The Flame Trees of Thika (29 page)

‘Twinkle will be safe, did you not get a charm to protect her?’ Njombo said. ‘Perhaps she has gone to find a bwana of her own.’

‘Come with me and look at the still,’ Robin suggested. ‘It is nearly finished, and has several improvements no one has thought of before. If they work as well as I expect, I shall take out a patent.’

The still appeared to be an incoherent mass of pipes, cylinders, coils, and drums without the least rhyme or reason, and although I tried to look intelligent, I could not understand a word of his explanation. But I do not think he noticed this, the still was his child and, if it had faults, he would overlook them. The only one it seemed to have at the moment was that it did not actually work, but this would very soon be remedied.

We walked home by the river, and a sudden commotion from the direction of the nursery arrested us.

‘Perhaps a child has fallen into the river,’ Robin said. ‘We had better go and see.’

A small crowd had collected beside the pool under the waterfall, looking at something on the other side. Among them was a woman who wailed and gabbled in a high-pitched voice and appeared to be on the edge of hysteria. I knew at once it was the python, and so it was, although at first I could not see it; the reptile was lying in the shadow of some rocks, in a shallow cave. I saw it only when it moved a little, as if to make itself more comfortable. One of the Kikuyu pointed with his herding-spear and exclaimed:

‘Look, can’t you see, it has eaten something big and now it is
lying there with a full belly like a man gorged on meat, or a woman with child.’

And indeed, as its outlines disengaged themselves from the darkness of the wet rock, a large bulge could be seen distinctly in the snake’s coils.

A horrible conviction swept over me, and I seized Robin’s arm. ‘It has swallowed Twinkle,’ I cried, and burst into tears.

‘Nonsense, it’s probably just the way it’s lying, unless…What is the matter with that woman, I wonder?’

His inquiries met a barrage of cries and lamentations in Kikuyu. The woman was distraught, the men excited, the python menacing.

‘I was afraid so,’ Robin said gravely. ‘It has taken her
toto
…. Be quiet, or you will frighten it; stay silent while I fetch the gun.’

I waited in a place he indicated, a little way back from the river. It was wrong, of course, but I could not help feeling thankful that Twinkle had not been the victim, although still not entirely convinced. Robin returned at the head of a posse of young men with spears and the long, thin swords of the Kikuyu. They walked softly, restraining their battle cries, and some vanished above the waterfall, perhaps to cut off the snake’s retreat.

The python had moved back a little, but he was still on his rock. I had never seen him before so close and so bold. Usually all one could see was a gleam of oily motion as he slipped into the water so quietly one would think it must have opened to receive him, as the Red Sea divided before the children of Israel.

Robin’s first shot boomed out loudly among the rocks and the python’s great head, broad as a soup-plate, reared up and seemed to hang for a moment in mid-air, searching for its attacker. That pause was fatal to it; Robin’s second shot was true. The head collapsed, the huge body writhed and lashed and threshed on the rocks, like some dark cauldron boiling over, like a monstrous worm of corruption spewed up from the caverns of the earth. The Kikuyu flung off their blankets and rushed naked into the stream to save it from falling into the river, but they did not touch it until the slithering coils lay still. Then they dragged it up the bank and stretched it out: and there
in the middle, sure enough, was an enormous bulge, like a great bead strung upon a cord.

The Kikuyu began to slice the python up its pale under-side, as if they were filleting a fish. How neat and handsome were the little horny scales, each fitting so tightly with its neighbour to make a perfect coat of chain-mail! The snake shuddered as its insides parted, just as if it were alive. The black and silver skin was drawn so tightly over the bulge that you could scarcely believe it could stretch so far without bursting. A swift slash of the knife freed the object within. I saw something black and that was all, people crowded in front of me; the leg of a child, or had it not been a black hoof, a slender dark-haired ankle? I turned away, feeling sick, smothered by the long-drawn-out ee-ee-ee-ees and ay-ay-ay-ays of the Kikuyu. Then I heard Robin exclaim:

‘I’d never have believed if it I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes!’

They had cut out a goat absolutely whole, not a scratch on it, or the least sign of damage, and if the python had been shot a little earlier I believe it would have got up and walked away. As it was, the poor goat was dead, presumably from suffocation, but it must have been alive, Robin said, after it had been swallowed, and struggled in the python’s inside.

