by Wilbur Smith
He took all four down to the stern cabin, lit the lanterns and spread his charts upon the deck. They squatted around them in a circle, and the black men prodded the parchment sheets with their forefingers and argued softly in their sonorous voices, while Hal explained the lines on the charts to the three who, unlike Aboli, could not read.
When the ship’s bell tolled the beginning of the morning watch, Hal went on deck and called Ned Tyler to him. ‘New course, Mr Tyler. Due south. Mark it on the traverse board.’
Ned was clearly astounded at the order to turn back, but he asked no question. ‘Due south it is.’
Hal took pity on him, for it was evident that curiosity itched him like a burr in his breeches. ‘We’re closing the African mainland again.’
They crossed the broad channel that separated Madagascar from the African continent. The mainland came up as a low blue smudge on the horizon and, at a good offing, they turned and sailed southwards once more along the coast.
Aboli and Jiri spent most of the hours of daylight at the masthead, peering at the land. Twice Jiri came down and asked Hal to stand inshore to investigate what appeared to be the mouth of a large river. Once it turned out to be a false channel and the second time Jiri did not recognize it when they anchored off the mouth. ‘It is too small. The river I seek has four mouths.’
They weighed anchor and worked out to sea again, then went on southwards. Hal was beginning to doubt Jiri’s memory but he persevered. Several days later he noticed the patent excitement of the two men at the masthead as they stared at the land and gesticulated to each other. Matesi and Kimatti, who as part of the off-duty watch had been lazing on the forecastle, scrambled to their feet and flew up the shrouds to hang in the rigging and stare avidly at the land.
Hal strode to the rail and raised Llewellyn’s brass-bound telescope to his eye. He saw the delta of a great river spread before them. The waters that spilled out from the multiple mouths were discoloured and carried with them the detritus of the swamps and the unknown lands that must lie at the source of this mighty river. Squadrons of sharks were feeding on this waste, and their tall, triangular fins zigzagged across the current.
Hal called Jiri down to him and asked, ‘What do your tribe call this river?’
‘There are many names for it, for the one river comes to the sea as many rivers. They are called Muselo and Inhamessingo and Chinde. But the chief of them is Zambere.’
‘They all have a noble ring to them,’ Hal conceded. ‘But are you certain this is the river serpent with four mouths?’
‘On the head of my dead father I swear it is.’
Hal had two men in the bows taking soundings as he crept inshore, and as soon as the bottom began to shelve steeply he dropped anchor in twelve fathoms. He would not risk the ship in the narrow inland waters and the convoluted channels of the delta. But there was another risk he was unwilling to face.
He knew from his father that these tropical deltas were dangerous to the health of his crew. If they breathed the night airs of the swamp, they would soon fall prey to the deadly fevers that were borne upon them, aptly named the malaria, the bad airs.
Sukeena’s saddle-bags, which with her mother’s jade brooch were her only legacy to Hal, contained a goodly store of the Jesuit’s powder, the extract of the bark of the Cinchona tree. He had also discovered a large jar of the same precious substance among Llewellyn’s stores. It was the only remedy against the malaria, a disease that mariners encountered in every known area of the oceans, from the jungles of Batavia and Further India to the canals of Venice, the swamps of Virginia and the Caribbean in the New World.
Hal would not risk his entire crew to its ravages. He ordered the two pinnaces swung up from the hold and assembled. Then he chose the crews for these vessels, which naturally included the four Africans and Big Daniel. He placed a falconet in the bows of each and had a pair of murderers mounted in the sterns.
All the men in the expedition were heavily armed, and Hal placed three heavy chests of trade goods in each boat, knives and scissors and small hand mirrors, rolls of copper wire and Venetian glass beads.
He left Ned Tyler in charge of the Golden Bough with Althuda, and ordered them to remain anchored well offshore, and await his return. The distress signal would be a red Chinese rocket: only if he saw it was Ned to send the longboats in to find them.
‘We may be many days, weeks even,’ Hal warned. ‘Do not lose patience. Stay on your station as long as you do not have word of us.’
