Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [94]
I stopped there because I fainted, chip of charcoal in my hand and head on the page. There’s more ink in this letter than water in body. But that feels good. To know a part of my soul has escaped evaporation.
Perhaps I should stop writing and save energy? But then this is what’s keeping me alive, you.
In the east I can see pale blue, the burning day behind. How terrifying that the sun will rise. And that my leg has lost all feeling below the knee.
But on this page I’m whole. What a strange place to suddenly explain myself, to give voice to this body. At the bottom of the world in the middle of a desert, yet not alone. Because I have something to write with, a piece of paper.
Is this it? No energy. And the sun flares up from the horizon. Risen. Must find shade, cool place. Water. Water.
Body burning.
What happens when I can’t write?
Show Me the Sky
1 August 1835
The Josephine seemed to anchor and sail in the break of a wave, with only its glittering deposit of guns proof that she had even called.
Dismayed that he had been ignored during the negotiations – as the officers had directed their conversation via myself to the king – the rev. had not waited to be asked on-board, instead inviting himself, so that he may ‘purchase essentials in a manner more civilised’.
Presuming I too would be making my way on-board, I accompanied the rev. to the pinnace, only to find myself bidding him farewell. The next morning, when four of the crew were required to shoulder his newly purchased trunk up the hill to the mission I was curious as to what he had procured and duly enquired. ‘No more than what is necessary to carry out the work of the Lord,’ was his enigmatic reply.
While the men hefted his trunk, its contents clinked like the cart of a brewery along a cobbled lane.
3 August 1835
Two days the rev. has slept late and delivered ill-prepared sermons. Only when a messenger of King Tanoa shook him from his drunken dreams did he wake before noon today.
Together, seated before an angry king firing insults into the air like fat from a hot pan, we heard how the officers from the Josephine had hoodwinked his majesty – the guns worked, but the kegs of powder had been filled with pepper.
Either daringly or foolishly, the rev. offered that the Lord had punished King Tanoa for refusing His word, the Gospel truth. I translated as courteously as possible, understanding that denigration of the ruler of all Fiji was as good as a blaspheme against our Saviour. When he unravelled my over-polite syntax to discover he had just been criticised, he shooed us from the fort with the barrel of a musket, roaring we were lucky it was seasoning in the chamber and not gunpowder.
Shaking, sweating, calling the king a ‘traitor of God’, Rev. Thomas swore that those who challenge his authority ‘challenge the authority of the Lord Himself.’
I advised that we should quieten our preaching, for a king disdained is a foe possessing pots and pans large enough to contain our limbs. But the rev., his fear now transformed to anger, was a man with God on his side and not to be intimidated.
‘Compared to Christian stratagems,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘the cunning of the devil is the mere subterfuge of a child.’
5 August 1835
Yesterday, an hour before dawn, the rev. hissed, ‘Nelson, Nelson,’ into my ear and woke me from sleep.
Did I believe that Jesus Christ died so that we may live? Was it by the grace of God that we even breathed? ‘Yes, Yes,’ I answered, before he enquired if I were a solider worthy of a mission for the Lord. ‘Of course,’ I replied. The Rev. then told me to dress and meet him outside.
He led me from the house to a vantage point so that he could point to a lone palm on a ridge several miles inland. In that orange glow the trunk and leaves seemed