The Flame Trees of Thika (23 page)

‘’Nuff said, my dear. I think we understand each other. You’re a very plucky woman, you know.’

‘I’m a very wet one. And I want my tea.’

It was not a pleasant ride back. The cold and slippery saddle rubbed my bottom, everything clung to the skin, and poor Moyale slid and slithered up and down slopes now traversed by miniature red rivers. The tempest had left a sky full of storm-wrack through which a red and savage sun reappeared to suck a white miasmic mist out of sodden pasture.

The storm had deluged the farm, and lightning had blasted a
fig-tree half-way up the river slope. Robin said that he had felt the flash strike the earth, and it was like the entry of the demon king in a very expensive pantomime.

Hereward hurried back to Lettice, who, he said, hated thunder and hid in a cupboard, or under bedclothes, with her Pekinese.

‘Poor Hereward,’ Tilly said. ‘He’s absurd, but one can’t help feeling sorry for him.’

‘Pompous ass,’ Robin commented. He was not often unkind about other people but his enthusiasm for Hereward had waned, because of a manner he thought patronizing. ‘I can’t think why Lettice ran off with him.’

‘In his way he’s quite attractive, but not nearly so attractive as…’ Tilly noticed me, and added: ‘Go and take off your wet things at once and have a good hot bath.’

If you were a Kikuyu, I thought, you never had a hot bath and so it must be hard to get warm and dodge chills; on the other hand, your skin was oily and the water flowed off, as from a bird, or from Twinkle, whose thick pelt kept her skin as warm and dry as if no rain at all had fallen.

The rain brought out the
siafu
. Those fearful black rivers of implacable insects poured between their low mud banks over the garden, across the veranda, through the kitchen quarters. The Kikuyu put hot ashes round the house and their own huts to deflect the vicious armies, and stood the legs of our beds in sardine-tins full of water. These were the only things that would turn
siafu
aside - ashes and water. Tilly put the dogs on leads when she took them out, for if one of them should step among them it would rush about in a frenzy, very likely straight into another
siafu
trail; dogs had been killed in this manner.

Of all things in the world, I feared
siafu
most. Silent, determined, innumerable, they would overwhelm you in an instant, swarm into your nose and hair and eyes and kill with a remorseless cruelty. Not that I had ever heard of a man or woman being killed by them, but it always seemed possible. They had destroyed cattle and horses. And where were they going, these creatures with armour-plated bodies, pincer-jaws, and baneful juices, always in a hurry, never pausing, surging forward in those countless, terrifying millions, a never-ending stream of close-packed bodies that might flow on for several days? Where had
they come from, what force was driving them on? Had each individual ant a brain, a heart, a will? If this were so, how did it come about that all these individual creatures, million upon million of them, acted together as if they were one, as if that long black coil of separate insects was a single creature with a single heart and brain and will? These were mysteries as deep as the universe that no one could solve.

And what about Njombo, alone in his dark hut, unconscious, but still breathing? If the
siafu
passed over his body they would strip it to the bone, as they stripped hens and chicks and puppies, all helpless things. The same thought occurred to Tilly and she told Juma to spread ashes round his hut, but when she went out later she found that nothing had been done.

‘The ashes are finished,’ Juma said sulkily.

‘Very well; then you must lift Njombo out and carry him here to this veranda, where he will be safe.’

Juma recoiled, muttered something, and vanished into the kitchen. When Tilly went to investigate in half an hour, ashes had been spread round the dark and silent hut.

Although protected by the sardine-tins of water, I went nervously to bed, afraid that somehow the biting armies would find a way round our defences and imagining that every rustle from the papyrus-lined walls, which rustled constantly, signified an invasion, and that the ants would trek along the ceiling and drop down on to the bed. Tilly allowed me to keep the safari lamp burning low, and on the whole this made matters worse, as in the dim shadows which it threw I seemed to see the moving masses of the enemy. In the night heavy rain fell, without thunder, which I hoped would drown the armies, or at least discomfit them.

