A Single Swallow (18 page)

A rare stretch of simple hard sand ran into a wall of trees. A single machine, a dragon-like thing with a long clawed arm, wrestled with a
tree. Beyond the tree was a village, and beyond the village, nothing but forest.

We stopped. A man appeared, then another, dragging a generator. A third man emerged from a hut carrying a car battery, another brought a welder and goggles. In not much more time than it took all of us to get out of the Land Cruiser the battery was connected to the generator, the welder plugged in, the goggles put on, the bolt welded to the scar. The mechanical dragon won its battle with the tree, which came down with a rustling crash. It was midday exactly and a chicken, standing still, apparently watching proceedings, cast only the merest shadow directly beneath itself. We all climbed back into the Land Cruiser, crossed the equator and plunged into the forest.

Crushed between the hot gentleman and the driver's elbow I tried to be as small as possible. The Land Cruiser's gearbox had lost whatever had once covered it and now gave off blasts of heat, steam-cleaning my left knee. We stopped occasionally to pour water into the engine. The driver coaxed us up steep banks of mud and plunged us down into ravines. In some places the track disappeared entirely into long lakes of standing brown water, their sides knitted tight with trees: the Land Cruiser forged into the lakes, becoming a kind of barge. It was an indomitable machine, the toiling engine putting up fresh hot blasts of vapour like whale-spouts when we pushed through water. We passed streams and dark green pools. As the machine swayed from side to side, roared, groaned and fought its way forward I tried not to think about what would happen when, as seemed likely, the gearbox exploded. On downhill stretches the driver accelerated to 50, then 60 km/h, all of us hanging on grimly as the wheels bucked over stream beds. Where we hit landslips and impassable craters the vehicle heeled over to a terrifying degree and proceeded as if on two wheels.

It was an epic, operatic performance which ended with a gentle run up into a village. It was mid-afternoon and very quiet. The village was a scattering of wood-framed huts, roofed with a kind of thatch. The Land Cruiser stopped.

‘
C'est ça
,' said the driver. That's it.

We climbed out. Under a tree stood a group of unsmiling young
men with bicycles. For a price they would pedal your bag through the forest to the river. There was something thuggish about them, as they bartered with the travellers. The young man travelling alone drew me aside.

‘I am Bertrand,' he said. ‘Who are you?'

We shook hands.

‘What happens now?'

‘Now we walk!'

‘Right!'

‘But first,' he said, ‘come with me.'

‘Where are we going?'

‘Just behind that hut, into the forest.'

‘Why?'

‘To smoke some
tabac congolais
, to give us force.'

Bertrand produced a small knot of green weed and an empty cigarette packet, which he tore open to make a flat rectangle. Then he worried one edge of the card and blew on it with short fierce puffs. One of the layers of paper of which it was composed began to peel away. Carefully, with more worrying and more blowing, Bertrand stripped it off.

‘
Et voilà!
' he said, and rolled it into a joint. When we emerged from behind the hut we were both charged up and giggly. The bicycle men and the other travellers had disappeared. We walked into the trees.

The rainforest grew up in canopies around us, a pavilion of widening, ever-higher green tents. You could not see very far into it; as the plants pushed up they led your gaze up with them, to the sky. It was like being a shrimp at the bottom of a deep green moat. At first we went quite slowly as I marvelled and Bertrand laughed at my amazement.

‘Look!' I cried, ‘
Regarde-moi ça! Le papillon!
'

The butterfly was as big as the palm of my hand and deep silken crimson.

‘But I have never seen that colour before!' I breathed. The insect swam across the path in front of us.

‘You wait until we meet the Pygmies,' Bertrand said. ‘You haven't
seen them before, either.'

We came into clouds of butterflies; lemon yellow, orange, blue and white, lifting off the path like shoals of blossom. The track narrowed to a single path in places and the forest was very quiet, there was barely a bird call and no wind. I noticed twigs bent into strange configurations, crosses and triangles, and wondered if they were Pygmy signs. A person standing still 5 metres away would be invisible to us and though we did not say anything we both felt the forest watching. We came to a stream where small children were playing: they pointed at me excitedly and Bertrand said something which made them laugh.

