West with the Night (21 page)

The wounded man was borne in silence, while wildebeest, ostrich, and zebra circled the ceremony, unholy hyenas whimpered their frustration, and the visionary whose visions came true directed the disposition of the semi-rigid bundle, like a priest of Baal offering a sacrifice.

An hour later, in commemoration, I suppose, of our first meeting, Tom Black and I sat at the only all-night coffee stand in Nairobi, and I yielded to curiosity; I asked questions.

Something about that irreverent contrivance of fabric and wires and noise, blustering through the chaste arena of the night, had stirred the course of my thoughts to restless eddies.

Where had he been? Why had he come?

He shrugged, looking at me out of eyes that, for the first time, I saw were disturbing in their clarity. They were blue and they seemed to dissolve all questions and all answers within themselves. And they laughed when they should have been solemn. They were eyes that might have followed the trajectory of a dead cat through a chapel window with more amusement than horror, but might at the same time have expressed sympathy for the fate of the cat.

‘I flew the plane down from London,’ he explained, ‘and landed at Kisumu. That was yesterday. Before I could take off again for Nairobi, a runner came with a message from a safari near Musoma. Same old thing — somebody proving how fatal it is to be a fool. Lion, rifles — and stupidity. You can imagine the rest.’

I could, almost, but I preferred to listen. I looked around the little coffee stand where we sat. A corporal of the K.A.R. and an Indian clerk stood at the counter, yards apart, eating solemnly as if each were to be hanged at dawn. But there was no one else. We four were the only acolytes at the shabby midnight altar — we four and its silent mullah who moved among the pots and dishes, clothed in a vestment of tarnished white.

Through my own insistence, fortified by coffee transparent as tea, I got the details of what I suppose was hardly more than an incident, but which somehow proved that Africa is capable of a sardonic smile, that it accepts new things, but allows no thing to escape its baptism.

Tom Black had flown six thousand miles with a new aeroplane and a new idea. His dream had sprouted wings and wheels. It had an authentic voice that he hoped would wake other dreamers, and silence the sleepy sounds, of a roused but still too lazy land.

If the towns and villages of Kenya lacked roads to unite them, like threads in a net, then at least there was land enough for the wheels of planes and sky enough for their wings and time enough for their propellers to beat back the barriers of doubt they flew against. Everywhere in the world, highways had come first — and then the landing fields. Only not here, for much of Kenya’s future was already the past of other places. New things that shone with the ingenuity of modern times were superimposed upon an old order, contrasting against it like a chromium clock against a rawhide shield. The mechanistic age impended over an horizon not hostile, but silently indifferent.

Into this horizon Tom Black had flown his aeroplane. One day it would carry mail, as he intended it to do. It would soar above old paths tamped by the feet of Native runners; it would cleave wakes in the wind.

But first, in homage to its ancient host, it had already performed an errand; it had carried a message of enterprise, a cargo of pain, and a vessel of death through an African night.

‘Lion, rifles — and stupidity’ — a simple story as he told it, and as it was.

None of the characters in it were distinguished ones — not even the lion.

He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment.

The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him with-out killing him, and then turned the unconscionable eye of a camera upon his agony. It was a small, a stupid, but a callous crime.

When Tom Black, sacrificing a triumphant arrival at Nairobi, landed instead at the camp site near Musoma, one man lay dead and a second, mangled and helpless, was alive only by the caprice of chance. A third white man and a couple of Native boys stood about the burdened canvas cot performing feeble incantations and attempting sorcery against gangrene with bandage, iodine, and water. The camera was a ruined mass of glass and metal, the lion was dead, though some kind of elemental retribution had armed him with strength for the last blow. There was a human corpse to be disposed of and a life to be saved — if that were possible.

Messages were sent by runner and by telegraph from Kisumu. And messages were received. The dead man, it was requested, was to be cremated and his ashes brought to Nairobi.

Cremation is a smooth word that seeks to conceal the indelicate reality of a human body being baked in fire. In print and in the advertisements of mortuaries equipped with silver-handled kilns, it is a successful word. In mid-afternoon on the African veldt under a harsh and revealing sun, it is at best a euphemism. Still, since men cherish the paradox requiring that to insure immortality they must preserve what is most mortal about them, wood was gathered and a fire was built.

The wounded man, wrapped in his bandages and his pain, could smell at intervals the heavily significant smudge of the embers. The Natives vanished.

Tom Black, who liked Life too much to be patient with Death, squatted on his heels through the long afternoon, solaced by an occasional jigger of tepid whisky, while a pencil of smoke rising from the pyre wrote endlessly its dismal little tale in disturbing and legible script.

If there were vultures — those false but democratic mourners at every casual bier — they were not mentioned in his recounting. There were no tears, no fumbling over a prayer book. The third white man who had accompanied the abortive safari had nothing to say; there couldn’t have been much.

It was a tragedy with too petty a plot to encourage talk, too little irony to invite reflection. It was a scene whose grand climax consisted of the scooping of a few miserable ashes into a bent and unsanctified biscuit tin, and whose final curtain, wove from ribbons of dusk and a few thin threads of smoke, rolled down upon a shiny aeroplane straining toward the sky.

The injured man lived to tell (but I think not to boast) about his encounter with the lion, and the ashes of his companion repose now, I suspect, in an urn of Grecian elegance far from any path a creature more ominous than a mouse might choose to wander. Perhaps above that urn there hangs a picture salvaged from the broken camera — a picture of a great beast frozen forever in an attitude of bewildered agony by the magic of a lens. And, if this is so, then those who pause before these otherwise unmeaning trifles may consider that they speak a moral — not profound, but worthy of a thought; Death will have his moment of respect, however he comes along, and no matter upon what living thing he lays his hand.

