We left next morning at 6.42. It was raining. Our host had warned us that the road was bad and that we should have to be careful of any patches we found where the road had been repaired. These patches were apt to be slippery. We didn’t really understand what he meant, but we were soon to learn. The method of repairing the road is this. The road, like the soil on each side, is simply red earth. In fact, the red earth is the road. When a stretch becomes too deeply rutted to be passable, holes are dug at the side of the road and the earth removed from these holes is spread on the road, spread on it very carefully to a depth of about a foot. This work cannot be done in the dry season as the wind would then simply blow the red earth away in the form of dust, so it has to be done during the rains. Perhaps my readers can imagine what the surface of the road is like: a foot depth of soft red earth after a week’s rain and real rain, Rhodesian rain, not gentle showers like we get in England, but a torrential downpour that may last for a week or more! It resembles nothing so much as a newly ploughed field in Devonshire where the soil is of a similar red colour after a wet month. It is incredibly slippery, and we were thankful that we had not tackled this stretch in the darkness of the night before. Where the road had not been repaired, it was passable. Deeply rutted and wet, it was nevertheless not too bad but the repaired patches, sometimes a mile or more in length, were nightmares. I am quite sure that without our great knobbly Dunlop tyres we should not have got through without a great deal of trouble. As it was, we had one adventure which was something of a joke. We had negotiated several of these evil stretches of repaired road and had covered some miles since the last one when we met parties of native roadmen walking towards us. We concluded that they had been working on repairs to the road ahead and kept a sharp lookout for a change of surface. The road climbed a fairly steep straight hill and at the top curved slightly to the left. I rounded the bend very cautiously, probably at about 20 mph and immediately I saw that we were in for it. The road sloping sharply downhill was quite straight and wide, and the whole surface of it from edge to edge was covered with a foot-deep layer of this loose slimy red mud. I braked as hard as I dared before reaching the line where the mud started, then released the brakes just before we reached it and hung on. Immediately the front wheels entered the mud they slewed sideways, and the tail of the car swung the other way. It was hopeless to attempt to correct the slide as it was clear that the front wheels would not answer the steering. Humfrey said quickly “Let her go, Bertie, its quite all right.”
Round and round we went, gyrating in graceful circles, till I had no idea which way we were facing and had quite lost count of the number of turns we had made. Our speed was so slow that the whole business was more comical than anything else and as the edges of the road were of a soft swampy nature there was no danger of damaging any part of the car by hitting an obstacle. We had almost reached the foot of the hill and I began to see a prospect of regaining control on reaching the level, when with an extra vicious swing of the tail the car slid bodily backwards off the road, and stopped with the rear wheels in the swampy ground and the bonnet facing almost in the direction from which we had come.
I began to say I was very sorry but Humfrey, laughing, said “It doesn’t matter a bit, Bertie. You did the only thing possible in not trying to hold her.” I said that the reason I had not tried to correct the slide was for fear of turning the car over. Humfrey replied that that was the only danger and that it only remained now to get out again.
We tore some brushwood that lay handy and packed it under the wheels. Humfrey said “I believe I could drive out of here. Anyway, its worth trying before we start trying to jack her up.” He got in and started up the engine: I gave a push behind and, as he let in the clutch very gently, the big, barred tyres bit on the brushwood and slowly the car emerged onto the road. She was of course facing almost exactly in the wrong direction but Humfrey, giving a dab on the acceleration and twisting the steering wheel quickly, swung her neatly round till she was facing straight up the road. He called “Jump in, Bertie. I don’t want to stop.” With my damaged leg it was not easy but somehow, I managed to scramble in, and we were away. But not yet out of the wood. Ahead stretched a long gentle slope covered with this deep red mud and Humfrey crept gingerly along at about 5 miles an hour. He changed up to second, hoping to avoid wheelspin by using the higher gear, but had to return hurriedly to bottom gear as the resistance of the soft surface was such that the engine, on the mere whiff of throttle that was all he dared to use, could not pull the load on second gear. Creeping along like the top of the rise looked miles away and halfway up was a little ridge where the gradient steepened for perhaps 20 yards. “If we get over that”, said Humfrey, “we shall be all right.” But we didn’t. Slower and slower grew our progress till we were barely moving. Humfrey opened the throttle a trifle and immediately the rear wheels began to spin. We stopped. “I’ll give her a push,” I said, opening the door, “and you can get away.”
“Wait a minute,” Humfrey answered, “I’ll try without your pushing.”
“All right”, I said “but for goodness sake don’t get the wheels dug in.”
“I won’t,” he replied. “There’s a bottom under this stuff if the wheels can only get down to it.”
Whether the wheels did get down to it or not, I don’t know but Humfrey, using infinity of care in the manipulation of clutch and throttle, managed to get the car on the move again. Presently we topped the summit, and the incident was over. It was rather amusing and for some miles it quite cheered us up.
