The Enchanted City Page 3
Mimoun, to whom the sorceress was still showing her teeth, simply put his hand on his heart and murmured in a placid tone: “Alhamdulillah!”—God be praised.
As for Chocolat, he did not take the time to recognize, in that occurrence, the intervention of his usual protector, San José de Cacuaco. Feeling the freedom of his long fingers, he hastened to plunge them into his supply bag. From the depths of the sack he extracted, voluptuously, a Lyon sausage, of which he only made three mouthfuls.
Chapter IV
His Excellency Isidore
The camp on the plateau of Nyonngo was formed of hamlets arranged in a defensive formation and a few fenced areas, large circular enclosures known in Africa as bomas. Inside each enclosure, symmetrically arranged in concentric circles, was a multitude of huts built from mimosa branches and woven tiger grass. Their cylindrical form and conical roofs with which they were coiffed made them resemble beehives, and that form was in harmony with their purpose, for they sheltered invaders, black hornets with human faces.
Each boma was pierced with a dozen gates, next to each of which stood a special hut known as an ihouanza, endowed with the dual function of guard post and café. It was there that warriors of distinction came to drink pommbé, a detestable indigenous beer that they savored with delight while pursuing the course of their interminable palavers.
A special boma housed the Sonapanga’s general quarters. In the center of the fenced enclosure stood a large rectangular building with four walls, supported by outhouses. That was the great chief’s palace. Another boma served as a park for his elephants.
Isidore was hastily provided with an elegant hut, from the top of which flew a banner of red cloth. Inside, the ground was covered by a lion skin carpet. A neighboring hut was allocated to Mimoun and Chocolat; another served as a baggage store. The booty taken from the prisoners was restored to them almost integrally; they found all their bales, with the exception of some cases of rum, which the Sonapanga thought he ought to keep, in order to drink to the fortunate deliverance of the foreigners.
When that installation was complete, it was solemnly followed by the investiture of His Excellency Isidore, in conformity with the national etiquette. A long red mantle charged with glass beads was thrown over the shoulders of the ganga-ya-ita; he was coiffed in a felt hat with a crest of ostrich and parrot feathers; he was armed with a spear with a shaft of reed acacia and a large cavalry saber of European provenance; finally, a sack was hung on his back. He thought so for a moment, but it was not a beautiful handmaiden with which he was being gratified, but a bronze footstool like those that the petty kings of central Africa always carry in order to be able to sit down during battles.
Given the absolute lack of horses, the new Excellency received by way of a mount one of the Mata Sonapanga’s elephants, a magnificent beast, admirably well trained, answering to the name of Moonchild. She wore a sheet of red cloth heightened with glass beads and large porcelain beads; her forehead and ears had been painted with the colors of war; a host of multicolored plumes floated around her enormous skull. On her back there was a haoussah, a kind of packsaddle edged with a low parapet like a handrail. That bulwark was garnished with white cotton decorated with red ribbons. On her neck sat a driver armed with an iron bar analogous in form to a whaler’s harpoon. A Hindu by birth, the driver had been hired in Zanzibar.
Thus heaped with honors, wilting under the weight of his new dignities, the former drummer in the zouaves did not feel at ease. Taking his role seriously, he thought about reorganizing the army placed under his command, and, for a start, of constituting a service staff. Unfortunately, the personnel at his disposal were somewhat limited; all he were his two companions, Mimoun and Chocolat.
Isidore was not put off by such a small inconvenience.
“You’ve been a soldier,” he said to Mimoun. “You’re an old Senegal spahi, so you’re familiar with military service. You’ll be the chief of my general staff. It’s up to the two of us to draw up plans, and to get out of trouble. A fine business!”
“Insha’Allah!”—If Allah permits—replied Mimoun sententiously.
“As for you, Chocolat, you great vol-au-vent, you’ve only ever served at table. What are you good for? Not much, undoubtedly…but since I can’t do otherwise, I’ll give you preferential treatment. You’ll be my aide-de-camp, my orderly officer, my secretary and all the trimmings.”
