Elephant Song - Smith Wilbur - Страница 81

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In her hatred of the road, Kelly wished there was some way to halt this intrusion, this accelerating process of degradation and destruction, but she knew that there was none.  BOSS and the syndicate were behemoths on the march.  The forest, its soil, its trees, its animals, birds and its people were all too fragile.

All she could hope for was to help retard the process and in the end to save some precious fragment from the melting-pot of progress and development, and exploitation.

Abruptly the truck swung off the road and in a cloud of red talcum dust drew up at the rear of one of the roadside dukes.

Peering from her peephole, Kelly saw that it was a typical roadside store with mud walls and roof, thatched with ilala palm fronds.  There was a logging truck parked in front of it and the driver and his mate were haggling with the store-keeper for the purchase of sweet yams and strips of dried game meat blackened with smoke.

Patrick Omeru and his brother began to unload some of the baskets of dried fish to sell to the store-keeper and as they worked he spoke without looking at Kelly's hiding-place.  Are you all right, Kelly, I'm fine, Patrick.  I'm ready to move, she called back softly.  Wait, Doctor.  I must make certain that it is safe.  The army patrols the road regularly.  I'll speak to the store-keeper; he knows when the soldiers will come.  Patrick went on unloading the fish.

in front of the duka the truck-driver completed his transaction and carried his purchases to the logging truck, He climbed on board and started up with a roar and cloud of diesel smoke, then pulled out into the rutted roadway towing two huge trailers behind the truck.  The trailers were laden with forty-foot lengths of African mahogany logs, each five feet in diameter, the whole cargo comprising hundreds of tons of valuable hardwood.

As soon as the truck had gone, Patrick called to the Uhali store-keeper and they spoke together quietly.  The store-keeper shook his head and pointed back along the road.  Patrick hurried back to the side of the fish truck.  Quickly, Kelly.  The patrol will be coming any minute now, but we should hear the army vehicle long before it arrives.

The store-keeper says that the soldiers never go into the forest.

They are afraid of the forest spirits.  He pulled away the fish baskets that covered the entrance to Kelly's hiding-place, and she scrambled out and jumped down to the sun-baked earth.  She felt stiff and cramped, and she stretched her body to its full extent, lifting her hands over her head and twisting from the waist to get the kinks out of her spine.

You must go quickly, Kelly, Patrick urged her.  The patrol!

I wish I had someone to go with you, to protect you.  Kelly laughed and shook her head.  Once I'm in the forest, I will be safe.  She felt gay and happy at the prospect, but Patrick looked worried.  The forest is an evil place.  You are also afraid of the diinni, aren't you, Patrick? she teased him as she shrugged her pack on to her shoulders.

She knew that, like most Uhali or Hita, Patrick had never entered the deep forest.  They were all terrified of the forest spirits.  Whenever possible the Barnbuti were at pains to describe these malignant spirits and to invent horror stories of their own dreadful encounters with them. It was one of the Bambuti devices for keeping the big black men out of their secret preserves.  Of course not, Kelly.  Patrick denied the charge a little too hotly.  I am an educated man; I do not believe in djinni or evil spirits.

But even as he spoke his eyes strayed towards the impenetrable wall of high trees that stood just beyond the halfmile wide strip of gardens and plantations.  He shuddered and changed the subject.  You will get a message to me in the usual way?  he asked anxiously.  We must know how he is.  Don't worry.  She smiled at him and took his hand.  Thank you, Patrick.  Thank you for everything.  It is we who should thank you, Kelly.  May Allah give you peace.  Salaam aleikum, she replied.  To you peace also, Patrick.  And she turned and slipped away under the wide green fronds of the banana trees.  Within a dozen paces she was hidden from the road.

As she went through the gardens she picked the fruits from the trees, filling the pockets of her backpack with ripe mangoes and plantains.

It was a Bambuti trick.  The village gardens and the villages themselves were considered fair hunting grounds.

The pygmies borrowed anything that was left untended, but stealing was not as much fun as gulling the villagers into parting with food and valuables by elaborate confidence tricks.

Kelly smiled as she recalled the glee with which old Sepoo related his successful scams to the rest of the tribe whenever he returned from the villages to the hunting camps in the deep forest.

Now she helped herself to the garden produce with as little conscience as old Sepoo would have evinced.  In London she would have been appalled by the notion of shoplifting in Selfridges, but as she approached the edge of the forest she was already beginning to think like a Barnbuti again.

It was the way of survival.

At the end of the, last garden there was a fence of thorn branches to keep out the forest creatures that raided the crops at night, and at intervals along this fence, set on poles were grubby spirit flags and juju charms to discourage the forest demons and diinni from approaching the villages.  The Bambuti always howled with mirth when they passed this evidence of the villagers superstition.  It was proof of the success of their own subtle propaganda.

Kelly found a narrow gap in the fence, just big enough to accommodate the pygmy who had made it and she slipped through.

The forest lay ahead of her.  She lifted up her eyes and watched a flock of grey parrots flying shrieking along the treetops a hundred feet above her.

The entrance to the forest was thick and entangled.  Where the sunlight had penetrated to the ground it had raised a thicket of secondary growth.  There was a pygmy track through this undergrowth, but even Kelly was forced to stoop to enter it.

The average Bambuti was at least a foot shorter than she was, and with their machetes they cut the undergrowth just above their own head-height.  When fresh, the raw shoots were easy to spot, but once they dried, they were sharp as daggers and on the level of Kelly's face and eyes.  She moved with dainty care.

She did not realise it herself, but in the forest she had learned by example to carry herself with the same agile grace as a pygmy.

It was one of the Bambuti's derisive taunts that somebody walked like a wazungu in the forest.  Wazungu was the derogatory term for any outsider, any foreigner.  Even old Sepoo admitted that Kelly walked like one of the real people and not like a white wazungu.

The peripheral screen of dense undergrowth was several hundred feet wide.

it ended abruptly and Kelly stepped out on to the true forest floor.

It was like entering a submarine cavern, a dim and secret place.  The sunlight was reflected down through successive layers of leaves, so that the entire forest world was washed with green, and the air was warm and moist and redolent of leaf mould and fungus, a relief from the heat and dust and merciless sunlight of the outside world.  Kelly filled her lungs with the smell and looked around her, blinking as her eyes adjusted to this strange and lovely light.  There was no dense undergrowth here, the great tree-trunks reached up to the high green roof and shaded away into the green depths, ahead, reminding her of the hall of pillars in the mighty temple of Karnak on the banks of the Nile.

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