“Tell them it’s natural,” Ross said, blushing.
Munro spoke briefly to the women. “I told them it was the color of your father’s hair,” he told Ross. “But I’m not sure they believe it.” He gave Elliot cigarettes to pass out, one to each man; they were received with broad smiles and odd girlish giggles.
Preliminaries concluded, they were taken to a newly constructed house at the far end of the village where the dead white man was said to be. They found a filthy, bearded man of thirty, sitting cross-legged in the small doorway, staring outward. After a moment Elliot realized the man was catatonic—he was not moving at all.
“Oh, my God,” Ross said. “It’s Bob Driscoll.”
“You know him?” Munro said.
“He was a geologist on the first Congo expedition.” She leaned close to him, waved her hand in front of his face. “Bobby, it’s me, Karen. Bobby, what happened to you?”
Driscoll did not respond, did not even blink. He continued to stare forward.
One of the pygmies offered an explanation to Munro. “He came into their camp four days ago,” Munro said. “He was wild and they had to restrain him. They thought he had blackwater fever, so they made a house for him and gave him some medicines, and he was not wild anymore. Now he lets them feed him, but he never speaks. They think perhaps he was captured by General Muguru’s men and tortured, or else he is agudu—a mute.”
Ross moved back in horror.
“I don’t see what we can do for him,” Munro said. “Not in his condition. Physically he’s okay but…” He shook his head.
“I’ll give Houston the location,” Ross said, “and they’ll send help from Kinshasa.”
During all this, Driscoll never moved. Elliot leaned forward to look at his eyes, and as he approached, Driscoll wrinkled his nose. His body tensed. He broke into a high-pitched wail—”Ah-ah-ah-ah”—like a man about to scream.
Appalled, Elliot backed off, and Driscoll relaxed, falling silent again. “What the hell was that all about?”
One of the pygmies whispered to Munro. “He says,” Munro said, “that you smell like gorilla.”
3. Ragora
Two HOURS LATER, THEY WERE REUNITED WITH Kahega and the others, led by a pygmy guide across the rain forest south of Gabutu. They were all sullen, uncommunicative—and suffering from dysentery.
The pygmies had insisted they stay for an early dinner, and Munro felt they had no choice but to accept. The meal was mostly a slender wild potato called kitsombe, which looked like a shriveled asparagus; forest onions, called otsa; and modoke, wild manioc leaves, along with several kinds of mushrooms. There were also small quantities of sour, tough turtle meat and occasional grasshoppers, caterpillars, worms, frogs, and snails.
This diet actually contained twice as much protein by weight as beefsteak, but it did not sit well on unaccustomed stomachs. Nor was the news around the campfire likely to improve their spirits.
According to the pygmies, General Muguru’s men had established a supply camp up at the Makran escarpment, which was where Munro was headed. It seemed wise to avoid the troops. Munro explained there was no Swahili word for chivalry or sportsmanship, and the same was true of the Congolese variant, Lingala. “In this part of the world, it’s kill or be killed. We’d best stay away.”
Their only alternate mute took them west, to the Ragora River. Munro frowned at his map, and Ross frowned at her computer console.
“What’s wrong with the Ragora River?” Elliot asked.
“Maybe nothing,” Munro said. “Depends on how hard it’s mined lately.”
Ross glanced at her watch. “We’re now twelve hours behind,” she said. “The only thing we can do is continue straight through the night on the river.”
“I’d do that anyway,” Munro said.
Ross had never heard of an expedition guide leading a party through a wilderness area at night. “You would? Why?”
“Because,” Munro said, “the obstacles on the lower river will be much easier at night.”
“What obstacles?”
“We’ll discuss them when we come to them,” Munro said.
A mile before they reached the Ragora, they heard the distant mar of powerful water. Amy was immediately anxious, signing What water? again and again. Elliot tried to reassure her, but he was not inclined to do much; Amy was going to have to put up with the river, despite her fears.
But when they got to the Ragora they found that the sound came from tumbling cataracts somewhere upstream; directly before them, the river was fifty feet wide and a placid muddy brown.
“Doesn’t look too bad,” Elliot said.
“No,” Munro said, “it doesn’t.”
