The Sky And The Forest (14 page)

It was vastly difficult to retain any sense of direction in that kind of jungle, but they learned that it was a help for them all to echo a cry by Loa, who, hearing the shouts behind him, could judge the direction in which the little column was pointing, and that would help him to correct his own new direction. His instincts were sound enough to save him from ever becoming completely reversed as to his orientation while in the undergrowth; on emergence once more into the dark groves a cast to the right (they were following down the left bank of the stream) would eventually -- although sometimes only after a long and despairing journey -- bring them back to the boggy borders of the river. It was impossible to stay close to the water's edge; the bogginess, the sharp roots in the mud, even the leeches which lived there in great numbers, prohibited that.

They were lean with their exertions -- the once well-rounded Nessi was lean, so that every rib could be counted, and her breasts shrunken and her hipbones clearly apparent; and they were all scratched and cut so that their bodies were covered with healing scars and open wounds. They had purulent sores where ticks had burrowed into their skins or where the bites of black ants had become infected, and yet they went on through the forest from dawn until dark every day, for twelve hours each day, and no question arose among them of ceasing this monstrous labour. They were still faced with the same alternative, that to halt meant to reconcile their minds to permanent settlement here in the forest, while to go on meant still cherishing the hope of eventually reaching “home.” And in Loa’s mind there were still some residual traces of his confidence in himself as a god. Something within himself told him to push on downstream, and nothing occurred to make him doubt this inward inspiration, which drove him eternally onward and carried his followers with him.

Yet he was by no means the perfect leader, for he was not nearly as skilled in the details of forest life as were the others. He was dependent on them to such an extent that it seems likely that had he been alone he would have starved. He could not recognize sources of food nearly as quickly as the others could; Musini did much to feed him and even Lanu contributed, vaguely amused at this big father of his who was so incompetent in some ways. He could not make fire -- Musini and Lanu were expert at it and could produce a flame in less than fifteen minutes of work if the materials were not hard to find. They needed a lump of a softish wood, and a foot-long stick of hard wood, and some handfuls of the rotting fibre pulled from under the bark of a fallen tree. They would loop the string of Lanu's bow round the stick, and then restring the bow. Musini pressed the end of the stick firmly into the block of wood, while Lanu moved the bow from side to side, rotating the stick rapidly against the block, cutting a short shallow groove into its grain. As the groove grew hot Musini, still pressing the stick hard against the block, would take a handful of dry fibre and cram it round the rotating point, pressing it down into the groove. The fibre grew hot, the sparks were caught in it, and soon Musini bent to blow into the handful, coaxing it into a glow that could with skilful management be transferred to light dry wood kept ready to hand. It was a series of operations with which Musini had long been familiar, and which she carried out with the skill of long practice. With the fire so obtained they could toast into digestibility the wood beans gathered during the day, and anything they might have in the nature of meat could be cooked on long sticks. The smell of the fire, the smoke by day and the flame by night, would reveal their position to the little people, but that was a risk they had to take. So far they had seen nothing of them except their handiwork -- the poisoned skewers in the trails, and the deadfalls overhanging them.

In the lighting of fires, in most of the hunting for food, Loa was of less use than Musini and Lanu, even less than Nessi. He was both inexperienced and ignorant; it was as if in these practical affairs of daily life his wife and child accorded him a good-humoured toleration, even a tolerant contempt. He was to be reverently followed implicitly in matters the others knew nothing about, such as the route they should follow, but when it came to digging out white ants, or toasting frogs’ legs on a stick before a fire, he was demonstrably less capable than they were. Lanu would sigh with a resignation prematurely adult, but Musini was even capable of shoving Loa aside. Loa was content to let it be so, for it did not lessen his opinion of himself -- it did not even change it -- that he should be unable to carry out duties always relegated to boys and women. He was content to squat and think his ponderous thoughts while the women might busy themselves, while Lanu might address himself to shaping a new arrow, chipping and whittling with his little axe, rubbing down on a stone, braiding the binding for the head out of creeper-fibres. Loa could squat and meditate, and eat the food they gave him, while Musini harassed Nessi as always with her sharp tongue. And at night he slept in Musini's loving but skinny arms.

