OxTravels

by Mark Ellingham

  EVENTUALLY, WE REACHED our destination – the great volcanic geyserland of Soborom – and started the journey home. On entering the Tibesti ten days before, we had exchanged the Land Rovers for camels, of which we had a string of a dozen or so; they were essential for our food, water and baggage, but – the local saddles being excruciatingly painful – we seldom rode them until evening, when we were too tired to walk any further.

  Of all our animals, Costa’s was generally the slowest; we had long grown accustomed to hearing his frantic cries of ‘Vas-y Alphonse!’ or ‘Alphonse, NON!’, echoing behind us. But one afternoon Alphonse was used by our local guide Abdullahi for an exhibition of galloping, and the excitement went to his head. When, shortly before sunset, we left the mountains and reached the fringes of the Bardai oasis, there was no holding him. He smelt home, greenery and water; and, just as a horse will when approaching its stable, broke once more into a gallop. But a horse has stirrups and a bridle; a camel has neither. Costa, accordingly, took the only course open to him. He fell off – and from the top of a camel it’s a long way to the ground.

  I had been riding a little ahead and had no idea of what had happened until I got to the camp five minutes later. As I dismounted, Jean – our French guide – ran up, dragging a heavy mattress behind him. ‘Viens vite,’ he shouted, ‘Costa a eu un accident.’ He dashed to the nearest Land Rover, hurled the mattress in the back, and together we drove as fast as we dared to where Costa lay, conscious but in great pain and quite unable to move. Somehow we got him back to the camp, but then what? Bardai consisted only of a small fort, manned by a handful of the Chad army. It had no doctor, and certainly no X-ray. For all we knew, Costa had broken his back; the slightest wrong movement might snap his spinal cord and paralyse him for life.

  The next two days was a time of increasing anxiety for us all. At first we had hoped that Costa might have suffered nothing worse than serious bruising and shock, and that after a couple of days’ rest all might be well. But it soon became clear that there was more to it than that: there could be no question of his being able to return in a bumpy Land Rover the thousand-odd miles back to Djanet. He was tortured with pain, unable even to move in bed without assistance. Luckily we had plenty of morphia with us, but we knew that we had to get the patient to hospital as soon as we could. The fort was theoretically in constant radio communication with the regional centre at Faya-Largeau, but by a piece of cruel ill-fortune the electric generator had broken down a few days before and all contact with the outside world had been lost. Costa had by now made up his mind that he was dying – and we were by no means certain that he was not right.

  Then, on the morning of the third day after the accident, I was returning from the last of innumerable trips to the fort to see how work on the generator was progressing when I saw a line of camels approaching across the sand. Ahead of them walked a man wearing a curious knee-length khaki tunic and a pale blue kepi. As they drew nearer I could also see, in the shade of the kepi, a close-cropped reddish beard. This, I realised, was one of the lonely handful of French méharistes still patrolling the Sahara. He grinned, and introduced himself: sergent-en-chef Jean-François Renn. Did he, I asked, have a radio? Of course he did. Could he send an SOS for us? Of course he could. In five minutes his aerial was set up; one of his local goumiers was sitting in the sand, grinding away at a hand generator; and our message was on its way to Faya-Largeau.

  Sergeant Renn acted on us like a tonic; we all felt better. But Costa was distinctly worse. He had now developed a hacking cough and a lung infection which we feared – in the primitive conditions in which we were living, without electricity or running water – might easily lead to pneumonia. The reply from Faya-Largeau too was depressing. The doctor would be there on his rounds in about a week. We replied at once: this was an emergency – in a week the patient would probably be dead. Our second appeal worked. A flying doctor and two male nurses were announced to be already on their way and would be at Bardai within the hour.

  The long wait was over. Half an hour later the French doctor was at the bedside; Costa was expertly transferred to a stretcher and strapped down; he was slid, with the smoothness of a drawer in a filing cabinet, into a waiting Land Rover; his kitbag was stuffed in after him; and he was gone. We hardly had time to recover our breath before we heard the aeroplane again. It circled twice over our heads to gain height; then disappeared over the mountains to the south.

