Lost Worlds Read online

  The forest thinned out. The carefully layered profiles of vegetation became more anarchic—a rampant battle for air and light. The ordered hierarchy of plants and trees I had seen in the Ituri now became ragtag tangles of greenery, broken by small BaLese tribal farms and cleared sections and sinewy swaths of savanna. The air was cooling too as we climbed laboriously toward a high plateau.

  Suddenly, after negotiating a steep incline up through the last fringes of forest, we emerged on a broad grassy plain, and there they were! The magnificent Ruwenzoris—looking so close and so tactile I felt I could almost leap out of the truck, bound across the bouncy grass, and start my ascent immediately. Knifing through their almost perpetual cloud cover, a series of purpled peaks patterned with flashing snowfields and glaciers rose up into a perfect blue sky.

  I’d been waiting for this moment for so long. Even Jan, who’d seen these same vistas many times before on his interminable drives along this hell highway, stopped his incessant cigarette puffing, rolled his truck to a standstill, and sat staring at them, smiling. We climbed out of the cab and strolled a short distance up the track. After the incessant growl and churn of the diesel engine and the endless racket of his heavy-metal tapes, there was nothing now but silence. A pure silvered silence and cool winey air, which I sucked down in great breaths. A few scarlet-winged butterflies fluttered and flashed over the dusty scrub at the roadside. Other than that there were no movements, no sounds anywhere. The plain rose slowly ahead of us to a jumble of grassy and forest-free foothills, and then came enormous surges of gray-blue granite cliffs, arêtes, and ridges rising through clouds to those sharp sparkling peaks.

  It had been worth all the agonies and angst of the journey so far just to see this.

  But I knew there was to be more—much more. The adventure had hardly begun. In the shadowy clefts and high valleys of those mountains were some of the strangest places on our planet. Life-forms and gigantic hybrid plants to be found nowhere else on earth. One of our most mysterious lost worlds. A place I had waited twenty years to explore and touch. A place that was showing itself to me in a splendor I had hoped for but never expected. I was high and happy. I grasped Jan’s hand and shook it. He laughed and slapped my shoulder.

  “So—you like?” he shouted.

  “Absolutely bloody marvelous!” I replied, and we broke out more beer to celebrate the occasion and toast those oh-so-splendid mountains.

  While Beni was yet one more faded, jaded Zairois town, at least it had a transitory cosmopolitan air due to the large numbers of truckers and merchants from Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda who used this place as a transit and trading center. The large market plaza was a redolent hum of smells, noise, and activity, but it was too hot to dally there.

  Jan decided to make his delivery and head back to Kisangani the same day, not even pausing to enjoy a night on the town among the ramshackle beer joints and the painted ladies. I thanked him with a few gifts from my backpack and went off for a night of luxury at a hotel with running (cold) water and a restaurant of sorts. An air-conditioner stuck in the cracked window of my room overlooking the main street looked as if it had never cooled anything in years. I banged it, kicked it, and finally took the cover off to find it had no working parts inside. Just a rusty metal box. A symbolic relic of fine ambition leached of life—not unlike Zaire itself. It was hot, so I showered again and let the water evaporate by itself with the window open until the flies and noise and smell of roaring trucks on the streets set my teeth on edge. With the windows closed and the remnant of a torn curtain pulled across, I finally faded into sleep, bathed in sweat.

  I’d planned on spending a couple of days resting up for the trek into the mountains, but after that one night in Beni I realized I’d probably regenerate my energy far better in the mountains away from this nonentity of a town.

  Part III—Into The Mountains of the Moon

  Early in the morning, after a hasty breakfast of eggs and stale bread, I bought some provisions for the hike ahead and walked to the truck terminal to find a lift to the starting point of the Ruwenzori trail. The clouds were much lower than yesterday and the mountains were hidden. Fickle creatures, I thought, although I’d been warned that for more than three hundred days a year they were cloud-covered, rain-lashed and snowbound, and even though I’d chosen the time of my arrival here carefully to coincide with the “dry season,” there were no guarantees of basking in the kind of vistas I’d enjoyed with Jan the day before.

