The Prospector (28 page)

I'm left half-dazed for a long time. When I come back to my senses I feel something warm running through my hair, down my cheek: I'm bleeding. I'm too weak to stand and I remain lying at the bottom of the ravine, leaning on one elbow, pressing my handkerchief against the back of my head to stop the bleeding.

A little before nightfall I'm drawn from my torpor by a noise at the entrance to the ravine. Delirious, I grab the pick handle to defend myself in case it's a wild dog or a starving rat. Then I recognize Sri's slim, dark figure against the blinding light of the sky. He's walking at the top of the ravine and when I call him he comes down the slope.

There's a wary look in his eyes, but he helps me get up and walk to the entrance of the ravine. Although wounded and weak, I say, like a frightened animal, ‘Come on, get on with it!' Together we walk through the valley to the camp. Ouma is waiting for me. She brings some water in the pot and dips it out in the hollow of her hand to wash the wound where the blood has matted my hair.

‘Are you really all that fond of gold?' she asks.

I tell her about the cache I found under the basalt rock, the signs that point to those rocks and that ravine, but I'm belligerent and confused and she must think I'm crazy. For her, the treasure is meaningless, she scorns gold as do all Manafs.

Head wrapped in my bloody handkerchief, I eat the meal she's brought me, dried fish and
kir
. After the meal she sits beside me and we remain silent for a long time, facing the translucent, twilit sky. The seabirds are flying across English Bay in flocks towards their roosting place. Now I don't feel impatient or angry any more.

Ouma rests her head against my shoulder like she used to when we first met. I can smell the odour of her body, of her hair.

I tell her about the things I love, the fields in Boucan, Trois Mamelles, the dark and dangerous valley of Mananava, where the two tropicbirds always fly. She listens without stirring, she's thinking of something else. I can sense that her body is no longer at ease. When I try to reassure her, caress her, she moves away, puts her arms around her long legs, as she does when she's alone.

‘What's the matter? Are you cross?'

She doesn't answer. We walk down to the dunes together in the gathering night. The air is so balmy, so soft at summer's start, the cloudless sky begins to light up with stars. Sri has stayed back near the camp, sitting up straight and as still as a guard dog.

‘Tell me about when you were a child again.'

I talk slowly, smoking a cigarette, smelling the honey-like odour of English tobacco. I talk about all of that, about our house, about Mam who read the lessons under the veranda, about Laure, who went to hide in the tree of good and evil, about our ravine. Ouma interrupts me to ask questions about Mam, about Laure mostly. She questions me about her, about her outfits, about her likes, and I believe she's jealous. I find it amusing that this wild girl should pay so much heed to a young girl from the bourgeoisie. I don't believe I can understand, even for an instant, what she's going through, what's tormenting her, making her vulnerable. In the darkness I can barely make out her silhouette sitting next to me in the dunes. When I make to get up and go back to camp, she holds me back by the arm.

‘Stay a little longer. Talk to me some more about over there.'

She wants me to tell her more about Mananava, the fields of cane where Denis and I used to run, the ravine that opened in the mysterious forest, and the slow flight of the dazzlingly white birds.

Then she talks to me about herself again, about her journey to France, the sky so dark and so low that you'd think the light would be extinguished once and for all, the prayers in the chapel and the songs she loved. She talks of Hari and Govinda, who is growing up amid the herd animals back there in her mother's country. One day Sri made a flute out of a reed and started playing it all alone in the mountains and that's how her mother had realized he was the Lord's messenger. When she came back to live with the Manafs he was the one who taught her to chase after and catch goats, who led her down to the sea for the first time to fish for crabs and octopuses. She also speaks of Soukha and Sari, the two birds of light who can speak and who sing for the Lord in the land of Vrindavan, she says they were the birds I saw back in the old days at the entrance to Mananava.

Later we go back to the camp. Never before have we talked in that way, gently, in hushed tones, without being able to see each other, in the shelter of the tall tree. It's as if time as well as everything else in the world except this tree, these stones, has ceased to exist. When we've talked far into the night, I lie down on the ground to sleep in front of the entrance to the tent, my head resting on my arm. I wait for Ouma to come and join me. But she remains sitting still where she is, looking at Sri, who is perched on a stone off to one side, and their silhouettes outlined against the sky are like two night watchmen.

