Sand rivers Read online

  Knowing that Hugo and I resisted all this burning, Brian spoke impatiently about the views of a certain ecologist who believed that the annual burning as practised in Nicholson's day would eventually transform that part of the Selous into a desert, since fire turns the soil surface to hardpan by burning off the thin layer of humus until only acacia and other thorny inhabitants of arid bush are able to penetrate to the moisture below. "As a scientist, he has to come up with a theory, and he'll find facts to fit that theory," Brian said. In his opinion, quick "cold" fires set not long after the rains, when the conflagration was limited by lack of fuel, encouraged fresh growth without harm to the soil; what did real damage was setting "hot" fires too late in the dry season, when a great mass of accumulated dry grass, stalky brush, and deadwood caused deep burning.

  In most places, in any case, there was no humus to burn. The pale ferralitic soils of this central plateau were derived from weathered sands of quartz and granite, which derived in turn from the ancient pre-Cambrian rocks of the African shield; leached out by millions of years of sun and tropic rains, they had become acid and infertile, and the glades of rank savanna grass in shallow valleys and in the water-logged valley bottoms called mbugas produced poor forage; where drainage was poor, the mbugas turned to clay known as "black cotton", which cracked wide open in the dry season and swelled into heavy morass during the rains.

  PETER MATTHIESSEN

  These poor soils without nutrients, together with the tsetse fly, discouraged permanent human habitation, which is why this vast wilderness had survived into historic times unchanged by man.

  Nevertheless, as Brian said, man created the miombo, which depended upon his fires to survive; without fire, miombo rapidly reverted to a dense thicket. Alan Rodgers agreed that the miombo was a recent habitat type, no older than the last pluvial period, perhaps 12,000 years ago, in the lost centuries when the first bush fires were set - accidentally, perhaps - by the early hunters. The use of fire as a hunting tool is very ancient, and its constant use in this uncompromising climate, where the dry season extends almost unbroken for more than half of every year, led eventually to the ascension of fire-resistant hardwoods - in this region, airy, graceful, thornless trees, well-spaced and of fair size, belonging mostly to such characteristic genera as Brachystegia and Julbernardia. This open savanna woodland is the most characteristic aspect of the Selous.

  Throughout most of its considerable extent elsewhere in Tanzania, and in Mozambique, Zambia, Zaire, Angola, and Zimbabwe, the miombo is flat, dry, and monotonous, a seemingly limitless scrub waste without landmarks or water or other relief for the oppressed eye. Because of the low water table across most of this African plateau, there is little grass regeneration after fires, and the aspect of most of the miombo, with its blackened ground and burnt small leafless trees, its humid heat and drought and tsetse, under heavy skies, is immensely oppressive. In typical miombo, birds and animals are few, not only in species but in numbers, although the sable antelope and Lichtenstein's hartebeest have developed as endemic miombo species, and the roan antelope and bush duiker are more common in this habitat than any other. All these antelope are well adapted to long grass and to browsing; the buffalo, elephant, eland, impala, wart hog, wildebeest, and zebra, all of which are fond of short-grass grazing, are only found in the miombo in small numbers. In the Selous, however, there is considerable variation in land form as well as habitat and also an abundance of good water; even toward the end of the seven-month drought there is no point more than six miles from permanent water. As a result - or so 1 had read, so 1 had heard - the fauna of the Selous is probably more diverse and more abundant than in any comparable area of Africa.

  In the deep woods not far south of the crossroads sat a Bedford truck all but split in two by the pterocarpus tree it had encountered at high speed on this rough track (so rough, in fact, that more than once, we had got out and poked about on foot in order to find it). In silence, Brian Nicholson in his floppy hat, cigarette holder clenched between his teeth, walked all the way round the defunct truck, which had "Selous Game Reserve" painted on the door. He got back into his Land Rover before speaking. "The last time 1 saw this truck was in Dar, in 1973," he said at

