Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [147]
In the afternoon a Company pinnace with twelve oars came out for them, rowed by looser-built, lither men, Paris noticed, than the Kru boatmen of the Grain Coast they had just left. Thurso left the ship in charge of Barton, and he and the surgeon embarked in the pinnace for shore. The town at this distance was a low jumble of native huts set in a mesh of greenery. Lying to the left of it, on a rocky eminence above the river bank, rose the white fort, shimmering in the sunshine, dramatic and imposing, with its block towers and high, crenellated walls. Paris made out the Union Jack flying from the battlements, and another flag, blue and white – the colours of the Company, Thurso told him.
With astonishing judgement and skill, the oarsmen brought them to shore through the violent paroxysms of the surf. They mounted the slope of the foreshore, past narrow fishing boats curved high at the prow, with tufted fetish-bundles tied at their heads. It was hot here, out of the breeze, and the strength of the light troubled Paris’s eyes. Screens of nets were drying on poles and the scraps of fish scales caught in them glinted and flashed.
Escorted by the Company negroes, they made their way past marshy flats where naked children ran, flies rose in swarms, geese and ducks pottered in the muddy water. There was a strench of dead crabs from the river bank and of decaying coconuts that had been half buried in the sand to rot the fibre free.
The walls of the fort rose above them with an intensity of white almost blinding. There was to Paris a terrible strangeness in this great monumental structure amidst the squalid and provisional evidences of life around them: the cluttered, evil-smelling shore, the ramshackle town, the signs everywhere of a collaboration with the forces of nature that was tentative and temporary. The battlemented walls denied all this; they asserted the principle of permanence. There would always be profits to make, interests to defend. In the fertile interior of Africa her children, her greatest resource, would multiply endlessly and come down in endless procession to be sold below these walls, beside the sea.
The way they were following rose more steeply in the last few hundred yards as they approached the rocky bluff on which the fort was built. Then they were in the sharp black shadows of the buttresses and Paris felt immediate relief from the assaults of heat and light. The heavy gates stood open. The soldiers on sentry duty, one at either side, straightened from their position of ease without coming fully to attention, their tunics dark red in the deep shadow.
They were conducted to the Governor’s quarters, up flights of stone stairs with steps of alternate white and black, freshly painted. On the landing, defending the approach, two small brass cannon squatted. Crossed pikes stood on the wall behind. There was a passage and a narrow hallway, also hung with weapons; then finally the door to the Governor’s chambers.
He was there to receive them, a handsome, pale-mouthed man with a high bridge to his nose and a languid, murmuring manner of speech. His shirt was elaborately ruffled with lace at the neck and cuffs and he wore a short silver wig with curled rolls above the ears.
‘Captain Thurso, Mr Paris,’ he said, with minimum effort of the lips. ‘I am glad to make your acquaintance. We have not had dealings before, Captain, I believe?’
‘No, sir.’ Bewigged, cocked hat under his arm, in his ceremonial broadcloth, Thurso looked out of his element here, in this wainscoted room, with its several low tables and armless leather chairs. Paris was reminded of their first meeting, in Liverpool, with his uncle present, when Thurso had worn that same look of staring outrage, as if he had been derided. The captain was a fish that could only swim in a certain water …
‘I did trade with Mr Charles Gordon,’ he said now, in his hoarse and lingering fashion. The words seemed forced from the depths by the pressure of some urgent secret, as if only a rage