Nonetheless, even that task was nerve-racking. The boat was lowered by a pulley to the sea thirty feet below. An experienced sailor climbed down the hull on a swaying rope ladder and jumped into the bow of the boat. He then fended it off the hull and kept it as steady as possible in the swell while I assisted the passengers and their luggage down. Last, I managed to lower myself successfully.
With the passengers all safely aboard and the luggage stowed, the veteran sailor took charge of the oars and rowed the boat through massive breakers, which were being patrolled by squadrons of sharks. Only Dupont, who’d been ferried this way several times before, didn’t seem too worried that we might breach and spill into the jaws of the sharks. To everyone else’s relief, we eventually reached the shore. Obeying my last order as a crew member, I jumped into the shallows and pulled the boat the last few feet onto the beach.
Standing at last on solid ground wasn’t quite what I’d expected. The sandy beach seemed to roll just as unpredictably as the ocean and I’d trouble keeping my balance. For a while I felt like an alien creature, at home neither on land nor sea.
THOUGH I’D HEARD from the crew that Racca was smelly and overcrowded, I wouldn’t have minded exploring it for a while. But Dupont already knew the city well and had no desire to linger. Instead, from the port he arranged places for us as passengers in the bed of an open truck that had wooden sides and rear. It was ready to leave and would transport us from the coast into the dense bush of the hinterland.
“Not that we have any choice, but a truck’s really the only way to travel if you want to get a sense of this country — it’ll be an education for you,” Dupont said as we squatted behind the truck’s cabin. “This one will take us right to the hospital door.” These trucks acted as buses, going from village to village along the way, picking up and dropping off passengers. With any luck, we’d arrive at the hospital before sundown.
Some other passengers boarded, the truck’s engine roared, the gears crashed, and we lurched on our way. At first we had to stop and start frequently as we traversed the messy sprawl of the suburbs around the port. Then we left modern life behind and entered the band of primeval jungle that separated us from the grasslands and the desert.
5
The roads had now become trails that were potholed and deeply fissured from lack of repair. Sudden violent rainstorms would turn them into rushing torrents with steep, muddy banks. The truck would have to clamber out of them and stop till the rains let up, which usually took only a few minutes. Then the water level would sink enough to make travel possible once more.
As we proceeded farther into the jungle, I sometimes felt slightly feverish. The huge trees leaning over the trail became an endless library with bookcase after bookcase full of the same tattered book, or a monotonous canyon of slums in an oddly sweltering Tollgate.
But in spite or because of my stupor, I was generally at ease. The jungle’s dark embrace, limiting our horizon to only a few yards in all directions, was at this point more comforting to me than the sea’s endless vistas.
I WAS FASCINATED by the passengers who got on and off at their villages along the way. Their smooth, dark complexions were noticeably free of the pimples, boils, and pockmarks of slum dwellers. The women, in their vivid floral dresses, were especially beautiful. When they spoke and laughed, their words sounded like a strange poetry.
The layout of most of the villages, aside from the fact that they were built in clearings in the middle of a vast forest, wasn’t all that different from the little Upland towns. In the centre of each village was the market where the spear makers, bakers, potters, and meat sellers displayed their wares. Also in this main area was a sort of high street with the compounds of chiefs and various members of their council. The less important people lived in smaller huts at the edges of the village where the jungle began, so, according to Dupont, they were easier prey for lions, wild boars, black mambas, and a host of other creatures much more deadly than those in the Uplands.
The flimsiness of the buildings surprised me at first — their walls were made of bamboo with slats you could see right through. Dupont pointed out that the climate here required that houses have as much ventilation as possible. Still, those slats in the walls didn’t allow them much in the way of privacy, in our Western sense.
“Maybe they have fewer secrets than those of us brought up in brick dwellings,” Dupont said. “Or maybe they have different kinds of secrets from us. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what those might be?”
Around noon, while I drowsed on, the truck halted for a while and a fire was built to enable our fellow passengers to cook their lunches. When I smelled roasted meat, I began to feel hungry and looked over the edge of the truck. The passengers and drivers were sitting around the fire holding individual bamboo skewers.
Impaled on each skewer was the roasted body of a tiny baby, complete with all its limbs.
Dupont saw I was aghast.
“They’re not what you think,” he said. “They’re actually little tree monkeys. They do look quite human though, don’t they? They’re supposed to be very tasty.”
The sight of the others stripping the meat from the tiny bodies as though they were chickens, together with the crunching noise of teeth on the little finger bones — these things became too much for me. I climbed out of the truck and, in a bush nearby, allowed myself to be sick. When I came back, Dupont gave me a little talk on the proper attitude of a wise traveller.
“You must understand, Harry, that these people aren’t violating some universal code of ethics by eating different foods from us,” he said. “Some travellers refuse to accept the basic dietary fact that, like it or not, we all have to eat other living organisms to survive. It’s pure chance whether you’re born in a place that eats pigs or one that prefers monkeys — rather than kale and porridge, as I suppose you did in Scotland.”
I didn’t like being lumped in with narrow-minded travellers. So although the idea of eating little monkeys was nauseating, I didn’t argue with him.
6
We now emerged from that area of heavy jungle onto a red dirt road that led us into a much more open landscape. It consisted of head-high thorn bushes and clusters of narrow-leaved gum trees on endless stretches of grass.
“We’re getting nearer the desert,” said Dupont.
Even in these less confined spaces, however, things were not always as they seemed.
For example, several times, what appeared to be carpets of fallen leaves on the road ahead would leap into life as the truck approached — the leaves were actually huge swarms of locusts, basking in the sun after their ravages.
The most remarkable instance occurred when the road— which was really just the ghostly trace left by previous vehicles on the red dirt — was taking us through an area full of blackened gum-tree stumps, the remnants of some past inferno. Dupont pointed out what looked like boulders standing precariously on top of some of the stumps.
These boulders matched the surroundings so well that I hadn’t even noticed them. But now that he’d brought them to my attention, I assumed they must have been put there by local tribes for some ritualistic purpose.
Dupont shook his head.
“Watch this,” he said, and asked the driver to stop the truck for a moment.
He got out, picked up a pebble at the roadside, and threw it in the direction of one of those stumps. Immediately, the boulder on top metamorphosed into a bird, sprouting heavy brown wings and taking off into the air with furious squawks.