Congo Read online

  Even in. the 1960s the jungle remained terra incognita, -an unknown land with the power to hold the technology of mechanized warfare beyond its periphery. And with good reason, Munro thought. Men just did not belong there. He was not pleased to be back.

  Elliot, never having been in a rain forest, was fascinated. The jungle was different -from the way he had imagined it to be. He was totally unprepared for the scale—the gigantic trees soaring over his head, the trunks as broad as a house, the thick snaking moss-covered roots. To move in the vast space beneath these trees was like being in a very dark cathedral: the sun was completely blocked, and he could not get an exposure reading on his camera.

  He had also expected the jungle to be much denser than it was. Their party moved through it freely; in a surprising way it seemed barren and silent—there were occasional birdcalls and cries from monkeys, but otherwise a profound stillness settled over them. And it was oddly monotonous: although he saw every shade of green in the foliage and the clinging creeper vines, there were few flowers or blooms. Even the occasional orchids seemed pale and muted.

  He had expected rotting decay at every turn, but that was not true either. The ground underfoot was often firm, and the air had a neutral smell. But it was incredibly hot, and it seemed as though everything was wet—the leaves, the ground, the trunks of the trees, the oppressively still air itself, trapped under the overhanging trees.

  Elliot would have agreed with Stanley’s description from a century before: “Overhead the wide-spreading branches absolutely shut out the daylight. . We marched in a feeble twilight. . . The dew dropped and pattered on us incessantly. . . Our clothes were heavily saturated with it.

  Perspiration exuded from every pore, for the atmosphere was stifling. . . . What a forbidding aspect had the Dark Unknown which confronted us!”

  Because Elliot had looked forward to his first experience of the equatorial African rain forest, he was surprised at how quickly he felt oppressed—and how soon he entertained thoughts of leaving again. Yet the tropical rain forests had spawned most new life forms, including man. The jungle was not one uniform environment but many different microenvironments, arranged vertically like a layer cake. Each microenvironment supported a bewildering profusion of plant and animal life, but there were typically few members of each species. The tropical jungle supported four times as many species of animal life as a comparable temperate forest. As he walked through the forest, Elliot found himself thinking of it as an enormous hot, dark womb, a place where new species were nourished in unchanging conditions until they were ready to migrate out to the harsher and more variable temperate zones. That was the way it had been for millions of years.

  Amy’s behavior immediately changed as she entered the vast humid darkness of her original home. In retrospect, Elliot believed he could have predicted her reaction, had he Thought it through clearly.

  Amy no longer kept up with the group.

  She insisted on foraging along the trail, pausing to sit and chew tender shoots and grasses. She could not be budged or hurried, and ignored Elliot’s requests that she stay with them. She ate lazily, a pleasant, rather vacant expression on her face. In shafts of sunlight, she would lie on her back, and belch, and sigh contentedly.

  “What the hell is this all about?” Ross asked, annoyed. They were not making good time.

  “She’s become a gorilla again,” Elliot said. “Gorillas are vegetarians, and they spend nearly all day eating; they’re large animals, and they need a lot of food.” Amy had immediately reverted to these traits.

  “Well, can’t you make her keep up with us?”

  “I’m trying. She won’t pay attention to me.” And he knew why—Amy was finally back in a world where Peter Elliot was irrelevant, where she herself could find food and security and shelter, and everything else that she wanted.

  “School’s out,” Munro said, summarizing the situation. But he had a solution. “Leave her,” he said crisply, and he led the party onward. He took Elliot firmly by the elbow. “Don’t look back,” he said. “Just walk on. Ignore her.”

  They continued for several minutes in silence. Elliot said, “She may not follow us.” “Come, come, Professor,” Munro said. “I thought you knew about gorillas.”

  “I do,” Elliot said.

  “Then you know there are none in this part of the rain forest.”

  Elliot nodded; he had seen no nests or spoor. “But she has everything she needs here.”

  “Not everything,” Munro said. “Not without other gorillas around.”

  Like all higher primates, gorillas were social animals. They lived in a group, and they were not comfortable—or safe—in isolation. In fact, most primatologists assumed that there was a need for social contact as strongly perceived as hunger, thirst, or fatigue.

  “We’re her troop,” Munro said. “She won’t let us get far.”

  Several minutes later, Amy came crashing through the underbrush fifty yards ahead. She watched the group, and glared at Peter.

  “Now come here, Amy,” Munro said, “and I’ll tickle you.” Amy bounded up and lay on her back in front of him. Munro tickled her.

  “You see, Professor? Nothing to it.”

  Amy never strayed far from the group again.

  If Elliot had an uncomfortable sense of the rain forest as the natural domain of his own animal, Karen Ross viewed it in terms of earth resources—in which it was poor. She was not fooled by the luxuriant, oversized vegetation, which she knew represented an extraordinarily efficient ecosystem built in virtually barren soil.*

  The developing nations of the world did not understand this fact; once cleared, the jungle soil yielded disappointing crops. Yet the rain forests were being cleared at the incredible rate of fifty acres a minute, day and night. The rain forests of the world had circled the equator in a green belt for at least sixty million years—but man would have cleared them within twenty years.

