Eric McCormack - Cloud

I WAS FASCINATED by the passengers who got on and off at their villages along the way. Their smooth, dark complexions were noticeably free of the pimples, boils, and pockmarks of slum dwellers. The women, in their vivid floral dresses, were especially beautiful. When they spoke and laughed, their words sounded like a strange poetry.

The layout of most of the villages, aside from the fact that they were built in clearings in the middle of a vast forest, wasn’t all that different from the little Upland towns. In the centre of each village was the market where the spear makers, bakers, potters, and meat sellers displayed their wares. Also in this main area was a sort of high street with the compounds of chiefs and various members of their council. The less important people lived in smaller huts at the edges of the village where the jungle began, so, according to Dupont, they were easier prey for lions, wild boars, black mambas, and a host of other creatures much more deadly than those in the Uplands.

The flimsiness of the buildings surprised me at first — their walls were made of bamboo with slats you could see right through. Dupont pointed out that the climate here required that houses have as much ventilation as possible. Still, those slats in the walls didn’t allow them much in the way of privacy, in our Western sense.

“Maybe they have fewer secrets than those of us brought up in brick dwellings,” Dupont said. “Or maybe they have different kinds of secrets from us. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what those might be?”

Around noon, while I drowsed on, the truck halted for a while and a fire was built to enable our fellow passengers to cook their lunches. When I smelled roasted meat, I began to feel hungry and looked over the edge of the truck. The passengers and drivers were sitting around the fire holding individual bamboo skewers.

Impaled on each skewer was the roasted body of a tiny baby, complete with all its limbs.

Dupont saw I was aghast.

“They’re not what you think,” he said. “They’re actually little tree monkeys. They do look quite human though, don’t they? They’re supposed to be very tasty.”

The sight of the others stripping the meat from the tiny bodies as though they were chickens, together with the crunching noise of teeth on the little finger bones — these things became too much for me. I climbed out of the truck and, in a bush nearby, allowed myself to be sick. When I came back, Dupont gave me a little talk on the proper attitude of a wise traveller.

“You must understand, Harry, that these people aren’t violating some universal code of ethics by eating different foods from us,” he said. “Some travellers refuse to accept the basic dietary fact that, like it or not, we all have to eat other living organisms to survive. It’s pure chance whether you’re born in a place that eats pigs or one that prefers monkeys — rather than kale and porridge, as I suppose you did in Scotland.”

I didn’t like being lumped in with narrow-minded travellers. So although the idea of eating little monkeys was nauseating, I didn’t argue with him.

We now emerged from that area of heavy jungle onto a red dirt road that led us into a much more open landscape. It consisted of head-high thorn bushes and clusters of narrow-leaved gum trees on endless stretches of grass.

“We’re getting nearer the desert,” said Dupont.

Even in these less confined spaces, however, things were not always as they seemed.

For example, several times, what appeared to be carpets of fallen leaves on the road ahead would leap into life as the truck approached — the leaves were actually huge swarms of locusts, basking in the sun after their ravages.

The most remarkable instance occurred when the road— which was really just the ghostly trace left by previous vehicles on the red dirt — was taking us through an area full of blackened gum-tree stumps, the remnants of some past inferno. Dupont pointed out what looked like boulders standing precariously on top of some of the stumps.

These boulders matched the surroundings so well that I hadn’t even noticed them. But now that he’d brought them to my attention, I assumed they must have been put there by local tribes for some ritualistic purpose.

Dupont shook his head.

“Watch this,” he said, and asked the driver to stop the truck for a moment.

He got out, picked up a pebble at the roadside, and threw it in the direction of one of those stumps. Immediately, the boulder on top metamorphosed into a bird, sprouting heavy brown wings and taking off into the air with furious squawks.

Dupont then threw stones at other boulders, all of which turned out to be perching birds. They milled around in the air, protesting angrily.

Dupont got back in the truck.

“They’re called nightjars,” he told me.

The truck had barely got underway again when the birds settled back on their stumps, becoming inconspicuous once more.

“During the daytime, they’re so immobile against their background you’d never know they were living things,” said Dupont.

Even then, for some reason, witnessing these transformations filled me with a sense of foreboding. I told Dupont so.

“Probably there are human beings with the same talent,” he said.

Neither of us could have had any inkling of the ominous significance those words would have in a far-off day, in a distant hemisphere.

DUPONT WAS well known in some of the villages, having visited them on his previous trips. He was able to get by in pidgin and in several of the native languages. The chief or the shaman would sometimes come to greet him, having heard by means of the drum-telegraph that he was passing through. They’d fawn over him and beg him to use his alien magic on their behalf.

We stopped for a brief clinic at one of these grasslands villages. Dupont had told me I’d see someone of interest there, but wouldn’t say more.

“It’s a surprise,” he said.

From a hut near where the truck stopped, a man and several women came to greet us. The man was tall and thin, with big sad eyes. But what astonished me about him was this: he had a wispy grey beard divided in two parts, adorned at the points with green beads and little silver bells.

“I wanted you to see where I got the idea,” said Dupont, smiling and fingering his own beard. “This man’s the tribe’s shaman — their medicine man — and I’m our medicine man, so why not?”

He went to the tall man and shook his hand. They chatted in a strange language for a moment, their bells jingling as they talked. Dupont turned to me.

“Apparently almost everyone’s out harvesting crops, so there won’t be any need for a clinic this visit,” he said. “But there’s a woman who’s just given birth to her first baby in this hut — it’s the maternity hut — and he’s about to perform the initiatory rite. I’m going in to watch. Do you want to come along? I guarantee it’ll be quite educational.”

Knowing Dupont as I did by now, I tended to be cautious when he said something like that. He saw what I was thinking.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not as if they’re going to offer us anything weird to eat.”

Though I was feeling a little dizzy, I agreed to go with him. We all proceeded — the shaman, the women, Dupont, and I— into the hut.

THE MATERNITY hut was large and airy. Some other female villagers were already there, standing around a rattan mat on the floor. They made room for the shaman. One of them tied an elaborate multicoloured cloak around him.

On the rattan mat lay a naked woman with swollen breasts. The baby she’d just delivered was being held by an onlooker, who rocked it gently in her arms and crooned to it. The little body was streaked in blood and slime.