BOOK THREE
     VISITORS TO THE FARM

     Post Res Perditas

     Chapter 1
     BIG DANCES

     We had many visitors to the farm. In Pioneer countries hospitality is a necessity of life not to the travellers alone but to the settlers. A visitor is a friend, he brings news, good or bad, which is bread to the hungry minds in lonely places. A real friend who comes to the house is a heavenly messenger, who brings the panis angelorum.
     When Denys Finch-Hatton came back after one of his long expeditions, he was starved for talk, and found me on the farm starved for talk, so that we sat over the dinner-table into the small hours of the morning, talking of all the things we could think of, and mastering them all, and laughing at them. White people, who for a long time live alone with Natives, get into the habit of saying what they mean, because they have no reason or opportunity for dissimulation, and when they meet again their conversation keeps the Native tone. We then kept up the theory that the wild Masai tribe, in their manyatta under the hills, would see the house all afire, like a star in the night, as the peasants of Umbria saw the house wherein Saint Francis and Saint Clare were entertaining one another upon theology.
     The greatest social functions of the farm were the Ngomas, — the big Native dances. At these occasions we entertained up to fifteen hundred or two thousand guests. The entertainment offered by the house was however in itself modest. We would give the old bald mothers of the dancing Morani and the Nditos, — the maidens, — snuff, and the children, — at those dances to which children were brought, — sugar, distributed by Kamante in wooden spoons, and I sometimes asked the D.C.'s permission for my Squatters to make tembu, a deadly drink, fabricated from sugar cane. But the real performers, the indefatigable young dancers, brought the glory and luxury of the festivity with them, they were immune to foreign influence, and concentrated upon the sweetness and fire within themselves. One thing only did they demand from the outside world: a space of level ground to dance on. This was to be found near my house, the big lawn was plain under the trees, and the square, in the forest between my boys' huts, had been laid out level. For this reason the farm was highly thought of by the young people of the country, and the invitations to my balls much valued.
     The Ngomas were held sometimes in the day and sometimes at night, In the day-time the Ngomas needed more room, since they brought with them as many onlookers as dancers; they therefore took place on the lawn. At most Ngomas the dancers stand in a large circle, or in a number of smaller circles, and there keep jumping up and down, the head thrown back, or stamping the ground to a rhythm, throwing themselves forward on one foot, and back on to the other, or again slowly and solemnly walking round sideways with their faces to the centre of the ring, the prominent dancers separating themselves from the ring, to perform, jump, and run in the middle of it. The day-time Ngomas left their mark stamped upon the lawn in larger and smaller dry brown rings, as if the grass had here been burnt away by fire, and these magic rings would only slowly disappear.
     The big day-time Ngomas had the character more of a fair than of a ball. Crowds of onlookers followed the dancers and grouped themselves under the trees. When the rumour of the Ngoma had spread widely enough we would even see here the flighty ladies of Nairobi, — the Malaya, a pretty word in Swaheli, — arriving in style, in Ali Khan's mule-traps, all wrapped in lengths of gay large-patterned calico, and looking, when seated, like large flowers on the grass. The honest young girls on the farm in their traditional oiled and greased leather skirts and mantles, took up their position close to them, and frankly discussed their clothes and manners, but the beauties of the town, cross-legged, remained as quiet as glass-eyed dolls of dark wood, and smoked their little cigars. Swarms of children, enraptured by the dances, and keen to learn and imitate, stormed from one ring to another, or were carried away to form little dancing-rings of their own on the outskirts of the lawn, and there jumped up and down.
     The Kikuyu, when going to a Ngoma, rub themselves all over with a particular kind of pale red chalk, which is much in demand and is bought and sold; it gives them a strangely blond look. The colour is neither of the animal nor the vegetable world, in it the young people themselves look fossilized, like statues cut in rock. The girls in their demure, bead-embroidered, tanned leather garments cover these, as well as themselves, with the earth, and look all one with them, — clothed statues in which the folds and draperies are daintily carried out by a skilled artist. The young men are naked for an Ngoma, but on such occasions make much out of their coiffures, clapping the chalk on to their manes and pigtails, and carrying their limestone heads high. During my last years in Africa, the Government forbade the people to put chalk on the head. In both sexes the rig-out is of the greatest effect: diamonds and high decorations will not impart to their bearers a more decided gala appearance. Whenever at a distance you catch sight, in the landscape, of a group of red-chalked Kikuyu on the march, you feel the atmosphere vibrating with festivity.
     An open-air dance in the day suffers from lack of limitation. The stage is far too big for it, — where does it begin and where end? The small figures of the individual dancers may be all dyed, with the entire back-part of an ostrich floating behind their heads, and the bold cavalier-like cockspurs made of Colobus-monkey skin at the heels, they cannot help looking spread and scattered under the tall trees. The show, — including larger and smaller rings of dancers, spread-out groups of onlookers, and children running to and fro, — flings your eyes from one corner of it to the other. The whole scene has some likeness to those old pictures of a battle, observed from an eminence, in which you will see the cavalry advancing at one side, while the artillery takes up its position at the other, and isolated figures of ordnance officers gallop diagonally across the field of view.
     The day-time Ngomas were likewise very noisy affairs. The dancing music from flutes and drums was often drowned in the clamour from the audience, the dancing girls themselves gave out a strange, long-drawn and shrill shriek when, in one of the figures executed by male dancers, a Moran made a jump, or swung his spear over his head, in an exceptionally fine manner. An unbroken stream of congenial conversation was kept up amongst the old people on the grass. It was pleasant here to watch a couple of ancient Kikuyu women carousing, with a calabash between them, absorbed in gay talk, presumably of the days when they had themselves cut a figure in the dancing ring, their faces more and more radiant with happiness as, in the course of the afternoon, the sun sank lower, and the supply of tembu in the calabash as well. At times, when the group was joined by a couple of old husbands, one of the women would be so carried away by the memories of her young days that she stumbled to her feet and, flapping her arms, took a running step or two in the true Ndito manner. She was ignored by the crowd, but enthusiastically applauded by her little circle of contemporaries.
     But the Ngomas of the night were set about in earnest.
     They were held in the autumn only, after the maize-harvesting, and below the full moon. I do not think that they had any religious significance to them, but they may have had so once; the manner of the performers and onlookers suggested a mysterious and sacred moment. These dancers may have been a thousand years old. Some of them, — which was highly approved of by the mothers and grandmothers of the dancers, — were held by the white settlers to be immoral, they felt that they must have them prohibited by law. One time, when I came back from a holiday in Europe, I found that twenty-five of my young warriors had, in the height of the coffee-picking season, been sent to jail by my Manager for having danced a forbidden dance at a night Ngoma on the farm. My Manager informed me that his wife could not possibly put up with the dance. I upbraided the elders of the Squatters for having held their Ngoma near my Manager's house, but they gravely explained to me that they had been dancing at Kathegu's manyatta, four or five miles away from it. I then had to go to Nairobi to talk matters over with our D.C., who let the whole lot of dancers come back to the farm to pick coffee.
     The night dances were fine spectacles. Here you were not in doubt as to the theatre of the show, it was formed by the fires and extended as far out as the light spread, indeed fire was the central principle of the Ngoma. It was not really needed for the dancing, for the moonlight of the African Highlands is marvellously clear and white; it was brought to create an effect. The fire made of the dancing place a stage of the first order, it collected all the colours and movements within it into a unity.
     Natives will rarely overdo an effect. They had no great flaming bonfires lighted. Firewood was carried to the dancing-place during the day before the dance by the Squatter women of the farm, who will have looked upon themselves as hostesses to the feast, and was here piled up in the centre of the dancing-ring. The old women who honoured the ball with their presence at night took their seats round this central pile, and from there a row of small fires, like a circle of stars, was fed through the hours of the night. The dancers again were dancing and running outside the fires, with the forest-night as a background. The place had to be fairly big or the heat and smoke would get into the eyes of the old onlookers, but it was all the same an enclosed place in the world, as if it had been a large house for the joint use of all within it.
     Natives have no sense or taste for contrasts, the umbilical cord of Nature has, with them, not been quite cut through. They held their Ngomas only during the time of the full moon. When the moon did her best they did theirs. With the landscape bathing and swimming in gentle powerful light from the sky, to the great illumination over Africa they added their little red-hot glow.
     The guests arrived in small parties, sometimes three at a time, sometimes a dozen or fifteen, — friends who came together by appointment, or who had joined company on the road. Many of these dancers had walked fifteen miles to get to the Ngoma. When travelling many together they brought flutes or drums with them, so that, on the night of the big dance, all the roads and pathways of the country would resound and ring with music, like jingles shaken at the face of the moon. At the entrance to the dancing-ring the wanderers paused and waited for the ring to open to them; sometimes, when they came from very far away, or were sons of the big neighbouring Chiefs, they were received into it by one of the old Squatters or prominent dancers of the farm, or by the monitors of the dance.
     The monitors of the Ngoma were young men from the farm like the others, but they were there to keep up the ceremonial of the dance, and made the most of their position. Before the dancing began, they strutted up and down in front of the dancers with knitted brows and a grave face; as the dance grew livelier they ran from one side of the ring to another, to watch that everything was going as it should. They were effectively armed, carrying bundles of sticks tied together, the one end of which they kept burning, by dipping them from time to time into the fire. They kept a sharp eye upon the dancers, and wherever they espied anything of an unseemly nature going on, they were at them at once; with a terrible expression and a furious snarl they hurled their whole bunch of sticks, the burning end foremost, straight at the body of the offender. The victim was seen to be bent double at the stroke, but he never gave a sound. Perhaps a burn of this kind was no dishonourable wound to be carrying away from an Ngoma.
     In one of the dances the girls would stand demurely upon the feet of the young men and clasp them round the waist, while the young warriors with an outstretched arm at each side of the girl's head, held on to their spear with both hands, from time to time lifting it and striking it down to the ground with all their might. It made a pretty picture, of the young women of the tribe having taken refuge at the bosom of their men against some great danger, and of the men guarding them, even by letting them stand on their feet, protecting them against snakes or any other dangers from the ground. As the dance went on for hours the faces of the dancers took on an expression of angelic ecstasy, as if they were really all ready to die for one another.
     They had other dances in which the dancers ran in and out amongst the fires, where one head-dancer made a number of very high jumps and leaps, and there was much swinging of spears; it was, I believe, built upon a lion-hunt.
     They had singers at the Ngoma, as well as flutes and drums. Some of these singers were famous all over the country, and were made to come from far away. Their singing was more a rhythmical recitation than a song. They were improvisators, and made up their ballads off-hand, with the quick, attentive chorus of the dancers joining in. It was pleasant to listen, in the night air, to the one gentle voice being raised, and to the regularly repeated, measured call of young voices. But as it went on all night, with the drums falling in for an effect from time to time, it became both deadly monotonous and strangely excruciating to hear, as if you could not bear either to have it going on for one moment longer, or to have it ever stopped.
     The most famous singer of my day came from Dagoretti. He had a clear strong voice and was, besides, himself a great dancer. When singing he would walk or run inside the dancing-ring in a long, sliding stride, half-kneeling at every step, he held the one flat hand to the corner of his mouth; it was probably done to concentrate the sound, but it gave effect of a great dangerous secret being confided to the congregation. He looked like the African echo itself. He used to move his audience to happiness or to a warlike mood as he chose, or to real convulsions of laughter. He sang one formidable song, a war song, in which the singer is, I believe, imagined running from village to village calling the nation to war, and describing to them the massacre and the loot. A hundred years ago it would have made the blood of the white immigrants run cold. But generally he was not so terrifying. One night he sang three songs, which I asked Kamante to translate to me. The first of them was a fantasy: the whole party of the dancers were imagined getting hold of a ship and sailing to Volaia. The second song, Kamante explained to me, was all in praise of the old women, the mothers and grandmothers of the singer and the dancers. This song sounded sweet to me, it was long, and must have described in detail the wisdom and kindness of the toothless bald old Kikuyu wives, who listened at the pile of firewood in the centre of the place, and nodded their heads. The third song was short, but drew great shouts of laughter from everybody, the singer had to raise his shrill voice to be heard through it, and laughed himself as he sang. The old women, who had now been put in good humour by being so strongly flattered, beat their thighs, and threw up big gapes, like crocodiles, at it. Kamante was loth to translate it to me, he said it was nonsense, and gave it me only very much shortened. The theme of it was simple: after a recent epidemic of plague, the Government had set a price upon each dead rat handed into the D.C.'s, — the described how the rats, universally pursued, were taking refuge in the beds of the old and young women of the tribe, and what happened to them there. It must have been amusing in its details, which I did not get; Kamante himself, while translating it to me very much against his wish, at times could not repress a sour smile.
     At one of the night Ngomas a dramatic incident took place.
     The Ngoma was a farewell feast, given in my honour a short time before I was going to Europe on a visit. We had had a good year, it was held in great style, there may have been fifteen hundred Kikuyu present. The dance had been going on for a few hours; as I came out to have another look at it before going to bed, a chair was placed for me with its back to one of the boys' huts, and I was entertained by a couple of the old Squatters.
     All at once a great stir ran through the ring of dancers, a deep movement of surprise or fear, a curious sound, as when the wind blows through a bed of rushes. The dance slowed up, slowed up, but it did not stop yet. I asked one of the old men what was the matter. He answered quickly, in a low voice: "Masai na-kudja," — the Masai are coming.
     The news must have been brought by a runner, for it lasted some time before anything more happened, probably the Kikuyu were sending back to say that their guests would be received. It was against the law for the Masai to come to a Kikuyu Ngoma, too much trouble had arisen from this kind of thing in the past. My houseboys came up and stood by my chair; everybody looked towards the entrance of the dancing-ground. When the Masai came in, the dance stopped altogether.
     There were twelve young Masai warriors walking in, and when they had taken a few steps they stopped, waited, and looked neither right nor left; they blinked a little towards the fire. They were naked except for their weapons and their magnificent head-dresses. One of them had on the lion-skin head-dress of the Moran at war. A broad stripe of scarlet was painted vertically from the knee to the foot, as if the blood was running down the leg. They stood erect, stiff-legged, their heads thrown back, silent and deadly grave, their attitude was at the same time that of the conqueror and the prisoner. It was felt that they had come to the Ngoma against their own will. The dull beating of the drum had run across the river into the Reserve, had gone on, and gone on, and troubled the hearts of the young warriors there; twelve of them had not had it in them to resist the call.
     The Kikuyu were deeply agitated, too, but they behaved well to their guests. The chief dancer of the farm welcomed them into the dancing ring, where in deep silence they took their place, and the dance was begun once more. It was, however, different from what it had been before, the air was loaded now. The drums began to beat in a louder voice, and a more rapid rhythm. Had the Ngoma gone on, we should have seen some striking feats, when Kikuyu and Masai would have taken upon themselves to show one another their vigour and skill as dancers. But it did not come to that: there are things which can not be carried through even with the good will of everybody concerned.
     What happened I do not know. All of a sudden the ring swayed, and was broken, some one shrieked aloud, in some seconds the whole place before me was a mass of running, thronging people, there was the sound of blows and of bodies falling to the ground, and over our heads the night air was undulating with spears. We all got up, even the wise old women of the centre, who crawled on to the stacks of firewood to see what was going on.
     When the emotion had calmed down, and the storming crowd had dissolved again, I found myself in the centre of the swarm, with a little cleared space round me. Two of the old Squatters came up to me, and reluctantly explained what had happened: the violation of law and order committed by the Masai, and the present state of things: a Masai and three Kikuyu were badly wounded, "cut to pieces," their expression was. Would I now, they went on gravely, consent to sew them up again? — otherwise everybody was likely to get much trouble from the Selikali, — the Government. I asked the old man what the fighters had had cut off. "The head," he answered proudly, with the Native instinct to make the most of a catastrophe. At that moment Kamante was seen to advance across the place, carrying a long-threaded darning needle, and my thimble. I still hesitated, and at that moment old Awaru came forward. He had learned tailoring during the seven years that he had been in prison. He must have been looking for an opportunity for practising, and showing off his craft, he volunteered to take charge of the case, and at once the interest concentrated upon him. He did indeed sew up the wounded, they got well under his hands, and he himself in after times made much of the achievement, but Kamante told me in confidence that the heads had not been off.
     As the presence of the Masai at the dance had been illegal, we for a long time had to conceal the wounded Masai in the hut reserved for white visitors' servants. Here he recovered, and from here in the end he disappeared without a word of thanks to Awaru. It comes hard, I believe, to the heart of a Masai to be wounded, — and healed, — by Kikuyu.
     When towards the end of the night of the Ngoma, I walked out to ask for news of the wounded people, I found, in the grey morning air, the fires still smouldering. A number of young Kikuyu were in action round them, leaping and poking long sticks into the embers, under the direction of a very old Squatter wife, Wainaina's mother. They were making a spell to prevent the Masai from having any success in love with the Kikuyu girls.

