The Overloaded Ark

PRELUDE

THE ship nosed its way through the morning mist, across a sea as smooth as milk. A faint and exciting smell came to us from the invisible shore, the smell of flowers, damp vegetation, palm oil, and a thousand other intoxicating scents drawn up from the earth by the rising sun, a pale, moist- looking nimbus of light seen dimly through the mists. As it rose higher and higher, the heat of its rays penetrated and loosened the hold the mist had on land and sea. Slowly it was drawn up towards the sky in long lethargically coiling columns, and gradually the bay and the coastline came into view and gave me my first glimpse of Africa.

Across the glittering waters were scattered a handful of tiny islands, each a cone-shaped mass of vegetation, so overloaded that it seemed they must topple into the waters under the weight of this climbing tower of leaves Behind them the coastlands climbed upwards, covered with a thick, unbroken quilt of trees, to where, dim and gigantic, Mount Cameroon crouched, gilded by the morning light. The colours of this landscape, after the pale pastel shades of England, seemed over- bright, almost garish, hurting the eyes with their fierce intensity. Over the islands flocks of grey parrots wheeled in strong, rapid flight, and faintly their clownish screams and whistles came to us. In the glistening wake of the ship two brown kites circled in an anxious search for something edible, and out of the remaining skeins of mist being drawn up into the sky a fishing eagle suddenly appeared, heavy and graceful, its black and white plumage shining. Over all this, the land and sea seen obscurely through the shifting, coiling mist, lay the magic smell we had noticed before, but now it was stronger, richer, intoxicating with its promise of deep forest, of lush reedy swamps, and wide magical rivers under a canopy of trees.

We landed as in a dream, and were rudely brought bath to earth by a nerve-shattering half-hour with the Customs, trying to explain our eccentric baggage. At last we were speeding along the road to Victoria, a red earth road lined with hibiscus hedges aflame with flower, and copses of the yellow, feathery, pungent-smelling mimosa. We arrived at the little white rest-house on the hill where we were to live for a week, and proceeded to look around. We had much to do, and in any other place it would probably have seemed irksome; as it was we were interviewed, our numerous papers stamped, we purchased vast quantities of stores, went to dinner with numbers of kind people, swam in the sea, and did a great many other things in a sort of dream-like trance. Everywhere we went there was something new to see. The straggling town lay along the side of the bay, filled with rustling palms, hibiscus and bougainvillaea hedges glowing with flowers, and in every compound and garden stood sedate rows of canna lilies, like vivid flames on thin green candlesticks. It was an enchanting place, but even so we yearned for the day when we should move up-country. At last it dawned.

The lorry had been ordered to arrive at the rest-house at seven-thirty for loading, and by eight-thirty we thought we should be well on the road. It was very apparent that we were new to Africa. At ten o’clock we were pacing round and round our mountain of luggage on the veranda, cursing and fuming impotently, scanning the road for the truant lorry. At eleven o’clock a cloud of dust appeared on the horizon and in its midst, like a beetle in a whirlwind, was the lorry. It screeched to a halt below, and the driver dismounted. I noticed an assortment of odd passengers sitting in the back, about twelve of them, chatting happily to each other with their goats, chickens, bags of yams, calabashes of palm wine, and other necessities of travel spread out around them in the lorry. I stormed down to interview the driver, and it was then I learned that it is better not to inquire why a lorry is late in the Cameroons: I was treated to at least six different and contradictory reasons, none of which satisfied anyone except the driver. Wisely leaving this subject, I turned my attention to the crowd in the back of the vehicle. It transpired that this was the driver’s wife, this was the driver’s wife’s cousin, this was the father of the motor-boy, and this was the motor-boy’s mother-in-law, and so on. After a prolonged altercation which for shrillness and incomprehensibility could not have been rivalled by any race on earth, they were removed, together with their household goods and livestock. The driver then had to turn the lorry for loading, and my faith in his abilities was rudely shattered when he backed twice into the hibiscus hedge, and once into the rest-house wall. Our baggage was then loaded with a speed and lack of care that was frightening, and, as I watched, I wondered how much of our equipment would be left intact on arrival in Mamfe. I need not have worried. It turned out later that only the most indispensable and irreplaceable things got broken.

During my tête-à-tête with the driver, and my careful genealogical investigation of the passengers, John had taken no part. Now, as the pandemonium lessened, he wandered round the front of the lorry and discovered something that amused him greatly. Above the windscreen, in large white uneven letters, had been printed “THE GODSPEED . . . VICTORIA TO KUMBA”. That a lorry with such an imposing name should be two and a half hours late struck him as being funny. It was not until later that we discovered what a gross euphemism the name really was. At twelve o’clock we were off, flying through the streets of Victoria in a cloud of dust and frightened chickens, the engine of the “Godspeed” roaring manfully to try and live up to its name.

