Ivory (22 page)

‘The women are the worst,' he said as he checked to make sure the lorry was waved through in their wake.

‘By worst, I take it you mean the most efficient?'

‘The most honest.'

It was a quiet road and most of the few other vehicles they saw were smoke-belching trucks laden heavily with long, dark hardwood logs, which Alex said were pod mahoganies. He swore as he pointed one out to her. ‘They're raping this country. That timber's destined to be made into furniture in Asian countries that have decimated their own forests. Also, the locals are still into slash-and-burn agriculture, clearing the land for peanuts and other cash crops. They don't even sell the timber they cut. It's criminal.'

She saw the anger in his dark eyes. Where, she wondered, did he draw the line in terms of his own morality? Who was he, a man who used terror and military tactics to rob honest traders, to condemn other businessmen who took advantage of an African country's poverty? On the other hand, his passion for the environment touched something in her.

‘Mozambique has been pillaged for centuries,' he carried on, steering with one hand and waving with the other to emphasise certain points. ‘The province we're in now, Sofala, is named after the original Arab name for the port of Beira, from where ivory, slaves and gold were shipped. After the Arabs came the Portuguese, then we had Russian
advisers
here shooting wildlife from helicopter gunships, and now Chinese merchants. Mozambique needs a chance to heal itself, to
recover properly instead of being someone else's larder, to be emptied whenever they're hungry for resources.'

At the small town of Inchope Alex pulled three cans of Dois M from the car fridge while they waited in a garage for both vehicles to be topped up with fuel. He took one can to the driver of the truck, and handed the other to Jane as he got back behind the wheel and started the engine.

‘You're not going to drink and drive, are you?'

‘What are you going to do, report me to the police? It's not far to the national park now.'

She opened her beer and had to admit to herself that it was thrilling doing something that back in England might have resulted in her getting disbarred. Alex drove slowly when they turned onto the dirt road, which was badly potholed with what looked like thousands of tiny bomb craters, each the size of a dinner plate.

‘This road floods in the wet season, from October to March, and elephant move through. The indentations of their feet dry out in the winter and this is what's left,' he explained as the steering wheel juddered in his hand.

‘Are you going to tell me where you're taking all the animals in that truck behind us?' she asked him.

‘I'm going to show you.' He turned off the rutted track into an open clearing of long dry grass.

He shifted the Toyota into low-range four-wheel drive and Jane had to grip the handle on the dashboard to keep herself steady. She glanced behind them and saw the truck plodding along slowly in their wake. Alex continued on for about five hundred metres until they were out of sight of the track.

‘This should do fine,' he said.

Alex killed the engine and got out. Jane climbed down out of the vehicle and followed Alex back to the truck. He spoke to the driver in rapid Portuguese and the man nodded. He got out of his cab and moved to the rear of the lorry, where he undid the rope fastening the canvas tarpaulin canopy.

‘Are you going to release them all here?'

‘Most of them. I'll take the python and a few of the other snakes to the Pungoe River,' he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

‘I thought you were going to sell them to someone. I'm pleased, of course, but don't you think you should tell the park authorities?'

He looked at her and smiled. ‘But Jane, what I'm doing is illegal.'

She laughed at the absurdity of it, but took a wary step back when Alex climbed up into the back of the truck. The African driver pushed the leopard's wooden cage to the rear. The cat, perhaps sensing its imminent release, was snarling and pawing at the slats.

‘Get into the cab,' Alex told Jane, and repeated the instructions in Portuguese to the driver.

Jane watched from the running board on the passenger's side as Alex fixed one end of a length of rope to a ring bolt on the top of the sliding entry to the cage. Next, he climbed up onto the roof, his weight causing the canvas to sag between the metal bows supporting the canopy. ‘Get inside the cab and close the doors,' he said to her. The driver was already in his seat, peering out a half-closed window.

