West with the Night (26 page)

I am not sure whether the name Seramai is an ancient one bestowed by the Kikuyu or whether John Carberry thought of it himself; it means ‘Place of Death.’ If the name did have a Kikuyu origin, though, it is not likely that Carberry would have been intimidated by its hardly subtle significance. He would, I believe (if the price were reasonable and the opportunity existed), be happy to purchase, and live in, Mr. Poe’s House of Usher — granted permission to build a landing field beyond the tarn. John Carberry is an extremely intelligent and practical man, but his unorthodox sense of humour makes him, at times, almost literally a bedfellow of the dead French author who liked to use a human skull for an inkpot. ‘J. C.’ is a man who snickers when circumstances pointedly indicate the propriety of a shudder.

‘J. C.’ is what he likes to be called. Lord of the realm or not, he is fired throughout his lanky frame with a holy passion for democratic ways and manners. He has lived in the United States and loves it. He will never write one of those books comparing England and America, only to conclude that the culture of the latter offers the same clinical interest as a child prodigy born of congenitally daft backwoods parents. When John Carberry says that something has gone ‘haywire,’ he says it with full appreciation of the succinct quality of American expression — with such enthusiasm, in fact, that a New York taxi-driver might count him as no more alien than a visitor from Tennessee after a month’s exposure to Times Square.

J. C. had a wonderful airplane mechanic in a Frenchman by the name of Baudet, and beyond that he had an adequate runway, a good hangar, and facilities for making minor repairs on planes. Since Tom had gone to England, it was, regardless of the distance, easier for me and more pleasant to fly to Seramai for servicing on the Avian than to use Wilson Airways. The Carberry house was always open to friends and its landing field to pilots.

June Carberry, small, nimble-minded, and attractive, presided over evenings at Seramai like a gracious pixy over a company of characters snatched from an unfinished novel originally drafted by H. Rider Haggard and written by Scott Fitzgerald, with James M. Cain looking over his shoulder. Conversation drifted from phantom elephants to the relative potency of various cocktails, to Chicago gangsters — but usually ended on aeroplanes.

John Carberry, in spite of his wife’s lack of enthusiasm for flying, could (and would) talk straight through three highballs on an aeronautic subject so relatively simple as wingflaps.

‘Watch the Amurricans,’ said J. C, ‘their commercial planes have got it over ours like a tent. Say! Listen! when I was in California …’

And we listened.

On the morning I was to return to Ithumba, I listened to J. C.’s almost gleeful chortle as we regarded the weather out of the sitting-room windows of Seramai. Normally, you could see Mount Kenya and the Aberdares; abnormally, you could at least see the Gurra Hill, not ten miles from the runway.

But on that morning you could see nothing; mountain mist had stolen down from Kenya during the night and captured the country.

J. C. shook his head and affected a deep sigh. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve always maintained that nobody could get out of here unless he could see the Gurra. Of course I’m not sure about it, because nobody has ever been jackass enough to try. I wouldn’t do it for a million dollars.’

‘That’s encouraging. What do you suggest?’

J. C. shrugged. ‘Well, there always has to be a first time, you know. I think if you bear a bit to the west and then a bit to the east, you might just get through all right. That’s only a guess, you know, but hell, Burl, you’re a good blind flyer and with a little luck — who can tell? Anyway, if you get through, just give this bottle of gin to Old Man Wicks, will you?’

It has always been a question in my mind as to whether J. C.’s nature is sadistic, or if only he prefers to paint a gloomy picture in the hope that the subsequent actuality will seem brighter by contrast. Many German flyers, having a superstition that to wish good luck brings bad luck, will see a fellow pilot off with the cheering remark, ‘ Farewell — but I hope you break your arms and legs!’ Perhaps J. C. has that superstition. At least, when I did take off, his longish face — more aristocratic, I suspect, than suits his humble taste — had a grin. But his grey eyes, in spite of it, had a flyer’s concern for a flyer’s worries.

