Hemingway Adventure (1999)

by Michael Palin

  In the background I see the old man who circumcised the boy weaving unsteadily amongst the huts. He is rewarded for his work with as much beer as he can drink and already has the third or fourth bottle of Tusker at his lips. No one talks to him. I ask an older Masai about him. He says that circumcision is always done by the poorest people, usually from another village.

  ‘Is he good?’

  My friend is philosophical. ‘Some are good, some are bad.’

  His own circumcision took over an hour. He nods across to the hut where the boy lies. ‘He’ll be all right in five days.’

  In True at First Light, as they sit outside their mess tent feeling the cool night breeze off Mount Kilimanjaro, Miss Mary (Mary Hemingway), tells the narrator (Ernest):

  ‘I want to go and really see something of Africa. We’ll be going home and we haven’t seen anything. I want to see the Belgian Congo.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You don’t have any ambition. You’d just as soon stay in one place.’

  ‘Have you ever been in a better place?’

  It’s easy to imagine the real life Hemingways having this conversation as they looked out on Kilimanjaro, the way we do this morning. Right now, as a soft wind blows and the dust rises from the cattle trudging across this magnificent wide-screen landscape, I would back Ernest. I have been in few better places.

  But Miss Mary was a tenacious woman and eventually got what she wanted.

  On 21 January 1954 the Hemingways, with a bush pilot by the name of Roy Marsh, took off from Nairobi to see the Belgian Congo. Hemingway called it his Christmas present to Mary.

  After flying due north to look down on friends in the rich farming belt of the Kenya Highlands they turned south, inspecting the lakes and volcanoes of the Great Rift Valley, the twelve-mile-wide Ngorongoro Crater and the game-filled Serengeti Plains. After a refuelling stop at Mwanza they headed west, out over Lake Victoria and the desolate northern quarter of Rwanda and by the end of the first day they reached the Belgian Congo, putting down for the night at the town of Coster-mansville, now Bukavu.

  The next day they flew north over the Rwenzori mountains, a spectacular snow-capped range in the very centre of Africa, known to early explorers as the Mountains of the Moon, and from there to Entebbe in Uganda. Hemingway, in his article ‘The Christmas Gift’, for Look magazine, extravagantly praised the comforts of Entebbe’s Lake Victoria Hotel, adding pointedly that he hoped ‘Miss Mary was beginning to lose the claustrophobia she had experienced while being confined to the Masai Reserve and the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro.’

  But Miss Mary’s claustrophobia was far from cured and once the mist cleared next morning they were in the air again heading over George and Albert, the lakes of the Western Rift Valley, and on to the Murchison Falls on the River Nile. Diving down to what Hemingway later described as ‘a reasonably legal height’, they had a good look at this spectacular torrent of white water, and were heading back to Entebbe when their tail and propeller clipped a telegraph wire and the plane hurtled down into low scrub beside the crocodile-infested waters of the Nile. This was only the start of the nightmare.

  I suppose you could say it’s because of Mary that we find ourselves uprooted from our earthly paradise beside Kilimanjaro, flown north-west across the Equator and deposited, at the end of a long day, in the sticky humidity of lakeside Entebbe. No genets at night, no cups of tea to wake us in the morning, just the putrid stink of corridors sprayed against the ubiquitous lake flies, and a lavatory cistern that shoots a jet of water onto my head whenever I pull the chain.

  A terrific din wakens me. Cannot immediately distinguish the sound. Is it a hurricane or is the building collapsing? It turns out to be thick plummeting rain, drumming on the ground and on the roof, product of a massive tropical storm.

  The prospect of a light plane trip in the morning makes me anxious. Pad off to the lavatory. Water on my head again.

  On our way to Entebbe airport we are flagged down at a checkpoint. Two security men step out from beside a large notice warning ‘Please Deposit Firearms, Briefcases’.

  They examine our mini-bus, especially the bulky camera equipment inside. Whilst one walks alongside with a strange coat-hanger device held in front of him, his colleague questions us.

  ‘Anything to declare?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No guns?’

  ‘No. No guns.’

