The Enchanted City, page 18
“Very well.”
“Now I can die in peace. God save the Queen!”
The Commandant is still holding the hand of the wounded man. That hand goes cold. The face is crimson. The doctor is called to the dying man.
Having arrived on deck, where he sets about commanding the maneuver necessary to pass through the mouth of the harbor, Monsieur Fresnel is surprised by an outburst of shouting—cries of joy!”
The passengers on the Saint Michel see the boat bridge emerging under the porch of the Phlegeton fill up with an immense crowd. They are not Galla! It is a part of the population in the midst of whom they found refuge on the thirtieth of January, and which then disappeared into the catacombs. From where have those worthy people reappeared, and what has happened in the strange banza? They will soon find out, for everyone can already see Monsieur Cornelius and Samanou standing on the harbor dock.
They have not been massacred, thank God! They have remained in safety in the catacombs.
Before going ashore, Monsieur Fresnel goes back to see the sick man. Alas, the Englishman is delirious. His words are incoherent.
“Salt!” he murmurs. “Very dear, salt! Imported from Zanzibar…negro money! Livingstone embalmed in salt….Livingstone to Westminster! Very rich, Harry Fox! Via Tanganyika!”
Emerging from the cabin, Monsieur Fresnel had difficulty holding back his tears
Having set foot on the dock, he fell into the arms of Monsieur Cornelius. The latter explained the events that had taken place in the city since the day he left.
With a skillfully aimed rifle shot, Isidore had wounded the Sonapanga. That had caused the initial flutter in the ranks of the Galla.
Taking advantage of that momentary disturbance, the worthy Samanou, who had just rallied the queen’s bodyguard, demanded their collaboration in simultaneously opening all the ditches containing the lions.
Scarcely had the gates of the menagerie opened when between three and four hundred wild beasts had launched themselves on the shaken assailants—hence the cries of fright and the howls heard by the passengers of the Saint Michel.
One lion had hurled itself on the Sonapanga, who was already lying on the ground, and had killed him. Having lost their leader, the enemy fell into disarray. There was an immense, unspeakable, indescribable stampede.
The diabolical army had struck the camp at Kifoukourou, the camp and Nyonngo and all the other surrounding camps. Terrified, the barbarians had fled in an easterly direction.
Then, Touloumia had come out of the catacombs. Monsieur Cornelius had seen her and talked to her.
All kinds of peril having been averted, the queen of Mikinyaga had wanted to return immediately to her capital Aktibanza. She had departed the day before with her bodyguards and the princesses Halima, Zenza, Oulimanga and Foume-a-Kenna.
The entire court was laughing and dancing.
“One remarkable thing,” said Monsieur Cornelius, pompously, “was quite astonishing! There were several hundred lions wandering in the city. Their work of carnage accomplished, although sated, they still had a menacing appearance. What could be done with so many inconvenient Bohemians? Samanou tried hard to get them to go back into their ditches, to master them by imitating all the tones of the cock’s crow, but the beasts stayed where they were. They positioned themselves everywhere, in all the corners, licking themselves tranquilly, immobile on the stones that served them as pedestals, like the statues of lions, wild beasts of granite.
“Well, the queen only had to show herself, and all those beasts came to her like domestic cats, arching their backs and purring. Then, at a simple sign from her royal hand, those ferocious animals went peacefully back to their ditches, where the inhabitants of the city have continued to feed them. It’s a menagerie unique of its kind! The docility of these domesticated lions is, I can assure you, incredible in its effects. It’s the last word in the art of animal taming.”
The hour of deliverance had sounded for everyone.
Isidore came in his turn to give Monsieur Cornelius the homage of his respectful felicitations.
“Let’s go have lunch!” the professor replied. “There’s no restaurant in the catacombs. For more than a week I’ve been eating nothing but swallows’ nests and….”
“Monsieur is right—that’s not very substantial….”
While serving the professor an exceedingly fine lunch, the cook, faithful to his old habits, engaged him in conversation on various topics.