“Señor Isidore,” the jack-jack observed, “ego meschinello…nescio the trimmings.”7
“That’s fine! No observations! Besides which, your new métier won’t be difficult. I just have to buy you some shoulder knots. Don’t worry, you’ll get your braid, and with that, you’ll see, everything will go like clockwork.”
Having made these arrangements, the cook, generously abusing his ministerial authority, promised Mimoun the rank of colonel and Chocolat the rank of captain. The improvised colonel insisted on retaining his Arab costume, so elegant and so comfortable as it was beneath the African sky. He also hastened to add to it an excellent hunting rifle that he had found in his luggage, which he slung over his shoulder. Under the terms of a bizarre etiquette, the observation of which would have struck Speke with profound amazement, he was given by way of a battle charger a lovely milk cow with a black and white coat. The Africans have, as is evident, solved the equation cow = horse, so celebrated in the annals of schoolboy humor.
For the excellent Muslim, who was never astonished by anything, the sight of his baroque mount only brought to mind one of the hundred and fourteen surahs of the Koran, the one entitled “The Cow,”8 in which there is mention of men who, “occupied uniquely in the concern of fighting in the path of God, have no means of enriching themselves by commerce.”
As for Chocolat, who always did whatever was wanted, provided that he had provisions of food in his supply bag and a knife suspended from his belt, he consented to put on a new uniform, and received in consequence effects of clothing appropriate to his rank: a red woolen skirt, a mantle made of porcupine skin, a cap with jay plumes and a small short-handled hatchet. For a mount he had a small and plump gray saddle donkey, much less tall than his long legs.
With that, His Excellency decided that, as any good commanding general ought to do, he would hold a grand review of his troops the very next day. An important occasion!
It was late. Having given orders and smoked a few cigarettes, Isidore lay down on the lion skins in order to go to sleep—but it was impossible for him to close his eyes because of the racket that was being made in the camp. The war drums, which had not stopped beating for a moment all day, continued to beat all night long. The sticks of the gongongs and the hammers that struck the iron hoop bells were plied by hands of steel. The drumbeats rumbled like thunderclaps.
The orchestra was comprised of no less than twenty-five brigades of fifteen musicians, and all those instrumentalists were elite virtuosos. What they were executing so intrepidly was a continuous serenade in honor of the new ganga-ya-ita. That being the case, the ganga-ya-ita Isidore could hardly permit himself to impose silence on those disturbers of the public peace; he could only chew his bit. That was what he did, while letting loose the flood of his maledictions against the frightful percussionists who had certainly not been to military school, since they were not playing any tune, could not distinguish their fla from their ra, and did not even know how to execute a roll.
In spite of the fatigues of a long night of insomnia, the former drummer of the 1st zouaves was up at daybreak, in full dress uniform.
Following the program he had traced out the day before, he had to commence his inspection with the troops of the lake flotilla. In consequence, he went down toward the Tanganyika with his chief of staff, Mimoun, his aide-de-camp, Chocolat, and a few Orma officers who served as his guides. The path he had to follow broke up into monotonous threads traced through fields of sorghum, alternating with fallow land, zones of red clay afflicted with sterility, and jungles of bamboo saplings and stunted rattan. To adva
nce along that route invaded by tropical vegetation, it was necessary to defend oneself continually against rushes, ferns, trenchant stems that cut the traveler’s face and lianas that wound around him or lacerated him.
Finally, they arrived at a little cove, where the pirogue was moored that had been sent by the admiral commanding the siege in the lake sector. They embarked immediately to go to the mooring lines that extended in front of the harbor of Kisimbasimba.
The lake is a very striking sight. Surrounded by high mountains in which red clay, sandstone and granite are dominant, the equatorial Caspian was framed at the level of the camp by a zone of verdure bordered by a ribbon of golden sand fringed with tall reeds. Its waters are of two shades, one sea-green and the other pale blue, which dissolves in places into a milky tint. When the wind rises, the Tanganyika is troubled; its waves, suddenly becoming green-tinted, break into a menacing surf.
