The African Queen (15 page)

The new blade was in position now, an exact match of its fellows, and to casual inspection seemingly secure, but Allnutt was not yet satisfied. He could appreciate the leverage exerted upon a propeller blade in swift rotation, and the strain that would come under the base—upon his makeshift joint. At the risk of slightly reducing the propeller’s efficiency he joined all three blades together with a series of triangles of wire strained taut. That would help to distribute the strain around the whole propeller.

“That ought to do now,” said Allnutt. “Let’s ’ope it does.”

Putting the propeller shaft back into position, and settling it into its brackets, and putting on the propeller again, called for a fresh spell of subaqueous activity on the part of Allnutt.

“Coo, blimy,” said Allnutt, emerging dripping at the side of the
African Queen
. “I oughter been a diver, not a blinkin’ blacksmith. Let’s ’ave that other spanner, Rosie, an’ I’ll ’ave another go.”

Allnutt was very dear to her now, and she thought his remarks extraordinarily witty.

When shaft and propeller were in position, there was very little chance of testing the work. Once they left the bank they would have to go down the next cataract, willy-nilly. Allnutt got up steam in the boiler, and sent the propeller ahead for a few revolutions, until the mooring ropes strained taut, and then he went astern for a few revolutions more. It was good enough proof that shaft and propeller would turn, but it proved nothing else. It did not prove that the propeller would stand up to a full strain, nor that the shaft would not buckle under the impulse of a head of steam. They would have to find that out amid the rapids and cataracts, with certain death as their portion if Allnutt’s work should fail them.

The night before, they had both of them visualized this situation, and they had neither of them ventured to discuss it. They had lain in each other’s arms. Rose’s eyes had been wet, and Allnutt’s embrace had been urgent and possessive, each of them consumed with fear of losing the other. And this morning they tacitly acknowledged their danger, still without mentioning it. Steam was up, a full cargo of wood was on board, they were all ready for departure, Allnutt looked about him for the last time, at their rock-built hearth, and his rock-built anvil, and the heap of ashes that marked the site of one of their charcoal burning experiments. He turned to Rose, who was standing stiff and dry-eyed beside the tiller. She could not speak; she could only nod to him. Without a word he cast off the moorings, and held the
African Queen
steady in the eddy with the boat hook, while Rose scanned the surface of the river.

“Right!” said Rose, and her voice cracked as she said it. The sound of it hardly reached Allnutt’s ears above the noise of the river and the hiss of steam. Allnutt pushed with the boat hook, and as the bows came out into the current he gingerly opened the throttle.

“Goodbye, darling,” said Allnutt, bent over the engine.

“Goodbye, darling,” said Rose at the tiller.

Neither of them heard the other, and neither was meant to; there was a high courage in them both.

The
African Queen
surged out into the stream. For a moment they both felt as if something was wrong, because the shaft clanked no longer—it was straighter than it had been before the accident. Shaft and propeller held firm, all the same. The launch spun round as her bows met the current and Rose put the tiller across. Next moment they were flying downstream once more, with Allnutt attentive to the engine and Rose at the tiller, staring rigidly forward to pick her course through the weltering foam of the cataract ahead.

S
OMEWHERE
along their route that day they passed the spot where the Ulanga River changes its name and becomes the Bora. The spot is marked on no map, for the sufficient reason that no map of the country has ever been made, except for the hazy sketches which Spengler drew. Until Spengler and his Swahili boatmen managed to make the descent of the river by canoe no one had known, even if they had suspected it, that the big rapid river which looped its way across the upland plateau and vanished into the gorges at Shona was the same as the stream which appeared in the tangled jungle of the Rift Valley a hundred miles from Shona and promptly lost itself again in the vast delta which it had built up for itself on the shore of the Lake.

The native population, before the arrival of the Germans, had never troubled their heads about it. The delta of the Bora was a pestilential fever swamp; the rapids of the Ulanga were as Rose and Allnutt found them. No one in his senses would waste a minute’s thought about one or the other, and since there was no practicable connection between the upper river and the lower it was of no importance whatever that they should happen to have different names.

When all was said and done, the difference in their names was justified by the difference in appearance. The change from the steep slope of the side of the Rift Valley to its flat bottom was most noticeable. The speed of the river diminished abruptly, and the character of the banks changed as well.

For the Ulanga, traveling at its usual breakneck speed, is charged with all sorts of detritus, and rolls much of its bed with it. No sooner does it reach the flat land than all its matter in suspension is dropped in the form of mud and gravel; the river spreads out, chokes itself with islands, finds new sluggish routes for itself. It is to be supposed that when the Lake was first formed it lapped nearly up to the edge of the Rift Valley in which it lay, but for untold centuries the Ulanga—the Bora, as it must now be called—has deposited its masses of soil on the edge of its waters until a huge delta, as much as thirty miles along each of its three sides, has been formed, encroaching upon the Lake, a dreary, marshy, amphibious country, half black mud and half water, steaming in a tropical heat, overgrown with dense vegetation, the home of very little animal life, and pestilent with insects.

Rose and Allnutt quite soon noted indications that the transition was at hand. For some time the current was as fast as ever, and the stream as irregular, but the cliffs which walled it in diminished steadily in height and in steepness, until at last they were in no more than a shallow valley, with a vast creeper-entangled forest close at hand, and when they emerged from the shade, the sun blazed down upon them with a crushing violence they had not known in the sunless gorges of the upper river. The heat was colossal. Despite their motion through the stifling air they were instantly bathed in a sweat which refused to evaporate, and streamed down their bodies and formed puddles wherever its channel was impeded, and dripped into their eyes, and stung them and blinded them.

