Lost Worlds Read online

  “What the hell….”

  I waited for a second scream. My mind whirled with possibilities, from the more modest—a frightened hiker behind me, challenged by a snake—to the plain outlandish—the return of Zaire’s notorious Simba terrorists, whose habit it had been to emit shrill shrieks before committing violent murders—or even the sound of one of their victims, horribly mutilated and dismembered before death!

  There was no second scream. And then I remembered that the tree hyrax, the tiny member of the elephant family with hooves for feet, was said to emit a pretty intense signature call when disturbed or alarmed.

  Was that what it was—that odd little anomaly of the animal kingdom? Or had it been human, as I’d first thought?

  Should I go back into the forest to find out, or…I chose the “or” alternative, grabbed my backpack, and set off up the trail at a pace that made me realize my weariness was a sham and I had amazing reserves of energy previously untapped.

  Fear does that.

  After twenty minutes of half running, half scrambling up slippery mud slopes I began to wonder if I’d made a serious mistake by not bringing a guide-porter with me. I’d still seen no sign of the German hikers far ahead of me and my backpack seemed much heavier at the height of nine thousand feet than it had at the starting point, around four thousand feet.

  To add insult to indecision, I had now left the forest behind and was entering a strange world of high bamboo groves, necktall nettles (a far more vicious sting than the relatively benign species back home), and vast open heaths of thick spongy moss bog. If I kept to the narrow trail I was safe, but the moss lured me with false paths ending abruptly in lichen-surfaced bogs that look firm-surfaced until I trod on them and watched them collapse like lumpy porridge. At one juncture I’d taken the wrong route and ended up thigh deep in a rotting morass of this peaty mud and dead vegetation. To make matters worse, the mists were becoming thicker, approaching pea-soup intensity in places.

  I was not a happy hiker. I tried a few bars of my marching song, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was mud-caked, cold, and a little frightened. This leg of my long journey to the Ruwenzori was not quite what I’d expected. In fact the whole thing was rapidly becoming a right royal screwup.

  Now I knew I should have hired a guide.

  Things went from bad to terrible. More dark, dank swaths of heather forest with snagging roots and eerie tentacles of beard moss dangling from the branches and brushing my face (memories of the old “Ghost Train” horrors of seaside fairs back home when invisible spider-webby threads would envelop my head in the blackness). There were infrequent delights too in the form of beautiful forest orchids and scarlet fuchsias hanging from the trees like fat bunches of grapes—but such sights seemed only to intensify the malevolent evil and danger of the place.

  One particularly nasty tangle of moss-shrouded roots grabbed my ankles and sent me sprawling into the slime of the trail. At first everything seemed fine: My backpack straps had held and nothing in my body seemed broken. But as I stood, a sear of pain shot up my right leg and my ankle felt to be on fire. Oh, boy—not that! Not a broken, or even a twisted ankle. Not in this place.

  I knew that if any damage was done, sitting down to rest would only increase the swelling. So I moved on slowly, hobbling, as the ankle throbbed and gave me fiery branding-iron shocks if I put too much pressure on it.

  I was exhausted and close to tears. I knew that even at the next base hut, Mahangu, I’d only be around eleven thousand feet—still six thousand feet below the peak of Mount Margherita. What to do? The ankle was obviously not broken, but I’d messed it up badly in the fall. If I turned back I could possibly reach the Kalongi hut by nightfall. If I kept on going I might be lucky enough to find the Germans at the Mahangu hut.

  I decided to cut myself a long bamboo walking staff and keep climbing.

  The remaining four hours of the day’s hike are better not remembered in detail. Even now, as I write, I find my mind merely giving me flashes of recollection—more ethereal bamboo groves bent by the winds, each delicate pointed leaf edged with silvered moisture; more grab-and-scratch heather trees; more moss bogs sprinkled with tiny white flowers. And everything sheened in a drizzly gray mist that soaked through my layered clothing, leaving me shivering and utterly miserable. When was I going to see those mystical mountains I’d come so far to explore and touch? If the mist persisted even during this so-called dry season, then what was the point of going on? Even reaching the summit would be a rather pathetic experience if I couldn’t at least enjoy vistas across central Africa. But on the other hand, I’d come too far to give up. The weather might improve…

  Only it didn’t.

