TEN COINCIDENCE-PACKED days later we were in Yaounde railway station, buying single tickets to N’gaoundere.
In Fundong we had camped in Steve Tabor’s compound for two nights and riotously celebrated Cameroon’s Day of National Unity. Then, continuing towards the Bambouto Mountains, two misfortunes simultaneously befell us in a Babanki doss-house: severe toothache (mine) and nemesis (Rachel’s). At first I thought, ‘Toothache — hell! — ignore it and it’ll go away.’ Rachel had similar dismissive thoughts about a crop of tiresome little sores on her legs, to which I also paid no attention, being then too ignorant to recognise incipient tropical ulcers. (These were the fruits of her rash incursion, with bare legs, into that thorny cleft by Lake Nyos.) However, our upper lips were unstiffening by the time we had almost got back to Bafut, via gruelling bush-paths over precipitous, uninhabited mountains.
Then, on the edge of the town, Rachel’s malaria flared again, as malaria will when the body’s defences are down — and a dozen tropical ulcers, even when incipient, quickly lower defences. We spent that night where she collapsed with a raging fever at 4 p.m. Our room, behind a sleazy shebeen-cum-chop-house, reeked of achu and was shared with numerous restless small children. By sunset my right jaw was swelling fast and I suspected, correctly, that this was no mere toothache (an affliction to which I am not prone) but an abscess. A double dose of pain-killers did not kill — or even diminish — the searing shafts of pain now affecting my whole head.
Next morning Rachel’s fever was down though she remained groggy. I then noticed her much-enlarged leg sores and she conceded that they were ‘quite painful’. At 6 a.m. we walked slowly into the town centre; it was market-day and the tracks were thronged. Soon we met Omo, the Fon’s ‘Tourist Manager’, who confirmed that Bafut’s only doctors are medicine-men. A kind youth, he proposed that we should stay in his tiny shack at 1,000 CFA per night, while recovering.
Omo lived on the far side of the town, beyond the palace, and when he had swept the floor — raising dense clouds of dust — Rachel collapsed on his frail pallet. Then, noticing two books in a wall-niche, she eagerly asked to see them and I handed her a bilingual (Farsi and French) History of Iran and an English Methodist Hymnal. She was by then so print-starved that she read the latter. We each began a course of our broad-spectrum antibiotics and I took lots more pain-killers before unrolling my flea-bag and collapsing on the floor. Illogically, I believed that soon we would both feel better.
By 3 p.m. we both felt much worse. I was being driven crazy by pain; Rachel’s sores were violently inflamed and swollen and beginning to ooze ounces of pus. The Parkinsons were only fifteen miles away, in Bamenda. Clutching my throbbing jaw, and looking at the appalling happenings on Rachel’s legs, I reckoned we needed the Parkinsons, very badly.
‘But we can’t!’ groaned Rachel. ‘They’re so kind — we can’t go sponging again!’
Remembering the quality of the Parkinson welcome, on our arriving unexpectedly post-Egbert loss, I didn’t share her inhibition. On that unforgettable evening I realised that the Parkinson-Murphy friendship was not just one more of those agreeable but superficial relationships formed as one wanders the world. In temporal terms we were as yet mere acquaintances, but friendship is not to be measured temporally. I had no doubt that Joy and John are the sort of people who, if they knew we were in dire trouble in Bafut, would not have wanted us to be inhibited. We dashed Omo and took a shared taxi to Bamenda, arriving at the Parkinsons just in time for tea.
There was much to be discussed and not until after dinner did John remember that a letter awaited us; it had come the day before. A letter? Puzzled, I looked down at the envelope. It was post-marked Banyo and my heart — perhaps disordered by too many pain-killers — seemed to stop beating.
Rachel translated the Francophone vet’s hard-to-decipher scrawl, written fifteen days previously. No details were supplied, merely the bare facts that Egbert had been found and was being looked after by the vet. His finder would return him to us in exchange for 20,000 CFA (about £45). It was unclear whether or not the finder and the vet were separate people.
Joy and John — old Africa hands — chuckled. Rachel gasped, ‘He must be joking! That’s bare-faced holding Egbert to ransom!’
My elation left no room for negative feelings. ‘Who cares?’ I said. ‘When we go back we just take him. We have Doi’s fiscal-stamped receipt. No one can stop us walking away with our own horse!’
‘Don’t get too excited,’ cautioned Rachel. ‘It may be the vet trying to flog someone else’s horse. And anyway does it make sense for us to bush-taxi back to Makelele? We’ll have to spend more on fares than we’re likely to get when we sell him.’
