Lost Worlds Page 5

  “No, sorry—I’ve just finished the last one.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  More silence. I was getting a little irritated now. I don’t like sketching when people are watching and he gave no indication of moving on.

  “Ah—I see you smoke cigars.”

  “Yes. Yes, I enjoy the occasional cigar.”

  “Excuse me, monsieur—but do you have one cigar for me?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m out. My cigars are all back in the cabin.” I wished I’d had one. He may have left me alone.

  “Of course.”

  The throb of the boat’s engine ran through my body like a vibrator bed. A pleasant sensation, made even more relaxing by the river breezes which Uriah Heep was now effectively blocking.

  “I wonder, monsieur. I am needing of buying something. Is it possible that you have a little—excuse me—a few zaires for me—un petit cadeau.”

  Okay, I’d had it. My patience had gone now and I wanted my breeze back—and my solitude.

  I turned and gave him my stern look.

  “I am sorry, I don’t have a beer, I don’t have a cigar, and I don’t have any zaires on me at the moment. Now, if you don’t mind…”

  And he did it! He actually reached up and touched his forelock. Didn’t exactly pull it, but near enough to confirm all my expectations.

  “Ah. Eh, bien. I will leave you now. Adieu, monsieur.”

  Five minutes later I’d forgotten about him. But the following morning as we docked in Lisala it was obvious he had not forgotten me.

  We slid slowly through more floating mats of hyacinths and made a dainty landing at the old, battered docks below a steep bluff. I was told we had a three-hour stopover so I decided to disembark and go exploring.

  The long stairway up to the top of the bluff was shaded by trees. On the top, breezes blew away my almost constantly pumping sweat. From glimpses of the other small river towns with their decaying, vine-shrouded European mansions and crumbling civic buildings, I didn’t expect too much of Lisala—but surprise, I discovered cool gardens, a large mission and church, and a broad plaza full of music and beer-chugging locals. I was looking forward to joining them, but suddenly found myself in the company of two soldiers carrying automatic rifles. And some way behind them, who should be there but that hunched little weasel, Uriah Heep. The glint in his shaded eyes was sheer maliciousness; his smile was as tight and false as yesterday, but there was some other expression in his face—vengeance! Not a pleasant sight.

  He kept his distance, shuffling his feet in the soft sandy surface of the avenue, while the soldiers informed me that I was obliged to accompany them to the immigration and customs offices.

  My initial alarm gave way to increasing confidence. All my papers were in order. I had my medical and vaccination forms, and my British passport was safely in my bag with its splendid “requirement” written in copperplate type on the inside cover. The ring and rhythm of its language always impressed me and I reproduce it here for all those who’ve never really studied the intricacies of one of Her Majesty’s passports:

  Her Britannic Majesty’s

  Secretary of State

  Requests and requires

  In the Name of Her Majesty

  All those whom it may concern

  To allow the bearer to pass freely

  Without let or hindrance,

  And to afford the bearer

  Such assistance and protection

  As may be necessary.

  Splendid—almost pure colonial rhetoric! “Without let or hindrance.” I love that line.

  I started to hum quietly and nonchalantly, but the soldiers seemed unamused. Their fingers tightened on their guns. One of them even grasped my elbow. I shook him free and he didn’t try again, but his look reminded me to exercise caution. Show respect David, I thought. This is Zaire and the Queen of England is a hell of a long way away.

  Behind the pleasant river bluff facades of Lisala, the town became increasingly unkept and overgrown: sidewalks buckling and sprouting weeds, broken lampposts, old colonial buildings boarded up, with cracked, mold-flecked walls, decaying shutters, and collapsing roofs.

  We entered a particularly decrepit specimen up a flight of lopsided concrete steps.

  A few people in ragged clothes lay sprawled on the porch surrounded by children with reddening hair (a sure sign of malnutrition), goats, and the remnants of a meal of manioc and little else.

