The BobWood Story
The year was 1958. I was lost, deep in the forests of the République du Congo.
I had arrived in the center of the Continent two weeks earlier, part of the French Foreign Legion. Their mission? A doomed effort to save one of the last outposts of colonialism. Mine? Simply to survive.
For me, the Foreign Legion was an escape. The Congo, at that time a part of France's equatorial holdings, was the end of a long journey which had led me from my childhood home on the moors of Scotland to the North of Africa.
It was in a darkened bar in Algeria that I first heard of the mysteries on the Congo- the Heart of Darkness. I was deep in my cups, listening to the stories of the Legionnaires who sat near and around me, as they described their campaigns into deepest, darkest Africa. I will not here recount those stories, but suffice it to say, they filled me at once with awe and with terror.
As the evening wore on, and the stories died down, we sat staring at the fire, each man reliving in his mind what had brought him to this place... and wondering what might lie ahead.
I had no plans, other than to stay there in the North of Africa, perhaps to see the Pyramids of Egypt, and eventually to make my way to the Sub-Continent and see for myself the mysterious Swamis of that land, and bathe myself in the Ganges... but fate had other ideas.
Whiskey I can handle, but that night, as the whiskey ran dry, the men began to drink a sweet liquor of Algerian origin whose name I cannot now remember, but its effects were soporific in a way I had yet to encounter in my young life. All I know was that I must have nodded off before that fire, for when I awoke, I discovered I had been gang-pressed into the Legion, and we were on a boat, rounding the western tip of the continent. It had been two days since I sat at that bar in Algiers and in that time I had slept fitfully in the hold of the hired ship.
It was many days, at least a fortnight, and many miles after we landed in Gabon, that we finally reached the Legionnaire outpost in Congo. My first night there, exhausted, malarial, and despondent over my turn of fortune, I wandered down to the nearby stream to dip my feet in the cool water. I must have (once again!) unwittingly fallen asleep, for when I awakened, it was morning, and the sun was already bearing down on me.
I sought the shade of the trees and thinking to make my way back to camp, I wandered thru the bushes and hanging vines. Sure of the direction, I pressed ever deeper, and yet- the camp was nowhere to be found. All that day I circled, I called, I beat my breast in anguish and still, not a sign did I find of the Legionnaires or their camp.
Despairing of my life, I sat down under a Wenge tree, its dark wood mysteriously cool in spite of the African heat. Slowly the stars began to appear...