A Single Swallow (2 page)

Here in the south of Africa I am
intaka zomzi
, a bird of the home. None of the Nguni peoples would ever harm me, because I bear a
message from their ancestors. Life in the next world is richer, better: none who honour me should despair.

‘The Zulus say,' my father said, thoughtfully, when I told him my plan, ‘that those who follow the swallows never come back.'

That frightened me. I began to think of ways around it: perhaps the Zulus mean that if you follow them from what is now Kwa-Zulu Natal you will not go back to Kwa-Zulu Natal.
Well that is all right, I am not going to Kwa-Zulu Natal
, I told myself. But I could not help thinking about it.

Somewhere on a cape of Africa, in a tropic of half-imagined time, where proud people lived in kraals, ruled by leaders great and terrible, Mzilikaze, Chaka, who led them to the wars in impis, whose footsteps shook the earth itself, one day someone, perhaps a young man, told his family he was going to follow the Inkonjani and went away with them, just before the summer ended and the storms of winter came. Saying farewell to his friends and passing on foot from village to village, whatever trail he left of memories and encounters, whatever snatches of news came back to his family, if he had one, or to his friends, if they lived, nothing of him survives but a certainty in a saying. Those who follow the swallows . . . He cannot have been the only one.

Apart from very rare exceptions all the swallows of the north flee south before the winter. Born in the high latitudes in early summer, they fly through an autumn which heats and brightens to a sea, then becomes a desert. The south-bound route for British birds runs in a rough line from Brighton to Barcelona to Cape Town, cutting corners around the Gulf of Guinea. (If the map of Africa is an elephant they go straight across its ear and slide down its trunk.) They fly over plains of permanent sun to forests of constant rain; across glades and hills and wooded worlds of mist, through the valleys of rivers, some copper, some green, to the grasslands, the vast savannahs towards the end of the land, and the veldts and the vleis of southern Africa. Here they base themselves near lakes, marshes and rivers, where they roost.

Arriving in November at the beginning of the southern summer, the swallows remain in the south until just before the onset of winter in February and early March. They spend their time here eating, travelling a bit and roosting in large flocks. They court a little, and compete perhaps for food, though the southern African summer does not lack flies. They certainly do not prospect for nest sites, mate, build, lay, incubate, rear young or defend territory: all this they save for the north.

To follow the birds from south to north I constructed a route plan entirely based on two sentences, from the best and most recent book on swallows from a British perspective,
The Barn Swallow
by Angela Turner.

My route, based on the paragraph above, should therefore link South Africa, Algeria and Wales, bearing north-north-west.

The swallow pages of
The Migration Atlas
of British birds include a map showing Africa and Europe, and a curvaceous, red, many-tailed arrow joining the Republic of South Africa to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This is a computer-plot, made from joining the dots of ring recoveries. (Trapping swallows, ringing them and recording where those rings are recovered, either on birds trapped for a second time, or found dead, is still the only way in which ornithologists are able to track their movements.) I stared at it, imagining a vast wind-tunnel of swallows hurtling diagonally up the globe.

Our two species, swallows and humans, have lived alongside each other throughout recorded time. The earliest recorded instance of swallows and men living together is a 15,000-year-old nest in a cave in
Derbyshire – a cave which was also inhabited by man. Amazingly, we who live and work by information superhighways do not know very much more about swallows than did Gilbert White in 1789, when he recorded the then common speculation that they spent the winters clinging together in the mud at the bottoms of European rivers and ponds. They were supposed to join claw to claw, beak to beak, and slide down the reeds in which they roosted. In his dictionary Dr Johnson defined ‘Conglobulate' as hanging together in clumps, as swallows were supposed to do. The stories that gave rise to this belief remain a puzzle. Two hundred years before White, Olaus Magnus wrote:

There are stories from Germany which go further, telling of birds recovered in this manner which came out of ‘hibernation' in the warmth of a fisherman's house and flew around the room before expiring.

How can this be explained? A kind of cryogenic lightning, like the icy winter of 1682–3, which froze the Thames for two months? Perhaps speculation is half the pleasure of the amateur birdwatcher; if so, we must thank professional ornithology for the other half.

The swallow and martin family,
Hirundindae
, occur almost everywhere on earth except for the polar caps. In the northern summer the Barn Swallow might be found anywhere in Eurasia, from the furthest west of Ireland to the Central Himalayas, and has a North American cousin, very little different, which breeds from Hudson Bay to Baja California and migrates to Mexico. They all follow the same seasonal tides, coming and going, breeding in the north. There are a great many kinds of swallow along the migration route of the Barn Swallow: Mosque Swallows, Angolan Swallows, Greater Striped Swallows, Red-Rumped Swallows, Pearl-Breasted Swallows, not to mention the swifts and martins. Some of these creatures travel half the world twice
a year, others do not migrate, but merely shuffle around their preferred parts of the globe.

Swallows do not yet submit to satellite tracking: they are too small and fly too far for the technology of the time of writing. Ornithologists do not yet have a transmitter which would last the time the migration takes, and still allow the birds to fly – the batteries are too big. The only way to follow them, therefore, is to go with them.

But they are fast, so fast: 4 metres per second in low gear, 14 metres per second at top speed. Depending on wind, route and inclination they can cover 300 kilometres in a day. They can do the entire trip in twenty-seven days – perhaps less. My plan was to leave South Africa with the vanguard of the migration, and to arrive with the main body, or even with the tail-enders. In this way I hoped to travel with the migration, rather than trying to keep pace with individual birds. My timetable was built on a departure from South Africa at the beginning of February and an arrival in Britain around the middle of April, when most birds should be making their landfalls.

