Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) (2 page)

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tepping off the train, a few miles from Tsavo, Jeremy noticed twenty yards ahead of the engine, the railway simply ended. The rails stopped unevenly, the right rail a little longer than the left, a pile of sleepers next to it waiting to be placed, the recently raised embankment the red of a wound from the clay of the tropical soil. Fifty feet past the sleepers, the embankment trailed off, dead-ending in a scrubby forest. Stunted thorn trees as far as could be seen in every direction, the equatorial sun hanging low on the horizon. The only water available was imported one hundred miles down the railway from Mombasa. He had been told, with almost two thousand workers on the line now, the railway could not transport the water fast enough. It took time to load and unload, slowing down all the other supply trains in the process. And last week, the water had been halted entirely when a lioness decided to bask in the sun on top of the water tank and no one nearby had a gun. No matter how much noise the engineer and porter made, beating on jerricans with shovels and yelling, the animal had continued to sleep there for six hours. All the workers up the line near Tsavo, dehydrated already from their tight rations, simply lay down in the shade for the day, unwilling or unable to work until the water arrived.

Even those in command were issued only a small basin of water once a week to clean up in. Before today, Jeremy (who had always enjoyed his morning ablutions) had assumed this lack of bathing would bother him the most of all the deprivations of camp life. At the moment, however, standing in this ninety-degree temperature—wearing all appropriate layers of outer clothing and undergarments, with the added weight of the unfamiliar flannel spine protector pressing against his back—he began to glimpse for the first time that heat and thirst might take primacy.

Behind him, conscripted workers piled off the train, newly arrived from India, their term of contract three years. For the past twenty-four hours on the train, these Indians had eaten fruit he had never seen before, chattering loudly in languages he did not know, wearing a style of headdress he was not sure how they donned. Did a turban come pre-wrapped so one just tossed it onto one's head like a hat in the morning? Or did it take two men to get dressed, the first standing still, the other winding the material round and round his head? Coolies, these men were called, some of them as light-colored as a tan white person, others a saturated brown as dark as the natives here. In camp, there would be a scattering of Persian Mohammedans as well as a few tribesmen. The only other white man would be a British physician by the name of Alan Thornton. All of them would have to learn to work together.

Back in Maine, when acquaintances inquired why Jeremy had decided to travel all the way to British East Africa for employment, he had narrowed his eyes, looking off into the distance as though searching for the best way to explain. He started by mentioning that his Grandpapi had homesteaded in Maine, wresting an order from the wilderness, creating a large dairy farm from what had been simply a mass of trees. He described how much he admired that fact, as well as the honest and well-used nature of Grandpapi's hands. Even now that Grandpapi was in his sixties, those hands were muscled and tendoned, always cratered with working injuries, the pinky nail permanently missing from a long-ago mishap with a cow. Jeremy would admit he would be proud to have similar hands, to spend his life taming a land like his grandfather had.

Grandpapi was one of the pillars of the community, a loyal church member and town selectman. Most of the people listening to Jeremy's explanation would nod at his words, satisfied with his answer.

Sometimes however (mostly when he was talking with more distant farmers who had not caught up yet on recent gossip) the listeners would lean forward, awaiting additional reasons. After all, Africa was on the other side of the equator, weeks of travel away—a savage and unknown land. With these people, Jeremy inhaled and added that, since he wished to tame a wilderness, Africa was clearly the place to be. European countries had just divided the continent up into territories, were begging for settlers to homestead, handing the land away for free. His plan was to help for several years to build the railroad and then, from his firsthand knowledge of the area, pick some prime land to settle on.

Occasionally one of the listeners would mention the possibility of disease, but Jeremy would steer the conversation instead toward the vast profits to be made. The continent was rumored to have huge repositories of gold, diamonds, and copper, as well as untold tons of ivory, exotic furs, and rubber. How could a settlement placed in the midst of such wealth fail? He would ask the listeners to judge for themselves. Did they not believe it possible that the colonization of Africa could, as it had in America, result in the gradual unification of the territories? He would state there was no greater fulfillment he could wish for in life than to contribute to the birth of a nation, helping the continent to realize its power.

At this point, even the most distant acquaintances nodded, satisfied.

And the others, having heard the rumors, had already let the subject drop. They had reached their own conclusions long before.