African tragedy — melancholy trivia. What’s in a point of view?

Tom Black sipped his coffee, stared into the cup as if it were a crystal ball, and grinned at his own story.

‘There’s a technique about distinguishing one kind of ash from another,’ he said, ‘known only to myself and the early Egyptians. So don’t ask questions. Just remember never to fly without a match or a biscuit tin. And of course you’re going to fly. I’ve always known it. I could see it in the stars.’

‘Ruta,’ I said, ‘I think I am going to leave all this and learn to fly.’

He stood in a loose-box beside a freshly groomed colt — a young colt gleaming like light on water. There was a body-brush in Ruta’s hand, its bristles intertwined with hairs from the colt. Ruta removed the hairs with slow fingers and hung the brush on a peg. He looked out the stable door into the near distance where Menegai shouldered a weightless cloud. He shrugged and dusted dustless hands, one against the other.

He said, ‘If it is to be that we must fly, Memsahib, then we will fly. At what hour of the morning do we begin?’

W
E BEGAN AT THE
first hour of the morning. We began when the sky was clean and ready for the sun and you could see your breath and smell traces of the night. We began every morning at that same hour, using what we were pleased to call the Nairobi Aerodrome, climbing away from it with derisive clamour, while the burghers of the town twitched in their beds and dreamed perhaps of all unpleasant things that drone — of wings and stings, and corridors in Bedlam.

Tom taught me in a D. H. Gipsy Moth, at first, and her propeller beat the sunrise silence of the Athi Plains to shreds and scraps. We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it. These I learned at once. But most things came harder.

Tom Black had never taught another soul to fly, and the things he had to teach beyond the simple mechanics that go with flying are those things that have not lent themselves to words. Intuition and instinct are mysteries still, though precisely spelled or rolled precisely off the tongue. Tom had these — or whatever qualities they signify.

After this era of great pilots is gone, as the era of great sea captains has gone — each nudged aside by the march of inventive genius, by steel cogs and copper discs and hair-thin wires on white faces that are dumb, but speak — it will be found, I think, that all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it.

One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day this will be an airborne life. But by then men will have forgotten how to fly; they will be passengers on machines whose conductors are carefully promoted to a familiarity with labelled buttons, and in whose minds knowledge of the sky and the wind and the way of weather will be extraneous as passing fiction. And the days of the clipper ships will be recalled again — and people will wonder if clipper means ancients of the sea or ancients of the air.

‘Trust this,’ said Tom, ‘but nothing else.’ He meant the compass.

‘Instruments can go wrong,’ he said. ‘If you can’t fly without looking at your airspeed and your altimeter and your bank-and-turn indicator — well, then you can’t fly. You’re like somebody who only knows what he thinks after reading his newspaper. But don’t mistrust the compass — your judgement will never be more accurate than that needle. It will tell you where you ought to be going and the rest is up to you.’

There were ear-phones in the Gipsy Moth, but Tom never used them. While I sat in the rear cockpit, a fumbling beginner, apprehensive and wondering how my hands, so used to strips of leather and my feet so used to stirrups, would ever get used to this, Tom might have eased the task a little by talking into those ear-phones — but he never would. He rolled them up and put them in a corner out of reach. He said: ‘It’s no good my telling you where you go wrong each time you do. Your own intelligence will tell you that. Speed sense, sense of height, and sense of error will come later. If they don’t, well … but they will.’

That they did was due to him. There was never a more careful pilot nor yet a more casual one. His confidence never shrank beside the bullying roar of a plane. He wasn’t a tall man, but he had a quiet, convincing manner that made him look bigger than any job he ever held and more capable than any craft he ever flew.

Wilson Airways — the first commercial enterprise of its kind in East Africa — had been the child of Tom’s imagination and foresight. When he undertook to teach me to fly, he was managing director, chief pilot, and guiding spirit of the hopeful little company, but the somewhat pompous executive title had nothing to do with polished desks and swivel chairs.

Tom’s job was to pioneer new routes, to probe inland Africa, seeking footholds for the future. More often than not, he took off from Nairobi, flying over country as unused to wheels as it was to wings, with no more than a modest expectation that there might be some place to land at the end of his flight.

And not all of this was done by daylight; he flew without beams, without beacons or radio, through whatever darkness the night could offer — and through whatever weather. There was rarely a light of a village for guidance, nor any highways, nor rails, nor wires, nor farms. He did not call it blind flying; he called it night flying, though when fog or storm required it of him, he flew blind for hours without special instruments, yet not failing on his course. He had what those thick books with dull gray covers call ‘sensory reaction.’

We flew down into Tanganyika once just after I had got my ‘A’ licence, and it may have been that I was a bit full with the sense of achievement. Or, if I wasn’t, Tom suspected that I might be.

Near the end of the return trip, flying north toward the Ngong Hills over the Rift Valley, the Gipsy Moth was afflicted with a strange lethargy. I was at the controls and, as the hills (which rise about eight thousand feet above sea level) came closer so that their ravines and green slopes emerged from the lazy haze they live in, I opened the throttle and drew back the stick for altitude. But, it seemed, there wasn’t any more.

The little plane was doing a respectable eighty miles an hour — hardly record speed even then, but still fast enough to make me appreciate the sad and final consequences of not getting over that close horizon. As I blundered on, the trees of the Ngong Hills began to separate one from another, to stand out individually — even magnificently; the ravines got deeper.

More stick, more throttle.

I was calm. Most beginners, I thought, might have got a bit rattled — but not I. Certainly not Tom. He sat in front of me motionless as a drowsing man.