chapter 30
Mosfeia—the sheik—Denham, Clapperton, Oudney—Vogel—Loggoum’s capital—Toole—calm over Kernak—the governor and his court—the attack—pyromaniac pigeons.
The next day, May 11, the Victoria resumed her adventurous course; our travelers trusted her the way a seaman trusts his ship.
At any time or place, during dreadful hurricanes, tropical heat waves, dangerous liftoffs, or even more dangerous landings, she had come through triumphantly. Fergusson guided her by sleight of hand, you might say; consequently, even though he didn’t know his final destination, the doctor had no other worries about his journey’s outcome. But in this country of barbarians and fanatics, common sense dictated that he take the strictest precautions; so he advised his companions to keep watch around the clock for anything and everything.
The wind led them a little more to the north, and around nine o’clock they glimpsed the big town of Mosfeia, built on a knoll that was itself boxed in between two lofty mountains; it occupied an invulnerable location; the only means of access was a narrow road between a marsh and some woods.
Just then a sheik made his entrance into town, dressed in bright-colored clothing, accompanied by an escort on horseback, and preceded by trumpeters and heralds who parted the tree branches for him as he went.
The doctor dropped down to get a closer look at these natives; but as the balloon grew bigger before their eyes, signs of sheer terror spread among them, and in no time they were scampering away as fast as their legs and horses could move.
Only the sheik stayed put; he took his long musket, cocked it, and waited proudly. The doctor got within 150 feet of him, then in his most dulcet tones greeted him in Arabic.
But when these words dropped from the sky, the sheik dismounted, fell prostrate in the dust of the road, and the doctor couldn’t get him to leave off his adoring.
“These people,” he said, “can’t help but see us as supernatural beings—when the first Europeans came among them, the natives thought they were a race of supermen. And when this sheik mentions our encounter in the future, he won’t fail to exaggerate things with all the resources of his Arabic imagination. You can easily guess how their legends will portray us someday.”
“That might be a problem,” the hunter replied. “From a civilizing standpoint it would be better if we were viewed as plain human beings; that would give these Negroes quite a different idea of what Europeans are capable of.”
“Agreed, my dear Dick, but what can we do? You could spend hours explaining how a balloon works to the wisest men in the country, but it would be too much for them, and they’d still think it was a supernatural apparition.”
“Sir,” Joe asked, “you mentioned the first Europeans who explored this country; could you please tell us who they were?”
“My dear boy, we’re on Major Denham’s exact route; right here in Mosfeia he was welcomed by the Sultan of Mandara; he’d come from Bornu, he went with the sheik on a sortie against the Fulas, and he was present at the attack on the town, which gallantly withstood the Arabs’ bullets with its arrows and drove off the sheik’s troops; all this was only a prelude to murder, raids, and pillaging; they stripped the major of everything he had and left him naked, so if he hadn’t slipped under a horse’s belly and fled from his conquerors at a frantic gallop, he never would have reentered Kouka, Bornu’s capital.”
“But who was this Major Denham?”
“A courageous Englishman; from 1822 to 1824 he commanded an expedition into Bornu along with Captain Clapperton and Dr. Oudney. They left Tripoli during the month of March, got to Murzuk, the capital of Libya’s Fezzan region, used the route Dr. Barth would later take back to Europe, and reached Kouka near Lake Chad on February 16, 1823. Denham went on various exploratory outings in Bornu, in the Mandara Kingdom, and along the lake’s east bank; meanwhile, on December 15, 1823, Captain Clapperton and Dr. Oudney pushed into Sudan as far as Sokoto, and Oudney died of exhaustion and deprivation in the town of Murmur.”
“So this part of Africa,” Kennedy asked, “has sacrificed many lives on the altar of science?”
“Yes, this region is deadly! We’re traveling straight to the kingdom of Bagirmi, which Vogel crossed in 1856 on his way to Wadaï, where he vanished. This young man—he was only twenty-three—had been sent to assist Dr. Barth with his work; the two of them met up on December 1, 1854; then Vogel began to explore the country; his last letters, toward 1856, announced that he planned to scout out the kingdom of Wadaï, which no European had entered at that time; apparently he got to its capital city of Wara, where some say he was held captive and others say he was put to death for trying to climb one of the area’s sacred mountains; but we mustn’t be too quick to accept the deaths of travelers, because that does away with having to search for them; Dr. Barth, for example, was officially declared dead on many occasions, which he rightly found aggravating! So it’s entirely possible the Sultan of Wadaï is holding Vogel captive in hopes of getting ransom money. Baron von Neimans was about to leave Cairo for Wadaï when he died in 1855. We now know that Herr von Heuglin has started on Vogel’s trail with an expedition arriving from Leipzig. Accordingly we soon should have the facts about the fate of that interesting young traveler.”*
Mosfeia had vanished below the horizon a good while earlier. The Mandara Kingdom unfolded its amazing fertility under our travelers’ eyes—its forests of acacia trees, its locust trees with red flowers, the herbaceous plants in its fields of cotton and indigo; the Chari River rolled along its impetuous course, emptying into Lake Chad eighty miles farther on.
The doctor had his companions follow it on Barth’s maps.
“You see the tremendous exactitude,” he said, “with which this scholar did his work; we’re heading straight to the Loggoum district and maybe even to Kernak, its capital. That’s where poor Toole died when he was barely twenty-two: he was a young Englishman, a sublieutenant in the 80th Regiment who had joined Major Denham in Africa a few weeks earlier, and it wasn’t long before he met his death there. By Jove, you’d be right in calling this immense region the European’s graveyard!”
