West with the Night (7 page)

‘It’s a small world,’ groaned Woody from the plane.

‘Na furie sana ku wanana na wewe,’ I said to Bishon Singh in Swahili. ‘I am very happy to see you again.’

He was dressed as I had always remembered him — thick army boots, blue puttees, khaki breeches, a ragged leather waistcoat, all of it surmounted by a great turban, wound, as I recalled it, from at least a thousand yards of the finest cotton cloth. As a child, that turban had always intrigued me; there was so much of it and so little of Bishon Singh.

We stood a few yards in front of his three nodding donkeys, each with a silent Kikuyu boy in attendance, and each with an immense load on its back — pots, tin pans, bales of cheap Bombay prints, copper wire to make Masai earrings and bracelets. There was even tobacco, and oil for the Murani to use in the braiding of their hair.

There were things made of leather, things of paper, things of celluloid and rubber, all bulging, dangling, and bursting from the great pendulous packs. Here was Commerce, four-footed and halting, slow and patient, unhurried, but sure as tomorrow, beating its way to a counter in the African hinterland.

Bishon Singh raised an arm and included both the Klemm and the Avian in its sweep.

‘N’dege!’ he said — ‘the white man’s bird! You do not ride on them, Beru?’

‘I fly one of them, Bishon Singh.’

I said it sadly, because the old man had pointed with his left arm and I saw that his right was withered and crippled and useless. It had not been like that when I had seen him last.

‘So,’ he scolded, ‘now it has come to this. To walk is not enough. To ride on a horse is not enough. Now people must go from place to place through the air, like a
diki toora.
Nothing but trouble will come of it, Beru. God spits upon such blasphemy.’

‘God has spat,’ sighed Woody.

‘My friend was stranded here,’ I said to Bishon Singh, ‘his n’dege — the one that shines like a new rupee — is broken. We are going back to Nairobi.’

‘Walihie! Walihie! It is over a hundred miles, Beru, and the night is near. I will unpack my donkeys and brew hot tea. It is a long way to Nairobi — even for you who go with the wind.’

‘We will be there in less than an hour, Bishon Singh. It would take you as long to build a fire and make the tea.’

I put my hand out and the old Sikh grasped it and held it for a moment very tightly, just as he had often held it some ten years ago when he was still taller than I — even without his fantastic turban. Only then he had used his right hand. He looked down at it now with a smile on his thin lips.

‘What was it?’ I asked.

‘Simba, Beru — lion.’ He shrugged. ‘One day on the way to Ikoma … it makes us like brothers, you and me. Each has been torn by a lion. You remember that time at Kabete when you were a little child?’

‘I’ll never forget it.’

‘Nor I,’ said Bishon Singh.

I turned and went forward to the propeller of the Avian and grasped the highest blade with my right hand and nodded to Woody. He sat in the front cockpit ready to switch on.

Bishon Singh moved backward a few steps, close to his Tom Thumb cavalcade. The three donkeys left off their meagre feeding, raised their heads and tilted their ears. The Kikuyu boys stood behind the donkeys and waited. In the dead light the Klemm had lost her brilliance and was only the sad and discredited figure of an aerial Jezebel.

‘God will keep you,’ said Bishon Singh.

‘Good-bye and good fortune!’ I called.

‘Contact!’ roared Woody and I swung the prop.

He lay, at last, on a bed in the small neat shack of the East African Aero Club waiting for food, for a drink — and, I suspect, for sympathy.

‘The Klemm is a bitch,’ he said. ‘No man in his right mind should ever fly a Klemm aeroplane, with a Pobjoy motor, in Africa. You treat her kindly, you nurse her engine, you put silver dope on her wings, and what happens?’

‘The magneto goes wrong,’ I said.

‘It’s like a woman with nerves,’ said Woody, ‘or no conscience, or even an imbecile!’

‘Oh, much worse.’

‘Why do we fly?’ said Woody. ‘We could do other things. We could work in offices, or have farms, or get into the Civil Service. We could …’

‘We could give up flying tomorrow. You could, anyhow. You could walk away from your plane and never put your feet on a rudder bar again. You could forget about weather and night flights and forced landings, and passengers who get airsick, and spare parts that you can’t find, and wonderful new ships that you can’t buy. You could forget all that and go off somewhere away from Africa and never look at an aerodrome again. You might be a very happy man, so why don’t you?’

