The Dream of the Celt: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

source to its mouth at the Atlantic! To accompany the hero who found the missing Dr. Livingstone! Then, as if the gods wanted to extinguish his exaltation, he suffered his first attack of malaria. Nothing, compared with the second, three years later—1887—and above all this third attack, in 1902, when for the first time he thought he would die. The symptoms were the same that dawn in the middle of 1902 when, his traveling bag already packed with maps, compass, pencils, and notebooks, he felt himself trembling with cold as he opened his eyes in the bedroom on the top floor of his house in Boma, in the colonists’ district, a few steps from Government House, which served as the consul’s residence and office. He moved aside the mosquito netting and saw through the windows, without glass or curtains but with metal screens to keep out insects and riddled now by a downpour, the muddy waters of the great river and the outline of islands covered with vegetation. He couldn’t stand. His legs collapsed under him, as if they were made of rags. John, his bulldog, was frightened and began to jump and bark. He let himself fall back into bed. His body was burning and the cold penetrated his bones. He shouted for Charlie and Mawuku, the Congolese steward and cook who slept on the lower floor, but no one answered. They must have gone out and, caught by the storm, run to take shelter under a baobab tree until it abated. Malaria again? The consul cursed. Just on the eve of the expedition? He would have diarrhea; hemorrhages and weakness would oblige him to stay in bed for days, weeks, dazed and shivering.
    Charlie was the first of the servants to return, dripping water. “Go for Dr. Salabert,” Roger ordered, not in French but in Lingala. Dr. Salabert was one of two physicians in Boma, the old slave-trade port—it was called Mboma then—where, in the sixteenth century, Portuguese traffickers from the island of São Tomé came to buy slaves from the tribal chiefs of the vanished Kingdom of the Kongo, transformed now by the Belgians into the capital of the Congo Free State. Unlike Matadi, in Boma there was no hospital, only a dispensary staffed by two Flemish nuns for emergency cases. The doctor arrived half an hour later, shuffling his feet and leaning on a cane. He was younger than he seemed, but the harsh climate, and especially alcohol, had aged him. He looked like an old man and dressed like a vagabond. His high shoes had no laces and his vest was unbuttoned. Even though the day was just beginning, his eyes were bloodshot.
    “Yes, my friend, malaria, what else would it be. What a fever. You know the treatment: quinine, abundant fluids, a diet of broth and biscuits, and lots of blankets to sweat out the infections. Don’t even dream of getting up before two weeks. And certainly not of going on a trip, not even to the corner. Tertian fevers demolish the organism, as you know all too well.”
    It wasn’t for two but three weeks that he was devastated by fevers and fits of shivering. He lost twenty pounds, and on the first day he could stand, he took a few steps and fell to the floor exhausted, in a state of weakness he did not recall having felt before. Dr. Salabert, staring into his eyes, warned him in a cavernous voice and with acid humor:
    “In your condition it would be suicide to go on that expedition. Your body is in ruins and would not survive even a crossing of the Crystal Mountains, much less several weeks of living outdoors. You wouldn’t even reach Mbanza-Ngungu. There are faster ways to kill yourself, Consul: a bullet in the mouth or an injection of strychnine. If you need them, you can count on me. I’ve helped several people undertake the great journey.”
    Roger telegraphed the Foreign Office that the state of his health obliged him to postpone the expedition. And since the rains made the forests and river impassable then, the expedition to the interior of the Congo Free State had to wait a few more months that