Drums Along the Congo Read online

  “This will be delicious,” he promises.

  Innocent and Ange return with their prize in two pieces, Ange carrying a body and Innocent a head wrapped in an arum leaf. Gabriel and Theo show up empty-handed. “He went into the swamp, and we lost,” Gabriel explains.

  Innocent checks to see that all the mangabeys are males. There are heavy fines for killing a female.

  “Brazzaville doesn’t have to tell us about the jungle,” Ange snaps at Innocent. “What about the finger sellers. They’re the ones.”

  Traders in Kinshasa sell gorilla fingers, hands, and internal organs, which are coveted by the Chinese and Koreans for their supposed curative powers. Marin, my black-market contact, assured me that genuine shrunken heads and gorilla parts were available in Zaire, but he refused to take me to these benighted traders, sure that they would kill us if we didn’t buy anything. A shrunken head, he told me, goes for five hundred dollars, and a gorilla finger costs fifty dollars.

  “The state doesn’t understand the jungle,” Ange adds. “Ask our cousins and comrades in Ouesso. You’re wrong if you think they want their forest cut…”

  Innocent slightly bows his head. I sense that he agrees with Ange about the deforestation around Ouesso, but his loyalty lies with the Forestry Department, right or wrong.

  The gunshots and commotion have scared off everything worth eating except snakes, which are deaf, though they can sense vibrations traveling through the air and ground. Raymond heads back out to hunt them as we turn toward camp.

  Pulling out my butterfly net, I trap and release a long-tailed Congo swallowtail and an assortment of whites and blues, all of them common species already in my collection. But under a false nutmeg tree, fluttering between two buttresses, is a handsome butterfly I don’t have, a dusky swordtail. It’s an agile flier and leads me on a dizzying course, and I hoot triumphantly once it’s captured. Only a few collections have this rare black butterfly spangled with emeralds; a connoisseur might pay five hundred dollars or more for this specimen. I study its long, slender tail and gaze appreciatively at the row of green disks running down the middle of its wings, each oval precisely drawn and a bit larger than the one below it. There are delicate splashes of light green in the subapical area, and faint stripes along its costa tease the eye. Carefully pinching its thorax and opening the killing jar, I take one last look at the living butterfly. There has been enough killing for one day, I decide, opening my fingers and releasing the swordtail.

  Raymond returns without any snakes, but he has found several fallen birds’ nests and a large chunk of vaka, hardened tree resin, all of which make excellent tinder. Ange has sharpened his machete and stands poised like a sacrificial priest—palms together in a prayerful manner, eyes shut, the machete tucked under an arm. Gabriel lays the gutted monkeys out on a log, and Ange mutters something that makes the others bow their heads. He lifts the machete and grunts mightily as the blade comes down; three whacks later, the first carcass is split into two pieces and Ange lines up the next one. Gabriel uses his hands to disembowel and salt the raw flesh.

  Flames vault into the sky, their tips dancing above our heads as Raymond and Theo both fan the coals. Gabriel surveys their work with a critical eye and points to an area that isn’t hot enough. “Make it grow,” he shouts.

  Once the fire is to his liking, Gabriel lobs the meat into the blaze, and a horrid smell of burning flesh and hair gags me. Innocent holds his nostrils, but the others inhale the smoke as if it’s precious incense. Gabriel waves everyone back. He’s cooking tonight and doesn’t want any interference. He uses his machete like a spatula to spread the salt and tend the meat. The body fat dripping into the flames sizzles and pops; the monkey skin tightens, and the body parts look more and more human. Grease spits at us, and Raymond sucks the oily stains out of his shirt. Gabriel flips the meat after a few minutes. More than five minutes a side is too much, I’m told. “You want it chewy,” Gabriel says.

  He lifts the cooked meat onto a bed of arum leaves, where Ange quarters it and hands us each a piece. The meat has been blistered to charcoal on the outside, but it’s pink, bloody, and nearly raw on the inside. I throw my piece back on the fire until it’s well done. It has a gamy, sour taste, but I manage to eat most of a thigh.

  That night around three, a fierce gust of wind startles us awake. Thunderclaps echo in the distance. Ange, Gabriel, and Raymond stagger out from under the lean-to and shine their flashlights up into the canopy. The trees are gyrating wildly, shaking leaves, nests, and twigs to the ground. Innocent and Theo jump up, but I stay inside the tent, comfortably wrapped in my sheet.

