Log-causeway over the Lukasashi -
single lane traffic at all times!
This section contain all contributions received.
Jog your memories and share your experiences of life
"on safari."
.
Nyama - roast wild boar on the menu!
Unfortunately many of the workers were Muslim and were not able to participate in the feast!
Murray - cruising down the river - on the Lukasashi River.
CHARTERED EXPLORATION
Murray Surtees recalls the 'good old days"
"We commonly used foot safaris in Northern Rhodesia (present day Zambia) in the early 1960’s to get into the country and geologise. In terms of cash spent and labour and time used there was just so far that a 4WD-track could justifiably be cut in rugged country, before we took to our feet to complete a sampling or mapping traverse. A foot safari lasted about a week – that was a convenient length of time to cater food and supplies, also for your pool of muscle power.
In addition, a week of sampling gave enough weight to carry. As the food depleted, so the samples collected increased.
There is an art to equipping a foot safari. The morning before we set out the bearers formed piles of what they needed for the week away; the "capito" or team leader and chief sampler would do the same with the equipment they needed to do their work. The cook would gather his requirements, food, pots and pans, etc. as well as his Bwanas’ katundu (the geologist’s and field officer’s sleeping gear and kit). They laid this kit out in a line for inspection; invariably there would be too much gear. We whittled it down meticulously to cut the weight. As the porters’ job was to carry it, this was a stringent practice.
The amount of gear the white men had compared to what our workers needed always embarrassed me. The men needed little more than the clothes they stood in, a kilogram or two of mealie (maize) meal, a couple of pots between all of them and a blanket to sleep in.
The bwanas, by contrast, took heavy tinned food, kitchen utensils, sleeping bags, possibly a Hounsfield camp bed, a light flysheet, a change of clothes and a haversack of geological gear.
All the katundu was then amalgamated into as near as possible equal-weighted and equal-sized piles in front of each porter. Each would tie his pile together and test it for weight. Could he carry it for 7 days? The porters balanced the gear on their heads and had a small haversack each.
Trial and error showed that a gang of porters of about nine, certainly no more than 12, was required for a weeklong foot safari.
Any more men than that and the personal gear increased to the extent that you would find individual porters carrying exclusively the gear of other porters.
Invariably one of the cholo-boys (haversack carriers that stayed close to the geologist or field officer) would ask whether we were taking a gun or a rifle.
"Eh Bwana, tina tata sebam?"
A cholo-boy would become a gun bearer, if there were firearms on the safari. I presume this was quite an important job in the eyes of the crewmembers. Whether firearms accompanied us on the safari or not was always of interest to the crew. Firstly because it might mean that fresh meat would be eaten on the safari and secondly because they were perceived to afford a protection of sorts. Living so close to nature the rural population on the fringes of the wild areas had a healthy respect for a variety of animals that lived there. The question was answered after discussion as to the game population of the area we were going to.
In addition to their own kit, the porters carried most of the gear of the 3-man sampling crew and all the bwanas’ kit. This left the samplers and geological crew free and unencumbered to roam over the hills and across watersheds away from the porters. The porters then went directly to the next night’s campsite, on their own. We chose this site by a study of the aerial photographs. The signs of water were simply a thick grove of trees on a stream with a reasonable catchment area – this pointed to the existence of a water hole. Having transferred the chosen spot to the basic 1:50,000-stream and river map sheet drawn up by Huntings, that we used, we measured a compass bearing to it. The porters would be set off on this bearing and told to go until the sun was here (raising your arm to a particular elevation of the sun indicating say mid-afternoon – few read the time, let alone owned a watch). We told them to cross so many ridges and streams and then find the grove of trees we had spotted on the photos and set up camp there. If there was no water there they were to go either up- or down-stream, which ever was the more likely direction to find water, and then camp there. The streams were drying up as the winter field season progressed in this sub-tropical highland. Campsites on waterholes became harder to find.
Late in the season in the eastern side of the country, only a dampness of the sand in the riverbed indicated the presence of water.
The men would dig to find water under these well tree-ed sections of the streams. The water here was palatable, fresh and filtered by the sand if left undisturbed to allow the mud, mixed into it by digging, to settle.
A failing of the set-up where you separated the porters from yourself was that they often got lost.
The porters from the rural areas, in the early 60’s, were unfortunately of meagre education. Very few of them had attended any form of school.
