The Overloaded Ark

CHAPTER EIGHT SNAKES AND SUNBIRDS

AT Bakebe I found that John had obtained permission to live in a huge native hut that had once done duty as a Public Works Department store. It was a three-sided structure, light and airy, perched on top of a hill above the village. This vantage-point gave us a magnificent view over an endless, undulating sea of forest, to the French Cameroon borders and beyond. Every conceivable shade of green seemed to have been used in the composition of this picture, with here and there a bombax tree glowing like a great bonfire, its branches full of scarlet flowers and sunbirds. There were feathery, delicate trees in pale green; thick-set oak-like trees with deep olive leaves; tall, spreading, aristocratic trees, whose pale silver trunks stretched up elegantly several hundred feet from the ground, and whose slender branches negligently supported a mass of shimmering yellow- green leaves, as well as the deep green, untidy bundles of orchids and tree ferns that clung to its bark. Curious hills rose from the forest on all sides, hills shaped as perfect isosceles triangles, as square as bricks, or ridged and humped as the back of an old crocodile, and each one covered to its summit with the shaggy cloak of forest. In the early morning, looking out from under our hilltop, the forest would be invisible under the blanket of white mist; as the sun rose this dispersed, twisting and coiling in great columns up to the blue sky, so that it seemed as though the whole forest was on fire. Soon the mist would only cling round the curiously shaped hills, so that they looked like islands in a sea of milk.

Bakebe, I soon found, was a good place for reptiles. Half a mile away was a deep broad river, and every so often a small boy would appear with a baby Broad-fronted Crocodile dangling from a noose of grass. On arrival I had had a pool constructed for the crocodiles, and I found very soon that I was forced to enlarge it. Every week I had a count of the inmates of the pool, as I had a shrewd suspicion that unless I did this I might be buying the same reptiles over and over again. These counts were exciting affairs which generally ended in the animal staff having bandaged fingers. It is astonishing how hard even a six-inch crocodile can bite when it puts its mind to it. Needless to say the staff did not look upon this duty with any enthusiasm: they considered it a most dangerous occupation, and always tried to shirk it if they could.

One day the staff had been more dilatory than usual over their duties and so, more as a punishment than anything, I told them to go and count the crocodiles. Presently I heard a loud wail, followed by a crashing sound and a splash. Hurrying out I found chaos reigning at the pool: Daniel, in climbing the fence, had slipped and fallen against it, and the entire side, not having been designed to withstand this sort of treatment, had given way. Daniel had then completed the destruction by rolling into the pool, and thus scaring some forty baby saurians out of the water, up on to the bank, and so out of the broken fence. When I arrived the ground was covered with crocodiles. They scuttled in all directions with great speed and agility, their mouths open threateningly. The Africans, who were unshod, were also moving with speed and agility. I yelled for reinforcements, and the household staff rushed from the kitchen to join in the chase, and they were followed by the bird staff from the house. In times of crisis such as this, everyone, no matter what his station or job, was called upon to lend a hand. Well in the rear, upholding the Englishman’s traditional reputation for calmness, came John, in his normal slow and unhurried manner. By the time he arrived on the scene most of the reptiles had taken cover in the surrounding undergrowth. Peering round he could only see one or two crocodiles in sight, and so naturally wanted to know what all the shouting and fuss was for.

“I thought all the crocs had escaped,” he said aggrievedly. “That’s why I came down.”

As if in answer, five crocodiles appeared out of the grass and converged about his feet. John looked at them broodingly for a minute, unaffected by the cries of alarm from the bird staff, and then he bent down and, picking one carefully up by the tail, he waved it at me.

“Here’s one, old boy,” he called.

“Don’t hold it like that, John,” I called, “it will turn . . ”

Acting as if under instructions the tiny reptile curved itself up and fastened its jaws on John’s finger. To his credit let it be said that not a sound escaped him; he shook the reptile free, not without some effort, and backed away from the battle area.

“I don’t think I will join in after all, if you don’t mind,” he said, sucking his fingers, “ I am supposed to be a bird man.” He retired to the hut and fastened an enormous bandage round his finger, while the rest of us spent a hot and painful hour rounding up the remaining crocodiles, and mending the fence.

This incident was the beginning of a whole row of irritating episodes in John’s life, all of which involved reptiles. He insisted that all these episodes took place at my instigation: before my return from Eshobi, he said, he had led a happy and reptile-free existence. As soon as I appeared on the scene the reptile world, so to speak, converged on him. John was not afraid of snakes, but he treated them with caution and respect and, while able to appreciate their beauty from afar, he did not want them on too intimate a footing with him. And so the fact that, for a short time, reptiles in general and snakes in particular seemed to find him irresistible, was a source of considerable annoyance to him. Not long after the escape of the crocodiles John’s finger was healing nicely, and the second episode occurred.

I was just leaving the hut one day to go and examine some traps I had set, when a man arrived with a wicker fish-trap full of water-snakes. Now these snakes, I was fairly sure, were non-poisonous. Even if venomous they would only be mildly so. As I was in a hurry I purchased the creatures and pushed them into an empty kerosene tin and placed a plank on top, meaning to attend to them on my return. When I got back that evening I found that the carpenter had removed the plank to convert it into a cage, and all the water-snakes had disappeared. As this had happened in the open I presumed that the reptiles had dashed back to the forest, so, beyond lecturing the carpenter on carelessness, I did nothing. Half an hour later John was doing some moving in the bird section, and on lifting up a large and heavy cage was startled to find five fat water-snakes coiled up beneath it. Unfortunately, in his surprise, he let fall one end of the cage, which landed on his instep. There followed a hectic chase, during which John had to move most of his bird-cages as the reptiles slid from one to the other with great rapidity. John was not amused, and his short soliloquy on the reptile kingdom (in which he included me) was a joy to listen to.

A few days later a panting boy rushed up from the village and informed me that there was a snake in a banana tree, and would I go and catch it. It so happened that the entire staff was out on various errands, and so John was the only one to whom I could appeal for help. Very reluctantly he left his bird feeding and accompanied me down the hill-side. At the village we found a crowd of about fifty people round a banana tree which grew at the back of one of the huts, and with much shouting they pointed out the snake to us. It was coiled in and out of a very large bunch of bananas at the top of the tree, and it surveyed us with a glittering eye. John asked me if it was poisonous, and I replied that, so far as I could see, it was a tree viper of sorts, and probably quite poisonous enough to make things interesting should it bite anyone. John retreated as far as the crowds would let him, and asked how I proposed to capture it. As far as I could see the best way was to cut down the bunch of bananas with the snake inside, and so we carefully ringed the area in which the fruit would fall, with the smallest mesh net we possessed, and I stationed John on the outside of this, armed with a stick to repel the snake should it try to get away. Then I borrowed a machete off a bystander, and asked the crowd if the owner of the tree would mind my cutting down the unripe fruit. Several voices assured me that he would not mind at all, and it was only later, when the real owner turned up, that I found out he objected very strongly and to the tune of several shillings. However, I approached the tree swinging my machete in a professional manner. The crowd had now increased considerably, and we were surrounded by a solid wedge of humanity all anxious to watch the white man’s snake- catching methods. When I discovered that I could not reach the bananas to cut the stem, they were all greatly amused.

“I shall have to cut the whole tree down,” I said to John.

“All right,” he replied, “only wish we could get rid of this crowd. If the damn thing makes a run for it someone will get bitten.”

“Don’t worry,” I said soothingly, “if it does make a run for it they’ll get out of the way quickly enough.”

I started to hack at the trunk of the tree. Now, the stem of a banana tree is deceptive: it looks quite solid, but in reality it is soft and fibrous and juicy, and very easily cut. This I did not know, so it was with considerable surprise that I felt the blade of the machete go right through the trunk at my second swipe, and the whole tree crashed earthwards. That it should fall exactly where John was standing was pure bad luck. With an agility of which I would not have thought him capable, he leapt to one side, and the tree missed him. The bunch of bananas was broken off by the fall and rolled and bounced its way across the ground to his feet, and the snake fell from it, wiggling angrily. The crowd, as I had predicted, faded away, and John was left facing the angry snake with nothing between them but a length of flimsy net. Apparently I had misjudged the size of the snake, for he proceeded to wiggle through the net with the greatest of ease, and then, before John could do anything to prevent it, it slithered between his legs and off into the undergrowth. It was useless to search for him in that thick mass of bushes, so I started to disentangle the net from the wreck of the banana tree. John watched me malevolently.

“I have decided,” he said at last, “that I am not cut out for this snake-charming stuff. In future you can catch all snakes yourself.”

“But they seem to like you,” I pointed out, “you fascinate them. Now, if we could only hang some nets round your legs, all the snakes rushing to get close to you would become entangled. You ought to be flattered, it’s not everyone that has this magnetic attraction for reptiles.”

“Thank you,” said John witheringly, “your suggestion about the nets, though I’ve no doubt it’s very sound, would, I feel, hamper my movements somewhat; I am quite happy exercising a fascination over birds, without enlarging my repertoire to include reptiles.” Then he stalked up the hill and left me to interview the owner of the banana tree who had just arrived.

The last affair came three days later. A voluble hunter arrived carrying a small basket in which nestled a fat and beautiful Gaboon Viper. The skin of these plump, squat-looking snakes is covered with the most intricate and colourful pattern, and having purchased it, I carried it in for John to admire. The reptile had recently shed his skin, so the colours glowed with life, a lovely patchwork of pink, red, fawn, silver, and chocolate. John admired it, but implored me to keep it safely locked

^up.

“It’s deadly, isn’t it, old boy?”he asked.

“Yes, very deadly.”

“Well, for goodness’ sake keep it in its cage . . . remember the water-snakes. We don’t want a repetition of that.”

“Don’t worry, I’m having a special cage built for it.”

So the special cage was built, and the sluggish and deadly viper placed reverently inside. All would have been well if it had not been for the thunderstorm. This broke with unusual force just as I was having my bath and, remembering that the reptile cages were piled out in the open, I yelled to the animal staff to bring them in. If the cages got damp the wood warped, and it is surprising how small a crack a snake can squeeze through if it wants to. The cages were rushed inside and piled up near the monkeys. This proved my undoing.

John was seated near the table, in his pyjamas: he was busy cutting down some old fruit tins to make into water pots for the birds, and he was absorbed in his work. I was just putting the finishing touches to my toilet when I saw something move in the shadows beneath his chair. Putting on my dressing-gown I went closer to see what it was. There on the floor, about six inches away from John’s inadequately slippered feet, lay the Gaboon Viper. I had always believed, judging by what I had read and was told, that at moments like this one should speak quietly to the victim, thus avoiding panic and sudden movement. So, clearing my throat, I spoke calmly and gently:

“Keep quite still, old boy, the Gaboon Viper is under your chair.”

On looking back I feel that I should have left out any reference to the snake in my request. As it was, my remark had an extraordinary and arresting effect on my companion. He left the chair with a speed and suddenness that was startling, and suggestive of the better examples of levitation. The tin can, the hammer, and the tin cutters, went flying in various parts of the hut, and the supper table was all but overturned.

The Gaboon Viper, startled by all this activity, shot out from under the chair and wiggled determinedly towards the back of the monkey cages. I headed him off, and after a few tense minutes got him entangled in the folds of a butterfly-net, then I carried him and dumped him in his cage. I saw then the reason for his escape: the reptiles had been stacked too close to the monkeys, and a female Drill had amused herself by putting her paws through the bars and undoing all the cages she could reach. The first one, as always happens, belonged to the Gaboon Viper. John said little, but it was terse and to the point. I agreed with him wholeheartedly, for should the snake have bitten him he would not have survived: there was no snake-bite serum in the Cameroons, to the best of my knowledge, and the nearest doctor was twenty-five miles away, and we had no transport.

“Why don’t you go away again?” asked John plaintively. “It’s at least three weeks since you came back from Eshobi, high time you plunged back into the impenetrable bush in search of more beef.”

“Well,” I said thoughtfully, “I had thought of going off again, if you don’t mind holding the fort.”

“Where were you thinking of going?”

“N’da Ali,” I replied.

“Good Lord, that’s an idea. You might even get killed on one of those cliffs with a bit of luck,” said John cheerfully.

N’da Ali was the largest mountain in the vicinity. It crouched at our backs, glowering over the landscape, the village, and our little hill. From almost every vantage point you were aware of the mountain’s mist-entangled, cloud-veiled shape brooding over everything, its heights guarded by sheer cliffs of gnarled granite so steep that no plant life could get a foothold. Every day I had looked longingly at the summit, and every day I had watched N’da Ali in her many moods. In the early morning she was a great mist-whitened monster; at noon she was all green and golden glitter of forest, her cliffs flushing pink in the sun; at night she was purple and shapeless, fading to black as the sun sank. Sometimes she would go into hiding, drawing the white clouds around herself and brooding in their depths for two or three days at a time. Every day I gazed at those great cliffs that guarded the way to the thick forest on her ridged back, and each day I grew more determined that I would go up there and see what she had to offer me. Since John seemed so anxious to get rid of me I lost little time in making enquiries. I found out that N’da Ali really belonged to the people of a neighbouring village called Fineschang, and naturally the mountain had a ju-ju on it. No self- respecting mountain like N’da Ali would be without its ju-ju. Further investigation disclosed the fact that, while the people of Fineschang were allowed, by the terms of the ju-ju (if I may put it like that), to hunt and fish on the lower slopes of the mountain, only one man was allowed access to the summit. It transpired that there was only one way up to the summit anyhow, and this particular man was the only one who knew it. So I sent him a message saying I would be pleased if he would take me up N’da Ali for the day to look out for a suitable camp site. Then when this had been arranged, if he would accompany my troop of hunters, bird-trappers, and hangers-on to the top and superintend the whole affair. While I waited with ill-concealed impatience for his reply, I gazed all the more longingly at the slopes of the mountain.

John’s bird collection was now of impressive dimensions, and was more than a full-time job. Apart from the preparation of food (hard-boiling eggs, chopping up cooked meat, soaking dried fruit, and so on), he would move from cage to cage with a tin full of grasshoppers or wasp grubs and a pair of tweezers, and solemnly feed each bird individually. In this way he was sure that every specimen was feeding properly, and was getting the required amount of live food to keep it healthy. His patience and painstaking methods were a joy to watch, and under his care the birds prospered and sang happily in their wooden cages. His chief source of annoyance was the maimed and dying birds that were brought in to him. He would come to me holding in his hands a colourful and lovely bird, and show it to me. “Look at this, old boy,” he would say angrily, “a beautiful thing, and absolutely useless just because these blasted people can’t take care in handling them. It’s quite useless, got a broken wing. Really, it’s enough to make you weep.” He would go off and the following conversation would take place with the hunter.

“This bird no good,” John would say, “it get wound. It go die.”

“No, sah,” the hunter would reply, “he no get wound, sah.”

“It’s got a broken wing, you hold it too tight,” John would say.

“No, sah, he no fit die, sah. Na good bird, sah.”

“What can you do with these fools?” John would say, turning to me, “They always assure me the thing won’t die, even if it’s got every bone in its body broken.”

“I know, they try their best to persuade you.”

“But it’s so annoying. I would have given him five bob for this if it had been in good condition. But even if you explain that they don’t seem to see it. They’re hopeless.”

One day a hunter turned up carrying a Crested Guinea-fowl, a bird as large as a chicken, with a blue-grey plumage covered with white spots, and its head adorned with a crest of curly black feathers. It seemed to be in very bad condition, and after examining it, John agreed that it was not long for this world.

“I no buy him. He go die,” said John.

The hunter appeared cut to the quick at this disparaging remark.

“No, sah,” he gasped, “he no go die. Na strong bird dis. I go show Masa,” and he placed the bird on the floor. Just as he was protesting for the second time that it would not die, the Guinea-fowl rolled over, gave a couple of kicks and expired. It was a very crestfallen hunter who went off down the hill with our laughter following him, and shouted jeers from the animal staff.

Shortly before this John had been brought another of these Guinea-fowl, together with the clutch of eight eggs she had been sitting on when she was captured. After some trouble we found a broody hen in the village, and purchased it. She sat well on the Guinea-fowl’s eggs and in due course hatched them all out. The young were delightful, if drab, little things, and scuttled around the pen in which their foster-mother was confined as ordinary chicks will. Unfortunately their hen mother was a great, muscular, heavy-footed bird, and was constantly treading on her offspring. She was very proud of them, but would walk over them with complete unconcern and a bland expression on her face. In desperation John tried to get another foster parent, built on less generous lines, with more grace of movement, but all in vain. The great, clumsy hen slowly but surely trod on all the delicate little Guinea-fowl, and killed the lot. Later, John was brought another clutch of eggs, and even found a more sylph-like hen to sit on them, but they must have been on the hunter’s hands for some time, or else he had handled them roughly and damaged them, for they never hatched. John was depressed by this bad luck, for, although he had six female Guinea-fowl, he wanted to get at least one male so that he could take a breeding stock back to England, and there, under ideal conditions in aviaries with slim and delicate bantams or silkies to hatch and rear, the birds could be bred.