  The soldiers paused at the top of the steps and Uriah Heep darted past, through the torn fly-screened door, his eyes and face hidden behind hunched shoulders. The door slammed shut and we waited. It was hot. Very hot. No breezes here. I cursed my penchant for perspiration. My mother once told me it was a genetic characteristic of her side of the family, but here it might be taken for nervousness or downright panic.

  However, I didn’t feel any panic. This would, I thought, be one of those amusing little misunderstandings ideal for dinner table dialogue after a fine meal, during the Stilton and port phase. How would I tell it? “Well, anyway, there I was wandering about this pleasant little plaza in the middle of the Belgian Congo….”

  A voice boomed inside the building and the soldiers broke my reveries by rushing me through the door past what was once a magnificent double-curve staircase and into a dark, dirty back room where the servants’ quarters must once have been in the “soirée and dansantes” days of Belgian hegemony.

  A man in a wrinkled uniform sat with his back to a spider-web-laced window at a small desk. His face was silhouetted against the sunlight that struggled in between the dust and decayed webs. Uriah Heep was nowhere to be seen. The soldiers pushed me into a rickety cane chair and stepped back to the doorway.

  It was very quiet and very hot. Oh, yes—and here comes the perspiration, I thought, rolling out of my pores, now the size of meteor craters.

  “Papers.” The officer extended his long fingers and I gave him my passport and all the other bureaucratic claptrap neatly packaged in a leather case. It all looked very impressive, until he started pulling out its contents with disdain and scattering them over his dusty desk like wastepaper.

  The passport seemed to fascinate him. I have an extra large one to accommodate all the visas and stamps of my travels and he started at the beginning and laboriously perused each smudgy symbol and signature, some going back over eight years.

  I began to hum to myself again—just a tiny, almost inaudible hum, you understand—but it seemed to annoy him. He looked up, stared at me until I stopped, and then resumed his exacting perusal.

  I watched a fly in the window, moving slowly down the screen in the heat. It was making straight for a web in the bottom corner where dried bits of bodies and wings of its compatriots lay in a dusty pile. Surely it could see that they were the remnants of flies like itself; surely it could see the web through its complex multilensed eyes; some of the strands were bright gold in the sunshine. Apparently not. The dumb thing walked straight into the web, struggled pathetically to release itself as the spider emerged from the pile of fly detritus, and watched. After a minute or so of writhing about, the fly had effectively wrapped itself into a neat compact bundle ready for spider lunch. And the spider obliged, casually approaching and tapping the bundle to ensure there was no more fight left in the fly and the settling down to a long, leisurely repast.

  A frisson of fear jingled down my neck and spine. Maybe there was a touch of fly in me and my spider was sitting directly across the desk….

  He’d dismissed the passport and was now flicking through the other papers.

  “Medical—where is?”

  “Ah, you speak English. I wonder, sir, if you could please tell—”

  “Medical—where is?” he repeated louder.

  I pointed to a neatly folded series of vaccination cards, all with U.S. medical stamps and signatures.

  In the gloom of the room I could feel, rather than see, his smile. It didn’t feel to be a nice smile. Far too spidery for this increasin
gly uncomfortable fly.

  “No good.”

  “Why no good, sir?” I asked as gently as I could.

  “No Zaire medical.”

  “No. These are from the United States of America.” I said the words slowly and majestically, as if describing some celebratory doctorate of honor.

  “No good. No Zaire medical.”

  Bullshit! No one had told me I had to have my up-to-date vaccination forms validated in Zaire.

  “Zaire doctor. He must sign.”

  “I was not aware of that. Your people let me into this country. They saw these documents.”

  “New regulation.” I could feel the spider now. Lunch was almost ready.

  And Mobutu too. I suddenly noticed a dusty photograph of the president on the wall to the left of the officer, replete in his leopard-skin hat, the “Great-Warrior-Who-Conquers-Everything” staring right at me, eyes wide open and lips smiling, just a little. Under the photograph was a plaque in French: LISALA. BIRTHPLACE OF OUR PRESIDENT.

