West With the Night Page 2

  When, much later than Nungwe or Tripoli or Zanzibar, or any of the remote and sometimes outlandish places I have flown to, I crossed the North Atlantic, east to west, there were headlines, fanfare, and, for me, many sleepless nights. A generous American press found that flight spectacular and what is spectacular is news.

  But to leave Nairobi and arrive at Nungwe is not spectacular. It is not news. It is only a little hop from here to there, and to one who does not know the plains of Africa, its swamps, its night sounds and its night silences, such a flight is not only unspectacular, but perhaps tedious as well. Only not to me, for Africa was the breath and life of my childhood.

  It is still the host of all my darkest fears, the cradle of mysteries always intriguing, but never wholly solved. It is the remembrance of sunlight and green hills, cool water and the yellow warmth of bright mornings. It is as ruthless as any sea, more uncompromising than its own deserts. It is without temperance in its harshness or in its favours. It yields nothing, offering much to men of all races.

  But the soul of Africa, its integrity, the slow inexorable pulse of its life, is its own and of such singular rhythm that no outsider, unless steeped from childhood in its endless, even beat, can ever hope to experience it, except only as a bystander might experience a Masai war dance knowing nothing of its music nor the meaning of its steps.

  So I am off to Nungwe — a silly word, a silly place. A place of small hopes and small successes, buried like the inconsequential treasure of an imaginative miser, out of bounds and out of most men’s wanting — below the Mau Escarpment, below the Speke Gulf, below the unsurveyed stretches of the Western Province.

  Oxygen to a sick miner. But this flight is not heroic. It is not even romantic. It is a job of work, a job to be done at an uncomfortable hour with sleep in my eyes and half a grumble on my lips.

  Arab Ruta calls contact and swings the propeller.

  Arab Ruta is a Nandi, anthropologically a member of a Nilotic tribe, humanly a member of a smaller tribe, a more elect tribe, the tribe composed of those too few, precisely sensitive, but altogether indomitable individuals contributed sparingly by each race, exclusively by none.

  He is of the tribe that observes with equal respect the soft voice and the hardened hand, the fullness of a flower, the quick finality of death. His is the laughter of a free man happy at his work, a strong man with lust for living. He is not black. His skin holds the sheen and warmth of used copper. His eyes are dark and wide-spaced, his nose full-boned and capable of arrogance.

  He is arrogant now, swinging the propeller, laying his lean hands on the curved wood, feeling an exultant kinship in the coiled resistance to his thrust.

  He swings hard. A splutter, a strangled cough from the engine like the premature stirring of a sleep-slugged labourer. In the cockpit I push gently on the throttle, easing it forward, rousing the motor, feeding it, soothing it.

  Arab Ruta moves the wooden chocks from the wheels and steps backward away from the wing. Fitful splashes of crimson light from crude-oil torches set round the field stain the dark cloth of the African night and play upon his alert, high-boned face. He raises his hand and I nod as the propeller, whirring itself into invisibility, pulls the plane forward, past him.

  I leave him no instructions, no orders. When I return he will be there. It is an understanding of many years — a wordless understanding from the days when Arab Ruta first came into my father’s service on the farm at Njoro. He will be there, as a servant, as a friend — waiting.

  I peer ahead along the narrow muram runway. I gather speed meeting the wind, using the wind.

  A high wire fence surrounds the aerodrome — a wire fence and then a deep ditch. Where is there another aerodrome fenced against wild animals? Zebra, wildebeest, giraffe, eland — at night they lurk about the tall barrier staring with curious wild eyes into the flat field, feeling cheated.

  They are well out of it, for themselves and for me. It would be a hard fate to go down in the memory of one’s friends as having been tripped up by a wandering zebra. ‘Tried to take off and hit a zebra!’ It lacks even the dignity of crashing into an anthill.

  Watch the fence. Watch the flares. I watch both and take off into the night.

  Ahead of me lies a land that is unknown to the rest of the world and only vaguely known to the African — a strange mixture of grasslands, scrub, desert sand like long waves of the southern ocean. Forest, still water, and age-old mountains, stark and grim like mountains of the moon. Salt lakes, and rivers that have no water. Swamps. Badlands. Land without life. Land teeming with life — all of the dusty past, all of the future.

  The air takes me into its realm. Night envelops me entirely, leaving me out of touch with the earth, leaving me within this small moving world of my own, living in space with the stars.

  My plane is a light one, a two-seater with her registration letters, VP-KAN, painted boldly on her turquoise-blue fuselage in silver.

  In the daytime she is a small gay complement to the airy blue of the sky, like a bright fish under the surface of a clear sea. In darkness such as this she is no more than a passing murmur, a soft, incongruous murmur above the earth.

  With such registration letters as hers, it requires of my friends no great imagination or humour to speak of her always as just ‘the Kan’ — and the Kan she is, even to me. But this is not libel, for such nicknames are born out of love.

  To me she is alive and to me she speaks. I feel through the soles of my feet on the rudder-bar the willing strain and flex of her muscles. The resonant, guttural voice of her exhausts has a timbre more articulate than wood and steel, more vibrant than wires and sparks and pounding pistons.

  She speaks to me now, saying the wind is right, the night is fair, the effort asked of her well within her powers.

  I fly swiftly. I fly high — south-southwest, over the Ngong Hills. I am relaxed. My right hand rests upon the stick in easy communication with the will and the way of the plane. I sit in the rear, the front cockpit filled with the heavy tank of oxygen strapped upright in the seat, its round stiff dome foolishly reminding me of the poised rigidity of a passenger on first flight.

  The wind in the wires is like the tearing of soft silk under the blended drone of engine and propeller. Time and distance together slip smoothly past the tips of my wings without sound, without return, as I peer downward over the night-shadowed hollows of the Rift Valley and wonder if Woody, the lost pilot, could be there, a small human pinpoint of hope and of hopelessness listening to the low, unconcerned song of the Avian — flying elsewhere.

  II

  Men with Blackwater Die

  THERE IS A FEELING of absolute finality about the end of a flight through darkness. The whole scheme of things with which you have lived acutely, during hours of roaring sound in an element altogether detached from the world, ceases abruptly. The plane noses groundward, the wings strain to the firmer cushion of earthbound air, wheels touch, and the engine sighs into silence. The dream of flight is suddenly gone before the mundane realities of growing grass and swirling dust, the slow plodding of men and the enduring patience of rooted trees. Freedom escapes you again, and wings that were a moment ago no less than an eagle’s, and swifter, are metal and wood once more, inert and heavy.

  The clearing at Nungwe blinked into my horizon about half an hour before dawn. At a thousand feet the wavering crude-oil torches outlined no more than a narrow runway — a thin scar on the vast sprawled body of the wilderness.

  I circled once, watching the flares yield to the rising wind, gauging the direction of its flow. Shadows that were made by moving men criss-crossed the clearing, shifted, changed design, and became immobile.

  A gentle pull on the throttle eased the motor to an effortless hum. I held the nose of the Avian on the beacons until the earth sped under her, and the wheels, reaching for solid ground, swept her onto the runway in a maelstrom of dust and flickering orange light. I cut the engine, relaxed in the seat, and adjusted my ears to the emptines
s of silence.

  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 surroundin
g 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.