Paid Story
“In the second half of adulthood, it is a man’s duty to uncorrupt himself.” - Reuben Khosa
I.
In 1910, Reuben Khosa abruptly abandoned his career as a tracker and guide for the white sportsmen who then traveled to Africa in search of trophies. The year he quit he was thirty years old and had already trekked over ten thousand miles across the length and breadth of the continent, from the terra incognita that runs along the Gulf of Aden to the Horn to the lichen-encrusted forests of Aberdare Mountains and from the Skeleton Coast on the Atlantic down to the Nkomati sugar estates of Portuguese Mozambique which then abounded in Cape Buffalo—among the brutes most highly sought by his clients.
It was not until I was given access to Reuben Khosa’s notebooks, found inside St. Athanasius Monastery in the outskirts of Mombasa, that I learned the grotesque circumstances behind his decision.
And it is from a remarkable, hand-written account of his final safari that I have assembled the following narrative.
At intervals I have abridged Khosa’s renderings for the sake of clarity and recreated some of it using my own words, although for the most part, the precision and eloquence of Khosa’s prose indulges no edit.
As background, by the time of the final safari, Khosa had already outfitted many celebrated clients and survived numerous close shaves—one with an iron-tipped arrow from a quick-tempered Liangulu tribesman; another with a monstrous river hippopotamus he had to dispatch with a sheath knife; a third came from a black-maned lion who pulled down his horse along the Sergoit river. Such stories abound in Khosa’s journal and must certainly establish his professional credentials as well as his physical ferocity.
It is also true that, while some of the era’s white adventurers who came looking for big ivory or world-record heads did not regard a Negro as fit for any job but porter or bush-beater, Khosa makes it clear throughout his log that he refused to endure any racial slight.
Of these so-called sportsmen, he writes:
“These were not the sort of men I accepted as clients. Many of them had a devotion to the flowing bowl and never wanted to be ten miles from a canteen. They were soft men who smelled of soap and starch; these were men who had never before seen a lion out of a cage. I can direct you today to the grave of an Englishman called Rolleston who was killed by the first elephant he ever encountered. Some of these greenhorns hired Kafirs or Somali askars to do their shooting for them, and one fellow named Lannigan came from New York City accompanied by his high-spirited girlfriend who wanted to see ‘the Black Continent.’ The girl wound up gored by a rhino when Lannigan accidentally discharged his rifle into the ground rather than at the beast who was charging them at full gallop. The rhino was subsequently killed by Lannigan’s gun-bearer, and when an amused taxidermist in Nairobi presented the New Yorker with the animal’s 24-inch horn, it still had a piece of his girlfriend’s scalp wrapped around it.
I did not want such bad medicine to stain my reputation, and personally, I would not lead such weak fellows into terrain more treacherous than the red light districts of Nairobi.”
But there were other hunters that Khosa was eager to lead, primarily those who paid him well and could be relied upon to leave girlfriends at home and would shoot rampaging beasts instead of dirt.
In the early years of the century, his top client was an American maverick called W.D. Crosby, and during that final, fateful safari, he was under Crosby’s employ.
Any credible history of oil refining in America lists W.D. Crosby as the man responsible for the commercial development of the oil seeps in northwestern Pennsylvania; he secured his place in industry annals by using steam-power cable-tools and brine-drilling derricks otherwise employed in digging for salt. Having subsequently sold his interests in Superior Rock Coal Company, Crosby had become a canny speculator in South African diamond mines. ‘Petroleum Pioneers’ (Sloan & Griffith,1900) describes Crosby as a rugged outdoorsman, an avid hunter, a rubicund and fleshy bull of a man with a raucous laugh and a persuasive personality.
The accompanying photograph portrays him as exactly that.
Khosa further labels him ‘as reckless as he was unafraid—cowed by neither tusk nor fang’ and in his journal, gives accounts of some of their earlier trophy hunts:
“One year, Crosby brained a two-ton black rhino on the Barsaloi sand river. The next, he took a savage leopard on the rocky cliffs of Voi who managed to swipe his face with a paw and leave a dew-claw in his right eye, which, with difficulty, I removed. The following year he shot a four-hundred-pound salt-and-pepper lion in prime condition that had spent the previous two years eating laborers at work on the Uganda Railway; the pegged-out skin measured 10 feet 9 inches. And then, amid the desert thorn-scrub known as The Borani, where soils are volcanic and there is no shade, we tracked a famous bull elephant called ‘Crown Prince’ for fourteen days and wore out several pairs of hobnailed boots; we slept in the elephant’s tracks and drank from his water holes and finally cornered him in a thicket where Crosby dropped him with a single side-brain shot; the record-class tusks weighed 129 and 124 lbs. And lastly, on the thickly-jungled Mballamballa Island, a Cape buff broke from a swaki grove not ten feet distant; the ice-cool blow from Crosby’s doubled-barreled .470 was vintage and the brute succumbed only at the last second, pinning Crosby so firmly beneath its deadweight that it took the entire crew to roll the body off.
As always, Crosby rose from the ordeal, dusted himself off and downed a mouthful of wompo whiskey. An awestruck game scout gave him a nickname: ‘B’wana Doomay,’ which in Swahili means ‘Mr. Fearless Male.’
Crosby assured him, “Me? Afraid of what? This is the most fun I have ever had pursuing something that money can’t buy.”
But following this particular buffalo hunt, Khosa realized that for him, money would become a problem. Having bagged the last of his ‘Big Five’ trophy heads, Crosby began to talk excitedly about moving on to hunting tigers in Kaladhungi and chamois in the Alps, expressing regret that his favorite tracker did not know the spoors or panoramas of India or Europe.
His regret did not equal Khosa’s: Despite being educated at the Jesuit Mission School in Lamongo, Khosa did not adhere to the Christian view of monogamy; at the time, he had three wives and had set his eyes on a fourth—a well-developed woman he describes as ‘blessed by the supreme god Nzambi with onyx eyes and exquisite chocolate-colored features.’
She was, in addition, the daughter of a regional headman, and so in English terms, a princess.
To secure a trophy head like hers would not require four-ounce bullets or Curtis and Harvey’s powder but the funds to pay off the father, who set the girl’s price at sixty cows.
With his gravy train laying tracks toward greener pastures, Khosa did not think he could raise the cash even by taking out parties of American dirt-shooters, who (unlike W.D. Crosby) refused to pay a black man at the same rate they did a white-skinned tracker from British or German East Africa.
It was for this reason that Reuben Khosa took a gamble: On Crosby’s final night at the Mballamballa encampment, after sharing hunting memories over fat eland steaks, Reuben Khosa dipped deeply into his repository of stories and related a tale that (to his knowledge) no man without African blood had ever before heard. While he told it, the native porters shook their heads and noted that Khosa was fingering the thick fringe on his Gilly Gilly—a Bantu amulet designed to counteract the evil that they expected would follow.
The campfire blazed that night, casting eerie flickers across a grassy glade:
“As you know,” Khosa began, “there is a landmass in the very center of this continent that remains unmapped. It is ruled mostly by the fists of four or five hundred mafuca—little tribal kings—who in most cases are not potent or powerful, but live in thatched shimbecs and administer to lazy, poverty-stricken subjects; such are twin traits that often go hand in hand among men but a few steps removed from brute creation. What you may not know, B’wana, is that three hundred miles to the west of the Borani elephant country where we tracked Crown Prince there exists uninhabited territory straddled on the north by the Zuhura volcanos and to the south by the primeval rainforests of Lumene ku Lumonso. In the midst of this vast landlocked plateau is a region referred to in the Kikongo tongue as ‘Wankulu Nduengoso’—in English, ‘Valley of the Angels.’ It is so named because it is sacred, overseen not by these petty Congolese princes, but by your own Christian God, who watches over it as He did the garden in Eden. You will find it said that in Wankulu Nduengoso, there is no single apple tree in which the evil spirit resides; for mankind, the entire valley is so forbidden.”
