DAY 6: LIKO
June 18, 1979
1.Rain Forest
THE NEXT MORNING THEY ENTERED THE HUMID perpetual gloom of the Congo rain forest.
Munro noted the return of old feelings of oppression and claustrophobia, tinged with a strange, overpowering lassitude. As a Congo mercenary in the 1960s, he had avoided the jungle wherever possible. Most military engagements had occurred in open spaces - in the Belgian colonial towns, along riverbanks, beside the red dirt roads. Nobody wanted to fight in the jungle; the mercenaries hated it, and the superstitious Sambas feared it. When the mercenaries advanced, the rebels often fled into the bush, but they never went very far, and Munro's troops never pursued them. They just waited for them to come out again.
Even in. the 1960s the jungle remained terra incognita, -an unknown land with the power to hold the technology of mechanized warfare beyond its periphery. And with good reason, Munro thought. Men just did not belong there. He was not pleased to be back.
Elliot, never having been in a rain forest, was fascinated. The jungle was different -from the way he had imagined it to be. He was totally unprepared for the scale - the gigantic trees soaring over his head, the trunks as broad as a house, the thick snaking moss-covered roots. To move in the vast space beneath these trees was like being in a very dark cathedral: the sun was completely blocked, and he could not get an exposure reading on his camera.
He had also expected the jungle to be much denser than it was. Their party moved through it freely; in a surprising way it seemed barren and silent - there were occasional birdcalls and cries from monkeys, but otherwise a profound stillness settled over them. And it was oddly monotonous: although he saw every shade of green in the foliage and the clinging creeper vines, there were few flowers or blooms. Even the occasional orchids seemed pale and muted.
He had expected rotting decay at every turn, but that was not true either. The ground underfoot was often firm, and the air had a neutral smell. But it was incredibly hot, and it seemed as though everything was wet - the leaves, the ground, the trunks of the trees, the oppressively still air itself, trapped under the overhanging trees.
Elliot would have agreed with Stanley's description from a century before: "Overhead the wide-spreading branches absolutely shut out the daylight. . We marched in a feeble twilight. . . The dew dropped and pattered on us incessantly. . . Our clothes were heavily saturated with it.
Perspiration exuded from every pore, for the atmosphere was stifling. . . . What a forbidding aspect had the Dark Unknown which confronted us!"
Because Elliot had looked forward to his first experience of the equatorial African rain forest, he was surprised at how quickly he felt oppressed - and how soon he entertained thoughts of leaving again. Yet the tropical rain forests had spawned most new life forms, including man. The jungle was not one uniform environment but many different microenvironments, arranged vertically like a layer cake. Each microenvironment supported a bewildering profusion of plant and animal life, but there were typically few members of each species. The tropical jungle supported four times as many species of animal life as a comparable temperate forest. As he walked through the forest, Elliot found himself thinking of it as an enormous hot, dark womb, a place where new species were nourished in unchanging conditions until they were ready to migrate out to the harsher and more variable temperate zones. That was the way it had been for millions of years.
Amy's behavior immediately changed as she entered the vast humid darkness of her original home. In retrospect, Elliot believed he could have predicted her reaction, had he Thought it through clearly.
Amy no longer kept up with the group.
She insisted on foraging along the trail, pausing to sit and chew tender shoots and grasses. She could not be budged or hurried, and ignored Elliot's requests that she stay with them. She ate lazily, a pleasant, rather vacant expression on her face. In shafts of sunlight, she would lie on her back, and belch, and sigh contentedly.
"What the hell is this all about?" Ross asked, annoyed. They were not making good time.
"She's become a gorilla again," Elliot said. "Gorillas are vegetarians, and they spend nearly all day eating; they're large animals, and they need a lot of food." Amy had immediately reverted to these traits.
"Well, can't you make her keep up with us?"
"I'm trying. She won't pay attention to me." And he knew why - Amy was finally back in a world where Peter Elliot was irrelevant, where she herself could find food and security and shelter, and everything else that she wanted.
