Chapter 2
BEFORE the sun was really hot next morning the little weather-beaten oxen with their humps and sagging dewlaps were in-spanned and we set off again down the wagon track.
On our right the tawny plain stretched away, a bowl of sunlight, to the Tana river and beyond: you felt that you could walk straight on across it to the rim of the world. On our left rose a long, dark-crested mountain range from which sprang rivers that watered a great part of Kikuyuland. These rivers, no larger than streams, had dug down through soil red as a fox and rich as chocolate to form steep valleys whose sides were now green with young millet and maize. So numerous were these streams that on a map they looked like veins and arteries in a diagram of anatomy. Our track crossed them at the point where the intervening ridges flattened out into the great plain, so we had to ford several streams; but their banks were no longer steep, and their water was becoming sluggish. Instead of mossy rocks and ferns and trees bending over rushing water, we traversed incipient swamps with papyrus and reeds.
Sometimes we passed or encountered Kikuyu travellers, the backs of the women always bent low under enormous burdens suspended by leather straps that bit into their sloping foreheads. They wore pointed leather aprons and trudged along looking like big brown snails. As a result, no doubt, of this pack-animal existence you never saw a good figure, except among the young girls; once married, the women’s breasts sagged like empty purses and their legs moved in a quick, shuffling gait.
The men, on the other hand, were slim and upright and often had a remarkable look of fragility; their bodies were hairless, shining, and light. The young warriors wore their locks embellished with sheep’s fat and red ochre and plaited into a large number of short pigtails to hang down all round, like the fleece of a long-haired sheep; they walked with a loping stride quite different from the women’s plod. By now the influence of missionaries and Government combined had put them into blankets, which they wore like togas, knotted over one shoulder. Most of the blankets were red with black stipes and looked well against coppery skins and gay red and blue ornaments. Ear-lobes were pierced, and the hole enlarged to take plugs of wood, coils of wire, or bead necklaces that hung down to their shoulders; the young bloods wore a beaded belt from which depended a a slim sword in a leather scabbard dyed vermilion with an extract from the root of a creeper.
We had with us in the cart a cook-cum-houseboy called Juma lent to us, as a great favour, by Roger Stilbeck to see us in. He was used to grander ways and, the farther we travelled from Nairobi, the more disapproving he became of the local inhabitants, who to me looked as wild and exciting as the gazelles and antelopes.
‘They are small like pigeons,’ he said loftily. ‘They eat chickens, which make them cowardly. Look at their legs! Thin like a bustard. And their women are like donkeys, with heads as smooth as eggs. They are not to be trusted. Why do you wish to live amongst such stupid people? Here your crops will not prosper, your cattle will die….’
Juma was a Swahili from the Coast, or said he was: Swahilis were fashionable, and quite a lot of people who were nothing of the sort appointed themselves as members of this race, with its Arab affinities. He also claimed to be a Muslim, though it was hard to say in what this consisted. We never saw him at his prayers and doubted if he knew the direction of Mecca. His only strict observance was his refusal to eat meat unless the throat of the animal providing it had been cut. So when Robin shot a buck, a knife would materialize in Juma’s hand, he would gird his long white kanzu round his waist (he wore nothing underneath) and sprint like a flash to the stricken antelope. He was a great meat-lover.
He was also a magician. With three stones, a few sticks, and one old, black cooking-pot he would produce a four-course meal a great deal better than anything to be had in most restaurants or hotels. He had the secret, known only to Africans, of serving food hot and promptly, and yet not dry and burnt, at any hour of the day or night. Cooks were men of substance and authority, respected and well-paid. Juma made the most of his superior position. In fact he was a bully – large, strong, and black-skinned.
