08 Safari Adventure (13 page)

Darkness veiled the scene. But suddenly a powerful floodlight was turned on. It illuminated the beach and the edge of the lake. Two busy pigs, a wart-hog, and a Stately waterbuck had already arrived. They looked up into the light. Perhaps they were surprised to see the sun shining at that hour of the night, but they were not frightened. They could not see the balcony and the spectators, for the hotel was now completely dark. They went back to their search for salt.

Four rhinos came on the scene. They eagerly sucked up the salty mud. Others joined them. They quarrelled over the choicest mudholes, pushed and jostled each other, made angry blowing sounds and a peculiar blast that sounded like a loud snore. Their ears went round like radar screens picking up signals. A slight cough of one of the guests sent them galumphing off.

Soon they were back, or others like them, chasing each other, making a puff-puff-puff like a steam locomotive. They also snorted like a horse, but with rhino power instead of horsepower.

Now came the elephants, great lumbering monsters, wading into the lake and throwing water up over their dusty hides, then coming out to insert the delicate tips of their trunks into deep footprints made by the rhinos. There they found salt and conveyed it to their mouths. They blinked now and then at the floodlight but evidently took it for the moon or for a sun that had forgotten to set.

Unlike the hot-tempered rhinos, the elephants did not interfere with each other. And when a baby elephant poked its trunk into a hole already being explored by an adult, the big one let the little fellow have it.

Five shaggy buffaloes now came on the stage and they proved as hot-tempered as the rhinos. Soon the beach was a battlefield where the weapons were rhino horns against the harder, sharper horns of the buffaloes, and the night resounded with their grunting and trumpeting.

The elephants didn’t like the squabble and finally all joined in a screaming charge that sent the misbehavers flying into the forest.

A giraffe came out to drink. He had to spread his legs far apart to get his head down to the water. The lake was surrounded now by graceful antelopes of many sorts; impalas, Tommies, Grant’s, kudu, waterbuck, and klip-springer. These charming and dainty animals took care not to get under the feet of the monsters.

‘Look. There they come,’ whispered Roger.

The visitors both boys had been eagerly waiting for slipped out of the forest into the light. They were the colobus monkeys. What lovely creatures they were with their white-ringed faces, their rich silky fur and magnificent white tails! No wonder they were so loved by fashionable ladies that they were being slaughtered at the rate of more than ten thousand a month.

Roger strained his eyes. Was his friend among them? He borrowed a pair of binoculars from Geoffrey.

Yes - there was no mistake about it - he could make out on the neck of one of them a line where the wire noose had rubbed away the fur and cut into the flesh.

The trusting creature he had held on his lap seemed to be equally happy with its new friends. Roger felt a pang of jealousy but was instantly ashamed of it. The pretty creature that might have made such a good pet was where it belonged, with others of its own sort, and among the great trees it loved.

The boys kept vigil most of the night - then returned to their cots to dream of what they had seen.

At breakfast Hal said to Geoffrey, ‘What a wonderful idea it was - to build a treehouse over this pool.’

Geoffrey agreed. ‘Only a person with a good imagination would have thought of it. It was a woman, you know. A certain Lady Bettie Walker came here with friends long before this was made a National Park. She had been reading Swiss Family Robinson. You remember, the treehouse described in that book. That gave her the idea for Treetops. It seemed a crazy idea to some of her friends.’

‘Crazy or not, it’s great. I hate to leave but we’d better begetting along. We have a big day ahead.’

Back to the plane and the patient okapi, nibbling a leafy breakfast. The flight over the great lion country of the Serengeti Plain to Mwanza on the south shore of Lake Victoria took two hours.

There, Hal chartered the only craft available, a clumsy raft with a wheezy outboard motor, and set out on the fifteen-hour passage to Rubondo I sland.

Warden Crosby’s prediction that there would be five storms during the fifteen hours proved wrong. There was only one storm - but it lasted fifteen hours.

A strong north wind sweeping down the 250-mile length of the mighty lake brought big waves that washed across the raft, sousing boys and okapi alike. The boys were not allowed to forget that among all the freshwater lakes of the world only Superior is greater than Victoria. This lake deserved to be named after England’s great queen and had all the majesty one had a right to expect of the source of the mighty Nile.