But Munro understood about the Congo. The fourth largest river in the world (after the Nile, the Amazon, and the Yangize) was unique in many ways. It twisted like a giant snake across the face of Africa, twice crossing the equator— the first time going north, toward Kisangani, and later going south, at Mbandaka. This fact was so remarkable that even a hundred years ago geographers did not believe it was true.
Because the Congo flowed both north and south of the equator, there was always a rainy season somewhere along its path; the river was not subject to the seasonal fluctuations that characterized rivers such as the Nile. The Congo poured a steady 1,500,000 cubic feet of water every second into the Atlantic Ocean, a flow greater than any river except the Amazon.
But this tortuous course also made the Congo the least navigable of the great rivers. Serious disruptions began with the rapids of Stanley Pool, three hundred miles from the Atlantic. Two thousand miles inland, at Kisangani, where the river was still -a mile wide, the Wagenia Cataract blocked all navigation. And as one moved farther upriver along the fan of tributaries, the impediments became even more pronounced, for above Kisangani the tributaries were descending rapidly into the low jungle from their sources—the highland savannahs to the south, and the 16,000-foot snowcapped Ruwenzori Mountains to the east.
The tributaries cut a series of gorges, the most striking of which was the Portes d’Enfer—the Gates of Hell—at Kongolo. Here the placid Lualàba River funneled through a gorge half a mile deep and a hundred yards wide.
The Ragora was a minor tributary of the Lualaba, which it joined near Kisangani. The tribes along the river referred to it as baratawani, “the deceitful road,” for the Ragora was notoriously changeable. Its principal feature was the Ragora Gorge, a limestone cut two hundred feet deep and in places only ten feet wide. Depending on recent rainfall, the Ragora Gorge was either a pleasant scenic spectacle or a boiling whitewater nightmare.
At Abutu, they were still fifteen miles upriver from the gorge, and conditions on the river told them nothing about conditions within the gorge. Munro knew all that, but he did not feel it necessary to explain it to Elliot, particularly since at the moment Elliot was fully occupied with Amy.
Amy had watched with growing uneasiness as Kahega’s men inflated the two Zodiac rafts. She tugged Elliot’s sleeve and demanded to know What balloons?
“They’re boats, Amy,” he said, although he sensed she had already figured that out, and was being euphemistic. “Boat” was a word she had learned with difficulty; since she disliked water, she had no interest in anything intended to ride upon it.
Why boat? she asked.
“We ride boat now,” Elliot said.
Indeed, Kahega’s men were pushing the boats to the edge of the water, and loading the equipment on, lashing it to the rubber stanchions at the gunwales. –
Who ride? she asked.
“We all ride,” Elliot said.
Amy watched a moment longer. Unfortunately, everyone was nervous, Munro barking orders, the men working hastily. As she had often shown, Amy was sensitive to the moods of those around her. Elliot always remembered how she had insisted that something was wrong with Sarah Johnson for days before Sarah finally told the Project Amy staff that she had split up with her husband. Now Elliot was certain that Amy sensed their apprehension. Cross water in boat? she asked.
“No, Amy,” he said. “Not cross. Ride boat.”
No, Amy signed, stiffening her back, tightening her shoulders.
“Amy,” he said, “we can’t leave you here.”
She had a solution for that. Other people go. Peter stay Amy.
“I’m sorry, Amy,” he said. “I have to go. You have to go.”
No, she signed. Amy no go.
“Yes, Amy.” He went to his pack and got his syringe and a bottle of Thoralen.
With her body stiff and angry, she tapped the underside of her chin with a clenched fist.
“Watch your language, Amy,” he warned her.
Ross came over with orange life vests for him and Amy.
“Something wrong?”
“She’s swearing,” Elliot said. “Better leave us alone.” Ross took one look at Amy’s tense, rigid body, and left hurriedly.
Amy signed Peter’s name, then tapped the underside of her chin again. This was the Ameslan sign politely translated in scholarly reports as “dirty,” although it was most often employed by apes when they needed to go to the potty. Primate investigators were under no illusions about what the animals really meant. Amy was saying, Peter shiny.
Nearly all language-skilled primates swore, and they employed a variety of words for swearing. Sometimes the pejorative seemed to be chosen at random, “nut” or “bird”
or “wash.” But at least eight primates in different laboratories had independently settled on the clenched-fist sign to signify extreme displeasure. The only reason this remarkable coincidence hadn’t been written up was that no investigator was willing to try and explain it. It seemed to prove that apes, like people, found bodily excretions suitable terms to express denigration and anger.
