Sand rivers (20 page)

There are six porters, young Ngindo who were recruited from Ngarambe village, just outside the eastern boundary at Kingupira, and behind the porters, making sure that none falls by the wayside, is the young Giriama camp assistant named Kazungu, who will serve as cook.

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Kazungu did not wish to accompany this foot safari because he thought he would have to carry a load upon his head, like these unsophisticated young Tanzanians; as late as yesterday, he was complaining of an excruciating pain in his right foot, screwing up his lively face for emphasis. But when informed that he would only have to carry his own gear, together with a panga for cutting firewood and brush, he was happy enough to come along; in fact, as I discovered later, he kept an enthusiastic journal of the safari which he and his friend, the Taita mechanic John Matano, translated from Swahili into English and were kind enough to let me use:

We began our safari at the junction of two rivers, the Luwegu and the Mbarangandu, and the date that 1 left was the 2nd September 1979. We were eight of us and two Euroji'eans, one as our guide, whose name was Bwana Niki, and the other a book writer from America whose name is Mister Peter. And I was the tenth one, as the cook. One of us was an askari of the bush [the game scout, Goa] so we had no doubt with wild animals. We walked for a number of kilometers until we came to the Luwegu ...

The porters take turns carrying the old-fashioned tent that Brian wished to bring along, despite my feeling that we did not need it. Since I am carrying nothing but binoculars and notebooks, I feel slightly ashamed, whereas Brian is not sheepish in the least. "If I had to carry one of those loads in this sort of heat," he admits cheerfully, "I wouldn't last out the first hour. I've never carried a thing on trek in forty years, and I never shall." What 1 was hearing wasn't laziness - Nicholson is anything but lazy - but a principle left over from the reign of lonides, who liked to say, "I never do anything that can be done for me by somebody else."^ Brian is proud that all his old safaris were elaborate - far more elaborate, as he says, than this one. "Always had my own tent, of course, with tent fly and camp table and chair, and my gunbearer and cook and a hell of a lot of porters. Sometimes I'd be out five months at a time, so I needed a lot of equipment, but also it was important to be comfortable. Took along whatever I wanted, as a matter of fact. I had one man who just carried books, another who carried a coin chest for buying food in the settlements; the rest carried my personal gear and the food for all the others. On short safaris through settled areas, I had fifteen porters; on long ones through the bush, I would have forty. But once the food started to go, I couldn't have all those people sitting around eating up what was left, so I'd send them back in lots of six; they couldn't be sent off in ones and twos, not in this country."

On the ridge between the rivers, the file moves rapidly, in ant-like silence, as if in flight from the accumulating heat. Since leaving the Mbarangandu, we have encountered no animals at all, only the pale rump

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of a kongoni, vanishing like a ghostly face into high grass. Other animals have come and gone - we see a rhino scrape, the elegant prints of greater kudu, old droppings of elephant and buffalo - but as the day groves, so does the sense of emptiness in the still woodland, which is not a closed canopy but open to the sun, and everywhere overgrown with high bronze grass. "All dead, dry stuff," Nicholson mutters. "No good to animals at all. In my time, the whole Reserve would be burned over every year, two at the most; I had over four hundred game scouts who spent most of their time out in the field, and burning was their main job." He murmurs to Goa in Swahili, then stalks on, and Goa steps off the elephant path and sets fire to the tinder grass, which ignites with a hollow rush of the dry air. The fire leaps up with a hungry crackling, and a dark pall of smoke rises in our wake as we move southward.

This thin, tall man walking ahead of me in his big floppy hat, old shirt and shorts, and worn red sneakers looks more like old Iodine must have looked than the conventional idea of the East African professional hunter, or the crisp old-style warden in regimental khaki: I like this "Mister Meat" for his lack of vanity. In his angular, stoop-shouldered gait, he keeps up a long easy pace, remaining close to the swift, effortless Goa, yet every little while he turns and casts a hard, bald eye back along the line, noticing quickly when the porters fail to keep close ranks in river thickets and karongas, or when one or more tends to fall too far behind. "Wanakujar' he calls. "Are they coming?" And with the barrel tips of the shotgun that he carries he moves a thorn branch off the thin trail, anticipating the bare feet of the young porters. His concern is professional - foot injuries will cripple our safari - but it isn't unfeeling, whatever he might have one believe.

