Lost Worlds (11 page)

Then he told me the going rates. I could have hired ten Nepalese porters for the price and was loath to part with more U.S. dollars for
cadeaux—
gifts. Especially for something I didn’t need. So I lied.

“I’m with the German party—the four Germans, y’know, who left yesterday. I have to walk quickly to reach them.”

He looked even more confused.

“Also I am a writer.” I showed him a rather ragged copy of one of my earlier books and pointed to my photograph on the dust jacket. He studied it carefully. Then I played the final card. “Look, I must hurry. I need good photographs. This is for very important American magazine.”

He was totally perplexed.

Time to go. I heaved on my backpack and walked away as quickly as I could, squelching and splashing through the muddy earth, soaked by early morning drizzle.

He called out, but I could tell his heart wasn’t really in it. I’d got what I wanted. I was off—alone—into these mysterious mountains.

A couple of hours later I was less certain of my decision. The terrain was difficult now; the neat little patchwork fields of manioc, bananas, and maize were far behind and I climbed upward through eight-foot-high
pennisetum
“elephant” grass and spray-topped papyrus. Then the forest closed in, leaving me a narrow muddy trail and a tunnel through the tangle of lianas, aerial roots, strangled vines, and groping branches. Familiar-looking ferns reached eight feet into the thick humid gloom, and beard moss, similar to the Spanish moss found on the swamp cedars and live oaks of Deep South United States, hung over the trail in long tentacled strands. I felt as if I were a child in a
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
kind of world. A world of recognizable plants that had suddenly become giant-sized. Familiar, yet threatening.

And then came the great tree ferns. I was suddenly back in a picture-book scenario of precoal-age earth when dinosaurs roamed and pterodactyls flew and these enormous thirty-foot-high specimens with dark trunks and winglike leaves filled the wet forests and swamps. I welcomed the hummingbirds and the gold and amber butterflies that bounced through the rare shafts of sun—at least they were of recognizable size. Even the occasional tiny lizards and little mold-green snakes that crossed my trail were reassuring signs that some things were still as they should be in this peculiar place. I looked for the Ruwenzori’s unique three-horned chameleon and those yard-long earthworms but saw nothing except vast armies of soldier ants on the move through the half-light. I wondered if I might come across one of Zaire’s famous gorilla families, but I knew their Djomba sanctuary was way to the south. Two large white and black monkeys gave a fine display of very ungorilla acrobatics and then vanished screaming into the forest.

I was in a region of deep gorges and gullies. Occasionally views would open up between the hagenias, giant orchids, and gloriosa lilies which sinewed themselves around the ferns, and I’d peer out across mist-shrouded clefts hundreds of feet deep. The higher parts of the mountains were, as I’d expected, lost in the clouds. In fact, I hadn’t seen anything of Mount Stanley since that sudden revelation before Beni. My role was just to keep walking and climbing and trust to luck that I’d finally reach a cloud-free summit.

When I arrived at Kalongi base hut I was around seven thousand feet up on the slopes and the air was cool and refreshing. In spite of the mud and the tangle of the forest, I felt far less exhausted than I’d expected. Time to celebrate, I thought, but the hut itself was hardly appropriate for a hedonistic interlude. One broken bed, not a single window intact, missing floorboards, cobwebs of Ruwenzori scale, and abundant evidence of animal rather than human occupation. But there was a black sooted-encrusted stove which I crammed with scraps of branches and twigs and in five minutes had a blazing fire, hot enough to warm me and heat water for a dehydrated food supper. Hardly gourmet fare, but, as I hadn’t had a really decent meal in more than two weeks, my palate and stomach gleefully accepted curried shrimp and long-grain saffron rice despite its cardboard-and-paste taste.

Night came quickly. I rolled out my foam rubber mat and waterproof sleeping bag, took a couple of swigs from my flask of whiskey-Zairois, and fell into a seamless sleep.