  Gusts give way to a steady blow that rips into the forest, bending branches and whipping saplings back and forth. Then an ominous lull descends. At sea, in tropical waters, a stillness like this presages gale-force winds, with a five- to ten-minute interlude before squalls buffet the area. Aboard ship I’d drop the sails, set the drogue, and dash below, life jacket on, praying for dear life. In the jungle I stare out happily, feeling safe inside the tent, eager for the big show to begin.

  The rain commences as a thunderclap rattles the earth. Purple-blue flashes lance the jungle blackness, freezing everything in an icy light; millions of volts crackle through the air, zapping limbs and trunks. The wind rages, with gusts over forty knots. A sapling near the tent bends to the jungle floor. Everyone but me is outside, their heads thrown back and their flashlights slicing through the downpour. They move back and forth in unison, as if dancing. More lightning forks down, and I can see Innocent waving to me. The wind sweeps his voice away.

  Kaboom! A tree falls somewhere close by, sending tremors through the ground and up my body. A heavy branch tears through the tent roof and takes a chunk out of the ground near my foot. I jump outside, joining the others and quickly learn the dance: dodge the falling debris and duck under the whip-lashing lianas. A tent is no haven in a jungle squall.

  My feet are raw by the time the storm passes, twenty minutes later. Soaked to the bone and exhausted, we crawl into a heap under the lean-to. I sleep next to Gabriel, who recaps tonight’s lesson in jungle survival: “If you can’t see it coming, you won’t know where to run.”

  I expect to awaken to a devastated landscape, with uprooted trees and ravaged undergrowth, but surprisingly, the rain forest is relatively unscathed, proving its resiliency in the worst weather. The diversity of trees and their flexibility, as well as the stabilizing effect of all the interconnected lianas, protected the forest from severe damage. Gabriel says these storms hit the area every couple of months or so, with the most violent ones coming at the beginning of the rainy season, which officially starts this week. “We don’t have glass in our windows at home, we have shutters.”

  It’s sour coffee and soggy cookies for Innocent and me while the others happily gnaw monkey for breakfast. The great swamp is only a mile away, so we break camp early, expecting to reach Lake Télé by midafternoon. We haven’t seen our friend, the black-and-white colobus monkey, and I doubt it’s anywhere around after the hunt and last night’s storm. Even so, Innocent and Raymond leave out some dried fruit. To neglect the messenger, Raymond says, is to insult the god who employs him.

  The leaf clutter gradually gives way to soft, moss-covered ground. Saprophytes dot the area, rising from the earth like so many lingams painted in Shiva’s favorite colors of red, pink, and purple. Occasionally one of them will ejaculate its spores in a small cloud, making our eyes tear and setting Raymond to sneezing, mighty blasts that carry spittle yards downwind. As the jungle floor grows squishier, new flora appears: mangroves, tree ferns, and cycads. Instead of arum and maranta plants, there are now many different species of ferns, and great strings of moss replace the woody lianas we’ve been accustomed to seeing.

  Gabriel grabs my arm and steers me away from a small muddy pool that smells of sulfur. “Devil,” he cautions. “That’s his mouth… His stomach has no bottom. Watch out, they eat men.”

  Gingerly, I dip a finger into the
black goo. One taste tells me that it’s oil, and an unsavory image of oil rigs and pipelines looms before me.

  Soon we’re slogging through ankle-deep water. The air reeks of methane, the stench increasing as the brown, scum-covered water deepens. Most of the trees are denuded, broken-limbed, and leaning at odd angles, as if blown over in an atomic blast. The sky is open above us, but the sun is blotted out by a heavy ground mist that leaves an acrid taste in my mouth. Hundreds of dragonflies skim the water, darting left, then right, their iridescent red and green bodies conspicuous in this bleak, postnuclear landscape. When they land on the black fungi girdling the dead trees, they look like jeweled brooches on velvet. Mosquitoes, newly hatched and hungry, buzz around. Tadpoles, salamanders, and frogs dive and hop as we pass, only to pop back up seconds later, blinking madly. Water spiders skitter on the waves we make, floating on their buoyant leg hairs. A loud splash off to our right sends us all racing onto the nearest fallen tree trunk, where we stand searching for the ripples of a swimming snake or crocodile. Raymond drops into a crouch as Gabriel and Ange load their shotguns and Theo flicks off the safety on his AK-47. Innocent and I strike the water with sticks, trying to attract whatever made the sound, but nothing appears. Even so, we wait for several minutes; there’s no serum for the bite of an African water cobra.