  “Don’t weaken,” I told myself as the fifth effort to cadge a lift failed. “You’ve made it this far. You can only keep going.”

  Finally I paid a small fee in U.S. dollars to the driver of a small van (“Dis tin’ you askin’ is not law. Much trouble with police. Give me cadeau—gift—five dollars. American.” We settled on three.) And off we bounced, leaving Beni behind in a trail of pink dust.

  We climbed steadily toward a rock-strewn pass and one of those African vistas that makes your mind go all gooey and your heart skip an alarming number of beats. This continent always amazes me by its size, just as it has amazed every other explorer and writer. You can never really grasp its scale. The view before me was of sinewy rivers, shards of hazy forest, lakes, small farms and villages, great slashes of red earth looking like fresh tiger scratches on exposed flesh, and roll after roll of Ireland-green foothills brightened by recent rains and soft valleys, some resembling the dales of Yorkshire (without the drystone walls), others more reminiscent of Appalachian “hollers.” The scene seemed vast, endless. Yet as I defined its dimensions on my now-tattered map I saw it was a mere pinhead of printed paper against the enormity of the African landmass. An insignificant, irrelevant semi-quaver of space lost in the grand symphony of mountains, deserts, forests, swamps, airy plateaus, river basins, and more than sixteen thousand miles of coastline from the “Skeleton Coast” of Namibia to the bleached beaches of Morocco and Tunisia, to the empty desolation of Somalia’s Benadir and the rugged mountain-bound bays of South Africa.

  That’s another reason why the Ruwenzori had drawn me for so long. It was the wonder expressed in the writings of early explorers that made me think of this region as the epitome of all things African—huge, inaccessible, and full of secrets. You can sense this spirit in Henry Stanley’s words when, at his camp at Lake Albert in Uganda in 1888, the clouds pulled back for a brief period and revealed a vision never before recorded by a white man:

  A peculiarly-shaped cloud of a most beautiful silver color, which assumed the proportions and appearance of a vast mountain covered with snow, drew all eyes and every face seemed awed…for the first time I was conscious that what I gazed upon was not the image or semblance of a mountain but the solid substance of a real one.

  He had found Ptolemy’s “Mountains of the Moon,” and although he never climbed them (Lougi Amadeo di Savoia, Duke of Abruzzi, was the first white to ascend and map the Ruwenzori in 1906), Stanley carried that magnificent vision with him to his death in 1904. “It was perhaps the most wondrous moment in all of my African journeys,” he wrote to a close friend.

  I expected nothing less for myself.

  But this time the clouds failed to lift as they had done the previous day. As I unloaded my backpack at a small straggle of huts by the roadside and set off along the narrow trail to base camp in the foothills, I prayed that the weather would improve and that I’d be given that chance I’d waited for so long, to touch the summit of Mount Margherita (the 16,763-foot peak on Mount Stanley), the third highest peak in Africa—and by far the most splendidly profiled. There are eight separate peaks here altogether in an area of seventy by thirty miles, including Mount Speke and Mount Baker, all around 16,000 feet, but Margherita was the one I wanted to conquer.

  Unlike the volcanic cones of Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, the Ruwenzori are relatively recent granite peaks thrown high above the African plains by tectonic plate movements less than two million years ago along the vast Great Rift Valley to the east, which stretches four th
ousand miles from the Jordan Valley deep into Zimbabwe. The intrusion of these enormous upended Archean massifs into the atmosphere creates a sudden updraft of western air flows laden with moisture from the soggy Congo basin, resulting in an annual precipitation on their slopes of almost seven feet, much in the form of blizzards and ice storms across the summits. Swamps and bogs on the lower slopes, glaciers and icefields higher up (striated with crevasses), and treacherous walking and climbing conditions are characteristics of this region. I had pitons for my boots and some warm clothing, but this was another of my solo ventures and I was not equipped for long grapplings with a bare and frozen mountain.

  I stayed that first night in a pleasant little guest house surrounded by scrub jungle and was told by the elderly black man who brought my dinner of manioc and pork that a party of four Germans had passed through earlier in the day and would be well on their way to the second camp at Kalongi hut.