‘What was that?'

‘I said the White was going to turn pink!'

‘Oh, ha ha!'

The track climbed out of the trees and took a long curve across a stretch of open ground. The temperature leapt, away from the shade, and the heat was a solid weight. We took turns singing to keep our spirits up. Bertrand hummed and la-la-ed to himself. I sang a random medley (‘Bread of Heaven', ‘The Big Ship Sails on the Alley-Alley-Oh', ‘A Fox Went out on a Winter's Night', ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes'), then Bertrand talked a spoken equivalent, a free-form chatter of whatever came into his head.

‘My father is in the police at Ouesso. You are going to love it there! There will be women and lots to drink. We are going to have some fun! Oh, you White. You have no idea. Do you know what was here a few months ago? Ninjas! A few years ago it was all war here – you would not have been able to walk along this path singing your songs –
mais non!
They would kill you quick. Do you know what it is like in Congo? No, you do not know. Have you heard of the Colonel? I don't think so. Listen, there is a colonel. He is in charge of security. If the Colonel asks you a question you answer fast. Because if you do not answer fast the Colonel takes out his pistol. And if the Colonel takes out his pistol he does not put it away until he has used it.'

‘What's his name?'

‘Don't worry about that.'

‘OK. Aren't you hot?'

‘Yes, but you are hotter. Let's have some more water.'

‘Haven't you got a hat?'

‘No.'

‘Wait . . .'

We proceeded, Bertrand wearing one of my shirts wrapped round his head like a turban. We passed some women coming the other way. One of them said something which made Bertrand crow with laughter.

‘What was that?'

‘She said the White is turning pink!'

Now the track descended again and the forest reared up ahead. There were huge trees, their great red trunks towering as straight as telephone poles, as wide as oaks at the base.

The water we drank turned straight to sweat. The path now returned us into the forest; we seemed to tunnel into its dark shade. Now we began to cross wide dark streams, bridged by U-section iron rails. Bicycling across one would be a severe test of nerve; Bertrand and I competed, covertly, in our demonstrations of nonchalance. We came to a village. A group of women were sitting on the ground.

‘See?'

‘What?'

‘Pygmies,' Bertrand whispered.

‘
Bonjour!
' I said, and raised my hat.

The women nodded and smiled. They were small, rather than tiny. Clumps of pineapples grew like brambles beside the path and here and there were clusters of bright flowers. A man came slowly up the path towards us.

‘
C'est un Pygmée
,' Bertrand whispered, unnecessarily.

‘
Bonjour!
'

The man nodded gravely.

We caught up with two of our fellow travellers, the young wife and the old lady, who had stopped to rest. As well as her basket the old lady was carrying a satchel: after some protest she let me carry this for her – she did not speak French and Bertrand grinned at our exchange rather than interpreting her Lingala. Her feet were bare, her basket
loaded, but her pace was just as fast as mine. Insects swam in lazy clouds at the stream-crossings and I mourned my donated shoes. A blister was beginning to grow on the ball of my right foot. I tried going barefoot but the grains of sand on the hot path prickled under my feet like glass dust. The old lady took up station behind me and gently shooed me along. Bertrand and the young wife chatted in Lingala and we sucked our teeth and laughed a little nervously as the balance-beam water crossings became harder. The young wife giggled and skipped across them as surely as if she were wearing a safety harness. Another
DANGER EBOLA
sign appeared, my blister burst, water filled one shoe and I wondered in how many ways the disease could be transmitted.

No one seemed to know how far we had to walk.

‘About 15 more,' Bertrand said.

‘But you have done it before?'

‘Yes. Another hour or two.'

We emerged again into an area of high grasses, the trees falling back briefly. There was a flicker of movement above us and I looked up.

‘Bertrand!' I cried. A single swallow shot over our heads and pulled round in a long, controlled skid.

