Drums Along the Congo Read online

  Flicking on the flashlight again, I return to my notes, reading the section headed: “Green and black snakes.”

  mambas strike w/whiplash motion; vipers hit like sledgehammers… Alive 3 hrs. post mamba bite = clear sailing; viper bite deceptive, poison (anticoagulant) may cause int. hemorrhaging, check stool + urine for blood, monitor pulse.

  “What are you doing? Reading at this hour?” Innocent asks, wiping the sleep from his eyes.

  “Oh, just going over some things.”

  “I’m having strange dreams. How about you?”

  “Nah, slept like a rock,” I lie.

  A few hours later, Innocent and I are drinking tea when Theo returns from his morning constitutional. The village health officer is outside, watching to make sure we use the outhouses.

  “Throw a rock inside before you go in,” Theo advises as I head for the facilities.

  We’ve avoided the outhouses in Boha so far, and I’ve never seen any of the villagers use them. In Epena there were a half-dozen well-maintained toilets, with barrels of lime outside each door, but in Boha creepers have swallowed the rust-covered pails next to the two outhouses, which are set off by themselves near the jungle wall. I knock on the door.

  “Bonjour?… Bonjour?”

  There’s no response, but when I open the door, an angry

  swarm of bees rushes out, along with a noxious odor. I jump backward as the door snaps closed on its spring hinges and pepper the outhouse with dirt bombs until the bees stop coming out. What’s a few bees to someone about to explore a pathless jungle? No problem, I tell myself, and step boldly inside. As I squat over the hole, I can barely see the walls in the dim light. Something keeps dropping on my head, so I crack open the door to find that the inside of the outhouse is caked with wriggling, oozing maggots. I jump up, trying to pull on my pants, and spring outside, landing bare-assed in a heap on the ground.

  “Mon Dieu!” Innocent exclaims. He elects to use the other outhouse, but once again a swarm of bees curls out. Regardless of what the health officer has to say, Innocent stalks off into the jungle to relieve himself.

  Teacher tells me later that the poor condition of the outhouses isn’t the fault of the village but of the regional government in Impfondo. Lime and disinfectant are supposed to arrive the first of every month, but they haven’t had a shipment since last year. The village council writes to complain every other week and gets a letter back each time promising action.

  By ten o’clock we’re almost ready to move out. Food and communal gear, like the flashlights and liquor and ammunition, are spread across the ground and are slowly being arranged by Raymond into six equal piles, none of which will weigh more than twenty pounds. Each of us carries his own personal items, with Gabriel’s kit the lightest of all—only a mirror and a toothbrush.

  The witch doctor sings as he approaches us, “I’ve been praying for you.”

  “Merci.”

  “The wind god will protect you … and I believe Mokele-Mbembe has listened to me as well.” The witch doctor looks at me and adds, “But we still have some work to do… You must be cleansed. Lake Télé is sacred to us.”

  Recalling my last spiritual cleansing, I ask if we can move into the shade. “Bien sur,” he agrees and suggests a large lime tree across the way, where we surprise Teacher’s wife. She’s gathering the white flowers from a nearby pyrethrum bush.

  “Insects,” she says, waving an arm through the air. When the pyrethrum flowers dry, she’ll either burn them to chase away mosquitoes or grind them into a powder, a natural insecticide.

  Once she slips back inside her house, the witch doctor looks around and, finding no women in sight, nods. Women shouldn’t witness the cleansing of a male, and vice versa.

  “Each has secrets that must be protected.”

  I start to take off my shirt, but he stops me. If spirits can pass through the bark of an ironwood tree, surely they can pass through your clothing.

  “Just stand there and think about the wind god and the forest god, Mokele-Mbembe.”

  He pours some water from a canteen into his palm and anoints me while reciting a short prayer. He repeats the prayer as he gathers a handful of dirt and lets it sift through his fingers onto my feet. He then blows softly into my left ear.

  “Très bon,” he announces, satisfied.

  “C’est tout?”

  “Oui,” he replies. “I have loaned you a powerful spirit and asked the gods to watch over you. What more can I do?”

