Wild Spirit (8 page)

Win was immediately suspicious, in view of their earlier comments. He walked down to the stern to investigate and found that only two of the four outboards were operating. I watched from a distance, but said nothing. This would be his first test of authority. He looked each of them in the
eyes, grinned widely, and indicated that he wanted the two idle motors to be restarted. The
pinnassiers
' expressions fell as they moved slowly across to the starter levers. With a single pull, each motor turned over perfectly, and the barge picked up speed again. The
pinnassiers
retired to the bow looking sheepish and remained silent for the rest of the trip. Win had negotiated his first hurdle, and we were spared a cold night on the river. We could only guess at what lay behind their actions. In time we would learn the truth.

It was almost seven-thirty and dark when we arrived at Mayebut. Kruger's estimate had been close – the trip had taken over ten hours. As the barge edged slowly onto the bank, flickering light from cooking fires dimly lit the dilapidated huts in the village. A couple of skinny dogs roamed around, and a baby cried somewhere.

Despite the incident during the afternoon, we shook hands with the
pinnassiers
and thanked them, then Win edged the Kombi slowly down the ramps and onto the bank. Libreville seemed a world away already. No moon lit the forest, and night sounds surrounded us. We climbed in, took deep breaths, and set out on the long drive up the mountain.

Cocooned in the Kombi, we tackled the steep ascent of the mountain. I had never felt more alert. My mind jostled with images of wildlife, men in hard hats, women building mud huts, and the welcoming warmth of the fireplace in the guesthouse.

Our life for the next six months would be played out in a minuscule clearing in the jungle just two hours from the Congo border, immersed in an unfamiliar culture and reliant on two-way radio for our only regular contact with the outside world. I believed I could handle it, but I couldn't be certain. I had nothing to go on but blind faith and my confidence that together, Win and I were capable of tackling almost anything.

Tiny brown shapes flitted across in front of us in the headlights. ‘Bats,' Win murmured. ‘Those lovely little fawn ones.' Moist branches and giant ferns slapped against the windows, and the sweet earthy smell of the forest came to us on the cold night air. The Kombi laboured under its load up the steep inclines and Win drove cautiously, ready
to brake if an animal darted out ahead of us. It was after eight-thirty when we rounded the last bend and the guesthouse came into view, flooded with light.

Mario strode out. ‘You made it! Come on in – we've waited dinner for you.' There was no time to reflect on the challenges ahead, as the guesthouse was crowded with new faces.

‘Annette and Win, meet the surveyors, Nigel, Andy, Colin and John!' The four men, all in their twenties, had been in camp just four days. The team leader, Nigel, with red hair and a ruddy complexion, came from Newcastle-on-Tyne; Andy was a tall, stocky, fair-haired Yorkshireman; Colin came from Scotland; and John was from southern England. Only Andy spoke any French.

‘I see you've already made the acquaintance of the
fourreaux
,' I quipped, looking at the livid insect bites covering their forearms.

‘Yeah, they're driving us nuts,' Andy grimaced.

‘Sorry to have held you up,' Win said. ‘The barge trip took over ten hours, and we'd still have been out on the river if I hadn't noticed the
pinnassiers
had cut two of the outboards while we were asleep.' We didn't know it then, but the
pinnassiers
regularly worked small rackets on these journeys if the opportunity arose. A favourite was selling off small quantities of the company's fuel to people in the riverside villages to power the outboards on their miniature pirogues; afterwards they would top up the 200-litre fuel drums with muddy river water. There appeared to be no way of stopping it. We could only speculate, but this informal village commerce may have been the reason behind their ploy to spend a night on the river.

During dinner, I sensed an atmosphere of unease
around the table, and it didn't take me long to work out why. Partly, it was the language barrier: Mario and the surveyors could barely communicate with one another. Also, the surveyors had been unable to do any work – all their equipment was still in transit from England, and there was no vehicle for them to use until the new mechanic arrived and could fix up an old Land Rover for them. To cap things off, their living quarters still weren't finished. They had bedrooms, but no toilets or showers, so they had to share the one in the guesthouse with Mario. They'd spent their first four days playing cards, listening to football on the radio and trying to escape the
fourreaux
. They had nowhere to relax but in the guesthouse, which wasn't designed for so many people. It hadn't been a promising start. It was little wonder everyone was edgy.

It struck me then that the project timetable seemed out of kilter: the surveyors' arrival should have been put off until things were ready for them. But I had a lot to learn about remote Africa.