Peter shitty. she signed again.
“Amy.. .“ He doubled the Thoralen dose he was drawing into the syringe.
Peter shiny boat shiny people shiny.
“Amy, cut it out.” He stiffened his own body and hunched over, imitating a gorilla’s angry posture; that often made her back off, but this time it had no effect.
Peter no like Amy. Now she was sulking, turned away from him, signing to nobody.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Elliot said, approaching her with the syringe held ready. “Peter like Amy.”
She backed away and would not let him come close to her. In the end he was forced to load the CO2 gun and shoot a dart into her chest. He had only done this three or four times in all their years together. She plucked out the dart with a sad expression. Peter no like Amy.
“Sorry,” Peter Elliot said, and ran forward to catch her as her eyes rolled back and she collapsed into his arms.
Amy lay on her back in the second boat at Elliot’s feet, breathing shallowly. Ahead, Elliot saw Munro standing in the first boat, leading the way as the Zodiacs slid silently downstream.
Munro had divided the expedition into two rafts of six each; Munro went in the first, and Elliot, Ross, and Amy went in the second, under Kahega’s command. As Munro put it, the second boat would “learn from our misfortunes.”
But for the first two hours on the Ragora, there were no misfortunes. It was an extraordinarily peaceful experience to sit in the front of the boat and watch the jungle on both sides of the river glide past them in timeless, hypnotic silence. It was idyllic, and very hot; Ross began to trail her hand over the side in the muddy water, until Kahega put a stop to it.
“Where there is water, there is always mambo,” he said. Kahega pointed to the muddy ‘banks, where crocodiles basked in the sunshine, indifferent to their approach. Occasionally one of the huge reptiles yawned, lifting jagged jaws into the air, but for the most part they seemed sluggish, hardly noticing the boats.
Elliot was secretly disappointed. He had grown up on the jungle movies where the crocodiles slithered menacingly into the water at the first approach of boats. “Aren’t they going to bother us?” he asked.
“Too hot,” Kahega said. “Mambo sleepy except at cool times, eat morning and night, not now. In daytime, Kikuyu say mambo have joined army, one-two-three-four.” And he laughed.
It took some explaining before it was clear that Kahega’s tribesmen had noticed that during the day the crocodiles did pushups, periodically lifting their heavy bodies off the ground on their stubby legs in a movement that reminded Kahega of army calisthenics.
“What is Munro so worried about?” Elliot asked. “The crocodiles?”
“No,” Kahega said.
“The Ragora Gorge?”
“No,” Kahega said.
“Then what?”
“After the gorge,” Kahega said.
Now the Ragora twisted, and they came around a bend, and they heard the growing roar of the water. Elliot felt the boat gathering speed, the water rippling along the rubber gunwales. Kahega shouted, “Hold fast, Doctors!”
And they were into the gorge.
Afterward, Elliot had only fragmented, kaleidoscopic impressions: the churning muddy water that boiled white in the sunlight; the erratic wrenching of his own boat, and the way Munro’s boat up ahead seemed to reel and upend, yet miraculously remain upright.
They were moving so fast it was hard to focus on the passing blur of craggy red canyon walls, bare rock except for sparse green clinging scrub; the hot humid air and the shockingly cold muddy water that smashed over them, drenching them time and again; the pure white surge of water boiling around the black protruding rocks, like the bald heads of drowned men.
Everything was happening too fast.
Ahead, Munro’s boat was often lost from sight for minutes at a time, concealed by giant standing waves of leaping, roaring muddy water. The roar echoed off the rock walls, reverberating, becoming a constant feature of their world; in the depths of the gorge, where the afternoon sun did not reach the narrow strip of dark water, the boats moved through a rushing, churning inferno, careening off rocky walls, spinning end around end, while the boatmen shouted and cursed and fended off the rock walls with paddles.
Amy lay on her back, lashed to the side of the boat, and Elliot was in constant fear that she would drown from the muddy waves that crashed over the gunwales. Not that Ross was doing much better; she kept repeating “Oh my God oh my God oh my God” over and over, in a low monotone, as the water smashed down on them in successive waves, soaking them to the skin.
