night, I was in the hotel dining room, making friends with the top men on the bridge project – surveyors and engineers, that sort of personage. I was down with fever, but I had run out of prints, you see, and serving as forwarding agent for Mopane Clarke’s trading business had not proved lucrative. I wanted to open a photography studio on this side of the river. Withstanding the trembles and blur, I stood the occasional drink, downed several myself, and tried to charm the gentler men. Things were going swimmingly when in waltzed Gavuzzi with his funny hat and vest, to see a man about a bill. Ada, who did the accounts, was behind him, holding Lina by the hand.
Now, it was a dizzy room already, tobacco smoke bitter in the air, half-naked Kaffirs careening about on errands, besuited Arab monkeys bowing over drinks trays. My fever was running amok, I was fagged out, and I could hardly hear – my head was a right balloon. Gavuzzi was an irritating man in the best of circumstances, and then he provoked me by cutting in. I shouted him off, he turned on his heel, and as he stepped away, I grabbed his hat, almost as a prank. It came off his head easily, but my grip went a touch too far and a patch of his hair came off with it, pulled up by the root!
I stared at it in my hand, wondering if it was a wig and we were in Parliament. Gavuzzi stood in shock, his pate turning scarlet, then sat on the floor with a bark. Ada rushed over quick as she could, given her condition – she was expecting – and left Lina in the corner. Most whelps would have wept but Lina shrieked with fury and when an innocent native boy rushed by with a tray, she struck him! Knocked him flat! He was never right in the head again. He became an imbecile, forever smiling at the daisies.
* * *
So much for drumming up funds for a studio. But I managed to procure a contract to photograph the bridge during the stages of its erection. And that’s how I ended up joining Sir Charles Beresford Fox, the nephew of the bridge’s designer, on a voyage to the bottom of the gorge. We climbed down the workers’ ladders and then along the face of the sheer wall. It was perilous going, rocky and thorny. We got to within twenty feet of the base, tied a rope to a tree, and slid down. We wandered along the bottom, clambering over rocks the size of my childhood home in Cambridge. Then the gorge narrowed to a thin ledge hanging over a rushing torrent. No exit.
We parted ways, feckless Fox pushing on while I headed back, having taken the snaps I wanted and wishing to get home by nightfall. As soon as I lost sight of my companion, a terrific explosion went off, sending rocks in all directions, one squarely at my head! Thankfully it missed and landed with a crash fifty yards away. Workers on the other end of the gorge had apparently set off their final blast of the day. By the time I got to the rope, I was too spent to climb. Willy-nilly, I was spending the night in that gorge.
I tied myself to a ledge and settled in. It was weird beyond description to lie in the dark, sensing the Falls without seeing them. The spray condensed and ran over me in rivulets. The mist floated round, moaning and whining, a faint whisper, a deep groan, the great roar swelling to thunder then dying again to a sibilant hush. I’ve often wondered how the guttural shout of the Falls can sometimes break off to sudden silence, like a thunderclap in a clear blue sky.
I lay there, thinking of all I had accomplished in Africa and all I had not, of Sir Charles and Fred ‘Mopane’ Clarke and what an extra ‘e’ on a name can do, of the suffocating grace of the high-born. Climbing down here for a mere spot of money had nearly brought death upon my head. I won’t say my life passed before my eyes that night, but I barely slept for bitterness. When dawn broke at last, I raced up that rope.
I staggered the half-mile to camp and demanded a whisky and Fox’s whereabouts. Turned out he’d had a far worse time than I. He found our rope