Hal took command of the leading boat. He had Aboli and the other Africans in his crew. Big Daniel followed in the second.
Hal explored each of the four mouths. The water levels seemed low, and some of the entrances were almost sealed by their sand bars. He knew of the danger of crocodiles and would not risk sending men over the side to drag the boats over the bar. In the end he chose the river mouth with the greatest volume of water pouring through it. With the onshore morning breeze filling the lug sail and all hands at the oars they forced their way over the bar into the hot, hushed world of the swamps.
Tall papyrus plants and stands of mangroves formed a high wall down each side of the channel so that their vision was limited and the wind was blanketed from them. They rowed on steadily, following the twists of the channel. Each turn opened the same dreary view. Hal realized almost at once how easy it would be to lose his way in this maze and he marked each branch of the channel with strips of canvas tied to the top branches of mangrove.
For two days they groped their way westwards, guided only by the compass and the flow of the waters. In the pools wallowed herds of the great grey river-cows which opened cavernous pink jaws and honked at them with wild laughter as they approached. At first they steered well clear of them, but once they became more familiar with them Hal began to ignore their warning cries and displays of rage, and pushed on recklessly.
His bravado at first seemed justified and the animals submerged when he drove straight at them. Then they came round another bend into a large green pool. In the centre was a mud-bank, and on it stood a huge female hippopotamus and at her flank a new-born calf not much bigger than a pig. The cow bellowed at them threateningly as they rowed towards her, but the men laughed with derision and Hal shouted from the bows, ‘Stand aside, old lady, we mean you no harm, but we intend to pass.’
The great beast lowered her head and, grunting belligerently, charged across the mud in a wild, ungainly gallop that hurled up clods of mud. As soon as he realized that the brute was in earnest Hal snatched up the slow-match from the tub at his feet. ‘By heavens, she means to attack us.’
He grabbed the iron handle of the falconet and swung it to aim ahead, but the hippopotamus reached the water and plunged into it at full tilt, sending up a sheet of spray and disappearing beneath the surface. Hal swung the barrel of the falconet from side to side, seeking a chance to fire, but he saw only a ripple on the surface as the animal swam deep below it.
‘It is coming straight for us!’ Aboli shouted. ‘Wait until you get a clear shot, Gundwane!’
Hal peered down, the burning match held ready, and through the clear green water he saw a remarkable sight. The hippo was moving along the bottom in a slow dreamlike gallop, clouds of mud boiling up under her hoofs with each stride. But she was still a fathom deep and his shot could never reach her.
‘She has gone beneath us!’ he shouted at Aboli.
‘Get ready!’ Aboli warned. ‘This is how they destroy the canoes of my people.’ The words had barely left his lips when beneath their feet came a resounding crack as the beast reared up under them, and the heavy boat with its full complement of ten rowers was lifted high out of the water.
They were hurled from their benches, and Hal might have been thrown overboard if he had not grabbed the thwart. The boat crashed back to the surface and Hal again seized the tail of the falconet.
The animal’s charge would have stove in the hull of any lesser craft, and would certainly have splintered a na
tive dugout canoe, but the pinnace was robustly constructed to withstand the ravages of the North Sea.
Close alongside, the huge grey head burst through the surface, and the mouth opened like a pink cavern lined with fangs of yellow ivory as long as a man’s forearm. With a bellow that shocked the crew with its ferocity the hippopotamus rushed at them with gaping jaws to tear the timbers out of the boat’s side.
Hal swung the falconet until it was almost touching the onrushing head. He fired. Smoke and flame shot straight down the gaping throat and the jaws clashed shut. The beast disappeared in a swirl, to surface seconds later half-way back to the mud-bank on which her calf stood, forlorn and bewildered.
The huge rotund body reared half out of the water in a gargantuan convulsion then collapsed back and sank away in death, leaving a long wake of crimson to mark the green waters with its passing.
