Congo Solo by Emily Hahn

Author:Emily Hahn [Hahn, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2011-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Tuesday, June 16

The first accident yesterday was when I slipped crossing a rotten bridge; my leg went through a hole and I landed in the middle of a procession of big red ants. It was uncomfortable, as I couldn’t get out in a hurry. When most of them were pulled off-they hold as hard as they can – I noticed that my leg hurt a little. Later on, it hurt a lot.

Matope was so exhausted that Sabani fell behind and carried him. The path was well-traveled, which made it worse. At every creek the ground for yards around was trampled into a soup, and after an hour of it my morale almost gave way. Trying to grip on the slippery ground, and splashing through cold mud up to the middle of my shins and wondering what was the matter with my legs, made an ensemble of torture. I thought that surely I had been walking for hours, and yet when I looked at the clock it hadn’t been so long. Now and then it rained. Nambedru, surprisingly enough, suddenly announced that her feet hurt and she was tired – this after only three hours. The others didn’t mind the road at all.

We came to a place where they had cut all the trees to plant a garden, and then had left the trees lying there. However, the road led straight through, over the trunks and branches. I thought I’d scream if my legs hurt any more. Just at the end, a little stick whipped me in the face and I did cry, but no one saw it as I was ahead. Suddenly we came out on the white man’s road. It was a new automobile road with tracks on it.

There was a man far off; we called him, and he told us that the white man was farther on at the end of the road. It was just noon now, the time I’d said that we would arrive, and I had thought it must be late afternoon. Now it was easy walking, of course, and by the time we came to the big house I was able to speak up as if a morning of mud-wading was a pleasure. The white man stood at his door, looking polite but annoyed. Belgians always look like that at first in the Congo. However, he invited me in and gave me a chair, and the other members of the caravan sat down on the barza. Everything looked very new and scarred and rough-hewn: the road is red, cut through laterite,5 and there were wheelbarrows and scales and mixing machines standing about. But the three-room twig house was comfortable. And there was no mud.

The Belgian said that the auto came twice a week; that I must wait two days unless I wanted to walk, and that, he said, wouldn’t help much as the distance was three marches and I wouldn’t get there any sooner. It’s a truck, he said, and I could carry all my boxes and a couple of servants if I wanted.

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