Green City in the Sun (89 page)

     Despite Mau Mau and settlers' fears about independence, tourists
were
starting to come to East Africa, but in a trickle. Geoffrey wanted to convert that trickle into a flood and therefore had been working on ways to make his safaris more alluring. Camps smacked too much of hardship, no matter how many Africans were employed to pitch the tents, cook gourmet meals, make the beds, or do the tourists' laundry. The romance wore off quickly, and few went home believing they had gotten their money's worth.

     That was when he had hit upon the idea of a resort hotel out in the bush, a "safari lodge," he called it, the first of its kind anywhere, complete with proper bedrooms, a dining room, a polite and friendly staff, and a cocktail bar from which the lazy adventurer could watch the wildlife.

     "A place where tourists can be clean and drunk and
safe,"
he declared, "where they can feel like Allan Quatermain without being threatened by animals or natives. Sort of like being on the inside looking out. A lodge that's set far away from Nairobi and from where Mau Mau took place, far away
from any hint of politics or hostilities. My clients will taste the Kenya of fifty years ago. They will experience it as our parents did, when it was primitive and unspoiled and when the white man enjoyed a life of graciousness and elegance. And they'll pay top money for the opportunity, I guarantee it."

     Geoffrey had then set out on a scouting safari in which he explored every corner of Kenya, observed each patch with the eye of a tourist, felt the wind, followed the game, and talked with local headmen. He had settled upon Amboseli for its beauty and abundant game and had leased from the Masai the site upon which his tent camp now stood. In the beginning of the new year construction on the hotel was going to start.

     He couldn't wait to reach camp. He was going to install Mona in the tent next to his, and later tonight, while everyone else was asleep, he was going to pay her a special call.

     With each bound and jolt of the Rover, as it hit holes and boulders, the two children in the back held on and screamed with delight. Deborah and Terry rode on the side benches, facing each other. The canvas sides were rolled up so that they sat in the full force of the wind as Terry's father pushed the car at top speed. Deborah's unruly black hair had escaped its rubber band and now flew about her head in stinging whips.

     This was her first safari; she could hardly control her excitement. As the Rover plunged through zebra herds, scattering the horselike creatures and making them bark, Deborah laughed and clapped her hands. She turned this way and that on her seat, watching giraffes run alongside the Rover, seeing startled rhinos suddenly turn and trot off in a trail of dust. She couldn't take in enough of it: the hawks in the sky; the vultures riding air currents; the lions drowsing; the weaverbirds building nests in the thorn trees. She had never before seen so much wildlife, such an endless expanse of land and sky. It took her breath away. She had had no idea Africa was so
big.

     They also passed herds of domestic cattle and Masai men whose bodies were painted red all over, each standing on one foot. They leaned on their spears—tall, angular men with long, plaited hair and crimson
shukas
knotted over one shoulder, flapping in the breeze. When the Rovers sped by, they raised their hands in generous, full-arm salutes. Deborah and Terry waved back, thinking them terribly foreign and exciting compared with the Westernized
Kikuyu among whom they lived, and then they waved at Uncle Tim and Uncle Ralph, who rode behind in the supply Rover.

     Deborah envied her ten-year-old friend in an almost physical ache. Terry was
so lucky.
His father led the most thrilling life! And he took his son on safaris with him, now that the white school in Nyeri was closed and Terry was still too young for boarding school in Nairobi, where his brothers and sisters were. Terry had been to Kilima Simba Safari Camp before, and he had gone leopard hunting with his father. Deborah wished Christopher and Sarah Mathenge could have come along, but when Deborah had asked her mother if she could invite them, she had received a dismissive silence.

     Deborah decided that when she got back to Bellatu, she was going to tell her two new friends all about this wonderful adventure and give them some of the photographs she planned to take with her Box Brownie.

     By the time they reached the camp, weary and hungry and covered in red dust, the sun was on the horizon. Geoffrey's resident staff, young Masai in khaki shorts and clean white shirts, welcomed the travelers as they stumbled to the ground and stretched aching limbs, and then began the hasty unloading of supplies and luggage.