The rowers wielded their oars with renewed vigour and the boat shot round the next bend, with Big Daniel’s boat close astern. The hull of Hal’s vessel was leaking fairly heavily, but with one man bailing they could keep her dry until they had an opportunity to beach her and turn her over to repair the damage. They pressed on up the channel.
Clouds of waterfowl rose from the dense stands of papyrus around them or perched in the branches of the mangroves. There were herons, duck and geese that they recognized, together with dozens of other birds that they had never seen before. Several times they caught glimpses of a strange antelope with a shaggy brown coat and spiral horns with pale tips, which seemed to make the deep swamps its home. At dusk they surprised one as it stood on the edge of the papyrus. With a long and lucky musket shot, Hal brought it down. They were astonished to find that its hoofs were deformed, enormously elongated. Such feet would act like the fins of a fish in the water, Hal reasoned, and give it purchase on the soft footing of mud and reeds. The antelope’s flesh was sweet and tender and the men, long starved of fresh food, ate it with relish.
The nights, when they slept on the bare deck, were murmurous, troubled by great clouds of stinging insects, and in the dawn their faces were swollen and bloated with red lumps.
On the third day the papyrus began to give way to open flood plains. The breeze could reach them now, and blew away the clouds of insects and filled the lug sail they set. They went on at better speed and came to where the other branches of the river all joined up to form one great flow almost three cables’ length in width.
The flood plains on each bank of this mighty river were verdant with a knee-high growth of rich grasses, grazed by huge herds of buffalo. Their numbers were uncountable, and they formed a moving carpet as far as Hal could see, even when he shinned up the pinnace’s mast. They stood so densely upon the plain that large areas of the grasslands were obscured by their multitudes. They were tarry lakes and running rivers of bovine flesh.
The outer fringes of these herds lined the banks of the river and stared across the water at them, their drooling muzzles lifted high and their bossed heads heavy with drooping horns. Hal steered the boat in closer and fired the falconet into the thick of them. With that single discharge he brought down two young cows. That night, for the first time, they camped ashore and feasted on buffalo steaks roasted on the coals.
For many days, they went on following the stately green flow, and the flood plains on either hand gradually gave way to forests and glades. The river narrowed, became deeper and stronger and their progress was slower against the current. On the eighth evening after leaving the ship, they went ashore to camp in a grove of tall wild fig trees.
Almost immediately they came upon signs of human habitation. It was a decaying stockade, built of heavy logs. Within its wooden walls were pens that Hal thought must have been for enclosing cattle or other beasts.
‘Slavers!’ said Aboli bitterly. ‘This is where they have chained my people like animals. In one of these bomas, perhaps this very one, my mother died under the weight of her sorrow.’
The stockade had been long abandoned but Hal could not bring himself to camp on the site of so much human misery. They moved a league upstream and found a small island on which to bivouac. The next morning they went on along the river through forest and grassland innocent of any further evidence of man. ‘The slavers have swept the wilderness with their net,’ Aboli said sorrowfully. ‘That is why they have abandoned their factory and sailed away. It seems that there are no men or women of our tribe who have survived their ravages. We must abandon the search, Gundwane, and turn back.’
‘No, Aboli. We go on.’
‘All around us is the ancient memory of despair and death,’ Aboli pleaded. ‘These forests are inhabited only by the ghosts of my people.’
‘I will decide when we turn back, and that time is not yet come,’ Hal told him, for in truth he was becoming fascinated by this strange new land and the plethora of wild creatures with which it abounded. He felt a powerful urge to travel on and on, to follow the great river to its source.
The next day, from the bows, Hal spied a range of low hillocks a short distance north of the river. He ordered them to beach the boats and left Big Daniel and his seamen to repair the leaks in the hull of the first caused by the hippopotamus attack. He took Aboli with him and they set off to climb the hills for a better view of the country ahead. They were further off than they had appeared to be, for distances are deceptive in the clear air and under the bright light of the African sun. It was late afternoon when they stepped out onto the crest and gazed down upon the limitless distances where forests and hills replicated themselves, rank upon rank and range upon range, like images of infinity in mirrors of shaded blue.
