For answer he lifted the lid of the box and displayed a third Angwantibo inside. I could hardly believe my eyes: to get two Angwantibos in two days struck me as being the sort of thing you dream about but never accomplish. Shakily I paid him, told him to try for more, and went to see John about it.
“Guess what I’ve just got?”
“Something interesting?”
“Another Angwantibo. . . .”
“I say, that’s very good,” said John, in a pleased tone of voice. “Now we’ve got three.”
“Yes, but what worries me is that I just ask this boy to try for another, and the next day he walks in with one, as though it’s no trouble at all. I’ve just told him to try and get me a fourth. What I will do if he comes back to-morrow with about six of them, I don’t know. After all, I can’t go on paying that fantastic price.”
“Don’t worry,” said John cheerfully, “I don’t expect you will get any more.”
As it turned out he was right, but the thought of being confronted with a basketful of Angwantibos at any moment haunted me for several days. I knew I could not have resisted buying them if they had been brought in.
The next good item was a rare and beautiful Superb Sunbird which a small boy brought in, clutched in one hot and sticky hand. Moreover, it was a male, the more colourful of the sexes, and undamaged. I happened to be in the bird house when it arrived and had the pleasure of seeing the usually unemotional John actually gasp with surprise and delight when he saw it. He recovered himself quickly, and became once more the cool and self-possessed Englishman, but there was a feverish glitter in his eye as he bargained with the boy, beating him down mercilessly penny by penny. When he had purchased it he asked the boy how he had caught it.
“With my hand, sah,” the boy replied.
“With your hand?” “Yes, sah, ’e done fly close to me and I done catchum with my hand, so . . .” said the boy, making a fly-swatting gesture with his hand.
John turned to me.
“You are supposed to be the expert on native mentality,” he said; “can you tell me why the boys never tell me the truth about catching these birds? To catch this on the wing he would have to have the eyesight of a hawk and the speed of a rifle bullet. . . . Why does he think I am going to believe such a blatant lie?”
“You look so nice and innocent, old boy, the sort of person that they sell Buckingham Palace to as a rule. There’s a sort of shining innocence about you.”
John sighed, told the boy to try and get him more birds, and went back to his feeding. But I saw him creep back to gloat over his sunbird later, when he thought I was not looking.
Not long after this the Reverend Paul Schibler asked me if I would like to accompany him and his wife on a trip they were going to make to a village at a lake called Soden, some miles from Kumba. He said, to tempt me, that there were hundreds of birds on the lake, and I would be sure to obtain some nice specimens. I suggested the idea to John and he was very enthusiastic, saying that he would watch over my now considerable collection of mammals and reptiles until I returned. We planned to go for a week, and I prepared a number of small cages and boxes for my captures, rolled up my camp-bed, and set off early one morning in the back of the Schiblers’ kit-car, with Pious, who was to minister to my wants. We took the car as far as the road went, and there we collected our carriers and started on our twelve- or fifteen-mile hike to the lake.
Our route was very level and the path wound gently through the forest, in and out of small native farms, and through villages that were mere handfuls of huts scattered about clearings among the great trees. Everywhere the people would come out to greet the Schiblers, shaking hands and calling welcome. Everyone we met stood to one side of the path for us to pass, and would mumble a greeting to us. If they were heavily laden, or suffering from some disease, the Schiblers would pause and inquire after their health or the distance they would have to travel, always ending with the sympathetic “Iseeya”. Sometimes we passed beneath bombax trees a-blaze with their scarlet flowers, and a quilt of yellow or white convolvulus draped around the base of their great silvery trunks. In the fields the corn husks were heavy and swollen, and their silken tassels waved in the breeze, the bananas hung in great yellow bunches from the trees, looking like misshapen chandeliers fashioned out of wax.
It was the evening before we reached the lake. The path twisted like a snake through the trees, and suddenly we stepped out from among the massive trunks and the great expanse of water stretched before us, smooth and grey except where the sinking sun had cast a ladder of glittering golden bars across the surface. The forest ended where the waters began, and all around the lake’s almost circular edge its shore was guarded by the trees. In the centre of that vast expanse of water lay a small island, thinly clothed with a scattering of trees, and we could just see the darker mass that denoted the village.
We waded out into the lake up to our thighs in the blood-warm water, and one of the carriers uttered a cry, a shrill, quavering, mournful wail that seemed to roll across the surface of the lake and split into a thousand echoes against the trees on the opposite shores. A pair of fishing eagles, vivid black and white, rose from the dead tree in which they had been perched, and flapped their way heavily across the waters towards the island. Presently from the village in the lake, we heard a repetition of
the mournful cry, and a tiny black speck detached itself from the island and started across the lake towards us. A canoe. It was followed by another, and then another, like a swarm of tiny black fish shimmering out from beneath a green and mossy rock.
Soon they grounded below us, their prows whispering among the rushes, the canoe-men grinning and calling, “Welcome, Masa, welcome”. We loaded our gear into the frail craft, which bucked and shied like skittish horses, and then we were skimming across the lake. The water was warm as I trailed my hand in it and the island, the lake, and the forest encircling them both like a ring, were all bathed in the blurred golden light of a falling sun. The only sounds were the gentle purr of the water along the brown sides of the canoe, the occasional rap of a paddle as it caught woodwork, and the soft grunt from the paddlers each time they thrust their paddies deep into the water, making the canoe leap forward like a fish. Above us the first pair of grey parrots appeared, with their swift, pigeon-like flight, cooeeing and whistling echoingly as they flew across the golden sky. And so we arrived at the island, almost in silence, a deep calm silence that seemed almost tangible, and any slight noise seemed only to enhance the evening quiet.
The Schiblers had a hut on the crest of the island, in the centre of the village, while I had a tiny shack, half hidden in a small grove of trees, right on the edge of the lake. When I went to bed that night I stood at the edge of the water smoking a last cigarette. The lake was calm and silvery in the moonlight, with here and there a faint dark ring where a fish jumped, plopping the water with a delightful liquid sound. Far in the forest I could hear an owl give a long quavering hoot, and as an undertone to all this there was the distant shimmering cry of the cicadas.
The next morning the light flooded into my shack as the sun lifted itself above the rim of the forest, and the lake looked inviting through my open door. I climbed out from under my net, stepped through the door, and with a run and jump I was in, the waters still warm from yesterday’s sun, yet cool enough to be refreshing. I had swum a few yards when I suddenly remembered crocodiles, and I came to a halt and trod water, surveying the lake about me. Round a tiny headland a miniature canoe appeared, paddled by a tiny tot of about five.
“Hoy, my friend,” I called, waving one arm, “na crocodile for dis water?”