     Deborah held her arms out and spun in a circle. It was glorious! The biting air, the long shadows, the unimaginable silence that stretched all the way to the flat horizon. It was a world with no walls, a land with no orderly rows of trees, a wilderness promising surprises and adventure. And Mount Kilimanjaro, she decided, was a thousand times more beautiful than her old Mount Kenya! She wished again, more desperately than ever, that Christopher Mathenge were here to share it with her.

     "You see," Geoffrey explained to the grown-ups as they strode over the uneven ground toward the tents, "part of my advertising campaign will be that this was once the site of a Hemingway encampment. Moreover, this was where the film
Snows of Kilimanjaro
was made and also parts of
King Solomon's Mines.
That native village we passed back there—those huts were props for the film. Now, over here, contiguous with these giant boulders, is where I plan to locate the main lodge...."

     Supper was no less than excellent, everyone decided, served by waiters in kanzus and white gloves, on china and silver, in the romantic light of a
watercolor sunset. Because there is no twilight in equatorial Africa, lanterns were promptly lit, filling the compound with a comforting glow. The dining tent was huge, with three gauze walls enabling those within to enjoy the panoramic view without having to battle mosquitoes. As they went through the consommé, the gazelle cutlets and new potatoes in gravy, and the lemon sherbet, Geoffrey continued to enlighten his companions about his plans.

     "I've several investors," he said, signaling for a second bottle of wine. "One of them is a famous disc jockey."

     Grace looked up from her food. "What's a disc jockey?"

     Ralph said, "An American," and everyone laughed.

     Including Mona, who had suffered the eight-hour journey from Nyeri in silence. She had taken the short tour of the camp without speaking a word, had washed and freshened up in her tent, and had come to the dining tent for sundowners with the guarded expression on her face that everyone had come to know. But now, after a few glasses of wine and the intimacy of the group, she, too, felt the immenseness of the plains, the otherworldliness of the isolated savanna, and she was starting to drop her defenses.

     Geoffrey was the first to notice.

     "We'll have what I call 'game runs,'" Geoffrey said, lighting a cigarette and sitting back. As he heard the noise of the night—the constant din of crickets, the roar of lions near by—Geoffrey congratulated himself once again on what he considered an exceptionally wise move. By selling his father's cattle ranch to Africans who had been eager to buy, Geoffrey was able to invest in a venture that he was certain was going to turn a huge profit. If he was going to be a white in Kenya, he decided, then he wanted to be a
wealthy
white.

     "We'll get the tourists up at dawn and trot them around in Rovers, looking for game to photograph, which is always very active and visible in the early-morning hours. Afterward it's back to the lodge for a big breakfast and a day spent around the swimming pool. In the late afternoon, when the animals are waking up and on the prowl, we trot the people out again on another game run in Rovers fitted with brandy and sandwiches. In the evening we'll require formal dress for the dining room and put on a good show with local Masai dancers."

     "It certainly sounds appealing," his brother, Ralph, said. "If old Jomo keeps the country stable, there's no reason why we can't make a go of this."

     Ralph had come back to Kenya the year before, when Uganda had achieved
its
independence. President Obote had decided that the British system of provinces was no longer needed in his country, so he had dismissed all white civil servants. Ralph Donald, who was still a bachelor at forty-eight, had been a provincial commissioner and had been given, as the local slang called it, the "golden bowler"—compensation for his years of service to the Crown. After briefly operating a control post for receiving convoys of white Belgian Congo refugees coming through Uganda, Ralph had come to Kenya to join his brother in the new tourist business.

     Silver-haired and ruddy of complexion, a man who had built a reputation for himself as a crack elephant hunter, Ralph Donald was the second person at the dinner table who had an eye on Mona.

     "The way I see it," he said now as he filled and lit his pipe, "with so many Europeans getting out of Kenya, we few who are left are going to rule the roost. There will literally be rich pickings for us. The wogs will look around themselves, realize they haven't a bloody notion of how to run a country, and they'll come running to us for help."

     Grace, who had hardly touched her food, gave Ralph a look. It was inconceivable to her that this self-centered man with the haw-haw voice could be James's son. "What baffles me," she said, "is where the Africans are getting all the money to buy up white farms. I heard that the Norich-Hastings plantation went for an astronomical sum!"

