Jane (16 page)

I had once and for all given up my diary keeping, as this very river journey had been so well described by Mary Kingsley. She had captured perfectly the strangeness of the mangrove swamps with their rotting shores that comprised the first many miles of the river: “black batter-like, stinking slime” and a “fearful stench.” She spoke of the water at high or low tide looking like “a pathway of polished metal … [being] heavily weighted with stinking mud,” and the vertical aerial root of a mangrove tree keeping a “hard straight line until it gets some two feet above water-level, and then spreading out into blunt fingers with which to dip into the water and grasp the mud.”

There were the “gaunt black ribs of the old hulks, once used as trading stations, which lie exposed at low water near the shore, protruding like the skeletons of great unclean beasts.” Raised on piles from the mud shores were the white-painted factories and their large storehouses for oil, and just as Miss Kingsley had said, the factories flew flags at half-mast because somebody was “dead again.”

I’d seen a hopping mudfish and a crocodile lying asleep with its jaws open on a sandbank in the sun. Heard the nighttime noises, “grunts from I know not what, splashes from jumping fish, the peculiar whirr of rushing crabs, and quaint creaking and groaning sounds from the trees; and … the strange whine and sighing cough of the crocodiles.”

Finally with the mangrove swamps behind us, the morning air on the river was soft, and the song of the plantain warblers soothing to the ear. The low, dense, luxuriant shores might have been monotonous in their verdant sameness but for the climbing plants that formed thick “curtains”—sometimes forty feet wide and seventy feet high. These vegetal veils were gaily festooned with flowers, as if decorated by the hand of an artist. The trunks and branches of many trees were themselves the show-offs in hues of pink and red and yellow. Some were bone white but arrayed in patterns of thick orange lichen and vermillion fungi. Stretches of sword grass along the banks, red-dwarf clay cliffs with tiny villages atop them, or neat coffee plantations with their rows of healthy bushes made the journey along the deep, silent river a joy.

Yabi had given the captain of the steamer precise instructions as to where the Porter Expedition should be let off. His village was downstream on a minor tributary of the Ogowe, many miles before the great rapids. This was apparently to be a different route to the Enduro Escarpment than Ral Conrath had taken with his hunting party, and he was therefore dependent on Yabi—all of us were—for our very lives.

There being no dock, the ten canoes—the newfangled metal ones that Conrath had purchased—were lowered into the water. Our supplies and team, numbering fifty, were loaded into them. One by one, with the paddlers’ muscular arms pumping in rhythm, the slender vessels made for the mouth of the tributary. The canoes met briefly on shore, then pushed off down the Mbele Ogowe. Its course appeared to me to run diagonally, south to be sure, but gently also to the west, back the way we’d come.

Here the real expedition began, and it was here the trouble began in earnest.

It was as if a very devil had taken up habitation in Ral Conrath’s being. He did not speak orders; he barked them. He was endlessly condescending to Yabi, something that I knew to be foolhardy in the extreme. He lobbed insults at D’Arnot, who, in his newly sober state, did not take to them very kindly but bore them stoically. Ral Conrath barely conversed with me and refused to meet my eye. It was only with Father that he managed to retain the thinnest veneer of civility.

I sat with Father in a canoe behind the leading one—with Conrath, Yabi, and D’Arnot aboard. No one spoke of the change in Conrath, everyone perhaps believing that this was the demeanor he always assumed to keep control of his expeditions—his “style of operation”—though I heard my father mutter to himself after one of Conrath’s outbursts at the laziness of the rowers, “Get a grip on yourself, man.”

The Mbele village was nearly two days’ paddling down the tributary, with Conrath refusing to allow the rowers to stop, an abominable labor for them, one that forced everyone not paddling to sleep sitting upright. But no one argued, as our leader claimed the crocodiles would have a feast of us if we put ashore on an uninhabited site.

We were welcomed ashore at Yabi’s village. His mother, a skinny woman with breasts hanging below her waist and who looked far too old and worn to have a runny-nosed infant at her teat, came and put her arms around her son, giving him a great smacking kiss on the cheek.