     Chapter 2
     A VISITOR FROM ASIA
 

     The Ngomas were neighbourly and traditionally social functions. In the course of time, it was the younger brothers and sisters and, later on, the sons and daughters of the first dancers known by me, who came to the dancing-ground.
     But we had visitors from distant countries as well. The monsoon blows from Bombay: wise and experienced old people travelled in ships, all the way from India, and came to the farm.
     There was in Nairobi a big Indian timber merchant by the name of Choleim Hussein, with whom I had done many deals when I was first clearing my land and who was a zealous Mohammedan and a friend of Farah's. One day he arrived at the house and asked for permission to bring a High Priest from India on a visit. He was coming all over the Sea, Choleim Hussein told me, to inspect his congregations of Mombasa and Nairobi: the congregations on their side were eager to entertain him well, and, working their brains, they could think of nothing better than this visit to the farm. Would I let him come? When I said that he should be welcome, Choleim Hussein went on to explain that the rank and holiness of the old man were such that he could eat nothing which had been cooked in pots ever used by Infidels. But I need not bother about that, he quickly added, the Mohammedan congregation of Nairobi would prepare the meal and send it out in good time; would I only let the High Priest partake of it in my house? As I agreed, Choleim Hussein after a little while took up the matter again, with difficulty. There was one more point, only one. Wherever the High Priest went, etiquette demanded that he should receive a present, in a house like mine it could be no less than one hundred Rupees. But I need not let that worry me, he hurried to explain, the money had been collected amongst the Mohammedans of Nairobi, who only asked me to hand it over to the Priest. But would the Priest, I asked, believe it to be a present from me? Of this I could extract no explanation from Choleim Hussein, there are times when coloured people cannot make themselves clear to save their lives. At first I declined the role intended for me, but looking at the disappointed faces of Choleim Hussein and Farah, which had a moment before been radiant with hope, I gave up my pride and thought that I would let the High Priest think what he liked.
     On the day of the visit I had forgotten about it and gone out in the field to try my new tractor. Titi, Kamante's little brother, was sent out to me there. The tractor made such a noise that I could not hear what he had got to say, and it was so difficult to start that I dared not stop it; Titi ran alongside of it all through the field like a small mad dog, panting and snapping in the deep ground and the long thick trail of dust, until at the end of the field we came to a pause. "The Priests have come," he roared to me. "What Priests?" I asked back. "All the Priests," he proudly explained; they had arrived in four carts, six in each. I went with him back to the house, and as I got near I caught sight of a swarm of white-robed figures spread on the lawn, as if a flight of big white birds had settled round my house, or a company of angels swooped on to the farm. It will have been a whole Spiritual Court sent from India to keep up the flame of orthodoxy in Africa. There was, however, no mistaking the dignified figure of the High Priest as he advanced towards me, escorted by two Subordinates, and, at a respectful distance, by Choleim Hussein. He was a very short old man with a delicate, refined face, as if carved in very old ivory. The retinue drew near, to stand guard upon our meeting, and then withdraw; I was expected to entertain my guest alone.
     We could not speak a word to one another, for he understood neither English nor Swaheli, and I did not know his language. We had to express our great mutual respect by pantomime. He had already, I saw, been shown the house, all the plate that it possessed was set out on the table, and flowers arranged according to Indian and Somali taste. I went and sat down with him on the stone seat to the West. There, under the breathless attention of the onlookers, I handed him over the hundred Rupees which were wrapped up in a green handkerchief belonging to Choleim Hussein.
     I had somehow been prejudiced against the old Priest on account of his preciseness, — on seeing him so very old and small I, for a moment, thought that the situation might be awkward to him. But as we sat together in the afternoon sun, in no way pretending to keep up any conversation, but holding one another company in a friendly spirit, I felt that to him nothing at all could be awkward. He conveyed a strange impression of being in safety, and completely secure. He had a courteous little manner with him, and smiled and nodded, as I pointed out the hills and the tall trees to him, as if he were interested in everything, and incapable of surprise at anything. I wondered if this consistency was produced by an entire ignorance of the evil of the world, or by a deep knowledge and acceptance of it. For whether there be no venomous snakes in the world, or whether you shall have arrived, by injecting ever stronger doses of venom into your blood, at a stage of perfect immunity to it, in the end it must come to the same thing. The look of the old man's calm face was that of a very young infant, which has not yet learnt to speak, and which is interested in everything, and by the nature of things incapable of surprise. I might have sat, on the stone seat, through an hour of the afternoon, in the company of a very small child, a noble infant, some old Master's child Jesus, — from time to time touching the rocker of the cradle with a spiritual foot. The faces of very old women of the world, who have seen all of it, and through it, will have that same look. It is not a masculine expression, — it goes with the swaddling-clothes and the woman's frock, and went well with the beautiful white cashmere robes of my old guest. In a person in male clothes I have seen it only in a clever clown in a Circus.
     The old man was tired, and would not get up, while the other Priests were taken by Choleim Hussein down to the river to see the mill. As he was like a bird himself he seemed to take an interest in birds. I had at that time a tame stork by the house, and I kept a flock of geese which were never killed, but were there to make the place look like Denmark. The old Priest showed much interest in them; by pointing to the corners of the world he tried to find out from where they came. My dogs were on the lawn, to make the millennium character of the afternoon perfect. I had thought that Farah and Choleim Hussein would have had them shut up in the kennel, for Choleim Hussein, as a true Mohammedan, was all in a panic about them whenever he came to the farm to do business. But here they were walking about, amongst the white-robed Clergy, indeed the lion by the lamb. Those were the dogs supposed by Ismail to know a Mohammedan by sight.
     Before he went away the High Priest gave me, in memory of his visit, a ring with a pearl. I felt then that I, too, wanted to give him something, in addition to the sham gift of the Rupees, and I sent Farah to the store to fetch the skin of a lion which had a short time ago been shot on the farm. The old man took hold of one of the big claws, and with a clear attentive eye tried the sharpness of it on his cheek.
     After he had gone away, I wondered whether he had taken into his lean, noble head every single thing within the horizon of the farm, or nothing whatever. Something he had noticed, for three months later I had a letter from India, very wrongly addressed and delayed in the post. In it an Indian prince asked me to sell to him one of my "grey dogs," of which a High Priest had made mention to him, and to fix my own price.

     Chapter 3
     THE SOMALI WOMEN

     Of one group of visitors, who played a great part on the farm, I cannot write much, for they would not have liked it. Those were Farah's women.
     When Farah married, and brought his wife from Somaliland to the farm, with her came a lively and gentle little flight of dusky doves: her mother, her younger sister, and a young cousin who had been brought up with the family. Farah told me that such was the custom of his country. The marriages of Somaliland are arranged by the elders of the families with consideration as to the birth, wealth and reputation of the young people; in the best families the bride and bridegroom have not seen one another till the wedding-day. But the Somali are a chivalrous nation, and do not leave their maidens unprotected. It is good manners in a new-married husband to take up his abode in his wife's village for six months after the wedding, during this time she may still hold her own as a hostess and a person of local knowledge and influence. Sometimes he cannot do so, then the bride's female relations do not hesitate to keep her company a bit into married life, even when this to them means lifting, and wandering into distant countries.
     The circle of Somali women in my household was later completed by a little motherless girl of the tribe whom Farah took on, not, I think, without an eye to a likely profit when her time to marry should come, after the pattern of Mordecai and Esther. This little girl was an exceedingly bright and vivacious child, and it was a curious thing to see how, as she grew up, the maidens took her in hand, and scrupulously formed her into a young virgin comme il faut. When she first came to live with us she was eleven years old, and was ever breaking away from the domain of the family to follow me about. She rode my pony and carried my gun, or she would run with the Kikuyu Totos to the fishing pond, tucking up her skirts and galloping barefooted round the rushy bank with a landing-net. The little Somali girls have their hair all shaven off, leaving only a ring of dark curls round the head and one long lock at the top of it; it is a pretty fashion, and it gave the child the air of a very gay and malicious young monk. But with time, and under the influence of the grown-up girls, she was transformed, and was herself fascinated and possessed by the process of her transformation. Exactly as if a heavy weight had been tied on to her legs, she took to walking slowly, slowly; she held her eyes cast down after the best pattern, and made it a point of honour to disappear at the arrival of a stranger. Her hair was cut no more, and when the day came that it was long enough, it was, by the other girls, parted and plaited into a number of little pigtails. The Novice gave herself up gravely and proudly to all the hardships of the rite; it was felt that she would rather die than fall short in her duties towards it.
     The old woman, Farah's mother-in-law, was, Farah told me, in her own country held in high esteem on account of the excellent education which she had given her daughters. They were there the glass of fashion and the mould of maidenly form. Indeed here were three young women of the most exquisite dignity and demureness; I have never known ladies more ladylike. Their maiden modesty was accentuated by the style of their clothes. They wore skirts of imposing amplitude, it took, I know, — for I have often bought silk or calico for them, — ten yards of material to make one of them. Inside these masses of stuff their slim knees moved in an insinuating and mysterious rhythm:

Tes nobles jambes, sous les volants qu'elles chassent
Tourmentent les desirs obscurs et les agacent,
Comme deux sorcieres qui font
Toumer un philtre noir dans un vase profond.

