by Peter Tonkin
‘It’s the . . .’ She took a deep breath and choked on a mouthful of mosquitoes. By the time she had stopped coughing they were out from under their makeshift ladder and seated together on the dock itself while he tenderly untied the rope from round her chafed and itching waist. They were on a cool concrete area, blinded by shadows and all too aware that the setting moon had robbed them of any real chance of going further. Ahead of them, the concrete stretched out towards the river whose insistent voice now filled the air around them as persistently as the ravening mosquitoes. On either hand, the jungle gathered impenetrably as soon as the palely glimmering concrete ended. And the jungle was full of restless stirrings, slitherings, whirrings and whisperings. From the far bank, but close enough to make them jump, came the cough of a big cat immediately followed by a snarl, a howl and a scream. Large bodies battered about among light shrubbery and the screams choked off into a heart-rending whimper.
All in all, it seemed safer to stay where they were until it grew light. Sleep was out of the question. The ground was covered in a thin, sandy grit but it was still rock-hard. The air stayed hot and filled with a whole range of insects, all of which seemed intent on sucking as many liquids from their bodies as possible. Grimly, they sat face to face on numb buttocks with cramping legs, swatting unavailingly with swollen fingers and raw palms, and planning their next step as the interminable hours wore on. Immediately above, in the arch of smotheringly soft black sky which reached from the cliff edge across to the black skeletons of the trees on the far shore, extravagant stars slowly wheeled through their motions as Ann and Robert talked. But, for all the energy and hope they poured into their plans, both of them knew that their destinies might just as well have lain in the astrological dictates of the stars. No matter what they planned and how they acted, survival would just be a matter of luck.
Because of their position at the foot of a westering cliff looking south, the dawn came up over Ann’s shoulder and suddenly flooded into Robert’s eyes like a summer spate on the river beside them. From the very moment of its birth, it had a bludgeoning power as though the heat had some unnaturally powerful force.
As soon as it struck them, they pulled themselves to their feet. Ann tucked her camera bag under her arm and Robert tightened the length of rope into a kind of cummerbund round his waist. Then, staggering like drunkards, they walked side by side towards the river. The concrete of the loading facility was rough and cracked. The grey dust with which it was covered, and which now also covered the pair of them, was ample evidence of the extent to which it had perished. The far end of it was still in place, however, and although they were cautious and increasingly wary of simply falling through it, they made it out to the very end and sat down again, looking around themselves. Here the scene that greeted them had the remains of a wild splendour about it. But the splendour was raddled, diseased and dying. At their feet, and for more than half a kilometre, the river ran, dark, greenish and sluggish, clearly a dwarf where a giant had once rolled. Beyond it sloped bare mud littered with rubbish, bones, dead tree branches.
‘It reminds me of Rudyard Kipling,’ she whispered.
‘What?’
‘This. All this. It’s from The Elephant’s Child: “The grey-green, greasy Limpopo River all set about with fever trees.” This is just what I always imagined it would be like.’ She shuddered so much that he looked down at her in concern, wondering if the mosquito bites had tricked off a fever after all. But after a glance, his weary gaze was seduced away again to the terrible sight before them, and he found himself echoing what she had said: ‘The grey-green, greasy river all set about with fever trees.’ This was it, all right.
On their left hand, flowing down out of the dawn light, oozing past them and curving away into the grey jaws of the dying forest far back on the dry mud banks on their right, the stream slid, far too small to keep the jungle here alive, far too big for the two of them to cross. Above the curve on their right, the beetling black cliff made it all too obvious that the shore on which they sat had as little life left to it as the vegetation growing on it. There was no doubt in either of their minds that the northern bank of the River Mau would be washing against sheer black basalt in a kilometre or two. It was equally obvious that on their left, it had flowed against sheer rock face from the foot of the Leopold Falls all the way down here as well. They were, in effect, marooned here, trapped on a thin, manmade tongue of land with the cliff behind them and the cliff on either hand washed by half a kilometre of sluggish, uncross-able water. If they didn’t find a ford or a boat, they might just as well climb back onto the ledge above and give themselves up to the soldiers.
