After a few minutes Walter came away from the fireside and joined me. He had taken off his glasses, and I knew what that meant. First, he was seeing the world as an astigmatic blur; second, he was going to be very serious.
“How are you, Steven?” No beating about the bush, no winding slowly into his subject.
“Excited. We’ll be in Kintongo tomorrow.”
“If the weather holds up and the paths are good.” Walter was the perfect project director because he took nothing for granted. “We’re an eight-hour drive from Kintongo in good conditions. Last time it took me nearly eleven; and we’re in a wetter season now.” He cleared his throat, and his expression became embarrassed and uncertain. “I suppose I’m going to find out the answer in a day or two, and I should have asked you this question long ago; but just what in hell do you hope to find in Kintongo? It’s just a little village. Nothing to get excited about.”
I did not speak.
“You see, I know why the rest of us are here,” he said at last. “We’re on an adventure in some of the best wild country on earth. But that’s not you, Steven, and I knew it before we began. You could be back home in your study, and a lot happier than you are now. We’ve watched you for the last week, and seen how you’ve hated every minute—the mosquitoes, and the food, and the heat. I know you haven’t complained, not a word. But this isn’t your stamping ground. So why did you want to come?”
“To see the tunicate.”
He shook his head. “To see the tunicate. I shouldn’t have asked. That fucking tunicate. It’s a fancy piece of carving. Steven, you’re going to be angry as hell in a couple of days. I hope you won’t be mad at us.”
His mouth puckered up, as though he were trying to inhale with his lips pressed tightly together, and I thought he was about to speak again. But he turned and went slowly back toward the fire.
He hadn’t come to see me of his own volition. Jane and Wendy had put him up to it, I was sure. But it was going to be all right. Tomorrow we would be in Kintongo and we would see the tunicate.
In the weeks and months before we left Washington I had teased information about Kintongo from Walter, little by little. He was my only source. The place was unknown to the Smithsonian, or to the map rooms in the Library of Congress.
Walter spoke of a thriving village, maybe a hundred people, in a fine natural setting: a pair of small volcanic cones each rising a few hundred feet above an alluvial plain, the cones overlapping in area and the taller one about fifty feet higher than the other. As volcanoes they were long extinct, and both craters had filled with water. The lake formed in the higher caldera was perhaps four acres in extent, and it fed the lower one, half its size, through a permanent trickling stream. The village of Kintongo sat by that stream. The water of the lakes was clean and deep, and decomposed volcanic ash provided a black soil that was easily worked, deep, and fertile.
The villagers were too intelligent to take their good fortune for granted, and they wanted no competition from new settlers. They were wary with all visitors, especially those with cameras.
Walter had planned our approach and first meeting in Kintongo with care. While we were still in Washington, he and Wendy spent a long time discussing the delicate question of gifts for the village chief. “He’ll remember me, you can be sure of that,” said Walter. “Lunga’s a shrewd old fellow. He’ll wonder why I’m back. We need a good reason.”
“Touring party?”
“Not if we want to stay a while near the village—a tour wouldn’t do that. Not enough to see.”
Wendy put her hand up to her forehead and rubbed at the roots of her hair. It was a nervous habit. She would rub until she had made a red patch at the hairline, then go to a mirror and frown in disgust at her reflection. “Working for the World Bank, or AID, on a development project? Bird watchers? Traders? I don’t know.”
“They don’t want to hear anything about development. Lunga would be happy if he never had another visitor from Kinshasa. Bird-watchers is better—there’s actually a wonderful breeding-forest a few hours from Kintongo, and we’ll visit it. But if we were mainly interested in that we’d naturally stay over there. No, your last shot is the best one. Traders. There are things we can sell in Kintongo, and my first trip helps. Lunga will suspect that my previous visit was a look at the market.”
Walter had brought an interesting selection. We had enamel pans, razor blades and disposable razors, flashlights and batteries, plastic plates, bowls, and spoons, a couple of pressure cookers, three boxes of candles that would light themselves again after you blew them out, and—Walter’s pièce de resistance—a gasoline-powered chain saw.
“This will get him,” he said. “They cut a lot of timber for the village, and they always need more. The pressure cooker will be our main gift, but he’ll really want the chain saw. Lunga will let us stay until he’s talked his way into getting it.”
Walter had done an amazing job pulling all his “trade goods” in through Customs with only a pittance of duty and a modest amount of bribes. It was all part of the game—the challenge that made the other three enjoy Africa. And on the way from Kinshasa he had done a little trading, just to practice his act for Lunga.
I was in the front seat of the bus as we ascended the slope that would take us into Kintongo. The little trailer was crammed with our food, tents, and supplies, and the volcanic cone was steep-sided. We jolted along in four-wheel drive, at about five miles an hour, and I had plenty of time for a leisurely first inspection of our destination.
It was not a clinical look. My pulse was fast, and I felt lightheaded from excitement and lack of sleep.