They needn’t have had. I was pretty good at hedge-hopping. It’s only natural to be pretty good when you’re flying two feet above the treetops beneath sixty miles of fog. Your sense of self-preservation becomes extremely acute if you know that your margin of safety is barely wider than your own shoulders. You feel trapped. You can’t allow yourself any altitude or you’ll be absorbed in the fog, just as the mountains somewhere ahead of you are absorbed in it. So you manage to hang just under the roof of the narrow corridor of visibility and above the tops of the trees that look like inverted clouds, black and ready to rain. I coasted down the slopes that run from Seramai to the plains, swinging east or west to round the swell of a hill or to cling on the misty curves of a valley. And in a little while I found a blue hole and went up and through it and consulted my compass — and got to Ithumba.

The runway there was better than most and the landing was easy. Our camp was set up in the lee of a hill of rock and the tents were open and waiting. The canvas chairs were out, the lorries were side by side and empty. Everything was ready — and had been for two days. Neither Bwana Blixen, reported Arab Ruta, nor Bwana Guest had been seen or heard from since the moment they had so bravely set forth to storm the Yatta.

The trouble is that God forgot to erect any landmarks. From the air every foot of the Yatta Plateau looks like every other foot of it, every mile is like the next mile, and the one after that, and the one after that.

Years of free-lancing, scouting for elephant and flying the mail in Africa, have made me so used to looking for a smudge of smoke that even now I have a particular affinity for chimneys, campfires, and stoves that puff.

But nothing puffed on the morning I looked for Winston and Blix; nothing stirred. It seemed to me that two intelligent white men with fifteen black porters could have managed a small corkscrew of smoke at least, unless the whole lot of them had been struck dead like the crew of the
Flying Dutchman.

I knew that the hunting party had taken only enough food for a couple of meals, which, according to my calculations, left them about seven meals short. That might, unless something were done about it, lead to sad, not to say morbid, consequences. What I could not understand was why they had insisted on remaining on top of the plateau when the camp at Ithumba lay just across the Tiva River. I banked and lost altitude and flew low over the Tiva to see if I could find them, perhaps in the act of fording it.

But the river had swallowed itself. It wasn’t a river any more; it was a proud and majestic flood, a mile-wide flood, a barrier of swift water defying all things that move on legs to cross it. And yet, beside the Athi, it was a lazy trickle.

The Athi, on the other side of the plateau, had got illusions of grandeur. It was sweeping over the parched country above its banks in what looked like an all-out effort to surpass the Nile. Far up in the Highlands a storm had burst, and while the sky I flew in was clean and blue as a Dutch rooftop, the Yatta was a jungle island in a rain-born sea. The gutters of Mount Kenya and the Aberdares were running deep. Winston and Blix and all their men were caught like kittens on a flooded stump; they were marooned in driest Africa.

In all likelihood the elephant they hunted was marooned as well if he had not already been shot. But in either case, dead or alive, he would have afforded small comfort.

Edible game is scarce on the Yatta, and the swollen rivers would hardly subside within a week. Given time, I knew Blix would be resourceful enough to figure a way out — possibly on rafts built of thorn trees. But, in order to work, men must eat. I nosed the Avian down toward the endless canopy of bush and zigzagged like a homeless bee.

In twenty minutes I saw their smoke. It was a wizened little string of smoke, sad and grey, and looking like the afterglow of a witch’s exit.

Blix and Winston stood by a fire, frantically heaping it with weeds and branches. They waved and swung their arms, and signalled me to come down. They were alone, and I saw no porters.

I swung lower and realized that a narrow clearing had been sculptured out of the jungle growth, but a landing seemed impossible. The runway was short and walled with thicket and rough enough to smash the Avian’s undercarriage.

If that happened, contact with the camp at Ithumba — and everything beyond Ithumba — would be cleanly broken. And if it didn’t happen, how could I take off again? Getting down is one thing, but getting up again is another.

I scribbled a note on the pad strapped to my right thigh, popped the note into a message bag, and aimed the bag at Blix.

‘Might get down,’ I said, ‘but runway looks too short for take-off. Will return later if you can make it longer.’

It seemed a simple message — clear and practical; but, judging from its reception, it must have read like an invitation to arson or like an appeal to warn the countryside by beacon that the fort had been stormed and massacre was imminent.

