16

I sought out the journal Frere had asked for.

We had gone to Babire four months after our discovery of the lake, and only weeks before the dry season was due to end. There was some urgency in mounting the trip, and Frere undertook all the arrangements concerning our provisions, guides and porters. All he asked of me, having secured my agreement to accompany him and help map our journey, was not to disclose our final destination to our porters. He confided in me that our guides would take us only as far as the mouth of the Babire River and that they had agreed to wait there for us. I asked him why such secrecy was necessary. Both Fletcher and Cornelius, I knew, had advised him against making the journey.

Babire, it transpired, lay between two warring tribes, and word had recently reached us that several battles – though we all understood that this was too grand a name for them – had been fought and a great many small villages destroyed and their inhabitants either killed or dispossessed of their lands and homes.

Frere said it was his intention to visit these ruined villages before they were overgrown and lost to the forest. He wanted to record and collect whatever evidence of the recent warfare that might remain, and to examine the surrounding country in the aftermath of the conflict. We lost too much of our wild rubber in these unsettled regions. He also wanted to try and understand how these small wars were fought, what savagery was involved, and how completely the people and settlements were consumed by them.

He had also begun a collection of the totems and fetishes left behind at the scenes of such savagery and he wished to add to this. He confessed to me that he had been waiting for news of just such a recent battle before pushing for a visit to its site. Normally, word of these affairs did not reach us until months afterwards – some boatman or other complaining of a delay or the absence of promised goods – and equally often these reports were vague in their details, and of events too far distant for us to be able to reach them quickly enough to satisfy Frere’s curiosity.

He had already calculated that, following our journey by river, two days’ walking would bring us to Babire. He allowed a further two to three days to examine the site and then to explore the surrounding countryside for whatever he might find there.

I asked Cornelius if he had cautioned us against going because he thought the fighting might still be taking place, but he said this was unlikely. They would not have been lengthy encounters anyway, and relatively few men would have been involved. The brief clashes might have been savage by our own standards, but it was unlikely that anyone now remained to threaten Frere or myself. He said he objected because he felt the journey was of no value other than to Frere personally – he had already accused Frere of dilettantism following our visit to the lake – and because, with the onset of the wet season, there was more than enough work to be undertaken at the Station. I could not refute this, and everything he said made me regret having agreed to accompany Frere. I knew that I had again succumbed to his enthusiasm, and that, despite wanting to again experience something of the sense of achievement I had felt upon locating the lake, I had been given no real choice in the matter; the credit of our friendship had again been drawn upon.

On the morning of our departure, Fletcher asked to look at the rifle I was taking, and when I showed him it – a weapon loaned to me for a price from Bone – he took it from me and insisted on exchanging it for one of his own, his treasured Martini-Henry. I objected, but he would not listen, and then stood with me as I practised loading it and turning the bolt.

When Frere learned of this, he laughed and gently accused Fletcher of over-reacting. Over-reacting to what? I asked him. He took me beyond the hearing of our porters and told me that Fletcher was concerned that one of the tribes involved in the fighting at Babire were again reputed to be cannibals. Before I could ask him if this were true, he reminded me of the tales we had been told concerning the people of the lake country and how little we had suffered there, at twice the distance from the Station, how much we had achieved there. Though he did not say it, I was being accused of the same alarmism I had been accused of then. Our conversation on the subject was ended by him saying that a single shot from Fletcher’s rifle would send anyone within a five mile radius running screaming back into the forest. It was rare that he resorted to such easy and evasive answers. I asked him if he anticipated there would still be anyone there – cannibal or not – to be scared away, and he finally lost his patience with me and told me that if I no longer wished to accompany him then he would go alone and that he would not hold my decision against me. As before, my choices evaporated around me.

We paddled and walked to Babire as planned, and left our guides and porters at the mouth of the river. Frere offered good wages, but none wanted to accompany us further. Some of the porters he paid off and they left us the instant the money was in their hands. We learned later that, of the six men left with the guides, a further two absconded during the first night of waiting.

Frere and I entered the disputed territory alone. We had no accurate idea of where Babire lay, and we came upon the ruined village unexpectedly, following a stream into the plundered fields and charred remains of the dwellings that had once stood there. At seeing the place so suddenly before us, we withdrew briefly and unburdened ourselves.

I followed Frere in a wide circle around the perimeter of the clearing, searching for the other paths which led to it. We found four of these, evenly spaced, and Frere followed each of them outwards for an hour in every direction, searching for whatever it was he sought.

He found the well-trodden path by which the attackers had come and then afterwards withdrawn. He found the marks on the trees he was looking for. He found a small, white-skulled doll made of clay and grass set into the path to deter pursuit. And all the time he searched, I kept my eyes and ears open for sight or sound of anyone remaining in the trees around us, and everywhere I looked I saw shapes and movement in the dappled light and shade, and in every silence I heard the whispering voices of watching men. As usual, Frere made a joke of my concern.

The forest around Babire was as dense as any I had previously encountered and our voices penetrated only a few feet on either side of us.

Frere insisted on following this main path even further from the village, and it was not until darkness started to fall and we were two hours from our loads, that I was able to persuade him to return with me. He suggested that I should return alone, light a fire, and that he would join me later. I refused to do this, and seeing that I was angry at the suggestion, he returned reluctantly with me to the ruins of Babire, eventually apologizing to me and admitting that it was in the ruins of the village itself that he hoped to make his greatest discoveries.

Having seen the empty space and its scattered wreckage I asked him what he could possibly hope to find there, and it was then, in his shrug of an answer, that I understood, despite his protestations to the contrary, we were again on the trail of cannibals.

‘Anthropophagy, James, anthropophagy.’ As though this added an immediate cachet and veneer of scientific respectability to what we did; as though the word itself conferred upon us some protection.

I was repulsed by the thought, but even as I considered it, I knew he was unlikely to be successful in his search. By my estimation, any fighting there had taken place over twenty days previously, and there were enough scavengers in the forest to ensure that nothing would remain. I mentioned none of this to him as we made our return to Babire in the darkness.

We retrieved our loads and lit a fire. I gathered wood from the ruined buildings to ensure that the blaze would be fed until dawn. I had expected to be kept awake by the usual noises, but the forest around that lost village was a peculiarly silent place, and following the day’s exertions I was the first to succumb to sleep and the last to wake.

I woke alone, to find our fire a mound of glowing ash. The sun was already above the canopy. At first I was alarmed, imagining that Frere had gone back along his path, but then a motion caught my eye and I saw him come out of the trees at the far side of the clearing. He was carrying a club and a piece of animal skin. He saw me watching and raised his trophies to me.

He came to me and showed me what he had collected. He told me how all the surrounding small cultivated plots had been plundered and their crops taken. He had been searching since before dawn. The club he held was weighted with a band of iron at one end. He could not identify the skin, but showed me the holes where it had once been stitched. He poured from his satchel the few other pieces he had found. It was a disappointing lot, but he remained enthusiastic.

He joined me for breakfast and explained that, according to his calculations, three hundred people had once lived there. I did not ask him if he had yet found any sign of the atrocities believed to have taken place in the village. He showed me the pieces of cooking pots he had collected. All had been smashed beyond use.

‘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.