2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (15 page)

≡ A similar scenario gets Allnutt (Humphrey Bogart) and Rose (Katharine Hepburn) out of a fix in
The African Queen
.

As the Belgian drank himself into a stupor in his cabin, Mauritzen went on to the bridge and began directing the crew. By 6
PM
the
Constantin
was free of the sandbank.

That evening the men camped onshore in a clearing in the village. Much to Dr Hanschell’s dismay—for he believed venereal disease had been transmitted into the area by Arab slavers—many of them went with the women of Mulango that night. According to Shankland, the ladies were ‘bold and handsome, some of them, and dressed only in a few beads and a scrap of bark-cloth fore and aft’. Some of the servants attached to the expedition began acting as procurers on their masters’ behalf, running between them and the bare-breasted tribeswomen until a price had been agreed. Fortunately Spicer, who had gone to bed, saw none of this.

The convoy set off again after an early breakfast, back under the command of a hungover Captain Blaes. They had gone only a few more miles when, to everyone’s fury, the
Constantin
snagged again. This time there was really no budging her. It suddenly seemed obvious enough why the Captain had resorted to the bottle and never bothered to shave. His job must have been sheer hell, if the steamer ran aground so often, and he clearly loathed himself as much as he loathed the job.

Like the riverboat captain whom Joseph Conrad deputised for during his trip up the Congo in 1890, Captain Blaes was probably half-sick with fever and dysentery, too. As an employee of the Societe Anonyme Beige pour le Commerce du Haut Congo, Conrad travelled up as far as Stanley Falls on a steamer called the
Roi des Beiges
. The name of the boat was no accident: nominally independent, the Societe was really a creature of King Leopold II, like everything else in the so-called Congo Free State at that time. Conrad fell ill himself during his four months in the Congo and grew despondent and world-weary, so it is easy to see how Captain Blaes had turned out the way he had. ‘Everything is repellent to me,’ Conrad wrote to his aunt. ‘Men and things; but especially men. And I too am repellent to them.’

As the expedition sat in the river above Mulango, Wainwright sucked on his pencil, wondering how they would get
Mimi
and
Toutou
back into the water. The Lualaba flowed past on either side of the
Constantin de Burlay
and round her lighter, which carried
Mimi
and
Toutou
—from which heel-kicking vantage point Dr Hanschell, Cross and the rest watched the waters heading north-northwest towards Stanley Falls. They were stuck fast. Surely this couldn’t be journey’s end after they had come so far?

Just then they spotted the smokestack of another paddle-steamer travelling in the opposite direction. Within minutes the
Baron Jansenn
hoved into view. More of a barge than a ship, it drew less water than the
Constantin
and would be able to float clear of the rocks and sandbanks that seemed to cover the river bed.

And so it proved, once Eastwood had brokered a deal between the two captains. Money changed hands, but there was no shortage of that. Eastwood had been given a great deal of petty cash for just such an emergency. The
Constantin
’s lighter, with
Mimi
and
Toutou
on board, was pulled behind the new steamer. The only losers were the mainly Congolese passengers on the
Baron Jansenn
, with their livestock, pots and pans and poultry. As it was now turning round and going back to Kabalo—the end-point of the expedition’s river journey—there was little point in them staying on board. Nor was there much use in boarding the beached
Constantin de Burlay
, to wait with Captain Blaes and his bottles for the rains to come. A good few of these stranded passengers must have cursed Spicer and his men as they disappeared upriver.

W
inding through the forest, the Lualaba River passed a clearing where a few mud huts could be seen. There were also some barns made of mud, but roofed with corrugated iron instead of straw. Next to these dismal structures was a boatyard in which were stacked the rusting brown ribs of a large steamer. Together with its rivets and side panels, they looked like the bones of some ancient creature dug up from deep in the Rift. Each panel was painted with a number. Nearby, a railway siding cut away into the dense jungle. The only other building was a prison: a high-walled, grey-stone compound, its interior divided into small cells.

Viewed through a haze of mosquitoes as they pulled alongside in the
Baron Jansenn
, it was a depressing place to disembark. The sweltering heat made the whole scene feel extremely claustrophobic. Undergrowth threatened the torpid encampment on every side and even the ground on which they stood was little more than a kind of coarse vegetative mat, composed in the main of the same sort of weeds as the islands they had skirted on their way upriver.