  He seems quite taken by surprise and repeats our answer incredulously. ‘No guns?’

  I rather feel we’ve let him down.

  By the time our two single-engined Cessnas take off, the worst of the storm has passed, but an hour out of Entebbe we hit a belt of heavy rain at seven thousand feet. The little plane bucks alarmingly and water streaks across the window below which I can see the outline of our right-hand landing wheel, and far below it occasional glimpses of great curved rocks rising from dense tropical forest. The weather is so bad that we have to put down at a maize-field airstrip close by a game lodge called Semliki, on the edge of the Mountains of the Moon.

  In grand comfort, under a tall thatch roof, we have lunch and, after the rain passes, set off again, flying north. The long thin finger of Lake Albert separates Uganda from what is now the Republic of the Congo. The Congo shore is hidden in a haze of smoke from land-burning fires, but the eastern shore of the lake is clear. A long cliff wall folds gracefully down to the water as the escarpment meets the Western Rift Valley. Waterfalls cascade down the rock-face splashing onto narrow beach settlements, inaccessible from the landward side. Fishermen’s boats are drawn up on the shore and the huts are simple straw shelters. As we fly lower and closer I’m surprised to see these tiny villages are full of people. They wave up at us and the children caper around as we fly over them. The sun breaks through for the first time today, sending an imprint of our fragile little plane skimming across the waters below.

  At the head of Lake Albert, on its eastern shore, is our first sight of the Nile, snaking east and north, a coil of silver in the late afternoon sun. When we get closer I can see large herds of elephant in the shallows, and the heads of innumerable basking hippos. Fish-eagles looking like lords in ermine with their white head and neck feathers fly below us as we slowly descend toward the falls.

  The Murchison Falls are not high and they’re so enclosed in rocks and forest that you don’t see them until you’re almost on top of them. What makes them so special is the sheer power of the water-flow. This is no elegant sheet of falling water, it’s more like a power-jet. The Nile, a third of a mile wide as it flows off the plateau, is squeezed into a tortuous gorge only twenty or thirty yards across. Some of the water spills over a precipice further away, but the bulk of this throttled river blasts its way downwards in a corkscrew spiral, the water tossed from one rock face to another until it crashes out of the gorge in a carpet of foam a quarter of a mile wide and half a mile long.

  We land at a dirt airstrip nearby then take the ferry over the river to put up for the night at the Nile Safari Camp.

  There is no respite from the heat, no evening breeze like the one that cooled us in the Chyulu Hills. Instead, the chatter of crickets and the drone of mosquitoes and, echoing up from the river below, a frog chorus interspersed with the chuckle and splash of the hippos.

  When the Hemingways passed their unscheduled night in the undergrowth beside Murchison Falls, with Mary in considerable pain, they spent it building fires and scaring off elephants whilst Roy Marsh sent out Mayday signals and desperately repeated the plane’s call sign: ‘Victor Love Item! Victor Love Item!’

  The call didn’t reach the crew of a BOAC Argonaut which flew over the scene, reported seeing wreckage and presumed whoever was down there was dead. They didn’t know it was Ernest Hemingway, and he was already making survival plans.

  We rationed the Carlsberg beer, which was to be consumed at the rate of one bottle each two days shared among three people. We rationed the Grand MacNish [whisky] which was to be issued one drink eac
h evening. The water we planned to renew from the Murchison Falls where there seemed to be a plentiful supply.

  ‘A Christmas Gift’

  A local man named Francis Oyoo Okot, who works for the Uganda Wildlife Service, says he knows exactly where the Hemingways’ plane came down. His father had shown it to him when he was ten years old, which must make Francis, a gentle beaming man, almost my own age. The site is a mile or two up-stream from our camp and he takes me there in a converted Lake Albert fishing-boat, called Overtime, for reasons I can’t quite work out.

  Shoals of leathery pink hippo lie in the water in family groups, some with only their ears and eyeballs above the water. They snort, propel themselves gently about and occasionally get into a short-lived scrap, but basically they lie there in the shallows exuding a placid atmosphere of deep, vaguely erotic contentment.

