by Mary Morris
I crept into my room, bones aching, and pulled down the shade. The light from the day which would not end filtered in. Then I made my way through the velvet curtains that led to the small sleeping alcove. The bed was of dark wood, with a white lace canopy. Beside the bed was a small bedstand with a light, but I didn’t even think to turn it on. Instead, I lay down for the first time on my narrow bed and pulled the canopy around it.
I lay in the small alcove, in the small room, and on that narrow bed enclosed in lace, I felt the small body contained within my own. We lay there together for the first time, one inside the other, inside the bed, inside the alcove, the room, like those Russian dolls I carried with me as gifts, each one smaller and smaller, tucked inside the other.
CHRISTINA DODWELL
(1951–)
An uncommonly zealous adventurer and battler of “tick-bick fever” and rabid jackals, Christina Dodwell is a modern-day Mary Kingsley: despite the hardships she endures one can visualize a smile curving the corners of her mouth. The English travel writer was 24 years old in 1975 when she answered an advertisement in a magazine and set off with three others to cross Africa in a Landrover. That began a three-year African journey. Part of it she spent accompanied by Lesley, a New Zealand nurse, alongside whom she suffered relentless mosquito attacks; part of her adventure she faced alone. In addition to Travels with Fortune she has written four other travel books about journeys in such far-flung places as China and Papua New Guinea, and an intrepid travelers guide called The Explorer’s Handbook, which recounts “tested exits from tight corners.” When not on the road she lives in West London.
from TRAVELS WITH FORTUNE: AN AFRICAN ADVENTURE
I woke up. It was 7 A.M., 4 August—the Great Day had arrived. Lesley and I drank beer with a huge breakfast, put our luggage in the car, filled the storage jar with fresh water, and went down to the dugout.
It certainly was a funny looking craft, but the patched holes hadn’t leaked overnight and the inside was dry. The dugout was twenty-five feet (including the pointed ends) by one foot six inches. The sundeck at the stern, which hid the polystyrene buoyancy packing, was five feet long and raised several inches above the curved floor of the dugout. An old iron bar which was attached to the wood plank rudder extended from the point of the stern to the back of the sundeck. The tin trunk fitted neatly lengthwise in a less crooked part of the front end; we put the ropes and the anchor at the point of the prow and there was plenty of space in the middle for the water jar and our rucksacks. We didn’t dare admit that we had no idea how to paddle.
All the American team came to see us off. A bottle of champagne and glasses appeared, and we used the dregs to christen the dugout La Pirogue, meaning dugout in French. Champagne finished, farewells said, we picked up our short spear-shaped paddles, hopped aboard, waved frantically, and we were off. Although it was the middle of the rainy season, the morning was sunny and the river was calm. Lesley, acting as lookout and chief paddler, was up front perched on the old tin trunk. I was perfectly happy to find myself at the back, and was therefore in charge of the tiller, navigation, and a paddle. I sat on the sundeck with my legs outstretched; the dugout was just wide enough to fit into comfortably, and it rode so low in the water that its rim was only eight inches above the surface of the river.
Bangui disappeared from sight. Now we were on our own and I felt an overwhelming sense of freedom. There was no going back, even if we wanted to we couldn’t paddle upstream against the strong current. We had left the security of Bangui and were now out in the big African world of giant trees with roots gone crazy and pale trunks against the black depths of the rain forest.
At this point the river was about a mile wide, with occasional long islands covered in forest but sandy at the ends. We paddled slowly past a fishing village set in a large clearing where men were repairing their nets and women were pounding corn outside their thatched huts. Everyone shouted greetings in French and a man in a dugout paddled over to throw some fish to us. The fish landed on the sundeck. I had considerable difficulty in holding the squirming wet fish while keeping a smiling face. I put them down by my feet and they lay still.
