swamplands. He could see it was taking him generally south. There were adventures and mishaps and some further narrow escapes along the way. Maybe you can imagine them as well as I can. There was the encounter with the men on the log raft, drifting downriver, to whom he sold fish and by whom he was warned about the Bobangi, an imperious people controlling trade and passage at the mouth of the Sangha. He didn’t know what that meant, the mouth of the Sangha; he pictured this river going on forever. There was the ambush by the crocodile, another hateful moment, but he had been lucky that morning. It was a nasty animal, not large, barely six feet, presumptuous and stupid to attack a human, and he’d had his revenge. He ate the belly meat and tail of the crocodile for six days afterward. He had never eaten chicken so to him it tasted like fish. He placed the crocodile’s severed head into a column of driver ants and they cleaned it of flesh within an afternoon. Now the sun-bleached skull rode atop the other cargo in his canoe, toothy and grinning, like a totem. He reached the mouth of the Sangha and tried to elude the Bobangi, running midriver at night and laying up by day. But he couldn’t stay with his treasures every moment. He left the boat unguarded once, for only a short time, to gather fruit beneath a mobei tree, and so there was his standoff with the solitary Bobangi man whom he found, as he had found the Tall Boy, committing an outrage: looking into his canoe. Unlike the Tall Boy, this man heard him and turned around.
The man had gray hair at his temples and his left eye was milky blue. His right eye was normal. He was old but not too old to be dangerous; his body appeared still strong. He carried a small iron knife, but no machete, and a little packet in animal hide strung around his neck. He looked like a magus or a sorcerer. He had unwrapped the Voyager’s ivory. The Voyager knew that there were many other Bobangi on the river, maybe even some within earshot. The Voyager felt trapped. He remembered the sickening sound of his machete on the Tall Boy’s head. He decided, very quickly, upon a desperate compromise. He addressed the blue-eyed man in Lingala, not sure whether a Bobangi would understand.
I give you one tusk, the Voyager said.
No sign of response.
I give you one tusk, he repeated, speaking very clearly. You deliver it to your chief. Or . . . you don’t.
He waited, letting the blue-eyed man ponder.
One tusk, he said. He held up a finger. Or I fight you and I kill you for two.
It seemed a long delay. The Voyager began wishing he had simply cracked the man’s skull, at least tried to, whatever the consequences. Then the blue-eyed man turned back to the Voyager’s canoe. He rummaged, shoved away leaves, and lifted out one tusk. He stroked it, testing the smooth cool surface, and appeared satisfied. The Voyager watched him; willed him on his way. All right. Take it. Go. But then, no, the man stooped again. He picked up a single smoked fish. He gaped back at the Voyager with an expression of shameless, bemused defiance. The blue eye twitched—or was that a wink? He took the tusk and the fish and he departed.
That night the Voyager passed onward through Bobangi territory, slipping by their big village near the mouth of the Sangha, where this river debouched into another, unimaginably huge: the Congo. He was astonished when daylight revealed the extent of its braiding channels, islands, and strong currents. It was like a bundle of rivers, not just one. He paddled harder than ever now, but also more carefully, learning wariness of the eddy lines that could knock a canoe sideways, the whirlpools that could suck it under. He kept a distance between himself and other canoes. When he saw men on a raft, he paddled within shouting distance, offered to sell fish, sought information. Once he encountered a steamboat, like a great house proceeding upriver under power, with a machine inside thumping stupidly, passengers and bundled cargo on the deck. It was a strange sight. But the Voyager had seen other strange sights—the spilled brains of a boy, the Ouesso market, a blue-eyed Bobangi thief—and by now felt almost inured to astonishment. The boatman, he could see, was a