Chapter Fourteen

THEN, on that Friday, May 27, we climbed back on to the highest edge of the Little Ruo valley, about eight thousand five hundred feet high. There Quillan and Vance decided to take a short cut to our camp for the night and to send our bearers round the long, easy, known route with our guide. They did this because there was some unknown country in front that they thought we should see. As we stood on the rim, talking it over, in a cold breeze and under a grey, morning sky, I noticed far away in the plain below the lumber camp, the top of Mount Chiperone covered in cloud. The wind was blowing off it towards us and the weather was rapidly building up round it.

In a flash I remembered Boyd’s warning to me in his house at Mlanje: “For God’s sake, when that happens on the peak, look out.”

So I said to Quillan and Vance: “It looks to me as if there is a Chiperone on the way. Don’t let’s take any chances! I don’t like short-cuts anyway. My experience of mountains is that the longest way round is the shortest way there.”

They turned round, regarded Chiperone solemnly, for a moment, looked at each other, nodded, and then Quillan said: “It is only a bit of morning mist. It will clear up soon. We’ll be in the camp in an hour or two and can spend the afternoon resting. I think we can all do with it.”

Because they were the experts on the mountain, because it was their mountain and their mountain’s weather, and because I have been trained to give priority to what appears to be reasonable, I stifled my instinct and said no more. But if the future had an origin other than in itself, then I believe it was born in that moment. Our decision was a bad decision, it was the wrong decision. Wrong begets wrong, starts a chain of accident and disharmony in circumstances which quickly develop a will of their own. These circumstances exact their own logical toll and must run their time to the bitter end, before the individual is able to break free of them again.

We sent our bearers on their way, kept only Vance’s own gun-bearer with us, dropped quickly into the valley below, crossed a wide stream and started up on the other side. We climbed hard and fast. It was eleven o’clock exactly when we came out on the rim close on nine thousand feet. We sat down, ate a piece of chocolate and prepared to admire the view.

Almost directly underneath us was the greatest of Mlanje’s many dark gorges, the Great Ruo Gorge. The water of the Great Ruo river itself plunged down the top end of the gorge; fell with a wild, desperate, foaming leap into an abyss, thousands of feet deep. We could not see the bottom of it. On either side it was flanked by black, glistening, six-thousand-foot cliffs, tapering off into grey peaks nine thousand feet high. The whole of the gorge rustled, whispered and murmured with the sound of falling water, which at every change of mountain air would suddenly break over us with a noise like the sound of an approaching hail-storm.

“You see that clump of cedars just beyond the fall,” Vance said, “our camp is there. We shall be there within the hour.”

As he spoke the mist came down. He and Quillan said it would soon lift. We waited. We got colder and colder. The mist rapidly thickened. It began to drizzle. At eleven-thirty we decided to do the best we could. The sun had vanished, the wind had dropped. Neither Vance, Quillan, I, nor, for that matter, any living person, had ever stood before where we then stood. In the sunlight one stone is very like another; but in the mist on Mlanje they were undistinguishable. Because of that terrible gorge we could not go further down until we were past the head of the waterfall. So we set out along the peaks, keeping as near to their crest as we could.

Worst of all, the mist halo lay like a blanket over the noise of the fall. Not a sound came up to us. We had not even a whisper from it for guidance. The silence was really complete, except for our breathing, our boots squelching on the wet grass and moss or crunching on stone.

From eleven-thirty until four-thirty—and we had been going since seven without rest—we went up one peak and down into a bottom, up the other side and down again.

At half-past four the rifle-bearer said: “It is no good, Bwana; we are lost. Let us make a fire and wait for it to clear.”

I said no. I knew it was no mist. It was a Chiperone and it came, so Boyd had said, in multiples of five days. We would be dead of cold before it cleared. I added, “At all costs, we must go down now. The night is not far off. We must get into a valley and then we can consider the next step.”

So slowly down we went, down those steep, uneven slopes of Mlanje, listening carefully for the noise of falling water. But the whole mountain had gone as silent as the dead.