‘Don’t be sordid!’ I snapped. ‘I don’t care about selling him, I only want to be sure it’s Egbert and he’s OK. If we haven’t time to find a buyer we can leave him with the Foxes in Mayo Darlé.’
‘You can argue later,’ said Joy, ‘when you’re fit again. Right now neither of you can go anywhere.’
I happily endured my second sleepless night; but for the abscess and the ulcers, we would not have returned to Bamenda in time to act on the vet’s letter.
Joy began her ambulance delivery round early next (Monday) morning. By 7.40 a.m. I had been dropped off at the Bamenda General Hospital where a Paris-trained Francophone dentist holds a daily clinic starting, in theory, at 8 a.m. I was too pain-obsessed to snoop around the hospital, but to get to the dental clinic one has to walk between all the wards and I took in enough — through eyes, nose and ears — to rejoice at not being an in-patient.
By 9.45 there was a long queue, including several unfortunates in apparently — even more agony than myself. The dentist arrived at 9.50 and saw me half an hour later. He was tall, elegant, gentle, kind. He x-rayed my jaw and told me to come back early next morning for the result; he would have to develop the plates at his home that evening. He mentioned that a tooth-abscess of such magnitude, if it infects the brain, can be fatal. Then, dismissing our broad-spectrum antibiotics as worse than useless, he wrote a prescription for something more appropriate which I must begin to take at once. And he added a prescription for powerful pain-killers, imported from France and specifically aimed at tooth-abscesses.
Meanwhile Joy had driven the hideously suppurating Rachel to another clinic, miles away in the opposite direction, where she was given a prescription for Ampicillan — not, alas! available in Bamenda. (My capsules were available.) As a second-best, she started a course of Tetracycline.
Early next morning, after a third sleepless night, I was back in the dentist’s queue. He appeared at 9.20 a.m. and looked very taken aback on seeing me; he had forgotten my x-ray. When he at once returned to his home, in some distant salubrious suburb, my fellow-sufferers might have been expected to complain but didn’t. (Do Africans ever complain about delays? Presumably not, for the reasons suggested by Professor Mbiti.)
That x-ray was not a pretty picture. It showed a treble abscess, afflicting three molar roots, and it had to be cured before its cause could be investigated. All now depended on the antibiotics, which were as yet having no effect.
For four days neither of us wrote up our diaries and my recollection of events is somewhat confused; by that Tuesday I was almost delirious with pain. Yet the Egbert news had induced a euphoria that on one level transcended the abscess — so strangely does mind dominate matter.
Rachel’s ulcers were not responding to the Tetracycline and seemed to be worsening hourly. I found them much more worrying than my own condition and was reprimanded for this — ‘I’m grown up! You must control your maternal instinct!’ Yet the reverse syndrome was also operating. That evening Joy put Rachel in a separate bedroom, since I, plainly, was not going to be a soothing companion during the stilly watches. But within an hour she came limping back: ‘I’d prefer to be here to keep an eye on you.’
By then I did look alarming — rather as though I had had a stroke. My face was twisted, with one eye half-closed, and even had I wished to eat I could not have swallowed. The new pain-killers were no more effective than the old. All night I sat up in bed, rocking to and fro nonstop and reading P. D. James’s Death of an Expert Witness. Few authors could have delivered me from madness that night; P. D. James did. I have ever since felt grateful to her for writing that book. Meanwhile Rachel was sleeping — but restlessly. Could our Wum SSP friend have seen her legs, he would certainly have diagnosed leprosy.
That night was the abscess’s climax. At about 7 a.m. the pain began to ease slightly; my antibiotics were winning. But Rachel’s were not. There remained only one thing to do: take a bush-taxi to Yaounde on the morrow (Thursday).
Efficiently the Parkinsons got us organised — exit visas secured, taxi seats booked. In Yaounde we were to stay a night with friends of theirs, then get the train to N’gaoundere, arriving in time for the famous Fulani celebrations of the first day of Id — marking the end of Ramadan. From N’gaoundere we could, we supposed, get bush-taxis to Galim and walk on — presuming our antibiotics had by then done their jobs to Makelele and Egbert.
It seems unfair to comment on a city in which one has spent only thirty-six hours. Yet I cannot resist commenting that thirty-six hours in Yaounde seemed enough; the capital of Cameroon does not tempt one to linger.
We arrived at 2.30 p.m. after a six-hour journey on a velvet-smooth road, recently completed. The hilly green landscape was pleasant but not exciting; we didn’t wish we were trekking.
