West with the Night (8 page)

Singing it still, I took up my trot toward the rim of the low hill which might, if I were lucky, have Cape gooseberry bushes on its slopes. The country was grey-green and dry, and the sun lay on it closely, making the ground hot under my bare feet. There was no sound and no wind.

Even Paddy made no wound, coming swiftly behind me.

What I remember most clearly of the moment that followed are three things — a scream that was barely a whisper, a blow that struck me to the ground, and, as I buried my face in my arms and felt Paddy’s teeth close on the flesh of my leg, a fantastically bobbing turban, that was Bishon Singh’s turban appear over the edge of the hill.

I remained conscious, but I closed my eyes and tried not to be. It was not so much the pain as it was the sound.

The sound of Paddy’s roar in my ears will only be duplicated, I think, when the doors of hell slip their wobbly hinges, one day, and give voice and authenticity to the whole panorama of Dante’s poetic nightmares. It was an immense roar that encompassed the world and dissolved me into it.

I shut my eyes very tight and lay still under the weight of Paddy’s paws.

Bishon Singh said afterward that he did nothing. He said he had remained by the hay shed for a few minutes after I ran past him, and then, for no explainable reason, had begun to follow me. He admitted, though, that, a little while before, he had seen Paddy go in the direction I had taken.

The Sikh called for help, of course, when he saw the lion meant to attack, and a half-dozen of Elkington’s syces had come running from the house. Along with them had come Jim Elkington with a rawhide whip.

Jim Elkington, even without a rawhide whip, was very impressive. He was one of those enormous men whose girths alone seem to preclude any possibility of normal movement, much less of speed. But Jim had speed — not to be loosely compared with lightning, but rather like the cannon balls of the Napoleonic Wars. Jim was, without question, a man of considerable courage, but in the case of my Rescue From the Lion, it was, I am told, his momentum rather than his bravery for which I must be forever grateful.

It happened like this — as Bishon Singh told it;

‘I am resting against the walls of the place where hay is kept and first the large lion, and then you, Beru, pass me going toward the open field, and a thought comes to me that a lion and a young girl are strange company, so I follow. I follow to the place where the hill that goes up becomes the hill that goes down, and where it goes down deepest I see that you are running without much thought in your head and the lion is running behind you with many thoughts in his head, and I scream for everybody to come very fast.

‘Everybody comes very fast, but the large lion is faster than anybody, and he jumps on your back and I see you scream but I hear no scream. I only hear the lion, and I begin to run with everybody, and this includes Bwana Elkington, who is saying a great many words I do not know and is carrying a long kiboko which he holds in his hand and is meant for beating the large lion.

‘Bwana Elkington goes past me the way a man with lighter legs and fewer inches around his stomach might go past me, and he is waving the long kiboko so that it whistles over all of our heads like a very sharp wind, but when we get close to the lion it comes to my mind that that lion is not of the mood to accept a kiboko.

‘He is standing with the front of himself on your back, Beru, and you are bleeding in three or five places, and he is roaring. I do not believe Bwana Elkington could have thought that that lion at that moment would consent to being beaten, because the lion was not looking the way he had ever looked before when it was necessary for him to be beaten. He was looking as if he did not wish to be disturbed by a kiboko, or the Bwana, or the syces, or Bishon Singh, and he was saying so in a very large voice.

‘I believe that Bwana Elkington understood this voice when he was still more than several feet from the lion, and I believe the Bwana considered in his mind that it would be the best thing not to beat the lion just then, but the Bwana when he runs very fast is like the trunk of a great baobob tree rolling down a slope, and it seems that because of this it was not possible for him to explain the thought of his mind to the soles of his feet in a sufficient quickness of time to prevent him from rushing much closer to the lion than in his heart he wished to be.

‘And it was this circumstance, as I am telling it,’ said Bishon Singh, ‘which in my considered opinion made it possible for you to be alive, Beru.’

‘Bwana Elkington rushed at the lion then, Bishon Singh?’

‘The lion, as of the contrary, rushed at Bwana Elkington,’ said Bishon Singh. ‘The lion deserted you for the Bwana, Beru. The lion was of the opinion that his master was not in any honest way deserving of a portion of what he, the lion, had accomplished in the matter of fresh meat through no effort by anybody except himself.’