We slid and slithered in a way that was neither prudent nor safe. Suddenly at five the mist began to thin. The gun-bearer gave a tremendous shout. A warm golden glow was coming up to meet us and in a few minutes we were in the tawny-grass bottom of the Great Ruo itself, three miles above the gorge and four miles from our camp. We got to our camp at nightfall and the mist changed into a heavy, steady, drumming downpour of rain. The bearers were already in and Leonard had prepared our little mud-and-straw native hut. We lay down by the side of the fire in the middle of the hut, a great glow of gratitude inside us. We were too tired to speak for half an hour or more, and listened to the violence of the rain.

“It is a Chiperone all right now,” said Vance: “the point is, how long is it going to last?”

Our camp was a disused, discarded lumber camp, the huts which had originally housed the native timber carriers. Once again, as often before in Africa, I thanked Providence for the African hut-builder. These insignificant-looking, brown beehive huts one dashes past by car or train in Africa are amazing. Considering the poor material, the lack of scientific equipment and research, the lack of education of their humble builders, they are works of genius. Although the rain now pounded down so violently, not a drop came through the ancient thatch.

When we had recovered sufficiently, we went round to inquire after our bearers and found them, also under dry roofs, cooking their dinners round crackling cedar fires. They were a happy and cheering sight.

We told Leonard to stay with them in the dry. We did not want him splashing round in the wet, trying to wait on us. We went back, dried ourselves out thoroughly, and did our own cooking. I made a kettleful of hot coffee which we drank very sweet, laced liberally with my medicinal cognac. The cognac was a great improvement on the Portuguese brandy and a welcome and complete surprise. It was precisely the anticipation of moments like these that had made shopping in Blantyre such fun, and I drew a glow of reassurance from this slight justification of my planning.

We ate in silence. I myself was too full of an unutterable sense of well-being to attempt to speak. I think the others perhaps felt something else as well, for they both, particularly Vance, looked somewhat reproved by the experience of the day. Then silently we stretched ourselves out beside the fire, with a good heart, to sleep.

But I was too tired to sleep at once. I lay with my ear close to the ground and listened to the rain drumming down on the mountain. Among those vast peaks there was no other sound than this continuous, violent, downpouring of the rain. There was no light of stars or far-off reflection of town or hamlet; only the dying glow of the cedars from a dying world of trees. The night, the mountain and the rain were woven tightly into a dark pre-human communion of absolute oneness. No leopard, pig or antelope or elastic mountain gazelle would venture out on a night like this. It is precisely against moments like these that the leopards bury some portion of bird, bush ape or pig, and leave it near their holes and caves. The summons riding the mountains with such desperate dispatch was not for animal or human hearts. But it was as if the earth underneath my head was slowly beginning to respond to this drumming, this insistent beat of the rain; to take up this rhythm of the rain; to answer this ceaseless knocking at its most secret door, and to open itself to this vast orchestration of its own natural, primeval elements, to begin to quicken its own patient pulse, and deep inside itself, in the core of its mountain, its Jurassic heart, to do a tap-dance of its own. Whenever I rose in the night to make up the fire there was the rain and this manner of the rain; and when I lay down again there was this deep, rhythmical response of the earth.

We woke finally at five and talked over the day while waiting for the kettle to boil. Our plan originally had been to go over the top of the mountain in the direction of Chambe. But we found now that our experience of the day before among the peaks on the far side of the Ruo valley had made us all decide in the night against any more adventures in the clouds while the Chiperone was blowing. In this way the previous day influenced our behaviour. Our guide well knew the way over the top and, had it not been for that short-cut, I do not believe we would have changed our plans.

Vance now said he knew an easy way down off the mountain which led to a large tea estate at the bottom. Quillan said he knew it too, it was the old timber carriers’ track. It was steep, but cut out in the side of the Great Ruo gorge and clearly defined. We could not go wrong. Only it meant abandoning the last part of the trip and that, he thought, would be a pity for me. I said firmly, “Abandon.” Vance then decided to go ahead to the tea estate and get a truck to take us round by road to Likabula. With luck, he said, we could all be back on the mountain at Chambe that evening.

With our last eggs I made him a quick omelette for breakfast, and sent him off in the rain. Quillan and I followed slowly with the carriers.