Here is what I saw: there was a tightly drawn group of huts, approaching as close as thirty yards to the little lake. Each building was made of tall vertical poles of dry timber, with dry grass stuffed between and grass sheaves plaited above to form sloping roofs. The huts looked fairly fragile, but wind-proof and rain-proof, and that was enough. Cold would almost never be a problem. It was just as well, because everything looked tinder-dry and a fire inside any of the huts would be an insanity. The communal cooking-place sat between the village buildings and the lake. An enamel bathtub had been set up to catch the overflow of the stream where it trickled down into the lake, and two women were filling pans from it as we drove slowly up the slope and stopped at a respectful distance from the huts and the cooking area.
They were ready for us. Our arrival had obviously been long expected. The top of the higher volcanic cone must provide an excellent lookout point across twenty miles of plain, and Lunga was wary enough of visitors that he would keep that post well-staffed. It seemed as though the whole village had turned out for our arrival. Walter had been on the low side with his estimate. I did a rough count before we had exchanged our first words, and there must have been two hundred people thronged around our bus.
Lunga sat in state outside the biggest hut. He was quite recognizable from Walter’s description and quick pencil sketch, a pot-bellied man whose grizzled hair didn’t match his smooth face and young eyes. He waited calmly, nodding to himself in a thoughtful way when he saw Walter. He looked briefly at me, then turned his attention to Wendy and Jane. I wondered if he had seen white women in Kintongo before.
My inspection of Lunga was even more cursory; for behind him, standing against the wall of the hut and supported on a well-made wooden trestle, was the object that I had traveled six thousand miles to see. It lay on its side now, rather than upright as it had shown in the slide, but it was quite unmistakably the tunicate.
I would have liked to go over and look at it at once, but even in my urgency I realized that we had to go through the formalities. What I had underestimated was the length of time that those formalities would occupy. First there had to be formal greetings. I soon discovered that in Africa even the meeting of total strangers can be time-consuming. And we had another complicating factor, one that Jane had
already predicted—though in her practical way she had also pointed out that there was nothing we could do about it.
I mean the presence of the two army men, the representatives of the far-off President in Kinshasa. Lunga’s immediate reaction to that was a cold aloofness during our introductions, with a suggestion through his interpreter that we were clearly just passing through his village and would be on our way within the hour. But I suspect he knew the realities of the situation very well, and could see that we liked the army presence even less than he did. For after his formal expression of displeasure he at once provided us all with cups of beer and invited us to sit on the floor with him. Then he and Walter began their discussions, in the curious mixed-language talk you hear a lot in the middle of the continent. I could understand most of the French and English phrases and guess at some others, but sometimes I was lost completely.
But then I was also preoccupied. It was certainly not a carving, or even a paper model, as Wendy had irritatingly suggested that first evening. Six feet was a better estimate than seven, because the native women in Walter’s slide must have been shorter than I expected; and the surface had a glossy, finished look that had not come across in the slide, either, almost as though it had been recently varnished or polished. The opening in the upper end—the inhalant siphon—was about ten inches across, and I could see that the whole interior had been scooped clean. The big surprise was at the other end. The usual sessile nature of a mature tunicate did not allow for any form of true flexible foot. But Master Tunicate had three distinct lower pads, each looking as though it was designed for real locomotion.
I was itching for a closer look, but a roar of laughter from Lunga brought my attention back to our little circle. The cups of beer had been steadily refilled every few minutes, and with the sun beating down on the bare black earth we were all sweating hugely. I felt terrible, but Walter seemed to be enjoying himself and he was doing famously. He had done his razzle-dazzle with plastic cups and plates and trick candles, and had presented Lunga with a pressure cooker. Now he was all set to demonstrate the chain saw.
Lunga’s eyes lit up at the roar of the motor and the flying sawdust. He called for more beer, and sent a villager away to bring the biggest log he could find. The noise was horrendous. When we went back to the bus, an hour later, we were all half-deafened. But everyone was tipsy and seemed well pleased with the meeting. On the way to the bus we paused by the pool. It was obviously well-used by the natives, and it didn’t look as clean as Walter had advertised.
“That’s it, Steven,” said Walter. “In the middle of all the other chit-chat I asked about your friend. He said that Master Tunicate”—this was the first time I heard that phrase spoken—“wasn’t there one day, then there was a monster rain storm and electrical storm that night, and the next day he was there, in this pond. Nobody saw him come. Lunga says he knew they had found a god, but he said it in a way that made me feel maybe he didn’t mean it. The other villagers believe it—but perhaps Lunga doesn’t.”
Walter may have been right. But that problem has been solved. Lunga is now a part of Master Tunicate’s entourage.
We went closer to stare into the depths of the pool.
“How deep is it?” I asked.
Walter shook his head, and I turned to Jane. “Think I could dive it?” One of my few athletic talents, as we had found in Bermuda. I was better in water than any of them.
She looked doubtful. “You could, but I don’t think you should. I saw signs of schisto in some of the villagers. And you can tell they don’t try to keep this pond clean, or have any decent sanitation.”
“Schisto?” I asked.
“Schistosomiasis,” said Walter. “I don’t know if this is a schisto area or not, but we don’t want to take the risk.”
“But I’d only be going in once.”
“Quite enough,” said Jane severely. “I’ll tell you an African riddle: Do you know the difference between true love and schistosomiasis?”
