West With the Night

  One of the games was jumping, because the Nandi said that a boy or a man must be able to jump as high as himself to be any good at all, and Kibii and I were determined to be good. When I left Njoro, at last, I could still jump higher than my head. I could wrestle too, the Nandi way, because Kibii taught me all the holds and the various tricks and how to pick another toto up over my head and throw him to the ground.

  Among my galaxy of scars is one which an ungallant Nandi boy, whom I had bested in a wrestling bout, made with his father’s sword. He waited until he caught me walking alone one day about two miles from the farm, and then he rushed from behind a thorn tree swinging the weapon like a demented Turk. I had a knobkerrie in my hand at the time and I caught him behind the ear with it in the fight that followed, but not before he had slashed my leg above the knee as deeply as his sword would go.

  There were quiet days when Kibii and I played, all during the long afternoons, a game that took me months to learn and, having forgotten it, I could never learn again. I remember only that we used the little poisonous yellow sodom apples for counters and a series of round holes in the ground for our board, and that the mental arithmetic required was more than I have since used in twenty years. We would play it in the shade of the wattle trees, or, after finishing our work with the horses, down behind the walls of the stables, sitting cross-legged over the smooth yellow balls like diminutive practitioners of black magic, waiting for a Sign. I had a small allowance of rupees from my father and Kibii had a salary of sorts. We gambled like fiends with this largesse, but neither of us established the roots of a fortune with our winnings, though a few of the coins of the realm were worn thinner.

  You couldn’t live in Africa and not hunt. Kibii taught me how to shoot with a bow and arrow, and when we found we could shoot wood-pigeons and blue starlings and waxbills, by way of practice, we decided on bigger things. Kibii had a daring plan, but it didn’t work. We invaded the Mau Forest one day and haunted its church-like aisles and recesses until we found a Wandorobo huntsman, a wizened little man barely taller than a bush-buck, and begged him for poison for our arrows. Kibii was furious when the Wandorobo wisely refused on the grounds that we were too young to tamper with such things, and we crept out of the forest again just before dark — as non-poisonous as we had entered it.

  ‘When I am a Murani …!’ Kibii said with impotent ferocity. ‘Just wait until I am a Murani …!’

  On nights when there was a full moon we would sometimes go to the Kikuyu ingomas, which were tribal dances held usually behind a tall ridge on Delamere’s Equator Ranch. As a Nandi, Kibii had only a generous tolerance for the Kikuyu dances, though, when pressed, he admitted that the singing was good.

  The Kikuyu are more like the Kavirondo in their way of living than like the Masai or the Nandi. But physically they are the least impressive of all. It may be because they are primarily agriculturists, and generations of looking to the earth for their livelihood have dulled what fire there might once have been in their eyes and what will to excel might have been in their hearts. They have lost inspiration for beauty. They are a hard-working people; from the viewpoint of Empire, a docile and therefore a useful people. Their character is constant, even strong, but it is lustreless.

  The flippancy of the Kikuyu dances always shocked Kibii. The emotional ones, he thought, seemed carnal — and the purely spiritual ones lacked dignity. But I think his impatience was touched with tribal vanity.

  At any rate, there were few Kikuyu ingomas whose audiences did not include Kibii, the critic, and myself.

  When the edge of the moon cut into the night and the flat, grassy meadow behind the ridge on Equator Ranch was light enough to receive the shadows of moving bodies, the dancers formed in a ring. The heads of the girls were shaved smooth and the heads of the young men were resplendent in long plaits of hair decorated with coloured feathers. The young men wore rattles of metal on their legs, shaped like cowrie shells, and the skins of serval-cats swayed and dangled from their buttocks. They wore the black-and-white tails of Colobus monkeys and made them writhe like snakes when the dance was on. They sang in voices that were so much a part of Africa, so quick to blend with the night and the tranquil veldt and the labyrinths of forest that made their background, that the music seemed without sound. It was like a voice upon another voice, each of the same timbre.

  The young men and the girls together stood in a wide circle with their arms on each other’s shoulders. The white light of the moon bathed their black bodies, making them blacker. A leader stood alone in the centre of the ring and began the chant; he struck the spark of their song and it caught on the tinder of their youth and ran around the ring like a flame. It was a song of love — of this man’s love and of that one’s. It was a song that changed as many times as there were young men to proclaim their manhood, and lasted as long as there were young girls to trill their applause.

  The leader swayed in the centre of the ring. The chorus took volume, the feet of the dancers began their rhythmic stomp, the tempo of the song grew faster. Chanting, the leader jumped into the air, holding his heels together, giving the song its beat. His head jerked back and forth on a rigid neck; the breasts of the young girls rose and fell with the vigour of the dance as the chorus snatched the last line of each verse and rolled it again and again from a hundred throats.

  When the leader was exhausted, there was another to take his place, and after that another, and another, but the one who stayed the longest and leapt the highest was the hero of the night, and his crown was forged from the smiles of the girls.

  Almost always it was dawn when the dance was over, but at times Kibii and I left when it was still dark. We liked walking in the dark, past the edge of the forest, listening to the shrill cry of the hyrax and the noise of the crickets that sounded like the snipping of a million shears.