Other indignities were forced upon them by nature. Even in the boiling, pounding heart of the gorge, black clouds of mosquitoes hung in the air, stinging them again and again. Somehow it did not seem possible that there could be mosquitoes in the midst of the roaring chaos of the Ragora Gorge, but they were there. The boats moved with gut-wrenching fury through the standing waves, and in the growing darkness the passengers baled out the boats and slapped at the mosquitoes with equal intensity.
And then suddenly the river broadened, the muddy water slowed, and the walls of the canyon moved apart. The river became peaceful again. Elliot slumped back in the boat, exhausted, feeling the fading sun on his face and the water moving beneath the inflated rubber of the boat.
“We made it,” he said.
“So far,” Kahega said. “But we Kikuyu say no one escapes from life alive. No relaxing now, Doctors!”
“Somehow,” Ross said wearily, “I believe him.”
They drifted gently downstream for another hour, and the rock walls receded farther away on each side, until finally they were in fiat African rain forest once more. It was as if the Ragora Gorge had never existed; the river was wide and sluggish gold in the descending sun.
Elliot stripped off his soaking shirt and changed it for a pullover, for the evening air was chilly. Amy snored at his feet, covered with a towel so she would not get too cold. Ross checked her transmitting equipment, making sure it was all right. When she was finished, the sun had set and it was rapidly growing dart. Kahega broke out a shotgun and inserted yellow stubby shells.
“What’s that for?” Elliot said.
“Kiboko, “Kahega said. “I do not know the word in English.” He shouted, “Mzee! Nini maana kiboko?”
In the lead boat, Munro glanced back. “Hippopotamus,” he said.
“Hippo,” Kahega said.
“Are they dangerous?” Elliot asked.
“At night, we hope no,” Kahega said. “But me, I think yes.”
The twentieth century had been a period of intensive wildlife study, which overturned many tong-standing conceptions about animals. It was now recognized that the gentle, soft-eyed deer actually lived in a ruthless, nasty society, while the supposedly vicious wolf was devoted to family and offspring in exemplary fashion. And the African lion—the proud king of beasts—was relegated to the status of slinking scavenger, while the loathed hyena assumed new dignity. (For decades, observers had come upon a dawn kill to find lions feeding on the carcass, while the scavenging hyenas circled at the periphery, awaiting their chance. Only after scientists began night tracking the animals did a new interpretation emerge: hyenas actually made the kill, only to be driven off by opportunistic and lazy lions; hence the traditional dawn scene. This coincided with the discovery that lions were in many ways erratic and mean, while the hyenas had a finely developed social structure—yet another instance of longstanding human prejudice toward the natural world of animals.)
But the hippopotamus remained a poorly understood animal. Herodotus’s ‘river horse” was the largest African mammal after the elephant, but its habit of lying in the water with just eyes and nostrils protruding made it difficult to study. Hippos were organized around a male. A mature male had a harem of several females and their offspring, a group of eight to fourteen animals altogether.
Despite their obese, rather humorous appearance, hippos were capable of unusual violence. The bull hippopotamus was a formidable creature, fourteen feet long and weighing nearly ten thousand pounds. Charging, he moved with extraordinary speed for such a large animal, and his four stubby blunted tusks were actually razor sharp on the sides. A hippo attacked by slashing, moving his cavernous mouth from side to side, rather than biting. And, unlike most animals, a fight between bulls often resulted in the death of one animal from deep slashing wounds. There was nothing symbolic about a hippopotamus fight.
The animal was dangerous to man, as well. In river areas where herds were found, half of native deaths were attributed to hippos; elephants and predatory cats accounted for the remainder. The hippopotamus was vegetarian, and at night the animals came onto the land, where they ate enormous quantities of grass to sustain their great bulk. A hippo separated from the water was especially dangerous; anyone finding himself between a landed hippo and the river he was rushing to return to did not generally survive the experience.
But the hippo was essential to Africa’s river ecology. His fecal matter, produced in prodigious quantities, fertilized the river grasses, which in turn allowed river fish and other creatures to live. Without the hippopotamus African rivers would be sterile, and where they had been driven away, the rivers died.
This much was known, and one thing more. The hippopotamus was fiercely territorial. Without exception, the male defended his river against any intruder. And as had been recorded on many occasions, intruders included other hippos, crocodiles, and passing boats. And the people in them.
