The Shadow of the Sun

The Lazy River

I am met in Yaoundé by a young Dominican missionary named Stanislaw Gurgul. He will take me into the forests of Cameroon. “But first,” he says, “we will go to Bertoua.” Bertoua? I have no idea where this is. Until now, I had no idea it even existed! Our world consists of thousands — no, millions — of places with their own distinct names (names, moreover, that are written or pronounced differently in different languages, creating the impression of even greater multiplicity), and their numbers are so overwhelming that traveling around the globe we cannot commit to memory even a small percentage of them. Or — which also often happens — our minds are awash with the names of towns, regions, and countries that we are no longer able to connect meaningfully with any image, view, or landscape, with any event or human face. Everything becomes confused, twisted, blurred. We place the Sodori oases in Libya instead of in Sudan, the town of Tefé in Laos instead of in Brazil, the small fishing port of Galle in Portugal instead of where it actually lies — in Sri Lanka. The oneness of the world, so unachievable in the realm of empirical reality, lives in our minds, in the superimposed layers of tangled and confused memories.

It is 350 kilometers from Yaoundé to Bertoua, along a road that runs east, toward the Central African Republic and Chad, over gentle, green hills, through plantations of coffee, cacao, bananas, and pineapples. Along the way, as is usual in Africa, we encounter police guardposts. Stanislaw stops the car, leans his head out the window, and says: “Évêché Bertoua!” (the bishopric of Bertoua!). This has an instantaneous and magical effect. Anything to do with religion — with the supernatural, with the world of ceremony and spirits, with that which one cannot see or touch but which exists, and exists more profoundly than anything in the material world — is treated with great seriousness here, and immediately elicits reverence, respect, and a little bit of fear. Everyone knows how toying with something higher and mysterious, powerful and incomprehensible, ends: it ends badly, always. But there is more to it. It is about the way in which the origins and nature of existence are perceived. Africans, at least those I’ve encountered over the years, are deeply religious. “Croyez-vous en Dieu, monsieur?” I would always wait for this question, because I knew that it would be posed, having been asked it so many times already. And I knew that the one questioning me would at the same time be observing me carefully, registering every twitch of my face. I realized the seriousness of this moment, the meaning with which it was imbued. And I sensed that the way in which I answered would determine our relationship. And so when I said, “Oui, je suis croyant” (yes, I believe), I would see in his face the relief this brought him, see the tension and fear attending this scene dissipate, see how close it brought us, how it allowed us to overcome the barriers of skin color, status, age. Africans valued and liked to make contact on this higher, spiritual plane, to which often they could not give verbal definition, but whose existence and importance each one sensed instinctively and spontaneously.

Generally, it isn’t a matter of belief in any one particular god, the kind one can name, and whose appearance or characteristics one can describe. It is more an abiding faith in the existence of a Highest Being, one that creates and rules and also imbues man with a spiritual essence that elevates him above the world of irrational beasts and inanimate objects. This humble and ardent belief in the Highest Being trickles down to its messengers and earthly representatives, who as a consequence are held in special esteem and granted reverential acceptance. This privilege extends to Africa’s entire multitudinous layer of clergymen from the most varied sects, faiths, churches, and groups, of which the Catholic missionaries constitute only a small percentage. For there are countless Islamic mullahs and marabouts here, ministers of hundreds of Christian sects and splinter groups, not to mention the priests of African gods and cults. Despite a certain degree of competition, the level of tolerance among them is astonishingly high, and respect for them among the general population universal.

That is why, when Father Stanislaw stops the car and tells the policemen, “Évêché Bertoua!” they don’t check our documents, do not inspect the car, do not demand a bribe. They only smile and make a consenting gesture with their hand: we can drive on.

After a night in the chancery building in Bertoua, we drove to a village called Ngura, 120 kilometers away. Measuring distances in kilometers, however, is misleading and essentially meaningless here. If you happen upon a stretch of good asphalt, you can traverse that distance in an hour, but if you are in the middle of a roadless, unfrequented expanse, you will need a day’s driving, and in the rainy season even two or three. That is why in Africa you usually do not say “How many kilometers is it?” but rather “How much time will it take?” At the same time, you instinctively look at the sky: if the sun is shining, you will need only three, four hours, but if clouds are advancing and a downpour looks imminent, you really cannot predict when you will reach your destination.

Ngura is the parish of the missionary Stanislaw Stanislawek, whose car we are now following. Without him, we would never be able to find our way here. In Africa, if you leave the few main roads, you are lost. There are no guideposts, signs, markings. There are no detailed maps. Furthermore, the same roads run differently depending on the time of year, the weather, the level of water, the reach of the constant fires.

