Up in the Rainforest

The young English engineer, Morley Horstler, was excited to have found someone, even this uncommunicative German hunter, Ure Talle, whose marriage with a Ghanaian girl had worked out satisfactorily. Of course he still had the problem ahead of convincing Christiana to marry him, but Ure seemed to think that there would be no problems after that.

“People leave alone one here,” Ure had said.

They were in the plains country beyond Accra, driving slowly because it was not yet dark, and John was enjoying the flagrant death of the sun beyond the plains in the distant ocean. He felt very useful and adventurous. For three months he had been surveying at a dam site up in the forests; before that he had been up by third-class railway, lorry, and camel-back to the desert in Mauritania.

“We have too accustomed become to daytime hunting,” Ure said. “To this plan there are numerous advantages.”

They drove through the low hills and villages of the coastal plain, past the palm-wine sellers, past trays of red peppers, stacked pineapples, mounds of laterite-dusted yams, the women and girls selling peeled oranges at the lorry stops. The lamps began to be lit for the night.

“Your dam is some effect going to have here,” Ure said.

“Their dam,” Morley corrected him quickly, angry inside at the habitual expatriate’s distinction between the pronouns they and us, not quite certain what it was that really caused these sudden irritations in him. He had been looking forward to this trip.

At Kwangonsi they signed at the police station for their guns and waited for Kwesi Bampong who hunted with them when he was not on duty. They turned off the paved road near a group of mango trees and got set up, loading the guns and adjusting their head lamps. It had rained in the afternoon so that it turned dark enough early for their kind of hunting.

Ure moved off first into the darkness. He was always eager for antelope and seldom came back without one, but tonight he had already complained of the amount of water that filled small depressions and noted that it would keep the main water places sparse of game.

Kwesi went next. Morley felt envious of them both. He could never feel secure in the darkness. It was too simple to feel why the Africans believed in the presence of ancestral spirits. The gutteralities of thousands of frogs were as constant and overlapping as though a new race were looking for its past; the bush babies cried like demented old men; owls were wandering souls. After a short time, his face was a swarm of insects and he switched off the light to conserve the batteries. Kwesi and Ure would pick up anything.

At first, from a distance, they thought the snake was an animal; it was looped down from a tree so that its eyes were at the natural level. Kwesi was the first to notice the swaying motion.

“Good, good,” said Ure. “For the bridegroom, power. Virility, you say, hey! Wait, wait. We go close and then you shoot. Put on your torch too. One move at one time now.”

Morley wanted to back out, to give someone else the shot, but Ure insisted vehemently that he shoot. Ure calculated the wind velocity and the distance for him; he stood beside him as he shot; he cast a steady beam of light at the python from the miner’s lamp on his forehead.

“A very nice shot, I think,” Ure said when Morley had fired. “We with our empty hands will not go back tonight. I will have this one skinned for you. And the meat, do not throw away the meat. The meat is very good for eating; is not that so, Kwesi?”

The next day they were back in the city and he tried, as he had before going shooting, to arrange a meeting with Christiana. He began to question her excuses and somewhat angrily she agreed that she would be at the Bamboo Grog Shop that evening.

“My father is not getting any happier about it;” she said, “no happier at all.”

That evening, although the Bamboo Grog Shop was festive and the musicians happy and he told himself that he was at home there where the musicians were his good friends, he felt ill at ease and found the highlifes repetitive and knew that he would drink too much and that things were headed for a smash.

Christiana was beautiful and he felt she moved like a river out on the crowded dance floor. She sat down when the Kpanlogo was played, but she danced to all the other dances and it was easy to see that she had been to Holy Child and then abroad for her schooling and that for beauty she was easily head and shoulders above everybody else there. Yet she would never dance more than one number with him, and even when they sat out a dance she would not speak seriously with him and when he tried she laughed about incidents she had seen on her last trip to London or made jokes about the weakness of sterling. Her father was a country policeman, but her uncle was in the Ministry of Agriculture and she was his favourite.

There had been an attack on the Redeemer’s life during the week, and no one wanted to talk about hunting. A guard had been killed in mysterious circumstances and Kry Kanaram, who owned half of the nightclub, was convinced that this marked the birth of the counter-revolution. Ure became very happy drinking and listening to the music, but Kry called him a bugger of a German draughtsman three or four times and Ure went home early. He stayed with his wife in the big house which Kry’s trader father owned on Embassy Row.

