The Book of the Heathen (14 page)

My mother gave me the names of a dozen missionaries she had known, and the places they had served along the river. Some of those places no longer existed, and most had changed their names. She told me to try and contact some of the people she had once known and to pass on her regards to them, speaking as though they lived in the next county and I was calling on them for tea. It was only when I realized she was talking of people she had known thirty or thirty-five years ago that I understood the futility of this request. I read out some of the names to Cornelius, but even he shook his head at them.

I took the trunk of dust outside and emptied it. I salvaged the buttons because they had some value, but I kicked away everything else until it was scattered. Several men watched me from a distance and then came over and searched sifting with their fingers through what I had discarded. I told them there was nothing to find, but either they did not understand me or did not believe me. They retrieved the half-eaten pages of unidentifiable novels and gathered these together; they picked up tiny pieces of the gold-painted binding as though it were gold itself. One man even found the metal cap to one of my pens and rose yelling from the other sifters as though he had found a jewel.

*   *   *

On one of our expeditions, Frere and I had gone in search of a lake, supposedly five days to the north-east of us, in Uregga country, and supposedly the home of a monster, a creature the size of twenty elephants, according to the Uregga porters who told us of it. There were many such tales, many such monsters, but we went anyway. The most we could hope for, Frere suggested as we departed, was a variant species of lake hippopotamus, though he was doubtful of even that. It was one of our first expeditions together, and undertaken at a time when he still believed they would be frequent and sanctioned.

We moved into the forest between the Lulindi and Elila. I knew from the maps I possessed of the region that there were other, unnamed watercourses, but I had no idea of the land between them other than that it was forest and that the region further away from the river was populated by the scattered villages of the Uregga.

I asked Frere about these people on the eve of our departure, but he knew little about them, except that they had recently been greatly reduced by war and disease, and that they were a dying people. I asked him if they were likely to be hostile towards us and he said he didn't know. He then reassured me by saying that he doubted if we would encounter anyone prepared to stop us travelling through the region.

According to Fletcher, the Uregga were an impoverished tribe who could not even compete with the scavenging Ayaya living along the river. I sensed that Frere was disappointed at learning all this, that he had expected something more of the expedition than a trek to establish the existence, or otherwise, of the lake itself, let alone the creature it was rumoured to contain.

At his insistence, we left before dawn, crossing the river several miles from the Station.

The shore where we landed was overgrown, and trees lay where they had fallen. There were no staging posts, no markers or other indicators of human presence, and as we disembarked, Frere asked me which path we were to follow. The question caught me by surprise. He had been so certain of our landing point that I assumed he already knew the route of the first part of our journey. But as he waited for my answer, I saw that I had been set a deliberate challenge – that whichever course we followed we would be following it blind – and so I rose to it. I indicated inland along a shallow stream in a steep-sided valley, hoping that this would connect with one of the larger watercourses. Frere applauded my confidence and said he assumed we would simply travel north-east until we encountered someone with local knowledge of the lake. I told him that this had been my understanding, too. I took readings to establish our landing place, and then others to mark the exact line of the water as we left it behind.

The first day's travelling was hard. The terrain was steep, irregular, and more heavily forested than I had expected, and I calculated that in ten hours we crossed barely six miles.

By mid-afternoon a low plateau had appeared ahead of us. On one of my maps a scarp line was drawn immediately south of the supposed site of the lake, and I imagined this was the raised land before us. I showed this to Frere and we were both encouraged by the prospect.

Here and there we crossed tracks in the trees, though whether they were used only by game or by the inhabitants of the region, we could not tell. Occasionally, Frere told me to wait where I stood while he went into the forest in search of specimens. I called out to him at regular intervals and he answered me. It was difficult to judge both distance and direction because of the distorting effect of the trunks, and because of the canopy overhead. Once he came back with a small, squirrel-looking animal rolled into a ball in his hand, and on another occasion he captured a bird with foot-long crimson tail feathers, which he plucked out before throwing the bird back up into the branches. He killed the squirrel by piercing its spine with a small knife, and carefully arranged the feathers in one of his cardboard tubes.

At one point, approaching the foot of the plateau, and where the trees had at last given way to scattered thorn and scrub, he suddenly held up his hand and signalled for me to remain silent and still. Then he pointed to a low rise ahead of us, conspicuous because of its crown of taller trees, and I shielded my eyes to see what he had seen. We both instinctively lowered ourselves into the high grass.

At first I could see nothing, but then a movement caught my eye, followed by another. There were men ahead of us, and Frere indicated to me that he had seen five. He shed the load from his shoulders. I did likewise, and followed him as he crawled forward into the open. The men on the rise were gathered in a circle and appeared to be working in unison upon whatever was at their centre.

‘They've killed something,' Frere whispered to me. He studied the men through the smallest of his telescopes before handing me the glass.

‘Do you want to approach them?' I said.

He considered this. ‘Wait.'

We sat and watched the men for a further hour, after which they rose together and descended the slope towards us. I searched for signs of a path in the grass, but saw none. I was concerned that they would come upon us and misinterpret why we had concealed ourselves to watch them. I started to move backwards, towards our discarded baggage, but Frere put a hand on my arm to stop me.

The men continued towards us, each carrying a spear or a bow. They were all short, none of them over five foot, but they did not resemble the other pygmies I had seen, and were much darker in colour. It was difficult to follow their movement through the high grass, but at the moment I felt certain we would be discovered, they turned away from us along a track parallel to the trees, as though they were reluctant to enter that darker realm. Frere moved forward to watch them go, and only when the last man had disappeared from view did he rise and beckon me to him.

