Lost Worlds (3 page)

“We believe the forest is part of the Golden Time,” the chief’s son told me, “a time of balance. The forest is our home, our pantry, a place for our medicines. Yet every year it is threatened. There have been so many plans to take our trees, make our islands into places for tourists, build roads through our forest, and bring cattle into the lowland along the coast.”

He went on to explain that after laborious petitioning of the government and with the help of U.S.-based institutions, the Cuna have so far managed to safeguard their sacred forests and maintain their traditional way of life. Western scientists now work with the tribespeople to study the ecological cycles of the Darien rain forest and the medicinal properties of plants unique to this region.

“You see,” the chief’s son told me, “there are many things in our forest which may help other people. We do not have to destroy it. We can live here. The balance can be kept.”

Hence my optimism. I believe we are beginning to learn to appreciate and maintain fragile balances. Also, in questioning many of our own modern-day mores, in realizing the complexity of the problems we have created for ourselves, and in looking again at the knowledge, cohesion, and balance of so-called primitive societies, we are becoming far less myopic in our thinking and possibly more modest about our once-bombastic sense of endless change and progress.

And a final reason for my optimism. The journeys undertaken for this book and its precursor (
The Back of Beyond: Travels to the Wild Places of the Earth
, HarperCollins, 1991) have made me realize just how wild and unexplored much of our planet remains. My wanderings through “lost worlds”—places seemingly untouched by the horrors of mindless decimation and the hyperbole of the “end-of-the-earth” doomsayers—reinforced my faith that we, and these places, will survive. Just to know that such “lost worlds” exist at all—untouched, unspoiled—is succor for the spirit of wonder in each one of us. It is my hope—my optimistic hope—that these journeys will help a little to rekindle that spirit and reinforce our efforts to maintain and protect the great wildernesses of our earth.

We are learning to tread softly in these secret places and to safeguard a world we barely comprehend. We are learning to accept its gifts gratefully, to take only what we need (and continually reexamine the need for these “needs”) and to hold its bounty in trust for the future. It is our world—our only home. We are the earth—and the earth is us.

And—last confession—I love it.

To the Mountains of the Moon

Just think about it. Soaring ice and glacier-wrapped peaks rising almost seventeen thousand feet out of the scrub, forests, swamps, and grasslands of lowland Zaire and Uganda. The third highest mountains in Africa. Vast, majestic, sky-scratching, cloud-smothered pinnacles in the middle of millions of square miles of unexplored, unmapped wilderness.

Henry Morton Stanley, the man who sought out the elusive Dr. Livingstone in 1871 and became the first European explorer to see this mystical mountain massif, called it just that—Ruwenzori. A simple Bantu expression meaning “hill of rain” or “rainmaker.” He recorded his sighting as:

Those two irascible wanderers Richard Burton and John Speke were convinced the Nile was born here. Burton referred to the massif as the “Lunatic Mountains” because of the old legends of men being driven to madness trying to seek them out in a region covered by clouds for most of every year. But the two men never proved their hypotheses to the satisfaction of the walrus-mustached, sideburned doyens of exploratory knowledge sipping their ports and brandies in the mahogany-and portrait-walled confines of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society.

The wonderfully foolish, courageous, desperate (and very erotic) expeditions of these two men merely added confusion and cartographical conflict to the neat-minded “Empire” protagonists in their sagging leather wing chairs.

“Nonsense!” they said.

“Wrong measurements,” they said.

“Let’s have another drink and toast the Queen,” they said.

And so two more “life must be more than this” exponents were dumped into the ash cans of dubious notoriety. Lives of soaring adventure ending in squalid squabbles, mutual backstabbing—and ignominious deaths.

The “Mountains of the Moon”! What an enticing prospect. A red rag to this wandering bull. Hidden in their almost perpetual cloud cover, they definitely exist. We know that from later, better-organized expeditions. But even Ptolemy guessed the presence of the “Lunae Montes” somewhere in the center of the continent. Aristotle referred to “a silver mountain” in the heart of Africa, and Aeschylus wrote of “the Gods’ great garden [the Nile Delta] fed by distant snows.”

The region is still a mysterious lost world today. People have vanished here, dying in blizzards, being swallowed up by moss bogs, or tumbling off the edge of ice-sheened precipices. French mountaineer Bernard Pierre described it “a place not of this planet.”