We set out at eight but the rain was so thick and violent that there was only a dim, first-light around us. We went slowly. The track was steep and highly dangerous. On the left of us, only a yard or so away, was that deep cleft down to the Great Ruo gorge. The bearers too had great difficulty with their loads. They had to lower themselves down from one level to another by cedar roots and help one another down perilous mud precipices.

As we went down, the noise of falling water all round us became deafening. Whenever there was a slight lift of the rain and mist, the half-light, the mepacrine gloom on the mountain would be suddenly illuminated by a broad, vivid flash of foaming white water leaping down the face of smooth black cliffs, thousands of feet high. We had to shout in places to make ourselves heard.

Moreover the mountain itself, the very stones on which we trod, the mud wherein we slid, seemed to begin to vibrate and tremble under this terrible pounding of water. At moments when we rested, the ground shook like a greaser’s platform in the engine-room of a great ship. This movement underfoot, combined with the movement of the flashing, leaping, foaming water in our eyes, and driving rain and swirling mists, gave to our world a devastating sense of instability. The farther down we went, the more pronounced it became, until I began to fear that the whole track would suddenly slither like a crocodile from underneath my feet and leave me falling for ever under the rain and Mlanje’s cataclysmic water. It needed a conscious effort of will to keep me upright, and I found this all the more difficult because of a new complication that was arising. I began to feel as if my very senses were abandoning their moorings inside myself.

Luckily this stage of the journey did not last too long. Two and a quarter hours later our track suddenly became easier and broader.

Quillan said, “We’ll soon be off it now.”

We came round a bend in the track and there, to our surprise, was Vance. He was sitting at the side of a fast stream of water which was pouring over the track and had evidently held him up. He was joining some lengths of creeper, of monkey rope, together.

“I didn’t want to cross this stream without a rope,” he said. “I have been up and down this stream as far as possible and this is the best place to try it. It doesn’t look difficult. Do you think this will do?”

He handed me his rope of creepers.

“No! Certainly not,” I said, and looked at the stream.

Its beginnings, above us, were lost in the mist and rain. Then it suddenly appeared out of the gloom about a hundred yards above, charging down at us at a steep angle, and finally, just before it reached us, smashing itself up behind a tremendous rock, deeply embedded on the side of the gorge. Somewhere behind the rock it reassembled its shattered self and emerged from behind it flowing smoothly. For about twenty yards it looked a quiet, well-behaved stream but, on our left at the track’s edge, it resumed its headlong fall into the terrible main Ruo gorge below us. I now went to this edge and looked over, but the falling water vanished quickly in the gloom and told me nothing. Only the ground shook with the movement as my eyes and head ached with the noise.

I came back and found Quillan lighting a fire.

“Our bearers are nearly dead with cold,” he explained. “They’ll crack up if we don’t do something. Two woodcutter blokes died here of exposure two years ago. But if I can get this fire going for them in the lee of this rock, our chaps will be all right.”

The rain poured down even more heavily than before, and it looked darker than ever. The shivering negroes, the bamboos bent low with rain, the black rocks, were like figures and things moving in the twilight of a dream.

Again I went and looked at the stream above. Vance appeared to have chosen rightly. The stream was swollen but did not look dangerous at that point, particularly with a good rope. Higher up it would have been hopeless.

“I tell you, Dicky,” I said. (It was the first time I had called him that and I don’t know why I did, except that we all suddenly seemed to be very close to one another.) “I tell you what, Dicky. We’ll take all our ropes, you knot them together and then I’ll go across. I am bigger than you.”

“I don’t think that is necessary,” he said. “I know the way. You don’t. And with a rope it will be easy.”

We joined up the ropes, tested the result in every way, pulling it, leaning on it. It seemed tight and strong. We took Vance’s valise straps and added them to the end, just in case. I then tied it round Vance’s chest with a knot that couldn’t slip. I made sure it could not tighten and hinder his breathing.

As I tied it I said, “Dicky, are you sure you are happy about this and know how to do it, for if you are not I would much rather do it myself?”

“Of course I know,” he said with a deep laugh. “I have done it scores of times in Burma. And I must hurry. I want to get those poor black devils under shelter as soon as I can.”

“Well, remember,” I said, “keep your face to the stream; always lean against it; go into it carefully and feel well round your feet with your stick before you move.”

