Read Chapter 10: The First Fever

The first man to collapse was a Hausa porter named Sidi, whom Émile had always thought of as the most cheerful member of the company. He was singing—a low, rhythmic work-song about rain and market days—when his knees simply folded beneath him. He went down like a struck tent, face-first into the red dust, and lay there humming the same melody until Bakary rolled him over.

Sidi’s eyes were open. They tracked the sky. His lips moved, but the song had become something else. Émile knelt beside him and pressed a hand to the man’s forehead. Hot. Far too hot for the hour—the morning was still cool, the sun barely clear of the ridgeline. He checked Sidi’s pulse, found it racing, and tried to recall the symptoms of malaria. The intermittent fever, the chills, yes. But Sidi was not shivering. He was staring at something beyond the canopy, and his mouth kept forming sounds that were almost words, nearly language, slipping away before Émile could catch them.

“What is he saying?” Émile asked Bakary.

Bakary listened. His face went still in that particular way Émile had learned to recognize—the mask that dropped when something beneath the world moved. “He says the man without a shadow has been counting his steps.”

“The man without a shadow,” Émile repeated. He wanted to dismiss it. Heat, exhaustion, a touch of the sun. But his own hands were trembling, and not from the morning chill.

He stood too quickly. The world swayed, and Henri caught his elbow.

“Easy,” Henri said. “You’re white as a sheet.”

“I’m fine. It’s the men we need to worry about.”

Even as he said it, another porter crumpled at the edge of camp, folding into the shadow of a baobab. Then a third, a young Fulani boy named Issa, who had spent the previous day joking about French cooking. He was curled on his side, breathing fast and shallow, and when Émile grasped his shoulder, Issa flinched as if burned.

“Fever,” Émile said, more to convince himself than the others. “Malaria. It moves through the water, the air. We need to treat them—quinine, if any remains.”

He reached for his medical satchel and realized his hands were shaking badly enough that he had to grip his wrist to steady them. The satchel felt wrong in his fingers, the buckle unfamiliar. For a moment he could not remember how it opened. Then the mechanism returned to him, like a word surfacing from deep water, and he dug out the small glass vial of quinine powder. Half full. Enough for perhaps four doses.

“How many men are down?” he asked, not looking up.

Henri’s voice came from somewhere to his left. “Three. But Mamadou is showing signs—you should see his hands.”

Émile finally turned. Mamadou was sitting apart from the others, arms wrapped around his knees, rocking gently. The old porter’s face was slick with sweat, and his fingers twitched against his shins as though counting something that would not stay still. His lips moved in a constant, silent stream of words.

“Mamadou,” Émile said, approaching slowly. “Can you hear me?”

Mamadou’s gaze snapped to Émile’s face. His eyes were bright and feverish, but there was something else behind them—a clarity that Émile had learned to distrust. The man without a shadow is patient, Mamadou said in Hausa, low and urgent. He walks beside the column. He counts us. He has counted us every day since we crossed the river.

“The river,” Émile said, and felt his stomach drop. “Which river?”

Mamadou shook his head. The one that moved. The one that was behind us and then ahead of us. That river. The man without a shadow stood on the far bank when we crossed. He has been following ever since. He borrows men’s footsteps. When he has enough, he will not need to follow. He will walk in front.

Bakary translated without looking at Émile, his eyes fixed on the treeline. The translation itself seemed to cost him something. He finished, and then added his own words, quietly: “I have heard of this. The shadowless one. He is not a demon of the lake. He is older. He is what the lake feeds on.”

Émile pressed his palms against his thighs to stop the trembling. The diagnosis was cleaner if he could hold on to it. Malaria. Intermittent fever, prostration, delirium. All of it could be explained by the disease. The man without a shadow was a mirage of a fevered mind. The missing days, the erased notebook, the shifting stone circle—those could be explained too, if he just had time to think. But he did not have time. The men were falling around him, and his own body was betraying him.

