The day of our departure dawned, we shook hands with the villagers, paddled across the placid and beautiful lake, and landed on the shore near the path. Before we started I took one last look at the island, lying in the great expanse of sun-shimmering water, ringed with the thick and vivid forest. Then we set off through the trees, and I had to concentrate on watching my carriers to see they did not bump the cages against overhanging branches, or place them in the fierce sun when we rested. Twice I fed the precious kingfishers en route, for I had brought a tin can filled with water, and this contained a mass of tiny fish. One of the Pied kingfishers seemed very wild and would not feed, but the others did not seem to be minding the journey.
In the brief twilight we reached the road, paid off the carriers, and climbed thankfully into the kit- car. It was dark when I arrived back at the school-house and found John just sitting down to dinner. Even John’s delight at the kingfishers could not lighten the gloom that I suddenly felt, for I realized that I had just made my last trip. Within ten days we were to leave Africa. I climbed into bed, and as I drifted off to sleep I remembered the warm waters of the lake, the curious little island, the village and its charming and happy inhabitants. One day, I promised myself, I would go back to the village in the lake, just for a holiday. I would swim among the fish and drift alongside the dead trees in a canoe and watch the kingfishers.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE ARK DEPARTS
It is easy enough to get a passage on a ship until you explain that most of your luggage consists of a hundred-odd crates of birds, mammals, and reptiles, all very much alive. We had quite a lot of trouble, until the kindness of Elders and Fyffes enabled us to obtain a passage on one of their ships. Once the sailing date was known to us we discovered to our dismay that we had less time to prepare for the voyage than we had anticipated. You cannot just climb aboard a ship with your animals and expect the cook to feed them. There are stores to be bought, meat to be ordered, last-minute repairs to the cages to make sure that nothing will escape on board, and a hundred and one other things. We had to send members of the staff 200 miles upcountry to obtain certain commodities for us which were not grown on the lowlands: ordinary potatoes, for example. At Kumba you could get any amount of sweet potatoes, but no ordinary ones. Then there was corn: when you are buying things in bulk you find it cheaper to buy in the area in which the stuff is grown, and the highlands of the Cameroons are the agricultural areas. We had to have ten dozen eggs, forty stems of bananas in various stages of ripeness, fifty pawpaws, a hundred oranges, twenty pineapples, four sacks of corn, four of sweet potatoes and four of ordinary, two sacks of beans, and the carcase of a whole bullock for meat. All this, as I say, had to be collected from different areas of the Cameroons and brought down to us, and it had to be done quickly if we did not want to sail without some of our precious foodstuffs.
I chose this trying time to go down with malaria. I did not realize it was malaria, but thought I was simply run down, and so I struggled on for nearly a week, feeling like death, until I decided that there must be something the matter with me, and so I paid a visit to the local hospital. The doctor examined me, gave me a huge injection in a most painful part of my anatomy, and ordered me to bed. Very reluctantly I spent two days in bed, while chaos and confusion reigned in the animal house, and John struggled to feed his birds, examine sacks of potatoes, and see that the monkeys were fed. We had decided to travel by night down to the coast, arriving at dawn on the day we were due to get the collection on board and sail. It was the day before we were to start our journey when the doctor, called to see me once more. Our hut now resembled a market: there were sacks of food, boxes of eggs, baskets of fruit, all over the floor. The doctor picked his way through this litter, took my temperature, and prepared to give me another injection. While he was holding the needle up to the light and squirting quinine through it (a horrible habit doctors have), and I lay there and quaked, he asked me why there was so much activity.
“Oh, we’re leaving to-morrow night,” I said cheerfully, eyeing the needle.
“What do you mean, leaving?”
“Leaving to get the ship. We’ve to be on board by ten-thirty on Tuesday.”
“Are you lying there and telling me that you propose to travel down to Tiko and catch a ship tomorrow in your condition?” he rasped. I might have been having a baby from his tone.
“But I’m not so ill,” I protested, “I felt fine this morning.”
“Listen to me,” said the doctor in wrath, “you had a temperature of nearly a hundred and three, on an average, for the last week. You should be kept in bed for at least a fortnight. You can’t travel on that ship.” “But I’ve got to, doctor, we had hell’s own job getting this passage. If we call it off we’ll never get another. We’ve simply got to get that ship.”
“You might not reach the ship. In your condition, to take that sort of journey is lunacy: if you had a relapse when you reach the coast (and it’s more than likely), you will have to go into hospital, or . .”
“Or what?” I asked.
“Or die,” he said bluntly. And then he jabbed the needle into me with great skill.
As soon as I could speak:
“But we can’t cancel it now. We’ve got to go.”
“All right,” said the doctor, “but I won’t accept any responsibility for you.” And he marched out through the sacks and the baskets and into the night.
The next evening the lorries arrived, the collection was loaded, and then all the food, the sacks of potatoes, corn, beans, the boxes of eggs, and the bullock carcase wrapped in wet sacks to keep it cool. By the time we were ready to start I felt that I was very unpleasantly drunk and my head was throbbing like a drum. I climbed into the cab of my lorry with Sue, the baby chimp, wrapped in a blanket on my knees, and our cavalcade started. It was a nightmare journey, for the first rains of the season had fallen and turned the red earth into a quagmire of sticky clay over which the lorry skidded madly, bumping and jolting over unseen rocks. I could hear the monkeys chattering a frenzied protest from the back of the vehicle and I wondered what rare, and now irreplaceable specimen, would be weakened, perhaps killed, by the jolting. I got some sleep, but it was fitful and uneasy, and once I awoke icy cold and with my teeth chattering, and was forced to stop the lorry and dive into the back to look for blankets to cover myself with. Within ten minutes I was sweating so much I had to unwrap myself once again. At one point we were held up by John’s lorry getting a puncture, and John walked down to inquire how I was, and we drank a much-needed cup of tea out of the Thermos flask.