by Wilbur Smith
“Patrick!” she called hoarsely, and one of the figures jumped up and ran towards her. “Patrick,” she repeated, and stumbled and would have fallen if he had not caught her.
“Kelly! Allah be praised. We had given you up.”
“The patrol boat…” she gasped.
“Yes. We heard firing and saw the light. We thought they Had caught you.”
Patrick Omeru was one of old President Omeru’s nephews. So far he had escaped the purges by Taffari’s soldiers. He was one of the first friends that Kelly had made after her arrival in Ubomo. He lifted the pack from her shoulders, and she groaned with relief. The wet straps had abraded her delicate skin.
“Kill the fire,” Patrick called to his brother, and he kicked sand over the coals. Between them they led Kelly to where the truck was parked in a grove of mango trees behind the derelict mosque. They helped her into the back and spread a tarpaulin over her as she lay on the dirty floorboards. The truck stank of dried fish.
Even though the truck jolted and crashed through the potholes, she was at last warm, and soon she slept. It was a trick she had learned in the forest, to be able to sleep in any circumstances of discomfort.
The sudden cessation of engine noise and movement woke her again. She did not know how long she had slept, but it was light now and a glance at her watch showed her it was after nine in the morning. She lay quietly under her tarpaulin and listened to the sound of men’s voices close alongside the truck. She knew better than to disclose her presence. Minutes later, Patrick pulled back the tarpaulin and smiled at her.
“Where are we, Patrick?”
“Kahali, in the old town. A safe place.” The truck was parked in the small yard of one of the old Arab houses. The building was dilapidated, the yard filthy with chicken droppings and rubbish. Chickens roosted under the eaves or scratched in the dirt. There was a strong smell of drains and sewage. The Omeru family had fallen on hard times since the old president’s downfall.
In the sparsely furnished frontroom, with its stained walls on which old yellowed newspaper cuttings had been pasted, Patrick’s wife had a meal ready for her. It was a stew of chicken spiced with chilli and served with a bowl of manioc and stewed plantains. She was hungry, and it was good.
While she ate, other men came to speak to her. They slipped in quietly and squatted beside her in the bare room. They told her what had happened in Ubomo during her absence, and she frowned while she listened. Very little of it was good tidings.
They knew where she was going and they gave her messages to take with her. Then they slipped. away again as quietly and furtively as they had arrived.
It was long after dark when Patrick stood up and told her quietly, “It is time to go on.”
The truck was now loaded with dried fish in woven baskets. They had built a small hiding-place for her under the load. She crawled into it and Patrick passed her pack in to her, then seated the opening behind her with another basket of fish.
The truck started and rumbled out of the yard. This part of the journey was only three hundred miles. She settled down and slept again.
She woke every time the truck stopped. Whenever she heard voices, the loud arrogant voices of Hita speaking Swahili with the distinctive cutting accent, she knew they had halted at another military road-block.
Once Patrick stopped the truck along a deserted stretch of road and let her out of her hiding-place and-she went a short distance into the veld to relieve herself. They were still in the open grassland savannah below the rim of the Great Rift. She heard cattle lowing somewhere close and knew that there was a Hita manyatta nearby.
When she woke again it was to a peculiar new motion and to the chant of the ferrymen. It was a nostalgic sound and she knew she was nearly home.
During the night she had opened a small peephole from her little cave under the baskets of dried fish into the outside world. Through it she caught glimpses of the expanses of the Ubomo River touched with the hot orange and violet of the breaking dawn. The silhouettes of the ferrymen passed back and forth in front of her peephole as they handled the lines that linked the ferry-boat from one bank of the river to the other. The ferry across the Ubomo River was almost at the edge of the great forest. She could imagine it as clearly as if she were actually looking at it.
