The sergeant worked up his engine, smoke pumping from the exhaust stack behind his head. He engaged the gears and drove forward, gradually forcing the root-crown from the cavity where it rested. To my disappointment, it failed to put up any great fight, but lay passively against the tractor’s scoop, a gnarled mass of dead roots some six feet in diameter. Forced on to its back, it rolled soundlessly into a hollow between two nearby hillocks and expired there in a cloud of sandy dust, a long-dead god of the earth.
I waited as the tractor rumbled forward, its treads easily straddling the cavity below. As the sergeant headed towards the forest path I walked down the earth ramp and peered into the open mouth. Scores of torn roots emerged from the ground-soil, the crop of a strange subterranean plantation. To my surprise, however, a small pool of water had appeared at the base of the cavity. As if leaking from the amputated roots, the dark liquid slowly covered the sandy floor, the last sap of the dead oak irrigating its own grave.
All too aware of the irony that I had at last struck water, I gathered the loose soil between my feet and swept it into the cavity. But the water was already several inches deep, fed from some underground stream, part of an artificial reservoir, I assumed, created by the construction of the airstrip. I gazed down, seeing my own face reflected in the black mirror from which the dead roots of the oak rose to greet me. I kicked a last shower of earth into my reflection and strode down the remains of the ramp, following one of the parallel pathways left by the tractor.
Fifty yards into the forest, I stopped to wait for the tractor’s smoke to dissipate through the trees. Looking back, I could see the pattern of metal tracks stamped into the long bracelets of soil that led to the airstrip.
A thin stream of water, little more than the width of my arm, flowed along the track, carried by the slight gradient that ran down to the lake. While I waited, it crept towards my heels and touched them, moving in a zigzag of lateral and forward movements that seemed to notch up a series of coded messages, computerizing itself around my feet.
An hour later, as I stood on the jetty beside the police barracks, above the beach where the twelve-year-old had tried to kill me, I saw the stream emerge from the forest and make its way down to the drained bed of the lake. It formed a small pool beneath the debris along the beach, nudging at the cigarette packs and beer cans which were already floating on its surface, as if trying to stir this dusty rubbish into a second life.
Behind my back, a mirror was forming. All morning, as I worked among the packing cases in the looted clinic, I was aware of the vivid reflection from the lake, as if someone had switched on the underwater lights of a swimming pool. For reasons of its own the sun had come closer to Port-la-Nouvelle, perhaps intrigued by the appearance of this dark water that had spent so many aeons within the earth.
Resigned at long last to closing the clinic and returning to England, I tried to ignore the lake and the line of drilling rigs. Harare’s guerillas had ransacked the dispensary, stealing at random from the drug cabinet in my office, scattering powdered milk over my desk and crushing scores of glass vials under their feet. I swept the debris into the yard, and packed the last of the medical supplies into a suitcase with the few clothes that Harare’s soldiers had left me.
At dusk the previous evening, when I opened the door to the trailer, I first thought that the guerillas had detonated a hand grenade as a farewell present. Exhausted after the hours in Harare’s custody, and the tomfoolery of Sanger’s mercy mission, I cleared a space in the heap of clothes, books and crockery, pulled the mattress from below the upended refrigerator, and fell asleep as Captain Kagwa’s men patrolled the deserted town, playing their radios through the darkness of the surrounding forest. Twice I was woken by the sounds of gunfire, and heard the explosions of mortar shells in the tobacco farms, as the rival forces shifted the furniture of the night.
All in all, it was time to go. My short career as hydrologist – an absurd venture from the start – had been part of the same curious obsession that had brought me to central Africa in the first place. After a childhood in Hong Kong, where my father had been a professor of genetics at Kowloon University, I was sent to school in England, and then graduated from Trinity College, Dublin. Although a qualified physician, in the ten years that followed I had gone to any lengths to avoid actually practising medicine in either Europe or North America, whose populations, it eventually became clear, had failed to be sufficiently ill to meet certain bizarre needs of my own – in Europe, I argued dubiously to myself, most of the sick were physically in better health than many of the healthy in Asia. I became editor of a specialist medical journal, and then the so-called research director of a small pharmaceutical company, in reality its publicity manager and Fleet Street lobbyist. One day, while lecturing to a paediatric conference on the merits of a new infant cough linctus, I recognized a fellow Trinity student in the audience, now a child neurologist at a state hospital. In his eyes I saw myself as he saw me, a drug company salesman beginning to believe my own patter.
Three months later I joined the World Health Organization, and by a roundabout route – Toronto, Puerto Rico, Lagos – I found myself in central Africa. After six months in northern Nigeria, trying to isolate a suspected outbreak of smallpox – a disease which WHO had eliminated from the world – I began to forget my uneasy life in London, although it seemed ironic that I should find fulfilment in an unnecessary struggle against an imaginary disease. But I was then transferred to the Central African Republic, still devastated after the rule of Bokassa, and finally sent across the border to the former French East Africa. Yet even in Port-la-Nouvelle I was never happier than when I embarked on the futile drilling project. Lying in my derelict trailer, I knew that it was time to return to England before I could discover why.
When Captain Kagwa called to see me soon after daybreak, I told him that I was closing the clinic and would leave Port-la-Nouvelle whenever he could provide me with transport.
‘My regrets, doctor.’ He gazed at the shambles in the dispensary, and at the blood stains on my hand and legs. With only a few bottles of drinking water, there had been no means of cleaning myself. Clearly he was relieved to see me go. ‘Six months at Port-la-Nouvelle, and so little achieved. You cannot even play your national anthem. However, I can arrange your flight with Air Centrafrique. The Dakota returns today.’
‘So soon? Hope comes and goes. That doesn’t say much for Professor Sanger’s concern for the starving.’
‘The journalists are restless – perhaps they feel disappointed here.’
‘I can understand. Now about the plane. Thank you, Captain, but no – I don’t trust that Dakota. The thought of being incinerated at the end of a runway my tractor helped to build is bad enough, but being strapped into the seat next to Sanger when it happens …’
‘Charity, doctor – or, if you prefer, self-interest – besides, Professor Sanger is not leaving with you. He is to stay here and make me famous. This very morning he will interview me on our local television station.’
‘Our local what …?’ I stared with wonder at Kagwa, aware now of the source of his good humour. Cool and confident, he was resplendent in a freshly pressed uniform, as if about to be promoted to General of Police by the President himself. ‘This is obviously an important interview. To whom will it be transmitted?’
‘To Port-la-Nouvelle and the Lake Kotto area, doctor. Professor Sanger has all the latest equipment – he isn’t drilling for water in a desert.