The Nile—the quivering mountain—homesickness—the Arabs’ accounts—the Nyam-Nyams—Joe talks sense—the Victoria dodges a few bullets—Madame Blanchard1—ascensions by lighter-than-air vehicles.
“What’s our heading?” Kennedy asked, watching his friend check the compass.
“North-northwest.”
“Bloody hell, that isn’t exactly north!”
“No, Dick, and I think we’ll be hard pressed to reach Gondokoro; that’s disappointing, but we’ve finally linked the exploring parties from the east to those from the north; we have no cause for complaint.”
The Victoria was wafting farther and farther from the Nile.
“Take one last look,” the doctor said, “at this insurmountable latitude that the bravest travelers could never get beyond! Those were the same intransigent tribesmen reported by such travelers as Messrs. Petherick, Arnaud, Miani, and young Monsieur Lejean, who’ve left us the best work on the upper Nile.”
“Does this mean,” Kennedy asked, “that our discoveries match up with the scientific theories?”
“They match up perfectly. The headwaters of the White Nile, the Bahr-el-Abiad, are submerged in a lake the size of a sea; that’s its birthplace; of course the imaginative arts will lose out as a result; people loved thinking of this king of rivers as heavenly in origin; the ancients referred to it as an ocean and they weren’t far from believing it flowed directly from the sun! But sometimes we have to lower our expectations and abide by what science teaches us; there will always be dreamers, but there might not always be scholars.”
“You can see some more waterfalls,” Joe said.
“That’s Makedo Falls at latitude 3° north. Nothing could correspond more closely! If only we could have followed the Nile’s course for a few hours!”
“And down there ahead of us,” the hunter said, “I see a mountaintop.”
“That’s Mt. Logwek, known to Arabs as ‘the quivering mountain’; Debono visited this whole region, calling himself Latif Effendi while traveling through it. The tribes along the Nile are deadly enemies and wage genocidal war on each other. You can easily judge the perils he had to face.”
By that point the wind was carrying the Victoria to the northwest. To dodge Mt. Logwek, they needed to find a steeper current.
“My friends,” the doctor told his two companions, “this is where our African crossing truly begins. Until now we’ve mainly followed in the footsteps of our predecessors. From this point we’ll plunge into the unknown. Courage won’t be a problem for us, will it?”
“Never!” Dick and Joe exclaimed in unison.
“Then off we go, and heaven help us!”
By ten o’clock that evening, after passing over ravines, forests, and scattered villages, our travelers had reached the flanks of the quivering mountain and were skirting its gentle gradients.
On that memorable day of April 23, propelled by a brisk wind during a fifteen-hour run, they had covered a distance of more than 315 miles.2
But this latest part of the journey left them in a melancholy mood. Utter silence reigned in the gondola. Was Dr. Fergusson all caught up in his discoveries? Were his two companions brooding over their trip through these unknown territories? No doubt these matters were mixed in with aching memories of England and faraway friends. Only Joe seemed to have a carefree outlook, finding it perfectly natural that his homeland was somewhere else the moment he left it; as for the tight-lipped Samuel Fergusson and Dick Kennedy, he let them be.
At ten o’clock that evening, they “tethered” the Victoria alongside the quivering mountain,* packed in a substantial meal, then took turns sleeping and standing watch.
Next day, calmer thinking prevailed when they woke up; the weather was pleasant, and the wind was blowing the right way; breakfast, brightened by Joe in top form, ultimately restored their cheery high spirits.
They were crossing an immense region at that moment; it lies between the Mountains of the Moon and the Darfur range, an expanse as big as Europe.
“No doubt,” the doctor said, “we’re crossing over what’s believed to be the kingdom of Usoga; geographers have maintained that a huge basin existed in the middle of Africa, an immense central lake. We’ll see if this formulation bears any resemblance to reality.”
“But where did that belief come from?” Kennedy asked.