  We pass the time talking of our families. It’s a rather onesided conversation as Francis has twelve children to my three. When I ask him their ages his brow furrows.

  ‘The oldest is twenty-two and the next …’ His voice tails off apologetically. ‘Well, there are so many.’

  He has been working for the park service for over thirty years and his activities have not been confined to boat trips and bird-spotting. He has three gun-shot wounds from run-ins with poaching gangs. He pulls up his shirt and rolls up his yellow trousers to show me the scars. One bullet is still embedded in his left thigh.

  We turn into a small bay about a mile down-stream from the falls, passing uncomfortably close to a rock entirely covered by the largest, most evil-looking crocodile I’ve ever seen. Two or three persistent kingfishers dive-bomb the frothy water around us as we pull into the shore.

  As we disembark and make for the thick and thorny undergrowth, I notice for the first time that Francis’ injury causes him to limp quite badly. But he pushes on with gusto, knocking aside the branches until we come across a telegraph pole, abandoned and weathered to the colour of the undergrowth around it. This, he tells me, is the remains of the old telegraph line that brought down the Hemingways. After more cutting and slashing we break through into an open sandy area at the bottom of a rocky cliff where the plane actually came to rest.

  There were many more elephants around then and the area would have been much less thickly wooded.

  Francis leads me to the top of a rocky outcrop, a climb of about a hundred and fifty feet. The morning after the crash Hemingway and the pilot carried Mary up here to avoid the elephants and it was from this bluff that they first saw the approach of a sight-seeing launch, the SS Murchison, which was carrying a party celebrating a golden wedding. The son-in-law proved to be a surgeon, who diagnosed Mary as having two broken ribs. The boat proved to be the one on which Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart filmed The African Queen, and best of all, for Hemingway, it boasted ‘An excellent refrigerator containing Tusker beer and several brands of ale’.

  Francis and I slowly make our way down to the beach from which the Hemingway party was rescued. I ask him if there is anything left here from the accident - an unpublished novel perhaps. He smiles and shakes his head. Everything was collected and taken down to Butiaba, which is where we have to go if we want to know more about the saga of Miss Mary’s Christmas present.

  A terrifying cry rends the night air. A harsh and fearful screech, repeated three or four times until the noise dies to a whimper. I lie, frozen sleepless and full of awful imaginings. Something torn from the trees by a creature from the river. Fighting to get away.

  Despite the fact that modern man was born in the cradle of these African Rift Valleys, mortality, of one kind or another, always feels close at hand in Africa. Maybe that’s why Hemingway liked it, student of death that he was.

  I’m idiotically keen on keeping things alive. It probably comes from some deep need to be liked, even by ants and bluebottles.

  I remember once in India seeing a naked man, surrounded by a small crowd, being escorted down a street in Delhi. I assumed he’d been arrested for indecent exposure. It turned out that he was a religious leader, a holy man of the Jainists who believe in non-injury of living things. If he dressed then there would be the danger of his clothes squashing some tiny creatures. They call this practice Ahimsa.

  All this weighs on my mind for two or three seconds, then I fall back to sleep until five o’clock, when I wake to find a bat flying around in my tent. Unzip the front flap, but for all their much-vaunted powers of radar, it takes fifteen minutes for the bat to find its way out.

  We are into our vehicles and off towards Butiaba even before the party of Austrians who arrived last night has stirred. The road is so bad that we have made little progress by sunrise. Outside one village we pull to a halt, beguiled by the sight of a woman, in a T-shirt and brightly patterned skirt, striding through the fields carrying a bale of cotton on her head. Our local assistant approaches her, tells her we are from the BBC and would she mind if we filmed her as she walked.

  At which moment heads pop up from all over the long grass and before we know it the fields are alive with the sound of directors.

  ‘Do it once more! They want you to do it once more!’ the ever-growing crowd shouts at the hapless woman.

  ‘You must walk faster! You must walk more slowly!’

  The pitted mud road tips and sways us on between fields of maize and sweet potato, trees crowded with black kites, and Manhattan-like termite mounds over ten feet high.