  We missed Costa a lot. It was an immeasurable relief to know that he was in safe hands at last, but the party was not the same without him. His interest in everything, his astonishing knowledge, his sheer enthusiasm had fired us all; now he was gone, we all felt diminished. We were worried too. He had promised to telegraph to us the results of his X-ray; but there was no chance of our hearing anything until we reached Djanet, which could not be for another three or four days at the earliest. Those days were as long as any I have ever spent. The last – which happened to be Easter Sunday – was the worst. Of our twelve hours on the piste, six were occupied with repairs after as many different breakdowns. We eventually roared into Djanet – I use the word advisedly, two of our silencers having given up altogether – and made straight for the post office where, sure enough, a telegram was waiting. The news was at least better than we had feared. Three vertebrae had been concertinaed into each other, but nothing had actually been broken. The patient was still lying in a plaster cast, but in ten days’ time he hoped to be well enough to return.

  Poor Costa – it was only later, when we were all home again, that we learned the full, hair-raising story of his sufferings in Fort-Lamy. Once, in pre-independence days, its hospital had been one of the best in French Africa; and even now he had nothing but praise for the two remaining French doctors and the treatment they gave him. It was not their fault that the supply of anaesthetics was so short that they were obliged to set his spine without any; nor that, while their backs were turned, the drip-feeding apparatus that they had arranged for the patient in the next bed, seriously ill and unconscious, should have been torn away by his family, bursting en masse into the ward with much assorted livestock and cramming handfuls of rice into his unresisting mouth. Without an adequate staff of trained nurses such incidents were unavoidable. Untrained nurses seem to have been plentiful enough, but their methods tended to be unorthodox. Over some of these methods, such as the unsolicited and unwanted petits soins lavished on the powerless Costa by Georgette, his ward orderly, it is only decent to draw a veil.

  Costa recovered; but he was growing older and – possibly as a result of his accident – increasingly bent. For a few more years he continued to travel, but no longer as adventurously as he had in the past; finally he stopped altogether, and settled back with his memories into his little house in the Midi. That was where I last saw him. He was by now virtually crippled, but he greeted us with all his old warmth and talked with his usual gusto throughout our lunch. My last sight of him was standing at his doorway, leaning heavily on his stick but waving cheerfully at us as we drove away.

  The Other World

  JOHN GIMLETTE (born London, 1963) began his travels as a teen, setting out across the Soviet Union by train, but was distracted by studying law and became a barrister. He has been writing travel books since 1997, when he won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for a book on Paraguay, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig; it was followed by Theatre of Fish (about Newfoundland) and Panther Soup (on WWII battlefields). His latest book is Wild Coast (2011), which describes his travels in Guyana, Surinam and French Guiana. He lives in London. www.johngimlette.com

  The Other World

  JOHN GIMLETTE

  A few years ago, I set off west down the Ridgeway, through North Wessex. After Goring-on-Thames, the beechwoods thinned and fell away. A great, seared savannah unrolled itself ahead of me, and the path was fringed with scabious, yellow rattle, and wild thyme. Not only was the beauty of this countryside startling, but I also experienced the unsettling sensation of being a
n intruder from the present. Here were forts and funerary complexes that pre-dated the pyramids and shared views with nothing more modern than Roman temples. Further west still, the path becomes almost a ribbon-development of ancient defences; Segsbury, Uffington, Liddington, and Barbury. These places are now all so old that no one really knows who built them, or why.

  And that intrigues me. What were the early Britons really like? History is tough on those who didn’t record themselves in stone, and assumes they were savages. My great-grandfather and my grandfather had dedicated their lives to excavating hill forts. But all they’d found was pottery and flints. This prehistoric trash only made its owners ever more obscure. Meanwhile, films and books have always made monkeys of Iron Age men. They’re improbably hairy and stooped, and their women are fabulously ugly. They have no pride or humour, and everyone seems to speak with a carnivorous belch. But is that right? Whoever built Uffington shifted thousands of tons of chalk. For that, they’d have needed an army, or at least a miniature economy. That suggests a society, made up in layers. But who would we find if we dug down into their lives? Who were we?