The whites in the party were taken into the village, a place surrounded on all but the river side by large rough-hewn stakes, which Yabi explained were to protect against rampaging elephants. It was a shabby place of mud and thatch huts, their door flaps made of leathery elephant ears. All the Mbele were thin and appeared beaten down, perhaps from their lack of nourishment. But preparations were soon under way for huts to be vacated for Yabi’s guests.

Then from within the largest hut, one twice the size of any other in the village, came the sound of drumming. Its front door swung open, and out strode a large native man, an amazingly attired creature—most certainly the chief. His name was Motobe.

In the main he was covered by the scarlet tunic of a militia uniform. Wound around his waist were many yards of bright yellow gingham cloth, the long ends of which hung down and trailed on the ground like a queen’s train. He wore the helmet of an English life guard, carried a lady’s pink parasol with gold lace edges, and around his neck was a wooden tambourine, lacking only its skin top. As the chief strode toward us, I could hear the tambourine’s brass cymbals jingling. Following behind him were his six women, several carrying babies, and weighted down with row upon row of colored glass bead necklaces.

We were fed small portions of stringy goat, foul-tasting manioc paste and mashed yams, and a palm wine that reeked strangely of turpentine. But the sentiment was as gracious as dinner at a Cambridge great house, and perhaps more sincere. I was touched deeply.

Over the campfire, with Yabi and Paul D’Arnot translating, the chief was told of our plans to travel southwest in search of Waziriland. Motobe howled with laughter. This was a joke, he was sure. There was nothing down there but some mountains with “trees that touched the sky,” and bad spirits that made the earth rumble and quake.

Certainly no one expected the headman to understand about million-year-old fossils or Darwin’s theory of evolution, so we simply laughed along with him at our own stupidity and recklessness.

Later, as the fire burned into embers, the talk became more serious. The chief spoke of the tribe’s falling on hard times. They were, in fact, facing starvation. Their crops had not failed, he told us, leaning close to the fire, but an “evil monster elephant” had decided to curse the village, and night after night it had come and trampled the Mbele gardens into the mud. Could Yabi’s new friends spare some ammunition for their guns? They were all out and had nothing with which to barter for bullets. It was a useless request, for even I could see that their flintlocks were ancient. The Porter Expedition had no ammunition for such weapons.

“Yabi,” Ral Conrath said, “tell Motobe that I’ll kill his monster elephant for him. We’ll go on a hunt. Bring him down. Say that his people’s stomachs will be large with elephant meat.”

Yabi’s eyes lit up, but before he could begin the translation, Father objected, worried about our timetable. We could not afford to be stuck in the bush when the rains came.

But Ral Conrath was convincing. People were starving here—women and children. It was an argument a great-hearted man like Archie Porter could hardly contest.

But the next morning, Ral Conrath’s mood had turned ugly almost at once. By the time we’d entered the jungle proper—Father and I armed with rifles for the first time—he was tripping over fallen trees and enormous roots, being bruised and scratched by thorny creepers, and cursing the sodden ground with such noisy vehemence it startled the birds and monkeys above. Earlier I had cornered him, demanding to know why we were carting everything we’d brought with us from Liverpool on an elephant hunt.

“You think they’d leave us a pot to piss in if we left it there?” he’d snapped at me. “I wouldn’t trust a Negro as far as I could throw him.”

It was late in the afternoon with everyone’s nerves frayed to the snapping point. The Mbele hunters were insisting that we had come too far, that this could not be the place of the evil beast, but Ral was deaf to their pleading. Hardly a moment later, Yabi pointed to a great spreading forest of tall bamboo. Straight through its center was a path four feet wide where the stalks had been beaten into the ground—an elephant path, Yabi told us.

We were instructed to follow Ral Conrath down the path. The rustling and click-clacking on both sides of us was claustrophobic and unsettling. The giant bamboo culms were so tall and slender that they leaned inward, touching in an arch above our heads, thus no sky could be seen. The air was thick and stuffy, and D’Arnot felt faint. Father and I stayed behind to tend him, but Conrath pushed ahead, determined to bring down one of the beasts by day’s end.

When Father and I caught up to him at the far end of the grove, he was opening the crate that held the Gatling gun.

“You’re not using that thing on an elephant,” Father said.