“Answer: Schisto is forever,” said Wendy. “It’s a disease with no cure. Steven, you’re not going in that pond. We’ve done very well so far, Walter has managed miracles here—let’s not spoil it.”
“Does Lunga really believe we’re traders?” said Jane.
“He thinks Steven and I are,” said Walter. “I told him you and Wendy are our women. He understood that.”
“And he believed you brought us with you all the way from America?” said Jane. “That sounds fishy. I bet Lunga’s more suspicious of us than you realize. He knows women can be had right here.”
“He said that to me.” Walter’s face was expressionless. “But I pointed out to him that you two are spectacular-exceptional-amazing in bed. He was very interested. He asked if he could try you both, especially the long one. I told him maybe—if the trading here goes well.”
He headed for the bus before Jane or Wendy could hit him with a good reply. They hurried after him, cursing. I stayed on for another look at the lake. The water was a little green and cloudy, but I imagined I could see bottom. It ought to be easy enough to dive it, even at night.
Our meeting in Kintongo had not helped my sleeping difficulty at all. It had made it worse. Lying in our tent while Wendy peacefully slumbered beside me, I found my mind running in circles over the same issues that had surfaced on that first evening in Great Falls.
Problems.
There were physical problems with a six or seven foot tunicate that I had not mentioned to the others.
To take one specific: think about scale. Like the idea of a six-foot ant or housefly, the existence of a very large tunicate would introduce all kinds of physiological difficulties. For example, a tunicate eats by inhaling water through a siphon, straining it for food particles, and exhaling the water through another siphon. I could see that might work quite well for a very large tunicate—after all, blue whales are the biggest animals on earth, and they eat through a similar process of straining water for food. But unlike the whale, the tunicate has no lungs. It relies on the same water that carries in the food to carry in oxygen. And for a six-foot tunicate, that supply would be totally inadequate. So a six-foot tunicate is impossible. Very good—but there were the remains of one less than a half a mile away.
That, plus a dozen other more specialized questions of tunicate anatomy and function, assured that I would be awake well before dawn. When the sun came up I was already dressed, outside the tent, and firing up the stove.
I made plenty of noise, so by the time I had boiled water the rest of them were stirring, yawning and muttering inside the tents. They joined me outside and we had a hefty but hurried breakfast. For various reasons, all four of us wanted an early start to the day’s work.
An hour after first light, Walter and I were heading on foot for Kintongo. When we left, Jane and Wendy had started to reallocate food and supplies between the bus and trailer. The plan called for a trip to the bird breeding-grounds as soon as the two of us returned—Walter insisted that it was a not-to-be-missed sight, one of the main reasons for visiting this part of Zaire. I had not objected.
Lunga was an early riser, too. He was waiting for us when we got there, yawning and scratching, chewing on a leg of monkey boucané that looked disturbingly like the smoked limb of a human baby, and smoking an ancient yellow-brown meerschaum pipe. He was more than ready to begin discussions, and after the obligatory few minutes of general chit-chat he and Walter got down to serious business. It was my chance to stroll over to the tunicate and take a much closer look.
There are three orders of tunicate—Ascidiacea, Thaliacea, and Copelata—and no one can pretend to know every detail of every species. I certainly won’t make that claim. But I do know the features common to all the orders, and Master Tunicate—while undoubtedly a tunicate—had anomalies that perturbed me greatly. The strangest was an extension of the tunic structure inside the body cavity, creating what amounted
to a complicated internal skeleton as well as the usual tough outer layer. No tunicate had a skeleton. And there was a great bulge between the two siphons. That was where in a normal tunicate the wad of nerve tissue that makes up the animal’s “brain” should lie. Here it was preposterously well-developed, a significant fraction of the total body mass. And those lower pads; they looked less and less as though they were designed for simple attachment to a rock, and more and more like feet.
There were so many questions. If only I could find a living specimen…
I went back to Walter’s side, and found him alone for the moment. Lunga had stepped away to another hut.
“He’ll be back quickly enough,” said Walter. He grinned in a self-satisfied way. “He wants to buy that saw so bad, and I told him it wasn’t available for sale because you had already promised it elsewhere. But I told him maybe if he wanted to trade that”—he jerked his head toward the great convex cylinder on the wooden trestle—“I’d try to talk you into a deal. I said you were fascinated with it.”
“Thanks, Walter.” My throat was suddenly tight with nervous anticipation. But when Lunga returned I leaned back into the shade and tried to look coolly indifferent.
Lunga was carrying an oblong piece of blue-gray metal or plastic, about three feet long. The surface was scored with a regular grid, an accurate pattern of ruled lines, and the edges of the material branched many times, to terminate in a broad sheaf of tiny wires. He jabbered away at Walter for a few minutes, while I struggled unsuccessfully to follow.
Walter shook his head firmly and turned to me. “He won’t trade your friend there. Quite honestly, I think he’d be happy to see the last of Master Tunicate, but the villagers would give him trouble. They think they have a powerful magic going for them. But he says that blue gadget was with the god when it arrived in the village, and he’d be quite willing to trade that to us. He asked if you wanted to buy it, and I said not.”
Dancing With Myself Page 5