Those that had, perhaps at the local, invariably, Catholic mission, had not attended long enough to properly grasp the intricacies of numbers and the alphabet.
There was generally no one amongst them who had any idea of how to follow a compass direction – although the bush was their environment and their sense of direction was adequate to get them back to a place they had been to before.
Those that could follow a prismatic compass bearing were the hard-core of the sampling or geological crew which we brought with us into areas such as the Lukusashi or Luangwa Valleys at the beginning of the field season. And these guys were in short supply.
You can thus imagine how many problems could arise to prevent the porters from reaching the chosen campsite when you arrived there after a hard day’s tramp over hill and dale.
Firstly, there might be innate reluctance of the porters, with the gear on the heads, to walk the required distance to that chosen stream.
Secondly, the fact that you told the porters to cross three streams, and you did not recognise the substantial gully on the photographs that your porters counted as one of the three streams.
Thirdly, they simply got lost.
Fourthly, fear makes these primitive people reluctant to proceed too far into the unknown.
There is little worse than arriving at the place the camp should be, late in the afternoon after a full day’s slog over hill and dale and not finding it there. You then must look for your men, in the dark and in the bush.
The probability of sleeping out with no food or warmth is high.
If this happens to you, you are thereafter reluctant to send the porters off by themselves. The solution is to use someone who knows how to track along a prismatic compass bearing and estimate distance, as well as recognize spurious streams for they are, to guide the porters.
You sacrifice your capito at the expense of the sampling crew. I did a lot of foot safari work in Lusaka East and the Lukusashi Valley.
Lusaka East was, as were most of the areas I worked in, an uninhabited area. It lay to both sides of the Zambia’s Great East Road north to the Lunsenfwa River and south to the Zambezi River’s escarpment. It stretches 100 to 200 kilometres east of Lusaka to the Luangwa River. Rufunsa is about in the centre of the area.
One afternoon of mapping and sampling in this area, a 3-man sampling crew and I were late and heading for a one-night camp on a **stream none of us had seen before, to which the porters had been directed early that morning.
We had come to the lower part of that stream’s system by a circuitous route via a different stream system sampling the sediments and geologising along the way.
In front, there was a bicycle man measuring distance. He had a pair of bicycle forks on a handle, between which was a rubber tyre-ed wheel with a cyclometer attached.
A cyclometer is a distance measurer that every pre-pubescent boy wanted on his bike in those days. It measures in tenths of a mile by a clicker on the spokes hitting a star-wheel on the meter.
We took a sample every ¼ mile along the streams. It was a handy device; it gave you a measurement of distance you covered every day. 8 to 10 mile was the average distance we covered while sampling – thus every sampling crew took 32 to 40 samples every day.
The distance actually walked crossing divides and dead walking was probably 2 to 3 miles more than that.
During the exploration campaign of 1963, two of the field officers, Dave Madgen and Dirk Eva, competed to break the record number of samples taken in a day.
Dirk came back one evening when we were working from a base camp – that is going out and returning to the base camp every
evening – with a loud boast that he had taken 100 samples, that is about 25 miles of rugged territory stream sediment sampling.
Dave came back the next day having covered about 27 miles.
Dirk, who fancied himself as the most rugged of field officers (and he probably was) confided to me that he could not have Dave beat him.
Of course as the days went by the sampling was getting more difficult because every day you had to start further from the camp.
Dirk nearly pulled a poop-string coming back the following evening with 28 miles of sampling. That was the end of it, thankfully. I did not want our Senior Geologist, Jack Mills, to start thinking that my, by comparison, measly 8 – 10 miles was too little.
* * *
The rest of the crew behind the bicycle man were the sampler and the mattock-man. The latter dug the holes for the samples. The mattock-man was wearing ragged clothes with big tears in his trouser legs. We crossed a stream, perhaps 3 or 4 kilometres away from the expected campsite, and it was full of water in clean pools.
This boded well for the chosen camp in that water might be there too. I was behind the leading bicycle-man. As I hopped off one rock slab in a pool across to another, I heard a strangled scream behind me.
It came from the ragged mattock-man. I looked back and saw him en-coiled by a large and very active snake.
The bicycle-man and I had in turn, woken it and then frightened it.
It was lying well camouflaged on the rock slab. It had dived for the cover of the pool as the mattock-man had jumped onto its slab.
Its head caught in one of the holes in his trouser legs at his shin and because this blinded it and impeded its forward progress, it thrashed up around him in coils.