‘What do you think?’ asked Ann, though she knew the answer perfectly well.
‘We’d better go downstream first,’ answered Robert. ‘We have to find a ford or a boat.’
They sat and thought for a little longer as the sun began to weigh down upon them as though it was the gold it seemed to be. The river slouched past, thick, green and impenetrable, more like bile than water. The sluggish breeze brought the putrid stench up to wash over them but the movement of the air did little more than stir the flies and mosquitoes to a renewed frenzy. It seemed too much trouble to get up and get on with things; they were both far more exhausted, shocked and drained than they realised.
Their thoughts rapidly became so depressing and the weight of the day so enormous that at last they were glad enough to pull themselves up once more and seek some shelter in the trees, no matter what dangers might lurk beneath the shadows lingering in the dying undergrowth. Had it not been so near death, they would never have been able to get through the undergrowth. Clearly no human foot had been set here since the thirties, and they would both have needed heavy machetes had the vegetation been strong. As things were, the branches and fronds yielded to the pressure of their bodies with brittle weakness, and all they needed to be careful of was the shard-sharp edges which swung back into their faces like broken bottles in a pub brawl.
Keeping the sibilance of the river on their left, they wrestled their way westwards through the undergrowth, always alert for a chance to break out onto the bank of the river, eyes sharp for a crossing or a craft. To no avail. The river was much reduced and the bank on the outside of the curve was effectively a mud cliff ten metres high, but the nearer the edge, the thicker and greener the verdure. Tall trees stood strong and the bushes between them, with deep roots, had strong branches, long thorns and sharp-edged leaves. So there was no way to the edge, no way down the bank and no way across the river. Westward they plunged, through the dead grey forest, hoping against hope that there would be something to help them across before they ran out of shoreline.
But there was nothing. Forbidden all but an occasional look out over the river itself from an impenetrable wall of undergrowth, they fought their way westward through the first hour of the morning. The shadows protected their eyes but did little to cool them, especially as they were exerting themselves so fiercely. The movement of the branches, catching, scratching and cutting them, at least seemed to sweep the worst of the mosquitoes away. The canopy overhead remained thick enough to protect them from any prying eyes in the first low helicopter of the day, which swept in on the end of a long, sinister drone from the south-east, flying at no altitude from the direction of the Blood River and the border with Congo Libre.
At last, towards mid-morning, the forest around them thinned. The ground beneath them sloped down increasingly steeply. The bush began to die back and bare earth under their feet was briefly covered with a crisp pelt of dead grass, and they were out onto a long spit of dry mud which stretched westwards away to nothing along the foot of the black cliff, edged on the left with the sluggish surge of dull green water. The river turned in to the cliff foot here, but it was still a good three hundred metres wide and was just beginning to urge itself into something like a serious flow. Out towards the middle of the stream, the dull sage of the water was roused into sinister, lacy white by a series of i
rregularities which, had the water been shallower or quicker, would have been rapids.
On the far bank there was a wealth of debris, everything from lone trees through clumps of bushes, dead with their roots in the air, to a car tyre, an ancient wicker chair and an old divan bedstead. Had almost any of it been on this side, they might have made a makeshift raft. But there was nothing here. Nothing but a long, pointed tongue of stinking, sunbaked mud, as hard and red as brick. The pair of them staggered onwards, looking around themselves in dazed disbelief, going into slow motion like characters escaped from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Down at the thin end, with five hundred metres of rock face reaching up sheer on their right while the shallow green water chuckled and sucked away busily within a couple of centimetres of their shoes on their left, they stood, looking down, defeated.
