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Outside Magazine March 2003

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DESTINATIONS SPECIAL: The Scouting Expedition
A Trip is Born (Cont.)

Day 14, mile 391
WE HAD PADDLED TO within two hours of the confluence by pushing hard almost until dark. Still, Connolly could appear behind us at any moment.

Rod lay prone on the sandbar in the firelight, his back hurting him. I hurt everywhere. Everyone but Josh looked tattered, worn, and very thin—with a beef-jerky quality to their physiques.

"Thank you for saving us hundreds of times," Cherri said, toasting Clinton and Rod with a ration from our renewed whiskey canteen. I toasted them and Cherri, for all her organization. Although I had been irritated with her on many occasions, I admired her drive and her uncomplaining coolness in the face of the dangers we'd encountered.

Clinton asked me for the usual bedtime story. I chose "The Death of Hugh Clapperton." A famed Scottish explorer in his day, Clapperton had expired of fever in the arms of his compatriot Richard Lander on an 1827 expedition to West Africa. "No mournful cypress or yew weeps over the lonely spot," wrote Lander, "no sculptured marble shines above all that remains of heroic enterprise and daring adventure!"

My stomach started grinding as I lay in my tent. Drums pounded in a village somewhere. Accompanying the drums was a strange sound, like someone huffing through a loudspeaker. Diarrhea repeatedly dispatched me into the darkness of the nearby willows. Were there animals about? I didn't care. I slept briefly. I awoke suddenly and crawled halfway out my tent door before vomiting copiously onto the sand.

"It is not all pleasure, this exploration," Livingstone, lost in the swamps of Lake Bangweulu, wrote a few days before he died of dysentery.

"Did you hear the lion out there?" Rod asked sleepily when I awoke him around midnight to borrow some iodine tablets for the water in my canteen.

I lay awake. Was it something I'd eaten or something special offered up by Africa's "disease barrier," the wall of exotic diseases that decimated early European explorers? I felt that nakedness again. Was this what the 19th-century explorers found so intoxicating about Africa, despite the fatal risks? In one way, I was glad we didn't have a gun. It accentuated this feeling of being among creatures far more powerful than us—whether hippos, crocs, and lions or the invisible inhabitants of the disease barrier. Was this, finally, the Niassa Reserve's greatest contribution to the earth's health? Like all great wildernesses, it forces us to recognize that we remain only an animal among animals.

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