Too Close to the Sun (10 page)

In the spring of the same year, his work at Oxford done, Denys went up to Liverpool and called on Toby aboard the
Lusitania,
as he was about to sail to New York. Toby had been courting Margaretta Drexel, the daughter of Anthony J. Drexel, Jr., a Philadelphia-based financier from a family of distinguished money brokers and entrepreneurs. (The railroad magnate Jay Gould was Margaretta’s great-grandfather on the maternal side.) The Drexels were Europhiles, maintaining residences in both Paris and London, and the courtship had proceeded smoothly, with transatlantic visits on both sides. Now the couple were officially engaged, and Toby was heading west for a round of prenuptial festivities. As for Henry, Ossie Williams would not do, but this match was all right; he approved of an injection of American cash into the depleted Winchilsea reserves. Marrying American money had been a popular solution to the problem of dwindling wealth for two decades, adumbrating the relationship between new American cash and the old world order; but this was a love match, of sorts at least, and Toby was no Gilbert Osmond.

As soon as they returned from America, Toby and Margaretta were married (“crowd and heat appalling,” the groom noted in his diary). Ten bridesmaids carried Margaretta’s brocade train up the aisle. The church, banked with lilies, was thronged with duchesses, ambassadors, and American plutocrats. But Denys had refused to be best man. He said, hurtfully, that he couldn’t be bothered. But it was Topsy whom he didn’t want to hurt. She had been denied a wedding and was still sitting it out alone.

In the month that Toby married, Denys learned that he had been awarded a fourth-class degree.
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It was a spectacularly unheroic performance, but he could not have cared less. The prospects of formal employment bored him. All he could think about was getting away. “England is small, much too small,” he told Cousin Essex. “I need space.” Immediately after the wedding, he went to Wolverhampton to visit Cousin Muriel and her husband, Artie Paget. They were a pair of affable, unconventional golfers, and Denys was fond of them both. Artie had read chemistry at Oxford, later deploying his scientific expertise in his work as a patent lawyer. Denys had enjoyed following the progress of a motorcar with a push-pull steering column on which Artie had collaborated, and had watched from the window as Muriel was taken for a jerky tour in this innovative machine. Like everyone else in the family, the Pagets invested considerable energy into moving house as often as possible. They had recently come to rest at Old Fallings Hall, in Bushbury, north of Wolverhampton in the West Midlands. Using this early-Georgian brick manor as their headquarters, they followed the Edwardian season, traveling down to London for the choicest parties before departing again to India or the Sudan, where Artie would attempt to flog his latest invention to colonial governments and private companies. Now they had their sights set on South Africa. In 1901, Artie’s sister Dorothy had married Herbert Gladstone, the youngest son of the late prime minister. After thirty years as an MP, early in 1910 Gladstone had abruptly been created viscount and bundled off to South Africa as the first governor-general of the newly constituted Union. He and Dolly had sailed out on a lavender-hulled Union-Castle mail steamer and landed in Cape Town in May. Muriel and Artie were eager to visit, especially as a Paget brother was on Gladstone’s staff and a sister was living in Johannesburg. Artie also hoped to interest South African railways in an exciting automatic buffer coupler. They were sailing in July.

Denys, meanwhile, had been mulling over escape routes. Africa was a natural choice. He was a willing outcast with a vagrant’s heart, and sought a place where he would not have to conform. He had been brought up on stories of derring-do on the Dark Continent. To boys of his background, Africa was a stage on which Europeans enacted their fantasies or lived out the heroic ideal. Tatham had read out essays on Livingstone and Gordon and others who had slashed their way through malarial swamps or parleyed with Maasai chiefs in feathered headdresses. “What do we mean by a hero?” Tatham had begun his description of Gordon. While Denys could take or leave the idealization of Gordon as a symbol of Christian civilization, and was by temperament antipathetic to the conformism of the military, he warmed to the lack of restraint that characterized Africa—even to the savagery suggested by G. W. Joy’s often-reproduced oil
General Gordon’s Last Stand.
The pursuit of large animals had come tantalizingly alive through the exploits of big-game hunter Allan Quatermain, the protagonist of Rider Haggard’s
King Solomon’s Mines,
the first popular novel in English to be set in Africa. (“The thirst for the wilderness was on me,” Quatermain proclaimed when he abandoned England.) More personally, there had been the talk of Kenya during days and nights with the Buxtons at Dunston.
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Much of East Africa was undeveloped, as Queensland had been when Denys’s father and the Avunculus had taken their chances. Africa represented the open space that he craved, both literally and metaphorically. He decided to go to South Africa with Muriel and Artie and spend a short time on the Cape before sailing back to Mombasa to take a look up-country.

