Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (151 page)

One at a time the Bambuti turned from him and disappeared back into the forest as silently as they had come, until only Sepoo remained.

“Because of what you have done the forest god will send the Molimo to us,” said Sepoo, and Pirri stood with despair in his heart and could not raise his head to meet his brother’s eyes.

Chapter 37

Daniel began a review of the videotapes as soon as they reached Gondola.

Kelly set aside a corner of her laboratory for him to work in and Victor Omeru hovered over him, making comments and suggestions as he compiled his editing notes.

The quality of the material he had gathered was good. As a cameraman he rated himself as competent but lacking the artistry and brilliance of somebody like Bonny Mahon. What he compiled was an honest sober record of the mining and logging operation in the Wengu forest reserve, and of some of the consequences.

“It has no human warmth to it,” he told Victor and Kelly at dinner that evening. “It appeals to reason, not to the heart. I need something more.”

“What is it you want?” Kelly asked. “Tell me what it is and I’ll get it for you.”

“I want more of President Omeru,” Daniel said. “You have presence and style, sir. I want much more of you.”

“You shall have me.” Victor Omeru nodded. “But don’t you think it is time we dispensed with the formalities, Daniel? After all, we have climbed the sacred honey tree together. Surely that entitles us to use each other’s Christian names?”

“I’m sure it does, Victor,” Daniel agreed. “But even you won’t be enough to convince the world. I have to show them what is happening to human beings. I have to show them the camps where the Uhali forced labour units are housed. Can we arrange that?”

Victor leaned forward. “Yes,” he said. “You know that I am the leader of the resistance movement to Taffari’s tyranny. We are growing stronger every day. At present it is all very much underground, but we are organising ourselves and recruiting all the most important and influential people who reject Taffari. Of course, we are mostly Uhali, but even some of Taffari’s own Hita people are becoming disenchanted with his regime. We will be able to get you to see the labour camps. Of course, you won’t be able to get into the camps, but we should be able to get you close enough to film some of the daily atrocities which arc being perpetrated.”

“Yes,” Kelly asserted. “Patrick and the other young resistance leaders will be arriving here within the next few days for a conference with Victor. He will be able to arrange it.” She broke off and thought for a moment. “Then there are the Bambuti. You can show your audience how the destruction of the forest will affect the pygmies and destroy their traditional way of life.”

“That’s exactly the type of material I still need,” Daniel replied. “What do you suggest?”

“The Molimo ceremony,” Kelly said. “Sepoo tells me that the Molimo is coming and he has agreed that you may witness it.”

Patrick, Victor Omeru’s nephew, arrived at Gondola a day earlier than was expected. He was accompanied by a retinue of a dozen or so Uhali tribesmen. The pygmies had guided them through the forest. Many of the delegation were also relatives of Victor Omeru, all of them educated and committed young men.

When Daniel showed them the tapes he had already filmed and described the material he still required, Patrick Omeru and his men were enthusiastic. “Leave it to me, Doctor Armstrong,” Patrick told him. “I’ll arrange it for you. Of course, there will be some danger involved. The camps are well protected by the Hita, but we’ll get you as close as is humanly possible.”

When Patrick and his men left Gondola, Daniel and Sepoo went with them. The two of them returned to Gondola nine days later. Daniel was thin and gaunt. It was obvious that they had travelled hard and unremittingly. His clothing was mud-stained and tattered and Kelly saw at once that he was near the point of exhaustion as he stumbled up on the verandah of the bungalow.

Without thinking she ran to greet them and the next moment they were in each other’s arms. It startled both of them. They clung to each other for a moment, but when Daniel turned his mouth down towards hers, Kelly broke away and shook his hand instead.

“Victor and I were so worried,” she blurted, but she was blushing a deep rose colour that Daniel found enchanting, and she released his hand quickly.

That afternoon, after Daniel had bathed and eaten and slept for two hours, he showed them the new material. There were sequences of the forced labour gangs working along the logging roads. They had obviously been filmed, from a distance with a telephoto lens.

