The Book of the Heathen (15 page)

I spent the morning recording what further calculations I was able to make, and Frere cut branches to fit to his nets and went in search of the underwater life of the lake.

We decided that we would return to the high rim of the plateau before nightfall, and that we would explore east and west along this in the days remaining to us. I wanted to determine why nothing of the lake itself was visible from this vantage point. I imagined that others had climbed the slope before us, and, disappointed by what they saw, or didn't see, had turned back.

I remained convinced that Frere and I were the first Englishmen to set eyes on the lake.

I could not have known it at the time – and if it had occurred to me then, I would have been reluctant to believe it – but that early expedition and the finding of the lake was perhaps my greatest achievement in this place; certainly, nothing I did subsequently created the same sense of wonder or accomplishment in me. For weeks afterwards, the others referred to Frere and myself as their Intrepid Explorers, and I for one was unable to disguise my childish pleasure at the title, however intended.

Several months later, and then by chance, I learned from Fletcher that some among the Uregga people remained notorious for their cannibalism, and that all those months earlier he had tried to dissuade Frere from embarking on the expedition. Frere, he told me, had made him promise not to raise the matter with me prior to our departure. Upon confronting Frere with this, he was dismissive of my concern and accused me of overreacting. I remembered then the growing excitement with which he had watched the men on the low knoll, and how eager he had been to reach their fire; I remembered, too, his excitement at realizing we were ourselves being watched during our night at the lake. Unable to contain my anger at the way I considered I had been used and deceived by him, I had left him. He apologized to me soon afterwards, saying he genuinely regretted his behaviour. What he regretted most, he said, was that my sense of achievement might now be debased and not enhanced by this new understanding. Neither of us was granted permission to leave the Station for several months afterwards.

12

I was at my desk when the door to my room opened and Amon entered unannounced. He brought with him a satchel made of pale leather the consistency of cloth, and still without speaking to me he came to where I sat and dropped this bag beside the chart upon which I was working. I objected to this sudden intrusion, but he simply took a step back and waited for me to pick up the satchel. I pushed it to one side and blew on the drying ink of my chart. Ensuring that no harm had been done, I covered the detail of the map with a sheet of blank paper. Seeing this, Amon made it clear to me that he had no interest in my work, and he yawned to emphasize the point.

‘What is it?' I knew he was not acting for himself.

‘Look inside.'

I took out a single slender journal, recognizing it immediately as one of Frere's. I knew that I would in some way commit myself if I opened it, and so I left it where it lay and instead gathered up my pens and washed their drying nibs.

‘Surely you recognize it,' Amon said.

‘It's one of Frere's.'

‘Are you not intrigued to learn what it contains?'

‘Whatever I discover, you will no doubt insist on telling me five times over in case I fail to grasp the smallest point of the exercise.'

He smiled at my anger and raised his palms to me. ‘Please, I am merely the messenger.'

I looked again at the journal and saw that most of its pages had been torn out, that its board covers contained only half of what they should.

‘How did you come by it?'

‘How do you think? Hammad bought it from the feather-gatherer along with your Mr Frere.'

‘“Bought”?'

‘Whatever.'

‘Hammad “bought” Frere from the gatherer?'

‘Perhaps it was the only way the man would relinquish his hold on such a prize.' He was now less certain of himself, and to press home my small advantage I looked at the scar on his lips and then allowed his eyes to catch mine as I raised them.

‘What does it matter?' he said. ‘That,' he indicated the journal, ‘is why I am here.'

‘Why you were sent.'

‘Whatever.'

‘You stole it from him.'

‘I assure you—'

‘Along with the rest of his possessions.'

‘Perhaps he had long since abandoned all those so-called possessions. Perhaps he was so overjoyed at being found and rescued from the father of the child he had killed that he forgot all about them. Perhaps he made a gift of all he still possessed to his rescuers. Who knows?' He thrived on the uncertainty and menace of his own making.

‘Then if you do not know, I shall assume you stole it,' I said. ‘You, or Hammad.'

It concerned him to hear his master's name used so disrespectfully, and I knew he would not repeat what I said. Hammad himself would not have tolerated any of this confusion.
His
message – those missing pages – was clear enough.

‘What do you expect me to do?' I said.

‘Examine it. See what it contains.'

‘It is a man's personal journal, a private thing.'

‘It contains your name.'

‘I don't doubt it. I don't doubt that it contains all our names, perhaps even the name of someone as lowly as yourself.'

He grinned at this and I saw that my brief advantage was gone. ‘No,' he said. ‘Only yours.' He retrieved the journal and opened it, flicking his thumb over the torn edges of the missing pages.

‘Where are they?' I said.

‘My employer considered it judicious to remove them for safe-keeping. As you can see, the first hundred or so have been left intact. He would not want there to be any doubt as to the provenance of the thing.' He handed the journal back to me and I took it.

The remaining pages were filled with Frere's fine and minute handwriting. The first page was dated the day he left us, and a quick examination showed me that two or three pages had been completed for each day he was missing. The pages of the book were wrinkled and stained, as though it had been dropped in water, retrieved and then too quickly dried.

‘I assume I will find nothing of any real significance in the pages that remain,' I said.

Amon shrugged. ‘Possibly, possibly not.'

‘So their purpose is merely to suggest to me the importance of what has been removed.'

‘And which my employer now has in safe-keeping.'

‘Why?'

‘Why what?'

‘Why has he taken them? What does he expect from me, us, for their return?'

‘He expects nothing. He simply feels that they contain information of such a nature that it would be best if they were kept secure and unseen until someone more qualified to inspect and understand them were to do so.'

I understood then what he was telling me, what true purpose those lost pages served.

‘Have
you
seen them?'