  “Do you have a doctor here? Can he sign these papers?”

  “No doctor. Away.”

  “You have no doctor anywhere in this town?”

  “No doctor.”

  “So—what do you want me to do?”

  That smile again. And Mobutu’s too. I was trapped in their little game. Somewhere nearby, maybe peeping through a keyhole with his mean little eyes, was Uriah Heep. I could sense him. And he’d be smiling that weasel smile. He’d got even with me for my brusqueness of yesterday.

  “You must stay. Until doctor comes.”

  “Stay here. In Lisala?”

  He nodded.

  “When will the doctor come?”

  Smug smile and elegant French shrug (outstretched hands and all).

  “But I am on the boat, going to Kisangani. I have a ticket and a cabin.”

  He played his ace. “Also you have drawings.”

  “Drawings? What drawings?”

  “Of ports on the river.”

  Now it all became hideously clear. No wonder Heep had been so happy to see my sketch pad.

  “Those are drawings of the villages and the people. That’s all.”

  “They are of ports.”

  “Not ports. Just the villages. And no one told me I couldn’t sketch on the boat.” But to be honest I had heard unpleasant travelers’ tales of tourists whose cameras and film had been confiscated for photographing “forbidden subjects.” But surely a few innocent sketches didn’t count.

  “They are for my book. A book on my travel here.”

  “Ah—you are writing book. On Zaire?”

  “Yes. That’s why I am here.”

  “But you come as tourist. Not journalist.”

  “I’m not really a journalist. I’m an author—I write travel books and I use my sketches in my books. I have one of my books back in the boat. I can show you.” I was really nervous now. There wasn’t much time before the boat left, and things were getting a bit too complicated.

  The officer knew that too and decided to provide a succinct summary of my position.

  “So.” He leaned back in his creaking chair and held his hands in prayer position. “You have no medical stamps. You are journalist, not tourist, and you are drawing our ports.”

  This fly was well and truly webbed. The spider could feast on me at his leisure. I could sense that arguing the finer points of his accusations would only make things much worse and I’d miss the boat and be stuck in this place for God knows how long.

  The solution, of course, was predetermined. I emerged from that horrible little room ten minutes later, $20 lighter (a small fortune in the Zaire black market), and carrying my medical papers on which he’d scrawled illegible signatures. As I hurried away back to the boat I’m sure I heard laughter—lots of laughter—rattling the tin roof and broken shutters of that once-regal mansion. I never saw Uriah Heep again, but his ghost followed me throughout the rest of my journey across this strange and dangerous country.

  The last night on the boat, after another long chat with Paul (who praised the way I’d handled the “unpleasantness” at Lisala), I gave myself up to the romp and reggae of the barge bars, drinking far too much beer and “whiskey” and home-brewed palm wine, dancing with some pirogue fishermen who popped in for a bit of a shindig after successfully selling their thrashing river fish, dancing (but only dancing) with the whores, even dancing with myself at one point, I think, while the room roared and hands clapped and I flung my anger and frustration away in the heat and the haze and the happy-go-lucky headiness of that crazy music on that crazy boat….

  Part II—Kisangani to Beni—Overland Through the Pygmy Forest

  At last I was in Kisangani, the first leg of the long journey over. Only I didn’t want to be in Kisangani. In fact, I had no more desire for towns or sodden heat or soldiers or corrupt officials or even (strange for me) a change of diet in the town’s restaurants. I wanted to be on the road, driving through the bush. I wanted to get to the Ruwenzori Mountains and feel their cool breezes and touch the ice on their summits.

  I found Kisangani—the old Stanleyville—far prettier than Kinshasa but still a rather depressing place, as one might expect from the town that inspired Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and was the home of V. S. Naipaul’s sad and cruelly treated store owner in A Bend in the River. A battered sign by a ramshackle hotel told me I was now at the geographic heart of Africa, but even that didn’t do much to cheer me up. King Leopold’s headquarters had once been located here; Conrad’s notorious Kurtz had his base here; the Simbas committed some of their worst atrocities here in the mid-sixties, followed by Tshombe’s white mercenaries, who did equally atrocious things to the Simbas. Not a very encouraging history in this discouraging place.

