Robbers and cannibals

About a week after departure, Desi began complaining of gut pains and faiblesse and drifted bleary-eyed into spells of apathy. The very aspect of the river turned menacing, with the surrounding forest now a dark and snarled wall of vegetation rising hundreds of feet into the sky straight from the banks. A day past the town of Bumba, some 240 miles from Kisangani, the sky closed in on us, iron-gray, the palm fronds blew backwards, the water frilled with white. A storm was coming. A barge passed by; we ran roughshod and lurching through its wake. But two pirogues hitherto unseen came about from behind it and shot toward us. The pilots -- two men in each -- were in rags, but muscular, paddling in unison, pitching and rolling with the wake. They sidled up to us, one port and one starboard. "Mboté! Mboté!" Greetings in Lingala were exchanged all around, but smiles were not, and no handshakes followed. "Problem eza te!" said Desi (No problem). I heard "mondelé" over and over again, "pesa ngai" (give me), "mbongo" (money) and "koliya" (food). One of the men began rifling through our provisions. The others held our pirogue firmly to theirs. We were being robbed. Desi reached under his bag and drew out the shotgun, expressionlessly waving its barrel back and forth across the four brigands. We bobbed on the waves; we drifted. They abandoned our sacks, straightened up and smiled. Desi smiled, too. I smiled. The brigands began half-bowing, rapidly uttering a supplicatory Lingala. Engombe was mentioned over and over, as well as "matata" (evil). The encounter ended with them giving us several smoked catfish. We parted, and paddled off toward lowering skies. I was shaken and nonplused, but very admiring of Desi's cool. "They wanted to rob us," Desi said. "When they saw the gun, they apologized, offering the fish to make amends. They warned me we are now in Engombe land, that they, Engombes, are vicious and matata robbers, and proud of it. They told us to avoid showing ourselves to the villages ahead. No one enters Engombe land who is not an Engombe. We will have problems." The river on which fishermen had hitherto paddled by us at least four or five times a day now flowed ominously empty. That evening we hid our pirogue in dense bush, camouflaged our tents with tree branches and abstained from lighting our lanterns or playing the radio. We spoke in whispers -- when the rare voice or two carried across the river we held our breath, and Desi tried to discern what was being said. No one passed directly by us, though. Our newfound solitude had a sinister feel. Desi slept with the machete by his head. I dozed off with my hand on the gun, awakening with a lurch to the usual crashings of animals, which now sounded like approaching Engombe murderers. Fear began to weary me; the zeal for adventure that had propelled me out of Moscow into Zaire began to wane. The next day we saw no one until we floated by a cove hidden by a finger of land covered with trees. There, two youths bearing machetes came rushing out of the forest and leapt into their pirogue. A powerful surge of adrenaline coursed through me and I plunged my paddle deep into the muddy water. As the pirogue overcame us, Desi raised his shotgun and trained it on the youths. "Ah, you and the mondele have a gun!" one shouted to us in French. "You win! We would have robbed and killed you both!" They dropped back, laughing, and returned to their cove. Later we came upon a pirogue filled with men from Lokutu, Desi's village. They paddled alongside us, regaling Desi with tales of massacres that had taken place in the abattoir that stretched ahead to the town of Mbandaka on the equator. To pass through the abattoir we would have to hire a soldier for protection in Lisala, the town a day away. Soldiers, stoned on bangi grass and belligerent, set upon us when we drew up to Lisala's beach, and were it not for my laissez-passer from the general, I'm sure they would have robbed us or worse. I addressed myself directly to the army base commander, who recruited candidates for our expedition. One, Amisi, was genial and just over 5 feet tall -- maybe not the fiercest-looking guardian, but he seemed trustworthy, unlike the others I had interviewed. He held high his .72-caliber FAL automatic rifle -- a Belgian version of the M-16. I hired him to accompany us to Mbandaka. "C'est difficile, from Lisala to Mbandaka," a Zairian colonel told me. Engombes had killed and eaten both foreigners and Zairians alike there, he said. In the past, Engombe tribesmen would sneak up on barges and, using gaffs, drag people sleeping on deck into the water, drown them, then