“Nope.”
Gray leaned toward me. “But it does explain your nose.”
I punched her in the arm and everyone laughed. My nose wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the petit little beak both Gray and Kate had been gifted at birth.
Monique asked about bush devils and rights of passage. I explained that in Liberia, kidnapping the adolescent was cutting the strings of the child-mother relationship. The initiation in the bush was a youth’s passage into adulthood. We talked ourselves through two more liter bottles of Sovobra as the town went to sleep around us.
Gray, Kate, and I said our goodbyes and parted at the corner a few streets down. I continued alone the last few blocks toward my house, lost in my memories of the bush devil. A new moon covered its face, and a darkness deeper than velvet lined the sky. The damp smell of amphibians and moss blew by on the breeze, raising goose bumps along the flesh of my arms. I looked around and in a moment of confusion couldn’t recognize where I was in the darkness. Above me, haze muted the stars, erasing Orion’s shoulders and belt. The back of my neck tingled.
The morning after I had almost met the bush devil, I had gone to the clinic as usual. Francis had smiled at my story, but James had given me a somber look that had sent a chill down my spine. He had been there. He had either been the one who had pushed me through my front door, or he had been the bush devil himself. Either way, he had protected me.
Witches and devils were not evil, we were just human. The bush devil always brought the children back to their village. The only true evil I had ever known was the Devil who stole a child and never returned.
Behind me, a line of eucalyptus waved their tattered sleeves in the wind. I had wandered a block past my compound. Retracing my steps, I wished that the Devil of Death could be as human as James.
Chapter 23
The Strong Brown God
December/Safar
At 3:30 pm, Kate and I, an elderly man, and two matronly women all veiled our heads with cloth against the heat of the sun. We sat on the side of a narrow road in the southwest region of Upper Volta. High trees lined the road on both sides. Our taxi perched at the edge of the road with its back end jacked up like an old yellow dog lifting its leg to pee.
Kate passed me a small flask of whiskey. The back tire had gone flat the first hour out of Bobo, and our taxi driver had hitched a ride back to repair it. Though cool season had arrived, the humidity of the south heated up the afternoons. The heat and the whiskey lulled me into a half-doze. Sweat and dust gathered into mud puddles in the folds of my neck, elbows, and knees.
At 7 am that morning, the same taxi driver had lured us into a five-seat sedan, its paint eaten by rust, and promised we would leave for Mopti as soon as the car filled. The definition of “a full taxi” depended on the size of the people who showed up and the amount of luggage they brought with them. For our particular taxi, “full” meant five hours later, with me and Kate riding shotgun, three large adults and two children in the back, and a bulging trunk tied closed with a piece of rope. No one had thought to ask if we had a spare tire.
Another taxi came by. We stood and pumped our arms up and down, palms down like waving flags. The taxi sped by with more pairs of eyes than our own, choking us with another layer of dust. Why was I doing all of this crazy travel Peace Corps style business again?
Peace Corps volunteers, by necessity, lived in similar houses as the villagers and took local modes of transportation. We prided ourselves in our minimalist living and quietly held other aid workers in contempt (especially government workers like U.S.AID) for their luxurious houses and their private cars. A tough and proud breed, Peace Corps volunteers were the Marines of the humanitarian aid crowd.
I, however, had graduated to a higher rung on the aid ladder and was ready to be demoted in the eyes of the local PCVs.
“Tell me,” I turned to Kate, “why we’re not traveling in some cushy U.S.AID truck.”
“Nobody was going up that way.”
I took another sip of whiskey. It burned going down. Kate took the flask, and we once again sat on the dirt bank, convinced we’d be sleeping on the side of the road come nightfall.
Two days before, Jack had left on the plane for six weeks in the States to spend Christmas with Lori. Lucky for me I already had plans. Kate and I were on our way to Mopti to catch the riverboat the following afternoon, which was proving to be no easy task.
The two children in our taxi family took advantage of the rest stop to chase each other with sticks. The man and two women chatted pleasantly in the flowing tongue of the Bobo people, eventually dozing in the shade. Any seasoned traveler knew that being stranded on the side of the road for several hours was an integral part of every taxi ride. It gave one more time to relax, talk of the world, and see the sights.