There was one dreadful period when an epidemic of mycosis ran like fire through his bird cages, killing some of his most choice specimens. This disease is a deadly thing, a peculiar fungus-like growth which develops in the bird’s lungs, spreads with incredible speed through other organs, and kills the bird rapidly. There is apparently no sign of this complaint until the later stages, when you will see the bird breathing heavily, as though it had a cold. But by this time it is too late to do anything effective. When this horrible disease took a hold on the bird collection, John fought it in every possible way, but still the losses increased. He was losing specimens which had taken months to obtain, and could not be replaced. He told me that there was only one thing which could possibly have any effect on the disease, and that was potassium iodide. Where we were to obtain this commodity in the middle of the Cameroon forest was the question. Now, there was a small hospital at Mamfe, and thither I went in search of the required drug, but discovered that they had none. That seemed to be that, and my hopes of John saving his collection dwindled to nothing. I happened to be buying some things in the United Africa Company’s store when I came across a row of dusty bottles piled in a dark corner of the shop. On examining them I discovered, with astonishment and incredulity, that they were a dozen good bottles with potassium iodide written on the label. I went in search of the manager.

“Those bottles down in the store, are they really potassium iodide?” I asked of him eagerly.

“Yes, blasted stuff. They sent it up from Calabar on the last canoe. I can’t think what for, because I can’t sell the stuff,” he replied.

“Well, you’ve just sold the lot,” I said jubilantly.

“What in the name of Heaven do you want with a dozen bottles?” asked the manager, considerably astonished.

I explained at great length.

“But are you sure you want the whole dozen? It’s an awful lot of potassium iodide, you know.”

“If something isn’t done we shan’t have any birds left,” I said, “and I’m not going to take too little and then find, when I come back for more, that you’ve sold out, or something. No, I’ll take the whole lot. How much are they?”

The manager named a price that I would have thought expensive for an iron lung, but I had to have those bottles. Carefully they were packed in the lorry, and I drove back to John in high spirits.

“I’ve got you some potassium iodide, old boy,” I said on arrival, “so now there is no excuse for killing your specimens off.”

“Oh, good work,” said John, and then he gaped at the box I presented to him, “is that all potassium iodide?”

“Yes, I thought I might as well get a supply in. I wasn’t sure how much you would need. Is it enough?”

“Enough?” said John faintly. “There is enough of the stuff here to last fifty collectors approximately two hundred years.”

And so it proved. For months afterwards our baggage was full of bottles of potassium iodide. We couldn’t get rid of the stuff. It hung about and seized every opportunity of upsetting itself on our clean shirts, or cunningly mixing itself with the bicarbonate of soda. But it checked the mycosis, and that was the main thing.

By this time I had almost forgotten about the hunter I had sent the message to about N’da Ali, and I was quite surprised when a messenger appeared one morning from Fineschang. The hunter, I learned, would be very pleased to lead me on a day reconnaissance of the mountain, at any time that would suit me. I decided on a day and sent a message back to say that I would be at Fineschang on that morning. I also sent a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of beer, in case the ju-ju should think that I had overlooked it.

“Ah!” said John, when he heard the news, “so you are going on Thursday. Do you think you are going to be able to get up to the top and back in one day?”

We both looked at the almost sheer cliffs of N’da All gleaming pinkly in the evening sun.

“I think so,” I replied, “at any rate, I’m going to have a damn good try.”

CHAPTER NINE ARCTOCEBUS AHOY!

THE day appointed for my mountaineering arrived and dawned bright and clear. N’da Ali was invisible behind a wall of mist; everywhere the forest smoked and steamed, and small hills would appear suddenly out of the mist, like misshapen ships in a fog. What could be seen of the forest was gleaming golden-green in the pale morning sunlight.

I had gaily agreed to be at Fineschang at eleven o’clock. It had not occurred to me until the night before that I had no means of getting to my destination except by walking, and as Fineschang was ten miles away along a hot and dusty road, this idea was uninteresting. Frantic last-minute conferences with the staff had disclosed the fact that a district messenger was staying in the village, and he had with him a shiny new bicycle. The messenger was most helpful, and agreed to lend me his machine; so in the morning sun the great, heavy bicycle was solemnly wheeled up to our hut, and I prepared to depart. I had decided to take Daniel with me, as he was the smallest and lightest of the animal staff, and so could be accommodated on the crossbar. Apart from this passenger I had a large bag of collecting gear, and another one full of sandwiches and beer to sustain me on the journey. As I was tying these on the bicycle John appeared on the scene.

“Why are you taking all that beer?” he inquired.

“Well, to begin with, it’s going to be thirsty work shinning up that mountain, and apart from that I’ve found that beer has a very soothing effect on ju-jus and their owners.”

Daniel approached and eyed me nervously. It was obvious that he had very little faith in my cycling abilities.

“Where I go sit, sah?” he asked.

“Here on the crossbar,” I said.

I leant forward and hauled him up. He clutched wildly at the handlebars and twisted them round, and we fell to the ground in a tangled heap, amid the clanking of beer bottles.

“This does not look to me like the start of a scientific expedition,” said John gravely, “it looks more like an elopement.”

I righted the machine and hauled Daniel aboard, this time without mishap. We wobbled off down the path.

“Bye-bye, old boy,” called John earnestly.

“ ’Bye. . .” I yelled, steering cautiously round the potholes.

“See you to-night,” called John, with complete lack of conviction.

We sped down the hill and shot out on to the high road like a drunken snipe. Here I found the going easier, but my chief difficulty was to get Daniel to loosen his vice-like grip on the handlebars so that I could steer with greater accuracy. Cycling along a Cameroon road is an unforgettable experience: the rich, silky red dust spreads upwards in great clouds enveloping you and your machine; pot-holes of great depth and jagged edges loom suddenly under your front wheel, making you swerve wildly back and forth across the road; every hundred yards or so you come suddenly upon an area which has been liberally sprinkled with rocks of various sizes, and riding across these you feel that a fractured pelvis is the least you can hope to sustain. Every half-mile you crossed a bridge: these consisted of two thick beams laid from bank to bank, with planks laid crossways or, in some cases, length-ways. It was one of the latter type I was silly enough to try and ride over quite early in the trip. My front tyre slid delightedly into the groove between the two planks and stuck there and Daniel, the beer, and I, fell to the ground. By now the sun had come out from the mist and the heat on the open road was terrific. By the time we had reached the half-way mark I was pouring with sweat, and my mouth and eyes were clogged with dust. We swept down a hill, and at the bottom was the inevitable bridge, spanning a wide, shallow stream, with snow-white sandbanks and tall trees grouped round it casting deep shadows. I weakened.

“We go stop here small time, Daniel,” I said hoarsely, “sometime there go be beef for this small water.”

I knew perfectly well that there would be no beef of importance in such a place, but I wanted to soak in the clear glinting waters and get some of the dust off my body. We left the cycle in the ditch and made our way down the slope to the water, where we stripped and plunged in, and watched the red dust washed from our bodies like swirls of blood in the clear waters. Half an hour later we were still sitting in the shallows, relaxed and cool with the waters playing over us, when I suddenly saw a strange thing, which immediately roused me out of my trance. A long brown ribbon of water weed which was attached to the rock near me, detached itself suddenly and swam away. I gazed after it in astonishment, then floundered to my feet with a cry and started in pursuit. The weed swam quickly upstream and went to earth under a small boulder. With Daniel’s aid I shifted the stone and we captured this piece of aquatic flora. Cupped in my hands I held the most extraordinary fish. It was long, narrow, thin, and brown, exactly like a long ribbon of weed. Its face was pulled out into a little snout, and its eyes were round and staring, but they seemed to have more intelligence in them than any ordinary fish’s. I recognized it because I had spent many happy hours hunting its relatives in the weed beds in the Southern Mediterranean. It was a Pipe-fish. I was astonished, for I had not expected to find a freshwater Pipe-fish pretending to be a bit of water weed in an African river. I fashioned a small pool for it and placed it inside. It at once fastened itself to a small rock and turned into a bit of weed, curving and shimmering with the current. I pondered over it unhappily: I longed to know what its habits were, where it laid its eggs and hatched its young, and a hundred other things about it, but I realized mournfully, and not for the first time, that when you are collecting for a living you cannot spend your time unravelling the life history of an obscure fish. Reluctantly, annoyed at the harshness of life, I released the Pipe-fish and watched it swim off into deep water. But the capture of the fish had roused me out of my dream-like trance.

We left the river and returned to the road, and remounted the bicycle which, by now, I was beginning to dislike intensely. I pounded miserably onwards, feeling the dust settling once more on my body and clothes.

Half an hour later we were free-wheeling down a long gentle incline, when I saw a figure in the distance marching towards us. As we drew closer I saw that the man was carrying a small basket fashioned out of green palm leaves, a sure sign that he was bringing an animal to sell.

“Dat man get beef; Daniel?” I asked, putting on the brakes.

“I tink so, sah.”

The man came padding along the dusty road, and as he drew closer he doffed his cap and grinned, and I recognized him as an Eshobi hunter.

“Welcome,” I called. “You done come?”

“Morning, sah!” he answered, holding out his green basket. “I done bring beef for Masa.”

“Well, I hope it’s good beef,” I said, as I took it, “or else you’ve walked a long way for nothing.”

Daniel and the hunter shook hands and chattered away in Banyangi while I undid the mouth of the basket and peered inside.

I don’t know what I expected to see: a Pouched rat, or possibly a squirrel, certainly nothing very unusual. But there, blinking up at me out of great golden eyes from the bottom of the basket, was an Angwantibo!

There are certain exquisite moments in life which should be enjoyed to the full, for, unfortunately, they are rare. I certainly made the most of this one, for both Daniel and the hunter thought I had gone mad. I executed a war dance in the middle of the road, I whooped so loudly in my excitement that I sent all the hornbills for miles around honking into the forest. I slapped the hunter on the back, I slapped Daniel on the back, and I would, if I could have managed it, have slapped myself on the back. After all those months of searching and failure I held a real live Angwantibo in my hands, and delight at the thought went to my head like wine.

“Which day you done catch this beef?” I asked, as soon as my excitement had died down somewhat.

“Yesterday, sah, for night-time.”

That meant that the precious creature had been without food and water for twenty-four hours. It was imperative that I got it back to Bakebe immediately and gave it something to eat and drink.

“Daniel, I go ride quickly-quickly to Bakebe to give dis beef some chop. You go follow with dis hunter-man, you hear?”

“Yes, sah.”

I loaded him down with the collecting gear and the beer, and then I hung the basket containing the Angwantibo round my neck and set off along the road to Bakebe. I sped along like a swallow, taking dust, pot-holes, and bridges in my stride and not even noticing them. My one desire was to get the priceless little beast now hanging round my neck into a decent cage, with an adequate supply of fruit and milk. Bakebe was reached at last, and leaving the cycle in the village I panted up the hill towards our hut. Half-way up a dreadful thought occurred to me: maybe my identification had been too rapid, maybe it wasn’t an Angwantibo after all, but merely a young Potto, an animal very similar in appearance. With a sinking heart I opened the basket and peered at the animal again. Quickly I checked identification of various parts of its furry anatomy: shape and number of fingers on its hands, size of ears, lack of tail. No, it really was an Angwantibo. Heaving a sigh of relief I continued on my way.

As I came within sight of the hut I could see John moving along the row of cages, feeding his birds; bursting with pride and excitement I bellowed out the good news to him, waving my hat furiously and breaking into a run:

“John, I’ve got one . . . an Angwantibo . . . alive and kicking. . . . AN ANGWANTIBO, d’you hear?”

At this all the staff, both animal and household, dashed out to meet me and see this beef that I had talked about incessantly for so long, and for which I had offered such a fantastic price. They all grinned and jabbered at my obvious delight and excitement. John, on the other hand, displayed complete lack of interest in the earth-shaking event; he merely glanced over his shoulder and said, “Good show, old boy,” and continued to feed his birds. I could have quite cheerfully kicked him had not my pleasure been so great.

No other animal’s arrival had created half the upheaval that the Angwantibo’s did: a family of Pouched rats that were sleeping peacefully in their cage were routed out unceremoniously, and the cage was swept and cleaned as a temporary abode for the creature. The carpenter was given a big box and told to produce, in record time, the biggest and best cage he could construct, or else suffer a dreadful fate. Various members of the staff were sent scurrying in all directions to procure eggs, pawpaw, banana, and dead birds. At last, when the cage had been furnished with a nice set of branches and there were plates of food and drink on the clean sawdust floor, the great moment came. With a thick crowd around me, hardly daring to breathe in case they disturbed this valuable animal and thus earned my wrath, I carefully tipped the Angwantibo out of the basket and into his temporary home. He stood on the floor for a moment, looking about him; then he walked over to one of the plates, seized a bit of banana in his mouth, and then climbed swiftly up into the branches, and crouching there commenced to eat the fruit greedily. This was a very pleasant surprise; after my experiences with other nervous creatures I had not expected him to eat at once. As I watched him sitting on the branch mumbling his banana I felt quite unreasonably proud, as though I had captured him myself.

“John,” I called in a hoarse whisper, “come and see him.”

“Oh, he’s quite a pretty little animal,” he said.

This was the highest praise you could get out of John for anything without feathers. And indeed he was a pretty little animal. He looked not unlike a teddy-bear, with his thick golden-brown fur, his curved back, and golden eyes. He was about the size of a four-week-old kitten, and though his body was fat and furry enough, his legs, in proportion, seemed long and slender. His hands and feet were extraordinarily like a human’s, except that on his hands the first and second fingers had been reduced to mere stumps. This, of course, gave him a much greater grasping power, for without the first two fingers in the way he could get his little hands round quite a thick branch, and once having got a grip he would cling on as though glued.

After I had stood in silent and awed contemplation of the beast for half an hour, during which time he ate one and a half bananas, he scrambled on to a suitably sloping branch, grasped it firmly with hands and feet, tucked his head between his front legs, his forehead resting on the wood, and went to sleep. Reverently I covered the cage with a cloth so that the sunlight should not disturb him, and tiptoed away.

Every half-hour or so I would creep back to the cage and peep at him to make sure that he had not dropped down dead or been spirited away by some powerful ju-ju, and for the first two days I would leap out of bed in the morning and rush to his cage, even before imbibing my morning cup of tea, a most unheard-of event. John also became infected with my nervousness, and would peer out from under his mosquito-net like a woodpecker from its hole and watch me anxiously as I removed the sacking from the cage front and looked inside.

“Is it all right?” he would inquire. “Has it eaten?”

“Yes, half a banana and the whole of that dead bird.”

Now, there were several reasons for the fuss that was made over the Angwantibo, or, to give it its correct title, Arctocebus calabarensis. The first was that the animal is extremely rare, being found only in the forests of the British and French Carneroons, and even there they do not seem common. The second reason was that they had long been wanted by the London Zoo, and they had asked us specially to try and obtain them a specimen.

Though the Angwantibo had been known to science since 1859, the British Museum have still only some dozen specimens of it, and all naturalists who have searched for the animal in its native haunts agree that it is extremely rare and hard to find. The Angwantibo is a lemuroid, a group of animals closely related to the monkeys. Only once before had this little creature been kept alive in captivity and studied, but this was the first time that anyone had tried to bring one back alive to England. If we were successful it meant that for the first time zoologists and anatomists would be able to observe the habits and movement of a live Angwantibo. So, naturally, we weren’t taking any chances with losing the one we had, for we thought it might well be the only one we should get.

I will give this little fellow his due and state that he was no trouble at all. At once he showed a preference for bananas and the plump breast of a dead bird. This he would wash down with a drink of milk. Then he would have a light snack of half a dozen grasshoppers just before we went to bed. All day he would sleep, clinging tightly to the branch, his head buried between his front legs. In the evening, just before sunset, he would wake up, give himself a rapid grooming, yawn once or twice, showing his bright pink tongue, and then he would start on his stroll about the cage to work up an appetite. He would climb down one side of the cage, walk across the floor to the other side, hoist himself into the branches, scramble along them until he was back where he started, and then repeat the whole performance over again. This little circular tour he would continue for about an hour, until it was time to feed. As soon as his plate was put in he would start to eat, showing no sign of fear at all. Sometimes he would come down and stand on the floor, his head hanging low and his back humped up, looking more like a miniature bear than ever. Occasionally, if his plate was placed directly under a convenient branch, he would hang down by his feet, and grab the pieces of banana with his pink hands and stuff them into his mouth, smacking his lips and licking the juice from his nose. During all the time that I had him I never heard him make any noise except a cat-like growl and a faint hissing when I tried to handle him. To get him off a branch required considerable effort, for with his queer misshapen hands and feet he would grip the branch with incredible strength. To get him off you were forced to grab him round the chest and pull, and he would counter this by ducking his head between his front legs and biting you in the thumb with his needle-sharp teeth.