The Hita guards stood over the gangs with clubs in their hands, and they struck out seemingly at random at the half-naked men and women toiling in the mud and slush below them. I’ve got much too much of this, Daniel explained, but I’ll edit it down, and keep only the most striking sequences. There were sequences of the gangs being marched in slow exhausted columns back to the camps at the end of the day’s work, and other shots, taken through wire, of their primitive living conditions.

Then there were a series of interviews, shot in the forest, with prisoners who had escaped from the camps. One of the men stripped naked in front of the camera and displayed the injuries that the guards had inflicted- upon him. His back was cut to ribbons by the lash, and his skull was crisscrossed with scars and half-healed cuts where the clubs had fallen.

A young woman showed her feet. The flesh was rotting and falling away from the bone. She spoke in soft Swahili, describing the conditions in the camp. “We work all day in the mud, our feet are never dry. The cuts and scratches on them fester like this, until we cannot walk. We cannot work.” She began to weep softly.

Daniel was sitting beside her on the log. He looked up at the camera which he had previously set up on a tripod. “This is what the soldiers in the trenches of France during’World War One called ‘trench foot’. It’s a contagious fungoidal infection that will cripple the sufferer, will literally rot his feet if it is not treated.”

Daniel turned back to the weeping woman and asked gently in Swahili, “What happens when you can no longer work?”

“The Hita say that they will not feed us, that we eat too much food and are no longer of any use. They take the sick people into the forest…”

Daniel switched off the VTR and turned to Kelly and Victor. “What you are about to see are the most shocking sequences I have ever filmed. They’re similar to the scenes of the Nazi death squads in Poland and Russia. Some of the quality might be rather poor. We were filming from hiding. It’s horrible stuff. You might prefer not to watch it, Kelly?”

Kelly shook her head. “I’ll watch it,” she said firmly.

“Okay, but I warned you.” Daniel switched on the VTR and they leaned forward towards the tiny screen as it flickered and came alive again.

They were looking into a clearing in the forest. One of the UDC bulldozers was gouging a trench in the soft earth. The trench was forty or fifty yards long and at least ten feet deep, judging by the way the bulldozer almost disappeared into it. Patrick was able to find out from his spies where they were doing this, Daniel explained. So we could get into position the night before. The bulldozer completed the excavation and trundled up out of the trench. It parked nearby. The shot was cut off. This next sequence is about three hours later, Daniel told them.

The head of a column of prisoners appeared out of the forest, chivvied on by the Hita guards on the flanks. It was apparent that all the prisoners were sick or crippled. They staggered or limped slowly into sight. Some were supporting each other with arms around the shoulders, others were using crude crutches. A few were carried on litters by their companions.

One or two of the women had infants strapped on their backs. The guards marched them down into the trench and they disappeared from sight. The guards formed up in a line on top of the excavation.

There were at least fifty of them in paratrooper overalls with sub-machine-guns carried on the hip. Quite casually they began firing down into the trench. The fusillade went on for a long time. As each paratrooper emptied his Uzi machine-gun, he reloaded it with a fresh magazine and recommenced firing. Some of the men were laughing.

Suddenly one of the prisoners crawled up over the bank of the pit. It was almost unthinkable that he could have survived this long. One of his legs was half shot away. He dragged himself along on his elbows. A Hita officer unholstered his pistol and stood over him and shot him in the back of his head. The man collapsed on his face and the officer put his boot against his ribs and shoved him over the lip of the trench.

One at a time the soldiers stopped shooting. Some of them lit cigarettes and stood in groups along the edge of the grave, smoking and laughing and chatting.

The driver of the bulldozer climbed back on to his machine and eased it forward. He lowered the blade and pushed the piles of loose earth back into the trench. When the excavation was refilled he drove the bulldozer back and forth over it to compact the earth.

The soldiers formed up into a column and marched away along the track they had come. They were out of step and slovenly, chatting and smoking as they went.

Daniel switched off the VTR and the screen went blank.

Kelly stood up without a word and went out on to the verandah of the bungalow. The two men sat in silence until Victor Omeru said quietly, “Help us please, Daniel. Help my poor people.”

