The Shores Of Hell

An adventure for Mombasa PCs, working for Hassan’s Emporium.

American film producer Merian C. Cooper found wandering Mombasa docks. Dazed. Hollow-cheeked. Filthy. Clothing in tatters. Can’t explain how he got there. Memories distorted. Keeps repeating the word “Hell”.

Expelled from U.S. Naval Academy for hell-raising and championing air power. Becomes Midwestern reporter. Chases Pancho Villa with National Guard. WWI bomber pilot. Founds volunteer Koścuiszko Squadron to fight Reds in Polish-Soviet War. Spends nine months in Soviet POW camp.

Travels world as New York Times reporter and American Geographical Society researcher. Meets Ras Tafari. Dodges pirates. Makes films among Persian nomads, Siamese farmers, desert warriors of Sudan. Explorers’ Club member. On Pan American Airlines board.

Last seen with film crew en route to island of Nosy Be in northern Madagascar. Hired ship, porters in Mombasa. Planning to make lemur documentary. Cagey about details. Carefully recruited team.

William Sclater. Naturalist. Editor of journal Ibis. Bird Room curator at London’s Natural History Museum. Pompous. Stubborn. Travelled all over Africa. Determined to prove his father’s theories about lost Indian Ocean lemur continent. Inspired by Tamil mythology. Believes lemurs ghostly devolved remnants of superior Lemurian race.

Ernest B. Schoedsack. Cameraman. First job filming slapstick for “King of Comedy” Mack Sennett. Joins army Signal Corps. Works with Cooper feeding refugees in Poland. Does all his films. Meets and marries actress Ruth Rose on Galapagos expedition - small, mousy, persistent, specialist in doe-eyed ingénue roles. Brings her along.

Marguerite Harrison. Baltimore society princess. Woman’s Civic League director. Runs free hospital school for indigent children. Journalist. Volunteers to spy on postwar Soviet Union - immediately caught. Imprisoned for ten months in Lubyanka. Writes a book about it. Meets Cooper at Warsaw ball. Hosts his documentaries. Easy to dislike.

Kurt Engelbrecht. Captain of steamer Java Queen. Forty years on Indian Ocean - knows every rock and harbour between Cape Town and Perth. Resigned to forever wrangling with petty landsman’s squabbles. Grey-faced. Schnapps flask. Eager first mate Jack Cabot from Boston wants to be a playwright - sees Rose, falls in love.

Hell-Ville. Sleepy tropical French colonial port on Nosy Be. Cooper’s last known port of call.

Ylang-ylang and vanilla plantations. Perfumed steam wafting from stills. Dhows bobbing in bay. Postman on bicycle. Bare-footed fishermen. Canoes hauled up on beaches. Tin-roofed Gujarati general store under branches of spreading tamarind tree.

Chief of police snoozing on verandah. Bungalow among ferns. Fruit stalls under umbrellas. Humped zebu cattle wandering among white headstones. Sakalava tomb posts - wooden figures erotically entwined. Lamba cloth wraps. Cow wrestlers training for big show on the mainland. Kids counting to ten in French in village schools.

Zero crime. Everyone knows each other. Corpses of night-crawling aye-ayes - said to creep into huts and puncture people’s hearts with long pointed fingers - hung up outside farmers’ cottages as warning to the others. Fluffy white sifakas. Ring-tailed lemurs hopping about. Startled-looking orange-eyed black lemurs dining off fruit scraps.

Fruit bats. Sea turtles. Chameleons. Spiny hedgehog-like tenrecs. Fossa - weasel-cougar hybrids - climbing trees in search of quivering nocturnal mouse lemurs with gigantic eyes. Ancestors’ bodies wrapped in silken shrouds - removed from crypts every seven years, paraded through village, provided with new cloth.

Pierre de Hell.

Local eccentric. Three-quarters Malagasy. Short. Pugnacious. Wears tricorn hat. Full of island gossip and implausible sea stories. Claims to be grandson of Anne Chrétien Louis de Hell, French admiral and 19th-century governor of Réunion. Runs beachside bar where people congregate on warm summer evenings - popular with sailors.

Shady palm trees. Rum. Plantain fritters. Croissants. Samosas. Groundnuts cooked with pork. Bottled lemon and mango pickle. Scratchy jazz records. Women on djembe, valiha bamboo zither, handmade kabosy box guitar.

Met Cooper in Mombasa years ago. Tried to sell him inherited sea chart showing unknown island northeast of Mayotte. Not always there. Shrouded by fog banks. Magnetic anomalies drive sailors away. Spoken of in hushed tones by navigators. Mentioned in old texts - Greek, Arabic, Portuguese. Sorabe flowered-paper grimoires made for Merina kings by Antemoro astrologer sages, living in spike-walled villages, descended from Somalis, barred by taboo from wearing shirts or hats.

Cooper finally took him up on the offer. Set off to find the legendary island. Photograph its wildlife. Introduce its natives to the modern world.

May vaguely remember at this point the Java Queen wrecking on a coral reef. Immense black figure emerging from the fog. Doesn’t know what happened next.

Hell Island.

Grown from crystal fragments of Lemuria. Lost to mists of time. Difficult to get to - can only be found by people who know it’s there.

Smouldering volcano. Black lava fields. Ridges. Headlands. Crater lakes. Shark-infested lagoons. Coastal mangrove forests. Thick primeval jungle. Orchids. Ferns. Grandidier’s baobab - twined around each other in romantic pairs.