  This widespread destruction had caused some alarm Ross did not share. She doubted that the world climate would change or the atmospheric oxygen be reduced. Ross was not an alarmist, and not impressed by the calculations of those who were. The only reason she felt uneasy was that the forest was so little understood. A clearing rate of fifty acres a minute meant that plant and animal species were becoming extinct at the incredible rate of one species per hour. Life forms that had evolved for millions of years were being wiped out

  * The rain forest ecosystem is an energy utilization complex far more efficient than any energy conversion system developed by man. See C. F. Higgins et at., Energy Resources and Ecosystem Utilization (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prentice Hall, 1977). pp. 232—255.

  every few minutes, and no one could predict the consequences of this stupendous rate of destruction. The extinction of species was proceeding much faster than anybody recognized, and the publicized lists of “endangered” species told only a fraction of the story; the disaster extended all the way down the animal phyla to insects, worms, and mosses.

  The reality was that entire ecosystems were being destroyed by man without a care or a backward glance. And these ecosystems were for the most part mysterious, poorly understood. Karen Ross felt herself plunged into a world entirely different from the exploitable world of mineral resources; this was an environment in which plant life reigned supreme. It was no wonder, she thought, that the Egyptians called this the Land of Trees. The rain forest provided a hothouse environment for plant life, an environment in which gigantic plants were much superior to—and much favored over—mammals, including the insignificant human mammals who were now picking their way through its perpetual darkness.

  The Kikuyu porters had an immediate reaction to the forest: they began to laugh and joke and make as much noise as possible. Ross said to Kahega, “They certainly are jolly.”

  “Oh, no,” Kahega said. “They are warning.”

  “Warning?”

  Kahega explained that the men made noise to warn off the buffalo and leopards. And
the tembo, he added, pointing to the trail.

  “Is this a tembo trail?” she asked.

  Kahega nodded.

  “The tembo live nearby?”

  Kahega laughed. “I hope no,” Kahega said. “Tembo. Elephant.”

  “So this is a game trail. Will we see elephants?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” Kahega said. “I hope no. They are very big, elephants.”

  There was no arguing with his logic. Ross said, “They tell me these are your brothers,” nodding down the line of porters.

  “Yes, they are my brothers.”

  "Ah."

  “But you mean that my brothers, we have the same mother?”

  “Yes, you have the same mother.”

  “No,” Kahega said.

  Ross was confused. ‘You are not real brothers?”

  “Yes, we are real brothers. But we do not have the same mother.”

  “Then why are you brothers?”

  “Because we live in the same village.”

  “With your father and mother?”

  Kahega looked shocked. “No,” he said emphatically. “Not the same village.”

  “A different village, then?”

  “Yes, of course—we are Kikuyu.”

  Ross was perplexed. Kahega laughed.

  Kahega offered to carry the electronic equipment that Ross had slung over her shoulder, but she declined. Ross was obliged to try and link up with Houston at intervals throughout the day, and at noon she found a clear window, probably because the consortium jamming operator took a break for lunch. She managed to link through and register another Field Time—Position.

  The console read: FILD TME—POSITN CHEK—10:03 H

  They had lost nearly an hour since the previous check the night before. “We’ve got to go fester,” she told Munro.

  “Perhaps you’d prefer to jog,” Munro said. “Very good exercise.” And then, because he decided he was being too hard on her, he added, “A lot can happen between here and Virunga.”

  They heard the distant growl of thunder and minutes later were drenched in a torrential rain, the drops so dense and heavy that they actually hurt. The rain fell solidly for the next hour, then stopped as abruptly as it had begun. They were all soaked and miserable, and when Munro called a halt for food, Ross did not protest.

  Amy promptly went off into the forest to forage; the porters cooked curried meat gravy on rice; Munro, Ross, and

  Elliot burned leeches off their legs with cigarettes. The leeches were swollen with blood. “I didn’t even notice them,” Ross said.

  “Rain makes ‘em worse,” Munro said. Then he looked up sharply, glancing at the jungle.

  “Something wrong?”

  “No, nothing,” Munro said, and he went into an explanation of why leeches had to be burned off; if they were pulled off, a part of the head remained lodged in the flesh and caused an infection.

  Kahega brought them food, and Munro said in a low voice, “Are the men all right?”

  “Yes,” Kahega said. “The men are all right. They will not be afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?” Elliot said.

  “Keep eating. Just be natural,” Munro said.

  Elliot looked nervously around the little clearing.

  “Eat!” Munro whispered. “Don’t insult them. You’re not supposed to know they’re here.”

  The group ate in silence for several minutes. And then the nearby brush rustled and a pygmy stepped out.

  2. The Dancers of God

  HE WAS A LIGHT-SKINNED MAN ABOUT FOUR AND A half feet tall, barrel-chested, wearing only a loincloth, with a bow and arrow over his shoulder. He looked around the expedition, apparently trying to determine who was the leader.

