by Tahir Shah
Oswaldo had been leaping about since he had heard about the Nyiragongo and its significance: he loved volcanoes.
“Che!” he cried out, “Can Zake came claymeng vocannow? Pleeese che.”
I muttered that Zak and Marcus could tag along if they would aid the expedition in every way possible. They promised to do so.
Marcus grabbed up the chicken. We left La Planéte and started out of Goma, hoping for a truck to pick us up. Oswaldo and I were laden with our belongings. I would always keep my saddle-bags nearby, even though at times they could be inconvenient. Various hardened travelers had cautioned me never to leave my possessions alone for a moment in Africa. I noticed that they generally traveled by car. Some had porters to carry the baggage. None had ancient saddle-bags.
A massive sculpted hand — clutching a burning torch — sprang forth from a triangle of white cement like Excalibur: the symbol of Mobutu’s tyranny. We tiptoed past.
The Nyiragongo volcano had apparently last erupted in 1977, sending a ten-foot high wall of lava towards Goma and forcing the townspeople to flee into Rwanda. Oswaldo spluttered all he knew about erupting volcanoes: he had once done a school project on Parangaricutiro, a village covered by the erupting lava of the Paricutin volcano in Mexico.
Marcus was a peculiar boy: he chain-smoked lumps of black tobacco which he rolled in broad green leaves. He never said anything, just ambled along behind the rest of us, pulling at the string to make his chicken hurry. I asked Zak if Marcus spoke English. He replied:
“Man, he don’t speak nothin. He was hexed as a baby... best dude I ever knew.”
I wondered how Zak had found out that Marcus had been bewitched, if they were unable to communicate in speech: indeed, how did any one know to call him Marcus? But it would have been rude, somehow, to have asked.
Zak, who came from Seattle, had played ice hockey for Washington State. His body was muscular and stocky, and his feet were size thirteen: perfect for the world of professional ice hockey. Zak had a set of crude false teeth — many of his own teeth had been knocked out in hockey matches. He would remove the dentures from time to time and put them in his jeans pocket. “They”re a bit too big,” he mumbled, as he carried on chatting. His stories of players having fingers sliced off with skates and limbs gashed, made Oswaldo and me reel in abhorrence.
“Zak, what exactly brought you to Zaire?” I asked, for it seemed curious that an ice-hockey star should be attracted to Central Africa.
“Well,” he said slowly, “there is a reason.”
“What is it?” I probed inquisitively.
“Mokele-Mbembe,” he said.
“What on earth is that?”
“It’s supposed to exist in the most remote parts of the jungle, where it lives in caves and on the banks of rivers.”
“But what exactly is it like?”
“Its body is said to be as large as an elephant’s; some say it has a giant horn mounted on its nose; its neck is long and muscular, and the tail is like that of an alligator. It can live on the land or in water, and its a kinda grayish-brown color and about thirty feet long.”
“Deenosaw!” said Oswaldo firmly, wiggling about.
“Yeah man, it’s a kinda dinosaur. I came here to track it. No one from the West has ever positively seen one. I figured if I hung out here long enough I’d eventually bump into a specimen.”
“Searching for Mokele has not been easy,” said Zak pensively.
“Why soo hard, amigo?” asked the Patagonian.
“Well,” said Zak candidly, “there’s an old pygmy myth which makes things a bit tricky.”
“What do the pygmies say?” I inquired.
“They say that if you see Mokele-Mbembe and tell of it, you will die a horrible and agonising death... so getting witnesses to step forward has been hindered.”
“Is this the precise area it’s supposed to be living?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” began Zak, “it’s thought to exist mainly around the Mainyu river over in Cameroon.”
“Did you go and look over there already?”
“Yup.”
“How long did you stick it out?”
“Eighteen months,” said Zak, “I guess we just never bumped into each other over there... so I came to this part of the jungle. I like it here.”
Maybe, I mused, Zak had seen the legendary creature already, but was gagged by the peril of the pygmy myth.
After we had walked for an hour, a petrol tanker rolled along. Zak jumped into the road and the driver slammed on the brakes.