When I saw him, his arms were thrashing with the mattock tightly clasped and the snake over his face and shoulders.
A remarkable sight!
I would not have questioned if he had turned white directly. By coiling around him the snake was able to get its head out of his trouser leg to dash off into the water. It disappeared, thankfully.
The bicycle and I had run forward and the sampler had run backward away from the unfortunate mattock man tussling with the snake.
It was a big snake, definitely over 6 feet long. Worried and not knowing what type of snake it was - it could have been a cobra or a mamba - I examined him. The snake had not bitten him and he was outwardly unharmed. He said he was OK.
That might have been so; I’ll wager, though, that any cholesterol he might have had stuck to his vein walls was dislodged by the surge of blood they had endured.
Colleagues suggested later that it was a water-python, thinner and faster moving than a normal land-based African or rock python. I actually saw another snake in a still pool in a stream in this area later; it was completely stationary, submerged about one metre beneath the surface of the crystal clear water. Its eyes were wide open observing us
– those beadies on you are unmistakable.
* * *
After this mishap, we progressed upstream. The hills along the valley sides became silhouettes against the darkening sky. The big trees along the river-edge stood blackly and imposingly over us. We bunched up and walked close together in single file. Darkness fell. Talk quietened. My crew became worried.
They baulked at carrying on, saying I had guided them to the wrong stream and that the camp was not on this stream we were on. Walking was difficult along a bush-filled and boulder-strewn riverbed in the dark. The progress is slow and one is tempted to believe that we should have reached the campsite before this. A rock-wall, a dry waterfall, slowed our progress. There was no sound of a camp. As it was still fairly early no one was calling or firing a rifle to home us in. The crew’s unanimous conviction that I was wrong weighed on me. I was sure that I was right and insisted we press on.
However, the possibility that the porters themselves had not made it to the allotted spot was distinct. I did not raise that with my crew.
Some time later, the sampler, Sandford, exclaimed "Mina nunka moto!" - I smell (smoke from) a fire! That was it! The weight left my shoulders and my step lightened, I stumbled less.
Then we saw the campfires and heard the porters talking. There they were! ~~The camp was set up and my safari companions were relaxing near the fire. They were oblivious to my predicament of the last hour.
That night I learned an important lesson. Stick to your convictions; push forward to your goal.
* * *
One night, on another safari, a new field officer failed to turn-up at the agreed overnight camp. His name was Sid Dodgen, which name became legendary after the police caught him speeding and weaving through the traffic along Cairo Road (Lusaka’s main thoroughfare) in his Rover 90 saloon. They wanted to arrest him for teasing a police officer when asked to give his name he replied "Dodgem"!
Sid was a gung-ho sort of a fellow, an ex-miner from the Copperbelt, who was older than us and would not allow us to teach him anything. He once sent a cholo-boy on a day’s march back to the Rufunsa base camp to get a pocket stereoscope that we used for aerial photos. Jack Mills told us that he sent it back to him but as Sid had been given only one photo he had to laugh.
He was employed as a miner / field officer who would double as a rock breaker when that work was needed.
One evening in Lusaka we were boozing in the Traveller’s Club and Sid had collected a number of cases of dynamite to take out to Allies Mine project to help with the pitting through laterite.
The party was warming up and Sid had to leave town before dark, the police were organized to escort him and his explosives to the city limits and see him on his way.
So we said cheerio to Sid and carried on.
An hour later he was back; "Ah, Sid just in time to buy the next round". He had been escorted out of town by the coppers, as arranged, waved to them and then had taken off the red flags from his Landrover and doubled back to the Traveller’s Club and parked in the backyard of the place, near to the stairs and railing where people took the air and flicked cigarettes and lighted matches.
On that blasting job, Sid had had overcharged his first blast and the resulting explosion collapsed a host of Jim Downie’s pits.
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So Sid was missing that night I started to tell you about. We lit fires and fired rifles. We stumbled over the ridges calling and whistling. Not anyone’s favourite pastime.
Damn if, at around 11 pm when we had given up but left the fires burning, he doesn’t walk in claiming that he had been sampling and that he was not lost. At 11 PM! Well that’s the last time I took him on safari – he was a danger unto himself.
* * *
Maurice Bergmann and I had an adventurous foot safari in the Lukusashi Valley in 1964. We were in its northern part and entered from the Great North Road via Serenje to the Chipendezi Camp.