After a week, when I was sure that Arcto, as we called him, had thoroughly settled down, I again attempted my reconnaissance of N’da Ali. Once again Daniel and I rode through the dust and pot holes, but this time we were not turned back, and we arrived hot and dishevelled at Fineschang round about eleven one morning. I found the hunter awaiting me, and a more surly, objectionable character I have never met. Apart from his face, which left much to be desired, his feet were swollen to twice normal size with elephantiasis, and he had those peculiar patches all over his legs which you sometimes see among the natives: areas like large birth-marks which are devoid of the natural brown pigment, and are a horrible pale pink, with the surface of the skin shiny like patent leather. We started without delay, leaving Daniel in the village, for I thought that such a climb would be too much for one so young and of such frail physique. It wasn’t until we were half-way up that I discovered my own physical condition left much to be desired.

The hunter walked up the slope of the mountain, which appeared to be a gradient of two in one, at a tremendous speed, and I scrambled behind with the sweat pouring down my face, doing my best to uphold the White Man’s prestige. Only once did the hunter check his speed, and that was at one point where a green mamba, probably the fastest and most deadly of West African snakes, whisked across our path like a streak of green lightning. It appeared round the trunk of one tree, wiggled across the path some three feet in front of the hunter’s misshapen feet, and disappeared among the bushes; the hunter stopped dead and went a pale cheese colour. He gazed ferociously in the direction the reptile had taken, and then turned to me:

“Ugh!” he said vehemently and comprehensively. It was the only remark he had made since we started, so I felt I ought to be sociable.

“Ugh!” I agreed.

We continued upwards in silence.

When we had reached the half-way mark the hunter led me to a large shallow pool at the base of the waterfall, and here he removed his sarong and proceeded to bathe. I did likewise, choosing a position upstream from him as I had no particular desire to catch any of the great variety of diseases he was suffering from. When he had washed he drank vigorously, belching in between gulps . . . a remarkable and sustained performance. I squatted on a rock to open a bottle of beer; it was then that I discovered the opener had been left behind. Offering a brief prayer for the soul of the person who had packed the bag, I broke the neck off the bottle and drank gratefully, hoping that there was not too much glass inside. The hunter had now disappeared behind some rocks, with becoming modesty, and was performing what appeared to be, to judge from the noise he was making, his annual catharsis. Not wishing to intrude on so private and, it seemed, so painful a matter, I amused myself by wandering among the rocks at the base of the falls, in search of frogs.

Eventually my guide reappeared and we went on our way. After a time I walked in a sort of trance, the sweat running down into my eyes unheeded. That part of the trip seems to be a complete blank. I came to as we burst out of the forest into a tiny grass field, bleached white by the sun, and a troop of Mona Guenons rushed from the grass and leapt into the trees with a crashing of leaves. We could hear them crashing off, shouting “oink . . . oink . . ” to each other, as Monas do. The hunter led me to the edge of the grass field where there was an enormous rock, as big as a house, perched on the edge of the cliff we had just climbed. Scrambling to the top of this a wonderful sight met my eyes.

In every direction stretched the forest below us, miles and miles of undulating country, here and there rising into a curious shaped hill, all of it covered with a thick pelt of trees in every shade and combination of greens. Far away below us, like a faint chalk stripe among the trees, lay the road, and following it along with my eyes I could see Bakebe and, perched on the hill above, the big hut that housed our collection. In front of us the forest rolled away to the French border and beyond, and to our right, seen dimly shimmering in the heat haze, more like a faint fingerprint on the blue sky, I could see Mount Cameroon, nearly eighty miles away. It was a breath-taking and beautiful sight, and for the first time I fully realized the vastness of the incredible forest. From the plain below where we sat the forest stretched, almost unbroken, right across Africa, until it merged into the savannah land of the east: Kenya, Tanganyika, and Rhodesia. It was an astonishing thought. I sat there smoking a much-needed cigarette, and wondering how many beef there were to a square mile, but after a few minutes of intense mental arithmetic I began to feel dizzy at the thought of such numbers and I gave it up.

The hunter lay on the rock and went to sleep. I sat there and examined a vast area of forest with the aid of my field-glasses, and I found it a fascinating occupation. I followed the flight of the hornbills across the tops of the trees, which, from this distance, resembled the head of a cauliflower: I watched a troop of monkeys, only visible by the movement of the leaves as they jumped from tree to tree.

Along the road a speck that looked like an exotic red beetle became the Mamfe to Kumba lorry, apparently creeping along the road and dragging a plume of dust behind it. I followed it along for quite some time and then switched to something else, which was a pity, as half a mile further on the lorry went through a bridge and dropped twenty feet into the river below, a thing I did not learn about until I returned home and found that John had spent the afternoon administering first aid to the wounded passengers.

As the hunter was slumbering peacefully I at last climbed down from the rock and explored the grass field. On the opposite side, some twenty feet into the trees, I came upon a glade between the great tree trunks, and here a tiny stream meandered its way through moss-covered boulders. This, I decided, was the very place for a camp. When I had examined the ground, peered under a few boulders, and generally investigated the position, I walked on through the forest, and presently came to another grass field, much larger than the first. So apparently the camp site I had chosen was in a tongue of forest, bordered on two sides by grass. This struck me as admirable, for I felt that these grass fields might well yield some good specimens.

Returning, I found the hunter awake, and I suggested that we should now return as I had seen all I wanted to see, and it was getting late. He led the way without a word; he was by far the most silent inhabitant of the Cameroons I had come across. The way down was much easier, and so we made better time. As we reached the last slope of the mountain a sudden wind sprang up, bringing with it a sharp shower of rain. Leaves and small branches were ripped from the trees and fell all about us, and somewhere in the forest we heard a splintering crash that denoted the fall of quite a large branch or tree, bent beyond endurance by this sudden fierce wind.

We arrived at Fineschang wet through, and I took shelter in the hunter’s evil-smelling abode, where presently Daniel joined me. After we had smoked for a while the hunter showed no signs of broaching the subject, so I asked him when he would lead my party up the mountain and pitch the camp, and how much he would want for the job.

“Masa go pay me twenty pounds for do dis ting,” he stated calmly.

I was so surprised I laughed, which seemed to annoy him, for he went into a long tirade about the ju-ju that lived on the mountain over which he was the only man to have any control, and what a dangerous business it was placating a ju-ju, and so on. Then he really nettled me by stating that I could not go up the mountain without him, so I would have to accept his price. It had stopped raining, so I rose to my feet and glared at him.

“Listen, my friend, if you go take me for dis place I go pay you two shillings a day, and I go dash you when I come back if I catch good beef up dere. If you no agree, I go for dis place myself. I go get other hunter man who go help me, you hear? If you agree, tell me.”

The hunter looked at me scornfully and said something derogatory in his own language, to which Daniel replied heatedly.

“Does he agree, Daniel?”

“No, sah, he no agree.”

“Come, then, we go leave dis stupid man,” I said. I laid three shillings on the step of his house and strode out of the village wrathfully, mounted the bicycle with all the dignity I could muster, and rode away.

CHAPTER TEN N’DA ALI

WE started for N’da Ali at some hideous grey hour in the morning, and by the time the sun had broken through the mists we had reached the lower slopes of the mountain. It was a hard climb from then on, and the carriers moaned and whistled and gasped as they crawled their way upwards, hoisting themselves and their loads from rock to rock, and edging their way over and around the great curled tree roots. It was in this type of country more than in any other that I felt a great respect and sympathy for my carriers. Here was I, unencumbered except for field-glasses and a shotgun, gasping for breath and feeling my heart pounding as though it would burst, having to sit down every half-mile or so for a rest. Yet the line of carriers crawled steadily upwards with their great loads balanced on their woolly heads, their faces gleaming with sweat, and their neck muscles standing out with the effort of supporting and balancing the boxes and bales. The Tailor and I moved ahead and above them, picking out the easiest path for them to travel, and the Tailor marking it with quick cuts of his machete into the green bark of the saplings. When we came to a place where the rocks were dangerous, or a huge tree lay across our path in a shroud of lianas, the Tailor and I would pause and wait for the carriers to catch up so that we could help them over the obstacle. As each carrier passed I would exchange a remark in pidgin with him, much to the amusement of the others.

“Iseeya, bo.”

“Tank you, Masa. . . .”

“You get power too much, my friend.”

“Na true, sah.”

“Walka strong, bo.”

“I go try, Masa.”

And so on as each grinning, sweating man negotiated the difficult area. On reaching the other side in safety each man would whistle sharply through his teeth, a great exhalation of breath that echoed briefly through the trees.

After an hour’s steady climbing I judged that we were about half-way to our objective, the place I had chosen far the campsite, and so I called a halt on a comparatively flat area of land. The carriers put down their loads with grunts of relief and squatted round on their haunches breathing deeply, while the Tailor distributed the cigarettes I had brought for them. Half an hour later the men rewound the little mats of leaf or cloth which they place on their heads, the loads were hoisted up again, and we set off on the last lap of the journey.

We had started up the lower slope of N’da Ali at seven-thirty, and by eleven we had reached the flat area of forest that represented the great “step” that ran along one side of the mountain. It was not long before we passed through a small grass field, and on the other side we entered a thin woodland bordering on a small stream. Here the loads were put down and great activity took place: the tent was erected, a kitchen was made out of saplings and grass, and the carriers built themselves tiny, goblin-like houses among the tall buttress roots of a huge tree nearby. When some sort of order had been established the Tailor, myself, and the youth who was to act as bird trapper went into the neighbouring forest and picked out and marked some thirty spots that seemed likely places for setting traps. Then the youth was sent off to cut himself the twigs and branches for trap building. Having got this under control I wandered off by myself, following the course of a tiny stream that glinted and purred its way through the mossy boulders twenty feet from my tent, in the hopes of finding a place deep enough to bathe in. Soon I found the stream entered a thick tangle of low undergrowth, and here it flowed over a great sheet of rock, which it had hollowed out into a series of pools. The largest of these was some fifteen feet long, and about two feet deep: it was lined with a bed of white sand and a scattering of small smooth yellow pebbles. As a natural bathtub it left nothing to be desired, and I stripped and stepped gratefully into the water. The shock I received was considerable, for the streams in the lowlands, though cold, were not unpleasant. But this stream was pure snow-broth that numbed sensation and made the extremities of your body ache. I splashed half-heartedly for a few minutes and then climbed out with my teeth chattering, and gathering up my shoes and clothes I made my way through the undergrowth into the grass field. After assuring myself that there was nothing more dangerous than a few locusts about, I stretched myself in the sun to dry.

I dozed for a time, and presently I sat up and looked about me: not thirty feet away from me, among the golden tufts of grass, stood a handsome spotted cat gazing at me with an expression of meditative appraisal. For one frightful moment I thought it was a leopard, but a longer look and I recognized it as a Serval, an animal much smaller, and with a brownish coat covered with small round spots. My chief feeling was one of surprise, for every hunter, black or white, and nearly every book that has been written about the forest assures one that if you catch a glimpse of a great cat once in fifty years you are doing fine. So I was filled with a mixture of apprehension and pleasure on finding the Serval there when I awoke.

It stood quite still, regarding me thoughtfully, and the tip of its tail moved very gently among the grass stalks. I had seen domestic cats looking like this at sparrows, twitching their tails, and I did not feel very happy about it. Also, I was stark naked, and I have found that in moments of crisis to have no clothes on gives one a terribly unprotected feeling. I glared at the Serval, wishing that I had my shorts on and that I could think of some way of capturing it without the risk of being disembowelled. The Serval blinked its eyes and looked as though it was considering lying down in the warm grass and joining me in a nap. Just at that moment an uproar broke out from the direction of the camp, and the cat, after glancing hurriedly over its shoulder in the direction of the noise, disappeared into the undergrowth with a swift smooth rush. I struggled hastily into my shorts and shoes, and although I was not long in reaching the spot where the cat had entered the bushes, I could see no sign of it. In the warm, still air there hung a strong, pungent odour, and in the patch of soft earth was one paw mark. Cursing myself; the carriers, and the Serval with equal vehemence, I made my way back to camp, and here I found out the reason for the noise that had startled the cat.

One side of the kitchen had collapsed, and everyone was standing around arguing and shouting, while the cook, his hair full of grass, was dancing with rage. I took the Tailor aside, out of earshot of the more timid members of my retinue, and told him what I had just seen.

“It was a tiger, sir?”he asked.

A tiger in pidgin means a leopard, a typical example of how animals are wrongly named.

“No, it wasn’t a tiger: it was like one, but smaller, and with much smaller mark-mark for his skin.” “Ah, yes, I know this animal,” said the Tailor.

“Well, how can we catch it? If there’s one up here there must be others, no be so?”

“Na so, sir,” he agreed. “What we want is dogs: I know some hunter man near Bakebe who get fine dogs: shalt I go send him message to come up?”

“Yes, tell him to come up here to-morrow if he can.”

The Tailor went off to arrange this, and I went to see what lunch had been salvaged out of the wreckage of the kitchen.

That afternoon I wandered off alone into the forest, keeping the bulk of N’da Ali on my left so that I would not get lost. I was going nowhere in particular, and so I walked slowly, pausing often to examine the trees and surrounding undergrowth for signs of life. I was watching a huge solitary ant wandering about the leaf-mould, when I heard a rustle of leaves in a tree close by, followed by a loud “tchack! . . . tchack!”. A branch dipped gracefully and along it a pair of small squirrels came running, tails streaming out behind them. I realized with delight that they were Black-eared Squirrels, a rather rare forest animal which I had not seen before. With my field-glasses I could see that they were male and female, and apparently engaged in the time-honoured method of flirtation. The female leapt from the end of the slender branch and landed on another some ten feet away, and the male followed her, uttering his sharp cry of “tchack! . . . tchack! . . .” I moved a little closer to the tree so that I could see them more easily, and found that they were now playing a form of hide- and-seek round the trunk. They were delightful little animals to look at: they had orange-coloured heads with a narrow edge of black round their small ears: the upper parts were brindled greenish, and along the sides was a line composed of little white dots. Their tummies were orange-yellow, as were their chests. But it was their tails that captivated me. The top surface was banded faintly with white and black, but the underside was the most vivid shade of orange-red. As they ran along the branches the tail would be held out straight, but when they stopped they would flick it over their backs so that the tip hung down almost on the nose. Then they would sit quite still and flick their tails with an undulating motion for a few seconds at a time, so that the vivid underside gleamed and flickered like a candle flame in a draught. I watched these squirrels leaping and scurrying around that tree for half an hour, bobbing and bowing to each other and flicking their tails among the green leaves, and I have rarely witnessed such enchanting play between two animals. Slowly they played from tree to tree, and I followed them, my field-glasses glued to my eyes. Then, to my annoyance, I stepped on a dry twig: the squirrels froze on a branch and the male cried out again, but instead of being gentle and endearing the cry was now sharp and full of warning. The next minute they were gone, and only a slight movement of leaves showed the place where they had been.

I walked on, considering my luck: in the space of a few hours I had seen a Serval and two squirrels, and this was a record for any day. I presumed that, as the mountain was so rarely visited by human beings, the animal population was less suspicious than in the lowlands. Also, of course, the forest here was more open, being broken by cliffs and grass fields, and this made the animals easier to see and approach. As I was musing on this the silence of the forest was suddenly shattered by the most blood-curdling scream, which was followed by bursts of horrible, echoing maniacal laughter, that screeched and gurgled through the trees, and then died to a dreadful whimpering which eventually ceased. I stood frozen in my tracks, and my scalp pricked with fright: I have heard some ghastly sounds at one time and another, but for sheer horrific impact this was hard to beat. It sounded like a magnified recording of a party in a padded cell. After a few minutes’ silence I summoned what little courage I possessed and crept through the trees in the direction from which the sounds had come. Suddenly it broke out again, spine-chilling gurgles of laughter interspersed with shrill screams, but it was much farther away now, and I knew that I should not catch up with whatever was producing it. Then suddenly I realized what was making this fearsome noise: it was the evening serenade of a troop of chimpanzees. I had often heard chimps laugh and scream in captivity, but I had never, until that moment, heard a troop of them holding a concert in the forest which gave their cries an echoing quality. I defy anyone, even someone who has had experience with chimps, to stand on N’da Ali and listen to these apes at their evening song without getting a shudder down his spine.

After we had been for some days on N’da Ali I learnt the habits of this crowd of apes. In the early morning they would be high up the mountain screaming and laughing among the tall cliffs; at midday they would be in the thick forest lower down, where they could find shade from the sun, and at this time they were almost silent; in the evening they would descend to the great step along the side of the mountain on which we were camped, and treat us to an evening concert which was prolonged and nerve-shattering. Then, as darkness fell, they would grow silent except for an occasional whimper. Their movement was very regular, and you could tell with reasonable accuracy what time of day it was by listening to hear which part of the forest they were in.

