West With the Night

  Blix and Winston stormed her sides like pirates storming a sloop. They were unshaved and dirty. I had never realized before how quickly men deteriorate without razors and clean shirts. They are like potted plants that go to weed unless they are pruned and tended daily. A single day’s growth of beard makes a man look careless; two days’, derelict; and four days’, polluted. Blix and Winston hadn’t shaved for three.

  ‘Thank God, you got here!’ Winston was smiling, but his normally handsome face was half-mooned in whiskers and his eyes were definitely not gay. Blix, looking like an unkempt bear disturbed in hibernation, gave me his hand and helped me out of the cockpit.

  ‘I hated to ask you to land, but I had to.’

  ‘I guessed that. I saw you couldn’t get off the plateau. But what I don’t understand …’

  ‘Wait,’ said Blix, ‘everything will be explained — but first, have you brought anything?’

  ‘I’m afraid not — nothing to eat, anyway. Haven’t you shot anything?’

  ‘No. Not even a hare. The place is empty and we haven’t eaten for three days. That wouldn’t matter so much, but …’

  ‘But no word from Doctor Turvy? Well, I’m betraying a trust, but J. C. did send a bottle of gin for Old Man Wicks. I suppose you need it more than he does. What happened to your porters?’

  It was the wrong question. Blix and Winston exchanged glances and Blix began to swear rhythmically under his breath. He reached into the locker and got Old Man Wicks’s bottle of gin and pulled the cork out. He handed the bottle to Winston and waited. In a minute Winston handed it back and I waited, watching the largesse from Seramai go the way of all good things.

  ‘The porters are on strike,’ Winston said.

  Blix wiped his mouth and returned the bottle to his companion in exile.

  ‘Mutiny. They haven’t lifted a hand since they missed their first meal! They’ve quit.’

  ‘That’s silly. Porters don’t go on strike in Africa. They haven’t got a union.’

  Blix turned away from the plane and looked back across the runway. ‘They didn’t need one. Empty bellies constitute a common cause. Winston and I cleared that runway ourselves. I don’t think we could have made it any longer even if you had insisted on it.’

  I was impressed. Limited as it was, the runway was nevertheless a good hundred yards long and ten yards wide, and the clearing of such a space with nothing but Native pangas to use was a herculean job of work. Some of the growth must have been fifteen feet high, and all of it so dense that a man could barely force his body through it. I suppose that more than a thousand small trees, with trunks three to five inches in diameter, had been felled with those ordinary bush knives. Once the trees had fallen, their stumps had to be dug out of the earth and thrown to the side and an effort made to level the cleared ground.

  I learned later from Makula — who had diplomatically remained aloof from the labour controversy (as well as from the labour itself) — that for two nights running Blix had slipped out of his blankets when everyone else was presumably asleep and had worked straight into the morning on the clearing. Certainly he deserved his nip of gin.

  Every one of Blix’s porters, in what still is, to my knowledge, the most wonderful example of nose-slicing to spite the face, had insisted that since they had no food they could do no work. They had lounged around the makeshift camp day after day while Blix and Winston had slaved at the clearing, though it had been explained to the porters very carefully (and no doubt with some heat) that if there were no clearing, they might not see a bowl of posho for weeks to come.

  Nevertheless, Blix was worried about his porters. I think that a less just man might have been tempted to say, ‘ Starve, damn you!’ But not Blix. His reputation as a White Hunter wasn’t entirely built in the cocktail bar at Muthaiga. He said, ‘Beryl, I know it’s asking a lot, but you’ve got to get Winston out of here first, then come back for me — and then for Makula. Get Farah to give you all the beans and dry food you can carry for the porters, and bring it here after you’ve dropped Winston. It means two more landings in this hole and three take-offs. But if I didn’t think you could manage, I wouldn’t ask you to do it.’

  ‘I suppose if I ask what happens if I don’t manage, you’ll tell me how quiet it gets when the goldfish die?’

  Blix grinned. ‘Terribly quiet,’ he said, ‘but so peaceful.’

