The Bafut Beagles Read online

  The Bafut Beagles

  Gerald Malcolm Durrell

  GERALD DURRELL

  THE BAFUT BEAGLES

  WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

  Ralph Thompson

  In Which We Done Come

  The Cross River picks its way down from the mountains of the Cameroons, until it runs sprawling and glittering into the great bowl of forest land around Mamfe. After being all froth, waterfalls, and eager chattering in the mountains, it settles down when it reaches this forest, and runs sedately in its rocky bed, the gently moving waters creating ribs of pure white sand across its width, and washing the mud away from the tree roots, so that they look as though they stand at the edge of the water on a tangled, writhing mass of octopus4ike legs. It moves along majestically, its brown waters full of hippo and crocodile, and the warm air above it filled with hawking swallows, blue and orange and white.

  Just above Mamfe the river increases its pace slightly, squeezing itself between two high rocky cliffs, cliffs that are worn smooth by the passing waters and wear a tattered antimacassar of undergrowth that hangs down from the forest above; emerging from the gorge it swirls out into a vast egg-shaped basin. A little further along, through an identical gorge, another river empties itself into this same basin, and the waters meet and mix in a skein of tiny currents, whirlpools, and ripples, and then continue onwards as one waterway, leaving, as a result of their marriage, a huge glittering hummock of white sand in the centre of the river, sand that is pockmarked with the footprints of hippo and patterned with chains of bird-tracks. Near this island of sand the forest on the bank gives way to the small grassfield that surrounds the village of Mamfe, and it was here, on the edge of the forest, above the smooth brown river, that we chose to have our base camp.

  It took two days of cutting and levelling to get the camp site ready, and on the third day Smith and I stood at the edge of the grassfield watching while thirty sweating, shouting Africans hauled and pulled at what appeared to be the vast, brown, wrinkled carcass of a whale that lay on the freshly turned red earth. Gradually, as this sea of canvas was pulled and pushed, it rose into the air, swelling like an unhealthy lookingpuffball. Then it seemed to spread out suddenly, leechlike, and turned itself into a marquee of impressive dimensions. When it had thus revealed its identity, there came a full-throated roar, a mixture of astonishment, amazement, and delight, from the crowd of villagers who had come to watch our camp building.

  Once the marquee was ready to house us, it took another week of hard work before we were ready to start collecting. Cages had to be erected, ponds dug, various chiefs from nearby villages interviewed and told of the animals we required, food supplies had to be laid on, and a hundred and one other things had to be done. Eventually, when the camp was functioning smoothly, we felt we could start collecting in earnest. We had decided that Smith should stay in Mamfe and keep the base camp going, gleaning what forest fauna he could with the help of the local inhabitants, while I was to travel further inland to the mountains, where the forest gave place to the great grasslands. In this mountain world, with its strange vegetation and cooler climate, a completely different fauna from that of the steamy forest region was to be found.

  I was not certain which part of the grasslands would be the best for me to operate in, so I went to the District Officer for advice. I explained my dilemma, and he produced a map of the mountains and together we pored over it. Suddenly he dabbed his forefinger down and glanced at me.

  'What about Bafut?' he asked.

  'Is that a good place? What are the people like?'

  'There is only one person you have to worry about in Bafut, and that's the Fon,' he said; ' get him on your side and the people will help you all they can.'

  'Is he the chief?'

  'He's the sort of Nero of this region,' said the D.O., marking a large circle on the map with his finger, 'and what he says goes. He's the most delightful old rogue, and the quickest and surest way to his heart is to prove to him that you can carry your liquor. He's got a wonderful great villa there, which he built in case he had any European visitors, and I'm sure if you wrote to him he would let you stay there. It's worth a visit, is Bafut, even if you don't stay.'

  'Well, I'll drop him a note and see what he says.'

  'See that your communication is…er … well lubricated,' said the D.O.

  I'll go down to the store and get a bottle of lubrication at once,' I assured him.