“Explain to me,” he said, “what you did in the catacombs to reckon with the diabolical army’s miners. I don’t quite understand what you did then with Samanou.”
“Something quite simple. The first time, the mossenga threw into the hole a nest full of slightly drowsy wasps. The warm atmosphere of the mine woke them up abruptly.”
“Oh, I understand that—I was the one who provided them.”
“The second time, Samanou delicately introduced into the company of the unsuspecting enemy a band of lynxes, leopard-cats and other hungry carnivores.”
“And the miners were bloodied like wood rabbits by a ferret! That’s perfect.”
“Finally, the third time, you saw me deliver the camouflet, and I did so in the ancient manner.”
“As in the Middle Ages.”
“And even before. The employment of that procedure is mentioned in history nearly two hundred years before our era. I therefore took a sleeve of cloth of a diameter equal to that of the hole. The cylinder was filled with toucan feathers and ibis down. I set fire to it; I blocked the holed and the tunnel filled with smoke.”
“Some tobacco!”
“The smoke of those burning feathers put the mine tunnel out of action for some considerable time.”
“Well, Monsieur, you win the plume! How does Monsieur find that elephant’s foot and bananas?”
“Excellent!”
“And the zebra cutlet au vin de palme?”
“Delicious!”
“Well, I don’t mind telling you, Monsieur, that there’s still something that I haven’t yet grasped.”
“What’s that?”
“You know the day when the Galla sent elephants to demolish our palisades?”
“Well?”
“Well, how is it that we got out of the affair when Samanou made his Saint Anthony’s bird sing?”
“Quite simple again. I was lucky enough to remember that, among the terrestrial fauna, there are species separated by profound and almost insensate antipathies—that there are animals that horrify others. Thus, lions are frightened by the crowing of a cock; bears flee before horses; horses can’t stand the scent of a camel or an elephant. The elephant itself is afraid of the cries of a pig. You saw that as soon as our peccary started making music, our assailants decamped.”
“Brave little pig! By the way, Monsieur, is it true that the poor Sonapanga is dead?”
“Oh yes—he died under the lion’s teeth.”
“You know that he was like a Maréchal de France in the diabolical army. I knew him well, having been his deputy. Furthermore, he was the chief of all the magicians and other high priests of the god Ouaka.”
“Ah!”
“He was, therefore, a holy Mata.”
“Oh.”
“And today, Monsieur….”
“What
“He’s a Mata mort!”45
“Isidore, you’re right. Your lunch was perfect, and you always have plenty of wit.”
Epilogue
Before leaving the Enchanted City, the French founded an establishment there, which is occupied at present by the Abbé Couëdic, Dr. Quentin, the carpenter, the blacksmith and one of the two mechanics.
The inhabitants of the banza, mild and intelligent, have lent that personnel the collaboration of their arms. In less than two months, a new zeriba has been built outside the walls of the city. That fifth station is called René-Caillié, after the young voyager who went on foot from Senegal to Timbuktu and came back from Timbuktu to Tangier, in an era when no one had yet thought of exploring the African continent.46
The zeriba René-Caillié ought, by virtue of its situation, become a city of the first rank, perhaps the capital of Central Africa. It is the crossroads of the communicating route that extends from Saint Paul to Zanzibar and those that will not be long in linking the valley of the Zambezi to that of the Nile.
Commandant Beautemps-Fresnel left the Enchanted City on 1 May 1877, the fourth anniversary of Livingstone’s death. Having descended the Tanganyika from north to south, he headed westwards along the line that was now marked out by the stations of Debaize, Compiégne, Le Saint and Maizan. When he returned, those already-flourishing stations envisaged the future in the most cheerful colors. The idea conceived by the late Admiral seems sure to be realized in the near future.
Monsieur Fresnel reached Saint Paul de Loanda on 8 August 1877, the same day when Stanley arrived in Mboma, not far from the mouth of the Congo. The French expedition had therefore lasted no less than two years, two months and ten days.
Now the reader will doubtless be wondering what became of the characters who have had some role to play in the drama for whose action the Enchanted City served as a theater.
