was us.’
‘You want some coffee?’ He had a thermos in a knapsack: he gave me a little and drank some himself. I said, ‘Come and see my friends.’ He came and sat down with us. He was amused at my having pulled the rifle trick with him. He said, ‘I fell for it, particularly as everyone knows you left carrying a gun, and there’s no tracker who’ll go after you.’
He told us he had been in Guiana twenty years and that he’d been free these last five. He was forty-five. Because of the silly caper of having had that mask tattooed on his face, life in France didn’t mean anything to him. He worshipped the bush and lived off it entirely – snakes’ and jaguars’ skins, butterfly collections, and above all catching live hoccos, the bird we’d eaten. He could sell them for two hundred or two hundred and fifty francs. I suggested paying for it, but he refused indignantly. This is what he told us: ‘The bird is a sort of wild bush cock. Of course, it’s never so much as seen an ordinary hen or a cock or a human being. Well, I catch one, I take it to the village and I sell it to someone who has a hen-run – they’re always in demand. Right. You don’t have to clip his wings, you don’t have to do anything at all: at nightfall you put him into the henhouse and when you open the door in the morning there he is, standing by, looking like he was counting the cocks and hens as they come out. He comes out after them, and although he eats alongside of them, all the time he’s watching – he looks up, he looks sideways and he looks into the bushes all round. There’s no watchdog to touch him. In the evening he stands there at the door and although no one can tell how, he knows if there’s a hen or two missing, and he goes and finds them. And whether it’s a cock or whether it’s a hen, he drives them in, pecking them like mad to teach them to keep an eye on the clock. He kills rats, snakes, shrews, spiders and centipedes; and a bird of prey has hardly appeared in the sky before he sends everyone off to hide in the grass while he stands there defying it. He never quits the hen-run for a moment.’ And this was the wonderful bird we had eaten like any common barnyard cock.
The Masked Breton told us that Jesus, Fatgut and some thirty other freed men were in prison in the Saint-Laurent gendarmerie, being investigated to see whether any of them could be recognized as having been seen prowling about the building we escaped from. The Arab was in the black-hole of the gendarmerie. He was in solitary, accused of having helped us. The two blows that knocked him out had left no mark, whereas each of the screws had a little lump on the head. ‘For my part, I wasn’t interfered with at all, because everybody knows I never have anything to do with preparing a break.’ He told us Jesus was a sod. When I spoke to him about the boat he asked to see it. He’d scarcely caught sight of it before he cried, ‘But the bastard was sending you to your death! This canoe could never live for an hour in the sea. The first wave of any size, and it’d split in two as it came down. Don’t go off in that thing – it’d be suicide.’
‘What can we do, then?’
‘Got any money?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’ll tell you what to do: and what’s more, I’ll help you. You deserve it. You mustn’t go anywhere near the village – not at any price. To get hold of a decent boat you have to go to Pigeon Island. There are about two hundred lepers there. There’s no warder, and no healthy man ever goes, not even the doctor. At eight o’clock every day a boat takes food for twenty-four hours: uncooked food. A hospital orderly hands over a case of medicine to the two attendants, lepers themselves, who look after the patients. No one sets foot on the island, whether he’s warder, tracker or priest. The lepers live in little straw huts they make themselves. They have a central building where they meet. They raise hens and ducks, and that helps them out with their rations. Officially they aren’t allowed to sell anything off the island, so they have an illicit trade with Saint-Laurent, Saint-Jean and the Chinese of Albina in Dutch Guiana. They’re all dangerous murderers. They don’t often kill one another but they do a fair amount of villainy when they get out of the island on the quiet – they go back and hide there when it’s over. They have some boats stolen from the nearby village for these excursions. Possessing a boat is the worst crime they can commit. The warders fire on any canoe that comes or goes from Pigeon Island. So the lepers sink their boats, filling them with stones: when they need one they dive down, take out the stones, and the boat comes up. There are all kinds on the island, every colour and nation and from every part of France. What it comes to is this – your canoe is only any use to you on the Maroni, and without much in it, at that. To get out to sea, you’ve got to find another boat, and the best place for that is Pigeon Island.’
‘How are we to set about it?’
‘This is how. I’ll come with you up the river until we’re in sight of the island. You wouldn’t find it, or at any rate you might go wrong. It’s about a hundred miles from the mouth, so you have to go upstream again. It’s about thirty miles from Saint-Laurent. I’ll guide you in as close as I can and then I’ll get into my canoe – we’ll tow it behind. Then, once on the island, it’s all up to you.’
‘Why won’t you come on to the island with us?’
‘Ma Doué,’ said the Breton, ‘I just set foot on the landing stage one day, the jetty where the official boats come in. Just once. It was in full daylight, but even so, what I saw was quite enough for me. No, Papi: I’ll never set foot on that island again in my life. Anyhow, I’d never be able to hide my disgust at being near them, talking to them, dealing with them. I’d do more harm than good.’
‘When do we go?’
‘At nightfall.’
‘What’s the time now, Breton?’
‘Three o’clock.’
‘OK. I’ll get a little sleep.’
‘No. You’ve got to load everything properly aboard your canoe.’
‘Nothing of the sort. I’ll go with the empty canoe and then come back for Clousiot. He can stay here with the things.’
‘Impossible. You’d never be able to find the place again, even in the middle of the day. And you must never, never be on the river in daylight. The search for you isn’t over, so don’t think that. The river is still very dangerous.’
Evening came. He brought his canoe and we tied it behind ours. Clousiot lay next to the Breton, who took the steering paddle, and then came Maturette, and then me in front. We made our slow way out of the creek and when we came into the river, night was just about to come down. Over towards the sea a huge brownish-red sun lit up the horizon. The countless fireworks of an enormous display fought to be the most brilliant, redder than the red, yellower than the yellow, more fantastically striped where the colours were mixed. Ten miles away, we could distinctly make out the estuary of the splendid river as it ran gleaming pink and silver into the sea.
The Breton said, ‘It’s the last of the ebb. In an hour we should feel the flood-tide: we’ll make use of it to run up the Maroni: the current will take us up without any effort, and we’ll reach the island pretty soon.’ The darkness came down in a single sweep.
‘Give way,’ said the Breton. ‘Paddle hard and get into the middle of the stream. Don’t smoke.’ The paddles dug into the water and we moved quite fast across the current. Shoo, shoo, shoo. The Breton and I kept stroke beautifully; Maturette did his best. The nearer we got to the middle of the river the more we felt the thrust of the tide. We slid on rapidly, and every half hour we felt the difference. The tide grew in strength, pushing us faster and faster. Six hours later we were very close to the island and heading straight for it – a great patch of darkness almost in the middle of the river, slightly to the right. ‘That’s it,’ said the Breton