As intended, he had piqued the oilman’s interest; Khosa listened closely as curiosity filtered its way through Crosby’s natural skepticism: “Sounds like a humbug. Like Shangri-La or Atlantis.”
“It may be just that, B’wana. No man now alive is known to have visited this valley, rumored to be the habitat of the many monsters that at one time roamed the planet but have elsewhere died out. One may claim they perished in Noah’s flood or grew extinct through some natural catastrophe, but here—in God’s protectorate—they survive unmolested.”
“If they have not been seen, what makes you think they exist?”
“Well that’s it, B’wana. It is a superstation among the Bantu with representation in the song cycles of Xosa, Mashona, the Zulu; you can trust these stories or throw them away—it doesn’t matter. But you will recall that I distinctly said no man ‘now alive.’ What is officially forbidden may be secretly deferred, and when I was a little boy at the Christian mission school, we once gave temporary shelter to a ragged, toothless, hooded stranger—a nomadic fellow belonging to the rough class of trader that is today—like these prehistoric beasts—well-nigh extinct. Being high-strung boys, we were enthralled with his adventure stories, most especially regarding his recent passage from the Cabo Rojo on the coast through the very heart of Wankulu Nduengoso and all the way to the little missionary dormitory. Oh, we listened to him with our jaws agape and our eyes on fire—especially when he drew back his hood and showed us how the Christian God had branded his trespass—he had a Chi-Rho burned into his forehead, the Biblical mark of Cain.”
Much of the schoolboy remained intact within W.D. Crosby; he became enthralled as well. He bid Khosa to continue.
“We were all the sons of Africa, of course, and from the time we were weaned from our mother’s breast we had been versed in the many wonders and endless peculiarities of nature. And even so, the trader’s images were, to us, something entirely novel—luxurious trees with mighty creepers, strange and luscious fruits and appalling new insects. But most amazing were the beasts he encountered; the lords of this inland empire. The hooded man described them in such detail that the most talented among us set about to draw them in a tablet, and revised them at his direction until they were a faithful rendition of what he had seen.”
With this, Khosa took up a stick and began to draw outlandish creatures in the dirt. Crosby had the safari crew build up the campfire to create better light and at the end of twenty minutes, Khosa had recreated five of the beasts that the hooded wretch had described: There was a hair-clad elephant with four tusks, a hog-like brute with prehensile lips, a giant cat with sabers for teeth, a bipedal sloth and a massive armadillo; for scale, Khosa drew the crude shape of a palm tree beside the animals. “No mountain goats in Wankulu Nduengoso, B’wana,” the tracker pointed out. “Alas.”
Examining the drawings, Crosby frowned: “A shame your man did not carry a camera. Anyone can find an illustration in a library book and create pictures to mesmerize children. I don’t suppose you know if your trader can still be found today and interviewed?”
“I said ‘no man now alive.’ News came back to us in the upcoming weeks that the mark on his brow had been detected in the nearby village of Pambo and they were not as eager as the missionaries to show him kindness; in fact, they poisoned him with cassia seed and left his body to rot and his bones to bleach.”
“A further shame, then, since there is no credible corroboration to these sightings.”
“Oh, it’s no shame,” Khosa replied with conviction: “It’s a blessing. It’s surely best to leave Wankulu Nduengoso to the angels untouched, as your God demands. It is the last place in Africa that has not been shot over and let it remain so. And to think, you can hunt for goat horns in the Alps without imperiling your soul. And I suppose and the largest tiger in all Kaladhungi may leave a dew-claw in your other eye but he has neither the patronage or the authority to place on your forehead the mark of Cain.”
Crosby leaned back on his wooden stool and gazed into the trembling embers for a long time; long enough for Khosa to suppose that a final incentive was needed.
He said, “Besides, look at the horrified faces on these carriers—they are up-country Africans; they know this folklore as well as I do. I will bet that despite your vast American fortune, you don’t have enough money to induce these boys to a safari to Wankulu Nduengoso.”
The push had the intended result: In a moment, Crosby said, “I bet I do.”
II.
Crosby lost that bet; not one of his usual retinue of beaters and tent boys would sign on. Their fears survived from elder times—they were from tribes where taboos outweighed wages, even wages two times in excess of what they were used to getting.
“N’gong gong, n’geten zambi,” they said, by which they meant, “Nzambi Mpungu will repay anyone who treads this place with death.”
But Reuben knew of only one man who had ever dared tread there, and he had not been killed by God, but by Bantu poison. So, when Crosby (believing, as intended, that the idea was his own) raised the prospect of penetrating the unmapped, uncharted country of the far interior, Khosa alone volunteered to risk it. He assured the oilman that, owing to the increase in pay and his fluency in native dialects, he could assemble a superb caravan of porters from tribesmen ignorant of (or oblivious to) the legends of Wankulu Nduengoso.
Crosby took him at his word and instructed him to outfit an expedition that would depart at the start of the following winter, April or May in these latitudes, when it would be relatively dry and without excessive heat.
In the meantime, he left to purchase a claim in some ‘diamondiferous’ land along the Orange and Vaal Rivers, a down-country trip that would occupy the better part of the rainy season.
And so, Reuben Khosa was able not only to secure his princess bride, but to bind her arms in gold and raise gorgeous tattoos across her back while living in luxury for several months.
Why not? Tall, in the masculine bloom of youth with skin that shone like polished obsidian, Khosa believed he deserved a life of elephant heart and blue palm wine, and in settling into it too easily, he made his first critical mistake: He waited until he’d run through the better part of Crosby’s stake—$500 to outfit a three-month-long safari—before setting to work to hire porters.
Since this was the Golden Age of shooting excursions, the cream of the crop had already been snapped up and what remained in the hiring pool were dregs, either inexperienced men or those jaded to indolence. Some were drunkards; some were scarcely on the sunny side of barbarity while the rest were childlike men suited to collecting wood or picking ticks off oxen, but unlikely to display much mettle in the face of elemental forces. The best of the lot was M’zuela, who had been attacked by a pack of wild dogs as a child and was missing most of the flesh of his face.
The pack animals Khosa managed to rustle up were not much better: Having spent lavishly on his wives (as befits a prince), the mules he bought were ancient and the span of oxen were unsalted, and so, remained susceptible to distemper.
But for good or ill, this cast the die, and on Tuesday April 21, 1910, W.D. Crosby disembarked at a rail spur in Luemba accompanied by a raw-boned Cape Town skinner called Coetzee and William Westbeech, a watery-eyed stringer from ‘National Geographic.’ Westbeech came equipped with as detailed a map of the Congo State as then existed and a Brownie No. 2 camera so that whatever Crosby bagged could be preserved alive on film as well as dead in skulls and skins.
That morning, the station compound was overflowing with turbaned Musselmen and Indian traders, but Khosa’s laden, white-topped wagons and forty assorted carriers, tent-boys, sais and shenzi made an impressive enough sight. Khosa assured B’wana that the cortège was battle-tested and game to get on with it.
Crosby, who on many occasions had trusted Khosa with his life, took him at his word, and of this sentimental confidence Khosa later wrote (rather sadly): “Never was erring mortal man more deceived.”
From Luemba, they set off on the first leg of the trip; a trek to the frontier outpost of Yiingasa, which sat on the banks of the Mongofo River, at the mouth of a gorge between a line of extinct volcanos. In the lingua franca, ‘Yiingasa’ meant ‘far enough’ and it seemed to be an apt title—on Mr. Westbeech’s map, nothing lay beyond it but white, uncharted emptiness.