On returning to camp I found that the bird trapper had made the first two captures: one was a Forest robin, which was not exciting as I knew that John had plenty of them, and the other was a drab little bird with a speckled breast, which was almost indistinguishable from an ordinary English thrush. It was, in fact, so uninteresting that I was on the point of letting it go again, but I thought that I would send it down to John for him to look at, so I packed up both birds and sent the carrier post-haste down the mountain to Bakebe, with instructions that he was to be back again early next morning.

The next day he appeared neck and neck with my morning tea, bringing a note from John. From this it transpired that the drab little bird I had sent was, in reality, a Ground Thrush of great rarity, and an important addition to the collection, and my companion exhorted me to get as many as I could. When I remembered how close I had been to releasing what now turned out to be a bird that rejoiced in the name of Geokichla camerunensis, my blood ran cold. I hastily called for the bird trapper and informed him that he would get extra pay for each of the Ground Thrushes he procured.

“Masa mean dat bird ’e get red for ’e front?” he inquired.

“No, no, dat one ’e get mark mark for ’e front.”

“But,” pointed out the bird trapper, with some justification, “Masa done tell me he no want um again.”

“Yes, I know, But now I want um . . . plenty plenty, you hear?”

“I hear, sah,” said the youth dismally, and wandered off to cogitate on the curious ways of the white man.

As I was eating breakfast the Tailor appeared, and with him was a stocky young man with a lean, intelligent face, and curious pale yellow eyes. At his heels followed a pack of four piebald, lanky, unkempt-looking dogs, with suspicious eyes.

“This is the hunter man, sir,” said the Tailor, “he done bring dogs.”

After greeting the man, I asked how he hunted with the dogs. For answer he rummaged in the bag that hung from his shoulder and produced four little wooden bells, and these he hung round the necks of his dogs, and as they moved the bells gave out a pleasant “clonking” sound.

“Dis dog,” said the hunter, “ ’e go for bush and ’ego smell de road for de beef and ’ego run quickly quickly. In de bush you no get chance for seeum, but you go hear dis ting make noise and you go follow. So we go catch beef.”

It sounded a vague and extremely exhausting process, but I was willing to try anything once.

“All right,” I said, “we go for bush and try. . . ”

We set off into the forest, Tailor, Yellow-Eyes, myself, and three others who were laden down with bags and nets, the dogs running ahead of us through the trees sniffing wildly in all directions. For an hour we walked and nothing happened. One of the dogs found some mess or other, and a disgraceful fight broke out as to which of the pack should roll in the delicacy. In the end they shared it, and we proceeded amid a strong and nauseating odour. I was just beginning to wonder if hunting with dogs was all the Tailor had made it out to be, when the smallest of our pack put her nose to the ground, uttered a series of shrill yaps, and rushed headlong into the thickest tangle of undergrowth she could find. The rest of the pack, all giving tongue, followed her, and they were soon out of sight. With a loud cry, which was presumably meant as an encouragement to his dogs, Yellow-Eyes plunged into the tangle of thorns and lianas, and the Tailor and the rest of the retinue followed. Unless I wanted to be left behind it was obvious that I should have to do the same; so, cursing the dog for finding the scent in such an overgrown bit of forest, I pushed my way into the undergrowth, tripping and stumbling, and getting stabbed by thorns and twigs. At last I caught up with the others who were running easily and swiftly, ducking and twisting between the trees and the creepers. Ahead of us the pack was silent except for an occasional yap, but we could hear the little wooden bells clonking like mad.

We ran for what seemed hours and at last came to a gasping and perspiring halt; we listened, between gulps for air, but there was no sound from the dogs, not even the clonking of the bells. Yellow-Eyes gave a few shrill falsetto screeches, but there was no response: we had lost our pack. I lay on the ground, thankful for this respite, filling my lungs with air, and wondering if my heart was going to jump through my ribs. Yellow-Eyes and the Tailor disappeared into the forest, and some time after faint yodels brought us to our feet; when we caught up with them we could hear in the distance the clonking of the bells. We ran on and each moment the sound of the bells grew clearer, and we could hear the dogs yapping frenziedly. We were running downhill now, and the ground was covered with great boulders and fallen trees which made the going more difficult and dangerous. Suddenly we came to a small clearing, and an astonishing sight met my eyes: the dogs were grouped round the base of a small cliff some thirty feet high, its surface speckled with moss and begonias, and, yapping and snarling, they were leaping wildly in the air in an attempt to reach a ledge some ten feet above them, and on it, hissing like a train and lashing with its tail, lay a huge Monitor. Whatever else I thought we should get I had not thought of Monitors, for I had been under the impression that these huge lizards frequented the larger rivers. But there was no mistaking this one for, with its tail, it measured about five feet long. Its great body was raised on its stumpy legs, and its long tapering tail curved ready to strike; its throat swelled with the hissing exhalations of breath, and its long black, forked tongue flicked in and out of its mouth.

It had apparently run up the rock face when pursued, using its long claws to obtain a foothold where no dog could follow. Having reached this narrow ledge it found that the cliff above bulged out, so it could go no further. The dogs were mad with excitement, giving great twisting leaps into the air in an attempt to reach the ledge, frothing at the mouth and yapping loudly. Yellow-Eyes called them off and tied them to a small tree, which they made quiver and bend with their barking and straining. Then we stretched the toughest net we had on to two long poles and, running forward, flung the net over the ledge. As it landed the Monitor leapt forward to meet it, tail lashing, mouth open, and it became intricately entangled in the mesh of the net, and both net and lizard fell to the ground with a crash. We jumped forward, but the reptile was not finished yet, for the net had fallen about him in loose folds, and he had plenty of room to bite and lash with his tail. With some difficulty we got him out of the net, wrapped him in sacks, bound him with cords, and then slung him between two poles. His skin was rough and black, with a scattering of golden spots, pin-head size, here and there; his eyes were a fierce filigree of gold and black. His strong curved claws would have been envied by a large bird of prey. We carried him back to the camp in triumph, and I worked far into the night with the Tailor, fashioning a rough wooden cage out of poles, in which to send him down the mountain to Bakebe.

The next morning, exhilarated and encouraged by the previous day’s success, we set off to hunt early in the morning, and the dogs found a fresh scent almost at once. We ran with them for perhaps a mile and then, as before, they were suddenly swallowed in the vastness of the forest, and we could neither see nor hear them. For a long time we wandered around in circles, trying to find trace of them; then I saw Yellow-Eyes cock his head on one side and, listening carefully, I heard the distant purring of a waterfall.

“Eh, sometime they done go for water,” panted Yellow-Eyes, “and then we no go hear um.”

We ran on, the noise of the fails grew louder, and soon we found ourselves stumbling along the rocky banks of a frothing, tumbling stream. Ahead was the waterfall, a shining wall of water falling from a rock face some fifty feet high into a tumble of big boulders thickly encrusted with green moss and lush plants. Everything was misty with spray, and over the crest of the waterfall hung a tiny blurred rainbow which gleamed and faded with the pulsating of the water. Above the voice of the falls we could now hear the clonking of the bells, and from out of the undergrowth between two rocks backed one of the dogs, stern first, yapping hysterically.

Leaping from rock to rock through the rapids we reached the base of the fails, and clambered eagerly over the slippery rocks to see what it was that the dogs had cornered. There, in a small shady area between the boulders, lay another Monitor, but, in comparison to it, the one we had caught the day before looked like a pygmy. It was curved like a great taut bow, its massive body quite still except for the heaving movement of its ribs. Its mouth was open, and even above the sounds of the waters we could hear it hissing. He had chosen the best place to stand at bay, for on three sides he was protected by rocks, and his claws, tail, and mouth made the other line of attack dangerous to say the least. All the dogs realized this fact except one, a young and foolish bitch, and she had yapped and yarred herself into a fit of hysterical bravery which our presence seemed to increase. Before we could stop her she had rushed into the corner and, more by good luck than anything, had succeeded in fastening her teeth in the loose skin of the Monitor’s neck; the reptile, lashing at the dog’s thin body with his tail, grasped one of her ears in his sharp-edged mouth. The dog was now in a difficult position, for she could not let go and bound away, held as she was in this vice-like grip. Slowly and carefully the Monitor rose on his thick legs and gradually edged his way round until first one and then both of his hind legs were on the unfortunate bitch’s back. Then he hunched himself, and suddenly kicked out with his hind feet, raking and tearing the skin off the dog’s back with his curved claws. The bitch gave a scream of pain and let go of the reptile’s neck, and, to my surprise, the great lizard also released his hold. As she scuttled away from him he lashed round with his tail and bowled her over in a bloodstained heap. She crawled out from among the rocks, shivering and whining, and went and sat on the banks of the stream and tried to lick the dreadful wounds on her back. The Monitor was unharmed except for a scratch on his neck, and looked quite ready to give battle again at a moment’s notice.

Leaving the Tailor to watch the reptile, Yellow-Eyes and I tied the dogs up to a tree, and I bathed the bitch’s wounds. From midway down her back to her rump were seven long gashes, as though she had been sliced with a rather blunt knife. I had just finished with the dog when a cry from the Tailor to the effect that the Monitor was moving sent us all rushing back to the cliff. The reptile had advanced a few yards, but as soon as he saw us he retreated to his corner again. We made several attempts to throw a net over him, but there was no space to manoeuvre properly, and the net kept getting caught up on the rocks. There was only one thing to do, and that was to get above him and drop a noose over his head. Leaving the others with instructions to rush in and net him as soon as I had the rope round his neck, I crawled slowly over the rocks to a vantage point above him.

I had to move slowly and cautiously for the rocks were slippery with moisture where exposed, and the moss slid off the surface like slime under my feet. At length I reached the small promontory above our quarry and, squatting on my haunches, I fashioned a slip-knot at the end of a long thin cord. Then I lowered it towards the head of the reptile some six feet below me. In my excitement I did not fasten the loose end of the rope to anything, and then added to my stupidity by kneeling on the coil of rope . . . which made my downfall doubly ignominious.

Lowering the noose to within a foot of the lizard’s head I flipped it over very neatly and pulled it tight, feeling the rosy glow of pride that goes before a fall. As he felt the noose tighten the Monitor shot forward in a great wiggling dash that jerked the cord from my hands and whipped my knees from under me, so that I toppled over and slid down the rocks, in the most undignified position and with ever-increasing speed. In the brief moment before I landed, with a spine-shattering crash, in the miniature canyon below, I offered up a prayer that my descent would frighten the reptile into the nets. I had no desire to engage him in a wrestling match after seeing what he had done to the dog. Luckily, he was scared and tried to make a dash for it, and his fore quarters were enfolded in a heap of netting. The Tailor and Yellow-Eyes leapt forward on to his lashing tail and hind quarters and pulled the net over completely. As soon as he was well trussed up in sacking and cord I examined the bite on his neck, but I found that the dog’s teeth had only just broken the skin. These two giant lizards were a very welcome addition to the collection, principally because of their size. In the collection at Bakebe I had a number of youngsters, but they were insignificant in comparison. When they are young these Monitors are slim and neat, their skin a peculiar shade of greeny-black, thickly dotted with groups of bright golden-yellow spots. As they grow older the skin becomes a deep, dusty black, and the yellow spots fade and disappear until only a faint scattering of them remains. They were not difficult feeders, eating anything in the way of dead animals or birds. The things they adored above all else were eggs, and with the use of these delicacies they soon became quite tame, and allowed me to massage their rough backs and pull the dry flakes of skin off when they were sloughing.

When, much later, we returned to camp, I found the traps had yielded a mixed bag of birds, and to my delight it included two of the Ground Thrushes. Although it was so late I felt that the sooner John had these precious birds in his hands the better, so I packed them up and sent them off down the mountain with the Monitor. The carriers moaned and complained at being sent off at that hour, protesting that it would be dark very soon and that the lower slopes of the mountain were notorious for the size and ferocity of its leopards and the cunning and malignancy of its ju-jus. So I gave them an extra lantern to ward off these dangers, and watched them out of sight.

Later, while there was still enough light left to see by, I went for a stroll about half a mile from the camp, and presently I found that I was at the edge of a cliff about a hundred feet high. The tops of the trees that grew below were on a level with the top of the cliff, and their lower branches interlaced with the undergrowth growing there. By crawling to the edge of the cliff, in amongst the curling roots and twisted hedge of low growth, I found I was in an excellent position for, being on a level with the massive tree-tops that grew from below, it was as though I had suddenly been transported to the top layer of the forest. I concealed myself beneath a large bush, unhitched my field-glasses and scanned the leaves for a sign of life.

I lay there for a long time, but nothing happened. Faintly, far away down the mountain, I could hear some hornbills honking. Then I heard a faint rustle that seemed to come from somewhere behind me. I had half-turned to see what was making the noise when something landed with a crash of leaves in the bush under which I lay. I lay as still as possible and waited. For a few seconds there was silence, and then from above me came a loud, deep cry: “Oink! . . . Oink!”, and I realized that it was a troop of Mona guenons. For the next half-hour I was treated to the most delightful close-up of monkey life that anyone could wish for.

The monkey in the tree above me was presumably the leader, for he was a male of huge proportions. Having surveyed the forest below the cliff and seen no danger, he had uttered his “all clear” cry to the rest of the troop, and then he leapt from his bush above me and plummeted downwards like a stone over the edge of the cliff, hands and legs outstretched, to land among the top branches of a tree-top just opposite to where I was lying. He disappeared among the leaves for a few seconds, and then reappeared walking along a branch. When he reached a comfortable fork he seated himself, looked about him, and uttered a few deep grunts.

Immediately the bush above me swayed and shook as another monkey landed in it, and almost in the same movement leapt off again to drop down over the cliff into the tree-top where the old male was waiting. Their progression was very orderly: as one landed in the tree below another would arrive in the bush above me. I counted thirty adults as they jumped, and many of the females had young clinging to their bodies. I could hear these babies giving shrill squeaks, either of fear or delight, as their parents hurtled downwards. When the whole troop was installed in the tree they spread out and started to feed on a small black fruit that was growing there. They walked along the branches, plucking the fruit and stuffing it into their mouths, continuously glancing a-round them in the quick nervous way that all monkeys have. Some of the bigger babies had now unhooked themselves from their mothers’ fur and followed them through the trees uttering their plaintive cries of “Weeek! . . . Weeek!” in shrill, quavering voices. The adults exchanged comments in deep grunts. I saw no fights break out; occasionally a particularly fine fruit would be snatched by one monkey from the paws of a smaller individual, but beyond a yarring grunt of indignation from the victim, nothing happened to disturb their peaceful feeding.

Suddenly there was a great harsh swishing of wind and a series of wild honking cries as two hornbills flew up from the forest below, and with the air of drunken imbecility common to their kind crashed to rest among the branches, in the noisy unbalanced way that is the hornbill’s idea of a perfect landing. They clung to the branches, blinking delightedly at the Monas from under the great swollen casques that ornamented their heads, like elongated balloons. Then they hopped crabwise along the branches and plucked the black fruit with the tips of their beaks most delicately. Then they would throw back their heads and toss the fruit down their throats. After each gulp they would squat and stare roguishly at the monkeys from their great black eyes, fluttering their heavy eyelashes. The Monas ignored these tattered clowns with their Cyrano de Bergerac profiles, and continued to feed quietly. They were used to hornbills, for what the vulture is to the lion, the hornbill is to the monkeys in the Cameroons. Whenever there is a troop of monkeys feeding, there, sooner or later, you will find some hornbills, giving the whole position away with their loud honking and the swish of their wings, which can be heard a mile away. How the monkeys must have hated the company of these great birds, and yet they had to suffer it.

Presently the hornbills flew off with a great thrashing of wings, and soon after the leader of the Monas decided that it was time they were moving. He grunted a few times, and the mothers clasped their young to their bellies, and then they leapt, one by one, down into the foliage below, and were swallowed up in a sea of leaves. For some little time I could hear their progress through the forest below, the surging crash of leaves as they jumped from tree to tree sounding like slow heavy breakers on a rocky shore. When I could no longer hear them I rose from my hiding place, cramped and stiff, picked the twigs and the ants from my person, and blundered my way back to camp through the darkening forest.

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE JU-JU THAT WORKED

THE next two days were spent hunting with the dogs, and we had exceptionally good luck. The first day we caught a young Monitor and a full-grown Duiker, but it was on the second day that we secured a real prize. We had spent some hours rushing madly up and down the mountain following the dogs, who were following trails that seemed to lead nowhere, and at length we had halted for a rest among some huge boulders. We squatted on the rocks, gasping and sweating, while our dauntless pack lay at our feet, limp and panting. Soon, when we had all regained our breath somewhat, one of the dogs got up and wandered off into some neighbouring bushes, where we could hear it sniffing around, its bell clonking. Suddenly it let out a wild yelp, and we could hear it rushing off through the bushes; immediately the rest of the pack was galvanized into action and followed quickly with much yelping. We gathered up our things hastily, flung away our half smoked cigarettes, and followed the pack with all speed. At first the trail led downhill, and we leapt wildly among the boulders and roots as we rushed down the steep incline. At one point there was a flimsy sapling hanging low over our path, and instead of ducking beneath it as the others had done, I brushed it aside with one hand. Immediately a swarm of black dots appeared before my eyes and an agonizing pain spread over my neck and cheek. On the branch which I had so carelessly thrust aside there was hanging a small forest wasps’ nest, a thing the size of an apple hanging concealed beneath the leaves. The owners of these nests are swift and angry, and do not hesitate to attack, as I now realized. As I rushed on, clutching my cheek and neck and cursing fluently, it occurred to me that the hunters had seen the nest and had instinctively ducked to avoid disturbing it, and they presumably thought I would do the same. From then on I imitated their actions slavishly, while my head ached and throbbed.