     The mother herself was an impressive figure, very stout, with the powerful and benevolent placidity of a female elephant, contented in her strength. I have never seen her angry. Teachers and pedagogues ought to have envied her that great inspiring quality which she had in her; in her hands education was no compulsion, and no drudgery, but a great noble conspiracy into which her pupils were by privilege admitted. The little house, that I had built for them in the woods, was a small High-school of White Magic, and the three young girls, who walked so gently upon the forest-paths round it, were like three young witches who were studying at it as hard as they could, for at the end of their apprenticeship great mightiness would be theirs. They were competing in excellency in a congenial spirit; probably where you are in reality upon the market, and have your price openly discussed, rivalry takes on a frank and honest character. Farah's wife, who was no longer in suspense as to her price, was holding a special position, like that of the good Pupil who has already obtained a scholarship in witchcraft; she might be observed in confidential talks with the old Head Magician, and such an honour never fell to the maidens.
     All the young women had a high idea of their own value. A Mohammedan virgin cannot marry beneath her, such a thing would call down the gravest blame upon her family. A man may marry beneath him, — that is good enough for him, — and young Somalis have been known to take Masai wives. But while a Somali girl may marry into Arabia, an Arab girl cannot marry into Somaliland, for the Arabs are the superior race on account of their nearer relationship with the Prophet, and, amongst the Arabs themselves, a maiden belonging to the Prophet's family cannot marry a husband outside it. By virtue of their sex, the young females of the race have a claim to an upward social career. They themselves innocently compared the principle to that of a stud-farm of purebreds, for the Somali think very highly of mares.
     By the time that we had become well acquainted, the girls asked me if it could be true what they had heard, that some nations in Europe gave away their maidens to their husbands for nothing. They had even been told, but they could not possibly realize the idea, that there was one tribe so depraved as to pay the bridegroom to marry the bride. Fie and shame on such parents, and on girls who gave themselves up to such treatment. Where was their self-respect, where their respect for woman, or for virginity? If they themselves had had the misfortune to be born into that tribe, the girls told me, they would have vowed to go into their grave unmarried.
     In our days we have in Europe no opportunity to study the technique of maidenly prudery, and from the old books I had failed to catch the charm of it. Now I understood how my grandfather and great-grandfather were forced to their knees. The Somali system was at once a natural necessity and a fine art, it was both religion, strategy, and ballet, and was practised in all respects with due devotion, discipline and dexterity. The great sweetness of it lay in the play of opposite forces within it. Behind the eternal principle of refutation, there was much generosity; behind the pedantry what risibility, and contempt of death. These daughters of a fighting race went through their ceremonial of primness as through a great graceful war-dance; butter would not melt in their mouth, neither would they rest till they had drunk the heart's blood of their adversary, they figured like three ferocious young she-wolves in seemly sheep's clothing. The Somali are wiry people, hardened in deserts and on the sea. Heavy weights of life, strenuous pressure, high waves, and long ages, must have gone to turn their women into such hard, shining amber.
     The women made Farah's house home-like in the manner of a nomadic people, who may have to break their tents at any time, with many rugs and embroidered covers hung on the walls. Incense to them was an important component to a home; many of the Somali incenses are very sweet. In my life at the farm I saw few women, and I got into the habit of sitting, at the end of the day, for a quiet hour with the old woman and the girls in Farah's house.
     They took an interest in everything, and little things pleased them. Small mishaps on the farm, and jokes on our local affairs, set them laughing like a whole chime of jingles in the house. When I was to teach them to knit they laughed over it as over a comical puppet-show.
     There was no ignorance in their innocence. They had all assisted at childbirths and death-beds, and discussed the particulars of them coldly with the old mother. Sometimes, to entertain me, they would relate fairy tales in the style of the Arabian Nights, mostly in the comical genre, which treated love with much frankness. It was a trait common to all these tales that the heroine, chaste or not, would get the better of the male characters and come out of the tale triumphant. The mother sat and listened with a little smile on her face.
     Within this enclosed women's world, so to say, behind the walls and fortifications of it, I felt the presence of a great ideal, without which the garrison would not have carried on so gallantly; the idea of a Millennium when women were to reign supreme in the world. The old mother at such times would take on a new shape, and sit enthroned as a massive dark symbol of that mighty female deity who had existed in old ages, before the time of the Prophet's God. Of her they never lost sight, but they were, before all, practical people with an eye on the needs of the movement and with infinite readiness of resource.
     The young women were very inquisitive as to European customs, and listened attentively to descriptions of the manners, education, and clothes of white ladies, as if out to complete their strategic education with the knowledge of how the males of an alien race were conquered and subdued.
     Their own clothes played a tremendous part in their lives, which was no wonder, since to them they were all at once material of war, booty of war, and symbols of victory, like conquered banners. Their husband, the Somali, is abstinent by nature, indifferent to food and drink and to personal comfort, hard and spare as the country he comes from: woman is his luxury. For her he is insatiably covetous, she is to him the supreme good of life: horses, camels and stock may come in and be desirable, too, but they can never outweigh the wives. The Somali women encourage their men in both inclinations of their nature. They scorn any softness in a man with much cruelty; and with great personal sacrifices they hold up their own price. These women cannot acquire a pair of slippers in any possible way except through a man, they cannot own themselves but must needs belong to some male, to a father, a brother or a husband, but they are still the one supreme prize of life. It is a surprising thing, and to the honour of both parties, what amounts of silks, gold, amber and coral the Somali women get out of their men. At the end of the long, strenuous trading-Safaris, the hardships, risks, stratagems and endurances were all turned into female apparel. The young girls, who had no men to squeeze, in their little tent-like house were making the most of their pretty hair and looking forward to the time when they should be conquering the conqueror, and extortionating the extortioner. They were all very good at lending one another their finery, and took pleasure in dressing up the young sister, who was the beauty of the lot, in her married sister's best clothes; even, with laughter, in her cloth-of-gold head-dress, which the virgin could not lawfully wear.
     The Somali are given to lawsuits and long feuds, and we were hardly ever without a case that needed Farah's frequent presence in Nairobi, or meetings of the tribe at the farm. At such times the old woman, when I came to the house, would pump me on the cases in a gentle and intelligent manner. She might have questioned Farah, who would have told her all she wanted to know, for he had a great respect for her. But she took the other course, I believe, from diplomacy. In this way she could still maintain, should it suit her, a woman's ignorance of men's affairs, and a womanly incapability to understand a single word of them. If she gave advice it should be uttered in Sibylline fashion, divinely inspired, and nobody should ever hold her to account.
     At these big meetings of the Somali at the farm, or at the great religious celebrations, the women had much to do with the arrangement and the food. They were not themselves present at the banquet, and they could not go into the Mosque, but they were ambitious as to the success and splendour of the party, and did not even amongst themselves let out what in their hearts they thought of it all. On these occasions they so strongly reminded me of the ladies of a former generation in my own country, that in my mind I saw them in bustles and long narrow trains. Not otherwise did the Scandinavian women of the days of my Mothers, and Grandmothers, — the civilized slaves of good-natured barbarians, — do the honours at those tremendous sacred masculine festivals: the pheasant-shoots and great battues of the autumn season.
     The Somali have been slave-owners for innumerable generations, and their women got on well with the Natives and with them had an unconcerned placid way. To the Native, service with the Somali and the Arab is less difficult than with the white people, for the tempo of life of the coloured races is everywhere the same. Farah's wife was popular with the Kikuyu of the farm, and Kamante many times told me that she was very clever.
     With those of my white friends who frequently came to stay at the farm, like Berkeley Cole and Denys Finch-Hatton, the young Somali women were friendly, they frequently talked of them and knew a surprising lot about them. They conversed with them, when they met, in a sisterly manner, their hands in the folds of their skirts. But the relations were complicated because both Berkeley and Denys had Somali servants, and those the girls could not, for the life of them, meet. No sooner had Jama or Bilea, turbaned, lean and dark-eyed, shown themselves on the farm, than my young Somali women were gone from the face of it, not a bubble showing where they had sunk. If during these times they wanted to see me, they came sneaking round the corners of the house, drawing one of their skirts together over their faces. The Englishmen said that they were pleased by the confidence shown them, but in their hearts, I believe, a little cold wind blew at the consciousness of being thought so harmless.
     I sometimes took the girls out for a drive or a visit; I was careful then to question the mother as to the correctness of it, for I would not begrime names that were as fresh as Dian's visage. To the one side of the farm lived a young Australian married woman who was for a few years a charming neighbour to me; she would ask the Somali girls over for tea. Those were great occasions. They then dressed up as pretty as a bouquet of flowers, and as we were driving along, the car behind me twittered like an aviary. They took the greatest interest in the house, the clothes, even, — as he was seen riding or ploughing in the distance, — in the husband of my friend. As tea was served, it came out that it was only the married sister and the children who could partake of it, to the young girls it was forbidden as too exciting. They had to content themselves with cakes and did so demurely, with a good grace. There was some discussion about the little girl, who was with us, — could she still drink tea, or had she reached an age to which it would prove too dangerous? The married sister held that she might have it, but the child gave us a deep, dark, proud glance, and rejected the cup.
     The cousin was a pensive girl with red-brown eyes, she could read Arabic and knew passages of the Koran by heart. She was of a theological turn of mind, and we had many religious discussions and talks about the wonders of the world. From her I learned the true paraphrase of the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife. She would admit Jesus Christ to have been born of a virgin, but not as the son of God, for God could have no sons in the flesh. Mariammo, who was the loveliest of maidens, had been walking in the garden, and a great angel, sent by the Lord, with his wingfeather had touched her shoulder, from this she conceived. In the course of our debates I one day showed her a picture postcard of Thorvaldsen's statue of Christ, in the Cathedral of Copenhagen. Upon that she fell in love, in a gentle and ecstatic way, with the Saviour. She could never hear enough about him, she sighed and changed colour as I narrated. About Judas she was much concerned, — what sort of man was he, how could there be people like that? — she herself would be only too happy to scratch out his eyes. It was a great passion, in the nature of the incense which they burned in their houses, and which, made from dark wood grown upon distant mountains, is sweet and strange to our senses.
     I asked the French Fathers, if I might bring my party of young Mohammedan women to the Mission, and when they agreed in their friendly lively manner, — pleased that something was going to happen, — we one afternoon drove over to them, and one by one solemnly entered the cool Church. The young women had never been in such a lofty building, as they looked up they held their hands over their heads to protect themselves should it fall down upon them. There were statues in the Church, and, with the exception of the picture postcard, they had never in their lives seen anything like them. At the French Mission there is a life-size statue of the Virgin, all in white and light blue, with a lily in her hand, and beside her another of St. Joseph with the infant on his arm. The girls were struck dumb in front of them, the beauty of the Virgin made them sigh. Of St. Joseph they knew already, and they thought highly of him, for being such a loyal husband and protector to the Virgin, now they gave him deep thankful glances because he carried the child for his wife as well. Farah's wife, who was then expecting her child, kept near the Holy Family all the time she stayed in the Church. The Fathers prided themselves much on their Church windows, which were done up in a paper imitation of stained glass, and represented the passion of Christ. The young cousin became all lost and absorbed in these windows, she walked round the Church with her eyes on them, wringing her hands, her own knees bending as under the weight of the cross. On the way home they said very little, they were afraid, I believe, to betray their ignorance by any questions they might make. Only a couple of days later did they ask me if the Fathers could make the Virgin or St. Joseph come down from their plinths.
     The young cousin was married from the farm, in a pretty bungalow which was then empty, and which I lent to the Somalis for the occasion. The wedding was a splendid affair and lasted for seven days. I was present at the head ceremony, when a procession of women, all singing, led the bride to meet the singing procession of men who brought the bridegroom to her. She had never seen him till then, and I wondered if she had imagined him in the likeness of Thorvaldsen's Christ, or if she would have had two ideals, a heavenly and an earthly love, on the model of the romances of chivalry. In the course of the week I drove over there more than once. At whatever hour I arrived I found the house ringing with festive life and fumigated with wedding incense. Sword-dances, and great dances of the women, went with a swing; big deals in cattle were done amongst the old men, guns were fired and mule traps from town were arriving or leaving. At night, in the light of hurricane-lamps on the Verandah, the loveliest dyes of Arabia and Somaliland were going in and out of the carts and the house: carmoisin, prune pure, Sudan brown, rose bengale and Saffranine.
     Farah's son was born on the farm, Ahamed, whom they called Saufe, which means, I believe, a saw. In his heart there was none of the timidity of the Kikuyu children. When he was a tiny infant, swaddled like an acorn, with hardly any body to his dark round head, he sat up erect, and looked you straight in the face: it was like holding a small falcon on your hand, a lioncub on the knee. He had inherited his mother's gaiety of heart, and, when he could run about, became a big joyful adventurer who held much influence in the young Native world of the farm.
    