As these things go, the trek to Yiingasa was unexpectedly arduous; the equatorial heat kicked in too early and the riverbeds dried to bedrock beneath the glare. They adjusted route and habit, traveling by night with the Cross over their left shoulders and the Bear on their right, moving from water-hole to water-hole; they marched through wastes of desolation and miles of fine sand that rose in choking clouds.
Under these stresses, the physical limitations of Khosa’s porters became obvious. With seasoned grunts, a safari could make fifteen miles a day; these ragged wretches, struggling under fifty-pound loads, barely made five. Food, Crosby decided, was the source of their problem—since being engaged, these men had subsisted on wet sawdust made from the pounded roots of trees and dried wildebeest which had gone quite green. So he set to work shooting wart hogs and antelope cows wherever he could, and the trees around the camps were generally festooned with strips of flesh. But filled bellies cannot cure innate laziness, and the men placed in charge of their daily-constructed kraals routinely neglected to lock them, and so, their mules were taken by hyenas. Meanwhile, the oxen, one by one, succumbed to distemper.
Neither did the fresh meat help them through the nastiest bits of bush, where the foliage was matted together and guarded by green-barked trees with two-inch thorns as sharp as needles. The men had been outfitted with broad-bladed assegai machetes but received wounds from the thorns that would not heal. Many became seriously ill and died, and by the time they arrived at Yiingasa, nineteen of the forty porters Khosa hired had left their bones beneath unhospitable soils.
Crosby had intended to top off the entourage with men hired from the outpost, but in this, he was equally disappointed; Yiingasa was an anchorage for deformities. The village men were emaciated and haunted-looking, naked but for ritual scars coiling across their chests and backs like railroad tracks and the women were equally forlorn—old ones with teeth worn to the gums and young ones standing around listlessly with hungry babies in skin slings while their breasts leaked milk. The only animation came from the barking jackals the villagers kept as pets and from the youngest children, who skittered off in terror at the sight of fair skin. They lived in beehive huts backed by niggling little shambas and flimsy pig sties, but largest part of their focus was directed at the huge ant hill in the center of the village, near which, old men squatted by small fires smoking pipes and old women crouched over piles of stinking dried fish.
Khosa knew their language, which differed only slightly from the Kikongo he’d spoken as a child, but his attempts to locate the village headman were met by crooning confusion followed by eerie songs with weird and meaningless refrains.
Crosby had intended to set up camp on the outskirts of Yiingasa and remain for as long as it took to refit and recuperate, but his mood became increasingly foul over the bungled situation—the death and incompetence had tracked them from Luemba.
To further explain Crosby’s bile and its disastrous consequences, I will defer again to poetic passages lifted verbatim from Rueben Khosa’s notebook:
“A Cape buffalo that has been wounded by a lion is, quite naturally, among the most ill-tempered creature under the sun. I hereby declare that such an injured beast is a gnat compared to W.D. Crosby within a day or two of our reaching Yiingasa. In this case, the lion was myself and the wound was his faith in my ability to manage the important expedition of his life.
In attempt to regain his graces, I set about trying to secure a fleet of canoes from the villagers, which would help immensely on our return trip laden with heavy skins and trophy heads. From what I could determine, the Mongofo River had its headwaters somewhere up ahead, beyond the gorge rising above us as an imposing, mist-draped, jungle-clad fortress, and would serve as a natural conduit from the interior. But I had no luck with the boats; the primitive mind is absolute, and once our destination was made clear, not even the sturdiest among them would consent to sign on, though I offered them fifty rupees each. Yiingasa, they declared, was ‘far enough.’
Meanwhile, B’wana was insistent on setting out at once despite having fewer than half the men that such an expedition would require. His fear was justified; those few we had set up camp in a mopani grove a hundred yards or so from the village and promptly discovered a store of munkoyo beer. In addition, the Yiingasa women had neither honor nor willing protectors to look out for them, and proved to be quite indifferent to their own assaults. To his disgust, inside one of the porter tents Crosby discovered girls no more than ten years old with bound wrists. He would have shot the offending grunts on the spot had not their services been irreplaceable in the days that loomed ahead.
The Geographic stringer, meanwhile, seemed no more anxious than the porters to resume the safari. Since leaving Luemba, Mr. Westbeech had more than once referred to the search for the Valley of the Angels as ‘utterly quixotic,’ but professionally, he recognized the opportunity in such an experience. He had hoped to spend a week or two in Yiingasa, and was having a field day photographing the strange and haggard natives in their bowl-cut braids.
But Crosby was footing the bill, so at his insistence, we broke camp and, cloaked by dawn on the following day, we set off into the looming mountain range. By then, we were reduced to a skeleton crew of twelve who proved, in the end, to be of little more worth than actual skeletons.
We first faced Lumene ku Lumonso—a green and monstrous barrier that seemed to stand still in an indeterminate state, time-sealed from the perceivable present. We climbed ever higher into this harsh terrain, floundering up boulder-strewn rises until we faced a seemingly impenetrable walls of vegetation, and then found or hacked out routes into the longest shadows. Three thousand feet, four thousand feet up a dormant volcano that Westbeech called Macaia Chintomo, the last landmark with a name. On the far side the moss-laden jungle was wreathed in earth-exhaled vapors—an ambiguous and formidable vista.
We cut our way down the opposing slope, and that ‘way’ quickly closed behind us as a door will shut if propelled by a gust of wind. But there was little wind among the high stillness that swamped these primeval forests where the trunks of trees grew ten to fifteen feet in diameter and their huge limbs hung nearly to the forest floor, weighed by pendulous flower clusters. After the heat and drought of the sand-belts between Luemba and Yiingasa, the cool damp of this phase of the trek was initially welcome.
Into a gorge and then up another mountain—five thousand feet, six thousand feet. And in all this time, what seemed to us most inexplicable was the lack of wildlife. For a team of hunters and trackers (and one ‘Geographic’ naturalist), we could locate no spoor amid the massive arboreal buttresses nor did we catch sight of so much as a dormouse.
There were no birds in the skies nor fish in the rivers, but what flourished here were insects; the curtains of mist we’d seen on the boughs of mlozilozi trees from a distance turned out to be spiders’ webs the size of houses. Ticks abounded, and scorpions had to be removed daily from our sheepskin karosses. We encountered a species of jigger whose bites raised lumps that turned into sores. Worst of all, the quivering haze and festering slime gave birth to vicious, long-legged black mosquitoes with a bite like the sting of a wasp. They descended on us each night, carrying with them some unnamed sickness whose symptoms were not the lethargy that comes with malaria but the opposite: Twirling their fimbo sticks, our porters and camp-boys went from silent plodding to almost manic singing, claiming that the earth was speaking through them. It may have been delirium, but I knew as well as anyone that these tribal voices, rising from the least technological cultures on earth, may have been corrupted by European commerce, but retained the intimate relationship between land and language. They writhed and twitched; they clawed their feet sideways and flicked out their tongues; they sang birthright verses and dropped their heavy packs and machetes and could only be induced to take them again when confronted with the barrel of W.D. Crosby’s Winchester. “No creature alive is the match of a man with a gun,” the B’wana told them, “and this includes the naked ape.”
This sort of strangeness went on for many days. Eighteen of them to be precise. For my part, I noticed a discernable change in my perceptions—whether mosquito born or not, I cannot say. I found it increasingly difficult to imagine time and space as distinct dimensions. At night it became worse—my dreams were peculiar and in my memory, without parallel. Through them, I was entirely lucid, and I saw the road ahead exactly as it was shown on Mr. Westbeech’s map—an absolute void without connection to anything material.