  A bird flies overhead, and for a moment it looks to be a member of the pterosaur family, a Quetzalcoatlus to be exact, last thought to have flown in the late Cretaceous period. Focusing my camera, zooming in and out on the bird’s coal-black leathery wings, I realize that’s it’s only a cormorant.

  The guns remain loaded, safeties off, as we slosh on through the swamp. We walk cautiously, our eyes fixed on the scummy surface. Any splashing sound brings us to a stop. “Shhh!” Gabriel says every time, scanning the murk. Sometimes we sink up to our ankles in mud and it’s a struggle to pull free. Skin borers by the hundreds tunnel through my arms and hands. Another type of borer is digging through the soles of my feet. These worms begin life no larger than a match head, but given the right conditions, they can grow to the size of a small snake within the leg, their growth arrested only by knee joints and ligaments. Eventually they eat through the calf and exit from the skin just below the knee.

  Gradually the water level falls, and we sight a green tree line through the fog. A salamander wiggles by and I scoop it up, depositing it a few inches beyond the lip of Mokele-Mbembe’s home turf, a land stalled in time.

  We leave the swamp behind and reenter the rain forest, where flora blossoms and sweet smells emerge. Sunshine pours through openings in the canopy, and for the first time in days, we have shadows. The others bend down to touch their silhouettes, and I do the same. In animist doctrine, shadows are manifestations of the soul, which leave the body’s side at night to roam the spirit world and gather dreams.

  “No one’s shadow is the same,” Innocent says. “When we don’t see them for a while, we worry. They protect us,” he adds, explaining that witch doctors often cast their spells at night, when the body, unguarded by its shadow, is most susceptible to devils.

  We take a break under a giant plane tree to scrape the mud off our clothes. The great swamp turned out to be neither great nor perilous. It was only a few miles wide, and the most dangerous creature we encountered was a poisonous frog, a killer only if you somehow manage to eat two of them at a sitting.

  CHAPTER 24

  VASCO DE BALBOA first sighted the Pacific Ocean from the height of a tree, but I spot Lake Télé from the mud, spread-eagled after tripping over a root. Unexpectedly able to see beneath the shrub layer, I glimpse a broad, vague expanse shimmering in the distance.

  Leaping to my feet with excitement, I urge the others to pick up the pace, but Ange grabs my shoulder bag and holds me back. We’re guests, he explains, and we’re expected to honor Mokele-Mbembe with certain rituals. There are prayers to be said and an offering to be made. The men from Boha, each a priest in the service of Mokele-Mbembe, must lead the way; otherwise we risk angering the beast and bringing a damaging curse upon ourselves. In the past they’ve let the outsiders forge ahead, secretly hoping they’d suffer the repercussions.

  “We need food, so we do it right this time,” Ange declares. “Touch the water before we do, and it will be the last drink you ever take.”

  We dump our gear at the campsite and walk several yards to the shore. Innocent, Theo, and I stand back as the three men drop to their knees and pray. Afterward they sip the water, splash some on their chests, and invite us to do the same. Gabriel makes a small raft from sticks, and Ange pulls out a piece of manioc and two limes and places them on the raft. I add my own tribute of dinosaur-shaped cookies brought especially from America.

  Being the tallest, I’m asked to push the raft beyond the snags. As I wade into the water, Ange asks Mokele-Mbembe to tolerate our presence and to bless us with a plentiful supply of food. When the water starts lapping my chest, I give the raft a gentle shove.

  Feeling comfortable in the lukewarm water, I decide to float awhile and contemplate the lake surroundings. Congolese myth refers to Télé as the inner sanctum of the god-beast, its water a fount blessed by the god himself. Perhaps Mokele-Mbembe is observing me right now. The lake is bordered by thirteen sheltered inlets, or lobes, each one big enough to conceal a family of twenty-ton dinosaurs. Every inlet leads to a stream. A few of them feed the swamp; one flows to the Bai River, twenty kilometers to the west; and others trickle in from the forest, connecting Télé to a network of satellite lakes. Raymond says that Mokele-Mbembe travels along these streams, as its body is too large for it to traverse the gnarled jungle.