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  last. "Brand new that day, and it was nearly brand new when they did this to it, in July of that same year, just before I got fed up and packed it in. Before I left, 1 gave explicit orders to have this lorry recovered; haven't got around to it yet, apparently. Look at that motor, and the tires; still perfectly good." He turned away. "This is where all the aid money goeS; you give them millions, and this is what they do with it. You should have seen my road grader after just three months,- if you'd hired an expert, you couldn't do that much damage!" I thought about the machine-shop-cum-garage 1 had seen at Kingupira, all the abandoned vehicles, the rusting parts left out in the rain and sun, and no sign whatsoever of activity. It wasn't for lack of good African mechanics - Renatus was very good indeed, and so was Charles Mdedo of Rick Bonham's staff, and Brian boasted of the mechanics he had had in the Selous. No, it was the absence of responsible direction, the absence of purpo§e, Brian felt, that had caused the good mechanics to depart. Seeing his face, I could guess what he was feeling: the splayed truck, with its title on the door, represented twenty years of wasted effort.

  Not far beyond the dead truck, on a hillside, there were kudu - a bull and four cows and two young, bounding along a barrier of silver deadwood at the edge of the wood. Safe in the dappled sunlight of the trees, the big animals turned to look as one of the calves began to suckle; then these shades of silver brown seemed to evaporate into the shifting light.

  At Tanda ya Nyama (Animal Pool) open-bills and saddlebills, herons, sandpipers, and plovers had gathered, and a male jacana with the powder blue brow of the breeding season led his hen across the water lettuce on long spidery toes. A small hippo clan of a dozen fatty heads observed man carefully as he ate his lunch, and serenaded the Land Rovers with a vast rumpus as we departed once again, heading south into red rock hills with broad prospects of the Mahoko Mountains.

  In the afternoon I rode with Karen Ross, and drove her Land Rover. The feel of bush driving came back to me quickly, the ceaseless gear shifting, the easing over humps and trenches, potholes and stone rivers, the bundu-bashing through the trees where a track is blocked, the bucking climbs up steep eroded banks; to minimize the jolts and the crude grinding protest of the car, a certain deftness is required, especially if the passengers, with no steering wheel to cling to, are to be spared.

  One of the passengers was Mzee Nzui, our magisterial cook, whose gat teeth in a pale, clean-featured Kamba face made him look less African than Mongol. Nzui's quiet economy of motion, his serenity, even the simple efficiency of his kitchen - the sapling rack covered with green fronds that is used for drying pots and dishes, the wooden hook for moving kettles on and off the fire, the long neat ash bed of the fire itself - reminded me of another Kamba cook named Kimunginye, who in 1970 was cook on a safari which I accompanied to the Northern Frontier

  PETER MATTHIESSEN

  District and Lake Turkana. When Karen asked him if he had ever known Kimunginye, Mzee Nzui's face broke wide with surprise and pleasure; not only was Kimunginye his friend, he was the brother of Mzee Nzui's wife!

  Karen was firm and easy with the Africans; she enjoyed their company and sat with them and laughed with them and talked in the same soft flowing way that they do. Therefore they liked her and respected her, especially Mzee Nzui, who could be peremptory and stern in the way he ran his kitchen, and once reprimanded her for trying to hurry supper. Nzui said, "You do me an injustice, Memsahib. I must go at my own pace." But most of the time he gazed upon her with forthright affection, and his feelings were shared by the others on the staff.

  Even Charles Mdedo, a sophisticated city man who worked ordinarily for Cooper Motors in Mombasa and might have been expected to resent any criticism from a white woman, gave way to her that afternoon without
the smallest rudeness or resistance. Though a competent mechanic, Charles was not used to makeshift repairs out in the bush, and tended to panic without all the equipment and spare parts of a well-equipped garage; that day he was riding in the Land Rover driven by Robin Pope when it broke down, and he promptly announced that the clutch was shot before having a good look at it. By the time we came up, Hugo's mechanic, the gentle Chagga mission boy Renatus, had scrambled eagerly beneath the Land Rover, and now he emerged with a big smile and the good news that the problem was nothing more than a bleeding nut that had vibrated loose, causing the transmission fluid to run out. When Charles denounced Renatus's diagnosis harshly and sarcastically, Karen stepped in very quickly, saying, "Oh, come on, Charles, pole pole" - take it easy - and Charles instantly subsided.