  ‘When the world began,’ Kibii said, ‘each animal, even the Chameleon, had a task to do. I learned it from my father and my grandfather, and all our people know this fact.’

  ‘The world began too long ago,’ I said — ‘longer than anybody could remember. Who could remember what the Chameleon did when the world began?’

  ‘Our people remember,’ said Kibii, ‘because God told it to our first ol-oiboni, and this one told it to the next. Each ol-oiboni, before he died, repeated to the new ol-oiboni what God had said — and so we know these things. We know that the Chameleon is accursed above all other animals because, if it had not been for him, there would be no Death.

  ‘It was like this,’ said Kibii:

  ‘When the first man was made, he wandered alone in the great forest and on the plains, and he worried very much because he could not remember yesterday and so he could not imagine tomorrow. God saw this, so he sent the Chameleon to the first man (who was a Nandi) with a message, saying that there would never be such a thing as death and that tomorrow would be like today, and that the days would never stop.

  ‘Long after the Chameleon had started,’ said Kibii, ‘God sent an Egret with a different message, saying that there would be a thing called Death and that, sometime, tomorrow would not come. “Whichever message comes first to the ears of man,” God warned, “will be the true one.”

  ‘Now the Chameleon is a lazy animal. He thinks of nothing but food, and he moves only his tongue to get that. He lagged so much along the way that he arrived at the feet of the first man only a moment before the Egret.

  ‘The Chameleon began to talk, but he could not. In the excitement of trying to deliver his tidings of eternal life, before the Egret could speak, the Chameleon could only stutter and change, stupidly, from one colour to another. So the Egret, in a calm voice, gave the message of Death.

  ‘Since then,’ said Kibii, ‘all men have died. Our people know this fact.’

  At that time I was naïve enough to ponder the verity of such fables.

  In the years that have passed, I have read and heard more scholarly expositions upon similar subjects; God has changed from G
od to an Unknown Quantity, the Chameleon has become x and the Egret y. Life goes on until Death stops it. The questions are the same, but the symbols are different.

  Still, the Chameleon is a gay if sluggish fellow, and the Egret is a pretty bird. There are doubtless better answers, but somehow, nowadays, I prefer Kibii’s.

  IX

  Royal Exile

  TO AN EAGLE OR to an owl or to a rabbit, man must seem a masterful and yet a forlorn animal; he has but two friends. In his almost universal unpopularity he points out, with pride, that these two are the dog and the horse. He believes, with an innocence peculiar to himself, that they are equally proud of this alleged confraternity. He says, ‘Look at my two noble friends — they are dumb, but they are loyal.’ I have for years suspected that they are only tolerant.

  Suspecting it, I have nevertheless depended on this tolerance all my life, and if I were, even now, without either a dog or a horse in my keeping, I should feel I had lost contact with the earth. I should be as concerned as a Buddhist monk having lost contact with Nirvana.

  Horses in particular have been as much a part of my life as past birthdays. I remember them more clearly. There is no phase of my childhood I cannot recall by remembering a horse I owned then, or one my father owned, or one I knew. They were not all gentle and kind. They were not all alike. With some my father won races and with some he lost. His black-and-yellow colours have swept past the post from Nairobi to Peru, to Durban. Some horses he brought thousands of miles from England just for breeding.

  Camciscan was one of these.

  When he came to Njoro, I was a straw-haired girl with lanky legs and he was a stallion bred out of a stud book thick as a tome — and partly out of fire. The impression of his coming and of the first weeks that followed are clear in my mind.

  But sometimes I wonder how it seemed to him.

  He arrived in the early morning, descending the ramp from the noisy little train with the slow step of a royal exile. He held his head above the heads of those who led him, and smelled the alien earth and the thin air of the Highlands. It was not a smell that he knew.

  There was a star of white on his forehead; his nostrils were wide and showed crimson like the lacquered nostrils of a Chinese dragon. He was tall, deep in girth, slender-chested, on strong legs clean as marble.

  He was not chestnut; he was neither brown nor sorrel. He stood uncertainly against the foreign background — a rangy bay stallion swathed in sunlight and in a sheen of reddish gold.

  He knew that this was freedom again. He knew that the darkness and the terrifying movement of the ship that strained his legs and bruised his body against walls too close together were gone now.

  The net of leather rested on his head in those same places, and the long lines that he had learned to follow hung from the thing in his mouth that could not be bitten. But these he was used to. He could breathe, and he could feel the spring of the earth under his hooves. He could shake his body, and he could see that there was distance here, and a breadth of land into which he fitted. He opened his nostrils and smelled the heat and the emptiness of Africa and filled his lungs and let the rush of air go out of them again in a low, undulant murmur.

  He knew men. In the three quick years of his life he had seen more of them than of his own kind. He understood that men were to serve him and that, in exchange, he was to concede them the indulgence of minor whims. They got upon his back and most often he let them stay. They rubbed his body and did things to his hooves, none of which was really unpleasant. He judged them by their smells and by the way they touched him. He did not like a hand with a tremor, or a band that was hard, or one that moved too quickly. He did not trust the smell of a man that had nothing of the earth in it nor any sweat in it. Men’s voices were bad, but there were some not too loud that came to his ears slowly, without insistence, and these he could bear.