B
LIX HEAPED FOLIAGE AND
wood on his fire until the smoke from it could be smelled in the cockpit as I flew over the clearing, and I think that in the end he cast his terai hat into the blaze, or perhaps it was Winston’s. The smoke rose in enormous grey mushrooms, and I could see pink whips of flame snap in the sunlight. Both men leapt up and down and gesticulated with their arms as if, for months past, they had fed altogether upon flowers that conferred a kind of inspired lunacy.

Quite plainly I was to have no larger runway, and just as plainly, there was a reason for it. Blix would not ask me to chance a landing in a spot like that unless other possibilities had first been explored.

By now I was pretty sure I could land if I had to, but not at all sure I could get off again in the same space. There was no wind to check a landing nor to aid a take-off. I had to think.

I banked the plane and circled several times, and each time I did it the dark balloons of smoke grew fatter and soared higher and the dance below achieved the tempo of ecstasy. I still could see no porters.

It breaks my heart to land a plane on rough ground; it is like galloping a horse on concrete. I considered side-slipping in, but remembered Tom’s admonition that to do it expertly (to straighten up from the slip and flatten out a few inches from the earth) is impracticable when you have to land on a broken surface. More often than not this is courting a damaged undercarriage or a cracked longeron. ‘Save your sideslips for a time when the approaches are such that you can’t possibly get in any other way,’ Tom used to say, ‘or for a day when your motor has quit. But so long as your motor can help you — fly in.’ So I flew in.

I flew in and the Avian hit the roots and clods and buried stumps with gentle groans and creaks of protest. She churned the loose dust to billows that matched the billows of the fire. She roared to the edge of the thicket as if she meant to leap it, but decided not. Eventually the drag of the tail-skid and manipulation of the rudder pulled her up, and she stopped with a kind of apprehensive shudder.

Blix and Winston stormed her sides like pirates storming a sloop. They were unshaved and dirty. I had never realized before how quickly men deteriorate without razors and clean shirts. They are like potted plants that go to weed unless they are pruned and tended daily. A single day’s growth of beard makes a man look careless; two days’, derelict; and four days’, polluted. Blix and Winston hadn’t shaved for three.

‘Thank God, you got here!’ Winston was smiling, but his normally handsome face was half-mooned in whiskers and his eyes were definitely not gay. Blix, looking like an unkempt bear disturbed in hibernation, gave me his hand and helped me out of the cockpit.

‘I hated to ask you to land, but I had to.’

‘I guessed that. I saw you couldn’t get off the plateau. But what I don’t understand …’

‘Wait,’ said Blix, ‘everything will be explained — but first, have you brought anything?’

‘I’m afraid not — nothing to eat, anyway. Haven’t you shot
anything?
’

‘No. Not even a hare. The place is empty and we haven’t eaten for three days. That wouldn’t matter so much, but …’

‘But no word from Doctor Turvy? Well, I’m betraying a trust, but J. C. did send a bottle of gin for Old Man Wicks. I suppose you need it more than he does. What happened to your porters?’

It was the wrong question. Blix and Winston exchanged glances and Blix began to swear rhythmically under his breath. He reached into the locker and got Old Man Wicks’s bottle of gin and pulled the cork out. He handed the bottle to Winston and waited. In a minute Winston handed it back and I waited, watching the largesse from Seramai go the way of all good things.

‘The porters are on strike,’ Winston said.

Blix wiped his mouth and returned the bottle to his companion in exile.

‘Mutiny. They haven’t lifted a hand since they missed their first meal! They’ve quit.’

‘That’s silly. Porters don’t go on strike in Africa. They haven’t got a union.’

Blix turned away from the plane and looked back across the runway. ‘They didn’t need one. Empty bellies constitute a common cause. Winston and I cleared that runway ourselves. I don’t think we could have made it any longer even if you had insisted on it.’

I was impressed. Limited as it was, the runway was nevertheless a good hundred yards long and ten yards wide, and the clearing of such a space with nothing but Native pangas to use was a herculean job of work. Some of the growth must have been fifteen feet high, and all of it so dense that a man could barely force his body through it. I suppose that more than a thousand small trees, with trunks three to five inches in diameter, had been felled with those ordinary bush knives. Once the trees had fallen, their stumps had to be dug out of the earth and thrown to the side and an effort made to level the cleared ground.