Kelly smiled as she recalled the glee with which old Sepoo related his successful scams to the rest of the tribe whenever he returned from the villages to the hunting camps in the deep forest.
Now she helped herself to the garden produce with as little conscience as old Sepoo would have evinced. In London she would have been appalled by the notion of shoplifting in Selfridges, but as she approached the edge of the forest she was already beginning to think like a Barnbuti again.
It was the way of survival.
At the end of the, last garden there was a fence of thorn branches to keep out the forest creatures that raided the crops at night, and at intervals along this fence, set on poles were grubby spirit flags and juju charms to discourage the forest demons and diinni from approaching the villages. The Bambuti always howled with mirth when they passed this evidence of the villagers superstition. It was proof of the success of their own subtle propaganda.
Kelly found a narrow gap in the fence, just big enough to accommodate the pygmy who had made it and she slipped through.
The forest lay ahead of her. She lifted up her eyes and watched a flock of grey parrots flying shrieking along the treetops a hundred feet above her.
The entrance to the forest was thick and entangled. Where the sunlight had penetrated to the ground it had raised a thicket of secondary growth. There was a pygmy track through this undergrowth, but even Kelly was forced to stoop to enter it.
The average Bambuti was at least a foot shorter than she was, and with their machetes they cut the undergrowth just above their own head-height. When fresh, the raw shoots were easy to spot, but once they dried, they were sharp as daggers and on the level of Kelly's face and eyes. She moved with dainty care.
She did not realise it herself, but in the forest she had learned by example to carry herself with the same agile grace as a pygmy.
It was one of the Bambuti's derisive taunts that somebody walked like a wazungu in the forest. Wazungu was the derogatory term for any outsider, any foreigner. Even old Sepoo admitted that Kelly walked like one of the real people and not like a white wazungu.
The peripheral screen of dense undergrowth was several hundred feet wide.
it ended abruptly and Kelly stepped out on to the true forest floor.
It was like entering a submarine cavern, a dim and secret place. The sunlight was reflected down through successive layers of leaves, so that the entire forest world was washed with green, and the air was warm and moist and redolent of leaf mould and fungus, a relief from the heat and dust and merciless sunlight of the outside world. Kelly filled her lungs with the smell and looked around her, blinking as her eyes adjusted to this strange and lovely light. There was no dense undergrowth here, the great tree-trunks reached up to the high green roof and shaded away into the green depths, ahead, reminding her of the hall of pillars in the mighty temple of Karnak on the banks of the Nile.
Under her feet the dead leaves were thick and luxuriant as a precious oriental carpet. They gave a spring to her step and rustled under her feet to give warning to the forest creatures of her approach. it was unwise to come unannounced upon one of the wicked red buffalo or to step upon one of the deadly adders that lay curled upon the forest floor.
Kelly moved swiftly, lightly, with the susurration of dead Leaves under her feet, stopping once to cut herself a diggingstick and to sharpen the point with her clasp-knife as she went on.
She sang as she went, one of the praise songs to the forest that Sepoo's wife, Parnba, had taught her. It was a Bambuti hymn, for the forest itself is their god. They worship it as both Mother and Father.
They do not believe a jot in the hobgoblins and evil spirits whose existence they so solemnly endorse and whose depredations they recount with so much glee to the black villagers. For the Bambuti the forest is a living entity, a deity which can give up or withhold its bounty, which can give favours or wreak retribution on those who flout its laws and do it injury. Over the years she had lived under the forest roof Kelly had come more than halfway to accepting the Bambuti philosophy, and now she sang to the forest as she travelled swiftly across its floor.
In the middle of the afternoon it began to rain, one of those solid downpours that were a daily occurrence. The heavy drops falling thick and heavy as stones upon the upper galleries of the forest roared like a distant river in spare. Had it fallen on bare earth with such force, it would have ripped away the topsoil and raked deep scars, washed out plains and scoured the hillsides, flooding the rivers and wreaking untold harm.
In the forest the top galleries of the trees broke the force of the storm, cushioning the gouts of water, gathering them up and redirecting them down the trunks of the great trees, scattering them benevolently across the thick carpet of dead leaves and mould, so that the earth was able to absorb and restrain the rain's malevolent power. The rivers and streams, instead of becoming muddied by the torn earth and choked by uprooted trees, still ran sweet and crystal clear.
As the rain sifted down softly upon her, Kelly slipped off her cotton shirt and placed it in one of the waterproof pockets of her pack. The straps would cut into her bare shoulders so she rigged the headband around her forehead and kept her arms clear as the pygmy women do. She went on, not bothering to take shelter from the blood-warm rain.
Now she was bare-chested, wearing only a brief pair of cotton shorts and her canvas running shoes. Minimal dress was the natural forest way. The Bambuti wore only a loincloth of beaten bark.
When the first Belgian missionaries had discovered the Bambuti, they had been outraged by their nakedness and sent to Brussels for dresses and jackets and calico breeches, all in children's sizes, which they forced them to wear. In the humidity of the forest these clothes were always damp and unhealthy and the pygmies for the first time had suffered from pneumonia and other respiratory complaints.
After the constraints of city life, it felt good to be half-naked and free. Kelly delighted in the rain upon her body. Her skin was clear and creamy white, almost luminous in the soft green light and her small taut breasts joggled elastically to her stride.
She moved swiftly, foraging as she went, hardly pausing as she gathered up a scattering of mushrooms with glossy domed heads and brilliant orange gills. These were the most delicious of the thirty-odd edible varieties.
On the other hand there were fifty or more inedible varieties, a few of which were virulently toxic, dealing certain death within hours of a single mouthful.
The rain ceased but the trees still dripped.
Once she stopped and traced a slim vine down the trunk of a mahogany tree. She dug its pure white roots out of the rainsoaked leaf mould with a few strokes of her digging-stick. The roots were sweet as sugar cane and crunched scrumptiously as she chewed them. They were nutritious and filled her with energy.
The green shadows crowded closer as the day died away and the light faded. She looked for a place to camp.