All the secondary agents of the expedition—the Pagazis, Kirangosis, Kabindards, Biribis and Hindu servants have been duly repatriated and generously recompensed for their long devotion. Chocolat is in Saint Paul, where he lives on his income, which consists of an honest regular ration of victuals. Every day he draws the amount due of that pension for life. He is the happiest of mulattos, and every day he offers San José de Cacuaco the expression of his actions and graces.
Mimoun is in Algeria. He lives in Medeah, where he fulfills the functions of a muezzin at the mosque of the Maliki rite. The good Muslim is content with his fate. One can hear him at daybreak calling the faithful to the fedjeur prayer, crying out to them in a nasal voice: “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”
Thanks to his energy and the vigor of his constitution, Captain Harry Fox did not die of his wounds. After a long convalescence, the valiant officer of the Indian Army is in a satisfactory state of health. Having, of course, won his bet, Mr. Fox has become a millionaire. The geographical societies of London and Bombay have awarded him their great Gold Medal.
Commandant Fresnel and the engineer Duvivier are presently in Paris, where they are correcting the proofs of their travel journal.
Isidore is also in Paris, as anyone can see, for he is occupying the position of laboratory chef at the Hôtel Continental. A melancholy smile strays over his lips when he proceeds, in the morning, with the preparation of a cutlet à la Soubise, a preparation in which he succeeds marvelously. He then compares himself to the said Soubise, that great general of the Middle Ages, who had no more luck than he did, and who would have won the Battle of Rossbach…but for the fact that he lost it.
Notes
1 I have retained the author’s Frenchified version of the name of the chief seaport and capital city of Angola, then known as São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda and nowadays simply known as Luanda.
2 Again, I have retained the author’s version of what appears to be a conflation of the names of two local villages long since swallowed up by the city of Luanda, São José do Calumbo and Cacuaco.
3 The fruits of the baobab, Adansonia digitata, were indeed known as pain de singe [monkey-bread] at the time, but are not to be confused with the modern American pastry to which the same name was applied in the 1950s.
4 The kingdom of Kittara, which occupied a tract of land that is now mostly in Uganda, although it extends westwards into the Democratic Republic of the Congo and southwards into Tanzania, had long decayed and disintegrated by 1877, but was still remembered with a certain reverence.
5 The French folk song Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre.
6 Sabir [literally “science” or “knowledge”] was a pidgin employed all around the Mediterranean coast as a lingua franca from the 11th to the 19th century.
7 Meschinello is Italian rather than Latin, meaning an individual of little worth.
8 The reference is to the second surah [chapter] of the Koran, “Al-Baqara”
9 Presumably Opsaridium microlepsis, the “lake salmon.”
10 An ironic reference to the Romantic writer Joseph Méry (1797-1866) who wrote several colorful novels set in various tropical regions, including Central Africa, before anything much was known about the regions in question, improvising freely.
11 Ficus exasperata, aka the sandpaper fig—not to be confused with the American tree blessed with the same nickname.
12 “Sergent la Ramée” [approximately, Sergeant Evergreen] was a standard personification of a French soldier, often featured in cartoons and numerous comic literary works.
13 A slang term for female military service staff, or, more disdainfully, camp followers.
14 The Greek Ortyx means quail, and that meaning gives the present Greek island of Ortygia its name via a myth of metamorphosis. The name was also given by the Greeks to several other places, although I can find no evidence that one of them was the African continent.
15 The taxonomy of the primates was still confused in the mid-19th century, the situation not having been helped in the least by the Comte de Buffon, whose supposedly-definitive Histoire naturelle had mixed up chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans on the basis of inaccurate traveler’s tales, much as the author does here (soko being an African term for chimpanzee). It was Buffon who dubbed the great apes “quadrumanes,” meaning four-handed.
16 The formulation ouatsoq bi allah is given in a dictionary of the Algerian language published by Théodore de Bussy in 1838, from which the author presumably took it. The modern equivalent would probably be Tawakkaltu ala Allah.