The wide sweep of the river was the natural boundary between savannah and forest. The first time she had stood upon its bank she had been amazed by the abruptness with which the forest began. On the east bank the open grass and acacia dropped away towards the lake, while on the far bank stood a gigantic palisade of dark trees, a solid unbroken wall a hundred feet high, with some of the real giants towering another fifty feet above those. It had seemed to her at once both forbidding and frightening. On the far bank the road tunneled into the forest like a rabbit hole.
In the few short years since then, the forest had been hacked back as the land-hungry peasantry nibbled at its edges. They had toppled the great trees that had taken hundreds of years to grow and burned them where they fell for charcoal and fertiliser. The forest retreated before this onslaught. It was now almost five miles from the ferry to the edge of the tree-line.
In between sprawling shambas with fields of plantains and manioc. The worked-out ground was being abandoned to weeds and secondary growth. The fragile forest soils could bear only two or three years of cultivation before they were exhausted and the peasant farmers moved on to clear more forest.
Even when it reached the retreating forest edge, the road was no longer a tunnel through the trees, roofed over with a high canopy of vegetation as it once had been. The verges of the road had been cut back half a mile on each side. The peasants had used the road as an access to the interior of the forest. They had built their villages alongside the road and hacked out their gardens and plantations from the living forest that bordered it.
This was the terribly destructive slash and burn cultivation method by which they felled the trees and burned them where they fell. Those true giants of the forest, whose girth defied the puny axes, they destroyed by building a slow fire around the base of the trunk. They kept it burning week after week until it ate through the hardwood core and toppled two hundred feet of massive trunk.
The road itself was like a deadly blade, a spear into the guts of the forest, steeped in the poison of civilisation. Kelly hated the road. It was a channel of infection and corruption into the virginal womb of the forest.
Looking out of her peephole she saw that the road was wider now than she remembered it. The deep rutted tracks were churned by the wheels of logging and mining trucks and the other heavy traffic that had begun using it since President Omeru had been overthrown and the forest concession given to the powerful foreign syndicate to develop.
She knew from her studies and the meticulous records that she kept that already the road had altered the local rainfall patterns. The mile-wide cutline was unprotected by the umbrella of the forest canopy. The tropical sun struck down on this open swathe and heated the unshielded earth, causing a vast updraught of air above the road. This dispersed the rain clouds that daily gathered over the green forest.
Nowadays little rain fell along the roadway, although it still teemed down at the rate of three hundred inches a year upon the pristine forests only a few miles away.
The roadside was dry and dusty and hot. The mango trees wilted in the noonday heat and the people living beside the road built themselves barazas, thatched roofs supported by poles without walls, to shield them from the cloudless sky above the roadway. Without the forest canopy the whole Ubomo basin would soon become a little Sahara.
To Kelly the road was the Sodom and Gomorrah of the forest. it was temptation to her Bambuti friends. The truckdrivers had money and they wanted meat and honey and women. The Bambuti were skilled hunters who could provide both meat and honey, and their young girls, tiny and graceful, laughing and big-breasted, were peculiarly attractive to the tall bantu men.
The roadway seduced the Bambuti
and lured them out of the fastness of the deep forest. It was destroying their traditional way of life. It encouraged the pygmies to over-hunt their forest preserves. Where once they had hunted only to feed themselves and their tribe, now they hunted to sell the meat at the roadside dukas, the little trading stores set up at each new village.
Game was each day scarcer in the forest and soon, Kelly knew, the Bambuti would be tempted to hunt in the heartland, that special remote centre of the forest where by tradition and religious restraint no Bambuti had ever hunted before.
At the roadside the Bambuti discovered palm wine and bottled beer and spirits. Like most stone-age people, from the Australian Aboriginals to the Inuit Eskimos of the Arctic, they had little resistance to alcohol. A drunken pygmy was a pitiful sight.