Fifty-foot barges were coming down the Chari’s course. A thousand feet up, the Victoria scarcely attracted the natives’ attention; but the wind—which had been blowing with some force until then—was showing a tendency to die down.
“Are we going to get caught again in a flat calm?” the doctor said.
“Oh great! At least, master, we won’t have to worry about the desert and running out of water.”
“No, but the people are even more threatening.”
“Now here,” Joe said, “is something like a town.”
“That’s Kernak. The last puffs of wind are taking us to it, and if we like, we’ll be able to draft an exact ground plan.”
“Aren’t we going to pull in closer?” Kennedy asked.
“Nothing could be easier, Dick; we’re right over the town; let me give the spigot on our burner a partial turn, and we’ll soon be descending.”
Half an hour later the Victoria stood stock-still, 200 feet in the air.
“At this point we’re closer to Kernak,” the doctor said, “than a man on top of St. Paul’s steeple is to London. So we can sightsee at our leisure.”
“What’s that pounding noise all around us?”
Joe looked closely and saw that the noise came from many weavers beating pieces of fabric, which were stretched over huge tree trunks in the open air.
By then you could take in the full expanse of Loggoum’s capital, as if you had unrolled its ground plan; it was an honest-to-goodness town with rows of houses and tolerably wide streets; a slave auction was under way in the middle of a huge square; there were multitudes of customers, because Mandara women have exceptionally small hands and feet, are much in demand, and fetch excellent prices.
When the Victoria came in sight, the effect produced so often was reproduced once more: first there was shouting, then deep astonishment; business dealings came to a halt; work stopped; noises died out. The travelers stayed perfectly still, not missing one detail of that populous city; they actually dropped as low as sixty feet from the ground.
Then Loggoum’s governor emerged from his mansion, his green banner unfurled and followed by musicians blowing buffalo horns raucously enough to burst your eardrums, or anything else except their own lungs. The crowd gathered around him. Dr. Fergusson tried to make himself heard; he wasn’t successful.
With their high foreheads, curly hair, and nearly aquiline noses, these people seemed proud and intelligent; but they found the Victoria’s presence unusually upsetting; you saw riders racing in from every direction; it soon became clear that the governor’s troops were mobilizing to do battle with this extraordinary enemy. Joe did a nice job waving white handkerchiefs, plus every other color, but to no effect.
Meanwhile the sheik gathered his court around him, called for silence, and delivered a speech without a single word that the doctor could understand; it was a mix of Arabic and Baghirmi; only, thanks to the universal language of hand gestures, Samuel did grasp that he was being cordially invited to go someplace else; he asked for nothing better, but given the lack of wind, this wasn’t a possibility. His inaction exasperated the governor, and the courtiers let out a chorus of howls to shoo the monster away.
They were odd characters, these courtiers, with five or six multicolored shirts over their bodies; they had enormous bellies, some of which looked artificially stuffed. The doctor surprised his companions when he told them this was how the sultan’s subjects paid homage to him. The abdomen’s rotundity indicated a person’s ambition. These fat men shouted and flailed about, especially one who must have been prime minister, assuming his proportions had been suitably rewarded by the present administration. The crowds of Negroes added their howls to the shouts of the court, aping their body language and producing a single instantaneous movement of ten thousand arms.
These methods of intimidation were judged insufficient, so others more daunting took their place in the mix. Soldiers packing bows and arrows fell into battle formation; but the Victoria had already expanded and climbed serenely out of range. Then the governor grabbed a musket and pointed it at the balloon. But Kennedy had his eye on him, and a bullet from his rifle shattered the weapon in the sheik’s hands.
At this bolt from the blue, there was a mad scramble; they all rushed inside their huts at top speed, and the town remained absolutely deserted the rest of the day.
Night fell. Not a puff of wind anywhere. They had no choice but to remain stationary 300 feet off the ground. Not a light gleamed in the darkness; a deathly silence reigned. The doctor was extra cautious; this calm could be a trap.
And Fergusson was right to be on his guard. Around midnight the whole town seemed to go up in flames; hundreds of blazing streaks crisscrossed in the air like rockets, forming a tangle of fiery lines.
“How very odd!” the doctor said.
“Lord almighty!” Kennedy responded. “You’d think that bonfire was heading up our way!”
Sure enough, while muskets went off and frightful shrieks rang out, that mass of flame was rising toward the Victoria. Joe got ready to drop ballast. Before long Fergusson found the explanation for this phenomenon.
The town had turned thousands of pigeons loose against the Victoria, their tails garnished with flammable material; as they climbed, the terrified birds scrawled incandescent zigzags in the air. Kennedy was ready to fire every one of his weapons into the heart of that blazing mass; but what could he do against those endless battalions? The pigeons had already surrounded the gondola and the balloon, whose walls reflected their light as if they were encircled by a network of fire.
The doctor didn’t hesitate, chucked out a quartz fragment, and stayed beyond the reach of those dangerous birds. For two hours you could see them race here and there in the night; then, one by one, their numbers shrank and their lights went out.
“Now we can sleep in peace,” the doctor said.
“Not a bad trick for savages to dream up!” Joe noted.1
“Yes, they employ pigeons pretty routinely to set thatched roofs on fire in rival villages; but this time the village flew higher than their pyromaniac poultry!”
“Which proves,” Kennedy said, “that a balloon doesn’t have any enemies worth worrying about.”
“Oh yes it does,” the doctor countered.
“So who are they?”
“The careless people riding in her gondola; therefore, my friends, be vigilant always and everywhere.”
* Following the doctor’s departure, letters sent from El Obeid by Herr Munzinger, the expedition’s new leader, unfortunately leave no further doubts about Vogel’s death.