It circled us once and swept away, slightly to the west of our path. The hair seemed to stand up on my arms and I felt flushed from my stomach to the back of my head with a strange, tingling warmth, as though the bird had cast a spell around us. It gave a brief, chittering call as it turned its circle over our heads.

‘Did you see that? An
hirondelle
– that's the bird I am following! And it was here – just here!'

Bertrand grinned, half in encouragement, half in mystification. I was suddenly swept with a wonderful kind of euphoria, an electrifying feeling beside which the mild buzz of the dope, earlier, was as nothing. The whole day, this journey, the decision to come this way, all were cast suddenly in a different light; a different substance in my mind; as if a tentative hope had suddenly hardened into certainty. Suddenly it did not matter that I was so far away from the world as I had known it. This remoteness, the commitment to this track, the helplessness, in
which I could only follow, only keep going – all were justified, were confirmed. It was as if I had been blessed.

We came down the Likouala River as the sun was beginning to lose its grip on the sky. It was still crushingly hot and humid, but the lapping of the deep grey-brown water seemed to radiate relief. The bicycle men were sitting in the shade with the luggage: one asked for a supplementary tax from Bertrand, and there was a debate, which he lost.

‘Now I have nothing,' he said, sadly, but still smiling.

Having carried my own bag, I was still flush with CFA francs.

‘You bargain, I'll pay,' I muttered. There were two pirogues waiting on the bank. We loaded slowly, carefully, everyone sweating and heavy-legged. I swept my hat through the water and crammed it onto my head.

‘The White is hot!' laughed our paddler, and pushed us out into the stream. The river unravelled slowly around a bend. There were no villages, no paths, nothing but the Likouala gliding through the immense press of trees. We climbed out on the far bank and followed a sandy path to a village. There, sitting under a tree, pointing away from us, towards the north, was another Land Cruiser. This one was in excellent condition, with a heavy-duty cage covering its open back. In a hut, in near-darkness, sitting at a table with a cold bottle of beer open in front of him and dark mirror-shades covering his eyes, was its owner and driver, on whose pleasure we all now depended. This was Chef.

We went in two at a time. When Bertrand and I entered, Chef bade us sit with a nod of his head. He can have seen very little from behind his shades: to the naked eye there was almost nothing visible in the gloom but eight bright bars of sunlight glowing through slats. Chef required that we drink with him (a sort of alcoholic grape juice from a carton, for us, more beer for him), converse in a civilised way and accept his price. Once that was achieved, he nodded us away: Chef did not handle the money; that was his motorboy's department.

Outside I fell into conversation with a small man in a bright red
baseball cap.

‘So do you like our forest?'

‘Yes! It's incredible!'

‘You are a tourist?'

‘Sort of . . .'

‘Ah, swallows,' he said, when I had explained. He had no particular stories about them. Like many Africans I met, he could name them, and say when they came and went, and that was all.

‘So you are not here to see us?' he smiled.

‘You?'

‘Pygmies!'

‘Well, it is very good to meet you. Do many people come to see you?'

‘I am a guide to the reserve.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘Yes, we are guides for French tourists, and other kinds too.'

‘Is it very expensive to get in?'

‘Ah! But you are in!'

He explained that tourists were flown in and out, staying in a luxury hotel. I asked him why a reserve was necessary.

‘Because they are killing the forest,' he said. He pointed out and named the different kinds of giants whose heads we could see from where we stood. Iroko, known as the African teak, and sapelli, the most magnificent of all, formed an entirely separate realm; green pavilions on red trunks, watchtowers above the forest, a canopy above the canopy.

‘To us they are sacred,' he said, ‘especially sapelli.'

The countries of the north and west are greedy for their corpses. Parquet floors, guitars, even the interiors of Cadillacs require them. I had not understood that the ancient forest we stood in was one of the few significant tracts remaining in the Republic of Congo: to the west and south of us millions of hectares had long since been destroyed.

‘There is still forest in Gabon, and some in Cameroon,' he said. ‘But you will see.'

Two motorboys loaded us all into the Land Cruiser. I opted for the
cage.