Suddenly ten minutes later one leapt flapping onto my legs. I yelled and jumped, the dugout skewed sideways, hit a half-submerged tree, and Lesley fell off the tin trunk into the river. The dugout straightened up and sailed merrily on as I shouted, “Stop, stop.” I pointed the front towards the river bank, but it went even faster downstream and no closer to the shore. I paddled desperately towards a bush which grew over the river, grabbed some branches and hung on grimly. They were full of red ants which ran down onto my hands and arms and bit me furiously. Lesley swam alongside, hauled herself aboard and I let go. We shot forwards and found ourselves hopelessly entangled in some reeds along the bank. It was going to be a long way to Brazzaville.
Keeping close to the shore was fraught with problems; the currents constantly pushed us around and we got caught in all the eddying pools with little power to choose our direction. We invariably ended up in the reeds. Many trees had fallen out across the water where the river had undermined the banks, and trying to dodge their sturdy far-reaching branches made me feel as though we were on an obstacle course.
By noon our muscles were aching and we were very hungry so we decided to stop and cook the fish. The shores were densely overgrown so we aimed for the sandy tip of an island. We paddled hard, but the river was stronger and we missed the island completely. Spurred on by our hunger we paddled more fiercely towards the next, but hit the shore at an angle and shipped a lot of water. While Lesley bailed it out I went to gather wood and started the fire. Two branches balanced on forked sticks made a good grill for roasting the fish. We ate a loaf of bread and four fish, which looked like perch, were very filling and tasty, but rather full of sand. Having eaten, we rested in the shade until a long black snake slid past us and into the river, swimming with its head above the water and a rat in its mouth. It was time to move on.
We spent the afternoon mid river, where the current was much stronger, though the only danger seemed to be from the clumps of water hyacinth which came spinning downstream. They wound themselves round the rudder making steering impossible. Legend said that the hyacinth was introduced at the source of the Congo by a Belgian missionary’s wife who thought it was such a pretty flower. It was also the fastest spreading weed in the world, and could not be destroyed or used. It grew and multiplied on the surface of the water, with hairy roots, strange bulbous stems, attractive diamond-shaped leaves and delightful purple flowers. I picked some of the flowers and arranged them in my bailing can.
As clumps of hyacinth went past us, we had the impression we were going backwards. Lesley’s clock had been soaked in one of the morning’s accidents—it stopped working and we moved into a state of timelessness (I had sold my watch in Kano). When it was nearly sunset we found a parking space between overhanging trees alongside a low cliff of sand.
With blissful ignorance we set up camp, rigging our mosquito nets over the old tent poles in the central section of the dugout which was long enough for both of us to lie in comfortably. I lay down contentedly to listen to the night noises, but the only sound was a strange, loud humming, like mosquitoes. The noise was so loud that Lesley and I had to shout to make ourselves heard. I found some mosquitoes inside my net, and some more, so I assumed the net must be torn. I sat up and started looking for the tear, but couldn’t find it. I looked again, but there were more and more mosquitoes inside. Then I realised what was happening, and I stared with fascination and horror.
The outside of the net was thickly coated in small mosquitoes, small enough to simply fold back their wings and crawl through the netting. Within five minutes I counted over three hundred mosquitoes in my net, and the number kept growing. They bit viciously and repeatedly, even stinging through a layer of cloth, so I threw on more coverings, until they couldn’t bite that deep. I didn’t dare move a muscle in case the padding slipped. It was a hot
equatorial night and I became slimy with sweat. There was not a breath of wind and inside the dugout the air was still and close. Underneath all my coverings I felt claustrophobic. I wanted to scream and scream and scream. The high pitched howling of the mosquitoes made me feel twisted with loathing; my stomach felt knotted; and my fists were clenched tight. I pleaded with the night to end quickly while the sweat continued to pour off me until my bedding was soaked. I wrapped a towel around my head and face, leaving only a tiny slit for breathing. The mosquitoes crept through the crack and stung my nose, lips, tongue and all round the inside of my mouth. In exhaustion I dozed off, but I woke up choking with my head under water. A torrential rainstorm. “Lesley,” I yelled. She leapt up sleepily, overbalanced, fell in the river and was swirled away. The cliff of sand beside our parking space became waterlogged and collapsed forwards onto the dugout, which started to sink. I sat down, put my head in my hands, and began to laugh.
