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     BOOK FOUR
     FROM AN IMMIGRANT'S NOTEBOOK

 

 

 

     Chapter 1
     THE WILD CAME TO THE AID OF THE WILD

 

     My manager during the war had been buying up oxen for the army. He told me that he had then, down in the Masai Reserve, bought from the Masai a number of young oxen, which were offspring of Masai cattle and Buffalo. It is a much debated question whether it is possible to cross domestic animals with the game; many people have tried to create a type of small horse fitted to the country, by breeding from Zebra and horses, though I myself have never seen such cross-breeds. But my Manager assured me that these oxen were really half-Buffalo. They had been, the Masai told him, a much longer time growing up than the ordinary cattle, and the Masai, who were proud of them, were by this time pleased to get rid of them, as they were very wild.
     It was found to be hard work to train these oxen for the waggon or plough. One strong young animal amongst them gave my Manager and his Native ox-drivers endless trouble. He stormed against the men, he broke their yokes, he foamed and bellowed; when tied up he shovelled up earth in thick black clouds, he turned up the bloodshot white of his eyes, and blood, the men said, was running from his nose. The man, like the beast, towards the end of their struggle, was dead beat, the sweat streaming down his aching body.
     "To break the heart of this ox," my Manager narrated, "I had him thrown in the bullocks' paddock, with his four legs tied hard together, and a rein round his muzzle, and even then, as he was lying dumb on the ground, long scalding jets of steam stood out from his nose and terrible snorts and sighs came from his throat. I was looking forward to seeing him under the yoke for many years to come. I went to bed in my tent and I kept on dreaming of this black ox. I was woken up by a big row, the dogs barking and the Natives shouting and yelling down by the paddock. Two herdboys came into my tent all trembling and told me that they believed a lion had got in amongst the oxen. We ran down to the place and took lamps with us, and I myself brought my rifle. As we came near to the paddock the noise died down a little. In the light of the lamps I saw a speckled thing making off. A leopard had been at the tied-up ox, and had eaten the right hind-leg off him. We would never come to see him in the yoke now.
     "Then," said my Manager, "I took my rifle and shot the ox."

 

     The Fireflies

     Here in the highlands, when the long rains are over, and in the first week of June nights begin to be cold, we get the fireflies in the woods.
     On an evening you will see two or three of them, adventurous lonely stars floating in the clear air, rising and lowering, as if upon waves, or as if curtseying. To that rhythm of their flight they lighten and put out their diminutive lamps.
     You may catch the insect and make it shine upon the palm of your hand, giving out a strange light, a mysterious message, it turns the flesh pale green in a small circle round it. The next night there are hundreds and hundreds in the woods.
     For some reason they keep within a certain height, four or five feet, above the ground. It is impossible then not to imagine that a whole crowd of children of six or seven years, are running through the dark forest carrying candles, little sticks dipped in a magic fire, joyously jumping up and down, and gambolling as they run, and swinging their small pale torches merrily. The woods are filled with a wild frolicsome life, and it is all perfectly silent.

 

     The Roads of Life

When I was a child I was shown a picture, — a kind of moving picture inasmuch as it was created before your eyes and while the artist was telling the story of it. This story was told, every time, in the same words.

In a little round house with a round window and a little triangular garden in front there lived a man.

 

 

Not far from the house there was a pond with a lot of fish in it.

 

 

One night the man was woken up by a terrible noise, and set out in the dark to find the cause of it. He took the road to the pond. Here the story-teller began to draw, as upon a map of the movements of an army, a plan of the roads taken by the man.

He first ran to the South. Here he stumbled over a big stone in the middle of the road, and a little farther he fell into a ditch, got up, fell into a ditch, got up, fell into a third ditch and got out of that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then he saw that he had been mistaken, and ran back to the North. But here again the noise seemed to him to come from the South, and he again ran back there. He first stumbled over a big stone in the middle of the road, then a little later he fell into a ditch, got up, fell into another ditch, got up, fell into a third ditch, and got out of that.

 

He now distinctly hear that the noise came from the end of the pond. He rushed to the place, and say that a big leakage had been made in the dam, and the water was running out with all the fish in it. He set to work and stopped the hole, and only when this had been done did he go back to bed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When now the next morning the man looked out of his little round window, — thus the tale was finished, as dramatically as possible, — what did he see? —

 

 

 

  A stork!

 

 

I am glad that I have been told this story and I shall remember it in the hour of need. The man in the story was cruelly deceived, and had obstacles put in his way. He must have thought: "What ups and downs! What a run of bad luck!" He must have wondered what was the idea of all his trials, he could not know that it was a stork. But through them all he kept his purpose in view, nothing made him turn round and go home, he finished his course, he kept his faith. That man had his reward. In the morning he saw the stork. He must have laughed out loud then.