Retrieving our loads, we went forward to the low rise, and we saw there the stripped bones of whatever game the hunters had killed and butchered. The ground was trodden bare, and with boulders set in a circle. Frere sketched this and made several pages of notes. He gathered up some of the cooling bones and slid them into his pack. Afterwards, he became noticeably more enthusiastic about our expedition.

I took my own measurements and calculated that two hours would take us to the rim of the plateau. Three hours of daylight remained to us. Frere examined the trees on the rise for any marks on them. He found these and made further drawings.

My calculation had been clumsy: I had been deceived by the apparent height of the plateau, and by the haze which covered the land immediately below it, and it was already dark by the time we arrived at its foot, where we stayed for the night.

After eating, I sat with Frere at a small fire for several hours, and I saw him more excited then – there is no other word – than I had ever seen him at the Station. He insisted on seeing my figures and calculations and then on me translating these into the crudest of maps for him. He told me I might name the small rise after myself, but I declined. I told him I could not be so presumptuous, and that, anyway, the offer was not his to make. He skinned the small squirrel and we cooked and ate what little meat was to be had from it.

The following day we climbed the scarp slope. Our climb lasted until midday, when we were rewarded with a view I believe no other Englishman had ever seen before us. Ahead of us, the plateau stretched away into the distance, and I guessed that we could see for thirty miles, standing as we did at its upper end. It was forested for the most part, and I saw at least three watercourses. An immense flock of egrets passed over the treetops beneath us, and for the first time I started to believe in the existence of the lake, and even that it might have held its monster.

Our travelling that day was considerably easier; the slope was gentle and downhill, and the trees were neither so dense nor so tall. We walked for several hours. At one point I imagined I could smell wood-smoke. Frere confirmed this, and we became more cautious as we went on and spoke only in whispers, adding to our notion of ourselves as true explorers.

We came to a river and I pointed out to him that it was not flowing in the same direction as the others we had so far encountered, that instead of following the lie of the land to the north, it ran in a more easterly direction. So far that day, Frere had gathered nothing but insects and butterflies, all now packed, dead or dying in his jars and cases.

We followed the course of this water, marking the start of our path with a cairn. I took our bearings on the slope behind us, and afterwards measured our progress at more frequent intervals. We passed a fetish, the dried and wizened claw of a small cat pinned to a tree. Frere also found a small arrowhead and several inches of its shaft embedded in the same trunk further down. He gouged this out and told me he considered it his most important find thus far.

At three in the afternoon we followed a bend in the river and ahead of us saw the lake into which it flowed. The sight of this body of water took us by surprise and we stood speechless before it. At best, I had imagined something surrounded and concealed by dense forest, something dark and stagnant, perhaps, plant-choked and dying, but here was an expanse of water as large as any I had seen, clear in the shallows and blue at its centre in the sun, and with the white of gentle waves across its entire surface. Flocks of birds congregated across it in every direction.

We both stood and looked out over the expanse of water without speaking. I could not believe that something so large had not previously been noted and explored. It was possible to see the whole of the surrounding land, but even so, and allowing for the illusion created by the heat, here was a body of water at least ten miles across, and perhaps fifty in circumference.

We discarded our packages and went out into the open land of the shore. Frere was the first to take off his boots and wade out into the water. He pronounced it warm and said that he could see small fish swimming around his legs. I followed him in.

As we stood together, looking out, savouring our discovery, the water to our knees, he said to me, ‘We are, of course, being observed.'

I looked quickly around us. ‘Where?'

‘I imagine to our left.' He continued to look directly out over the water.

‘How do you know?'

‘When we turned the bend there was the faintest wisp of smoke above the trees. A fire that has now been doused.'

I looked, but if the smoke had existed, it had drifted to nothing by then. All I saw were several trodden clearings at the water's edge.

‘Are we in any danger?' I asked him, but he could not say.

I was the first to return to the shore and pull on my boots. And as I did this, I was surprised and alarmed to see him cup his hands to his mouth and shout out, turning left and right as he did so. The echo of his words skimmed back and forth across the water, but there was no answering call.

I added the lake to my chart. It did not matter then to measure its true extent or depth or dimensions exactly, merely to be precise about how it might be again reached. All those other calculations could come later, made by lesser men following in our wake.

I knew, looking out over the bright, clear water that it contained no monster.

That night we retreated to the edge of the trees. We lit a fire, and periodically one of us returned to the open shore to see if any others had been lit there. At first we saw nothing, but as the night darkened, I saw that at least two other fires burned several miles from us to the west. The fact that they had been lit, and that ours was visible to whoever sat around these other blazes, reassured me.

The night, as usual, was filled with its noises. Buffalo came down through the long grass all around us. Hippopotami grunted and splashed unseen away from the shallows. It was the night-amplified noises of these creatures, we decided, that came closest to the roaring of a monster.

‘Did you ever believe that there might have been something here?' I asked Frere.

‘Not truly. But I was prepared to believe in it in the hope that my expectations would not yet again be driven so far ahead of the truth of the situation.'

‘And what if you had seen or heard something – not necessarily the creature itself – to make you think otherwise?'

‘Then I would have believed in the monster the same way you believe in God.
That
would have been the nature of my belief or faith in its existence.'

Six months earlier I might have been offended or felt myself challenged by the remark, but not then.

The night remained uneventful. The distant fires burned until dawn. One of us kept watch while the other slept, but the rising sun found us waking together, our packages undisturbed around us.