  So that afternoon, a messenger went off to the mountains, carrying with him my note and a bottle of gin. Four days later he returned, bearing a letter from the Fon, a masterly document that encouraged me tremendously.

  Fon's Office Bafut, Bafut Bemenda Division, 5th March, 1949.

  My good friend,

  Yours of 3rd March, 1949, came in hand with all contents well marked out.

  Yes, I accept your arrival to Bafut in course of two month stay about your animals and too, I shall be overjoyed to let you be in possession of a house in my compound if you will do well in arrangement of rentages.

  Yours cordially, Fon of Bafut.

  I made arrangements to leave for Bafut at once.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Toads and Dancing Monkeys

  Most West African lorries are not in what one would call the first flush of youth, and I had learnt by bitter experience not to expect anything very much of them. But the lorry that arrived to take me up to the mountains was worse than anything I had seen before: it tottered on the borders of senile decay. It stood there on buckled wheels, wheezing and gasping with exhaustion from having to climb up the gentle slope to the camp, and I consigned myself and my loads to it with some trepidation. The driver, who was a cheerful fellow, pointed out that he would require my assistance in two very necessary operations: first, I had to keep the hand brake pressed down when travelling downhill, for unless it was held thus almost level with the floor it sullenly refused to function. Secondly, I had to keep a stern eye on the clutch, a wilful piece of mechanism, that seized every chance to leap out of its socket with a noise like a strangling leopard. As it was obvious that not even a West African lorry driver could be successful in driving while crouched under the dashboard in a pre-natal position, I had to take over control of these instruments if I valued my life. So, while I ducked at intervals to put on the brake, amid the rich smell of burning rubber, our noble lorry jerked its way towards the mountains at a steady twenty miles per hour; sometimes, when a downward slope favoured it, it threw caution to the winds and careered along in a madcap fashion at twenty-five.

  For the first thirty miles the red earth road wound its way through the lowland forest, the giant trees standing in solid ranks alongside and their branches entwined in an archway of leaves above us. Flocks of hornbills flapped across the road, honking like the ghosts of ancient taxis, and on the banks, draped decoratively in the patches of sunlight, the agama lizards lay, blushing into sunset colouring with excitement and nodding their heads furiously. Slowly and almost imperceptibly the road started to climb upwards, looping its way in languid curves round the forested hills. In the back of the lorry the boys lifted up their voices in song:

  Home again, home again,

  When shall I see ma home?

  When shall I see ma mammy?

  I'll never forget ma home . . .

  The driver hummed the refrain softly to himself, glancing at me to see if I would object. To his surprise I joined in, and so while the lorry rolled onwards trailing a swirling tail of red dust behind it, the boys in the back maintained the chorus while the driver and I harmonized and sang complicated twiddly bits, and the driver played a staccato accompaniment on the horn.

  Breaks in the forest became more frequent the higher we climbed, and presen
tly a new type of undergrowth began to appear: massive tree-ferns standing in conspiratorial groups at the roadside on their thick, squat, and hairy trunks, the fronds of leaves sprouting from the tops like delicate green fountains. These ferns were the guardians of a new world, for suddenly, as though the hills had shrugged themselves free of a cloak, the forest disappeared. It lay behind us in the valley, a thick pelt of green undulating away into the heat-shimmered distance, while above us the hillside rose majestically, covered in a coat of rippling, waist-high grass, bleached golden by the sun. The lorry crept higher and higher, the engine gasping and shuddering with this unaccustomed activity. I began to think that we should have to push the wretched thing up the last two or three hundred feet, but to everyone's surprise we made it, and the lorry crept on to the brow of the hill, trembling with fatigue, spouting steam from its radiator like a dying whale. We crawled to a standstill and the driver switched off the engine.