Your only hope is someone local, someone who knows the area intimately and can decipher the landscape, which for you is merely a baffling collection of signs and symbols, as unintelligible and bewildering as Chinese characters to a non-Chinese. “What does this tree tell you?” “Nothing!” “Nothing? Why, it says that you must now turn left, or otherwise you will be lost. And this rock?” “This rock? Also nothing!” “Nothing? Don’t you see that it is telling you to make a sharp right, at once, because straight ahead lies wilderness, a wasteland, death?”

In this way the native, that unprepossessing, barefoot expert on the writing of the landscape, the fluent reader of its inscrutable hieroglyphics, becomes your guide and your savior. Each one carries in his head a small geography, a private picture of the world that surrounds him, a most priceless knowledge and art, because in the worst tempest, in the deepest darkness, it enables him to find his way home and thus be saved, survive.

Father Stanislawek has lived here for years, and so guides us without effort through this remote region’s intricate labyrinth. We arrive at his rectory. It is a poor, shabby barracks, once a country school but now closed for lack of a teacher. One classroom is now the priest’s apartment: a bed and a table, a little stove, an oil lamp. The other classroom is the chapel. Next door stand the ruins of a little church, which collapsed. The missionary’s task, his main occupation, is the construction of a new church. An unimaginable struggle, years of labor. There is no money, no workers, no materials, no effective means of transport. Everything depends on the priest’s old car. What if it breaks down, falls apart, stops? Then everything will come to a standstill: the construction of the church, the teaching of the gospel, the saving of souls.

…

Later, we drove along the hilltops (below us stretched a plain covered in a thick green carpet of forest, enormous, endless, like the sea) to a settlement of gold diggers, who were searching for treasure in the bed of the winding and lazy Ngabadi River. It was afternoon already, and because there is no dusk here, and darkness can descend with sudden abruptness, we went first to where the diggers were working.

The river flows along the bottom of a deep gorge. Its bed is shallow, sandy, and gravelly. Its every centimeter has been plowed, and you can see everywhere deep craters, pits, holes, ravines. Over this battlefield swarm crowds of half-naked, black-skinned people, streaming with sweat and water, all of them feverish, in a trance. For there is a peculiar climate here, one of excitement, desire, greed, risk, an atmosphere not unlike that of a darkly lit casino. It’s as though an invisible roulette wheel were spinning somewhere near, capriciously whirling. But the dominant noises here are the hollow tapping of hoes digging through the gravel, the rustle of sand shaken through handheld sieves, and the monotonous utterances, neither calls nor songs, made by the men working at the bottom of the gorge. It doesn’t look as if these diggers are finding anything much, putting much aside. They shake the troughs, pour water into them, strain them, inspect the sand in the palm of their hand, hold it up to the light, throw everything back into the river.

And yet sometimes they do find something. If you gaze up to the top of the gorge, to the slopes of the hills that it intersects, you will see, in the shade of mango trees, under the thin umbrellas of acacias and tattered palms, the tents of Arabs. They are gold merchants from the Sahara, from neighboring Niger, from N’Djamena and from Nubia. Dressed in white djellabahs and snowy, gorgeously wound turbans, they sit idly in tent entrances drinking tea and smoking ornate water pipes. From time to time, one of the exhausted, sinewy black diggers climbs up to them from the bottom of the crowded gorge. He squats in front of an Arab, takes out and unrolls a piece of paper. In its crease lie several grains of gold sand. The Arab looks at them indifferently, deliberates, calculates, then names a figure. The grime-covered black Cameroonian, master of this land and of this river — it is, after all, his country and his gold — cannot contest the price, or argue for a higher one. Another Arab would give him the same measly sum. And the next one, too. There is only one price. This is a monopoly.

Darkness descends, the gorge empties and grows quiet, and one can no longer see its interior, now a black, undifferentiated chasm. We walk to the settlement, called Colomine. It is a hastily thrown together little town, so makeshift and scruffy that its inhabitants will have no qualms abandoning it once the gold in the river runs out. Shack leaning against shack, hovel against hovel, the streets of slums all emptying into the main one, which has bars and shops and where evening and nightlife take place. There is no electricity. Oil lamps, torches, fires, and candles are burning everywhere. What their glow picks out from the darkness is flickering and wobbly. Here, some silhouettes slip by; over there, someone’s face suddenly appears, an eye glitters, a hand emerges. That piece of tin, that’s a roof. That flash you just saw, that’s a knife. And that piece of plank — who knows what it’s from and what purpose it serves. Nothing connects, arranges itself, can be composed into a whole. We know only that this darkness all around us is in motion, that it has shapes and emits sounds; that with the assistance of light we can bring bits of it up to the surface and momentarily observe them, but that as soon as the light goes out, everything will escape us and vanish. I saw hundreds of faces in Colomine, heard dozens of conversations, passed countless people walking, bustling about, sitting. But because of the way the images shimmered in the flickering flames of the lamps, because of their fragmentation and the speed with which they followed one another, I am unable to connect a single face with a distinct individual or a single voice with some particular person that I met there.