“Yo man, we need to go to the Nyiragongo! You dig?”
The African driver, who was recovering from the whiplash of the emergency stop, threw up his arms and said, “Quoi?”
“Hey man I don’t speak ya language, you speak American?”
The driver spat. Oswaldo blushed and asked in his own brand of French if the vehicle was going towards the Nyiragongo. It was. Although Zak had spent such a long time searching for the mysterious Mokele-Mbembe, he had not mastered any Central African dialects, let alone French. The driver motioned us to climb aboard. We jumped up onto the slippery tanker and clung on as it squirmed between deep potholes towards our goal. Near to Kibati, on the Rutshuru Road, we descended.
Out of the jungle undergrowth rose the steep slopes of the Nyiragongo. A sense of primeval desertion surrounded the remote peak: this was the very centre of Gondwanaland.
As we stood in awe and breathed in deeply, I could taste the sulfur and vapours on my tongue. A silence, the like of which I had never before known, surrounded us. Everything was still, almost as if in respect for this quintessential form. Torrential rain began to pour from the sky. Yet, instead of taking cover, we all stood in wonder and felt strangely affected.
A boy wearing purple plastic shoes appeared from nowhere, a banana leaf shading his head. He could take us to the top for a few zaires. Oswaldo handed him a note and he led the way. As we climbed higher up the thin mud path, the terrain changed in density to a lighter mixture of ferns and shrubs. Marcus choked now and then and exhaled black smoke in time with his steps. Steam sprang from fissures on either side of the track. And the stench of sulfur was all around.
After about five hours of climbing we reached the cloud level. It was like walking into a wet white sheet. Zak sang hockey songs, with Oswaldo improvising, as the child in purple plastic sandals leapt from crag to crag ahead of the group. He turned to Marcus and asked him a question in Lingala. Marcus said nothing, as usual, but looked at the sky and put his left hand on the back of his neck. The other boy nodded. Whenever anyone asked Marcus a question, whether in Lingala or French, he did this. It seemed to make perfect sense to all Zairean people.
The enormous chicken squawked and stopped to peck at the mud. I wondered if it was the first domestic fowl ever to have ascended the Nyiragongo.
By the time we reached the layer of solidified larva, Zak was staggering along with Oswaldo stretched across his arms. There was still no sign of the Gonds’ sister tribe. Oswaldo moaned in Spanish the words from La Cucaracha that there was no way he could walk another step. The boy in purple plastic shoes looked round, surprise on his face that we could have been afflicted so easily with such exhaustion.
Suddenly, a bushy red beard pushed out of the apparently virgin undergrowth. It was attached to the face of a massive Australian. He had ferns tied to his feet and was carrying a banana leaf on his head. His name, he informed us, was Howard.
“G’day sport! What’s new from the old country?” he asked me.
I replied that as far as I knew everything was fine. Pulling a bottle of Primus lager from his belt, he bit off the top, and indicated that it should be passed around. Marcus’ eyes lit up. He snatched the brown glass bottle and gulped down the contents in five seconds flat. Howard looked sad that a minor should have already taken such a liking to drink. I asked Howard what he was doing in Zaire.
“Well, things in Brisbane were down, really down. Felt it was time
to chuck in the job and go walkabout.”
“What did you do in Australia?” I asked.
“I was a computer systems analyst.” He chuckled.
There was something I had to know. Plucking up courage, I put the question bluntly, “Howard, please tell me why you’re wearing ferns on your feet and a banana leaf on your head.”
He looked at me as if I was absolutely insane: as if I were inquiring why birds fly. He shook his head slowly and said, “Don’t you know?”
Then he walked off into the undergrowth again.
Zaire had a strange quality which, however unpleasant the conditions, made it assuredly one of the most enchanted places. Completely unexpected things would happen. I had been guilty of thinking like a westerner when challenging the reasons for Howard’s appearance. The Australian had striven to cast away these obstacles of thought — leaving behind the life and mentality of a systems analyst — to attain salvation in the Zairean rain forest.