‘I couldn’t bear it,’ said Woody. ‘It would all be so dull.’

‘It can be dull anyway.’

‘Even with lions tearing you to bits at Kabete?’

‘Oh, that was back in my childhood. Some day I’ll write a book and you can read about it.’

‘God forbid!’ said Woody.

W
HEN I WAS A
child, I spent all my days with the Nandi Murani, hunting barefooted, in the Rongai Valley, or in the cedar forests of the Mau Escarpment.

At first I was not permitted to carry a spear, but the Murani depended on nothing else.

You cannot hunt an animal with such a weapon unless you know the way of his life. You must know the things he loves, the things he fears, the paths he will follow. You must be sure of the quality of his speed and the measure of his courage. He will know as much about you, and at times make better use of it.

But my Murani friends were patient with me.

‘Amin yut!’ one would say, ‘what but a dik-dik will run like that? Your eyes are filled with clouds today, Lakweit!’

That day my eyes were filled with clouds, but they were young enough eyes and they soon cleared. There were other days and other dik-dik. There were so many things.

There were dik-dik and leopard, kongoni and warthog, buffalo, lion, and the ‘hare that jumps.’ There were many thousands of the hare that jumps.

And there were wildebeest and antelope. There was the snake that crawls and the snake that climbs. There were birds, and young men like whips of leather, like rainshafts in the sun, like spears before a singiri.

‘Amin yut!’ the young men would say, ‘that is no buffalo spoor, Lakweit. Here! Bend down and look. Bend down and look at this mark. See how this leaf is crushed. Feel the wetness of this dug. Bend down and look so that you may learn!’

And so, in time, I learned. But some things I learned alone.

There was a place called Elkington’s Farm by Kabete Station. It was near Nairobi on the edge of the Kikuyu Reserve, and my father and I used to ride there from town on horses or in a buggy, and along the way my father would tell me things about Africa.

Sometimes he would tell me stories about the tribal wars — wars between the Masai and the Kikuyu (which the Masai always won), or between the Masai and the Nandi (which neither of them ever won), and about their great leaders and their wild way of life which, to me, seemed much greater fun than our own. He would tell me of Lenana the brilliant Masai ol-oiboni, who prophesied the coming of the White Man, ad of Lenana’s tricks and stratagems and victories, and about how his people were unconquerable and unconquered — until, in retaliation against the refusal of the Masai warriors to join the King’s African Rifles, the British marched upon the Native villages; how, inadvertently, a Masai woman was killed, and how two Hindu shopkeepers were murdered in reprisal by the Murani. And thus, why it was that the thin, red line of Empire had grown slightly redder.

He would tell me old legends sometimes about Mount Kenya, or about the Menegai Crater, called the Mountain of God, or about Kilimanjaro. He would tell me these things and I would ride alongside and ask endless questions, or we would sit together in the jolting buggy and just think about what he had said.

One day, when we were riding to Elkington’s, my father spoke about lions.

‘Lions are more intelligent than some men,’ he said, ‘and more courageous than most. A lion will fight for what he has and for what he needs; he is contemptuous of cowards and wary of his equals. But he is not afraid. You can always trust a lion to be exactly what he is — and never anything else.’

‘Except,’ he added, looking more paternally concerned than usual, ‘that damned lion of Elkington’s!’

The Elkington lion was famous within a radius of twelve miles in all directions from the farm, because, if you happened to be anywhere inside that circle, you could hear him roar when he was hungry, when he was sad, or when he just felt like roaring. If, in the night, you lay sleepless on your bed and listened to an intermittent sound that began like the bellow of a banshee trapped in the bowels of Kilimanjaro and ended like the sound of that same banshee suddenly at large and arrived at the foot of your bed, you knew (because you had been told) that this was the song of Paddy.

Two or three of the settlers in East Africa at that time had caught lion cubs and raised them in cages. But Paddy, the Elkington lion, had never seen a cage.

He had grown to full size, tawny, black-maned and muscular, without a worry or a care. He lived on fresh meat, not of his own killing. He spent his waking hours (which coincided with everybody else’s sleeping hours) wandering through Elkington’s fields and pastures like an affable, if apostrophic, emperor, a-stroll in the gardens of his court.