Lesley somehow reappeared, and in the dark we bailed out the sand and water while the mosquitoes feasted on us. All our clothes, everything we had was wringing wet. The night seemed interminable. We huddled silently together wrapped in a sodden sleeping bag, shivering, constantly looking up to the sky for any sign that the night was ending, and praying that dawn would come soon.
The sky lightened, and the blood red sun rose slowly above the forest horizon. The horror of the night faded quickly in the beauty of the day. The howling mosquitoes had gone. We heard instead the cries of monkeys, the splash of pied kingfishers diving for fish, and the whirring wings of flocks of red and grey parrots flying overhead.
Our reverie was interrupted as a cross current flung the dugout head first into the reeds. We pushed through them to the bank, it was a good opportunity to stop, find dry firewood, make coffee, and rummage in the tin trunk for the nivaquine pills. Over the past month we had been taking one pill every day, but because there were so many mosquitoes we doubled the dose to two pills daily. At the bottom of the tin trunk we found a lovely surprise. It was a bottle of whisky which the Americans had hidden there and marked: “For use on rainy days.” Next we re-erected the tent poles, strung a washing line from the front to the back of the dugout, and hung all our clothes and gear out to dry while we floated on down the middle of the river. We passed some local fishermen in a dugout. When they caught sight of us they stood up, their mouths hanging open and their eyes bulging. I suppose we must have made a strange picture: to them it would look like nothing on earth, to me we looked rather like a floating Chinese laundry.
Our day was heaven. It was peaceful drifting along in the gentle current, and every now and then when I had nothing better to do I would paddle lazily, listening to the riot of jungle noises, and watching clouds of large yellow and black butterflies against a sunny blue sky.
At dusk we moored La Pirogue to a fallen tree. It was another horrific night of mosquitoes and the darkness rang with their evil blood-frenzied song. This time I didn’t use thick coverings, I climbed into my sleeping bag, but the sweat bath was just as bad and somehow the mosquitoes found a way inside the sleeping bag. I screamed a long anguished howl. Lesley didn’t go to sleep; she sat up inside her mosquito net and used the torch to spot the mosquitoes, clapping her hands on five or six at a time and announcing the death toll in a monotonous voice all night long, while far away we could hear pounding drums of people celebrating in the forest. We opened the whisky bottle but took only a small drink, knowing that there would be many more nights when we would need it again.
As the sun rose we floated off downriver. Dawn in an iridescent world, hushed as the inner wall of a shell. Mist floating suspended in a never-ending sky, vulnerable as all beautiful things. The water was like glass; purple flowering hyacinth cast reflections as true as life; we drifted silently; it was not for us to disturb the tranquillity. The wide flat river went snaking through dense tangled mighty forest; trees tall and majestic, roped together with knotted vines, strung with white flowering creeper; branches hung shaggy with green trailing lichen, and enshrouded in cobweb; straight trees with pale luminous pinky-yellow bark, short squat trees with leaves like fans, or feathers; trees with leaves the size of umbrellas; gnarled old and crooked trees; immense trees 100 feet tall with roots like the fins of rocket ships; impenetrable dark undergrowth; monkeys fighting and thunder rumbling; parrots and horn-bills flying overhead; hot and sultry sun; the smell of sweating earth in the forest, and the perfume of flowers hanging heavily in the air.
I caught sight of a movement on the water; it was a dugout going across the river to an island where there was a group of six small round huts. The dugout was paddled by a woman returning from her vegetable garden; she came over to look at us, steering close alongside. She sold us twenty maize cobs and a branch of plantain bananas for 50 CFA (11p), although what she really wanted in exchange was La Pirogues rudder.