"School's out," Munro said, summarizing the situation. But he had a solution. "Leave her," he said crisply, and he led the party onward. He took Elliot firmly by the elbow. "Don't look back," he said. "Just walk on. Ignore her."
They continued for several minutes in silence. Elliot said, "She may not follow us." "Come, come, Professor," Munro said. "I thought you knew about gorillas."
"I do," Elliot said.
"Then you know there are none in this part of the rain forest."
Elliot nodded; he had seen no nests or spoor. "But she has everything she needs here."
"Not everything," Munro said. "Not without other gorillas around."
Like all higher primates, gorillas were social animals. They lived in a group, and they were not comfortable - or safe - in isolation. In fact, most primatologists assumed that there was a need for social contact as strongly perceived as hunger, thirst, or fatigue.
"We're her troop," Munro said. "She won't let us get far."
Several minutes later, Amy came crashing through the underbrush fifty yards ahead. She watched the group, and glared at Peter.
"Now come here, Amy," Munro said, "and I'll tickle you." Amy bounded up and lay on her back in front of him. Munro tickled her.
"You see, Professor? Nothing to it."
Amy never strayed far from the group again.
If Elliot had an uncomfortable sense of the rain forest as the natural domain of his own animal, Karen Ross viewed it in terms of earth resources - in which it was poor. She was not fooled by the luxuriant, oversized vegetation, which she knew represented an extraordinarily efficient ecosystem built in virtually barren soil.*
The developing nations of the world did not understand this fact; once cleared, the jungle soil yielded disappointing crops. Yet the rain forests were being cleared at the incredible rate of fifty acres a minute, day and night. The rain forests of the world had circled the equator in a green belt for at least sixty million years - but man would have cleared them within twenty years.
This widespread destruction had caused some alarm Ross did not share. She doubted that the world climate would change or the atmospheric oxygen be reduced. Ross was not an alarmist, and not impressed by the calculations of those who were. The only reason she felt uneasy was that the forest was so little understood. A clearing rate of fifty acres a minute meant that plant and animal species were becoming extinct at the incredible rate of one species per hour. Life forms that had evolved for millions of years were being wiped out every few minutes, and no one could predict the consequences of this stupendous rate of destruction. The extinction of species was proceeding much faster than anybody recognized, and the publicized lists of "endangered" species told only a fraction of the story; the disaster extended all the way down the animal phyla to insects, worms, and mosses.
* The rain forest ecosystem is an energy utilization complex far more efficient than any energy conversion system developed by man. See C. F. Higgins et at., Energy Resources and Ecosystem Utilization (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prentice Hall, 1977). pp. 232 - 255.
The reality was that entire ecosystems were being destroyed by man without a care or a backward glance. And these ecosystems were for the most part mysterious, poorly understood. Karen Ross felt herself plunged into a world entirely different from the exploitable world of mineral resources; this was an environment in which plant life reigned supreme. It was no wonder, she thought, that the Egyptians called this the Land of Trees. The rain forest provided a hothouse environment for plant life, an environment in which gigantic plants were much superior to - and much favored over - mammals, including the insignificant human mammals who were now picking their way through its perpetual darkness.
The Kikuyu porters had an immediate reaction to the forest: they began to laugh and joke and make as much noise as possible. Ross said to Kahega, "They certainly are jolly."
"Oh, no," Kahega said. "They are warning."
"Warning?"
Kahega explained that the men made noise to warn off the buffalo and leopards. And the tembo, he added, pointing to the trail.
"Is this a tembo trail?" she asked.
Kahega nodded.
"The tembo live nearby?"
Kahega laughed. "I hope no," Kahega said. "Tembo. Elephant."
"So this is a game trail. Will we see elephants?"
"Maybe yes, maybe no," Kahega said. "I hope no. They are very big, elephants."
There was no arguing with his logic. Ross said, "They tell me these are your brothers," nodding down the line of porters.
"Yes, they are my brothers."
"Ah."
"But you mean that my brothers, we have the same mother?"
"Yes, you have the same mother."
"No," Kahega said.
