Wild Spirit (18 page)

The second and third drums arrived soon after – one a smaller version of the first, the other a slit drum made from a thick section of tree trunk and played with two sticks.

A crowd had just begun to assemble in the open when lightning cracked and flashed overhead and rain began to pound on the rusty tin roofs. Everyone rushed for the shelter of an open-sided pavilion in the middle of the clearing and huddled together inside it, with children laughing and squealing, dogs barking and babies crying as the rain grew heavier.

I breathed in the sweetness of the wet earth and watched the flashes of lightning illuminate the forest, feeling the people's excitement and anticipation all around me. In that moment I felt utterly at home, and I contemplated for the first time the magnitude of the change in me since we had come to Belinga. Some time in the past five months, the person I had previously been had disappeared and someone else had taken her place. Layers of my new identity were being added each day. I was being remade.

After the storm we moved outside again. People arranged themselves around three sides of a square facing inwards, and the musicians took up their position on the fourth side. Two other musicians joined the three drummers – a woman with rattles made from old gas canisters filled with pebbles, and a man with a length of iron pipe and a heavy wooden baton. A woman swept the dancing ground with a leaf broom and placed a lighted hurricane lamp in the centre.

I jumped, startled, as the band suddenly erupted into life. The two tom-toms throbbed in complex cross-
rhythms, the stone rattles swished, and the iron pipe clanged. Underneath them, the slit drum boomed out deep visceral sounds that I could feel as well as hear – they reverberated through my abdomen.

A woman moved to the middle of the square and began shuffling slowly in a circle, throwing invocations to the crowd, who responded in a throaty chorus of guttural sounds. Then the other women rose to join her. They formed a circle, moving one behind the other, shuffling in a pattern of three steps and a pause. At the same time, they sang what sounded like a chant. Some had babies strapped to their backs. Abruptly – as if in mid-phrase – the music and dance ceased. As a singer myself, I couldn't work out how everyone knew the precise moment to stop.

The music began again with a more insistent rhythm. Several women emerged from a hut brandishing white monkey-tail fly-switches, and joined the others to form a new circle, facing inwards. They all bowed from the waist, then one at a time moved to the centre, twirling their fly-switches in the air and pivoting on the spot. Without warning, one of them singled me out, urging me to join in. I leapt up and joined the moving circle, shuffling sideways, waving my arms in the air and shouting. Then it was my turn to do a solo. Someone thrust a fly-switch into my hand and thirty female voices cried out, ‘
Allez, Madamo!
' (
Madamo
was a more familiar form of address indicating they felt comfortable with me.)

My love of dancing took over. I moved to the centre and whirled in a tight circle, brandishing the switch over my head in time to the clapping and singing. Win and Rodo looked on grinning. I had whirled back to the circle and handed on the switch, completely transported by the
rhythms, when the music abruptly ceased on the offbeat, leaving me flailing my arms and legs while everyone else dissolved in laughter, cheering. I felt my cheeks burning with embarrassment, but the women were gracious. One by one they came over, shook my hand, and said ‘
Merci, madame!
'

The celebration continued long into the night. While the women danced, the men looked on. Rivulets of sweat streamed down the drummers' bodies. Their eyes were tightly closed, and I had the impression they would not have heard if anyone had spoken to them. Mary Kingsley would have heard sounds like this a century ago, I thought.

We took leave of our hosts around 2 am and drove back up the mountain with the vibrations of the slit drum still resonating in our ears. I wondered what my family would think if they could have seen me dancing by the light of the hurricane lamp in this tiny village, deep in the African wilderness. Could they understand anything of my life now? I doubted it.

By Christmas, the appearance of the camp had changed radically. The place where the black and white colobus monkeys had played at the edge of the forest had become a bare, gravel-surfaced yard used for storing drums of fuel and parking bulldozers. Down where the old bamboo houses had stood, a series of new home sites had been cleared. Nearby, the first of the duplex mini-apartments was almost complete. Eamon's new stone house was already under construction, and six guestrooms had been created in the
cas de passage
for the team of Canadian drillers scheduled to arrive in several months.

