The Diary, 1939
AN ADVENTURE
by Hercule Perpignon
(In which we begin reading the diary of the adventurous and handsome French engineer Hercule, and find out why he has been sent to a backwater in deepest, darkest, most curious French West Africa; we learn how he builds canals, although his big project is threatened by the war. What will happen to our dashing hero?)
Palm Deux
1 December, 1939
19 (1415 lbs.)
It has become my habit to write down the numbers every week, nothing else. Without words this could quite easily become a book of figures. So I have decided to write something to go along with all the totals and weights.
I could tell you that my job has kept me from filling these pages in more detail, what with rushing about Palm Deux, but that would not be true. Compared to my days at the canal in La Cité, things here are quiet. Perhaps that is where I should start then, with the canal and what went wrong there.
The irony, of course, is that everyone thought it would be nature which eventually got in the way of Vridi, not man. And for a while, they were right. When I arrived here last year, it was the sea and the lagoon, one of them or both, which kept hampering the canal’s progress. Cachet, my predecessor, was driven to distraction by his task.
Every day for months his natives removed tons of sand, finally coming within yards of joining the Gulf of Guinea and the lagoon called the Ebrié. Somehow, inexplicably, the water moved in overnight, like a silent army, bringing more sand and silt. The next morning he awoke to find all his work undone, a waterway where he wanted it but before he wanted it.
The second time that happened he lost more than two dozen natives, sucked into the current he created with his powerful Exeter diesel engines. He switched on all ten of them in a panic at the last moment to try and keep the water out. Walls caved in, and workers tumbled after them and were torn apart most violently underwater. Even if they had been able to swim, they did not stand a chance.
Cachet was clearly at a loss about what to do. Few of us have worked in terrain like this before. And the tropics are so different, so oppressive at times, that the obvious solution can be staring you in the face and you look straight through it. The damp hotness makes you less lucid, slower. Marseille in the worst of August is cool next to this.
After the first flooding, Cachet put natives on guard throughout the night. Later he even set up a tent nearby for himself. What feeble gestures. Once a leak starts, there is no way to stop it. The water is relentless. The sand at twenty feet is like a sponge. The barricades he had erected stood for a while, but the water crept around them, under them, and the timber giants were eventually as effective as matchsticks. They just gave way and snapped.
Cachet sat for months staring at a desk full of papers, adding, dividing, testing the moisture in the sand, working through the currents, tides, retraits du sable, once even resorting to Volta’s less-than-successful methods of hydromechanics, all the things he had learnt as an engineer in Lyon. But his problem remained unsolved. He might as well have been emptying a bucket with a thimble, a badly perforated thimble at that.
The first time, the ocean flooded the canal. The second time, it came from the rear, from the Ebrié. This caught him by surprise. He never considered that the Atlantic was somehow feeding the Ebrié, giving it the force it needed to break down the barriers. Nor did he have any reason to, for the two have no visible link.
The third time, the two bodies of water somehow acted as one, battering down Cachet’s front and back doors while he looked on helplessly from his tent. And each time, the catastrophe happened at night, which is when the worst things here always take place – when men die of fever or someone is taken by a strange animal – and there is never enough moonlight by which to see it, never enough time to take some kind of preventive action.
Conjecture is unfair but inescapable. We engineers always ask, “What if?” What if he had used iroko wood instead of pirrier? What if his machinery had been powerful enough to create a Scythe Eddy beyond the walls and to keep it going through the night? What if he had used some of the more facile techniques of Panama, technology he had at hand? The fact is, he did not. (Going from his notes, I should add, it is also clear that Cachet believed Vridi to be the next PanamaCanal, even though it lacked the length and the scale. Nor was Cachet a second De Lesseps. He even forgot the golden rule about the angle of entry: Never Entirely Straight to Avoid a Strait.)
No wonder Cachet lost hope. When the septicemia set in, he had little strength left to fight it. The infections started slowly, just like the waters he had been battling daily for eleven months. Then they simply poured in. I got here several weeks before he died.