Ross was confused. 'You are not real brothers?"
"Yes, we are real brothers. But we do not have the same mother."
"Then why are you brothers?"
"Because we live in the same village."
"With your father and mother?"
Kahega looked shocked. "No," he said emphatically. "Not the same village."
"A different village, then?"
"Yes, of course - we are Kikuyu."
Ross was perplexed. Kahega laughed.
Kahega offered to carry the electronic equipment that Ross had slung over her shoulder, but she declined. Ross was obliged to try and link up with Houston at intervals throughout the day, and at noon she found a clear window, probably because the consortium jamming operator took a break for lunch. She managed to link through and register another Field Time - Position.
The console read:
FILD TME - POSITN CHEK - 10:03 H
They had lost nearly an hour since the previous check the night before. "We've got to go fester," she told Munro.
"Perhaps you'd prefer to jog," Munro said. "Very good exercise." And then, because he decided he was being too hard on her, he added, "A lot can happen between here and Virunga."
They heard the distant growl of thunder and minutes later were drenched in a torrential rain, the drops so dense and heavy that they actually hurt. The rain fell solidly for the next hour, then stopped as abruptly as it had begun. They were all soaked and miserable, and when Munro called a halt for food, Ross did not protest.
Amy promptly went off into the forest to forage; the porters cooked curried meat gravy on rice; Munro, Ross, and
Elliot burned leeches off their legs with cigarettes. The leeches were swollen with blood. "I didn't even notice them," Ross said.
"Rain makes 'em worse," Munro said. Then he looked up sharply, glancing at the jungle.
"Something wrong?"
"No, nothing," Munro said, and he went into an explanation of why leeches had to be burned off; if they were pulled off, a part of the head remained lodged in the flesh and caused an infection.
Kahega brought them food, and Munro said in a low voice, "Are the men all right?"
"Yes," Kahega said. "The men are all right. They will not be afraid."
"Afraid of what?" Elliot said.
"Keep eating. Just be natural," Munro said.
Elliot looked nervously around the little clearing.
"Eat!" Munro whispered. "Don't insult them. You're not supposed to know they're here."
The group ate in silence for several minutes. And then the nearby brush rustled and a pygmy stepped out.
2. The Dancers of God
HE WAS A LIGHT-SKINNED MAN ABOUT FOUR AND A half feet tall, barrel-chested, wearing only a loincloth, with a bow and arrow over his shoulder. He looked around the expedition, apparently trying to determine who was the leader.
Munro stood, and said something quickly in a language that was not Swahili. The pygmy replied. Munro gave him one of the cigarettes they had been using to burn off the leeches. The pygmy did not want it lit; instead he dropped it into a small leather pouch attached to his quiver. A brief conversation followed. The pygmy pointed off into the jungle several times.
"He says a white man is dead in their village," Munro said. He picked up his pack, which contained the first-aid kit. "I'll have to hurry."
Ross said, "We can't afford the time."
Munro frowned at her.
"Well, the man's dead anyway."
"He's not completely dead," Munro said. "He's not dead-for-ever."
The pygmy nodded vigorously. Munro explained that pygmies graded illness in several stages. First a person was hot, then he was with fever, then ill, then dead, then completely dead - and finally dead-for-ever.
From the bush, three more pygmies appeared. Munro nodded. "Knew he wasn't alone," he said. "These chaps never are alone. Hate to travel alone. The others were watching us; if we'd made a wrong move, we'd get an arrow for our trouble. See those brown tips? Poison."
Yet the pygmies appeared relaxed now - at least until Amy came crashing back through the underbrush. Then there were shouts and swiftly drawn bows; Amy was terrified and ran to Peter, jumping up on him and clutching his chest - and making him thoroughly muddy.
The pygmies engaged in a lively discussion among themselves, trying to decide what Amy's arrival meant. Several questions were asked of Munro. Finally, Elliot set Amy back down on the ground and said to Munro, "What did you tell them?"
