The African Queen

by C. S. Forester

  Before he had finished Allnutt developed a surprising capacity for holding his breath, and as a result of his prolonged immersions and exposures, his skin peeled off in flakes all over him. It was an important moment for Rose when at last, bending over the shaft in the bottom of the boat, she saw it slide out through the glands, and Allnutt emerged wet and dripping beside the boat with it in his hands.

  Allnutt shook his head over the kinks and bends now revealed in the light of day—the terminal one was nearly half a right angle—but the two of them set themselves doggedly to the business of forging the thing straight again.

  The sight of those kinks brought relief to Allnutt’s mind in one respect. The fact that the metal had bent instead of breaking revealed that its temper was such that it might not suffer much from his amateur blacksmith’s work—Allnutt was very well aware that what he knew about tempering was extraordinarily little. He comforted himself philosophically by telling himself that after all he was not dealing with a tool steel, and that obviously the shaft had a good deal of reserve strength, and that if he did not use extravagantly high temperatures and if he annealed the thing cautiously, he might not do too much harm.

  There was not the slightest chance of their using very high temperatures, as they quickly discovered. Their attempts at making charcoal were complete and utter failures. When trying to reconstruct from memory what they had seen done, they soon discovered that they had seen with eyes unseeing. All they had to show in return for several piles of wood were heaps of white ashes and a few bits of what only a kindly person could have called charcoal. In desperation Allnutt resolved to try if he could not obtain a great enough heat with a wood fire and bellows. He made the bellows neatly enough with a couple of slabs of wood and an inch or two of piping and a pair of black, elbow-length gloves which Rose had carried in her tin box for ten years of Central Africa without wearing. When they found at last a good shape for their hearth of piled rocks Allnutt was relieved to discover that by energetic working of the bellows they could heat up that unwieldy shaft until he could actually alter its shape with his light hand hammer. They scorched themselves pretty well all over while using the flaring, inconsistent fuel, but all the same, the metal became soft enough to work in a manner of speaking, and Allnutt was becoming reconciled to makeshifts by now.

  Nevertheless, under the urging of the bellows, at which Rose worked feverishly on her knees with scorched face, the open hearth consumed wood at an incredible rate. It was not long before they had gathered in every scrap of driftwood accessible in the ravine, and the work was as yet hardly begun. They had to climb the steep face of the ravine into the forest, and gather wood there. The heat was sweltering, they were bitten by insects of all sorts, they wore themselves out and their clothes into rags hacking paths through the undergrowth. No one on earth could have climbed down that cliff face with a load of wood; they had to drag the bundles to the verge and push them over the edge, and some fell direct into the river, and one or two caught on inaccessible ledges and were lost just as thoroughly although they were in sight, but they managed to profit by about half the wood they collected in the forest.

  Curiously enough, they were as happy as children during these days of hectic work. Hard regular labour suited both of them, and as soon as Allnutt had become infected by Rose’s passion to complete the job, they had a common interest all day long. And every day there was the blessed satisfaction of knocking off work in the late afternoon, and revelling in the feeling of comradely friendliness which drew them close together until passion was aroused and hand went out to hand and lip met lip. Rose had never known such happiness before, nor perhaps had Allnutt either. They could laugh and joke together; Rose had never laughed nor joked like that in the whole thirty-three years of her existence. Her father had taken shopkeeping as seriously as he (and her brother) had taken religion. She had never realized before that friendliness and merriment could exist along with a serious purpose in life, any more than she had realized that there was pleasure in the intercourse of the sexes. There was something intensely satisfying in their companionship.

  Little by little that propeller shaft was straightened. Patient heating and patient hammering did their work. The major bends disappeared, and Allnutt turned his attention to the minor ones. He had to use a taut string now to judge the straightness of the shaft, and he had to make himself a gauge of wire for testing the diameter, so nearly true was it, and there came a blessed morning when even his exacting mind was satisfied, and he pronounced the shaft as good as he could make it. He could lay it aside now, and turn his attention to the far more difficult matter of the propeller blade.

  In the end Allnutt made that new blade out of half a spare boiler tube. The operations on the shaft had taught him a good deal of the practical side of smith’s work, and his experience with the propeller blade practically completed his education. Under the urging of necessity, and with the stimulus given him by Rose’s confiding faith in his ability, Allnutt devised all sorts of ways of dealing with that boiler tube; it might almost be said that he reinvented some of his processes. He welded one end into a solid plate, and he worked upon it and beat it and shaped it until it gradually began to assume an appearance reminiscent of the other two blades which were his models.

  The ravine rang with the sound of his hammer. Rose was his diligent assistant. She tended the fire, and worked the bellows, and, her hands shielded with rags, held the nominally cool end of the tube under Allnutt’s instructions. Her nostrils were filled with the smell of scorching cloth, and she burned her fingers over and over again and nearly every single garment she and Allnutt possessed between them was burned and torn until they gave up the hopeless pursuit after decency, and she somehow enjoyed every minute of it.

  There was intense interest in watching how the new blade took shape; there were exciting discussions as to how this difficulty or that was to be evaded. Allnutt found it all to his taste; there was gratification in the primitive pleasure of making things with his own hands.

  “If my old dad,” said Allnutt once, “had put me to blacksmithing when I was a kid, I don’t think I should never have come to Africa. Coo! I might still—”

  Allnutt lost himself in a pictured fantasy of a London working-class shopping district on a Saturday night, redolent with fried fish shops, garish with lights, and all a-bustle with people. He experienced a little qualm of homesickness before he came back to real life again, to the ravine with its pale red rocks, and the singing river, and the dazzling light, and the African Queen rocking in the eddy down below, and Rose beside him.

  “But then I shouldn’t never have met you, Rosie, old girl,” he went on. He fingered the embryo propeller blade. “Nor done all this. It’s worth it. Every time it is, honest.”

  Allnutt would not have exchanged Rose for all the fried fish shops in the world.

  Later the propeller blade began to demand accurate measurement, so like had it grown to its fellows. Allnutt had to invent gauges of intricate shape to make sure that the curvature and contour of the old blades were accurately reproduced, and before this part of the work was quite completed he turned his attention to the other end and set to work to forge a socket to fit over the broken stump, and to drilling holes by which it might be made comparatively safe. The moment actually came at last when the completed blade was slipped on over the stump, and Rose was given a practical demonstration of riveting—Allnutt made the rivets out of stumps of nails, and Rose had a trying time as “holder-on”; neither spanner nor pincers were really effective tongs.

  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 th
e 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.

  Chapter 9

  SOMEWHERE 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.