THEN DENYS FELL IN LOVE
with planes. When he turned up at Old Fallings, he found his cousins in the grip of aviation mania. Artie was chairman of the organizing committee for a flying meeting on Wolverhampton racecourse at the end of June. The dream of flight, so long cherished, was becoming a reality before the eyes of the young men of Denys’s generation. The Wright brothers had been toiling in the back of their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, learning from the pantomime-style efforts of nineteenth-century aeronauts, and in 1903 they fixed a small engine on the gossamer frame of a machine they called simply the Flyer. They hauled it out to the dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and got it to stay up, with Orville in it, for twelve seconds. In August 1908, the unflappable Wilbur brought a flying machine to Le Mans. The following year, crash-prone Louis Blériot made the first crossing of the English Channel, and soon after, in Rheims, the first major international air show provoked public scenes of near-hysteria. Artie’s event was trumpeted as the first all-British flying meeting. Aviators inveigled to Old Fallings included Claude Grahame-White, who in April had made the first London-to-Manchester flight in a biplane box kite, and Charles Rolls, who had just become the first person to fly both ways across the Channel without stopping.
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The weather was poor for almost the entire week. Even when the sheep had been removed, the Dunstall Park racecourse was too small, and it was inconveniently surrounded by trees. In addition, the lesser-known pilots refused to participate because of a dispute over their hotel bills. On the last day, when the principal prizes were on offer (categories for minor awards included one for “bomb-throwing”), the weather was so bad that Grahame-White did not even attempt to fly but, instead, drove his plane round and round the field, tooting and waving as he circled the crowd. After tea the clouds lifted and all the aviators went up, with the usual results. By the end of the day, airplane fragments lay in all corners of the racecourse, though for once nobody was killed. Grahame-Wright won the £1,000 endurance prize, with a cumulative total of one hour and twenty-three minutes airborne. Captain Scott and his wife, the sculptress Kathleen Bruce, were among the spectator-guests. Scott was in the news, as he had just seen his ship, the
Terra Nova,
off on her journey south for his second expedition to the Antarctic. He and Kathleen were sailing to join the ship later. No passenger flights were scheduled, but Muriel persuaded Grahame-Wright to take her up. It was considered dangerous for women to fly, as their hats blew off and became entangled in the propeller. Artie, who was judging and knew nothing of Muriel’s plan, was at the far end of the course inspecting a machine when he looked up and saw his wife’s legs dangling from the front edge of the lower part of the biplane. Never to be outdone, Kathleen Bruce also went for a spin, gushing to reporters afterward, “It was simply splendid. The feeling as one sails smoothly through the air is most exhilarating…. I was not a bit nervous.” The day ended with the consumption of a giant rum-filled cake in the shape of a plane, and a valedictory chorus from the tubas of the Wolverhampton Military Band. Ten days later, Rolls was dead; his plane crashed in an air show at Bournemouth. Denys had just turned twenty-three, and the three defining themes of his life had emerged: Africa, flying, and bohemian women.

T
HE SHIP DOCKED AT CAPE TOWN IN DECEMBER 1910. IT WAS NINETY-FIVE
degrees in the shade. Denys and the Pagets stayed with Governor-General Gladstone at his official residence, an old Dutch house in the forested shadow of Table Mountain. For the next three months, Denys practically lived outdoors. The gilded hostesses of the expatriate elite competed for his presence, but he avoided their cocktail parties. South Africa was too sophisticated. In early March of 1911, he said goodbye to Muriel and Artie and took a ship up the east coast to Kenya, still then the land of the pioneer.

As the ship crawled up the bony flank of eastern Africa, Denys was finally alone. He was anxious to get to Nairobi. Until Dar es Salaam, the trading posts on the coast were thin enough. But at the end of the second day of the voyage the scent of cloves and spices overlaid with shark meat floated from Zanzibar on warm southwesterlies. The shark, which had arrived by dhow from Arabia, had been deposited in vats to be salted before being reexported to the African mainland. The island had become the most prosperous port between Durban and the Suez Canal, and its sultan also claimed an impressive empire on the mainland. But in living memory Zanzibar had been a clearinghouse for slaves. Royal Navy vessels on anti-slave-trade patrol were once coaled and bunkered there by slaves, an appropriate image of the double standards often at work when the white man intervenes in Africa.

At Mombasa, passengers disembarked in a rowboat and entered a tin customs shed behind a line of bald baobabs. Below the fretworked balconies of close-packed coral-lime houses, rickshaw boys with teaky backs pulled carts teetering with the graying boards of dried kingfish. The hard red mud of the street was steaming. Women with gold nose studs squatted behind ziggurats of limes, guavas, and Zanzibar oranges; Arabs in flowing garments rode Muscat donkeys; and turbaned Somalis led camels toward a sun-bleached minaret. The low elephant grief of a ship’s horn rose above the din of Kiswahili banter and, at dusk, when the sun set far off below the plains, on the walls of the Mombasa Club the cobalt hues of agama lizards died with the light.

