January 18th: Luanda to Point Noire
Having skirted all the way around the dark heart of Africa - the DRC, which lies malignant at the center of the continent - we now skip our way through countries, languages, and the legacy of colonialism like stepping stones in the river of history, with the Congo River brooding subsumed in cloud off the starboard wingtip of the airplane. This jungle is a black hole. We have flown over six hundred nautical miles to avoid this geographical and political roadblock, unable to chart a course through it that would not require installing the ferry fuel system or hazarding the instability and chaos that permeate the jungle and the great river and its veins that course sluggishly under the canopy, sliding silent and dark with silt as far as the lofty Rwenzori mountains on the border with Rwanda and Uganda, where mammoth thunderstorms pile up and drop their torrential load upon the river basin.
On the way into Pointe Noir we overfly the mouth of the Congo, where Marlow began his search by steamship up the lethargic reaches of the river in search of Mistah Kurtz. The image of Marlow, sitting like a Buddha on the deck of a ship in the Thames estuary narrating his tale to companions in the gloaming, appears like a message in a bottle sent by Conrad over one hundred years ago, drifting past the fervid banks and sandbars littered with the ancient wrecks of steamers; something immortal emergent from one of the most malevolent environments on Earth.
Beaches unfurl off the aircraft's other wing as we make our way up the coast.
There is a dream repeated in Hemingway’s masterpiece “The Old Man and the Sea” about lions playing on the beach in Africa. In Santiago’s dream, “They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them.” I don’t know which coastline of Africa Hemingway had in mind when he wrote these lines, but here, along the Atlantic, the beaches stretch white and sandy and bordered by dense knots of green into the diminishing distance. There are few towns, fewer cities and no resorts. Santiago’s struggle with the great marlin and his suffering alone in his small boat is life. As is his futile battle with the sharks. But the book ends with the line, “The old man was dreaming about the lions.”
Hemingway must have seen these beaches because it is impossible to see the white sand bulwarked against the immensity of the Atlantic where the long rollers end their journey; to see the sliver of white sand attenuated to the horizon and broken only by the occasional rocky headland, and not be hopeful, even now, without the lions.
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