    Chapter 4
    OLD KNUDSEN

     Sometimes visitors from Europe drifted into the farm like wrecked timber into still waters, turned and rotated, till in the end they were washed out again, or dissolved and sank.
     Old Knudsen, the Dane, had come to the farm, sick and blind, and stayed there for the time it took him to die, a lonely animal. He walked along the roads all bent over his misery; for long periods he was without speech, for he had no strength left over from the hard task of carrying it, or, when he spoke, his voice, like the voice of the wolf or hyena, was in itself a wail.
     But when he recovered breath, and for a little while was without pain, then sparks flew from the dying fire once more. He would then come to me and explain how he had got to fight with a morbid melancholic disposition in himself, an absurd tendency to see things black. It must be outreasoned, for the outward circumstances they were not amiss, they were, the devil take him, not to be despised. Only pessimism, pessimism, — that was a bad vice!
     It was Knudsen who advised me to burn charcoal and sell it to the Indians of Nairobi, at a time when we were, on the farm, more than usually hard up. There were thousands of Rupees in it, he assured me. And it could not fail under the aegis of Old Knudsen, for he had, at one time of his tumultuous career, been to the utmost North of Sweden, and there had learned the craft at his finger's end. He took upon himself to instruct the Natives in the art. While we were thus working together in the wood I talked much with Knudsen.
     Charcoal-burning is a pleasant job. There is undoubtedly something intoxicating about it, and it is known that charcoal-burners see things in a different light from other people; they are given to poetry and taradiddle, and wood-demons come and keep them company. Charcoal is a beautiful thing to turn out, when your kiln is burnt and opened up, and the contents spread on the ground. Smooth as silk, matter defecated, freed of weight and made imperishable, the dark experienced little mummy of the wood.
     The mise-en-scène of the art of charcoal-burning is in itself as lovely as possible. As we were cutting down the undergrowth only, — for charcoal cannot be made from thick timber, — we were still working under the crowns of the tall trees. In this stillness and shade of the African forest, the cut wood smelt like gooseberries; and the piercing, fresh, rank, sour smell of the burning kiln was as bracing as a sea breeze. The whole place had a theatrical atmosphere which, under the Equator, where there are no theatres, was of infinite charm. The thin blue whirls of smoke from the kilns arose at regular distances, and the dark kilns themselves looked like tents on the stage; the place was a smugglers' or soldiers' camp in a romantic Opera. The dark figures of the Natives moved noiselessly amongst them. Where the underwoods have been cleared away in an African forest you will always get a great number of butterflies, which seem to like to cluster on the stubs. It was all mysterious and innocent. In the surroundings, the small crooked form of Old Knudsen fitted in wonderfully well, flickering about, red-topped, agile, now that he had got a favourite job to attend to, sneering and encouraging, like a Puck grown old and blind and very malicious. He was conscientious about his work and surprisingly patient with his Native pupils. We did not always agree. In Paris, where as a girl I went to a painting school, I had learnt that olive-wood will make the best charcoal, but Knudsen explained that olive had no knots in it, and, seven thousand devils in Hell, every one knew that the heart of things was in their knots.
     A particular circumstance here in the wood soothed Knudsen's hot temper. The African trees have a delicate foliage, mostly digitate, so that when you have cleared away the dense undergrowth, so to say hollowing out the forest, the light is like the light in a beechwood in May at home, when the leaves are just unfolded, or hardly unfolded yet. I drew Knudsen's attention to the likeness, and the idea pleased him, for all the time of the charcoal-burning he kept up and developed a fantasy: we were on a Whitsunday picnic in Denmark. An old hollow tree he christened Lottenburg, after a place of amusement near Copenhagen. When I had a few bottles of Danish beer hidden in the depths of Lottenburg, and invited him to a drink there, he condescended to think it a good joke.
     When we had all our kilns lighted we sat down and talked of life. I learned much about Knudsen's past life, and the strange adventures that had fallen to him wherever he had wandered. You had, in these conversations, to talk of Old Knudsen himself, the one righteous man, — or you would sink into that black pessimism against which he was warning you. He had experienced many things: shipwrecks, plague, fishes of unknown colouring, drinking-spouts, water-spouts, three contemporaneous suns in the sky, false friends, black villainy, short successes, and showers of gold that instantly dried up again. One strong feeling ran through his Odyssey: the abomination of the law, and all its works, and all its doings. He was a born rebel, he saw a comrade in every outlaw. A heroic deed meant to him in itself an act of defiance against the law. He liked to talk of kings and royal families, jugglers, dwarfs and lunatics, for them he took to be outside the law, — and also of any crime, revolution, trick, and prank, that flew in the face of the law. But for the good citizen he had a deep contempt, and law-abidingness in any man was to him the sign of a slavish mind. He did not even respect, or believe in, the law of gravitation, which I learnt while we were felling trees together: he saw no reason why it should not be — by unprejudiced, enterprising people — changed into the exact reverse.
     Knudsen was eager to imprint on my mind the names of people he had known, preferably of swindlers and scoundrels. But he never in his narrations mentioned the name of a woman. It was as if time had swept his mind both of Elsinore's sweet girls, and of the merciless women of the harbour-towns of the world. All the same, when I was talking with him I felt in his life the constant presence of an unknown woman. I cannot say who she may have been: wife, mother, school-dame or wife of his first employer, — in my thoughts I called her Madam Knudsen. I imagined her short because he was so short himself. She was the woman who ruins the pleasure of man, and therein is always right. She was the wife of the curtain-lectures, and the housewife of the big cleaning-days, she stopped all enterprises, she washed the faces of boys, and snatched away the man's glass of gin from the table before him, she was law and order embodied. In her claim of absolute power she had some likeness to the female deity of the Somali women, but Madam Knudsen did not dream of enslaving by love, she ruled by reasoning and righteousness.
     Knudsen must have met her at a young age, when his mind was soft enough to receive an ineffaceable impression. He had fled from her to the Sea, for the Sea she loathes, and there she does not come, but ashore again in Africa he had not escaped her, she was still with him. In his wild heart, under his white-red hair, he feared her more than he feared any man, and suspected all women of being in reality Madam Knudsen in disguise.
     Our charcoal-burning in the end was no financial success. From time to time it would happen that one of our kilns caught fire, and there was our profit gone up in smoke. Knudsen himself was much concerned about our failure, and speculated hard upon it, at last he declared that nobody in the world could burn charcoal if they did not have a fair supply of snow at hand.
     Knudsen also helped me to make a pond on the farm. The farm-road in one place ran through a wide cup of grassy ground, there was a spring here and I thought out the plan of building a dam below it and turning the place into a lake. You are always short of water in Africa, it would be a great gain to the cattle to be able to drink in the field, and save themselves the long journey down to the river. This idea of a dam occupied all the farm day and night, and was much discussed; in the end, when it was finished, it was to all of us a majestic achievement. It was two hundred feet long. Old Knudsen took a great interest in it, and taught Pooran Singh to fabricate a dam-scoop. We had trouble with the dam when it was built, because it would not hold water when, after a long dry period, the big rains began; it gave way in a number of places and was half washed away more than once. It was Knudsen who struck upon the scheme of strengthening the earthwork by driving the farm oxen and the Squatters' stock across the dam whenever they came to the pond to drink. Every goat and sheep had to contribute to the great work and stamp the structure. He had some big bloody fights with the little herdboys down here, for Knudsen insisted that the cattle should walk over slowly, but the wild young Totos wanted them galloping across, tails in the air. In the end, when I had sided with Knudsen and he had got the better of the Totos, the long file of cattle, sedately marching along the narrow bank looked against the sky like Noah's procession of animals going into the ark; and Old Knudsen himself, counting them, his stick under his arm, looked like the boatbuilder Noah, content in the thought that everybody but himself was soon to drown.
     In the course of time, I got a vast expanse of water here, seven feet deep in places; the road went through the pond, it was very pretty. Later on we even built two more dams lower down and in this way obtained a row of ponds, like pearls upon a string. The pond now became the heart of the farm. It was always much alive, with a ring of cattle and children round it, and in the hot season, when waterholes dried up in the plains and the hills, the birds came to the farm: herons, ibis, kingfishers, quail, and a dozen varieties of geese and duck. In the evening, when the first stars sprang out in the sky, I used to go and sit by the pond, and then the birds came home. Swimming birds have a purposeful flight, unlike that of other birds: they are on a journey, going from one place to another, — and what perspective is there not in the reading wild swimmers! The duck concluded their orbit over the glass-clear sky, to swoop noiselessly into the dark water like so many arrow-heads let off backwards by a heavenly archer. I once shot a crocodile in the pond, it was a strange thing, for he must have wandered twelve miles from the Athi river to get there. How did he know that there would be water now, where it had never been before?
     When the first pond was finished, Knudsen communicated to me the plan of putting fish into it. We had in Africa a kind of perch, which was good to eat, and we dwelt much upon the idea of rich fishing on the farm. It was not, however, an easy thing to get them, the Game-Department had set out perch in ponds but would let nobody fish there yet. But Knudsen confided to me his knowledge of a pond of which no one else in the world knew, where we could get as many fish as we wanted. We would drive there, he explained, draw a net through the pond, and take the fish back in the car in tins and vats in which they would keep alive on the way if we remembered to put water-weeds in with the water. He was so keen on his scheme that he trembled while developing it to me; with his own hands he made one of his inimitable fishing-nets for it. But as the time for the expedition drew near it took on a more and more mysterious aspect. It should be undertaken, he held, on a full moon night, about midnight. At first we had meant to take three boys with us, then he reduced the number to two and to one, and kept asking whether he was absolutely trustworthy? In the end he declared that it would be better that he and I should go by ourselves. I thought this a bad plan for we would not be able to carry the tins into the car, but Knudsen insisted that it would be by far the best, and added that we ought to tell no one of it.
     I had friends in the Game-Department, and I could not help it, I had to ask him: "Knudsen, to whom do these fish that we are going to catch, really belong?" Not a word answered Knudsen. He spat, a regular old sailor's spit, — stretched out his foot in the old patched shoe and rubbed out the spitting on the ground, turned on his heel and walked off deadly slowly. He drew his head down between his shoulders as he went, now he could no longer see at all, but was fumbling before him with his stick, he was once more a beaten man, a homeless fugitive in a low, cold world. And as if in his gesture he had pronounced a spell I stood upon the spot where he had left me, victorious, in Madam Knudsen's slippers.
     The fishing project was never again approached between Knudsen and me. Only some time after his death did I, with the assistance of the Game Department, set perch into the pond. They thrived there, and added their silent, cool, mute, restive life to the other life of the pond. In the middle of the day one could, on passing the pond, see them standing near the surface, like fish made out of dark glass in the dim sunny water. My Toto Tumbo was sent to the pond with a primitive fishing-rod and drew up a perch of two pounds whenever an unexpected guest arrived at the house.
     When I had found old Knudsen dead on the farm-road, I sent in a runner to the Police of Nairobi and reported his death. I had meant to bury him on the farm, but late at night two police officers came out in a car to fetch him, and brought a coffin with them. In the meantime a thunderstorm had broken out, and we had had three inches of rain, for this was just at the beginning of the long rainy season. We drove down to his house through torrents and sheets of water; as we carried Knudsen out to the car the thunder rolled over our heads like cannons, and the flashes of lightning stood on all sides thick as ears in a cornfield. The car had no chains to it and could hardly keep on the road, it swung from one side of it to another. Old Knudsen would have liked it, he would have been satisfied with his Exit from the farm.
     Afterwards I had a disagreement with the Nairobi Municipality over his funeral arrangements, it developed into a heated argument and I had to go into town about it more than once. It was a legacy left to me by Knudsen, a last tilt, by proxy, at the face of the law. Thus I was no longer Madam Knudsen, but a brother.

     Chapter 5
     A FUGITIVE RESTS ON THE FARM

     There was one traveller who came to the farm, slept there for one night, and walked off not to come back, of whom I have since thought from time to time. His name was Emmanuelson; he was a Swede and when I first knew him he held the position of maître d'hotel at one of the hotels of Nairobi. He was a fattish young man with a red puffed face, and he was in the habit of standing by my chair when I was lunching at the hotel, to entertain me in a very oily voice of the old country, and of mutual acquaintances there; he was so persistently conversational that after a while I changed over to the only other hotel which in those days we had in the town. I then only vaguely heard of Emmanuelson; he seemed to have a gift for bringing himself into trouble, and also to differ, in his tastes and ideas of the pleasures of life, from the customary. So he had become unpopular with the other Scandinavians of the country. Upon one afternoon he suddenly appeared at the farm, much upset and frightened, and asked me for a loan so as to get off to Tanganyika at once, as otherwise he believed he would be sent to jail. Either my help came too late or Emmanuelson spent it on other things, for a short time after I heard that he had been arrested in Nairobi, he did not go to prison but for some time he disappeared from my horizon.
     One evening I came riding home so late that the stars were already out, and caught sight of a man waiting outside my house on the stones. It was Emmanuelson and he announced himself to me in a cordial voice: "Here comes a vagabond, Baroness." I asked him how it was that I should find him there, and he told me that he had lost his way and so been landed at my house. His way to where? To Tanganyika.
     That could hardly be true, — the Tanganyika road was the great highway and easy to find, my own farm-road took off from it. How was he going to get to Tanganyika? I asked him. He was going to walk, he informed me. That, I answered, was not a possible thing to do for anyone, it would mean three days through the Masai-Reserve without water, and the lions were bad there just now, the Masai had been in the same day to complain about them and had asked me to come out and shoot one for them.
     Yes, yes, Emmanuelson knew of all that, but he was going to walk to Tanganyika all the same. For he did not know what else to do. He was wondering now whether, having lost his way, he could bear me company for dinner and sleep at the farm to start early in the morning? — if that was not convenient to me he would set out straight away while the stars were out so bright.
     I had remained sitting on my horse while I talked to him, to accentuate that he was not a guest in the house, for I did not want him in to dine with me. But as he spoke, I saw that he did not expect to be invited either, he had no faith in my hospitality or in his own power of persuasion, and he made a lonely figure in the dark outside my house, a man without a friend. His hearty manner was adapted to save not his own face, which was past it, but mine, if now I sent him away it would be no unkindness, but quite all right. This was courtesy in a hunted animal, — I called for my Sice to take the pony, and got off, — "Come in, Emmanuelson," I said, "you can dine here and stay over the night."
     In the light of the lamp Emmanuelson was a sad sight. He had on a long black overcoat such as nobody wears in Africa, he was unshaven and his hair was not cut, his old shoes were split at the toe. He was bringing no belongings with him to Tanganyika, his hands were empty. It seemed that I was to take the part of the High Priest who presents the goat alive to the Lord, and sends it into the wilderness. I thought that here we needed wine. Berkeley Cole, who generally kept the house in wine, some time ago had sent me a case of a very rare burgundy, and I now told Juma to open a bottle from it. When we sat down for dinner and Emmanuelson's glass was filled he drank half of it, held it towards the lamp and looked at it for a long time like a person attentively listening to music. "Fameux" he said, "fameux; this is a Chambertin 1906." It was so, and that gave me respect for Emmanuelson.
     Otherwise he did not say much to begin with, and I did not know what to say to him. I asked him how it was that he had not been able to find any work at all. He answered that it was because he knew nothing of the things with which people out here occupied themselves. He had been dismissed at the hotel, besides he was not really a maître d'hotel by profession.
     "Do you know anything of book-keeping?" I asked him.
     "No. Nothing at all," he said. "I have always found it very difficult to add two figures together."
     "Do you know about cattle at all?" I went on. "Cows?" he asked. "No, no. I am afraid of cows."
     "Can you drive a tractor, then?" I asked. Here a faint ray of hope appeared on his face. "No," he said, "but I think that I could learn that."
     "Not on my tractor though," I said, "but tell me, Emmanuelson, what have you ever been doing? What are you in life?"
     Emmanuelson drew himself up straight. "What am I?" he exclaimed. "Why, I am an actor."
     I thought: Thank God, it is altogether outside my capacity to assist this lost man in any practical way; the time has come for general human conversation. "You are an actor?" I said, "that is a fine thing to be. And which were your favourite parts when you were on the stage?"
     "Oh I am a tragic actor," said Emmanuelson, "my favourite parts were that of Armand in 'La Dame aux Camelias' and of Oswald in 'Ghosts'."
     We talked for some time of these plays, of the various actors whom we had seen in them and of the way in which we thought that they should be acted. Emmanuelson looked round the room. "You have not," he asked, "by any chance got the plays of Henrik Ibsen here? Then we might do the last scene of 'Ghosts' together, if you would not mind taking the part of Mrs. Alving."
     I had not got Ibsen's plays.
     "But perhaps you will remember it?" said Emmanuelson warming to his plan. "I myself know Oswald by heart from beginning to end. That last scene is the best. For a real tragic effect, you know, that is impossible to beat."
     The stars were out and it was a very fine warm night, there was not long, now, to the big rains. I asked Emmanuelson if he did really mean to walk to Tanganyika.
     "Yes," he said, "I am going, now, to be my own prompter."
     "It is a good thing for you," I said, "that you are not married."
     "Yes," said he, "yes." After a little while he added modestly: "I am married though."
     In the course of our talk, Emmanuelson complained of the fact that out here a white man could not hold his own against the competition from the Natives, who worked so much cheaper. "Now in Paris," he said, "I could always, for a short time, get a job as a waiter in some cafe or other."
     "Why did you not stay in Paris, Emmanuelson?" I asked him.
     He gave me a swift clear glance. "Paris?" he said, "no, no, indeed. I got out of Paris just at the nick of time."
     Emmanuelson had one friend in the world to whom in the course of the evening he came back many times. If he could only get in touch with him again, everything would be different, for he was prosperous and very generous. This man was a conjurer and was travelling all over the world. When Emmanuelson had last heard of him he had been in San Francisco.
     From time to time we talked of literature and the theatre and then again we would come back to Emmanuelson's future. He told me how his countrymen out here in Africa had one after another turned him out.
     "You are in a hard position, Emmanuelson," I said, "I do not know that I can think of anyone who is, in a way, harder up against things than you are."
     "No, I think so myself," he said. "But then there is one thing of which I have thought lately and of which perhaps you have not thought: some person or other will have to be in the worst position of all people."
     He had finished his bottle and pushed his glass a little away from him. "This journey," he said, "is a sort of gamble to me,le rouge et le noir. I have a chance to get out of things, I may even be getting out of everything. On the other hand if I get to Tanganyika I may get into things."
     "I think you will get to Tanganyika," I said, "you may get a lift from one of the Indian lorries travelling on that road."
     "Yes, but there are the lions," said Emmanuelson, "and the Masai."
     "Do you believe in God, Emmanuelson?" I asked him.
     "Yes, yes, yes," said Emmanuelson. He sat in silence for a time. "Perhaps you will think me a terrible sceptic," he said, "if I now say what I am going to say. But with the exception of God I believe in absolutely nothing whatever."
     "Look here, Emmanuelson," I said, "have you got any money?"
     "Yes, I have," he said, "eighty cents."
     "That is not enough," I said, "and I myself have got no money in the house. But perhaps Farah will have some." Farah had got four rupees.
     Next morning, some time before sunrise, I told my boys to wake up Emmanuelson and to make breakfast for us. I had thought, in the course of the night, that I should like to take him in my car for the first ten miles of his way. It was no advantage to Emmanuelson, who would still have another eighty miles to walk, but I did not like to see him step straight from the threshold of my house into his uncertain fate, and besides I wished to be, myself, somewhere within this comedy or tragedy of his. I made him up a parcel of sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, and gave him with it a bottle of the Chambertin 1906 since he appreciated it. I thought that it might well be his last drink in life.
     Emmanuelson in the dawn looked like one of those legendary corpses whose beards grow quickly in the earth, but he came forth from his grave with a good grace and was very placid and well-balanced as we drove on. When we had come to the other side of the Mbagathi river, I let him down from the car. The morning air was clear and there was not a cloud in the sky. He was going towards the South-West. As I looked round to the opposite horizon, the sun just came up, dull and red: like the yolk of a hard-boiled egg, I thought. In three or four hours she would be white-hot, and fierce upon the head of the wanderer.
     Emmanuelson said good-bye to me; he started to walk, and then came back and said good-bye once more. I sat in the car and watched him, and I think that as he went he was pleased to have a spectator. I believe that the dramatic instinct within him was so strong that he was at this moment vividly aware of being leaving the stage, of disappearing, as if he had, with the eyes of his audience, seen himself go. Exit Emmanuelson. Should not the hills, the thorn-trees and the dusty road take pity and for a second put on the aspect of cardboard?
     In the morning breeze his long black overcoat fluttered round his legs, the neck of the bottle stuck up from one of its pockets. I felt my heart filling with the love and gratitude which the people who stay at home are feeling for the wayfarers and wanderers of the world, the sailors, explorers and vagabonds. As he came to the top of the hill he turned, took off his hat and waved it to me, his long hair was blown up from his forehead.
     Farah, who was with me in the car, asked me: "Where is that Bwana going?" Farah called Emmanuelson a Bwana for the sake of his own dignity, since he had slept in the house.
     "To Tanganyika," I said.
     "On foot?" asked he.
     "Yes," I said.
     "Allah be with him," said Farah.
     In the course of the day I thought much of Emmanuelson, and went out of the house to look towards the Tanganyika road. In the night, about ten o'clock, I heard the roar of a lion far away to the South-West; half an hour later I heard him again. I wondered if he was sitting upon an old black overcoat. During the following week I tried to get news of Emmanuelson, and told Farah to ask his Indian acquaintances who were running lorries to Tanganyika, whether any lorry had passed or met him on the road. But nobody knew anything of him.
     Half a year later I was surprised to receive a registered letter from Dodoma, where I knew no one. The letter was from Emmanuelson. It contained the fifty rupees that I had first lent him when he had been trying to get out of the country, and Farah's four rupees. Apart from this sum, — the last money in all the world that I had expected to see again, — Emmanuelson sent me a long, sensible and charming letter. He had got a job as a bartender in Dodoma, whatever kind of bar they may have there, and was getting on well. He seemed to have in him a talent for gratitude, he remembered everything of his evening on the farm, and came back many times to the fact that there he had felt amongst friends. He told me in detail about his journey to Tanganyika. He had much good to say of the Masai. They had found him on the road and had taken him in, had shown him great kindness and hospitality, and had let him travel with them most of the way, by many circuits. He had, he wrote, entertained them so well, with recounts of his adventures in many countries, that they had not wanted to let him go. Emmanuelson did not know any Masai language, and for his Odyssey he must have fallen back upon pantomime.
     It was fit and becoming, I thought, that Emmanuelson should have sought refuge with the Masai, and that they should have received him. The true aristocracy and the true proletariat of the world are both in understanding with tragedy. To them it is the fundamental principle of God, and the key, — the minor key, — to existence. They differ in this way from the bourgeoisie of all classes, who deny tragedy, who will not tolerate it, and to whom the word of tragedy means in itself unpleasantness. Many misunderstandings between the white middle-class immigrant settlers and the Natives arise from this fact. The sulky Masai are both aristocracy and proletariat, they would have recognized at once in the lonely wanderer in black, a figure of tragedy; and the tragic actor had come, with them, into his own.

