The antelope hunt
The forest of gum trees—the blue antelope—the signal to report back—a surprise attack—Kanyemé—a night in the open air—Mabunguru—Jihoue-la-Mkoa—water supply—arriving in Kazeh.
Arid and parched, its clayish earth cracking open from the heat, the country seemed deserted; here and there you saw a few traces of caravans, the bleached bones of men and animals, half gnawed, crumbling into the same dust.
After walking for half an hour, Dick and Joe plunged into a forest of gum trees, eyes on the lookout, fingers on the triggers of their shotguns. They weren’t sure what they were up against. Although he wasn’t a marksman, Joe was handy with a firearm.
“Walking does a body good, Mr. Dick, but the going isn’t too great on this terrain,” he said, blundering into the quartz fragments scattered around.
Kennedy motioned to his companion to keep quiet and not move. They had to manage without hunting dogs, and as nimble as Joe was, he didn’t have the nose for it like a pointer or a greyhound.
In a riverbed that still had a few stagnant pools, a herd of some ten antelope were quenching their thirst. The graceful animals seemed uneasy, as if scenting danger; in between sips, their shapely heads darted upward, their supple nostrils sniffing the air to windward of the hunters.
Joe stood still while Kennedy circled some shrubbery; he got within shotgun range and fired. The antelope herd vanished in the blink of an eye; hit in the small of the shoulder, a lone male dropped in his tracks. Kennedy rushed up to his prey.
It was a blaue bock,1 a magnificent animal, pale blue turning to gray, belly and insides of the legs as white as snow.
“A shot in a thousand!” the hunter exclaimed. “He’s a very rare species of antelope, and I hope I can treat his hide so it’ll keep.”
“Whoa! You really mean that, Mr. Dick?”
“Positively! Look at this handsome coat.”
“But Dr. Fergusson would never take on all this extra weight.”
“You’re right, Joe! Still, he’s quite an animal, and it’s a shame to leave the whole works behind!”
“The whole works? No way, Mr. Dick; we’ll remove all his nutritional benefits, and with your permission, I’ll carve him up as expertly as the staff of the Worshipful Company of Butchers.”2
“Have at it, my friend; but when I wear my hunter’s hat, I can skin a piece of game as smartly as I bag it.”
“I’m sure you can, Mr. Dick; so it’ll be a snap for you to set up a grill over three stones; you’ve got lots of deadwood, and I need just a couple of minutes to put your hot coals to use.”
“I’ll be finished in no time,” Kennedy shot back.
He instantly went to work building his fireplace, which was ablaze in a matter of moments.
Extracting a dozen chops and the juiciest tenderloin cuts from the antelope’s carcass, Joe soon transformed them into mouthwatering meat dishes.
“They’ll be a treat for our friend Samuel,” the hunter said.
“Know what I’m thinking about, Mr. Dick?”
“Why, fixing your steaks, what else.”
“Not even close. I’m thinking about the faces we’ll make if we don’t find our balloon again.”
“Good lord, what an idea! You’re expecting the doctor to leave us behind?”
“No, but what if his anchor happened to pop loose!”
“Impossible. Anyhow Samuel wouldn’t have a problem bringing his balloon back down; he maneuvers her pretty expertly.”
“But what if the wind carried him away, what if he couldn’t get back to us?”
“Stow it, Joe, enough of your what ifs; they’re not funny.”
“Look, sir, it’s natural for all sorts of things to happen in this world; now then, anything can happen, which means we need to be ready for everything—”
Just then a gunshot rang out overhead.
“Huh?” Joe said.
“My rifle! I’d know that sound anywhere.”
“A signal!”
“We’re in danger!”
“Maybe he is too,” Joe countered.
“Come on!”
The hunters quickly gathered up the results of their hunting and returned in their tracks, following the branches Kennedy had broken to guide them back. The heavy undergrowth kept them from seeing the Victoria, although she couldn’t have been very far away.
They heard a second gunshot.
“It’s urgent,” Joe said.
“Good lord! He just fired again.”
“Sounds like he’s defending himself.”
“Let’s get moving.”
And they ran at top speed. Reaching the edge of the woods, they immediately saw the Victoria in her berth and the doctor in the gondola.
