Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [95]
I asked, ‘How?’ incredulous at his certainty.
He then slipped back into the mission and returned holding what looked like a coconut, only with a long black stalk dangled from its underside. ‘The captain of the Josephine drove a hard bargain, but the work of the Lord has no price.’
He asked if I knew what would happen if he lit the fuse, and I said I did. I knew that a powder blast this size would burn the clothes off a man fifty yards away. ‘Or the boughs off a palm tree,’ added the grinning rev.
He then fished a handsome silver and gold timepiece from his waistcoat, carefully opened the back casing and set the mechanism precisely to his own, before slipping it into my pocket. ‘At one minute to midday, not a second before or after, you must light the fuse of this here charge and retire as though you had tugged on the tail of a Bengal tiger.’
A simple instruction, I acknowledged, but where and why?
‘In the top of that lone palm, my dear Nelson, so that those who witness the blast will believe it a summoning of God ordained by yours truly.’
I asked him if it were not a false miracle we were performing, and that to introduce heathens to Jesus by deception was surely a gross sin.
‘Let us ask God by lighting the fuse.’ He then placed the bomb in my palm and with his fingers closed mine around it.
It took me three hours to make the ridge. I had prepared the necessary sticks to twist into flame and, as instructed, kept the smallest, clean-smoking fire tended until the time arrived for me to shin the trunk of the condemned palm. With a smouldering twig in my teeth, I climbed to the thatch of leaves and wedged the bomb between clusters of green coconuts. I checked the watch – 11.56 – and clung on till the minute hand nudged 11.59. I then put the twig to the fuse. Sparks fizzed. I dropped to the ground and scrambled, fearing an early detonation would fell the tree upon my head.
When the bomb blew, as loud as a crack of thunder, as bright as a flash of lightning, the top of the tree vanished, nothing left but a charred and smoking trunk, smouldering like a frayed end of burning rope.
Far below, in a clearing wide enough to see all the way to the top of the mountain, the rev. had just clicked his fingers. The men gathered around him had fallen to their knees, believing he had the power to make any of them disappear in a puff of smoke.
Only it was not King Tanoa who had been courted with sorcery, but his younger brother.
When Naraqino saw the palm explode on the command of the rev., he too had knelt on the earth. At once the rev. promised Naraqino the protection of Heaven and Earth if that when he rose he would accept that there was one true God and pledge his soul to Jesus.
On my return to Rewa, hearing news of this allegiance with Naraqino, I warned the rev. that the king would see this as treachery, thus endangering our lives to his jealous rage.
‘For that too I am prepared,’ smiled the rev., invigorated with the accolade of a miracle-maker. Then, even with the sun still not set, he suggested we retire to the mission. We were escorted by two of Naraqino’s most trusted warriors into our rooms, where four more already waited.
I have written these words with the two more men, both armed with clubs, watching over my person. I doubt I shall sleep. I trust these men with my life no more than I would do a hungry guard dog.
6 August 1835
As we paddled across the mouth of the estuary from Rewa to Bau, the chapel burned. The sun had just risen in the east, but all villagers, both sides of the river, watched this bloom of flames as they would the break of day. The rev., sitting at the right hand of Naraqino, perched upon the trunk of stolen muskets as though it were his throne, seemed to read my thoughts.
‘Fear not, Nelson,’ he consoled. ‘Remember Jesus in Matthew: Every government divided against itself is brought to ruin, and every city or house divided against