  The witch doctor sends word to the village drummer to announce our departure. The message goes out, and moments later we hear replies from other villages.

  “What’s the word?”

  “Better than before,” Innocent says, cupping his ear. “Only one village is denouncing you. American go home, they say.”

  “Good idea,” Ange growls.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE SCHOOL BELL CHIMES an early recess, and children scramble from their classrooms. Women return from the manioc fields or the river, while men hotbox their cigarettes down to the nub and rise from their chairs in the shade to see us off.

  A woman comes up to me with a string of rosary beads in one hand and a fetish in the other. She rubs each along my forearm, first using the plastic cross and then a tiny red doll, which has a brass thumbtack stuck between its painted eyes.

  “Good spirits. They bring luck and good hunting,” she says, pressing the cross into the doll’s face, then walking off into the crowd. Ange smiles at the woman and she rubs his forearm as well. Gabriel and Raymond line up behind Ange for their blessing. Innocent tells me that the first Portuguese sailors to visit the Congo exchanged rosary beads, talismans, and holy relics for native dolls. The Western charms were called feitico in old Portuguese, and that led to the dolls being called fetishes.

  “Play something for the wind spirit,” the witch doctor instructs the drummer.

  He responds with an up-tempo rhythm, and several men dash to their houses and return with instruments. They join the village drummer, layering the music and driving the melody forward. The young man next to me pounds his bongos with a bone of some type.

  “Bongo, naturellement!” he says, slapping his leg to indicate where on the animal it came from.

  The witch doctor stands in the middle of the path, tapping the shaft of his ceremonial spear, one of three in Boha. The vice president of the village council stands next to him, holding the second spear. The chief owns the third, but I don’t see him around. Teacher is all excited, speaking rapidly in French, Lingala, and English, telling me that his daughter’s temperature is down and her appetite has returned. “For the medicine you gave her,” Teacher says, stuffing something into my shirt pocket. It’s a coin purse made from lizard skin. Inside are all types of seeds. “Plant them and their spirits will thank and protect you.”

  “Oui?”

  “Oui,” the witch doctor confirms.

  We shoulder our bags and take up positions behind the witch doctor and the vice president. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot the chief lurking in the doorway of his hut, and I wave to him. He doesn’t respond. The witch doctor raises his spear, and the music comes to an abrupt halt.

  “Tokay,” the witch doctor announces.

  The villagers spread out to either side as we pass, and a few wish us good hunting. The woman with the fetish and rosary beads has her eyes closed, but her lips are moving, no doubt praying for us to return with plenty of meat.

  No one follows us beyond the school, where we veer to the right, avoiding the devil’s path near the camwood, and enter the manioc field. Halfway across the field, the witch doctor and the councilor step out of the procession without saying a word. At the edge of the forest we stop to adjust our bags. While the others fidget with their gear, I run my hand over the belly of the jungle wall, which bulges out several feet, like the topsides of a mighty ark. The wall’s rough exterior is woven from a jumble of tightly knit vines, forming a warp and woof that defies my attempts
to separate them. Stepping back, I note an unusual number of parasol trees, a sure sign that this is second-growth jungle. Maybe it’s a part of the original manioc field that has been reclaimed by the forest. Parasols, or umbrella trees as they’re often called, are pioneers, speedy growers that are always among the first to establish themselves in a new clearing. They can grow up to eight feet a year for the first ten years, but such prodigious growth comes at a high price. Parasols die young, crashing to the ground by their eighteenth birthday, rotted by fungus and strangled at the roots by the dominant trees, like mahogany and djave nut, slow and steady growers that live many centuries.

  In an area dappled by sunshine I plant several of the seeds Teacher gave me, placing them away from the tended rows of manioc, where they might be mistaken for weeds. Raymond helps me plant them and instructs me to blow into the soil on top of each one. “The breath of life,” he explains. Gabriel loads his Chinese-made shotgun and asks us to stand back.

  “For luck… We fire once before we leave and once when we come back. See that fig vine over there? Make sure you touch it three times before going inside.”