Apart from the rain, the night was very silent, but once I awoke to hear the bone-chilling howl of a hyena, close to the house. Hyenas were said to be cowards, but in their midnight howlings there was something intimate, knowing, and sly, as if they were saying: it will be your turn one day, your flesh will rot as other people’s, you too will join the great legion of the faceless and dissolved. The hyenas were no doubt waiting for Njombo, and perhaps while I lay in bed their jaws were pulling at his limbs, so that there would be no more Njombo, nothing to show that he had lived, laughed, and existed, and everything that was a
man had ended in a few moments of satisfaction for these heavy-shouldered shadows of the night.

I was awakened, as always, by the high, metallic ring of iron on iron (a bar struck by a rod) that was our daily summons to work. In such a soft and golden morning, alert with the praise of birds, night fears were silly; the
siafu
had gone, the doves were cooing, Twinkle sparkled like a queen, her fur dew-beaded, and picked fastidiously at shrubs that shot miniature cascades of cold water over her black, quivering nose. The Kikuyu greeted us and each other with smiles, one could not imagine that existence of terror and pain. Yet Njombo lay as before in the dark hut - alive still, Tilly reported, but only just; his limbs were so light and fragile it was a wonder there was any blood in them. She had propped him up and tried to make him drink but he seemed too weak to swallow.

‘It’s today or never,’ she said. She told the syce who had replaced him to saddle a mule and be ready to start at noon with a note for the
D.C.
, hoping that news of this would convince Kupanya’s spies that we meant business.

‘What will happen’, Robin asked, ‘if Sammy and Kupanya pay no attention?’

‘Then we must put Njombo into the mule-buggy and take him to Fort Hall, dead or alive. That will force a case, anyway, and get someone into trouble, even if it doesn’t save his life.’

The strangest part of it all was that none of Njombo’s relations had turned up to look after him. A Kikuyu is normally embedded in his family like ore in the rock, or a tooth in the jaw: organically a part of it, unable to conduct a separate existence. Yet here was Njombo cast aside like a bad tooth, alone and abandoned to the care not just of strangers, but of aliens from another world. When I saw Kamau, later in the morning, I asked him what had kept Njombo’s family away.

‘They are afraid,’ he answered.

‘Afraid of what?’

Kamau gave me a sideways look ‘Afraid…of his sickness.’

‘My mother is not afraid.’

‘It is not a sickness that attacks Europeans…. There is a man who has some baby porcupines. Would you like to buy them?’

‘Will Njombo die?’

Kamau looked upset. ‘Tch, tch, this is not my affair, nor an affair for children…. There are two porcupines, as big as that.’ He held out his hands.

‘Where has Sammy gone?’

‘Kupanya has sent for him.’

‘Then perhaps he will bring back medicine for Njombo.’

‘Sammy cannot give the medicine. There is a man…’

‘A sort of doctor?’

‘It is bad to speak of such things. Is it true that in England there are cattle as large as elephants, and men who are neither red nor black, but blue?’

Kamau was very interested in England, and sometimes we gave him old illustrated magazines. He had the King and Queen on the wall of the office and several other pictures from the
Illustrated London News
, including part of a naval review upside-down. As he had never set eyes on the sea, or heard of it until the other day, we found difficulties in explaining a battleship, or indeed any kind of ship at all. ‘Like a cart on top of water,’ was the best we could do.

After breakfast Robin went out as usual to the shamba, Tilly attended to business in the office and store, and I was employed drawing pictures of a sabre-toothed tiger being stalked by a prehistoric man, since, for the moment, our history lessons had switched from the Civil War back to the Pleistocene, owing to the arrival of a book on Early Man.

Tilly returned to the house at noon and called on Juma to prepare beef tea. She looked angry and stern; and, glancing at the book on Early Man, remarked: ‘All those centuries, and nothing much has changed - except of course the hairiness, but that’s only on the surface, it seems. When the coffee comes into bearing I think we must get a piano. Lettice would teach you; would you like to learn?’

‘Very much,’ I said, imagining my hand sweeping up and down the keys to create rivers of splendid melody, and the plaudits of a large audience.

‘There’s not much music in my family,’ Tilly reflected, ‘but Highlanders must have some in them, if they could only be kept away from pipes…. Well, I suppose I mustn’t put this off any longer.’

Juma appeared in the door without the beef tea, and said:

‘It would be best to leave this thing alone a little longer, memsabu.’