     Chapter 6
     VISITS OF FRIENDS

     The visits of my friends to the farm were happy events in my life, and the farm knew it.
     When one of Denys Finch-Hatton's long Safaris was drawing to its end, it happened that I would find, on a morning, a young Masai standing upon one long slim leg outside my house. "Bedâr is on his way back," he announced. "He will be here in two or three days."
     In the afternoon, a Squatter Toto from the outskirts of the farm sat and waited on the lawn, to tell me, when I came out: "There is a flight of Guinea-fowl down by the bend of the river. If you want to shoot them for Bedâr when he comes I will come out with you at sunset to show you where to find them."
     To the great wanderers amongst my friends, the farm owed its charm, I believe, to the fact that it was stationary and remained the same whenever they came to it. They had been over vast countries and had raised and broken their tents in many places, now they were pleased to round my drive that was steadfast as the orbit of a star. They liked to be met by familiar faces, and I had the same servants all the time that I was in Africa. I had been on the farm longing to get away, and they came back to it longing for books and linen sheets and the cool atmosphere in a big shuttered room; by their campfires they had been meditating upon the joys of farm life, and as they arrived they asked me eagerly: "Have you taught your cook to make an omelette a la chasseur? — and have the gramophone records from 'Petrouchka' arrived by the last mail?" They came and stayed in the house also when I was away, and Denys had the use of it, when I was on a visit in Europe. "My Silvan Retreat," Berkeley Cole called it.
     In return for the goods of civilization, the wayfarers brought me trophies from their hunts: Leopard and Cheetah skins, to be made into fur coats in Paris, snake and lizard skins for shoes, and marabout feathers.
     To please them I experimented, while they were away, with many curious recipes out of old cookery books, and worked to make European flowers grow in my garden.
     Once, when I was at home, an old lady in Denmark gave me twelve fine peony-bulbs which I brought into the country with me at some trouble, as the import regulations about plants were strict. When I had them planted, they sent up, almost immediately, a great number of dark carmoisin curvilinear shoots, and later a lot of delicate leaves and rounded buds. The first flower which unfolded was called Duchesse de Nemours, it was a large single white peony, very noble and rich, it gave out a profusion of fresh sweet scent. When I cut it and put it in water in my sitting-room, every single white person entering the room stopped and remarked upon it. Why, it was a peony! But soon after this, all the other buds of my plants withered and fell off, and I never got more than that one flower.
     Some years later I talked with the English gardener of Lady McMillan, of Chiromo, about peonies. "We have not succeeded in growing peonies in Africa," he said, "and shall not do so till we manage to make an imported bulb flower here, and can take the seed from that flower. This is how we got Delphinium into the Colony." In that way I might have introduced peonies into the country and made my name immortal like the Duchesse de Nemours herself; and I had ruined the glory of the future by picking my unique flower and putting it in water. I have very often dreamed that I have seen the white peony growing, and I have rejoiced because after all I had not cut it off.

     Friends from farms up country, and from the town, arrived at the house. Hugh Martin, of the Land Office, came out from Nairobi to entertain me; a brilliant person, versed in the rare literature of the world, who had passed his life peacefully in the Civil Service of the East, and there, amongst other things, had developed an innate talent for looking like an immensely fat Chinese Idol. He called me Candide, and was himself a curious Doctor Pangloss of the farm, firmly and placidly rooted in his conviction of the meanness and contemptibleness of human nature and of the Universe, and content in his faith, for why should it not be so? He hardly ever moved out of the large chair in which he had once placed himself. With his bottle and glass before him, and a sedately beaming face, he there spread and expanded upon his theories of life, luminating with ideas, like some fantastical quick phosphoric growth of matter and thought, a fat man at peace with the world and resting in the Devil, with the stamp of cleanliness upon him that the Devil's disciples bear, in preference to many of those of the Lord.
     Young, big-nosed Gustav Mohr from Norway, of an evening suddenly swooped on the house from the farm he managed, on the other side of Nairobi. He was a rousing farmer and helped me in the work of the farm in word and deed, more than any other man in the country, — with a simple vigorous readiness as if it were standing to reason that farmers, or Scandinavians, were to slave for one another.
     Here he was now flung on to the farm by his own burning mind, like a stone out of a volcano. He was going mad, he said, in a country which expected a man to keep alive on talk of oxen and sisal, his soul was starving and he could stand it no longer. He began the moment he came into the room and went on till after midnight, holding forth on love, communism, prostitution, Hamsun, the Bible, and poisoning himself in very bad tobacco all the time. He would hardly eat, he would not listen, if I tried to get a word in he shrieked, glowing with the fire within him, and butting the air with his wild light head. He had much in him to rid himself of, and was generating more as he spoke. Suddenly, at two o'clock at night, he had no more to say. He would then sit peacefully for a little while, a humble look on his face, like a convalescent in a hospital garden, get up, and drive away at a terrible speed, prepared to keep alive, once more, for a while, on sisal and oxen.
     Ingrid Lindstrom came to stay on the farm when she could get away for a day or two from her own farm, her turkeys and market-gardening at Njoro. Ingrid was as fair of skin as of mind, and the daughter and wife of Swedish officers. She and her husband had come out with their children to Africa on a joyous adventure, a picnic, to make a fortune quickly, and had bought up flax-land because at that time flax was £5OO a ton, and when, just after that, flax fell to £4O and flax-land and flax-machinery were worth nothing, she put in all her strength to save the farm for her family, planning her poultry farm and her market garden, and working like a slave. In the course of that strife she fell deeply in love with the farm, with her cows and pigs, Natives and vegetables, with the very soil of her bit of Africa, in such a great desperate passion that she would have sold both husband and children to keep it. She and I, during the bad years, had wept in one another's arms at the thought of losing our land. It was a joyful time when Ingrid came to stay with me, for she had all the broad bold insinuating joviality of an old Swedish peasant woman, and in her weather-beaten face, the strong white teeth of a laughing Valkyrie. Therefore does the world love the Swedes, because in the midst of their woes they can draw it all to their bosom and be so gallant that they shine a long way away.
     Ingrid had an old Kikuyu cook and houseboy named Kemosa, who filled a number of offices with her, and looked upon all her activities as his own. He slaved for her in the market-garden and poultry-yard, and also acted as a Duenna to her three small daughters, travelling with them to and from their boarding school. When I came up to visit her on her farm at Njoro, Ingrid told me, Kemosa lost all his balance of mind, let go his hold of everything else, and made the grandest possible preparations for my reception, killing off her turkeys, so much was he impressed with Farah's greatness. Ingrid said he looked upon his acquaintance with Farah as upon the greatest honour of his existence.
     Mrs. Darrell Thompson of Njoro, whom I hardly knew, came out to see me when the doctors had informed her that she had only got a few more months to live. She told me that she had just been buying a pony in Ireland, a prize-jumper, — for horses were to her, in death as in life, the height and glory of existence, — and that now, after she had talked with the doctors, she had at first meant to cable home to stop him from coming out, but then she had made up her mind to leave him to me when she herself should die. I did not think much about it until, after her death half a year later, the pony, Poor-box, made his appearance at Ngong. Poor-box when he came to live with us, proved himself the most intelligent being on the farm. He was not much to look at, stumpy and long past his youth, Denys Finch-Hatton used to ride him, but I never cared much to do so. But by pure politics and circumspection, by knowing exactly what he wanted to do, amongst the young shining fiery horses brought out for the occasion by our wealthiest people of the Colony, he won the jumping competition of Kabete, which was held in honour of the Prince of Wales. With his usual collected unassuming mien and countenance he brought home a big silver medal and, after a week of extreme anxiety, raised great radiant waves of rapture and triumph in my household and on all the farm. He died from horsesickness, six months later, and was buried outside his stable under the lemon trees, and much lamented; his name lived a long time after him.
     Old Mr. Bulpett, whom the Club called Uncle Charles, used to come out to dine with me. He was a great friend of mine, and a kind of ideal to me, the English gentleman of the Victorian age, and quite at home in our own. He had swum the Hellespont, and had been one of the first to climb the Matterhorn, and he had been, in his early youth, in the 'eighties perhaps, La Belle Otéro's lover. I was told that she had ruined him altogether and let him go. It was to me as if I were sitting down to dinner with Armand Duval or the Chevalier des Grieux themselves. He had many lovely pictures of Otéro, and liked to talk about her.
     Once, at dinner at Ngong, I said to him: "I see that La Belle Otéro's memoirs have been published. Are you in them?"
     "Yes," he said, "I am in them. Under another name, but still there."
     "What does she write about you?" I asked.
     "She writes," he said, "that I was a young man who went through a hundred thousand for her sake within six months, but that I had full value for my money."
     "And do you consider," I said and laughed, "that you did have full value?"
     He thought my question over for a very short moment. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I had."
     Denys Finch-Hatton and I went with Mr. Bulpett for a picnic to the top of the Ngong Hills on his seventy-seventh birthday. As we sat up there we came to discuss the question of whether, if we were offered a pair of real wings, which could never be laid off, we would accept or decline the offer.
     Old Mr. Bulpett sat and looked out over the tremendous big country below us, the green land of Ngong, and the Rift Valley to the West, as if ready to fly off over it at any moment. "I would accept," he said, "I would certainly accept. There is nothing I should like better." After a little time of thought he added: "I suppose that I should think it over, though, if I were a lady."

     Chapter 7
     THE NOBLE PIONEER

     As far as Berkeley Cole and Denys Finch-Hatton were concerned, my house was a communist establishment. Everything in it was theirs, and they took a pride in it, and brought home the things they felt to be lacking. They kept the house up to a high standard in wine and tobacco, and got books and gramophone records out from Europe for me. Berkeley arrived with his car loaded up with turkeys, eggs, and oranges, from his own farm on Mount Kenya. They both had the ambition to make me a judge of wine, as they were, and spent much time and thought in the task. They took the greatest pleasure in my Danish table glass and china, and used to build up on the dinner table a tall shining pyramid of all my glass, the one piece on the top of the other; they enjoyed the sight of it.
     Berkeley, when he stayed on the farm, had a bottle of champagne out in the forest every morning at eleven o'clock. Once, as he was taking leave of me, and thanking me for his time on the farm, he added that there had been one shadow in the picture, for we had been given coarse and vulgar glasses for our wine under the trees. "I know, Berkeley," I said, "but I have so few of my good glasses left, and the boys will break them when they have to carry them such a long way." He looked at me gravely, my hand in his. "But my dear," he said, "it has been so sad." So afterwards he had my best glasses brought out in the wood.
     It was a curious thing about Berkeley and Denys, — who were so deeply regretted by their friends in England when they emigrated, and so much beloved and admired in the Colony, — that they should be all the same, outcasts. It was not a society that had thrown them out, and not any place in the whole world either, but time had done it, they did not belong to their century. No other nation than the English could have produced them, but they were examples of atavism, and theirs was an earlier England, a world which no longer existed. In the present epoch they had no home, but had got to wander here and there, and in the course of time they also came to the farm. Of this they were not themselves aware. They had, on the contrary, a feeling of guilt towards their existence in England which they had left, as if, just because they were bored with it, they had been running away from a duty with which their friends had put up. Denys, when he came to talk of his young days, — although he was so young still, — and of his prospects, and the advice that his friends in England sent him, quoted Shakespeare's Jaques:

"If it do come to pass
That any man turn ass,
Leaving his wealth and ease
A stubborn will to please . . ."

