West with the Night (3 page)

The air was heavy, with life gone out of it. Men’s voices came from across the runway, sounding, after the deep drone of the plane, like the thin bleating of reed pipes or like the fluted whispers of a bamboo forest.

I climbed out of the cockpit and watched a band of dim figures approach before the dancing flares. By the manner of their walk and by their clothes, I could see that most of them were black — Kavirondo, bulky-thighed in their half-nakedness, following two white men who moved with quicker, more eager steps over the clearing.

Somewhere an ancient automobile engine roared into life, its worn pistons and bearings hammering like drumbeats. Hot night wind stalked through the thorn trees and leleshwa that surrounded the clearing. It bore the odour of swampland, the smell of Lake Victoria, the breath of weeds and sultry plains and tangled bush. It whipped at the oil flares and snatched at the surfaces of the Avian. But there was loneliness in it and aimlessness, as if its passing were only a sterile duty lacking even the beneficent promise of rain.

Leaning against the fuselage, I watched the face of a short, chunky man loom gradually larger until it was framed before me in the uncertain light. It was a flabby face under a patch of greying hair and it held two brown eyes that seemed trapped in a spider web of weary lines.

Its owner smiled and held out his hand and I took it.

‘I am the doctor,’ he said; ‘I sent the message.’ He jerked his head toward the other white man at his elbow. ‘This is Ebert. Ask him for anything you need — tea, food, whatever you want. It won’t be good, but you’re welcome to it.’

Before I could answer, he turned away, mumbling as he went about sickness, and the time of night, and the slowness of the box-body Ford now lurching across the runway to pick up the oxygen. In his wake followed half a dozen Kavirondo, any one of them big enough to lift the little doctor off the ground and carry him, like a small goat, under one arm. Instead they slouched dutifully behind at a distance I thought must have been kept so precisely unaltered out of simple fear and honest respect, blended to perfection.

‘You’re early,’ Ebert said; ‘you made good time.’

He was tall and angular in a grey, work-stained shirt and loose corduroy trousers patched many times. He spoke apologetically as if, as a visitor from the remote and glamorous civilization of Nairobi, I might find my reception somehow less than I had the right to expect.

‘We fixed the runway,’ he said, ‘as well as we could.’

I nodded, looking into a lean-boned, sun-beaten face.

‘It’s a good job,’ I assured him — ‘better than I had hoped for.’

‘And we rigged up a windsock.’ He swung his arm in the direction of a slender pole whose base was surrounded by half a dozen flares. At the top of the pole hung a limp cylinder of cheap, white ‘Americani’ cloth looking a bit like an amputated pajama leg.

In such a breeze the cylinder ought to have been fully extended, but instead, and in defiance of the simplest laws of physics, it only dangled in shameless indifference to both the strength of the wind and its direction.

Moving closer, I saw the lower end had been sewn as tightly shut as needle and thread could make it, so that, as an instrument intended to indicate wind tendency, it was rather less efficient than a pair of whole pajamas might have been.

I explained this technical error of design to Ebert and, in the half-light of the oil torches, had the satisfaction of seeing his face relax into what I suspected was his first smile in a long, long time.

‘It was the word “sock,” ’ he said, ‘that confused us. We couldn’t imagine a proper sock with a hole in its toe — not even a windsock!’

With the help of the little doctor who had lapsed into preoccupied silence, we unstrapped the oxygen tank, lifted it from the front cockpit, and set it on the ground. It was not terribly heavy, but the Kavirondo who gaily picked it up and walked with it toward the Ford, bore the thick metal cylinder as if it had been no more than a light bedroll.

It is this combination of physical strength and willingness to work that has made the Kavirondo the most tractable and dependable source of labour in East Africa.

From the loose confines of their native territory, which originally stretched south from Mount Elgon along the eastern shores of Victoria Nyanza for two hundred miles or so, they have wandered in all directions, mingling and working and laughing until what was once an obscure and timid tribe is now so ubiquitous as to cause the unobservant traveller in East Africa to suspect all natives are Kavirondo. This misconception is harmless enough in itself, but is best left unrevealed in the presence of such fire-eaters as the Nandi, the Somali, or the Masai, the racial vanity of any one of whom is hardly less than that of the proudest proud Englishman.

