Elephant Song - Smith Wilbur - Страница 87
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Ahead of them was such a sight as Kelly could not have conceived in her most hideous nightmares. She gazed upon it until night fell and mercifully hid it from her and then she turned away and went back.
In the night she came awake to find herself weeping aloud and Sepoo's hand stroking her arm to comfort her.
The return journey down the dying river was slower, as though she were burdened by her sadness and Sepoo shortened his stride to match her.
Five days later, Kelly and Sepoo reached Gondola.
Gondola was a site unique in this part of the forest. It was a glade of yellow elephant grass less than a hundred acres in extent. At the south end it rose to meet a line of forest-clad hills. For part of the day the tall trees threw a shadow across the clearing, keeping it cooler than if it had been exposed to the full glare of the tropical sun. Two small streams bounded this wedge of open ground, while the slope and elevation disclosed a sweeping vista over the treetops towards the northwest. It was one of the few vantage points in the Ubomo basin from which the view was not obscured by the great forest trees. The cool air in the open glade was less humid than that of the deep forest.
Kelly paused at the edge of the forest, as she always did, and looked out at the mountain peaks a hundred miles away.
Usually the Mountains of the Moon were bidden in their own perpetual clouds. This morning, as if to welcome her home, they had drawn aside the veil and stood clear in all their glistening splendour. The glaciated massif of Mount Stanley was forced upwards between the faults of the Great Rift Valley to a height of almost seventeen thousand feet.
It was pure icewhite and achingly beautiful.
She turned away from it reluctantly and looked across the clearing.
There was her homestead and laboratory, an ambitious building of log, clay plaster and thatch which had taken her almost three years to build, with a little help from her friends.
The gardens on the lower slopes were irrigated from the streams and fenced in to protect them from the forest creatures. There were no flowerbeds. The garden was not ornamental but provided the small community of Gondola with a large part of its sustenance.
As they left the forest, some of the women working in the garden spotted them and ran to greet Kelly, shrieking and laughing with delight. Some were Bambuti, but most were Uhah women in their traditional colourful long skirts. They surrounded her and escorted her up to the homestead.
The commotion brought a solitary figure out of the laboratory on to the wide verandah. He was an old man with hair as silver as the snows on Mount Stanley that faced him from a hundred miles away. He was dressed in a crisp blue safari suit and sandals. He shaded his eyes and recognized her and smiled.
His teeth were still white and perfect in his dark intelligent face.
Kelly. He held out both hands to her as she came up on to the verandah, and she ran to meet him. Kelly, he repeated, as he took her hands. I was beginning to worry about you. I expected you days ago.
it's good to see you. It's good to see you also, Mr. President. Come now, my child.
I am no longer that, at least not in Ephrem Taffari's view, and when did we last stand on ceremony, you and I? Victor, she corrected herself. I have missed you so, and I have so much to tell you. I don't know where to begin. Later. He shook his handsome grizzled head and embraced her.
She knew that he was over seventy years old but she could feel that his body had the strength and vigour of a man half that age. First let me show you how well I have taken care of your work during your absence. I should have remained a scientist rather than becoming a politician, he said. He took her hand and drew her into the laboratory, and immediately they were engrossed in technical discussion.
President Victor Omeru had studied in London as a young man. He had returned to Ubomo with a Master's degree in electrical engineering and for a short time had been employed in the colonial administration until he had resigned to lead the movement towards independence. Yet he had always retained his interest in the sciences and his learning and skills had always impressed Kelly.
When he had been overthrown in Ephrem Taffari's bloody coup, he had fled into the forest with a handful of loyal followers and sought sanctuary, with Kelly Kinnear at Gondola.
In the ten or so months since then, the settlement in the glade had become the headquarters of the Ubomo resistance movement against Taffari's tyranny, and Kelly had become one of his most trusted agents.
When he was not receiving visitors from outside the forest and planning the counter-revolution, he made himself Kelly's assistant and in a very short time had become invaluable to her.
For an hour the two of them were happily engrossed with slides and retorts and cages of laboratory rats. It was almost as though they were deliberately putting off the moment when they must discuss urgent and ugly reality.
Kelly's research was handicapped by inadequate equipment and shortage of expendable supplies. All of this had to be portered into Gondola, and since Kelly's field grant had been rescinded and Victor Omeru deposed, she had been even more restricted. Nevertheless, they had made some exciting discoveries. In particular they had been able to isolate an anti-malarial substance in the sap of the selepe tree. The selepe was a common plant of the forest that the pygmies used for the dual purposes of building their huts and treating fever.
Malaria was a resurgent menace in Africa where more and more frequently there appeared strains resistant to the synthetic prophylactics. Soon malaria might rank, once again, as the greatest killer on the continent, apart from AIDS. It seemed ironic that both these scourges should have their origin in the cradle of man himself, in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, where man had stood upright and taken his first uncertain footsteps into glory and infamy. Was it not possible that the ultimate cure for both these diseases might yet come from this same area of the globe? They both reasserted that hope, as they had done a thousand times before.
In addition to the malarial cure, there were the other possibilities that Kelly and Victor Omeru were considering. The one disease to which the Bambuti were susceptible was cancer of the pancreas. This was caused by some factor of their diet or environment in the forest. The women of the tribe used an infusion of the root of a vine that contained a bitter milky sap to treat the disease, and Kelly had witnessed some seemingly miraculous cures. She and Victor Omeru had isolated an alkaloid from the sap which they hoped was the active agent in the cure, and they were testing it with encouraging results.
They were using the same alkaloid to treat three of the Uhali men in camp who were suffering from AIDS. It was too soon to be certain, but once again the results were most encouraging and exciting. Now they discussed them avidly. This excitement and the pleasure of reunion lasted them through the frugal lunch of salads that they shared on the verandah of the thatched bungalow.
Kelly revelled in the joy of conversing with such a cultured and erudite man. Victor Omeru's presence had transformed her lonely isolated life at Gondola. She loved her Bambuti friends, but they came and went without warning, and though their simple happy ways were always a joy, they were no substitute for the stimulation of a superior educated mind.
Victor Omeru was a man she could respect and admire and love without reservation. As far as Kelly was concerned, he was without vice, overflowing with humanity and compassion for his fellow men, and at the same time with a deep and abiding respect and concern for the world in which they lived and the other creatures that shared it with them.
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