OWONGO’S PLUMBING

Owongo gets rid of one of the foulest smells to inflict a human nose.

The settlement where Owongo had lived all his life, and his stone-age parents before him, could hardly be called a village. It was a random assortment of ancient caves in a sandstone hillside and it had once been the proud habitation of the pack of wild wolves until Owongo’s ancestors had scared them off by discovering fire and wafting it under their canine noses. Then the humans had moved in and made their settlement as comfortable as you can when the walls are those of a cave and you have no doors or windows.

Let me explain: Owongo is a distant ancestor of mine and I am proud of his many achievements in the field of science even though the whole lot were soon forgotten when his time was up and he succumbed, as we all must, to the grim reaper. When I say that he is a distant ancestor of mine he must also be a distant ancestor of yours if you live in the West. If you don’t then maybe his genes never quite reached you, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they did. He lived an awfully long time ago and various strands of humanity have moved almost everywhere since then, and where there are people there is the dispersal of genes via the gift, as Owongo might have put it, of the shag.

So to this particular spark of brilliance that infused Owongo’s mighty prehistoric mind.

The cave settlement had a variety of plumbing created almost entirely by dried-up streams from a much earlier age, one of them threading through the back of the caves with a series of fissures providing a nice convenient depository for unwanted liquids �" opening as it did in a kind of natural toilet arrangement in all of the caves. I know, it’s most unlikely, but unlikely things have always happened and frequently been used by the ingenuity of the human being for his convenience.

Rainfall was welcomed by the inhabitants of the settlement, for without it the stench became barely tolerable, but there was normally enough rainfall for all waste matter to be washed away, going further and further from the settlement underground until it splashed into the broad river a mile of two away and became so diluted as to be virtually undetectable by the human nose.

All was well with this arrangement until there was a blockage.

Hillsides can be the very devil when it comes to unwanted movement. Seismic things can happen. Collapses can occur, unsuspected, deep in the bowels of a porous earth, and one occurred during the summer of a year lost to time.

And not only was it a summer, but a particularly dry one. The weather was delicious with a hot yellow sun bathing the people with all the radiation necessary for their bodies to produce excesses of vitamin D and become bronzed and beautiful, a fact that they failed to either understand or even notice.

And the natural subterranean plumbing started stinking.

It can be truly scary how much noxious aroma can be produced by blocked plumbing when there’s nothing in the way of flushing, and how foul gases can seep out just about everywhere. The truth of the matter was the settlement became overcome by a cloud of foetid stench, and disease followed hard on its noxious heels.

Desperation struck the village, and then a second consequence of the burning summer affected the people, as if the smell wasn’t enough.

Just before it found its way into the broad river a mile away the underground stream meandered just under the ground through a layer of porous stone and provided water for a little glade of fruit trees, that bore delicious and highly nutritious fruits the like of which have hardly been seen since, and the people of Owongo’s settlement feasted off them every autumn. It was like a special harvest, and they even called it nectar from the gods (some of the more gullible believed in a wide variety of gods).

With the drought the trees started to shrivel and the immature fruits dried up on the trees. Starvation lay in front of the people, starvation wrapped in a poisonous and acrid stench of rotting faeces.

Owongo knew something had to be done. The lack of fruit and the stench combined to put a little bit of extra impetus behind the processes of his mind, and he started to work out what might by wrong.

“There is a blockage!” he concluded, and he danced into the village, announcing that he knew the cause of their smell. “It is a blockage!” he shouted, triumphantly.

And to prove that he was right he started investigating. He tapped walls here and there until he was rewarded with a dull “clunk” rather than a happy hollow “clack”

“It’s here!” he told his woman Mirumda. “Now to clear it!” he added.

He took himself to the broad river and filled a wooden leak-proof bowl he’d made for his mother a decade earlier with water. It might have been a long hot summer, but the river was still flowing, taking melt-water from the distant blue mountains to the equally distant blue seas.

Then he chibbled away at the place where his knocking had produced a “clunk”, grateful that it was at the back of someone else’s cave rather than his own. No sooner had he broken through to the natural plumbing that the smell, already outrageous, became unbearable, so foetid that he could both taste it and feel its very texture on his bronzed skin.

In one single movement he flushed his wooden bowl of river-water into the gap that he’d made, and was rewarded by a rattling and a gurgling as the blockage was swept away, and with it went weeks of foul matter and the detritus created vy digestive systems accustomed to all the wrong kinds of food (as specified by twenty-first century dietitians.)

And then it started raining in the world outside, and the plumbing happily transported over more freshly-fallen water away towards the river. Owongo had to block his hole up post haste to prevent leakage!

On its way that water, taking a season’s human waste with it, watered and fed the dying fruit orchard, and so nutritious was the mixture that they perked up and dried fruit started expanding with life, almost as if they needed to reward the people from the settlement for their salvation.

And Owongo was, from that day, revered, as was only right.

After all, he’d invented plumbing.

© Peter Rogerson 29.08.16