Our driver, Noah, dropped us, together with the sampling and porterage crews, in a Landrover.
We arranged that he would meet us at certain river crossing in one week. Our starting point was the ford across a pleasant open river with many pools of water in a narrow and sandy floodplain.
The first night, camped beside a pool on the sandy banks of that river, we dined on smoked guinea fowl. The bird was bagged with the single-shot bolt-action Webley 410 shotgun, earlier in the afternoon.
The cook, because he had no pots on this trip, pegged the guinea fowl on a thin stick angled a metre over the campfire in the smoke. It was a memorable meal, tender and succulent, eaten while lying around the campfire on the sand like Arab sheiks.
For the rest of the week we ate canned food, unappetizing in contrast.
The safari progressed uneventfully and we got to the allotted meeting point with Noah on the appointed date in the early afternoon. At nightfall he had not pitched-up. Nor did he for two more nights.
What you carry on a foot safari is fine-tuned to last just as long as the safari.
Our food was finished when we reached the rendezvous point. We were in somewhat of a predicament. There was water in pools in the river. On that count we were OK.
The biggest pool, in a bend around an outcrop of granite gneiss, was a little green but we realised that it contained numerous fish.
They were predominantly barbel, but there were a variety of scaled silver fish such as bream (tilapia) and possibly small chessa. They had gravitated there as the river dried up with the progressing dry season.
I fired a shot from my Wlm. Heym 9.3 mm into the pool and momentarily stunned a barbel, which came to the surface belly up. One of the chaps grabbed it smartly.
I fired another shot, but without success this time. This was expensive and nine-three cartridges are heavy to carry and were in limited supply. We had to conserve what we had in case we needed them.
We cooked and ate the barbel. It tasted of mud. The water in the pool was pretty murky. That one barbel did not stretch beyond Maurice and myself. Remember, there was a crew of 12 or so of us.
The next day one of the crew, a true bushman, set to catching a heap of the fish. He collected the branches of a Euphorbia plant that is common in the Valley.
Encyclopedia Britannica reports that the Euphorbiales are a huge family of plants that grow throughout the world, except in cold alpine or arctic regions, most of them are found in temperate and tropical regions. 400They vary from lawn weeds to cactus like plants.
The African type is a tall plant with columnar stems looking like the classic cacti of the American cowboy movie. It has fleshy stems of different shapes armed with spines.
It is characterized by a milky sap or latex. The latex of Euphorbias includes a variety of compounds, including starch, alkaloids, resins, and rubber. In some species of Euphorbia the resin is dangerously toxic and potentially carcinogenic.
In contrast, that of other species is considered worthy of research in the effort to cure cancer.
He organized the crew to hammer the cut ends of the fleshy Euphorbia branches against the rocks at the edge of the pool. The milky sap ran down into the pool.
Within a short while the fish started to come to surface and gulp air.
The silver fish came up first and a little later even the barbel were doing it. This is a fish known to survive in the mud below dried out pools until the rains break, even to flap across the land between river systems.
I don’t know what the sap was doing to the water but the fish did not like it. The men gathered a huge quantity. This kept the wolf from the door for the whole crew for the next 36 hours.
We corrected the muddy taste in a novel way. We put single fish in a bucket of clean water (from another pool!).
As they swam around in it, the water became muddy as the fish cleaned itself out. This extended to the flesh of the fish, not only its stomach, as one would imagine.
After a change of water and about an hour of swimming around the flesh of the fish was clean and not at all muddy.
I have often heard people complain about the muddiness of bream (the Tilapia family of fishes) that were caught in rivers and dams in Africa.
Letting them swim in a bucket of clean water will cure this in an hour. I had never eaten barbel before.
I had, when fishing previously, considered them a pest. Their meat is red, almost beefy, and quite tasty. Having found enough food to sustain the crew we relaxed and considered what to do.
We had just completed a week’s foot safari and none of us was keen to walk the 40 or so kilometres back to the base camp at the Chipendezi River.
We speculated what had held Noah up. Was he confused as to the pick-up date? Had he broken down? We continued to relax. We ate into the fish supply and finished it.
On the third evening the strangest thing happened. As if providence was looking after us we found a duiker, a small buck the size of a Labrador dog, in the environs of the camp.
The buck quartering towards us was standing and looking straight at Maurice and me. I had the nine-three rifle. I brought it to my shoulder and took aim.
As I did this I realized the importance of the shot I was about to take and got cold feet.