“Listen, old man, this is my hunt, and I’ll use the weapon of my choice. I’m going to bring down an elephant today and be a hero tonight. One way or the other.”

I tilted my head out the opening in the bamboo into a long, wide clearing. On its far side was a jungle, and thirty yards down to the left of us there stood a single elephant. It foraged with its trunk on the trees at the edge of the greenery.

It was not very large, certainly not the culprit from the Mbele gardens. Nevertheless, the Gatling gun was set on its tripod, and Ral Conrath, swaggering like a soldier, took his place behind it.

Then to my horror, in a thunderous hail of machine gun fire, he shot the placidly grazing elephant. Its front knees buckled and, with a confused shake of its head, fell in a mountainous heap.

Conrath wasted no time crossing the clearing to examine his kill … or rather to gloat. Stunned as I was, I followed him. The downed beast was a female. She lay on her side, wrinkled grey skin oozing red from a hundred cruel wounds. She was not yet dead, her trunk moving weakly in the dust, her one eye glazed with pain. I felt my blood begin to boil.

Ral Conrath was leaning over his trophy. Without thinking, I smashed him hard in the back with my rifle butt. He swiveled and glared at me with as much shock as hatred.

“You’re despicable,” I said. “Move aside.”

He was unarmed and could see that I should not be trifled with. Bile rising in my throat, I took aim and put the poor animal out of her misery. I heard my father calling my name as he crossed the clearing, ordering the bearers to follow him out of the bamboo.

But I froze where I stood with the next sounds that came to my ear. First it was a deep rumbling vibration under my feet, followed quickly by the shrill trumpeting of many elephants.

I turned to see the most terrifying of scenes: the clearing filled with members of the Porter Expedition, my father, D’Arnot, the bearers, and Mbele tribesmen and, led by a giant bull, a herd of rampaging elephants bearing down on them.

Father had already taken aim but was knocked off his feet by a panicked bearer. I had no choice. I lifted my rifle and took aim at the bull. He was coming straight at me, so the target was, I thought with bitter irony, easier than shooting skeet.

I fired.

A single stream of blood spurted from between his eyes. The bull fell dead in his tracks. At that very moment I thought that I’d heard a lion’s roar, but I had no time to look for its source, for the stampede I believed would be halted by the bull’s downing was still coming toward us. The sound of gunfire had merely deflected them. Several followed the scrambling bearers and tribesmen into the elephant path and others wildly trampled down the giant bamboo stalks as if they were saplings.

Ral ripped the rifle from my hands and, using the dead female as cover, was firing into the melee. Father and D’Arnot were at my side when we heard the first human shrieks rising from the bamboo grove. Father, himself trembling, clutched me protectively to him.

“This is my fault,” he whispered, his voice husky with outrage. “My fault.”

There was nothing I could say to comfort him.

*   *   *

I felt sick.

The elephant hunt had proved a tragedy of unspeakable proportions. Five men had died, two bearers of the Porter Expedition and three Mbele, one of them Yabi’s cousin. They’d been gored and trampled to death by the animals. I had felt like a rampaging beast myself as I turned on Ral Conrath when all had quieted. I’d been forced to take the life of that magnificent creature—the first elephant I’d ever seen in the wild. I shouted with almost incoherent fury at his appalling stupidity and insane pigheadedness. He was no better than a murderer. I’d never spoken like that to anyone, and I hadn’t cared who was listening—the Mbele, the bearers, my father, D’Arnot … and no translation had been needed for their perfect understanding.

Conrath had gone stone-cold at my tirade. Even as the words flew from my mouth, I saw the venomous expression on his face and knew without question that I had made the first true enemy of my life. How dare a woman (really no better than one of the “lesser races”) humiliate Ral Conrath? Cause him to lose face before his employer and members of the safari?

More stunning to me was the knowledge that the man had no remorse for those who had died because of his actions. The moment I was through shouting at him, he had turned away and, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, directed the bearers to butcher the carcasses, then called out orders for the Mbele hunters to fetch “reinforcements” who could carry loads of elephant meat back to the village.

Father, livid, had insisted that Conrath go with him and make apology to Motobe for the loss of his tribesmen. He had flatly refused. He would stay with the slain elephants to ensure that the survivors of the herd did not return and attack the butcherers.