In the deep forest, there was no tribal tradition that restrained the Bambuti girls from sexual intercourse before marriage. They were allowed all the experimentation and indulgence they wanted with the boys of the tribe, except only that intercourse must not be with a full embrace. The unmarried couple must hold each other’s elbows only, not clasp each other chest to chest. To them the sexual act was a natural and pleasant expression of affection, and they were by nature friendly and full of fun. They were easy game for the sophisticated truckdrivers from the towns. Eager to please, they sold their favours for a trinket or a bottle of beer or a few shillings, and from the lopsided bargain they were left with syphilis or gonorrhoea or, most deadly of all, AIDS.
In her hatred of the road, Kelly wished there was some way to halt this intrusion, this accelerating process of degradation and destruction, but she knew that there was none. BOSS and the syndicate were behemoths on the march. The forest, its soil, its trees, its animals, birds and its people were all too fragile. All she could hope for was to help retard the process and in the end to save some precious fragment from the melting-pot of progress and development, and exploitation.
Abruptly the truck swung off the road and in a cloud of red talcum dust drew up at the rear of one of the roadside dukes. Peering from her peephole, Kelly saw that it was a typical roadside store with mud walls and roof, thatched with ilala palm fronds. There was a logging truck parked in front of it and the driver and his mate were haggling with the store-keeper for the purchase of sweet yams and strips of dried game meat blackened with smoke.
Patrick Omeru and his brother began to unload some of the baskets of dried fish to sell to the store-keeper and as they worked he spoke without looking at Kelly’s hiding-place. “Are you all right, Kelly?”
“I’m fine, Patrick. I’m ready to move,” she called back softly.
“Wait, Doctor. I must make certain that it is safe. The army patrols the road regularly. I’ll speak to the store-keeper; he knows when the soldiers will come.” Patrick went on unloading the fish.
In front of the duka the truck-driver completed his transaction and carried his purchases to the logging truck, He climbed on board and started up with a roar and cloud of diesel smoke, then pulled out into the rutted roadway towing two huge trailers behind the truck. The trailers were laden with forty-foot lengths of African mahogany logs, each five feet in diameter, the whole cargo comprising hundreds of tons of valuable hardwood.
As soon as the truck had gone, Patrick called to the Uhali store-keeper and they spoke together quietly. The store-keeper shook his head and pointed back along the road. Patrick hurried back to the side of the fish truck. “Quickly, Kelly. The patrol will be coming any minute now, but we should hear the army vehicle long before it arrives. The store-keeper says that the soldiers never go into the forest. They are afraid of the forest spirits.”
He pulled away the fish baskets that covered the entrance to Kelly’s hiding-place, and she scrambled out and jumped down to the sun-baked earth. She felt stiff and cramped, and she stretched her body to its full extent, lifting her hands over her head and twisting from the waist to get the kinks out of her spine.
“You must go quickly, Kelly,” Patrick urged her. “The patrol! I wish I had someone to go with you, to protect you.”
Kelly laughed and shook her head. “Once I’m in the forest, I will be safe.” She felt gay and happy at the prospect, but Patrick looked worried.
“The forest is an evil place.”
“You are also afraid of the diinni, aren’t you, Patrick?” she teased him as she shrugged her pack on to her shoulders. She knew that, like most Uhali or Hita, Patrick had never entered the deep forest. They were all terrified of the forest spirits. Whenever possible the Barnbuti were at pains to describe these malignant spirits and to invent horror stories of their own dreadful encounters with them. It was one of the Bambuti devices for keeping the big black men out of their secret preserves.
“Of course not, Kelly.” Patrick denied the charge a little too hotly. “I am an educated man; I do not believe in djinni or evil spirits.” But even as he spoke his eyes strayed towards the impenetrable wall of high trees that stood just beyond the halfmile wide strip of gardens and plantations. He shuddered and changed the subject. “You will get a message to me in the usual way?” he asked anxiously. “We must know how he is.”
“Don’t worry.” She smiled at him and took his hand. “Thank you, Patrick. Thank you for everything.”
“It is we who should thank you, Kelly. May Allah give you peace.”
“Salaam aleikum,” she replied. “To you peace also, Patrick.” And she turned and slipped away under the wide green fronds of the banana trees. Within a dozen paces she was hidden from the road.
