Munro stood, and said something quickly in a language that was not Swahili. The pygmy replied. Munro gave him one of the cigarettes they had been using to burn off the leeches. The pygmy did not want it lit; instead he dropped it into a small leather pouch attached to his quiver. A brief conversation followed. The pygmy pointed off into the jungle several times.
"He says a white man is dead in their village," Munro said. He picked up his pack, which contained the first-aid kit. "I'll have to hurry."
Ross said, "We can't afford the time."
Munro frowned at her.
"Well, the man's dead anyway."
"He's not completely dead," Munro said. "He's not dead-for-ever."
The pygmy nodded vigorously. Munro explained that pygmies graded illness in several stages. First a person was hot, then he was with fever, then ill, then dead, then completely dead - and finally dead-for-ever.
From the bush, three more pygmies appeared. Munro nodded. "Knew he wasn't alone," he said. "These chaps never are alone. Hate to travel alone. The others were watching us; if we'd made a wrong move, we'd get an arrow for our trouble. See those brown tips? Poison."
Yet the pygmies appeared relaxed now - at least until Amy came crashing back through the underbrush. Then there were shouts and swiftly drawn bows; Amy was terrified and ran to Peter, jumping up on him and clutching his chest - and making him thoroughly muddy.
The pygmies engaged in a lively discussion among themselves, trying to decide what Amy's arrival meant. Several questions were asked of Munro. Finally, Elliot set Amy back down on the ground and said to Munro, "What did you tell them?"
"They wanted to know if the gorilla was yours, and I said yes. They wanted to know if the gorilla was female, and I said yes. They wanted to know if you had relations with the gorilla; I said no. They said that was good, that you should
not become too attached to the gorilla, because that would cause you pain."
"Why pain?"
"They said when the gorilla grows up, she will either run away into the forest and break your heart or kill you."
Ross still opposed making a detour to the pygmy village, which was several miles away on the banks of the Liko River. "We're behind on our timeline," she said, "and slipping further behind every minute."
For the first and last time during the expedition, Munro lost his temper. "Listen, Doctor," he said, "this isn't downtown Houston, this is the middle of the goddamn Congo and it's no place to be injured. We have medicines. That man may need it. You don't leave him behind. You just don't."
"If we go to that village," Ross said, "we blow the rest of the day. It puts us nine or ten hours further back. Right now we can still make it. With another delay, we won't have a chance."
One of the pygmies began talking quickly to Munro. He nodded, glancing several times at Ross. Then he turned to the others.
"He says that the sick white man has some writing on his shirt pocket. He's going to draw the writing for us."
Ross glanced at her watch and sighed.
The pygmy picked up a stick and drew large characters in the muddy earth at their feet. He drew carefully, frowning in concentration as he reproduced the alien symbols: E R T S.
"Oh, God," Ross said softly.
The pygmies did not walk through the forest: they ran at a brisk trot, slipping through the forest vines and branches, dodging rain puddles and gnarled tree roots with deceptive ease. Occasionally they glanced over their shoulders and giggled at the difficulties of the three white people who followed.
For Elliot, it was a difficult pace - a succession of roots to stumble over, tree limbs to strike his head on, thorny vines to tear at his flesh. He was gasping for breath, trying to keep up with the little men who padded effortlessly ahead of him. Ross was doing no better than he, and even Munro, although surprisingly agile, showed signs of fatigue.
Finally they came to a small stream and a sunlit clearing.
The pygmies paused on the rocks, squatting and turning their
faces up to the sun. The white people collapsed, panting and gasping. The pygmies seemed to find this hilarious, their laughter good-natured.
The pygmies were the earliest human inhabitants of the Congo rain forest. Their small size, distinctive manner, and deft agility had made them famous centuries before. More than four thousand years ago, an Egyptian commander named Herkouf entered the great forest west of the Mountains of the Moon; there he found a race of tiny men who sang and danced to their god. Herkoufs amazing report had the ring of fact, and Herodotus and later Aristotle insisted that these stories of the tiny men were true, and not fabulous. The Dancers of God inevitably acquired mythical trappings as the centuries passed.
As late as the seventeenth century, Europeans remained unsure whether tiny men with tails who had the power to fly through the trees, make themselves invisible, and kill elephants actually existed. That skeletons of chimpanzees were sometimes mistaken for pygmy skeletons added to the confusion. Colin Turnbull notes that many elements of the fable are actually true: the pounded-bark loincloths hang down and look like tails; the pygmies can blend into the forest and become virtually invisible; and they have always hunted and killed elephants.
The pygmies were laughing now as they got to their feet and padded off again. Sighing, the white people struggled up and lumbered after them. They ran for another half hour, never pausing or hesitating, and then Elliot smelled smoke and they came into a clearing beside a stream where the village was located.
He saw ten low rounded huts no more than four feet high, arranged in a semicircle. The villagers were all outside in the afternoon light, the women cleaning mushrooms and berries picked during the day, or cooking grubs and turtles on crackling fires; children tottered around, bothering the men who sat before their houses and smoked tobacco while the women worked.