17 These details—and, indeed, many of the previous details of Isidore’s journey and the accompanying comments—are taken from Henry Morton Stanley’s memoir How I Found Livingstone in Central Africa (1872)
18 Georg August Schweinfurth’s Im Herzen von Afrika (1874; tr. as The Heart of Africa) was presumably another of the sources on which the author drew in researching his novel.
19 In the famous farce by Théophile Dumersan, Madame Gibou et Madame Pochet, ou le Thé chez la ravaudeuse (1832).
20 The 1671 play by Molière—Scapin is the deceitful valet who continually puts one over on his master Léandre, the “old fool” to whom Isidore is referring.
21 Samuel White Baker, the discovery of Albert-Nyanza (Lake Albert) had set out to discover the source of the Nile; his first memoir of his expedition was The Albert N’yanza, Great Basin of the Nile (1866). He subsequently ventured into popular fiction in Cast Up by the Sea (1868).
22 Verney Lovett Cameron, the first European to cross Africa from the shore of the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic shore, published Across Africa in 1877.
23 The reference is to the river Tenarus, where Alaric the Goth allegedly had to put new heart into his troops on the way to sack Rome.
24 John Hanning Speke published Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile in 1863.
25 The French statesman Adolphe Thiers was notoriously short—even shorter than Napoléon—at five foot one.
26 Ernest Doudart de Lagrée led the French Mekong Expedition of 1866-68, which he did not survive, leaving its completion to his second-in-command Francis Garnier, who was subsequently killed in action against insurrectionists.
27 Honoré Théodoric d’Albert, Duc de Luynes (1802-1867) assembled a vast collection of antiquities at the Château de Dampierre, and sponsored several expeditions, traveling himself to the Dead Sea and Petra in 1864.
28 Victor Largeau—the father of the more famous Victor Emanuel Largeau, who played a major role in the creation and colonization of Chad—published two accounts of his attempts to cross the Sahara and reach Timbuktu in 1875 and 1877.
29 Carl Alexanderson, F.R.G.S. is virtually forgotten today, although his exploration of the Kwanza is mentioned in Verney Lovett Cameron’s Across Africa, where the author undoubtedly discovered it.
30 Eugène Maizan (1816-1845).
31 Sub-Lieutenant J. F. M. Le Saint has completely faded from memory, but his expedition is mentioned in the memoirs of Richard Francis Burton, who was also responsible for spreading Maizan’s fame with a bloodcurdling account of his murder.
32 Louis-Alphonse Dupont, Marquis de Compiègne (1846-1877).
33 This reference is anachronistic, given that Abbé Michel-Alexandre Debaize—who was a Jesuit, but not a missionary—did not die until 1880 and had not yet started for Lake Tanganyika in November 1876, let alone reached it.
34 Isidore has misconstrued the expression grand échelle, which can mean both “large scale” and “big ladder.”
35 Isidore thinks it’s funny because in French, pagaie [paddle] rhymes with sagaie [assegai].
36 The Capuchin friar Denis de Carli undertook a journey to the Congo in 1666-67. Filippo Pigafetta had published an account of the kingdoms of the Congo even earlier, in 1591, which included a historically significant map.
37 The ethnologist Augustus Henry Keane (1833-1912), who published his racial theories in Nature in 1879-81.
38 Alexander Keith Johnson F.R.G.S. published a guide to physical geography intended for use in schools in 1869. He published a much more detailed book specifically about Africa in 1884, which Hennebert might have seen before the Mame edition of his novel was published, but the reference is probably based on the earlier text, from which the preceding and subsequent lists of names are likely to have been appropriated.
39 Arnaud-Michel d’Abbadie and his brother Antoine travelled widely in what is now Ethiopia between 1838 and 1848, to which Arnaud returned in 1853. Arnaud published Douze ans dans la Haute-Ethiopie in 1868.
40 The linguist Johann Ludwig Krapf travelled widely in Africa, latterly in the company of Johannes Rebmann, between 1843 and 1853.
41 In fact Ophiusa (Ophiuse in French), meaning “land of serpents” was a name given by the ancient Greeks to a region in Portugal.