It was ironical in consequence that Loa obtained for them one of the best meals they had. He was walking through the forest carrying his flail, the long pole that had once been his yoke, with the links of iron chain dangling from it, when he disturbed the black snake. Seven feet long it was, as thick nearly as a man's thigh, one of the largest specimens of the most deadly inhabitant of the forest. Loa saw the snake just in time and stopped; the snake was coiled, ready to defend itself, not seeking to strike needlessly, its eyes glaring coldly back at him. Loa stood as still as a statue, with every muscle tense, and then at last he stepped aside to circle round the thing. The black snake, coldly confident in its power, turned its flat head to watch him. Yet there was a second when Loa had an opening, and Loa seized the opportunity. He struck like lightning with his flail, muscles and eye coordinating with the exactitude of a primitive man's, his prodigious strength swinging his weapon at a speed equal to the snake's. The iron links struck into the snake just behind the head, probably disabling the creature at that single blow, but Loa struck again and again and again at the coils as they straightened and bent, not ceasing until his arms were weary and the sweat was running down him in rivers. Before him the snake still moved, its uncoordinated segments heaving although its back was broken in a dozen places. Loa raised his voice in a shout of triumph which brought the others running to him, to look down from a safe distance at the dying death. With his flail Loa carefully poked the head free from the coils -- the mouth still gaped and shut -- and pounded it into an unrecognizable mass, and even then he was not satisfied until he had taken the little axe and severed the shattered head from the body. He did so with another exultant shout, in which the others joined.

Here was food in plenty, pounds and pounds of it, and none of your belly-aching beans at that, but meat -- rich, delightful meat. They camped on the spot; they lit a fire, and Lanu went to work with his axe, skinning the creature as well as he could and hacking it into vast collops -- disregarding its slight writhing at each blow -- which soon were frizzling over the fire and giving out a savour that brought the water into Loa's mouth as he waited. He burned his fingers, callused though they were, as he seized the hot meat when it was given him; he burned his mouth as he bit into it. Juicy meat, fit food for a god; his big white teeth tore the meat from the bones and he swallowed it down with unmatched pleasure. And when that was finished there was another collop ready to be eaten, and after that another, so that the first pleasure of gratifying a fierce appetite blended with the next of eating steadily to fill an empty stomach, and from that he could progress to the next wonderful step of packing tight a stomach already comfortably full. To eat although he felt he could eat no more was a gratification of the mind acutely pleasurable after so long a while with never enough to eat. He ceased to squat, unable to bear longer the pressure of his thighs against his bulging belly. He lay on his side to eat his last collop, and he feebly let fall the last fragments, lying out straight and enjoying the perverse pleasure of the pain of overeating. He groaned in delightful agony.

It was that night that Loa added Nessi to his long list of wives, and presumably it was because that night he was filled with meat. Ura had been Nessi's husband, but Ura was most likely dead, and Nessi's child was dead, and it was likely that Nessi was a piece of property left without any owner at all, and in that case Loa was entitled to inherit, as he always did in similar circumstances. That was the only way in which a widow could come into anyone's hands who was not a relation, but it was perfectly legal and not unprecedented; but Loa had no thoughts about legality or precedents, and neither, it is to be feared, had Nessi, when Loa reached out his big arms to her in the faint light of the dying fire. It was a plain ebullition of animal spirits; for both of them it was a strange contrast, after having been attached to each other for so long by a five-foot pole, that added a fierce savour to their embrace -- and for Loa there was the added contrast of Nessi's gentle submission after Musini's more exacting affection.