The longer I stayed in Zaire, the more outlandish seemed the events which took place, and the more I began to understand the limitations of my knowledge of people. Real people.
The boy in purple plastic shoes shouted out. We had reached the crater. There was no one about. Perhaps Jacques had been mistakenly informed about the Gonds’ sister tribe; but what faced me now drove all thoughts of lost peoples from my mind.
I had expected the crater to be a few feet wide: nothing serious, just a gap. Rain plunged down as we sat on the rim, and stared in stupefaction at its enormousness. The Nyiragongo’s diameter seemed to be many hundreds of feet across. Black cloud was mixed with the steam that bathed us. Oswaldo yelled louder than I had heard him yell before. No echo followed his roar and, in a remarkable way, his cries hardly dented the silence.
As he held my legs, I bent over the precipice. Exhilaration and a sense of absolute elation grasped me, as I peered down through an abyss of vapour. The Nyiragongo was alive — I was sure of it — and I could almost sense it breathing. Was this not Gondwanaland’s core pulsing beneath me?
Our guide was growing nervous. It would soon be night and we should descend the volcano before darkness fell. Noises of the twilight had begun in the rain forest, as wild animals caught their evening prey and birds sang out in warning of our presence.
Oswaldo, Zak, Marcus, the chicken and I reached the road and started to walk towards Goma. An hour later there was still no sign of a car. At ten P.M., the whine of an engine was heard, then headlights appeared, and a small white Renault came to a halt just in front of us. The driver was Belgian. A doctor — going to a patient in a village halfway to Goma — he was willing to take us to the crossroads where he had to turn off.
The old settler chatted away in excellent English about the days before African rule.
“I remember when there was a dying man at the top of the Nyiragongo,” he said. “I had to climb up at night to save him. There was so much snow that we built an igloo on the summit to take shelter, as we couldn’t move the patient for three days until more painkillers came.”
The doctor had been unable to readjust to his native country after living in Central Africa for so many years. I was beginning to understand the curious addictive force of Africa. The longer one stayed, the more dependent upon it one became.
At the crossroads we clambered out of the car. It hooted twice and drove away, leaving us in the middle of nowhere. Oswaldo switched on the penlight flashlight he always carried in case of an emergency. We walked for hours. Morale plummeted. Zak’s ice-hockey jokes had been told and told again, and a steady stream of rain fell from the night sky. After a few miles we saw a side road that seemed as if it might lead off to a village.
By group decision we agreed to take a chance and venture down the track. Several miles later the road suddenly ran out, and a wall of jungle sprang from the ground in front. Maybe the track had been reclaimed by the jungle, or perhaps never finished. The rain fell harder and we assembled in a huddle. Marcus grasped the bedraggled chicken close to his chest for warmth and we each moaned in turn.
But in Zaire, when things were at their lowest ebb, something unusual always happened.
A pretty, teenage girl stepped out of the jungle ahead of us. I wondered for a moment if she was from the Gonds’ sister tribe, but she did not resemble the Indian Gonds. Her hair was twined in hundreds of short antennae and her cheeks had dimples. We followed her into the undergrowth. It seemed as if we were entering an enchanted forest: each of us stepped cautiously with expectation.
The trees sprouted taller and thicker and the stars were hidden by their foliage. After an hour or so of trudging I began to fear a trap. Something or other, at any rate, was going to befall us.
Suddenly, Oswaldo stopped whining and stood motionless. Then Zak and Marcus froze, transfixed. I stared up at one of the most phenomenal sights I had ever seen: a chateau of typical European design stood squarely in front of us. Its reflection was visible, lit by the moon, in lake Kivu.
The girl shuffled towards it and we followed, each of us thunderstruck.
A figure, bent-over with age, moved towards us in the darkness. He looked even more shocked than we to meet like this. Addressing me in French, in an almost poetic tone, he said:
“You have returned! We have waited all these years. I knew that this night would come.”