  I staggered into the Mahangu hut at dusk to find it empty and as miserable as Kalongi. The only compensation was a generous pile of branches and twigs near the stove left behind presumably by the elusive Germans. I soon had a fire going, and in spite of the rapidly increasing cold I felt safe and warm, cocooned in my sleeping bag trying to eat another cardboard concoction of dehydrated fantasy food. The ankle had gotten through the rest of the day without further trauma; it was discolored and puffy, but the pain was muted.

  I fell asleep before finishing dinner.

  Things looked more promising on the morning of the third day. The mists had lifted—not far enough to expose the summits, but I could look back the way I’d come and be amazed by the power and majesty of the scene. Huge serrated granite ridges, deep clefts and gorges, broken cliffs and screes, and those deep tangled forests and emerald green moss bogs—a splendid riot of scenery. Even if I stayed here and went no farther I’d enjoy a semblance of satisfaction.

  No, you wouldn’t, my adventurer voice informed me. You’d know you failed.

  So I kept on going.

  The ankle complained a little, especially when I squeezed its swollen components into my damp boot. But it responded well to a tentative stroll around the hut. I’d been lucky. It could have been a lot worse. I was going to make it to the top after all!

  The trail began the same way it had ended the previous evening. More snarled roots and mud slides and boggy patches. I discarded my bamboo walking staff, now badly cracked, and cut a fresh one.

  The sun began to appear in patches and the mists lifted even higher as I entered one of the strangest regions of the Ruwenzori. I’d heard about it from a couple of world wanderers I’d met on the riverboat but never expected to find such an other-planet environment.

  There were no trees now, just great upward sweeps of moss and high-elevation grasses. But rising out of this relatively benign surface was a Hollywood film set for a days-of-the-dinosaurs fantasy movie. Enormous twenty-foot-high versions of the familiar ankle-high lobelia surged like fiery spears into the clearing sky; equally tall groups of triffidlike groundsels and senecios, crowned with thick cabbagelike rosettes of leaves, rose on ancient thigh-thick trunks encased in the dead and rotting layers of previous “crowns.” The chill breezes made these creatures sway as if alive; their brittle appendages rattled like skeleton bones.

  Scattered between these enormous freaks of nature were large golden-tinged mounds of moss that had surged unchecked over long-dead and fallen groundsels. Other, less familiar plants filled in the spaces—bushes with fat spongy leaves and thin candlelike flowers, tall shrubs that felt like latex foam, great swaths of ferns and bracken bathed in mist-moisture, and, in the clefts of distant cliffs, what looked like giant gorse bushes sprinkled with bright lemon flowers.

  An alien, magical place.

  I sat on a lichen-covered rock and gazed around in open-mouthed awe. The expression “lost world” took on new, fresh meanings here. I gave thanks that my ankle had held up and that I hadn’t been forced to turn back the previous day. To have missed this experience would have been one of the greatest disappointments of all my lost world odysseys.

  There are sound scientific reasons for the profusion of such unique species in this very high environment—a lack of competitive
forest, which allows plants to grow to previously unrecorded heights, supported by vast amounts of year-round rain, rich mineral soils, and unusually high levels of ultraviolet radiation. But such explanations in no way diminished the impact of just being here, touching these strange growths and experiencing the deep mysteries of this place.

  I arrived late in the afternoon at the third hut, Kiondo, and, once again, found the place empty. My energy seemed boundless. The day’s walk up through the “pterodactyl territory” had been relatively easy, with no mishaps. The mist had vanished, the sun was shining, and the high clouds were lifting off the peaks. Maybe at last I’d see what I’d been hoping to see for days—the summits of the Ruwenzori.

  A path meandered away from the hut to the ridge of Musswa-Messo, a mere five hundred feet or so higher up. I was already at fourteen thousand feet and it looked like an easy stroll. According to my map I’d be able to get a much better view of the mountains from that vantage point, so I left my backpack in the hut by the stove and set off up the springy moss-flecked ground singing my walking song.

  And I had it all.

