The African Queen (18 page)

It was terribly hot work among the reeds, which were not high enough to give shade although they cut off what little wind there was, and the sun glared down upon them with its noonday intensity. And soon the insects found them; they came in clouds until the air was thick with them, mad with the thirst for blood. The work was heavy and tiring, too. Two hours of it left Allnutt gasping for breath, and whenever he gasped he spluttered, in consequence of the insects he had drawn into his mouth.

“Sorry, Miss,” he said at last, apologetically. “Can’t keep on at this, not any’ow.”

The face he turned towards Rose was as wet with perspiration as if be had been under a shower bath; so were his rags of clothes. Neither he nor Rose noticed his use of “Miss”—it sounded perfectly natural from a beast of burden such as he had become.

“All right,” said Rose. “Give me that hook.”

“The work’s a bit ’eavy,” said Allnutt, with a note of protest in his tone.

Rose took no notice, but climbed past him on to the little foredeck, the boat hook in her hand. Allnutt made as if to argue further, but did not. He was too exhausted even to argue. He could only sink down into the bottom of the boat and lie there with the sweat drip-drip-dripping about him. For Rose he had, literally, worked until he dropped. Rose certainly found the work heavy. Reaching forward to get a grip with the boat hook was a strain. To get the boat to move forward over the mud and the reed roots called for the exertion of every particle of strength she possessed—convulsive effort, to be followed immediately by the need for another, and another after that, interminably.

It did not take very long to exhaust her completely. In the end she put down the boat hook with a clatter and reeled down the boat into the waist, her clothes hanging about her in wet wisps. The flies followed her, in myriads.

“We’ll go on again to-morrow,” she gasped to Allnutt, who opened his eyes at her as he slowly came back to normality.

The reeds were higher about them now, for in their progress under this new method of traction they had practically left the papyrus behind and were come into the territory of another genus, and the sun was lower. They were in the shade at last; the boat, which had seemed as hot as a gridiron to the touch, became almost bearable, and the flies bit worse than ever. In time Rose recovered sufficiently to try to find out how close they were to the shore. She climbed on the gunwale, but the giant reeds stretched up over her head, and she could see nothing but reeds and sky. How far they had come, how far they were from the forest, she could not guess. She certainly had not anticipated taking a whole day to get through a belt of reeds a mile wide, but here was the first day ended and as far as she could tell they were only halfway in, and there was nothing to indicate that they would ever get through at all. No matter. They would go on trying to-morrow.

Anyone less stout-hearted than Rose might have begun to wonder what would happen to them if their forward progress became impossible. There was no chance at all of their pulling the boat back stern first the way they had come. They would be held there until they starved like trapped animals, or until they drowned themselves in the mud and slime beneath the reeds, trying to make their way ashore on foot. Rose did not allow that sort of notion to trouble her. Her resolution was such that no mere possibility could alarm her. She was like Napoleon’s ideal general in that she did not make pictures of what might be—just as, all through this voyage, she had acted on Nelson’s dictum “lose not an hour.” If following, however unconsciously, the advice of the greatest soldier and the greatest sailor the world has ever seen would bring success to this land and water campaign, success would be theirs. And if they failed it would not be through lack of trying—that was what Rose was vowing to herself as she fought the flies.

T
HERE
had been no need to moor the boat that night. No ordinary manifestation of Nature could have stirred her far from where she lay among those tall reeds. The wind that came with the thunderstorm that night was hardly felt by them at all—it bowed the reeds across the boat, but sitting beneath the arch they formed they did not not notice the wind. They had to endure all the discomforts of the rain as it poured down upon them in the dark, but even in those miserable conditions the ruling passion of that quaint pair displayed itself again.

“One thing abart this rine,” said Allnutt during a lull. “It my deepen the water in this ’ere channel—if you can call it a channel. This afternoon we wasn’t drorin’ much more than there was ’ere. ’Alf a inch would mike a ’ell of a big difference. It can’t rine too much for me, it can’t.”

Then later that night, when the rain had long ceased, and Allnutt had somehow got to sleep despite the mosquitoes, Rose was suddenly aware of a noise. It was only the tiniest, smallest possible murmur, and only the ear of faith could have heard it through the whining of the mosquitoes. It was the noise of running water. From all around there came this gentle sound, slighter than the quietest breathing—water seeping dribbling through the reeds as the level rose in the lagoon, helped on by the gathered rain which the Bora was bringing down. Rose almost woke up Allnutt to listen to it, but refrained, and contented herself with vowing to make an early start in the morning so as to take full advantage of any rise before it could leak away through the delta—although seeing that they always started at the first possible moment it is hard to understand what Rose meant by an “early start.”

There was this much variation, all the same, in their routine on rising that morning, in that they did not have to spend time in firing up the boiler and getting up steam. The sun was still below the tall reeds when they were ready to start, and already before Allnutt had come up into the bows to resume his yesterday’s toil Rose was standing there, gazing into the reeds, trying to make out what she could about their course.

There really was no denying that they were still in some sort of waterway leading through the reeds. It was ill-defined; all there was to be seen was a winding line along which the reeds grew less densely, but it surely must lead somewhere.

“I think she’s afloat,” said Allnutt with satisfaction, taking the boat hook.

He reached out, found a hold, and pulled. There seemed to be a freer movement than yesterday.