  “This is his home,” Raymond said, “but he goes anywhere water goes.”

  I look for molombo vines, which reportedly bear the god’s favorite food. The molombo fruits that I’ve seen on the trail were the size of softballs, with the texture of an unripe pear; they had a sour taste and oozed a milky latex. The shoreline is crowded with cycads and tree ferns, which botanists often refer to as “living fossils” because they’ve hardly changed in hundreds of millions of years. Cycads range from only two feet tall to over forty feet. Unisexual, with primitive reproductive systems, they all have thick stems crowned by pinnate leaves. Wherever coal beds are found today, cycads once flourished.

  “Climb aboard,” Raymond calls from the stern of a leaky pirogue. Innocent sits forward, bailing with a cook pot. I’m content to stay in the water. There will be plenty of time to row around the lake.

  “Crocodiles live here,” Raymond warns. I wave him off. I’m only twenty-five yards from shore, and besides, Rothermel assured me that only vegetarian species of crocodile lived in the lake.

  “The biggest one I ever caught was over there, next to that fallen tree,” Raymond says, pointing to a spot on the eastern shore. “It was five meters long. Teacher measured the skin for me.” I swim to the pirogue; only man-eating Nile crocodiles grow that big.

  Raymond poles us along with his spear. Two pirogues are kept moored at the campsite, and this eleven-footer, with its punked bow and cracked keel, is the better of the pair. Both were adzed years ago, when Raymond was a young boy, and it’s doubtful they will be replaced soon. He toes the paddle floating in the bilge and groans, “It takes days to make one of these… The next time you come, bring a boat from America. None of us wants to make a new pirogue.”

  The water in Lake Télé is a dark sherry color, but its taste would dismay any vintner, being highly acidic, with a tongue-numbing amount of tannin. Several dozen species of fish inhabit the lake, and Raymond says some of the perch weigh more than ten kilos. Catfish are his favorite, though, and he boasts of one he speared that weighed more than 120 pounds. Oddly, my field guides don’t mention any fish of that size in West Africa.

  “Do your books talk about dinosaurs?” Innocent asks.

  Gun blasts boom from the other side of the lake, where our companions are hunting, and we see a tree limb shake. “Très bien,” Raymond whispers a
nd smacks his lips.

  Above us, peering through a thin shield of mangrove leaves, a half-dozen monkeys watch the canoes. They’re diademed guenons, named for their crown of projecting forehead hair and overgrown eyebrows. Near them is a troop of green monkeys, easily identified by the males’ lurid blue scrotums. A few are pulling at leaves, and others are grabbing for insects. Their expandable cheek pouches are stuffed with food, making them look as if they have mumps.

  The next series of gunshots sends them scampering for cover but has no discernible effect on the male cicadas, which keep singing their monotonous love songs. Until they find a mate, they won’t shut up. Jean-Henri Fabre, the French entomologist and author of The Social Life of Insects, once demonstrated their resolve. He enlisted the help of the army to set up a field gun under a tree infested with cicadas. Two rounds were fired, but the unfazed cicadas kept on singing.

  Raymond turns the boat around, and the bow of the double-ended canoe becomes the stem. As I start paddling, Innocent points out a forest hog about seventy yards away on the eastern shore. Barrel-shaped and covered in bristly auburn hair, it must weigh three hundred pounds. Forest hogs have razor-sharp tusks, and in Boha I heard of a villager who was gored in the thigh by one and died from gangrene. The hog is fiercely rooting for something, and even though we’re upwind, within range of its sensitive nose, it doesn’t seem to have noticed us. Having learned my lessons well from Alain and Caspar, I feather the paddle at the end of each stroke and make sure the blade reenters the water at a steep angle, slicing the surface, not punching it. We glide silently along.

  Raymond kisses the tip of his spear and assumes his stance, right arm cocked, ready to fire. We’re forty yards away when the hog thrusts its snout into the air, grunts twice, and reels into the jungle, flattening shrubs and gaining speed as it goes. Raymond throws his spear and misses the hog by less than a foot. He smiles though, pleased that he got this close. No one from Boha has ever speared a hog from a boat; usually a kill comes only after a long, chaotic chase by a half-dozen men and dogs.