the rail, feeling queasy, but it passed. The sea before him was deceptively calm, and the morning sun, already brutal, smeared it with a gelatinous glow. Wentworth was down there, wrapped in his canvas shroud, carried ever downward by the weight attached to his feet, plucked at, nosed about, shaken, devoured by creatures of that other world. Wentworth, the joker, and thousands like him. How many thousands?

The sailors referred to the end of time as that day when the sea gives up its dead. It was a cliché, but Doyle vexed his brain to imagine that day. It might, after all, be tomorrow. Would the waters withdraw and the souls of the dead rise up through the wreckage of the ships littering the ocean floor? Or would the dead be disgorged onto the coasts of every landmass, clinging to rocks, floundering in the shallows, pushing forward in waves like the sea itself, waves of the dead, with their pale flesh and hollow eyes?

It was absurd. The sea would not give up her dead. To be committed to the sea, as Wentworth had been, and as he might himself have been – he had seen that in Captain Wallace’s eyes – was to be lost forever in an immensity beyond comprehension. If every living soul on earth were dropped into the deep, would it even raise the level of the oceans? Would a great tidal wave be engendered that would sweep across the sea and flatten everything, including islands and coastal cities that stood in its path? And even if that did happen, it would make no difference. The oceans of the world could absorb mankind entire and still the tides would roll in and out, the sun would rise and set, the moon wax and wane, pulling the waves to the shore.

He could not look at it, this vast and temperamental creature that was the sea. And he would not, as he had once thought he might, spend some formative part of his life upon it. It was too lonely and cruel, it didn’t pay well, and it made men melancholy, fatalistic, and mad.

As he made his way back to his bunk, his thoughts turned to home. Or not to home, which had, until recently, been a series of increasingly smaller and more crowded rented rooms, but to the spacious, sunny, stylish flat at George Square that his mother and his three sisters now shared with her lodger, Dr. Waller. A lodger who paid the entire rent; in what sense was such a man characterized as a lodger?

A lodger who was young enough to be her son, who had conspired with her to send her husband to the “sanatorium.” A lodger who was the godfather of her baby girl, named for him. An aristocratic lodger, with an estate and a coat of arms quartered with the royal family of France; a pompous and demanding lodger who had refused to fight. It was clear now; Waller had been on his mother’s hands and in her confidence for years. He could not be dis‑lodged.

A usurping lodger, like a cuckoo, soiling the nest and driving out the chicks, the rightful heirs of the poor pale gentleman who cowered in his room by day, and wandered the streets by night, trying to sell his own clothes in exchange for a drink. Did the pale gentleman set fire to the nest? That was the charge against him, among others. The dry‑eyed mother had appealed to her son. “We’ll need your signature,” she said, while the lodger gazed out the tall, handsomely corniced window at the park opposite the square. “Here, and here.”

And of course, he could deny her nothing. He picked up the pen and signed.

Now, in his berth, he took out his diary, opened to the last entry, November 18, 1881, and reread his own description of the fires on the African shore at night and his recollection that in Hanno’s account of his voyage along the same coast two thousand years ago, he had spoken of a world on fire, of active volcanoes sputtering red lava rivers that poured into the sea, the steam rising in blasts of white smoke that clouded the night. Now these volcanoes were shiny black peaks, rising cold and indifferent above the florid green of the coast.

He left three blank pages to account for the days he had lost. November 22 , he wrote on the next. But the pen was mysteriously heavy, and his fingers hadn’t the strength to hold it upright. He laid it across the page and collapsed onto his bed, where a deep, restorative sleep swallowed him up completely, as if he were a fish and sleep a great, black whale.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 689