It was the longest chase we had had to date; we must have run for nearly an hour, and towards the end I was so exhausted and in such pain that I did not really care if we captured anything or not. But eventually we caught up with the pack, and we found them grouped around the end of a great hollow tree trunk thaat stretched across the forest floor. The sight of the animal that crouched snarling gently at the dogs in the mouth of the trunk revived my interest in life immediately; it was the size of an English fox, with a heavy, rather bear-like face, and neat round ears. Its long sinuous body was cream coloured, as were its head and tail. Its slim and delicate legs were chocolate brown. It was a Black-legged Mongoose, probably the rarest of the mongoose family in West Africa. On our arrival this rarity cast us a scornful glance and retreated into the interior of the trunk, and as soon as he had disappeared the dogs regained their courage and flung themselves at the opening and hurled abuse at him, though none of them, I noticed, tried to follow him.

The hunters now noticed for the first time that I had been stung, for my face and neck were swollen, and one eye was half closed in what must have looked like a rather lascivious wink. They stood around me moaning and clicking their fingers with grief, and ejaculating “Sorry, sah!” at intervals, while the Tailor rushed off to a nearby stream and brought me water to wash the stings with. Application of a cold compress eased the pain considerably, and we then set about the task of routing the Mongoose from his stronghold. Luckily the tree was an old one, and under the crust of bark we found the wood dry and easy to cut. We laid nets over the mouth of the trunk, and then at the other end we cut a small hole and in this we laid a fire of green twigs and leaves. This was lit and the Tailor, armed with a great bunch of leaves, fanned it vigorously so that the smoke was blown along the hollow belly of the dead tree. As we added more and more green fuel to the fire, and the smoke became thicker and more pungent, we could hear the Mongoose coughing angrily inside the trunk. Soon it became too much for him, and he shot out into the nets in a cloud of smoke, like a small white cannon-ball from the mouth of a very large cannon. It took us a long time to unwind him, for he had tied himself up most intricately, but at last we got him into a canvas bag, and set off for camp, tired but in high spirits. Even the pain of my wasp stings was forgotten in the warm glow of triumph that enveloped me.

The next morning I awoke feeling wretched: my head ached, and my face was so swollen that I could hardly see out of my copiously watering eyes.

To irritate me still further it turned out to be one of N’da Ali’s off days: she had enveloped herself in every available cloud and even the kitchen, a few paces away from the tent, was invisible in the white dampness. As I was gently masticating the remnants of my breakfast, Pious loomed out of the mist, and with him was a short, misshapen, evil-looking man bearing a huge basket on his head.

“Dis man bring beef, sah,” said Pious, eyeing my swollen face with disapproval.

The man bobbed and bowed, displaying withered yellow stumps of teeth in his fox’s grin. I disliked him on sight, and I disliked him even more on opening his basket and finding inside, not the fine specimen I had hoped for, but a solitary mangy rat with an amputated tail. Having told the man what I thought of his beef I returned to my breakfast. Pious and the man whispered together for a few minutes, the man glancing furtively at me now and then, and Pious came forward once more.

“Excuse me, sah, dis man come from Fineschang, and he say he get something to tell Masa.”

The man capered forward, bowing and grinning and flapping his wrinkled hands.

“Masa,” he whined, “de people for Fineschang dey angry too much dat Masa done come for dis place.”

“Well?”

“Yesterday dey done put ju-ju for Masa. . . .”

“Whar!” yelped Pious, slapping the man on the head so that his dirty hat fell over his eyes. “Na what kind of ju-ju dey done put for Masa, ay?”

“No be bad ju-ju,” said the man hastily, “only Masa no go catch any more beef for dis place, no go get lucky, get plenty rain too much, Masa no go stay.”

“Go tell the people of Fineschang I no fear their ju-ju,” I said wrathfully, “I go stay here until I want to go, you hear? And if I see any Fineschang man for dis place, I get gun that get power too much, you hear, bushman?”

“I hear, sah,” said the man, cringing, “but why Masa de shout me, I no get palaver with Masa?”

“My friend, I savvay dis ju-ju talk: dis ju-ju no fit work if I no know dis ting, and so you be messenger boy, no be so?”

“No, sah, I no get palaver with Masa.”

“All right, now you go for Fineschang one time or I go get palaver with you. You hear?”

The man scuttled off through the mist and Pious gazed anxiously after him.

“You want I go beat him, sah?”he asked hopefully.

“No, leave him.”

“Eh! I no like dis ju-ju business, sah.”

“Well, don’t tell the others, I don’t want them all panicky.”

It was the first time that I have had a ju-ju put on me, and I was interested to see what would happen. I most emphatically do not dismiss ju-ju as a lot of nonsense and mumbo-jumbo, and anyone who does so is a fool, for ju-ju is a very real and potent force all over Africa, and has been known to produce results which are difficult to explain away. Perhaps the commonest sort, and the most effective, is where you have the co-operation of your victim. By this I mean that the man must know he has had a ju-ju placed on him, and then, if he believes in magic, he is ripe for the slaughter. A “well-wisher” comes to the unfortunate man and tells him that a ju-ju has been placed on him, and then, if he believes it, he is left in horrid suspense for a time. Slowly the whole plot is unfolded to him by different “well-wishers” (these, in Africa, are just as deadly as their European counterparts) and he learns that he is gradually to waste away and die. If he is sufficiently convinced of the efficacy of the spell, he will waste away and die. The man who had just been to see me was one of these “well-wishers”, and now that I had been told about the ju-ju, it was more or less up to me. The curious thing was that the ju-ju did work, better than anyone could have wished, but how much of it was due to my own unconscious efforts, and how much was mere coincidence, I don’t know.

The next afternoon, the swelling on my face having gone down, the Tailor, myself, and four others went to the base of some huge cliffs a few miles from camp. These cliffs were riddled with caves, and our object was to try and catch some of the bats that lived in them and to see what else we could find. N’da Ali had recovered from her bad mood, and the day was sparkling with sunlight, and there was even a gentle breeze to keep us cool. I had forgotten all about the ju-ju . . . or, at any rate, I thought I had.

To get down to these caves, which were all connected to each other by a network of narrow passages, we had to lower ourselves into a gorge about forty feet deep. We soon found that the ropes we had brought with us were not long enough for this, and so we had to cut great lengths of “bush rope”, that thin, tough creeper that grows everywhere in the forest.

With these bits of creeper tied together, we lowered ourselves into the gash in the mountainside At the bottom we separated, and each squeezed through a different tunnel to explore various sections of the caves. The place was full of bats, from the tiny little insect-eaters to the great heavy fruit- eaters, but for two hours they flicked about us and we caught nothing.

Blundering through the labyrinth I met the Tailor, who was standing gazing at a pile of rocks in one corner of the cave. In an excited whisper he said that he had just seen something move on top of the, pile of rocks, high up by the roof. While we were holding a whispered argument as to the best thing to do, we were joined by another member of the hunting brigade, so we all trained our torches on the pile of rocks and surveyed them carefully. There was nothing to be seen.

“Are you sure you saw something, Tailor?”

“Yes, sah, sure. ’E dere for on top.”

We peered again, and suddenly we were startled by the appearance of a black shape which humped itself above the rocks and grunted loudly.

“Na tiger, sah,” said the Tailor.

I was inclined to agree, for the shape was too big to be anything else. On hearing our identification the third member of our little party fled down the cave towards the blessed open air and safety, leaving the Tailor and myself to face the foe.

“Na foolish man, dat,” said the Tailor scornfully, but I noticed that the hand that held his torch was none too steady. I was not at all sure what was the best thing to do: if the leopard turned nasty it would be extremely dangerous to shoot at it, for letting off a gun in a cave like that is a dangerous procedure, as it may bring the whole roof down. I felt that I would rather face a live leopard than be buried dead . . . or alive . . . under several tons of rock.

Meanwhile the black shape; after humping itself up several times and giving a few more growls, disappeared behind the rocks, and we heard a faint clatter of rocks, In the shadowy darkness of the cave we could not tell where the animal would next appear, so I was just about to suggest a strategic withdrawal when a head appeared over the top of the pile of rocks, gaped at us for a moment, and then said: “Masa, I done catch beef.”

It was the smallest and most useless of the party, one Abo, who had climbed to the top of the rocks in pursuit of a rat, Lying on his stomach he had followed the rodent through the rocks, and the heaving shape we had seen was his backside as he wriggled painfully between the slabs, grunting loudly with the unaccustomed exertion. This anti-climax left both the Tailor and myself weak with laughter, and the Tailor reeled round the cave, tears streaming down his face, slapping his thighs in mirth.

“Eh . . . aehh! Abo, nearly Masa done shoot you. Eh . . . aehh! Abo, you be fine tiger . . ” he chortled.

Abo climbed down from the rocks and held out for my inspection a small rat.

“I tink I done wound him small, Masa,” he said, which proved to be an understatement for the rat was very dead.

While we were looking around to see if we could catch any more of these rats, we heard a rumble of thunder from the outside world, which echoed ominously along the caves and passages. When we reached the gorge we found it dark and gloomy, for above us, along the sides of the huge cliffs, swollen black rain clouds were coiling and shifting. We hauled each other out of the gorge as quickly as possible, and started to pack the equipment in the bags. Suddenly the thunder crashed directly overhead, seeming to shake the very foundations of the mountain, and the next minute the clouds swept low over us and an icy sheet of rain descended. I have never seen rain so thick and heavy; almost before we realized what was happening our flimsy clothes were drenched, and our teeth chattering with cold. The sky was scarred by a sudden flash of lightning, followed by a tremendous regurgitation of thunder, and somewhere to our left in the forest I could hear the chimpanzees screaming and hooting a shrill protest at the weather.

The men picked up their bundles and we started off down the hill-side for camp; we had not gone fifty feet when my feet slipped on a rain-soaked rock, and I fell and went bouncing and rolling down the slope, ending up against the trunk of a tree, bruised and scratched, with my right leg doubled up under me and hurting badly. For a moment I thought I had broken it until I straightened it out, and then I realized I had only wrenched my ankle. But this was bad enough, for I could not stand on it for the pain. I lay there among the rain-lashed drooping trees, with a shivering group of men about me, trying to rub some life back into my leg. We were a good four miles from camp and my ankle was swelling visibly. It was obvious that we could not stay there indefinitely, and to add to my discomfiture I realized that the storm clouds hanging low over the mountain would bring darkness upon us more quickly than we had anticipated. I sent the Tailor to cut me a sapling, and this he fashioned into a rough crutch. Using this, and with the Tailor supporting me on one side, I managed to hobble along, albeit painfully, and so we progressed slowly through the dripping trees. Soon we reached a more or less level area of forest, and the sound of running water came to us. I was surprised, for the only stream we had crossed on the way up had been a wide shallow one, barely covering our ankles, and yet this one sounded like a well-fed stream. I looked at the Tailor for an explanation.

“Dat small water done fillup,” he said.

It was my first experience of how quickly a stream, especially a mountain stream, could “fillup” in a good downpour of rain. The stream we had crossed, shallow as a bird-bath, was now a foaming yellow torrent nearly waist deep, and in this roaring broth, branches, roots, leaves and bruised flowers were swept and whirled among the rocks. The shallowest point to cross was where this stream left the level forest floor and plunged down the steep mountain-side over a great sheet of rock, which had been stripped of its covering of leaf-mould by the waters. The other men went first, and when they were safely across the Tailor and I followed. Slowly we edged our way across, I testing each step with my stick. We reached the centre, and here the force of the water was greatest for it was squeezed between two big rocks. It was here that I placed my stick on a small stone that tilted, my stick was twitched away from my grasp, and I had a momentary glimpse of it sweeping down the slope, bobbing on the surface, before I fell fiat on my face in the water.

It was the grip the Tailor had on my arm that prevented me from being swept down the hill-side in company with my stick. As it was, when I landed in the water I felt myself being swept down, until I was brought up with a jerk by the Tailor’s hand, but this jerk nearly threw him alongside me into the water. Bent almost double to keep his balance he roared for help, and the others jumped back into the stream and laid hold of whatever bits of my anatomy they could see, and hauled us both to safety. Panting and shivering and sodden, we continued our way to camp.

The last half-mile was the worst, for we had to clamber down the escarpment, crawling from boulder to boulder, until we reached the level strip where the camp awaited us. Only visions of dry clothes, a hot meal and a drink kept me going. But when we reached the camp a dreadful sight met our eyes: the tiny unassuming stream that had whispered and twinkled so modestly twenty feet from my tent, was now a lusty roaring cataract, Swollen with its own power it had burst its tiny banks and leapt upon the camp. The carriers’ flimsy huts had been swept away as though they had never existed; half the kitchen was a wreck and the floor knee-deep in water. Only my tent was safe, perched as it was on a slight hillock, but even so the ground under and around it was soggy and shuddery with water. There was no firewood and the only means of heating food was the solitary Tilly lamp. Under these conditions there was only one thing to do: we all crawled into the tent . . . myself and twelve Africans in a tent that had originally been designed to accommodate two at the most! We boiled pints of hot, sweet chocolate over the lamp, and drank it out of a strange variety of dishes ranging from tin mugs to animal plates. For three hours we sat there, while the rain drummed on the taut, damp canvas, then gradually it died away, and the mountain was enveloped in great drifts of white cloud. The carriers became busy rebuilding their little shelters, and as I watched them I suddenly thought for the first time of the ju-ju. Well, the first round certainly belonged to it: my leg was very bad, and the rain made everything more difficult, and hunting almost impossible. I had a bad night, and the next day it rained solidly and dismally from dawn to nightfall, and my leg showed no improvement. Reluctantly I came to the conclusion that it would be more sensible to call it a day and give in to the ju-ju: down in Bakebe, at least, I could rest my leg in comfort and be doing some useful work, but sitting up on top of N’da Ali was not doing anyone any good. So I gave the orders to pack up and said we would leave the next morning, whereupon everyone except myself looked very pleased.

The next morning was radiant: as we set off the sun shone down on us, and there was not a cloud in the sky. A mass of tiny sandflies, which appeared from nowhere, accompanied us down, biting us unmercifully and, I thought, a little triumphantly. When we reached the level forest at the foot of N’da Ali they disappeared as mysteriously as they had come.

As I hobbled down the road to Bakebe I comforted myself with the thought that I had, at least, got a few nice specimens from the mountain. I turned to look at her: in that clear morning light she seemed so near that you could stretch out your hand and run your fingers through that thick pelt of forest. Her cliffs blushed pink and gleaming in the sun, with here and there on their surfaces a pale, twisting thread of waterfall, the only sign of the storm.

CHAPTER TWELVE THE LIFE AND DEATH OF CHOLMONDELEY

SHORTLY before we left our hill-top hut at Bakebe and travelled down to our last camp at Kumba, we had to stay with us a most unusual guest in the shape of Cholmondeley, known to his friends at Chumley.

Chumley was a full-grown chimpanzee; his owner, a District Officer, was finding the ape’s large size rather awkward, and he wanted to send him to London Zoo as a present, so that he could visit the animal when he was back in England on leave. He wrote asking us if we would mind taking Chumley back with us when we left, and depositing him at his new home in London, and we replied that we would not mind at all. I don’t think that either John or myself had the least idea how big Chumley was: I know that I visualized an ape of about three years old, standing about three feet high. I got a rude shock when Chumley moved in.

He arrived in the back of a small van, seated sedately in a huge crate. When the doors of his crate were opened and Chumley stepped out with all the ease and self-confidence of a film star, I was considerably shaken, for, standing on his bow legs in a normal slouching chimp position, he came up to my waist, and if he had straightened up, his head would have been on a level with my chest. He had huge arms, and must have measured at least twice my measurements round his hairy chest. Owing to bad tooth growth both sides of his face were swollen out of all proportion, and this gave him a weird pugilistic look. His eyes were small, deepset and intelligent; the top of his head was nearly bald owing, I discovered later, to his habit of sitting and rubbing the palms of his hand backwards across his head, an exercise which seemed to afford him much pleasure and which he persisted in until the top of his skull was quite devoid of hair. This was no young chimp as I had expected, but a veteran of about eight or nine years old, fully mature, strong as a powerful man and, to judge by his expression, with considerable experience of life. Although he was not exactly a nice chimp to look at (I had seen more handsome), he certainly had a terrific personality: it hit you as soon as you set eyes on him. His little eyes looked at you with a great intelligence, and there seemed to be a glitter of ironic laughter in their depths that made one feel uncomfortable.