‘We are coming now to the country of the cannibals,’ he said facetiously, and quite untruthfully. ‘These Kikuyu, they scavenge like hyenas, they will dig up corpses and eat them. Sometimes their women give birth to snakes and lizards. They have never heard of Allah. They eat the intestines of goats and circumcise their women. They –’
‘Silence, Juma.’ Tilly commanded. She was hot, tired, dusty, and in no mood for anatomical gossip, and her understanding of the Swahili tongue was still shaky. Although she had studied it with her usual energy and grasp on the voyage out, her phrase-book, acquired from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, had not always suggested sentences most helpful to intending settlers. ‘The idle slaves are scratching themselves’…‘Six drunken Europeans have killed the cook’…turning these over in her mind, on top of the ox-cart in the sun, she doubted if their recital, even in the best Swahili, would impress Juma favourably.
After his remarks I stared at the passing Kikuyu with a new interest. They looked harmless, but that was evidently a pose. We passed a woman carrying a baby in a sling on her back, as well as a load. I could see the infant’s shiny head, like a polished skittle ball, bobbing about between the mother’s bent shoulders, and looked hopefully for the glimpse of a snake or lizard. But no doubt the mothers would leave these at home.
‘These oxen,’ Juma grumbled, ‘they are as old as great-grandmothers, their legs are like broken sticks, this driver is the son of a hyena and lacks the brains of a frog. When the new moon has come we shall still be travelling in this worthless cart.’
‘No more words,’ Tilly said snappily. Juma had a patronizing air that she resented, and she doubted if he was showing enough respect. Those were the days when to lack respect was a more serious crime than to neglect a child, bewitch a man, or steal a cow, and was generally punishable by beating. Indeed respect was the only protection available to Europeans who lived singly, or in scattered families, among thousands of Africans accustomed to constant warfare and armed with spears and poisoned arrows, but had themselves no barricades, and went about unarmed. This respect preserved them like an invisible coat of mail, or a form of magic, and seldom failed; but it had to be very carefully guarded. The least rent or puncture might, if not immediately checked and repaired, split the whole garment asunder and expose its wearer in all his human vulnerability. Kept intact, it was a thousand times stronger than all the guns and locks and metal in the world; challenged, it could be brushed aside like a spider’s web. So Tilly was a little sensitive about respect, and Juma was silenced.
We came at last to a stone bridge over the Chania river, newly built, and considered to be a great achievement of the P.W.D.S. Just below it, the river plunged over a waterfall into a pool with slimy rocks and thick-trunked trees all round it, and a little farther on it joined the Thika. This meeting-place of rivers was a famous hunting-ground; not long before, Winston Churchill had slain a lion there, and many others came to camp and shoot. The game, like the soil’s fertility, seemed inexhaustible; no one could imagine the disappearance of either.
A hotel had been started just below the falls. It consisted of a low-roofed, matched grass hut whose veranda posts were painted blue and gave the place its name; of three or four whitewashed rondavels to sleep in, and a row of stables. The manager was a lean, military-looking, sprucely-dressed man with a bald head and a long moustache, who had the misfortune to be very deaf. One day a safari visitor, admiring his host’s neat attire, rashly asked: ‘Who made your breeches?’ After he had bawled this question several times, growing more and more embarrassed, the deaf man seized his hand and shook it warmly, saying: ‘Ah, yes, Major Breeches, delighted to see you, hope you will enjoy your stay.’ After that the innkeeper was always called Major Breeches, and I never knew his real name at all. The owner was a rich young man called Harry Penton whose best-known exploit (if it could be called that) was to be found s
tark naked astride the roof of the Norfolk hotel proclaiming himself to be a mushroom, and holding a tin bath over his head.
Robin rode down on a mule to meet us at the Blue Posts.
‘Is the house built?’ Tilly asked hopefully.
‘Not exactly,’ Robin answered. ‘I’ve picked out a splendid site, only there doesn’t seem to be any labour to build it with.’
‘But Roger Stilbeck said there was any amount.’
‘Perhaps he was thinking of ticks and white ants; there are plenty of those.’
‘Well, we’ve got tents,’ Tilly said. I think she was glad, really; already she had fallen in love with camp life and was in no hurry to become civilized again.
‘There are said to be some chiefs in the reserve,’ Robin added. ‘I shall go and see them. The bush is much heavier than Stilbeck led me to believe. I shall have to do a lot of clearing before I can plough any land.’
