8

I had hoped to visit Frere the following day, but circumstances worked against me. On that morning a vessel arrived at the centre of the river flying a yellow flag. The waterways on either side of it emptied immediately, and I could not understand why the small steamer had dropped anchor there rather than continuing downriver. An hour later, a second vessel arrived, also showing a fever flag. These two joined themselves stern to prow and continued on their way together.

The rest of the day was filled with speculation. It was Cornelius’s opinion that they had come from the mission at Mohta, but we were at a loss as to what contagion they might have carried. There had been men working on the decks of both vessels while they waited.

Several hours passed before anyone crossed the river, almost as though something of the boats’ sickness might remain diluted in the water. There was some complaint from our consignment traders that the vessels they were expecting had been kept away by the flags. Later, we received word that a cargo of palm oil and block attar had been diverted to Biembo at word of the flags.

The incident left us unsettled; these things seldom occurred in isolation. An order was given to all the independent traders due to leave over the following days to conclude their work more quickly and to leave before nightfall. When they complained at being hurried like this, Fletcher told them either to leave or to take back on board all their recently unloaded supplies. Few persisted in their complaints.

‘If it is an outbreak of something at Mohta,’ Cornelius said, ‘then the boats will be back and forth.’

Seven hundred women and children lived at the mission. Cross-river traffic ceased for two days afterwards. Abbot complained that everyone was overreacting, and that our business had been delayed and disrupted enough over the previous months without this.

Cornelius waited for him to leave us before saying to me, ‘I read Proctor’s papers last night. The Company was informed within an hour of Frere’s return. They’ll know already down in Boma.’

Boma remained our administrative centre in preference to Stanleyville, where the Belgian presence was too great. Sea-breeze Boma we called it, where life was easy, and departure forever on the minds of the men who worked there.

‘Someone will be sent to examine the facts of the matter. Frere might even be returned with whoever is sent.’

‘Is there no chance that we might be left to sort it out for ourselves?’ I asked him.

‘Those days are over,’ he said. ‘It seems we can no longer be trusted. Besides, there are other considerations.’

I regretted having asked. He told me nothing I had not considered a hundred times over through the previous night.

He went on: ‘All I’m saying is that it is in all our interests – especially Frere’s – to be aware that these things are about to happen to us, for us to be ready for them to happen, and then for us to act accordingly.’

‘Which, you believe, involves us keeping our distance from the man.’

‘Whatever.’

‘Are we going to sacrifice him so readily?’

He shook his head at this remark. ‘I am as powerless as you,’ he said.

I asked if anyone had been to see Frere since his return.

‘Bone is under orders to keep everyone away for the first few days.’

‘Why?’

‘Perhaps to give Frere time to prepare himself.’

‘And to imagine that we here, his friends, have all abandoned him.’

‘I doubt he will believe that.’

‘Has Bone set a guard on him?’

‘Bone himself, honest, decent, conscientious little man that he is.’

‘Hardly our greatest conversationalist.’

‘And perhaps that is the last thing Frere needs of us for the time being.’

‘And after this embargo?’

‘Then presumably whoever wishes to see him will be free to do so.’ I heard the note of caution sounded in the remark.

It was as we discussed the other matters of the day – primarily the anticipated arrival of our monthly consignment of rubber and indigo – that Fletcher arrived with news of an accident at the quarry, a landslide beneath which four workers had been buried, believed killed. I took out our ledger of employees from my desk and asked him if he knew the men’s names.

‘Who among us knows any of their names? Abbot’s up there now, flapping around like the headless chicken that he is.’

‘Will it hold up the digging?’ Cornelius said.

‘Apparently not. The fall was on an old face.’

It was unlikely that the diggers’ bodies would be retrieved unless they were either visible or easily accessible. In the past, men had been killed in the quarry and abandoned beneath the rock and earth which had crushed them. Their families were afterwards sought and compensated depending on how loyal the workers were deemed to have been – another division of Abbot’s authority – and how long they had worked for the Company.

At the news of a single death, ten families would immediately petition Abbot, and then sit for days on the quarry floor until they were either driven out or they abandoned their useless appeals. We were regularly sent directives on how every type of payment and compensation was to be calculated.

I went with Fletcher and Cornelius to the quarry, where we were joined by Abbot. It was clear where the wall had collapsed: a slope of bright red earth and soft rock, fifty feet high, near-liquid in appearance and spreading outwards over the quarry floor. There was some effort still being made to search the surface of this by men probing with long canes, but little hope remained for the buried diggers.

It was Abbot’s opinion that only three, not four, men had been lost, and that this ought to be remembered when the wailing women arrived. He made no attempt to supervise the search for the men, leaving this to those who had been working alongside them when the fall occurred, and those who knew how much easier it was to search than to continue working elsewhere. Abbot calculated that the work of twenty men would be lost for half a day. Fletcher asked him if that included the three dead men, and Abbot said it did.

I went with Cornelius to the quarry floor, to the outermost edge of the debris.

‘They cut it too sharp,’ he said. He indicated the high, sheer faces all around us.

‘That’s because there’s less and less to recover,’ I told him, knowing that within a year the place would be abandoned. We watched the naked men on the slope above us. There was little apparent order to their searching, but even they must have by then understood that they were digging for corpses.

A man higher up the slope began suddenly to scream. He scrabbled in the earth at his feet, and a moment later he pulled free the lower part of a man’s leg and foot. Others scrambled up the slope to help him. Letting go of the corpse, the rescuer then cupped his hands to his mouth and let out a cry which reverberated around the enclosed space.

‘Now Abbot will have to go to the bother of a burial,’ Cornelius said. He started forward up the slope and I followed him.

By the time we arrived at the top, the body had been fully retrieved. It looked flattened, tan from head to foot, both arms and both legs either dislocated or broken, or both. The man’s eyes were cleared of the red clay and it was scooped from his mouth. At our approach, the diggers stood aside and fell silent, acknowledging our greater responsibility in the matter. Both Cornelius and I were covered from head to foot in the same red mess. Cornelius told two of the men to drag the body to the quarry floor, and we waited where we stood while this was done.