Then, round the corner, upstream, as though it had been following them down the river on purpose, came a felled tree, its roots in a wild, mad tangle, as if it had taken Medusa as a figurehead. With silent, powerful majesty it moved, sweeping along like a queen. Robert looked at Ann and the pair of them looked around themselves once again. They were alone. Exposed. There was no other help, no promise of help, in sight. ‘I’m going for it,’ announced Robert.
‘Give me the end of your rope, just in case,’ she ordered. ‘If anything goes wrong I can pull you back.’
‘Good thinking.’ He was already pulling loops of it from round his waist, glancing alternately down at his stiff, clumsy hands and up at the stately progress of their one true hope. She caught up the end at once and began to tie it round her own waist. He paused, looking doubtful, but it was as clear to him as it was to her that she could never have held it with any firmness. And there was nothing down here to belay it round. She caught his look and shrugged. ‘Needs must,’ she said.
He nodded, his attention dwelling on her only for a moment, then his eyes were pulled back to the steady sweep of the tree trunk. It was nearly level with them now, out in the middle, less than a hundred metres away but swinging in towards them, moved by the current round the proto-rapids.
‘Thank God I’m not at home,’ he said, and began to wade into the water.
‘What?’
He paused and gestured down at the water which was so thick and dark that his legs were invisible already. ‘Piranha,’ he said. ‘Anacondas. They don’t have either of them here.’
‘That’s right,’ she said brightly. ‘So you don’t have anything to worry about. Except the crocodiles.’
He may or may not have heard her. He took another step and fell forward, preferring to swim than to wade. She regretted having said it, however. He was doing a brave thing and trying to make light of it. She had been joking, not supporting, and it seemed a little petty, somehow.
As he swam, the rope uncoiled and it soon became clear to her that she would have to get her feet wet too if he was going to stand any chance of reaching the tree. The current was swinging it round and in towards him as he swam, but there was only a hundred metres or so of the rope and it looked as though the bulk of the tree would pass nearly two hundred metres out. With the closest approach to quick thinking that her exhausted mind could manage, she began to run down the spit of land and out into the thick, warm water.
As soon as it flooded into her boots she stopped again, doing her best to calculate rapidly while making sure the blessedly watertight camera bag was done up properly. A mass of sensation swept over her in the breathless instants which followed, as though her fatigue-stunned mind nevertheless recognised the onset of violent action and was preparing her for it with an excess of information.
Above the waterline, the ground was rock hard. Below it, the mud still oozed, and it sloped away surprisingly steeply. No sooner was she standing in the busy shallows than she found herself slipping and sliding forward and down, no longer quite able to stand still and think. The tug of the water on her ankles was insistent, and it was easy to see how the tree, and Robert himself, were suddenly moving so fast out in the main thrust of the current. The rope was all in the water now, streaming out in a loop downstream, adding its strong tug at her waist to the sinister suck of the river at her calves and knees. It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep her feet and she found herself waving her arms like a tightrope walker in a high wind as she fought to stay upright.
But it seemed to be working. Robert was a little downstream of her now but the tree was still level and the two of them were coming rapidly together. The branches reached out in a welcoming tangle for a good ten metres on either side of the squat, thick trunk. Not only did they reach out, but as the whole tree spun slowly in the grip of the water, so they swung across to catch the swimming man. One moment Robert was chopping his way through the water in an ugly but effective crawl, the next he was floundering onto a trampoline of small branches and actually pulling himself out of the water. Ann drew in her breath to cheer.
And something massive hit her in the back. That is what she felt, and visions came into her mind of the chimpanzee horribly resurrected or some soldier from Nimrod Chala’s army of police creeping up behind her. Thrust forward by the impact, she flew off her feet and out into the water. It was no animal or paramilitary policeman however, it was only the rope, behaving with the inevitability of anything caught up in the laws of physics; doing exactly what they should have known it would do, had they been thinking more clearly. There was no give in the line or in the knots she had tied. The rope was fastened at its far end to a big man solidly anchored in the branches of a tree moving westwards at five kilometres an hour, and as soon as the slack was used up, Ann sprang from rest to movement in an instant. For a moment or two her rate of acceleration exceeded that of a Bugatti and she was lucky not to crack a couple of ribs.
