Nowadays little rain fell along the roadway, although it still teemed down at the rate of three hundred inches a year upon the pristine forests only a few miles away.
The roadside was dry and dusty and hot. The mango trees witted in the noonday heat and the people living beside the road built themselves barazas, thatched roofs supported by poles without walls, to shield them from the cloudless sky above the roadway. Without the forest canopy the whole Ubomo basin would soon become a little Sahara.
To Kelly the road was the Sodom and Gomorrah of the forest. it was temptation to her Bambuti friends. The truckdrivers had money and they wanted meat and honey and women. The Bambuti were skilled hunters who could provide both meat and honey, and their young girls, tiny and graceful, laughing and big-breasted, were peculiarly attractive to the tall bantu men.
The roadway seduced the Bambuti and lured them out of the fastness of the deep forest. It was destroying their traditional way of life. It encouraged the pygmies to over-hunt their forest preserves. Where once they had hunted only to feed themselves and their tribe, now they hunted to sell the meat at the roadside dukas, the little trading stores set up at each new village. , .
Game was each day scarcer in the forest and soon, Kelly knew, the Bambuti would be tempted to hunt in the heartland, that special remote centre of the forest where by tradition and religious restraint no Bambuti had ever hunted before.
At the roadside the Bambuti discovered palm wine and bottled beer and spirits. Like most stone-age people, from the Australian Aboriginals to the Inuit Eskimos of the Arctic, they had little resistance to alcohol. A drunken pygmy was a pitiful sight.
In the deep forest, there was no tribal tradition that restrained the Bambuti girls from sexual intercourse before marriage.
They were allowed all the experimentation and indulgence they wanted with the boys of the tribe, except only that intercourse must not be with a full embrace. The unmarried couple must hold each other's elbows only, not clasp each other chest to chest. To them the sexual act was a natural and pleasant expression of affection, and they were by nature friendly and full of fun. They were easy game for the sophisticated truckdrivers from the towns. Eager to please, they sold their favours for a trinket or a bottle of beer or a few shillings, and from the lopsided bargain they were left with syphilis or gonorrhoea or, most deadly of all, AIDS.
In her hatred of the road, Kelly wished there was some way to halt this intrusion, this accelerating process of degradation and destruction, but she knew that there was none. BOSS and the syndicate were behemoths on the march. The forest, its soil, its trees, its animals, birds and its people were all too fragile.
All she could hope for was to help retard the process and in the end to save some precious fragment from the melting-pot of progress and development, and exploitation.
Abruptly the truck swung off the road and in a cloud of red talcum dust drew up at the rear of one of the roadside dukes.
Peering from her peephole, Kelly saw that it was a typical roadside store with mud walls and roof, thatched with ilala palm fronds. There was a logging truck parked in front of it and the driver and his mate were haggling with the store-keeper for the purchase of sweet yams and strips of dried game meat blackened with smoke.
Patrick Omeru and his brother began to unload some of the baskets of dried fish to sell to the store-keeper and as they worked he spoke without looking at Kelly's hiding-place. Are you all right, Kelly, I'm fine, Patrick. I'm ready to move, she called back softly. Wait, Doctor. I must make certain that it is safe. The army patrols the road regularly. I'll speak to the store-keeper; he knows when the soldiers will come. Patrick went on unloading the fish.
in front of the duka the truck-driver completed his transaction and carried his purchases to the logging truck, He climbed on board and started up with a roar and cloud of diesel smoke, then pulled out into the rutted roadway towing two huge trailers behind the truck. The trailers were laden with forty-foot lengths of African mahogany logs, each five feet in diameter, the whole cargo comprising hundreds of tons of valuable hardwood.
As soon as the truck had gone, Patrick called to the Uhali store-keeper and they spoke together quietly. The store-keeper shook his head and pointed back along the road. Patrick hurried back to the side of the fish truck. Quickly, Kelly. The patrol will be coming any minute now, but we should hear the army vehicle long before it arrives.
The store-keeper says that the soldiers never go into the forest.
They are afraid of the forest spirits. He pulled away the fish baskets that covered the entrance to Kelly's hiding-place, and she scrambled out and jumped down to the sun-baked earth. She felt stiff and cramped, and she stretched her body to its full extent, lifting her hands over her head and twisting from the waist to get the kinks out of her spine.
You must go quickly, Kelly, Patrick urged her. The patrol!
I wish I had someone to go with you, to protect you. Kelly laughed and shook her head. Once I'm in the forest, I will be safe. She felt gay and happy at the prospect, but Patrick looked worried. The forest is an evil place. You are also afraid of the diinni, aren't you, Patrick? she teased him as she shrugged her pack on to her shoulders.
She knew that, like most Uhali or Hita, Patrick had never entered the deep forest. They were all terrified of the forest spirits. Whenever possible the Barnbuti were at pains to describe these malignant spirits and to invent horror stories of their own dreadful encounters with them. It was one of the Bambuti devices for keeping the big black men out of their secret preserves. Of course not, Kelly. Patrick denied the charge a little too hotly. I am an educated man; I do not believe in djinni or evil spirits.
But even as he spoke his eyes strayed towards the impenetrable wall of high trees that stood just beyond the halfmile wide strip of gardens and plantations. He shuddered and changed the subject. You will get a message to me in the usual way? he asked anxiously. We must know how he is. Don't worry. She smiled at him and took his hand. Thank you, Patrick. Thank you for everything. It is we who should thank you, Kelly. May Allah give you peace. Salaam aleikum, she replied. To you peace also, Patrick. And she turned and slipped away under the wide green fronds of the banana trees. Within a dozen paces she was hidden from the road.
As she went through the gardens she picked the fruits from the trees, filling the pockets of her backpack with ripe mangoes and plantains.
It was a Bambuti trick. The village gardens and the villages themselves were considered fair hunting grounds.
The pygmies borrowed anything that was left untended, but stealing was not as much fun as gulling the villagers into parting with food and valuables by elaborate confidence tricks.