B’wana also felt the mental shift—I knew this without asking. Amid the trees that rose into the canopy like stern old men, his temperament succumbed. His fury abated and his face took on wild and colorful intensity. We pushed forward, deeper into saddle terrain of the Zuhura volcanos, up one mountain, down another, six thousand, seven thousand feet. Another week went by ...and bizarrely, we still saw no game.
Being without a map that listed landmarks, I began to privately if we would even know it if we came upon Wankulu Nduengoso. Our supplies dwindled, and since we generally supplemented our corn and rice with animals shot along the way, we began to ration food; the porters went back to their rancid wildebeest and such insects as could catch. I heard the murmurs around the campfires, and I believed that these surly porters intended to cannibalize the next man who fell.
Hearing this, I naturally questioned myself, not merely as a guide, but as a man. I had secured my exquisite black princess; I was heir to her father’s throne, but I had taken these things on credit, and if I could not deliver the Valley of the Angels to my sponsor, I saw that I would have to return everything. For this is who I am: Having spent my formative years in a Christian school, my mind has not accepted their otherworldly Yahweh, but I have infinite respect for the worldliness of integrity.
And then, at last, on a clear evening, heading into a setting sun, we seemed to penetrate a final montane jungle and stood at the peak of a last volcanic summit—and everyone knew by instincts both sensual and emotional that if any Valley of Angels existed, we must be staring into her heart.
By this point in history, the native abundance of the African continent had been largely lost, but here, in the elongated rays of a fading sun, it appeared as a spacious and inexhaustible now. Below us spread true virginity—a mosaic of unknown rivers, un-savaged woodlands, wild grassy savannas, and far off, on the horizon, glacier-clad mountains that Crosby estimated could not be less than 14,000 feet in height.
He declared it to be the most beautiful thing any man had ever witnessed.
“Save Adam,” I answered.
Not everything surrounding us was beautiful, though; the bugs had done their damage. Gone were the singing and ritualized cavorting; the porters were bone-weary and many suffered tick fever to compound whatever the mosquitoes had provided. The worst off was Mr. Westbeech, who had taken ill two days before and now appeared to be on the brink of death, no longer responsive to fever tincture and rapidly losing the power of his limbs.
We knew that we would have to establish a base camp before we even considered a descent into the valley, and to our great fortune, amid the thickets of vegetation, we found a cave—a cool rock tunnel thirty feet deep and six feet high. It was not large enough for everyone, but the porters had their tents and promptly set them. We managed to get Westbeech onto a mossy dais and tended him as best we could. My night passed dreamlessly, meaning sleeplessly, since the grunts and wails from the delirious photographer was an intolerable lullaby.
I finally drifted off toward dawn, and was almost immediately nudged awake by Crosby’s boot. He told me to prime the guns and fill the powder bags, and then, with manic excitement, he dragged me to the cliff overlooking the valley and shoved his field glasses at me. I gazed into the enveloping mists and soon began to make out what he’d just seen:
The plains below were teeming with life; living descendants of beasts that had roamed the earth for thousands of years, unnamed perhaps, but not unknown—they were the ones described by the hooded wanderer in Lamongo and duplicated by me in the dust of a Mballamballa campfire. Below us were droves of beasts in herds many hundreds strong, as yet unthinned by hunters. Some were migrating; others were gathering by lakes, more were crossing river courses where even from a great distance I could detect surges of colorful fish. Everything seemed to blossom forth spontaneously from a vast green density.
This is exactly what I had promised, and so in that moment, I became in B’wana’s estimation, just like the vista: A singularly sacred presence.
He took the field glasses back, and had me return to camp to roust our skinner and tell him to listen carefully for the report of a rifle. That would signal B’wana’s first kill; whereupon, Coetzee was to gather up as many porters as were healthy enough to carry skins and heads and then listen again on the half-hour for more rifle shots by which they could find us. Crosby also had me fetch Mr. Westbrook’s Brownie, since the man was no longer in a state to use it.
I did exactly as he asked, when I returned, B’wana was slavering; a starving man before a sprawling feast. He wanted a slice of everything and his tone took on a febrile intensity and he cursed the fact that so many of his carriers had died—mourning not for their wives and children, but for the limit it placed on what he could bag and preserve.
In his mind, today marked the first of many safaris to Wankulu Nduengoso. I was not so sure. I felt the aura of dread and confusion that had been hovering above me for weeks settle now into the marrow of my bones. I am not convinced that I possess a soul, but if I do, I believe that in the moment I stepped beyond the threshold, it decomposed and became submerged within hidden dimensions.
In the instant, though, my discomfort made no difference. Perhaps it should have. I was B’wana’s vaunted tracker with a fee to earn and I intended to earn it. With the heat of the day rising quickly, we began our descent into the crater. All told, we scrambled a mile or more down into the valley, hugging the cliffs, wending through close-knit bush until we finally reached the bottom. There, I immediately cut fresh spoor from one of the furred, four-tusked elephants we had spied from above; one so massive that it made our prized ‘Crown Prince’ look like a domestic pig. By the size of the smooth-heeled tracks—nearly four feet in diameter—B’wana estimated the four tusks would weigh over a hundred forty pounds each.
But despite this girth, I was pleased to find that the habits of this new beast were not much different from the solitary bulls of the Borani, so I tracked him in the identical fashion, following piles of steaming dung into a strip of riverine jungle half a mile wide, and in time came to a sandy patch where the ground had been ploughed and overturned as the creature dug for roots. From this point, we moved in a semi-circular course until we were nearly back to the steep slope down which we had initially descended, perhaps a mile or two further down the crater rim.
There in a small clearing stood our trophy tusker, trunk raised toward the breezes, testing them for tainted air. We advanced like serpents, wriggling on our bellies until we reached the base of an acacia tree about thirty yards from the bull.
Crosby raised his .405, but before he fired, he gestured toward the Brownie, and I took the photograph. This was against my instincts; I anticipated what would happen next. In fact, the sound of the shutter was enough to alert the beast, and now the eddies shifted and he caught our scent. He swung his thick silvery trunk around and trumpeted, then crashed off into the forest.
It was not the first time a stalk had been frustrated in the final instant, but it was the first time that it was followed by a phenomenon of this magnitude:
Something had been perched on a volcanic cone part way up the slope, secreted from our view, camouflaged by foliage and rock and a set of massive burnished wings. Now, roused by the elephant’s alarm, it reared up; B’wana saw it at the same time as I did.
Rather, in the same moment, we both saw him.
My description is surely wanting and my artistry is better suited to pointed sticks and campfire ash. But I shall attempt it: The creature we saw—but who did not yet see us—was nearly ten feet tall; in form, it looked like a man, but a man with multiple wings—six in all—which, in grandeur and majesty, like an immense golden peacock, he now unfolded. His face held the radiance of suns immemorial; his skin had the sheen of beryl from Cleopatra's Mines. The act of his standing up spread wondrous light across the clearing; surely, this was a holy being. In fact, recalling my once-mandatory Bible readings, I could even identify the species: A Seraphim.
We were well hidden in heavy bush, the creature was a hundred and thirty yards distant, and I saw that we might still make our escape undetected. The light from his countenance illuminated the shadows before us, but the iron-hard dirt through which we’d crawled remained in full shade from the acacia grove, and I grappled with B’wana’s sleeve to urge an immediate retreat. It was only then that I recognized the other kind of light, the diabolical hellfire that sparked in Crosby’s eyes.
And to me, suddenly, it was no longer deniable: Crosby’s blood was unsalvageable, deluged by the sins which the overlords in our epoch have elevated to virtues; the vainglory, the lust, the greed and gluttony of a relentless hunt for trophies. Before us stood an apex, the most majestic of designs, and in B’wana’s appraisal, without question, this made him the most prize-worthy trophy in all of Africa, in all the world, and for that matter, in all creation. And Crosby, the big game hunter, crouching and avaricious, was a long—but not impossible—shot away.
