West with the Night (4 page)

He lay on a camp bed under a thin, sticky blanket and he had no recognizable face. What the Egyptians had done with chemicals to dead bodies, malaria and the subsequent blackwater had done to him.

I have seen baskets of raw animal skin stretched over sticks and left to dry in the sun, and these baskets were no more empty or fleshless than the half corpse Ebert presented to me in the darkened hut.

It was a tiny hut with the usual single window blocked with corrugated iron, the usual thatched roof, old and dropping its leaves like a rotted tree, and the usual earthen floor paved with burnt matchsticks, paper, and shreds of tobacco.

There never seems to be any reason for filth, but there are occasions, like this one, where it would be hard to find a reason for cleanliness. ‘Poverty,’ an old proverb says, ‘is not a disgrace, but a great swinishness.’ Here was poverty — poverty of women to help, poverty of hope, and even of life. For all I knew there might have been handfuls of gold buried in that hut, but if there were, it was the poorest comfort of all.

The sick man’s name was Bergner — a Dutchman, perhaps, or a German. Not English, I thought, though whatever racial characteristics had once distinguished him were now lost in the almost Gothic contours of his shrunken head.

His eyes alone appeared to live. They were enormous, seeming to move in their sockets independently of the body they served. But they stared at me from the bed with something that was at least interest and might almost have been humour. They seemed to say, ‘This is a hell of a way to receive a young lady just in from Nairobi — but you see how things are!’

I smiled, a little wanly, I think, and then turned to Ebert — or at least to the spot where he had been. With dexterity that might have done credit to the most accomplished Indian fakir, Ebert had vanished, leaving me alone with Bergner.

For a moment I stood in the centre of the room experiencing, in spite of myself, some of the trepidation one might feel hearing the door of a burial vault close on one’s back.

The comparison seems exaggerated now, but the truth is that all my life I have had an abhorrence of disease amounting almost to a phobia.

There is no reason in this; it is not fear of infection, because Africa has accorded me my full share of malaria and other illnesses, from time to time, along with a kind of compensating philosophy with which to endure them. My phobia is an unaccountable physical repulsion from persons who are sick rather than from sickness itself.

Certain people are repelled even by the thought of snakes and I can only compare my feeling toward the aspect of unhealthiness to this — mambas, pythons, puff-adders, and some of their brethren have frequently popped into my life either on treks through the forests or during elephant hunts, or when, as a child, I wandered in the bush seeking small adventure. But while I have learned to avoid snakes and have even, I think, developed a sixth sense for the purpose, I feel I could, if necessary, still face a mamba with greater calm than I can face a human being swathed in the sickly-sweet atmosphere of disease and impending death.

Here in this hut, at the side of a strange, bedridden man, I had to fight back an impulse to throw open the door and bolt across the runway into the protecting cockpit of my plane. Coupled with this was the realization that each moment the sun rose higher, the day grew hotter, and if Woody were by some miracle still alive, an hour or so more of delay on my part could result in a tragedy that would not be less because of the comfort Bergner might find in my visit.

Somewhere, just beyond Nungwe, the little doctor must at that moment have been pouring oxygen into the lungs of another man, if that man were still alive.

Death, or at least the shadow that precedes him, seemed to have stalked far and wide that morning.

I pulled up a chair and sat in it near the head of Bergner’s bed and tried to think of something to say, but he spoke first.

His voice was soft and controlled, and very tired.

‘You don’t mind being here, I hope,’ he said. ‘It’s been four years since I left Nairobi, and there haven’t been many letters.’ He ran the tip of his tongue over his lips and attempted a smile. ‘People forget,’ he added. ‘It’s easy for a whole group of people to forget just one, but if you’re very long in a place like this you remember everybody you ever met. You even worry about people you never liked; you get nostalgic about your enemies. It’s all something to think about and it all helps.’

I nodded, watching little beads of sweat swell on his forehead. He was feverish, and I couldn’t help wondering how long it would be before the inevitable delirium overtook him another time.

I don’t know what the scientific term for blackwater is, but the name those who have lived in Africa call it by is apt enough.