I handed the rifle to Maurice and he, cool as a cucumber, dropped the unfortunate animal. Meat! Not much of it when rationed among the 12, but it saw us through the night and the next (the third) morning.
We began to realise that the situation would become uncomfortable if more food was not found soon after that third morning. Then the next big break came.
We heard a vehicle approaching. Was it really a vehicle?
We stood with our mouths open to better hear. .No doubt about it – Jerry Wilson, our travelling mechanic, rolled-in in his forward-control Landrover. He had arrived at the Chipendezi camp from the workshops at the Lusaka office.
Not finding us there, as had been arranged, he followed our tracks into the bush. Intrepid and excellent, was all I could say.
Noah was with him, being towed behind the forward-control. He was not in our best books, as you can imagine.
Actually Noah had had a tougher time of it than we had. He had left Chipendezi in my Landrover at the arranged time to collect us.
On the way he had gone over a step in a rock pavement that had dropped the front wheels and a cross-member of the chassis had collected the step.
This had pushed it into the transfer-box and put the works out of alignment. The vehicle was not seriously damaged but Noah’s training forbade him to travel if there was a chance that it would seriously damage the vehicle.
He waited at the vehicle with no food and little water the whole time we were catching fish and eating duiker meat.
Right there at our makeshift camp Jerry organised to get the damaged Landrover back to camp.
He cut out the bent cross member, hammered it straight and welded it back into position.
Having a feed of fish and antelope meat at the end of that safari was, on the face of it, rather of a bonus. Our normal fare was tinned food. In the early 1960’s the only tinned meat that one could get in Lusaka was Fray Bentos’s bully beef, pressed ham (the spam of the World War II British army), Vienna sausages or meatballs.
Tins of spaghetti in tomato sauce, sardines, and dried peas and beans supplemented.
I found this food, when eaten day in and day out, to be absolutely foul. Bully beef or ham was fairly palatable if eaten cold and unadulterated but some of the less discerning of us would go so far as to cook it again.
This brought out its awfulness; lumps of fat and what I thought with shudder might be mesentery, hitherto unseeable, would separate out during the cooking process.
Potatoes and onions kept well if hung in the stringed pockets in which they were bought. Tomatoes, normally tiny ones that had become like that by replanting the seeds continuously, were sometimes available from a village.
Many years later these tiny tomatoes turned up in supermarkets of the western world as delicacies called "cocktail tomatoes".
The occasional egg or chicken was also available from the village, but the people were on the breadline in their standard of living and were reluctant to part with chickens eggs or tomatoes.
All we had to offer them in exchange was money and what use was money if you lived 5 day’s hike from the nearest store?
Most of the cooks in Zambia were masters at bread making.
The camp oven was a hole in the ground or an anthill. It was preheated by a wood fire and then closed off when the dough was put inside. This bread was made daily in the camp because without preservatives and the various things we now eat in our supermarket bread, it had no ability to stay fresh.
Day old camp bread was like a rock and was of little use on a foot safari.
A year or two later the shops in Zambia started to sell a better variety of tinned food. Fray Bentos made a flat tin of steak and kidney pie with pastry and all that you heated in the camp oven.
With such delicacies life improved on safari but by that stage my career had moved onto less strenuous geological pursuits.this.
Thus if game was bagged when in camp or on safari the cuisine improved.
Pestered constantly for meat by the crew on one safari Maurice took my 9.3 mm and went out hunting from a one-night safari camp. We were many miles from the base camp. Within a short while we heard a single report. An hour later the word came in on the wind "Nyati" (buffalo).
The two chaps that were with him came staggering in under the weight of a buffalo’s hindquarter suspended on a pole between them.
The rest of the crew, who had been lazing around, with whoops and hollers, took off in the direction of Maurice’s kill.
He had come upon a herd of buffalo in long grass. While stalking them he came upon one beneath him in a steep-sided wash or donga, only a few metres away and facing away from him grazing.
He said that he was nervous it would hear him click-off the safety catch of the rifle, he was that close. Carefully he took aim and fired. The cartridge misfired. That was a failing of that rifle – if you used Eley Knoch shells they would often misfire in it.
Carefully and as quietly as possible, he lifted the bolt handle and reset the firing pin. The buff paid no heed, quietly grazing away.
This time the shot went off. The bullet entered the left side at the top of the buffalo’s neck just behind its head.