He shook his head. ‘Only Mr Frere himself, an illiterate man who does not even understand that his own name can be written, and Hammad.'

‘Who wishes us all to know that he once again wields a stick over us.'

‘What a vivid imagination you possess, Captain Frasier. Why would he want to do that? He is your friend, your ally.'

I was careful after that not to say anything that I didn't want repeated verbatim to Hammad.

‘Would he show these missing pages to me privately?' I asked. ‘Or if not to me, then to Cornelius?'

It was something Amon had not considered.

‘He told me to bring the journal directly to you,' he said. ‘To show it to no-one else.'

‘But knowing, surely, that I would share it with the others.'

‘It is yours to do with as you choose.'

I turned to the last page. A cursory reading of it told me nothing. Frere had sketched a beetle and drawn a map of the confluence of three unnamed rivers. A pattern of small islands marked the confluence, and though I could not place it then, it might have been possible afterwards to locate precisely where Frere had made the drawing, where he had been – in the journal at least – before he had disappeared from sight. The day's entry was incomplete, and so I imagined that the succeeding pages had been torn out with good reason, and that no other clue remained to me.

‘The pages removed no doubt explain the circumstances of the crime he is alleged to have committed,' I said.

Amon considered this remark and then slowly repeated my words. ‘Do you truly imagine a man might avoid the truth of a matter simply by avoiding using those words which express that truth most directly?' he said.

‘Are there any instructions from Hammad?'

‘Merely that he wishes you to read the remaining pages and confirm that the journal does indeed belong to the unfortunate Mr Frere.'

‘And what if I were to say that the missing pages were all blank, that this was where Frere stopped writing?' I knew this was unlikely.

‘I believe you know better,' Amon said. ‘But if it is the story you wish to tell, then I am powerless to stop you.' He picked up the fine leather satchel and went back to the door. ‘We can all close our eyes when it suits us,' he said, and then left me.

I decided to postpone reading the journal until I was alone.

An hour later, Cornelius came to see me. I slid the book beneath a sheaf of papers as he entered. He had seen Amon departing and wanted to know why he had come. I told him the Syrian had been sent to ensure that Frere was recovering his health. Whether he believed me or not, he left me before my lie to him was exposed.

I had seen less and less of him since the arrival of Klein, and whenever the priest entered a room, Cornelius invariably left. He told me little more about the man, or of their distant involvement, but the animosity between them remained and curdled.

For his part, Klein behaved as though he were one of us – but one of us in possession of information or a secret the others did not possess – entitled to come and go among us where he chose, to indulge himself in our company and conversation, and to share what few small concessions or luxuries remained to us. We tolerated the man, but that was all; we were all growing to despise him.

13

It rained more heavily over the following days than any of us had before known. It came and ended at its usual times, but fell with such ferocity in between that the water rose in minutes to levels which had hitherto taken hours, and each afternoon the compound was turned into a lake, rising to a man's thighs in places, which then drained and dried in the heat of the returning sun, which also seemed in those days to burn more fiercely than usual, as though the two elements were striving to maintain some vital, contested balance.

Work was suspended in the quarry, where run-offs poured with water from the top to the bottom of the faces in vividly red spouts, filling the quarry floor. A new channel was blasted out to the river to allow this to drain away. This was supervised by Abbot, who announced the success of the operation on the day the rain finally subsided and resumed falling in its more accustomed quantities.

Out on the river a new configuration of banks and bars was seen to have formed between us and the far shore, causing some disruption to the traffic there. Floating vegetation caught on these bars and collected there, trapping more with each of the river's dying surges. These new islands would not last – we all understood that; nothing lasted on that river – but it was a busy time of year for the rubber traders on either side, and both Cornelius and Fletcher were convinced that, presented with the obstacles in coming towards us, the traffic would prefer the easier route to the far shore. The two men spent hours out on the bars, examining them and plumbing the channels which braided among them. Whenever possible, Abbot avoided the two men, which had the unfortunate consequence of forcing him more and more into my company.

During the downpours of that week I was able to work on my charts without being called elsewhere. I rose earlier than usual and worked longer hours, often by the light of my lamps. I was determined to keep a part of each day free so that I might visit Frere.

The garrison yard was as badly flooded as the compound, and the quarters of Bone and his men leaked worse than our own dwellings. There were times when the path joining us was so far under water as to be lost to sight completely, forcing those few of us who passed between the two places to make lengthy detours onto higher ground.

Trees were undermined by the scouring rain, mostly along the river, where the crumbling banks were sheared away, and one, an ancient baobab, toppled onto one of Cornelius's warehouses, requiring him and his quartermasters to work through the deluge to cut it to pieces and drag these clear before salvaging the goods inside. It was a common enough sound to hear, these trees falling in the forest, or to hear the drawn-out crash of snapped and over-laden branches dropping from the canopy to the floor below.

I discussed the freak circumstances of this weather with Frere, relieved that it gave us something to talk about other than his own situation, of the events already beyond our reach. I made no mention to him of what I had learned from Amon concerning the lost pages of his journal.

‘Measure it for me,' he said on my third visit. ‘Measure the rain.' He instructed me on how to set up his gauges and where best to place them. ‘Tell me everything that happens with the flooding.'

I did as he told me, keeping notes, embers to fan into the flames of our conversations. Only afterwards did I understand that in his enthusiasm he was as complicit in the deceit of avoidance as I was in the compliance of his wishes. I told him everything I had seen and heard, and in this manner we kept ourselves apart from those other events and their darker consequences for the week of the flood.

He compiled a new journal, which he insisted I should not read until he was gone. I no longer probed him for his own guarded understanding of what was happening to him; for the time being, the water was enough.