But it
is
on this planet and I had to see these peaks. Touch them. Trample over their glaciers and ice fields. Explore the strange foothills where familiar flowers and plants back home—heather, lobelia, groundsels, and ferns—grow into tree-sized specimens, where three-foot-long earthworms ease through mossy bogs, and where one of the oddest creatures on earth, the rock or tree hyrax (a rabbitlike member of the elephant family with hooves and a humanlike shriek) frolics in the always-wet gloom of fantasy forests seen nowhere else on earth. I had to come here and experience these hidden wonders in deepest central Africa for myself.

My destination was the town of Beni in eastern Zaire, couched on the lower flanks of these great Ruwenzori Mountains. However, I began my journey a long way from Beni, over eleven hundred miles to the west, in the capital city of Kinshasa (Leopoldville) on the great Zaire (Congo) River—the Amazon of Africa. Getting to the mountains presented experiences and challenges that, by themselves, could have filled a good half of this book.

Part I—Kinshasa to Kisangani by Riverboat

Chaos. Absolutely bloody, sweaty pandemonium.

I though I’d get there early. “Board at dawn,” an official of the riverboat told me. “Afterwards—all crazy!” Well—it was barely dawn. The sun was still below the horizon. And it was already crazy. Passengers—hundreds of them—tumbling across the docks, down metal plates that pretended to be a gangplank—goats, pigs, bundled chickens, caged monkeys, buckets full of vegetables and meat, baskets bulging and covered with sacks, women in bright flowery frocks carrying babies papoose-style, little children dragging even smaller children, an Indian merchant balancing twelve bound rolls of printed fabric on his head, three Bantu tribesmen manhandling an enormous trunk with brass padlocks and a Christmasy ornamentation of stickers and transit labels. And soldiers too—big fellows with angry faces and automatic rifles and a penchant for pushing and bawling at the churning, shouting, screaming mass.

I hardly had a chance to see the boat from the quay.
The General
something or other—a lopsided, low-in-the-water, rusty white five-deck creature pierced with tiny windows—mother to a flotilla of five even rustier barges strapped with frayed cables to its superstructure and to one another. Together they were easily the size of a football field. My ticket indicated I had a “to-share” cabin in the main vessel. Most of the crowd was surging farther forward into the shadows of the single-and double-deck barges. Over three thousand people were in there, I was told later, for our seven-hundred-mile, eight-day ride from Kinshasa to Kisangani (Stanleyville). I don’t know how many were in the main boat, but it felt like a floating palace compared to the stifling claustrophobia of the prisonlike rooms and passageways on those barges.

I found my room. Two bunk beds and a porthole encrusted with explosions of rust and black cobwebs. Couldn’t open it. Wouldn’t make any damned difference anyhow. Never been in a tiny space so hot before. Sweat pouring. Wanted to dump my pack but nobody around, no key, so dragged it back up on deck and sat in a small patch of shade, wondering what the hell I was going to do with myself for the next eight days.

Time passed very slowly in the sweltering heat. They’d said the boat would leave at ten
A.M.
It was now one
P.M.
and still no sign of departure. More shouting, desperate passengers—more goats and chickens. Finally a great blast of steam, whistles, gongs, and soldiers giving vent to their pent-up anger by dragging away two raggedly dressed men who tried to leap for the side of the boat as it creaked and sagged into the main channel of the river. Howls and yells from friends or family on board. Didn’t make a bit of difference. The soldiers had something to punch and pound at last. God—sometimes I hate Africa.

And then again, sometimes I don’t. Ten or more miles upstream, things settled down. People came out on the long veranda with stools and folding chairs; there was the chink of beer bottles, even the aroma of food being cooked somewhere deep in the growling bowels of this ungainly boat-barge conglomeration. A breeze too. And shade. Now we were getting civilized. Kinshasa was gone. Farewell, festering, unworkable city of four million. The locals call it Boubelleville—Trash Can City! A remarkably accurate description in spite of a patina of modernity in the form of broad boulevards and modest high rises. All for show, though. The truth lies beyond the gleaming towers.

The jungle was edging in. Miles and miles of it in all directions tumbling to a ragged halt along torn, timber-strewn shores. Might not be such a bad journey after all. The cabin was a hellhole, but what the heck, I would stay on the deck.