He looked down at his hands. The shaking was worse now. He could not hold a pencil steady. He tried to recall the day’s date and found only a blank space where the number should have been. He knew there had been a date. He had recorded it this morning. He remembered writing it, remembered the scratch of graphite on paper, but the information itself was gone, swallowed by the same emptiness that had eaten his notebook.

“Henri,” he said, and hated the unsteadiness in his voice. “I need you to take this.” He thrust the quinine vial at his companion. “Three doses. Dilute in water. See to the men.”

Henri took the vial, his expression unreadable. “And what will you do?”

“I’m going to send a message back. To the coast. To the mission at Sokodé.” Émile pulled a leaf of paper from his jacket—his official stationery, the only blank sheet left. He fumbled for his pencil, found it, and tried to write. The letters came out ragged, slanting downhill despite his efforts to keep the line level. He wrote: *Require immediate relief. Fever among porters. Position unknown beyond bearing west. Send word to Académie. É. Fournier.*

It was inadequate. It was pathetic. But it was something—a thread of contact with the world he had left behind. He folded the sheet, addressed it to the acting governor’s office in Dakar, and looked around for a runner.

Bakary was watching him with those ancient eyes. “You will not send a man alone.”

“I have no choice. The others are down. You can’t be spared.”

“You send a man into the blank alone and he will not return.”

“They need treatment. The mission has supplies. We are days away from the planned resupply point, and this—” Émile gestured at the men sprawled beneath the trees. “This cannot wait for plans.”

Bakary said nothing. He simply looked at Émile’s hands, which were shaking so badly now that the paper rattled between his fingers.

Émile cursed under his breath and forced stillness into his arms. He called to one of the porters who had not yet fallen—a wiry Mossi man named Kabré, who had been with the expedition since the seaport. Kabré came forward reluctantly, his eyes darting from Mamadou’s rocking form to the blanket-wrapped bodies of the other sick men.

“Kabré,” Émile said. “You know the way back?”

Kabré’s gaze fixed on the paper in Émile’s hand. He made no move to take it.

“You will return to Sokodé,” Émile pressed. “You will give this to the priest there. He will send it on. You will not stop, you will not look back. Do you understand?”

Kabré’s throat worked. He spoke in breathy French, the language he had picked up in the trading posts. “The way back, monsieur—it is no longer the way I came.”

Émile felt a cold trickle of sweat run down his spine. “What do you mean?”

“The trail markers I placed with the rocks,” Kabré said. “They are not there. I looked this morning. The rocks, they are gone. But the tree that I marked, the one I cut with my knife—it is also gone. There is a different tree there. One I have never seen.”

Bakary made a low sound in his throat. The prayer, the naming, the anchor of spoken words. He began to speak rapidly in his own language, addressing the air itself, giving names to the trees around them as though the act of saying them aloud might make them stay.

Émile closed his eyes. When he opened them, Kabré was still standing before him, waiting, terrified. The paper was still in his hand. The message was useless—if the land would not hold still long enough for a man to walk back through it, then no letter would ever reach the coast.

But he could not admit that. Not to Kabré. Not to himself.

“Take it,” Émile said, pressing the folded sheet into Kabré’s hands. “Follow the sun east. Keep the sun at your back. Do not stop for anything.”

Kabré took the letter. He did not look at it. He looked at Émile’s face, and whatever he saw there made him abruptly turn and begin walking east, quick and mechanical, as though he had to move before his own legs betrayed him.

They watched him go. The canopy swallowed him within a hundred paces.

Mamadou’s voice rose from his rock, thin and cracked: *He will not reach the river. The shadowless one will count him first.*

Émile did not answer. He was staring at his own hands, which had stopped shaking. They were perfectly still now. Steady as stone.

He knew he should feel relieved. But all he could feel was the weight of the letter that Kabré was carrying, and the unsettling certainty that he had just written his own name on a message he would never read, sealed in a hand that no longer trembled, addressed to a world that, like everything else in this land, was beginning to slip away from him.