“From accounts by Arabs. Those people are adroit storytellers, maybe too adroit. Reaching Kazeh or the great inland lakes, a few Arab travelers saw some slaves hailing from these central regions, questioned them about their country, slapped together the records of their various answers, and used that as the basis of their formulations. Deep down we still find a little truth there, and as you saw, they weren’t mistaken about where the Nile originates.”
“They were spot on,” Kennedy replied.
“Those records led them to rough out some tentative maps. Accordingly I’m going to follow our course on one of them, correcting it where I need to.”
“Do people live all over this region?” Joe asked.
“They do, troublesome people.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“These scattered tribes are lumped together under the general name of Nyam-Nyams, and this label is nothing but a nonsense word; it’s supposed to sound like chewing.”
“It does a perfect job,” Joe said. “Nyam! Nyam!”
“My gallant Joe, if you were on the receiving end of this nonsense word, you wouldn’t find things so perfect.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean these tribes are viewed as cannibals.”
“That’s a fact?”
“An established fact; people also claimed these natives came equipped with tails like common quadrupeds; but it soon emerged that these appendages belonged to the animal skins they were wearing.”
“What a shame! A tail’s mighty nice for chasing mosquitoes away.”
“Maybe so, Joe; but these need to be relegated to the realm of tall stories, just like those dog heads that the traveler Brun-Rollet attributed to certain tribes.”
“Dog heads? Handy for barking and for biting people too!”
“Which, unfortunately, is what has proven true about these ferocious tribes—they’re so greedy for human flesh, they hunt for it obsessively.”
“All I ask,” Joe said, “is that they don’t obsess too much over mine.”
“You do go on!” the hunter said.
“Here’s how I see it, Mr. Dick. If there’s ever a food shortage and I have to be eaten, I want it to benefit you and my master! But stuff those rascals’ stomachs? No way, I’d die in dishonor!”
“Well, my gallant Joe,” Kennedy said, “you’ve made it clear: we can count on you when the cupboard’s bare.”
“Yours to command, gentlemen.”
“Joe’s talking this way,” the doctor remarked, “so we’ll coddle him and fatten him up.”
“Could be,” Joe replied. “Humans are such self-centered creatures!”
In the afternoon a warm fog seeped from the soil and covered the sky; its fine spray barely let you make things out on the ground; fearful of banging into some unexpected mountaintop, the doctor accordingly called a halt around five o’clock.
The night was uneventful, but the murkiness was so intense, they had to be exceptionally vigilant.
Throughout the next morning a monsoon blew with tremendous force; the wind surged into the balloon’s lower cavities; it gave a good shaking to the appendix that the inflation pipes fitted into; they had to be secured with lines, an operation in which Joe acquitted himself with great dexterity.
At the same time he verified that the balloon’s throat was still hermetically sealed.
“That’s doubly important to us,” Dr. Fergusson said. “First, we avoid any loss of our precious gas; next, we don’t leave a flammable trail around us, which might end up catching on fire.”
“That wouldn’t be one of our journey’s highlights,” Joe said.
“We’d be hurled to the ground?” Kennedy asked.
“Not hurled, no! The gas would burn quietly, and we’d descend little by little. This kind of accident happened to a French balloonist, Madame Blanchard; her balloon caught on fire while she was setting off fireworks, but she didn’t fall out of the sky, and she probably wouldn’t have been killed if her gondola hadn’t banged into a chimney and thrown her to the ground.”
“We’ll hope nothing like that happens to us,” the hunter said. “Till now this trip hasn’t struck me as dangerous, and I don’t see anything that’ll keep us from reaching our destination.”
“Nor do I, my dear Dick; but accidents have always been caused by the balloonist’s carelessness or the faulty construction of his equipment. Even so, out of several thousand ascensions in lighter-than-air vehicles, there have been fewer than twenty fatal accidents. As a general rule it’s the liftoffs and landings that present the greatest dangers. Consequently these are the moments in which we mustn’t overlook any precautions.”
“And now it’s lunchtime,” Joe said. “We’ll have to settle for canned meat and coffee, till Mr. Kennedy finds some way to dish us up a decent hunk of venison.”
* Tradition has it that whenever a Muslim sets foot on the mountain, it quivers.