A grid of test-drilling sites had been drawn up on the surveyors' newly made maps, each one requiring an access road. Eamon's dozer drivers had been hard at work on them: from the guesthouse windows, the raw scar of a new access road was visible along the side of Babiel, and on Bakota South new tracks and clearings had penetrated the forest. For me, these developments were the bitter corollary of the sweet. Every incursion into the forest meant more wildlife was at risk. From the outset, I had known this was
inevitable; now it stared us in the face. But just a few months later my discomfort about it was to be eclipsed by a wildlife experience so remarkable that it would resonate with me for decades afterwards.

 

‘There'll be some special visitors this weekend,' Eamon told me one morning. ‘Annie Gautier-Hion and her husband will be coming up, along with Professor Brosset and a doctoral student.'

‘You mean
the
Annie Hion, who worked here with the gorillas in the 1960s?'

‘That's the one.'

‘Is this just a social visit?'

‘No, far from it. Annie and Jean-Pierre want to record the calls of
cercocèbe
monkeys, and Professor Brosset plans to revisit the bat cave where he carried out his research years ago. I believe the doctoral student, Louise, is hoping to collect some brush-tailed porcupines.'

I had never met a naturalist before, and the prospect of meeting Annie was heady. I felt I knew her already, because I had heard so much about her from Eamon and Jacques. She and her husband were in Gabon for a month's field work, staying at CNRS where Professor André Brosset was director.

‘They'll drive up from Makokou on Friday afternoon and stay two nights,' Eamon said. The biologists had chosen an ideal time to come. It was February and the short dry season was still with us, which meant the new road via the Djadié River was open.

Their Land Rover, crammed with gossamer-fine mist nets, cages, cameras and sound-recording gear, pulled
up outside the guesthouse late on Friday. A slim, vivacious woman stepped out, smiled warmly, and extended her hand. ‘
Bonjour! Annie Gautier-Hion, et voiçi mon mari, Jean-Pierre Gautier.
' They made a handsome couple, and their open friendliness attracted me straightaway. Rodo and I introduced ourselves and shook hands.

‘
Bienvenue à Belinga!
' I said, and watched as Annie's gaze swept over the familiar sight of the guesthouse, looking much as it would have done a decade before.

André Brosset exactly fitted my image of a naturalist. He wore a long-sleeved shirt, a khaki camera jacket with rows of bulging pockets, jungle-green pants and sturdy boots. He could have been fifty, but his head of luxuriant black hair and carefully trimmed beard made him look younger. Louise Emmons, a slightly built American in her twenties, spoke quietly and looked scholarly. Her sandy hair, tied back in a ponytail, framed an elfin face.

‘Eamon will be back soon,' Rodo said, ‘but in the meantime, let me show you to your rooms.'

Next morning, I had my first chance to watch biologists at work. Eamon had spread the word that the scientists were interested in any small animals people could bring in, especially brush-tailed porcupines. Annie, Jean-Pierre and Louise had set themselves up at a long table beside the road, surrounded by equipment. By the time I arrived, they'd already recorded the calls of a band of
cercocèbe
monkeys moving through the trees several hundred metres away on the edge of camp. The monkeys were distinctive because of their huge voice boxes, which made the calls audible over long distances.

The carcasses of several small animals lay spread out on the table. They measured each one, weighed it on a set of
portable scales, examined it closely, then recorded the information on field data sheets. I hovered in the background, fascinated, but anxious not to disturb them.

Annie looked over and smiled. ‘Come and have a look.' As I watched and listened, I envied them a little – their passion was also their work. Their lives had direction and purpose, they were respected for their knowledge, and they were doing what they loved. Twelve years of officework had never once ignited my passion. If only I could do something similar to what they did, I thought.