     But he was wrong in his view of himself, so was Berkeley, and so perhaps was Jaques. They believed that they were deserters, who sometimes had to pay for their wilfulness, but they were in reality exiles, who bore their exile with a good grace.
     Berkeley, if he had had his small head enriched with a wig of long silky curls, could have walked in and out of the Court of King Charles II. He might have sat, a nimble youth from England, at the feet of the aged d'Artagnan, the d'Artagnan of Vingt Ans Après, have listened to his wisdom, and kept the sayings in his heart. I felt that the law of gravitation did not apply to Berkeley, but that he might, as we sat talking at night by the fire, at any moment go straight up through the chimney. He was a very good judge of men, with no illusions about them and no spite. Out of a kind of devilry, he was most charming to the people of whom he had the poorest opinion. When he really chalked his soles for the job he was an inimitable buffoon. But to be a wit in the manner of Congreve and Wycherley en plein vingtième siècle takes a few more qualities than Congreve or Wycherley themselves had got in them: a glow, grandezza, the wild hope. Where the jest was carried far in its daring and arrogance, sometimes it became pathetic. When Berkeley, a little heated, and as if translucent with wine, really got on his high horse, on the wall behind him the shadow of it began to grow and move, falling into a haughty and fantastical canter, as if it came of a noble breed and its sire's name had been Rosinante. But Berkeley himself, the invincible jester, lonely in his African life, half an invalid, — for his heart always gave him trouble, — with his beloved farm on Mount Kenya every day more in the hands of the Banks, would have been the last to recognize or fear the shadow.
     Small, very slight, red-haired, with narrow hands and feet, Berkeley carried himself extremely erect, with a little d'Artagnanesque turn of the head to right and left, the gentle motion of the unbeaten duellist. He walked as noiselessly as a cat. And, like a cat, he made every room that he sat in, a place of comfort, as if he had had in him a source of heat and fun. If Berkeley had come and sat with you upon the smoking ruin of your house, he would, like a cat, have made you feel that you were in a picked snug corner. When he was at his ease you expected to hear him purr, like a big cat, and when he was sick, it was more than sad and distressing, it was formidable as is the sickness of a cat. He had no principles, but a surprising stock of prejudices, as you would expect it in a cat.
     If Berkeley were a cavalier of the Stuarts' day, Denys should be set in an earlier English landscape, in the days of Queen Elizabeth. He could have walked arm in arm, there, with Sir Philip, or Francis Drake. And the people of Elizabeth's time might have held him dear because to them he would have suggested that Antiquity, the Athens, of which they dreamed and wrote. Denys could indeed have been placed harmoniously in any period of our civilization, tout comme chez soi, all up till the opening of the nineteenth century. He would have cut a figure in any age, for he was an athlete, a musician, a lover of art and a fine sportsman. He did cut a figure in his own age, but it did not quite fit in anywhere. His friends in England always wanted him to come back, they wrote out plans and schemes for a career for him there, but Africa was keeping him.
     The particular, instinctive attachment which all Natives of Africa felt towards Berkeley and Denys, and towards a few other people of their kind, made me reflect that perhaps the white men of the past, indeed of any past, would have been in better understanding and sympathy with the coloured races than we, of our Industrial Age, shall ever be. When the first steam engine was constructed, the roads of the races of the world parted, and we have never found one another since.
     There was a shadow cast over my friendship with Berkeley by the circumstance that Jama, his young Somali servant, was of a tribe at war with Farah's tribe. To people familiar with the clannish feelings of the Somali, those dark deep desert glances that were exchanged over our dinner table, when the two were waiting on Berkeley and me, bode as ill as possible. Late in the evening we fell to talking of what we were to do when we should be coming out in the morning to find both Farah and Jama cold, with daggers in their hearts. In these matters the enemies knew neither fear nor sense, they were held back from bloodshed and ruin solely by their feelings of attachment, such as they were, for Berkeley and me.
     "I dare not," said Berkeley, "tell Jama tonight that I have changed my mind, and that I shall not this time be going to Eldoret, where lives the young woman that he is in love with. For then his heart will turn to stone against me, it will be a matter of no importance to him if my clothes are brushed, and he will go out and kill Farah."
     Jama's heart, however, never did turn to stone towards Berkeley. He had been with him a long time, and Berkeley often talked about him. He told me how once, over a matter in which Jama held himself to be right, Berkeley had lost his temper and had hit the Somali. "But then, my dear, you know," said Berkeley, "at the very same moment I had one straight back in my face."
     "And how did it go then?" I asked him.
     "Oh it went all right," Berkeley said, modestly. After a little while he added: "It was not so bad. He is twenty years younger than me."
     This incident had left no trace in the attitude of either the master or the servant, Jama had a quiet, slightly patronizing manner towards Berkeley, such as most Somali servants have got towards their employers. After Berkeley's death, Jama did not want to stay in the country, but went back to Somaliland.
     Berkeley had a great, ever unsatisfied, love of the Sea. It was a favourite dream of his that he and I should, — when we had made money, — buy a dhow and go trading to Lamu, Mombasa and Zanzibar. We had our plans all worked out and our crew ready, but we never did make money.
     Whenever Berkeley was tired or unwell he fell back on his thoughts of the Sea. He then grieved over his own foolishness in having spent a lifetime anywhere but on salt water, and used strong language about it. Once when I was going to Europe and he was in this mood, to please him I conceived the plan of bringing out two ships' lanterns, starboard and port, to hang by the entrance door of my house, and told him of it.
     "Yes, it would be nice," he said, "the house would be in that way like a ship. But they must have sailed."
     So in Copenhagen in a sailors' shop by one of the old Canals, I bought a pair of big old heavy ships' lanterns, which had for many years sailed in the Baltic. We had them up on each side of the door, it faced East and we were pleased to think that the lamps were correctly placed; as the earth, on her course through the ether, throws herself forward, there would be no collision. These lamps gave Berkeley much content of heart. He often used to come to the house quite late, and ordinarily at a great speed, but when the lamps were lighted he drove slowly, slowly, up the drive, to let the little red and green stars in the night sink into his soul and bring back old pictures, reminiscences of ship-faring, to feel as if he were indeed approaching a silent ship on dark water. We developed a signalling system in regard to the lamps, changing their place or taking down the one, so that he should know, already while in the forest, in what mood he would find his hostess, and what sort of dinner was awaiting him.

     Berkeley, like his brother Galbraith Cole and his brother-in-law Lord Delamere, was an early settler, a pioneer of the Colony, and intimate with the Masai, who in those days were the domineering nation of the land. He had known them before the European civilization, — which in the depths of their hearts they loathed more than anything else in the world, — cut through their roots; before they were moved from their fair North country. He could speak with them of the old days in their own tongue. Whenever Berkeley was staying on the farm, the Masai came over the river to see him. The old chiefs sat and discussed their troubles of the present time with him, his jokes would make them laugh, and it was as if a hard stone had laughed.
     Because of Berkeley's knowledge of, and friendship with, the Masai, a most imposing ceremony came to take place on the farm.
     When the Great War first broke out, and the Masai had news of it, the blood of the old fighting tribe was all up. They had visions of splendid battles and massacres, and they saw the glory of the past returning once more. I happened to be out, during the first months of the war, alone with Natives and Somali, with three ox-waggons, doing transport for the English Government, and trekking through the Masai Reserve. Whenever the people of a new district heard of my arrival they came round to my camp, with shining eyes, to ask me a hundred questions of the war and the Germans — was it true that they were coming from the air? In their minds they were running breathless, to meet danger and death. At night the young warriors swarmed round my tent, in full warpaint, with spears and swords; sometimes, in order to show me what they were really like, they would give out a short roar, an imitation of the lion's roar. They did not doubt then that they would be allowed to fight.
     But the English Government did not think it wise to organize the Masai to make war on white men, be they even Germans, and it forbade the Masai to fight, and put an end to all their hopes. The Kikuyu were to take part in the war as carriers, but the Masai were to keep their hands off their weapons. But in 1918, when conscription had been introduced in regard to all the other Natives of the Colony, the Government thought it necessary to call out the Masai as well. An officer of the K.A.R., with his regiment, was sent to Narok to procure three hundred Morani as soldiers. By this time the Masai had lost their sympathy with the war and refused to come. The Morani of the district disappeared into the woods and the bush. In the pursuit of them the K.A.R. troops by mistake fired on a manyatta, and two old women were killed. Two days after, the Masai Reserve was in open revolt, swarms of Morani swept through the country, killed a number of Indian traders, and burned down more than fifty dukhas. The situation was serious, and the Government did not want to force it. Lord Delamere was sent down to negotiate with the Masai and in the end a compromise was set up. The Masai were allowed to take out the three hundred Morani themselves, and they were let off with a joint fine in punishment of their devastation in the Reserve. No Morani appeared, but by that time the Armistice put an end to the whole matter.
     During the time of all these events, some of the old big Masai chiefs had made themselves useful to the English military, by sending out their young men to scout on the movements of the Germans in the Reserve and on the border. Now that the war was over, the Government wanted to show their recognition of their services. A number of medals were sent out from home to be distributed amongst the Masai, and as far as twelve of the medals were concerned Berkeley, who knew the Masai so well and could speak Masai, was asked to deal them out.
     My farm bordered on the Masai Reserve and Berkeley came to ask me if he might stay with me and give out the medals from my house. He was a little nervous about the enterprise, and told me that he had no clear idea what was expected from him. On a Sunday we drove together a long way down into the Reserve, and talked with the people in the manyattas, in order to summon the chiefs in question to the farm on such and such a day. Berkeley in his very young days had been an officer in the 9th Lancers, and he was then, I have been told, the smartest young officer in his regiment. Still, as, towards sunset, we were driving home again, he began to speak to me of the military calling and mentality, and to develop his ideas upon them, in the manner of a civilian.
     The distribution of the medals, although in itself of no special consequence, was an event of great dimensions and weight. So much wisdom, sagacity and tact were displayed in it, on both sides, as to make it stand for an act in the history of the world, or a symbol:

". . . His Darkness and his Brightness
exchanged a greeting of extreme politeness."

     The old Masai had arrived, followed by retainers or sons of theirs. They sat and waited on the lawn, from time to time discussing my cows grazing there, perhaps they had a faint hope that, in reward of their services, they were to be made a present of a cow. Berkeley kept them waiting a long time, which was, I believe, to them in the order of things, in the meantime he had an armchair carried out on the lawn in front of the house, in which to sit while he gave out the medals. When in the end he came forth from the house he looked, in this dark company, very fair, red-haired and light-eyed. He had now the complete brisk cheerful carriage and expression of an efficient young officer, so that I learned that Berkeley, who could let his face express so many things, could also in the hour of need, make it an absolute blank. He was followed by Jama, who had on a very fine Arabian waistcoat all embroidered in gold and silver, which Berkeley had let him buy for the occasion, and who carried the box with the medals.
     Berkeley stood up in front of his chair to speak, and so active was the uprightness of his slight small figure that the old people got on to their legs, one by one, and stood facing him, their eyes in his, gravely. What the speech was about I cannot say, as it was in Masai. It sounded as if he were briefly informing the Masai that an unbelievable benefit was to be bestowed upon them, and that the explanation of the happenings was their own incredibly praiseworthy behaviour. But seeing that it was Berkeley who spoke, and that from the faces of the Masai you would never learn anything, it may have contained something quite different, of which I should never have thought. When he had spoken, without a moment's pause he let Jama bring up the box, and took out the medals, solemnly reading out, one after another, the names of the Masai chiefs, and handing them their medals with a generously outstretched arm. The Masai took them from him very silently, in an outstretched hand. The ceremony could only have been carried through so well by two parties of noble blood and great family traditions; may democracy take no offence.
     A medal is an inconvenient thing to give to a naked man, because he has got no place to fix it on to, and the old Masai chiefs kept standing with theirs in their hand. After a time a very old man came up to me, held out his hand with the medal in it and asked me to tell him what it had got on it. I explained it to him as well as I could. The silver coin had on the one side a head of Britannia, and upon the other side the words: The Great War for Civilization.
     I have later told some English friends of the incident of the medals, and they have asked: "Why was not the King's head on the medals? It was a great mistake." I myself do not think so, it seems to me that the medals should not be made too attractive, and that the whole matter was well arranged. It may still be that it is this sort of thing which we shall be given at the time when our reward is great in heaven.

     When Berkeley was taken ill, I was about to go to Europe on a holiday. He was then a member of the Legislative Council of the Colony, and I telegraphed to him: "Will you not come and stay at Ngong for the sitting of the counci. Bring bottles." He wired back: "Your telegram straight from heaven. Arriving with bottles." But when he came to the farm, his car all filled up with wine, he did not care to drink it. He was very pale, and even sometimes quite silent. His heart was bad, and he could not do without Jama, who had been taught to give him the injections for it, and he had many worries that lay on it heavily; he lived in great fear of losing his farm. Still, by his presence, he turned my house into a chosen, comfortable corner of the world.
     "I have come to the stage, Tania," he said to me gravely, "when I can only drive in the very best of cars, only smoke the finest cigars and only drink the most exquisite vintages of wine." While he was staying with me then, he told me one evening that the doctor had ordered him to go to bed and stay in bed for a month. I said to him that if he would follow the order, and stay in bed for a month at Ngong, I would give up my journey to remain there and look after him, and go to Europe next year. He thought my offer over for a little while. "My dear," he said, "I could not do it. If I did it to please you, what should I be afterwards?"
     I said good-bye to him then with a heavy heart. While I was sailing home, past Lamu and Takaunga, where our dhow was to have found her way, I thought of him. But in Paris I heard that he had died. He had dropped down dead before his house, as he was stepping out of the car. He was buried on his farm, where he wished to be.
     When Berkeley died, the country changed. His friends felt it at the time, with great sadness, and many people came to feel it later. An epoch in the history of the Colony came to an end with him. In the course of the years many things were reckoned from this turning point, and people said: "When Berkeley Cole lived" or "Since Berkeley died." Up till his death the country had been the Happy Hunting Grounds, now it was slowly changing and turning into a business proposition. Some standards were lowered when he went: a standard of wit, as it was soon felt, — and such a thing is sad in a colony; a standard of gallantry, — soon after his death people began to talk of their troubles; a standard of humanity.
     As Berkeley went away, a grim figure made her entrance upon the stage from the opposite wing, — la dure nécessité maîtresse des hommes et des dieux. It was a strange thing that a small slight man should have been able to keep her from the door, for so long a time as he drew breath. The yeast was out of the bread of the land. A presence of gracefulness, gaiety and freedom, an electric power-factor was out. A cat had got up and left the room.

