The Day of Creation

8

The Creation Garden

‘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 into the forest, and then assigned three men to help me dam or divert the stream.

Even with their aid it was soon obvious the current was too strong for us. The earth dam we built at the mouth of the stream – a rampart of sand and soil driven over the delta by the tractor – was overrun within hours. A second, which we constructed using a section of the runway extension, was washed aside before we could bridge the two banks. Meanwhile the stream continued to grow, deepening and widening its channel, sweeping with it a freight of uprooted saplings, rafts of brushwood, and a legion of beer bottles and aerosol cans. Watching this tide of man-made rubbish, I could almost believe that this small stream was trying single-handedly to cleanse the continent of the garbage which the century had deposited there.

Within a week of my creation of the river, the first brown water reached the pier of the police barracks, and Captain Kagwa reassigned the three men, leaving me on my own. His mechanics were working on the engines of the police launch and the car ferry stranded on the beach beyond the cigarette factory. Already the bows of the restaurant barge – a floating bordello once patronized by the oil-company workers – were washed by the lake. The plaster goddess with yellow hair who hung below the bowsprit, crudely painted to resemble a future Queen of England, dipped up and down on the shallow waves, as if the venerable craft were preparing itself for the trade to come.

Meanwhile this mysterious stream continued to transform the forest. The foliage was brighter, and a green lustre filled the once blanched canopy, as if the stream had bathed everything with a subterranean light. As I walked through the trees, trying to devise some means of building an effective dam, I sensed around me the atmosphere of a new world. I breathed the fresh, Edenic air, almost believing that I had planted and watered a forgotten corner of the original creation garden. I felt light-headed on the sweet scents of blossom and rotting bark, and yet curiously at rest, as if I were waking into a dream that had slept within me since my childhood. I remembered the derelict kitchen garden of the house my father had bought in Kowloon, a miniature wilderness where I had played as a boy among tomato and cucumber frames overgrown with wild sugarcane. Rats and small snakes infested the deep grass, but I had made my child’s world there until, at the age of seven, my father had brought in a local contractor, cleared the ground and built an asphalt tennis court. However, even as an adolescent playing with my friends, I could still sense the lost jungle of the rubbish tip around me.

I waded in the silvery water, washing the dust from my arms and face. In my fancy I imagined that this stream was a forgotten tributary of the primordial river in the desert gorges of central Africa, where man’s primitive ancestors had broken their pact with the tree, the giant river which had descended beneath the Sahara and lain dormant for thousands of years.

Perhaps aware of the refreshing light in this waking forest, others were also drawn to the stream. By night Harare’s guerillas haunted the upper reaches of the channel, now and then firing a mortar shell into the deserted streets of Port-la-Nouvelle. By day Kagwa’s soldiers walked naked in the cool water, washing their clothes and hunting for gold.

Even Sanger had crossed the runway to inspect the stream, and twice a day would fill a flask of water for the boiled rice on which he and his two aides subsisted. Abandoned in disgust by the journalists and the freelance film crew, who had soon realized that this risible mercy mission was merely a publicity stunt, he now lived on at the airstrip, waiting for the Dakota to return and collect his broadcasting studio.

Stranded in Port-la-Nouvelle until Air Centrafrique received payment from his sponsors in Tokyo, Sanger camped with Mr Pal beside the control shack, surrounded by his bags of rice, the cameras and recording equipment, and the dismantled sections of his satellite dish, an electronic dream already overgrown by the runway grass.

He was now his own famine victim, benefactor and documentary historian, a self-contained one-man television disaster area. Once he came down to the dispensary and borrowed money from me, ostensibly to purchase supplies from Captain Kagwa’s quartermaster, but I saw him hand the cash over to the Japanese photographer, who had already threatened to leave. She lived alone in her pup tent, below the wing of her aircraft, refusing to share her supplies. It was clear that Sanger’s documentary needed a radical change of script, some new theme that would revive the project and satisfy the Tokyo networks.

While I worked with my spade, I noticed that Sanger was listening intently to Mr Pal. The slim-shouldered Indian stood beside the beached skiff and kept up his endless commentary, now and then glancing at me in a knowing way, as if I had already suggested to him the germ of a new wild-life programme, perhaps on the subject of amateur dam-building. Even Miss Matsuoka had begun to point her camera at me when she had no other subject in view. I was all too aware that this intense young Japanese saw me as one of the odder denizens of the forest.

Irritated by this air of small conspiracy, I threw the clods of earth at their feet.

‘Sanger – tell Miss Matsuoka to aim her camera at someone else.’

‘You’re careless of life, doctor.’ Sanger instantly came forward when he saw that I was waiting for him to go. ‘Like all your profession, you dismiss everything that doesn’t fit into some punitive scheme of things. That’s why the public venerates you.’

‘Why don’t you leave Port-la-Nouvelle? There’s nothing here for you.’

‘There’s nothing for me anywhere else.’ Sanger shrugged, with one of the displays of frank despair to which he often treated me, as if testing me in some way. ‘I’m waiting for funds to be telexed. I need to lease a big plane for the rice. People don’t realize what all this charity weighs.’

‘Then leave the rice here. Go to Gambia, make a tourist documentary about crocodiles.’

‘It’s been done too many times. The natural realm is exhausted, everyone got there first in the sixties. Nobody wants to know how the world is, they want emotion and imagination rolled across it like a soft carpet. Believe me, Dr Mallory, you need new ideas these days. Just as we need new vices.’

‘What you really need is a new set of lies.’ I said this without malice – in an unexpected way, I found myself drawn to this amiable imposter. I thrust at the oozing mud between my feet. ‘Still, that shouldn’t be too hard to find.’

‘Very hard.’ Sanger held my shoulder, oblivious of the flecks of mud on his suit. ‘You are wrong again, doctor. Television doesn’t tell lies, it makes up a new truth. In fact, the only truth we have left. These sentimental wild-life films you despise simply continue that domestication of nature which began when we cut down the first tree. They help people to remake nature into a form that reflects their real needs.’

‘And that justifies any invention?’

‘No. It must chime with their secret hopes, their deep-held belief that the universe is a kindly place. Besides, everything is invented and then pondered upon. God rested on the seventh day in order to look at the rushes. These trees, these leaves, flowers and roots, are fictions invented to trap the sun, catch an insect, suck the water. Look at your river – that’s a complete invention.’

‘A television company might even have thought it up?’

‘Perhaps it did. And what difference? Sooner or later, everything turns into television. Consider, Dr Mallory, you may already be the subject of a new documentary about a man who invents a river …’

A cascade of gravel fell on to the bank beside me, splashing into the water at my feet like the pellets of a shotgun. The sharp stones stung my arms and neck, and I dropped my spade into the mud. I turned to see the Japanese photographer standing above me on the crumbling face of the runway, the stone chips falling from her flight boots. She had listened to Sanger and now fixed me in the viewfinder of her camera, already accepting that I was her new project.

Sanger was kneeling at the water’s edge, filling his flask as Mr Pal pushed the skiff into the stream. The clear liquid poured into the chromium flask, its silvery reflection dancing happily in its private vault. Sanger wet his hands, and then raised his sunglasses and bathed his tired eyes, as if they had already seen enough of my real motives.