He stood on the ground and surveyed his surroundings with a shrewd glance, and then he turned to me and held out one of his soft, pink-palmed hands to be shaken,with exactly that bored expression that one sees on the faces of professional hand-shakers. Round his neck was a thick chain, and its length drooped over the tailboard of the lorry and disappeared into the depths of his crate. With an animal of less personality than Chumley, this would have been a sign of his subjugation, of his captivity. But Chumley wore the chain with the superb air of a Lord Mayor; after shaking my hand so professionally, he turned and proceeded to pull the chain, which measured some fifteen feet, out of his crate. He gathered it up carefully into loops, hung it over one hand and proceeded to walk into the hut as if he owned it. Thus, in the first few minutes of arrival, Chumley had made us feel inferior, and had moved in not, we felt, because we wanted it, but because he did. I almost felt I ought to apologize for the mess on the table when he walked in.

He seated himself in a chair, dropped his chain on the floor, and then looked hopefully at me. It was quite obvious that he expected some sort of refreshment after his tiring journey. I roared out to the kitchen for them to make a cup of tea, for I had been warned that Chumley had a great liking for the cup that cheers. Leaving him sitting in the chair and surveying our humble abode with ill-concealed disgust, I went out to his crate, and in it I found a tin plate and a battered tin mug of colossal proportions. When I returned to the hut bearing these Chumley brightened considerably, and even went so far as to praise me for my intelligence.

“Ooooooo, umph!” he said, and then crossed his legs and continued his inspection of the hut. I sat down opposite him and produced a packet of cigarettes. As I was selecting one a long black arm was stretched across the table, and Chumley grunted in delight. Wondering what he would do I handed him a cigarette, and to my astonishment he put it carefully in the corner of his mouth. I lit my smoke and handed Chumley the matches thinking that this would fool him. He opened the box, took out a match, struck it, lit his cigarette, threw the matches down on the table, crossed his legs again and lay back in his chair inhaling thankfully, and blowing clouds of smoke out of his nose. Obviously he had vices in his makeup of which I had been kept in ignorance.

Just at that moment Pious entered bearing the tray of tea: the effect on him when he saw me sitting at the table with the chimp, smoking and apparently exchanging gossip, was considerable.

“Eh . . . aehh!” he gasped, backing away.

“Whar . . . hooo,” said Chumley, sighting the tea and waving one hand madly.

“Na whatee that, sah?” asked Pious, from the doorway. “This is Chumley,” I explained, “he won’t hurt you. Put the tea on the table.”

Pious did as he was told and then retreated to the door again. As I poured tea and milk into Chumley’s mug, and added three tablespoons of sugar, he watched me with a glittering eye, and made a soft “ooing” noise to himself. I handed him the mug and he took it carefully in both hands. There was a moment’s confusion when he tried to rid himself of the cigarette, which he found he could not hold as well as the mug; he solved the problem by placing the cigarette on the table. Then he tested the tea carefully with one lip stuck out, to see if it was too hot. As it was, he sat there and blew on it until it was the right temperature, and then he drank it down. When he had finished the liquid there still remained the residue of syrupy sugar at the bottom, and as Chumley’s motto was obviously waste not want not, he balanced the mug on his nose and kept it there until the last of the sugar had trickled down into his mouth. Then he held it out for a refill.

Chumley’s crate was placed at a convenient point about fifty yards from the hut, next to a great gnarled tree stump to which I attached his chain. From here he could get a good view of everything that went on in and around the hut, and as we were working he would shout comments to me and I would reply. That first day he created an uproar, for no sooner had I left him chained up and gone into the hut to do some work, than a frightful upheaval took place among the monkeys. All these were tethered on ropes under a palm-leaf shelter just opposite the hut. Chumley, after I had left him, felt bored, so looking around he perceived some sizeable rocks lying about within easy reach. Arming himself with these he proceeded to have a little underarm bowling practice. The first I knew of this was when I heard shrill screams and chatterings from the Drills and Guenons, and dashing out I was just in time to see a rock the size of a cabbage land in their midst, fortunately missing them all. If one of these rocks had hit a monkey it would have been squashed flat. Seizing a stick I raced down upon Chumley waving it and shouting at him, trying to appear fearsome, while all the time I was wondering what was going to happen if I tried to deal out punishment to an animal almost my own size and with twice my strength, when I was armed with only a short stick that

seemed ridiculously flimsy. However, to my surprise, Chumley saw me coming and promptly lay

on the ground, covering his face and his head with his long arms, and proceeded to scream at the top of his voice. I gave him two cuts with the stick across his back, and it had about as much effect as if I had tried to demolish St Paul’s Cathedral with a toothpick. His back was broad and flat, solid muscle as hard as iron.

“You are a very wicked animal,” I said sternly, and Chumley, realizing that punishment was apparently over, sat up and started to remove bits of leaf from himself.

“Whoooooo . . .” he said, glancing up at me shyly.

“If you do that again I will have to give you a really good beating,” I continued, wondering if anything short of a tree trunk would make any impression on him.

“Arrrrrr . . . oooo,” said Chumiey. He shifted forward, squatted down and commenced to roll up my trouser leg, and then search my calf for any spots, bits of dirt, or other microscopic blemishes. While he was thus engaged I called the animal staff and had them remove every rock from the vicinity. Later, after giving the beast yet another talking to, I left him, and shortly afterwards I noticed him digging hopefully in the earth near his crate, presumably in search of more rocks.

That night, when I carried Chumley’s food and drink of tea out to him, he greeted me with loud “hoo hoos” of delight, and jogged up and down beating his knuckles on the ground. Before he touched his dinner, however, he seized one of my hands in his and carried it to his mouth. With some trepidation I watched as he carefully put one of my fingers between his great teeth and very gently bit it. Then I understood: in the chimpanzee world to place your finger between another ape’s teeth and to do the same with his, is a greeting and sign of trust, for to place a finger in such a vulnerable position is a sure display of your belief in the other’s friendliness. So Chumley was flattering me by treating me as he would another chimp. Then he set to and soon polished off his meal. When he had finished I sat beside him on the ground, and he went carefully through my pockets and examined everything I had on me.

When I decided that it was time he went to bed he refused to give back a handkerchief which he had removed. He held it behind his back and passed it from one hand to the other as I tried to get it. Then, thinking that the action would settle the matter, he stuffed it hurriedly into his mouth. I realized that if I gave in and let him keep the handkerchief he would think that he could get away with anything, so for half an hour I sat there pleading and cajoling with him, until eventually, very reluctantly, he disgorged it, now very sodden and crumpled. After this I had no trouble with him: if he was playing with something that I wanted I would simply hold out my hand and ask him for it, and he would give it to me without any fuss.

Now, I had known a great number of attractive and charming animals from mice to elephants, but I have never seen one to compare with Chumley for force and charm of personality, or for intelligence. After knowing him for a while you ceased to look upon him as an animal; you regarded him more as a wizard, mischievous, courtly old man, who had, for some reason best known to himself, disguised himself as a chimpanzee. His manners were perfect: he would never grab his food and start guzzling, as the other monkeys did, without first giving you a greeting, and thanking you with a series of his most expressive “hoo hoos”. Then he would eat delicately and slowly, pushing those pieces he did not want to the side of his plate with his fingers. His only breach of table manners came at the end of a meal, for then he would seize his empty mug and plate and hurl them as far away as possible.

He had, of course, many habits which made him seem more human, and his smoking was one. He could light his cigarette with matches or a lighter with equal facility, and then he would lie down on the ground on his back, one arm under his head and his legs bent up and crossed, blowing great clouds of smoke into the sky, and occasionally examining the end of his cigarette professionally to see if the ash needed removing. If it did he would perform the operation carefully with one finger nail. Give him a bottle of lemonade and a glass, and he would pour himself out a drink with all the care and concentration of a world-famous barman mixing a cocktail. He was the only animal I have met that would think of sharing things with you: on many occasions, if I gave him a bunch of bananas or two or three mangoes, he would choose one and hold it out to me with an inquiring expression on his face, and he would grunt with satisfaction if I accepted it and sat down beside him on the ground to eat it.

Chumley had three aversions in life: coloured people, giant millipedes, and snakes. Natives he would tolerate, and he got a great kick out of attracting them within range and then leaping at them with a ferocious scream. Not that I think he would ever have harmed them; he just liked to watch them run screaming in fear. But the trouble was that the natives would tease him if they got the chance, and Chumley would get more and more excited, his hair would stand on end, he would sway from side to side swinging his powerful arms and baring his great teeth, and then Heaven help the native who came too close.

Giant millipedes fascinated him, but he could never bring himself to trust them whole-heartedly. The giant millipede looks not unlike a thin black pudding, with a fringe of legs (a hundred or so pairs) arranged along the underside, and a pair of short feelers in front. They were completely harmless creatures, that would glide about on their numerous legs, their feelers waving about, and liked nothing so much as a really rotten log of wood to feed on. However, their snake-like motion made them suspect in Chumley’s eyes, although he seemed to realize that they were not snakes. If I placed a couple on his box he would sit and watch them for ages, his lips pursed, occasionally scratching himself. If one walked over the edge of the crate and fell to the ground, and then started to walk in his direction he would leap to his feet, retreat to the end of his chain, and scream loudly until I came and rescued him from the monster.

Snakes, of course, worried him a lot and he would get really most upset if he saw me handling one, uttering plaintive cries and wringing his hands until I had put it down. If I showed him my hands after handling a snake he would always examine them carefully, I presume to make sure I had not been bitten. If, of course, the snake slid towards him he would nearly have a fit, his hair would stand on end, he would moan, and as it got closer, throw bits of grass and twig at it in a vain effort to stop its advance. One night he flatly refused to be shut in his box when it grew dark, a thing he had never done before. When I tried to force him in, thinking he was merely playing up, he led me to the door of the crate and, leaving me there, he retreated, pointing with one hand and “hoo hoooing” loudly and in obvious fear. Investigating his blankets and banana-leaf bed I discovered a small, blind burrowing snake coiled up in the middle. This was a harmless creature, but Chumley was taking no chances.

Not long after Chumley’s arrival he suddenly went off his food, lost all his interest in life, and would spend all day crouched in his crate. He would refuse all drink except about half a mug full of water a day. I was away at the time, and John’s frantic message brought me hurrying back, for John was not sure what the ape was suffering from, or how ill he really was. On my return I tried everything I knew to tempt Chumley to eat, for he was growing visibly thinner. The staff was sent to search the country-side for ripe mangoes and pawpaws, and delicate fruit salads were concocted with great care by my own hands. But Chumley would not eat. This went on for nearly a week, until I was really beginning to think we should lose him. Every evening I would force him to take a walk with me, but he was so weak that he had to sit down and rest every few yards. But I knew it would be fatal to let him lose all interest in life, for once an ape does that he is doomed. One evening before I went to take Chumley for his walk I opened a tin of Ryvita biscuits and concealed a dozen or so in my pockets. When we had walked some distance Chumley sat down and I sat beside him. As we both examined the view I took a biscuit from my pocket and started to eat it. He watched me; I think he was rather surprised when I did not offer him any, as I usually did, but finished it up and smacked my lips appreciatively. He moved nearer and started to go through my pockets, which was in itself a good sign, for he had not done that since the first day he had been taken ill. He found a biscuit, pulled it out, sniffed it, and then, to my delight, ate it up. He again broached my pocket and got another, which he also ate. Altogether he ate six, and for the next four days he existed on water and Ryvita. Then came the morning when he accepted, first his cup of tea, and then two bananas. I knew he was going to be all right. His appetite came back with a rush, and he ate us out of house and home for about two weeks, and then he returned to normal. I was very glad to have pulled him round, for we were due to leave for Kumba, and he was certainly in no condition to face the journey as thin as he had been.

The day of our departure from Bakebe dawned, and when Chumley saw the lorry arrive to load the collection he realized he was in for one of his favourite sports, a lorry ride. He hooted and yelled and danced on the end of his chain with excitement, and beat a wild tattoo on his crate, making as much noise as possible so that we should not overlook him. When everything else had been loaded his crate was hoisted on board, and then he climbed into it, hooting delightedly. We started off, and we had not gone far before the staff, all clinging to the back and sides of the vehicle, started to sing loudly, as they always did, and presently Chumley joined in with a prolonged and melodious hooting, which convulsed the staff. In fact, the cook-mate found a singing chimpanzee so amusing that he fell off the back of the lorry, and we had to stop and pick him up, covered with dust, but still mirthful. It was a good thing we were not going at any speed.

On arrival at Kumba we had put at our disposal three school-houses belonging to the Basle mission, through the kindness of the Reverend Paul Schibler and his wife. On moving in, as always happened when you made a fresh camp, there was complete chaos for a while, and apart from numerous other things that had to be attended to, there was the question of water supply. While a suitable water-carrier was being employed, furnished with tins, and told to do his job at the double, Chumley made it quite clear that he was very thirsty indeed. He was chained outside, and had already attracted a large crowd of natives who had never seen a fully grown chimp before. In desperation I opened a bottle of beer and gave him that, and to my surprise he greeted its arrival with hoots of joy and smacked his lips over the froth. The lower the level fell in the bottle the more Chumley showed off, and the greater the crowd grew around him. Soon he was turning somersaults, and in between dancing a curious sort of side shuffle and clapping his hands. He was was covered with beer froth, and enjoying himself hugely. But this drunken jig caused me a lot of trouble, for it took Chumley several hours to sober up and behave properly, and it took three policemen to disperse the crowd of two hundred-odd people who were wedged round our houses, making entry and exit impossible. After that Chumley never had anything stronger than tea or lemonade, no matter how thirsty he became.

It was not long after we settled in at Kumba that Sue arrived. She was the youngest chimp I had ever seen: she could not walk, and was the proud possessor of four teeth only. She arrived in a basket out of which she peered with wide-eyed interest, sucking her left foot. How she had been kept alive by her native owner, who had been feeding her on a diet of mashed coco yam, I don’t know. Within an hour she was sucking away at a bottle full of warm milk, liberally laced with sugar and cod-liver oil. When I took her out to show her to Chumley he displayed no interest other than trying to poke her in the eye with his forefinger, so my hopes of a romantic attachment faded.

To any mother who is sick of her squealing red-faced brat I would say, “Go and exchange it for a chimpanzee like Sue: she will be half the trouble and give you just as much pleasure.” She spent the night in a warm basket, and the day on my bed, and there was never a murmur out of her. The only time she screamed, clenching her little fists and kicking her legs in gusts of fury, was on those occasions when I showed her the bottle and then discovered it was too hot for her to drink straight away. This was a crime, and Sue would let you know it. She had her first feed at about seven o’clock in the morning, and her last feed at midnight. She would sleep right through the night, a trick that some human babies would do well to adopt. During the day, as I say, she would sprawl on my bed, lying there sucking her thumb or foot, or occasionally doing press-ups on the edge of the bed to get her arm muscles in trim for feeding time. Most of the day, however, she just slept.

Her face, hands, and feet were pink, and she had a thick coat of wiry black hair. On her head this looked as though it had been parted in the middle and then cut in a fringe over her large ears. She reminded me of a solemn-faced Japanese doll. At first sight her tender years (or months) had rather put me off, as I felt that she would require endless attention which I had not the time to give her. But, as it turned out, she was considerably less trouble than any of the other animals. The animal staff were so captivated by her that they would fight for the privilege of giving her a bottle, and I even found John, on more than one occasion, prodding her fat tummy and muttering baby talk at her, when he thought I was not within earshot.

Chumley was, I think, a little jealous of Sue, but he was too much of a gentleman to show it. Not long after her arrival, however, London Zoo’s official collector arrived in the Cameroons, and with great regret I handed Chumley over to be transported back to England. I did not see him again for over four months, and then I went to visit him in the sanatorium at Regent’s Park. He had a great straw-filled room to live in, and was immensely popular with the sanatorium staff. I did not think that he would recognize me, for when he had last seen me I had been clad in tropical kit and sporting a beard and moustache, and now I was clean-shaven and wearing the garb of a civilized man. But recognize me he did, for he whirled around his room like a dervish when he saw me and then came rushing across to give me his old greeting, gently biting my finger. We sat in the straw and I gave him some sugar I had brought for him, and then we smoked a cigarette together while he removed my shoes and socks and examined my feet and legs to make sure there was nothing wrong with them. Then he took his cigarette butt and carefully put it out in one corner of his room, well away from his straw. When the time came to go, he shook hands with me formally and watched my departure through the crack in the door. Shortly after he was moved to the monkey-house, and so he could receive no more visitors in his private room.