He took up the stout stick that we had cut for him. I called Quillan and two of the bearers. Quillan and I took the rope. I braced my feet against a tree on the edge of the stream, just in case, but I was not at all worried.

Vance waded in. The water came about to his navel. He went steadily on for some distance then, to my bewilderment, turned his back slightly on the stream. It was the first deviation from plan.

He took another step or two, stopped, suddenly abandoned his stick to the stream and yelled to us, “Let out the rope!”

It was the second deviation from plan. I was horrified. What the hell was he up to? Before we had even properly grasped his meaning he had thrown himself on the stream and was swimming a breast-stroke. As was inevitable, the stream at once caught him and quickly swept him to where it foamed and bubbled like a waterfall over the edge of the track. The unexpected speed with which all of this had happened was the most terrifying thing about it. Even so, Vance had got to within a foot of the far bank, was on the verge of reaching it—when the water swept him over the edge and he disappeared from our view.

Quillan and I were braced for the shock. As we saw it coming we both shouted for the bearers, who rushed to our assistance in a body. The rope tightened in a flash. The strain was tremendous. Vance’s body, no longer waterborne but suspended out of sight, below the edge of the rocky track, with the weight and stream of water pouring on top of it, strained the rope to the utmost. Yet it held.

I think it would have continued to hold if the angle and violent impact of the water on the body had not now with incredible speed whipped Vance along the sharp edge of the rocks, swung him from the far side over towards our bank and chafed the rope badly in the process. It still held for a second or two. We worked our way along it towards him—were within two yards of him—when the rope snapped.

At that moment we knew that he was dead. Anyone who stood with us in the black rain, amid those black cliffs in that world of storming, falling, rushing, blind water, must have known that he was dead. Quillan turned round, lifted a face to me naked and bare with misery, and said hoarsely, “What to do, now? He is dead, you know!”

I nodded and said, “Please take a search-party as far as you can, Peter, and see what you can see.”

He immediately set out. I called Leonard and some bearers and started to undo our baggage. It was obvious we could not cross now. We had lost all our rope; we had lost one body with a rope, we could not risk losing one without a rope. Nor could we stay there.

Quillan was back almost at once. I was not surprised. We were, as I have said before, on the edge of the Great Ruo gorge.

He shook his head. “Not a sign, not a hope. He is dead and there is nothing we can do now except to see that these fellows don’t conk out.”

He indicated the bearers.

We called them all round us. They were cold and terribly shaken by Vance’s death. One old man was crying and they were all shivering as if with malaria. We told them to dump their loads and to start back up the mountain to the huts we had slept in the night before. A moan of despair rose up from them. They said they wanted to sit by the river, wanted to make a fire and wait for the sun. But I knew that that only meant that the spirit had gone out of them, that they had given up hope and were resigned to do no more than sit down and die in comfort.

It was then that Leonard, the puny plainsman, the sophisticated native from the towns, stood up, unsolicited, and lashed them with his tongue. I don’t know what he said, but he insulted them into some shape of spirit.

We distributed all our own and Vance’s clothes among them. That cheered them. They began to laugh and to tease one another, at the sight of their companions in tennis shirts, grey sweaters too big for them, in green, blue, red and grey striped pyjamas, and my own green jungle bush-shirts with their red 15 Corps flashes still on them.

I expect it was an incongruous sight in that world of rain, falling water and black, impersonal rock, but I did not find it at all funny. It seemed to me to fill the cup of our misery to overflowing. I expect whatever gods sit on this African Olympus might well find it amusing to kill a young man of twenty-eight in order to dress up some of the despised, ubiquitous outcasts of their African kingdom in silk pyjamas in the pouring rain. To me, just to kill was bad enough; to mock the kill an intolerable perfection of tragedy. I came near to joining in Quillan’s tears at that moment, but fortunately I got angry as well, so angry that I believe if my strength had matched my rage I could have picked up the whole of Mlanje and thrown it over the edge of the world into the pit of time itself.

I walked up to the bearers in anger such as I have never known and told them, by look and gestures, to get the hell up the mountain without delay. In that mood, Quillan and I got them up the steep, slippery sides of the gorge that we had come down only a few moments before.