Tsingy - eroded karst plateaus turned into fields of limestone needles. Riddled with caves and sinkholes. Mosses cling to sides. Secret routes cut through them - rope bridges and stairs.

Prehistoric wildlife.

Easily frightened three-metre elephant birds stomping through underbrush like unusually stupid and baleful chickens. Gorilla-sized lemurs hanging upside-down from branches of towering banyans and rosewoods, peacefully feeding on figs. Fat pink metre-long hippos squatting happily in waterholes. Overstuffed dodos angrily pecking rocks.

Pack-hunting giant fossa. Red-throated frigatebirds. White Mauritian tomb bats. Coelacanths in rockpools. Spider colonies festooning canyons. House-sized coconut crabs feasting on dead whales. Ten-foot aye-ayes stealing sleepers from their beds.

Scorpions. Centipedes. Jumping leeches. Flesh-eating leaf-tailed geckoes. Lumbering moss-covered boulder tortoises. Vengeful crocodiles - stalk their brothers’ murderers. Horned tiger-striped twenty-foot chameleons - hard to see until they move.

Horrible stunted half-monkey old man wraps his legs around your neck and won’t let go. Diamond vein glitters in crevasse - gigantic screaming snakes eat anyone who enters. Turbanned skeletons with scimitars restage the First Fitna - decapitate each other, reassemble every morning to start fighting again.

Roc sleeps in volcano’s dead crater. Big enough to carry off elephants. Terrifying. Rarely seen.

Cyclopean basalt structures in jungle around mountain’s base. Sabaean votive inscriptions. Egyptian graffiti from Necho II’s circumnavigation of Africa. Qarmatian scriptures among Persian sailors’ bones. Fifty-foot smooth black glass walls across green valleys - unclear what they’re supposed to be keeping out.

Vazimba dwarves. Madagascar’s first inhabitants - resentful of outsiders. Only active at night. Bury their dead in highland bogs. Practice debased form of Judaism mixed up with demon worship. Spears. Pit traps. Bones and teeth glow blue in the dark - faintly visible through flesh. Obscenely lucky so long as they have their sampy amulets - can kill half a dozen men with throw of a single rock.

Libertalia.

17th-century pirate settlement around idyllic lagoon on Hell Island’s north shore. Stilt huts over water. Dhows, canoes, frigates anchored in harbour. Grog. Tavern brawls. Swordfights. Flintlocks. Treasure chests. Captains recruiting for new piratical ventures. Swarthy bearded Welshmen, Marathis, Spaniards, Rhode Islanders, Swahilis, escaped Jamaican slaves. Smiling Malagasy women in bright skirts tending bar.

Time a little slippery. Pirates evasive when asked what year it is. Stone fortress on headland. Cannons. Dungeons. Jolly Roger flying high.

James Mission. Mayor. Devoted to absolute freedom of the individual. Outrageous French accent. Long pointy moustache. Always drunk. Presides over Pirate Court in King’s Head tavern. Keeps Pirate Code in gigantic cryptic book that only he can read.

Marius Cazeneuve. Stage magician. Comically sombre. Flamboyant. Twirls his moustache. Lampoons the British. Sent to explore the island by Queen Ranavalona III. Too entertaining to be allowed to leave. Often found in pub. Pirates never get tired of even the most banal sleight of hand. Fought in Franco-Prussian War - knows how to use a gun.

Caraccioli. Mayor’s sidekick. Harmlessly horny priest. Makes all real decisions.

Explains all newcomers must suffer the tangena ordeal to prove they have the pirate spirit. Swallow three fatty pieces of chicken skin followed by death drink - glass of banana juice mixed with poison brewed from mangrove fruit. Don’t die. Regurgitate all three chicken pieces - this proves you’re not a symbolic cannibal.

Cooper failed the test - went mad, staggered off into jungle. Cabot passed with flying colours. Has become pirate chief and Java Queen’s new captain. Harrison his first mate. Schoedsack and Engelbrecht refused to drink poison - hang suspended in gibbets from headland’s rocky arch until pirates settle on funniest way to kill them.

Sclater given pass on test - immediately recognised by pirates as loveable eccentric who it would be a waste to kill. Obsessively studying local wildlife. In his element. Working with Cabot on scheme to return to New York in triumph with greatest prize of all.

Long Kong.

Fifty-foot sloth lemur. Moves on all fours. Huge staring orange eyes. Black muzzle. Ruff of pure white fur. Worried expression. Incredibly long arms. Fears only the roc.

Worshipped by the pirates as a god. Sacrificial captives tethered on basalt platform in jungle clearing - taken back by him to volcano-side waterfall den where they live long and peaceful lives. Crushes anything he dislikes to putty in bare hands.

Cabot wants to capture him.

Furious that Rose won’t marry him. Has her locked in cabin watched by unsavoury pirate crew. Eyepatches. Peg legs. Gold teeth. Dice games. Jigs. Hornpipes. Free-flowing rum. Familiar with modern boats - no difficulty at all handling the Java Queen.

Intends to use her as bait for Kong.

Stake her out on the platform. Wait for Kong to appear. Knock him out with ship’s stockpile of gas bombs, brought to island by Cooper in expectation that some monster hunting might be on the cards.

Chain him up. Take him to America. Exhibit him on Broadway. Get his name in lights as world’s most famous adventurer and showman. Be elected President. Win thousands of girls’ hearts.