  There were few clues amongst those still living on the ridge. Although their lives were often intriguing – and occasionally hard – they were, in the end, undeniably modern. I remember one family, living in a hollow of candytuft and hairy hawkbit, sharing their double-decker bus with a small herd of goats. Another lot were out hunting hares, apparently with dingoes. Down in Letcombe Regis (where the Riot Act was last read out), eleven tractors were parked outside ‘The Greyhound’, heaped with brawny children. Their fathers were hurling staves at a sort of skull (a game apparently) and then, suddenly, they all mounted their machines and roared away, leaving a heady tang of diesel. The village had inspired Jude the Obscure and, the previous week, was busted for 60kg of cannabis.

  The Ridgeway, a long walk through the Iron Age world

  Even Wantage, where Alfred the Great was born, felt only fleetingly ancient. It was attractive and cheerfully pagan: here, you could still dance your way back to the 1970s, and have your animals blessed at the church. I booked into a pub on the square. ‘I think it’s going to be one of those nights,’ said the barman solemnly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘The farmer boys like to come heckling …’

  Alfred’s kinsmen, I noticed, were already congregating around his statue.

  ‘At New Year, council covers it with scaffolding,’ continued the barman.

  ‘And does that work?’

  ‘Nope, every year, the boys tear it down.’

  ‘To free Alfred?’

  ‘Last year, they even brought spanners …’

  Despite this threat of an Ancient Heckle, I still didn’t feel I’d found what I was after. That night, I hardly slept at all. Great, agricultural machines hurtled round the square till dawn, inches from my head.

  Nor were the secrets of our forebears written in the landscape. The next morning, I clambered back onto the Downs. It was improbably tranquil except for a twister, moving along the horizon, sucking a tiny thread of straw, helter-skelter, into the clouds. I ambled on, through Betjeman country, into Neolithic Wiltshire. A light plane rose from a field of poppies, and a hobby snatched a linnet from the sky and cracked its neck. Then I passed Silbury Hill, which was created by men using antlers, and is the largest mound in Europe. With such outsized altars and the vast corrugations, it was now harder than ever to shrug off the feeling that I’d never understand the Iron Age world, and that – here – I was the alien. Even the boulders, abandoned by the glaciers, are still referred to as sarsens – or foreigners – and they’ve been here for millions of years.

  So, my ancient hunter-gatherer was more obscure than ever. I realised I knew almost nothing about him. He lived in ditches, hunted wild animals and threw his pottery in holes. But what did he and his friends think and do? Did they have laws and hairstyles and wandering hands? Did they dote on their wives, or hide them away? Were they frightened of laughter, or did they tell filthy jokes and light their farts? We’ll never know, of course. But, for me, far more dispiriting than ignorance was the easy assumption that man – stripped of his modern trappings – is without personality and character. Something needed to happen, or my Iron Age man would languish forever in caricature.

  THAT ‘SOMETHING’ happened a few months later.

  It began when I read a story in the papers about some tribesmen, deep in the forests of eastern India, who’d made a plan to eat their teacher. The tribe was called the Bonda, and was known for its ferocity, and for a way of life unchanged for thousands of years. Here, I decided, were people who could help me. Eight weeks later, Jayne – my wife – and I flew to Bhubaneshwar. There, we hired a guide and a driver, and headed for the hills.

  Subrat was thrilled by the tribes of his native Orissa. Their territories began a day’s ride beyond the city, and spread over an area twice the size of Scotland. There were sixty-two tribes, mostly animists, mostly resilient to modern life and each isolated by dense teak forests and bewildering languages. Some might have shared a common ancestry with the northern Mongols and Aryans, some might have emerged from the southern Dravidians but the origins of others – like the Bonda – were tantalisingly obscure. ‘Perhaps they are Asio-Australoids,’ said Subrat. ‘Nobody knows how they got here.’

  ‘And what about the teacher?’ asked Jayne.

  ‘Ah yes, she was sent by the government …’

  ‘But why did they want to eat her?’

  ‘Because she had a talent they wanted to acquire …’

  ‘By eating her?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Subrat. ‘She was very good at cooking curry.’

  ‘And did they eat her?’

