The Flame Trees of Thika

  Nairobi was full of khaki men with rifles. They had no settled uniform, but most of them wore breeches and puttees, bush shirts, and felt hats, with gay bandana handkerchiefs round their necks. While we were shopping in the town a platoon rode by carrying native spears adorned with red and yellow pennants; Tilly said they had turned themselves into Lancers, and were called Monica’s Own, after the Governor’s daughter.

  In the evening Tilly put me on the train in charge of the guard, with a good deal of luggage, and some last-minute presents for Mrs Crawfurd such as a box of little trees, a sack of seed potatoes, a preserving pan, an egg timer, and two new blouses and some material that had arrived in the last boat before the war began. ‘They will bring nothing now but beer and bullets, I expect,’ Tilly remarked gloomily, ‘so we had better get what we can.’ The guard said he would put the Speckled Sussex in the van.

  When I got off the train next morning everything smelt quite different, fresh and cold. An ox-cart met me at the station with a young Dutchman who said his name was Dirk, and that he would take me to the Crawfurd’s farm.

  At Molo everything was much bigger than at Thika – hills, trees, distances, even sky and clouds. The trees were black and clumped, the grass naked and tufty, and bent over on one side, and you felt as if you had reached the very top of the world. The air was sharp and clean as iced lemon juice, and a wind blew, and spikes of pink and bronze wild gladioli grew among the buff sedgy grass. We passed no round huts, no goats, no shambas, no valleys with banana-trees; everything was empty and cold.

  I was silent on the journey, and so was Dirk, and we jolted along with very few words. Dirk walked with a limp, and told me he had broken his leg.

  At the end of the track, I told myself, would be Mr Crawfurd, and he would be just like Ian only rather larger, because he was the elder of the two. But Humphrey Crawfurd was another surprise. He was not like Ian at all, in fact I did not believe that they were brothers. Humphrey was certainly much larger, but dark instead of fair, with a heavy moustache and big thick hands; indeed he was heavy all over, bulky, silent, he did not sparkle at all. It was only in the eyes that I could see a resemblance, both pairs were proud and smoky blue; and a little in the smile, perhaps, which made Humphrey look younger and less preoccupied.

  What I remember most about him was his ability to embalm himself so deeply in thought that flies could crawl about his face, even into his ears, without his making any sign. This gave him a monumental quality which impressed itself deeply on my mind. He did not flap and twitch like ordinary people, or like cows. He must, one felt, be sunk in some tremendous wisdom or philosophy. In fact, he was a man who held to one passion at a time, and at the moment his thoughts were concentrated upon water, and on ways of getting it about. He had a large farm, a ranch really, and it needed a great many pipes, channels, and flumes.

  Mrs Crawfurd was as lavish with words as he was sparing. They bubbled out like water from one of his sluice-gates, and like the water they were fresh, bright, gay, and occasionally a little monotonous. She had the knack of uncovering drama in every event, significance in every situation, and importance in every human being. In fact monotonous is the wrong word, just as it would not be the right expression to use of a dappled, busy, flashing mountain stream. Such streams can lull you into a half-drowsy, half-dreaming state where every now and then you catch the intonation of a little waterfall, the whisper of a rock pool. That may have been how Humphrey Crawfurd felt. She did not expect him to listen to every word of hers, for she enjoyed talking, nor did he expect an over-lively interest in his water schemes. They gave and took. They had two children, a girl called Althea who was in Scotland, and a boy of about two years old who was with them, called Bay; and a baby was expected quite soon.

  After my retinue of packages had been unloaded and sorted out, and Mrs Crawfurd had exclaimed on Tilly’s generosity, she added:

  ‘And it was angelic of your darling mother to send such a splendid kikapu of vegetables, they are quite magnificent, but they are perhaps the one thing we could have done without. Now we are going to have so much water everywhere I shall be able to irrigate a garden, and meanwhile we grow splendid vegetables from English seed, that is one of the things we can do on our mountain-tops.’

  This gave a jolt to my memory. The Speckled Sussex! They had not been in the ox-cart. Had they been left behind?

