For reasons of her own the girl was defending the stream, accepting some self-imposed challenge. She scurried through the trees, fierce eyes watching me from her pallid face, like a child-terrorist who had planted a bomb and was waiting half-fearfully for it to explode. Behind her she towed the filthy bandage, as if trying to confuse me by trailing this thread of her own blood.
I shouted to her, but my voice was drowned in the blare of the Dakota. It swept above the lake, barely clearing the forest canopy. I stepped into its trembling reflection and walked through the warm water towards the nearest drilling tower.
A silver arm of the lake had reached the well before me. I leaned between the trestle posts and peered into the bore, where a pool of dusty fluid rose through the discarded newspapers. A horn sounded from the police barracks. Captain Kagwa was waving to me from his jeep. He lowered my suitcases on to the wharf, shook his head in disapproval and drove away. No doubt he had assumed all along that I would stay at Port-la-Nouvelle and had thoroughly enjoyed the irony of my wells filling with water from the forest stream that I had accidentally created.
Kagwa or no, I would stay at Port-la-Nouvelle and reopen the dispensary. And I would defend my dry wells.
‘We’re threatened, Mallory! Forget your dam!’
‘Go away, Sanger. Make a film about someone else.’
‘No! Doctor, it’s time to build an ark …’
A familiar shabby figure in a sweat-stained safari suit hailed me across the water. Sanger lounged back in the stern of his skiff, in relaxed good humour, as always when he saw me working on one of my various futile schemes. He watched me shovel the soil on to the crumbling wall that I hoped would be one shoulder of an earth dam. As hard as I worked, the current carried away the damp clods.
Mr Pal, his scientific adviser and general factotum, stood in the bows, punt pole sunk into the bed of the stream. He held the craft against the current, staring at my modest efforts with an expression of deep gloom, and then confided his verdict to Sanger.
‘Median depth is now three feet, Professor, rising approximately at one inch per hour.’ He spoke in a light educated voice, his diction giving a lilt of good news to his depressing litany. ‘Current estimated three miles per hour, capacity six hundred cubic feet per minute. Flood table imminent.’
‘Mallory, did you hear Mr Pal? Flood table imminent.’ I drove the spade into the bank and rested my reddened palms on the handle. Somewhere below my knees a pair of mud-caked boots had vanished into the brown water. My shorts and chest were spattered with the red mud.
‘What are you doing here, Sanger? Do you want to interview me?’
Sanger gestured in an artless way, as if this was a prospect beyond all his dreams. ‘You don’t want to be interviewed, doctor. For you, television is vanity, the death-warrant of the human race written in 625 lines. Yes, you told me so, very bluntly.’ He spread a hand across the water, like a card-sharp about to tamper with a pack. ‘We might be looking for gold.’
‘Good, you’ll be able to pay the journalists to come back to Port-la-Nouvelle. And return my fifty dollars.’
‘Fifty? As little as that? I feel better about my debt to you. Every dollar you lend me is a deposit in the bank of friendship. Still, it might be worth panning here – there is equipment in the tobacco factory we could modify.’
‘Sanger, you’re wasting your time. As Mr Pal will tell you, the geology is against you. Anyway, this stream will soon cease to exist, once I’ve managed to divert it.’
‘Stream?’ Sanger beckoned Mr Pal to the bank. Holding the Indian’s arm he stepped from the skiff and stood beside me. He touched my shoulder in his frank and engaging way. Behind his dark glasses I could see his weak but curiously trusting eyes. ‘Stream, doctor? You still call it a stream? This is a river. You have created a river.’
His voice carried through the trees, catching the ear of the young Japanese woman who was photographing the channel. Still wearing her flying overalls, she followed Sanger everywhere, flitting about him like the Ariel of this threadbare Prospero. His eyes and his ears, Sanger called these two assistants, the shy young Indian with the mind of a breast-pocket encyclopaedia, and the busy-as-a-bee photo-journalist who ran here and there, endlessly performing the intricate mating dances that united nature and her camera lens. They were forever feeding him scientific facts and possible film locations. At times it seemed that nothing had any real significance for Sanger until Mr Pal and Miss Matsuoka had pre-digested it for him in the terms of an imaginary film documentary. Sanger existed in a fictionalized world, remade by the cliches of his own ‘wild-life’ nature films. These were not soap operas but soap documentaries. The makers of TV documentaries were the conmen and carpetbaggers of the late twentieth century, the snake-oil and fast-change salesmen purveying the notion that a raw nature packaged and homogenized by science was palatable and reassuring.
‘A river?’ I repeated. ‘Not yet. Strictly speaking it’s no more than a freak rise in the local watertable.’ We were standing below the shoulder of the runway extension, a few yards from the site of the original spring. All trace of the access ramp had been swept away by the rushing waters of the past eight days. The north-east corner of the runway had vanished, and a cliff of once compacted earth was now collapsing into the stream.
Whether stream or river, brook or burn, the channel was fifty feet wide. Draining from the unmapped forest swamps two miles to the north-east of Port-la-Nouvelle, it flowed past the airstrip to empty into Lake Kotto. Each morning when I woke in the trailer the light reflected from the surface rippled ever more brightly across the ceiling of the cabin. Already the western end of Lake Kotto was covered to a depth of twelve inches by a vast brown pool of silt-filled water that stretched six hundred yards from the quays beyond the tobacco factory.
All my drilling wells had been flooded. The line of towers stood like harbour buoys, linked to the shore by the charred sections of the viaduct. I had tried to defend the wells by building an earth rampart around them, a wall of dust which the advancing lake had soon penetrated. By the third day, when the last of the wells began to fill with water, I abandoned the effort and ordered the sergeant to return the tractor to the clinic.
Even then, a substantial delta had formed. This miniature river carried tons of fine soil and humus from the forest floor and deposited them at its mouth, where they lay in banks of silt as smooth as pillows of wet satin.
When I followed the stream’s course through the forest, past the airstrip and Nora Warrender’s breeding station, I soon found that the secret basin to which I had traced it no longer existed. The basin and the service road of the French oil-company workers had been obliterated by the strong channel that flowed among the trees, and which each day seemed to place its source ever deeper into the forest. Two miles to the north of the airstrip the stream was still ten feet wide, flowing through the scrub and undergrowth, but I was then turned back by a patrol of Kagwa’s soldiers. At night I heard the sounds of rifle fire and mortar shelling, and guessed that Harare’s guerillas had been drawn back to this unexpected supply of fresh water.
Kagwa seemed to concur. At first the Captain was eager to rid himself of this nuisance that threatened the airstrip, distracted his men, and altered the strategic balance of the arid region under his rule. After my meeting with the armed patrol he clearly suspected that I was acting in some way as an emissary between Harare and dissident elements to the south. But Kagwa merely warned me of the dangers of trying to penetrate too deeply