Yesterday’s train from Ouaga to Bobo-Dioulasso had deposited us in the Bobo train station at 1:30 that morning. After a few hours sleep at a hostel, we found the taxi station and our cheerful taxi driver with a front tooth missing who promised a quick drive to Mopti. Now, eight and a half hours later, less than a quarter of the way there, tired, sticky, and covered in red dust, we faced another sleepless night. Ah, vacation.
Kate balanced a dog-eared copy of
The Strong Brown God
on her lap. Though the author meant it as an insult, Sanche de Gramont defined travel in its purest sense. “Travel, after all, requires no special experience—all one has to do is place one foot in front of the other.” We were mentally preparing for our adventure up the Niger River.
“Until the middle of the nineteenth century,” Kate read between sips, “this part of Africa was known as ‘The White Man’s Grave.’”
Even as far north as the Niger, the African interior was a breeding ground for insect carriers of malaria, yellow fever, bilharzia, and sleeping sickness. For two years in Liberia, I had taken chloroquin, the newest form of malaria preventative. It was nasty stuff that, if taken in large doses, could cause psychosis. The several times I had gone to bed with malaria and taken the curative dose, my dreams had been like the psychedelic movies we had seen in junior high that promised we’d jump out of windows if we took LSD. Since arriving in Upper Volta, I had stopped taking chloroquin. The mosquitos in Dori were so few, it wasn’t worth the brain damage.
Into the third chapter and Kate’s recital of the English sailor song, “Beware and take care of the Bight of Benin/for one that comes out there are forty goes in,” our gap-toothed taxi man finally returned. He changed the tire and we were off, north, into the wilds between the sluggish waters of the Black Volta and the marshes of the Upper Niger.
Several hours later, we crossed the
frontier
into Mali. At Yorossa, the first town over the border, Kate and I each dined on a banana and stretched our legs. As the Malian customs agents went through the luggage, we all pooled our change to give the obligatory dash. Back into the taxi and up the road, I dozed and the miles passed.
I awoke around 11:00 pm. Cold air blew through the window. Kate and I wrapped ourselves in the sleeping bag we had borrowed from Jack. Soft snoring came from the backseat. Heads lolled and the children lay sprawled across the ample laps of the adults. The dark interior of the taxi was snug and quiet except for the gravelly hum of the engine.
Warm and happy to be moving, I rested my forehead against the side window. Beyond the black lace silhouette of the trees, the Big Dipper winked at me above the horizon, bigger than I had ever seen it. At 3 am we stopped in Tené to stretch our cramped legs. At a wooden kiosk near the taxi lot, we drank glasses of steaming white coffee, sweet and hot on the tongue. In the cold air, cottonwood trees towered against a black-blue sky full of brilliant stars.
Driving on through the night, a slice of waning moon rose in the east at 4 am, and by 5:30, the squat buildings of Mopti materialized in the gray light. It had taken seventeen hours of driving and ten stops at customs checks and police blockades to go the 210 miles from Bobo to Mopti.
Our hair, skin, and clothes dyed a dark shade of dirt, Kate and I sat outside on the breakfast porch of a
campement
. With four hours of sleep in the last forty-eight, and little to eat except strong cups of Nescafé, everything held a surreal quality—a shimmering clarity of light and color.
Waiting for a room, we drank coffee under a sky streaked with orange whips of cloud. The sun rose from behind a line of distant mountains, its light so clear and bright I sneezed. Hundreds of egrets lifted off the waters of a nearby marsh, snow-white waves against a cobalt sky. Behind the egrets, their wings wide and gleaming in the sun, stood a mosque, its walls and spires reminiscent of a gothic cathedral.
The sunrise alone was worth the all-night drive.
Kate, in the best tradition of Tricia, read a section from
The Strong Brown God
. “Did you know the Niger River was once two separate rivers?”
I had to admit that no, I didn’t.
“‘Between 4000 and 400 BC, when wildlife teemed across the fertile land of the Sahara and tribes of Neolithic man populated its shores, the upper Niger was the Joliba River. Originating in the hills of the Futa Jalon watershed near the Atlantic, the Joliba flowed north into the interior, 450 miles past Timbuktu. The lower Niger, then the Quorra River, began in the Saharan mountains of Ahaggar and flowed south into the Bight of Benin.’”