  They were not at Molo station, and Mrs Crawfurd wrote to break the news of their disappearance to Tilly. A week or two later, we heard their fate. Tilly had received a note from the matron of the hospital, thanking her warmly for her handsome gift of a dozen young hens. ‘The patients have enjoyed them, such a welcome change….’ Poor Speckled Sussex, it was sad for them to travel five thousand miles, so much cosseted and cherished, and destined to found a new colony of hens, only to be confused with a basket of vegetables and end up in the roasting-pan.

  A few days after I arrived, Mr Crawfurd opened a furrow that was to carry water from a spring in the forest to his house and farm. The trench was nearly two miles long and had taken over a year to dig and to line with a kind of clay that had been hauled by ox-carts, with frequent adventures in the mud.

  We rode up to the forest with a picnic, men with spades having gone on before. Nothing could have made Mr Crawfurd talkative, but you could feel that excitement was coiled up inside him like a spring. The labour on the farm had decided to make this into a holiday, and all the people living round about, attracted by the party as ants by sugar, had come to join in.

  Molo was not like Thika; there was no native reserve; only about fifteen years before, no humans of any sort had been living there. Too bleak for cultivators, too high even for Masai cattle, these Molo downs had lain there as God made them, empty and unchanged, with wild animals in sole possession and able to do as they pleased.

  After the Government had built a railway from the coast to Lake Victoria, they had offered blocks of this land for nothing beyond a very small annual rent, but they had not found any takers, not one. The land was beautiful, but people were not after beauty, they were after profit, or at any rate the chance to make a livelihood, and at Molo this could not be done. The land lay unwanted for a while, and then a few South Africans arrived, and scratched a living not by farming but by shooting the game and running transport from Londiani, the next station but one up the line, to the Uasin Gishu plateau, where Dutch settlers were growing maize, but had no railway to take it away.

  It was from a South African that the Crawfurds had bought their ranch, of five thousand acres. There was nothing on it, just a few huts made of split logs and some bomas for sheep and cattle. There was not even a road or track to link the ranch with the station. Mr Crawfurd’s trouble, like most people’s, was lack of capital, so he could only do a little bit at a time. Like the Dutchmen, he was slowly building up his flocks and herds, animal by animal, calf by calf. About the only crop for which there was a ready sale was maize, and Molo was too high for that. The Crawfurds did sell a little butter, which went down once a week in an ox-cart to the station, and then in small consignments to people they knew in Nairobi.

  As no Africans were living on this great western wall of the Rift Valley, of which Molo was a part, the earliest farmers sent to fetch some either from the Kavirondo country, or from Kikuyuland, and small native settlements arose near the European homesteads, and in folds of the hills. And as everyone within ten miles or so had decided to attend the opening of the Crawfurds’ furrow, we arrived to find quite a lot of people squatting round on their heels, or leaning on their spears.

  The head of the furrow lay a little distance inside the forest, in one of the glades. This forest, like the rest of Molo, was quite different from anything I had seen in the Kikuyu reserve. Most of the trees were either olives, or cedars with black, bitter berries, which grew to great heights. Their trunks, fluted and twisted like enormous sticks of Edinburgh rock, had a special talent for catching the sunlight and giving out a red glow. Their foliage was
hung with long, drooping beards of lichen, dry and brittle, of a peculiar, soft greenish-grey. This gave them a look of ancient giants, full of wisdom and mystery, turned into trees.

  Their branches were often twisted and half-bare, so that one might have imagined an ecstatic dance of venerable but frenzied priests, frozen by divine command and so obliged to spend eternity in those odd, tortured, and yet dignified positions. Inside the forest’s darkness the sharp cedar-smell was always in your nostrils, dry twigs cracked and whispered under your feet, the rotting fallen trunks lay as deep in moss as Plantagenet monarchs in furs and velvets. The slow decay of leaves, and the spotted fungi, added a pungent tang to the cool sunless air. The undergrowth was thick and spiky and you could not traverse it without getting torn to bits, and perhaps not even then. But game paths went everywhere, and some of these had been widened into human paths by the Dorobo, those little hunters who dwelt, like bongos, only in the very deepest forest. One seldom saw a Dorobo, but they had game pits in the forest, down which one might tumble on to a nest of sharp stakes.

