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.

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The Animal Lover – Chapter 1: The Riddle of the Carpy

A Bad Thursday

The water in Upton’s shower always came out at the same temperature, tepid. Morning, afternoon, evening, summer, winter, he knew that when he turned on the tap, the water would never change. It was just like the weather outside, humid tepid, hot tepid, rainy tepid. Underneath everything else, he could always be sure that things would be tepid.

Upton sometimes thought that’s what his life here had become, tepid. Like the shower, the weather, the city around him, there was nothing surprising about it. There was nothing he couldn’t predict. The last three days with Thursday had been a surprise, but that wasn’t the kind of surprise he was looking for. Which was why he’d come to the shower in the first place, to figure out a way of getting rid of her.

He stepped into the large, curtainless shower cubicle and turned on the faucet. Almost immediately he let out a small yelp. For the first time since he’d moved into the house, the water came out in a steady cold rivulet, colder than he could remember ever having felt in Africa. It would have been the perfect temperature if he’d been ready for it, but he wasn’t. He stepped away from the stream for a few moments, psychologically prepared himself for a cold shower instead of a tepid one, then stepped under the water again.

“It’s over, Thursday,” he said aloud, the sound of his voice drowned out by the patter of water on the concrete shower floor.

Over? he thought to himself. How could it be over when it hadn’t even started? Thursday had simply moved into Little Victoriabourg three days ago and never left. You could hardly call that the beginning of anything that could now be over. It wasn’t a relationship; it wasn’t even a friendship. Still, she had been staying under his roof for seventy-two hours, eating his food, using his tepid shower, and he now had to tell her to leave.

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