Gerald Durrell (28 page)

The hunters now
noticed for the first time that I had been stung, for my face and neck were
swollen, and one eye was half closed in what must have looked like a rather
lascivious wink. They stood around me moaning and clicking their fingers with
grief, and ejaculating “Sorry, sah!” at intervals, while the Tailor rushed off
to a nearby stream and brought me water to wash the stings with. Application of
a cold compress eased the pain considerably, and we then set about the task of
routing the Mongoose from his stronghold. Luckily the tree was an old one, and
under the crust of bark we found the wood dry and easy to cut. We laid nets
over the mouth of the trunk, and then at the other end we cut a small hole and
in this we laid a fire of green twigs and leaves. This was lit and the Tailor,
armed with a great bunch of leaves, fanned it vigorously so that the smoke was
blown along the hollow belly of the dead tree. As we added more and more green
fuel to the fire, and the smoke became thicker and more pungent, we could hear
the Mongoose coughing angrily inside the trunk. Soon it became too much for
him, and he shot out into the nets in a cloud of smoke, like a small white
cannon-ball from the mouth of a very large cannon. It took us a long time to
unwind him, for he had tied himself up most intricately, but at last we got him
into a canvas bag, and set off for camp, tired but in high spirits. Even the
pain of my wasp stings was forgotten in the warm glow of triumph that enveloped
me.

The next morning
I awoke feeling wretched: my head ached, and my face was so swollen that I
could hardly see out of my copiously watering eyes.

To irritate me
still further it turned out to be one of N’da Ali’s off days: she had enveloped
herself in every available cloud and even the kitchen, a few paces away from
the tent, was invisible in the white dampness. As I was gently masticating the
remnants of my breakfast, Pious loomed out of the mist, and with him was a
short, misshapen, evil-looking man bearing a huge basket on his head.

“Dis man bring
beef, sah,” said Pious, eyeing my swollen face with disapproval.

The man bobbed
and bowed, displaying withered yellow stumps of teeth in his fox’s grin. I
disliked him on sight, and I disliked him even more on opening his basket and
finding inside, not the fine specimen I had hoped for, but a solitary mangy rat
with an amputated tail. Having told the man what I thought of his beef I
returned to my breakfast. Pious and the man whispered together for a few
minutes, the man glancing furtively at me now and then, and Pious came forward
once more.

“Excuse me, sah,
dis man come from Fineschang, and he say he get something to tell Masa.”

The man capered
forward, bowing and grinning and flapping his wrinkled hands.

“Masa,” he
whined, “de people for Fineschang dey angry too much dat Masa done come for dis
place.”

“Well?”

“Yesterday dey
done put
ju-ju
for Masa. . . .”

“Whar!” yelped
Pious, slapping the man on the head so that his dirty hat fell over his eyes.
“Na what kind of
ju-ju
dey done put for Masa, ay?”

“No be bad
ju-ju
,”
said the man hastily, “only Masa no go catch any more beef for dis place, no go
get lucky, get plenty rain too much, Masa no go stay.”

“Go tell the
people of Fineschang I no fear their
ju-ju
,” I said wrathfully, “I go
stay here until I want to go, you hear? And if I see any Fineschang man for dis
place, I get gun that get power too much, you hear, bushman?”

“I hear, sah,”
said the man, cringing, “but why Masa de shout me, I no get palaver with Masa?”

“My friend, I
savvay dis
ju-ju
talk: dis
ju-ju
no fit work if I no know dis
ting, and so you be messenger boy, no be so?”

“No, sah, I no
get palaver with Masa.”

“All right, now
you go for Fineschang one time or I go get palaver with you. You hear?”

The man scuttled
off through the mist and Pious gazed anxiously after him.

“You want I go
beat him, sah?”he asked hopefully.

“No, leave him.”

“Eh! I no like
dis
ju-ju
business, sah.”

“Well, don’t
tell the others, I don’t want them all panicky.”

