The Dust Diaries Read Free

stood.’ Frank gestured to the bare dusty earth around the Cathedral. As they walked towards the Cathedral’s entrance, he continued over his shoulder, ‘Together with the trade in ivory, it was this market that ran the island.’
    Frank was still explaining the history of the site when they entered the Cathedral’s nave through a heavy carved door, stepping into the relief of the building’s cool darkness from the rising heat of the day outside. Impatient to show him the peculiar features of the building, Frank didn’t wait for Arthur’s eyes to adjust to the dim light, and immediately began his well-rehearsed tour. In the nave, the huge font made from Italian marble shipped in from the Apuan Alps, and next to this, twelve pillars, all upside down, mistakenly erected that way by the local workmen while the Bishop was off on safari. In the body of the cathedral he drew Arthur’s attention to the elegant Moorish windows, and a dark crucifix made from the wood of the tree under which Livingstone’s servants had buried his heart. At the altar a single round piece of white marble was inlaid where the whipping post of the slave market had stood. Around this, to represent the blood that had fallen there, were slabs of grey marble veined with red as if that blood had just been shed and was still unfurling in the stone’s frozen water.
    Behind the altar itself was the grave of the Cathedral’s founder, Bishop Steere, buried there in 1882, two years after the building was completed. Behind this again was the entrance-way down into the old slave chambers, into which Frank crouched with a lit candle. Arthur followed, bending down low to avoid the stone of the door frame above him.
    The chambers were low-ceilinged dungeons of disturbingly small proportions. Frank continued his tour, his soft voice falling like ash in the bare rooms. This, he explained, was where fifty men or seventy-five women and children were chained and kept for three days. One deep channel for faeces and urine ran through the centre of each chamber, and one narrow slit at the level of the street outside provided a dusty ventilation. There was nothing else. It was a culling ground. The weak did not survive, and the strong emerged back into the light barely human.
    After their visit to the Cathedral Frank had left Arthur to his own devices and he’d taken a walk through the town again. This time, walking through the streets alone, he found the strangeness of the place he’d felt that morning had begun to settle into a rhythm of its own. A rhythm he could identify and feel a part of. He talked to some of the traders in the tiny, cool shops that punctuated the narrow streets, and even bought himself a new khaki safari suit from one of them. It was a little short at the sleeves, but he was pleased with his rare purchase. Then he had lain down for a few hours in the cool of his lodgings, listening to the town outside, the distant roll of the port’s noise and the nearer quick talk of women and children, in both Arabic and Swahili. Eventually he slept, shedding his body of its sea weariness, until he was woken in the early evening by the muezzin’s call to prayer, skittering across the sky from one of the minarets that rose above the town’s bustle of people, plaster and dust.
    That evening he and Frank took a pony and trap out to the British Governor’s house for dinner. His sleep, seeing Frank again, the impressive Cathedral, feeling the foreignness of the town ebb about him, all of these had left Arthur with a sense of contentment that he hadn’t felt for years, either in England or on his journey south. Lying with his eyes closed in his bed on the Hertzog outside Beira Bay, feeling the gentle rock and swell of the ship, he remembers now how that short trip out to the Governor’s house had seemed so perfect, as if just momentarily he and his surroundings were in harmony. The sun blinked, low and orange, between the coconut palms at the side of the road