West With the Night

  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.

  Delamere had two great loves — East Africa and the Masai People. To the country he gave his genius, most of his substance, and all of his energy. To the Masai he gave the help and understanding of a mind unhampered by the smug belief that the white man’s civilization has nothing to learn from the black man’s preferred lack of it. He respected the spirit of the Masai, their traditions, their physical magnificence, and their knowledge of cattle which, excepting war, was their only concern.

  He spoke to their ol-oiboni with the same respect he employed in addressing his equals or he turned his fury loose upon them with the same lack of respect he occasionally employed in addressing certain of his associates, members of the Government, and on at least one occasion the Governor himself.

  Delamere’s character had as many facets as a cut stone, but each facet shone with individual brightness. His generosity is legendary, but so is his sometimes wholly unjustified anger. He was profligate with money — his own and what he could borrow; but he spent nothing on himself and was scrupulously honest. He withstood physical hardships with stoical indifference, but he was a sick man most of his life. To him nothing in the world was more important than the agricultural and political future of British East Africa — and so, he was a serious man. Yet his gaiety and occasional abandonment to the spirit of fun, which I have often witnessed, could hardly be equalled except by an ebullient schoolboy. Delamere looked and sometimes acted like Puck, but those who had the temerity to scratch him found a nature more Draconian than whimsical underneath.

  Although in later years I managed his Stud at Soysambu before I learned to fly, and before I thought it possible that I should ever want to do anything except handle horses, my understanding of him, or at least of his work in the Protectorate, grew largely out of my association with the first Lady Delamere while I was still a child.

  She was, in a sense, my adopted mother, since I lived alone with my father on the farm at Njoro, and over a period of several years there were few days when I did not visit ‘Lady D.’ at Equator Ranch. I cannot remember a time when her understanding of my youthful problems was lacking or her advice withheld.

  Delamere is revered and remembered as a man who faced hard tasks with irresistible will — and accomplished them all. Lady Delamere, in the memory of those who knew her, faced what to her must have been even harder tasks with perhaps less will than patience, less aptitude than loyalty to her husband’s ambitions; and if Delamere was the champion of the East African settler (as indeed he was), then the devotion and comradeship of his wife were as responsible for his many victories as his own genius.

  So the two homesteads at Njoro — Delamere’s and my father’s — while their huts were not within sight of each other, stood shoulder to shoulder under the dark brow of the Escarpment and waited for East Africa to grow.

  Wainina, the head syce, tolled the stable bell each morning and its rusty voice brought wakefulness to the farm. The Dutchmen inspanned their oxen, syces reached for their saddles, the engines at the mills got up steam. Milkers, herdsmen, poultry boys, swineherds, gardeners, and house boys rubbed their eyes, smelled the weather, and trotted to their jobs.

  On ordinary days Buller and I were a part of this, but on hunting days we escaped before the bell had struck a note and before the cocks had stretched their wings on the fences. I had lessons to do, and therefore lessons to avoid.

  I remember one such day.

  It began with the stirring of Buller asleep, as always, at the foot of my reimpie bed in the mud and daub hut we shared together — and with the hustle and hum of a million small insects.

  I moved, I stretched, I opened my eyes on the far tableland of the Liakipia Escarpment outlined in the frame of my un-glazed window, and I stepped on the earthen floor.

  The water in the stable bucket was cold on my face, because nights in the East African Highlands are cold. The rawhide thong I tied around my waist was stiff and the blade of my ‘bushman’s friend’ was unfriendly. Even the shaft of my Masai spear, which surely had life of its own, was rigid and unyielding, and its steel point, sunk in a sheath of black ostrich feather, emerged from it like a dull stone. The morning was still part of the night and its colour was grey.

  I patted Buller and he wagged his lump of a tail to say he understood the need for silence. Buller was my accomplice in everything. He was a past-master at stealth and at more other things than any dog I ever owned or knew.

  His loyalty to me was undeviating, but I could never think of him as being a sentimental dog, a dog fit for a pretty story of the kind that tears the heartstrings off their pegs; he was too rough, too tough, and too aggressive.

  He was bull terrier and English sheep dong, thoroughly mixed, and turned out to look not very much like either. His jaw protruded, though, and his muscles were hard and ropy like the ones on the fantastic coursing dogs in the stone friezes of ancient Persia.

  He was cynical toward life, and his black-and-white hide bore, in a cryptology of long, short, and semicircular scars, the history of his fighting career. He fought anything that needed to be fought, and when there was nothing immediately available in his category, he killed cats.

  It was my father’s complaint that when Buller was beaten for this, as he often was, he considered the punishment only as part of the inevitable hazard that went with cat-killing; and when the corrective treatment had been administered, it was always my father who looked chastened, and never Buller.

