Word: dangu
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...Alcock, was bound last March from Kisumu to Cairo, on the South Africa-to-England run. Young Alcock was rocketing along over the jungle at 200 m.p.h. when he found he was running out of fuel. Instead of flying over Juba, he was 150 miles to the southeast. The Dangu River, swarming with hippos, crocodiles and water snakes, hedged by high and slippery banks, yawned beneath...
...passengers jumped to safety he kept his engines roaring wide open, managed to hold the ship against the bank until his crew unloaded the mail, jumped clear. As the 2,960-h.p. engines finally sputtered and died, some $200,000 worth of flying boat sank back into the tropic Dangu...
Young Alcock, his passengers and three of the crew were carried overland to Juba, and from there the crestfallen pilot was recalled to London while thrifty Sir John rushed salvage engineers to the jungle. In three months, despite jungle fever, they completed repairs, and in July, when the Dangu rose to flood, they prepared to take off. With her four giant engines scaring up a bright cloud of fluttering parakeets, the patched Corsair lumbered majestically downstream. Before she rose, there was a disheartening rip and she tore her bottom out on a jagged rock...
Engineer Halliday decided to hire enough black bucks to dam the Dangu and create an artificial lake. A whole village, more than 200 blacks, were hired at a shilling and tuppence (27?) a head per week. In the sweating jungle Congo belles wheedled out of their bosses split piston rings for their noses, rivets for their ears. Duralumin rings for bracelets. Soon blacks and whites were so friendly that each Briton had a nickname in native dialect. Radioman James Wycherley was named "King of the white men" because he sat at his dials instead of working...
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