  Munro stood, and said something quickly in a language that was not Swahili. The pygmy replied. Munro gave him one of the cigarettes they had been using to burn off the leeches. The pygmy did not want it lit; instead he dropped it into a small leather pouch attached to his quiver. A brief conversation followed. The pygmy pointed off into the jungle several times.

  “He says a white man is dead in their village,” Munro said. He picked up his pack, which contained the first-aid kit. “I’ll have to hurry.”

  Ross said, “We can’t afford the time.”

  Munro frowned at her.

  “Well, the man’s dead anyway.”

  “He’s not completely dead,” Munro said. “He’s not dead-for-ever.”

  The pygmy nodded vigorously. Munro explained that pygmies graded illness in several stages. First a person was hot, then he was with fever, then ill, then dead, then completely dead—and finally dead-for-ever.

  From the bush, three more pygmies appeared. Munro nodded. “Knew he wasn’t alone,” he said. “These chaps never are alone. Hate to travel alone. The others were watching us; if we’d made a wrong move, we’d get an arrow for our trouble. See those brown tips? Poison.”

  Yet the pygmies appeared relaxed now—at least until Amy came crashing back through the underbrush. Then there were shouts and swiftly drawn bows; Amy was terrified and ran to Peter, jumping up on him and clutching his chest—and making him thoroughly muddy.

  The pygmies engaged in a lively discussion among themselves, trying to decide what Amy’s arrival meant. Several questions were asked of Munro. Finally, Elliot set Amy back down on the ground and said to Munro, “What did you tell them?”

  “They wanted to know if the gorilla was yours, and I said yes. They wanted to know if the gorilla was female, and I said yes. They wanted to know if you had relations with the gorilla; I said no. They said that was good, that you should

  not become too attached to the gorilla, because that would cause you pain.”

  “Why pain?”

  “They said when the gorilla grows up, she will either run away into the forest and break your heart or kill you.”

  Ross still opposed making a detour to the pygmy village, which was several miles away on the banks of the Liko River. “We’re behind on our timeline,” she said, “and slipping further behind every minute.”

  For the first and last time during the expedition, Munro lost his temper. “Listen, Doctor,” he said, “this isn’t downtown Houston, this is the middle of the goddamn Congo and it’s no place to be injured. We have medicines. That man may need it. You don’t leave him behind. You just don’t.”

  “If we go to that village,” Ross said, “we blow the rest of the day. It puts us nine or ten hours further back. Right now we can still make it. With another delay, we won’t have a chance.”

  One of the pygmies began talking quickly to Munro. He nodded, glancing several times at Ross. Then he turned to the others.

  “He says that the sick white man has some writing on his shirt pocket. He’s going to draw the writing for us.”

  Ross glanced at her watch and sighed.

  The pygmy picked up a stick and drew large characters in the muddy earth at their feet. He drew carefully, frowning in concentration as he reproduced the alien symbols: E R T S.

  “Oh, God,” Ross said softly.

  The pygmies did not walk through the forest: they ran at a brisk trot, slipping through the forest vines and branches, dodging rain puddles and gnarled tree roots with deceptive ease. Occasionally they glanced over their shoulders and giggled at the difficulties of the three white people who followed.

  For Elliot, it was a difficult pace—a succession of roots to stumble over, tree limbs to strike his head on, thorny vines to tear at his flesh. He was gasping for breath, trying to keep up with the little men who padded effortlessly ahead of him. Ross was doing no better than he, and even Munro, although surprisingly agile, showed signs of fatigue.

  Finally they came to a small stream and a sunlit clearing.

  The pygmies paused on the rocks, squatting and turning their

  faces up to the sun. The white people collapsed, panting and gasping. The pygmies seemed to find this hilarious, their laughter good-natured.

  The pygmies w
ere the earliest human inhabitants of the Congo rain forest. Their small size, distinctive manner, and deft agility had made them famous centuries before. More than four thousand years ago, an Egyptian commander named Herkouf entered the great forest west of the Mountains of the Moon; there he found a race of tiny men who sang and danced to their god. Herkoufs amazing report had the ring of fact, and Herodotus and later Aristotle insisted that these stories of the tiny men were true, and not fabulous. The Dancers of God inevitably acquired mythical trappings as the centuries passed.

  As late as the seventeenth century, Europeans remained unsure whether tiny men with tails who had the power to fly through the trees, make themselves invisible, and kill elephants actually existed. That skeletons of chimpanzees were sometimes mistaken for pygmy skeletons added to the confusion. Colin Turnbull notes that many elements of the fable are actually true: the pounded-bark loincloths hang down and look like tails; the pygmies can blend into the forest and become virtually invisible; and they have always hunted and killed elephants.

  The pygmies were laughing now as they got to their feet and padded off again. Sighing, the white people struggled up and lumbered after them. They ran for another half hour, never pausing or hesitating, and then Elliot smelled smoke and they came into a clearing beside a stream where the village was located.

  He saw ten low rounded huts no more than four feet high, arranged in a semicircle. The villagers were all outside in the afternoon light, the women cleaning mushrooms and berries picked during the day, or cooking grubs and turtles on crackling fires; children tottered around, bothering the men who sat before their houses and smoked tobacco while the women worked.