Alex hauled on the rope and the leopard exploded from its prison in a blur of black dappled fur. It growled and hissed and Jane was surprised when, instead of running off into the grass, it circled the vehicle, as if in search of human prey in revenge for its privations. Jane wound up her window and Alex slithered backwards along the canopy to the cab. The old Unimog, an ex-army vehicle, had a circular hatch in the roof. Jane popped it open and Alex slid inside, half falling on her in his haste to reach safety.

Jane started laughing and couldn't stop, despite Alex's stern look. The leopard, its tail twitching in frustration and annoyance, finally satisfied itself there was nothing it could kill, and slunk off into the long grass. Jane composed herself and watched through Alex's binoculars as the magnificent predator disappeared from view.

‘I think it's safe to carry on,' Alex said.

Jane found it a wonderful, liberating experience to open the cages that housed exotic African parrots, and a box full of blue-headed lizards
that clucked with apparent joy as their little feet touched bare earth for the first time in a long time – perhaps in their life.

She climbed back into the cab as Alex upended wriggling hessian bags. The driver, too, refused to get out of the Unimog once he knew there were snakes slithering about in the grass below. Alex conceded defeat and walked off to the Land Cruiser, parked close by.

Jane leapt down from the other vehicle and ran after him. ‘You've probably got Interpol and half-a-dozen other international agencies searching for you as a result of what happened on the
Penfold Son
, but here you are risking arrest by driving halfway across Mozambique to liberate a mobile zoo full of animals. I don't understand you.'

‘Well, that makes two of us.'

‘Why did you just do that?'

He shrugged. ‘Because it was the right thing to do? Perhaps I'm not totally morally bankrupt, after all.'

They drove back to the main track and after another deviation to the banks of the Pungoe River, where Alex prodded a giant sleepy python, with a body length twice that of a grown man and with a girth as thick as one of Jane's legs, reluctantly to freedom.

Eighteen kilometres and two hours after they'd left the sealed road they came to the entry gate and a sign that said
Bem viudo a Gorongosa
– welcome to Gorongosa National Park. An African ranger in a green uniform saluted them. Alex spoke to the man in Portuguese and whatever he said left the man laughing as he waved them through.

The sky was a hazy pale grey, which Alex explained was the result of fires lit deliberately outside the park by farmers clearing their lands. ‘There are farms on the slopes of Mount Gorongosa as well, which is why you can't see it, because of the burning.' He said there was a push by the national park's supporters to include the mountain, with its remnant covering of Afro-Montane forest and deep, clear natural pools, in the national park. ‘It makes sense,' he explained as he drove through the park, his eyes scanning left and right for animals and birds, ‘as the water collected by rainfall on the mountain feeds the floodplains, which support the park's biodiversity.'

‘You know a lot about this place,' she said.

‘This was my second home after the island. My father loved Gorongosa and its wildlife, while my mother liked coming here to spot celebrities. It was
the
safari park for the rich and famous in the old days.'

In front of them wide open grasslands stretched to the horizon and the invisible mountain beyond. These, Alex said, had once looked like a verdant carpet but so many of the herbivores that had once grazed on the plains had been shot to near extinction during the Mozambican civil war. They did, however, see herds of thirty and forty waterbuck at a time and Jane took an instant liking to their shaggy grey coats and faintly ridiculous telltale markings – a white mark in the shape of a toilet seat on their rear ends. Somewhere in the long grass, he said, were about sixty buffalo, the die-hard survivors of tens of thousands that had once roamed the park.

Jane used Alex's binoculars to watch a far-off lone elephant bull ambling slowly through grass which rose above the height of its belly. He'd avoided driving closer as the pachyderms were notoriously wary of humans, who they equated with gunfire and death. Much of the park's game had been slaughtered to feed RENAMO's soldiers.

Alex took two beers from the fridge behind him and popped them open. ‘There's hope, though. There are people dedicated to bringing the game back.'

‘Can the damage ever truly be undone?'

‘Come, I'll show you.'

At Chitengo, the main and only functioning camp in Gorongosa National Park, he took her on a tour that showed the horrors of Mozambique's past and the promise of what the country might yet become.

