2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth by Prefers to remain anonymous, Giles Foden Read Free Book Online Page A
Book: 2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth by Prefers to remain anonymous, Giles Foden Read Free Book Online
Authors: Prefers to remain anonymous, Giles Foden
and impressionable young men, Spicer is looking glamorous in full-dress uniform. He has his cutlass buckled on and, in his hand, his silver-topped black cane as a prop. The lines of care around his eyes have been temporarily transformed. No longer do they express the dashed hopes of a man whose career has failed, but instead call to mind a life of adventure and an accumulation of escapes from tight spots in the great outdoors. They bespeak the wisdom born of experience—and this is Spicer’s theme, which he warms to with thespian vigour. He is telling a tale of his days as a gunboat captain on the Gambia River in West Africa:
‘The rhino threw up his head, breathing heavily with rage…In an instant, with a sound like thunder, he was pounding straight for me! You know I have my ammunition specially made for me and my finely tempered buliets went right through the animal from stem to stern, piercing lungs, heart, spleen and liver on the way.’
The widows cluck in amazement while the doctor looks aside in embarrassment. He knows there are no rhino to be found in the Gambia, except perhaps in a zoo, if the Gambia had any zoos. But Spicer is untroubled by mere facts as the professional hunter in him gives way to the concerned zoologist.
‘I was really sorry I had to kill him, for these animals are becoming increasingly rare, but of course I had to in self-defence. His horn was exceptionally long—about 27 inches, as I recollect. Anyway, it was so remarkable that I presented it to the Natural History Museum.’
Dr Hanschell was surprised that Spicer’s nose did not grow equally long, Pinocchio-like, at this tall tale. Surely he ought to have been preparing for the task ahead, rather than indulging in such foolish exhibitions of boasting? The Commander didn’t even have a proper map and had shown the doctor where they were going in a Bartholomew’s school atlas, tracing a finger down the long blue streak of the great lake.
Throughout the nineteenth century control of Lake Tanganyika and the area around it had been in some doubt. A Congolese tribe, the warlike Holo-holo, had settled on the shore, ousting the other African tribes that had been there since ancient times. The Holo-holo were superstitious as well as fierce. Their supreme god was Kabedya Mpungu (‘Remote in the Sky’), to whom appeals were made through witch doctors, secret societies and intermediary spirits. Until the arrival of the Arabs, the crossing of the lake by the Holo-holo was the biggest political change the region had seen. The Holo-holo were themselves reacting to the expansion of the Luba tribe in Congo. They brought with them the practice of ordeal by poison and of drowning newborn babies whose top teeth happened to grow first. Arab slave parties began arriving on the lakeshore from 1820; they employed the Holo-holo to guard the slaves and shipments of gold and ivory.
And then the whites came. Among European travellers it was the British explorers Burton and Speke who first reached Lake Tanganyika. Starting from Zanzibar and following the caravan route, they arrived in January 1858. Not content with being the world’s longest freshwater lake,↓ Lake Tanganyika is also the world’s second deepest lake and the lowest point in Africa below sea level.
≡ About 420 miles or, as Spicer put it in his lecture, ‘as long as England from Southampton to the Scottish border’. The average width of the lake is 31 miles.
It has evolved utterly separately, even from the other great African lakes of the Rift, and its depths contain innumerable unique forms of life. ‘It filled us with admiration, wonder and delight,’ wrote Burton on first seeing it:
Beyond a short foreground of rugged and precipitous hill-fold, down which the footpath painfully zigzags, a narrow plot of emerald green shelves gently towards a ribbon of glistening yellow sand, here bordered by sedgy rushes, there clear and cleanly cut by the breaking wavelets. Farther in front
‘The rhino threw up his head, breathing heavily with rage…In an instant, with a sound like thunder, he was pounding straight for me! You know I have my ammunition specially made for me and my finely tempered buliets went right through the animal from stem to stern, piercing lungs, heart, spleen and liver on the way.’
The widows cluck in amazement while the doctor looks aside in embarrassment. He knows there are no rhino to be found in the Gambia, except perhaps in a zoo, if the Gambia had any zoos. But Spicer is untroubled by mere facts as the professional hunter in him gives way to the concerned zoologist.
‘I was really sorry I had to kill him, for these animals are becoming increasingly rare, but of course I had to in self-defence. His horn was exceptionally long—about 27 inches, as I recollect. Anyway, it was so remarkable that I presented it to the Natural History Museum.’
Dr Hanschell was surprised that Spicer’s nose did not grow equally long, Pinocchio-like, at this tall tale. Surely he ought to have been preparing for the task ahead, rather than indulging in such foolish exhibitions of boasting? The Commander didn’t even have a proper map and had shown the doctor where they were going in a Bartholomew’s school atlas, tracing a finger down the long blue streak of the great lake.
Throughout the nineteenth century control of Lake Tanganyika and the area around it had been in some doubt. A Congolese tribe, the warlike Holo-holo, had settled on the shore, ousting the other African tribes that had been there since ancient times. The Holo-holo were superstitious as well as fierce. Their supreme god was Kabedya Mpungu (‘Remote in the Sky’), to whom appeals were made through witch doctors, secret societies and intermediary spirits. Until the arrival of the Arabs, the crossing of the lake by the Holo-holo was the biggest political change the region had seen. The Holo-holo were themselves reacting to the expansion of the Luba tribe in Congo. They brought with them the practice of ordeal by poison and of drowning newborn babies whose top teeth happened to grow first. Arab slave parties began arriving on the lakeshore from 1820; they employed the Holo-holo to guard the slaves and shipments of gold and ivory.
And then the whites came. Among European travellers it was the British explorers Burton and Speke who first reached Lake Tanganyika. Starting from Zanzibar and following the caravan route, they arrived in January 1858. Not content with being the world’s longest freshwater lake,↓ Lake Tanganyika is also the world’s second deepest lake and the lowest point in Africa below sea level.
≡ About 420 miles or, as Spicer put it in his lecture, ‘as long as England from Southampton to the Scottish border’. The average width of the lake is 31 miles.
It has evolved utterly separately, even from the other great African lakes of the Rift, and its depths contain innumerable unique forms of life. ‘It filled us with admiration, wonder and delight,’ wrote Burton on first seeing it:
Beyond a short foreground of rugged and precipitous hill-fold, down which the footpath painfully zigzags, a narrow plot of emerald green shelves gently towards a ribbon of glistening yellow sand, here bordered by sedgy rushes, there clear and cleanly cut by the breaking wavelets. Farther in front