‘I told them that at noon…’

‘Kupanya’s is a long way off, and if you wait a little perhaps something will be arranged…’

‘I will wait until two o’clock,’ Tilly agreed. She looked at once much more cheerful, and began to think the bluff was going to work after all. ‘It is like walking on ice,’ she remarked. In reality, it was like living in one world while another co-existed, but the two scarcely ever meshed. Sometimes, when Tilly made a cake, she let me use the beater, which had a red handle that you turned. The two arms of the beater whirled round independently and never touched, so that perhaps one arm never knew the other was there; yet they were together, turned by the same handle, and the cake was mixed by both. I did not think of it at the time, but afterwards it struck me that this was rather how our two worlds revolved side by side.

Robin came back from the shamba much enraged by Sammy, who had left many things undone, and vanished in a most irresponsible way. But at lunch-time we heard that Sammy had returned, and Robin sent for him. No Sammy came, only a message, to say that he would report later.

‘I think that’s a good sign,’ Tilly said, when Robin showed symptoms of explosiveness. ‘Sammy may have brought a wizard with him to work the magic, and perhaps there is something going on now.’

‘I think we’ve both gone off our heads,’ Robin grumbled. ‘We know it’s all a lot of tomfoolery, the whole thing is illegal, and here we are playing their game, instead of bundling the whole lot of them in to the
D.C.
and letting him knock some sense into their heads.’

The afternoon slipped by without any striking event, and silently. I had expected something dramatic, perhaps a sound of drumming and song, or the mewing of spirits, or at least a goat’s bleat: for all the time I was wondering whether some broken-legged, half-flayed animal was paying with its agony for the restoration of Njombo’s hope of life.

At about four o’clock Sammy came to the door. He did not
smile, as usual, but looked sulky and subdued, gazed at his feet and said gruffly:

‘Come to see Njombo.’

At any other time his almost hectoring tone would have angered Tilly, but now she was too relieved and hopeful to mind. She returned in about half an hour with news of victory. Njombo had opened his eyes and allowed a little beef tea and brandy to trickle down his throat. Like the inaugural sap of spring, life had begun to stir hesitantly in his blood.

‘When I propped him up, it was like holding up a feather, his very bones seemed weightless,’ Tilly said. ‘There was chalk on his face and arms, and a queer smell. Heaven knows what had been going on in there, but whatever it was, I think that it has saved Njombo. And now you must read the riot act to Sammy, and tell him that if it ever happens again he’ll be imprisoned.’

‘We have no proof it was Sammy,’ Robin pointed out.

‘We have no proof of anything. In fact proof itself seems to be an exotic, like those poor little oak trees we planted. Thank Heaven it’s over, unless he relapses. And now I want my tea.’

How much does one imagine, how much observe? One can no more separate those functions than divide light from air, or wetness from water. It seemed to me that, after tea, everything was different; songs came from the Kikuyu huts, the women laughed like gurgling water as they carried firewood home, the previous day’s storm had vanished. Some years later, we had a parrot in a cage fitted with a green baize cover to snuff out the light at bedtime. How odd it must have been for the parrot, I thought, to see day turned to night in a single second; and now it seemed as if a cover had suddenly been lifted from the farm, and daylight had burst upon us all again.

Alec Wilson came over next day full of gossip. It was Kupanya, he said, who had saved Njombo, and Kupanya had intervened only because the storm, coming immediately after our visit, had convinced him that God was angry, and did not wish Njombo to die. ‘Kupanya didn’t give two hoots for the
D.C.
,’ Alec said, ‘but he was a bit reluctant to take on the Almighty.’

‘It’s always a good thing to have friends in high quarters,’ Tilly remarked.

The chief had sent for a wizard, who had broken the spell, and
so cheated Sammy of his revenge. Sammy was furious, for he believed that Njombo, out of jealousy and spite, had killed his young wife by witchcraft and caused the detonatoi to injure his son. There was no doubt at all that if Kupanya had not changed his mind, Njombo would have run down like an unwound watch, and died.

‘I should never have believed it’, Tilly said, ‘unless I’d seen it with my own eyes.’

‘I suppose we believed in it ourselves until not so very long ago,’ Alec said.