“You, Trish, and I will have to travel together someday, Kate.” I sipped my coffee and breathed in the scent of smoke, tanned leather, and spices.
Kate smiled and turned a page. “‘At the end of the last Ice Age when the glaciers began to melt, the southern limit of rainfall moved northwards, drying out the Sahara. As the Joliba and Quorra rivers dried up, they altered their courses and captured each other and the Niger was born, a great looped river, flowing 2,600 miles: The Cradle of West Africa.’ Look at this map.” She turned the book. The bend where the two rivers came together was about 200 miles directly north of Dori.
A gang of birds chirped from the trees surrounding the porch of the
campement
. In the crisp air, our breakfast of fried eggs and buttered bread, the first full meal we’d eaten since the train thirty-six hours before, was the best I’d ever tasted. Sunshine, coffee, food, and the promise of a bed—we clinked our coffee cups and laughed out loud.
Around noon, we made our way to the ticket kiosk near a river quay crowded with people, donkeys, and stray dogs.
“
Bonjour
!” I smiled at the man behind the ticket window. “We have reservations for a second-class cabin.” I gave him our names.
A pleasant, round-faced man opened a ledger and ran his finger down the page. He frowned and my stomach did a pirouette. “Your names are not on the list.”
“But we sent in our reservations from Ouaga over a month ago.”
“I’m sorry,
Mademoiselle
,” he clucked his tongue, “but we never received them.”
By this time, people were jostling one another behind me in their own efforts to secure a place on the boat. I got someone’s elbow in my back.
“I assure you,
Monsieur
…?”
“Culibali.”
“
Monsieur
Culibali, that we sent in our reservations. I’ll just wait here until you find them.”
Mr. Culibali shrugged. “I will keep your names,
Mademoiselle
, and see what I can do.”
Steel mesh surrounded the booth window. I took a quarter-step to the side and looped my fingers through the wire, ready to wait all day if need be. Kate stood back away from the crowds. The longer I stood there, the more her face drooped.
The crowd surged around me. The sun climbed to midmorning, and the air thickened with the smell of sweat and fish. Men in loose cotton pants and long shirts bought general boarding tickets for a place on the deck. Peace Corps volunteers and aid workers from different countries bunched together with everyone else to beg for tickets. Breakfast faded into an empty stomach and my feet hurt. Refusing to budge, I hung onto the wire, intermittently smiling and asking
Monsieur
Culibali in my most patient French if he had found our tickets.
After about two hours, the crowd thinned and I still hung onto the grate. My stomach growled so loudly,
Monsieur
Culibali finally turned to me.
“
Heureusement, Mademoiselle, j’ai encore deux places.
” He smiled, telling me that, happily, he had two bunks left in a second-class cabin.
After a hearty “
Merci, Monsieur
!!” I walked back in triumph, waving the two tickets at Kate, who had taken refuge on a bench under a tree.
We celebrated at the Bonzo Bar near the quay with cold Somalibo beers, spicy
riz Senegalese
, and grilled
capitaine
, a mild-tasting river fish and specialty of Mopti. The quay teemed with fishermen and dockworkers loading fish from their boats into trucks and wooden carts. Groups of small boys ran about with outstretched palms, offering to carry bags and boxes for the people boarding the riverboat.
Sipping my beer, I sat back to absorb the surroundings. The quay presented a timeless scene. Except for the sprinkle of white faces in the crowd, the year could have been 1101, 1601, or 1981—wooden boats pulled onto the banks, donkeys, goats, chickens, and dogs, camels dressed in silver bangles and leather tasseled saddles. Shining black skin wrapped in robes of colorful cloth. The air was fat with a rich cacophony of language. Here I was, sitting at the crossroads of ancient Saharan trade routes, on a river the Tuareg had named
N’ger-n-gereo
, the River of Rivers.
I was about to travel that river, 400 miles into the heart of Africa, following the same route as Mungo Park, Scottish explorer and hero of
The Strong Brown God
. Never mind that Park and other explorers had all gone mad, drank their own blood to stay alive, and drowned in an ambush. I was smiling so much, my cheeks hurt.