All the clearing had to be done by hand, by young men with pangas. They started off in blankets but soon laid these aside and glistened in the sun like red fish, jingling with charms and ornaments. They did not work hard, and rested often, and their wages were very low. Generally speaking they could earn the price of a goat in thirty days. This was about four rupees. The goat would be added to a flock being slowly assembled to pay for a bride.
‘I can only find one river,’ Robin added. ‘The other seems to be just a son of gully with no water in it. And there are several vleis which won’t be much use.’
‘Mr Stilbeck doesn’t seem to have been particularly truthful.’
‘Perhaps he didn’t know himself,’ suggested Robin, who always found excuses, when he could, for his fellow-men, and indeed for himself where necessary. ‘There’s a lot of red oat grass, which everyone says means high fertility. The stream that is there has a nice fall and we shall be able to put in a ram. Later on perhaps a little turbine might be possible…. There’s building stone by the river bank. And lots of duiker and guinea-fowl; we oughtn’t to go hungry, anyway.’
It all sounded wonderful, except the ticks. I had already found a lot crawling up my legs and had learnt to pluck them off and squash them in my fingers. They were red and active, and itched like mad when they dug into the skin. They left an itchy little bump and, if you scratched it, you soon developed a sore.
There were also jiggas. These burrowed under your toe-nails, laid their eggs, and created a swollen, red, tormenting place on your toe. To extract it, you had to wait until the jigga was ripe. Juma was an expert at this. He would seize a needle which you first held in a match-flame, grip your toe with thumb and forefinger, and plunge the needle in with such skill and dispatch that in a few moments he had cleared a pathway to the jigga and extracted on the end of his weapon the neatest little white bag, about as large as an onion seed, containing the eggs. It was the female who caused all the trouble; male jiggas either leapt about at large, or displayed the masculine habit of clustering together, in this case round the eyes or ears of dogs and chickens, evidently the clubs, lodges, and messes of the jigga world. I soon learnt never to go barefoot, or, if I had mislaid my slippers, to walk with my toes curled up off the ground, a habit that persisted for years after jiggas had passed out of my life.
We had reached, now, the end of the road: or, rather, the road continued to Fort Hall, where perhaps a quarter of a million Kikuyus were ruled by a solitary District Commissioner, and we had to make our way through roadless country to our piece of land. This lay uphill, towards the Kikuyu reserve.
‘I don’t know how the cart will get there,’ Robin mused. ‘For one thing, there are no bridges.’
‘Then we must get some built,’ Tilly replied. She never dwelt for long on difficulties.
Robin borrowed a mule for each of us from Major Breeches and we set out early next morning, before the heat of the day. A steepish hill immediately confronted us. Dry, wiry-stalked brown grass – hay, as it were, on the hoof – reached up to the mules’ shoulders and wrapped itself round my legs and knees. There were trees, but this was not forest; each tree grew on its own. Most of these were erythrinas, about the size of apple-trees, with rough bark and twisted boughs – rather tortured-looking, not calm and dignified like cedars; they bore their brilliant red flowers on bare branches, and only when these were over turned their attention to leaves. Tapering ant-hills like spires, or the ruins of castles, thrust themselves above the grass and bush; they were hard as sandstone, and the same colour. These were the craft of termites and underneath each one, if you dug, and if it was still in use, you would find a big, fat, slug-like white queen, large as a sausage, manufacturing egg after egg for years on end.
It soon grew very hot. The erythrinas were in bloom, and glowed like torches: Tilly called them sealing-wax trees. Small doves with self-important breasts cooed from the branches. The country undulated like the waves of the sea.
We followed a native path that corkscrewed about like a demented snake. There was not a straight stretch in it, and one could not see why, it did not seem to be avoiding anything, or even linking up dwellings. Its convolutions must have made the journey three times as long. Our attempts at short cuts were unsuccessful. The first time we tried it, we came to an unexpected stream with boggy edges which we failed to cross, and had to rejoin the path. Our second attempt led to the sudden disappearance of Robin. At one moment he was there, or at least the top part of him was, sheltering under a dirty, battered, broad-brimmed felt hat, with a dreamy look on his finely-cut, amiable features – the bottom part was hidden by long grass; at the next, he had completely vanished. A swaying and rustling in the grass betrayed the mule, as a disturbance in the ocean will suggest the passage of a school of fish just below the surface.