I was wondering if the sun was melting my brain. Couldn’t seem to focus on anything serious. All that noise and crush and panic had unloosed some idiot in my skull. I needed some relief. A beer first and then maybe someone to talk to.

“Hello.”

I looked up and saw a man about forty or so with graying hair, a lean face closely shaved, wearing a blue T-shirt and a crisply pressed pair of white safari shorts. (And carrying a generous supply of bottled beer.)

“I think you would enjoy a drink?”

I thanked him, maybe too profusely.

“May I sit with you?” he asked, and smiled.

“Please. I could do with some company.”

Paul was a French citizen who had lived in Zaire most of his adult life (“since I discovered African women”). After the normal introductory chitchat I asked him to tell me a little about this strange and mysterious country. Vaguely, from shards of schoolboy history, I remembered tales of atrocities and unbelievable cruelties inflicted on the Congo nation by Belgium’s King Leopold II. But Paul gave these tales flesh and blood. Too much blood.

“It was possibly the worst example of colonial rape ever inflicted on an indigenous people,” he said. “Even today I have friends in Belgium who will not talk—they refuse to discuss this period of their history. It is still hard for them to imagine such things as were done. I think they would prefer to forget. You see, Leopold was—ah, wait a minute—I am going too fast. Let’s begin with the Portuguese. One Portuguese man. A navigator, Diogo Cao, who discovered the Congo River in 1482. He thought it was just another bay and then found a river of such a size that it pushed out fresh water thirty, forty miles into the Atlantic. He could not understand a river of that enormity. We now know it is the fifth largest river in the world—almost five thousand kilometers long. Do you remember the others?”

I hadn’t expected the question and dredged my mind for the answers: “Er—the Amazon. Yes, certainly the Amazon. The Nile…the Mississippi, and…”

“The Yangtze, my friend. Never forget the Yangtze.”

“Right.”

“So—Signor Cao met the people—the Bakongo tribe—and sailed upriver as far as the Caldron of Hell—a very difficult part of those rapids that fill the last four hundred kilometers of the river below Kinshasa—the old Leopoldville. The things he offered them—gifts, education, the world’s most powerful religion, and personal friendship with King John of Portugal—seemed to please the Bakongo King, Nzinga, and what happened in the early fifteen hundreds was possibly one of the best relationships between an African and a European nation. We French—the British, the Spanish—we all had our dreams of riches and power, but Portugal for a while—well, they seemed happy just to convert, educate, and help the development of the Congo without destroying it.”

“That didn’t last too long, though. Not from what I understand.”

“Well—you are so right. Portugal became greedy—they saw how rich all the other colonial powers were becoming—and they joined the slave trade. And other things too. Then the Arabs moved in from the Middle East. Other countries got involved. Many of the native kingdoms were destroyed. Pirates, profiteers, planters—everyone tried to grab a bit of the Congo. Your Dr. Livingstone came too—he talked about ‘taming, educating, and Christianizing these savages of darkest Africa.’ And the tribes themselves. They also began to destroy one another.” He sighed. To him, Zaire’s history was still something very alive and tangible.

“So how did King Leopold get into all this?”

“Leopold? Ah—well. That was another Englishman, your Mr. Stanley, who came here looking for Livingstone, you remember, and then he seeked—searched for—someone—someone very rich—to invest in developing this place—this ‘Amazonia of Africa.’ In the 1880s Europe was carving up Africa—deciding who would have which bits. King Leopold had made a lot of money with his shares in the Suez Canal and was angry that Belgium didn’t seem to be getting much in the way of colonies in Africa. Somehow—I don’t know how—Stanley persuaded the European governments to let Leopold start a private company to collect ivory and rubber—and anything else that made a profit. So the king now had his own private colony—the whole Congo, eighty times the size of little Belgium—all his, to do with what he wanted.”

“And what did he do?”

“He made a lot more money. That’s what he did. He killed or starved eight million Africans; he cut off the hands of workers who gathered the rubber if they did not collect enough. His soldiers made fortunes too. The more hands they brought to him—they smoked the hands to preserve them and put them in big straw baskets—they more they got paid. I think that is what inspired the writer Conrad—another one of your Englishmen—to write that famous story ‘Heart of Darkness.’”