  The town of Masindi, where we arrive mid-morning, is the administrative centre for the region and its dusty pot-holed streets are lively. The buildings are single-storey and some are laid out with steps and shaded arcades which bear the names of the Asian shopkeepers who built them and who were later ordered out of Uganda by Idi Amin. The current President, Museveni, is encouraging them back.

  Masindi offers a rich variety of products and services. One shop advertises the ‘Mandela’ Human Love Charm, another, ‘Good Morning’ Lung Tonic. There are businesses like The Honest Brothers - Dealers In Essential Commodities, ‘In God We Trust’ Electrical Suppliers and Wiring, and the alarmingly candid New Fracture Driving School.

  Lured by the sign outside the Bamugisa Barber Shop, which ‘Cares To Make You Smat’, I go inside for a trim.

  So pleased is Fredrick Magembe with the job he does that he insists I have my portrait painted so he can add it to the display board outside the shop. I am greatly honoured to be chosen to represent style Number 8 at the Bamugisa Barber Shop in Masindi.

  We spend the night at the old railway hotel. It is basic. Inside, a narrow bed, with no mosquito net and lots of mosquitoes, bare bulbs and dodgy wiring. Outside, a long verandah and a spreading jacaranda with copious blue blossom. We’re sitting out here at the end of the day, trying to find the cool breeze, when a group of curious and very polite schoolchildren come by. One of them, who cannot be more than ten, regards me for a moment and says, solemnly:

  ‘We are here to make friends.’

  *

  Butiaba is an hour’s drive from Masindi. It’s a spectacular drive, over the escarpment, past a memorial to the Scottish engineer who laid out the road and who was trampled to death by an elephant for his pains.

  The air on top is fresh and invigorating. By the time we have wound our way down to Butiaba it’s hot and listless. The town is low and scattered and poor, its limited resources strained by a steady influx of refugees fleeing from the unrest in the Congo, twenty-five miles away across the lake. The livelihood is fishing and as we get there the morning boats are coming in and most of the town, as well as their goats, cows and thin bleating sheep, is gathered at the beach.

  As soon as the catch is landed the women slit and gut the fish, mostly Nile perch and the smaller tiger fish, and set them out to dry on racks. Directing operations is a genial middle-aged Ugandan wearing a striped shirt, thick brown trousers and bright blue rubber boots. His name is Abdul. He is one of the village elders and he knows where we can find the last piece of Hemingway’s Ugan
dan jigsaw. By the time the SS Murchison had brought the party safely to Butiaba, word had gone out, via the wire-services of the world, that one of the greatest living authors (The Old Man and the Sea had just won a Pulitzer Prize) was missing, believed dead, in the heart of Africa. Bounty-hunters were already searching the area and the lucky one, a Captain Reginald Cartwright, had tracked them to Butiaba. He had a de Havilland Rapide refuelled and ready to whisk them out of this hell-hole and back to Entebbe.

  Hemingway was not so keen and felt that he would rather proceed by road, but he was overruled and the three of them - Ernest, Mary and Roy Marsh, the pilot of the plane that had just crashed - squeezed into the Rapide.

  Hemingway described for Look magazine readers what happened next.

  One third of the way down the alleged airstrip, I was convinced that we would not be airborne successfully. However, we continued at the maximum rate of progress of the aircraft which was leaping from crag to crag … in the manner of the wild goat. Suddenly, this object … became violently air-borne through no fault of its own. This condition existed only for a matter of seconds after which the aircraft became violently de-air-borne and there was the usual sound, with which we were all by now familiar, of rending metal.

  The tone of Hemingway’s casually flippant description doesn’t accord with what Abdul remembers of the aftermath of Reggie Cartwright’s failed take-off.

  Standing amongst grazing cows in the wispy grassland which, apart from a rusted pole on which a wind-direction arrow still turns, is all that remains of Butiaba airstrip. Abdul remembers seeing the pilot climbing in, last of them all.

  ‘He was just a young boy,’ he says, as if by way of explanation.

  He confirms that the plane took off, ‘just a little way, then landed again,’ hitting the ground, bursting the right wing tank and beginning to burn. Mr Hemingway was the last to come out of the plane (thinking he was trapped he’d head-butted a door open).