Ahead, three young bull elephants are standing beneath a large and dark muyombo tree, which at this season, in anticipation of the rains, is covered with a red canopy of seed pods. Getting our scent, the elephants move away in no great haste as we come down into a grassy open glade. The blue acanth flowers of dry ground give way to blue commelina and lavender morning glory, and there are meadow springs and frogs and singing scrub robins. "At this season, most miombo is pretty dry from one end of Africa to the other, but here in the Selous it's so well-watered that these little paradises occur everywhere in the dry woods," Nicholson says, as the porters set down their loads beneath a tree. "That's why we didn't bother to bring water bottles." But Goa is out putting the torch to the dry grass all around, and over this paradise black smoke is rising; within minutes, the racquet-tailed rollers appear, filling the crackling heat with strident cries as they hawk the insects that whir up before the flames.

We head southwest across the river bends to the Luwegu. Unlike the Mbarangandu, the Luwegu still carries a swift flood of brown-gray water that in most places fills the river bed from one side to the other. This high

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water, unusual at this time of the year, must account in part for the scarcity of animals along the margins, since there is more water than they need in the pools and springs back in the woods. Where we come out on the banks of the Luwegu we see no elephant at all, only a large crocodile which lies out on a bar along the bank, its jaws transfixed in the strangled gape with which these animals confront their universe. In the mile between bends of the river two large herds of hippopotami are visible; it seems likely that there are too many, that one of these long, slow years there will come a great dying-off of the huge water pigs, to bring their numbers back into balance with the wild pastures that they have pushed further and further from the banks. According to Brian, such dying-off occurs in the Selous about once every seven years, in separate places; he remembers it once in the Ruaha, and another time on the Kilombero. But today they steam and puff and honk in great contentment, though two get at each other every little while in a great blare and thrash, to banish the monotony of river life.

Everywhere as we walk upriver the animals are starting to appear; it seems to be true, as Brian claims, that here in the Selous the animals are not especially active early in the day, as th^ are elsewhere, and do not move about until mid-morning, though why this might be true is not clear. Among the smaller animals that cross our path are ground squirrels and the green monitor lizards, small relatives of the great Komodo "dragons" of the East Indies, and a black-tipped mongoose, scampering along the bank, that is red as fire; the banded and pygmy mongoose are common in the Selous but this is the first of this weasel-like species I have seen. Impala are numerous and remarkably tame, and a band of waterbuck under a tamarind beside the river lets man walk up within a few yards before prancing off in a pretty canter into the woods; further north these animals would take off at a dead run at the sight of vehicles, which ordinarily disturb them less than a man on foot. Wart hog and wildebeest are also rather tame, though not confiding. Under a big tree by the comer of the river, from where the Mahoko Mountains can be seen off to the west, stands a placid group of elephants; not until we move a little uphill to the east of them, to let the breeze carry down our scent, do they give way. Kazungu described the scene in his journal:

We saw elephants where we wanted to pass. We went upwind of them to give them our smell, and this make me understand that no matter how dangerous an animal is, if he is not familiar with a smell, he will run.

We went up and down the hills and met some different animals.

Behind the elephants is a large grove of borassus palms, with their graceful swellings high up on the pale boles; from each palm, or so it seems, a pair of huge griffons violently depart, their heavy wing beats

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buffeting the clack of wind-tossed fronds. At this season, the borassus carries strings of fruit like orange coconuts, which are sought out by the elephants; here and there in the dry hills, far from the nearest palms, lie piles of dried gray borassus kernels, digested and deposited, from which the last loose dung has blown away. The mango-like kernels remind Brian of the elephant habit of gorging on the fallen fruits of the marula tree. "Used to ferment in their stomachs, make them drunk or sleepy; they'd just lie down on their sides and snore. Ever hear an elephant snore? Oh, you can hear that a hell of a long way!"