They parked the Land Cruiser and he led the way to the reception building. Three ranks each of seven young men, their bare torsos glistening above green fatigue trousers, were practising what looked like kung-fu moves, complete with loud exhalations of air at the end of each leg lunge and fist punch.

‘They're rangers in training,' Alex said. ‘In the old days they would
have been doing military drill, dressed as soldiers. The new administration wants to instil discipline, but not create an army.'

She nodded, though pointed to another recruit, armed with what looked like a wooden replica gun, slung from his shoulder. He waved a friendly hello to them on his way to duty. ‘So what's with the toy gun?'

‘The rangers will be armed, once they're trained, and the wooden rifle is a way of getting them used to carrying their weapon and being responsible for it, before they get the real thing.'

Chitengo was a watered green oasis amidst the still dry plains and bush. Manicured lawns surrounded tasteful chalets that looked newly painted. Alex said the camp was being progressively renovated to attract tourists, and new accommodation was being built for the park's staff, who had lived in the old guestrooms during the years when no one had visited Gorongosa.

After checking in and paying their entry fees they walked through the camping ground, which was shaded by tall Livingstone's coral trees. A couple of four-wheel drive vehicles with South African numberplates were parked side by side with fold-out tents sprouting from their roofs. Large shirtless men ensconced in deckchairs raised glasses as they walked by. Beside the swimming pool a young woman tapped away on a laptop, connecting to the rest of the world by wireless internet, within sight of a large building that still bore the pockmarks and holes of bullets and shells.

‘This was a slaughterhouse, literally, for the troops during the war. This is where so many of the park's animals ended up.'

‘It gives me the creeps,' Jane said.

‘It's meant to. The park management doesn't want to gloss over or hide Mozambique's past. They want visitors from here and abroad to see the good with the bad, in order to prevent it from happening again.'

‘Will it?'

‘I don't know.'

A group of boys aged somewhere between eight and twelve were playing soccer with a ball made from rags wrapped in rubber bands and duct tape. One ran awkwardly as he was carrying something in a
woven net slung over one shoulder. It wasn't until Jane walked closer, her curiosity piqued, that she saw it was a baby.

‘He's probably minding it while his mother works. Family ties are strong in Mozambique. It helps keep us together.'

Late in the afternoon, after they had checked into separate chalets, Alex took her on a drive along a bumpy trail across the floodplains. The sun had entered the thick band of dust and smoke that hung just above the horizon and the contaminants turned it a deep, bloody mary red. They parked for a while on the shores of Lake Eurema and watched hundreds of crocodiles, which Alex said the locals referred to as sardines, because of their density. Some basked on muddy banks while others patrolled the water, nothing but nostrils and malevolent golden eyes visible.

‘They say these ones thrived during the war,' Alex said. Jane shuddered.

They drove on and Alex stopped at the remains of a two-storey concrete building. He took a bottle of sparkling South African white wine out of the car fridge and unsnapped a leather case from which he took two crystal glasses. Jane eyed the dewy bottle with mixed emotions. They had already had a couple of beers and she was feeling a little light-headed, but she didn't want to break the magic of the sunset over the never-ending plains.

He led the way up a flight of external stairs. The building – really no more than a concrete hulk – bore the scars of wars like the others she'd seen in the camp. They took a seat, she at the top of the staircase and he two down from her, the bottle on the step between them. They were about four metres off the ground and the height gave them a commanding view.

‘What was this place? It's like a fortress.'

‘My father always said the Portuguese were masters of cement. This is called the “lion house”.' The cork left the bottle with a pop and the sound and sight of the golden liquid filling the glasses made her mouth water. ‘There used to be a bar here when I was a kid and the Portuguese elite and foreigners from around the world would gather to watch
the sun go down. Funnily enough, after the tourists stopped coming, researchers would often see a pride of lions living in and around this place, as if they'd taken over the house that was named for them.'