     "It's no mystery, Aunt Grace," Geoffrey said. "The money isn't African; it's British. When Her Majesty's government as good as abandoned us all here by saying it wouldn't send in another army if Mau Mau broke out a second time and
then
agreed to turn complete rule over to the blacks, it had to find a way to assuage its feelings of guilt and assist the very people it had betrayed. It's this way: Money from Britain goes through the World Bank, through African middlemen, and into settler hands. That settler, having unloaded his farm, packs up and goes back to England, taking his money with him. In some cases, I've heard, the money never even leaves England!"

     Ralph said, "I'll wager the wogs haven't a clue to what's going on," and
then looked at Mona. He was remembering the day, years ago, when she had come to Entebbe with her aunt to take his father home.

     "If you will excuse me," Grace said as she stood, "I'm very tired and not used to such traveling."

     Geoffrey rose with her, thinking that, for seventy-three, Grace had weathered the journey remarkably well. He said, "I'll call for an askari to accompany you to your tent. Never go about the camp at night without an escort. Animals do come into the area and some get quite aggressive."

     "Will the children be all right alone in a tent?"

     "Terry's camped here before. He'll see that Deborah is well taken care of."

     When Grace was by herself, a few minutes later, she sighed and sat down on the bed. She had to give Geoffrey his due; these tents were luxurious. They reminded her of the ones Valentine had erected back in 1919, when she and Rose had arrived to find that the house had not yet been built.

     
So long ago
, she thought.
So very long ago
...

     Grace was thinking that tomorrow was James's birthday and that he would have been seventy-five.

     As a lonely wind whistled through the canvas walls and sent the Coleman lanterns swaying, Grace prepared for bed. She didn't really know why she had come along on this trip, except perhaps that Geoffrey had so wanted her to see and approve of his new idea. Also, she had thought a spell away from the mission would do her good. It was years since she had had a proper holiday; this might give her time to think, to consider the proposal of the order of African nuns who wanted to take over the mission school. She and James had always talked of going on a proper safari together but somehow had never found the time. Now here she was with his two sons.

     She picked up the book she had brought along to read—the latest from America,
A Ship of Fools.
Then she put it down, unable to concentrate. James was on her mind. He filled her every thought; he lived in her soul.

     As she went to the tent flap and peered through the mosquito netting at the serene, moon-washed landscape, which looked deceptively sterile and devoid of life but which was very much alive with killing and death and procreation and life, Grace thought of her beloved James and wondered again, as she had thousands of times, what he had died for.

     It was a strange, new world she lived in now, and she wasn't sure if James would care for it. She herself understood little of it.

     Playing in Nairobi was an American film,
Dr. Strangelove
, which Geoffrey and use had taken her to see. The whole world, it seemed to Grace, was suddenly preoccupied with global nuclear annihilation. The radio seemed to play only American songs, sung by a new breed of people—someone named Joan Baez, who protested racial hatred and called for love and peace. The news was full of reports on civil rights demonstrations in Alabama; of riots and beatings; of two hundred thousand freedom marchers descending upon Washington. Young people were dancing something called the watusi; dissolute teenagers in Britain were growing their hair long and calling themselves mods and rockers. The world was rushing at a breathless rate—an American astronaut, Gordon Cooper, had just orbited the earth twenty-two times; Dr. Michael De Bakey in Texas was making history by opening up people's chests and operating directly on the heart.

     And three days ago President Kennedy had been assassinated.
What has all that
, Grace wondered as she gazed out at the placid, untouched African plains,
to do with this?

     And Kenya was caught up in its own breakneck race to become part of the bewildering, modern new world. Barely sixty years ago, Grace thought, these people were living in the Stone Age, with no alphabet, no concept of the wheel, not a clue to the mighty nations that loomed on the other side of the mountain. Now the Africans were driving automobiles and flying airplanes; African barristers wore white wigs in Nairobi's courts and spoke the Queen's English; Kenya women were discovering birth control and secretarial jobs. New words peppered the language, such as
uhuru
, "freedom," and
wananchi
, "the people." And Prime Minister Kenyatta had declared a new pronunciation for Kenya, saying that the e was to be a short one and that it was from now illegal to say "Keenya."