Moving over to Zak, he hugged him with all the strength left in his frail arms. His wife — who was much younger — walked over, her eyes peering to focus on us. She put out her fingers to touch mine. The door of the chateau was unlocked with a great iron key and pushed open. As I tried to come to terms with the paradoxical circumstances of the night, we entered the building, guided by Oswaldo’s penlight.
A hall led into a expansive living room: where original paintings hung on the walls and, enormous pieces of mahogany furniture stood about. A chandelier three feet across hung from the ceiling. Two tall glass doors led to the lake.
The man and his family, the remnant of its former staff, had been guardians of the property for many years. They had lived in the stables all this time. It was obvious that the colonials had left in a tremendous hurry. Many of their belongings and personal effects were spread randomly around the house. We lit candles and paraded about the rooms.
The main door swung open again; the girl brought in a bucket full of songo, boiled cassava, and medeso, black beans, as well as ajar of clean water. As we chewed on the cassava roots we heard a tapping noise. Oswaldo went to open the door.
The decrepit man shuffled in, bowed under the weight of a child who lay outstretched in his arms. The infant boy was placed carefully on the sofa. His forehead dripped with sweat... I suspected that he had malaria. Oswaldo fished some quinine tablets from his pack, crushed one, added water in the palm of his hand, and fed it to the child.
The guardian of the estate looked pleased with our attention and stuck his fingers down his pants, pulling out a creased piece of paper. He handed it to Zak who unfolded the purple corners. It was so worn that it seemed more like cloth. Mobutu’s face looked up from amongst the creases; it was a one-zaire note. Zak pressed it firmly back into the palm of the old gentleman, who stooped a little lower in respect.
Oswaldo carried the boy back out to the stables where the family insisted on huddling. They uttered blessings in Lingala and French and pulled socks over their hands, to keep warm.
Oswaldo made up the bed. Generations of moths had munched their way through the starched white sheets, the remains of which covered the great expanse of the black mahogany bed.
As the wind ripped across lake Kivu, eerie shadows played on the walls of the bedroom. Oswaldo, Zak, Marcus and I made excuses that for our safety we should all sleep in the same room. We lay in a line, with the hen at our feet.
Beams of yellow sunshine broke over the surface of the lake and lit up each of our faces in turn. The chicken scratched about, pecking for moths amongst the line of forty toes.
Rising before the others, I wan
dered out into the garden where newly-born gnats cavorted in the bright sunlight. It was only then that I understood the extent and grandeur of our lodgings.
Vines and untamed creepers concealed much of the stonework, their stems woven about the complicated architectural features. At one end of the chateau a tall lancet window looked out onto the jungle-fringed garden. Mossy tiles covered the roofs and a fine balustrade balcony was hidden beneath a carpet of green. A wrought-iron garden chair lay upturned and entombed in brambles. Pulling it out, I sat upon it in the middle of what must once have been a manicured lawn. My mind reeled at the vision, labor and expense of erecting a building like this in such a place — and having to flee it, perhaps at only a few minutes’ notice.
As I sat there I suddenly felt ashamed at our intrusion. I tried to convince myself that we had had good enough reason to spend the night uninvited in someone else’s home. It was easy to imagine a Belgian family taking tea on the lakeside lawn: nothing less than dangerous political developments could have caused them to decamp from such a paradise.
Back inside the house, my three companions were still fast asleep. I wandered into the drawing-room whose tall French windows looked out onto lake Kivu.
Sunlight streamed in as I perched on a faded beige chaise longue. An object was poking out from under one of the cushions. Without thinking I reached to see what it was. My fingers sensed something and pulled out a small pink cloth doll, with a lopsided smile and long woolen brunette hair. Holding her on my palm, I suddenly felt despondent, for there was a sense of something tragic around me.
For a moment I had contemplated staying forever, but this was not my home: we had been privileged to be guests, and now we should leave.
The caretaker and his wife brought some matoke, cooked bananas, for our breakfast. Their child was feeling much better after the medicine. His fever had vanished. Saying how pleased I was, I explained that we would have to leave almost immediately. The man looked at his wife and she stared back at him and then at me.
“It is not possible: leaving? You have just arrived.”