     Chapter 8
     WINGS

     Denys Finch-Hatton had no other home in Africa than the farm, he lived in my house between his Safaris, and kept his books and his gramophone there. When he came back to the farm, it gave out what was in it; it spoke, — as the coffee-plantations speak, when with the first showers of the rainy season they flower, dripping wet, a cloud of chalk. When I was expecting Denys back, and heard his car coming up the drive, I heard, at the same time, the things of the farm all telling what they really were. He was happy on the farm; he came there only when he wanted to come, and it knew, in him, a quality of which the world besides was not aware, a humility. He never did but what he wanted to do, neither was guile found in his mouth. Denys had a trait of character which to me was very precious, he liked to hear a story told. For I have always thought that I might have cut a figure at the time of the plague of Florence. Fashions have changed, and the art of listening to a narrative has been lost in Europe. The Natives of Africa, who cannot read, have still got it; if you begin to them: "There was a man who walked out on the plain, and there he met another man," you have them all with you, their minds running upon the unknown track of the men on the plain. But white people, even if they feel that they ought to, cannot listen to a recital. If they do not become fidgety, and remember things that should be done at once, they fall asleep. The same people will ask you for something to read, and may then sit all through an evening absorbed in any kind of print handed them, they will even then read a speech. They have been accustomed to take in their impressions by the eye.
     Denys, who lived much by the ear, preferred hearing a tale told, to reading it; when he came to the farm he would ask: "Have you got a story?" I had been making up many while he had been away. In the evenings he made himself comfortable, spreading cushions like a couch in front of the fire, and with me sitting on the floor, cross-legged like Scheherazade herself, he would listen, clear-eyed, to a long tale, from when it began until it ended. He kept better account of it than I did myself, and at the dramatic appearance of one of the characters, would stop me to say: "That man died in the beginning of the story, but never mind."
     Denys taught me Latin, and to read the Bible, and the Greek poets. He himself knew great parts of the Old Testament by heart, and carried the Bible with him on all his journeys, which gained him the high esteem of the Mohammedans.
     He also gave me my gramophone. It was a delight to my heart, it brought a new life to the farm, it became the voice of the farm. — "The soul within a glade the nightingale is." — Sometimes Denys would arrive unexpectedly at the house, while I was out in the coffee-field or the maize-field, bringing new records with him; he would set the gramophone going, and as I came riding back at sunset, the melody streaming towards me in the clear cool air of the evening would announce his presence to me, as if he had been laughing at me, as he often did. The Natives liked the gramophone, and used to stand round the house to listen to it; some of my house-boys picked out a favourite tune and asked me for it, when I was alone with them in the house. It was a curious thing that Kamante should stick, in his preference, with much devotion to the Adagio of Beethoven's Piano Concerto in G-Major; the first time that he asked me for it he had some difficulty in describing it, so as to make clear to me which tune it was that he wanted.
     Denys and I, however, did not agree in our tastes. For I wanted the old composers, and Denys, as if courteously making up to the age for his lack of harmony with it, was as modern as possible in his taste of all arts. He liked to hear the most advanced music. "I would like Beethoven all right," he said, "if he were not vulgar."
     Denys and I, whenever we were together, had great luck with lions. Sometimes he came back from a shooting Safari of two or three months, vexed that he had been unable to get a good lion for the people from Europe whom he had taken out. In the meantime the Masai had been to my house and had asked me to come out and shoot a certain lion or lioness which was killing off their cattle, and Farah and I had been out, camping in their manyatta, sitting up over a kill, or walking out in the early morning, without as much as finding the track of a lion. But when Denys and I went for a ride, the lions of the plains would be about, as in attendance, we would come upon them then there at a meal, or see them crossing the dry river-beds.

     On a New Year's morning, before sunrise, Denys and I found ourselves on the new Narok Road, driving along as fast as we could go on a rough road.
     Denys, the day before, had lent a heavy rifle to a friend of his who was going South with a shooting party, and late in the night he remembered that he had neglected to explain to him a certain trick in the rifle, by which the hair-trigger might be put out of action. He was worried about it and afraid that the hunter would come to some sort of harm by his ignorance. We could then think of no better remedy than that we should start as early as possible, take the new road and try to overtake the shooting party at Narok. It was sixty miles, through some rough country; the Safari was travelling by the old road and would be going slowly as it had heavy loaded lorries with it. Our only trouble was that we did not know if the new road would have been brought through all the way to Narok.
     The early morning air of the African highlands is of such a tangible coldness and freshness that time after time the same fancy there comes back to you: you are not on earth but in dark deep waters, going ahead along the bottom of the sea. It is not even certain that you are moving at all, the flows of chilliness against your face may be the deep-sea currents, and your car, like some sluggish electric fish, may be sitting steadily upon the bottom of the Sea, staring in front of her with the glaring eyes of her lamps, and letting the submarine life pass by her. The stars are so large because they are no real stars but reflections, shimmering upon the surface of the water. Alongside your path on the sea-bottom, live things, darker than their surroundings, keep on appearing, jumping up and sweeping into the long grass, as crabs and beach-fleas will make their way into the sand. The light gets clearer, and, about sunrise, the sea-bottom lifts itself towards the surface, a new created island. Whirls of smells drift quickly past you, fresh rank smells of the olive-bushes, the brine scent of burnt grass, a sudden quelling smell of decay.
     Kanuthia, Denys's boy, who sat in the back of the box-body car, gently touched my shoulder and pointed to the right. To the side of the road, twelve or fifteen yards away from it, was a dark bulk, a Manatee taking a rest on the sands, and on the top of it something was stirring in the dark water. It was, I saw later, a big dead Giraffe bull, that had been shot two or three days before. You are not allowed to shoot the Giraffe, and Denys and I later had to defend ourselves against the charge of having killed this one, but we could prove that it had been dead some time when we came upon it, though it was never found by whom or why it had been killed. Upon the huge carcass of the Giraffe, a lioness had been feeding, and now raised her head and shoulder above it to watch the passing car.
     Denys stopped the car, and Kanuthia lifted the rifle, that he carried, off his shoulder. Denys asked me in a low voice: "Shall I shoot her?" — For he very courteously looked on the Ngong Hill as my private hunting-ground. — We were going across the land of the same Masai who had been to my house to bewail the loss of their cattle; if this was the animal which had killed one after the other of their cows and calves, the time had come to put an end to her. I nodded.
     He jumped from the car and slid back a few steps, at the same moment the lioness dived down behind the body of the Giraffe, he ran round the Giraffe to get within shot of her, and fired. I did not see her fall; when I got out and up to her she was lying dead in a big black pool.
     There was no time to skin her, we must drive on if we were to cut off the Safari at Narok. We gazed round and took note of the place, the smell of the dead Giraffe was so strong that we could not very well pass it unknowingly.
     But when we had driven a further two miles there was no more road. The tools of the road-labourers lay here; on the other side of them was the wide stony land, just grey in the dawn, all unbroken by any touch of man. We looked at the tools and at the country, we would have to leave Denys's friend to take his chance with the rifle. Afterwards, when he came back, he told us that he had never had an opportunity to use it. So we turned back, and as we turned we got our faces to the Eastern sky, reddening over the plains and the hills. We drove towards it and talked all the time of the lioness.
     The Giraffe came within view, and by this time we could see him clearly and distinguish, — where the light fell on to his side, — the darker square spots on his skin. And as we came near to him we saw that there was a lion standing on him. In approaching we were a little lower than the carcass; the lion stood straight up over it, dark, and behind him the sky was now all aflame. Lion Passant Or. A bit of his mane was lifted by the wind. I rose up in the car, so strong was the impression that he made, and Denys at that said: "You shoot this time." I was never keen to shoot with his rifle, which was too long and heavy for me, and gave me a bad shock; still here the shot was a declaration of love, should the rifle not then be of the biggest caliber? As I shot it seemed to me that the lion jumped straight up in the air, and came down with his legs gathered under him. I stood, panting, in the grass, aglow with the plenipotence that a shot gives you, because you take effect at a distance. I walked round the carcass of the Giraffe. There it was, — the fifth act of a classic tragedy. They were all dead now. The Giraffe was looking terribly big, austere, with his four stiff legs and long stiff neck, his belly torn open by the lions. The lioness, lying on her back, had a great haughty snarl on her face, she was the femme fatale of the tragedy. The lion was lying not far from her, and how was it that he had learned nothing by her fate? His head was laid on his two front paws, his mighty mane covered him as a royal mantle, he too was resting in a big pool, and by now the morning air was so light that it showed scarlet.
     Denys and Kanuthia pulled up their sleeves and while the sun rose they skinned the lions. When they took a rest we had a bottle of claret, and raisins and almonds, from the car; I had brought them with us to eat on the road, because it was New Year's Day. We sat on the short grass and ate and drank. The dead lions, close by, looked magnificent in their nakedness, there was not a particle of superfluous fat on them, each muscle was a bold controlled curve, they needed no cloak, they were, all through, what they ought to be.
     As we sat there, a shadow hastened over the grass and over my feet, and looking up I could distinguish, high in the light-blue sky, the circling of the vultures. My heart was as light as if I had been flying it, up there, on a string, as you fly a kite. I made a poem:

The eagle's shadow runs across the plain,
Towards the distant, nameless, air-blue mountains.
But the shadows of the round young Zebra
Sit close between their delicate hoofs all day,
  where they stand immovable,
And wait for the evening, wait to stretch out, blue,
Upon a plain, painted brick-red by the sunset,
And to wander to the water-hole.

     Denys and I had another dramatic adventure with lions. It happened, in reality, before the other, in the early days of our friendship.
     One morning, during the spring-rains, Mr. Nichols, a South African, who was then my Manager, came to my house all aflame, to tell me, that in the night two lions had been to the farm and had killed two of our oxen. They had broken through the fence of the oxen's fold, and they had dragged the dead oxen into the coffee plantation; one of them they had eaten up there, but the other was lying amongst the coffee-trees. Would I now write him a letter to go and get strychnine in Nairobi? He would have it laid out in the carcass at once, for he thought that the lions would be sure to come back in the night.
     I thought it over; it went against me to lay out strychnine for lions, and I told him that I could not see my way to do it. At that his excitement changed over into exasperation. The lions, he said, if they were left in peace over this crime, would come back another time. The bullocks they had killed were our best working bullocks, and we could not afford to lose any more. The stable of my ponies, he reminded me, was not far from the oxen's enclosure, had I thought of that? I explained that I did not mean to keep the lions on the farm, only I thought that they should be shot and not poisoned.
     "And who is going to shoot them?" asked Nichols. "I am no coward, but I am a married man and I have no wish to risk my life unnecessarily." It was true that he was no coward, he was a plucky little man. "There would be no sense in it," he said. No, I said, I did not mean to make him shoot the lions. But Mr. Finch-Hatton had arrived the night before and was in the house, he and I would go. "Oh, that is O.K." said Nichols.
     I then went in to find Denys. "Come now," I said to him, "and let us go and risk our lives unnecessarily. For if they have got any value at all it is this that they have got none. Frei lebt wer sterben kann."
     We went down and found the dead bullock in the coffee plantation, as Nichols had told me; it had hardly been touched by the lions. Their spoor was deep and clear in the soft ground, two big lions had been here in the night. It was easy to follow through the plantation and up to the wood round Belknap's house, but by the time that we came there it had rained so heavily that it was difficult to see anything, and in the grass and the bush at the edge of the wood we lost the track.
     "What do you think, Denys," I asked him, "will they come back tonight?"
     Denys had great experience with lions. He said that they would come back early in the night to finish the meat, and that we ought to give them time to settle down on it, and go down to the field ourselves at nine o'clock. We would have to use an electric torch from his Safari outfit, to shoot by, and he gave me the choice of the roles, but I would rather let him shoot and myself hold the torch for him.
     In order that we might find our way up to the dead ox in the dark, we cut up strips of paper and fastened them on the rows of coffee-trees between which we meant to walk, marking our way in the manner of Hanzl and Gretl with their little white stones. It would take us straight to the kill, and at the end of it, twenty yards from the carcass, we tied a larger piece of paper to the tree, for here we would stop, sweep the light on and shoot. Late in the afternoon, when we took out the torch to try it, we found that the batteries of it had been running down and that the light it gave was only faint. There was no time to go in to Nairobi with it now, so that we should have to make the best of it as it was.
     It was the day before Denys's birthday, and while we dined, he was in a melancholic mood, reflecting that he had not had enough out of life till now. But something, I consoled him, might still happen to him before his birthday morning. I told Juma to get out a bottle of wine to be ready for us when we should come back. I kept on thinking of the lions, where would they be now, at this moment? Were they crossing the river, slowly, silently, the one in front of the other, the gentle cold flow of the river turning round their chests and flanks?
     At nine o'clock we went out.
     It rained a little, but there was a moon; from time to time she put out her dim white face high up in the sky, behind layers and layers of thin clouds, and was then dimly mirrored in the white-flowering coffee-field. We passed the school at a distance; it was all lighted up.
     At this sight a great wave of triumph and of pride in my people swept through me. I thought of King Solomon, who says: "The slothful man saith, There is a lion in the way; a lion is in the streets." Here were two lions just outside their door, but my school-children were not slothful and had not let the lions keep them from school.
     We found our marked two rows of coffee-trees, paused a moment, and proceeded up between them, one in front of the other. We had moccasins on, and walked silently. I began to shake and tremble with excitement, I dared not come too near to Denys for fear that he might feel it and send me back, but I dared not keep too far away from him either, for he might need my torchlight any moment.
     The lions, we found afterwards, had been on the kill. When they heard us, or smelt us, they had walked off it a little way into the coffee-field to let us pass. Probably because they thought that we were passing too slowly, the one of them gave a very low hoarse growl, in front and to the right of us. It was so low that we were not even sure that we had heard it, Denys stopped a second; without turning he asked me: "Did you hear?" "Yes," I said.
     We walked a little again and the deep growling was repeated, this time straight to the right. "Put on the light," Denys said. It was not altogether an easy job, for he was much taller than I, and I had to get the light over his shoulder on to his rifle and further on. As I lighted the torch the whole world changed into a brilliantly lighted stage, the wet leaves of the coffee-trees shone, the clods of the ground showed up quite clearly.
     First the circle of light struck a little wide-eyed jackal, like a small fox; I moved it on, and there was the lion. He stood facing us straight, and he looked very light, with all the black African night behind him. When the shot fell, close to me, I was unprepared for it, even without comprehension of what it meant, as if it had been thunder, as if I had been myself shifted into the place of the lion. He went down like a stone. "Move on, move on," Denys cried to me. I turned the torch further on, but my hand shook so badly that the circle of light, which held all the world, and which I commanded, danced a dance. I heard Denys laugh beside me in the dark. — "The torch-work on the second lion," he said to me later, "was a little shaky." — But in the centre of the dance was the second lion, going away from us and half hidden by a coffee-tree. As the light reached him he turned his head and Denys shot. He fell out of the circle, but got up and into it again, he swung round towards us, and just as the second shot fell, he gave one long irascible groan.
     Africa, in a second, grew endlessly big, and Denys and I, standing upon it, infinitely small. Outside our torchlight there was nothing but darkness, in the darkness in two directions there were lions, and from the sky rain. But when the deep roar died out, there was no movement anywhere, and the lion lay still, his head turned away on to his side, as in a gesture of disgust. There were two big dead animals in the coffee-field, and the silence of night all around.
     We walked up to the lions and paced out the distance. From where we had stood the first lion was thirty yards away and the other twenty-five. They were both full-grown, young, strong, fat lions. The two close friends, out in the hills or on the plains, yesterday had taken the same great adventure into their heads, and in it they had died together.
     By now all the school-children were coming out of the school, pouring down the road to stop in sight of us and there to cry out in a low soft voice: "Msabu. Are you there? Are you there? Msabu, Msabu."
     I sat on a lion and cried back to them: "Yes I am."
     Then they went on, louder and more boldly: "Has Bedâr shot the lions? Both two?" When they found that it was so, they were at once all over the place, like a swarm of small spring-hares of the night, jumping up and down. They, then and there, made a song upon the event; it ran as follows: "Three shots. Two lions. Three shots. Two lions." They embroidered and embellished it as they sang it, one clear voice falling in after the other: "Three good shots, two big strong bad kali lions." And then they all joined into an intoxicated refrain: "A. B. C. D.", — because they came straight from the school, and had their heads filled with wisdom.
     In a short time a great number of people came to the spot, the labourers from the mill, the squatters of the near manyattas, and my houseboys, carrying hurricane-lamps. They stood round the lions and talked about them, then Kanuthia and the Sice, who had brought knives, set to skin them. It was the skin of one of these lions that, later, I gave to the Indian High Priest. Pooran Singh himself appeared on the stage, in a negligee which made him look unbelievably slight, his melliferous Indian smile shone in the midst of his thick black beard, he stuttered with delight when he spoke. He was anxious to procure for himself the fat of the lions, that with his people is held in high esteem as a medicine, — from the pantomime by which he expressed himself to me, I believe against rheumatism and impotence. With all this the coffee-field became very lively, the rain stopped, the moon shone down on them all.
     We went back to the house and Juma brought and opened our bottle. We were too wet, and too dirty with mud and blood to sit down to it, but stood up before a flaming fire in the dining room and drank our live, singing wine up quickly. We did not speak one word. In our hunt we had been a unity and we had nothing to say to one another.
     Our friends got a good deal of entertainment out of our adventure. Old Mr. Bulpett when next we came in to a dance at the Club would not speak to us the whole evening.