“So what’s going on?” Kennedy asked.
“Good God!” Joe exclaimed.
“What do you see?”
“Down there, a band of Negroes surrounding the balloon!”
Sure enough, two miles away some thirty individuals were crowding around the foot of the sycamore, waving, howling, and jumping about. A few of them were climbing the tree and heading for its highest branches. The danger seemed clear and present.
“My master’s done for!” Joe exclaimed.
“Come on, Joe, calm down and look sharp. We’ve got the firepower to pick off four of those rascals. Let’s go!”
They covered a mile with tremendous speed, then another gunshot came from the gondola; it took out one big devil who was hauling himself up the anchor rope. His lifeless body tumbled from branch to branch, then hung there twenty feet up, two arms and two legs swaying in the air.
“Huh?” Joe said, coming to a stop. “How the devil’s that creature hanging on?”
“Who cares,” Kennedy answered. “Keep running!”
“Aw, Mr. Kennedy,” Joe exclaimed, breaking into laughter, “he’s hanging by his tail! By his tail! He’s an ape! They’re all just apes!”
“Well, we’re better off with their kind!” Kennedy shot back, rushing into the midst of that howling mob.
It was a fearsome pack of baboons, savage, vicious, and a horrific sight with their doglike muzzles. But a couple of gunshots quickly sorted things out, and the rest of that scowling horde took to their heels, leaving several of their brethren on the ground.
In a second Kennedy was clinging to the ladder; Joe hauled him self into the sycamore and detached the anchor; the gondola dropped down to his level, and he got back inside without difficulty. A few minutes later the Victoria rose into the air, heading east under the impetus of a moderate wind.
“That was some attack!” Joe said.
“We thought the natives had you surrounded.”
“Fortunately they were only apes!” the doctor replied.
“We couldn’t tell from far away, my dear Samuel.”
“Or even closer,” Joe remarked.
“Be that as it may,” Fergusson went on, “this ape attack could’ve had the direst consequences. If the anchor had come loose after all the shaking they gave it, who knows where the wind might’ve taken me?”
“What’d I tell you, Mr. Kennedy?”
“You were right, Joe; but on top of being right, you also were fixing some antelope steaks back then, and I was starting to drool at the sight.”
“I can well believe it,” the doctor replied. “Antelope meat is superb.”
“As you can judge for yourself, sir—dinner is served.”
“Gad,” the hunter said, “this hunk of venison has a woody aroma I can’t resist.”
“Yum!” Joe replied, talking with his mouth full. “I could live on antelope the rest of my days, especially with a glass of grog to aid the digestion.”
Joe brewed the above-cited beverage, which they sipped reverently.
“Things are going pretty well so far,” he said.
“Very well,” Kennedy remarked.
“Say, Mr. Dick, are you sorry you came along?”
“Not a man alive could’ve held me back!” answered our hard-nosed hunter.
By then it was four o’clock in the afternoon; the Victoria found herself a faster air current; the terrain was inching upward, and soon the column of their barometer indicated an altitude of 1,500 feet above sea level. For the gas to expand enough to keep his vehicle aloft, the doctor needed to have his burner going continually.
Around seven o’clock the Victoria soared over the Kanyemé basin; the doctor instantly identified that huge clearing, ten miles in expanse, its villages lost in the midst of baobab and calabash trees. This is the residence of one of the sultans in the country of Ugogo, where maybe folks are more civilized because it’s rarer for them to sell members of their own family; but all its citizens, whether man or animal, live together in round shanties that don’t have any framework and look like haystacks.
After Kanyemé the terrain turned arid and stony; but an hour later, in a fertile hollow some distance from Mdaburu, the vegetation was back in force. As the light died out, so did the wind, and the very air seemed to fall asleep. The doctor searched the different altitudes for a current but without success; looking over this calm expanse, he decided to spend the night in the skies, and for greater safety he rose to an altitude of about a thousand feet. The Victoria stood still. The night was magnificently starry and dead silent.
Dick and Joe stretched out on their peaceful bed and slept like logs during the doctor’s watch; the Scot relieved him at midnight.