  Renatus, shamed by the rebuke, stood by the car with his head sunk on his chest. But Renatus turned out to be right, and a few days afterward, when Hugo's Land Rover caught fire - a spark ignited the gasoline with which Renatus was cleaning the engine - Charles was the first to run to Renatus's aid, despite the risk of explosion and serious injury, and was also seen to comfort Renatus later. Putting aside his status and prestige as a mechanic, Charles also helped out cheerfully in the kitchen, even waited at table, and this willing attitude, like his acquiescence to Karen Ross, had nothing to do with subservience or eagerness to please.

  Karen Ross is a handsome graceful girl whose father, born Finn Miller Rosbjerg, ran away from home in Denmark and eventually became a naturalized British citizen, changing his name to "Ross" before his marriage. During the Mau Mau days, he read a newspaper article about the murder of a farm manager near Nanyuki and, on impulse, wrote to the farm's owner offering himself as a replacement, provided that his journey out to Africa was paid for. Under the circumstances, he had no competition for the post and his offer was accepted. Upon arrival he sent

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  his young English wife a photograph of the pretty farmhouse, and she agreed to join him, only to find that where they were to live was not the main house at all but the dead man's cottage, a scruffy two-room place with bloodstains all over the floor. Eventually, Ross got his own farm in the Aberdares, and when this was appropriated by the Kikuyu at the time of Independence, he bought a second at Nakuru. "When I was a child," Karen said in her soft voice, "we had lots of animals there, buffalo and elephant and leopard, and I loved the animals and the bush. For a while I thought 1 might become a vet, but later 1 turned back to the wild animals. I'm a bush girl, though my family weren't safari people, but I don't think I really appreciated Africa until I was sent away to school in England. I went wild back there, they thought I was some sort of jungle creature. Used to eat up the headmistress's roses, and disappear up trees." In September Karen was to return to Europe to complete her studies at the University of Edinburgh; she hoped to do her thesis on the ecology of Shimba Hills, south of Mombasa, a small game reserve where the only sable left in Kenya still may be found.

  More kudu were seen, in fleeting glimpses; buffalo and elephant sign was abundant on the track, and also the big heart-shaped prints of sable. From the southern distance, under odd round^topped hills, rose the white shine of broad sand rivers, then the glint of water as the gray and ghostly stubble of the miombo scrub high on the ridges turned into fresh red, green, and copper woods. Where the track descended the last slope of the rivers, the woods on both sides were littered with fresh buffalo dung. At the bottom of the hill, by the ruin of the abandoned Mkangira game post, Brian and Melva Nicholson sat in their Land Rover, gazing out over the confluence of the Mbarangandu and Luwegu rivers, and Karen and I also stopped to contemplate one of the loveliest views that we had seen in Africa.

  The Mbarangandu rounds its final bend under steep bluffs on this north side, where the ridges level out on to the plain; on the south side, across the river, lie grass banks and brakes, then open woodland that soon begins to climb into the hills that separate the Mbarangandu from the Luwegu. Seen from here, the Luwegu scarcely curves, seeming to fall straight out of the southwest as if it had descended without bends the entire one hundred and fifty miles from its headwaters east of Songa. (In fact, however, as we saw one day on an air survey made in the supply plane, the Luwegu flows first in a northerly direction, then east, coming swiftly down out of spectacular gorges in the Irawalla region of the Mbarika Mountains and carving broad bends almost all the way to its great junction with the Mbarangandu, where it turns north again toward Shuguli Falls.)

  On broad deltas of white sand numerous water birds flew back and forth about their business, and bands of waterbuck lay on the margins like the tame and stately park deer of old paintings. Beyond the tall

  PETER MATTHIESSEN

  borassus palms on the far side of the shining waters and white sands rise the blue hills: from this place, the Reserve extends more than one hundred miles to the southwest beyond those Mbarika Mountains, but there were no tracks beyond this point of rivers.

  "This is the first time I have ever come here and not seen elephants from this spot," Brian said mildly, complaining out of habit now, with a kind of perverse satisfaction. But he had seen a large buffalo herd as it crossed the track, and a cursory scan with my binoculars turned up two separate groups of elephant.

  At our Mkangira camp, which was a half mile further down on the Luwegu River, Rick Bonham reported a good number of elephant and buffalo, and although Brian did his utmost to conceal it, it was plain that he was happy and excited. "Tea ready, Melva?" He knew this camp site from the past, and while the tea was being prepared, he showed Sandy where she might bathe in safety behind silvered river logs that would protect her from the crocodiles.