‘Robin,’ Tilly called in alarm. ‘What’s happened?’
Had we indeed reached the land of magicians? I looked round, half-expecting to see him transformed into a tree. The grass writhed, his head slowly rose, hatless, followed by his shoulders.
‘The mule has got my theodolite,’ he said. This object, folded up, was strapped to the saddle; he had gone to great trouble to borrow it, for he thought it would help him to install a ram and other mechanical devices.
The mule had fallen into a hole made by ant-bears or by wild pigs. The ground was perforated by such cavities, and thence-forward we stuck to the path. Even that was not fool-proof, but at least you could see the holes, or the mule could. The mules were tiny, and walked with very short tripping steps, like dancers. When they decided to stop for a breather no amount of belabouring and kicking would budge them an inch. It seemed a very long five miles, and the heat stifled us like a heavy blanket. Cicadas kept up a shrill, continuous chorus that quivered like the heat in the air, and the heads of the grasses. It seemed that everything was quivering – air, heat, grass, even the mules twitching their hides to dislodge flies who paid no attention; the strident insect falsetto seemed like the voice of air itself, chattering through all eternity to earth and grass. The light was blinding and everything was on a high note, intensified, concentrated: heat, light, sound, all blended into a substance as hard and bright and indestructible as quicksilver.
I had never before seen heat, as you can see smoke or rain. But there it was, jigging and quavering above brown grasses and spiky thorn-trees and flaring erythrinas. If I could have stretched my hand out far enough I could surely have grasped it, a kind of colourless jelly. But it danced away as I rode uncomfortably towards it, my mule’s feet now and then tripping off tufts and hummocks.
Once or twice, on rounding a hairpin bend, we found ourselves face to face with a Kikuyu who stood transfixed, just like an antelope pierced by the instinct to bolt, and then stepped aside to let us pass. But the women uttered high-pitched squeals like those of piglets, and scattered into the grass as if they had been partridges, their loads and babies swaying on their backs. We could see their heads turned towards us at a safe distance in startled alarm, while the men shouted at them not to be fools. But they
would not approach. They chattered in excited voices, like a flock of starlings, the wire coils on their arms winking in the sun.
‘You see,’ Robin remarked with a certain glum satisfaction, ‘it scarcely looks as if they’re longing to come out to work.’
This ride through sun and heat, jolted by the sluggish mules, prickling with sweat, seemed to go on forever. We crossed a treeless vlei whose grass was short and wiry and where a duiker leapt away from under the mules’ feet. Robin pulled up and said. ‘Here we are.’ We did not seem to be anywhere. Everything was, just the same, biscuit-brown, quivering with heat and grasshoppers. There was not even an erythrina tree.
‘You mean this is the farm?’ Tilly asked. Her voice suggested that her feelings were much the same as mine. Even Robin did not sound very confident when he replied that it was.
None of us quite knew what to say, so Robin began to praise our surroundings in a rather hearty voice he always used when bolstering-up was needed.
‘This grass and stuff will burn off easily, we ought to be able to start our ploughing before the rains. There’s not a lot of clearing to be done in places, for instance round here.’
‘This is a swamp,’ Tilly objected. It did not look like one, in fact it was hard as rock; but we have been told that rain would flood these bits of open vlei, and we could see that nothing seemed anxious to grow there.
‘Not at all,’ Robin replied, rather hurt. ‘Roger said all the land was ploughable. Except of course the river bank, which is just over there.’
‘I can’t see a river,’ Tilly said.
‘Of course you can’t, if you don’t look.’ Robin’s testiness was a sign of disappointment; he had hoped for Tilly’s enthusiasm. He himself had already furnished the site with a large mansion equipped with running water and electric light, with a garden, an avenue of flame trees, and several hundred acres of fruiting coffee trees.