It was a beautiful day. The waters of the lake had taken on their most azure hue. In the clear waters, whose depths Africans are unable to measure, hippopotamuses were playing, along with freshwater porpoises and a kind of seal or Nereid peculiar to equatorial lakes. For a while, the pirogue was obliged to draw away from the bank along which it was traveling because of the presence of a tinghitinghi, a vast mass of interlaced plants forming a bank uncrossable by any boat—a bank in the tangles of which legions of bullfrogs were swarming and bellowing.
Emerging from those sargassos, the pirogue continued its route and reached the mooring lines without any encumbrance. The Orma flotilla was comprised of war canoes and daous, larger craft—all of them prizes taken from river dwellers. Hollowed out from a single alikonda trunk, each of the canoes was manned by a hundred and thirty warriors. The daous, formed in a squadron as if for a sea cruise, were moved by the arms of forty oarsmen; each carried a hundred and fifty men, archers or riflemen. The hulls of the primitive ships had been painted in war colors—or, more precisely, daubed with red, white and blue clay. Their long swan’s neck prows bore antelope horns at their summit, and between those forms were clumps of red and white parrot feathers.
The admiral’s daou was called the Magalarazi; it had a gongong aboard that rumbled without interruption like the drums of the land army. It was to the sound of that infernal music that the ganga-ya-ita, his chief of staff and his aide-de-camp took part in the gala banquet offered by the admiral. They were served a kind of insipid broth, which the former sous-chef of the Grand Hôtel immediately baptized as “pebble soup,” and a certain lake fish, the sanjika, the sovereign of intertropical waters.9
“Not bad, this herring,” opined Isidore, “but Jack Goudron doesn’t know how to make use of it. If only he’s read the works of Monsieur Méry of Marseilles,10 he’d know that this fish requires to be made into bouillabaisse.”
Chocolat devoured it.
The drums were still beating. The ganga-ya-ita, whose ears were hurting, hastened to take his leave of the admiral.
On returning to the plateau of Nyonngo, he began to inspect the land forces there without delay. The infantry troops were arranged in battle formation, but the order was singular. The lines extended in fantastic zigzags; the range of heights had been established according to the method known as “the staircase.” The uniformity of the effects of costume was a mere myth. A no less successful variety reigned among the objects of armament, which seemed to have emerged pell-mell from a bric-à-brac shop. The bucklers, for example, affected circular, elliptical or hexagonal forms; they were made of cow, buffalo or rhinoceros hide; some were striped with the three colors of war, others bore red feathers, strips of white cloth and tufts of thread steeped in indigo at their perimeter.
Offensive weapons were equally various among the infantry soldiers. Some carried immeasurably long lances with goatskin pennons, others a short-handled assegai with a tip like an ace of spades. Some had small bows whose jaguar gut strings were stretched by flexible wood passed through a sheath of multicolored snakeskin; others—but not very many—had poor rifles bought by barter on the coast. There was only a certain regularity among the leaders. The captains were armed with a cazengala, the junior officers with a courbache, a long hippopotamus hide whip.
In certain respects, however, the fact of an absolute uniformity seemed uncontestable. All these effects of armament, disparate as they were, were in an equally poor state, the skins torn or holed, the wood unpolished, the iron dented. Needless to say, all the iron, intact or not, was covered by a thick layer of rust. The maintenance of weapons requires everyday care, but the Orma infantry preferred not to bother with it at all. They had ready to hand, however, the “sandpaper tree,” an astonishing tree whose leaves are as rough as a tiger cat’s tongue.11 It is easy to make use of them to polish wood and metals.
The general who presented the plumed infantry troops to the Generalissimo seemed delighted by their fine turnout, but the worthy Isidore, who retained the memory of glorious times spent with the 1st zouaves, was far from sharing such an indulgent opinion.
“Oh, what wretched troopers!” he exclaimed several times. “What am I going to do with these penguins? Tell me, Mimoun, have you ever seen such specimens? But what need do I have, after all, to get queasy? They’re bad, it’s true, but still good enough to attack lascars who probably aren’t any better. Besides which, I have numbers on my side—and what numbers! That’s all I need to say. Not counting the freshwater mariners of Lake Tanganyika, I have seventy thousand men here, and seventy thousand more camping at Kifoukourou, which makes a hundred and forty thousand. Well, you see, Mimoun, when the great Clovis won the battle of Wagram, he was only at the head of thirty thousand Franks—the fruit of his economies, as Voltaire says in his Histoire du consulat. Well then, let’s see the file-past of this host of maladroit Franks.”
