Faustus in the Jungle

THE RED ROCK WILDERNESS (288 pp.)--Elspeth Huxley--Morrow ($3.75).

"Don't suck candy in the Congo" (i.e., do not take innocence into dark places) seems to be the moral pointed by British Novelist Elspeth Huxley,* latest explorer to go soul-searching in the jungle. Dr. Ewart Clausen, a famed Norwegian scientist, has renounced the world for his bush clinic at Luala, in French Equatorial Africa, and has become "a secular saint in the humanist calendar." From the far corners of the earth pilgrims come to sit at his feet; he proffers a bag of sticky bull's-eyes, advice, and the magic of his presence.

One such pilgrim--the book's narrator --is Andrew Colquhoun, a youngish Scots drifter eager to pluck the heart from Clausen's mystery, write his biography and perhaps thereby come to terms with his own restless nature. Also on the way to Clausen is an odd trio of characters: a tropical tycoon named Zuckermann, who is playing the white man's last rubber in the game of enlightened self-interest; his beautiful and enigmatic secretary. Gemma; and his top research man, a brilliant mixed-blood scientist who secretly aspires to be "a Napoleon of the black masses." As these and other characters converge on Luala, Colquhoun stumbles on a series of weird goings-on--sacrificial rams and totemistic moles and a mysterious concourse of natives performing rites by a river bank. At Luala, near the sacred rock Bamili (where sacrifices had probably been held since the time of Queen Nefertiti), Colquhoun discovers that those who come under the shadow of this red rock are doomed to a sad fate.

Clausen offers his ritual bull's-eyes to Colquhoun, but later makes the agonized confession that he has been an all-night sucker for the beastly magic of a local witch doctor. Hoping to bridge the gulf between European and African knowledge, he has dabbled in mysterious rites (in one, a man was burned to death by no visible flame) and is now desperately afraid for his soul. The fate of this jungle Dr. Faustus is sealed in what the press calls "the great Clausen scandal." Kenya-raised Novelist Huxley (Red Strangers, The Walled City) has written a literate thriller that is short on gore (despite the unlimited possibilities) and long on insight. It is also a drama of the scientific, humanitarian mind led, in its pursuit of ultimate truth, to its blackest dead end.

* Wife of Publicist Gervas Huxley, cousin of Aldous and Julian.

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