‘It’s really awfully kind,’ Soames said, ‘but I fear I’m going to be very busy during my brief stay.’
‘I have very nice house, sir, half up Stranger’s Hill. You will be having good entertainment.’
‘Oh, I’m sure.’
‘When I am in Calcutta I am having a white friend, sir.’
Growing more embarrassed, Soames attempted a feeble joke and said, ‘I’d like to come. It’s just that I think Queen Louise has my spare time pretty well arranged.’
‘The Queen is a bloody old hag, sir, if you excuse the word,’ Turdilal said, with no trace of anger in his voice. ‘I think later you are regretting you don’t come my house like I am asking, sir.’
He turned on his heel and snaked down the corridor. Soames sighed, abandoned his alcove, stuck his hands in his pockets and wandered down a flight of stone steps into the sunshine. Here, he was at the back of the palace; it was private and a rough attempt had been made at a garden. The trees were beautiful; big green lizards scuttled up them like rats as he approached.
Soames was enjoying himself. People are taking an interest in me, he thought self-indulgently; they may be no less self-seeking than my fellow-countrymen, but they go about the business with more originality, more verve. They are more amusing. The real reason for his enjoyment, however, was a deeper, sillier, better, less analysable reason; he was living in a strange land.
It was a different thing altogether from holidaying in a strange land. Here, although only temporarily, he belonged, was in touch. It was something, for all his excursions abroad and the brief business trips to Brussels and Paris, he had never managed before.
At the bottom of the garden flowed the river Uiui, only five feet below the brow of a tiny cliff. Soames stared down into the flood, its surface green and turbulent as it hurried along. A small fishing boat, manned by four negroes bent sweating over the oars, laboured against the current. A hill rose sheer out of the opposite bank, its jungle studded with jagged outcrops of rock. ‘Africa,’ whispered Soames to himself, ‘darkest Africa’; and he exulted.
There seemed to be no reason why his stay here should not be entirely pleasant, despite the vaguely disturbing warnings of M’Grassi Landor about the witch doctor. Already, reports of the situation had been transmitted home from the wireless room in the palace. What had threatened to be a difficult monetary situation had also been cleared up by M’Grassi Landor and a gentleman grandly styled Minister of Finances who turned out to be manager of the Umbalathorp Bank. Both Soames and Timpleton had been loaded down with doimores, the local coin; twenty mores equalled one doimore, and one doimore was worth ten shillings at the current rate of exchange.
Feeling both at peace with the world and excited by it, Soames turned left and made his way upstream by a path along the bank of the river. It wound enticingly, hedged with flowers and sheltered from the piercing sun. Soon he had left the palace grounds behind; the growth on either side became thicker, the path more devious. He passed an almost naked hunter, who stood gravely aside for him without a word or gesture. The dappled shadows ahead, the silence, led Soames on as if under an enchantment; he walked dreamily, mind a blank.
When he reached a square-framed reed hut, Soames halted, telling himself there was no point in going further. Suddenly he was tired. The hut was empty, its interior cool and inviting. Inside was nothing but a bundle of rags in one corner and an old orange box in another; gratefully, Soames went in and sat on the box.
He mopped his brow, letting his chin droop on to his chest as he rested. Warm drowsiness overcame him.
A sudden sense of being watched jerked his head up. A man stood in the doorway, staring at him with unfriendly eyes; he must have come up with almost supernatural quietness.
‘You frightened me for a moment,’ Soames said, aware that his start had been observed.
‘I am Dumayami, chief witch doctor of Umbalathorp. I want speak with you,’ the stranger said soberly.
It invariably happens that in those parts of the world which, disregarding the opinions of their inhabitants, we call remote, the products of the white man are more welcome than his presence. They precede him, they succeed him. In the heart of Sumatra (as dangerous now to a pale-haired one as it was two hundred years ago), you may come upon old men drinking from little round tins which once contained fifty of Messrs John Player’s cigarettes; the petrol can of the Occident is the foundation stone of the Orient; Coke bottles clog the very source of the untamed Amazon. Knowing this, Soames felt little surprise to find Dumayami clad in an undoubted Church of England surplice with, pinned to it, a badge saying ‘I like Ike’, just possibly a souvenir of the recent Gunther safari.
Apart from this, the witch doctor was an impressive figure, a giant feather nodding over his scaphocephalic skull, his face notched with tribal marks and wormed with wrinkles. An air of confidence and a whiff of rotten eggs surrounded him. Soames’ alarmed thoughts took on a defensive tinge; alas, he was armed with nothing fiercer than a nail file.
‘I am resting,’ he said. ‘What is it you wish to say?’
‘I think you already know that,’ Dumayami told him. ‘The many spirits of Umbalathorp all speak out against your coming. They declare only ill will come from your visit.’
‘What am I supposed to have done? Do the spirits tell you that?’
‘Spirits tell Dumayami all things,’ the witch doctor said, squatting for comfort on the threshold of the hut. The pupils of his eyes held a malevolent, tigerish glint. ‘Spirits say you come with machine to make much trouble here.’
‘Of course,’ said Soames. ‘The Apostle will trespass on your pitch in some respects, eh?’
‘In Umbalathorp is room for only one law. Now you bring Christian devil box, cast wrong spells, make much trouble.’
‘My dear man, the Apostle Mk II does no more than juggle with given data,’ Soames said; this old man was clearly a bit of a loon. ‘You’d better come up and look at it when it’s installed and set your mind at rest.’
Dumayami performed his own equivalent of crossing himself at the very suggestion.
‘First Apostle Mark come,’ he said gloomily, ‘then other apostles, Luke, John, maybe Paul. You must not have success here.’
‘Oh, how are you going to stop us? Burn cockerel feathers or something? Progress, Dumayami, has reached Goya at last.’
‘Already spirits pull down your flying machine,’ Dumayami said darkly. ‘Next blow up Christian devil box machine.’
It was, Soames mentally conceded, a crafty point; some people might even have been impressed by it.
‘And me? What’s going to happen to me, Dumayami?’ he enquired.
The witch doctor rose lazily, shaking his head as if to say that it was better for Soames not to know that. Groping under his surplice, he produced what looked like a sharp bone. With two backward paces he was out of the hut. He bent down and used the bone to inscribe a sign in the dusty earth of the threshold.
‘If you do not step over this sign, you do not leave Africa,’ he said. Raising one hand, he stepped from view and was gone as noiselessly as he came.
‘Damned silly,’ Soames muttered aloud. ‘Of course I can step over it.’
He went over the doorway to examine the mark Dumayami had made. Before he got there, two little yellow and red birds had fallen squabbling and copulating on to the path outside. Their bright wings, fluttering in lust and anger, erased the witch doctor’s sign. Soames stood there blankly, not heeding them as they plunged away.
At last, taking a long step over the threshold, he emerged from the hut and hurried back to the palace. Of Dumayami there was neither sight nor sound.