  That’s okay, I thought, I prefer to have the mountain to myself. But then the next morning the interminable Zairois tangle began. A young man in a shabby uniform approached and announced that a string of “new regulations” had just been decreed by the government. I’d had my fill of “new regulations” back at Lisala and this time I was ready.

  “You must take guide and porter,” he said, staring at me with that mix of Zaire humor and anger which only made him look confused.

  “I don’t want a guide or a porter.”

  “To Mount Stanley, very difficult. Five, six days up-down. You must have.”

  Then he told me the going rates. I could have hired ten Nepalese porters for the price and was loath to part with more U.S. dollars for cadeaux—gifts. Especially for something I didn’t need. So I lied.

  “I’m with the German party—the four Germans, y’know, who left yesterday. I have to walk quickly to reach them.”

  He looked even more confused.

  “Also I am a writer.” I showed him a rather ragged copy of one of my earlier books and pointed to my photograph on the dust jacket. He studied it carefully. Then I played the final card. “Look, I must hurry. I need good photographs. This is for very important American magazine.”

  He was totally perplexed.

  Time to go. I heaved on my backpack and walked away as quickly as I could, squelching and splashing through the muddy earth, soaked by early morning drizzle.

  He called out, but I could tell his heart wasn’t really in it. I’d got what I wanted. I was off—alone—into these mysterious mountains.

  A couple of hours later I was less certain of my decision. The terrain was difficult now; the neat little patchwork fields of manioc, bananas, and maize were far behind and I climbed upward through eight-foot-high pennisetum “elephant” grass and spray-topped papyrus. Then the forest closed in, leaving me a narrow muddy trail and a tunnel through the tangle of lianas, aerial roots, strangled vines, and groping branches. Familiar-looking ferns reached eight feet into the thick humid gloom, and beard moss, similar to the Spanish moss found on the swamp cedars and live oaks of Deep South United States, hung over the trail in long tentacled strands. I felt as if I were a child in a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids kind of world. A world of recognizable plants that had suddenly become giant-sized. Familiar, yet threatening.

  And then came the great tree ferns. I was suddenly back in a picture-book scenario of precoal-age earth when dinosaurs roamed and pterodactyls flew and these enormous thirty-foot-high specimens with dark trunks and winglike leaves filled the wet forests and swamps. I welcomed the hummingbirds and the gold and amber butterflies that bounced through the rare shafts of sun—at least they were of recognizable size. Even the occasional tiny lizards and little mold-green snakes that crossed my trail were reassuring signs that some things were still as they should be in this peculiar place. I looked for the Ruwenzori’s unique three-horned chameleon and those yard-long earthworms but saw nothing except vast armies of soldier ants on the move through the half-light. I wondered if I might come across one of Zaire’s famous gorilla families, but I knew their Djomba sanctuary was way to the south. Two large white and black monkeys gave a fine display of very ungorilla acrobatics and then vanished screaming into the forest.

  I was in a region of deep gorges and gullies. Occasionally views would open up between the hagenias, giant orchids, and gloriosa lilies which sinewed themselves around the ferns, and I’d peer out across mist-shrouded clefts hundreds of feet deep. The higher parts of the mountains were, as I’d expected, lost in the clouds. In fact, I hadn’t seen anything of Mount Stanley since that sudden revelation before Beni. My role was just to keep walking and climbing and trust to luck that I’d finally reach a cloud-free summit.

  When I arrived at Kalongi base hut I was around seven thousand feet up on the slopes and the air was cool and refreshing. In spite of the mud and the tangle of the forest, I felt far less exhausted than I’d expected. Time to celebrate, I thought, but the hut itself was hardly appropriate for a hedonistic interlude. One broken bed, not a single window intact, missing floorboards, cobwebs of Ruwenzori scale, and abundant evidence of animal rather than human occupation. But there was a black sooted-encrusted stove which I crammed with scraps of branches and twigs and in five minutes had a blazing fire, hot enough to warm me and heat water for a dehydrated food supper. Hardly gourmet fare, but, as I hadn’t had a really decent meal in more than two weeks, my palate and stomach gleefully accepted curried shrimp and long-grain saffron rice despite its cardboard-and-paste taste.