Antibiotic addiction in urban Cameroon ensures that there are many pharmacies; but unfortunately Ascension Thursday is a Christian public holiday so all Yaounde’s pharmacies were closed. Moreover, they would probably remain closed until the following Monday. For what reason? For because on Sundays pharmacies are, naturally, closed. And this Saturday was a Muslim public holiday (Id). And so this Friday was likely to be a ‘bridging public holiday’. But nobody was sure about that; it would not be decided until the morning. Decided by whom? The government, of course. And could the government not decide today? No, because today was a public holiday and the government wasn’t functioning … Well then, could the government not have decided yesterday? Baffled silence from the young man to whom we were talking.
Possibly a letter from my publisher awaited me in the British Embassy. We asked the young man if all embassies observe all Cameroonian public holidays. Some do, he said, and some don’t …
We soon found the embassy; Yaounde at least has the advantage of being a mini-capital. The front door was shut but the back door was open. The Cameroonian staff were off enjoying their public holiday, the British staff were so busy trying to decide whether they were or were not on duty that they couldn’t find the mail. Thus does Cameroon undermine British phlegm. Subsequently that letter turned up in the British Consulate in Douala, with a kind covering note from the Ambassador.
In Cameroon it is not possible to telephone your friends in the next city to tell them that two diseased Irish vagrants are on the way. But the Farmers gallantly made us feel that diseased vagrants are their favourite sort of overnighters. And in their opulent guest room history was made at 5.50 p.m. when my abscess burst — the physiological equivalent of a hurricane. Suddenly, wondrously, I was free of pain. (Not of course free of soreness, but soreness and pain are two quite different sensations.)
The next day was a bridging public holiday. But Bill, our host — moved to terror and pity by Rachel’s legs — swore there must be an open pharmacy somewhere and spent hours driving us around the city. At noon we found one and on the spot Rachel began her Ampicillan course. We then bought tickets for the 7 p.m. night train to N’gaoundere and were advised by the girl in the booking-office to be back in the railway station by 5.30, if we wanted to be sure of seats.
It is a Cameroonian idiosyncrasy that no road connects the capital to the important town of N’gaoundere. Everything goes by rail, including cars, jeeps, trucks, motor-bicycles, tractors and bulldozers. Apparently this rail-roading of vehicles is worthwhile because a velvet-surfaced highway runs north from N’gaoundere to the big towns of Garoua and Maroua.
Having paid for our train tickets, it seemed that my CFA-padded hips were ominously slim. Sitting in the comfortable ex-Italian (why Italian?) railway carriage, I counted our remaining notes and realised that we were broke. Seriously broke. Almost destitute. Without money for transport to Galim, without money for even the meanest dosshouses, with scarcely enough money for the next fortnight’s food. Suddenly Egbert became financially as well as emotionally important. If the horse awaiting us were not Egbert, or if we couldn’t sell him in Mayo Darlé, we would have to borrow from the Foxes.
‘Why are we broke?’ demanded Rachel.
I did sums on the back of my diary. During the past week we had spent more than 50,000 CFA (about £110) on antibiotics, pain-killers, dental expenses, transport and exit visas — all, except the last, unexpected expenses. (In Cameroon antibiotics are sold at criminally inflated prices.) And those 50,000 CFA made all the difference between having more than enough to get back to Heathrow and not having enough to eat.
‘This is a challenge!’ I said brightly. ‘We’re spoiled First Worlders — it won’t do us any harm to be destitute for a fortnight.’
Rachel grunted unenthusiastically, looking as though she’d recently had enough challenges, and swallowed her second dose of Ampicillan.
Cameroonian rail travel is orderly and dull, compared to its Indian equivalent, but in our debilitated condition that suited us; we needed rest more than local colour. The carriages were clean and without visible livestock, though towards dawn sounds of muffled crowing came from under one seat. When the train pulled out, only half an hour late, it was full but not overcrowded. After so long in the bush, hearing only Pidgin, Foulfouldé and local languages, it seemed odd to hear our fellow-passengers conversing animatedly in French. (The Francophones speak French much more fluently than the Anglophones speak English.) But for once we didn’t become socially involved: soon we were sound asleep.
I awoke at dawn feeling won-der-ful — not only pain-free but unsore. (‘It’s the saliva,’ said Rachel scientifically. ‘Mouth sores always heal quickly.’)
That was a cool, cloudy dawn and through a haze of light rain I gazed across miles of green scrubby hills. The few compounds of small thatched huts looked impoverished and there was little cultivation. Yet the locals seemed sturdy and cheerful. Perhaps they eat a lot of fish; for the rest of the way the track ran close beside the broad brown Vina river.