  The pleasant feature of this forest was the open glades, like lakes of grass in the mountains of cedar. At one moment you would be walking along a dark tunnel, scrambling over logs, pushing through creepers, and listening for the squawk of a monkey or the harsh, sudden cry, like the protest of a rusty hinge, of that queer bird the plantain-eater, with its awkward flight and crimson-banded wings. The next moment you would stand on the margin of a glade lying before you as open and inviting as a garden or park. No human beings had created these glades; how they had arisen, why trees would not grow in them, I never discovered. Each time you came to one, you had the feeling that you were the first human being ever to stand upon that verge and gaze across the tufted grasses, like Cortez and the Pacific, and that some extraordinary prehistoric animal would be browsing there.

  The Crawfurds’ furrow started in one of these open glades, and the things I principally remember were the scent of jasmine, and the butterflies. A strong-smelling species of jasmine grew in this forest for the most part invisibly, but now and then you would see a cluster of tiny white stars gleaming from the dark, knotted undergrowth. Its scent blended in an exciting way with the musky, fat-and-ochre smell of the spectators, and in the background was the dry smell of wiry grass, with a faint undertone of aromatic cedar.

  The sunlight drenched us all, the air was clean as ice and large, vivid butterflies, purple and gold, quivered on the bush while Mr Crawfurd took a spade to dig away the last foot of furrow, and thus to link it with a little pool that had formed just below a spring. It was quite a small spring, but Mr Crawfurd was satisfied that it would supply many thousands of gallons, I forget how many, every day.

  ‘What a thrilling moment we are coming to!’ Mrs Crawfurd cried. ‘Humphrey, I’m sure you ought to be presented with a silver spade. We should have the date engraved on it with a motto, or quotation…. Perhaps we ought to have asked someone to come and open it, not the Governor exactly, possibly Lord Delamere, or the D.C.’

  ‘No, not the D.C.’

  ‘Surely he would have loved it, such a change from collecting taxes and sending natives to prison, and he’s a great one for a party, is our D.C.’

  ‘Not one with so much water about.’

  Mrs Crawfurd laughed, not in a dutiful wifely way but as if she really meant it, and musically, in a series of up-and-down trills.

  ‘If only Althea were here! How she would enjoy it! Althea would take a spade and make a lot of lakes and rivers, and a pond for ornamental fish. Do you think we shall be able to keep goldfish, Humphrey? Would they live at this height?’

  ‘No,’ Mr Crawfurd said, digging away with his spade. When he was not listening he always said no, because it was safer. You could change to yes later, but not from yes to no.

  ‘Never mind, think of the sweet peas and new potatoes and the strawberries. And water from a tap! It’s too exciting. Do you think frogs will get into the pipe? Do you think the buffalo will use the furrow to wash in, Humphrey?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The water’s going to rush through any minute! What a lot of people have come! Isn’t it a good sign, that they’re so interested! Do you think they’ll all go away and tell their friends, and the friends will start to irrigate in the reserves?’

  ‘No.’

  Mr Crawfurd had now paused beside the last barrier of soil to fall before his spade. The water seemed to lean against it, awaiting its release. Under a cedar, a group of elders sat on their haunches taking snuff. They wore robes of stitched goatskin – their own dress, not blankets – and looked watchful and wise. They were fascinated by the furrow and everything about it, for the Kikuyu, although so intelligent in many ways, had never thought of irrigation; yet other, smaller, and much less successful tribes such as the Elgeyo and Njemps had worked out clever systems of their own.

  ‘Perhaps they think that we are being sacrilegious,’ Mrs Crawfurd said. ‘They think it wrong to cut down sacred trees; if spirits live in them, they believe, the spirits should not be disturbed. Perhaps it is wrong to move a stream, or in this case create a whole new one. Do you suppose we’re being sacrilegious, Humphrey?’

  ‘No.’ Mr Crawfurd straightened his back and looked round before he knocked away the last barrier. Several of the old men now came forward and made a little speech which I could not understand, for it was in Kikuyu; their faces were animated, they moved their skinny arms in graceful gestures and their voices slid like a stream over smooth rocks, and gurgled into little pools.