It went right through its brain and lodged just behind its left eye. It dropped like a stone – the best way to kill a buff.
After the shot was fired the herd stampeded away through the long grass from all around while the three of them crouched silently hoping that a 1000 lb beast would not come charging over them from a peripheral position. We delayed departure the next day so that the crew could eat their fill and to give us a chance to make biltong.
After the day of forced eating the crew elected to send two of the porters back to base camp with as much meat as they could carry to continue the meat-drying process there.
This left them with extra loads to tote for the rest of the safari. But not one scrap of meat was left behind in that camp.
That meat, although tasty and less gamey than most buck, was the toughest I have ever eaten. The fat juicy steak, cooked on the coals, that I had that night, required the assistance of the heel of my hand to press closed my jaw, which was flagging with muscle fatigue before I was half way through it.
The biltong, tasty as can be, needed to be pounded with a hammer to powder and thin shreds before it could be eaten.
We took a bagful to Lusaka and enjoyed the fun of watching the biltong gannets battling with it.
* * *
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Without trying to be too commonplace I may mention that the clothes I chose for walking around the bush comprised a safari jacket, shorts or jeans, thick socks and boots and a cloth floppy hat.
All the cloth was of cotton. The safari jacket is an admirable article of clothing. I had a number of white ones that I bought from the Farmers Co-op in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia – probably one of the best clothing buys I ever made.
The jacket had 2 chest pockets and two waist / hip pockets – all spacious with buttoned flaps. These gave you ample room to carry all manner of things.
Four buttons kept the jacket closed in the front. It was loose and comfortable; it was white and cool.
The air circulated under it freely and you could open the front to keep cooler.
At no point on your body was it tight and uncomfortable and liable to chafe.
The cloth was tough, and that, and the garment’s looseness protected you from thorns and sticks. You looked a bit of a monkey if you were silly enough to wear a safari jacket in town but in the bush they were top class.
The politicians adopted this icon of Colonial clothing, somewhat modified, as the national dress of Zambia.
Zambia’s first president, Dr Kenneth Kaunda, whom I saw on a plane in 2000, still wears the safari suit, albeit fashionably modified and well tailored.
His successor I notice sports snappy pale suits, possibly to indicate the change of leadership.
Walking the many miles an explorationist does comes ultimately down to footwear. A variety of good boots could not be found in Lusaka. Clarke’s Combat boots were the only ones available. These were steel toe-capped with a buckled anklet. These had high heels that were difficult to walk on if your ankles were not completely straight.
Most of us walked the heels over to the sides of these boots as we teetered from rock to tussock. The constant abrasion at the toe - Zambia was a country of almost ubiquitous grass cover between its trees – wore out the leather and exposed the steel.
An American geologist had a pair of Redheads, the classic American hunting boot, with sensible walking soles and heels. These were greatly admired but he was as mean as dirt and made no effort to supply me despite repeated requests. I thus battled on with my Clarkes. The proliferation of footwear available today is wonderful and makes those days of tired aching feet a distant memory.
* * *
The longest foot safari I took was to the Niobium Prospect in the Lukusashi Valley.
We started off from the MO16 copper prospect and walked about 70 miles, into the hills in a generally up-river direction to where previous sampling, I presume by the Loangwa Valley Concessions geologists under Dr. J. Austen Bancroft, had located a niobium anomaly.
How they had detected it without Frank Farrel and his modern spectrographic laboratory in Lusaka, I don’t know.
The walk took 3 days going and 2 returning. While at the prospect we put in a sampling grid. Later that year when we had got Landrovers across the Lukusashi River, Maurice cut a road to the prospect.
The elephant population did not like this. To keep us out they regularly pushed trees down over the track. Noah got the fright of his life on this road. It crossed a number of very steep sided and deep streams.
The approach to these streams was along a flat flood plain, from which the streambed could not be seen.
Once you had dropped over the lip into one of these stream crossings you were all but committed to going on down and racing up the other side.
Noah was driving alone. As he dropped off the lip into one of these ravines there was a group of elephants at the bottom. Well, he performed miracles to stop the Landrover and reverse back up over the lip.
* * *
Elephants were the friends of those who walked along the thick riverine vegetation. They cut smooth paths along the rivers. They also maintained them, by their frequent passages along them. Not only did they open the riverbanks but they cut roads up hillsides too. I once watched through binoculars a mother, with 2 youngsters trailing behind her, making a path up the opposite ridge across a valley in the Lukusashi Valley. I first noticed that the progress of the group was unusually slow and then saw that the cow in the front was moving from side to side. This made me bring out the glasses and I then saw that the side-to-side movement was caused by the stamping, but not so much stamping as heavy pressing, of her feet into the ground.