paddle away into the blackness with their mangled human booty, to be smoked and consumed later. A few days after departing Lisala, our luck slipped out of kilter once and for all. As the heat intensified (we were approaching the equator), Desi's faiblesse developed into a fever, and he stopped eating. We should have been midway to Mbandaka, but the islands, once distinct and few, were now numerous, each the same riotous outgrowth of trees and vines as the one before, and we strayed from the navigation route. Though Desi said he knew the river, he did not know it this far from home. As a result, we got lost. The risk arose that we would drift down a river lane ending in swamp and be unable to extract the pirogue from it -- and this hundreds of miles from anywhere. We would then become prey for anyone -- or anything -- in the jungle. I began to understand that with or without Amisi, I was running up against obstacles that might prove insuperable, at least with such a small crew, but there was no turning back: The river flowed in one direction and the only way out was downstream. At night I found myself drifting in dream back to Tat'yana in Moscow, even back to my childhood in the U.S. Sleep became sweeter than ever. I longed for its escape. It provided respite from the fear that lay like a stone on my heart all day. I could not let it show, however. I was afraid that if I appeared vulnerable, Desi and Amisi might mutiny rather than risk further travel with me down this dangerous river. But Desi's condition worsened by the hour, and it transpired that he was, in any case, too weak for revolt. On our third lost day, he plaintively asked me to take some photos of him with my Polaroid for his wife, clearly implying that they were to be remembrances of him. I agreed, and on an island we held a bizarre final photo session, with Desi donning his best sweats and looking solemnly into my lens. But if he were to die, how would Amisi and I make it out? More than 100 miles were left to Mbandaka, and we needed Desi's skill as a piroguist to cover them. As we pushed away from the bank, I thought about dying, about how, out there, there would be no closing ceremony to my life, just a cessation, as though it were a movie interrupted in the middle by the flare-up of a faulty projector bulb. Death seemed tangible and near. I felt distraught most of all because it might overtake me far away from Tat'yana, my parents and my friends. I was afraid, but there was nothing to do except paddle and drift, with the forest a wall of monster trees and vines endlessly renewing itself, ceaselessly looming above us and passing by, indifferent to anything I feared, felt or thought. If we ceased to be, it would subsume us and continue being, ever silent and impassive, an eternal, if unfathomable, life force apart. Toward noon the next day, the sky threatened another tempest. We erected our umbrellas and took to drifting close to shore. It began to drizzle, but there was no wind, so we kept on. That evening, during a lull in the rain, we passed through a shower of butterflies, a limitless confetti of yellow. But they were set against a vista of thunderclouds churning to the east. "That storm won't come this way," said Desi, prostrate under his umbrella. The wind soon set the river aboil; the gusts and waves nearly knocked us off our feet. Amisi grabbed his oar and did his best to help me pilot the pirogue. We reached the bank but it was a wall of thorns and spiked ferns and we became entangled in it. We had to relinquish one mooring spot, then another, tearing our skin on the very bush we sought to approach. Desi raised himself to steer. A crocodile crashed into the river as we drew near the bank again. Another snag prevented us from landing. A wave nearly pitched us overboard. "We are in danger," Desi stated in a monotone. Having seen the crocodile enter the water but having lost him from view, I felt totally exposed, vulnerable to ambush. Winds buffeted us past another clearing and I, at the bow, had to jump into the shallows to drag the pirogue by the tow chain up to the bank, an ordeal during which I slipped in the clay muck and banged my shin on a snag, all the while racing my eyes over the water in search of the croc. With the rain washing over us in undulant silver sheets, we threw up our tarp, then crawled underneath to wait out the storm. The moon hung a giant pale orange orb that night, the forest echoed with hoots from monkeys, with the great splashings of hippos in the shallows somewhere behind us. "May God's will be done. I place my fate in the hands of le bon Dieu," said Desi, and he crawled into his mosquito