Their summering grounds in South Africa have flowed and ebbed, perhaps with climates, perhaps with changing human land-use. From strongholds in the tropical eastern Cape they spread westwards, and may now be in retreat again. Ringing data suggested that the best place to find a bird that came from near my home in South Wales, in the west of western Europe, would be in the far south-west of the Cape.

While the route was vague, the birds' speed intimidating and the reputations of some of the countries to be crossed either obscure or outright ominous, one or two aspects of swallow behaviour gave me hope. They fly at low level, feeding as they go: between a foot above the ground and 60 feet up is typical. So if there were any around, I ought to be able to spot them. And no less than the height of flight, the habitats they favour are dictated by the whereabouts of their prey: blow-flies, hover-flies, beetles, aphids, moths, caterpillars and water bugs, among other insects. Watercourses, rivers and lakes would always be good places to look for them. They favour reed beds for roosting on migration, so swamps might prove fruitful. When temperatures are high they tend to hunt and fly at lower levels and
further away from vegetation, nearer to it and higher up when the weather is cooler.

Swallows prefer to fly into or across the wind, which allows them enough lift to hunt as they go, feeding with no fear of stalling on whatever crosses their path. When they have to make time, crossing the Sahara, for instance, they may go high up and ride a tail wind. When they find somewhere conducive to rest and feeding they may pause for days at a time.

On 26 January 2008 I woke an hour before the light and lay still. For weeks I had marvelled at nothing much: at the turning of a tap that brought warm water, at the blissful plunge into a clean towel, at the smell and softness of everything, at the opulence and ease of life: at piles of food, at PIN numbers, at films on desire and all the rest.

Today was the end of all that. My belongings were in storage, my savings were liquidised: I had bet everything on today and thrown everything at it. In two bags I had everything I could possibly need. Still I knew I was not ready, not prepared enough, not well-read enough, not pared down enough, but now it was almost time.

I lay still and breathed through fears. Knifed in South Africa, infected in Zambia, cursed in Congo, battered in Cameroon, murdered in Nigeria, kidnapped in the Sahel, slaughtered like a sheep in Algeria and probably posted on the internet. Money gone, passport gone, phone gone, no way out . . .

Then the morning came, and lunch with my brother, and then afternoon. Just before leaving the house I sat on my rucksack and shoulder bag, in the hall. This is a Russian tradition: you sit quietly on your bags before you begin a journey. You still yourself, despite your haste, and when you are ready, you go. So I sat on my bags, half-thinking that I would at least remember anything I had overlooked. I had forgotten nothing. I was comprehensively, almost laughably, well equipped.

In my back pocket was a UK passport, number 108949308, in the name of David Horatio Clare, British Citizen, born 05 09 1973,
London. Inside the passport was one of travel's great paragraphs, the very definition of British self-image, which starts so grandly and becomes a hopeful sort of mutter:

Her Britannic Majesty's

Secretary of State

requests and requires in the

name of her Majesty

all those whom it may concern to allow

the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance,

and to afford the bearer such assistance

and protection as may be necessary.

The passport contained a silicon chip, on a loop of what looked like copper wire, which as I understand it is a transmitter and receiver, holding unknown personal data. Between the chip and the request from Her Majesty's Secretary of State were the visas.

South Africa's would be granted on entry; Zambia's cost £30 and was valid for three months. There was a man asleep on his arms at the desk behind the receptionist in the Embassy of Cameroon. Cameroon cost a processing fee, a few days, many phone calls and a reservation confirmation fax from the Hilton, Douala. Congo-Brazzaville required endless phone calls (the lines are jammed during the day, apparently oil companies are responsible for much of the traffic) and cost US $150 sent via Western Union to the manager of the Hotel du Centre, Brazzaville, for the necessary fax confirming reservation, and a processing fee. Once it has established that you are not mistakenly seeking a visa for the Democratic Republic of Congo a man's voice gives painstaking directions to the consulate of the Republic of Congo, a broom cupboard in the corner of the offices of a commercial visa service in South London.

‘Shall I bring my yellow fever certificate?'

‘Well you can bring it but frankly I won't have time to look at it,' said the French accent on the phone.

‘How long does it take to issue the visa?'

‘I will issue it in about sixteen minutes,' he said.

Congo-Brazzaville's diplomatic mission to the United Kingdom consists of one man, Louis Muzzu, a thin, dark-haired Frenchman who would not look out of place in a photograph of de Gaulle's France, which, as a young man he served, staying on to work for post-independence regimes.

‘It's a beautiful country,' he said, not exactly sighing, having stamped the passport with an attractive circular design incorporating the head of a Congolese woman and the motto ‘Unity, Work, Progress'. It was valid for two weeks.

‘Is it safe?'

‘Oh yes, quite safe now.'

Obtaining a Niger visa meant faxes, calls and a processing fee, plus a trip to Paris, where the consulate was technically shut but where a kind woman issued the visa anyway, in return for my promise not to go to the north of the country.

‘Too dangerous,' she said. ‘Truly, much too dangerous.'

The Nigerian Consulate near Trafalgar Square contained a hundred people, with different colour tickets, some slumped, in demeanour apathetic, others in unhappy, restless lines: occasionally someone would make a despairing rush at the service windows, only to be repelled. Fortunately the rules had recently changed, there was no time to process my application and so I was spared trial by queuing system. I would try again in Africa.

Algeria required a reservation confirmation from a hotel in Algiers, which was wonderfully easy. But lying to, or rather being vague with, the consular authorities was not possible. If you are an independent tourist, you need an itinerary and a profession.

‘Author.'

‘Author?' said the visa man. ‘Writer?'

It was a strangely warm and rainy January day in London. I was cold-sweating.

‘Yes! – a writer of books.'

‘Writer of what books? About what? Osama bin Laden?' (He grinned.)