 

Now, standing here in this foreign land, he felt gratitude that at least the railroad tracks were the same width and tolerances as the ones in America, the same materials. If the Indian workers had not been around, he might have reached a hand down to touch these familiar rails for reassurance, so straight and clean, what one of his engineering teachers used to call the iron rods of civilization. A few miles ahead lay the Tsavo River, over which he would have to build a bridge. He had been engaged here mostly on the strength of two facts. The first was that all his engineering projects so far—two railroad bridges in Maine—had been completed on schedule. The second was that no accidents had happened to his men, not even a crushed limb. He was proud of his record, had labored hard toward safe conditions, secretly terrified that a decision of his might result in another's death.

At a fundraiser for Rensselaer Polytechnic—the engineering school Jeremy had attended—he had once been briefly introduced to the elusive Washington Roebling. Impeccably dressed, the famous man picked his words with as much care as if they were bricks creating something permanent. He spoke this way even though the conversation concerned only the cheese-plate selection. Roebling's innovative Brooklyn Bridge had cost the lives of at least twenty workers. The bridge's feet, the caissons, had to be laboriously dug deep into the river's bottom, giving the men—when they returned to the river's surface—some type of previously unknown malady now being called “the bends.” In the worst cases, the men's skin bubbled and they clutched their heads, shrieking into their deaths. And this was not the only type of danger associated with the bridge's construction. High above the water, the metal ropes Roebling had invented to hold the bridge up sometimes snapped and tossed workers hundreds of feet through the air.

Interrupting the discussion of the cheese plate, a woman had pressed in past Jeremy and taken Washington's arm. Ahh, Jeremy realized, Emily Roebling, rumored to be as great an engineer as her husband, though she had never attended school for it. A thin woman with a lively face, she apologized to everyone and led Washington firmly away. The gossip was for years he had barely left his bedroom, pained with debilitating headaches and wavering sight, leaving Emily to oversee the work on the bridge. Perhaps these migraines came from his many hours down in the caissons. However Jeremy wondered if they could have been compounded by an unwillingness to witness any more deaths.

Unlike some of his classmates, Jeremy had never sought to have the primary value of his work come through its artistic merits or engineering feats. Instead he was content to have the worth of his bridges be equated with their usefulness, their ability to help people transport the food and materials they needed to survive. And this was a reason to work in Africa. While America was voracious at the turn of the century for bridges of technological wonder—longer and taller than any built before—Africa more closely matched his taste. It desired straightforward solutions.

He started to stroll down the embankment toward camp, following the Indians, gazing at the wilderness the railway cut its way through. This was the land where he would start his life afresh.

Unfortunately, at the moment, the land did not look like much. Back in Maine, he'd pictured trees hundreds of feet high, giant apes and elephants everywhere, the sounds of birds screeching and water dripping off leaves. Instead this area was semiarid, closer to a desert. The scrubby trees were not more than thirty feet tall, thickly entwined. Thorns several inches long grew everywhere on the branches and the trunks. Trying to walk through this forest without getting cut must be difficult. Nyika, he had been told the trees were called, Swahili for “barren land,” because few people wished to live among them. The trees were horrible to clear from the railway's path, slicing open the workers' hands and legs like teeth.

He had much to learn. On this continent, he could identify few of the foods or plants or animals, none of the poisonous snakes. He had no knowledge of the niceties of customs, nor the basics of any of the languages—not those of the African natives or the Indian workers. In this new land, the most he could hope for was to learn quickly. A man with the knowledge of a newborn, he would be in charge of over seven hundred men, the whole Tsavo River assignment.

Lost in these thoughts, following the Indians, gaping over his shoulder at the trees, he walked smack into a naked boy.

Jeremy's height of six foot one made him tall enough that his habitual stance was a touch hollow-shouldered, as though he were constantly in the midst of an apologetic shrug. This boy bounced off his elbow.