  'We go wait small-time, engine get hot,' he explained, pointing to the forequarters of the lorry, which were by now completely invisible under a cloud of steam. Thankfully I descended from the red-hot inside of the cab and strolled down to where the road dipped into the next valley. From this vantage point I could see the country we had travelled through and the country we were about to enter.

  Behind lay the vast green forest, looking from this distance as tight and impenetrable as lambs' wool; only on the hilltops was there any apparent break in the smooth surface of those millions of leaves, for against the sky the trees were silhouetted in a tattered fringe. Ahead of us lay a world so different that it seemed incredible that the two should be found side by side. There was no gradual merging: behind lay the forest of huge trees, each clad in its robe of polished leaves, glittering like green and gigantic pearly kings; ahead, to the furthermost dim blue horizon, lay range after range of hills, merging and folding into one another like great frozen waves, tilting their faces to the sun, covered from valley to crest with a rippling fur of golden-green grass that paled or darkened as the wind curved and smoothed it. Behind us the forest was decked out in the most vivid of greens and scarlets – harsh and intense colours. Before us, in this strange mountain world of grass, the colours were soft and delicate – fawns, pale greens, warm browns, and golds. The smoothly crumpled hills covered with this pastel-tinted grass could have been an English scene: the downland country of the south on a larger scale. The illusion was spoilt, however, by the sun, which shone fiercely and steadily in a completely un-English manner.

  From then onwards the road resembled a switchback, and we rattled and squeaked our way down into valleys, and coughed and grunted our way up the steep hillsides. We had paused on one hilltop to let the engine cool again, and I noticed in the valley ahead a village, looking at that distance like an irregular patch of black toadstools against the green. When the engine was switched off, the silence descended like a blanket; all we could hear was the soft hiss of the grass moved by the wind and, from the village far below us, the barking of a dog and the crowing of a cockerel, the sounds tiny and remote but clear as a bell. Through my field-glasses I could see that there was some activity going on in the village: crowds of people milled round the huts, and I could see the flash of machetes and spears, and the occasional glint of a gaudy sarong.

  'Na whatee dat palaver for dat place?' I asked the driver.

  He peered down the hill, screwing up his eyes, and then turned to me, grinning delightedly.

  'Na market, sah,' he explained, and then, hopefully.' Masa want to stop for dat place?'

  'You tink sometime we go find beef for sale dere?'

  'Yes, sah! '

  'For true?"

  ' For true, sah ! '

  'You lie, bushman,' I said in mock anger. 'You want to stop for dis place so you go find corn beer. No be so?'

  'Eh! Na so, sah,' admitted the driver, smiling, 'but sometimes Masa go find beef there also.'

  'All right, we go stop small time.'

  'Yes, sah,' said the driver eagerly, and sent the lorry hurtling down the slope towards the village.

  The big huts, with their conical thatched roofs, were grouped neatly round a small square which was shaded with groups of young eucalyptus trees. In this square was the market; in the patchwork of light and shadow under the slim trees the traders had spread their wares on the ground, each on his own little patch, and around them thronged the villagers in a gesticulating, chattering, arguing wedge. The wares offered for sale were astonishing in their variety and, sometimes, in their incongruity. There were freshwater catfish, dried by wood smoke and spitted on short sticks. These are unpleasant-looking fish when alive, but when dried and shrivelled and blackened by the smoking they looked like some fiendish little juju dolls, twisted into strange contortions by a revolting dance. There were great bales of cloth, some of it the highly coloured prints so beloved of the African, imported from England; more tasteful was the locally woven cloth, thick and soft. Among these patches of highly coloured cloth were an odd assortment of eggs, chickens in bamboo baskets, green peppers, cabbages, potatoes, sugar-cane, great gory hunks of meat, giant Cane Rats, neatly gutted and hung on strings, earthenware pots and cane baskets, eroco-wood chairs, needles, gunpowder, corn beer, gin-traps, mangoes, pawpaws, enemas, lemons, native shoes, lovely raffia-work bags, nails, flints, carbide andcascara, spades and leopard skins, plimsolls, trilbys, calabashes full of palm wine, and old kerosene tins full of palm and groundnut on.

