The Book of the Heathen (19 page)

‘And your cannibalism?' I finally asked him, wondering if he was prepared to keep further discoveries from me.

‘Nothing. Nothing whatsoever.'

He asked me to make a plan of the ruined village, to plot where its huts had once stood, where the hearths in these had been located, to examine the surrounding forest for track-ways and other cultivated clearings, and to mark on the chart anything I found that he himself had not already come across. He intended making a more thorough search of the surroundings, admitting for the first time that he hoped to find the body or the remains of someone killed or mortally wounded in the fighting, who had crawled away and died alone and unnoticed amid the trees. He did not imagine that he would be successful in this, but he was determined to make the attempt having come so far.

I expressed my reluctance to be separated from him in such an isolated place, but he merely reminded me of Fletcher's rifle and the faith I had earlier placed in the weapon, and remarked that we would achieve twice as much in the time left to us if we worked separately. He showed me the abundant notes he had already made during the night.

I worked through the day making a plan of the village. It was an accurate map and I was pleased with the result. Every few hours, Frere would reappear and show me what he had found. He showed me a small, broken shield, a snakeskin bracelet and a finely woven grass quiver. He complimented me on my map, and I felt encouraged to add to it. I showed him the few unremarkable pieces of pottery and wood-working I had found. One of these pieces, a ball of ebony, excited him as much as his doll. He said it was broken from another club, a weapon designed specifically for crushing skulls. But the highly polished surface of the black wood disappointed him and he asked me if I had wiped it clean before showing it to him. I disappointed him further by saying I hadn't.

We ate together and then he left me again.

I searched through the surrounding perimeter of trees for signs of once-cultivated plots. I could not be certain in my identification of these and I shaded the areas on my map accordingly. I occasionally heard him working further out among the trees. He sang and spoke aloud to himself as he went.

Later in the afternoon, he returned to the clearing. He carried two sacks of further findings, and he tipped one of these out for me to examine. There was nothing that I hadn't already seen elsewhere, and I sensed that he too was disappointed by the haul. I asked if the second sack contained more of the same and he said it did. I asked him to let me see, but this time instead of tipping the contents out, he reached into the sack and brought them out piece by piece.

First among these pieces were several small bones, and it was not until he had arranged these on the ground that I understood I was looking at a small human arm. I asked him to confirm this and he nodded. He told me where he had found the bones, and that a fire had been lit near by. He took another bone from the sack, this one blackened and broken. Yet another still had some flesh and sinew attached to it. It was clear that they were not the bones of an adult, and the vanished inhabitants of Babire had not been pygmies.

‘They are the bones of a child,' I said bluntly.

He held the largest of the bones at arm's length, and when I took it from him to examine it more closely I caught the faint but distinctive odour it still possessed. He took the bone back and sniffed deeply at it, as though wanting to commit the smell to memory.

I asked him what he intended doing with the bones, and he said he wanted to keep them. He did his best to mask the excitement in his voice.

He reached carefully back into the sack and took out something else – something which I could not at first identify, and it was only when he held the thing between his finger and thumb and clear of his palm, that I was able to make out a small black hand with its thumb and one of its fingers missing. I looked from this trophy back to Frere's triumphant grin, the look on his face one of wonder, awe almost, the look of a man who might have found a diamond of the same size.

I told him to put it back in the sack, but either he did not hear me or he had become oblivious to my words, for he went on staring at the small black hand, turning it one way and then another as though to get a better impression of what it represented, of its great value to him.

My revulsion at seeing this was equal to that I felt at seeing the thing itself, and I made my feelings known to him, but he was either unconvinced of these or remained oblivious to them, and I left him alone with his prize, painfully conscious of this unexpected and unwelcome distance so suddenly between us.

Later, I suggested that the small, mutilated hand be buried – that he and I performed the ceremony – and he was angry at the suggestion. Casement and Morel had had their whole sacks of hands, he said, and their skulls, and their shrunken heads. What was this one small specimen collected in the name of science compared to all that? It was an empty argument and he knew this better than I did. The hand was already packed away in one of his jars of preserving fluid. He tried to divert me from my argument by telling me that the Mahdi, the killer of Gordon and possessor of the Sudan had delivered up ten sacks of locusts to the British emissary sent to bargain with him, saying they were the souls of the infidel soldiers killed by him, proof, if proof were needed, of their slaughter, and of the Mahdi's power and invincibility. The insects had clattered all around the delegation as they spoke, seemingly unnoticed by the Mahdi and his followers.

I sensed that somewhere in the tale lay Frere's apology to me, or if not his apology, then his concession to my feelings, and an acknowledgement that he regretted as much as I did the fracture between us.

17

I crossed the river in the uncertain hope of being able to see Hammad. Nor was I certain of what I hoped to achieve by the visit, other than to make a plea on Frere's behalf, or to better understand Hammad's own involvement in the affair. He would certainly have known of our coming investigators by then, and perhaps – or so I also tried to convince myself – the situation might now be sufficiently altered for him to divulge something or other to me. Such was the flimsy and desperate nature of my hope. I told no-one in the Station of my intentions.

I crossed with the old man, having the previous evening sent the deformed boy to make arrangements.

It was not an easy crossing and we were forced to manoeuvre among unfamiliar channels and currents before making landfall a mile downriver. I was warned that our return would need to be undertaken before the day's rain came. Neither the man nor the boy said much to me on the crossing. I asked the boy how he found Frere, but he told me nothing I did not already know. He was reluctant to talk in front of the old man and so I did not pursue the matter. They left me where I was landed.