A man can be riddled with malaria for years on end, with its chills and its fevers and its nightmares, but, if one day he sees that the water from his kidneys is black, he knows he will not leave that place again, wherever he is, or wherever he hoped to be. He knows that there will be days ahead, long, tedious days which have no real beginning or ending, but which run together into night and out of it without changing colour, or sound, or meaning. He will lie in his bed feeling the minutes and the hours pass through his body like an endless ribbon of pain because time becomes pain then. Light and darkness become pain; all his senses exist only to receive it, to transmit to his mind again and again, with ceaseless repetition, the simple fact that now he is dying.

The man on the bed was dying like that. He wanted to talk because it is possible to forget yourself if you talk, but not if you only lie and think.

‘Hastings,’ he said. ‘You must know Carl Hastings. He was a White Hunter for a while and then he settled down on a coffee plantation west of Ngong. I wonder if he ever married?’ He used to say he never would, but nobody believed him.’

‘He did, though,’ I said. It was a name I had never heard, but it seemed a small enough gesture to lie about a nebulous Carl Hastings — even, if necessary, to give him a wife.

In the four years Bergner had been away, the town of Nairobi had swelled and burst like a ripe seedpod. It was no longer so comfortably small that every inhabitant was a neighbour, or every name that of a friend.

‘I thought you knew him,’ Bergner said; ‘everybody knows Carl. And when you see him you can tell him he owes me five pounds. It’s on a bet we made one Christmas in Mombasa. He bet he’d never get married — not in Africa, anyway. He said you could boast about living in a man’s country, but you couldn’t expect to find a marriageable woman in it!’

‘I’ll tell him about it,’ I said; ‘he can send it by way of Kisumu.’

‘That’s right, by way of Kisumu.’

Bergner closed his eyes and let a tremor of pain shake his body under the flimsy blanket. He was like a storm-trapped man who seeks shelter in the niche of a wall from a passing fury of wind and then hurries on until the next blast drives him to cover again.

‘There’s Phillips,’ he said, ‘and Tom Krausmeyer at the Stanley Hotel. You’ll know them both — and Joe Morley. There are a number of people I want to ask you about, but there’s lots of time. Ebert said you’d be staying over. When I heard your plane I almost prayed that you’d had a flat tire or whatever you have in planes — anything to see a new face and hear a new voice. It isn’t considerate, but you get that way living in a hole like this — or dying in it.’

‘You don’t have to die in it. You’ll get well and then I’ll come back and fly you to Nairobi.’

‘Or even to London.’ Bergner smiled. ‘After that we might try Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York. My future looks brighter and brighter.’

‘You forgot Hollywood.’

‘No. I just thought it was too much to hope for all in one breath.’

I noticed that, in spite of his spirit and his courage, his voice had grown thin and less certain of its strength. He was holding himself together by sheer power of will and the effort made the atmosphere of the hut strained and tense.

‘You
are
staying over, then?’ He put the question with sudden urgency.

I didn’t know how to explain that I had to leave. I had a feeling that he wouldn’t have believed my reason; that with the quick suspicion of the insane and the very sick, he would have thought I was only trying to escape.

I mumbled something about how nice it would be to stay, and that I would, for a while, but that there were other things — a pilot down, the Avian to be refuelled …

I don’t suppose he heard any of it. He started to sweat again and his legs jerked under the blanket. A fleck of spittle formed on his lips and he began to talk in meaningless garbled words.

I couldn’t understand all of what he said, but even in delirium he was neither sobbing nor complaining very much. He mumbled only about small things, people he had known, places in Africa, and once he mentioned Carl Hastings and Nairobi together in an almost intelligible sentence. I had come closer to the bed and leaned down over it, feeling a wave of sickness in my own body. Trying to quiet him, I talked, but it was a wasted effort. He caught his hands in the loose folds of my flying clothes, tearing at the fabric pulling himself upward from the bed.

I wanted to call out for Ebert, for anyone. But I couldn’t say anything and no one would have heard, so I stood there with my hands on Bergner’s shoulders feeling the tremor of his muscles pass through my fingertips and hearing the rest of his life run out in a stream of little words carrying no meaning, bearing no secrets — or perhaps he had none.

