It was in the driving back of the Jaqqas that Dona Teresa’s father Don Rodrigo showed his valor, until he took a fever and died. And it was in the defense of Hippopotamus Island that Dona Teresa’s mother was stolen and, in all likelihood, consumed by the cannibal warriors. So the place that lay before us was closely linked in my mind to her, that woman whose lips and breasts and thighs, so sultry and siren-like, were fresh in my memory. And now we made our course toward that island.
Entering the mouth of the Zaire was no child’s task, and there I earned my keep as a pilot. You should know that the Zaire is a river that swallows all rivers, a tremendous torrent that by comparison makes our Thames seem like a stream. I would match it against the great Nilus of Egypt and the giant many-mouthed river in America that they call the Amazonas, for size, and I could not say which one has pre-eminence. While moving northward toward it I was compelled to stand well out to sea, sometimes as much as fifteen miles, for that the waters offshore are very shallow and the surf is evilly fierce. Keeping steady watch through my glass, I saw a long wall of high red clay cliffs, and then came to that which I knew from my charts to expect, but which must have astounded the first Portuguese explorers into silent amazement: the frightful onrush of the river into the ocean.
It comes down out of the land with a dark hue, which is the mud that it carries from Africa’s heart. And it drives this color forty, fifty, even eighty miles into the ocean, so that the waves breaking near shore are a strange and surprising yellow-brown color, and the ocean itself is deep red, a muddy bloody hue. And all this is fresh water, though it lies in the ocean: we could drink it, if so we wished. This river torrent emerges from the land between two broad spits like the claws of a mighty crab, that make what seems to be a natural harbor, a dozen miles or greater across, inviting mariners to enter. Here the red clay cliffs give way, and there are level beaches of sparkling sand, and behind that a forest of ollicondi trees, that must be the most swollen colossal trees in all the world, and then the blue wall of distant mountains somewhere eastward of all that.
So inviting a harbor, yes. But O! the entering of it! The terrible entering of it!
For the river comes forth with a violent roar and crash and beats itself upon the bosom of the sea like an awful flail, and our small pinnace was a mere cockleshell against such might. With the aid of the sea breezes I made my way slowly and cautiously into the Zaire’s vast mouth, thinking I was putting myself into the maw of a dragon. And though it was fair going at first, the river narrowed and narrowed and narrowed yet more, until it was scarce a mile across, with walls seven or eight hundred feet on its banks. The narrower the river the more furious its flow, in that there was that much less space here for all that volume of water to pass, so it must pass the more vigorously. We ran against a seaward current of ten knots that boiled and seethed, with whirlpools looming suddenly with loathsome sucking noises right beneath our keel. Now the Portugal sailors looked to me. I saw terror in Pedro Faleiro’s face, and knew why I was there.
“Tell us, pilot! Which way? Where the channel?”
There are times when it is best not to think in any solemn slow way, but to act according to your sense of the moment. At such times, if fortune goes with you, you become an arm of the sea, an adjunct of the winds, and everything flows through you without meeting resistance, and you know without knowing what must be done. So it was with me. I had studied the rutter and I knew something of the best way into the estuary, but I looked at no charts now. I put myself in a commanding place and gave signals to the men working the ropes and lines and to the one at the helm who gripped the whipstaff, and tacked her and swung her and leaned her into the wind, and felt the currents running below me like the blood through my veins, and called for readings on the fathoms as my leadmen sounded them. And ten thousand mile of river thrust against me out of Africa’s unknown core and I would not let it say me nay, but beat my way on and on and on, until at last the worst of it was behind me and we were in the estuary, moving through quiet channels where we were shielded from the worst of the onrushing force by the river islands that lay just ahead.
Ah, I thought. That is what sailing is! I had never known its like before.
And as we glided into the mouth of the Zaire, making our track between swamps and mud-flats and other such shallows, looking toward the saw-edged grass that rose three times the height of a man, and toward the hordes of coccodrillos whose eyes gleamed like emeralds out of their long nightmare heads from the sandspits, and listening to the flame-colored parrot-birds standing in the palm-trees, and seeing a hippopotamus arise from the water, more like a vast round-nosed pig than like the river-horse that its name would have us see, and opening its gaping red mouth as though to belch us back to Brazil—as I saw all these things, I felt a hand come to rest lightly on my shoulder, and did not look around, for I knew I should not see the owner of the hand, and the hand tightened in a fond grip and my father the master mariner Thomas James Battell of Leigh in Essex said to me in a voice that only I could hear, “Well done, my son, well done indeed.” And my eyes became moist, out of pride that I was my father’s son and worthy of the name.
Before us lay Hippopotamus Island, or the Island of Calabashes, or call it what you will.
Having Faleiro’s story of warfare and destruction fresh in my mind, I was surprised at the peace of the place. I suppose I expected to find bloody bodies scattered in mounds at the shore, or vast scenes of devastation. But that was idle of me, for all those monstrous events were twenty years in the past, and matters had long since calmed here. There was a little harbor, and a native town, and a Portuguese settlement of no great size, and after the turbulence of the river I found this place most placid, most welcoming.
This was my entry to the kingdom of Kongo, which once was the greatest realm of all this part of Africa, perhaps surpassing even the fabulous land of Prester John in far Ethiopia, but now is much fallen from high estate, owing to the bloodthirstiness of the Jaqqas and the different evil practiced by the Portugals upon these people. It was a light and open land, golden yellow in the grassy places—for there had not been rain in a long while—with fine dust drifting easily. But as is true everywhere in Africa, behind the open plains and easy sunny places there always lies a jungle, and the jungle is ever dark, dark.
This first taste of Kongo was pleasing to me. I saw myself at the gateway to a land which, although black, was in its way civilized. In Angola I had seen little except São Paulo de Loanda, which is wholly a Portuguese settlement created by them from the ground upward, and such blacks as dwelled there had come from elsewhere to be pressed into the service of the white masters. And on my journey to Masanganu I had seen but a few small villages, from which I had learned little of the nature of the people. But now I was in a true black nation, which was a novelty to me.
The people of the Kongo call themselves the Bakongo and they speak a language called Kikongo, in which I became fluent as time went along. They live by farming and other settled arts, understand the crafts of metalworking and textiles, and are by way of being Christians, though I will testify that their Christianity is but a shallow overlay, a sort of coat of glossy sacred varnish that covers the deep and strange paganism beneath. The giving of that love-idol to me by Dona Teresa is a fair example of that. In their capital city of São Salvador, which I was not to visit for some good long while, they do wear Portuguese dress, much of it quite fine, and give themselves Portuguese names and put on many other such pretensions of civility. But here on this island it was not quite that way. The place was small, but most exceeding hot and moist, and nothing about it showed much mark of great advancement. The native town was fashioned of light structures of branches and earth covered with thatch, much as I had seen at São Paulo de Loanda, and the streets were a muddled maze, so that, small as the town was, a stranger would instantly become lost in it. The people did not wear any European finery, but only a simple piece of red or green palm-cloth wrapped like a kilt about them from waist to feet, leaving the breast bare. Some of this fabric was quite finely worked, with pleasing decoration, but nothing like that which I would see later in the cities; most of it was rough stuff, for these were mere common people.