Denys took the Uganda Mail train to Nairobi, the administrative center of the Protectorate and the focus of settler activity. Through the Rabai Hills the coaches jolted so violently that passengers with false teeth were advised to remove them in advance. At every fuel and water stop, Swahili vendors thrust baskets of bananas and gourds of gruel up through the glassless windows, and if someone wanted to stop between stations to shoot a photograph or a gazelle he had only to ask the driver. After the fertile coast, the train entered the Taru Desert, where extremities of climate had reduced the landscape to a vegetable equality. Regulars took out goggles as clouds of red dust billowed through the window openings, and when they looked out it did not seem so very long since slave caravans had trekked through on their death-laden journey from the Great Lakes. At dusk, a railman walked along the roof, opening a trapdoor over each carriage and lighting the oil lamps from above before the sun went down in its equatorial haste and velvety stillness enveloped the bush. At Voi, the darkened plains erupted in crazy conical peaks, unnaturally symmetrical volcanic extrusions that no one from Europe could ever imagine might exist on the earth. Denys was twenty-four years old, and his future turned to rock before his eyes.

The train stopped at Voi for first-class passengers to dine at a corrugated-iron dak bungalow. Like some magic box, the third-class carriages, with their wooden benches, disgorged more people than it seemed possible for them to contain. Families sat down around baskets of yams, while in the bungalow white-jacketed stewards served soup, boiled beef, mashed potatoes, and cabbage, followed by tinned fruit and custard, all embedded with a variety of winged insects. After brandy and cigars on the veranda a bell sounded, indicating that the train was ready, though only rookies swallowed their drinks in haste. The black air filled with sparks and embers, with the mating calls of the tree hyrax, and with the smell of Africa—dry, peppery, and deep.

At dawn, the foothills of Kilimanjaro flushed flamingo beyond fresh young grass stained with billowing cumulus. Rain had recently ended three years of drought, and the land was alive. Kudu cows in big-bellied panic careered across the Athi Plains while flocks of gilded green guinea fowl skittered into an acacia thicket. Buffalo, ostrich, a fugitive band of lyre-horned hartebeest—on the pottery-colored steppe the air still vibrated with the bark of a hundred thousand zebras. The Uganda Mail was “a railway through the Pleistocene,” according to Teddy Roosevelt, who had ridden it two years before Denys. The air burned with the smell of wild sage as the engine curved through the acacias and puffs of cetacean steam leaped free of the branches to dissolve in the blue. The grasslands rose imperceptibly through the lambent heat. Then the train reached the marshy flats at the southern end of the Kikuyu uplands, one degree south of the equator, and for the first time Denys looked out at the grape-purple contours of the Ngong Hills.

In 1911, the year Denys arrived in Kenya, some Africans still had virtually no contact at all with whites—the elusive Dorobo, for example, said to be the country’s oldest inhabitants. Like other diminutive hunters, the Dorobo, who haunted the forest fringes, were despised by taller tribes. They were the best trackers in East Africa and could skin a buffalo in five minutes. But the British administration was already in the process of imposing its baleful apparatus on the tribes by establishing departments and municipalities, and although among Africans the flight to the towns had not begun to any significant degree—there were hardly any towns—a growing number were living and working in quasi-feudal arrangements with white settlers, their working conditions appalling at best. Pastoral and primarily pastoral people like the Maasai, the Kipsigi, and the Nandi still remained outside the new system, but this did not mean that they were left alone. These three tribes practiced a traditional kind of grazing that meant that much of their land lay empty for long stretches. If Europeans built on it, as they increasingly did, they restricted the movement of men and herds. If fertile land was occupied, settlers expropriated it. Districts had already been set aside as “African areas,” and a lengthy government report in 1909 had recommended a system of defined reserves to which Africans could be dispatched in order to keep them off more productive land. The Maasai had already been moved once en bloc, and within months of Denys’s arrival they were to be shifted again. No wonder most Africans viewed their new “rulers” with a jaundiced eye. While the white man’s medicine was still widely revered, few continued to believe in the kind of white magic that had spawned the belief, in the high noon of exploration, that some of the tin boxes unloaded at Mombasa contained spare, collapsible white men who could be shaken to life should extra authority be required.