He thrived in solitude. He had no mate, but pretended indifference and walked alone, not toying too much with imaginings of the unattainable. There were no physical barriers to his freedom, but the lions of the plains do not accept into their respected fraternity an individual bearing in his coat the smell of men. So Paddy ate, slept, and roared, and perhaps he sometimes dreamed, but he never left Elkington’s. He was a tame lion, Paddy was. He was deaf to the call of the wild.

‘I’m always careful of that lion,’ I told my father, ‘but he’s really harmless. I have seen Mrs. Elkington stroke him.’

‘Which proves nothing,’ said my father. ‘A domesticated lion is only an unnatural lion — and whatever is unnatural is untrustworthy.’

Whenever my father made an observation as deeply philosophical as that one, and as inclusive, I knew there was nothing more to be said.

I nudged my horse and we broke into a canter covering the remaining distance to Elkington’s.

It wasn’t a big farm as farms went in Africa before the First World War, but it had a very nice house with a large veranda on which my father, Jim Elkington, Mrs. Elkington, and one or two other settlers sat and talked with what to my mind was always unreasonable solemnity.

There were drinks, but beyond that there was a tea-table lavishly spread, as only the English can spread them. I have sometimes thought since of the Elkingtons’ tea-table — round, capacious, and white, standing with sturdy legs against the green vines of the garden, a thousand miles of Africa receding from its edge.

It was a mark of sanity, I suppose, less than of luxury. It was evidence of the double debt England still owes to ancient China for her two gifts that made expansion possible — tea and gunpowder.

But cakes and muffins were no fit bribery for me. I had pleasures of my own then, or constant expectations. I made what niggardly salutations I could bring forth from a disinterested memory and left the house at a gait rather faster than a trot.

As I scampered past the square hay shed a hundred yards or so behind the Elkington house, I caught sight of Bishon Singh whom my father had sent ahead to tend our horses.

I think the Sikh must have been less than forty years old then, but his face was never any indication of his age. On some days he looked thirty and on others he looked fifty, depending on the weather, the time of day, his mood, or the tilt of his turban. If he had ever disengaged his beard from his hair and shaved the one and clipped the other, he might have astonished us all by looking like one of Kipling’s elephant boys, but he never did either, and so, to me at least, he remained a man of mystery, without age or youth, but burdened with experience, like the wandering Jew.

He raised his arm and greeted me in Swahili as I ran through the Elkington farmyard and out toward the open country.

Why I ran at all or with what purpose in mind is beyond my answering, but when I had no specific destination I always ran as fast as I could in the hope of finding one — and I always found it.

I was within twenty yards of the Elkington lion before I saw him. He lay sprawled in the morning sun, huge, black-maned, and gleaming with life. His tail moved slowly, stroking the rough grass like a knotted rope end. His body was sleek and easy, making a mould where he lay, a cool mould, that would be there when he had gone. He was not asleep; he was only idle. He was rusty-red, and soft, like a strokable cat.

I stopped and he lifted his head with magnificent ease and stared at me out of yellow eyes.

I stood there staring back, scuffling my bare toes in the dust, pursing my lips to make a noiseless whistle — a very small girl who knew about lions.

Paddy raised himself then, emitting a little sigh, and began to contemplate me with a kind of quiet premeditation, like that of a slow-witted man fondling an unaccustomed thought.

I cannot say that there was any menace in his eyes, because there wasn’t, or that his ‘frightful jowls’ were drooling, because they were handsome jowls and very tidy. He did sniff the air, though, with what impressed me as being close to audible satisfaction. And he did not lie down again.

I remembered the rules that one remembers. I did not run. I walked very slowly, and I began to sing a defiant song.

‘Kali coma Simba sisi,’ I sang, ‘Asikari yoti ni udari! — Fierce like the lion are we, Asikari all are brave!’

I went in a straight line past Paddy when I sang it, seeing his eyes shine in the thick rass, watching his tail beat time to the metre of my ditty.

‘Twendi, twendi — ku pigana — piga aduoi — pig asana! — Let us go, let us go — to fight — to beat down the enemy! Beat hard, beat hard!’

What lion would be unimpressed with the marching song of the King’s African Rifles?