Bones of the River (5 page)

“‘Us’,” sneered Hamilton. “You illiterate hound! Get out!”

It is very trying to be brought into daily and hourly contact with a man who smelt alternately of lysol and naphthaline. It was maddening to find dinner delayed because Bones had strolled into the kitchen and had condemned the cooking arrangements; but the culmination of his infamy came when he invented a new filter that turned the drinking water a deep, rich pink that made it taste of iron filings.

“Can’t you telegraph to headquarters and have him reduced to the ranks, sir?” asked Hamilton savagely, after he had found crystals of pure carbolic acid in his shaving mug. “I’m being sanitised to death!”

Happily a tax-collecting tour was due, and Sanders was not sorry. Bones, of course, ordered the thorough fumigation of the
Zaire
, and for three days after the little steamer started on her voyage, the unhappy crew breathed sulphur fumes and drank sulphur water and ate sulphurated rice.

Bones came down to the quay, a strange and awesome spectacle; a thin veil of antiseptic gauze hung from the edges of his helmet like a curtain, and on his hands were odorous gloves.

“Hail to the bride!” snarled Hamilton from the bridge. “Where’s your orange blossom, Birdie?”

“I order you to keep away from the Ochori,” cried Bones in a muffled voice. “There’s measles there – drink nothing but Lithia water…”

Hamilton replied offensively.

*  *  *

There runs between the Pool of the Silent Ones and the Lesser Isisi, a strip of land which is neither forest nor swamp, and yet is of the nature of both. Here grow coarse trees that survive even the parasitical growths which shoot upward in one humid night to the height of a tall man; and here come the silent ones to sleep between trees, secure in the swamps that surround them and the guardianship of those little birds who love crocodiles and stand sentinel over them when they slumber. Of other birds there are few; other beasts do not come to the Wood of the Waters, and the elephants’ playing ground is on the firmer shore of the river. Here they have levelled the trees and stamped the earth flat, so that they may gambol and chase one another, and the calves may fight to the applause of trumpetings and waving trunks. There are many rotting huts in the Wood of the Waters, for the Isisi send here the old, the blind, and the mad, that they may die without distressing the whole and the sane. Sometimes they kill one another, but generally a scaly form creeps up from the mud and knocks them into the water with its quick tail, and there is an end.

Mr Commissioner Sanders was mad, but not slayable, by reason of his soldiers, his long-nosed “wung-wung” (so they called his hotchkiss) and the brass-jacketted guns that said “ha-ha-ha!”

Nobody but a madman would go squelching through the noisome mud of the wood, peering into foul huts, raking over ground for signs of skeletons (all that the crocodiles did not take was the little red ants’ by right). Yet this is what Sandi did. He slowed his fine boat and brought her to the bank.

“I have impressed upon Lulaga the impropriety of hastening the deaths of his relatives,” he said to Captain Hamilton of the Houssas, “and he has sworn by M’shimba and his own particular devil that there shall be no more blinding or old-age pensioning,” he added grimly.

Hamilton smiled wearily. “‘The customs of the country must not be lightly overridden or checked,’” he quoted from a famous Instruction received from the Colonial Office in bygone days – there isn’t a Commissioner from K’sala to Tuli Drift who cannot recite it by heart, especially after dinner.

“‘Nor,’” he went on, “‘should his religious observances or immemorial practices be too rudely suppressed, remembering that the native, under God’s providence, is a man and a brother.’”

“Shut up!” snarled Sanders, but the inexorable Houssa was not to be suppressed.

“‘He should be approached gently,’” he went on, “‘with arguments and illustrations obvious to his simple mind. Corporal punishment must under no circumstances be inflicted save in exceptionally serious crimes, and then only by order of the supreme judiciary of the country – ’”

“That looks to me like a new hut,” said Sanders, and stepped over the hastily rigged gangway, twirling a mahogany stick in his thin, brown hand.

Threading his way through a green and anaemic plantation, he came to the hut, and there he found B’saba, sometime headman of the village of M’fusu, and B’saba was mad and silly and was chuckling and whimpering alternately, being far gone in sleeping sickness, which turns men into beasts. He was blind, and he had not been blind very long.

The nose of Sandi
elaka
wrinkled.