“Wake me up if anything happens, no matter how trivial,” he told Dick. “And above all, don’t take your eyes off the barometer. It’s like a compass for folks in our shoes!”
The night was cold, its temperature as much as twenty-seven degrees lower3 than during the day. Once the darkness came on, it was shattered by a nocturnal chorus of creatures whom hunger and thirst had driven out of their lairs; frogs made a racket in the soprano register, jackals chimed in with their yelping, while lions warmed up their imposing bassos, filling out the harmonies of this high-spirited orchestra.
Resuming his post in the morning, Dr. Fergusson checked the compass and saw that the wind had changed direction during the night. Over the past two hours or so, the Victoria had drifted some thirty miles to the northeast; she passed above Mabunguru, stony country bulging with humpbacked crags and scattered with finely polished chunks of an igneous rock called syenite; similar to the boulders in Carnac, conical masses dotted the ground like so many dolmens from the days of the Druids; sundry buffalo and elephant bones added touches of white here and there; not many trees were around, except some extensive woods to the east, hiding a couple of villages in their depths.
At about seven o’clock, a circular rock appeared, nearly two miles in expanse, looking like an immense carapace.
“We’re heading the right way,” Dr. Fergusson said. “There’s Jihoue-la-Mkoa, where we’ll call a brief halt. I’m going to replenish the water supply I need for my burner—let’s try to hitch up somewhere.”
“There aren’t many trees,” the hunter replied.
“We’ll try in any case; Joe, toss out the anchors.”
The balloon gradually lost her lifting power and dropped closer to the ground; the anchors ran; a fluke on one of them lodged inside a crevice in a boulder, and the Victoria stood still.
You mustn’t assume that the doctor could turn his burner off during these layovers. He had calculated the balloon’s buoyancy while at sea level; however, the terrain was continually rising and anytime it got to an elevation of 600 or 700 feet, the balloon would have an automatic tendency to ride at a level lower than the ground itself; so to keep her aloft, the gas definitely needed to expand. A dead calm would be the only circumstance in which the doctor would let the gondola rest on the ground—but then his lighter-than-air vehicle would be relieved of considerable weight and would stay aloft without any help from his burner.
His maps indicated huge ponds on the western slope of Jihoue-la-Mkoa. On his own Joe made his way to them, carrying a cask that could hold some ten gallons; not far from a small deserted village, he easily found the designated locality, saw to his water supply, and was back in less than forty-five minutes; he hadn’t spotted anything out of the ordinary except some immense elephant traps; he very nearly fell into one of them, which had a half-eaten carcass lying inside.
He brought back from his excursion a species of medlar, a plumlike fruit that apes eat with enthusiasm. The doctor identified it as coming from the mbenbu tree, quite plentiful over the western part of Jihoue-la-Mkoa. Fergusson waited for Joe with some impatience, because even a quick layover in this unfriendly land left him in constant dread.
They got the water on board without difficulty, the gondola having dropped nearly to the ground. Joe was able to jerk the anchor loose, then nimbly climbed back in next to his master. The latter immediately turned up his flame, and the Victoria resumed her course through the skies.
By then she was about a hundred miles from Kazeh, a major settlement in Africa’s interior, where, thanks to a southeasterly current, our travelers could hope to arrive that same day; they were traveling at a speed of fourteen miles per hour; it was getting fairly difficult to guide their vehicle; they couldn’t go too high without the gas expanding a good deal, because the country already had an average elevation of 3,000 feet. Now then, the doctor preferred, as far as possible, to not overdo the expanding; so he deftly followed the windings of a fairly steep incline, hugging the villages of Thembo and Tura-Wels. The latter form part of Unyamwezi, a magnificent region where trees reach the most enormous dimensions and even cactuses grow to whopping sizes.
Around two o’clock, under magnificent skies and a fiery sun that gobbled up the tiniest current of air, the Victoria soared above the town of Kazeh, located 350 miles from the coast.
“We left Zanzibar at nine o’clock in the morning,” Dr. Fergusson said, checking his notes. “And with all our detours, we’ve gone nearly 500 statute miles4 after just two days of travel. Captains Burton and Speke took 4½ months to cover the same distance!”