This gloomy circle of hell was called Kabalo and the Naval Africa Expedition reached it at about 3
PM
on 22 October 1915. When Evelyn Waugh landed there while globe-trotting in 1930, it hadn’t improved much:

It was just before sundown when we reached Kabalo, a place of forbidding aspect. There was no platform; a heap of wood-fuel and the abrupt termination of the line marked the station; there were other bits of line sprawling out to right and left; a few shabby trucks had been shunted on one of these, and apparently abandoned; there were two or three goods sheds of corrugated iron and a dirty little canteen; apart from these, no evidence of habitation.

Waugh, who came up by train from Lake Tanganyika—making the same journey as Spicer’s men, but in the opposite direction—then turns his attention to the river:

In front of us lay the Upper Congo—at this stage of its course undistinguished among the great rivers of the world for any beauty or interest; a broad flow of water, bounded by swamps; since we were in the rainy season, it was swollen and brown. A barge or two lay in to the bank, and a paddle-steamer rusted all over, which was like a flooded Thames bungalow more than a ship. A bit of the bank opposite the railway line had been buttressed up with concrete; on all sides lay rank swamp. Mercifully, night soon came on and hid this beastly place.

As Wainwright worked out how to disembark
Mimi
and
Toutou
and to ready them for the final stretch of their journey, which would bring them to Lukuga on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, the men wandered round Kabalo. The numbered iron fragments in the shipyard turned out to be bits of the
Baron Dhanis
, the ‘hidden’ Belgian warship that had yet to be assembled. The Germans regarded it as the greatest threat to their naval power on the lake, even though it still lay in pieces; but as John Lee had explained to the Admiralty, the Belgians dared not take the
Baron Dhanis
to Lukuga, lest the Germans bombard her from the water. Despite her rusty appearance, the
Dhanis
was actually brand new. She had been at Kabalo for a year, waiting for a boiler. It was still in Antwerp, which had been captured by the Germans. The British Admiralty had sent out two twelve-pounder guns for the
Dhanis
, but since there was little likelihood of them being employed in the near future, the Belgians had taken the guns to Lukuga to use as shore batteries.

It took three days for
Mimi
and
Toutou
to be hauled on to flat-bed wagons at the rear of the train that would take them to Lukuga. On 26 October Spicer’s men took their own places on the hard seats of two wooden carriages. The line was extremely uneven and the ride was so bumpy as to make it difficult to read or do anything except clutch on to something and stare out of the window. At first the country was relatively featureless: miles and miles of tall yellow grass on either side of the tracks, some of it as high as the carriages. They stopped from time to time to take on firewood for the 70-ton locomotive that pulled them along.

Then the landscape changed dramatically. The train rocked its way up into some sandstone bluffs. Reaching the top it assumed an alarming angle and plunged down into the Lukuga Valley. Below them for nearly 200 miles—sometimes foaming angrily over rocks, sometimes sluggish and clogged with water-plants and creepers—flowed a river that was at the very heart of the mystery of Lake Tanganyika. As much as the Nile—with which it was mistakenly connected by Livingstone—Lake Tanganyika was the Holy Grail of the great European explorers of Africa. Despite its vast size, it proved strangely difficult to find. But added to this, nobody quite understood how it was connected to the great river-systems surrounding it.

It was a question that Spicer, as a trained hydrographer, had considered and discussed with Mauritzen. Their discussions were footnotes to a grand tradition. While Livingstone believed that the Lualaba River and the much smaller Lukuga were at the head-waters of the Nile, Stanley was convinced they both fed into the Congo, whose source (he reasoned) must be Lake Tanganyika. But exploring the lake in his wooden sailboat, the
Lady Alice
, in 1876, Stanley found the situation to be rather more complicated. Instead of flowing out of Lake Tanganyika, as he had expected, the Lukuga River was actually flowing in, through a marshy intermediate zone. Stanley calculated that the level of the lake was rising and, with characteristic egotism, he reckoned that after thousands of years it was now at its limit. Just a little more rain, he said, and it would pour out over the swamp. As John Geddie puts it in
The Lake Regions of Central Africa
, it was extremely magnanimous of Lake Tanganyika to delay ‘the ceremony of turning on the water’ until Stanley had arrived to witness it:

This is a fascinating theory, but perhaps a more obvious one is to be preferred. Tanganyika is too old not to have discovered this chink in its side long ago. In its time it has had several levels, and in point of fact it alters its flood-mark at least once every year with the rainy and the dry seasons. The Lukuga gap probably represents the fracture of an earthquake, or a hole which the imprisoned waters had broken out and escaped by in some former age, and which has been its safety-valve in its later history. When the Tanganyika has water to spare, it empties it westward; when it has not, it keeps all its supply to itself, and generally preserves a very fine balance between inflow and evaporation.