Bishon Singh offered this extremely reasonable interpretation with impressive gravity, as if he were expounding the Case For the Lion to a chosen jury of Paddy’s peers.

‘Fresh meat’ … I repeated dreamily, and crossed my fingers.

‘So then what happened …?’

The Sikh lifted his shoulders and let them drop again ‘What could happen, Beru? The lion rushed for Bwana Elkington, who in his turn rushed from the lion, and in so rushing did not keep in his hand the long kiboko, but allowed it to fall upon the ground, and in accomplishing this the Bwana was free to ascend a very fortunate tree, which he did.’

‘And you picked me up, Bishon Singh?’

He made a little dip with his massive turban. ‘I was happy with the duty of carrying you back to this very bed, Beru, and of advising your father, who had gone to observe some of Bwana Elkington’s horses, that you had been moderately eaten by the large lion. Your father returned very fast, and Bwana Elkington some time later returned very fast, but the large lion has not returned at all.’

The large lion had not returned at all. That night he killed a horse, and the next night he killed a yearling bullock, and after that a cow fresh for milking.

In the end he was caught and finally caged, but brought to no rendezvous with the firing squad at sunrise. He remained for years in his cage, which, had he managed to live in freedom with his inhibitions, he might never have seen at all.

It seems characteristic of the mind of man that the repression of what is natural to humans must be abhorred, but that what is natural to an infinitely more natural animal must be confined within the bounds of a reason peculiar only to men — more peculiar sometimes than seems reasonable at all.

Paddy lived, people stared at him and he stared back, and this went on until he was an old, old lion. Jim Elkington died, and Mrs. Elkington, who really loved Paddy, was forced, because of circumstances beyond her control or Paddy’s, to have him shot by Boy Long, the manager of Lord Delamere’s estates.

This choice of executioners was, in itself, a tribute to Paddy, for no one loved animals more or understood them better, or could shoot more cleanly than Boy Long.

But the result was the same to Paddy. He had lived and died in ways not of his choosing. He was a good lion. He had done what he could about being a tame lion. Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error?

I still have the sears of his teeth and claws, but they are very small now and almost forgotten, and I cannot begrudge him his moment.

T
HE FARM AT NJORO
was endless, but it was no farm at all until my father made it. He made it out of nothing and out of everything — the things of which all farms are made. He made it out of forest and bush rocks, new earth, sun, and torrents of warm rain. He made it out of labour and out of patience.

He was no farmer. He bought the land because it was cheap and fertile, and because East Africa was new and you could feel the future of it under your feet.

It looked like this at first: It was a broad stretch of land, part of it open valley, but most of it roofed with the heads of high trees — cedar, ebony, mahogo, teak and bamboo — and their trunks were snared in miles of creeping plants. The creeping plants rose to heights of twelve and fifteen feet and, from the ground, you never saw the tops of the trees until they fell from the blows of axes and were dragged away by teams of oxen handled by Dutchmen with whips that cracked all day.

People called Wanderobo lived in the forests and hunted in them with bows and poisoned arrows and poisoned spears, but they were never a threat to any of my father’s men or to us. They were not quarrelsome people. They hid in the creeping vines, in the trees, and the underbrush and watched the work of the axes and the teams of oxen and moved deeper into the growth.

When the farm began to acquire an atmosphere of permanence and the yard in front of the first few huts was trampled hard and dogs sprawled on it in the sun, some of these Wanderobo would come out of the forest bringing the black and white skins of Colobus monkeys to trade for salt and oil and sugar. The skins were sewn together to make soft rugs for the beds, and I remembered them long after they were worn out and forgotten and Colobus monkeys were no longer easy to find — and the farm had become almost an industry.

By then there were a thousand Kavirondo and Kikuyu working on it instead of ten or twenty, and hundreds of oxen instead of just a few. The forest had fallen back, giving ground with the grim dignity of a respected enemy, and fields were cleaned of the rocks and bush that had lent them the character of wilderness for centuries. Huts had become houses, sheds had become stables, cattle had cut paths in the prairie.

