The African Queen

by C. S. Forester

  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.”

  “All right,” said Rose.

  Allnutt sat naked on the gunwale and swung his legs over.

  “Good crocodile country this,” he said, and then, seeing the look on Rose’s face, he went on hastily. “Nao it ain’t. There ain’t no croc. on earth could get through these weeds.”

  Allnutt was not too sure about it himself. He was rising to an unbelievable height of heroism in what he was doing. Not even Rose could guess at the sick fear within him, but in reaction from his cowardice he was growing foolhardy. He took his knife in his hand and dropped into the water. Holding on to the gunwale, he breathed deeply half a dozen times, and then ducked his head under the boat. His legs vanished under the carpet of weed, while Rose began to count with trembling lips. At “thirty” she began to pull on the rope, and she sighed with relief as Allnutt emerged, all tangled with weed. He had to put up a weed-clustered hand to pull a mask of the stuff from his face before he could breathe or see.

  “There’s a lump like a beehive round that prop,” he said as he gasped for breath. “An’ ’alf the weeds in the lake are anchored on to it.”

  “Is it any use trying to clear it?”

  “Ooh yerss. Stuff cuts easy enough. I’d done a good bit already when I ’ad to come up. Well ’ere goes agine.”

  At the fourth ascent Allnutt grinned with pleasure.

  “All clear,” he said. “ ’Old the knife, will you, old girl? I’m comin’ in.”

  He pulled himself up over the gunwale with Rose’s assistance. The water streamed off him and from the masses of weed which clung to his body. Rose fussed over him, helping to pick him clean. Suddenly she gave a little cry, which was instantly echoed by Allnutt.

  “Just look at the little beggars!” said Allnutt—the swearwords he still refrained from using were those which, nev
er having come Rose’s way, she did not know to be swearwords.

  On Allnut’s body and arms and legs were leeches, a score or more of them, clinging to his skin. They were swelling with his blood as Rose looked at them. They were disgusting things. Allnutt was moved at the sight of them to more panic than he had felt about crocodiles.

  “Can’t you pull ’em off?” he said, his voice cracking. “Arhh! The beasts!”

  Rose remembered that if a leech is pulled off before he is gorged he is liable to leave his jaws in the wound, and blood poisoning may ensue.

  “Salt gets them off” she said, and sprang to fetch the tin in which the salt was kept.

  Damp salt dabbed on the leeches’ bodies worked like magic. Each one contorted himself for a moment, elongated himself and thickened himself, and then fell messily to the floor boards. Allnutt stamped on the first one in his panic, and blood—his own blood—and other liquid spurted from under his foot. Rose scooped the remains and the other leeches up with the paddle and flung them into the water. Blood still ran freely from the triangular bites, drying in brown smears on Allnutt’s body under the blazing sun; it was some time before they could induce it to clot at the wounds, and even when it was all over Allnutt was still shuddering with distaste. He hated leeches worse than anything else on earth.

  “Let’s get awye from ’ere,” was all the reply he could make to Rose’s anxious questionings.

  They paddled on across the lily pool. With the coming of the afternoon some of the pink blooms began to close. Other buds opened, ivy-coloured buds with the faintest tinge of blue at the petal tips. That carpet of lilies was a lovely sight, but neither of them had any eyes for its beauty. They sank into a condition of dull stupidity, their minds deadened by the sun; they said nothing to each other even when they exchanged places. Their course across the pool was as slow as a slug’s in a garden. They dipped and pulled on their paddles like mechanical contrivances, save when their rhythm was broken by the clutch of the maddening weeds upon the paddles.

  The sun was lower by now; there was a band of shade on the rim of the pool which they were approaching. With infinite slowness the African Queen’s nose gained the shade. Allnutt nerved himself for a few more strokes, and then, as the shade slid up to the stern and reached them, he let fall his billet of wood.

  “I can’t do no more,” he said, and he laid his head down upon the bench.

  He was nearly weeping with exhaustion, and he turned his face away from Rose so that she would not see. Yet later on, when he had eaten and drunk, his cockney resilience of spirits showed itself despite the misery the mosquitoes were causing.

  “What we want ’ere,” he said, “is a good big cataract. You know, like the first one below Shona. We’d ’ave got ’ere from the other side of the reeds in about a minute an’ a ’alf, I should say, ’stead of a couple of dyes an’ not there yet.”

  Later in the evening he was facetious again.

  “We’ve come along under steam, an’ we’ve paddled, an’ we’ve pushed, an’ we’ve pulled the ole boat along wiv the ’ook. What we ’aven’t done yet is get out an’ carry ’er along. I s’pose that’ll come next.”

  Rose remembered those words, later in the following day, and thought they had tempted Providence.

  Chapter 12

  IN the morning there was only a narrow strip of waterlily lake to cross under the urgings of the early sun. They fought their way across it with renewed hope, for they could see the very definite spot where the lilies ceased to grow, and the beginning of a channel through the delta, and they felt that no obstacle to navigation could be as infuriating and exhausting as those lilies.