  The inhabitants of the market were as varied and as curious as the wares offered for sale: there were Hausa men clad in their brilliant white robes and little white skull-caps; local chieftains in multi-coloured robes and richly embroidered caps with tassels; there were the pagans from distant mountain villages, wearing nothing but a scrap of dirty leather round the loins, their teeth filed to points, their faces tattooed. For them this represented a teeming metropolis, and the market was perhaps the high spot of the year's amusements. They argued fiercely, waving their arms, pushing each other, their dark eyes shining with delight, over such things as cocoa yams or Cane Rats; or else they stood in little groups gazing with hopeless longing at the toppling piles of multi-coloured cloth, milling round from one vantage point to another, in order to get the best views of these unobtainable luxuries.

  My staff and the lorry driver disappeared into this pungent, swirling crowd like ants into a treacle tin, and I was left to wander round by myself. After a time I decided to try to take some photographs of the pagan tribesmen, so I set up the camera and started to focus it. Immediately, pandemonium broke loose; the tribesmen with one accord dropped their goods and chattels and fled for the nearest shelter, screaming wildly. Rather bewildered by this, for the average African is generally only too pleased to have his photograph taken, I turned to a Hausa standing close by and asked him what was the matter. The explanation was interesting: apparently the pagans knew what a camera was, and knew that it produced pictures of the people it was pointed at. But they were firmly convinced that with each photograph taken the photographer gained a small portion of his subject's soul, and if he took many photographs he would gain complete control over the person in question. This is a good example of witchcraft being brought up to date; in the old days if you obtained some of your victim's hair or toe-nails you had great power over him; nowadays if you get a photograph it apparently acts just as well. However, in spite of the reluctance on the parts of my subjects, I did manage to get a few shots of them, by the simple method of standing sideways on, looking in the opposite direction, and taking the photographs from under my arm.

  It was not long before I discovered something that drove all thoughts of photography and witchcraft out of my head. In one of the dark little stalls that lined the square I caught a flash of reddish fur, and, moving over to investigate, I found the most delightful monkey on the end of a long string, squatting in the dust and uttering loud and penetrating 'prroup' noises. She had light ginger-coloured fur, a white shirt-front, and a mournful black face
, and the strange noises she was making sounded like a cross between a bird cry and the friendly greetings of a cat. She sat and watched me very intently for a few seconds, and then she got up suddenly and started to dance. First she rose on her hind legs and jumped up and down vigorously, holding her long arms wide apart, as though she were going to clasp me to her bosom. Then she got down on all fours and started to bounce like a ball, all four feet leaving the ground, her jumps getting higher and higher the more excited she became. Then she stopped and had a short rest before starting on the next part of die dance; this consisted of standing on all fours, keeping her hindquarters quite still, while she flung her forequarters from side to side like a pendulum.

  Having demonstrated the outline, she then showed me what could be done by a really experienced dancing monkey, and she twirled and leapt and bounced until I felt quite dizzy. I had been attracted to her from the first, but this wild dervish dance was irresistible, and I felt that I simply had to buy her. I paid her owner twice what she was worth and carried her off triumphantly. I bought her a bunch of bananas at one of the stalls, and she was so overcome by my generosity that she repaid me by wetting all down the front of my shirt. I rounded up the staff and the driver, all breathing corn beer, and we climbed into the lorry and continued our journey. The monkey sat on my knee, stuffing her mouth with bananas and uttering little cries of excitement and pleasure as she watched the scenery out of the window. In view of her accomplishment, I decided to call her Pavlova, and Pavlova the Patas monkey she became forthwith.

  We drove on for some hours, and by the time we were nearing our destination the valleys were washed with deep purple shadows and the sun was sinking leisurely into a thousand scarlet-and-green feathers of cloud behind the highest range of western hills.