  Subrat tutted mischievously. We were sitting in his Ambassador, winding upwards through the Eastern Ghats. Outside, it was ninety, and the forest had thickened all around us. On the dashboard, between Subrat and the driver, the plastic eyes of Lord Jaganath were dilated with panic. He needn’t have worried; we’d left the great crush of juggernauts on the coast road, and, up here, the only hazards were monkeys and road gangs of beautiful women. Besides, we were all so tightly packed in with a week’s supply of mineral water, bananas, sheets and loo paper that – if we’d bumped into anything – we’d have simply bounced around like a big, mushy ball.

  ‘Cannibalism was always rare in Orissa,’ said Subrat.

  Human sacrifice, he explained, was different, and had persisted into the 1940s.

  ‘And the teacher?’ we prompted.

  Subrat grinned. ‘She’s fine. Back in Bhubaneshwar.’

  This was a relief. But what would the tribes make of us?

  Subrat shrugged. ‘They’re friendly. Except the Bonda.’

  Most tribes, he explained, had even enjoyed good relations with the British, during the Raj. Of course, there were exceptions. There’d been anger at the banning of infanticide, and the Kondh had reacted badly to the restrictions on human sacrifice. But, otherwise, all went well enough. During World War II, many tribals had even concluded that the passing warplanes were agents of Queen Victoria, flying over from The Other World to check that all was well in the Ganjam Hills.

  ‘Only the Bonda are fierce,’ said Subrat. ‘You’ll see.’

  The deeper we got into the hills, the more it felt as if time was tumbling backwards. We passed through the territories of ten tribes in all. The first group we met were the Khutia Kondh. They lived high in the forest, in a pretty village of wattle houses, surrounded by a strong fence. This was to keep out the boars, said Subrat, and the wild elephants. Then we met our first tribesman. Immediately, he scrambled into a tree to get us a pot of frothy, palm liquor. Our second Kondh was a woman, neatly segmented by tattoos. She looked at our white skin, screamed and locked herself in her house. Subrat coaxed her out with a soothing language, and we became wary friends. Her tattoos, she explained, made her less attractive to slavers, and would also convey to the gods of the Afterworld t
he achievements of her life.

  The oxen were not so easily reassured, and refused to plough the turmeric. The ploughmen dropped the reins and came over to us. It was said that their forebears had fed the turmeric on human blood to make it strong and red. They themselves were brawny men with high cheekbones and wide, scaly feet. One had an old British Army musket.

  ‘What do they want?’ I asked Subrat.

  ‘Nothing really. Unless you’ve got any chocolate biscuits …’

  We spent our first night in Baliguda. Subrat warned that we might not like our first hotel but that things would get better after that. He was right. Baliguda itself had a forlorn air and, for want of anything better to do, people drifted in off the street, to study us as we sat in our cell. It had baby-pink walls, and a cement floor. At dusk, the spectators disappeared into a greasy glow of oil-lamps. We spread out our sheets over an archipelago of mattress-stains, and settled down to listen to the drama of a tropical night. At some stage, an enterprising rat got in, and pillaged our bananas. Things could only get better.

  As Subrat promised, they did. The hotels in Rayagada and Jeypore, although rather shapeless, could muster magnificent curries and were enthusiastically furnished. One place even had a thick ginger carpet and an enormous fridge that stood in the corner like a van. Air-conditioning and bloodless TV thrillers were also pumped into these rooms but, if we used everything at once, the main fusebox would explode and plunge the hotel deeper into darkness. This happened every night. It was ritually followed by the reassuring sound of waiters, scattered through the building, restoring order and light.

  We drove on, deeper into tribal territory. By now, life was thrillingly medieval. Subrat described a remarkable existence. Here, he said, bats could be boiled up, and used as a cure for asthma. He also taught us how to recognise the different tribal women. The Dongria Khond wore clumps of nose-rings and carried tiny sickles in their hair. The Paraja kept their hair bundled up with silvery daggers, and the Langia Saora sliced their ears into long hoops. We agreed that the most beautiful of all were the Dedeye, statuesque women, garlanded in fresh flowers. Their arms and necks were protected from tigers by thick aluminium hoops, and these they’d wear until they died.