Michael Crichton - Congo

Preliminaries concluded, they were taken to a newly constructed house at the far end of the village where the dead white man was said to be. They found a filthy, bearded man of thirty, sitting cross-legged in the small doorway, staring outward. After a moment Elliot realized the man was catatonic-he was not moving at all.

“Oh, my God,” Ross said. “It’s Bob Driscoll.”

“You know him?” Munro said.

“He was a geologist on the first Congo expedition.” She leaned close to him, waved her hand in front of his face. “Bobby, it’s me, Karen. Bobby, what happened to you?”

Driscoll did not respond, did not even blink. He continued to stare forward.

One of the pygmies offered an explanation to Munro. “He came into their camp four days ago,” Munro said. “He was wild and they had to restrain him. They thought he had blackwater fever, so they made a house for him and gave him some medicines, and he was not wild anymore. Now he lets them feed him, but he never speaks. They think perhaps he was captured by General Muguru’s men and tortured, or else he is agudu-a mute.”

Ross moved back in horror.

“I don’t see what we can do for him,” Munro said. “Not in his condition. Physically he’s okay but…” He shook his head.

“I’ll give Houston the location,” Ross said, “and they’ll send help from Kinshasa.”

During all this, Driscoll never moved. Elliot leaned forward to look at his eyes, and as he approached, Driscoll wrinkled his nose. His body tensed. He broke into a high-pitched wail-”Ah-ah-ah-ah”-like a man about to scream.

Appalled, Elliot backed off, and Driscoll relaxed, falling silent again. “What the hell was that all about?”

One of the pygmies whispered to Munro. “He says,” Munro said, “that you smell like gorilla.”

Two HOURS LATER, THEY WERE REUNITED WITH Kahega and the others, led by a pygmy guide across the rain forest south of Gabutu. They were all sullen, uncommunicative-and suffering from dysentery.

The pygmies had insisted they stay for an early dinner, and Munro felt they had no choice but to accept. The meal was mostly a slender wild potato called kitsombe, which looked like a shriveled asparagus; forest onions, called otsa; and modoke, wild manioc leaves, along with several kinds of mushrooms. There were also small quantities of sour, tough turtle meat and occasional grasshoppers, caterpillars, worms, frogs, and snails.

This diet actually contained twice as much protein by weight as beefsteak, but it did not sit well on unaccustomed stomachs. Nor was the news around the campfire likely to improve their spirits.

According to the pygmies, General Muguru’s men had established a supply camp up at the Makran escarpment, which was where Munro was headed. It seemed wise to avoid the troops. Munro explained there was no Swahili word for chivalry or sportsmanship, and the same was true of the Congolese variant, Lingala. “In this part of the world, it’s kill or be killed. We’d best stay away.”

Their only alternate mute took them west, to the Ragora River. Munro frowned at his map, and Ross frowned at her computer console.

“What’s wrong with the Ragora River?” Elliot asked.

“Maybe nothing,” Munro said. “Depends on how hard it’s mined lately.”

Ross glanced at her watch. “We’re now twelve hours behind,” she said. “The only thing we can do is continue straight through the night on the river.”

“I’d do that anyway,” Munro said.

Ross had never heard of an expedition guide leading a party through a wilderness area at night. “You would? Why?”

“Because,” Munro said, “the obstacles on the lower river will be much easier at night.”

“What obstacles?”

“We’ll discuss them when we come to them,” Munro said.

A mile before they reached the Ragora, they heard the distant mar of powerful water. Amy was immediately anxious, signing What water? again and again. Elliot tried to reassure her, but he was not inclined to do much; Amy was going to have to put up with the river, despite her fears.

But when they got to the Ragora they found that the sound came from tumbling cataracts somewhere upstream; directly before them, the river was fifty feet wide and a placid muddy brown.

“Doesn’t look too bad,” Elliot said.

“No,” Munro said, “it doesn’t.”

But Munro understood about the Congo. The fourth largest river in the world (after the Nile, the Amazon, and the Yangize) was unique in many ways. It twisted like a giant snake across the face of Africa, twice crossing the equator- the first time going north, toward Kisangani, and later going south, at Mbandaka. This fact was so remarkable that even a hundred years ago geographers did not believe it was true.

Because the Congo flowed both north and south of the equator, there was always a rainy season somewhere along its path; the river was not subject to the seasonal fluctuations that characterized rivers such as the Nile. The Congo poured a steady 1,500,000 cubic feet of water every second into the Atlantic Ocean, a flow greater than any river except the Amazon.

But this tortuous course also made the Congo the least navigable of the great rivers. Serious disruptions began with the rapids of Stanley Pool, three hundred miles from the Atlantic. Two thousand miles inland, at Kisangani, where the river was still -a mile wide, the Wagenia Cataract blocked all navigation. And as one moved farther upriver along the fan of tributaries, the impediments became even more pronounced, for above Kisangani the tributaries were descending rapidly into the low jungle from their sources-the highland savannahs to the south, and the 16,000-foot snowcapped Ruwenzori Mountains to the east.

The tributaries cut a series of gorges, the most striking of which was the Portes d’Enfer-the Gates of Hell-at Kongolo. Here the placid Lualаba River funneled through a gorge half a mile deep and a hundred yards wide.

The Ragora was a minor tributary of the Lualaba, which it joined near Kisangani. The tribes along the river referred to it as baratawani, “the deceitful road,” for the Ragora was notoriously changeable. Its principal feature was the Ragora Gorge, a limestone cut two hundred feet deep and in places only ten feet wide. Depending on recent rainfall, the Ragora Gorge was either a pleasant scenic spectacle or a boiling whitewater nightmare.

At Abutu, they were still fifteen miles upriver from the gorge, and conditions on the river told them nothing about conditions within the gorge. Munro knew all that, but he did not feel it necessary to explain it to Elliot, particularly since at the moment Elliot was fully occupied with Amy.

Amy had watched with growing uneasiness as Kahega’s men inflated the two Zodiac rafts. She tugged Elliot’s sleeve and demanded to know What balloons?

“They’re boats, Amy,” he said, although he sensed she had already figured that out, and was being euphemistic. “Boat” was a word she had learned with difficulty; since she disliked water, she had no interest in anything intended to ride upon it.

Why boat? she asked.

“We ride boat now,” Elliot said.

Indeed, Kahega’s men were pushing the boats to the edge of the water, and loading the equipment on, lashing it to the rubber stanchions at the gunwales. -

Who ride? she asked.

“We all ride,” Elliot said.

Amy watched a moment longer. Unfortunately, everyone was nervous, Munro barking orders, the men working hastily. As she had often shown, Amy was sensitive to the moods of those around her. Elliot always remembered how she had insisted that something was wrong with Sarah Johnson for days before Sarah finally told the Project Amy staff that she had split up with her husband. Now Elliot was certain that Amy sensed their apprehension. Cross water in boat? she asked.