Rodo, Win and I joined them for drinks before lunch, and I heard for the first time about the work being done at the research station in Makokou. CNRS was running a rehabilitation program for orphaned gorillas and chimpanzees, reintroducing them to the wild on an island in the river. Scientists from many disciplines also used the station as a base for their research. There were zoologists, botanists, entomologists and others who came for varying periods. André specialised in birds and bats. Louise's project involved radio-tracking the nocturnal movements of brush-tailed porcupines. She spent most nights alone on foot in the forest with a radio receiver, a grid map, a pen and a torch. I looked at her slight frame and wondered what she would do out there if something went wrong.

‘Aren't you frightened in the forest?' I asked. Her reply gave me my first insight into her extraordinary courage and resilience.

‘Not really,' she said nonchalantly. ‘The only real risk would come from elephants. Sometimes it's so boring, I take a book.'

André had come to Belinga to revisit his old research
site, a cave called La Grotte du Faucon, which lay two hours' climb from the camp.

‘It's the largest bat cave in Africa,' he explained. ‘We calculated that up to a million bats of three different species live in it.' And he had another reason for revisiting the site. Some rare birds – bareheaded rockfowls,
Picathartes orea
– dwelt at the cave entrance. The birds had been officially classified as endangered and few people had ever seen them. He had studied them extensively in the 1960s and wanted to see how they were faring a decade later. As I listened, I was unaware of André's global standing in the scientific community. I saw a humble man, passionate about his work and fired with the energy of someone half his age.

Over dinner, he told us he'd engaged his former assistant, Mateba Louis, who was now on our workforce, as a guide for the next day. They would leave at nine in the morning for the two-hour climb to the cave. Annie, Jean-Pierre and Louise would remain behind doing their own work.

André cast his eyes quizzically around the table. ‘I'd appreciate some company on the walk. Are there any takers?'

Rodo and I leapt at the chance. I looked across the table at Win. ‘Would you like to visit the bat cave? André has just invited us.'

His eyes lit up and he beamed across at André. ‘That would be wonderful! We'd love to.'

We woke early next morning to assemble our gear – bottles of drinking water, sweaters, spray jackets, cameras, torches and binoculars – and just before nine the five of us gathered in front of the guesthouse. Mateba Louis led the way up the dirt road towards the forest, where a track
branched off behind the reservoir. André cautioned us to speak only when necessary and always in whispers, so as not to frighten any wildlife away.

The morning air was still cool, and moisture dripped from the leaves. The mountainside rose steeply, and we scrambled and slipped up the slope in single file, grabbing at exposed roots and struggling with the gear slung around our necks. At the top, the track levelled out. We padded through the dimly lit understorey, past spiders' webs heavy with droplets of water, around fallen forest giants and past thorny vines, the only sound the soft fall of our feet on the leaf litter. When we came to particular fungi or ferns, André paused to explain their special attributes and the uses the local people had for them. Several times we came upon elephant tracks in the mud.

‘They often move over this ridge,' André explained. ‘They follow well-worn paths.' The track wound around the mountainside like a snake, skirting giant tree trunks and massive boulders. We walked at a steady pace for almost two hours before André signalled that we were almost there.

A steep thirty-metre drop led down from the crest of a ridge to the cave. We clutched at tree trunks and roots on the way down, slipping on loose stones and sliding on our backsides to the bottom, where a pebbly creek bed wound through understorey vegetation. Banks of giant boulders stood between us and the creek, providing perfect cover.

André motioned us into absolute silence. The cave mouth lay only fifteen metres away, and if we were to see
Picathartes
at all, we had to remain hidden. At the first hint of our presence, they would fly off. We crept up one by one behind the line of boulders, then crawled on our hands and knees behind a thick clump of vegetation. Holding our
breath, we slowly raised our heads just high enough to look through the gaps between the topmost leaves.