Keeping the porters close, we push through thickets to a shady grove beside the river. This first day we shall quit early, while the sun is high, to give the Africans a chance to dry the strings of dark red meat jerked from the buffalo killed yesterday near Mkangira; the biltong will be their main food for the journey. Goa and Kazungu string a line between high bushes on the bank to hang the meat, which is brought up in big handfuls by the porters; once dry, the biltong is very hard and tough and may be slung around amongst the luggage.

Abdallah spreads green canvas in the shade, and the sahibs lie down upon it to take tea. Since Brian's red sneakers are blistering his toes, the decision to stop early is a good one; also, the Ngindo are not trained porters and will collapse quickly in this heat - it must be 100 °F or more - unless they are given a day or two to get broken in. The remarkable Abdallah of the squint eye and sweet laugh is now doing headstands in the sun - actually jumping on his elbows in a small circle on the thorny ground - but two of his companions are laid out like corpses. One of these is Kalambo, who wears huge blue boxer's shorts with a white stripe that extend below his knobby knees, and the other is a heavy boy with the name "David" who wears a bright red shirt. Then there is Amede - short for Muhammed - who walks with the sway of a giraffe, and Shamu, whose face is wide-eyed, innocent, faintly alarmed, like the face of a small antelope; his small size and slight body, his expression, make him look too young to be carrying loads that might bend his bones, but on closer inspection I see that Shamu is a full-grown man who has retained a child-like air of innocence. Most of the time he sits quietly to one side, smiling delightedly at the witty sallies of his friends.

Finally there is Mata, small-faced as a vervet and given to harsh yapping barks; Mata likes to walk apart from the file of porters, and once or twice he dared walk on ahead when Goa and Brian had paused to light their fires. Bwana Niki had murmured something in Swahili which brought a bad look to Mata's face; he seemed to consider a spry remark, but then thought better of it.

"You'll have trouble with that one," Rick Bonham had said, but the Warden knew better. "Once you put a bit of distance between them and the camp, and they have to depend on you for their protection, they're

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quite anxious to please," Brian had said, and he was right; after the first encounter with the elephants Mata fell back into line, and gave no more trouble after that first day. "Oh, there are exceptions to the rule of course," Nicholson reflected later. "Once had to kick a porter in the balls and give him a good clout to go with it. No choice, really." When he says these things, old Mister Meat fixes me with that bald eye and gives a faint clack of his false teeth, and 1 can't make out whether he intends this as a literal account of makeshift discipline in the bush, or if he is teasing my "American" notions about Africans, or whether he is feeling nostalgic about the grand old days when lonides could have a whole Ngindo village flogged and get away with it. But as it turned out, he meant just what he said: the offending porter, Brian told me later, "was using blackmail in a very remote place, threatening to dump all the loads and abscond with his fellow porters unless 1 doubled the agreed pay. He was a huge man, who could have torn me apart easily if 1 hadn't disabled him."

By early afternoon the clouds have gone, and the day is dry and hot. Drinking gratefully from the brown river, Itealize how rare now are the places left in Africa where one can drink the water without risking bilharzia or worse; in the Selous, one can sip with impunity from pools and puddles and even from big footprints in the mud. Later I find a safe bathing place behind a silvered log, and lie back for a long time in the warm flood, watching the western sky turn red behind a gigantic baobab across the river. Behind me in the forest, an elephant's stomach rumbles - or perhaps the elephant is pondering my scent, for Brian says that what is usually called stomach-rumbling in elephants is actually a low growl of apprehension and perhaps warning. Trumpeter hornbills gather in the mahoganies over my head, and I am attended by a small dragon-fly, fire red in hue, that might have flown out of the sunset. I am extremely content to be here, yet 1 do not look forward to the evening; Brian and I have got on well enough, all things considered, but other people have always been around to smooth over the rough edges. I don't know this man as yet. We have been thrown together by fate, not by affinity, and doubtless he regards our enforced companionship as warily as 1 do.