  I’d seen the same sights in other river towns—broad, weed-clogged avenues lined with crumbling buildings; overgrown gardens given over to grunting, rooting, bellowing, and pissing goats, pigs, chickens, and geese; African families living like out casts among the tumbling porticoes of more of those once-pristine European mansions—the whole decrepit disassembling of an empire that meant nothing to most of Zaire’s indigenous inhabitants. Nothing, that is, except forced labor, forced religion, irrelevant education, cruel punishment, and perpetual poverty.

  You could sense it all here. All the horrors. That great cultural maw between the conquerors and the conquered. And you could sense Conrad’s “vengeful aspect,” the “implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.” The jungle returning, absorbing the crud of dead dreams; the people attempting to re-create the old traditions of village life in the abandoned shells of aborted colonialism.

  It was too much for me—the sparse, meager offerings at the outdoor market, beggars with wizened legs and arms, buildings still pockmarked by bullet holes, more slinking Uriah Heep types (no sketching or photography for me here), and the endless mud, tin, and cardboard slums surrounding a few last pockets of carefully nurtured Belgian bourgeoisdom. I had to get out. Fast.

  It was surprise time again. I managed to arrange a lift with a burly Belgian truck driver. Jan spoke a French dialect I couldn’t understand and only limited English, but he seemed the silent type anyway, content to play heavy metal tapes, smoke terrible cigarettes, and drink freely from his cargo of beer. His destination was the same as mine—Beni—four hundred miles or so to the east in the Ruwenzori foothills along what I’d been assured were undoubtedly the worst roads anywhere in the world. “But,” an informant in Kisangani had told me, “you’ll be passing through one of the most wonderful primeval forests on earth—the Ituri. No one has any idea of the things to be found in there—trees, birds, animals, insects—thousands of species never seen or recorded.” This was a bonus I hadn’t expected. How wonderful? I wondered. Will I be tempted to dally awhile? Will I ever reach Ruwenzori?

  At first the road had a semblance of surface on it. The red mud and dust had congealed into a passable if corrugated track and we passed by areas o
f low scrub and tiny gardens of manioc, fruit trees, and maize. A few ambitious locals had strung up unappetizing selections of dead forest animals for sale on long strands of vines: bush rats, monkeys, hyraxes, bats, and fat porcupines, their once-upright quills now hanging down in black and gold cascades, covering their heads.

  “They good meat,” Jan said as we barreled along. “You want?”

  Normally I might have accepted the offer, but in that early, sticky morning the invitation lacked appeal.

  “No. Thanks, Jan, I’m fine for now.”

  He handed me the first of countless beers. “This best for breakfast!”

  After a few miles we left traces of Kisangani far behind and entered the tall, dark forest. It crowded in on us at the side of the track and formed a high cathedral-like ceiling above us. Intricate weaver bird nests hung like huge suspended raindrops from the trees. Large yellow and turquoise butterflies tumbled among the wildflowers at the edge of the gloom, a few dying ignominious deaths on our windshield. I picked one off. Its wingspan was over five inches and patterned in an intricate filigree of curled black lines like a Dubuffet artwork. And the lines themselves were patterned in microscopic white dots, some of which had even tinier black centers. Why so much detail? Why such richness and complexity of design? Was it for mutual identification, or camouflage? Surely the tiny white dots—some hardly larger than a pinprick—would be indistinguishable while the butterfly was in flight. Was it merely accident—a genetic exercise in Pollock-randoming? I looked more closely. No, it couldn’t be that. The dots had distinct micropatterns, a kind of evenly spaced zigzag along the black bands, which themselves were less than a sixteenth of an inch wide. And I knew that if I put this wing under a microscope I’d see even more intricately designed subpatterns and, under an electron microscope, a whole new level of aesthetic delights—all as exactingly articulated.