At 7 a.m. we stopped for an hour at a small station where no one got on or off but much trading took place between hungry travellers and enterprising locals. One of the main items was delicious thick dark honey, sold in large whiskey, gin or vodka bottles at 500 CFA (just over £1) each. As honey is good for convalescents, we invested. The young man beside Rachel was such an addict that he at once ate half his bottle out of the palm of his hand. In between lickings he told us that N’gaoundere’s population is ‘30,000 — or maybe 50,000’.
Whatever its population, the Fulani capital is very much our sort of place. A straggling, friendly pre-colonial town, its old imposing Lamidat and its new less imposing mosque seem far more important than the extensive but decaying colonial district. To have arrived on the first day of Id was the sort of good fortune scatty travellers like the Murphies do not deserve. As we walked the mile or so from the station to the town centre, many groups of children and young people were already out showing off their colourful new Id outfits and exchanging Id gifts. And the streets were dominated by horsemen on extravagantly caparisoned steeds — some of the horsemen, aged eight or ten, having trouble because their steeds were too fiery.
Our food ration for that day consisted of honey on two warm crisp baguettes. We breakfasted near the mosque, an otherwise handsome building spoiled — as is the enormous new Catholic church at Fundong — by peculiarly virulent stained glass windows.
Suddenly the equestrian excitement all around reached a crescendo. Then eight-foot-long copper trumpets were blown by ‘slaves’ in knee-length tunics as the Lamido emerged from his palace at the head of a medieval procession — mounted on a charger and brandishing a spear. Beside him walked an improbably tall retainer, gorgeously robed and twirling a colossal blue and white umbrella above his master’s turbaned head. The horses’ manes were tightly plaited and their bridles lavishly decorated with coloured beads and woollen bobbles. Their warrior riders wore fine old brocade gowns, immensely long cummerbunds (to be taken off later and waved during mock battles) and ancient embossed leather knee-boots. Small boys riding small ponies carried small spears. Everyone chanted vigorously to the sound of war-drums, cymbals and trumpets.
Enthralled, we accompanied this exercise in nostalgia through the town centre to a sandy parade-ground. There a huge crowd had assembled to watch daring feats of horsemanship, processions of ‘slaves’ (old men who may well have been born into slavery), processions of solemnly dancing women singing songs to inspire the warriors, and processions of riderless horses being led by ‘slaves’. After several ritualistic mock battles, the Lamido was fanned with ostrich feathers while holding a Council of War. Then without warning he galloped off, spear poised, leading all his warriors in a charge that raised so much dust we soon lost sight of them. But ten minutes later they were back to report ‘victory’, before twice repeating the performance. Finally, at sunset, there was a public concert of martial music in the Lamidat — to which even we were admitted, on condition we left our boots outside.
Since we could afford neither supper nor ‘33’, we retired early and hungry to a sleeping-place chosen earlier, a small colonial covered grandstand overlooking the parade-ground. The Gendarmerie was nearby and lest vagrants might be unwelcome to sleep on their territory we didn’t switch on our torch while spreading space-blankets as insulation against the chill of concrete. Again we both slept deeply, despite empty bellies.
The dawn revealed a bag of mangoes lying a few yards away: relief supplies delivered by Fate. Slavering, I seized it. Scores of cockroaches rushed out but had left fourteen fat ripe mangoes unscathed. Beside the nearest standpipe, we enjoyed a filling if unbalanced breakfast.
Although Rachel’s sores were improving fast, it seemed advisable to spend that day lazing around in N’gaoundere. Since we couldn’t afford bush-taxis, and hitch-hiking is not on in the Third World, getting to Makelele might involve a lot of leg-work.
The ulcers had to be regularly stuped and squeezed, then painted with mercurachrome and securely plastered against the dust. While scrounging boiling water at the Catholic Mission we heard a rumour that the Norwegian Lutheran Mission jeep just might be going to Galim next day … But our three-mile walk to that Mission (a suburb in itself) was energy wasted. Even had the rumour been true — it wasn’t — we intuited that the jeep’s owners would much prefer not to have us aboard. They were very clean young Americans and Scandinavians.