The Kavirondo, though not racially conscious, is at least conscious of being alive and finds endless pleasure in that cheerful realization alone. He is the porter of Africa, the man-of-all-work, the happy-go-lucky buffoon. To the charge of other and sterner tribes that he is not only uncircumcised, but that he eats dead meat without much concern about the manner of its killing, he is blandly indifferent. His resistance to White infiltration is, at best, passive, but, consisting as it does of the simple stratagem of eating heartily and breeding profusely, it may one day be found formidable enough.

My cargo of oxygen having been unloaded, I watched a group of these massive and powerful men gather round my plane, eyeing her trim lines with flattering curiosity. One of the largest of the lot, having stared at her with gaping mouth for a full minute, suddenly leaned back on his heels and roared with laughter that must have put the nearest hyena to shame if not to flight.

When I asked him, in Swahili, to explain the joke, he looked profoundly hurt. There wasn’t any joke, he said. It was just that the plane was so smooth and her wings so strong that it made him want to laugh!

I couldn’t help wondering what Africa would have been like if such physique as these Kavirondo had were coupled with equal intelligence — or perhaps I should say with cunning equal to that of their white brethren.

I suppose in that case the road to Nungwe would be wide and handsome and lined with filling stations, and the shores of Lake Victoria would be dotted with pleasure resorts linked to Nairobi and the coast by competitive railways probably advertising themselves as the Kavirondo or Kikuyu Lines. The undeveloped and ‘savage’ country would be transformed from a wasteland to a paradise of suburban homes and quaint bathing cabanas and popular beaches, all redolent, on hot days, of the subtle aroma of European culture. But the essence of progress is time, and we can only wait.

According to my still apologetic host, Ebert, the little doctor would have to drive at least an hour before reaching the actual Nungwe mine site where his patient lay in a grass hut, too sick to be moved.

‘The doc’s tried everything,’ Ebert said, as we listened to the splutter of the disappearing Ford — ‘diet, medicine, even witchcraft, I think; now the oxygen. The sick chap’s a gold miner. Lungs gone. Weak heart. He’s still alive, but for God knows how long. They keep coming out here and they keep dying. There’s gold all right, but it’ll never be a boom town — except for undertakers.’

There seemed to be no answer to this gloomy prediction, but I noticed that at least Ebert had made it with something that resembled a sour smile. I thought of Woody again and wondered if there could be even a remote hope of finding him on the way back to Nairobi. Perhaps not, but I made up my mind to leave as soon as I could gracefully get away.

I saw to it that the Avian was safe on the runway, and then, with Ebert, walked toward the settlement past the rows of oil flares, pink and impotent now in the early dawn.

Grey blades of light sliced at the darkness and within a few moments I could see the mining camp in all its bleak and somehow courageous isolation — a handful of thatched huts, a tangle of worn machinery, a storehouse of corrugated iron. Dogs, hollow-bellied and dispirited, sprawled in the dust, and behind the twisted arms of the surrounding thorn trees the country lay like an abandoned theatrical backdrop, tarnished and yellow.

I saw no women, no children. Here under the equatorial sun of Africa was a spot without human warmth, a community without even laughter.

Ebert led me through the door of one of the largest huts and promised tea, remarking hopefully that I might not find it too bad, since, only eight months ago, his store had been replenished from the stock of a Hindu shop in Kisumu.

He disappeared through an exit at the rear of the room and I leaned back in a chair and looked around me.

A hurricane lamp with a cracked, soot-smeared chimney still spluttered in the centre of a long plank that served as a table and was supported by two up-ended barrels on an earthen floor. Behind the plank were shelves sprinkled with tins of bully beef, vegetables and soup, mostly of American concoction. Several old copies of
Punch
were stacked at one end of the plank and, on the seat of the chair opposite mine, was an issue of the
Illustrated London News
dated October, 1929.

There was a radio, but it must have been voiceless for many months — tubes, wires, condenser, and dial, all bearing the marks of frequent and apparently futile renovation, lay in a hopeless mass on the top of a packing-crate marked: VIA MOMBASA.