  As I scrambled up the last few feet to the grassy summit, the remaining shards of cloud slid off the peaks and there they were: Mount Stanley, Mount Margherita, and the other peaks; the enormous Stanley glacier, cracked and broken and blinding white; the appropriately named Lac Vert and Lac Noire nestled in their mountain bowls; and, far below, the great swaths of giant lobelia, seneca, and groundsel I’d hiked through earlier in the day. The vista was incredible—ice-etched ridges, the broken frost-shattered pyramids and pylons of granite pinnacles, snowfields as smooth as cake icing—all backdropped by a searing cobalt-blue sky.

  In places where the Stanley glacier had cracked to reveal the interior of its two-hundred-foot-thick ice pack, I could make out the precise layerings of the seasonal ice accumulations, some divided by dark bands of soot and windblown charcoal carried to those heights during gigantic bush fires on the western plains of Zaire and the Congo.

  It was getting colder as the sun eased down into the hazy plateau thousands of feet below, but I was reluctant to leave my aerie. This was exactly what I’d come to see—the splendor of Africa’s most mysterious mountains. The discomforts of the cold hut were meager enticements. I remained where I was, silent and happy.

  And tomorrow I’d try for the summit of Margherita. Up the long rock walls, across the ice fields, to touch the 16,763-foot peak. It looked so close. So accessible. It was all waiting for me. Worth every one of the terrors and tribulations of the long journey from Kinshasa.

  But fate works in odd and often unkind ways. Coming down from Musswa-Messo I was so entranced by the evening clarity of the scene and the soaring perfection of the peaks, I forgot that I was still on dangerous ground, slick with mud and littered with loose rocks.

  The fall came so suddenly I hardly noticed it. One moment I was gazing at the glacier, the next I was flat on my back in the mud and scree with my ankle—my right ankle again—badly twisted and sending those now-familiar spears of pain up my leg and thigh.

  Goddamn it! I’d done it again. Further damaging the already weak joint. And this time I knew it was more than a mere bruising. Something felt very wrong. If it wasn’t broken I’d certainly torn tendons and Lord knows what else. My left elbow had also taken a hell of a knock on a piece of jagged granite and my lower arm and fingers felt numb.

  Much later, after hopping down the few hundred feet to Kiondo hut, I lit a fire, removed my boots, wrapped the now-blue and swollen ankle in tight elastic bandages, and cooked another tasteless dehydrated dinner. I then swallowed a cluster of aspirins and tried to sleep.

  But fate hadn’t finished with me yet.

  During the night a rainstorm began and a furious howling of cold winds blew the pouring water right through the smashed windows. Sleep was impossible and, although my waterproof sleeping bag gallantly kept me dry, my mood descended to pitlike depths. The ankle throbbed and gave me those branding-iron burns every time I tried to move it to a more comfortable position. Swigs of whiskey-Zairois had no impact on the pain or my increasing depression.

  The early morning light merged with the miasma of the scene. Except there was no scene, really. It was just fog. Wafting masses of the stuff. Blowing through the windows in wraithlike curlicues and billowing about outside the hut.

  The lukewarm coffee tasted like mud. I ate the last of my chocolate and mint cake in the hope of releasing some latent energy. My mood only worsened. I’d been shown all that was before me—so close, so tangible—only to have it whisked away like a dream. To climb farther was obviously impossible; even to descend was highly questionable with an ankle as fragile as a feather.

  I hit the bottom of the spiritual barrel and began to wallow in surges of self-pity and self-recrimination.

  Then—voices. Faint at first, then louder. Shouts, laughs, cheers. A lot of people, by the sound of it.

  And a lot of people it was—four red-cheeked, dripping wet bronzed faces peering at me through the open doorway, and behind them a bunch of black faces with foreheads covered by the burlap straps of loads on their shoulders and backs.

  “Ah—guten morgen!” A giant of a man beamed at me in my sprawled state by the smoldering fire. Everyone else smiled too. The elusive German climbers had finally turned up and I began to feel better immediately.

  And better still, because they replenished the fire, made fresh coffee, and handed me slabs of salami and bread and strong cheese, and told me tales in broken English of the terrors they’d experienced on the higher slopes when they’d attempted to make the climb that morning from the final hut. Blizzards like they’d never known before, even in the Austrian Alps; two of the party almost lost over an ice fall; winds that blew them off their feet even when they weren’t moving.

  They had decided to abandon the climb and get down to the lower huts as soon as possible. Their guides had told them it would get much worse and by the look of the fog outside I agreed with them.