It was the first
time that I have had a
ju-ju
put on me, and I was interested to see what
would happen. I most emphatically do not dismiss
ju-ju
as a lot of
nonsense and mumbo-jumbo, and anyone who does so is a fool, for
ju-ju
is
a very real and potent force all over Africa, and has been known to produce
results which are difficult to explain away. Perhaps the commonest sort, and
the most effective, is where you have the co-operation of your victim. By this
I mean that the man must know he has had a
ju-ju
placed on him, and
then, if he believes in magic, he is ripe for the slaughter. A “well-wisher”
comes to the unfortunate man and tells him that a
ju-ju
has been placed
on him, and then, if he believes it, he is left in horrid suspense for a time.
Slowly the whole plot is unfolded to him by different “well-wishers” (these, in
Africa, are just as deadly as their European counterparts) and he learns that
he is gradually to waste away and die. If he is sufficiently convinced of the
efficacy of the spell, he will waste away and die. The man who had just been to
see me was one of these “well-wishers”, and now that I had been told about the
ju-ju
,
it was more or less up to me. The curious thing was that the
ju-ju did
work, better than anyone could have wished, but how much of it was due to my
own unconscious efforts, and how much was mere coincidence, I don’t know.

The next
afternoon, the swelling on my face having gone down, the Tailor, myself, and
four others went to the base of some huge cliffs a few miles from camp. These
cliffs were riddled with caves, and our object was to try and catch some of the
bats that lived in them and to see what else we could find. N’da Ali had
recovered from her bad mood, and the day was sparkling with sunlight, and there
was even a gentle breeze to keep us cool. I had forgotten all about the
ju-ju
. . . or, at any rate, I thought I had.

To get down to
these caves, which were all connected to each other by a network of narrow
passages, we had to lower ourselves into a gorge about forty feet deep. We soon
found that the ropes we had brought with us were not long enough for this, and
so we had to cut great lengths of “bush rope”, that thin, tough creeper that
grows everywhere in the forest.

With these bits
of creeper tied together, we lowered ourselves into the gash in the
mountainside At the bottom we separated, and each squeezed through a different
tunnel to explore various sections of the caves. The place was full of bats,
from the tiny little insect-eaters to the great heavy fruit-eaters, but for two
hours they flicked about us and we caught nothing.

Blundering
through the labyrinth I met the Tailor, who was standing gazing at a pile of
rocks in one corner of the cave. In an excited whisper he said that he had just
seen something move on top of the, pile of rocks, high up by the roof. While we
were holding a whispered argument as to the best thing to do, we were joined by
another member of the hunting brigade, so we all trained our torches on the
pile of rocks and surveyed them carefully. There was nothing to be seen.

“Are you
sure
you saw something, Tailor?”

“Yes, sah, sure.
’E dere for on top.”

We peered again,
and suddenly we were startled by the appearance of a black shape which humped
itself above the rocks and grunted loudly.

“Na tiger, sah,”
said the Tailor.

I was inclined
to agree, for the shape was too big to be anything else. On hearing our
identification the third member of our little party fled down the cave towards
the blessed open air and safety, leaving the Tailor and myself to face the foe.

“Na foolish man,
dat,” said the Tailor scornfully, but I noticed that the hand that held his
torch was none too steady. I was not at all sure what was the best thing to do:
if the leopard turned nasty it would be extremely dangerous to shoot at it, for
letting off a gun in a cave like that is a dangerous procedure, as it may bring
the whole roof down. I felt that I would rather face a live leopard than be
buried dead . . . or alive . . . under several tons of rock.

Meanwhile the
black shape; after humping itself up several times and giving a few more
growls, disappeared behind the rocks, and we heard a faint clatter of rocks, In
the shadowy darkness of the cave we could not tell where the animal would next
appear, so I was just about to suggest a strategic withdrawal when a head
appeared over the top of the pile of rocks, gaped at us for a moment, and then
said: “Masa, I done catch beef.”