She hit the water hard and was pulled under at once. Shock allowed her to keep the lungful of air she had jerked in, in spite of the fact that she felt as though she had been thumped on the back. She kept that precious air in her lungs as she surged and floundered out into the stream. Once she was in the water, however, her movement became relatively slow; the water was moving slightly faster than the tree and the line which had been tight soon slackened, allowing her to fight her way to the surface. She exploded out of the water, waving her arms and fighting to keep her head clear of the thick green warmth of it. She breathed out and in, her mouth gaping, then heaved helplessly as she felt slimy drops cascade back onto her tongue. A wild phantasmagoria of fears whirled in her imagination - all the toxic chemicals used in farms locally, all the diseases the thick hot water would hold. The vision of the skeletons along the low waterline on the far bank returned and she wished acutely that she had not made that crack to Robert about crocodiles.
The perspective she had on the tree was very different now. It looked very large but suddenly distant - a great mass of twisted black limbs like a cloud on her waving horizon. And the horizon was waving too, for the tree was just coming out of the grip of the rapids now but she was being pulled across and into the busy water. She saw no alternative but to try and swim, so she floundered into action at once and understood immediately why Robert’s style had been so brutally ugly.
Robert rose into her vision then, outlined against the hard blue sky, a black figure among the wild black branches. The rope round her waist tightened once again and panic returned for a disorientating moment before she realised he was pulling her in like a fish on a line. Gratefully she began to flounder towards him and within a very few minutes her plunging hands encountered the first branches of their safe haven.
What sort of tree it was or where it had come from was impossible to tell. It had a squat, thick trunk in the middle and a riot of thick branches at one end and equally thick roots at the other. The girth of the solid part was perhaps fifteen metres in circumference and the length of clear wood about the same. It sat solidly in the water and, although it was spinning when they first got aboard it, the current soon reclaimed it and it settled into a straight line of motion
with the wild roots as the prow.
As soon as she had dragged herself out of the maze of small branches into the arms of the more solid boughs, and thence into Robert’s arms, Ann led the way down, as though they were climbing out of a tree house, until they reached the junction of the lowest, thickest branches with the trunk. These made makeshift backrests and it was possible for them to sit side by side with their legs reaching down the trunk itself and their backs against the easy slope of the branches. It was by no means a comfortable situation, but they both felt relatively safe, especially after they used the slack line to anchor themselves in place.
Had Ann ever in her wildest dreams imagined that she would find herself drifting down an African river on a makeshift raft, she would have imagined herself standing intrepidly looking around, noting the finest detail of everything in sight for inclusion in her next book. As it was, she had no intention of doing anything but clinging on for dear life and waiting for the next thing to happen to her. What that thing might be she had no idea and did not speculate. Nor, apparently, did Robert. They simply sat side by side in stunned silence and allowed the day to wash over them.
The river swirled the tree trunk slowly and gracefully in against the foot of the cliff almost at once, showing them all too clearly that they would never have managed to come any further along the northern bank - unless they could have found a way of scaling several hundred metres of seamless, glassy black cliff. The movement of the water towards what was clearly the deepest part of the river bed also served to pull them well clear of the far bank, however. And any temptation they might have felt to use the tree as a launching pad for a second swim was nipped in the bud by the sight of a crocodile sunning itself on the muddy slopes which would have been their destination. It was difficult to be sure at this distance, but it looked to be about ten metres long. For a moment, the photographer in Ann stirred as she stared across at the great beast, but then she thought of the danger she would be putting her precious pictures in if she opened the camera bag here. She thought of the danger she herself would be in if she did anything but cower here and pray for deliverance.