     To Denys Finch-Hatton I owe what was, I think, the greatest, the most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm: I flew with him over Africa. There, where there are few or no roads and where you can land on the plains, flying becomes a thing of real and vital importance in your life, it opens up a world. Denys had brought out his Moth machine; it could land on my plain on the farm only a few minutes from the house, and we were up nearly every day.
     You have tremendous views as you get up above the African highlands, surprising combinations and changes of light and colouring, the rainbow on the green sunlit land, the gigantic upright clouds and big wild black storms, all swing round you in a race and a dance. The lashing hard showers of rain whiten the air askance. The language is short of words for the experiences of flying, and will have to invent new words with time. When you have flown over the Rift Valley and the volcanoes of Suswa and Longonot, you have travelled far and have been to the lands on the other side of the moon. You may at other times fly low enough to see the animals on the plains and to feel towards them as God did when he had just created them, and before he commissioned Adam to give them names.
     But it is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flyer is the flight itself. It is a sad hardship and slavery to people who live in towns, that in all their movements they know of one dimension only; they walk along the line as if they were led on a string. The transition from the line to the plane into the two dimensions, when you wander across a field or through a wood, is a splendid liberation to the slaves, like the French Revolution.
     But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space. The laws of gravitation and time,

". . . in life's green grove,
Sport like tame beasts, none knew how
gentle they could be!"

     Every time that I have gone up in an aeroplane and looking down have realised that I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a great new discovery. "I see:" I have thought, "This was the idea. And now I understand everything."

     One day Denys and I flew to Lake Natron, ninety miles South-East of the farm, and more than four thousand feet lower, two thousand feet above Sea level. Lake Natron is the place from where they take soda. The bottom of the lake and the shores are like some sort of whitish concrete, with a strong, sour and salt smell.
     The sky was blue, but as we flew from the plains in over the stony and bare lower country, all colour seemed to be scorched out of it. The whole landscape below us looked like delicately marked tortoise-shell. Suddenly, in the midst of it was the lake. The white bottom, shining through the water, gives it, when seen from the air, a striking, an unbelievable azure-colour, so clear that for a moment you shut your eyes at it; the expanse of water lies in the bleak tawny land like a big bright aquamarine. We had been flying high, now we went down, and as we sank our own shade, dark-blue, floated under us upon the light-blue lake. Here live thousands of Flamingoes, although I do not know how they exist in the brackish water, — surely there are no fish here. At our approach they spread out in large circles and fans, like the rays of a setting sun, like an artful Chinese pattern on silk or porcelain, forming itself and changing, as we looked at it.
     We landed on the white shore, that was white-hot as an oven, and lunched there, taking shelter against the sun under the wing of the aeroplane. If you stretched out your hand from the shade, the sun was so hot that it hurt you. Our bottles of beer when they first arrived with us, straight out of the ether, were pleasantly cold, but before we had finished them, in a quarter of an hour, they became as hot as a cup of tea.
     While we were lunching, a party of Masai warriors appeared on the horizon, and approached quickly. They must have spied the aeroplane landing from a distance, and resolved to have a close look at it, and a walk of any length, even in a country like this, means nothing to a Masai. They came along, the one in front of the other, naked, tall and narrow, their weapons glinting; dark like peat on the yellow grey sand. At the feet of each of them lay and marched a small pool of shadow, these were, besides our own, the only shadows in the country as far as the eye reached. When they came up to us they fell in line, there were five of them. They stuck their heads together and began to talk to one another about the aeroplane and us. A generation ago they would have been fatal to us to meet. After a time one of them advanced and spoke to us. As they could only speak Masai and we understood but little of the language, the conversation soon slackened, he stepped back to his fellows and a few minutes later they all turned their back upon us, and walked away, in single file, with the wide white burning salt-plain before them.
     "Would you care," said Denys, "to fly to Naivasha? But the country lying between is very rough, we could not possibly land anywhere on the way. So we shall have to go up high and keep up at twelve thousand feet."
     The flight from Lake Natron to Naivasha was Das Ding an sich. We took a bee-line, and kept at twelve thousand feet all the way, which is so high that there is nothing to look down for. At Lake Natron I had taken off my lambskin-lined cap, now up here the air squeezed my forehead, as cold as iced water; all my hair flew backwards as if my head was being pulled off. This path, in fact, was the same as was, in the opposite direction, every evening taken by the Roc, when, with an Elephant for her young in each talon, she swished from Uganda home to Arabia. Where you are sitting in front of your pilot, with nothing but space before you, you feel that he is carrying you upon the outstretched palms of his hands, as the Djinn carried Prince Ali through the air, and that the wings that bear you onward are his. We landed at the farm of our friends at Naivasha; the mad diminutive houses, and the very small trees surrounding them, all threw themselves flat upon their backs as they saw us descending.
     When Denys and I had not time for long journeys we went out for a short flight over the Ngong Hills, generally about sunset. These hills, which are amongst the most beautiful in the world, are perhaps at their loveliest seen from the air, when the ridges, bare towards the four peaks, mount, and run side by side with the aeroplane, or suddenly sink down and flatten out into a small lawn.
     Here in the hills there were Buffaloes. I had even, in my very young days, — when I could not live till I had killed a specimen of each kind of African game, — shot a bull out here. Later on, when I was not so keen to shoot as to watch the wild animals, I had been out to see them again. I had camped in the hills by a spring half way to the top, bringing my servants, tents, and provisions with me, and Farah and I had been up in the dark, ice cold mornings to creep and crawl through bush and long grass, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the herd; but twice I had had to go back without success. That the herd lived there, neighbours of mine to the West, was still a value in the life on the farm, but they were serious-minded, self-sufficient neighbours, the old nobility of the hills, now somehow reduced; they did not receive much.
     But one afternoon as I was having tea with some friends of mine from up-country, outside the house, Denys came flying from Nairobi and went over our heads out Westwards; a little while after he turned and came back and landed on the farm. Lady Delamere and I drove down to the plain to fetch him up, but he would not get out of his aeroplane.
     "The Buffalo are out feeding in the hills," he said, "come out and have a look at them."
     "I cannot come," I said, "I have got a tea-party up at the house."
     "But we will go and see them and be back in a quarter of an hour," said he.
     This sounded to me like the propositions which people make to you in a dream. Lady Delamere would not fly, so I went up with him. We flew in the sun, but the hillside lay in a transparent brown shade, which soon we got into. It did not take us long to spy the Buffalo from the air. Upon one of the long rounded green ridges which run, like folds of a cloth gathered together at each peak, down the side of the Ngong mountain, a herd of twenty-seven Buffalo were grazing. First we saw them a long way below us, like mice moving gently on a floor, but we dived down, circling over and along their ridge, a hundred and fifty feet above them and well within shooting distance; we counted them as they peacefully blended and separated. There was one very old big black bull in the herd, one or two younger bulls, and a number of calves. The open stretch of sward upon which they walked was closed in by bush; had a stranger approached on the ground they would have heard or scented him at once, but they were not prepared for advance from the air. We had to keep moving above them all the time. They heard the noise of our machine and stopped grazing, but they did not seem to have it in them to look up. In the end they realized that something very strange was about; the old bull first walked out in front of the herd, raising his hundredweight horns, braving the unseen enemy, his four feet planted on the ground, — suddenly he began to trot down the ridge and after a moment he broke into a canter. The whole clan now followed him, stampeding headlong down, and as they switched and plunged into the bush, dust and loose stones rose in their wake. In the thicket they stopped and kept close together, it looked as if a small glade in the hill had been paved with dark grey stones. Here they believed themselves to be covered to the view, and so they were to anything moving along the ground, but they could not hide themselves from the eyes of the bird of the air. We flew up and away. It was like having been taken into the hearhe Ngong Hills by a secret unknown road.
     When I came back to my tea-party, the teapot on the stone table was still so hot that I burned my fingers on it. The Prophet had the same experience when he upset a jug of water, and the Archangel Gabriel took him, and flew with him through the seven heavens, and when he returned, the water had not yet run out of the jug.
     In the Ngong Hills there also lived a pair of eagles. Denys in the afternoons used to say: "Let us go and visit the eagles." I have once seen one of them sitting on a stone near the top of the mountain, and getting up from it, but otherwise they spent their life up in the air. Many times we have chased one of these eagles, careening and throwing ourselves on to one wing and then to the other, and I believe that the sharp-sighted bird played with us. Once, when we were running side by side, Denys stopped his engine in mid air, and as he did so I heard the eagle screech.
     The Natives liked the aeroplane, and for a time it was the fashion on the farm to portray her, so that I would find sheets of paper in the kitchen, or the kitchen wall itself, covered with drawings of her, with the letters ABAK carefully copied out. But they did not really take any interest in her or in our flying.
     Natives dislike speed, as we dislike noise, it is to them, at the best, hard to bear. They are also on friendly terms with time, and the plan of beguiling or killing it does not come into their heads. In fact the more time you can give them, the happier they are, and if you commission a Kikuyu to hold your horse while you make a visit, you can see by his face that he hopes you will be a long, long time about it. He does not try to pass the time then, but sits down and lives.
     Neither do the Natives have much sympathy with any kind of machinery or mechanics. A group of the young generation have been carried away by the enthusiasm of the European for the motor-car, but an old Kikuyu said to me of them that they would die young, and it is likely that he was right, for renegades come of a weak line of the nation. Amongst the inventions of civilization which the Natives admire and appreciate are matches, a bicycle and a rifle, still they will drop these the moment there is any talk of a cow.
     Frank Greswolde-Williams, of the Kedong Valley, took a Masai with him to England as a Sice, and told me that a week after his arrival he rode his horses in Hyde Park as if he had been born in London. I asked this man when he came back to Africa what he found very good in England. He thought my question over with a grave face and after a long time courteously said that the white men had got very fine bridges.
     I have never seen an old Native who, for things which moved by themselves without apparent interference by man or by the forces of Nature, expressed anything but distrust and a certain feeling of shame. The human mind turns away its eye from witchcraft as from something unseemly. It may be forced to take an interest in the effects of it, but it will have nothing to do with the inside working, and no one has ever tried to squeeze out of a witch the exact recipe for her brew.
     Once, when Denys and I had been up, and were landing on the plain of the farm, a very old Kikuyu came up and talked to us:
     "You were up very high today," he said, "we could not see you, only hear the aeroplane sing like a bee."
     I agreed that we had been up high.
     "Did you see God?" he asked.
     "No, Ndwetti," I said, "we did not see God."
     "Aha, then you were not up high enough," he said, "but now tell me: do you think that you will be able to get up high enough to see him?"
     "I do not know, Ndwetti," I said.
     "And you, Bedâr," he said, turning to Denys, "what do you think? Will you get up high enough in your aeroplane to see God?"
     "Really I do not know," said Denys.
     "Then," said Ndwetti, "I do not know at all why you two go on flying."