Beside the road a nausea-inducing municipal dump — stinking hillocks of rotting refuse — extended for a mile or so. People live opposite, scarcely twenty yards away, in dreary slummy shacks. We returned to the town centre by another route, through a hilly district of attractive Fulani compounds — urban compounds, with high blank mud walls as in old Persian villages. Outside an enormous enclosed market, near the Lamidat, we sat watching the afternoon world go by and enviously sniffing kebabs while trying to concentrate on the millions who endure hunger not merely for a few days but for life… Then suddenly it was dark and all the street stall-holders frantically packed up and vanished. This was a Big Un. For two hours we Scrabbled on the wide concrete verandah of an abandoned colonial-type shop while the street in front of us became a river.
The charcoal-grey sky was almost touching the roof tops as we wandered on, feeling chilled and hungry-gloomy. We were not surprised when the storm resumed, driving us onto the balcony of a beat-up chop-house-cum-bar where we were tortured by the sight and smell of two men eating pasta and mince. When a smiling youth came to take our order my self-control snapped. ‘Let’s share a “33”!’ I suggested-and was not opposed. Never have the Murphies drunk a beer so slowly.
This odd establishment, at a road junction on a hilltop, was open on three sides to the elements. As these became ever more ferocious, we huddled in sagging, brown plastic-covered armchairs in the balcony’s one sheltered corner, while an icy gale drove sheets of rain across the few little tables and flooded the floor.
Then Belo appeared, racing up the steps from the street: tall, slim, handsome, kindly. A young Fulani aristocrat, he had just bought this chop-house; he apologised for its beat-up state; soon he would improve it. For eight years he had been working as an interpreter with the Peace Corps and similar organisations: his English, French and German were equally fluent. Moreover, he thought he knew of a jeep, bound for Tignere next day, in which we could travel free. Obviously, though not brashly, he was a rich man. And by this stage of malnutrition even Rachel was without hang-ups about accepting an invitation from someone for whom we had no dash.
This was our only experience of an urban Fulani home. Belo’s ‘townhouse’, one of many large though jerry-built bungalows in a tree-rich suburb, also accommodated four non-rent paying village students who otherwise could not have afforded to live in the city. He had no servant and himself cooked our supper of noodles and scrambled eggs: an unhappy-sounding combination, but to us, that evening, a food of the gods. It seems Fulani frugality survives city life. Although adequately comfortable, Belo’s bungalow was free (apart from a compound-blaster) of those non-essentials which most rich non-Fulanis find irresistible. Belo vacated his own bedroom for us; he was in any case going to a late-night Id party which we convalescents deemed it prudent to eschew. By 9 p.m. we were asleep on a Dunlopillo double-mattress on the floor. As our host sensibly observed, ‘Soft mattresses don’t need legs.’
Next morning Rachel’s ulcers were no longer painfully inflamed; no wonder Cameroonians see antibiotics as White Man’s magic. While Belo prepared breakfast – clove tea and fresh baguettes – we conversed with four pet rabbits who lived, apparently happily, in a huge raised cage opposite the kitchen window. He had bought them as a novel source of food, then fallen hopelessly in love with them. They had been bred, he told us, in Bamenda – by the Parkinsons.
News came then of the Tignere-bound jeep’s indisposition; it was awaiting a ‘piece’ from Yaounde and would not be travelling for a few days – ‘or it could be a few weeks,’ Belo admitted cheerfully. He urged us to wait for it: ‘I would like you to meet all my friends in N’gaoundere and to stay with my family in our village.’ Sadly we declined this invitation, explaining that our allotted span in Cameroon was running out. At 7.45 a.m. we set off to walk, if necessary, to Tignere, on a virtually traffic-free earth-track. The distance is only eighty miles: at worst, without lifts, a three-day marathon.
This was a new and pleasing landscape: lowish mountains, thick green scrub, thin jungle, poor land populated only by a few gaunt cattle and Bantu converts to Islam. For four hours the sky remained overcast and the temperature comfortable. Then the noon sun emerged, but just as we were beginning to wilt a pick-up truck, laden with Fulanis returning from the Id celebrations, gave us a free thirty-mile lift.
During the next ten hot miles I kept Rachel under close though unobtrusive observation, watching for signs of over-fatigue. But she seemed astonishingly fit – an impressive advertisement for Ampicillan.
That was one of our lucky days. In a tiny village an antique Tignere-bound lorry was already packed with people, poultry, goats, sacks and sheep; but somehow room can always be found for a few more bodies and after some haggling the driver agreed to take us cut-price – for 500 CFA.
Half an hour later a violent storm broke. Everyone had seen the black clouds speeding towards us from the north, across a flattish expanse of bush, yet the driver’s assistant waited until we were being drenched before beginning to untie the unwieldy tarpaulin. This had to be held down by all the passengers, including me, along the sides of the lorry, as the gale tried to tear it from our hands. The man beside me was wearing over his shoulder a quiverful of arrows – which threatened, in the dark confusion below the tarpaulin, to pierce my right breast.
