The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,90

like savannah or parkland, with contrasting accumulations of dark and deep forest in clefts in the hills and on the riverbank. About these accumulations were what looked like many smaller green splashes of vegetation: they looked superficial, easy to scrape off, but it was the great forest, ever seeking to re-colonise the land and extend its domain. The oldest forest, a few thousand years old, was beside the riverbank; that of course was where the water was, and from the other bank (where I was) it looked logical enough.

The pale-green colour of the savannah appeared to underlie everything, like the priming on a canvas. It made the landscape look tamer than it was, a place where tourists might come in buses and where teas might be served.

There was a further surprise: in this land, scraped clean and green in so many places, the separate clumps of forest marked the site of old, even ancient, villages. For this reason UNESCO had designated Lope as a heritage site. Between seven hundred and fourteen hundred years ago the villages were abandoned, for an unknown reason, and never reclaimed. So in spite of its apparent tameness the land held a mystery.

My guide was Kate White. She had spent many years in Lope as a researcher, in conditions of remoteness where I don’t think I would have lasted for a month.

It was necessary to people the landscape with Africans—such as one could still see—to begin to understand its drama: the land discovered and settled many centuries ago; the villages built, the trees planted; in some places the remains of kilns surviving where the vanished people had smelted iron ore into iron, using charcoal and local bellows in a difficult method the mid-nineteenth-century traveller Du Chaillu was still to see; and then, after centuries of success, centuries of mastering the land, because of some unknown calamity everything abandoned, only the village trees left growing, with no further record of the presence of men until our own time.

The places where smelting was done still showed as bare patches on the hillside. There were many of them in one place. You could—and it seemed a privilege, a link to the remote past—still pick up shiny flakes of ancient, burnt-out charcoal, and bits of half-smelted ore.

The roads of Lope were country roads, rough and red, much cut up by rain and raging water. They required patience and a strong back, even in a four-wheel drive.

Some small trees beside the road had been half broken by elephants, and we were told that the elephants of the equatorial forest were a metre shorter than the African elephants of more open spaces. Lope was a national park and elephants here were to some extent protected. But elsewhere in Gabon elephants were under threat; the very size that made them fearful creatures before the age of the gun now made them hopelessly vulnerable. Local people liked to eat elephant meat, and there was again a Chinese market for ivory. The loggers opened up the forest; the poachers moved in. Some of the logging companies were themselves Chinese, able now, far from home, fully to express the Chinese hatred for the earth.

Local people liked what they called, in their manly way, “bush meat.” With modern guns they were now able to kill for trade as well, sending carcases to Libreville. In a government magazine I read that a million animals—clearly a random figure—were killed in Gabon every year. Since people in places like Lope hunted all the time, the real figure would be much higher. Africans, like the French and the Chinese and the Vietnamese, ate everything, not only elephants and dogs and cats, but everything else with life. Everything with life was, you might say, fair game. The eating of bush meat had become a cultural matter; it was not to be questioned. The forest, with its apparently endless supply of bush meat, was like a free supermarket, open to everyone.

In this dependence on bush meat, the easy bounty of the forest, might perhaps be found a reason for the failure of the people here to develop a serious agriculture, which might have created another kind of civilisation, another kind of man, better able to take the outside world on, better able to move in all directions. But that was only one side of the story. Guy Rossatanga-Rignault had said that the sleeping sickness and malaria and the great heat had made the keeping of cattle an impossibility in Gabon. Perhaps, then, as