Crawling along as we were, nearly exceeding 30 miles an hour and frequently doing much less, the journey seemed endless and I could not help saying “What would people say if they saw us crawling along like this and were told that we were breaking the record to the Cape?”
Eventually we reached a place which the log called “Kasama Town”, where we saw a signpost point to our right with the word “Kasama”. It was 12.23 when we reached this point. We had come 109 miles in 5 hours and 41 minutes! We had averaged less than 20 miles an hour.
After Kasama Town the road improved: in other words, we got away from the region of “road repairs”. The country was dull and uninteresting but at last we crossed a horribly dangerous-looking bridge, crept up a steep hill round a shoulder of rock and saw a pleasant-looking little hotel. On it was the word “Makungwe”. Our next logging point had been Makungwe and as this was within 3 miles of where Makungwe should have been we decided that this must be it. The 68 miles from Kasama Town had taken us 2 hours and 35 minutes. So, we were speeding up! We had averaged 26½ miles an hour! After Makungwe we entered a stage that for sheer misery will live in my memory for ever. We were here close to the southern border of the Belgian Congo and we found ourselves travelling through dense forest. It was an unpleasant sort of forest: the trees were only about 20 or 30 feet high, but they were so close together that nowhere one had a vista on either side of more than 100 yards. The road was a dirty little track with deep ruts and every 100 yards or so there was a small depression full of water and mud. Driving over this road was a most exhausting business. At each one of these mudholes, ruts a foot deep had been left by passing vehicles. It was a matter of studying each one carefully as we approached and choosing the best method of avoiding the deepest part of the water. Sometimes one could put either the offside or the near side wheels off the road altogether, onto the coarse grass at the side of the road, while the tyres crushed the small bushes in their path: but sometimes, owing to a fear of the possible softness of the ground and the fear of getting bogged, one was compelled to drive straight through the ruts. Each one of these mudholes was impossible of negotiation at a higher speed than about 15 miles an hour. Everything faster than this sending all over the glass screen a shower of mud and water through which it was impossible to see. It became a deadly monotonous progress of frantic acceleration between these holes and decelerations to negotiate them and the maddening splash as we passed each one of these obstacles made the whole journey an absolute horror. Also, it rained. It rained in torrents, it rained in solid sheets. Words fail me to describe that rain. It descended in a curtain blotting out everything beyond a radius of 20 yards or so, and every 100 yards there was one of these exasperating mudholes to add to our misery.
We relapsed into sullen silence. Hour after hour we crawled along through the rain down that miserable track, our only comment being to try the twin horns after negotiating each mudhole full of water. These were mounted rather low, too low, in front of the car and they evinced a strong disaster to receiving a bath of mud and water every 100 yards. Sometimes one was put out of action, sometimes the other, sometimes both, but they always recovered when the water drained out of them and our progress was marked by a series of blasts – from the horns, of course – as we tried them after each water passage. At last, even this small amusement palled, and we relapsed into silence, only broken by a muttered apology when whichever of us was driving took a water splash too fast and covered the screen with an opaque film of mud and water.
Only once did anything occur to shake us from the sullen silence into which we had fallen. In one place the road passed directly through the middle of an antheap the centre of which had been cut away to leave a passage. An African antheap is a tall mound ten or twelve feet high and perhaps 10 feet in diameter. Baked by the sun into a substance as hard as concrete, these queer objects are a common feature of an African landscape. Rather than remove the antheap altogether the roadmakers had cut a path through it, leaving a kind of gateway between two vertical walls about 10 feet high. Earth had banked up in this gateway and formed a dam, where water lay to a considerable depth. I slowed to a crawl and cautiously crept through it. It must have been nearly two feet deep. The front wheels reached the earth dam and broke through it. Humfrey looked back through the rear window and said quickly “Get a move on, Bertie. We’re being pursued by a torrent from the dam.” I accelerated and Humfrey reported that we were gaining slowly on the veritable wall of water pursuing us. Soon we outdistanced it as some quite imperceptible rise of ground must have checked it, but the little incident which Humfrey described as an amusing sight quite cheered us up – for the moment. However, we soon relapsed into dull apathy.
Rain in torrents, a blank view through tree trunks for perhaps 100 yards on each side of the road, and the general undesirableness of the road itself, sodden and monotonous under the leaden sky, with its detestable and wearisome mudhole full of water every 100 yards or so, the deadly monotony of the same routine: creep through or round the deep water splash, accelerate, change to third, then to top, brake, change to second for the next hole – the same thing repeated continuously and becoming maddeningly tiring and boring. The rain streaming down from the narrow patch of heavy sky was all we could see as we ploughed along the narrow alleyway between the everlasting trees, deadly monotony and hopeless boredom. Also worry because a place called Chimfwembe that was supposed to boast a Government Rest house and an aerodrome hadn’t appeared at its appointed place. We began to feel that we were doomed to go on driving for ever through this endless forest under the pitiless sky. Then darkness fell but it made no difference to us. We plodded steadily on, mostly in silence.