I was horrified into the abstract, but what could I do? Crosby was my employer and I had guided him to this very spot in order for him to secure trophies. And yet, if I would shoot on sight a man in my safari who resorted to cannibalism, even to keep himself alive, how much worse was this? Carnal or celestial, this was a man—perhaps not entirely of mankind, but a burnished being of a higher order, neither white or black nor any shade produced on earth.
I should have acted instantly. But I hesitated in the critical second.. Crosby raised the Winchester and took sight on the glorious, ringlet-maned head as it turned this way and that, casting forth looks of annoyance, puzzlement and instinctive aversion. I cried out then and struck his elbow, but too late; he pulled the trigger, and if the shot was deflected, it was only by a millimeter. The angel was hit and Crosby barked in joy as the great winged apparition dropped from his perch, arms and wings akimbo, falling heavily into the bracken below.
As the shot echoed against the black volcanic wall, another sound came from further overhead—a peal of thunder. A sudden storm rolled in and a dusty verse from my schoolboy studies occurred to me:
“Though they were the terror of the mighty in the land of the living, they went down to Shaol with their weapons of war and their iniquities shall be upon their bones.”
We found the angel spread-eagled where he had fallen. There was no blood; or rather, the fluids that leaked from the hole in his temple were as clear as water shimmering from a brook. But the Seraphim was not quite dead—and with a truer brain-shot, he would have been.
B’wana reproached me for foiling his aim, and it was well-deserved. We stood in transfixed horror as the massive creature struggled to rise, rearing his head so that his saliva sluiced onto the dirt. In a lion or a tusker, we would have seen this action as spasmodic, the final death-throes, but as the angel’s glorious head briefly resurrected itself from black earth, he caught us in jewel-blue eyes and his regard was more potent than anything I have felt before or since. It was not wrath or hatred, but fierce and tragic sadness.
It was prophecy, too, without question; it was a foreshadow of fate for those who seize without the ability to replenish, who foul and exploit and ruin; it was anguish that came from the earth itself.
Our next move, however distasteful, was necessary—we’d have done the same thing for a sparrow: B’wana rose and shifted his position and held the muzzle of his rifle two inches from the base of the angel’s skull—just at the junction with the vertebrae—and fired a kill-shot so close to flesh that smoke from the powder curled from the green-tinted skin.
With that, the angel rolled onto his back and did not move again.
Overhead, the sky roiled with livid clouds. B’wana squatted with the rifle across his waist, lifting the great golden-maned head, tucking the lolling tongue back inside the mouth, opening the crystalline eyes wider, screaming, “Quickly, quickly, Khosa! ...before the rain sets in.”
He was calling for a photograph of himself with his ultimate trophy and adopted the classic hunter’s pose. I complied, of course. And as I pushed the slide lever, staring down the viewfinder, I saw in the angel’s pristine face a fixed and unchanging essence and within the blue eyes, the envelopment of my own eternity. Even lifeless, the angel saw that the gruesomeness of the spectacle was not the dead, but the living.
B’wana sat on his haunches and effected his customary scowl, intending the photograph to say, ‘Here squats the formidable conqueror, the oil driller, the diamond miner, the great white nimrod who takes without replacing.’
But his face was uneasy and his right arm trembled; his own head looked shrunken and impotent next to the massive golden one he held aloft. And this was not even the most striking feature that this lens would capture—B’wana’s brow was. Burned into his forehead was the Chi-Rho, the chrismon, the curse—the mark of Cain.
And afterward, when I lowered the Brownie, I found B’wana gaping at me just as intently. His expression, like mine, contained flashes of boding dread. So I fingered my own forehead then and sure enough, the identical imprint was burning through my skin, impressing itself upon my skull.
Rains came then; they fell heavily. And the iniquities were literally upon our bones.”
III.
Let me here offer a personal critique: Not only do I find Khosa’s narrative compelling, I place the quality of his prose alongside many of the era’s great adventure writers; Jules Verne, Jack London, Joseph Conrad, etc. Surely Rueben Khosa must have been among the most talented students ever produced at the Lamongo Mission School.
But this establishment has long since ceased operation and its records are lost. I can find nothing substantial related to his childhood. The surname ‘Khosa’ is common in modern day Zambia and Zimbabwe, where it is associated with the Bantu people. So I rate his mind as one of those rare sparks in the dark wash of history that show briefly as brilliant points of light and then vanish.
I will also add here that a portion of Khosa’s notes relates to his career; to wit, in 1899, he was introduced to the safari trade by R.J. Cunninghame (who he refers to as ‘Masharubu’), being engaged as a runner, a tracker, a beater. He also worked for Bill Judd and Leslie Tarlton and seems to have struck out on his own around 1903. His name does not appear in the writings of the professionals mentioned, but Theodore Roosevelt, in a footnote to page 179 of ‘A Hunter’s Africa’ (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), refers to an African tracker called Reuben Ntlokwana who ‘combined the qualities of a first-rate explorer, guide, field naturalist and a dignified safari manager known in particular for the strength of his limbs.’
Ntlokwana, as it happens, is the Swahili version of Khosa.
So I return to the next portion of the narrative:
“After three weeks beneath sweltering blue skies, such rain would otherwise have been welcome, but it quickly became our bane. The clouds overhead churned like black smoke and belched forth torrents, but B’wana would not consent to find shelter and leave his trophy to scavengers. So I did what I could; I fetched boughs and green saplings and wove them together with giant palm fronds to create a canopy. This would keep the rain off our powder and camera, but it would not keep the carcass from spoiling in heat that I reckoned at well over one hundred degrees.
As we sat, hour on hour, waiting out the storm, I took note that the angel’s eyes did not haze over in death, but remained dazzlingly clear, motionless, focused on anything that, by chance, came into their line of fire. As I moved about to patch up leaks in our little makeshift skerm, the target of that cold gaze—illuminated by tremendous lightning flashes—was frequently myself. I tried again and again to shut the lids, but they would not stay down—they lifted with mechanical persistence. So I covered the face in wet leaves, and then the entire figure, telling B’wana that I wanted to keep the flies away.
And soon enough, the flies came—great swarms of pink-tinged monsters bigger than horseflies—but they were drawn to the burn-marks on our foreheads and not one came within a yard of the corpse. We tried to light Guinea Gold cigarettes to ward off them off, but our matches were a casualty of the dampness and would not strike. We fired our rifle signal on the half-hour or so, intent on getting out of this stifling morass sooner and not later.
But considerably time passed and no one came. We huddled and waited and swatted. The gloom thickened, and we sensed the approach of dusk. Our options were limited—in my view, the only sensible one was to leave the dead Seraphim where he lay, make our own way out of the valley and return in the morning with the others.
But Crosby would not hear of it and I would not abandon him. Throughout the whole of the safari, from the first step to the final handshake, he was my obligation. We estimated the Seraphim at three hundred pounds, and if he intended to keep it, we would have to field dress it where it lay, de-flesh the skull and be content with that, or else carry the entire mass back to camp—none of which we could do without help. And B’wana was quite insistent: He wanted the entire ten-foot carcass, golden mane and massive wings. So we fired yet another signal shot, our tenth, and I began to worry about the amount of powder we had left.
In stern reality, we were in a fix. And then suddenly, emerging from the storm runoff that was pouring between boulders, Coetzee the skinner arrived. He was wearing a slicker and an army overcoat, clutching a wet and now probably useless Martini–Henry carbine; he looked like a bedraggled dog who had been bested in a fight and leapt into the river only to find it full of crocodiles.
