“Expensive,” Ellen agreed.
“The British Parliament was paying for all this,” Frank said, “and right from the beginning there was a strong minority that didn’t want to build the railroad at all. They were the anti-Imperialists, called the Little England group, and they didn’t want the interior of Africa opened up and colonized and made part of the British Empire. After ten years, when the cost of the railroad was just about doubled from the first estimate but they were actually getting close to the lake, the Little England bunch finally got their way. The money wasn’t shut off entirely, but the faucet was turned way down.”
“But they still reached the lake.”
“Sure. At Kisumu. Fifty-five miles closer than Port Victoria, a swamp next to a stagnant gulf, and it’s another forty miles across the gulf to the regular part of the lake. The British were just like anybody else: they spent like idiots when they didn’t know what they were doing, and as soon as some ready cash would have helped they got stingy.”
“So Port Victoria never happened.”
Nodding, Frank said, “It would have been what Kisumu is, a rich trading town with tourist hotels and its own airport and all that shit. Instead, it’s got a population of maybe a hundred, a little open-air village market, and that’s all. Also, the last twenty-five miles in is dirt road.”
“Dirt! In this weather?”
“It’s not that bad,” he said. “Most of it is rock. The way they build that kind of road, they just come in with bulldozers and scrape the topsoil away, and underneath you got rock. Anyway, back to the story. There’s a kicker in it.”
“A happy ending for Port Victoria after all?” Oddly enough, she had found herself sympathizing with the town, as though it were a person who’d been unjustly treated.
“In a way,” Frank said. “All the regular commerce went to Kisumu, but that left Port Victoria with all its natural advantages and nobody to use them. The natural harbor, the firm uphill land, the protected bay. And besides that, you’ve got Uganda just ten miles across the water.”
“You’re going to say smuggling.”
Frank laughed; history delighted him. “Sure, it’s smuggling. The biggest smuggling port on the lake. The straight world got the swamp and the stagnant gulf and a town called Kisumu, sounds like a sneeze. The underworld got Port Victoria.”
What Frank had called “mostly rock” turned out, in Ellen’s opinion, to be mostly mud. When they turned left off the B1 at Luanda—the sign pointed toward Siaya and Busonga, without mentioning Port Victoria at all—they were almost immediately half-mired in a broad lake of orangy-red mud. The road was very wide, probably three lanes (if it could be said to have such things as lanes), with high mud walls on both sides to channel the rain and keep it from running off. Those walls were undoubtedly the topsoil that had, according to Frank, been scraped off when this “road” had been built.
They passed a group of schoolgirls in bright pink jumpers and white blouses, all carrying gaudily colored umbrellas. A few glowered at the truck in sullen suspicion, but most showed cheery smiles under their umbrellas, and many waved.
Everywhere she went, Ellen saw these groups of schoolchildren, the girls in bright-colored jumpers, the boys frequently in short pants and white shirts and blue blazers. The strangest thing was to see a group of neatly dressed teenagers walking at the end of the day across the stubby fields toward their homes; a cluster of low mud huts, lacking electricity or running water. How do they get up in the morning in such hovels, she wondered, and manage to turn themselves into clean, pressed, shining-faced students? How far they were traveling to reach the twentieth century, and how quickly and surely they were making the journey.
Their own journey, on the other hand, was rather slower and more uncertain. The Land-Rover slithered and slued along this endless rice paddy, the wheels throwing mud in all directions. (Frank had slowed down when they passed the schoolgirls so as not to splash them.) Here and there a solitary person walked, occasionally someone was to be seen hunkered under a large umbrella by the roadside waiting for God knows who or what, and once a dangerously skidding blue bus crammed with passengers came lurching the other way, the driver madly honking his horn in lieu of attempting to control the wheel. Frank eeled by him, and Ellen stared back at all the white-eyed black-faced passengers seen through the steamy windows frighteningly close.
There were no more history anecdotes on this part of the trip. Driving took all of Frank’s attention and, as usual, most of his muscles. Keeping clear of the flailing elbows, Ellen sat close to the door and watched the muddy world go slowly by.
Frank had said Port Victoria was fifty-five miles from Kisumu, and at the rate they were going, it was beginning to seem it would take a week, when all at once the road made an abrupt right-angled turn at a village—not even a village; not anything at all that Ellen could see—called Busonga, and directly in front of them was a narrow, fast-running, muddy river and a small open ferry. “Good God!”
Frank was grinning at her as he wrestled the Land-Rover to a stop on the slippery macadam incline running down to the water. “Forgot to tell you about this,” he said. “The ferry over the Nzoia. Little adventure to tell your grandchildren.”
Suspiciously studying the ferry, which was inching this way from the farther shore, Ellen said, “You sure I’ll have grandchildren?”
“I’m willing to do my part,” he said.
She looked sharply at him, but saw that he was merely joking and not making a pass. “I’ll think of something funny to say,” she said, “when we reach the other side.”
The ferry was merely a large square raft, with a filthy greasy big engine bolted to it on one side. A thick cable attached to metal stanchions on each bank dangled across the river and through the raft’s engine so the ferry could slowly and agonizingly winch its way across the stream. In addition, another higher cable was slightly upstream; a third cable, one end of which was attached to the upstream side of the raft, was noosed around this higher one to keep the ferry from drifting too far downstream, thereby creating too much stress on cable number one as it was fed through the engine. Friction between the wire noose and the cable it was to slide along made the ferry move in slow uncertain fits and starts, like a very sleepy drunk.
The ferry had metal pipe railings on both sides, and twin narrow metal ramps for vehicles jutting out at front and back. At the moment there were about a dozen people standing clustered in the middle of the thing, dressed in red and white and yellow and pink, most holding umbrellas, forming a bright-colored temporary geodesic roof. More foot passengers waited on this side of the river; the monotony of their wait had been broken by the unexpected arrival of a Land-Rover containing two white people. Ellen stared back, but she grew bored before they did.
The man who ran the ferry was short, with a stout torso but spindly arms and legs like a spider’s. Also spiderlike in his movements, he crawled and swarmed over his engine, making a great complicated to-do about the landing, with the metal ramps scraping up onto the macadam.
Despite the ferryman’s angry shouts and warnings, most of the passengers had jumped off and gone on about their business before he’d finished docking to his own satisfaction. Then there was a semicomic moment when the waiting passengers all rushed on and the ferryman had to order them off again, with many yells and curses and flailings of his spindly arms, so the Land-Rover could be carefully maneuvered into position first. Ellen, feeling vaguely guilty that she was inside in the dry while all those people were out there in the wet, smiled apologetically at everybody whose eye she met, while Frank cursed under his breath at the contradictory instructions of the ferryman, who kept waving Frank to turn this way and that, when obviously the sensible thing to do was merely drive up the ramps and onto the ferry and stop.