I saw jars of black sand that must have contained gold, or hopes of it, and other jars labelled with cryptic figures that meant nothing to me, but were in any case empty. A blueprint clung to one of the walls and a spider, descending from the thatch overhead, contemplated the neatly drawn lines and figures and returned to its geometrically perfect web, unimpressed.

I stood up and walked to the window. It was no bigger than a small tea-tray and its lower half was battened with corrugated iron. In the path of the rising sun, scattered bush, and tufts of grass lay a network of shadows over the earth, and, where these were thickest, I saw a single jackal forage expectantly in a mound of filth.

I returned to the chair feeling depressed and a little apprehensive. I began to think about Woody again — or at least to wonder, since there was really nothing to think about.

The sight of the jackal had brought to mind the scarcely comforting speculation that in Africa there is never any waste. Death particularly is never wasted. What the lion leaves, the hyena feasts upon and what scraps remain are morsels for the jackal, the vulture, or even the consuming sun.

I dug in the pockets of my flying overalls for a cigarette, lit it, and tried to shake off a wave of sleepiness. It was a futile effort, but a moment later Ebert returned carrying the tea-things on a tray and I was able to keep my eyes open, watching him move. I noticed that his face had become sombre again and thoughtful as if, during the time he had been out of the room, an old worry, or perhaps a new one, had begun to brew in his mind.

He set the tray on the long plank and groped for a tin of biscuits on a shelf. Sunlight, full-bodied and strong, had begun to warm the drab colours of the hut and I reached over and blew out the flame of the hurricane lamp.

‘You’ve heard of blackwater,’ Ebert said suddenly.

I straightened in my chair and for want of an ashtray ground my cigarette out with my foot on the earthen floor. My memory shuttled backward to the days of my childhood on the farm at Njoro — days when the words malaria and blackwater had first become mingled in my consciousness with Goanese or Indian doctors who arrived too late, rumours of plague on the lips of frightened Natives, death, and hushed burial before dawn in the cedar forest that bounded our posho mill and paddocks.

They were dark days heavy-scented with gloom. All the petty joys of early youth, the games, the friendships with the Nandi totos lost their lustre. Time became a weight that would not be moved until the bodies themselves had been moved and grass roots had found the new earth of the graves, and the women had cleaned the vacant huts of the dead and you could see the sun again.

‘One of our men,’ Ebert said, handing me a cup of tea, ‘is down with blackwater. The chap you brought the oxygen for has a bare chance, but this one hasn’t. Nothing the doc can do — and you can’t move a man with blackwater.’

‘No.’ I put the cup back on the long plank and remembered that people with blackwater always die if they are moved, and nearly always die if they are left alone.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said.

There must have been other things to say, but I couldn’t think of them. All I could think of was the time I
had
moved a blackwater patient from Masongaleni in the elephant country to the hospital at Nairobi.

I never knew afterward for how many hours of that journey I had flown with a corpse for company because, when I landed, the man was quite dead.

‘If there’s anything I can do …?’ It seems impossible not to be trite on such occasions. The old useless phrases are the only dependable ones — ‘terribly sorry,’ and, ‘if there’s anything I can do …’

‘He’d like to talk to you,’ Ebert said. ‘He heard the plane come in. I told him I thought you might spend the day here and take off tomorrow morning. He may not last that long, but he wants to talk to someone from the outside and none of us in Nungwe has been to Nairobi in over a year.’

I stood up, forgetting my tea. ‘I’ll talk to him, of course. But I can’t stay. There’s a pilot down somewhere in the Serengetti …’

‘Oh.’ Ebert looked disappointed, and I knew from his expression that he, as well as the sick man, was lonely for news of the ‘outside’ — news of Nairobi. And in Nairobi people only wanted news of London.

Wherever you are, it seems, you must have news of some other place, some bigger place, so that a man on his deathbed in the swamplands of Victoria Nyanza is more interested in what has lately happened in this life than in what may happen in the next. It is really this that makes death so hard — curiosity unsatisfied.

But if contempt for death is correctly interpreted as courage, then Ebert’s dying friend was a courageous man.