  One night, a leopard, no doubt the chosen avenger of his species, crept through the open door of my h
ut and abducted Buller from the foot of my bed. Buller weighed something over sixty-five pounds and most of it was nicely coordinated offensive equipment. The sound and the fury of the first round of that battle sometimes still ring in my ears. But the advantage was with the attacker. Before I could do much more than scramble out of bed, dog and leopard disappeared in the moonless night.

  My father and I followed a trail of blood through the bush, by the light of a hurricane lamp, until the trail dwindled and led to nothing. But at dawn I set out again and found Buller, barely breathing, his hard skull and his lower jaw pierced as if they had been skewered. I ran for help and carried him back on a stretcher made of sacking. He recovered, after ten months’ tedious nursing, and became the same Buller again — except that his head had lost what little symmetry it ever had and cat-killing developed from a sport to a vocation.

  Together, Buller and I slipped out into the little yard that separated my hut from the dining quarters. There was still no real dawn, but the sun was awake and the sky was changing colour.

  Peering round the corner of my father’s hut, which was close to my own, I could see that one or two of the more conscientious syces were already opening their stable doors.

  Gay Warrior’s box had even got a heap of manure outside of it. That meant his syce had been there for some time. It also meant that my father would be out any minute to send his first string of race-horses to their morning work. If he were to see me with my spear, my dog, and the ‘bushman’s friend’ strapped to my waist, he would hardly conclude that my mind was wrapped in ardent thoughts of The Fundamentals of English Grammar or Exercises in Practical Arithmetic. He would conclude, and rightly, that Buller and I were on our way to the nearest Nandi singiri to hunt with the Murani.

  But we were adept at our game. We scampered quickly through the cluster of domestic buildings, got behind the foaling boxes, and , when the moment was ripe, we hurried along the twisted path that, except to ourselves and the Natives whose feet had made it, was completely hidden by the high dry weather grass. It was wet grass so early in the day, heavy with morning dew, and the wetness clung to my bare legs and soaked into Buller’s wiry coat.

  I swung into the hop-and-carry-one gait — a kind of bounding lope used by the Nandi and Masai Murani — and approached the singiri.

  It was surrounded by a lattice and thorn boma, high as the withers of a cow. Inside the fence, the low thatched huts, looking as if they had grown from the earth and not been built upon it, extended in a haphazard circle. Their walls were made of logs cut from the forests, placed upright and caulked with mud. Each hut had a single door, a low door that could only be entered by crouching, and there were no windows. Smoke curled upward through the leaves of the thatch and on a still day made the singiri seem, from a distance, like a patch in the prairie wreathed in the last wisps of a burned-out fire.

  The ground in front of the doors and all that encircling the boma was flat and beaten hard with the feet of men, cattle, and goats.

  A pack of dogs, half-bred, fawning, some of them snarling, rushed at Buller and me the moment we entered the boma. Buller greeted them as he always did — with arrogant indifference. He knew them too well. In packs they were good hunters; individually they were as cowardly as the hyena. I spoke to them by name to silence their foolish yapping.

  We were at the door of the hut of the head Murani, and the beginning of a Nandi hunt, even so small as this would be, did not take place in the midst of noise or too much levity.

  I drove the blunt end of my spear into the ground and stood beside it, waiting for the door to open.

  VII

  Praise God for the Blood of the Bull

  ARAB MAINA CLASPED THE gourd of blood and curdled milk in both hands and looked toward the sun. He chanted in a low voice:

  ‘Praise God for the blood of the bull which brings strength to our loins, and for the milk of the cow which gives warmth to the breasts of our lovers.’

  He drank deeply of the gourd then, let his belch roll upward from his belly and resound against the morning silence. It was a silence that we who stood there preserved until Arab Maina had finished, because this was religion; it was the ritual that came before the hunt. It was the Nandi custom.

  ‘Praise God for the blood of the bull,’ we said, and stood before the singiri, and waited.

  Jebbta had brought the gourds for Arab Maina, for Arab Kosky, and for me. But she looked only at me.

  ‘The heart of a Murani is like unto stone,’ she whispered, ‘and his limbs have the speed of an antelope. Where do you find the strength and the daring to hunt with them, my sister?’

  We were as young as each other, Jebbta and I, but she was a Nandi, and if the men of the Nandi were like unto stone, their women were like unto leaves of grass. They were shy and they were feminine and they did the things that women are meant to do, and they never hunted.

  I looked down at the ankle-length skins Jebbta wore, which rustled like taffeta when she moved, and she looked at my khaki shorts and lanky, naked legs.

  ‘Your body is like mine,’ she said; ‘it is the same and it is no stronger.’ She turned, avoiding the men with her eyes, because that too was law, and went quickly away tittering like a small bird.