net pale and weak. Amisi sulked. I called him over to talk. "Desi is sick," I said. "We have to decide what we will do if he cannot continue." "We should just keep on. I'm a soldier and a Christian. If God wills me to die here, I die. I can do nothing about it. Je n'y peux rien." For two more days we drifted. Desi lay in the stern of the pirogue, resigned, lifting himself up occasionally to retch into the river, though he and Amisi took to raising their guns as a matter of course whenever we approached a village. The next afternoon we landed squarely in the Engombe heartland, passing village after village, unable to find a hidden spot to camp. Darkness finally drove us ashore and we erected the tents as the mosquitoes descended. Pirogues paddled up, unseen in the humid night: "Is the mondele in there? What can the mondele give us!" came shouts in Lingala from the shadows over the water. Amisi answered: "Mboté! Stay away. I have an FAL rifle and I'll shoot." It worked, but none of us closed an eye. The moon was silvering the river; a luminous glow emanated from the water. I lay on my stomach, peering out of my tent's net door. Two pirogues bearing five people each materialized in the mists and moved toward us. I tried to warn Amisi but I found my throat paralyzed. I couldn't speak or move a muscle. The piroguists pulled up to our camp and unsheathed huge machetes that glinted in the moonlight. I struggled to cry out but felt asphyxiated, immobile. As they stepped up to my tent, I lunged into my net -- and woke up. I had been dreaming. On the river there were glints of silver -- reflections of the moon -- but no machetes or pirogues. Desi and Amisi had drifted off to sleep in their mosquito nets next to mine. Dawn broke and we decamped. We saw no one all day -- until 2 in the afternoon. "Mondelé! What are you doing here?" shouted a man in French from a village of thatched straw huts. Mothers gathered their children and ran into the forest to hide from me. Desi looked up. An exchange began in Lingala. The man became agitated, shouting and thumping his chest. He was the village chief, he said. We were trespassing. The shouts and angry queries multiplied, the people on the bank grew more and more hostile. Toward evening, an Engombe tribesman, puzzled by the sight of me, told us that the riverboat Colonel Ebeya would be passing by "La Gare -- just across the river." It was making its first run in four years, and was the only steamer operating on the river. Luck or le bon Dieu? Replacing Desi with a tribesman from the Engombe was not an option, and given his health, continuing would have meant risking his life and therefore ours. I had only one choice: to call off the expedition. With renewed hope, we paddled on in search of this "station." When the sun had set in a blaze of red and purple, the mosquitoes flew forth in roaring swarms, enveloping us in an impenetrable cloud, clogging nostrils, ears, mouths. We spit them out, we paddled, we swatted. Overhead the Milky Way stretched a glittering astral sea across the black vault of the sky, but not a village was to be seen. Soon, we were lost again. Around midnight a pale gray blob in the gloom drifted near -- a pair of monster pirogues loaded with stacks of smoked meat -- and their captain directed us toward La Gare. This time, we found it -- a sandy clearing by a village. We moored and commenced waiting. Desi was ashen and hunched over with cramps, sweating with fever. I looked out into the blackness, hoping to catch sight of the Ebeya's spotlight playing on the sky above the river. The next noon, on our 21st day, around 500 miles from Kisangani, with almost 600 left to Kinshasa, the riverboat finally appeared. I paid a couple of La Gare villagers to paddle us out to it as it passed. Three weeks on the river drew to a close with the fastening of our tow chain around the Colonel Ebeya's steel deck railing. Hands reached out and pulled us aboard. Undelivered, dispirited by the denouement that turned me into another defeated challenger of the Congo, I could answer no questions. I could barely return the smiles. A crowd enveloped us, hustled us away from the river up to the first mate's office. Desi recovered with rest and medicinal powders we bought from savant merchants on deck. As the days passed I was left alone with the ache of failure, with an unquenched monomania that only intensified as I watched the jungle drift by my cabin window, day after day after day, as beckoning as it was threatening, as intriguing as it was, even to me, terrifying. Yet as soon as the relief of our rescue wore off, I found myself longing -- to try the river again.