Less than ten metres away, on the bare expanse of smooth rock at the cave mouth, two
Picathartes
were performing a ritualised dance, a complicated hopping sequence, twisting and turning their bodies to right and left and cocking their heads from side to side. The two bald ovals on their heads stood out like the eyes of some creature from science fiction. They were the size of large pigeons, with sleek bodies and long thin legs.

As if on cue, a shaft of weak sunlight broke through the canopy and struck the rock platform, and for a few moments their brilliant colours were visible – rich wine red and mossy green on their heads, and dove grey on their wings and backs. Then something must have alerted them to our presence: in an instant, they had disappeared through the trees, leaving us gaping at the bare rock ledge.

André's joy at seeing them again shone from his face; Rodo, Win and I looked at one another, open-mouthed, stunned at the privilege of seeing them. Even when André signalled that we could stand up, we lingered, as if movement would break the spell.

We followed him down a dirt path towards the cave entrance. At the bottom, he crossed the creek bed and climbed up the left side of the cave mouth, pointing excitedly at something attached to the rock wall two metres from the ground.

‘It's the nest!' he cried. The
Picathartes
' mud nest, threaded through with straggly bits of plant and twigs, was perfectly camouflaged. The structure exactly matched the colour of the rock and was partially concealed by
overhanging grasses. We could easily have passed it by without noticing.
Picathartes
were poor breeders, and their numbers had dwindled steeply in the wild as a result of excessive collection. To see evidence that they were breeding must have been a dream fulfilled for André.

We stood poised at the cave entrance while he explained where we could safely walk once we were inside. For the uninitiated it could be treacherous, because the bats deposited several tonnes of guano on to the cave floor every day, and over millennia the droppings had built up to a depth of over a metre. During his research there, André had marked out a safe path to the back of the cave with vertical sticks. If we deviated from it, he warned, we would sink into the stinking sludge up to our chests.

With our torches on, we entered the gloom and moved slowly along the left side, where the guano was shallowest and we could balance against the rock wall. The surface was slimy and soft underfoot. The smell of the guano, a choking ammonia-like stench, filled our lungs and made breathing difficult.

At first, I saw nothing in the blackness. As we inched our way forward, a strange sound filled my ears, like a powerful wind rushing through a long tunnel but never reaching the end. Perhaps it was a trick of acoustics, I thought. But as my eyes adjusted, I realised the source of the sound – a frantic blur of moving bodies whirling above us. Hundreds of thousands of bats had simultaneously taken flight – countless fine-membraned wings all vibrating the air at once. Their furry black and brown shapes streaked in all directions, too fast for the eye to follow, the mass of moving bodies so dense it completely obscured the roof of the cave. Tiny high-pitched squeaks cut through the sound of
rushing wings, like the piping of piccolos – the bats were all calling at once.

Until then, I'd had no experience of bats. I had grown up with all the myths and horror stories that surrounded them in western culture, yet now I felt no fear or repugnance. I was curious and excited.

The deeper we moved into the cave, the staler and more humid the air became. Our skin dripped sweat, trapping swarms of tiny black insects. Then I realised fine moisture was falling on us. Condensation from the cave roof I thought at first. But it was bat urine, falling like mist, wetting our hair and clothes.

We turned off our torches and stood still in the blackness, listening, smelling and feeling – immersed like deep-sea divers in total sensory bombardment. Then André switched on his torch and directed it to the cave wall. No rock was visible, because thousands more bats clung to it, crowded together, squealing, squirming and fighting, a seething mass of contorted upside-down faces protesting the disturbance.

The cave opened out into a vast high-ceilinged cavern. As we moved yet further in, the moving shapes of other life forms became visible. Pale insects that looked part-spider, part-scorpion crawled around the ceiling. A moving carpet of cockroaches and beetles swarmed endlessly over the guano, and the coiled form of a hooded cobra glinted on a rock ledge, waiting to strike at an unsuspecting bat. I felt we had entered another world, immensely far back in time, an entire ecosystem that had existed unchanged for numberless centuries.