Before bed, Mario had some exciting news: ‘We have a distinguished visitor arriving tomorrow – Peter Telfair, the managing geologist from the old days. He'll stay overnight.' I looked forward to meeting him. It would give me an opportunity to learn some more of the camp's history.

 

Win had parked the Kombi near the old sample shed, close by the guesthouse, where we could use the bathroom. In the morning, we erected the canvas annexe to give ourselves some privacy and somewhere to dress and undress standing up.

After breakfast we had the camp to ourselves. Mario was at the
débarcadère
waiting to meet Peter from the morning
pirogue, and the labourers were out in the forest cutting survey lines – narrow swathes through the underbrush to give the surveyors straight lines of sight for their measurements. The lull in activity gave us a perfect opportunity to explore the parts of the camp we hadn't seen before.

The day was hot and steamy with little cloud. We set off on foot, taking the dirt road past the surveyors' quarters and beyond, to the site of the old expatriate houses. The area had been cleared in the 1960s, but the vegetation had since grown back, and shoulder-high grass covered much of the ground. We pushed our way through it and came to the remains of the houses – bamboo structures rotting in the sun. The thatched roofs had partially collapsed, and chinks of sunlight glinted through the perished slats on the walls. The abandoned gardens had been smothered by wild flowers and vines, but mature avocado trees still stood tall, laden with ripe fruit. Brilliant butterflies danced through the air and lighted on blossoming vines. We didn't speak, reluctant to break what felt like a spell. I could almost feel the spirits of the people who had lived, suffered and toiled there.

Nearby, a stand of bright pink waxy flowers, each as large as a human hand, stood stiffly on tall straight stems that reached over my head. The blooms looked like giant waratahs, except that the petals were glossy and hard as china. I stood on tiptoes to smell them, but they had no fragrance. I ran my fingers over the stiff petals. They seemed like a creation of science fiction, out of place in the forest. It turned out I was partly right: I learned much later that they were
roses de porcelaines
, natives of Martinique, Costa Rica and other Caribbean countries, but Gabon had adopted them as its national flower.

We skirted the porcelain roses and came to a cracked cement floor and waist-high concrete and tile benches that must have been part of the old geology laboratory. At our approach, a black-and-yellow-striped snake sunning itself on the benchtop moved lazily away. Flocks of rainbow bee-eaters whirled and called overhead.

But for the bird calls and the insects' drumming, everything was still – the place lay in a kind of sleep. I thought to myself that once this new exploration project was complete and everyone had left, the forest would do the same thing again – grow over it all as if it had never existed.

 

Mario arrived back with Peter Telfair just before lunch. I was washing clothes in a plastic basin when a Hemingway-esque figure in cream stovepipe denims and matching jacket climbed out of the Toyota, nursing two bottles of Scotch. He looked about sixty, with sparse grey hair and a weather-beaten face.

‘What's this? A white lady! How long've you been here?' The accent was American, east coast.

‘G'day, I'm Annette. We got here yesterday.'

‘Peter Telfair. Glad to know you! Come on in for a drink.' He walked into the guesthouse, stood by the empty fireplace and scanned the room, taking in every detail. His gaze lifted to encompass the view through the louvres out over the blue-green expanse of forest. I watched the emotions play across his face. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, swallowed hard and strode towards the kitchen.

‘
Étienne! Bernard! Bonjour! Comment ça va?
'

‘
Patron!
' they gasped. ‘
C'est bien vous?
' As he shook their
hands, tears sprang to their eyes. Shared history had bound them together, but it was almost a decade since they had last met.

Over lunch, conversation ranged across many topics, but one practical matter dominated. Mario said, ‘We've got a major problem with the water supply. The pressure's suddenly dropped to half. I've tried to find a diagram of the old system in the files, but there doesn't seem to be one.'

‘How about I take a look at it?' Peter offered. ‘I can still remember how it works.' Later we learned that he was the person who had designed it.

‘I'll come with you,' Win offered. ‘One of us should be familiar with it.'

I decided to tag along as well, out of curiosity. Accordingly, after lunch the three of us trudged up the hill beyond the edge of the camp to where a concrete cistern about four metres square had been built into the hillside. A galvanised-iron pipeline laid in a narrow V-shaped gully fed it from a spring further up. We scrambled up the gully to the top, looking for the water take-up point.