My father bought two old steam engines and anchored them to make power for a grist mill. It was as if there had never before been a grist mill anywhere, as if all the maize in the world waited to be ground and all the wheat ever grown needed only to be made into flour.

You could stand on a hill and look down on the dirt-track road that went to Kampi ya Moto, where the maize was so tall that the tallest man seemed like a child when he walked in it, and you could see a ribbon of wagons, each drawn by sixteen oxen, coming loaded with grain to the farm. Sometimes the wagons followed so close upon one another that the ribbon seemed motionless. But at the entrance to the mill, you could see that it almost never stopped.

The mill never stopped, and the crew of Kavirondo who unloaded the heavy bags and reloaded them again, the coarse grain ground smooth and yellow, moved from dawn until dark, and sometimes after dark, like the lesser members of a great ballet set to the music of steam and turning millstones.

Nearly all the produce of the mill, the flour, and the posho, went to the Government to feed the labourers of the Uganda Railway.

This was a good enough railway as far as it went (from Mombasa to Kisumu), but it had an unhappy youth. As late as 1900 its trains were afraid to go out in the dark — and with reason. Lion infested the country it traversed, and a passenger or an engineer was either a brave man or one with a suicidal phobia to disembark at any of the outlying stations unarmed.

A telegraph line followed the rails to Kisumu about 1902 — or it was intended that one should. The posts were there, and the wire too, but rhino take sensual and sadistic pleasure in scratching their great hulks against telegraph posts, and any baboon worthy of his salt cannot resist swinging from suspended wires. Often a herd of giraffe found it expedient to cross the railroad tracks, but would not condescend to bow to the elevated metal strands that proclaimed the White Man’s mandate over their feeding grounds. As a result, many telegrams en route from Mombasa to Kisumu, or the other way around, were intercepted, their cryptic dots and dashes frozen in a festoon of golden wire dangling from one or another of the longest necks in Africa.

With the money my father made out of the posho and flour, he bought two more old railway engines, fitted them with pulleys, and started the first important sawmill in British East Africa.

In time settlers who had lived in mud and daub huts built cedar houses and slabwood barns with shingled roofs, and the horizon took new shape and new colour. Thousands of cords of wood went from our farm into the fire boxes of the arrogant little engines of the Uganda Railway, and on dark nights the immense piles of sawdust slowly burning by the mill were like mountains with volcanic summits, dwarfed by distance.

Our stables grew from a few stalls to long rows of loose-boxes, and our Thoroughbred horses grew from two to a dozen, and then to a hundred, until my father had recovered his old love again, which had always been horses, and I gained my first love which has never left me.

Nor has my memory of the farm at Njoro ever left me.

I would stand in the little yard before the first of our few huts, and the deep Mau Forest would be behind me at my shoulder, and the Rongai Valley would be sloping downward from the tips of my toes. On clear days I could touch, almost, the high, charred rim of the Menegai Crater and see, by shadowing my eyes, the crown of Kenya studded in ice. I could see the peak of Sattima behind the Liakipia Escarpment that got purple when the sun rose, and smell the cedar wood and fresh-cut mahogo and hear the cracks of the Dutchmen’s whips over the heads of their oxen. Sometimes the syces would sing at their work, and all day long the mares and their foals would romp and feed in the pastures or make the soothing sounds that horses make with their nostrils and with their hooves rustling the deep grass bedding in the stables. At a little distance, their imperious lords, the stallions, fretted amiably in more luxurious boxes and grew sleek and steel-muscled under constant care.

But ours was not the only farm at Njoro. Lord Delamare, whose brilliant, if vibratory, character helped so much to shape the mould in which the Kenya of today is cast, was our nearest neighbour.

His place, called ‘Equator Ranch’ because the Equator crossed a corner of it, had its headquarters in a little cluster of thatched huts snuggled against the foothills of the Mau Escarpment.

Those huts were the nucleus of what later became, through Delamere’s courage and persistence, his vile temper and soft charm, his vision and peculiar blindness to other points of view, not only an exemplary farm for all of British East Africa to profit by, but almost a small feudal state as well.