DAY 7: MUKENKO
June 19, 1979
1. Kiboko
MUNRO’S INTENTION IN CONTINUING THROUGH the night was two-fold. First, he hoped to make up precious time, for. all the computer projections assumed that they would stop each night. But it took no effort to ride the river in the moonlight; most of the party could sleep, and they would advance themselves another fifty or sixty miles by dawn.
But more important, he hoped to avoid the Ragora hippos, which could easily destroy their flimsy rubber boats. During the day, the hippos were found in pools beside the riverbanks, and the bulls would certainly attack any passing boat. At night, when the animals went ashore to forage, the expedition could slip down the river and avoid a confrontation entirely.
It was a clever plan, but it ran into trouble for an unexpected reason—their progress on the Ragora was too rapid. It was only nine o’clock at night when they reached the first hippo areas, too early for the animals to be eating. The hippos would attack the boats—but they would attack in the dark.
The river twisted and turned in a series of curves. At each curve there was a still pool, which Kahega pointed out as the kind of quiet water that hippos liked to inhabit. And he pointed to the grass on the banks, cut short as if the banks had been mown.
“Soon now,” Kahega said.
They heard a low grunting, “Raw-huh-huh-huh.” It sounded like an old man trying to clear his throat of phlegm. Munro tensed in the lead boat. They drifted around another curve, carried smoothly in the flow of current. The two boats were now about ten yards apart. Munro held his loaded shotgun ready.
The sound came again, this time in a chorus: “Haw-huh-huh-huh.”
Kahega plunged his paddle into the water. It struck bottom quickly. He pulled it out; only three feet of it was wet. “Not deep,” he said, shaking his head.
“Is that bad?” Ross said.
“Yes, I think it is bad.”
They came around the next bend, and Elliot saw a half-dozen partially submerged black rocks near the shore, gleaming in the moonlight. Then one of the “rocks” crashed upward and he saw an enormous creature lift entirely out of the shallow water so that he could see the four stubby legs, and the hippo churned forward toward Munro’s boat.
Munro fired a low magnesium flare as the animal charged; in the harsh white light Elliot saw a gigantic mouth, four huge glistening blunted teeth, the head lifted upward as the animal roared. And then the hippo was engulfed in a cloud of pale yellow gas. The gas drifted back, and stung their eyes.
“He’s using tear gas,” Ross said.
Munro’s boat had already moved on. With a roar of pain the male hippo had plunged down into the water and disappeared from sight. In the second boat, they blinked back tears and watched for him as they approached the pool. Overhead, the magnesium flare sizzled and descended, lengthening sharp shadows, glaring off the water.
“Perhaps he’s given up,” Elliot said. They could not see the hippo anywhere. They drifted in silence.
And suddenly the front of the boat bucked up, and the hippo roared and Ross screamed. Kahega toppled backward, discharging his gun into the air. The boat slapped down with a wrenching crash and a spray of water over the sides, and Elliot scrambled to his feet to check Amy and found himself staring into a huge pink cavernous mouth and hot breath. The mouth came down with a lateral slash on the side of the rubber boat, and the air began to hiss and sizzle in the water.
The mouth opened again, and the hippo grunted, but by then Kahega had got to his feet and flied a stinging cloud of gas. The hippo backed off and splashed down, rocking the boat and propelling them onward, down the river. The whole right side of the boat was collapsing swiftly as the air leaked out of the huge cuts in the rubber. Elliot tried to pull them shut with his hands; the hissing continued unabated. They would sink within a minute.
Behind them, the bull hippo charged, racing down the shallow river like a powerboat, churning water in a wake from both sides of his body, bellowing in anger.
“Hold on, bold on!” Kahega shouted, and fired again. The hippo disappeared behind a cloud of gas, and the boat drifted around another curve. When the gas cleared the animal was gone. The magnesium flare sputtered into the water and they were plunged into darkness again. Elliot grabbed Amy as the boat sank, and they found themselves standing knee-deep in the muddy water.
They managed to beach the Zodiac on the dark riverbank. In the lead boat, Munro paddled over, surveyed the damage, and announced that they would inflate another boat and go on. He called for a rest, and they all lay in the moonlight on the river’s edge swatting mosquitoes away.