I left him at last and tiptoed through the door of the hut, closing it quickly behind me.

Bergner may have lived for a while after that, and it may be that the other man for whom the little doctor ordered the oxygen is still mining gold at Nungwe. But I never went back there again and so I never knew.

Years later, I did meet a man named Carl Hastings at one of those cocktail parties where both the people and the conversation pass out of your life and memory by dinner-time.

‘There was a man named Bergner,’ I began, ‘a friend of yours …’

Mr. Hastings, who was tall and swart and tailored smoothly, raised his glass and frowned over the edge of it.

‘You mean Barnard,’ he said, ‘Ralph Barnard.’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘It’s Bergner all right. You must remember — Christmas at Mombasa, some kind of bet about getting married? I saw him down at Nungwe and he told me about it.’

‘Hmmm.’ Mr. Hastings pursed his lips and thought hard. ‘It’s a funny thing about people,’ he said, ‘a very funny thing. You meet so many and remember so few. Now take this chap you’re talking about … Barker did you say his name was …?’

There was a tray of cocktails near my elbow, so I reached over and took one.

‘Cheers,’ said Mr. Hastings.

I took a sip of the drink, remembering my take-off from Nungwe, seeing it once more, clearly, in all its detail.

There were Kavirondo helping with the fuel tins, there was Ebert still apologetic, and still a bit disappointed — and there was the bedraggled windsock, with its toe still sealed shut, hanging from its mast like the pathetic flag of a domain so small that nobody could ever take it seriously.

Beyond that there was wind enough and too much sun and the lusty song of the plane. In a little while there was the Speke Gulf, deep as the sky and just as blue. And, after that, the Serengetti Plains.

T
HE SERENGETTI PLAINS SPREAD
from Lake Nyaraza, in Tanganyika, northward beyond the lower boundaries of Kenya Colony. They are the great sanctuary of the Masai People and they harbour more wild game than any similar territory in all of East Africa. In the season of drought they are as dry and tawny as the coats of the lion that prowl them, and during the rains they provide the benison of soft grass to all the animals in a child’s picture book.

They are endless and they are empty, but they are as warm with life as the waters of a tropic sea. They are webbed with the paths of eland and wildebeest and Thompson’s gazelle and their hollows and valleys are trampled by thousands of zebra. I have seen a herd of buffalo invade the pastures under the occasional thorn tree groves and, now and then, the whimsically fashioned figure of a plodding rhino has moved along the horizon like a grey boulder come to life and adventure bound. There are no roads. There are no villages, no towns, no telegraph. There is nothing, as far as you can see, or walk, or ride, except grass and rocks and a few trees and the animals that live there.

Years ago one of the banking Rothschilds on a hunting trip led by Captain George Wood, now aide-de-camp to His Royal Highness, the Duke of Windsor, pitched his tents in the Serengetti Plains near a huge pile of these rocks where there was protection from the wind and where there was water.

Since then countless hunting parties on safari have stopped there, and Rothschild’s Camp is still a landmark and a kind of haven for hunters who, coming so far, have for a while at least locked the comforts of the other world behind them.

There is no landing field at Rothschild’s Camp, but there is a patch of ground flat enough to receive a plane if the wind is right and the pilot careful.

I have landed there often and usually I have seen lion in the path of my glide to earth. Sometimes they have moved like strolling dogs, indifferent and unhurried, or, upon occasion, they have taken time to pause and sit on their haunches, in cosy groups — males, females and cubs staring at the Avian with about the same expression one finds in the gold-framed family portraits of the Mauve Decade.

I do not suggest that the lion of the Serengetti have become so blasé about the modern explorer’s motion-picture camera that their posing has already become a kind of Hollywoodian habit. But many of them have so often been bribed with fresh-killed zebra or other delicacies that it is sometimes possible to advance with photographic equipment to within thirty or forty yards of them if the approach is made in an automobile.

To venture that close on foot, however, would mean the sudden shattering of any kindly belief that the similarity of the lion and the pussy cat goes much beyond their whiskers. But then, since men still live by the sword, it is a little optimistic to expect the lion to withdraw his claws, handicapped as he is by his inability to read our better effusions about the immorality of bloodshed.