Free Jonestown by Wilson Harris Page B

declares itself. Such is the precocity of love, the precocity of feud as well. Marie was known to be the adopted daughter of the Doctor at the Port Mourant hospital. Doctors are Gods to peasant folk in poor people’s hospitals. But there was an ominous side to Marie’s parentage. One report claimed that her parents had been killed in a car crash and that – above the debris of the car – an Old God, or escaped Prisoner, materialized. Escaped from Devil’s Isle. The Inspector of Police seized him. Escaped prisoners from French Guiana were an occasional feature on the British Guiana coast. Carnival fastened on the event. The Old God claimed that he was Marie’s father and that the Doctor was not to be trusted.’ Mr Mageye was smiling.
    ‘No laughing matter,’ I said. ‘Carnival is no laughing matter.’
    ‘Indeed not,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘In the reaches of great windswept , rain-swept, sun-swept savannahs, the most ancient feuds between heaven and earth are revived in villages and upon roads that may seem jam-packed at times but are insubstantial and frail against an immensity of sky and land and sea that borders the coastlands. The peasantry and the people are native to, yet tormented by, such extremity. They long for a saviour, for authority, for truth. Where does authority reside? Does it reside in European empires whose presence they feel? Does it reside in the new power-hungry politicians? Does it reside in upper worlds, nether worlds? Tell me, Francisco. Feed my apparition in your book .’
    I hesitated for a long while and then I found the confidence to speak.
    ‘I would say,’ I began hesitantly, pulling a loose thread from my Nemesis Bag and letting it fall to the ground, ‘that all the ingredients of uncertainty that you stress, Mr Mageye, are woven into a car crash – as into the wreck of the Argo – into …’ I hesitated … ‘into wars and rumours of war across the sea, into submarines and the shadow of fleets patrolling the Atlantic seaboard of South America. No wonder the Old God hovers inspace only to be seized by the Inspector and placed in a cell.’ I stopped, but then it occurred to me to lay bare my heart to Mr Mageye. ‘That Prisoner or Old God wrestles with the Doctor and the Inspector to claim Marie as his Virgin daughter …’
    There was much more that I wished to say, my desire for Marie even before I met her, my jealousy of Deacon, but Mr Mageye interrupted – ‘Look! there they are.’
    It suddenly occurred to me – as in a Jest of Dream – that my jealousy of Deacon had helped to flesh out the occasion, to give content to both Deacon and Marie in the backward sweep of years since I began to write. There they were indeed, large as life, within the raining, mist-filled savannahs in which Mr Mageye and I stood invisible to them.
    We were I calculated halfway between Crabwood Creek and Port Mourant.
    Deacon was naked. The tattooed Scorpion Constellation shone darkly on his child’s arm. On the other monstrous, heroic arm stood the double star Aldebaran associated with Taurus, but the Bull had been overturned into Horses on the Moon. I was able to draw close to him with Mr Mageye’s assistance and to read every pore in his body.
    Deacon had abandoned his school uniform to come into his own as the masterful child-bridegroom who secures the Virgin of the Wild on her appearance at the end of every long, searing drought when the rains commence.
    Deacon had paused as if locked into the thread of my glance. But he shot forward again in my Dream-book. Mr Mageye (Camera in hand) was out of sight – as on a film set – and I (in my Nemesis Hat) kept in touch (though I was invisible to him). Such are the wonders of technology and science within futuristic strategies of the Imagination.
    He ran with a miraculous stride. Amazing to maintain his stride on the slippery path that he had taken. But the long drought had hardened the ground. The water table was low and it would take a day or