It had obviously rained heavily during the early hours. I lay next to a pool of water at dawn and wondered why, if someone had gone to the trouble of constructing this hut, someone else couldn’t come along occasionally and patch up the roof and floorboards and windows. But then I remembered: This is Zaire and one learns not to expect Swiss Alps efficiency in these wild climes. At least I was dry. My faithful waterproof sleeping bag had resisted all onslaughts except a small reconnaissance team of ants that, sometime deep in the night, had bivouacked and feasted on my arms.

Breakfast consisted of my always-effective Kendal Mint Cake and lukewarm tea loaded with sugar. Lots of energy stimulants but not really an ideal repast for what was to come on that second day of the climb.

It began innocently enough. More of the same branch-and root-tangled forest—no, let me say it—jungle. Jungle seems to be a nonword in today’s environmentally correct dialogue, but
forest
is far too euphemistic here. This place was a ragged riot of vegetation, little resembling the finely tiered layers of a true rain forest. A free-for-all razzmatazz of trees, vines, creepers, ferns, roots, and flowering bushes. And a new addition. Heather trees. A species I’d only seen once before in the wild and cloud-bathed heights of Gomera, one of the least known of the Canary islands.

Back home in Yorkshire, England, I was used to the benign, ankle-high surges of heather filling the moors of Brontë country and blossoming into a fall haze of tiny lavender flowers. But here in the Ruwenzori, everything was written large and heather grew into twenty-foot-high trees with distorted, writhing limbs, foot-snagging roots, and dense leaf canopies that turned day into dusk. Exciting, enticing, a fantasy of entrancing forms—but lousy hiking territory.

I prayed I wouldn’t snap a leg. The idea of being helpless in this unearthly place set up a jangle in my head. How would I get down? Who—if anyone—would find me before the soldier ants had their way with me and left a pile of moldy bones and a backpack full of aluminum-packed dehydrated curiosities to be mulled over by morose Zairois officials?

My mind was playing its tricks again. C’mon, I told myself. The brain saps energy quicker than anything. Seal it off. Compose a letter to Anne. Write a poem. Anything to suppress the silly yammer…. Invent a song and keep singing it! So I did (to a robust marching tune):

And it worked! God love us, it worked. I was fresh and frisky again as I fought with roots and branches, conquering the ridges and the mud holes and catching glimpses of mist-wisped canyons through infrequent gaps in the fervent foliage.

Sometime around midafternoon I emerged from the forest onto a barren plateau of broken rock to find the sun shining spasmodically through gashes in the high cloud cover. I needed a break and sat down abruptly on a boulder to feast on more energy-giving mint cake.

All was silence. The mists eased by in tattered strands, catching briefly in the tops of the trees. There were no sounds at all—no birds, no monkeys, no perpetual squelch of mud-caked boots, not even the sound of my own pumping heart and panting lungs. And once again came the mood that makes this kind of exploration so rewarding—the sense that I had the whole place all to myself and everything was just fine, in spite of my momentary weariness.

The silence, alas, did not endure for long. In the middle of my mellowness came one of the most terrifying screams I have ever heard—a gut-wrenching cacophony of agony, fear, and anger all rolled into one violent pitch. It was both human and animal and echoed down the rocky clefts and up the fogbound granite cliffs of the mountains.

“What the hell….”

I waited for a second scream. My mind whirled with possibilities, from the more modest—a frightened hiker behind me, challenged by a snake—to the plain outlandish—the return of Zaire’s notorious Simba terrorists, whose habit it had been to emit shrill shrieks before committing violent murders—or even the sound of one of their victims, horribly mutilated and dismembered before death!

There was no second scream. And then I remembered that the tree hyrax, the tiny member of the elephant family with hooves for feet, was said to emit a pretty intense signature call when disturbed or alarmed.

Was that what it was—that odd little anomaly of the animal kingdom? Or had it been human, as I’d first thought?

Should I go back into the forest to find out, or…I chose the “or” alternative, grabbed my backpack, and set off up the trail at a pace that made me realize my weariness was a sham and I had amazing reserves of energy previously untapped.

Fear does that.

After twenty minutes of half running, half scrambling up slippery mud slopes I began to wonder if I’d made a serious mistake by not bringing a guide-porter with me. I’d still seen no sign of the German hikers far ahead of me and my backpack seemed much heavier at the height of nine thousand feet than it had at the starting point, around four thousand feet.