The word went through the forest that the Molimo was coming, and the clans began to gather at the tribal meeting place below the waterfall at Gondola. Some of the clans came from two hundred miles away, across the Zaire border, for the Bambuti recognized no territorial boundaries but their own.

From every clan area and from every remote corner of the forest they came, until there were over a thousand of the little people gathered together for the terrible Molimo visitation.

Each woman built her leafy hut with the doorway facing the doorway of a particular friend or a close and beloved relative, and they gathered in laughing groups throughout the encampment, for not even the threat of the Molimo could quench their high spirits or dull their cheerful nature.

The men met old cronies and hunting companions that they had not seen since the last communal net hunt, and they shared tobacco and tall stories, and gossiped with as much relish as the women at the cooking-fires. The children squealed and ran unchecked amongst the huts, tumbling over each other like puppies, and they swam in the pool below the waterfall like sleek otter cubs.

One of the last to arrive at the meeting place was Pirri the hunter. His three wives staggered under the heavy sacks of tobacco they carried.

Pirri ordered his wives to build his hut with the doorway facing the doorway of his brother Sepoo. However, when the hut was finished, Pamba closed in the doorway of Sepoo’s hut and built another opening facing in the opposite direction. In Bambuti custom this was a terrible snub, and it set the women at the cooking-fires chattering like parrots at roosting time.

Pirri called to old friends, “See how much tobacco I have. It is yours to share. Come, fill your pouches. Pirri invites you, take as much as you wish. See here! Pirri has bottles of gin. Come drink with Pirri.” But not a man of all the Bambuti took advantage of the offer.

In the evening, when a group of the most famous hunters and story-tellers of the tribe were gathered around a single fire with Sepoo in their midst, Pirri came swaggering out of the darkness with a bottle of gin in each hand and elbowed a place for himself at the fire. He drank from the open gin bottle and then passed it to the man on his left.

“Drink!” he ordered. “Pass it on, so that all may share Pirri’s good fortune.” The man placed the untouched bottle on one side and stood up and walked away from the fire. One after the other, the men stood up and followed him into the darkness until only Sepoo and Pirri were left.

“Tomorrow the Molimo comes,” Sepoo warned his brother Softly, and then he also stood up and walked away.Pirri the hunter was left with his gin and his bulging tobacco pouch, sitting alone in the night.

Sepoo came to the laboratory to call Daniel the following morning, and Daniel followed him into the forest, carrying the camera on his shoulder. They went swiftly, for Daniel had by now learned all the tricks of forest travel, and even his superior height and size were no great handicap. He could keep up with Sepoo.

They started off alone, but as they went others joined them, slipping silently out of the forest, or appearing like dark sprites ahead or behind them, until at last there was a multitude of Bambuti hurrying towards the place of the Molimo.

When they arrived there were already many others before them, squatting silently around the base of a huge silk-cotton tree in the depths of the forest. For once there was no laughter nor skylarking. The men were all grave and silent.

Daniel squatted with them and filmed their sombre faces. All of them were looking up into the silk-cotton tree.

“This is the home of the Molimo,” Sepoo whispered softly. “We have come to fetch him.”

Somebody in the ranks called out a name. “Grivi!” And a man stood up and moved to the base of the tree. From another direction another name was called. “Sepoo!” And Sepoo went to stand with the first man chosen.

Soon there were fifteen men at the base of the tree. Some were old and famous, some were mere striplings. Young or old, callow or proven, all men had equal right to take part in the ceremony of the Molimo.

Suddenly Sepoo let out a shout and the chosen band swarmed excitedly up into the tree. They disappeared into the high foliage and for a time there was only the sound of their singing and shouting. Then down they came again, bearing a length of bamboo.

They laid it on the ground at the foot of the tree and Daniel went forward to examine it. The bamboo was not more than fifteen feet long. It was cured and dried out, and must have been cut many years before. There were stylised symbols and crude animal caricatures scratched on it, but otherwise it was simply a length of bamboo.