Here was a vast and sultry land newly opened for the white man’s profit. But Denys did not belong to any standard category of imperial pioneer. He did not share the mania for order and classification that had initially inspired Victorians to apply their prodigious energies to Africa. It was not commercial greed, either, that motivated him, or lust for power, or the impulse to “civilize” the African. He wanted only to carve a life out of open spaces and create sufficient personal freedom to live outside the frontiers of convention. He had capital to invest (though no information has survived as to how much), and on his initial visit planned to spend three weeks looking around with a view to acquiring land or a stake in a business—he had introductions from Geoffrey Buxton to help him, as well as a raft of school and family connections. If all went well, he would then return to England to tie up his affairs before sailing back to Kenya to settle.

IN NAIROBI, DENYS
checked in to the Norfolk Hotel, an establishment to which neither Africans nor Indians were permitted entry. An imposing two-story building with a balcony that ran the length of the second floor, the Norfolk was the place where settlers congregated to exchange news, and sundowners on the terrace were de rigueur. Every train ferried in prospective new residents, many hoping to buy up what was now Crown land, especially in the highlands around the Aberdare Mountains. When Joss and Nellie Grant arrived in 1912, according to their daughter Elspeth Huxley, Joss bought a piece of land in the Norfolk bar from a man wearing an Old Etonian tie. The harvests that followed the drought had brought prosperity to Kenya, and the governor-general, the monocle-wearing French Canadian Percy Girouard, had successfully lobbied the authorities in London for funds to improve the infrastructure of Nairobi. Although the entire settlement was less than a decade old, blue gum trees had been laid out along the three main roads and there was an electricity supply that often worked. New arrivals found that most basic facilities were already in place—including a whorehouse known as the Japanese Legation, because its prostitutes were Japanese women who had come up from Zanzibar with the railway.

Of all the potential enemies queuing to sabotage immigrants, the sun was perceived as the most terrible. During the day, everyone buttoned on spine pads of quilted flannel, as it was believed that getting too close to the sun had a deleterious effect on the spine. Men wore cummerbunds under their revolvers to protect the spleen, an organ also at risk. People with metal-roofed houses at altitude wore hats indoors, as they thought the sun’s rays penetrated iron. But the settlers did not indulge in sartorial pretensions for their own sake, and Kenya was not the brand of colonial outpost where dinner jackets were worn in the jungle. Even in Nairobi, it was not fashionable to be smart. This suited Denys, who usually looked as if he had just gotten out of bed. But he appreciated the company of his own kind. The Norfolk Hotel was known locally as the House of Lords, and the June 4 Old Etonian dinner was already a tradition in its high-ceilinged dining room, as it was in colonial hotels across India, where punkah wallahs fanned the old boys as they ladled on the custard—a substance that, like the empire itself, had advanced to the earth’s farthest corners—and toasted the founder in claret that hadn’t traveled as well as it should (a ritual more elaborately ridiculous than carrying a wheelbarrow on one’s head). But in fact, although many aristocrats were attracted to Kenya in these early decades of immigration, they were not, among settlers, in the majority. Most new arrivals sweating up from the coast had little, if any, capital, and although earls and barons made news, far more settlers emerged from the middle classes. For them there was much hardship, and a crucifying reliance on the bank. When Henry Markham,
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who moved to the Protectorate with his family in 1908, fell ill six years later, his farm was heavily mortgaged. He had an operation on his liver on the kitchen table and died, leaving his wife and sons with less than nothing.

When Denys first saw East Africa, scores of tribes and subtribes were still hunting and herding across the steppes and mountains, from the agricultural Bantu peoples of the Great Lakes to the tall and scarified cattlemen of the White Nile and the Congo Pygmies, who carried fire rather than made it. The land was trellised with their migration routes, both mythical and historical, and their past was rich with legends of lost cities and founding fathers who slid down to earth on the neck of a celestial giraffe. The majority were settled, including the most numerous, the Kikuyu, a central Bantu-speaking people who emerged as a single group in the fifteenth century and still lived in clusters of family-based villages, cleaving to many of the rituals of their ancient ways. Although most tribes in both Kenya and neighboring German East Africa had long before evolved some form of political superstructure over a kinship organization, and in some cases chiefs exacted tributes, there were no governments ruled by kings, as there were in southern Uganda. Governance in most cases lay in the hands of the heads of small clans, or of local councils composed of elders in an age-set system. But some tribes, such as the Hadza, secretive Bushmen who flitted around the crater highlands in the south firing arrows feathered with bustard vanes, had no chiefs or villages, and no concept of ownership. Hadza had little contact with other people, but most tribes had a hierarchical relationship with their neighbors. In the close papyrus marshes of the sudd—the dense, floating mass of vegetation that obstructs the White Nile—Nuer fought Dinka over cattle and land, and usually won; the Dinka took their revenge on the Bari, a small people who dwelled on the islands on the White Nile. But no tribe succeeded in intimidating the Maasai. For generations, they were invincible in East Africa.