And he was alone. Finding our primitive little shelter was a relief as it would get him out of the rain, but I assumed relief would be short-lived—in the gloom of rain-heavy twilight he did not notice the frond-draped heap, nor could he see what was stamped on our brows; in order to keep off the flies, I had wrapped our heads in strips torn from the sleeve of my bush jacket.
He spoke in rapid bursts, like fire from a Lewis gun: “Westbeech is dead,” he cried. “And the grunts have taken away the body. I can’t say what they’ve done with it but I suspect it ended in a meal. They’ve staged a general mutiny, at least that’s my interpretation. At the sound of your shot, I tried to rally them, but not one would follow me down into the ravine. They’ve had enough of this business. When I threatened them with my rifle, they laughed in my face and assured me one or two might fall, but the rest would eviscerate me with their assegais and devour me too.”
“So, you came by yourself?” B’wana frowned.
Coetzee scowled in exasperation. “Have you not heard me? I had no choice. The savages refused to come and it was unsafe for a white fellow to remain among them for another minute. But it was all I could do to find a path down the mountain in this bloody rain; if you marked a trail, it has vanished.”
“Did you at least secure your equipment before you left; your alum and salts?”
“Of course. I moved everything into the rear of the cave.”
B’wana replied, “Don’t worry about the porters then; I’ll see to their antics. They’re too soft to beat war drums in front of me; let them laugh in my face and I’ll return the favor with a load of shot in theirs. As for us, we’ll have to spend the night here; at first light we will string the carcass to a pole-hammock and the three of us will carry it up the slope and back to camp. The cave will be your skinning shed and we’ll get the hide of the carcass into the salt immediately.”
“Which carcass?” Coetzee asked.
“This one,” Crosby answered, pulling back the mantle of leaves to reveal his kill. The angelic face stared upward with blue-eyed glassiness.
Expecting an animal, the skinner was appalled, and his glance ricocheted between us. “Oh, no. This is murder, sir,” he said. “I cannot be a party to it.”
B’wana fixed him in a stare as unwavering as the angel’s: “It’s not a wish, Coetzee; it’s a command. You were hired to do a job for me, and by God, you’ll do it or I’ll feed you to the mutineers myself. Now, stop your nonsense and we’ll settle in—somewhere under that slicker you must have dry matches. We can’t build a fire for want of dry wood, but we can at least smoke.”
Coetzee grunted and in time, he gave in; he handed over the matches, shook his head and muttered in Afrikaans, “I suppose that if this is murder, I am already implicated.”
It was true, but the substantiation was not ours to provide: A violent discharge of lightning ripped through the gloom of our small makeshift, and as we watched, the center of Coetzee’s brow bubbled and darkened to form the ghastly, now familiar configuration.
We spent a long hot night in that sodden inferno. We set watches, but no one slept. Hour after hour, the morbid rain continued to hammer down. Time trickled by; the great storm did not abate and at times grew so furious that it seemed to be a miracle that our flimsy shelter held.
And the irony was not lost on me that the three of us, marked with the curse of damnation, were now dependent on miracles.
Morning brought no respite from the monsoon, but B’wana was adamant that we must take the body back to camp immediately and get the skin into a bed of salt. To lose a trophy like this to confounding weather was intolerable.
I will here again note that, although creature had been dead for a full day now and lay in extreme heat, it remained free of any signs of putrefaction. This further spooked Coetzee, whose trade in animal carrion was long and illustrious. He declared that such a phenomenon was without precedent.
As soon as daylight allowed, I cut down a long sweet-thorn sapling for a pole and we lashed the carcass to it with vines, binding the wings tightly about the form to make a sort of cocoon. And then, with nearly unfathomable difficulty, beset by roaring torrents that often disappeared into holes in the porous ground only to gush forth elsewhere, through thick shrouds of mist that rose from hidden gullies and over the mossy boulders grown slick with slime, we picked a way up the slope and managed to surmount the crater with the prize intact.
In that time, the camera was lost, although I doubted the mechanics would have survived the downpour.
By the time we located our camp, the day was nearly gone. Our burden slowed us, obviously, but we smelled the place from a quarter mile away. Death and ash—a potent stench. And for all his complaining, Coetzee shortly saw the timeliness of his getaway:
Lightning strikes seemed to be the main culprit behind what we beheld—trees were smoldering in spite of the rain and many of the tents were flattened and charred. But the porters? They had faced a worse night than we had; their corpses were strewn about the clearing, torn to pieces. This was the handiwork of wild animals, and this meant, perhaps, that the scavengers of Wankulu Nduengoso had crept out the valley. Without their guardian, they now had free rein.
We made a circuit to our cave and laid the carcass on the dais vacated by the late Westbeech. B’wana appeared haggard and, seeing the devastation in the clearing, his expression became distorted.
“I fear an attack of the ague coming on,” he grunted. “I will have to sleep it off. Here are your instructions, Mr. Coetzee—salt the skin and preserve the head and feet. Do what you will with the entrails, but Khosa will hang the meat. Smoke it if you can get a fire going, Reuben. It will be manna on our journey back in the event that we again find no game.”
With that, he crumbled into a sitting position, knees bent with his back pushed against the stone wall and fell into deep and insensate slumber.
Being equally depleted, the skinner sighed from his gut, but he was under orders and knew the danger of leaving carrion untreated for long in the mephitic heat. So he began to unpack his tools; his sacks of salt and scabbard of cutting knives. I was suddenly revulsed and turned away, finding that I no longer has the stomach for the abominations of his trade. In any case, I had no intention of hanging any butchered meat. The cave was too damp to dry it and I doubted I could find kindling I could ignite. Not only that, but I saw no value in either technique, having long since concluded that this was sacred flesh and not subject to spoiling. Nor would I eat so much as a morsel of it; not today, not tomorrow and not on a long journey back.
For the time, my pressing duty was to stand sentry in the event that whatever had attacked the porters last night returned tonight for more. I squatted near the entrance to the cave and felt the darkness gather in behind the rain, holding my Springfield at the ready, fully intending to remain alert through the night—something I had done countless times before.
Yet this time I failed, and within five minutes, I was asleep.
When I lurched awake it was daylight. The storm had not subsided and a cascade of rainwater now flushed from the overhanging rocks to form a shimmering veil. Through it, I could see a communal roost of carrion birds in the branches of a charred camphor tree about thirty yards away.
As my vision cleared, I realized that beneath these birds, from a lower branch, Coetzee’s corpse was suspended with a vine around his neck.
I fired a shot to scatter the birds; they lifted themselves on nine-foot wings and took briefly to the sky, circled uneasily, then resettled their roost. I would have to cut down the skinner’s body before they started to feed in earnest and get him beneath a cairn—it was the decent thing to do.
But first I checked on B’wana, and found that he was also dead.
I knew this without question because these were the signs of death with which I was familiar; the gaping jaw, the dull grey film over the eyes, the sagging and sheenless skin and above all, the maggots—the flies had been busy. And since their first round of eggs had already hatched, I knew it must have been at least eight hours since Crosby died, likely shortly after I fell asleep. I compared B’wana’s atrocious head to the Seraphim’s, who lay on his stone platform, pristine and perfect, eyes showing the curved reflection of the rock overhead, gleaming into the void.
Near his great maned head, I saw that Coetzee had gotten far enough along in his work to have unsheathed his largest knife, and—polished to a mirror surface—I suspected that he had seen his own reflection in it. And if something other than the sight of the Chi-Rho on his brow had induced to take his own life, I did not know what it was, or particularly care.
