Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [87]
‘We must keep to what my father said.’ Sarah was pale still, but she was smiling and her face wore an expression he had not seen on it before, of promise or perhaps only a new boldness, he could not determine. ‘We must wait till I am eighteen,’ she said.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Liverpool Merchant crept nearer to the coast through repeated, violent squalls of rain, a suitor drawn by obstinate attraction to brave all rebuffs of the beloved. From time to time the distant arc of the Sierra Leone mountains was glimpsed, only to be lost again in the low banks of cirrus constantly building to eastward. After three days of this, the weather clearing, they came to anchor in eleven fathoms. At daybreak the following day they weighed again but now, after all the buffetings they had suffered, there was not wind enough to overhaul the ebb and so they languished under full sail until a fuming Thurso ordered the yawl hoisted out to tow athwart the tide. Late in the afternoon a sea breeze sprang up and with it they gained upon the tide enough to make anchorage that night in nine fathoms, just south of the Bananas, leeward of the shoals and near enough shore to hear the incessant crashing of the breakers – as near as any merchantman of the time dared go.
Early next morning, from the deck, Paris had his first steady sight of Africa. Beyond the stretch of sea and the boiling of the surf, a low, forested horizon, pale green, unbroken, giving an immediate sense of subterfuge, of a deceitful sameness. There were no mountains in view now; they were concealed behind the wooded promontory of Sherbro. The sky was pale crimson in the aftermath of sunrise, as if with the glow of some distant conflagration. The land itself, where the creatures dwelt that they had come for, was hidden behind the green wall.
Flecks of white wavered above the line of the shore – sea-birds of some kind. It was not a single line, he now saw. There was an interplay, bands of colour or light, sea-water paling as the depth lessened, the mist of the breaking waves, the wet shoreline, the haze of green where shore and forest met. The zones lay side by side, blending at the edges but quite distinct. Some memory tugged at Paris, an obscure sense of recognition.
Perhaps it is merely the fact of arrival that seems always the same, whatever the look of the place, he wrote a little later in his journal, seeking by compulsive habit now to confide his sensations. That is, if this can be called an arrival. To arrive, in any happy sense we give it, is to be restored to oneself, to be taken back into community, for whatever that holds of good or ill. But we carry our community with us, like all ships, and it is one that seems unwelcome to the land; we have had this battering of squalls in these last days; and now there is this fearsome surf, which does not let us approach nearer, and the barricade of forest beyond it.
Meanwhile, we continue to make preparations, and beautify ourselves as if for a bridal. The booms have been lashed up to the masts, the decks cleared and scrubbed and scrubbed again and the ship’s complement of cannon run out – Thurso means to announce our presence here with a salvo. There are men fixing the awning on the quarterdeck and others busy fitting out the yawl. This yawl, or longboat, as I learn from Barton, is very essential to our purpose here, where the ship is prevented from coming in close. They have furnished her with spars and sails and the gunner is to mount a swivel cannon in the bows. Being flat and high-built she can bring stores aboard through the surf; but her chief employ is cruising the coast for slaves and getting downriver to the small trading stations.
Amidst all this activity there are two men conspicuously idle: these are the hulking, one-eyed man Libby, and the little man named Blair, more likeable, but a great boaster and violent in his disposition. These two have been on deck since yesterday in leg irons, on the captain’s orders, for fighting on board