In the morning we drove south, to the great forest. First, however, was the Kadeï River, which runs through the jungle (it is a tributary of the Sangha River, which flows into the Congo River north of Yumbi and Bolobo). In keeping with the operative local principle that a thing broken will never be repaired, our ferry looked like something fit only for the scrap heap. But the three little boys scampering around it knew exactly how to compel the monster into motion. The ferry: a huge, rectangular, flat metal box. Above it, a metal wire stretching across the river. Turning a squeaky crank, alternately tightening and releasing the wire, the boys move the ferry (with us and the car on board) — slowly, ever so slowly — from one bank to the other. Of course, this operation can succeed only when the current is sluggish and somnolent. Were it to twitch, to come alive, suddenly we would end up, carried off by the Kadeï, the Sangha, and the Congo, somewhere in the Atlantic.

After that — driving, plunging into the forest — sinking, slipping, into the labyrinths, tunnels, and underworlds of some alien, green, dusky, impenetrable realm. One cannot compare the tropical forest with any European forest or with any equatorial jungle. Europe’s forests are beautiful and rich, but they are of average scale and their trees are of moderate height: we can imagine ourselves climbing to the top of even the highest ash or oak. And the jungle is a vortex, a giant knot of tangled branches, roots, shrubs, and vines, a heated and compressed nature endlessly proliferating, a green cosmos.

This forest is different. It is monumental, its trees — thirty, fifty, and more meters high — are gigantic, perfectly straight, loosely positioned, maintaining clearly delineated distances between one another and growing out of the ground with virtually no undercover. Driving into the forest, in between these sky-high sequoias, mahogany trees, and others I do not recognize, I have the sensation of stepping across the threshold of a great cathedral, squeezing into the interior of an Egyptian pyramid, or standing suddenly amid the skyscrapers of Fifth Avenue.

The journey here is often a torment. There are stretches of road so pitted and rough that for all intents and purposes one cannot drive, and the car is flung about like a boat on a stormy sea. The only vehicles that can deal with these surfaces are the gigantic machines with engines like the underbellies of steam locomotives, which the French, Italians, Greeks, and Dutch use to export timber from here to Europe. For the forest is being cut down day and night, its surface shrinking, its trees disappearing. You constantly come across large, empty clearings, with huge fresh stumps sticking out of the earth. The screech of saws, their whistling, penetrating echo, carries for kilometers.

Somewhere in this forest, in which we all appear so small, live others smaller still — its permanent inhabitants. It is rare to see them. We pass their straw huts along the way. But there is no one around. The owners are somewhere deep in the forest. They are hunting birds, gathering berries, chasing lizards, searching for honey. In front of each house, hanging on a stick or stretched out on a line, are owl’s feathers, the claws of an anteater, the corpse of a scorpion, or the tooth of a snake. The message is in the manner in which these trifles are arranged: they probably tell of the owners’ whereabouts.

At nightfall we spotted a simple country church and beside it a humble house, the rectory. We had arrived at our destination. Somewhere, in one of the rooms, an oil lamp was burning, and a small, wavering glow fell through the open door onto the porch. We entered. It was dark and quiet inside. After a moment, a tall, thin man in a light habit came out to greet us: Father Jan, from southern Poland. He had an emaciated, sweaty face with large, blazing eyes. He had malaria, was clearly running a fever, his body probably wracked by chills and cramps. Suffering, weak and listless, he spoke in a quiet voice. He wanted to play the host somehow, to offer us something, but from his embarrassed gestures and aimless puttering about it was plain he didn’t have the means, and didn’t know how. An old woman arrived from the village and began to warm up some rice for us. We drank water, then a boy brought a bottle of banana beer. “Why do you stay here, Father?” I asked. “Why don’t you leave?” He gave the impression of a man in whom some small part had already died. There was already something missing. “I cannot,” he answered. “Someone has to guard the church.” And he gestured with his hand toward the black shape visible through the window.

I went to lie down in the adjoining room. I couldn’t sleep. Suddenly, the words of an old altar boy’s response started to play in my head: Pater noster, qui es in caeli… Fiat voluntas tua… sed libera nos a malo…

In the morning, the boy whom I had seen the previous evening beat with a hammer on a dented metal wheel rim hanging on a wire. This served as the bell. Stanislaw and Jan were celebrating morning mass in the church, a mass in which the boy and I were the sole participants.