I arrived at the centre of the Belgian Station and stood for a moment watching all that was happening there. There was a lively air of commerce about the place, and their wharves, in stark contrast to our own, were crowded with vessels being loaded and unloaded. I walked among the market stalls and the tables of their own rubber-buyers. I met several officers I knew and they invited me back to their quarters with them. They repeated the tales they had heard about famine and fighting, about the falling-off of the season's rubber.

Those who knew him, asked about Frere. They said they did not believe the stories they had heard, assuring me that he would soon be exonerated and released. I said nothing in return to either fuel their speculations or to bolster my own long-dead hope. Instead, I remarked on how much trade there was, allowing them to instantly divert their talk and to make the usual traders' complaints – too much, too little, prices too low to sell, prices too high to buy. It was a capricious whim of the river that had forced this difference in our fortunes, and they understood this as well as I did. The balance of profit and loss was seldom still.

I told them why I was there, hoping that one or other of them might be able to help me, but at the mention of Hammad they became evasive, apologetic, saying there was nothing they could do. It was Cornelius's opinion that the Belgians had no intention of handing over any powers to a native government, but that it was currently in their best interests to appear to be about to do so, and that the handing over of Frere to a native court for trial was all a part of this greater subterfuge. It was something I would put to Hammad if I saw him, if he had not already long since worked this out for himself, and now looked upon Frere and his trial in the light of his own ambitions. I saw again how we were all – the Belgians as much as ourselves – in thrall to the man, that he remained at the pivot of that balance, whatever other swings of fortune we endured.

Declining all their offers, I made my way to Proctor's garrison.

I found the man alone in his office, sitting with his feet on his desk reading a newspaper.

Upon hearing me enter, he swung his feet to the ground, but then seeing me he made a great play of lifting them back up and of continuing with whatever he read.

‘Six weeks old,' he said.
‘The London Times.'

At first I did not believe him. He saw this and showed me the heading. It cannot be imagined or overestimated what a sudden dart of longing seeing that title and its date sent through me. Our own papers, when they came, were invariably six
months
old, and though we treasured them for what they were, their primary purpose was denied to us. Men who had died were rotting in their graves while we thought them still alive; new-born babies were not yet conceived; civilized wars were started and ended before we even knew any hostility existed; the jigsaw of nations was shaken apart and re-assembled by new hands.

‘New man in yesterday,' Proctor said. ‘Four weeks at sea, two weeks straight here on the river. Gave me this without even knowing what it was worth.'

I considered asking him if he would sell it to me. Or if not the whole paper, then a page of it, and it was with a great effort that I said nothing, doing my best to not even look at the sheets he folded so carelessly to examine.

I told him my intentions.

‘No chance,' he said immediately.

‘He may see me out of curiosity,' I suggested.

He shook his head at me, as though I were a child incapable of understanding the simplest thing. ‘No chance. A mile up that road – ' he motioned in the direction of Hammad's home ‘ – he's got a dozen of his own men stopping everyone from going any further. Lot of activity up there for the past week and now not a single one of us is allowed to go near the place, not even the Station Manager.'

‘What do you think is happening?' Several barely formed ideas ran through my mind.

‘Obvious, I would have thought.' He took great pleasure in my ignorance. He put down the paper and again swung his feet from the desk so that we might face each other directly.

‘Not to me,' I said.

‘He's been on one of his own trading missions. That's what he calls them. Or if not him, then one of them's come back to him.'

‘Trading in what?'

‘What do you think? What do you think those dozen Arabs are stopping us from seeing?'

‘You think he's gathering slaves?'

‘Indentured labourers, if you don't mind. All you ever see of his palace is what he shows you. Walk a mile beyond it and you'll see another side of our Mister Hammad entirely. Buildings for men, buildings for women, buildings for all their screaming brats.'

‘And none of this trade comes down through here?'

He laughed. ‘Course it doesn't. You're talking about a man who might one day soon – one day
very
soon – wash his hands, sign his name to a piece of paper, raise a flag, and become the king of a new country.'

‘Do you really think so?' I made my scepticism clear.

‘Why not? He'll be perfectly suited to the place. The talks are going on. What did you think, that we'd get to lord it over them for ever? Perhaps if Hammad does take over, then the rest of us can go home and leave them to it. Place'd be a blood-bath within days while everything got settled.'

I considered the likelihood of all this. I knew what growth this mulch of conjecture and rumour supported, that what Proctor said, despite his own lurid emphasis and my own reluctance to believe it, was not so unbelievable.

It was by then midday and the room in which we sat was an overheated vault.

‘No, Hammad keeps himself clean here. He'll send most of them east, I imagine, where they still fetch a good price. That'll be the men, mostly; the women and children he can still sell on the more specialized markets. Still a big call for some of those women in Port Elys or Petit Coeur. And some of those girls, ten or eleven they are, bet you or me wouldn't say no to getting our hands on one of them for an hour. Word is that Hammad likes to break some of them in himself. Either him or one of his guards. Get them trained up, worth a bit less in the short run, but more in the long, if you know what I mean.'

I understood him perfectly, and I saw how he was goading me. The brothels at Port Elys and Petit Coeur were filled to overflowing and their trade never slackened.

Before we put an end to it under Company orders, caravans of these women and children were moved along the paths on our side of the river, sometimes being brought into the garrison yard or compound to await some vessel or other. They were a pathetic sight. Most were bound and yoked, and some were shackled. The mothers and children were kept apart, and despite how they were treated and what they must have suspected lay ahead of them, they were inevitably acquiescent in their behaviour. I learned later that some of the women were drugged before being bound. Worse, I learned that they were told they would only be allowed to remain with their children if they complied with everything they were told to do. They were also warned that they were resting in our Station under sufferance from us and that we would punish them ourselves if there was any disturbance.