“Goddamn,” he muttered at the sudden sharp jab, then turned with embarrassment at his oath. There stood a remarkably muscular child, now several feet back, balanced and unruffled as though he had never been touched, holding a branch in one hand. For an instant, Jeremy believed him to be a white boy with some manner of a terrifying full-body skin disease. Then he understood his mistake. The boy was covered with a thick white paste in which an elaborate pattern—or perhaps writing of some type—had been drawn, revealing his black skin. The thickset boy stood, head tilted, branch held out, muttering, concentrating, lines of writing running along each of his limbs and even down his male member. And as Jeremy's eyes rested there for a moment, he realized this was a full-grown man. A very short man, perhaps even a pygmy, but—considering the sagging scrotum and looser skin on the thighs—a man of advanced years.

Suddenly conscious of where his eyes were, he jerked his gaze up. The man watched without response, his stare locked on Jeremy, his lips still whispering. The end of the branch pointed at him, quivering as though in the lightest breeze. His mumbling was neither angry nor insane-sounding. Instead it had the same mechanical quality with which old women recite their rosaries.

“Terribly sorry,” Jeremy said. “Excuse me.” Although whether he was apologizing for bumping into the man or staring at his loins, he did not know.

The man whispered on.

At this point, Jeremy began to back away. Looking down the embankment, he noted all the Indians had come to a stop, were turned fully around, staring at him and the African. What had halted them at this distance, he wondered, what had made them turn? That small smack of flesh as he bumped into the man? His “excuse me?” The man's almost soundless whispering? There was something visually unnerving about hundreds of men standing still for no apparent reason, so motionless there was not even the rustle of cloth.

In the few minutes since the train's arrival, the sun had slid that final inch down behind the horizon. As Jeremy would learn over the next few weeks, here, there were no lingering sunsets. In the tropics, the sun did not arc diagonally across the sky to creep gradually behind the earth; instead it plummeted down. Hot shimmering day and then, with an almost audible snap, night. In the shadows, at this distance, the Indians' dark faces were already indistinct, their emotions hard to read. With the African's encrusted skin, it was difficult to discern with accuracy the edges of his eyes or mouth. His jaw moved on, as he mechanically mumbled. The branch shivered, pointed directly at Jeremy's heart.

Abruptly unnerved, Jeremy turned and walked away down the embankment, taking long purposeful steps, trying not to look as though he were fleeing. As he caught up with the Indians, stepping in among them in an attempt to lose himself in their ranks, he realized the branch had been nyika. Glancing down at his elbow, he saw the single drop of blood soaking through the white linen.

 

Jeremy had been hired for the railroad without ever visiting the newly named territory of British East Africa, without viewing the terrain he would be building on, without a single face-to-face interview. A simple correspondence of eleven letters sent back and forth: his resume and various recommendations, a few professional sketches of the Hadley bridge, a carefully phrased essay (in which Grandpapi's hands had featured prominently). In return he had received by post a technical description of the Tsavo River, a primer on the railway's political difficulties and urgency, a list of supplies and clothing recommended for his personal use, and the request for the transportation of certain engineering and medical goods from the States.

However, from those few letters, he had come to feel almost as though he knew this writer from Africa, his new employer. Ronald Preston—a methodical man, a driven one—was the top engineer responsible for building a railway across five hundred miles of extreme wilderness, cutting through swamps, jungles, and hills, leveling the ground and laying the tracks across every type of possible terrain, from a small coastal city to a point on the map chosen solely for its coordinates, not even a village there. The purpose of the railroad was not to transport African natives, but to claim the land, to attract European colonists and enable them to move any necessary building and farming supplies inland. The initial survey of this wilderness had barely been completed even before construction commenced. Many of the tribes had never seen a white person and some of those that had had sworn war on any additional whites they might encounter. The land was currently being ravaged by extreme drought and an ensuing famine, as well as by a continent-wide epidemic of rinderpest that was killing through its attendant ailments of diarrhea and pneumonia every kind of hoofed creature from the native Cape Buffalo to any imported cattle. Given rinderpest, the building of the railway would get no assistance from the labor of oxen, donkeys, or horses. No, this endeavor would be powered solely by train wheels and human muscle. This railway, this “lunatic line” as it had been nicknamed by the British press, was in a race with the German railroad in the neighboring colony as both imperial powers strove to tighten their claims on their disputed territories. When Jeremy contemplated Preston's responsibilities, he marveled at what must be the nearly insurmountable difficulty of simply transporting all the supplies necessary to keep up the pace of building half a mile of railway a day in such a foreign and immoderate land.