I really enjoyed being helmsman and learning how to handle our dugout. There was a variety of factors which affected our course and every change in each small element altered our direction. I had to take into account the river currents, the breeze, what clothes were hanging up to dry, which side Lesley was paddling, and how strongly we were paddling. When we both paddled powerfully the dugout responded far more quickly to the rudder and was much easier to control. The kink in the middle of La Pirogue meant that it always looked as if it were moving crabwise. Navigation was no problem; we either aimed for the furthest river horizon between the islands, or else we chose a particuarly beautiful water hyacinth and followed wherever it went.
We reached the junction of three countries, Central African Republic and Congo on our right, and Zaire on our left. It was about noon so we stopped on an island, made fire, roasted some corn and plantain, and finished off the fish from the previous day. We dug under the trees looking for worms to bait our fishing lines. Our tackle was rather primitive, just hooks tied onto nylon thread and wound round bits of wood, but then our fishing wasn’t very skilful either. Generally I just dropped the hooks overboard and looped the lines through my toes.
Lesley fell asleep in the sand, she hadn’t slept at all the previous night, and I went off to chase big colourful butterflies. A swarm of flies appeared which didn’t bite but tried to crawl into my ears, eyes, nose and mouth. They had also besieged Lesley, so we jumped into the dugout and fled. One island that we paddled past produced an echo, and we started clapping, tapping and drumming on the sides of the dugout, the rhythm resounding back and forth punctuated by the screeches of the monkeys and the haunting song of the hornbills which sounded like the ringing of a crystal wine glass when you run a damp finger fast round its rim. Our melody ended with the hiss of rain which swept upriver, made the water bubble and drenched us. We tried to take shelter under the tarpaulin, but it was full of holes and totally porous.
As the day drew to a close I started thinking about the night ahead and I shuddered with fear. The dugout was too wet to sleep in, the river banks were sheer clay cliffs topped by thick forest, there was nowhere to stop, and we hadn’t seen any villages or huts since early morning. We kept moving, hoping to find a stopping place; sunset became twilight, and the night arrived, but we still hadn’t found anywhere, and then it was too dark to see. We knew that if we went along near to the shore the current would push us onto rocks and half-submerged trees, so we pulled further out into the river. In the dim moonlight and with the aid of our torch we could just make out the line of the cliffs; the torch batteries were failing, so we put in new batteries, but they didn’t work. Obviously we weren’t going to be able to spot a camping place. A couple of miles later Lesley called out that she had seen distant flickering light and our hopes soared: the flickers of light turned out to be moonlight glinting on waves, white waves; soon we could hear the roaring noise of fast-rushing water, though we couldn’t see what was happening. Time stood still, and we kept moving.
The noise grew louder, and my eyes ached from straining to see in the darkness. The river became choppy, then i
t was churning and foaming, as we both paddled desperately; the dugout veered to the left and began to swing round; I pushed the tiller out against the current, a wave flooded in over my legs, the dugout responded, and we slid into calm water. Whatever it was back there, we had missed it. I was terrified.
It started to rain, and the miles stretched on. Then we heard voices, real voices, somewhere on the Congo shore ahead of us. We shouted to them, “Help, help, please get us off this river,” and we kept yelling until we were hoarse. Lamps appeared, and we were guided to the bank by the light. We tied the dugout to a tree, staggered up the rough clay steps hewn in the cliff, and into a small clearing with a campement of three huts. Five people wearing grass skirts stood in the lamplight staring at us in astonishment. We shook hands with them all and when we smiled they beamed back at us with their old and wrinkled faces.
The language of the river tribes was Likouala. It was a harsh-sounding tongue but easy to understand from tones and expressions, and some of the words were derived from French. Many of the local fishing folk we had met spoke simple French, but here they only spoke Likouala.
“What are they?” one asked.
An old woman replied something to the effect of, “I think they are girls.” Whatever it was she had said, the other disagreed and they took us to the fire to observe us more closely. We sat down by the fire. Since we couldn’t converse with them in French we drew some pictures instead. They were delighted with the pictures and put them proudly in their huts. They gave us supper of highly peppered fish, which was so hot that I felt as though I was breathing flames. We slept on mats on the floor; more rain cooled the night, but the mosquitoes still tormented us.