"They wanted to know if the gorilla was yours, and I said yes. They wanted to know if the gorilla was female, and I said yes. They wanted to know if you had relations with the gorilla; I said no. They said that was good, that you should
not become too attached to the gorilla, because that would cause you pain."
"Why pain?"
"They said when the gorilla grows up, she will either run away into the forest and break your heart or kill you."
Ross still opposed making a detour to the pygmy village, which was several miles away on the banks of the Liko River. "We're behind on our timeline," she said, "and slipping further behind every minute."
For the first and last time during the expedition, Munro lost his temper. "Listen, Doctor," he said, "this isn't downtown Houston, this is the middle of the goddamn Congo and it's no place to be injured. We have medicines. That man may need it. You don't leave him behind. You just don't."
"If we go to that village," Ross said, "we blow the rest of the day. It puts us nine or ten hours further back. Right now we can still make it. With another delay, we won't have a chance."
One of the pygmies began talking quickly to Munro. He nodded, glancing several times at Ross. Then he turned to the others.
"He says that the sick white man has some writing on his shirt pocket. He's going to draw the writing for us."
Ross glanced at her watch and sighed.
The pygmy picked up a stick and drew large characters in the muddy earth at their feet. He drew carefully, frowning in concentration as he reproduced the alien symbols: E R T S.
"Oh, God," Ross said softly.
The pygmies did not walk through the forest: they ran at a brisk trot, slipping through the forest vines and branches, dodging rain puddles and gnarled tree roots with deceptive ease. Occasionally they glanced over their shoulders and giggled at the difficulties of the three white people who followed.
For Elliot, it was a difficult pace - a succession of roots to stumble over, tree limbs to strike his head on, thorny vines to tear at his flesh. He was gasping for breath, trying to keep up with the little men who padded effortlessly ahead of him. Ross was doing no better than he, and even Munro, although surprisingly agile, showed signs of fatigue.
Finally they came to a small stream and a sunlit clearing.
The pygmies paused on the rocks, squatting and turning their
faces up to the sun. The white people collapsed, panting and gasping. The pygmies seemed to find this hilarious, their laughter good-natured.
The pygmies were the earliest human inhabitants of the Congo rain forest. Their small size, distinctive manner, and deft agility had made them famous centuries before. More than four thousand years ago, an Egyptian commander named Herkouf entered the great forest west of the Mountains of the Moon; there he found a race of tiny men who sang and danced to their god. Herkoufs amazing report had the ring of fact, and Herodotus and later Aristotle insisted that these stories of the tiny men were true, and not fabulous. The Dancers of God inevitably acquired mythical trappings as the centuries passed.
As late as the seventeenth century, Europeans remained unsure whether tiny men with tails who had the power to fly through the trees, make themselves invisible, and kill elephants actually existed. That skeletons of chimpanzees were sometimes mistaken for pygmy skeletons added to the confusion. Colin Turnbull notes that many elements of the fable are actually true: the pounded-bark loincloths hang down and look like tails; the pygmies can blend into the forest and become virtually invisible; and they have always hunted and killed elephants.
The pygmies were laughing now as they got to their feet and padded off again. Sighing, the white people struggled up and lumbered after them. They ran for another half hour, never pausing or hesitating, and then Elliot smelled smoke and they came into a clearing beside a stream where the village was located.
He saw ten low rounded huts no more than four feet high, arranged in a semicircle. The villagers were all outside in the afternoon light, the women cleaning mushrooms and berries picked during the day, or cooking grubs and turtles on crackling fires; children tottered around, bothering the men who sat before their houses and smoked tobacco while the women worked.
At Munro's signal, they waited at the edge of the camp until they were noticed, and then they were led in. Their arrival provoked great interest; the children giggled and pointed; the men wanted tobacco from Munro and Elliot; the women touched Ross's blonde hair, and argued about it. A little girl crawled between Ross's legs, peering up her trousers. Munro explained that the women were uncertain whether Ross painted her hair, and the girl had taken it upon herself to settle the question of artifice.
"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 black?water 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 Con?golese 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 Kon?golo. Here the placid Lual��ba 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.