At half-past twelve we were back in our camp of the night before; we started a great, blazing fire and dried ourselves. The warmth and the sight of fire and smoke effected an amazing revival of spirit among the Africans. I was discussing with Quillan a plan for going out myself through the Fort Lister gap to fetch help, leaving him there with the bearers because he knew the language, when the oldest forester spoke up and said: “You can’t do that, Bwana. It is too far. But I know a short way over the top that will bring us to Chambe safely by sundown.”

Quillan asked them all if they had heard what the forester said, understood, approved and were prepared to follow him implicitly? They all said emphatically, “Yes!” It was the only thing to do and they would do it.

By one o’clock we were climbing back up the peaks behind our camp, into clouds and into rain which seemed more violent than ever.

Peter Quillan was at his best. He was firm yet patient with the bearers, steadily urged them on, but it could not have been easy. He was heartbroken, and from time to time I could see he was in tears. He was deeply attached to Vance and was blaming himself bitterly for the accident. I did my best to comfort him. I couldn’t see how he was to be blamed at all, and if he were, then what about me? He, after all, had not been worried by a sense of the future. It wasn’t he who had lain awake at nights half stifled by a sense of death and listening to the dark drummer of Africa beating-up the weather round Mlanje. But as I comforted him and we slowly forced the bearers up the black peaks in front of us, I too was sick at heart and desperately tired.

Without any preliminary training I had been scrambling round these monstrous peaks from dawn until sunset for nine days, and I could now hardly lift my legs. Heaven knows I was fit, my lungs and spirit were all right, and my rage with the mountain and its gorge spurred me on. The problem was purely mechanical. My legs and feet were so abused that the muscles rebelled and would not react instinctively. It seemed to me that all my reflexes had gone. I had to treat each step as a mechanical and separate entity in the movement of my body. I could move only with a deliberate, calculated, conscious and determined effort of will. At one moment I thought seriously of retiring to the huts lest I should not be able to continue, and so should bring disaster on the others.

Quillan was amazing. His forester’s muscles were intact. He cheered and helped me on by word and example. When, afterwards, we told people of this journey over the highest and wildest part of Mlanje they would hardly credit it. But on the day of Vance’s death we did nearly twenty miles’ climbing. I hope never to do such a journey again.

For two hours after leaving the hut we continued to climb, at the steepest of angles, into deepening cloud and rain. Our guide, the old forester, in his rags and tatters, dripping with water, was unbelievable. He climbed at our head with his stick held in one hand in front of him. Every now and then he parted the grasses with it, peered at them intently, or tapped a stone, listening carefully to its ring, and then changed direction to the left or the right; but he never faltered. Over and over again the rain and mist completely hid him from my view. It was dark, it was black; even at the best of times it was grey all around us.

After two hours, as far as one could judge in the mist, we seemed to pass right over the top of a peak, and our course began to drop slowly down. The relief to my muscles was timely.

Quillan offered me some whisky and water. I do not drink spirits as a rule, but I accepted gratefully and pushed on with renewed energy. At four o’clock, we suddenly came out of the mist and rain; we walked through it as if it had been a wall. At one minute it was raining; the next we were in the sunlight looking down on the long ledge by Tuchila.

We climbed down there as fast as we could. We had seven miles to go before we reached that razor saddle, and unless we got there before dark we should be unable to cross to Chambe and shelter.

We got down easily enough, but getting up and then down the river gashes and finally up again on to that high steep shoulder by Chambe was for me a bitter and protracted agony. However, we got to the ridge where Val Vance was nearly killed, just as the sun went down.

It was a frightening sunset, a sort of cosmic schism of light and darkness. On our left was that immense, dark pile of rain, turning and wheeling constantly over the bulk of Mlanje, wheeling in such a manner, with such fantastic contortions of cloud shapes, that to my tired eyes it looked as if the devils of death were charging up and down those peaks on phantom, skeleton chargers. Yet to our right lay Chambe with a golden afterglow of sunlight on it, untroubled and serene, as if it had never known death or disaster of any kind. Less than a fortnight before I had seen Mlanje from afar at just such an hour, in such a way with this same pattern of fair and foul, dark and light, on it. Had the same pattern also been in me?