It was the
smallest and most useless of the party, one Abo, who had climbed to the top of
the rocks in pursuit of a rat, Lying on his stomach he had followed the rodent
through the rocks, and the heaving shape we had seen was his backside as he
wriggled painfully between the slabs, grunting loudly with the unaccustomed
exertion. This anti-climax left both the Tailor and myself weak with laughter,
and the Tailor reeled round the cave, tears streaming down his face, slapping
his thighs in mirth.

“Eh . . . aehh!
Abo, nearly Masa done shoot you. Eh . . . aehh! Abo, you be fine tiger . . .”
he chortled.

Abo climbed down
from the rocks and held out for my inspection a small rat.

“I tink I done
wound him small, Masa,” he said, which proved to be an understatement for the
rat was very dead.

While we were
looking around to see if we could catch any more of these rats, we heard a
rumble of thunder from the outside world, which echoed ominously along the
caves and passages. When we reached the gorge we found it dark and gloomy, for
above us, along the sides of the huge cliffs, swollen black rain clouds were
coiling and shifting. We hauled each other out of the gorge as quickly as
possible, and started to pack the equipment in the bags. Suddenly the thunder
crashed directly overhead, seeming to shake the very foundations of the
mountain, and the next minute the clouds swept low over us and an icy sheet of
rain descended. I have never seen rain so thick and heavy; almost before we
realized what was happening our flimsy clothes were drenched, and our teeth
chattering with cold. The sky was scarred by a sudden flash of lightning,
followed by a tremendous regurgitation of thunder, and somewhere to our left in
the forest I could hear the chimpanzees screaming and hooting a shrill protest
at the weather.

The men picked
up their bundles and we started off down the hill-side for camp; we had not
gone fifty feet when my feet slipped on a rain-soaked rock, and I fell and went
bouncing and rolling down the slope, ending up against the trunk of a tree,
bruised and scratched, with my right leg doubled up under me and hurting badly.
For a moment I thought I had broken it until I straightened it out, and then I
realized I had only wrenched my ankle. But this was bad enough, for I could not
stand on it for the pain. I lay there among the rain-lashed drooping trees,
with a shivering group of men about me, trying to rub some life back into my
leg. We were a good four miles from camp and my ankle was swelling visibly. It
was obvious that we could not stay there indefinitely, and to add to my
discomfiture I realized that the storm clouds hanging low over the mountain
would bring darkness upon us more quickly than we had anticipated. I sent the
Tailor to cut me a sapling, and this he fashioned into a rough crutch. Using
this, and with the Tailor supporting me on one side, I managed to hobble along,
albeit painfully, and so we progressed slowly through the dripping trees. Soon
we reached a more or less level area of forest, and the sound of running water
came to us. I was surprised, for the only stream we had crossed on the way up
had been a wide shallow one, barely covering our ankles, and yet this one
sounded like a well-fed stream. I looked at the Tailor for an explanation.

“Dat small water
done fillup,” he said.

It was my first
experience of how quickly a stream, especially a mountain stream, could
“fillup” in a good downpour of rain. The stream we had crossed, shallow as a
bird-bath, was now a foaming yellow torrent nearly waist deep, and in this
roaring broth, branches, roots, leaves and bruised flowers were swept and
whirled among the rocks. The shallowest point to cross was where this stream
left the level forest floor and plunged down the steep mountain-side over a
great sheet of rock, which had been stripped of its covering of leaf-mould by
the waters. The other men went first, and when they were safely across the
Tailor and I followed. Slowly we edged our way across, I testing each step with
my stick. We reached the centre, and here the force of the water was greatest
for it was squeezed between two big rocks. It was here that I placed my stick
on a small stone that tilted, my stick was twitched away from my grasp, and I
had a momentary glimpse of it sweeping down the slope, bobbing on the surface,
before I fell fiat on my face in the water.