In this manner she fashioned out the path into the hillside. They use a constant and easy, perhaps 1 in 4, gradient and they make switchbacks too – regular civil engineers!
Our practice was to seek out the main elephant path along the river or the one over the hill whenever we crossed over a watershed into a new river system. Walking along one of these elephant paths with the bicycle-man in front, we came into a bamboo thicket.
I had walked behind that fellow, Gaspar was his name, for kilometres too numerous to mention. I knew his every attitude. He was a short, well-built chap who pushed that wheel untiringly. He called out the distance readings diligently every quarter of a mile. He would do this in his peculiar way with a look over his shoulder at me. He invariably whistled quietly and happily.
He walked with a straight back, his chin up and his arm thrust forward pushing the wheel. He had hammered a walking stick-shaped handle of wood into the hole at the top of the forks where the handlebars of a full bicycle would go.
In this bamboo thicket there was a massive rock python lying across the elephant path.
There is an adage used in the African bush that refers to people inadvertently walking 800near to potentially dangerous animals (or wasps or bees). It says: the first passer-by wakes it, the second annoys it and the third it bites.
Gaspar, obliviously, with his head up, rode his wheel right over the python’s back and ten stepped over it. I was second in line and, looking around and paying attention only to rocks and things, with only a cursory glance to where I was putting my feet, stepped right over the python, thinking it a log. Sandford, the sampler, some metres behind and more observant, saw it and shouted "Nyoka!" ("Snake!").
This split the crew. Gaspar and I rushed forward; Sandford jumped back treading all over the sample-bearer. Between us was the massive python, 8 inches in diameter, whose head and tail stretched into the bamboo thicket to either side of the path, for distances that we could only imagine.
All we could see was one metre of the middle reaches of its massive body. It was presumably awake, after all Gaspar had run his wheel right over it. I don’t think it was annoyed yet, because I had not touched it; perhaps it had felt the vibrations of my footsteps? It was completely still. Sandford, now 20 metres away from it, picked up a long bamboo pole. He was about to annoy it really and properly. With a samurai-like yell he ran forward and brought the pole down smartly with all his force on the python’s back. The pole still had leaves and branches on it and it came down with a whooshing noise between the tight avenue the elephants had cut through the bamboo thicket. Well, all hell broke loose. This massive snake drew itself together and up in a huge thrashing, arching coil. Bamboo shook and bent on both sides of the path, the thick fall of dry leaves and branches became airborne. The noise was startling!
This was a big animal that had crept into this thicket slowly and calmly; it was not doubt coiled or bent around numerous bamboo stems. It was now getting the hell out in as straight a line and as quickly as possible. And then it was gone, followed for 25 metres by the loud noise of the bamboo thicket taking strain. The four of us looked at each other across this erstwhile zone of tumultuous disorder, speechlessly. We gathered our shaken wits and continued on, silently and gingerly.
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In Lusaka East, malaria took hold while I was on a foot safari with Dirk Eva and Tom Cawker. It had been a fairly eventful one. We had set up safari tents on a grassy bank of a stream near a waterhole. There was some burning going on to get rid of the long grass that probably had buffalo bean in it.
A single spark landed on the flysheet of one of the safari tents. It went up in flames immediately. By running with it trailing behind him Dirk managed to get his bedding out of it before the tent disappeared into smoke. These were the first light weight tents; they were the hi-tech portables of the day.
A small 1 m high by 2 by 1 m cottage tent with a flysheet and slotting together aluminium poles would pack down to a bag the size of half your leg. It wasn’t that lightweight, possibly 10 lbs. They were waterproof, providing you did not touch the underside of a wet tent. Immediately you did that they leaked.
Up until then all tents were made of heavy dark khaki green canvas. Unfortunately the material these new tents were made of was highly inflammable. I suppose a few people burned before tent manufacturers moved onto using a different material for lightweight tents.
However we were highly impressed by them and most safaris I took with me the flysheet. It packed small, was light and it kept off all but the heaviest rain.
As the safari progressed the malaria took hold. I was in no state to make any decisions and Dirk abandoned the safari. I was taken out hanging on the shoulders of two of the samplers, virtually with my feet making a double groove in the dirt to mark our passage.