At last, 95 miles – the longest miles we had known since our journey began from Makungwe – we came to something that we recognised. Our road bent sharply to the left and, running in from our right, came another road. “The Congo Road”, we exclaimed with one breath. Sure enough, there was a signpost, pointing up this other road, and “Belgian Congo” it said. This was the possible road of which we had been told and which we had turned down because of its reported difficulties. We were not really interested in the Congo Road itself now. We were only interested in its appearance because it meant that we were only 3 miles from Kapiri Mposhi. Humfrey said, “Look here, Bertie, we’ve had a hell of a day with these blasted roads and the rain and everything. If there’s a decent hotel here, I think we’ll stop for the night. What do you say?”
I said, “I am agreeable, though I’m ready to go on if you want to.”
“No,” he answered, “I think we’ll stop. We shall be all the better for it in the morning.”
We entered the beginning of the town and at once saw a small building with the word “Hotel”. We turned in at the entrance and stopped in the compound. At the same moment, I think, we both said, “Oh yes”. First impressions were favourable. We saw a long low single-storied building, a wide verandah in front of it on which were chairs and tables. At one table sat two young men and an older one. They had glasses before them. From an open doorway, golden lamplight streamed out. So, we both said “Oh yes” with one breath.
All three rose and came towards us. The elder man welcomed us with quiet courtesy. He was the proprietor, Locke by name, and we found out later that he was a wellknown character, a pioneer explorer of early days of Rhodesia and a man with a great fund of tales of Africa. The two younger men were studying our battered car with interest: suddenly one of them said, “By Jove, is your name Symons?” Humfrey said that it was and asked how he knew. It was then we heard for the first time that our story with photographs of the car lying in the bed of the river had already appeared in the African papers. These fellows had seen the account in the Bulawayo Chronicle which is one of the groups headed by the Cape Argus for which Symons writes a weekly London motoring article. The roll of films despatched by air from Juba the morning after we arrived there had reach Thomas at Wolseleys, been developed and printed, and prints had been sent by air to the South African group of papers. They had published them together with the cabled story of our accident that Humfrey had sent from Niagara, Juba and Nairobi. It was now the 18th of January and we had crashed on the 1st, so that there had been plenty of time for the rolls of films to reach England, be printed and arrive in South Africa before we got there. The young men were thrilled at meeting us and, after a drink or two, it was a merry party that sat down to dinner in the cheerful lamplit diningroom. They wanted to hear all about it and our host had an unending store of interesting tales to tell us of his adventures in African exploration.
Time passed rapidly and it was midnight before we said goodnight and sought our beds. The young men were, as far as we could gather, representatives of some large firm and were on their way to the copperfields of Northern Rhodesia on business. They were enthusiastic motorists and pro-British to the core, as all Rhodesians seem to be. They deplored the fact that British car manufacturers seemed to take little interest in the large market awaiting them throughout Rhodesia and, they added, Africa generally. They assured us that, as far as Rhodesia was concerned at least, everyone was anxious to buy British cars if ones suitable for the conditions were presented to them. Mostly British cars were too small, too low powered, too high priced, their springing, though admirable for the good roads of Europe, was far too hard for the bad road conditions in the Colonies. Sunshine roofs were definitely not wanted – the weather was either too hot or wet for them – and they were apt to leak under the extreme variation of dry and wet seasons. Our young friends, as enthusiasts, were in love with the fine lines, the beautiful finish of engines and bodies, and the excellent equipment of British cars and they were emphatic that an enormous market awaited a British manufacturer who would go all out for the Colonial trade and back it with a first class system of service and spare parts depots. “Take your Wolseley, for instance,” they said. “It looks absolutely ideal for the job. With its strong cambered springs, its beautiful internal finish and its general sturdy appearance coupled with the proof your journey has given of what it will stand. Well, that’s the job to collar the market and put the American car out of business. Can’t you persuade Wolseley’s to take it up?”
We replied that we didn’t know but that we would have a talk to them when we got back.
They were most interested in our huge tyres and asked us many questions as to how they behaved and what we thought of them. We told them that they seemed to us the complete solution of wet weather motoring in Africa and they were amazed to hear that we had neither used nor felt the need for chains. To give my readers an idea of how completely the season of the rains puts a stop to motoring I may say that their Chevrolet was the first car we had met with since our encounter with the Ford truck at the Abercorn Fork, nearly 500 miles back! Fancy if one were to meet one car at Biggleswade and the next at Inverness!! Wet weather motoring in Africa is but an adventure and no one attempts it unless they are forced to do so.
We only covered 275 miles in 13 hours motoring on this day, but we felt it was one of the hardest days we had had. The constant watchfulness for the dangerously slippery repaired patches and the monotonous boredom of the last 100 miles made the 275 miles seem more like 500 and we slept like tired dogs.
The Cape Record 