The file-past opened with a division of sixty beautiful elephants guided by Nubians; then the general commanding the maneuver had the infantry break into groups, which formed up in three ranks, fifteen to twenty meters apart. Every platoon leader mounted his cow, stuffed his calumet with strong tobacco whose smoke resembled clouds of nitric acid, and strove to draw puffs whose thickness a locomotive would have envied. That done, he tranquilly set about following his men, who stretched their legs to give their rhythmic step the largest possible stride.
Smoking under arms! The new ganga-ya-ita could not get over it. He was about to get annoyed when the general informed him that the captains were merely making use of a special privilege of their rank. As for the junior officers, Isidore addressed his congratulations to them, because they were cracking their courbaches and vigorously lashing the infantrymen who were not launching themselves rapidly enough onto the warpath. They had no pity for the women of the baggage train, who were carrying enormous burdens on their heads and one or two nurslings on their backs, upright in aloe sacks. Isidore noticed that those new model service staff recognized a robust virago as their chief; she was the harpy of the previous day. Isidore recognized her at the moment when, passing in front of Mimoun, she showed him her teeth again.
“Look,” said the ganga-ya-ita to his chief of staff. “That’s the she-ape who was pulling faces at us yesterday when we were under the elm. She’s in command of the squadron of service personnel; I think she’s regretting not having been able to slice us up, because she’s still pulling faces!”
The army filed past rapidly, ensigns deployed—or, to put it better, in advance of each platoon, fanatics were going crazy. There were the priest-warriors, waving crudely stuffed animal hides impaled on the ends of sticks with frenetic hands. Those astonishing ministers of the cult of the African Bellona had chosen the depictions of extremely ferocious beasts in order to throw the greatest sum of possible terror into the enemy. The heads of lions, the jaws of crocodiles, the wings of eagles and vultures were seen leaping about, while the tails of zebras floated and the coils or serpents glittered. Here and there, as if by way of a conclusion to be drawn from that phantasmagoria, scalped tresses appeared, human
tibias bumping into one another, and whitened skulls whose orbits were blocked with ibis eggs.
Isidore was bewildered, astounded, and almost fearful at having to deal with pacemakers of that sort. He was allowing himself to lapse into somber reflections when one of the priest-warriors—the one who was executing, amid a thousand contortions, the most violent drum-majorish manipulations—ended up getting his legs entangled with those of his neighbor, and stumbled badly. That fall had the side effect of sending the various objects he was wearing on his head rolling to within ten paces of the stage: a bizarre assemblage of rhinoceros horns, glass beads and pink shells.
At that sight, Chocolat could not help bursting into laughter.
“Ha ha ha! The great clown’s lost his hat…bonus, bona, bonna!”
“You never said anything so apt,” said Isidore. “He’s a clown, all right. We’re in the middle of a carnival. A fine command I’ve taken on here! What a diabolical army!”
Chapter IV
Going on Campaign
At the end of the memorable review, which left him with a melancholy impression, Generalissimo Isidore nevertheless proceeded with all possible ardor with the preparations for the military operation in which he had promised to succeed. The Mata Sonapanga, this liberator of the previous day, had honored him with great confidence, and he was determined to show himself worthy of the high opinion that the young chief had of him. Nothing would have been more painful for him than to offend against the laws dictated by the sentiment of propriety.
A fortunate inspiration caused him immediately to renounce the employment of the totality of those grotesque warriors; he resolved only to employ the elite troops, if there were any. His choice settled on a thousand archers who were reputed to be the most skillful, to whom he added the men, between four and five hundred in number, who were armed with rifles. The measure was sage, but, in making it, the cook was naively changing his mind. In the morning, he had loudly proclaimed the statistics of his enormous army and praised the force of numbers; in the evening, on due reflection, he thought that two good soldiers would be worth more than twenty bad ones.