“O man, I see you, but you cannot see me. I am Sandi, who gives justice. Now tell me, who brought you here?”

“Lulaga the king,” said the old man woefully. “Also he has taken my pretty eyes.”

He died that night, Sanders squatting on the ground by his side and feeding the fire that warmed him. And they buried him deep, and Sanders spoke well of him, for he had been a faithful servant of Government for many years.

In the dawn-grey he turned the nose of the
Zaire
against the push of the black waters and came to the village of the chief, to that man’s uneasiness.

The
lokalis
beat a summons to a great palaver, and in the reed-roofed hut Sanders sat in judgment.

“Lord!” said the trembling Lulaga. “I did this because of a woman of mine who was mocked by the old man in his madness.”

“Let her come here,” said Sanders, and they brought her, a mature woman of sixteen, very slim, supple and defiant.

“Give me your medal, Lulaga,” said Sanders, and the chief lifted the cord that held his silver medal of chieftainship. And when Sanders had placed it upon the neck of a trustworthy man, and this man had eaten salt from the palm of the Commissioner’s hand, soldiers tied Lulaga to a tree, and one whipped him twenty times across the shoulders, and the whip had nine tails, and each was a yard in length.

“Old men and madmen shall die in good time,” said Sanders. “This is the law of my King, and if this law be broken I will come with a rope. Hear me! The palaver is finished.”

There came to him, as he made his way back to the ship, an elderly man who, by the peculiar shape of his spear, he knew was from the inner lands.

“Lord, I am M’kema of the village by the Frenchi,” he said, “being a chief of those parts. Now, it seems to me that you have taken away the magic which our fathers gave to us, for all men know that the sick and old are nests where devils breed, and unless we kill them gently there will be sickness in the land. On the other side of the little river the Frenchi people are very sick, and some say that the sickness will come to us. What magic do you give us?”

Sanders was instantly alert.

“Any men of the Frenchi tribes who cross the river you shall drive back with your spears,” he said, “and if they will not go, you shall kill them and burn their bodies. And I will send Tibbetti, who carries many wonders in a little box, so that you shall not be harmed.”

On the way down river, Sanders was unusually thoughtful. Not less so was Captain Hamilton, for, as the elder man had said, from the beginning of time every tribe, save the Ochori, had carried its ancient men and women into the forest and left them there to die. Sanders had threatened; he had on occasions caught men in the act of carrying off their uncomfortable relatives; but never before had he punished so definitely for a custom which the ages had sanctioned.

They smelt headquarters before they saw the grey quay and the flowering palm-tops that hid the residency. Suddenly Sanders sniffed.

“What in the name of Heaven – !” he asked.

A gentle wind, blowing in from the sea, carried to him a strange and penetrating odour. It was not exactly the smell of tar, nor was it the scent which one associates with a burning soap factory. It combined the pungent qualities of both. Later, Sanders learnt that, in his absence, a trading steamer had called and had landed half-a-dozen carboys of creosote for the use of the Health Officer, and that Bones, in his enthusiasm and in that capacity, had tried the experiment of a general fumigation. The fire whereon the creosote had been transformed into its natural gases, still smouldered in the centre of the square, and Bones, a fearsome object in a gas mask, and without any assistance – his men had practically mutinied and flown to their huts – was continuing the experiment when, in sheer self-defence, Sanders pulled the siren of the
Zaire
and emitted so blood-curdling a yell that it reached beyond the protective covering of Bones’ mask.

“For the love of Mike, what are you trying to do?” gasped Hamilton, spluttering and coughing.

Bones made signs. After his helmet had been removed, he propounded the results of his experiments.

“There isn’t a jolly old rat left alive,” he said triumphantly; “the beetles have turned in their jolly old numbers, and the mosquitos have quietly passed away!”

“Are any of the company left?” demanded Hamilton. “Phew!”

“Creosote,” began Bones, in his professorial manner, “is one of those jolly old bug-haters–”

“Bones, I’ve got a job for you,” said Sanders hastily. “Get steam in the
Wiggle
and go up to the Lesser Isisi and on to the French frontier. Near a village which I gather is M’taka there is smallpox. Vaccinate everybody within a ten mile radius and be happy.”

