Denys was happy and cheerful all day, though he’d drunk most of the fifth of gin we’d shared the night before. It was a mystery to me, how he threw it off. His blood must have been thick indeed, for it carried enough malaria to sink an ox, and yet he never fevered and never went down. The sun was an anvil on the top of my head, shoulders, and neck, where fresh sweat poured and wetted my collar. My clothes hung on me, the wet salt from my body drying in rings. I was breathing hard, and hearing my own breath rise raggedly. But we had our distance to cover. What was tiredness? The porters moved ahead in a line, and when my vision blurred, the slim lines of their bodies against the great whiteness of the plain looked like human geometry. Limbs became sticks and sharp dashes, an equation of simple perseverance.
Just past midday, we stopped and rested in the muddled shade beneath a great baobab tree. It was squat and wide, with ribboning, undulating bark like a skirt of some sort, or like wings. This one hung with fruit in pale-brown drooping pods, and with the baboons feasting on them. Several sat on a branch over our heads, and we could hear them cracking open the fruit, a musical rattle, like maracas. A rain of the powdery meat fell on the ground around us, into the short yellow grass, and stray spat seeds, too, and baboon droppings, which smelled foul.
“We could move off,” Denys said when I grimaced, “or shoot them.”
I knew he wasn’t serious about the shooting, and joked, “Not on my account. I could probably lie down in the shit and drop off to sleep this minute.”
He laughed. “The physical effort changes you. You grow a tougher skin.”
“Mine was pretty tough to begin with.”
“Yes, I knew that straight away.”
I looked at him, wondering what else he’d felt when we first met—if he had sensed a jangling of recognition as I had, the sharp and familiar tolling of a bell, as if we were meant to know each other. “Did you ever imagine we might somehow end up here?”
“Under this terrible tree?” He laughed. “I’m not sure,” he said, as more dusty powder fell around us from above. “But I could grow to like it.”
—
By evening we’d reached the river and set up camp. We ate a young kudu that Denys had shot and skinned that morning, and then drank our coffee, staring into the fire as it snapped and spiralled, purplish smoke rising.
“Tania chased off a pair of lions once with only a rawhide whip,” he said. “She and Blix were on a cattle drive. He’d gone off to shoot something for their dinner when there was a loud commotion among the cattle. The porters scattered like mice, and it was only poor Tania standing there while each of the lions climbed up on the backs of their quarry. The rifles were packed away in the trunks, ridiculously enough.”
“So she whipped them away? That was brave of her.”
“Yes, she has even more courage than you’d think.”
We had been careful lately not to speak too much of Karen, for the farm had been sold, and it was clear she was going away. “You have plenty of reasons to love her,” I ventured.
“And admire her,” he said.
“Even better, for my money.”
“I would never have made her a good husband, though. She must have known that deep down.”
“It’s funny what we fight for, even when we know it’s impossible. Did she manage to save the oxen?”
“One, yes. The other they ate for dinner when Blix came back empty-handed.”
“It all worked out neatly then.”
“That time, yes.”
From far off, we heard the high monkeylike chirping of hyenas, the laughing you hear tell of, though it’s always sounded slightly mournful to me. The smoke billowed in a surge, as if it were trying to call out, too, to the horizon perhaps, or the just-stirring stars.
“It wouldn’t be such a bad life, you know, to be a lion,” Denys said. “The whole of Africa is his buffet. He takes what he wants, when he wants, without over-exerting himself.”
“He has a wife, too, though, doesn’t he.” It wasn’t a question.
“One wife at a time,” he clarified.
Then, while the fire rose and smoked and threatened to singe our feet, he spoke out Walt Whitman, because I asked him to. He said the words to me and to the stars while I grew more and more still. I was thinking about how I had struggled and strained for years, as Karen had, and towards things that were disastrous for me. And yet maybe that was unavoidable. The pilgrims and the lost often did look the same, as Denys had once told me, and it was possible everyone ended up in the same place no matter which path we took or how often we fell to our knees, undoubtedly wiser for all of it.
Barely seeming to move, Denys reached for my hand. With aching slowness he traced the fine bones and lines and ridges, the thickened flesh where I’d worked and worked. I thought of Karen with the rawhide whip. She was incomparably strong and courageous under her scarves and powder, her goblets and crystal and chintz. We had done a painful dance and lost a lot, we three, hurting one another and ourselves. But extraordinary things had happened, too. I would never forget any of them.
I think we sat like that for hours. Long enough for me to feel my own density settle more and more completely into the chalky dust. Aeons had made it, out of dissolving mountains, out of endlessly rocking metamorphosis. The things of the world knew so much more than we did and lived them more truly. The thorn trees had no grief or fear. The constellations didn’t fight or hold themselves back, nor did the translucent hook of the moon. Everything was momentary and endless. This time with Denys would fade, and it would last for ever.