When the sun rises in the sky, above the mountains, I'm sitting cross-legged in my tent in front of my trunk, which I use as a desk, drawing a new map of English Bay, upon which I trace all the lines between the markers, thereby making a sort of spider web appear whose six anchoring points form the large Star of David that was first represented by the two inverted triangles of the mooring rings to the east and west.

Today I'm not thinking about the war any more. Everything seems new and pure to me. Lifting my head I suddenly see Sri, who is looking at me. I don't recognize him immediately. At first I think he's one of the children from the Raboud farm who's come down with his father to fish. It's the look in his eyes that I recognize, wild, wary, but also gentle and bright, a look that comes straight over to me, unaverted. I leave my papers there and walk slowly in his direction, to avoid frightening him. When I'm ten steps away, the young boy turns and takes off. He goes jumping leisurely over the rocks, turning around to wait for me.

‘Sri! Come here!' I've shouted, even though I know he can't hear me. But he continues to make his way to the back of the valley. So I follow on the path without trying to catch up to him. Sri bounds lightly over the black rocks and I see his lithe shape, which seems to be dancing out in front of me, then he disappears in the underbrush. I believe I've lost him, but there he is standing in the shade of a tree or in the hollow of a rock. I only just catch sight of him when he starts walking again.

For hours I follow Sri through the mountains. We are high up, above the hills, on the bare flank of the mountain. Below me I see the rocky slopes, the dark patches of the screw pines and bramble bushes. Up here everything is barren, mineral. The sky is magnificently blue, the clouds coming from the east are skittering across the sea, passing over the valley, casting swift shadows. We continue climbing. At times I can't even see my guide any more and when I do catch sight of him, far out ahead, dancing along swift and light, I'm not sure I haven't seen a goat, a wild dog.

At one point I stop to look out at the sea, far in the distance, as I've never seen it before: immense, sparkling and hard in the sunlight, traversed by the long silent hem of breakers.

The wind is blowing in cold bursts that bring tears to my eyes. I sit down on a rock to catch my breath. When I start walking again, I fear I've lost Sri. Squinting, I search up around the top of the mountain, on the dark slopes of the valleys. Just as I'm about to give up trying to find him, I see him surrounded by other children with a herd of goats on the other side of the mountain. I call to him, but the echo of my voice makes the children flee and they disappear with their goats among the brush and the stones.

I can see traces of human beings up here: some sort of circular, drystone walls, much like those I found when I first arrived in English Bay. I also notice barely visible footpaths through the mountains, but I can make them out because the life out in the wild I've been living for the past four years in English Bay has taught me to spot signs of human presence. As I'm preparing to go down to the other side of the mountain to look for the children, I suddenly see Ouma. She walks up to me and, without saying a word, takes me by the hand and leads me over to the cliff top, to a place where the land makes a sloping overhang. On the other side of the shallow valley, on the arid mountainside, along a dried-up stream, I can see huts made of stone and branches, a few tiny fields, protected from the wind by low walls. Dogs have picked up our scent and are barking. It's the Manaf village.

‘You shouldn't go any farther,' says Ouma. ‘If a stranger came, the Manafs would have to move farther out into the mountains.'

We walk along the cliff top all the way to the northern slope of the mountain. We're facing the wind. Down below, the sea is infinite, dark, spotted with white horses. Over in the east is the turquoise-coloured mirror of the lagoon.

‘At night you can see the lights of the city,' says Ouma. She points to the sea. ‘And over in that direction you can see boats coming in.'

‘It's beautiful!' I say that almost in a whisper. Ouma has squatted down on her heels, as she does, wrapping her arms about her knees. Her dark face is turned towards the sea, the wind is tousling her hair. She turns westward, in the direction of the hills.

‘You should go back down, night will be falling soon.'