I never saw Chumley again, but I know his history: he became a great television star, going down to Alexandra Palace and doing his act in front of the cameras like an old trouper. Then his teeth started to worry him, and so he was moved from the monkey-house back to the sanatorium to have an operation. One day, feeling bored with life, he broke out and sallied forth across Regent’s Park. When he reached the main road he found a bus conveniently at hand, so he swung himself aboard; but his presence caused such horror amongst the occupants of the bus that he got excited and forgot himself so far as to bite someone. If only people would realize that to scream and panic is the best way of provoking an attack from any wild animal. Leaving the bus and its now bloodstained passengers, Chumley walked down the road, made a pass at a lady with a pram (who nearly fainted) and was wandering about to see what else he could do to liven life up for Londoners, when a member of the sanatorium staff arrived on the scene. By now I expect Chumley had realized that civilized people were no decent company for a well-brought-up chimp, so he took his keeper’s hand and walked back home. After this he was branded as not safe and sent back to the monkey-house. But he had not finished with publicity yet, for some time later he had to go back to the sanatorium for yet more treatment on his teeth, and he decided to repeat his little escapade.

It was Christmas Eve and Chumley obviously had memories of other and more convivial festivities, probably spent at some club in the depths of Africa. Anyway, he decided that if he had a walk round London on Christmas Eve, season of goodwill, he might run across someone who would offer him a beer. So he broke open his cage and set off once more across Regent’s Park. At Gloucester Gate he looked about hopefully for a bus, but there was not one in sight. But there were some cars parked there and Chumley approached them and beat on the doors vigorously, in the hope that the occupants would open up and offer him a lift. Chumley loved a ride in any sort of conveyance. But the foolish humans misconstrued his actions: there he was full of Christmas spirit, asking for a lift, and all they could do was to wind up their windows and yell for help. This, thought Chumley, was a damn poor way to show a fellow the traditional British hospitality. But before he had time to explain his mission to the car owners, a panting posse of keepers arrived, and he was bundled back to the Zoo. Chumley had escaped twice, and they were not going to risk it happening again: from being a fine, intelligent animal, good enough to be displayed on television, he had suddenly become (by reason of his escapades) a fierce and untrustworthy monster, he might escape yet again and bite some worthy citizen, so rather than risk this Chumley was sentenced to death and shot.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE VILLAGE IN THE LAKE

KUMEA was a large village and, for the Cameroons, comparatively civilized: that is to say, it had a white population of about ten people, it could boast of a United Africa Company store and a small hospital, and it was a regular stopping point for all the lorries from the coast. In consequence we thought that it would produce little in the way of rare specimens for us, and we looked on it more as a base within easy reach of port rather than a collecting station of possible value. To our surprise Kumba, and its inhabitants, produced for us some of our very choicest specimens.

The first of these arrived not long after we had settled in the three nice, airy school-houses which were situated on the edge of the village. A wild-looking fellow presented himself one day, bearing on his head a long cage skilfully made out of bamboo, and carefully wrapped in banana leaves. The man, it turned out, was a native from the French Cameroons, some thirty miles away, and he could speak nothing but his own dialect and a sort of pidgin-French. As my French is of much the same variety anyway, I found that we could converse. He told me that he had heard that I was buying monkeys, and so he had gone off to his farm and caught me some. Just like that. He then tore off the banana leaves and displayed to my astonished eyes three monkeys of a species that I had never seen before, sitting in the bamboo cage. On looking closer, moreover, I discovered that there were, in reality, four monkeys, for one of the females clutched a tiny baby to her breast, but it was so small that it was half buried in her fur. They were big handsome beasts, a very dark slate-grey all over, except for two spots of colour: under their chins the hair was soft and fluffy, like a powder-puff, and pure white; on the lower back the hair was a bright rust red in certain lights. Without argument I paid him the very modest price he demanded, and then tried to interrogate him in my very best French. A man who could catch monkeys in this quantity, and of this species, was, I knew, worth cultivating.

“Allons, mon ami, avec quelles choses avez-vous entrappe ces animaux?” I asked hopefully. “Pardon, monsieur ?”

I repeated, substituting a word for “animaux” that I hoped meant monkey.

The man thought for a long time, scratching his head.

“Je ne comprendspas, monsieur,” he said apologetically.

Frantically I looked around for rescue, and at that moment John appeared. Now I knew that my stalwart companion had spent some time in Belgium, and remembered that he could speak French or, at least, had told me that he could. So I called him over and he entered the fray. Speaking with a delightful Oxford accent he translated to my wild tattooed tribesman, and to my surprise the man understood. He replied with a flood of speech, and this time it was John who could not understand. After a hectic half-hour, during which we all spouted French, pidgin, and English at each other, and used nearly every French phrase except “the pen of my aunt”, we got the man’s story out of him. Apparently he would build a small cage of logs in his farm, somewhere near the place he knew monkeys to be, and then bait it with ripe bananas. When the monkey troop entered to feast on the fruit they dislodged some sticks, carefully balanced, and the door slammed shut behind them. I implored him to go and catch me more, and underlined it by dashing him two packs of cigarettes. He promised he would try, and left, but I never saw him again. I expect the price he had received for the first lot of monkeys had been enough to keep him going for several months and, according to the Cameroon outlook, why bother to work when you have enough money to buy what you want? Time enough to find a job when you are out of cash. A delightful sentiment, no doubt, and one that displays a very attractive philosophy, but it is hardly the sort of thing a collector wants of his hunters.

The monkeys turned out to be Preuss’s Guenon, or the Red-backed Monkey, and a species that had not been seen alive in England for about forty years. As soon as I could I moved them into decent cages, separating the mother and the baby so that they would not be worried or bullied by the others. They were the pride of my monkey collection, and I gloated over them for several days. Then, one frightful morning, some dreadful little child (who I sincerely trust has met with a bad and painful end) crept unseen into the animal house and started to open the cage doors to feed the monkeys. This did not matter with most of them, for they were tame and would accept food from the hand with confidence. But my precious Preuss’s had not settled down yet and were certainly not used to strangers opening their cage doors and waving fruit at them. One of the males jumped down and proceeded to bite the hand that was trying to feed him. The boy, of course, leapt back and for a couple of minutes the door was unguarded and open. That was time enough for the monkeys, who were out of their cage and on to the rafters in a second. Just at that moment the animal boys arrived and captured the culprit, saw the monkeys dancing on the rafters, and came running for me. But by the time we had rushed back to the animal house with nets it was too late, and my lovely pair of monkeys were galloping away across the grass in the direction of the nearest trees. The staff gave chase, but they were hopelessly outdistanced. I only hoped that the animals would have the sense to make for the deep forest with all speed, for if they hung around the trees in the village they would most certainly be shot for chop. So now I was left with my solitary female and her baby.

Carefully I approached the cause of my loss whose hand, I noticed with immense satisfaction, was badly bitten. But he glanced at my face, realized that I was not going to be charitable, and fled as fast as his little black legs could carry him. The panting staff returned, and immediately set off in pursuit of the boy, but he, like the monkeys, had too much of a start, and he disappeared among the back streets of the village.

I was still moaning about my loss two days later and hoping that the man from the French Cameroons would return with more of the Guenons, when I received a specimen that more than compensated for the loss of my monkeys. A youth presented himself to me clutching in his arms a box that had once, according to the label, contained bars of Lifebuoy soap. A strong odour argued that it was only recently the soap had been removed from the interior. I prised off the lid and looked into the dark and smelly box, and there crouched an Angwantibo.

Once more there was an uproar: the animal had to be confined in a makeshift cage while a proper one was constructed. The temporary home was not worthy of the beast’s rarity and value, but it was better than that suffocating box. The boy was paid, congratulated, and told to try again, which he promised to do. The next day I had just placed the animal in its proper cage, and placed the cage lovingly next to the one that contained the original specimen, when the same boy walked in carrying the same soap box.

“Ah . . . aaa!” I greeted him jovially, “na what beef you done bring? Another same same for dis one?” and I gestured at the Angwantibos.

“Yes, sah,” he said unemotionally.

“What?” I said. “You no get same beef again, eh?”

For answer he lifted the lid of the box and displayed a third Angwantibo inside. I could hardly believe my eyes: to get two Angwantibos in two days struck me as being the sort of thing you dream about but never accomplish. Shakily I paid him, told him to try for more, and went to see John about it.

“Guess what I’ve just got?”

“Something interesting?”

“Another Angwantibo. . . .”

“I say, that’s very good,” said John, in a pleased tone of voice. “Now we’ve got three.”

“Yes, but what worries me is that I just ask this boy to try for another, and the next day he walks in with one, as though it’s no trouble at all. I’ve just told him to try and get me a fourth. What I will do if he comes back to-morrow with about six of them, I don’t know. After all, I can’t go on paying that fantastic price.”

“Don’t worry,” said John cheerfully, “I don’t expect you will get any more.”

As it turned out he was right, but the thought of being confronted with a basketful of Angwantibos at any moment haunted me for several days. I knew I could not have resisted buying them if they had been brought in.

The next good item was a rare and beautiful Superb Sunbird which a small boy brought in, clutched in one hot and sticky hand. Moreover, it was a male, the more colourful of the sexes, and undamaged. I happened to be in the bird house when it arrived and had the pleasure of seeing the usually unemotional John actually gasp with surprise and delight when he saw it. He recovered himself quickly, and became once more the cool and self-possessed Englishman, but there was a feverish glitter in his eye as he bargained with the boy, beating him down mercilessly penny by penny. When he had purchased it he asked the boy how he had caught it.

“With my hand, sah,” the boy replied.

“With your hand?” “Yes, sah, ’e done fly close to me and I done catchum with my hand, so . . .” said the boy, making a fly-swatting gesture with his hand.

John turned to me.

“You are supposed to be the expert on native mentality,” he said; “can you tell me why the boys never tell me the truth about catching these birds? To catch this on the wing he would have to have the eyesight of a hawk and the speed of a rifle bullet. . . . Why does he think I am going to believe such a blatant lie?”

“You look so nice and innocent, old boy, the sort of person that they sell Buckingham Palace to as a rule. There’s a sort of shining innocence about you.”

John sighed, told the boy to try and get him more birds, and went back to his feeding. But I saw him creep back to gloat over his sunbird later, when he thought I was not looking.

Not long after this the Reverend Paul Schibler asked me if I would like to accompany him and his wife on a trip they were going to make to a village at a lake called Soden, some miles from Kumba. He said, to tempt me, that there were hundreds of birds on the lake, and I would be sure to obtain some nice specimens. I suggested the idea to John and he was very enthusiastic, saying that he would watch over my now considerable collection of mammals and reptiles until I returned. We planned to go for a week, and I prepared a number of small cages and boxes for my captures, rolled up my camp-bed, and set off early one morning in the back of the Schiblers’ kit-car, with Pious, who was to minister to my wants. We took the car as far as the road went, and there we collected our carriers and started on our twelve- or fifteen-mile hike to the lake.

Our route was very level and the path wound gently through the forest, in and out of small native farms, and through villages that were mere handfuls of huts scattered about clearings among the great trees. Everywhere the people would come out to greet the Schiblers, shaking hands and calling welcome. Everyone we met stood to one side of the path for us to pass, and would mumble a greeting to us. If they were heavily laden, or suffering from some disease, the Schiblers would pause and inquire after their health or the distance they would have to travel, always ending with the sympathetic “Iseeya”. Sometimes we passed beneath bombax trees a-blaze with their scarlet flowers, and a quilt of yellow or white convolvulus draped around the base of their great silvery trunks. In the fields the corn husks were heavy and swollen, and their silken tassels waved in the breeze, the bananas hung in great yellow bunches from the trees, looking like misshapen chandeliers fashioned out of wax.

It was the evening before we reached the lake. The path twisted like a snake through the trees, and suddenly we stepped out from among the massive trunks and the great expanse of water stretched before us, smooth and grey except where the sinking sun had cast a ladder of glittering golden bars across the surface. The forest ended where the waters began, and all around the lake’s almost circular edge its shore was guarded by the trees. In the centre of that vast expanse of water lay a small island, thinly clothed with a scattering of trees, and we could just see the darker mass that denoted the village.

We waded out into the lake up to our thighs in the blood-warm water, and one of the carriers uttered a cry, a shrill, quavering, mournful wail that seemed to roll across the surface of the lake and split into a thousand echoes against the trees on the opposite shores. A pair of fishing eagles, vivid black and white, rose from the dead tree in which they had been perched, and flapped their way heavily across the waters towards the island. Presently from the village in the lake, we heard a repetition of

the mournful cry, and a tiny black speck detached itself from the island and started across the lake towards us. A canoe. It was followed by another, and then another, like a swarm of tiny black fish shimmering out from beneath a green and mossy rock.

Soon they grounded below us, their prows whispering among the rushes, the canoe-men grinning and calling, “Welcome, Masa, welcome”. We loaded our gear into the frail craft, which bucked and shied like skittish horses, and then we were skimming across the lake. The water was warm as I trailed my hand in it and the island, the lake, and the forest encircling them both like a ring, were all bathed in the blurred golden light of a falling sun. The only sounds were the gentle purr of the water along the brown sides of the canoe, the occasional rap of a paddle as it caught woodwork, and the soft grunt from the paddlers each time they thrust their paddies deep into the water, making the canoe leap forward like a fish. Above us the first pair of grey parrots appeared, with their swift, pigeon-like flight, cooeeing and whistling echoingly as they flew across the golden sky. And so we arrived at the island, almost in silence, a deep calm silence that seemed almost tangible, and any slight noise seemed only to enhance the evening quiet.

The Schiblers had a hut on the crest of the island, in the centre of the village, while I had a tiny shack, half hidden in a small grove of trees, right on the edge of the lake. When I went to bed that night I stood at the edge of the water smoking a last cigarette. The lake was calm and silvery in the moonlight, with here and there a faint dark ring where a fish jumped, plopping the water with a delightful liquid sound. Far in the forest I could hear an owl give a long quavering hoot, and as an undertone to all this there was the distant shimmering cry of the cicadas.

The next morning the light flooded into my shack as the sun lifted itself above the rim of the forest, and the lake looked inviting through my open door. I climbed out from under my net, stepped through the door, and with a run and jump I was in, the waters still warm from yesterday’s sun, yet cool enough to be refreshing. I had swum a few yards when I suddenly remembered crocodiles, and I came to a halt and trod water, surveying the lake about me. Round a tiny headland a miniature canoe appeared, paddled by a tiny tot of about five.

“Hoy, my friend,” I called, waving one arm, “na crocodile for dis water?”

A peal of shrill childish laughter greeted this remark.

“No, Masa, we no get crocodile for dis water.”

“You no get bad beef at all?”

“Atall, sah, atall,” said the infant, and I could hear him chuckling as he paddled off across the lake. Thus soothed I enjoyed a long and luxurious swim, and after, ambled up to the village for breakfast. After this I was introduced to two paddlers who were to take me round the edge of the lake to see the birds. They were husky young men, who seemed shy and delightfully quiet, only speaking when spoken to. We set off in a long, deep-bellied canoe, and I perched in the bows, my field-glasses conveniently on my lap, and the gun snuggled alongside me. Schibler had promised me that I would see a lot of birds, but I had not expected the incredible array we saw that morning.

Round the shallow edge of the lake lay the bleached white trunks of many giant trees, their twisted white branches sticking above the dark waters and casting wiggling, pale, snake-like reflections. These trees had been gradually killed by weather and by insects, and the earth had been softened and washed away from their roots by the lake, until they crashed to their last resting-place in the shallow water, to sink slowly, year by year, into the soft red mud. Whilst their skeletons and their branches stuck above water they provided excellent resting-places for most of the bird life of the area, and as we paddled slowly round the lake I scanned them with my glasses. Commonest of the birds were the Darters or Snake-birds, a bird that looks very like the English cormorant, except that it has a very long neck, which it keeps curved like an S. They sat in rows on the dead trees, their wings stretched out to dry in the sun, their heads twisting on their long necks to watch us as we passed. They were clad in dark brown plumage, which from a distance looked black, and gave their upright rows a funereal look, like queues of mutes waiting for the hearse. If we ventured too close they would take wing and flap heavily across the water, and land with much splashing further down the shore. Then they would dive beneath the water and pop up in the most unexpected places, just their long necks and heads showing above the surface, like swimming snakes. It is this habit of their swimming, with only the head and neck showing, that has earned them the name of Snake-bird.

Next commonest, always sitting in pairs, were the Fishing-Eagles, their black-and-white livery standing out against the green, and their canary-yellow beaks and feet bright in the sun. They would let us approach quite close before flying off with slow flaps to the next tree.

