The African Queen

by C. S. Forester

  Bit by bit Allnutt filled the cylinders, cementing each layer of explosive hard and firm with mud. When each was full right up to the neck he stood up to ease his aching back.

  “That’s done prop’ly,” he said with pride, looking down at the results of his morning’s work, and Rose nodded approval, contemplating the deadly things lying on the floorboards. Neither of them saw anything in the least fantastic in the situation.

  “We got to make them detonators now,” he said. “I got an idea. Thought of it last night.”

  From the locker in which his toilet things were stored he brought out a revolver, heavily greased to preserve it from the air. Rose stared at the thing in amazement; it was the first she knew of the presence of such a weapon in the boat.

  “I ’ad to ’ave this,” explained Allnutt. “I used to ’ave a lot o’ gold on board ’ere going up to Limbasi sometimes. A nundred ounces an’ more, some weeks. I never ’ad to shoot nobody, though.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t,” said Rose. To shoot a thief in time of peace seemed a much more unpleasant thing than to blow up a whole ship in time of war.

  Allnutt broke open the revolver and took the cartridges into his hand, replacing the empty revolver in the locker.

  “Now let me see,” he said, musingly.

  Rose watched the idea gradually taking shape under his hands; the things took time to construct—what with meals and sleep and malaria, it was all of the two days of Allnutt’s previous rough estimate before they were ready.

  First he had, very laboriously, to shape with his knife two round discs of hard wood which would screw tightly into the noses of the cylinders. Then in each disc he pierced three holes of such a size that he could just force the cartridges into them. When the discs were in position in the nozzles, the bullets and the ends of the brass cartridge cases would now rest in among the explosive.

  The rest of the work was far more niggling and delicate, and Allnutt discarded several pieces before he was satisfied. He cut two more discs of wood of the same size as the previous two, and he was meticulous about what sort of wood he used. He wanted it neither hard nor rotten, something through which a nail could be driven as easily as possible and yet which would hold the nail firmly without allowing it to wobble. He made several experiments in driving nails into the various kinds of wood at his disposal before he eventually decided to use a piece of one of the floor boards.

  Rose quite failed to guess at the motive of these experiments, but she was content to sit and watch, and hand things to him, as he worked away in the flaming sunlight, the masses of mosquitoes always about him.

  When the new discs were cut, Allnutt carefully laid them on the others and noted exactly where the bases of the cartridges would rest against them. At these points he made ready to drive nails through the new discs, and, as a final meticulous precaution, he filed the points of the nails to the maximum of sharpness. He drove the nails gingerly through the discs at the points which he had marked, and on the other side he pared away small circles of wood into which the bases of the cartridges would fit exactly, so when that was done the points of the nails were just showing as gleaming traces of metal in the middle of each shallow depression, while on the other side the heads of the nails protruded for a full inch.

  Finally, he screwed his pairs of discs together.

  “That’s all right now,” said Allnutt.

  Each pair of discs was now one disc. On one side of the disc showed the nailheads, whose points rested against the percussion caps in the bases of the cartridges, the bullets of which showed on the opposite side. It was easy to see now that when the disc was in its place in the cylinder nose, and the cylinder pointing beyond the bows of the African Queen, the boat would be herself a locomotive torpedo. When she was driven at full speed against the side of a ship the nails would be struck sharply against the cartridges. They would explode into the high explosive packed tight in the cylinders.

  “I don’t think I could do it any better,” said Allnutt, half apologetically. “They ought to work all right.”

  There were three cartridges to each cylinder; one at least ought to explode; and there were two cylinders, each containing nearly a hundredweight of explosive—one cylinder, let alone two, ought to settle a little ship like the Königin Luise.

  “Yes,” said Rose, with all the gravity the situation demanded. “They ought to work all right.”

  They had all the seriousness of children discussing the construction of a sand castle.

  “Can’t put ’em into the cylinders yet,” explained Allnutt. “They’re a bit tricky. We better get the cylinders into position now an’ leave the detonators till last. We can put ’em in when we’re all ready to start. After we get out of these reeds.”

  “Yes,” said Rose. “It’ll be dark, then, of course. Will you be able to do it in the dark?”

  “It’s a case of ’ave to,” said Allnutt. “Yerss, I can do it all right.”

  Rose formed a mental picture of their starting out; it certainly would be risky to try to push the African Queen out from the reeds in the darkness with two torpedoes which would explode at a touch protruding from the bow.

  Allnutt put the detonators away in the locker with the utmost care, and turned to think about the remainder of the preparations necessary.

  “We want to ’ave the explosion right down low,” he said. “Can’t ’ave it too low. Fink it’s best to make those ’oles for the cylinders.”

  It was a toilsome, back-breaking job, although it called for no particular skill, to cut two holes, one each side of the stem, in the African Queen’s bows, just above the water line. When they were finished, Rose and Allnutt dragged and pushed the cylinders forward until their noses were well through the holes, a good foot in front of any part of the boat. Allnutt stuffed the ragged edges with chips of wood and rags.

  “Doesn’t matter if it leaks a little,” he said. “It’s only splashes which’ll be coming in, ’cause the bow rides up when we’re going along. All we got to do now is to fix them cylinders down tight.”