“And keep away from the French territory,” warned Hamilton.

Bones smiled contemptuously. “Am I a ravin’ old ass?”

“Not ‘old,’” said Hamilton.

Within two hours Bones was on his way, a huge pipe clenched between his teeth, a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles (“And God knows where he got those from!” said Hamilton in despair) on his nose, and, balanced upon his knees, a ponderous medical tome. The fact that it was a surgical work dealing with nerve centres made no difference to Bones, it was the only medical work he had – it had been sent to him, in response to his written request to a London publisher for a novel that was enjoying some popularity at the time. And if, reading Bones’ vile handwriting, the publisher translated his request for “Walter Newman’s Sister” into “Watts’ Diseases of the Nervous System,” he was hardly to blame.

In course of time he came to the Lesser Isisi, and was received with great honour by the new chief. It seemed that every man, woman and child in the village had turned out to meet him. But there were no marks of special enthusiasm, nor did any of the people smile. And the folk of the Lesser Isisi are only too ready to laugh.

“Lord,” said the new chief, “all men know that you bring great magic in your two hands, for Sandi has spoken well of you, and it is known that you are a friend of ju-jus and ghosts. Therefore, my people have come that they may see this magic which is greater than the magic of our fathers.”

This he said publicly, for all men to hear. In the privacy of his hut, he told another story.

“The people have anger in their stomachs, because Sandi whipped Lulaga, and there have been secret palavers,” he said. “And, lord, I think they will make an end to me. Also, there is a saying that Sandi loves death and hates the people of the lsisi, so that he would be glad if the cooking-pots were broken and the roofs of the village were fallen.”

Thus he symbolised death, for when a man of the Isisi passes, the pots wherein his food was cooked are broken on his grave, and no man tends his hut until the winds and the rain bring it sagging to the ground.

“That is foolish talk,” said Bones, “since Sandi has sent me to make all people well by the wonder which is in my little box. Behold, I will put into their arms a great medicine, so that they shall laugh at ghosts and mock at devils. For I am very honoured in my land because of my great wisdom with medicine,” added Bones immodestly.

Accompanied by four soldiers, he marched two days into the forest and came at last to the village by the water, and arrived only in time; for, in defiance of Sandi’s orders, three men from the Frenchi village had crossed in the night and were being entertained by the headman himself. They left hurriedly and noisily, Bones chasing them to their canoe, and whacking at them with his walking stick until they were out of reach of his arm. Then he came back to the village and called a palaver. In the palaver house, placed upon an upturned drum, and covered with one of his famous sanitary handkerchiefs, were innumerable little tubes and a bright lancet.

“O people,” said Bones in his glib Bomongo – and he spoke the language like a native – “Sandi has sent me because I am greater than ju-jus and more wonderful than devils. And I will put into your bodies a great magic, that shall make the old men young and the young men like leopards, and shall make your women beautiful and your little children stronger than elephants!”

He held up a tube of lymph, and it glittered in the strong sunlight.

“This magic I found through my wonderful mind. It was brought to me by three birds from M’shimba M’shamba because he loves me. Come you M’kema.”

He beckoned the chief, and the old man came forward fearfully.

“All ghosts hear me!” said Bones oracularly, and his singsong voice had the quality of a parrot’s screech. “M’shimba M’shamba, hear me! Bugulu, eater of moons and swallower of rivers, hear me!”

The old man winced as the lancet scraped his arm.

“Abracadabra!” said Bones, and dropped the virus to the wound.

“Lord, that hurts,” said M’kema. “It is like the fire of Hell!”

“So shall your heart be like fire, and your bones young, and you shall skip over high trees, and have many new wives,” promised Bones extravagantly.

One by one they filed past him, men, women and children, fear and hope puckered in their brows, and Bones recited his mystic formula.

They were finished at last, and Bones, weary but satisfied, went to the hut which had been prepared for him, and, furiously rejecting the conventional offer of the chief’s youngest daughter for his wife – Sanders had a polite and suave formula for this rejection, but Bones invariably blushed and spluttered – went to sleep with a sense of having conferred a great blessing upon civilisation; for by this time Bones had forgotten that such a person as Dr Jenner had ever existed, and took to himself the credit for all his discoveries.