  ‘He is saying that he is very happy to see water coming down from the mountain,’ the headman translated. ‘He asks God to see that it is good, and to help us.’

  Mr Crawfurd waited restively while the old men invoked blessings, which took some time, for each one had to speak in turn. No doubt they felt that this was the very least they could do on such an important occasion. Had it been their own furrow they were opening, they would certainly have held a long and solemn religious ceremony, and sacrificed a goat at least, and probably a bullock.

  ‘He is saying that God will send much water to help the crops and cattle, and he hopes God will help the bwana as the bwana helps the Kikuyu. And he hopes the bwana will help the Kikuyu to get back the cattle that the Nandi stole and sent to Fort Ternan, for it is a bad thing that thieves should come to this farm.’

  The elder was referring to a long shauri about some cattle lost by the senior Kikuyu on the place. Mr Crawfurd had engaged as cattleherds one or two men from the Nandi tribe, who despised the Kikuyu in the manner of a baron despising an ignorant churl, while the Kikuyu, for their part, hated the Nandi in the manner of a Roman loathing a barbaric Goth or Vandal. Ever since the Nandi came there had been nothing but shauris, and now the Kikuyu had accused the Nandi of stealing their cows. If Mr Crawfurd had not been there they might have slain the Nandi with poisoned arrows, or attacked them in their sleep with swords, and probably been massacred in return; as it was, they were frustrated to a terrible degree.

  ‘Thank you, old man,’ said Mr Crawfurd, who, although a believer, liked God to be confined to Sundays and not to interfere in the farm. ‘If you have proof it was the Nandi, you must bring a case before the D.C. Meanwhile you must remember what I told you about this new river. You may water your cattle at the tank but never, never, never in this furrow, and if you do I will fine you heavily and confiscate your cows.’

  ‘That we understand,’ the elder agreed, ‘but you must also ask God to keep away the buffaloes.’ So he had the last word, as befitted a Kikuyu. Nor could he resist sprinkling a little earth on the water as it trickled through and muttering an incantation, a blessing of some sort, I suppose.

  Mr Crawfurd struck away the last clod and stepped aside and down gushed the water, full of curiosity to explore this new path. It curled along like a snake with a creamy-yellow head, and flowed in great excitement down the clay bed. There was a murmur from the people, surprised perhaps that the water reall
y did flow along the furrow, as Mr Crawfurd had told them it would. This they did not regard as a certain consequence of digging; it was a happy conclusion, as when a boy is safely born; he might have been a girl, or been stillborn, or led to the death of his mother, but he had not; the prayers and magic had succeeded, the hoped-for result had been achieved. I do not suppose there was a single person there, except for the Crawfurds and Dirk, who did not believe that, had spirits frowned upon the enterprise, the water would have refused to flow along the clay bed.

  Now that all was safely over there was a great deal of smiling and laughter and congratulation. There must always be magic in the birth of a river, especially, no doubt, one that you have made yourself. Perhaps Mr Crawfurd felt as Moses felt when he struck the rock and water gushed forth into the desert.

  I can remember still the smell of the jasmine, and the purple butterflies, and the elders’ red goatskin robes, their long bead ear-rings and dangling snuff-horns, and the water singing down among the cedars, and Mrs Crawfurd standing with her hand in Bay’s, her face gay with pleasure, looking from the furrow to Mr Crawfurd as though he had indeed performed a miracle. Bay disengaged himself and waddled like a duckling to the furrow, and began to fill it with twigs and clods of earth. He was retrieved, and his father made a paper boat for him to launch upon the water, now flowing calmly as if it had been there for a hundred years. Of course one boat was not enough, and soon a small fleet had been dispatched, carrying sailors in the shape of twigs.

  We ate our sandwiches beside the pool and listened to the silence of the forest, and birds moving in the foliage, and the humming of a bumble-bee. The war they had talked of in Nairobi was a word without a meaning, and Humphrey Crawfurd munched his luncheon with a satisfied look in his eye. But before the meal was over he had spoken to his wife about another, longer furrow that he hoped to dig, to carry water to a more distant part of his farm.