  A white man came up to him now and walked around him. Other men, all of them very black — as black as his own mane — stood in a circle and watched the first man. The stallion was used to this. It was always the same, and it made him impatient. It made him bend the sleek bow of his neck and jab at the earth with his hooves.

  The white man put a hand on the stallion’s shoulder and said a word that he knew because it was an old word and almost all men said it when they touched him or when they saw him.

  The white man said, ‘So you are Camciscan,’ and the black men repeated, more slowly, ‘Camciscan,’ one after another. And a girl, who was white too, with straw-coloured hair and legs like a colt’s, said ‘Camciscan’ several times.

  The girl seemed foolishly happy saying it. She came close to him and said it again and he thought her smell was good enough, but he saw that she was familiar in her manner and he blew a little snort into her straw-coloured hair to warn her, but she only laughed. She was attended by a dog, ugly with scars, who never left her heels.

  After a little while the girl tugged gently on the lines Camciscan had learned to follow, and so he followed.

  The black men, the white girl, the scarred dog, and the bay stallion walked along a dirt road while the white man rode far ahead in a buggy.

  Camciscan looked neither to one side nor another. He saw nothing but the road before him. He walked as if he were completely alone, like an abdicated king. He felt alone. The country smelled unused and clean, and the smells of the black men and the white girl were not outside of his understanding. But still he was alone and he felt some pride in that, as he always had.

  He found the farm large and to his liking. It harboured many other horses in long rows of stables, but his box was separate from theirs.

  He remembered the old routine of food and saddle and workout and rest, but he did not remember ever being attended before by a girl with straw-coloured hair and legs that were too long, like a colt’s. He did not mind, but the girl was too familiar. She walked into his stall as if they had been old friends, and he had no need of friends.

  He depended upon her for certain things, but, in turn, she got on his back in the morning and they went to a valley bigger than any he had ever seen, or sometimes up the side of a certain hill that was very high, and then they came back again.

  In time he found himself getting used to the girl, but he would not let it be more than that. He could feel that she was trying to break through the loneliness that he lived by, and he remembered the reasons there were to mistrust men. He could not see that she was any different, but he felt that she was, and that disturbed him.

  In the early morning she would come to his stable, slip his head-collar on and remove his heavy rug. She would smooth him down with a cloth and brush his black mane and his tail. She would clean the urine from his floor, and separate the good bedding from that spoiled with manure. She did these things with care. She did them with a kind of intimate knowledge of his needs and with a scarcely hidden sense of possession which he felt — and resented.

  He was by Spearmint out of Camlarge, and the blood flowed arrogantly in arrogant veins.

  Mornings came when Camciscan waited for the girl with his ears and with his eyes, because he had learned the sound of her bare feet on the ground that was still unsoftened by any sun, and he could distinguish the tangle of straw-coloured hair among other things. But when she was in his stable, he retreated to a far corner and stood watching her work.

  He sometimes felt the urge to move closer to her, but the loneliness of which he was so proud never permitted this. Instead, the urge turned often to anger which was, to himself, as unreasonable as the unprovoked anger of another might have been. He did not understand this anger; when it had passed, he would tremble as if he had caught the scent of something evil.

  The girl vaulted to his back one morning, as she always did when they went to the hill or the valley, and the anger surged suddenly through his body like a quick pain. He threw her from him so that she fell against the root of a tree and lay there with blood running through the straw-coloured hair. Her legs that were too l
ong, like a colt’s, did not move even when the white man and the black men carried her away.

  Afterward, Camciscan trembled and sweated in his box and let his mistrust of the men who tried to feed him boil into hate. For seven mornings the girl did not return.

  When she did return, he moved again to the farthest corner and watched her work, or stood still as death while she lifted his feet, one by one, and cleaned them with a hard tool that never hurt. He was a Thoroughbred stallion and he knew nothing of remorse. He knew that there were things that made him tremble and things that filled him with anger. He did not know, always, what these things were.

  He did not know what the thing was that made him tremble on the morning he saw the chestnut filly, or how it happened that there was suddenly a voice in his throat that came to his own ears unfamiliar and distant, startling him. He saw his dignity slip away like a blanket fallen from his back, and pride that had never before deserted him was in an instant shamefully vanished.

  He saw the filly, smooth, young. and with a saunter in her pose, standing in an open field, under the care of four black men. Unaccountably, he had been led to this field, and unaccountably he strained against restraint toward this filly.

  Camciscan called to her in a tone as unfamiliar to him as it was to her, but there must have been danger in it. It was a new sound that he did not know himself. He went toward her, holding his head high, lifting his clean legs, and the filly broke from the kicking-straps that held her and fled, screaming, in a voice as urgent as his own.

  For the first time in his life he would have exchanged the loneliness he lived by for something else, but his willingness had gained him only the humility of rejection and disdain. He could understand this, but not more than this. He returned to his stable, not trembling. He returned walking with careful steps, each as even as another.