The thing that amazed and delighted me was the incredible quantities of kingfishers of every shape, size and colouring, and so tame they would let the canoe get within six feet of them before flying off. There were Pied kingfishers, vivid black and white, looking from a distance as though they were clad in plumage of black and white diamonds, a domino ready for some avian ball. Their long beaks were coal-black and glittering. There were Giant kingfishers, perched in pairs, with their dark and spiky crests up, their backs mottled with grey and white, and their breasts a rich fox-red. They were as big as wood-pigeons, and had great heavy beaks like knife-blades. There were even some of my favourites, the Pygmy kingfisher, squatting on the more delicate perches, clasping the white wood with their coral-red feet, and among them were the Shining-blue kingfishers, one of the most vivid of them all. These looked not unlike a larger edition of the Pygmies, but when they were in flight there was no mistaking them, for as they skimmed low over the water, twittering their reedy cry, their backs gleamed with a pure and beautiful blue that defies description, so they looked like opals flung glittering across the surface of the lake. I determined, as I watched them, that I would try and take some of these beautiful creatures back to enhance John’s collection. The Pygmies he already had, also the rather unlovely Senegal kingfishers, so I made the Pied, the Giant, and especially the Shining-blue, my targets.

Obsessed with this dazzling array of kingfishers I noted all other birds automatically: there were plump, piebald Wattled Plovers, with their yellow wattles dangling absurdly from either side of their beaks, flapping up and down as they trotted to and fro; small glossy Black Crakes, with fragile green legs that trailed behind them as they flew hurriedly from the clumps of reeds; delicate Cattle Egrets, stalking solemnly across the mud-flats; Glossy Ibis like shot silk, peering from the trees with cold and fishy eyes. At one point we came to a place where a tree had only recently fallen, and in falling had dragged with it a great mass of creepers and flowering plants that had been parasites upon it. The still water was littered with green leaves and the bruised petals of the flowers, while among the blooms that still remained, wilting and fading, among the greenery of the trees, a host of sunbirds whirred and fed, sometimes hanging in front of a flower only a few inches above the water, so both bird and flower would have their reflections.

Returning to the village I made inquiries, and soon found three young boys who knew how to make and use the “lubber”, or bird-lime, which I had seen used with such success in Eshobi. I told them the type of kingfisher I wanted, and the price I was willing to pay, and left them to it. Very early the next morning, in the pale green dawn-light before the sun rose, I was awakened by the splash of paddles, and looking through the door of my hut I could see three small canoes containing my youthful hunters setting off across the lake. The first one returned about midday, bringing with him a basket containing two Pied kingfishers and one Senegal. The latter I released as John had enough of them, but the Pied I placed carefully in my best cage and gloated over them. They were not, as I had feared, frightened, but on the contrary seemed vastly annoyed. If I placed my hand anywhere near the wire of their cage they would both stab at it with their sharp pointed beaks, and I soon found it was a painful experience to clean out their cages. The feeding problem was easily solved, for the shallows around the island were teeming with fry, and a few casts with nets procured enough for a dozen kingfishers. My pair of Pied fed greedily and then relapsed into somnolence.

In the afternoon the second hunter arrived back with nothing but a Pygmy kingfisher, but the poor mite was so encrusted with “lubber’ that it took me half an hour to clean him sufficiently to release him. When I opened my hand he sat for a moment on my finger, grasping it with difficulty in his tiny feet. He settled a few feathers that had become disarranged with the bath I had given him, and then flew off across the lake, straight as an arrow. The third hunter returned in the evening, and in his little wicker basket was a Shining-blue kingfisher. This settled down as well as the Pied had, but it seemed a trifle more nervous. I was jubilant, and told my hunters to try for the Giant the next day. I could imagine John’s face if I walked in with three species of kingfisher for him. But my dream was not to be realized, for the next day the hunters reported that the “lubber” was not strong enough to hold the Giant kingfisher. Apparently, out in the blazing sun, the lime dried up slightly and, although it was sufficient to hold the smaller birds, one with the strength of the Giant could easily break away. However, they did bring me one more Pied and one more Shining-blue, so with this I had to be content.

That afternoon I was lolling in the warm waters near my hut and watching the small, fluttering schools of fish investigating my legs, when a man came down from the village with a message from the Schiblers asking me to go up at once as a man had brought beef for me. I found a crowd gathered around what appeared to be, at first glance, a great flattish stone. Looking closer, however, I saw it was the biggest freshwater turtle I had ever seen. It was a species known as the Soft-shelled Turtle: the shell is fairly smooth and domed, and it protruded round the edge in a great soft rim, like damp cardboard. The young ones look not unlike thick and flabby pancakes. The nose of this remarkable reptile is protruded into a pair of miniature trunks, so that the beast can stick these above the surface of the water and breathe, without displaying any of its body. This unfortunate creature had been harpooned in the neck, and it expired just as I arrived on the scene. However, even when its head had been severed from its body the cruel razor-sharp jaws would snap a bit of wood and splinter it. I had no idea that these turtles grew to this enormous size: this one measured four feet in length, arid took two men to lift. After I had examined him and implored his capturer to get me one alive, the creature was cut up, and we ate him in a stew. The flesh proved to be most palatable, like a rich and slightly oily veal. But I never obtained a live one of these gigantic reptiles, and I was very disappointed.

The day of our departure dawned, we shook hands with the villagers, paddled across the placid and beautiful lake, and landed on the shore near the path. Before we started I took one last look at the island, lying in the great expanse of sun-shimmering water, ringed with the thick and vivid forest. Then we set off through the trees, and I had to concentrate on watching my carriers to see they did not bump the cages against overhanging branches, or place them in the fierce sun when we rested. Twice I fed the precious kingfishers en route, for I had brought a tin can filled with water, and this contained a mass of tiny fish. One of the Pied kingfishers seemed very wild and would not feed, but the others did not seem to be minding the journey.

In the brief twilight we reached the road, paid off the carriers, and climbed thankfully into the kit- car. It was dark when I arrived back at the school-house and found John just sitting down to dinner. Even John’s delight at the kingfishers could not lighten the gloom that I suddenly felt, for I realized that I had just made my last trip. Within ten days we were to leave Africa. I climbed into bed, and as I drifted off to sleep I remembered the warm waters of the lake, the curious little island, the village and its charming and happy inhabitants. One day, I promised myself, I would go back to the village in the lake, just for a holiday. I would swim among the fish and drift alongside the dead trees in a canoe and watch the kingfishers.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE ARK DEPARTS

It is easy enough to get a passage on a ship until you explain that most of your luggage consists of a hundred-odd crates of birds, mammals, and reptiles, all very much alive. We had quite a lot of trouble, until the kindness of Elders and Fyffes enabled us to obtain a passage on one of their ships. Once the sailing date was known to us we discovered to our dismay that we had less time to prepare for the voyage than we had anticipated. You cannot just climb aboard a ship with your animals and expect the cook to feed them. There are stores to be bought, meat to be ordered, last-minute repairs to the cages to make sure that nothing will escape on board, and a hundred and one other things. We had to send members of the staff 200 miles upcountry to obtain certain commodities for us which were not grown on the lowlands: ordinary potatoes, for example. At Kumba you could get any amount of sweet potatoes, but no ordinary ones. Then there was corn: when you are buying things in bulk you find it cheaper to buy in the area in which the stuff is grown, and the highlands of the Cameroons are the agricultural areas. We had to have ten dozen eggs, forty stems of bananas in various stages of ripeness, fifty pawpaws, a hundred oranges, twenty pineapples, four sacks of corn, four of sweet potatoes and four of ordinary, two sacks of beans, and the carcase of a whole bullock for meat. All this, as I say, had to be collected from different areas of the Cameroons and brought down to us, and it had to be done quickly if we did not want to sail without some of our precious foodstuffs.

I chose this trying time to go down with malaria. I did not realize it was malaria, but thought I was simply run down, and so I struggled on for nearly a week, feeling like death, until I decided that there must be something the matter with me, and so I paid a visit to the local hospital. The doctor examined me, gave me a huge injection in a most painful part of my anatomy, and ordered me to bed. Very reluctantly I spent two days in bed, while chaos and confusion reigned in the animal house, and John struggled to feed his birds, examine sacks of potatoes, and see that the monkeys were fed. We had decided to travel by night down to the coast, arriving at dawn on the day we were due to get the collection on board and sail. It was the day before we were to start our journey when the doctor, called to see me once more. Our hut now resembled a market: there were sacks of food, boxes of eggs, baskets of fruit, all over the floor. The doctor picked his way through this litter, took my temperature, and prepared to give me another injection. While he was holding the needle up to the light and squirting quinine through it (a horrible habit doctors have), and I lay there and quaked, he asked me why there was so much activity.

“Oh, we’re leaving to-morrow night,” I said cheerfully, eyeing the needle.

“What do you mean, leaving?”

“Leaving to get the ship. We’ve to be on board by ten-thirty on Tuesday.”

“Are you lying there and telling me that you propose to travel down to Tiko and catch a ship tomorrow in your condition?” he rasped. I might have been having a baby from his tone.

“But I’m not so ill,” I protested, “I felt fine this morning.”

“Listen to me,” said the doctor in wrath, “you had a temperature of nearly a hundred and three, on an average, for the last week. You should be kept in bed for at least a fortnight. You can’t travel on that ship.” “But I’ve got to, doctor, we had hell’s own job getting this passage. If we call it off we’ll never get another. We’ve simply got to get that ship.”

“You might not reach the ship. In your condition, to take that sort of journey is lunacy: if you had a relapse when you reach the coast (and it’s more than likely), you will have to go into hospital, or . .”

“Or what?” I asked.

“Or die,” he said bluntly. And then he jabbed the needle into me with great skill.

As soon as I could speak:

“But we can’t cancel it now. We’ve got to go.”

“All right,” said the doctor, “but I won’t accept any responsibility for you.” And he marched out through the sacks and the baskets and into the night.

The next evening the lorries arrived, the collection was loaded, and then all the food, the sacks of potatoes, corn, beans, the boxes of eggs, and the bullock carcase wrapped in wet sacks to keep it cool. By the time we were ready to start I felt that I was very unpleasantly drunk and my head was throbbing like a drum. I climbed into the cab of my lorry with Sue, the baby chimp, wrapped in a blanket on my knees, and our cavalcade started. It was a nightmare journey, for the first rains of the season had fallen and turned the red earth into a quagmire of sticky clay over which the lorry skidded madly, bumping and jolting over unseen rocks. I could hear the monkeys chattering a frenzied protest from the back of the vehicle and I wondered what rare, and now irreplaceable specimen, would be weakened, perhaps killed, by the jolting. I got some sleep, but it was fitful and uneasy, and once I awoke icy cold and with my teeth chattering, and was forced to stop the lorry and dive into the back to look for blankets to cover myself with. Within ten minutes I was sweating so much I had to unwrap myself once again. At one point we were held up by John’s lorry getting a puncture, and John walked down to inquire how I was, and we drank a much-needed cup of tea out of the Thermos flask.

“How are the birds bearing up?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said John gloomily, “we’ve been over some frightful bumps. I really daren’t look in the back until we reach Tiko.”

“I know, I feel the same about mine. Still, we can’t do anything until we unload, so let’s keep praying.”

As we skirted the lower slopes of the Cameroon Mountain and the road dipped towards the sea, a thin cold drizzle started to fall, obscuring still further the landscape that was veiled in the dawn mist. We came to the first of the palm plantations as the rising sun was struggling to shine through the grey clouds that hung low over the mountain. Soon, driving along the edge of the escarpment, we could see stretched below us the great area of flat land that lies around Tiko. This was a bit of civilized Africa, and I shivered as I looked at it: mile upon mile of nothing but banana trees in a great characterless sheet, arranged in neat rows like a green chess-board. Hideous regimentation, a thousand million banana trees standing in serried ranks, obediently bearing fruit that was plucked from them, still green, and carried aboard the waiting ships. Nothing to see but flapping wet banana leaves, like great green shields, sodden and dangling, in endless lines. Occasionally the monotony of this would be broken by a clearing containing a white bungalow, in which lived a European overseer; or a row of horrible corrugated iron sheds, in which lived the banana pickers. Our lorries squelched onwards in the fine drifting rain, and at last came to a standstill alongside a miniature railway. Up and down the tiny track shuffled chuffing engines pulling flat coaches behind them piled high with stems of green bananas. The trains had to cross a swampy area on to the quayside where the ship, with gaping holds, awaited the fruit.

We found, to our dismay, that we had arrived several hours too early, and we could not get the collection aboard for some time; so we left the animals in the lorries, as it was at least a protection from the rain, and there was no sun to make the cages too hot. No sooner had we decided on this than the sun broke through the clouds and shone down on us fiercely, and the rain dwindled and died away. So we set to and unloaded all the crates, piling them in the shade along the side of the train track, peering anxiously into each to make sure its occupant was still all right. When everything was unloaded John and I compared notes.

“I’ve lost two sunbirds, fortunately not the best ones. I think they were frightened off the perches and just flew around madly, you know, when we went over that very bad bit of road. Everything else seems fairly steady, but I’ll be glad to get them on board and feed and water them. How are your things?”

“One Drill’s got his hand bashed rather badly, stupid little fool. I think he pushed it through the wire just as we went over a bump, and got it crushed by another crate. But that will heal up O.K. That’s my only casualty, thank God. The Angwantibos are all right, but they seem a bit scared.”

After a delay that to us seemed interminable, for we could not feed or clean any of our beasts, a train dragging a row of empty carriages drew alongside, and we were told that we could load our crates on it. As we hoisted the last crate on to the train it started to rain again, but not the gentle drifting drizzle that it had been before. No, as we were out in the open and unprotected, the Cameroons decided to show us what she could do in the way of rain. Within seconds all our crates were running with water and the staff, John and myself looked as though we had been dipped in a water tank. Slowly the train jerked its way along the lines, dragging us nearer and nearer to the ship; at last we were alongside, and with all speed the crates were got aboard. I was shivering again and felt like death. Remembering the doctor’s warning about a relapse, I hurried down to our cabin and changed into some dry clothes, and then went in search of the chief steward. That understanding man took me into his cabin and poured me out a whisky that could have knocked out a horse, and I felt the warmth of it spreading along my veins. I took some of the tablets the doctor had given me and literally staggered up on deck. Every one of my cages was sopping wet, and the inmates as well. I had to set to and clean each one, scraping out the sodden sawdust and replacing it with dry, and then throwing handfuls of sawdust over the monkeys to try and dry some of the moisture from their dripping fur. Then I made them hot milk and fed them on fruit and bread, for the poor little things were shivering with cold, and I knew that unless I got them dry before nightfall some would most certainly catch pneumonia. After the monkeys I cleaned and fed the Angwantibos, which fortunately had escaped the full force of the rain as they had been sheltered by other crates.

By this time the effects of the whisky had worn off and I began to feel worse and worse. The deck appeared to be heaving and twisting, and my head felt as big as a pumpkin and ready to burst with the pain and throbbing inside it. I began to feel really frightened for the first time: having got on board the ship I did not want to pass out gracefully and be carried off to hospital, leaving John to face the voyage home with two men’s work to do. I crawled down to our cabin and flung myself on to the bunk. Presently John came down to tell me that he had more or less got his birds under control, and within half an hour he would be able to give me a hand with the animals, but I had sunk into a deep and restful sleep. When I awoke I felt a different person, and I sallied up on deck still feeling a bit dizzy, but now quite sure that I was not going to die. I finished off the night feed, hung blankets over the front of the monkeys’ and the Angwantibos’ cages, and then prepared Sue’s evening bottle. She screamed lustily when she saw it coming, so the wetting did not appear to have done her any harm. At last everything was done for the night and I could relax, easy in my mind for the first time in two days. I leant on the rail and gazed at the dank and forbidding view of the banana groves and mangrove swamps, and the rain drummed incessantly on the canvas awning above me. Presently John joined me, having completed his tasks, and we smoked in silence, gazing out into the rain.

“I don’t think people realize what a job collecting is,” said John reflectively, glancing at the dark bulk of his cages, “they don’t know the difficulties. Now look at us to-day: we might quite easily have lost the whole collection in that shower of rain. But they never think of that when they see the things in the zoo.”

“Well, you can’t really expect them to. They think that it’s as easy as it apparently was for Noah.”

“Noah!” snorted John in disgust. “If Noah had a fifth part of what he was supposed to have carried the Ark would have sunk.”

“All those different species of birds and mammals we’ve seen and collected! If he had only confined himself to what he could get here the Ark would have been overloaded.”

“It strikes me”, said John, yawning, “that we’ve got an overloaded Ark on our hands with just the few things we’ve got.” He gestured at our hundred-odd crates. “Well, I’m going to bed. What time do we sail?”

“About midnight, I think. I’ll follow you down in a minute.”

John went below, and I stood gazing out into the darkening and rain-striped landscape. Suddenly, between the trees, I saw a small fire spring up, glowing like a red heart in the darkness. Presently, very softly, someone started to play a drum, and I could hear the husky voices of the banana loaders take up the theme. The fire flickered, heart-like, and the drum throbbed, heart-like, in the darkness and the rain. The voices sang softly, chanting a song that was as old as the great forests. A song that was harsh and primitive, yet plaintive and sweet, a song such as the god Pan must have sung. As I watched the pulsing fire among the trees, and heard the beat of the drum merge and tremble with the voices, forming an intricate pattern of sound, I knew that some day I would have to return, or be haunted forever by the beauty and mystery that is Africa.