Remembering the drought-stricken Tignere we had left, it was a relief to see the town flooded – the river impassable to motor vehicles. Regretfully we passed the Faro, unable to afford even a shared ‘33’, and as the sun set we hastened to the Mission and confessed to Father Walter that we were destitute. He already had another guest, a young priest recently arrived from London and touring the various Mill Hill Missions before settling down on his own patch. Rachel went early to bed (walking twenty-two miles on ulcerated legs eventually takes its toll) and the rest of us made merry on the newcomer’s Duty-free. I learned a lot that evening, listening to an exchange of illusions and disillusionments between an enthusiastic fledgling and a wise old owl who had spent more than quarter of a century in Cameroon. On one point Father Walter was emphatic. ‘Europeans and Africans never have understood each other and never will. You’ll meet many Europeans who’ll claim to know what makes the African tick, but either they’re fooling themselves or trying to fool you. Most Africans are more realistic. They don’t even pretend to understand the whiteman …’
As the sun rose, we were following that familiar motor track towards the Custom Post. I had considered using the Garbaia valley bushpaths, but if again lucky with lifts we would get to Makelele much more quickly by returning to Galim and ascending from Wogomdou. We therefore turned left, just before coming to the Customs Post, and stayed with the ‘fair weather’ motor track.
This was a sparsely populated and ruggedly beautiful region of jungly green mountains, deep red gullies and long, wide, scrubby slopes. We were climbing steadily, under a blessedly grey sky, and soon the air felt cool. Recent storms had reduced the track to chaos and after twelve miles Rachel wondered, ‘Is this still “fair weather”?’ But moments later we were extraordinarily lucky. The first and only vehicle to appear an almost empty pick-up truck – gave us a free ride to the far side of Galim, where the climb to Wogomdou begins.
A mini-meal of one baguette and four bananas felt like inadequate fuel for our long ascent below all those curiously decorated mountains. But we consoled each other with thoughts of fufu and jammu-jammu in the Chief’s compound. This track had by now been so rain-ravaged that in places it was almost impossible to keep upright; and in midafternoon a hailstorm further lowered morale. Yet we arrived outside the Chief’s palace at 5.15 p.m. Having carried the rucksack for twenty-seven miles I experienced a weird sensation of weightlessness when free of it and could empathise with astronauts on the moon. Walking into the Chief’s compound, I imagined I was about to lose contact with the ground.
Poverty brings out the worst in one; furtively I had been fantasising about free beers, this being the village where we so lavishly entertained the populace on our previous visit. But word soon got around that now we were destitute and our matutinal drinking-companions never reappeared. Instead, we were entertained until sunset by half a dozen youths – the Chief’s sons – who brought two more than usually uncomfortable folding-chairs and a giant basin of cold washing water. They apologised for its being unheated; following the late arrival of the rains, all women were away in distant fields doing emergency planting and not returning home in the evenings. As a half-moon rose, the youths said goodnight and vanished, leaving us sitting outside the thatched guest but in a strangely silent compound.
The entire village, we then realised, was smokeless; it seemed Wogomdou’s sexist men were going to retire empty-bellied.
We looked at each other, despairingly, by moonlight. ‘Surely,’ said Rachel, ‘someone must feed the Chief?’
Moments later he appeared, for the first time that evening, and welcomed us warmly, laying a faintly flickering lantern at our feet. Then he too said goodnight and withdrew to his nearby sleeping but with his youngest son, aged about eight.
We had one tin of sardines left, and two small stale shop buns.
‘Let’s eat them now,’ I said, ‘or we’ll be too hungry to sleep.’
‘Let’s wait till 8.00,’ said Rachel. ‘fufu may come.’ But it didn’t.
We supped sitting on the edge of our hut’s only furniture, a single unblanketed pallet covered with stiff goat-skins. As we ate, Rachel drew a nice distinction between hospitality (obligatory when strangers of any type or colour arrive in a village) and generosity, which here would have involved an individual decision to stand us a beer or two now we were down on our luck. Tradition does not encourage individual decisions and so does not prompt generosity.
At dawn, to avoid a 4,000-foot climb on empty bellies, we asked our host if bananas were available. Earlier, they had been cheap and plentiful in Wogamdou; now they were very scarce indeed. The Chief himself anxiously banana-hunted and twenty minutes later presented us with twelve chubby specimens which we ate on the spot.