The tight place, the dark pit in which I am now lying, of what bird is it the talon? When the design of my life is complete, shall I, shall other people see a stork?

Infandum, Regina, jubes renovare dolarem. Troy in flames, seven years of exile, thirteen good ships lost. What is to come out of it? "Unsurpassed elegance, majestic stateliness, and sweet tenderness."

 

     Esa's Story

     At the time of the war I had a Cook named Esa, an old man of much sense and a gentle disposition. One day when I was in Mackinnon's grocery shop in Nairobi, buying tea and spices, a small lady with a sharp face came up to me and remarked that she knew Esa was in my service; I said that it was so. "But he has been with me before," said the lady, "and I want him back." I said that I was sorry about that, as she would not get him. "Oh, I do not know about that," she said. "My husband is a Government Official. Will you please tell Esa when you go home, that I want him back, and that if he does not come he will be taken for the Carrier Corps? I understand," she added, "that you have got enough servants without Esa."
     I did not tell Esa of these happenings straight away, only the next evening did I remember about them, and told him that I had met his old mistress, and of what she had said to me. To my surprise Esa was immediately beside himself with fear and despair. "Oh, why did you not tell me at once, Memsahib!" said he, "the lady will do what she has told you, and I must leave you tonight."
     "That is all nonsense," I said. "I do not think that they can take you like that."
     "God help me," said Esa, "I am afraid it may be too late already."
     "But what am I to do for a Cook, Esa?" I asked him.
     "Well," said Esa, "you will not have me for a Cook either when I am with the Carrier Corps, nor when I am lying dead, as I shall surely then be very soon."
     So deep was the fear of the Carrier Corps in the people in those days that Esa would not listen to anything I had to say. He asked me for the loan of a hurricane-lamp, and set off in the night to Nairobi, with what belongings he had in the world tied up in a cloth.
     Esa was away from the farm for nearly a year. During that time I saw him a couple of times in Nairobi and once I passed him on the Nairobi road. He was growing old and thin, and drawn in the face, in the course of this year, his dark round head was going grey on the top. In the town he would not stop to speak to me, but when we met on the flat road and I pulled up my car, he put down the chicken-coop which he was carrying on his head, and settled down to a talk.
     He had, as before, a gentle manner, but all the same he was changed, and it was now difficult to get into contact with him; he remained, all through our conversation, absent-minded, as if at a distance. He had been ill-used by fate, and deadly frightened, and had had to draw upon resources unknown to me, and through these experiences he had become chastened or clarified. It was like talking with an old acquaintance who has entered upon his novitiate in a monastery.
     He asked me about things on the farm, taking it, as Native servants usually do, that his fellow-servants in his absence were behaving as badly as possible to the white master. "When will the war be over?" he asked me. I said that I had been told that now it would not last much longer. "If it lasts ten years longer," he said, "you must know that I shall have forgotten to make the dishes you have taught me."
     The mind of the little old Kikuyu, upon the road across the plains, was running upon the same line as that of Brillat-Savarin, who said that if the Revolution had lasted five years longer, the art of making a chicken-ragout would have been lost.
     It was obvious that Esa's regrets were mainly on my behalf, and to put an end to his commiserations I asked him how he was himself. He thought my question over for a minute, there were thoughts which had to be collected from far away before he could answer. "Do you remember, Memsahib?" he said in the end, "that you said it was hard on the oxen of the Indian firewood-contractors to be inspanned every day, and never to have a whole day's rest, as the farm oxen have got? Now, with the lady, I am like an Indian firewood-contractor's ox." Esa looked away when he had spoken, apologetically, — Natives have in themselves very little feeling for animals; my saying about the Indian's oxen probably had struck him as very far-fetched. That now he should, on his own, come back to it for himself, was to him an unaccountable thing.
     During the war it was to me a cause of much annoyance that all letters, which I wrote or received, were opened by a little sleepy Swedish Censor in Nairobi. He can never have found anything the least suspicious in them, but he came, I believe, within a monotonous life, to take an interest in the people on whom they turned, and to read my letters as you read a serial in a magazine. I used to add in my own letters a few threats against our Censor, to be carried out after the end of the war, for him to read. When the end of the war came he may have remembered these threats, or he may on his own have woken up and repented; in any case he sent a runner to the farm with news of the Armistice. I was alone in the house when the runner arrived; I walked out in the woods. It was very silent there, and it was strange to think that it was silent on the fronts of France and Flanders as well, — all the guns had been stilled. In this stillness Europe and Africa seemed near to one another, as if you could have walked by the forest-path on to Vimy Ridge. When I came back to the house I saw a figure standing outside. It was Esa with his bundle. He at once told me that he had come back and that he had brought me a present.
     Esa's present was a picture, framed and under glass, of a tree, very carefully penned down in ink, every one of its hundred leaves painted a clear green. Upon each leaf, in diminutive Arabic letters, a word was written in red ink. I take it that the writings came out of the Koran, but Esa was incapable of explaining what they meant, he kept on wiping off the glass with his sleeve and assuring me that it was a very good present. He told me that he had had the picture made, during his year of trial, by the old Mohammedan priest of Nairobi, it must have taken the old man hours and hours to print it down.
     Esa now stayed with me till he died.