To add insult to indecision, I had now left the forest behind and was entering a strange world of high bamboo groves, necktall nettles (a far more vicious sting than the relatively benign species back home), and vast open heaths of thick spongy moss bog. If I kept to the narrow trail I was safe, but the moss lured me with false paths ending abruptly in lichen-surfaced bogs that look firm-surfaced until I trod on them and watched them collapse like lumpy porridge. At one juncture I’d taken the wrong route and ended up thigh deep in a rotting morass of this peaty mud and dead vegetation. To make matters worse, the mists were becoming thicker, approaching pea-soup intensity in places.

I was not a happy hiker. I tried a few bars of my marching song, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was mud-caked, cold, and a little frightened. This leg of my long journey to the Ruwenzori was not quite what I’d expected. In fact the whole thing was rapidly becoming a right royal screwup.

Now I knew I should have hired a guide.

Things went from bad to terrible. More dark, dank swaths of heather forest with snagging roots and eerie tentacles of beard moss dangling from the branches and brushing my face (memories of the old “Ghost Train” horrors of seaside fairs back home when invisible spider-webby threads would envelop my head in the blackness). There were infrequent delights too in the form of beautiful forest orchids and scarlet fuchsias hanging from the trees like fat bunches of grapes—but such sights seemed only to intensify the malevolent evil and danger of the place.

One particularly nasty tangle of moss-shrouded roots grabbed my ankles and sent me sprawling into the slime of the trail. At first everything seemed fine: My backpack straps had held and nothing in my body seemed broken. But as I stood, a sear of pain shot up my right leg and my ankle felt to be on fire. Oh, boy—not that! Not a broken, or even a twisted ankle. Not in this place.

I knew that if any damage was done, sitting down to rest would only increase the swelling. So I moved on slowly, hobbling, as the ankle throbbed and gave me fiery branding-iron shocks if I put too much pressure on it.

I was exhausted and close to tears. I knew that even at the next base hut, Mahangu, I’d only be around eleven thousand feet—still six thousand feet below the peak of Mount Margherita. What to do? The ankle was obviously not broken, but I’d messed it up badly in the fall. If I turned back I could possibly reach the Kalongi hut by nightfall. If I kept on going I might be lucky enough to find the Germans at the Mahangu hut.

I decided to cut myself a long bamboo walking staff and keep climbing.

The remaining four hours of the day’s hike are better not remembered in detail. Even now, as I write, I find my mind merely giving me flashes of recollection—more ethereal bamboo groves bent by the winds, each delicate pointed leaf edged with silvered moisture; more grab-and-scratch heather trees; more moss bogs sprinkled with tiny white flowers. And everything sheened in a drizzly gray mist that soaked through my layered clothing, leaving me shivering and utterly miserable. When was I going to see those mystical mountains I’d come so far to explore and touch? If the mist persisted even during this so-called dry season, then what was the point of going on? Even reaching the summit would be a rather pathetic experience if I couldn’t at least enjoy vistas across central Africa. But on the other hand, I’d come too far to give up. The weather might improve…

Only it didn’t.

I staggered into the Mahangu hut at dusk to find it empty and as miserable as Kalongi. The only compensation was a generous pile of branches and twigs near the stove left behind presumably by the elusive Germans. I soon had a fire going, and in spite of the rapidly increasing cold I felt safe and warm, cocooned in my sleeping bag trying to eat another cardboard concoction of dehydrated fantasy food. The ankle had gotten through the rest of the day without further trauma; it was discolored and puffy, but the pain was muted.

I fell asleep before finishing dinner.

Things looked more promising on the morning of the third day. The mists had lifted—not far enough to expose the summits, but I could look back the way I’d come and be amazed by the power and majesty of the scene. Huge serrated granite ridges, deep clefts and gorges, broken cliffs and screes, and those deep tangled forests and emerald green moss bogs—a splendid riot of scenery. Even if I stayed here and went no farther I’d enjoy a semblance of satisfaction.