Lost Worlds (10 page)

Maybe I even dozed off. Perhaps I was more tired than I realized. Later on I was vaguely aware of hands lifting me and helping me across the clearing toward one of the huts. I think I tried to protest. I felt like staying where I was, lying under the high canopy of dark forest trees, but a hut seemed to have been requisitioned for my use and the last I remember was slipping down onto hard-packed earth and fading off into sleep with the soft cooing of voices all around me….

Dawn sounds and smells awoke me. The screech of Columbus monkeys, birds declaring territorial boundaries in the treetops, the aroma of rekindled fires, the hum of women’s voices, the click and patter of falling leaves and pods from the buo trees. I peeped out of my small domed hut through which light trickled in thin shafts between the dried leaves of the thatch. On the fringe of the clearing I saw profusions of flowers—tiny pink blossoms like impatiens, gloriosa lilies, streams of mauve hibiscus blossoms, and what looked like a substantial patch of six-foot-high marijuana plants.

Two little girls saw my bearded white face emerge and ran away screaming in a combination of terror and delight.

One of my friends of yesterday came over and smilingly indicated that it was time to return through the forest to the truck.

I nodded and smiled back. How could I explain that I really didn’t want to leave? That I’d like to stay a few more days and see more of the dancing and learn more about their lives, their hunting, their customs. But I knew that it wouldn’t be fair to Jan. Even though he was a self-contained man and used to long periods alone on the road, we had established an amicable bond and I knew that if I didn’t return he’d more than likely come looking for me.

So—I had to leave. But not before I’d been invited to share a bounteous pygmy breakfast of honeycomb chunks dripping with sweet nectar gathered the previous day from a nearby bee colony. The sugar surged through me like a drug, filling me with energy and eradicating all the sloth and weariness of last night.

I thanked the women for their kindnesses, the young man for his dance, and the children for their morning smiles. Then I was off again with my three friends, back through the green-blue light of the cool forest, back to the road, back to my Beni-bound schedule.

Although I could discern no actual trail through the forest, we arrived a couple of hours later at exactly the same spot where I’d been introduced to bangi the day before. There was the truck and there was Jan finishing off the repairs.

He greeted me as if nothing peculiar had happened. As if my stroll into the hidden forest world of the Ituri pygmies was the most obvious way for me to spend my time while he was gone.

I found a few gifts in my backpack for my friends—a metal comb, a pack of cigars, and a Swiss army-style knife. They offered me a wad of bangi wrapped in green leaves. Jan nodded that I should accept, so I did and later, much to his delight, gave it to him. We said brief farewells. I turned to see if I could find some more chocolate for them, but they vanished. Zap. They were gone. I peered into the dark forest and listened for the sound of departing feet. Nothing. They disappeared as quickly and quietly as they had come.

Much as I loved the forest and its deep silences, I was ready for open spaces again. And colder air; how I longed to breathe long, heady lungfuls of cold air. It seemed weeks since I had actually enjoyed the pleasures and the brain-calming effect of long inhalations and exhalations. On the river particularly, the air had often seemed old, used, stagnant. The slight breezes of morning and evening were always so short-lived. In the torpid heat of the day and night I always seemed to be out of breath. The air had felt far too thick to reach deep into the tissues of my lungs and tickle my capillaries. My brain had felt oxygen-starved and sluggish. My body had felt sluggish and old.

But we were definitely climbing now and the road was better. Still terrible, of course—cracked, potholed, and corrugated, but free of those huge mud holes which, in the rainy season, can hold up convoys of trucks for weeks and even, as Jan had told me, swallow up smaller vehicles into their pernicious bogs.

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:

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 thousand 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.”