‘You see, you mustn’t worry about things that haven’t happened,’ Robin advised. ‘Twinkle is probably quite safe somewhere, enjoying herself, and so presumably is that silly woman’s child.’

Three men were needed to carry the python up the hill, where the skin was peeled off and pegged out to dry. I was worried to think that Robin might have shot the rainbow, but when I asked Njombo whether the colours would never be seen again in the sky he said vaguely that this was not the only snake and perhaps everything would be as before. I asked:

‘Why did that woman think the snake had eaten her
toto
? Is it safe?’

‘She did not think so. She has a baby in her belly. When a woman like that sees a snake it is unlucky, the baby will belong to the snake who may come to fetch it away, and so she was crying.’

I began to perceive that a third world lay beyond, inside and
intermingled with the two worlds I already knew of, those of ourselves and of the Kikuyu: a world of snakes and rainbows, of ghosts and spirits, of monsters and charms, a world that had its own laws and for the most part led its own life, but now and again, like a rock jutting up through earth and vegetation, protruded into ours, and was there all the time under the surface. It was a world in which I was a foreigner, but the Kikuyu were at home.

Every night I prayed that Twinkle might be preserved. I had faith in the charm, if only I could have been certain that it had been properly applied. With charms, everything had to be done exactly right, and when they failed, it was because some detail of their application had been faulty.

Njombo came to me a few days later and said:

‘I have news for you. There is a buck up there’ – he pointed with his chin – ‘that perhaps is Twinkle. Will you go to see?’

Mrs Nimmo did not allow rides into the reserve with Njombo, but I pleaded with Robin, and so, with some reluctance, he agreed to come too. We followed the twisting path up the ridge that led to Kupanya’s, but when we had gone about half-way we diverged, and halted by a homestead whose occupants Njombo engaged for some time in conversation. At length an elderly man in a blanket led us through some shambas and up a hill to a large boulder, and, with a monkey’s agility, clambered to the top. We followed. Evening shadows had already darkened the bottom of the valley but the boulder had the warmth of day stored in it, the warmth of life, as if it were the living flesh of the earth.

Our elder pointed across the river and spoke in Kikuyu, and Njombo translated. ‘He says that two buck come every evening to the river there.’

‘But why does he say that one of them is Twinkle?’

‘The owners of the shambas have set traps, and these duikers walk round them. A man threw a spear, he was as close to it as that tree, and the spear turned aside.’

This was just as I had feared: the enmity and wit of the Kikuyu were turned against Twinkle, no charm could be strong enough.

‘They will kill her,’ I said miserably.

‘This man says that the medicine is powerful.’

We waited for perhaps half an hour while shadows crept like a stain up the hillside, killing the gold and chestnut and copper in which the tree-trunks and the shambas had been bathed, and drawing the parrot-green from the young maize and bean-growth as one might draw wine from a flask, leaving it dull and empty. Yet the umbered purple of the shadows gave the valley its own beauty. Women passed by almost invisible under huge loads of sweet-potato tops, on their way home to feed rams imprisoned in their smoky huts to be fattened under the wooden platforms the Kikuyu used for beds. At last the old man pointed across the stream and said softly: ‘Look.’

In the pool of shade, two darker shapes were moving across a flat stretch of grass. They went jerkily, stopping often to look and listen, and now and then to crop a blade of grass, or the leaf of a shrub, as fastidiously as a queen plucking a flower for her lover. One of them wore two sharp points on his brow. Was the other Twinkle? How could I tell? Yet at that distance, in the dark shade, I felt that I recognized her, and the grace of her movements, and the proud lift of her head. As I watched her, she stood still, sniffed the air and, I could have sworn, looked straight at me, as if to say: I see you, I know you, but although I shall remember you I cannot come back, for I have returned to the freedom which is my heritage.

‘I must go and call her,’ I said.

‘She will run away,’ Njombo warned. ‘She belongs now to her bwana, not to the house any more.’