Next morning Musini was more bitter of tongue and chiding than ever, and Nessi was pert and inclined to be disrespectful to her, tossing her head at some request of Musini's. Musini darted a glance at Loa to see what his reaction would be, but Loa was experienced in the ways of rival wives -- he was especially experienced in Musini's behaviour in these conditions -- and he blandly ignored the whole incident. He had no intention of being involved in any arguments, and he acted as if he had been completely unaware of any friction at all. He took his flail and started off on the day's march; the ants during the night had made a clean sweep of the remaining fragments of the snake, so that only white bones remained round the ashes of the fire, and already he was hungry, perhaps as a result of his exertions in the night. Certainly he was thirsty; he scooped up handfuls of water from the stream when he walked down to it and drank them with eagerness, and then he set his face downstream on the two coincident businesses of the day, to find that day's food and to go on towards home -- if indeed home lay in that direction. And Nessi stayed close at his side, all that day and all that night.

The sky, unseen above the tops of the trees, was disturbed. Day after day in the late evening, the thunder would roll deafeningly, the flashes of lightning were bright enough to illuminate the forest so that the tree trunks could momentarily be seen, and the rain came streaming down in an abundance that spared nothing and no one, causing Loa and his followers hideous discomfort. The little people, in their normal life in the forest, used to counter this difficulty by erecting huts of phrynia leaves, temporary encampments which gave them shelter for several days before they were driven to move on by the consumption of the local food supply, but Loa's people had not the trick of it, and in any case never allowed themselves time before nightfall for any such labour. They had to endure their discomfort, changing their positions on the chilly wet leaf-mould, shifting back hurriedly when some alteration in conditions above them, some gust of wind perhaps, let loose a torrent of water, falling as if squirted from a hose upon naked skin, down through the roaring darkness. It meant sore heads and bad tempers in the morning, accentuating the nagging ill humour of Musini and the stubborn defiance of Nessi. Even Lanu was at times peevish and irritable, despite his perennial pride in doing man's work; and if the rain came on unusually early, making it impossible to light a fire at which to cook the wood beans they had gathered during the day, it meant going to bed supperless, and an early halt next day to enable them to satisfy their consuming hunger.

Yet there were days when there was compensation for their hardship. They were struggling through one of the stretches of forest where the growth grew thick, where above them the roof of greenery grew thin so as at times even to let through shafts of actual sunlight, when Lanu raised his voice in a high-pitched squeal, soaring up, up, up nearly to the pitch of a bat's squeak.

“Plantains! Plantains! Real plantains!” squealed Lanu.

“Never!” said Loa; that was his immediate reaction to the suggestion that plantains might be found growing in the virgin forest, but he checked himself when he remembered that Lanu might still be a child in years but was a man in the forest.

“Plantains!” cried Musini as Loa made his way through the undergrowth towards them.

So they were; desirable hands of fruit, each plantain almost the size of a man's forearm, many of them verging upon ripeness. Loa and Musini and Lanu, and Nessi when she straggled up to them, stood and gazed at them hanging close above their heads, dappled with sunshine.

“People have lived here,” decided Musini. “This was a garden.”

It seemed the only possible theory. The tangled jungle about them, of saplings and creepers, had until recently been a town clearing, and the trees had not yet grown sufficiently tall, and the parasites not sufficiently numerous, to destroy the plantain trees. The plantain in its Central African form is a product of civilization, which can only live with the help of man, who must fell the trees and root up the creepers to give it breathing space; the moment man's attention lapses, the forest crowds in again to suffocate the plantain. Normally a clearing will provide two or three crops before the exhaustion of the soil makes it desirable to make a fresh clearing and replant the plantain suckers. But this could not be an exhausted clearing, for here were the plantains in full bearing. And that mass of vegetation over there, Loa realized, of tangled vine and gay orchids, must be the stump of a felled tree, buried already under parasites, and yet not felled too long ago. There was no word in Loa's vocabulary for “year” or “month,” living as he did on the Equator where there was never any change of season, but he guessed that that tree could not have been felled at most more than two fruitings of the plantain ago. But where were the men who had felled the tree? He wrinkled his forehead momentarily over the puzzle before he put it aside to indulge himself in the pleasurable knowledge that here were plantains ripe for eating.