  He aims into the jungle and pulls the trigger with the gunstock inches from his shoulder. The recoil kicks the barrel up, sending the shot high into the canopy. He stares accusingly at the shotgun for several seconds, and rubs the barrel with an arum leaf.

  “I’m waking the spirit,” he says, reasoning that the shot went high because the gun spirit had been asleep. It has been weeks since he last fired the gun. “You’re awake now, aren’t you?” he asks the spirit, holding the weapon to his ear and apparently satisfied with what he hears.

  “Follow me,” Ange exclaims, taking the lead. We string out behind him, each of us tapping the lucky vine.

  We sidle through a slot in the jungle wall, stepping over plants pushing up from the ground and hunching under overhanging limbs and vines. The ambient light diminishes with each step. No place on earth has more flora per square foot than a second-growth jungle; it’s a chaos of runners, creepers, trees, bushes, and herbs, many spiraling in death grips around the others. Over time the vegetation will settle into a hierarchy headed by the dominant trees, but until then, passage must be earned with endless whacks of a machete. Someone in front of me curses; we remain crouched in the semidarkness listening until a voice says, “Tokay.”

  “Reach out,” Gabriel orders, and grabs my shoulder.

  I latch onto a sleeve.

  “Not me… Behind you!”

  I grope for Innocent, but he swats my hand away. “I thought it was a snake,” he says, telling me to keep my hands to myself. On we go, wiggling through vegetation that sustains itself in less light than I can read by.

  Several minutes later, on the other side of the wall, we spring upright, intruders in an emerald world domed by leaves, vines, and limbs. Now there’s no need for high-stepping or hunching; the primeval tropical forest is remarkably uncluttered, with less underbrush than in a temperate forest. We can see for hundreds of feet in almost every direction.

  I stretch toward the bottle-green sky. At last I’ve entered Mokele-Mbembe’s domain: a pristine world where plants are kings and dinosaurs gods. While the rest of the earth has undergone dramatic geological changes, this steamy chunk of Africa has remained in the Cretaceous period, the sunset years of the dinosaur hegemony. Winter was unknown, and mammals were just emerging into a world populated by spiders, scorpions, and reptiles. Trader Horn once described Africa as a place where the past has hardly stopped breathing; but in the Congo jungle, it seems that the past is indistinguishable from the present. My surroundings look as if they’ve been lifted from a diorama at a natural history museum. The first creature I see is a dragonfly, another survivor from the dinosaur age. I call out to Innocent, wanting him to see the double-winged insect with ruby eyes.

  “Shhh!” Gabriel admonishes as he looks above.

  “Monkey,” Ange whispers, directing my attention to a tree several hundred feet away. With my binoculars, I make out the profile of a green monkey.

  It’s a difficult target even for an accomplished marksman, but Gabriel has faith in his gun spirit, and the sight of a monkey makes his mouth water. Lucky for the olive-furred simian scampering along the high branches that he’s such a poor shot.

  “Huh, the gun spirit must be mad at me,” Gabriel says after missing. Again he plucks a leaf and rubs it along the barrel; this time he talks at length to the spirit, urging it to guide his future shots.

  It’s almost high noon, yet we’re bathed in diffused light. Many details that would be lost in bright sunshine, like the pale yellow lines on the leaves of variegated palms, are beautifully radiant. Most of the tallest trees are entwined with climbing vines or draped with aerial roots. One impressive plane tree draws my attention. Its trunk is a round, barely tapered column, like a factory smokestack, vaulting twelve stories into a thick haze of leaves. At its base are four massive buttresses, with ample space between them to park a station wagon. The others help me measure its girth with a fishing line. Its circumference exceeds twenty-six feet.

  “Small boy,” Gabriel scoffs. “The grandfathers live near the lake. They are twice as big.”

  “This is where life started, you know,” Raymond says. “Right here under a plane tree … love began.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The forest came before people,” he explains, “until one day a rose apple fell from the claws of an eagle and landed on a buttress of a plane tree. The apple split in two. A man grew from one half and a woman from the other… That’s what the Pygmies say.”