Luckily it had been a rainless night; twenty-four hours previously no one could have crossed the ‘rock-bridge’ river. As it was, we needed advice and physical support from a young man guiding a donkey whose load was saturated. We also had difficulty fording another wide river, furiously flooded and waist deep, with high steep banks of soft black mud. This obstacle didn’t bother three heavily laden donkeys whose owner crossed dryly by hitching up his skirt and vaulting onto the hindquarters of the last animal.
It was market-day in Wogamdou and on the crest of a long ridge three laughing women, surrounded by pickins, were selling hot chunks of roast manioc for 50 CFA (about l0p) each. We sat indulging ourselves on a sun-warmed boulder, rejoicing to have found this cheap but effective fuel for the final, near-vertical ascent. Several colourful groups were descending from the heights, appearing and disappearing on the gold-green slopes ahead. When eventually we met them, most knew of Egbert’s loss and our present quest and we were greeted like old friends.
By 9.30 a.m. we were up and an hour later came to a milk-bar. There a courteous Nigerian worker requested a small boy to provide us with pints and pints and pints of what is, when the chips are down, the best drink in the world.
This direct (we hoped) Wogamdou-Makelele route crossed unfamiliar territory, though several distant peaks and towering escarpments were usefully recognisable. From the milk-bar a testing pathlet led us around a succession of ever-higher mountains. In the rain-cleared air, immense expanses of forested foothills were visible on our right with every detail distinct – like the three mighty waterfalls gleaming white on blue-green slopes many miles away.
At noon we reached wide green pastureland where the wind was strong and singing, and diaphanous scarves of cloud streaked a cobalt sky. Rachel suddenly exclaimed, ‘You’re right! This place is special!’ And we agreed that the beauty of the Tchabal Mbabo will be with us forever.
Towards sunset it seemed we would have to camp on the only available flat ground, the crest of a high ridge. A storm was imminent but the area appeared to be uninhabited; we had seen nobody for two hours. Then a Fulani came into view, carrying a load of long branches from a nearby wooded cleft. He paused, laid down his burden (an umbrella was tied on top) and waited for us. After the statutory greetings he pointed into a narrow valley, at the base of a colossal fluted rock-wall, and smilingly beckoned us to follow him. On the way down a fearsome gradient, we saw smoke beginning to rise from Mahounde’s hidden compound. He was, it later transpired, a quarterchief; but the rest of that scattered quarter remained invisible.
Soon the storm broke with menacing violence and continued all night; in our tent we would have endured eleven hours of hungry misery. As it was, we had two suppers. Mahounde permanently employed a Bantu couple, Mr and Mrs Asa-Ah, who occupied two square thatched huts (an unusual shape here) outside the wickerwork ‘wall’ of this otherwise tin-roofed compound. Mr Asa-Ah hurried to greet us on arrival. Then much later, when we had just finished a mountainous meal of rice and herby mutton stew, Mrs Asa-Ah hastened through the downpour, beaming and chuckling, to place before us a huge dish of mildly curried mutton and four giant puff-puffs.
Once the gender-confusion had been sorted out, our gentle and charming host brought his wives and adolescent daughters to sit with us. By this stage the language barrier was rather lower than it had been and we remember that compound-evening as one of our happiest.
Mahounde looked worried when we sped away, unfed, at dawn. The storm had just abated and for an hour our pace was slowed by a dense resting cloud which reduced visibility to some fifty yards. Our faint path was sporadic and, where it faded completely, one couldn’t see it reappearing ahead. But here my human compass covered herself in glory; she now knew exactly where Makelele was.
Mercifully the cloud had dispersed when we came to an Ndung-type gradient. The path, scarcely a foot wide, was interrupted by three long outcrops of sloping rock, smooth and damp and overhanging a sheer 400-foot drop. I sweated with fear as I crossed these. ‘You really do love Egbert, don’t you?’ commented Rachel.
Each of the region’s many streams was now a challenging tumultuous torrent and we were frequently saturated from the waist down – occasionally from the arm-pits down. ‘We’ll need luck,’ I remarked, ‘to get Egbert across those two rivers near Sambolabbo.’
‘I thought,’ said Rachel dryly, ‘our plan was to try to sell him in Makelele?’
‘We should get a much better price in Mayo Darle,’ I said tendentiously.
At midday we were walking for an hour above that most beautiful of all our campsites, where Egbert disappeared – the corner of Cameroon we know most intimately. Here Rachel became solicitous for my mental/emotional balance and warned, ‘Be prepared for this horse to be not Egbert!’