“No doubt about it,” reported Allnutt. “We got all the water we want. If it wasn’t for these blasted reeds—”

The channel was narrower here than when they had entered it, and the reeds caught against the sides as they moved along. Some had to be crushed under the boat, with the result that as each pull progressed the boat met with an increasing resistance; sometimes, maddeningly, she even went back an inch or two as Allnutt sought for a fresh grip. The resistance of the reeds, all the same, was far less unrelenting than the resistance of yesterday’s mud, and Rose was able to be of some help by hastening about the boat freeing the sides from the reeds which impeded them.

They crawled on, slowly but hopefully. From what they could see of the sun there was no doubt that they were preserving a certain general direction towards the delta. Suddenly there came a squeal of joy from Allnutt.

“There’s another channel ’ere!” he said, and Rose scrambled up into the bows to see.

It was perfectly true. The channel they were in joined at an acute angle a similar vague passage way through the reeds, and the combined channel was broader, better defined, freer from reeds. As they looked at its dark water they could see that the fragments afloat on it were in motion—as slow as a slow tortoise, but in motion nevertheless.

“Coo!” said Allnutt. “Look at that current! Better look out, Rosie, old girl. It’ll be rapids next.”

They could still laugh.

Allnutt drew the
African Queen
into the channel. It was delightful to feel the boat floating free again, even though she could not swing more than an inch to either side. He hooked a root and gave a hearty pull; the boat made a good four feet through the water, and, what was more, retained her way, creeping along steadily while Allnutt sought for a new purchase.

“Blimy,” said Allnutt. “We’re going at a rate of knots now.”

A little later, as they came round a bend in the channel, Rose caught sight of the trees of the delta. They were instantly obscured again by the reeds, but the next bend brought them in sight again, not more than two hundred yards off, and right ahead. She watched them coming nearer. Almost without warning the passage through the reeds widened. Then, abruptly, the reeds ceased, and the
African Queen
drifted sluggishly forward for a yard or two and then stopped. They were in a wide pool, bordered on the farther side by dark trees, and the surface of the pool was covered with water lilies, pink and white, growing so closely that it seemed as if the whole pool was a mass of vegetation.

The sunlight was dazzling after the green shade of the reeds; it took a little while for their eyes to grow accustomed to the new conditions.

“That’s the delta all right,” said Allnutt, sniffing.

A dank smell of rotting vegetation came to them across the water; the farther bank was a wild tangle of trees of nightmare shape, wreathed with creepers.

“We won’t ’alf ’ave a gime getting this old tub through that lot,” said Allnutt.

“There’s a channel over that way,” said Rose, pointing. “Look!”

There certainly was some sort of opening into the forest there; they could see white water lilies blooming in the entrance.

“I s’spect you’re right,” said Allnutt. “All we got to do now, in a manner of speaking, is to get there.”

He remembered the last water lily pool they had encountered, high up on the Ulanga. There, all they had to do was to get out again having once entered. Here there was a hundred yards of weed-grown water to traverse.

“Let’s try it,” said Rose.

“Course we’re going to try it,” answered Allnutt, a little hurt.

It was not easy—nothing about that voyage to the lake was easy. Those water lily plants seemed to yield at a touch of the boat hook, and afforded no purchase at all by which they could draw themselves along. Yet at the same time they clung so thick about the boat as to limit its progress as much as the reeds had done. Allnutt darkly suspected from the behaviour of the boat that they were being caught upon the screw—that precious screw with the weak blade—and rudder. The bottom was of such liquidity that it offered practically no resistance to the thrust of the boat hook when used as a punt pole, and in drawing the pole out again Allnutt found that he pulled the boat back almost as much as he had previously shoved it forward. Volleys of gas bubbles rose whenever the boat hook touched the bottom; the stink was atrocious.

“Can’t we try rowing?” asked Rose. Time was passing with the rapidity they always noticed when progress was slow, and they had hardly left the edge of the pool.

“We might,” said Allnutt.

One item in the gear of the
African Queen
was a canoe paddle. Allnutt went forward and found it, and gave it to Rose. He brought back a billet of firewood for his own use.

Paddling the boat along made their progress a little quicker. There could be nothing slapdash nor carefree about wielding a paddle in those weeds. It had to be dipped carefully and vertically, reaching well forward, and it had to be drawn back with equal care, without twisting, lest at the moment of withdrawal it should be found so entangled as to call for the use of a knife to free it.

It was not a rapid method of transport. Rose would note some cluster of blooms up by the bows, and it would be at least a minute’s toilsome work before it was back alongside her. Nor was the
African Queen
adapted for paddling. She had to sit on the bench in the sternsheets twisted uncomfortably sideways; a few minutes’ paddling set up a piercing ache under her shoulder blade like the worst kind of indigestion. She and Allnutt had continually to change sides for relief.

So slowly did they move that when they came completely to a standstill they neither of them realized it at once, and went on paddling while the suspicion grew until they looked round at each other through the streaming sweat and found each had been thinking the same thing.

“We’re caught up on something,” said Allnutt.

“Yes.”

“It’s that ole prop. Can’t wonder at it in this mess.”

They stood together at the side of the boat, but of course there was no judging the state of affairs from there.

“Only one thing for it,” said Allnutt. He took out his knife, opened it, and looked at its edge.

“A spot of diving is the next item on the program, lidies and gents,” he said. He tried to grin as he said it.

Rose wanted to expostulate; there was danger in that massed weed, but Allnutt must chance the danger if the voyage was to go on.

“We’ll have to be careful,” was all she could say.

“Yerss.”

Allnutt fetched a length of rope.

“We’ll tie that round my waist,” he said, as he stripped off his clothes. “You count firty from the time I go under, an’ if I ain’t coming up by then, you pull at that rope, an’ pull, an’ pull, an’ go on pulling.”