  He nailed them solidly into position with battens split from the cases of provisions, adding batten to batten and piling all the available loose gear on top to make quite sure. The more those cylinders were confined the more effective would be their explosions against the side of the Königin Luise. When the last thing was added Allnutt sat down.

  “Well, old girl,” he said, “we done it all now. Everything. We’re all ready.”

  It was a solemn moment. The consummation of all their efforts, their descent of the rapids of the Ulanga, their running the gauntlet at Shona, the mending of the propeller, their toil in the waterlily pool and their agony in the delta, was at hand.

  “Coo,” said Allnutt, reminiscently, “ ’aven’t we just ’ad a time! Been a regular bank ’oliday.”

  Rose forgave him his irreverence.

  As a result of having completed the work so speedily, they now had to endure the strain of waiting. They were idle now for the first time since the dreadful occasion—which they were both so anxious to forget—when Rose had refused to speak to Allnutt. From that time they had been ceaselessly busy; they had an odd empty feeling when they contemplated the blank days ahead of them, even though they were to be their last days on earth.

  Those last days were rather terrible. There was one frightening interval when Allnutt felt his resolution waver. He felt like a man in a condemned cell waiting for the last few days before his execution to expire. As a young man in England he had often read about that, in the ghoulish Sunday newspaper which had constituted his only reading. Somehow it was his memory of what he had read which frightened him, not the thought of the imminent explosion—it deprived him of his new-won manhood and took him back into his pulpy youth, so that he clung to Rose with a new urgency, and she, marvelously, understood, and soothed him and comforted him.

  The sun glared down upon them pitilessly; they were without even the shelter of the awning, which might betr
ay them if it showed above the reeds. Every hour was pregnant with monotony and weariness; there was always the lurking danger that they might come to hate each other, crouching there among the reeds as in a grave. They felt that danger, and they fought against it.

  Even the thunderstorms were a relief; they came with black clouds, and a mighty breath of wind which whipped the lake into fury so that they could hear breakers roar upon the shoals, and the whole lake was covered with tossing white horses, until even in their reedy sanctuary the violence of the water reached them, so that the African Queen heaved uneasily and sluggishly under them.

  To pass away the time they overhauled the engine thoroughly, so as to make quite certain that it would function properly on its last run. Allnutt wallowed in the mud beneath the boat and ascertained by touch that the propeller and shaft were as sound as they could be hoped to be. Every few minutes throughout every day, one or the other of them climbed on the gunwale and looked out over the reeds across the Lake, scanning the horizon for sight of the Königin Luise. They saw a couple of dhows—or it may have been the same one twice—sailing down what was evidently the main passage through the islands, but that was all the sign of life they saw for some days. They even came to doubt whether the Königin Luise would ever appear again in her previous anchorage. They had grown unaccustomed to counting the passage of time, and they actually were not sure how many days had lapsed since they saw her last. Even after the most careful counting back they could not come to an agreement on the point, and they began to eye each other regretfully and wonder whether they had not better issue forth from their hiding place and coast along the edge of the lake in search of their victim. In black moments they began to doubt whether they would ever achieve their object.

  Until one morning they looked out over the reeds and saw her just as before, a smudge of smoke and a white dot, coming down from the north. Just as before she steamed steadily by to the south and vanished below their low horizon, and the hours crawled by painfully until the afternoon revealed her smoke again returning, and they were sure she would anchor again among the islands. Allnutt had been nearly right in his guess about the methodical habits of the Germans. In their careful patrolling of the Lake they never omitted a periodical cruise into this, the most desolate corner of the Wittelsbach Nyanza, just to see that all was well, even though the forbidding marshes of the Bora delta and the wild forests beyond made it unlikely that any menace to the German command of the Lake could develop here.

  Allnutt and Rose watched the Königin Luise come back from her excursion to the south, and they saw her head over towards the islands, and, as the day was waning, they saw her come to a stop at the point where she had anchored before. Both their hearts were beating faster. It was then that the question they had debated in academic fashion a week earlier without reaching a satisfactory conclusion solved itself. They had just turned away from looking at the Königin Luise, about to make preparations to start, when they found themselves holding each other’s hands and looking into each other’s eyes. Each of them knew what was in the other’s mind.

  “Rosie, old girl,” said Allnutt, hoarsely. “We’re going out together, aren’t we?”

  Rose nodded.

  “Yes, dear,” she said. “I should like it that way.”

  Confronted with the sternest need for a decision, she had reached it without difficulty. They would share all the dangers, and stand the same chance, side by side, when the African Queen drove her torpedoes smashing against the side of the Königin Luise. They could not endure the thought of being parted, now. They could even smile at the prospect of going into eternity together.

  It was almost dark by now. The young moon was low in the sky; soon there would only be the stars to give them light.

  “It’s safe for us to get ready now,” said Rose. “Goodbye, dear.”

  “Goodbye darling, sweet’eart,” said Allnutt.