Almost as soon as you leave Victoria you start to climb in a series of gentle loops, through apparently endless palm plantations. We had progressed some ten miles, and were just settling down. We lit cigarettes, and were arguing as to how long it would be before we reached real forest, when the engine gave a sharp hiccup, recovered itself, hiccupped again, and then slowly and apologetically faded away. We came to a gentle standstill.

“Camp Number One,” said John, gazing at the endless rows of palm trees about us, serried ranks, their drooping fronds whispering in the slightest breeze.

Everyone gathered round the engine, all talking at and getting their fingers burnt pointing out to each other what was wrong. After about half an hour the dismembered engine was lying about all over the road, and at least four people were under the lorry, arguing loudly. I began to have a horrible feeling that this uninteresting palm grove might have to be camp number one, so I suggested to John that we should walk on up the road, and they could follow when the lorry was mended. He gazed at the bits of engine in the road, at the black legs protruding from under the bonnet, and sighed: “Yes, I suppose we can walk on. If we take it easy we have a fair chance of them catching up with us before we reach Mamfe.” So we walked, but it was very dull. The palms did not foster bird life, and there were few insects in the dusty fringe of undergrowth at the roadside. Presently the lorry caught us up, everybody grinning and cheering like mad.

“I fear,” said John, “that their confidence in their combined mechanical powers is misplaced.”

As the “Godspeed” broke down again five miles farther on, I was inclined to agree with him. The third time broke down we had just left the last of the plantations and were entering real forest country, so it was with pleasure we dismounted and walked off down the road. The jabbering of the amateur mechanics faded away, we turned a corner, and the silence of the forest descended on us. This was our first experience of real forest, and we ambled slowly along, drinking in the sights and sounds, captivated by everything, drugged by so much beauty and colour. On one side of the road was a deep ravine, choked with undergrowth, on the other side the hillside sloped steeply upwards. On each side rose tremendous trees, straddling on their huge buttress roots, each with its cloak of parasitic plants, ferns, and moss. Through this tangle the lianas threaded their way, from base to summit, in loops and coils and intricate convolutions. On reaching the top they would drop to the forest floor as straight as a plumbline. In places there were gaps where one of the giant trees had been felled, or had fallen of its own accord, and here the secondary growth ran riot over the carcase, and everything was hung with the white and deep yellow flowers of the convolvulus, and another pink star-like flower in great profusion. In and out of these blooms flipped the Sunbirds, glinting metallically in the sun, hanging before the flowers for a brief instant on blurred and trembling wings. On the dead trees, bleached white as coral against the green, there were groups of Pygmy Kingfishers, small as a wren, brilliant in their azure blue, orange and buff plumage, with their crimson beaks and feet. Flocks of hornbills would be startled at the sight of us as they fed in the tree-tops, and would fly wildly across the road uttering loud maniacal honkings, their great untidy wings beating the air with a sound like gigantic blacksmith’s bellows. We crossed numbers of wooden bridges which spanned shallow rapid streams glinting on beds of pure white sand. On the banks, where it was moist and cool, with broken sunlight dappling the grass, rested hosts of butterflies. At our approach they rose and fluttered like a small firework display in the shade, blue- gold, yellow, green and orange, shifting and changing like a kaleidoscopic picture.

Occasionally we would pass a village, a straggle of huts along the side of the road, surrounded by small fields of feathery cassava bushes and forlorn plantain trees with tattered leaves hanging listlessly in the sun. A band of hysterically barking curs would chase the lorry, and the pot-bellied children would stand in the ditch, white teeth gleaming, pink palms waving madly. At one such village we stopped and bought a massive bunch of bananas for sixpence, and then gorged ourselves on the delicately scented fruit until we felt sick. Kumba was reached in the brief green twilight, as the grey parrots were screaming overhead into the jungle to their roosts. I made it abundantly clear to the lorry personnel that we wanted an early start in the morning. Then we ate, and crept tiredly under our mosquito nets.