Rose was sweeping it from her face as she steered the
African Queen
down the last flurry of rapids—not the roaring cataracts she had once known, but a wider, shallower channel down which the water poured with a velocity deceptively great, and where tree trunks and shallows took the place of the foaming rocks of the upper river. There was still need for quick thinking and careful steering, because shallows grew up in the middle of the river, and the deep channels divided and redivided, coursing ever faster over the bottom, and growing ever shallower until at last the rocky ledge underneath was passed and the water slid over a steep sharp edge into water comparatively deep and compartively slow.

Then there would be a respite for a time until a fresh change of colour in the water, and fresh danger signals ahead in the form of glittering patches of ripples, told of a new series of shallows approaching, and Rose had to plan a course for half a mile ahead, picking out some continuous deep channel, like a route through a maze, as far as the distant line of the steep edge. She knew enough about boats by now to guess that were she to choose a channel which died away into mere rushing shallows they would be hurried along until they bumped against the bottom, propeller and shaft damaged again, and probably, seeing how fast the river was running, the boat would be swung round, buried under the water piling against it, rolled over and torn to pieces while she and Charlie—she would not allow her mind to dwell on that, but bent her attention, with knitted brows, to seeing that the channels she chose did not come to that sort of end.

The weather changed with all the suddenness associated with the Rift Valley. Huge black clouds came rushing up the sky, intensifying the dampness of the heat until it could hardly be borne. Directly after came the lightning and the thunder, and the rain came pouring down, blotting out the landscape as effectively as a fog would do. At the first sight of the approaching storm Rose had begun to edge the
African Queen
in towards the shore, and the rain was just beginning when Allnutt got his boat hook into the stump of a huge tree which, still half alive, grew precariously on the edge of the water with half its roots exposed. The river had eaten away the bank all round it so that it formed a little island surrounded by dark, rushing water, and, swinging by their painter to this mooring, they sat uncomfortably through the storm.

The light was wan and menacing, the thunder rolled without ceasing to the accompaniment of a constant flicker of lightning. Yet the roar of the rain upon the boat and the river was as loud as the roar of the thunder. It beat upon them pitilessly, stupefying them. There was not even an awning now to offer them its flimsy shelter. All they could do was to sit and endure it, as if they were under the very heaviest type of lukewarm shower bath, hardly able to open their eyes.

The warm wind which came with the rain set the
African Queen
jerking at her painter despite the constant tug of the current, and before the storm had passed the wind blew from two thirds of the points of the compass, veering jerkily until at last Allnutt, blinded and stupefied though he was, had to get out the boat hook and hold the boat out from the shore lest the wind should blow her aground and imperil the shaft and propeller. Then at last the storm passed as quickly as it had come, the wind died away, and the afternoon sun came out to scorch them, setting the whole surface of the river steaming, and they could get out the pump and labour to empty the boat of the water which had filled it to the level of the floor boards.

With the cessation of the rain came the insects, clouds of them, hungry for blood, filling the air with their whining. Not even Rose’s and Allnutt’s experience of insects on the upper plateau had prepared them for an attack by these insects of the lower valley. They were ten times, twenty times, as bad as they had known them on the Ulanga; and moreover, their comparative freedom in the deep gorges had rendered them less accustomed and more susceptible still. Down here there was a type of fly new to them, a small black kind, which bit like a red-hot needle and left a drop of blood at every bite, and this type was as numerous as any of the dozen species of fly and mosquito which sang round them, flying into their eyes and their nostrils and their mouths, biting mercilessly at every exposed bit of skin. It was torment to be alive.

The coming of the evening and the sudden descent of night did nothing towards enfeebling their attacks. It seemed impossible to hope for sleep in that inferno of sticky heat under the constant torture of those winged fiends. The memory of yesterday’s fairly cool, insect-free bed, when they had lain side by side in happy intimacy, seemed like the vague recollection of a dream. Tonight they shrank from contact with each other, writhing on their uncomfortable bed as if on the rack. Sleep seemed unattainable and yet they were both of them worn out with the excitement of the day.

Sometime in the night Allnutt rose and fumbled about in the darkness.

“ ’Ere,” he said. “Let’s try this, old girl. It can’t be no worse.”

He had found the old canvas awning, and he spread it over the two of them, although it seemed as if they would die under any sort of covering. They drew the canvas about their faces and ears, streaming with sweat in the stifling heat. Yet the heat was more endurable than the insects. They slept in the end, half boiled, half suffocated; and they awoke in the morning with their heads swimming with pain, their joints aching, their throats constricted so that they could hardly swallow. And the insects still attacked them.

They had to wallow ashore through stinking mud to find wood, although it seemed agony to move; it took half a dozen journeys before the
African Queen
was fully charged with fuel again, sufficient to get them through the day. Already the sun was so hot that the floor boards seemed to burn their feet, and it was only Allnutt’s calloused hands which could bear the touch of metal work. How he could bear the heat of the fire and the boiler was inconceivable to Rose; the heat which was wafted back to her in the stern was sufficient for her.

Yet being under way at least brought relief from insects. The speed of the
African Queen
was sufficient to leave that plague behind, and out in the middle of the river, half a mile broad here, there were no new ones to be found. It was worth enduring the sledgehammer heat of the sun for that.