It was towards this occasional contributor to the Congo and unique hydrological phenomenon that the Naval Africa Expedition made its precarious way on 26 October 1915. Perhaps among the members of the expedition only Spicer understood the Lukuga River’s significance. He may well have read the account of its discovery written by his naval predecessor Lieutenant Cameron, who explored Lake Tanganyika in 1874, while in search of Livingstone.↓

≡
Across Africa
(London, 1877). Meeting Livingstone’s servants bearing the dead body of their master, Cameron explored Lake Tanganyika before proceeding westwards to the Atlantic, becoming the first European to cross equatorial Africa. He was later an author of adventure stories for boys.

After descending into a wooded area above the river, the train came to a halt. This was Kilu, said the Belgian engine-driver, where they would swap locomotives. For the remaining 40 or so miles of their journey,
Mimi
and
Toutou
would cross gorges on rickety wooden bridges that would not support the yo-ton locomotive, so a smaller one would be hooked up. In the event, the driver also ordered
Toutou
to be uncoupled. Both boats would be too heavy for the trestle bridges, he explained, and he would only take
Mimi
for the time being. So
Toutou
was shunted off into a siding along with the big locomotive.

Over the high rocks, to which the track clung with all the tenacity of a mountain goat, the tiny train chugged its way, continually dipping in and out of gulches. Where the gulches became gorges there were wooden bridges constructed from long poles driven into the rocks and fastened with guy ropes either side. At any moment the train might have plunged down one of these deep ravines and the driver stopped before each bridge to inspect its fixtures carefully and see if it was safe. Sometimes the gorges were more like tunnels. On one of the bridges the vertical clearance was so slight they had to remove the boats from the carriages and slide them along the tracks on their cradles. This was done, says Spicer, ‘by lowering them onto sleepers laid across the rails, which were well greased’. The engine then pulled the boats slowly through. Even so, Spicer adds, ‘we had only 7 inches clearance at the top’. There were no less than 33 bridges, so even though the distance they had to travel was relatively short, their journey took most of the day. Not far from Lukuga—the Belgian encampment on Lake Tanganyika—the line petered out. The train simply came to an abrupt halt on a piece of bare track. All of the rail and sleepers had been used up. There was a sort of station in the bush, consisting of little more than a few huts, a water-tank and a pile of firewood. From behind this modest establishment, a quaint and ragged personage greeted them, looking like some figure from the
commedia dell’arte
. It was Sub-Lieutenant Tyrer, otherwise known as Piccadilly Johnny, he of the monocle and the addiction to Worcester sauce. In the intervening months, however, his bottle of yellow hair-dye had run out and his hair was now as white as snow, with a beard to match. The other members of the expedition stared at this tatty individual in astonishment. Seemingly oblivious to their scrutiny, Tyrer informed them they would have to walk the remaining two miles to the lakeshore.

It was almost evening by this stage and too late to see Lake Tanganyika, so
Mimi
was hidden in a siding, in case the Germans came looking for her, and the expedition set up camp.

Dr Hanschell awoke the following morning to find that Spicer had already set off for the lake. The locomotive was being prepared to return up the line to fetch
Toutou
, accompanied by some of the men; the others had gone with Spicer to Lukuga. Dr Hanschell and Eastwood, finding themselves with nothing to do, decided to walk to the lake. Despite their very different religious beliefs, they were now firm friends. So it was with a sense of companionship as well as mounting excitement that they climbed the hills surrounding the vast expanse of water they had travelled so far to conquer; its presence was heralded by a change in the light over the brow of a range of hills some miles off. As they climbed, the weather broke with a warning thunderclap and a sudden flash of lightning. Finally the rains had arrived, it seemed, pattering down on the cane and dry grass in round fat drops.