They sat in silence, awed by the immensity of this wild land. At last Hal stood up reluctantly. ‘You are right, Aboli. There are no men here. We must return to the ship.’
Yet he felt deep within him a strange reluctance to turn his back upon this tremendous land. More than ever, he felt drawn to its mystery and the romance of its vast spaces.
‘You will have many strong sons,’ Sukeena had prophesied. ‘Their descendants will flourish in this land of Africa and make it their own.’
He did not yet love this land. It was too strange and barbaric, too alien from all he had known in the gentler climes of the north, but deeply he felt the magic of it in his blood. The silence of dusk fell upon the hills, that moment when all creation held its breath before the insidious advance of the night. He took one last look, sweeping the horizon where, like monstrous chameleons, the hills changed colour. Before his eyes they turned sapphire, azure, and the blue of a kingfisher’s back. Suddenly he stiffened.
He grasped Aboli’s arm and pointed. ‘Look!’ he said softly. From the foot of the next range a single thin plume of smoke rose out of the forest and climbed up into the violet evening air.
‘Men!’ Aboli whispered. ‘You were right not to turn back so soon, Gundwane.’
They went down the hill in darkness and moved through the forest like shadows. Hal guided them by the stars, fixing his eye upon the great shining Southern Cross that hung above the hill at the foot of which they had marked the column of smoke. After midnight, as they crept forward with increasing caution, Aboli stopped so abruptly that Hal almost ran into him in the darkness.
‘Listen!’ he said. They stood in silence for minute after minute.
Then Hal said, ‘I hear nothing.’
‘Wait!’ Aboli insisted, and then Hal heard it. It was a sound once so commonplace, but one that he had not heard since he had left Good Hope. It was the mournful lowing of a cow.
‘My people are herders,’ Aboli whispered. ‘Their cattle are their most treasured possessions.’ He led Hal forward cautiously until they could smell the woodsmoke and the familiar bovine odour of the cattle pen. Hal picked out the puddle of faintly glowing ash that marked the campfire. Silhouetted against it was the outline of a sitting man, wrapped in a kaross.
They lay and waited for the dawn. However, long before first light the camp began to stir. The wat
chman stood up, stretched, coughed and spat in the dead coals. Then he threw fresh wood upon the fire, and knelt to blow it. The flames flared and, by their light, Hal saw that he was but a boy. Naked except for a loincloth, the lad left the fire and came close to where they were hidden. He lifted his loincloth and peed into the grass, playing games with his urine stream, aiming at fallen leaves and twigs and chuckling as he tried to drown a scurrying scarab beetle.
Then he went back to the fire and called out towards the lean-to of branches and thatch, ‘The dawn comes. It is time to let out the herd.’
His voice was high and unbroken, but Hal was delighted to find that he understood every word the boy had said. It was the language of the forests that Aboli had taught him.
Two other lads of the same age crawled out of the hut, shivering, muttering and scratching, and all three went to the cattle pen. They spoke to the beasts as though they, too, were children, rubbed their heads and patted their flanks.
As the light strengthened Hal saw that these cattle were far different from those he had known on High Weald. They were taller and rangier, with huge humps over their shoulders, and the span of their horns was so wide as to appear grotesque, the weight almost too much for even their heavy frames to support.
The boys picked out a cow and pushed her calf away from the udder. Then one knelt under her belly and milked her, sending purring jets into a calabash gourd. Meanwhile, the other two seized a young bullock and passed a leather thong around its neck. They drew this tight and when the restricted blood vessels stood proud beneath the black skin, one pricked a vein with the sharp point of an arrow head. The first child came running with the gourd half-filled with milk and held the mouth of it under the stream of bright red blood that spurted from the punctured vein.
When the gourd was full, one staunched the small wound in the bullock’s neck with a handful of dust, and turned it loose. The beast wandered away, none the worse for the bleeding. The boys shook the gourd vigorously, then passed it from one to the other, each drinking deeply from the mixture of milk and blood as his turn came, smacking his lips and sighing with pleasure.