region set out to hunt down the giraffe rightly or wrongly accused of the missionary’s death.
“A white man’s life is priceless,” he told me. The hunt seemed vital to the villagers, who were afraid of the Americans—although the embassy had formulated no concrete demands on the subject—and whose regional governor had threatened to withhold all international aid if the culprit went unpunished. The hunt had mobilised about a hundred men and two police jeeps. The scapegoat, pursued across the bush for two whole days, took refuge in the mountains, but in the end, hounded on all sides by men shouting and firing shots as they drew ever closer, it was so exhausted a breath of wind would have mown it down. In the small hours of the morning it was found dying at the foot of a white limestone cliff. It was then transported to the village, where a witch doctor finished it off.
The region had seen no rainfall for two years and Dogon children stayed out in the rain, letting it whip their naked bodies as they expressed their happiness with whoops of joy. They paddled in the mud, jumped, played, laughed and danced. One of them ran towards the post bearing the cage, but he slipped and fell in a puddle halfway. He picked himself up and, I don’t know what made him do this, threw a nasty look at the cage, picked up a handful of mud, shaped it into a huge ball, which he moulded with great care and then threw with all his strength, his muscles quivering with childish glee. The soft, heavy projectile rose up through the air straight towards the giraffe’s head, but missed its target. Rain streamed over the pelt of the decapitated head with its distinctive markings, dripped from the animal’s long ears, filled its pinnae, ran over its forehead where a perfect tuft of hair conferred grace and nobility on its features, which looked as innocent as a newborn baby’s.
Soaked from head to foot myself, I retraced my steps to Tumchooq and set off again. I regretted coming to that village. I regretted it bitterly, because a feeling of guilt, which had been lulled to sleep by my long stay in China, woke and descended on me with thunderous force. For the first time in my life I felt guilty for being white, or even guilty for being human, guilty for my presence in that village, or even on that continent. I now understood that I could go to impossible lengths, set up a hundred more schools for the Songhais, Dogons, Malinkes, Bambaras, Bozos, Sarkoles, Khassokes, Senoufos, Bobos, Fulanis, Tuaregs or the Maures, but I would never be free of that guilt. These thoughts churned round inside my head as Tumchooq toiled back up the Niger, its engine sound deadened by the rain.
It was difficult to see much. The swampy, sparsely populated plain stretching from Mopti to Segu seemed even emptier, even more desolate than on the way down. We could see nothing in the river waters (we were covering under three kilometres an hour) except, here and there, a circular eddy, a vortex, a grassy islet.
At nightfall the rain stopped at last and Tumchooq, struggling with the counter-current, cut through the banks of aquatic plants we came across on the way down, the ones that seemed so magnificent, but now felt hostile. They skidded swiftly towards us, cruelly barring the way to our vessel, and, in order to make any progress, we had to battle constantly, pushing them aside with our long poles. I was at the end of my strength when a swarming black cloud of mosquitoes—they seemed to have multiplied now that the rain had stopped—surged out of the darkness, attacking me from every direction, surrounding me so that I almost couldn’t breathe. Real kamikazes, greedy and mindless, homing in like arrows on the tiniest patch of exposed skin. I killed quite a lot of them, and for a moment the others would abandon my veins to suck the blood-filled corpses of their companions, stuck to my skin like one large viscous scab.
By the following morning I was suffering from a terrible fever, my body on fire, blazing. As my temperature soared, my eyelids grew heavier and heavier and my ears buzzed, even though the mosquitoes had disappeared at dawn. Confused ideas collided inside my head. Huddled in a corner and racked with icy shivering, I wondered whether I was going to die. The fever still burned