But we just sit there very still in the whipping wind, unable to tear ourselves away from the sea, like birds gliding very high up in the sky. Ouma doesn't talk to me, but I have the feeling I can sense everything within her, her longing, her despair. She never puts it into words, but that's why she so loves to go down to the shore, dive into the sea, swim out to the breakers armed with her long harpoon and, hiding behind the rocks, observe the people from the coast.

‘Do you want to go away with me?'

The sound of my voice or else my question makes her start. She looks at me angrily, her eyes blazing.

‘Go away? Where? Who would have me?'

I try to find words to appease her, but she says vehemently, ‘My grandfather was a maroon, along with all the black maroons from Le Morne. He died when they crushed his legs in the cane mill because he'd joined Sacalavou's people in the forest. Then my father came to live here, on Rodrigues, and he became a sailor so he could travel. My mother was born in Bengal, and her mother was a musician, she sang for Govinda. Where would I be able to go? To a convent in France? Or to Port Louis to wait on the people who killed my grandfather, the people who bought and sold us like slaves?'

Her hand is ice-cold, as if she has a fever. All of a sudden, Ouma stands up, walks over to the slope in the west, over to the place where the paths separate, the place where she was waiting for me a little while ago. Her face is calm again now, but her eyes still glare with anger.

‘You have to go now. You can't stay here.'

I'd like to ask her to show me her house, but she's already walking away without looking back, she's going down into the dark, shallow dip in the land where the Manafs' huts stand. I can hear the voices of children, the barking of dogs. The darkness settles in rapidly.

I climb down the slopes, run through the thorn bushes and the screw pines. I can no longer see the sea or the horizon, only the shadow of the mountains growing larger in the sky. When I reach the valley of English Bay it is dark and a fine rain is falling gently. Under my tree, in the shelter of my tent, I curl up and lie still, feeling the cold, the loneliness. Then I think about the sound of destruction that is growing louder every day, that is rolling around like a rumbling thunderstorm, the sound that is now hanging over the entire world and that no one can forget. That night I decide to go off to war.

They are all standing together this morning at the entrance to the ravine: there are Adrien Mercure, a tall black man with herculean strength, who was once a foreman in the copra plantations on Juan Nova, Ernest Raboud, Celestin Prosper and young Fritz Castel. When they learned I'd found the cache they dropped everything and came immediately, each with a shovel and a piece of rope. Anyone seeing us walking across English Bay like that, them with their shovels, wearing their large vacoa hats, and me leading with my long beard and hair and my torn clothing, my head still bandaged with a handkerchief, might have thought it was a parody of the Corsair's men coming back to retrieve their treasure!

We're encouraged by the cool morning air and begin digging around the blocks of basalt at the bottom of the ravine. The earth, crumbly on the surface, becomes as hard as rock as we dig deeper. Taking turns, we heave at it with our picks, while the others busy themselves clearing the rubble over to the wider part of the ravine. That is when the idea dawns upon me that the boulders and earth piled up at the entrance to the ravine that I had taken for a natural obstruction caused by water runoff in the old torrent bed, are in reality the material that the Corsair's men cleared away after having excavated the caches in the bottom of the ravine. Once again I have the strange impression that the entire ravine is of human creation. Starting with a simple crevice in the basaltic cliff, those men dug, excavated, until they attained the appearance of this gorge which the rainwater has remodelled for almost two hundred years. It's a strange feeling, almost awesome, like the one explorers must experience when they uncover the ancient tombs of Egypt in the silence and the ruthless light of the desert.

Around noon the base of the largest basalt block has been sapped to such an extent that a simple nudge ought to be enough to send it tumbling into the bottom of the ravine. Together we all push on the same side of the rock, which rolls a few metres, causing an avalanche of dust and small stones. Before us, exactly in the place indicated by the groove engraved on the boulder at the top of the cliff, is a gaping hole still hidden by the dust floating in the air. Without waiting another minute I lie flat on my belly and drag myself through the opening, it takes several seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness: ‘What's in there? What's in there?' I hear the voices of the impatient black men behind me. After a very long time I back up, pull my head out of the hole. I feel sort of giddy, my blood is beating in my temples, in my jugular veins. This second cache is clearly empty as well.