Lost Worlds (7 page)

“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 of 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.

Was it all for the pure delight of a cosmic mind? The Creator rejoicing in the details of his own creation? “God in the details?”

I’ve used that Mies van der Rohe phrase so often, particularly in my one-time career as urban planner and architect-collaborator. We knew all too well what it meant in those days. We knew how the grand design of a hotel lobby or an office tower boardroom could be compromised by inappropriate door handles or even something as apparently insignificant as the precise shade and texture of the grouting on a vast tile floor.

But the phrase has developed other meanings in my travels. As I see and touch unfamiliar leaves, animals, tree barks, insects—yes, and butterflies—I am amazed not only by the rampant variations of such creations (more than twenty thousand different species of beetles, for example, on earth today!) but how each one is a complete and whole design solution in itself, right down to the juxtaposition of cells and ultimately, I suppose, molecules. Each infinitely small hair on the leg of a pepper-grain-sized flea has more construction specifications than the most sophisticated of automobile engines.

“You like them?” Jan asked as I stroked the soft-textured brilliant blue wing of the dead butterfly.

“Yes—they’re beautiful. I was just thinking—”

“Too many. Make mess!” he snapped and turned on the windshield wipers to scrape off the residue of their broken bodies.

It would be too difficult to explain what I was thinking. So I drank my breakfast beer and celebrated silently, amazed once again by the incredible wholeness and wonder of each smidgen of life around us.

We passed through small ragtag roadside villages consisting mainly of mud and thatch huts. Descendants of the Bantu tribe, dressed in an odd assortment of logo T-shirts and bright kanga cloth wraps, sat in the shade of mango trees, pounding and cooking manioc, the staple diet of rural areas. They were friendly and so were we. Lots of mutual waving as we bounced by.

After about fifty miles the track began to show signs of severe wear. Sections of it had collapsed and slid off into valleys that appeared between the forest scrub. We passed occasional remnants of overturned trucks that had tumbled off the road and into the trees below.

“In rains. Very bad. Sometimes two, three weeks to Beni,” Jan said, puffing on a never-ending chain of cigarettes.

“Three weeks to cover four hundred miles!”

“Sometimes never arrive!” He laughed and pointed to yet another scavenged truck in the half-light of our tunnel-like track. “Holes in road big…” he tried to think of a suitable simile in English, “like elephant. Big like elephant! Truck go in. Splash. No truck. Go right under. Bye-bye.”

Once again I thanked my instincts for leading me here in December, supposedly one of Zaire’s dry seasons (although fierce rainstorms on the river had left me suspicious of such predictions).

“You think now is a good time for travel?”

He shrugged a big French shrug and opened another bottle of beer with his teeth.

I was getting used to French-style shrugs in Zaire. It was almost a national expression—silent but oh so full of meaning. In a country where few things work as they should, where petty anarchy seems to have replaced centralized bureaucracy, where nothing is what or where you expect it to be, a shrug is often the only answer to important questions and the only solution to most problems.

“When Belgium here, many good roads. One hundred and fifty thousand kilometers. All good.” Jan imitated the sound of a racing car and waved his hand to suggest the speed and evenness of the colonial highway system. “Now—” he jumped up and down in his seat to simulate the impact of the bumps and gashes in the roads (he didn’t need to. We were jumping up and down quite enough as it was. Involuntarily), “terrible!’

Another long silence, interrupted by the squeaks and bangs of the bouncing truck. I wondered how long it would be before our cargo of beer became a frothy chaos of broken bottles shooting their contents into the air like a grand fireworks extravaganza.

Jan eventually leaned over and whispered “Mobutu take all!” He’d obviously been waiting to tell me his secrets about this strange country, but why the whisper? Surely he didn’t think the truck was bugged! Nothing much else works here. Bugs certainly wouldn’t. But then again, almost everyone else I’d met who had something critical to say about the country or its much-feared leader tended to transform into a whispering, look-over-the-shoulder informant.

“He take everything. 1974. Belgian farms, shops, houses, cars—everything. Take and give to his family and friends. He say “This is for my people!” but people not get rich. Mobutu get rich. Big! All copper—all diamonds. All for Mobutu. He is very powerful. He say, ‘All people change names to native names. No more French or Belgian names.’ He say Zairois all part of ‘popular revolution movement.’ ‘We must all sacrifice things,’ he says, and then he takes all money and builds big palaces for him—for himself! Rich friends ride around in big cars—very fat and fancy—but no roads, nowhere to go! That’s Zaire—nowhere to go!”

I vaguely remembered testimony given to a congressional committee in the United States some time back in the early eighties by an exiled prime minister of Zaire. His tales of corruption made the antics of such masters of the art as Idi Amin, Noriega, and Marcos seem amateurish and unambitious by comparison. Hundreds of millions—some say as much as ten billion—of U.S. aid dollars, plus hefty slices of off-the-top loot from nationalized mining and import-export companies poured into Mobutu’s secret bank accounts and made him—unofficially, of course (that is, not to be found in the Fortune list)—one of the richest men on earth, outflanked only by the Sultan of Brunei and maybe America’s Sam Walton (late owner of Wal-Mart stores).