A strange sensation washed over me. Having lost every single member of my safari, including my client, I did not experience the slightest bit of shame; rather, I felt inconceivable relief. Discharged from further obligation, I was suddenly free to flee this pestilent cave and escape the insanity which I had readily wrought and somehow wound up as the sole survivor. My objective was thus succinct: To make my way back through the wilderness, not as a hired tracker responsible for a wealthy American oilman and a worthless train of porters, but as a solitary native living by strength and wits.
First, however, I would cut the hapless skinner down and lay his corpse, along with Crosby’s, beneath stones—it was the proper thing to do. But as I attempted to lift Crosby’s corpse, he spoke:
“Is the skin in the salt?”
My own jaw fell open—this was not possible. Never in my years in the bush had the mark of death been more blatant in a corpse. The clouded eyes, the cold skin, the first metallic whiffs of rot. And not only that, but even an amateur naturalist will attest to the fact maggots do not consume living tissue. Here, these vile little worms seethed and boiled from every cavity in B’wana’s face.
And yet, though raspy and slurred like the voice of a drunken man, it belonged to W.D. Crosby: “Khosa, are you there? I have lost my vision entirely and I can scarcely hear. This is not ague—it’s something far more virulent; I fear I’m fly-stuck by an insect worse than the tsetse. Those devils that followed us into the lean-to, I suppose. Now answer me: Did Coetzee get the skin in the salt?”
“Coetzee is dead,” I said.
“Why won’t you answer? Is the skin in the salt?”
So I answered. Concluding that in his current state, semi-alive or semi-dead, his look-out was poor. I saw no reason to upset him: “Yes, B’wana. The skin is in the salt.”
“Excellent. So now you must arrange to get us out of this cursed place. My limbs get more numb by the minute. I can’t rise and I certainly can’t walk, but I believe you can build a sledge and bear me on it along with our preserved skin. I have a doctor in Nairobi with a sleeping sickness cure developed by the British army and perhaps it is effective on this affliction too. You are charged with keeping alive until then, Khosa. And if worse should come to worse, you must get this skin and skull to my people in Pittsburgh. Can you do this much for me?”
“I can do it, of course, B’wana. But we cannot move out until the rain stops. The Mongofo river will be swollen beyond what a sledge can cross. We will have to wait it out.”
“So build the sledge and we will wait it out, Khosa. A day or two at most. This is a freak storm—the monsoons are still months away.”
“I will build the sledge,” I promised.
But instead of a building that sledge, for which I guess there would be no need, I built a fire. It did not seem possible that B’wana could live much longer—minutes, perhaps—and should he confound his appearance beyond that time, he would never survive an overland trek of three or four hundred miles. Besides, he was already undergoing the immediate effects of death while somehow, appallingly, remaining conscious. His speech was labored as his jaw solidified in rigor mortis. Small blisters filled with fluid appeared on his face. His skin blued and was clammy to the touch; when I pressed his arm, the impression of my finger remained.
So I broke apart the chest that had contained Coetzee’s skinning equipment and shaved some wood tinder into a pile. Our matches were gone, but I was able to pry open a rifle cartridge and rub powder into a piece of flannel torn from my shirt, which I placed in the muzzle and ignited with the cap. I managed to get a flare going and fed it with strips of crate kindling. This afforded me a little more light as I set out to perform my most repulsive task:
One by one, I began to remove the maggots from Crosby’s face with the tip of my sheath knife.
He asked, “What are you doing?” and I answered lightly, “Tending to you, B’wana.”
“Is the skin in the salt?”
“Yes, the skin is in the salt.”
After that, he said nothing more; his jaw tightened until he could no longer form words. As soon as I had removed the last worm, I went to Coetzee and found him officially and metaphorically dead, so I cut him down and covered the corpse with stones I hauled over from piles washed from the mountainside.
I next rummaged beneath the remains of our tents and found more dry crates to feed my fire; also, there were oilskins, some duck-cloth and—with luck—I discovered a bolt of woven salampore that one of the porters had been carrying for bartering. In a pinch, this sort of colorful cloth can be substituted for fly-netting. I used it to swaddle B’wana’s head; likewise, I covered up the Seraphim’s face with duck-cloth, and afterward improvised a sort of doorway to the cave mouth with the oilskins.
With this pair of hideous faces out of sight—the dead one incorrupt and the living one decomposing in an inversion of the natural order—I found keeping watch easier.
But that night, there were new faces with which I had to contend: Strange beasts slunk up from the valley and lurked in the shadows, sometimes coming near enough for me to make them out—immense cats with tusks, wolves the size of zebras and hyenas bigger than lions. They sniffed and cast evil eyes toward me, but did not come closer. Perhaps it was my fire, but I believe their hesitation was due to the proximity of their dead guardian on the dais behind me. They were, in their solemn turn, doing the guarding. But they shortly made a mockery of my burial cairn by scrambling through the boulders and carrying away Coetzee’s body.
With the first fogs of dawn I checked on Crosby and found that he still breathed. But, beneath the salampore shroud, his head had now swollen to twice its size and the skin turned beef red. The smell he emitted was nearly overpowering.
“Do you live, B’wana?” I asked incredulously and a small melancholy croak from deep within his throat was my answer.
And the tireless rain continued to fall.
It had now been days since a morsel of food had passed my lips; I was gnawed by hungers that surmounted my disgust at the stench. I was ready for breakfast, but breakfast not being ready for me, I delved into surrounding caves until I found pale white crickets and, in dark pools beneath a dome of sulfurous flowstone, a species of eyeless, whitish-pink fish. A dubious diet, but delightful nonetheless—enough to see me through. I might die of ten thousand unique causes in this watery wasteland, but starvation would not be among them.
On the third morning, the singing started; a mewling gargle of nonsense words:
“Piggy on the railroad line,
Picking up the stones.
Along came the engine driver,
Breaking Piggy’s bones.”
It was with ineffable horror that I realized rigor mortis is a temporary state; it passes within days, beginning first in the smaller muscles of the face.
Having regained use of his jaws, B’wana pestered me about the skin; I assured him that the skin was salted. His own skin, I thought, could use some salt: Foamy, blood-tinged fluids dribbled from his nostrils and his face went from bloated red to forest green. I had to plug my nose with the linseed-coated oilcloth to endure his proximity.
Satisfied, he finished the nursery rhyme:
“‘Ah,’ said the Piggy,
‘That really isn’t fair.’
‘Oh,” said the engine driver.
‘I... do... not... care.’
And still, he would not die. And he would not stop singing.
How many days can a man endure such conditions and not lose his mind? I will give you a specific answer: Ten.
Each night the beasts came and glared through the gloom; shooting one was a crime I refused to consider lest I wind up ...like Crosby. And in time, in fact, I began to welcome them. They displayed a mighty vitality against the fog of death that hovered about me. I waited for them eagerly and night after night, they came to observe, snarling and chittering, and near dawn, they vanished.
Throughout this time, I found myself teetering between gods. I had, of course, been schooled in the discipline and authority of the Church, but rooted as deeply within me were the stories of earliest youth and the breath and bones of my ancestors. And yet this created not a mental dichotomy, but a fusion. And the fusion led, over those ten long days, to an inevitable conclusion: The mysteries of nature interpenetrate and inform; all things are aware and nothing is estranged. The Christian god Yahweh and the native god Nzambi exist in sensorial rapport; the world is a ramified network and the natural and the supernatural are in fact a unified whole.
For the full ten days, clouds bulged and billowed and the deluge went on and on; for all I knew, it was raining everywhere on earth. Perhaps inside my cave, I was not a rat in a hole but a Noah on an ark. The rains would not last more than forty days—of that I became gradually convinced—but they might last the full forty. B’wana, in his incomprehensible condition, might do the same. He might continue to putrefy, continue to expel foam and gas, continue to lose tissue mass, and he might continue to sing.