  One of the climbers inspected my ankle with long physician’s fingers and declared it badly sprained but possibly adequate for the hike down if I avoided any more falls. He bound it up again tightly in fresh bandages and helped me squeeze it into my boot.

  Half an hour later we were on our way down, moving through the mists that made the giant lobelias and groundsels look even more ominous and otherworldish. I was dreading the tangles of the heather forests, but the climbers had appointed one of the porters as my personal guardian and physical support on the rougher slopes.

  For much of the way the pain and discomfort of the ankle focused my mind on the trail. I was hardly aware of anything except the nature of the ground directly in front of me. Every root and rut was noted and avoided. On the more difficult stretches I leaned on my porter with my arm around his shoulder. He seemed amused by the familiarity. Maybe even pleased that he’d been able to relinquish his heavy pack for the relative ease of supporting this weary, pain-wracked wanderer. I taught him some of the lines to my marching song and we sang it together in terrible disharmony as the downhill trail went on and on and on….

  The next day, back in Beni, I treated the four Germans to the closest thing to a slap-up dinner my modest hotel could provide. Not a memorable feast but certainly a memorable celebration of their concern and kindness.

  They were as disappointed as I that we’d not made the summit of Margherita, but, after downing more than our sensible share of Primus beers and glasses of whiskey-Zarois, we peered out of the grubby windows in the evening light and laughed ourselves daft at the view.

  Zaire had won. For a few brief tantalizing moments Mount Stanley and all the other peaks sparkled brilliant gold and orange in the setting sun, ice fields flashing, ridges outlined in silver…then they slowly vanished again back into their cloud cocoon. A final ironic reminder of our mutual failure. Only our laughter outlasted the brief sighting as we all realized we were content just to have been here and to have shared the vis
ions of this strange and magnificent—if occasionally malevolent—place.

  2. VENEZUELA’S LOS LLANOS

  Exploring Infinities

  It was all the fault of a novelist who couldn’t make up his mind what to write next.

  In 1927, around about Easter, Rómulo Gallegos was wandering South America in search of inspiration for his next book. He was a restless, impetuous man constantly starting projects and then abandoning them in favor of new ideas. But he found abundant grist in Venezuela, where citizens are full of tales and the country itself is an incendiary catalyst of inspiration. The scenery is remarkably diverse—from the uncrowded white sand beaches of the Caribbean coast and islands and the great sprawling delta of the Orinoco to the frost-shattered peaks of the high Andes and the mysterious “lost worlds” of the Gran Sabana, where hundreds of vertical-sided mountains (tepuis) rise like unearthly totems out of the trackless Amazonian jungle.

  Gallegos was boggled by options. His publisher was restless. Two manuscripts lay stranded in midinspiration. He was not a happy man.

  Until he met the llanero—a cowboy of the plains.

  Now, llaneros love to talk. Any subject will suffice, but one close to their hearts is their homeland, Los Llanos, a vast six-hundred-mile-long by two-hundred-mile-wide plain in the heart of Venezuela occupying almost a third of the nation. The southern part, drained by the slow-flowing Apure and Arauca rivers, is the wildest part of the Llanos. The land has many of the features—or rather, nonfeatures—of the sprawling grasslands of Brazil’s Pantanal and the Argentina pampas. To call the region flat is like calling a Lamborghini a car. It is one of the flattest places on earth. Beyond a few scraggly hummocks (matas) of mapora palms and araguaneys (Venezuela’s national tree), the eye scours the horizons for any sign of variations in the unremitting horizontality. A little less rain and the place would be a desert stretching out to hazy infinities in every direction. But it does rain. Incessantly, between May and November, turning the plain into an enormous shallow lake. Birds flock here by the millions. Some leave at the onset of the dry season, but most remain, making Los Llanos one of the earth’s most important breeding reserves and a hot spot on ornithologists’ maps. Well over 250 species make their homes here, not to mention the alligators, capybaras (almost hunted to extinction when the Catholic church announced that, as the creature could swim, it could be eaten on “fish Fridays”), foxes, peccaries, agoutis, anteaters, tapirs, howler monkeys, ocelots, coati, wild boars, anacondas, and even the elusive jaguar.