  “That’s what the priests say the Pygmies say,” Ange interjects. His favorite story as a child was “a real Pygmy story” about creation. “It all started in a night world… Before there were forests, there was only darkness…” The gods grew bored with this dark universe and decided to create a diversion. They ordered astral mud wasps to build a giant nest, earth, out of black matter; worms were then commanded to fertilize the soil, and their burrowing created mountains, valleys, and riverbeds; at the same time, fireflies were assembled to form the sun, moon, and stars.

  “Then,” Ange says, grabbing a handful of humus, “the gods blessed earth. They gave us water. They gave us trees. They gave us life.”

  The men from Boha stride northward; they’ve walked this route often and can’t understand why I’m constantly checking my compass.

  “Only idiots get lost,” Ange says flatly.

  He demonstrates the first rule of trail blazing, slashing a tree with his machete and bending the stalk of a waxy arum plant to the ground. “If we do that every twenty or thirty meters, no one will get lost … and don’t forget your whistles.” We each carry a plastic whistle to signal those out of eyeshot.

  Innocent and I lag behind the others, more interested in studying the plant life than in listening to the hunters talk about past monkey kills. Like confused doctors standing over a patient, we pinch and probe plants, take notes and cuttings, and flip through reference books trying to identify species. At first glance, almost every tree looks like a twin of the one closest to it. All have leathery green ovate leaves, smooth light-colored bark, and trunks that rise straight and true. But slowly we learn to discern one species from another, relying not only on our eyes but also on our noses and fingers. Jabbing a knife into the cortex can release the pungent essence of the tree, and running a hand over the bark can reveal subtle differences in texture that escape the eye.

  At the base of a patternwood tree I notice a vine that looks familiar. Matching it to a picture in the field guide, I determine that it’s a philodendron, a cousin of the plant that grew in the corner of my old office in New York. However, this gigantean version is seventy feet tall. If only it were a strangler species, I would take a cutting back to give to my former boss.

  We hear the sound of a whistle, but we can’t find our own to respond—or even our bags. We put them down while we collected plants, and we locate them just as Ange arr
ives, huffing and puffing. He thought we might be in trouble, but as he says with a sneer, “You’re the trouble.”

  He’s anxious to reach tonight’s campsite and begin stalking game, so we walk double-time to catch up with the others. Innocent and I may be after plants and dinosaurs, but Ange is after meat. Once we’re reunited with the group, Raymond volunteers to shepherd Innocent and me while the others push on. After the forest warriors leave, Raymond tells us that he prefers a leisurely pace. “I don’t like to rush anywhere.” He adds, “The tortoise, you know, always has something to teach the spider.”

  As the three of us stroll along, I concentrate on the smells of the forest. There are raw odors of decay, sweet fragrances of new growth, potent swirls of methane, musky perfumes, and alluring scents of nectar. Each breath has a different taste from the last, some bitter, some sweet. Kick up the leaf clutter and a stench arises, jostle an orchid and volatile oils excite the air, squeeze a blossom and pollen sprays a honeyed mist; snap a root and earthy aromas circulate.

  With the air saturated with moisture, there’s little evaporation, and each drop of sweat soaks me further, attracting bees, flies, mosquitoes, and clouds of tiny gnats. The rubber bands cinching my cuffs don’t deter the ants from marching up to my torso, and spiders drop from overhead or scurry across my face when I walk through a web. Skin borers, a problem in Epena, are a plague here. They drill into my arms and hands, some burrowing to their deaths, others finding a new home in my bloodstream. Pollen glazes me like a baked ham.

  Insects chatter all around us, a bluster of clicks, whirrs, trills, and cheeps. Right now, in the middle of the afternoon, most mammals and birds are quiet, though the hornbills and touracos keep calling, as they will throughout the day and night. Several times reptilian hissing noises sizzle through the air, and I change course quickly. In the background is the constant splattering of water drops and detritus falling from leaf to leaf, from canopy to floor, an omnipresent sound generated by condensation and by millions of arboreal creatures going about their business. The forest is worked twenty-four hours a day, with some animals on the night shift, others on the day shift, and still more, like certain saprophytes, that do their char work around the clock.