  Filthy with dust and humid sweat, caked with insecticides from the long days in the tsetse woods, we sank down happily in the warm shallows. Sandpipers, skimmers, plovers, and kingfishers moved up and down the brown Luwegu, hippos disported in two different herds within sight of camp, and yellow crocodile and sunset-red impala shared the alluvial edge across the river.

  "Where's my tea? Fulfil your wifely duties, Melva!"

  "'Tea ready, Melva?'" Melva said. "That's all he ever says when he comes home! 'Tea ready?'"

  "Just trying to be sociable, Melva."

  And when Melva had served him "a nice cup of tea", the Warden stretched out in his camp chair with the greatest satisfaction, a rare grin breaking out upon his face: "You're a long way from anywhere now, I can tell you! The Selous is the finest wildlife habitat in Africa, and the Mbarangandu is the heart of it!"

  Before sunset, the diurnal birds were still; only the fish-tailed drongo was still flying. The water dikkop sang its sad, descending song of twilight, and nightjars left their camouflage of bark and leaves to settle on the warm sand of the tracks. At dusk, the tiny scops owl began its trilling, and toward midnight, a fishing owl at the water's edge, not far upriver, gave a strange, low, lugubrious grunt that was heard occasionally throughout the night, though after two days of human presence this shy bird must have gone away, for it was not heard again.

  VII

  At sunrise, a pair of big male hippos squared off in the river just in front of camp, as airy skimmers hfted along over their fevered brows. One contestant was dark brown, the other flesh-colored. 1 favored Old Brown over Big Pink (who looked new and raw, and a bit vulgar) although I sensed that Brown was going to lose; as in mankind, it is ordinarily the weaker individual that makes most of the noise, in Brown's case a cacophony of fearful groans and blarts and roars and grumbling, interspersed with deep watery gurgles. On the far bank, a yellow crocodile lay nerveless as the dead, coldly oblivious of all this hippo nonsense, as a pair of small falcons - African hobbies - watched for big flying insects from their high perch in a dead tree, and a few impala, hind legs kicking nervously, stepped discreetly to the water's edge, and wandered away again. The hippos hurled waves of water at each other, bluffed and skirmished, huge mouths wide, then sank from sight, perhaps to make the other nervous. But each time
Old Brown went down, he surfaced again a little further off, or faced ever so slightly the wrong way, as if something upriver had captured his attention; he appeared to be giving signals that, for all of his continuing uproar, he had lost interest in leadership and might abdicate gracefully if young Pink, stout fellow, would not hold out for total victory, would not insist on driving his old boss out of the herd. Now both hippos sank again, the river flowed on; somewhere below, 1 thought. Old Brown was considering a surfacing maneuver that would bring his hind end into play, thus confronting his

  PETER MATTHIESSEN

  opponent with a delicate ethical decision as well as a big faccful of manure. The titanic argument went on for several days, until the night when something huge, presumably Old Brown, came running through the camp with thunderous blows of big round feet. The next day, when Big Pink led the herd a short distance upriver. Old Brown was left alone, still and silent as a rock in the sinking river.

  In early September, Brian and I intended to head up the Luwegu, crossing over eventually to the Mbarangandu. The rivers were still very high, for the dry season came late, but if the Mbarangandu subsided enough in the next fortnight to permit Land Rovers to travel on the exposed sands, Rick Bonham would try to come upriver, bringing supplies, which would permit us to explore still further south; if there was no sign of him, we should return downriver.

  To get a rough idea how far a vehicle might get, we took a Land Rover upriver that afternoon, accompanied by Simon, one of the young Ngindo recruited at Kingupira; the other Ngindo were working hard to restore the Mkangira airstrip under the direction of Bakiri Mnungu. Simon was smart, able, and willing, and Rick described to Brian and me how a few nights before when the truck had got mired on the way down here, the rest of the crew had been satisfied with some makeshift preparations to extract it, but Simon had said, "No. If we're going to do a job, let's finish it properly!" Brian grunted, in mild disbelief. "When you find a chap with that attitude, you don't let go of him," Rick said. "I'm going to try to take him back to Kenya."