The okapi had certainly never made such a trip before and whinnied his strong disapproval. The constant tossing of the raft made the animal seasick and up came the leaves. The cage had been firmly lashed to the logs, yet the force of the waves against it seemed about to tear it loose at any moment.

Victoria is a lake of hidden reefs, lying just below the surface. Time and again the raft stumbled to a halt on a sand-bar. Sometimes reversing the engine would back it off. Sometimes this was not good enough and the boys must jump off and push the raft free. If on these occasions a six-foot wave came along and completely buried you, that was just part of the game.

One must keep a sharp look out for the crocodiles and hippos that infest the lake. Several times there was a wild scramble back on to the logs as the swish of a great tail signalled the approach of a croc. The hippos did not like the storm water and lurked in the lee of small islands. Not being carnivores, they preferred reeds to humans as their diet - nevertheless they were dangerous as the boys found out when one came up beneath the raft, hoisting it three feet into the air before it slid off edgewise into the water. Whether the great beast performed this feat just for fun, or with evil intent, the navigators did not stop to ask. They merely congratulated themselves that the raft had not been turned upside down.

The troubles of the day became a nightmare as darkness settled on the wild waters of the lake. A light far ahead marked Rubondo I sland. Sometimes it disappeared entirely behind rain and mist. Then only guess-work steered the raft. After a time the light would reappear off one quarter or the other and the course could be corrected.

Three exhausted sailors finally brought their craft into a fairly quiet cove of Rubondo and heard a welcoming shout from the wharf.

The warden, who introduced himself with ‘Just call me Tony’, helped them put the cage ashore. ‘What have you got in there?’

‘An okapi.’

‘Wonderful. Male or female?’

It seemed an odd question. What did it matter?

‘Male,’ Hal said.

‘Good. We have just one okapi on the island and it’s a female. Now we have a chance of breeding more. Mighty rare animal, the okapi. You can be sure we’ll handle this one with kid gloves. Wait till I get a towel.’

He ran to his small rustic cabin and came back with a towel. It was not for the shivering boys, but to dry the precious okapi. The cage was cautiously opened and the animal brought out on to the wharf.

Tony went over every inch of the hide with the towel, rubbing briskly to stimulate circulation. ‘There - he’ll do,’ said Tony finally.

‘Should we feed him?’ said Hal.

‘No need. He can’t go ten feet in these woods without finding food. And as for water, he has a whole lake of

it’

‘So we just let him go?’ inquired Roger, always sorry

to lose a pet.

“That’s the best thing for him. Just let him make his own way. He’ll be pretty safe. He has no enemies on this island - no lions, leopards, or poachers. A good many rhinos have been brought here for safe keeping, but they won’t bother your okapi. This is as close to heaven as any okapi will ever get.’

The okapi was already eagerly moving off into his heaven.

Hal had a pang of regret as he saw ten thousand dollars walking away. He and Roger had been sent to Africa to get animals for their animal-collector father who would then sell them to zoos. It seemed a pity to lose this one. But Hal was aware that few okapi had ever survived the journey to America. The important thing right now was not to capture an animal or two for their father, but to do everything possible to stop the killing of the thousands of animals of East Africa. In the long run that would do more for their business of animal-collecting than anything else they could do.

‘Now,’ said Tony, ‘come along to the cabin. It’s your turn to get dry - and you must be starved.’

The night was half gone before the boys were dried, fed and bunked in Tony’s cabin.

Roger was asleep in two minutes. Hal lay awake a little longer, worrying about the trip back - fifteen hours over the stormy lake, then two hours by plane. Impossible to get to Tsavo before dark. Impossible to come down on that tiny landing strip after dark.

Then he slept and did not wake until roused by the sizzle and smell of bacon and eggs. Tony had some good news for him.

‘I’m going to take you back to Mwanza in our launch. It will cut the time from fifteen hours down to seven. The boys can take the raft back later. There’s just one condition.’

‘What’s that?’

