Gerald Durrell - The Overloaded Ark

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.