I reached the main road and lay against the wall of a store while two of the crew were sent the considerable distance back to the base camp to rouse the driver to bring a 900Landrover. I took Camoquin and knocked it out of me over the next 5 or so days.
It was my second bout of malaria, following the one I had when my heart stopped when I was a young Boy Scout.
The base camp we had set up for this sector of the work had had this same dose of malaria sweep through. About half the staff had got it. In these situations you simply get malaria from a mosquito first biting a person with malaria and then it biting you. It quickly spreads from person to person. I seemed to be the last in line. Malaria became, in Zambia, a considerable problem for the management of Chartered Exploration Limited.
The Chief Geologist was moved to issue a written threat that if anyone else caught malaria he would fire him. We were so sure of the prophylactics in those days that this seemed like a reasonable thing to do.
Even so we knew that if you took Chloroquin as a prophylactic you would have to take Camoquin as a cure – or vice versa. Thus already in the early 1960’s malaria was becoming resistant to the drugs of the day. Daraprim which some took as a prophylactic (a tiny, almost tasteless white pill taken once a week) became completely ineffective by the time my 3 year old daughter caught malaria using it in 1970 in the Sanyati River area of Rhodesia.
To get back to my heart stopping. I caught the malaria while on a Boy Scout camp at Ruwa 30 kilometres southeast of Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia. I was about 10 or 11 years of age.
I was at home in bed, alone (my mother who was normally there had had to go out) when our family doctor, Dr Sugarman, called to see what was wrong with me.
She was taking a blood sample from one of my fingers when she noticed that I was going crook. I clearly remember feeling terrible and seeing the anxious look on her face as she massaged my heart area. At the same time she fumbled with the other hand in her bag to get an adrenalin injection to plunge into my heart.
Do you remember that nerve-jarring scene from Quentin Tarantino’s film "Pulp Fiction" where Vincent Vega plunges the hypodermic syringe into the X he has marked on the gangster moll’s chest? Well that was about to happen to me.
It was re-started by the massage, fortunately.
When my mother arrived I heard her and the good doctor say, "Marge, I thought I had lost him. I was getting ready to inject his heart". Well there you go then! In those days (early 1950’s) one was given quinine to cure malaria.
Ten yellow pills a day for 10 days or something like that and your skin turns yellow.
For all the mosquitoes that have sucked my blood, in all the places they have done that I have had only one other case of malaria.
This was many years later, in Tanzania. I was fishing with Maurice Bergmann on the Rufiji River and was late setting my tent up on the bank of the river. Four or 5 mosquitoes got into it and slept with me. In the early hours of the morning they started bite, and bite they did. I got up and searched around the campfire for an aerosol mosquito killer, which I eventually found. However the mozzies had done their job.
Ten or 12 days later (the incubation period for the disease) I was in the interior of Tanzania at Williamsons Diamond Mine and felt lousy. The mine hospital, whose pathologist must have seen many malaria signs in blood, could not see any in mine.
I was there for another day and felt better the next morning, as you always do when you have malaria.
I caught the plane to Dar es Salaam that afternoon. By then I was really crook. I asked the stewardess for a blanket on the flight, but this was Tanzania - who needs a blanket in this climate at 5 degrees south of the equator?
By the time I got into the dark grey Toyota Landcruiser that had been baking on the tarmac of the airport parking lot I was shivering as though I had been dunked in the Barends Sea. I said to Maurice, "Please switch off the air conditioner and don’t open the windows."
Poor Maurice was gasping in the heat while I was shivering with fever.
The Nordic Clinic diagnosed malaria from the blood slide – the doctor said it takes a day to start showing up in the blood, which was why they did not see it at Williamsons.
By this time, 25 years after my second dose of malaria, Camoquin and Chloroquin were 1000rendered ineffective by overuse and I was cured with an organic Chinese drug called Cotexin.
The Chinese developed this malaria cure about 25 years before but had not marketed outside of their country.
The American army heard of it and desperately tried to find the plant from which it was made. They scoured the earth with no success.
Eventually and recently, when China became a little more commercially minded in the world sense and they started to mass produce the drug, the Americans found the plant growing along the Potomac River in Washington DC.
Right near to the headquarters of the CIA, which had conducted the search for it worldwide. In fact everywhere but in their own back garden!
Strange but true, if the BBC is to be believed!
End of Murray's contribution
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