  Night came quickly. I rolled out my foam rubber mat and waterproof sleeping bag, took a couple of swigs from my flask of whiskey-Zairois, and fell into a seamless sleep.

  It had obviously rained heavily during the early hours. I lay next to a pool of water at dawn and wondered why, if someone had gone to the trouble of constructing this hut, someone else couldn’t come along occasionally and patch up the roof and floorboards and windows. But then I remembered: This is Zaire and one learns not to expect Swiss Alps efficiency in these wild climes. At least I was dry. My faithful waterproof sleeping bag had resisted all onslaughts except a small reconnaissance team of ants that, sometime deep in the night, had bivouacked and feasted on my arms.

  Breakfast consisted of my always-effective Kendal Mint Cake and lukewarm tea loaded with sugar. Lots of energy stimulants but not really an ideal repast for what was to come on that second day of the climb.

  It began innocently enough. More of the same branch-and root-tangled forest—no, let me say it—jungle. Jungle seems to be a nonword in today’s environmentally correct dialogue, but forest is far too euphemistic here. This place was a ragged riot of vegetation, little resembling the finely tiered layers of a true rain forest. A free-for-all razzmatazz of trees, vines, creepers, ferns, roots, and flowering bushes. And a new addition. Heather trees. A species I’d only seen once before in the wild and cloud-bathed heights of Gomera, one of the least known of the Canary islands.

  Back home in Yorkshire, England, I was used to the benign, ankle-high surges of heather filling the moors of Brontë country and blossoming into a fall haze of tiny lavender flowers. But here in the Ruwenzori, everything was written large and heather grew into twenty-foot-high trees with distorted, writhing limbs, foot-snagging roots, and dense leaf canopies that turned day into dusk. Exciting, enticing, a fantasy of entrancing forms—but lousy hiking territory.

  I prayed I wouldn’t snap a leg. The idea of being helpless in this unearthly place set up a jangle in my head. How would I get down? Who—if anyone—would find me before the soldier ants had their way with me and left a pile of moldy bones and a backpack full of aluminum-packed dehydrated curiosities to be mulled over by morose Zairois officials?

  My mind was playing its tricks again. C’mon, I told myself. The brain saps energy quicker than anything. Seal it off. Compose a letter to Anne. Write a poem. Anything to suppress the silly yammer…. Invent a song and keep singing it! So I did (to a robust marching tune):

  (Chorus) Well—here I am just
a lonely man lugging my way through the trees. Now I know I am just a happy man Singing this song to the breeze….

  (Verse) Oh—it’s a new day again and I’m squelching through the rain ignoring the pain becoming insane whistling like a train feeling kinda’ vain ’cause I’ve nothing to gain from weepin’ like a drain or acting like a zane-y crazy man….

  (Chorus) So here I am….

  And it worked! God love us, it worked. I was fresh and frisky again as I fought with roots and branches, conquering the ridges and the mud holes and catching glimpses of mist-wisped canyons through infrequent gaps in the fervent foliage.

  Sometime around midafternoon I emerged from the forest onto a barren plateau of broken rock to find the sun shining spasmodically through gashes in the high cloud cover. I needed a break and sat down abruptly on a boulder to feast on more energy-giving mint cake.

  All was silence. The mists eased by in tattered strands, catching briefly in the tops of the trees. There were no sounds at all—no birds, no monkeys, no perpetual squelch of mud-caked boots, not even the sound of my own pumping heart and panting lungs. And once again came the mood that makes this kind of exploration so rewarding—the sense that I had the whole place all to myself and everything was just fine, in spite of my momentary weariness.

  The silence, alas, did not endure for long. In the middle of my mellowness came one of the most terrifying screams I have ever heard—a gut-wrenching cacophony of agony, fear, and anger all rolled into one violent pitch. It was both human and animal and echoed down the rocky clefts and up the fogbound granite cliffs of the mountains.