As the light broke, she stretched her hungry limbs after the night, entreating it for a mate. What the fugitive dark provided was a monstrous tree. It embraced mother earth in its branches, making her writhe in joy and pain. They struggled for mastery. After a vast lapse of time, it seemed the tree had won. When the goddess was released, however, it was the tree that gave birth. Green shoots issued from its gnarly roots. Birds squeezed out through cracks in its trunk and flew away. Animals, too, it spawned. The first of these – and the most esteemed by man and woman when they themselves emerged – was the turtle.
Some students of the Swahili creation myth say that all this happened on the island of Zanzibar. On the eastern seaboard of Africa, it is a place known for the tranquillity of its harbours, the sweetness of its fruit, and the scent of its spices. Other scholars, especially those from the neighbouring island of Pemba, maintain it was there, in fact, that the Tree of Life pushed down its roots and gave birth to the great turtles of the Indian Ocean.
The turtles are so rare today that many believe they are ghosts. But the ghosts of Zanzibar and Pemba live not in thalassia, or any other pavilion of the ocean. They live in the fragrant orchards of clove and ylang-ylang that cover the islands like a shroud. It is through these that nightly predations are said to be made by the papabawa, the islands’ legendary pale-skinned vampire.
People say the papabawa is just a race memory of the slave trade. No one who has actually seen one of the great turtles, in any case, would call it a ghost. Khaled al-Khidr saw one on February 15, that year’s Night of Power, when the Koran descended in its entirety into the soul of the Prophet. They should have been observing that holiest of occasions, not lying about on the beach.
It was 1996 – the year of his twenty-first birthday. There was a full moon, the time when the turtle laid her eggs, and he was with his friends Ali and Juba. They were camping out on an islet a few miles off the main island, a place his father patrolled from time to time on behalf of its new owner.
They were dozing on the beach in front of a bonfire. All members of a soccer team back on Pemba, they had spent the afternoon on the sand – practising penalties, shooting the ball between two fronds of leaf that made for a goal, or just kicking it around between the three of them. Now it was dark and they were tired. Normally they listened to music at night on these trips, but the batteries on Khaled’s radio had run out.
The moon was shining brightly, its grey light mixing with the yellow of the fire. Khaled had just drunk a can of coke. Ali was chewing gum. Juba had been smoking – a fat roll of leaf that kept going out in the wind. He had been seized by a fit of coughing, and Khaled thought it was him again, but it wasn’t. It was a deeper, stranger sound. There was another noise too, like digging.
They exchanged glances in the firelight, then jumped to their feet and ran in the direction of the sound. A strong wind was whipping the palm trees, but it was easy to tell where the noise was coming from – even for Juba, who was still deep in the thrall of dagga, as marijuana is known in Swahili.
The turtle was enormous, easily seven feet long. The dome of her shell rose at least four feet high. She was digging a hole. The repetitive, wheezy cough came with the effort of it, accompanying each thump of her back flippers as they sprayed out sand behind her. Her front flippers were pushed out like levers, to give her purchase; the whole manoeuvre was perfectly achieved. They watched in awe, their figures casting shadows on the moonlit beach.
Once the hole had been dug, she started making another noise, more high-pitched, a sighing. With the culmination of each sigh, a glistening white egg dropped in the hole. Almost an hour passed, during which more than a hundred appeared, each about the size of a golf ball. Khaled lost count, gazing at every one as it fell.
When the hole was full, the turtle moved forwards a little and began shovelling sand back over the eggs, untroubled by the watching young men. Her glaucous eyes seemed to look straight through them, unseeing. Khaled saw oblivion there, a supreme indifference to everything except that universal law which bids all living things to eat and be eaten in their turn.
After the eggs were covered, they thought it was finished. But then the oddest thing of all happened. The turtle began executing a circle above the nest, pushing herself with each flipper in turn. Around she went, three times. When she finally shuffled away from the nesting ground, the sand was almost completely level. It would be hard for a predator to tell – at least by sight – where she had laid her treasure.
Under that bright full moon, with the sound of rustling palm trees and the rolling breakers all around, the three watched as the turtle progressed, heaving, down the beach. She paused for a moment in the surf and disappeared.
It was the following morning that Khaled al-Khidr, returning home, found his mother and father lying side by side on the floor of their living room. They looked as if they had been placed there deliberately, both of their arms extended above their heads. Across the throat of each was an abrupt, reversing stroke, like a Z on its side.
He tried to scream, but no sound issued. Gasping in anguish, feeling as if the earth itself were shaking, he reached out a hand to steady himself, gripping the back of a chair. He forced himself to breathe, to look, to approach. The edges of each slash were encrusted with dried blood, as were his parents’ shoulders. There were rubbery clots of it covering the mat upon which they lay.
For a few, shocked seconds, staring at the clots, he swayed. His mind wanted to shriek out again, but his voice once more disobeyed, offering only a horrified murmuring that, mounting upwards in the suffocating air, filling his throat and nostrils, choked his being with a sound of new-hatched evil. Unable to bear it, he fell, his legs buckling beneath him.