  It was small comfort to know that Winston took the same chance that I did when we attempted the take-off from the runway. I shouldn’t think that Winston weighs much less than a hundred and eighty pounds (dismounted and lightly clad), and that much weight made a lot of difference to the Avian under conditions prevailing that day on the Yatta. I insisted on waiting for a breeze, and finally got one strong enough to just bend the column of smoke that still rose from Blix’s fire.

  Winston got into the front seat, Blix swung the prop, and the Avian moved down the runway — slow, fast, faster. The wall of thicket came nearer and began to look more solid than a wall of thicket ought to look. I saw Winston shake his head and then lower it slightly. He was staring straight before him — a little like a prizefighter in a crouch.

  I held the stick forward trying to gather what speed I could before the take-off. I’m afraid I thought of Tom’s letter, but a second later I was thinking of Tom’s brilliant judgement in suggesting the Avian for African work. No other plane that I knew could have been pulled off the ground, almost literally, the way I pulled her off, without stalling. She responded like a Thoroughbred steeplechaser, missing the thicket with inches to spare. Winston abruptly came out of his crouch, swung around in the seat and winked at me — a little like the same prizefighter having won a decision in the fifteenth round. I gained altitude, throttled down, and swung toward the Tiva. It had no recognizable banks. It looked like a lake wandered from home.

  It would not be quite true to say that Arab Ruta and Farah were nervous wrecks when we arrived at Ithumba, but they were pretty obviously relieved. Farah, who is a lean, energetic Somali, inclined to talk so fast that you are still coping with his first sentence while he is waiting for an answer to the last, was of the opinion that his Bwana Blixen was touched with immortality. He did not think that anything serious could have happened to Blix, but he was aware that anyone else’s misfortune would be, in a way, also Blix’s. Farah greeted us with inquiring rather than worried eyes, while Arab Ruta rushed up to the plane and immediately inspected the landing gear, the wings, and the tail-skid. Then, a little tardily, he smiled at me.

  ‘Our plane is unhurt, Memsahib! — and you also?’

  I admitted that I was intact, at least, and prepared to take on the food needed for Blix’s rebellious porters.

  It takes a lot of practice to make perfect, but a little helps. I had no difficulty in picking up Blix or in putting him down again in the camp at Ithumba. And on the third trip, to get Makula, everything went smoothly too, except for Makula himself, who hesitated to go at all.

  ‘Ai-Ai!’ he complained in garbled Swahili, ‘how strange that hunger makes a man shake like a stick in the wind. Hunger does bad things to a man!’ He regarded the plane with a disquiet eye. ‘When one is hungry, it is better, I think, not to move.’

  ‘You won’t have to move, Makula. You can just sit in front of me until we get to camp.’

  Makula tugged at his shuka and ran his fingers up and down the sleek surface of his golden bow. He thumbed his rawhide string and made it sing a cautious song. ‘Each man is a brother to the next, M’sabu, and brothers must lean upon each other. All the porters are alone. Can I leave them?’

  The day was shorter than it had been, Blix’s fire was dead, and ‘all the porters’ were feeding in happy silence. They had won their strike and they had food enough and time enough, with no cares. What I had brought would last until the floods were down — and there was no work.

  But we needed Makula. I remembered an old Swahili phrase, and I said it: ‘A wise man is not more than a woman — unless he is also
brave.’

  The old tracker regarded me carefully for a long moment — as if I had uttered a truth from a cabala previously known only to himself and the lost ages. Then he nodded solemnly and spat on the ground. He stared at the spittle and then at the failing sun. At last he rubbed his hands on his shuka and climbed into the Avian. I swung the propeller, ran around to the rear cockpit, and got in behind him. His naked neck was rigid and ringed with glinting metal bands. White beads dangled from the bands and glinted too against his black skin. He held his bow in firm fingers and it tapered gracefully up from the cockpit like the magic wand he hoped it was. He waited until the plane moved and then he snatched from somewhere about his waist a thin blanket and bound his head with it, around and around, until he was blind as night and shapeless as fear. And then I took off.