When the Black Stars stopped playing, and the guitar band, The Avengers, had begun, the trumpet player came over to Morley’s table. He was a Canadian but he knew all of the band’s songs and he played with them except when they were on tour.

“Quite a girl you’ve got there,” he said. “She’s been here nearly every night for the last month and doesn’t look an inch the worse for wear.”

Then the drummer came over to have a drink with them. He was a supporter of the Redeemer and insisted that everybody drink toasts to the failure of the attempt.

“No whitey’s bullet will ever kill that man,” he said. “Never, never.”

The drummer had played for many years in America and took Down Beat and kept up on things. He was very happy because he had been playing well and many dancers had come up during his solos and placed ten shilling notes on his damp forehead. He had a towel around his shoulders like a tennis champion.

The Avengers played for a long time before the Black Stars returned.

“That old music is all through,” Kry said when they started again. “These electric guitars are the real show now.” He was quite quietly drunk and his thoughts weren’t connected. “Where did that Ure go? I called him a bugger to his face. He beats his wife you know. You Europeans are all the same. I found out about that pretty gal, by the way. You make violence your god and then you cry shame! shame! Bloody Savages! when somebody tries to assassinate the Redeemer. Kennedy’s death was totally natural. Look at the eighteenth century in England. Savagery. I let that Ure know he could stay for a week once. Big house, you know. Eight bedrooms. But he’s been camped in for a month now. Almost two months. He’ll have his wife’s family there first thing you know. You won’t have any luck with that gal. Her uncle’s arranged an import licence for Christmas biscuits. They offered us a share, but we declined. Last year there were none and this year you’ll have to go into high gear to get over them in the streets. The Redeemer must have taken a fat share. You’re too violent, that’s all. She’ll never have anything to do with a European. Want some real whiskey to drink? I brought it back from Togo last week. In the bottom of fishing pirogues. Seventy bob each.”

Morley left while Kry was going to a back room for the bottle of real whiskey. He felt in genuine despair about his situation; it was a case of collapsing or of causing some rash unpleasantness, and neither of those were what he had hoped for this evening. He thought in the morning he would take the python skin and go back up into the rainforest and get to work. Then when the skin was dried and could be rolled up he would have it delivered to Christiana. He would have a record of himself made, a record of himself singing a Housman poem, for he had a good tenor voice, and he would send that to her also.

He felt that logic was somehow slipping away from him, and yet he knew that if he were ever able to read her scattered letters of the past three months, without weaving his own yearnings into them, well then he would be able to logically chart his life up to this moment of thick-headed despair. He told himself so as he drove home.

He had no key to the house and stood there by the door for a long time, thinking of Christiana’s letters and considering sleeping on the grass in the roundabout’s circle of frangipani trees. But the watchman came up from the servant’s quarters with a light and rang a bell somewhere inside. Ure’s wife came down to let him in.

“You too are drunk,” she said. She led him into the living room and turned on one lamp. She was wearing a man’s red smoking jacket and while he stood there, blinking in the sudden light, she loosened the ties and revealed her body to him, welted and cut in manners he could not comprehend but strangely beautiful to him, as though she belonged to a tribe which was ashamed of its identity but had to mark that identity; and without words, with the bare movements of her body, she convinced him to make love to her, and he did, and he had never known he possessed such brutal and clambering lust.

When he awoke it was with a start; there had been a sharp click and there was a light on in the kitchen quarters. Ure was standing there in the light from the refrigerator. He was pouring himself a glass of water from one of the many jugs. The python meat was stacked on plates on many shelves, clean and white, like bleached salmon steaks. Ure closed the door and came towards him. Morley looked about himself groggily, but the woman was gone, the light was off, and his nakedness was covered with a coarse Mopti blanket of goats wool. The light in the room was coming from the early dawn.

“I do not think you are well,” Ure said. Except that as always the word think came out as though it began with a harsh, sibilant z. I do not zink you are well.

And in the morning it did seem he had contracted malaria, for he was weak and feverish. He had to be driven back to the dam site, for he insisted on moving, and the Italian doctor there chided him for not taking his Daraprin regularly. No matter how much he insisted that he had, the doctor would laughingly repeat his conviction that modern science no longer made mistakes and would stand over Morley as the patient swallowed the bitter, yellow, Chloroquin pills which were to cure the malady.