“That you give me a lift to Tsavo. I have some matters to discuss with Crosby - about a shipment of four rhinos to Rubondo.’

The hundred-mile dash to Mwanza by launch was pure joy compared with the painful and dangerous voyage by raft. By mid-afternoon they were aboard the Stork and flying again over the mysterious Serengeti Plain.

‘See that deep cut in the plain? Looks like the Grand Canyon. Fly low over it.’

Hal flew low. He was trying to remember what he had heard about this canyon.

‘Is it Olduvai Gorge?’

Tony turned to him in surprise. ‘So, you know about Dr Leakey. With luck, we may see him and his crew at work.’

Hal followed the twists and turns of the gorge. Then suddenly, straight below, could be seen a group of men at the bottom of the gorge digging into the rock wall.

The whirr of the plane made them look up. They waved and Tony waved back. Then they were left behind. It had been only a moment, but a moment Hal would always remember. For that single glance had carried his imagination back two million years.

Roger, who had never heard of Olduvai, was not impressed.

‘What’s so wonderful about that hole in the ground?’ he wanted to know.

Tony explained. ‘This archaeologist, Dr Leakey, has been digging there for several years. He had found the fossil bones of men who lived two million years ago. Those are the oldest human bones that have ever been discovered anywhere in the world.’

‘How can they tell they’re that old?’

‘A chemical test. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Carbon 14 test. That’s been used for a long time - the only trouble with it is that it can’t tell the age of anything more than fifty thousand years old. But there’s a new method now, the potassium-argon test. With that they can go back millions of years.’

‘And this two-million-year-old man - was he like man today?’

‘Apparently he was. Dr Leakey has found the bones of sixteen men. They were all pretty much like ours, but with some differences. Those men were only about four feet tall. Their thumbs and fingers were not as well adapted as ours for picking things up and holding them. Still they could use tools - some of their stone tools were found. The weight of these men was only about half the weight of modern man - five stone five pounds instead of ten stone ten. The weight of the brain was only one pound. Modern man’s brain weight is about three pounds. So, you see, man really has improved a bit during the last two million years.’

‘The thing that strikes me as remarkable,’ said Hal, ‘is that we have lasted that long. Think of all the animals that have died out during that time - the mastodon, brontosaurus, diplodocus, dodo, quagga, moa, and hundreds of others. AH gone. And we go merrily along - not only still living, but multiplying to beat the band.’

‘Multiplying too fast,’ Tony said. ‘And the faster we multiply, the faster we push the remaining animals off the planet. We, seem to think we own everything. How about our fellow-animals - don’t they have any rights?’

They passed over one of the greatest of the world’s craters, with one of the strangest of names, Ngorongoro. The volcanic fires had long since died out. The surrounding rim of the crater stood up like a wall two thousand five hundred feet above the crater floor. The floor was a lush green expanse of a hundred and fifty square miles, dotted with woods and meadows and lakes and swarming with animals.

‘Lots of life here,’ Roger remarked.

‘Yes, but what kind of life? Let’s get down a little closer.’

Flying lower, they could see dozens of lions, elephants, rhinos - but most of the room was taken up by thousands upon thousands of cattle tended by tall, bare Masai herdsmen.

‘This is the beginning of the end of this heaven for wild animals,’ Tony said. ‘It used to be reserved for them. But now the Masai have invaded it and their cattle are crowding out the wild life. The Masai have no need for so many cattle - they keep them just to show off. The same thing is happening in the national parks, even in Tsavo. Herds of bony, scrawny, worthless cattle are driving out the wild life.’

The crater was left behind and Lake Manyara appeared - a curiously pink lake, for on its surface rested millions of pink flamingoes.

‘At least the lake is safe from the cattle,’ said Hal.

‘Yes, but the flamingoes are having a different kind of problem. This lake has become very salty. The salt hardens on the flamingoes’ legs and makes great heavy balls three or four inches thick so that the birds cannot walk or fly. They starve to death by the tens of thousands.’

‘Is anything being done about it?’

‘Something fine is being done. See all those African youngsters down there wading among the flamingoes? They have been trained to save the birds by breaking up the ball of salt with a hammer so that the leg is once more clean and free.’