  Their preparations took much time, as they had anticipated. They had all night before them, and they knew that as it was a question of surprise the best time they could reach the Königin Luise would be in the early hours of the morning. Allnutt had to go down into the mud and water and cut away the reeds about the African Queen’s stern before they could slide her out into the channel again—the reeds which had parted before her bows resisted obstinately the passage of her stern and propeller.

  When they were in the river, moored lightly to a great bundle of weeds, Allnutt quietly took the detonators from the locker and went into the water again over the bows. He was a long time there, standing in mud and deep water while he screwed the detonators home into the noses of the cylinders. The rough-and-ready screw threads he had scratched in the edges of his discs did not enter kindly into their functions. Allnutt had to use force, and it was a slow process to use force in the dark on a detonator in contact with a hundredweight of high explosive. Rose stood in the bows to help him at need as he worked patiently at the task. If his hand should slip against those nailheads they would be blown into fragments, and the Königin Luise would still rule the waves of the Lake.

  Nor did the fact that the African Queen was pitching a little in a slight swell coming in from the Lake help Allnutt at all in his task, but he finished it in the end. In the almost pitch dark, Rose saw him back away from the torpedoes and come round at a safe distance to the side of the boat. His hands reached up and he swung himself on board, dripping.

  “Done it,” he whispered—they could not help whispering in that darkness with the obsession of their future errand upon them.

  Allnutt groped about the boat putting up the funnel again. He made a faint noise with his spanner as he tightened up the nuts on the funnel stay bolts. It all took time.

  The furnace was already charged with fuel—that much, at any rate, they had been able to make ready days ago—and the tin canister of matches was in its right place, and he could light the dry friable stuff and close down to force the draught. He knew just whereabouts to lay his hands on the various sorts of wood be might need before they reached the Königin Luise.

  There was a wind blowing now, and the African Queen was very definitely pitching to the motion of the water. The noise of the draught seemed loud to their anxious ears, and when Allnutt recharged the furnace a volley of sparks shot from the funnel and was swept away overhead. Rose had never seen sparks issue from that funnel before—she had only been in the African Queen under way in daylight—and she realized the danger that the sparks might reveal their approach. She spoke quietly to Allnutt about it.

  “Can’t ’elp it, Miss, sometimes,” he whispered back. “I’ll see it don’t ’appen when we’re getting close to ’em.

  The engine was sighing and slobbering now; if it had been daylight they would have seen the steam oozing out of the leaky joints.

  “S’ss, s’ss,” whistled Allnutt, between his teeth.

  “All right,” said Rose.

  Allnutt unfastened the side painter and took the boat hook. A good thrust against a clump of reeds sent the boat out into the fairway; he laid the boat hook down, and felt for the throttle valve and opened it. The propeller began its beat and the engine its muffled clanking. Rose stood at the tiller and steered out down the dark river mouth. They were off now, to strike their blow for the land of hope and glory of which Rose had sung as a child at concerts in Sunday school choirs. They were going to set wider those bounds and make the mighty country mightier yet.

  The African Queen issued forth upon the Lake to gain which they had run such dangers and undergone such toil. Out through her bows pointed the torpedoes, two hundredweight of explosive which a touch could set off. Down by the engine crouched Allnutt, his whole attention concentrated on ascertaining by ear what he had been accustomed to judge by sight—steam pressure and water level and lubrication. Rose stood in the tossing stern, and her straining eyes could just see the tiny light which marked the presence of the Königin Luise; there were no stars overhead.

  If it had been daylight the
y would have marked the banking up of the clouds overhead, the tense stickiness of the electricity-charged atmosphere. If they had been experienced in Lake conditions they would have known what that ominous wind foretold; they had no knowledge of the incredible speed with which the wind, whipping down from the mountains of the north, roused the shallow waters of the Lake to maniacal fury.

  Rose had had her training in rivers; it did not occur to her to look for danger where there were no rocks, nor weeds, nor rapids. When in the darkness the African Queen began to pitch and wallow in rough water she cared nothing for it. She felt no appreciation of the fact that the shallow-draught launch was not constructed to encounter rough water, and that she was out of reach of land now in a boat whose wall sides and flat bottom made her the most unseaworthy vessel it is possible to imagine. She found it difficult to keep her feet as the African Queen swayed and staggered about in haphazard fashion. In the darkness there was no way of anticipating her extravagant rolling. Waves were crashing against the flat sides; the tops of them were coming in over the edge, but that sort of thing was, in Rose’s mind, only to be expected in open water. She had no fear at all.

  The wind seemed to have dropped for a moment, but the water was still rough. Then suddenly the darkness was torn away for a second by a dazzling flash of lightning which revealed the wild water round them, and the thunder followed with a single loud bang like a thousand cannons fired at once. Then came the rain, pouring down through the blackness in solid rivers, numbing and stupefying, and with the rain came the wind, suddenly, from a fresh quarter, laying its grip on the torn surface of the lake and heaving it up into mountains, while the lightning still flashed and the thunder bellowed in madness. With the shift of the wind the African Queen began to pound, heaving her bows out of the water and bringing them down again with a shattering crash. It was as well that Allnutt had selected the type of fuse he had employed; any other might have been touched off by the pounding waves, but the water which could toss about a two-ton boat like a toy could not drive nails.