Achmed Abdullah

“ I pushed on, through an entangled, exuberant commingling of leaves and lasciviously scented, fantastic flowers that vaulted above me like an arch, cutting my way through the mangrove that opened before my canoe, with a dull, gurgling sob, then closed behind me, with a vicious, popping gulp, as if the jungle had stepped away to let me through, leisurely, contemptuously, invincibly, to bar my way should I attempt to return! ”

“ For I am a businessman, and I told myself that those fool negroes had saved me a tidy little penny by bolting, since I owed them a month’s wages. Too, I was well supplied with everything a fellow needs in the wilderness, from quinine to matches, from tabloid beef to—oh, tabloid fish cakes. My health, but for occasional, woozy fever spats—they being part of Africa’s eternal scenery and accepted as such—was first-rate, and my canoe a snug, comfy little affair that pulled as easy as a feather. ”

“ I knew that particular part of the French Congo better than I know my native Cape Cod, and I really did not need a guide; nor porter for that matter, since I was to go the rest of the way by canoe.
Nor was I afraid of any stray natives popping out of the bush. I’ve always been friends with them. I am not an adventurer—seeking for the rainbow, the pretty little rainbow that usually winds up in a garbage can—not an explorer, nor a soldier. ”

“ Rubbish a man can do without just as well? Well—don’t you believe it! Not for a single, solitary moment!
Oh, yes! You can do without all that truck when you are home, all snug and taut and comfortable—with shops around you on every street so that you know you can buy them, if the spirit moves you and you have the price. Sure.
But suppose you find yourself somewhere at the back of the beyond, where you can’t buy the fool things for love or money—absolutely cannot get them. ”

“ At any rate, there I found myself that morning, on the upper reaches of the Ogowe River, a day’s journey below Boue, a week from the coast, and all alone.
I was rather annoyed. You know, Africa raises Cain with a white man’s nerves and general amiability. And if I could have caught one of those runaway coons, I would have given him what was coming to him with my hippo-hide whip. But it was no use trailing them in the jungle. ”

“ The wilderness had swallowed them, and so I contented myself with cursing them in English and Freetown pidgin.
Afraid of being alone?
Not I. You see, I wasn’t a greenhorn, but an old Africander, dyed-in-the-wool, dyed-in-the-trek, and able to take care of myself. ”

“ We ll, the moment my paddle fanned the water, I reconsidered, subconsciously. I decided, again subconsciously, that I was in a devil of a hurry, that I must get away from the hinterland, from the Congo, from the whole of Africa.
I said to myself that, arrived at the coast, I would catch the first mail-boat bound for Liverpool and then on to America. No—I wouldn’t even wait for the mail-boat. I would go straight aboard the first dirty tramp steamer that came wallowing up from the south, and beat it home. Home! That’s what I needed! ”

“ I am a businessman, pure and simple, and I needed the natives to bring me rubber and ivory and gold-dust, while they needed me to get them their particular hearts’, and stomachs’, desires—American cloth, and beads, and pocketknives, and Worcester sauce, and Liverpool trade gin, and rifles that didn’t shoot and similar truck. ”

“ THE darkness that is Africa is brilliantly depicted in this weird story of a white man alone in the jungle.
The Incubus SPEAKING in after years about that period of his life, Lloyd Merriwether, being a New Englander and thus congenitally given to dissecting his motives and reactions and screwing them into test-tubes, used to add, by way of psychological comment, that it wasn’t the big things that mattered in a crisis, but the small ones ”