Gerald Durrell - The Overloaded Ark

The lorry had been ordered to arrive at the rest-house at seven-thirty for loading, and by eight-thirty we thought we should be well on the road. It was very apparent that we were new to Africa. At ten o’clock we were pacing round and round our mountain of luggage on the veranda, cursing and fuming impotently, scanning the road for the truant lorry. At eleven o’clock a cloud of dust appeared on the horizon and in its midst, like a beetle in a whirlwind, was the lorry. It screeched to a halt below, and the driver dismounted. I noticed an assortment of odd passengers sitting in the back, about twelve of them, chatting happily to each other with their goats, chickens, bags of yams, calabashes of palm wine, and other necessities of travel spread out around them in the lorry. I stormed down to interview the driver, and it was then I learned that it is better not to inquire why a lorry is late in the Cameroons: I was treated to at least six different and contradictory reasons, none of which satisfied anyone except the driver. Wisely leaving this subject, I turned my attention to the crowd in the back of the vehicle. It transpired that this was the driver’s wife, this was the driver’s wife’s cousin, this was the father of the motor-boy, and this was the motor-boy’s mother-in-law, and so on. After a prolonged altercation which for shrillness and incomprehensibility could not have been rivalled by any race on earth, they were removed, together with their household goods and livestock. The driver then had to turn the lorry for loading, and my faith in his abilities was rudely shattered when he backed twice into the hibiscus hedge, and once into the rest-house wall. Our baggage was then loaded with a speed and lack of care that was frightening, and, as I watched, I wondered how much of our equipment would be left intact on arrival in Mamfe. I need not have worried. It turned out later that only the most indispensable and irreplaceable things got broken.

During my tête-à-tête with the driver, and my careful genealogical investigation of the passengers, John had taken no part. Now, as the pandemonium lessened, he wandered round the front of the lorry and discovered something that amused him greatly. Above the windscreen, in large white uneven letters, had been printed “THE GODSPEED . . . VICTORIA TO KUMBA”. That a lorry with such an imposing name should be two and a half hours late struck him as being funny. It was not until later that we discovered what a gross euphemism the name really was. At twelve o’clock we were off, flying through the streets of Victoria in a cloud of dust and frightened chickens, the engine of the “Godspeed” roaring manfully to try and live up to its name.

Almost as soon as you leave Victoria you start to climb in a series of gentle loops, through apparently endless palm plantations. We had progressed some ten miles, and were just settling down. We lit cigarettes, and were arguing as to how long it would be before we reached real forest, when the engine gave a sharp hiccup, recovered itself, hiccupped again, and then slowly and apologetically faded away. We came to a gentle standstill.

“Camp Number One,” said John, gazing at the endless rows of palm trees about us, serried ranks, their drooping fronds whispering in the slightest breeze.

Everyone gathered round the engine, all talking at and getting their fingers burnt pointing out to each other what was wrong. After about half an hour the dismembered engine was lying about all over the road, and at least four people were under the lorry, arguing loudly. I began to have a horrible feeling that this uninteresting palm grove might have to be camp number one, so I suggested to John that we should walk on up the road, and they could follow when the lorry was mended. He gazed at the bits of engine in the road, at the black legs protruding from under the bonnet, and sighed: “Yes, I suppose we can walk on. If we take it easy we have a fair chance of them catching up with us before we reach Mamfe.” So we walked, but it was very dull. The palms did not foster bird life, and there were few insects in the dusty fringe of undergrowth at the roadside. Presently the lorry caught us up, everybody grinning and cheering like mad.

“I fear,” said John, “that their confidence in their combined mechanical powers is misplaced.”

As the “Godspeed” broke down again five miles farther on, I was inclined to agree with him. The third time broke down we had just left the last of the plantations and were entering real forest country, so it was with pleasure we dismounted and walked off down the road. The jabbering of the amateur mechanics faded away, we turned a corner, and the silence of the forest descended on us. This was our first experience of real forest, and we ambled slowly along, drinking in the sights and sounds, captivated by everything, drugged by so much beauty and colour. On one side of the road was a deep ravine, choked with undergrowth, on the other side the hillside sloped steeply upwards. On each side rose tremendous trees, straddling on their huge buttress roots, each with its cloak of parasitic plants, ferns, and moss. Through this tangle the lianas threaded their way, from base to summit, in loops and coils and intricate convolutions. On reaching the top they would drop to the forest floor as straight as a plumbline. In places there were gaps where one of the giant trees had been felled, or had fallen of its own accord, and here the secondary growth ran riot over the carcase, and everything was hung with the white and deep yellow flowers of the convolvulus, and another pink star-like flower in great profusion. In and out of these blooms flipped the Sunbirds, glinting metallically in the sun, hanging before the flowers for a brief instant on blurred and trembling wings. On the dead trees, bleached white as coral against the green, there were groups of Pygmy Kingfishers, small as a wren, brilliant in their azure blue, orange and buff plumage, with their crimson beaks and feet. Flocks of hornbills would be startled at the sight of us as they fed in the tree-tops, and would fly wildly across the road uttering loud maniacal honkings, their great untidy wings beating the air with a sound like gigantic blacksmith’s bellows. We crossed numbers of wooden bridges which spanned shallow rapid streams glinting on beds of pure white sand. On the banks, where it was moist and cool, with broken sunlight dappling the grass, rested hosts of butterflies. At our approach they rose and fluttered like a small firework display in the shade, blue- gold, yellow, green and orange, shifting and changing like a kaleidoscopic picture.

Occasionally we would pass a village, a straggle of huts along the side of the road, surrounded by small fields of feathery cassava bushes and forlorn plantain trees with tattered leaves hanging listlessly in the sun. A band of hysterically barking curs would chase the lorry, and the pot-bellied children would stand in the ditch, white teeth gleaming, pink palms waving madly. At one such village we stopped and bought a massive bunch of bananas for sixpence, and then gorged ourselves on the delicately scented fruit until we felt sick. Kumba was reached in the brief green twilight, as the grey parrots were screaming overhead into the jungle to their roosts. I made it abundantly clear to the lorry personnel that we wanted an early start in the morning. Then we ate, and crept tiredly under our mosquito nets.

To our surprise we were on the road by eight o’clock, and, as if to make up for the previous day, the “Godspeed” went like a bird. At midday we lunched at the roadside under the massive trees, drinking warm beer, contesting ownership of the sandwiches with the local ants and surveying our surroundings with the field-glasses. Bird life, as before, seemed the most prominent: Yellow-casque Hornbills honking and swishing in the tree-tops, kingfishers glittering on the dead tree stumps, a beautiful rich brown and yellow Coucal with a shrike-like beak, that peered fascinated at us while we ate. A lovely blood-red dragon-fly zoomed down the road, flicked sideways, and landed on the rim of my glass of beer. Six large ants crawled slowly and methodically up my trouser leg, and they were presently joined by a small green caterpillar that swung suddenly out of the sky on an almost invisible thread.