  All the way to Ithumba my bundle never moved. Makula had always cultivated the suspicion that he was as deft at witchcraft as at tracking. He carried a little bag of wooden amulets and feathers and odd bones which, because they were rarely seen and never explained, had taken on for his confrères the quality of talismans contrived in hell. I could almost believe that Makula was using them now, calling on their darkly potent powers to suspend sense and consciousness just this once — oh, God or Devil! — for just this little time.

  I landed gently and taxied smoothly and stopped, and my bundle stirred. Blix and Winston were on hand, both relieved to see us — and both shaved. At the sound of their voices above the sound of the propeller that still ticked over with lazy ease, Makula began to unwind the blanket that his witchcraft had saved from a shroud’s duty. When his head appeared, he did not sigh nor blink his eyes; he stared at the palms of his hands and then at the sky, and nodded at nothing in a gesture of restrained approval. Things had worked out about as he had planned them; he would forgo, for the time, any minor complaints. He climbed out of the plane with a certain grace and arranged his shuka and smiled at everybody.

  ‘Well, Makula,’ said Blix, ‘how did you like your first trip through the air?’

  I think it was less a question than a pleasant gibe — and there was an audience to hear the answer. Not only Farah and Ruta, but those porters who had stayed with the camp, had joined the circle that honoured old Makula. We thought the glibness of his tongue was being put to test, but he thought it was his dignity. He made himself a little taller and skewered Blix with a glance.

  ‘Baba Yangu (Father of Mine), I have done many things — and so this was no great thing to me. To a Kikuyu, or a Wandorobo, or a Kavirondo, it might be a great thing to fly through the air. But I have seen much of the world.’

  ‘As much as you saw today, Makula?’

  ‘Not so much at one time, Baba Yangu. Today, it is true, I saw the great sea down there by Mombasa, and the top of Kilamanjaro, and the place where the Mau Forest ends — but those things I had seen before, by myself.’

  ‘You saw all those things today?’ Farah’s scepticism went undisguised. ‘You could not have seen those things, Makula. You did not fly so far, and we all know that your head was wrapped in your own blanket! Can men see, then, through darkness?’

  Makula let his long fingers caress the little bag of witchery that hung from his waist. He turned to his accuser and smiled with magnificent forgiveness.

  ‘Not all men, Farah. Who could expect so much of God?’

  You could expect many things of God at night when the campfire burned before the tents. You could look through and beyond the veils of scarlet and see shadows of the world as God first made it and hear the voices of the beasts He put there. It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation’s hour had left it.

  In a sense it was formless. When the low stars shone over it and the moon clothed it in silver fog, it was the way the firmament must have been when the waters had gone and the night of the Fifth Day had fallen on creatures still bewildered by the wonder of their being. It was an empty world because no man had yet joined sticks to make a house or scratched the earth to make a road or embedded the transient symbols of his artifice in the clean horizon. But it was not a sterile world. It held the genesis of life and lay deep and anticipant under the sky.

  You were alone when you sat and talked with the others — and they were alone. This is so wherever you are if it is night and a fire burns in free flames rising to a free wind. What you say has no ready ear but your own, and what you think is nothing except to yourself. The world is there, and you are here — and these are the only poles, the only realities.

  You talk, but who listens? You listen, but who talks? Is it someone you know? And do the things he says explain the stars or give an answer to the quiet questions of a single sleepless bird? Think of these questions; fold your arms across your knees and stare at the firelight and at the embers waning on its margin. The questions are your questions too.

  ‘Sigilisa!’ (Listen!) ‘Simba is hungry tonight.’

  So a Native boy interprets the first warning of a distant lion stalking in a distant silence. A jackal skirts the red pool of comfort that warms you, a tent flap chatters in the wind.

