Too Close to the Sun (11 page)

According to their own mythology, the Maasai had migrated from an area north of Lake Turkana half a millennium earlier, reached the Ngong Hills in the seventeenth century, and continued south. Soon their land extended hundreds of miles in every direction. They were not the murderous savages of legend, though that image had been heavily promoted by Arab traders in their bid to keep Europeans off their pitch. It was true, however, that young Maasai men in black ostrich plumes used to raid cattle from the lakes to the coast and were feared by Arab, Bantu, and European alike. But in the 1880s the Maasai were weakened by civil wars, and then by drought and disease. By 1900, they languished in decline, and clans of Samburu, the most northerly group of Maa-speakers, occupied swathes of their lands. Other tribes at a historical low point included the Kipsigi, the most numerous of the pastoral Kalenjin-speaking groups of the western highlands. Their less populous Nandi relations were the most formidable people on the western side of the Rift Valley at the turn of the century, raiding freely and attempting to fend off the white man. Bands of Rendille regularly fought Somalis over camels, on which both were reliant. A Cushitic-speaking Galla people from the eastern deserts, the Rendille, when they did not feel inclined to be disputatious, wandered the riverbeds of the Northern Frontier District chewing
mswaki
twigs and balancing on one leg, like herons.

Among these stood the mission African, the parody of the white man. Mission schools, of which there were forty in Kenya in 1911, were situated mainly on the coast. But secular colonists were already influencing the lives of coastal peoples more decisively than missionaries. The first large tribe to be deeply affected were the Giriama, cultivators who were compelled to pay tax to representatives of the Crown and send young men as laborers to government projects and plantations. Similarly, male Nyamwezi, who came from what was then central German East Africa, were working as porters for European farmers or pimply district officers straight out of Cambridge setting off to administer an area the size of England. A Nyamwezi could march with fifty pounds on his head as easily as with nothing, and his tribe, who had carried the chains of the slave caravans and the chop boxes of the first explorers, had naturally taken up the desks and ledgers of the next tribe of invaders.

EVERYONE AT THE NORFOLK
was talking about the highlands, so, at the end of his first week, Denys returned to the railway station and set off through twenty-seven miles of juniper-wooded hills to the summit of the Kikuyu escarpment, the eastern wall of the Great Rift Valley, part of a 3,700-mile continental fault system that slashes Africa from Mozambique to the Red Sea (where it continues to northern Syria). Operating since ancient times as a natural frontier for both humans and animals, the Rift is Kenya’s most outstanding topographical feature, a fold in the surface of the earth and a literal rift across the country, its escarpments dipping to a tawny floor of savanna teeming, then, with game. The Kenyan Rift varies in width, narrowing at Lake Elmenteita and flaring out again, like a skirt, at Lake Naivasha. Denys headed toward the thin middle section to stay with Lord Delamere, the most influential white man ever to settle in Kenya.

Hugh Cholmondeley, the third baron Delamere, always had the same meal for his tea: gazelle chops, blancmange, and tinned peaches consumed to the accompaniment of “All Aboard for Margate” on the windup gramophone. A gnomelike figure with red hair and a large nose, he was to become a firm friend of Denys’s through the African years despite their differences. Besides his height and comic appearance, Delamere lacked Denys’s charisma as well as his literary sensibility and musical gifts, but he could have taught Denys about ambition and achievement. Through focus, application, and monomania, he had kick-started East African agriculture.

Delamere had grown up on his family estate, Vale Royal in Cheshire, and acquired a taste for big-game hunting on a trip to Somaliland when he was twenty-one. In 1897, he trekked south from Somaliland and after a thousand miles on foot emerged on the northern levels of the Laikipia Plateau. There he looked out over the highlands—the fertile foothills, the temperate, cedar-forested slopes of the Aberdares, the rioting invasion of soundless life that followed the rains—and, after what he had been through, he thought he had found the promised land. He grew increasingly certain that the white man could develop these well-watered highlands, and it was a passionately held belief that determined the course of his life. Ever since he and his wife moved to Kenya in 1902, they had been experimenting with large-scale agriculture and battling to prove that white men could live permanently in the tropics (although they had left their infant son in Cheshire, just in case). Delamere had acquired land at Njoro, in the southwestern Rift—the equator ran through a corner of it, so he called it Equator Ranch—and sent voluminous orders home for stock and equipment. The difficulties facing the pioneering farmer, struggling to introduce British methods, were immense. The Maasai ewe was so shaggy that to the European eye it was not even recognizable as a sheep. Lambing, every white man knew, had to take place in spring: but when was spring? Horticulture was just as challenging, and, as most East African tribes were pastoral, nobody knew what might grow. When he got the idea of harnessing an abandoned railway steam engine to a plow, Delamere had to teach his workers how to use it. At least he had space on his side. When the plowhands asked how they should turn, he said, “Don’t waste time turning. Just go straight on.” Delamere worked through disasters and diseases (his own, and his animals’), and everything failed at first. In the inaugural lambing at Njoro, only six lambs survived from four thousand ewes. When he ran a herd of donkey mares with a zebra stallion in the belief that such a cross would be resistant even to the dreaded tsetse fly, and therefore make an ideal East African draft animal, one of only four foals was shot by a visiting hunter who thought he had discovered a new species. And yet Delamere persisted, a living symbol of the imperial belief that virtue belonged to the Briton who struggled to control his own environment. After further debacles with wheat, he negotiated more loans, brought a horticulturalist out to Njoro, and evolved the first successful East African wheat breed. When this was established, he moved forty miles down the Rift to Soysambu, where he had bought ten thousand waterless acres and established a stock farm—he was a herdsman at heart. He was already selling wool to London, and in 1910 formed a company that was to open a chain of butcher shops, importing machinery for the country’s first cold store and bringing butchers over from England.