As she went through the gardens she picked the fruits from the trees, filling the pockets of her backpack with ripe mangoes and plantains. It was a Bambuti trick. The village gardens and the villages themselves were considered fair hunting grounds. The pygmies borrowed anything that was left untended, but stealing was not as much fun as gulling the villagers into parting with food and valuables by elaborate confidence tricks.
Kelly smiled as she recalled the glee with which old Sepoo related his successful scams to the rest of the tribe whenever he returned from the villages to the hunting camps in the deep forest.
Now she helped herself to the garden produce with as little conscience as old Sepoo would have evinced. In London she would have been appalled by the notion of shoplifting in Selfridges, but as she approached the edge of the forest she was already beginning to think like a Barnbuti again. It was the way of survival.
At the end of the, last garden there was a fence of thorn branches to keep out the forest creatures that raided the crops at night, and at intervals along this fence, set on poles were grubby spirit flags and juju charms to discourage the forest demons and diinni from approaching the villages. The Bambuti always howled with mirth when they passed this evidence of the villagers superstition. It was proof of the success of their own subtle propaganda.
Kelly found a narrow gap in the fence, just big enough to accommodate the pygmy who had made it and she slipped through. The forest lay ahead of her. She lifted up her eyes and watched a flock of grey parrots flying shrieking along the treetops a hundred feet above her.
The entrance to the forest was thick and entangled. Where the sunlight had penetrated to the ground it had raised a thicket of secondary growth. There was a pygmy track through this undergrowth, but even Kelly was forced to stoop to enter it.
The average Bambuti was at least a foot shorter than she was, and with their machetes they cut the undergrowth just above their own head-height. When fresh, the raw shoots were easy to spot, but once they dried, they were sharp as daggers and on the level of Kelly’s face and eyes. She moved with dainty care.
She did not realise it herself, but in the forest she had learned by example to carry herself with the same agile grace as a pygmy. It was one of the Bambuti’s derisive taunts that somebody walked like a wazungu in the forest. Wazungu was the derogatory term for any outsider, any foreigner. Even old Sepoo admitted that Kelly walked like one of the real people and not like a white wazungu.
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The peripheral screen of dense undergrowth was several hundred feet wide. It ended abruptly and Kelly stepped out on to the true forest floor. It was like entering a submarine cavern, a dim and secret place. The sunlight was reflected down through successive layers of leaves, so that the entire forest world was washed with green, and the air was warm and moist and redolent of leaf mould and fungus, a relief from the heat and dust and merciless sunlight of the outside world. Kelly filled her lungs with the smell and looked around her, blinking as her eyes adjusted to this strange and lovely light. There was no dense undergrowth here, the great tree-trunks reached up to the high green roof and shaded away into the green depths, ahead, reminding her of the hall of pillars in the mighty temple of Karnak on the banks of the Nile.
Under her feet the dead leaves were thick and luxuriant as a precious oriental carpet. They gave a spring to her step and rustled under her feet to give warning to the forest creatures of her approach. It was unwise to come unannounced upon one of the wicked red buffalo or to step upon one of the deadly adders that lay curled upon the forest floor.
Kelly moved swiftly, lightly, with the susurration of dead leaves under her feet, stopping once to cut herself a digging stick and to sharpen the point with her clasp-knife as she went on. She sang as she went, one of the praise songs to the forest that Sepoo’s wife, Parnba, had taught her. It was a Bambuti hymn, for the forest itself is their god. They worship it as both Mother and Father.
They do not believe a jot in the hobgoblins and evil spirits whose existence they so solemnly endorse and whose depredations they recount with so much glee to the black villagers. For the Bambuti the forest is a living entity, a deity which can give up or withhold its bounty, which can give favours or wreak retribution on those who flout its laws and do it injury. Over the years she had lived under the forest roof Kelly had come more than halfway to accepting the Bambuti philosophy, and now she sang to the forest as she travelled swiftly across its floor.