In Hama Aoudi many greeted us, and revived us with milk, and knew we had returned to be united with our lost horse.
‘It must be Egbert!’ I exclaimed, as we set off on the last lap.
‘It may be Egbert,’ said Rachel firmly.
By 4.30 p.m. we were in Makelele, where the beaming Chief himself conducted us back to his brother’s guest hut. At once all our old (young) friends joyfully swarmed around but the Chief left immediately and we expected ‘the horse’ to appear at any moment.
Milk was provided, followed by fried manioc. Time passed ... More time passed ... And yet more time passed ...
‘We really have gone native,’ observed Rachel. ‘For days we’ve been busting ourselves to get here and see this horse. But now somehow we’re able to wait genuinely patiently. Funny how Africa gets to one!’
She was right. I felt completely relaxed: but perhaps only because I had no doubt that ‘the horse’ was Egbert.
At 5.50 he arrived, cantering up the slope from the track with a grinning small boy on his back. Self-respect compels me to draw a veil over our reunion; intrepid travellers are supposed to be made of sterner stuff ... The family fell about. They understand people loving horses but they do not understand demonstrations of that emotion.
Predictably, our hero looked somewhat the worse for wear. Clearly he had been ridden hard and often; his coat was sticky and spiky with dried sweat. Also, he had several potentially lethal, vividly coloured ticks embedded near the root of his tail and around his genitals. When I had removed these I groomed him vigorously and within fifteen minutes he was looking much more like ‘our Eggles’. (His Irish head-collar had of course ‘got lost’.)
But what was the story? Where and when and how and by whom had Egbert been found? The vet was in Banyo and no one knew when next he might visit Makelele. His engaging fourteen-year-old son, Pierre – eldest of the Makelele family – spoke adequate French but was uninformative. We dashed him 2,000 CFA (about £4.50), set aside for that purpose (one-tenth of the specified ransom!) and Rachel wrote Papa an effusive thank-you letter in French. To this day we don’t know the story.
As we devoured our unadorned fufu (the jammu-jammu contained rotten meat), Pierre confirmed that it would make economic sense to sell Egbert in Mayo Darle. Horses abound in Makelele, and Egbert, being docile, was held in low esteem. Fulani horsemen favour fiery steeds, whom only the brave dare mount. And fieriness was not among Egbert’s many virtues; a toddler could have ridden him down a precipice. His market-value in Makelele was zero.
‘You do look pleased!’ said Rachel. ‘Are you really going to enjoy trekking for days on an empty belly?’
‘We won’t have to,’ I retorted. ‘Now we know we’ve got Egbert we can spend all we’ve left. We’ll surely be able to sell him for at least £50.’
Two Whites and a laden horse send Cameroonians’ eyebrows into their curls. Two Whites – one carrying a huge load – and an unladen horse confirm a widely held view that all Whites are nutty. But, ironically, our forced march to Mayo Darle (eighty-seven miles in three days) would not have been possible with a laden Egbert. Unladen, he often trotted of his own volition and I suspected him of wickedly relishing this ludicrous role reversal.
A forced march was essential because so little time remained before our unalterable date of departure from Cameroon. As it was, we could spend only two days in Mayo Darle: not long enough to find a suitably kind buyer, though Egbert looked glossily handsome after a prolonged soapy scrub-down in the river. So we left him with the Foxes, who lent us 35,000 CFA (about £80). The arrangement was that they would sell him to the sort of person who deserved to own him and keep the profit if any.
As we left the Mission compound, soon after sunrise, Egbert was grazing fifty yards away by the ‘parish hall’. I glanced at him, but chose not to say goodbye.
‘I’ll bet,’ said Rachel, ‘he reckons he’s well rid of those crazy Whites!’
Two months later John Fox wrote to us: ‘You are daily in our thoughts because of the continuing presence at Mayo Darle of Egbert, who is back in fine form after some horse complaint that required injections. Yaya takes care of him with a zeal and a devotion worthy of a Derby winner and has already initiated him into the repertoire of Islamic warhorse for the occasional parades which occur at the Lamido’s Banyo palace.’
Four months later the most significant of our Christmas cards – the one that really made our festive season joyous – was a large photograph of Egbert taken in mid-November. A beaming Yaya and his two-year-old son Ibrahim were in the saddle and Jacqueline’s letter reported:
‘As you can see, Egbert is still part of the family! Not so long after you left, Yaya fell in love with him and was praising his qualities and good-natured character every minute. So, guessing you would agree with me, I decided not to sell him but to leave him in Yaya’s possession.’