There is a Tide
How infinitely soothing to the heart it was to be home. I began that evening with nothing but peace in me: and the evening itself jellied down over Africa with a mild mother’s touch: so that even now I must refuse myself the luxury of claiming any premonition of the disaster for which the scene was already set.
My half-brother, K-Jubal (we had the same father), was in a talkative mood. As we sat at the table on the veranda of his house, his was the major part of the conversation: and this was unusual, for I am a poet.
‘… because the new dam is now complete,’ he was saying, ‘and I shall take my days more easily. I am going to write my life story, Rog. G-Williams on the World Weekly has been pressing me for it for some time; it’ll be serialised, and then turned into audibook form. I should make a lot of money, eh?’
He smiled as he asked this; in my company he always enjoyed playing the heavy materialist. Generally I encouraged him: this time I said: ‘Jubal, no man in Congo States, no man in the world possibly, has done more for people than you. I am the idle singer of an idle day, but you – why, your good works lie about you.’
I swept my hand out over the still bright land.
Mokulgu is a rising town on the western fringes of Lake Tanganyika’s northern end. Before Jubal and his engineers came here, it was a sleepy market town, and its natives lived in the indolent fashion of their countless forefathers. In ten years, that ancient pattern was awry; in fifteen, shattered completely. If you lived in Mokulgu now, you slept in a bed in a towering nest of flats, you ate food unfouled by flies and you moved to the sound of whistles and machinery. You had at your black fingertips, in fact, the benefits of what we persist in calling ‘Western civilisation’. If you were more hygienic and healthy – so ran the theory – you were happier.
But I begin to sound sceptical. That is my error. I happen to have little love for my fellow men; the thought of the Massacre is always with me, even after all this time. I could not deny that the trend of things at Mokulgu and elsewhere, the constant urbanisation, was almost unavoidable. But as a man with some sensibility, I regretted that human advance should always be over the corpse of Nature. That a counterblast was being prepared even then did not occur to me.
From where we sat over our southern wines, both lake and town were partially visible, the forests in the immediate area having been demolished long ago. The town was already blazing with light, the lake looked already dark, a thing preparing for night. And to our left, standing out with a clarity which suggested yet more rain to come, stretched the rolling jungles of the Congo tributaries.
For at least three hundred miles in that direction, man had not invaded: there lived the pygmies, flourishing without despoiling. That area, the Congo Source land, would be the next to go; Jubal, indeed, was the spearhead of the attack. But for my generation at least that vast tract of primitive beauty would stand, and I was selfishly glad of it. I always gained more pleasure from a tree than population increase statistics.
Jubal caught something of the expression on my face.
‘The power we are releasing here will last for ever,’ he said. ‘It’s already changing – improving – the entire economy of the area. At last, at long last, Africa is realising her potentialities.’
His voice held almost a tremor, and I thought that this passion for Progress was the secret of his strength.
‘You cling too much to the past, Rog,’ he added.
‘Why all this digging and tunnelling and wrenching up of riverbeds?’ I asked. ‘Would not atomics have been a cheaper and easier answer?’
‘No,’ he said decisively. ‘This system puts to use idle water; once in operation, everything is entirely self-servicing. Besides, uranium is none too plentiful, water is. Venus has no radioactive materials, I believe?’
This sounded to me like an invitation to change the subject. I accepted it.
‘They’ve found none yet,’ I assented. ‘But I can speak with no authority. I went purely as a tourist – and a glorious trip it was.’
‘It must be wonderful to be so many million miles nearer the sun,’ he said. It was the sort of plain remark I had often heard him make. On others’ lips it might have sounded platitudinous; in his quiet tones I caught a note of sublimity.
‘I shall never get to Venus,’ he said. ‘There’s too much work to be done here. You must have seen some marvels there, Rog!’
‘Yes … Yet nothing so strange as an elephant.’
‘And they’ll have a breathable atmosphere in a decade, I hear?’
‘So they say. They certainly are doing wonders … You know, Jubal, I shall have to go back then. You see, there’s a feeling, er – something, a sort of expectancy. No, not quite that; it’s hard to explain – ’ I don’t converse well. I ramble and mumble when I have something real to say. I could say it to a woman, or I could write it on paper; but Jubal is a man of action, and when I did say it, I deliberately omitted emotional overtones and lost interest in what I said. ‘It’s like courting a woman in armour with the visor closed, on Venus now. You can see it, but you can’t touch or smell or breathe it. Always an airtight dome or a space suit between you and actuality. But in ten years’ time, you’ll be able to run your bare fingers through the sand, feel the breezes on your cheek … Well, you know what I mean, er – sort of feel her undressed.’
He was thinking – I saw it in his eye: ‘Rog’s going to go all poetic on me.’ He said: ‘And you approve of that – the change over of atmospheres?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yet you don’t approve of what we’re doing here, which is just the same sort of thing?’
He had a point. ‘You’re upsetting a delicate balance here,’ I said gingerly. ‘A thousand ecological factors are swept by the board just so that you can grind these waters through your turbines. And the same thing’s happened at Owen Falls over on Lake Victoria … But on Venus there’s no such balance. It’s just a clean page waiting for man to write what he will on it. Under that CO2 blanket, there’s been no spark of life: the mountains are bare of moss, the valleys lie innocent of grass; in the geological strata, no fossils sleep; no amoebae move in the sea. But what you’re doing here …’
‘People!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve got people to consider. Babies need to be born, mouths must be fed. A man must live. Your sort of feelings are all very well – they make good poems – but I consider the people. I love the people. For them I work …’
He waved his hands, overcome by his own grandiose visions. If the passion for Progress was his strength, the fallacy inherent in the idea was his secret weakness. I began to grow warm.
‘You get good conditions for these people, they procreate forthwith. Next generation, another benefactor will have to step forward and get good conditions for the children. That’s Progress, eh?’ I asked maliciously.
‘I see you so rarely, Rog; don’t let’s quarrel,’ he said meekly. ‘I just do what I can. I’m only an engineer.’
That was how he always won an altercation. Before meekness I have