Delamere had already gone through well in excess of £80,000, though in his personal and domestic habits he was ascetic. He needed little sleep, often working from five one morning till two the next, and he had extraordinary stamina for one who suffered congenital poor health. When there was a labor shortage, he counted twenty-three thousand sheep by hand each week. He was also intimately involved in public affairs, and from the outset acted as the settlers’ leader in their perennial disputes with the administrators, speaking with a distinctive hectoring confidence that invariably carried the day. Delamere was a looming and controversial presence in the small white community. He was inclined to Lear-like outbursts of anger, though never with the Maasai, with whom he was as soft as butter. He laughed when they stole his cattle (Maasai, conveniently, believed that all the cattle in the world belonged to them, the same feeling the Cheyenne in America had about horses), and had learned to speak several Maa dialects. Many Europeans indulged in a kind of romantic cult of Maasai adulation: the bravery of an enemy appealed to the element of chivalry bound up in the imperial ideal, and the athletic Maasai form reminded a certain kind of settler of the classical hero. Others—all English-men—simply liked being despised. Yet there was no awareness of the complexities of tribal groupings, or of the multilayered threads of custom that bound Africans together in an elaborate sequence of delicate ligatures, or of the intricate system of fines and penalties that covered every transgression big or small. Sir Charles Eliot, commissioner for the Protectorate from 1900 to 1904 as well as a world authority on sea slugs, wrote that Europeans were not “destroying any old or interesting system but simply introducing order into blank, uninteresting, brutal barbarism.”

Delamere and his wife, Florence, lived by the Mereroni River in Kikuyu rondavels, or thatched mud huts, and there was always space for travelers, especially those linked by the kinship of class. Early in the morning, cows woke the somnolent residents with hot gusts of fetid breath snorted through an opening. When the sun rose, skeins of flamingos returned from their nocturnal sortie and settled in a feathery clatter on the lakeshore. Herders clustered around fires in the greening mist, drinking a first gourd of hot milk laced with ginger. Later in the morning, gravid clouds tumbled ponderously in a never-ending procession, throwing shadows on the shoulder of the escarpment. Lake Elmenteita was too alkaline for fish, but it was all right for hippos, and their tuba voices orchestrated the murmur of flamingos. In the bands of forest above the lake, behind gothic fronds, black rhinos lumbered from the salt licks like warm-blooded dinosaurs. When Denys arrived, rain had already cleansed the late-March air and a breeze wafted the smell of soda from the lake. The landscape had a numinous quality foreign to the Northern Hemisphere. Away from the sounds of the forest, out on a ridge, Denys, like Cortés, saw a new planet. The fears that traumatized twentieth-century England were not felt in Africa, and, looking out over the savanna of the Rift, he heard nothing but the stillness of the eternal beginning. Then the sun dipped below the escarpment and the flamingos took flight, and when the great digestive African darkness had swallowed everything up, Maasai smeared in sheep fat crouched by their fires and talked in low tones.

By the time he went home three weeks later, Denys had opened an account at the Nairobi branch of the Standard Bank of South Africa and, spurred on by his own private
Torschlusspanik,
committed himself to investments that included an interest in a chunk of bush in Dorobo and Nandi country, twenty-five miles north of the settlement on the Uasin Gishu Plateau. He had been in Kenya only a month, and he knew nothing about land. But he knew a lot about gambling and that, in effect, was what he was doing. At the beginning of April, the long rains in spate, he sailed home. As an acquaintance later wrote, “He had seen what men with imagination cannot help seeing in a dream country like Africa.”

BACK IN ENGLAND,
in the abnormally hot summer of 1911, Denys took his seat at Westminster Abbey for the coronation of George V. The ceremonies lasted a killing seven hours, every minute gilded in a mystic sheen of tradition. The abbey was banked with red tulips, white lilies, and blue delphiniums, and rows of ermined Lords, Indian princes in jeweled turbans, and scrubbed choristers in ruffled carmine soutanes watched the Prince of Wales kneel to offer his father allegiance under a gold canopy. Outside, the crowds in the streets stood ten-deep.

Toby had taken a job in the City selling stocks for a discount banking firm, a move that reflected the landed aristocrat’s drift from patrician professions such as law, church, and army. His son, Christopher, was born on August 2, though his arrival did little to disrupt Toby’s annual routine. He was obsessed with his car, an Italian Bianchi that featured in his diary more prominently than his offspring. Toby was a man of Solomonic deliberation—even as an undergraduate he had found fun an effort. When he appeared in a production staged by the university’s dramatic society, he recorded after the first night, “Great success though personally bored to tears. Had to stand half an hour in an archway with a broken sword in tights.” He was a rigorous socialite and rarely missed a ball, but he lacked Denys’s glamour and spontaneity. He knew it, of course, but rather than resent his younger brother he nourished a painful devotion. Toby looked forward to Denys’s return visits from Africa with what, for him, was fervid enthusiasm. That year, 1911, was the first of three consecutive summers that Denys spent in England, and on each occasion he alerted Toby of his ship’s departure date, then wired from every port. Toby’s diary reads like a countdown: Suez, Naples, Marseilles…. One year, he metevery train from the continent at Charing Cross Station on a particular day, “hoping to find Denys’s.”