To our surprise we were on the road by eight o’clock, and, as if to make up for the previous day, the “Godspeed” went like a bird. At midday we lunched at the roadside under the massive trees, drinking warm beer, contesting ownership of the sandwiches with the local ants and surveying our surroundings with the field-glasses. Bird life, as before, seemed the most prominent: Yellow-casque Hornbills honking and swishing in the tree-tops, kingfishers glittering on the dead tree stumps, a beautiful rich brown and yellow Coucal with a shrike-like beak, that peered fascinated at us while we ate. A lovely blood-red dragon-fly zoomed down the road, flicked sideways, and landed on the rim of my glass of beer. Six large ants crawled slowly and methodically up my trouser leg, and they were presently joined by a small green caterpillar that swung suddenly out of the sky on an almost invisible thread.

We reached Mamfe at nightfall, and soon were installed in the great, empty, echoing rooms of the rest-house, where we watched the pale pink geckos creep out from the cracks and scutter across the ceiling in hot pursuit of the insects our lamp had attracted. They crept across the white ceiling almost imperceptibly, until they were near enough to a resting moth or fly, and then they would suddenly rush in with incredible speed and snap. The next moment the insect would have gone, and the gecko, after a short pause for gulping and meditation, would trot off across the roof to another meal.

After getting stores and various other commodities together in Mamfe, John and I decided to split up. John wanted to go to a village called Bakebe, some twenty-five miles from Mamfe, which he thought would be a good place for birds. I, on the other hand, wished to go to Eshobi. This village is situated north of the Cross River on the edge of a section of forest that stretches unbroken and almost uninhabited hundreds of miles northwards until it reaches the desolate mountains where the gorilla has its stronghold. I felt that it would be an ideal place to set up a subsidiary camp, while John established the main base at Bakebe. While I collected mammals and reptiles I could also be obtaining birds for John, and while collecting birds in Bakebe he could also get some mammals and reptiles for me. On this plan we agreed, and I set about the task of obtaining carriers for the trek to Eshobi (for there was no road to it), and hiring a lorry to transport John to his village, which was, fortunately, on a road.

The morning of our separation arrived and, with it, my ten carriers. John and I surveyed them as we ate breakfast under the trees on the rest-house lawn. They were an unprepossessing lot.

“I shouldn’t think”, said John, eyeing them, “that you will even reach Eshobi with that lot. They will probably eat you before you’ve gone half a mile into the forest.”

At this point one of the carriers yawned and displayed teeth that had been filed to points in the time- honoured cannibal way, and I was not reassured. At this moment, however, the barber arrived. It had been John who had suggested that I should get my hair cut before plunging off to Eshobi, and the suggestion was sound.

As I seated myself, and the barber placed his robe reverently round me, I noticed that the carriers were dancing about, slapping themselves and cursing. I thought nothing of it until I was suddenly assailed with a series of agonizing bites on my leg, and I looked down and got my first view of a driver ant column spread out to attack. The ground was a seething black mass of ants. I roared for rescue, and two of the staff came dashing to my aid, rolled up my trousers and started to pick the ants off my legs. Just at that moment a small boy wandered on to the scene carrying two baby Drills clasped round his waist. Now I was very anxious to obtain some of these baboons, so I bargained furiously with the lad, and eventually bought them. He planted them both in my lap and departed hurriedly, for the ants were already investigating his legs. The Drills decided that this change of ownership did not appeal to them at all, and they both started to kick and scream and bite like spoilt children. The scene in the compound now beggared description: the carriers were leaping about to keep clear of the ants, our staff were trying to get the ants out of the carriers’ loads, I was struggling with the Drills, finding myself very much hampered by the barber’s cloak, and the two members of the staff were still working on ant extermination on my upper calves. The barber had not enjoyed himself so much for years; he gazed at the lively scene, occasionally exchanging a bit of good advice or an insult with one of the carriers or the staff, and absent-mindedly chopping in the general direction of my scalp. Once, when he told a carrier which load to take, the argument waxed so fierce that I expected an ear to fall in my lap at any moment.

Eventually we sorted things out, and John accompanied us to the rusty suspension bridge which spanned the Cross River. On the other side was the forest and Eshobi. We stood there, watching the line of carriers make their way across, a hundred feet above the dark waters. As they reached the other side they were swallowed up in the multi-coloured undergrowth of the forest. When the last had disappeared, and only their voices came faintly to us, I turned to John.

“Well, dear boy,” I said, “I must brave the unknown. See you in about three months’ time.”

“Good luck,” said John, and, as an afterthought, “you’ll need it, I expect. . . ”

I crossed the rickety, groaning planks of the bridge, the lizards darting away from me across the sun-drenched wood. At the other side I turned and waved to John, who now seemed dwarfed by the width of the river and the great trees under which he was standing. Then I turned and walked quickly down the path into the forest, anxious to catch the carriers up.

After all those months of waiting and preparation the great moment had at last arrived.