  ‘The blood of the bull…’ said Arab Maina.

  ‘We are ready.’ Arab Kosky drew his sword from its scabbard and tested its blade. The scabbard was of leather, dyed red, and it hung on a beaded belt that encircled narrow and supple hips. He tested the blade and put it back into the red scabbard.

  ‘By the sacred womb of my mother, we will kill the wild boar today!’

  He moved forward behind Arab Maina with his broad shield and his straight spear, and I followed Arab Kosky with my own spear that was still new and very clean, and lighter than theirs. Behind me came Buller with no spear and no shield, but with the heart of a hunter and jaws that were weapons enough. There were the other dogs, but there was no dog like Buller.

  We left the singiri with the first light of the sun warming the roofs of the huts, with cattle, goats, and sheep moving along the trails that led to open pastures — fat cattle, pampered cattle, attended as always by the young, uncircumcised boys.

  There were cows, steers, and heifers — liquid brown eyes, wet, friendly nostrils, slobbery mouths that covered our legs with sticky fluid as Arab Maina pushed the stupid heads aside with his shield.

  There were the pungent stench of goat’s urine and a hot, comforting odour seeping through the hides of the cattle, and light on the long muscles of Arab Maina and Arab Kosky.

  There was the whole of the day ahead — and the world to hunt in.

  His little ritual forgotten now, Arab Maina was no longer stern. He laughed when Arab Kosky or I slipped in the cattle dung that littered our path, and shook his spear at a big black bull busy tearing up the earth with his hooves. ‘Take care of your people and dare not insult me with a barren cow this year!’

  But, for the most part, we ran silently in single file skirting the edge of the dense Mau Forest, wheeling north to descend into the Rongain Valley, its bottom a thousand feet below us.

  Eight weeks had passed since the end of the heavy rains and the grass in the valley had already reached the height of a man’s knee. The ears had begun to ripen in dried patches. Looking down upon it, the whole was like a broad counterpane dyed in rust and yellow and golden brown.

  We filed along our path, almost invisible now, through the fresh-smelling leleshwa bush, avoiding with quick turns and careful leaps the stinging nettle and the shrubs that were armed with thorns. Buller ran at my heels with the native dogs spread fanwise behind.

  Halfway down the slope of the valley a bevy of partridges rose from the grass and wheeled noisily into the sky. Arab Maina lifted his pear almost imperceptibly; Arab Kosky’s long muscles were suddenly rigid. Watching him, I froze in my tracks and held my breath. It was the natural reaction of all hungers — that moment of listening after any alarm.

  But t
here was nothing. The spear of Arab Maina dipped gently, the long muscles of Arab Kosky sprang again to life, Buller flicked his stubby tail, and we were off again, one behind another, with the warm sunlight weaving a pattern of our shadows in the thicket.

  The heat of the valley rose to meet us. Singing cicadas, butterflies like flowers before a wind fluttered against our bodies or hovered over the low bush. Only small things that were safe in the daylight moved.

  We had run another mile before the cold nose of Buller nudged against my leg and the dog slipped quickly past me, past the two Murani, to plant himself, alert and motionless, in the centre of our path.

  ‘Stop.’ I whispered the word, putting my hand on Arab Kosky’s shoulder. ‘Buller has scented something.’

  ‘I believe you are right, Lakweit!’ With a wave of his hand Arab Kosky ordered the pack of native dogs to crouch. In that they were well trained. They pressed their lean bellies on the ground, cocked their ears, but scarcely seemed to breathe.

  Arab Maina, sensing the need for free action, began laying down his shield. The fingers of his left hand still touched the worn leather of its handle, his legs were still bent at the knee, when a male reed-buck bounded high into the air more than fifty yards away.

  I saw Arab Kosky’s body bend like a bow and watched his spear fly to his shoulder, but he was too late. The spear of Arab Maina flashed in a quick arc of silver light and the reed-buck fell with the hard point sunk deep under his heart. Not even his first frantic bound had been completed before Arab Maina’s arm had brought him down.

  ‘Karara-ni! The hand of our leader is swifter than the flight of an arrow and stronger than the stroke of a leopard.’

  Heaping praise on Arab Maina, Arab Kosky ran toward the fallen reed-buck, the sword from his red leather sheath drawn for the kill.

  I looked at Arab Maina’s slender arms with their even, flat muscles and saw no visible sign of such immense strength Arab Maina, like Arab Kosky, was tall and lithe as a young bamboo, and his skin glowed like an ember under a whisper of wind. His face was young and hard, but there was soft humour in it. There was love of life in it — love for the hunt, love for the sureness of his strength, love for the beauty and usefulness of his spear.