Paul Theroux - The Lower River

Hunched over the front of the motorbike like a workman digging a street, the bike itself resembling a jackhammer in the pounding of its front fork, and jumping in the ruts, Manyenga sped through the bush, Hock clinging to his doggy shirt. They came to a dry streambed, a bouldery trench lined with sand and stones, just a rough sluice that showed the disfigurement of rushing water and exposed rocks.

Hock got off and helped guide the bike over the big rocks.

“Is this Malawi or Mozambique?” Hock asked.

“It is having shrines there — sacred groves — and fugitives, and fruit trees. There used to be a mission on the Matundu Hills side, but they ran away. Maybe you can say it is Zambesia. But this is no country at all.”

“No man’s land.”

“No man’s land! Ah-hah!” Manyenga roared. “No man’s land!”

Hock remembered that he’d always seemed like a witty genius to his students in Malabo when they heard him utter a cliché for the first time.

After the streambed they entered higher ground, where the mopane trees were fuller of leaves — greener and taller, and their shade gave the impression of coolness. Sausage trees, too, stood with their bulbous fruit suspended. The birds were bigger and more numerous here, keeping to the upper branches of the trees. Hock knew the starling from its purple feathers, and the gray lourie from its cry: go-away, go-away. In one thicket of yellow-striped bamboo he saw the hanging nests of weaver birds. The leaf mulch crackled under the wheels of the bike; the earth was denser and kept moist by the shade. No dust cloud followed them now, only the blue fumes of the engine.

A small impala bounded away from them, and soon after, at the base of a tamarind tree, a troop of baboons backed away and fled on all fours like dogs, faces forward, using their knuckles for propulsion. Some of his anxiety left him, and Hock was reassured by this more orderly and fertile green Africa of shadows and animals.

Deeper in the bush a dampness softened the air, the whiff of stagnation that was a suggestion of life. A dark green moss like a scouring pad coated some of the big boulders in the shade, and in places boulders blocked the path. They pushed the bike awhile, Manyenga panting, and Hock wondered if this higher ground was part of the Matundu Hills that Manyenga had mentioned.

“So what—?” Hock began.

“The answer is no,” Manyenga said. He laughed, his usual cackle. “What’s the question?”

Who taught him that rude reply? What bullying foreigner said that to him, to sour him and show him how to be mean?

In this higher ground of ridges and sheltering trees, with a film of dampness clinging to the dark overhangs of the empty creekbed, Hock felt he was in another country — at least nowhere near the Lower River; far from Malabo, another zone altogether. He could breathe the air without snorting a hum of dust in his nostrils, and none of the trees looked as if they’d been interfered with — no paths either, not even the tracks of motorcycles. It was odd to see a sunny slope of sand without footprints on it, though in one corner he caught a glimpse of a fat furtive monitor lizard. The land was too stony and steep for a garden, too far from the river or any well to support a village. The heat and mud and scrubby bush and accessible water of the Lower River made it habitable, but these slopes of thick trees and toppled rocks and shade kept people away.

Gaining the top of a ridge, Hock felt the breeze on his sweaty face, as though he’d stuck his head above a fence into a wind. He looked across at what must have been the Matundu Hills, a silhouette of rounded peaks in blue haze. Below was a circular valley, a green bowl of foliage. Behind him, Manyenga was pushing the motorcycle slowly, bumping over tree roots and the protruding knuckles at the base of thick-stemmed bushes.

“Do you see it?” Manyenga asked.

“The valley?”

“The compound.”

“What compound?

All that Hock saw were the smooth sides of the valley and a profusion of bushy treetops, and the word that came to him, because he was so unused to seeing such a lush unspoiled valley, was “uneaten.” He could not see any road in or out, no gardens, no cultivation, nothing dead or burned, only the great bowl of green trees.

“There,” Manyenga said, “that side.”

A glint of silver metal, a glimpse of geometry, a fence; and then he saw it, an enclosure, perfectly square, though some of it was hidden, two of its corners. At this distance it looked like a cage in the form of a playpen, a high fence with some buildings inside it, painted green, blending with the green of the valley, easily mistaken for a symmetrical hillock. But they were houses, and studying them he saw the people, more easily visible than the houses because the people were white.

“ Mzungu, ” Hock said.

“ Azungu, ” Manyenga gasped, correcting him with the plural. He had lit a cigarette and coughed, and panted from having pushed the motorbike up the slope.

“What are they doing there?”

He sucked in smoke and coughed again and bared his teeth for air. He said, “You can ask them, father.”

No road led to the fenced enclosure; the path they used was probably a game trail. Apart from this sturdy camp, no sign of any other human structure was visible — odd in a place that was so fertile-looking, but perhaps not so odd considering how far this valley was from the river and how hard this rocky soil would have been to break with a plow.

“There, that side,” Manyenga said, dropping his voice while pushing the bike, guiding it along the narrow track that was damp enough to keep the prints of animals that had used it: the monkey feet — narrow, with long toes — here and there the hooves of dik-diks, an oblong that might have been a hare’s paw, and clusters of dark grape-sized scat.

Hock had seen Manyenga only as bossy or smilingly manipulative, the brute or the calculator, not as he was now, cautious, stealthy, shy, almost intimidated as he approached the looming chain-link fence that surrounded the three flat-roofed buildings — prefab bungalows, painted green. A garden of purpley-pink bougainvillea near one bungalow was contained in a circle of whitewashed rocks, giving a suburban touch to this forest compound. Beyond the buildings was an open area marked with a large white-painted X on the bare ground, obviously a helipad.

“The helicopter must have come from here.”

“Of course,” Manyenga said. “What do you think?”

“You’ve been here before?”

“I tell you, my friend, I am knowing these people. And they are knowing Festus.”

He was peering through the last of the bush cover, where it had been cleared for the high fence. He was peering through the fence too, which seemed absurdly strong, overbuilt, the sort of fence you’d see at a national frontier, Hock thought, something to keep undesirables out, a steel barrier topped with coils of razor wire.

“They are stupid,” Manyenga said, still studying the fence. “Look at this.”

“What is it, anyway?”

“They are calling it the depot.”

“Where’s the chopper?”

“Maybe making another food drop in the bush somewhere, isn’t it? Because they are having a visit from the big people.”

“That man and woman on the chopper?”

“Famous, I tell you! Big people. Pop stars! You are knowing them.”

“I don’t know them,” Hock said, thinking of the man in the cowboy hat, the blond woman in the catsuit. “My daughter might know them.”

“You can ask her. She will be so happy. Eh! Eh! ‘You have seen the big people in Malawi!’”

As though talking to himself, rehearsing the improbable notion, Hock said, “When I go home, maybe I’ll call my daughter. I’ll tell her where I was. I’ll tell her what I saw.”