My decision to come to Africa had started only by chance, me going to the meeting of the Société Francaise de l’Afrique de l’Ouest in Marseille with Michel. Two years ago, the canal was practically all they talked about, a major project, un grand travail, something to compete with the British successes in Gold Coast.
The two great hopes for France in Africa were Vridi and Kong. Far inland and on the edge of the Sahel, Kong was to have been Michel’s undertaking. He was going to reestablish the trade route through the old town, destroyed many years earlier by the marauding Samory Touré. But he had hardly started his job – to try and make it a modern Timbuktu – when it was ended as abruptly as mine.
* * *
2 December
2 (95 lbs.)
My last entry was interrupted by Mohammed. An elephant had sneaked down Route Douze, was already in Zone B, hardly a mile from here. He was easy to kill, did not take more than a few minutes, and I got my tooth. The second, his mate, I found not far away and took her just as simply. But enough of that. Let me return to where I left off – the canal.
When I first arrived in La Cité, it was to work as Cachet’s assistant. Even though I was the one who had finally been selected by the Société, I felt totally incompetent. What did I know as a 26-year-old? As I said, I had been here less than a month when Cachet died. Then I was invited (no, it was an order really) to take his place. Considering the general lack of success before I arrived, I worked with relative speed. The administration was impressed, called me a young genius. But I have to admit that there was also a fair bit of luck on my side.
Only a few weeks after burying Cachet, we stumbled onto (actually, sailed over) the trou sans fond, the hole without a bottom. (At the Commandant du Cercle’s request, I have already written a paper to the Maritime Institute describing this oceanic cavity.) Poor Cachet. If only he had known that he was barely one hundred paces from success.
He went quite berserk in the end, wandering naked around the floor of Vridi, shouting “Viens mer!” We thought he was calling the sea, daring it to come and take him away too, another one of its victims. Having read his notes, however, I now know that it was his mother he was crying for. I will not correct anyone. Let them think of him as a man dedicated to his job to the very end.
No sooner had we found the trou sans fond and came so close to making a viable port, however, than we were stopped in our tracks. Construction of the canal was halted without any explanation, although we could guess why. The war has affected even the one great engineering hope of the colony.
I went to the Commandant to plead Vridi’s case. Did he not see that postponing the project was as good as killing it? Surely it would be wiser to finish the canal quickly. A port in Africa could come in handy for a country at war. To leave it now and then recommence in a month, a year, ten years, would be even more costly.
The Commandant isn’t a bad man, but he was quite deaf to my appeals. He has his own vision of empire, and it does not include a waterway. More important to him is the railway to Ouagadougou. Trains somehow mean more than canals. Just as Britain’s Monsieur Rhodes was obsessed with a line from Cape to Cairo, the Commandant’s dream is La Cité, Belleville, Ouagadougou, Niamey, Agadez, Tamanrasset, In Salah and then Algiers. I have since heard that his ambitious plans have also been shelved.
With Vridi in limbo, so am I. As much as I would like to leave Africa, go fight alongside my comrades in Europe, I cannot. I have to be here in case they decide to start the canal again, although everyone knows there is no chance at all of that happening.
If it had not been for Monsieur Valdez-Cullot, I would still be in La Cité, probably spending my time drinking at Le Dôme, slipping toward the drunken oblivion of the petits blancs. I met Monsieur V-C one day at the Commandant’s offices totally by chance. He told me of his farm, Palm Deux, and said he needed a manager, but, more importantly, someone who shoots. I immediately told him of how I had been handling a gun since I was five and had shot every animal on four legs that he could name.
The Commandant said that as long as I stayed in the region, he would agree to let me take the new job. And that is how I came to be up here, on the farm Palm Deux, near Belleville and far away from La Cité, but still doing something productive, killing elephants.
(Next: In which Upton is chased out of his house by a murderous Thursday, who seems to be slaughtering chickens in a voodoo ceremony; sunglasses figure poorly in Upton’s life, Magna Exchange shows it is a greedy company; Bigelow gets drunk (or does he?); Upton brings up the diary of Hercule Perpignon as well as his fascination with women who love animals; we learn an ape isn’t only a primate; and Upton decides to go in search of the mysterious Ella Bazaar.)