  But Simba is not hungry. He is alone, too, companionless in his courage, friendless in his magnificence — uneasy in the night. He roars, and so he joins our company, and hyenas join it, laughing in the hills. And a leopard joins it, letting us feel his presence, but hear nothing. Rhino — buffalo — where are they? Well, they are here too — somewhere here — just there, perhaps, where that bush thickens or that copse of thorn trees hides the sky. They are here, all are here, unseen and scattered, but sharing with us a single loneliness.

  Someone stands up and stirs the fire which needs no stirring, and Arab Ruta brings more logs, though there are logs enough. Another fire burns a little distance from our own where the black porters squat as if they are fitted into niches of the night.

  Somebody attempts to break the loneliness. It is Blix, asking a simple question that everybody answers, but nobody has listened to. Winston stares at the tips of his boots like a child who has never before had boots and never wants to lose them. I sit with a notebook on my knee and a pencil in my hand, trying to write a list of what I need, and writing nothing. I must answer Tom, too. He has written to say that he has entered for the International Air Race from Mildenhall to Melbourne. Eleven thousand and three hundred miles — half around the world almost. England to Australia. I should be in England. I ought to fly to England again. I know the route: Khartoum — Wadi Halfa, Luxor, Cairo, Benghazi, Tobruk … Tripoli and the Mediterranean … France and England. Six thousand miles — only a quarter around the world, and take your time. Well … I wonder.

  ‘Want to fly to London, Blix?’

  He says yes without even looking up from the rifle he’s fiddling with.

  ‘It’s funny about that elephant,’ says Winston.

  Winston is still up there on the Yatta. ‘Not even a spoor!’ He shakes his head. ‘Not a single sign,’ he says.

  Arab Ruta stands just behind me and Farah is next to him. They are there on the pretext of serving, but actually they are there just as we are there — thinking, talking, dreaming.

  ‘In Aden,’ says Farah to Ruta, ‘where I was born, there by the Red Sea in Arabia, we used to go out on the water in boats that had each one wing, brown and very high, and the wind pushed this wing and carried us along. Sometimes at night the wind would stop — and then it was like this.’

  ‘I have seen the sea at Mombasa,’ says Arab Ruta, ‘and at night too. I do not think the sea is like this. It moves. Here, nothing moves.’

  Farah thinks, Blix whistles a few low notes from a knockabout tune, Winston ponders his phantom elephant, and I scribble by the light of the fire.

  ‘The sea at Mombasa,’ Farah says, ‘is not the same sea.’

  Momentarily the categorical pronouncement confounds Ruta. He bends to pick a log from the ground and toss it into the fire, but he is thoughtful.

  ‘How big would you say that bull was?’ Winston looks at Blix and
then at me.

  Blix shrugs. ‘The one on the Yatta? Very big.’

  ‘Tusks over a hundred?’

  ‘Nearer two,’ says Blix. ‘He was very big.’

  ‘Well, it’s damned funny we never even saw his spoor.’

  Winston relapses into silence and stares at the night as if his elephant might be there, swinging his huge trunk from side to side in soundless derision. Up on the plateau, the meeting place of Greek and Greek waits with no Greeks at hand.

  I return to my list of things needed, but not for long. I wonder if I should have a change — a year in Europe this time — something new, something better, perhaps. A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think.

  It is no good telling yourself that one day you will wish you had never made that change; it is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.

  Still, I look at my yesterdays for months past, and find them as good a lot of yesterdays as anybody might want. I sit there in the firelight and see them all.

  The hours that made them were good, and so were the moments that made the hours. I have had responsibilities and work, dangers and pleasure, good friends, and a world without walls to live in. These things I still have, I remind myself — and shall have until I leave them.

  I nod stupidly at something Blix says and idly contribute a twig to our fire.

  ‘Are you falling asleep?’

  ‘Asleep? No. No, I am just thinking.’ And so I am. I spend so much time alone that silence has become a habit.

  Often, except for Ruta and Farah, I am alone at safari headquarters day after day, night after night, while the hunters, following a herd that I bave found or waiting for me to find one, are camped miles away. At dawn they expect the sound of my Avian, and it always comes.