On the tenth day, I determined that I could not allow the monstrosity to continue; I would not suffer the ordeal to extend into an eleventh day. The crate-wood for the fire had run out and my regimen of bugs and blind fish had weakened me markedly. On that day—the tenth—I understood that if I intended to survive a trek back to civilization, at least with my brain and body intact, I could neither wait out the rain nor haul my client along as cargo. And by my deteriorating stamina, I saw that I would have to leave very, very shortly.
This led me to a decision that, however gruesome and repugnant, was necessary: I would have done the same for a sparrow: I held B’wana’s rotting head between my hands, offered him a last confession and got another round of Mother Goose for an answer. I said a few words of meaningless comfort and pointless apology since I knew that I was doing him the most intimate of kindnesses, then placed the muzzle of my Springfield against his chest, above the heart, and fired.
And the singing finally stopped.
What I did next, however, was not only gruesome and repugnant, but entirely unnecessary by the standards of Christian convention. But in the hierarchies of my birth culture, the head of a chieftain is of profound ceremonial importance.
This was the fusion within me made manifest; and so, I decapitated him.
With fire and a vessel, I would have boiled away what remained of his flesh and kept the skull, but I had neither, so I simply wrapped the head in oilcloth to hold back the stink, then entombed the torso under stones from the rockslides and left it where it lay, within the cave; outside, the wild animals had made short enough work of my cairn, but this was a place they did not seem inclined to enter. It was, without question, a shrine that harbored their celestial custodian, and for them, I saw that it would be an open-ended vigil for a corpse untouched by the ravages of time.
Before I left the cave for good, I uncovered the Seraphim’s head a final time, and slipping my fingers into the great mouth, still wet with saliva, I anointed my burned forehead in a pursuit of any small mercy. With that I slung Crosby’s head across my back (as a mother would do with an infant) and headed out to entwine myself once more in the rich textures of the continuum, heading east, with no idea what I might find beyond the storm.”
I need not spend much time condensing Khosa’s account of his return to the land of mortal men—it is brief enough in the original telling. Beyond the storm he found no Biblical flood engulfing the planet. He found that he was not the new Noah, but simply another bedraggled traveler with a scar on his face like the man who had wandered into his classroom many years before. He kept Crosby’s head covered in oilcloth and he wrapped his own in the same material, mindful of the fate of those marked with the chrismon among the Bantu.
But still, he minimized the risk: Wherever possible he avoided human contact and when it was unavoidable, he stuck to places where people dwelled in cesspools of shame and degradation and where he would not stand out. Weeks blend into months and then into years, and finally, he came to the shores of the Indian Ocean. Able to flee no farther from Wankulu Nduengoso, he declared that he was done with traveling. He took a menial job at St. Athanasius Orthodox monastery in Nduny Njeru and lived out the rest of his life tending gardens, cooking for his holy benefactors and looking after their livestock.
Reuben Khosa died at the remarkable age of 100, and as far as I can determine, in the seventy years he lived among these kindly, otherworldly monks, he did not mention the story of Wankulu Nduengoso or the final safari, nor did he once leave the consecrated grounds of the compound.
IV.
And now I shall introduce myself: I am Cornelius Engelbreght, Ph.D., doctor of ethnology at the Mombasa campus of the Richard Leakey Institute. My specialty is African pictographic alphabets.
In 1980, I was contacted by the Reverend Archimandrite Fr. Patrikios at St. Athanasius, who had found an elaborately carved blackwood chest hidden behind the wall in the room of their late caretaker, Reuben Khosa. In allowing me to examine the contents, he requested and received my promise of discretion, informing me that while preparing Khosa’s body for burial, a beatified mark was found on the forehead—a scar that he had kept concealed from them for more than seventy years. That was a shame; to Fr. Patrikios’ sect, the Chi-Rho was not a curse, but a divine anointment, and the mark had taken on the sort of golden sheen that one finds in the halos of Byzantine icons. Against his ebony skin, Patrikios said, it was a startling and potentially miraculous apparition.
It was the prospect of learning the source of Khosa’s sacred insignia that impelled the Archimandrite to allow me to take the entire chest back to my offices in Mombasa; it was filled with random documents one may collect throughout a long life, including—most significantly—a set of notebooks written in a strange, primordial text.
It was this text that I was charged with deciphering and the initial hope was that somewhere among the loose reams of ephemera contained within the chest, some clue might exist to help in decoding the script.
It did not; the papers in the chest were nothing more than simple to-do lists, dashed-off notions and receipts and the system of pictography wound up being entirely of Khosa’s own invention. The translation became, therefore, a dogged trial-and-error exercise that occupied the better part of forty years.
In brief, I can say that, although related to Ge’ez and the Bamum ‘mbiba,’ the script was entirely of Khosa’s own creation. He used a form of capitalization visually similar to an inverted question mark for proper names, a decimal system of glyphs for numbers and a semi-syllabary made up of several thousand logograms and characters arranged on the pages from top to bottom. Ultimately, I concluded that Khosa wrote these journals in a stylized, wholly invented script because he did not want them read by ecclesiasts. The church is happy to wrestle with supernatural manifestations, but only those of their own choosing. And Khosa’s tale was not a manifestation they would have chosen.
It is equally possible that he’d simply reached the limits of his tolerance for the commodification of Africa’s human, non-human and then, extra-worldly inhabitants, and wished to return to the holistics of a heritage where society treats its bounties with respect, not disdain. The latter explanation would explain the journal’s opening line, its ‘moral’:
“In the second half of adulthood, it is man’s duty to uncorrupt himself.”
In March of 2024, the distinguished Reverend Archimandrite Fr. Patrikios passed away, and thus—through his death—relieved me of my long vow of silence. I can now in good conscience offer the text of Reuben Khosa’s notebooks, embellishing no detail and using discretionary words only in those passages that contain phrases or concepts for which I can manage no direct English correlation.
Presumably, I have kept Khosa’s ‘voice’ intact by substituting words of which I believe he would have approved.
Besides being a remarkable read, the journal solves an enduring mystery: What actually became of the celebrated oilman and big game hunter W.D. Crosby who, along with ‘National Geographic’ photographer William Westbeech, vanished into the African wilderness in 1910?
As for the rest, it reads as a work of fiction, but I believe it to be true. You are welcome to form your own conclusion on this matter, but I will here add that shortly after I finished the translation and was about to return the elaborately-carved blackwood chest to the monastery, I found that it was equipped with a false bottom, and once the panel was removed, I uncovered an oilcloth sack that contained a human head. On the brow was the Chi-Rho, turned charcoal black.
Without a proper forensic analysis, I would not swear that the head belonged to W.D. Crosby, but in comparing it to the photograph in Sloan & Griffith’s ‘Petroleum Pioneers,’ I believed it to be his. The fact that such a comparison could even be made was inconceivably strange: The decomposition of the facial tissue appeared to have stalled, making it quite recognizable more than a century after Crosby’s final safari. In fact, the relic was in the state of disintegration that one might expect to encounter in a human head cut from a body dead for around ten days.
Inside all Africans there exists a nesting place for old gods and new, but one thing is certain: In the realm of Catholicism, an ‘incorruptible’ is one whose corpse has forgone normal decomposition and serves as a symbol of the deceased’s holiness during life. And since no one is willing to make a case for W. D. Crosby’s sainthood, I concluded that this phenomenon of preservation must have sprung from a darker cradle—from the primordial dampness of an earth that predates the Messiah. I believe that Khosa was able to embrace both the pious and the profane while I can convince myself to embrace neither.
In any event, the head was macabre beyond imagination, so rather than inform Fr. Patrikios of the discovery or contact authorities—or even consult the academics at my university—I simply flung it off the Nyali bridge where it was shortly carried away into the Indian Ocean.
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