  The delta of the Bora is a mangrove swamp, for the water of Lake Wittelsbach, although drinkable, is very slightly brackish, sufficiently so for some species of mangrove to grow, and where mangroves can grow there is no chance of survival for other trees. Where the mangroves began, too, the water lilies ended, abruptly, for they could not endure life in the deep shade which the mangroves cast.

  They reached the mouth of the channel and peered down it. It was like a deep tunnel; only very rare shafts of light from the blazing sky above penetrated its gloomy depths. The stench as of decaying marigolds filled their nostrils. The walls and roof of the tunnel were composed of mangrove roots and branches, tangled into a fantastic conglomeration of shapes as wild as any nightmare could conceive.

  Nevertheless, the repellent ugliness of the place meant no more to them than had the beauty of the water lilies. These days of travel had obsessed them with the desire to go on. They were so set upon bringing their voyage to its consummation that no place could be beautiful that presented navigational difficulties, and they were ready to find no place ugly if the water route through it were easy. When they crashed out from the last clinging embrace of the water lilies they both with one accord ceased paddling to look into the water, each to his separate side.

  “Coo,” said Allnutt, in tones of deep disgust. “It’s grass now.”

  The weed which grew here from the bottom of the water was like some rank meadow grass. The water was nearly solid with it. The only encouraging feature it displayed was that the long strands which lay along the surface all pointed in the direction in which they were headed—a sure sign that there was some faint current down the channel, and where the current went was where they wanted to go too.

  “No going under steam ’ere,” said Allnutt. “Never get the prop to go round in that muck.”

  Rose looked down the bank of mangroves, along the edge of the lily pool. They might try to seek some other way through the delta, but it seemed likely that any other channel would be as much choked with weed, while any attempt to find another channel would involve more slow paddling through water lilies. She formed her decision with little enough delay.

  “Come on,” was all she said. She had never heard Lord Fisher’s advice “Never explain,” but she acted upon it by instinct.

  They leant forward to their work again and the African Queen entered into the mangrove swamp with the slowness to be expected of a steam launch moved by one canoe paddle and one bit of wood shaped rather like a paddle.

  It was a region in which water put up a good fight against the land which was slowly invading it. Through the mangrove roots which closed round them they could see black pools of water reaching far inwards; the mud in which the trees grew was half water, as black and nearly as liquid. The very air was dripping with moisture. Everything was wet and yet among the trees it was as hot as in an oven. It made breathing oppressive.

  “Shall I try ’ooking ’er along, now, Rosie?” said Allnutt. He was refusing to allow the horror of the place to oppress his spirits. “We get along a bit better that wye.”

  “We could both of us use hooks here,” said Rose. “Can you make a hook.”

  “Easy,” said Allnutt. Rose was fortunate in having an assistant like him.

  He produced a four-foot boat hook quickly enough, beating the metal hook out of an angle iron from an awning stanchion, binding it tightly to the shaft with wire.

  With both of them using hooks their progress grew more rapid. They stood side by side in the bows, and almost always there was a root or branch of the mangroves within reach on one side or the other, or up above, so that they could creep along the channel, zigzagging from side to side. Reckoning the mangrove swamp as ten miles across, and allowing fifty per cent extra for bends in the channel, and calling their speed half a mile an hour—it was something like that—thirty hours of this sort of effort ought to have seen them through. It took much longer than that, all the same.

  First of all, there were the obstructions in the channel. They encountered one almost as soon as they entered among the mangroves, and after that they recurred every few hundred yards. The African Queen came to a standstill with a bump and a jar which they came to know only too well—some log was hidden in the black depths of the water, stretching unseen across the channel. They had to sound along its length. Somet
imes, when they were fortunate, there was sufficient depth of water over it at some point or other to float the boat across, but if there was not they had to devise some other means of getting forward. The funnel early came down; Allnutt dismantled that and the awning stanchions quite soon in consequence of the need for creeping under overhanging branches.

  Generally, if the channel were blocked they could find some passage round the obstruction through the pools of water which constituted a sort of side channel here and there, but to work the African Queen through them called for convulsive efforts, which usually involved Allnutt’s disembarking and floundering in the mud, and warping the launch round the corners. It was as the African Queen was slithering and grating over the mud and the tree roots that Allnutt’s ill-omened words about getting out and carrying the boat recurred to Rose’s mind.

  If there were no way over or round they had to shift the obstruction in the channel somehow, ascertaining its shape and weight and attachments by probings with the boat hooks, heaving it in the end, with efforts which in that Turkish bath atmosphere made them feel as if their hearts would burst, the necessary few inches this way or that. They grew ingenious at devising methods of rigging tackle to branches above, and fixing ropes to the obstructions beneath, so as to sway the things out of their way. And Allnutt, perforce, overcame his shuddering hatred of leeches—on one occasion they squatted in mud and water for a couple of hours, while with knives they made two cuts in a submerged root which barred the only possible bit of water through which they could float the African Queen.

  It was a nightmare time of filth and sludge and stench. Be as careful as they would, the all-pervading mud spread by degrees over everything in and upon the boat, upon themselves, everywhere, and with it came its sickening stink. It was a place of twilight, where everything had to be looked at twice to make sure what it was, so that, as every step might disturb a snake whose bite would be death, their flounderings in the mud were of necessity cautious.