Nevertheless I set off down the hill and when I plunged into a plantation of bananas near the river I could see them standing stock-still on the farther bank. The bananas blotted out the view, and then the stream had to be crossed by stepping-stones. At last I emerged on the other side, climbed a steep place, and stood at the foot of the slope where the duikers had browsed. The hillside lay silent and lifeless, the duikers had vanished; sunlight was withdrawing from the crest of the ridge and guinea-fowl were crying in the shambas.

I called to Twinkle, but my voice sounded alien and futile, a sound that belonged to nothing, that intruded on the valley’s ancient secrecy – water whispering to stones, a soft hissing of banana fronds, goat-bells from a distance, a guinea-fowl’s chatter,
a francolin’s call. I knew then it was no good trying to follow Twinkle, that the cord of trust had snapped for ever.

We rode back silently through the darkening landscape, Moyale jiggling, even prancing sometimes, in his anxiety to be back in his stable with his evening meal. I did not mention Twinkle again, and nor did Robin, but next time he went to Nairobi he brought me a new paintbox and a book about Buffalo Bill.

Njombo, too, not long afterwards proffered a basket covered with leaves, and inside were five little speckled furry balls with legs thinner than match-sticks and bright, pin’s-head eyes. They were guinea-fowl chicks, warm and wriggling when you held them in your hand. Mrs Nimmo put them under a broody hen in a wire-netting cage to shelter them from hawks.

‘They will make good eating,’ she said, looking at those darting, grey-speckled little bright-eyed creatures with a mixture of affection and greed. At that moment I hated her. But she was kind, and had made me a dress, from material specially ordered from Nairobi, which she had worked at in the evenings by the light of a safari lamp so that it would be a surprise. There was painstaking embroidery on it, some little flowers, and drawn-thread work, and altogether it was a fine dress.

‘It’s about time you were brought up to be a young lady, not a savage,’ Mrs Nimmo said. I was pleased with the dress, and at the same time rather in awe of it; like Tilly’s ear-rings, it was beautiful but not much use, and I remarked:

‘I don’t know when I shall wear it.’

‘That’s just what I mean. This isn’t the right place for a child. I expect when the coffee comes into bearing, your daddy will send you home.’

I was thankful, even if Robin and Tilly were not, that many years would go by before the coffee was in full bearing, and everyone became rich.

A
LTHOUGH
he had not been two years in the country, Alec Wilson seemed already to be an old hand, for he was hard-working, thorough, and did not rush with a burst of enthusiasm into every new project. Robin, for instance, had been launched upon geraniums by a fellow-Scot who in a single season had ploughed, prepared, and planted a thousand acres of cuttings, and imported and erected a still capable of dealing with the resulting crop. At first this optimist’s geraniums had thrived, but a few weeks before harvest some unknown disease had killed every one. Alec would never be caught like that. He tried everything first in an experimental plot, and did not expect to make his fortune for twenty years.

Now he took on a pupil, which was a profitable thing to do, for by custom pupils paid quite a large premium for the privilege of learning the trade. They were useless for about six months because they knew no Swahili, but after that they could become a valuable help on the farm.

Alec brought his pupil over to Mrs Nimmo’s one day. He was a tall, dark young man of about eighteen called Edward Rivett, with trusting brown eyes, high cheek-bones, and a pink-and-white complexion not yet browned by the sun. This took some time to happen, because the hats everyone wore had such deep brims that the sun seldom penetrated as far as the face. In fact Edward Rivett asked permission, somewhat shyly, to keep his hat on during luncheon, because the house had a corrugated iron roof. He had already been a pupil with a farmer who had warned him never to remove his hat indoors unless the house had a ceiling, because galvanized sheets did not repel all the sun’s rays.

He was a shy, polite, soft-voiced young man who did not speak unless he was spoken to, but replied to questions about his previous farm in a dry, concise way that made us laugh. His former masters had gone in for ostriches. As soon as he arrived, they sent him to a hilltop at daybreak with a pair of binoculars, and instructions to spot the ostrich cocks getting off their nests,
soon after sunrise, on the plains below. Ostriches take it in turn to hatch their eggs, the hens by day and cocks by night – that is why cocks are black, and hens grey. At about eight o’clock he went down on the plain, found the nests he had spotted, and marked them with sticks. Later on, natives drove off the sitting hens to rob the nests, and the huge eggs (each of which would make an omelette big enough to feed twenty people) went into an incubator.