‘This is it,' Peter said. A small concrete drain fed the water from the spring into a 200-litre metal drum via a pattern of holes in the lid, which filtered out leaves and stones. On the downhill side of the drum the pipeline led to the cistern, having deposited any sediment at the bottom of the drum. The system was brilliantly simple, but the drum needed to be cleaned out regularly – a point neither Mario nor Doug had realised.

Leaf litter had built up on the lid: Peter raked it clean then lifted the lid off. Inside, the drum was choked with silt. He rolled up a sleeve and grinned at Win. ‘How long's
your arm?' They knelt down, one each side, and plunged their arms into the water up to the shoulder, hauling out fistfuls of mud. I watched for twenty minutes as they flung the mud out into the forest, until finally they could feel the bottom of the drum.

‘That should do it.' Peter replaced the lid and stood up. We walked back a different way, following another pipeline from the cistern to the surveyors' quarters. About halfway along, we found water seeping from a joint in the pipe into a deep puddle.

‘There's your other problem,' Peter said. ‘Mario will need to get on to that. In the old days someone used to check the water lines every day.'

 

After dinner, Mario and the surveyors retired early, leaving Win and me by the fire with Peter. It was the opportunity I had hoped for to ask him about the history of the camp.

‘How was iron ore discovered here?'

Peter drew an old map from his bag and smoothed it out on the coffee table. ‘An old French
piste militaire
– an army track – used to run between these two villages here – Mekambo to the east, near the Congo border, and M'Vadhi on the banks of the Ivindo, about an hour's journey upstream from here. In the 1890s, a French soldier walking the track came across a group of people using forged iron spearheads. It was such an important discovery that he made a report to the colonial government. When systematic geological exploration started around here in the 1950s, we used their old records.'

‘So what does “Belinga” mean?'

‘It's the local Bakota word for iron.'

‘And how did this camp start?' As I asked the question I could see he was reliving it all, his mind snapping back as if it were just a week ago.

‘We sited and established it in the late 1950s. I was the managing geologist, responsible for everything. Over the years, we employed more than 300 Gabonese workers on the exploration program. We blasted tunnels into the mountainsides to sample the ore and cut eighty kilometres of tracks through the forest.'

I told him we had seen the old split bamboo houses that morning.

‘Ah yes, they worked well on the whole, but they were so open that a leopard wandered into someone's living room one night.'

‘Was anyone hurt?'

‘No, not that time, but people here can tell you stories of leopards taking their relatives from inside a house. Just ask Étienne.'

‘What about the research scientists who worked here?'

‘We had lots of people working in different fields – birds, bats, monkeys and so on – but mainly with the western lowland gorillas. There was a French primatologist, Annie Hion, who hand-reared eight of them here. One of them was called Arthur; he was like a member of the family. When we used to sit around having a drink at the end of the day, Arthur would be there with us, sitting on a chair, drinking beer out of a glass. He was included in all our social gatherings.'

I sat transported, trying to imagine how that must have been.

Peter's face softened and he smiled. ‘People used to carry Arthur around on their backs while they worked. And one
of his favourite pastimes was friendly wrestling. Some of the men used to wrestle him while everyone else watched. He loved it.'

My knowledge of gorillas was minimal, but these stories of Arthur fascinated me. We talked until almost midnight, by which time the fire had burnt down to a pile of ashes and we were all ready for sleep.

To Mario's relief, the water pressure had returned to normal in the morning. I shook Peter's hand as he prepared to leave for Makokou after breakfast.

‘It's been a joy talking with you,' I said. ‘I won't forget.'

‘You're a strong woman, Annette. Make the most of your time here. You won't find another place like this.'

I watched him climb into the Toyota with Mario and drive off for the
débarcadère
, and thought about what he had said. I had already fallen under Belinga's spell just as he had all those years ago.

Our night encounter with the leopard came just days after Peter had left. As I recounted the episode to the surveyors over breakfast the following morning, I thought of Peter telling me a leopard had come into one of the old bamboo houses in the early days. Little had changed in the intervening fifteen years. Belinga was still a place where people and animals met in an uneasy relationship.

 

During that first week, I took every opportunity I could to learn from Mario about how the camp operated and who made up our workforce. The camp and the whole project had captured my imagination, as they had Win's. With everything I did, I had to know the detail – a general impression was never enough. In addition, I was
determined to be accepted as a useful member of the camp team, not simply a young wife along for the ride, and that meant fitting into a man's world. So I asked endless questions, and I wrote up my diary every evening.