 

     The Iguana

     In the Reserve I have sometimes come upon the Iguana, the big lizards, as they were sunning themselves upon a flat stone in a river-bed. They are not pretty in shape, but nothing can be imagined more beautiful than their colouring. They shine like a heap of precious stones or like a pane cut out of an old church window. When, as you approach, they swish away, there is a flash of azure, green and purple over the stones, the colour seems to be standing behind them in the air, like a comet's luminous tail.
     Once I shot an Iguana. I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin. A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten. As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale, all colour died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was grey and dull like a lump of concrete. It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within the animal, which had radiated out all that glow and splendour. Now that the flame was put out, and the soul had flown, the Iguana was as dead as a sandbag.
     Often since I have, in some sort, shot an Iguana, and I have remembered the one of the Reserve. Up at Meru I saw a young Native girl with a bracelet on, a leather strap two inches wide, and embroidered all over with very small turquoise-coloured beads which varied a little in colour and played in green, light blue and ultra-marine. It was an extraordinarily live thing; it seemed to draw breath on her arm, so that I wanted it for myself, and made Farah buy it from her. No sooner had it come upon my own arm than it gave up the ghost. It was nothing now, a small, cheap, purchased article of finery. It had been the play of colours, the duet between the turquoise and the "nègre", — that quick, sweet, brownish black, like peat and black pottery, of the Native's skin, — that had created the life of the bracelet.
     In the Zoological Museum of Pietermaritzburg, I have seen, in a stuffed deep-water fish in a showcase, the same combination of colouring, which there had survived death; it made me wonder what life can well be like, on the bottom of the sea, to send up something so live and airy. I stood in Meru and looked at my pale hand and at the dead bracelet, it was as if an injustice had been done to a noble thing, as if truth had been suppressed. So sad did it seem that I remembered the saying of the hero in a book that I had read as a child: "I have conquered them all, but I am standing amongst graves."
     In a foreign country and with foreign species of life one should take measures to find out whether things will be keeping their value when dead. To the settlers of East Africa I give the advice: "For the sake of your own eyes and heart, shoot not the Iguana."

 

     Farah and the Merchant of Venice

     Once a friend at home wrote out to me and described a new staging of The Merchant of Venice. In the evening as I was reading the letter over again, the play became vivid to me, and seemed to fill the house, so much, that I called in Farah to talk with him about it, and explained the plot of the comedy to him.
     Farah, like all people of African blood, liked to hear a story told, but only when he was sure that he and I were alone in the house, did he consent to listen to one. It was therefore when the houseboys were back in their own huts, and any passer-by from the farm, looking in through the windows, would have believed him and me to be discussing household matters, that I narrated, and he listened, standing up immovable at the end of the table, his serious eyes on my face.
     Farah gave his full attention to the affairs of Antonio, Bassanio and Shylock. Here was a big, complicated business deal, somewhat on the verge of the law, the real thing to the heart of a Somali. He asked me a question or two as to the clause of the pound of flesh: it obviously seemed to him an eccentric, but not impossible agreement; men might go in for that sort of thing. And here the story began to smell of blood, — his interest in it rose. When Portia came upon the stage, he pricked his ears; I imagined that he saw her as a woman of his own tribe, Fathima with all sails set, crafty and insinuating, out to outman man. Coloured people do not take sides in a tale, the interest to them lies in the ingeniousness of the plot itself; and the Somali, who in real life have a strong sense of values, and a gift for moral indignation, give these a rest in their fiction. Still, here Farah's sympathy was with Shylock, who had come down with the cash; he repugned his defeat.
     "What?" said he. "Did the Jew give up his claim? He should not have done that. The flesh was due to him, it was little enough for him to get for all that money."
     "But what else could he do," I asked, "when he must not take one drop of blood?"
     "Memsahib," said Farah, "he could have used a red-hot knife. That brings out no blood."
     "But," I said, "he was not allowed to take either more or less than one pound of flesh."
     "And who," said Farah, "would have been frightened by that, exactly a Jew? He might have taken little bits at a time, with a small scale at hand to weight it on, till he had got just one pound. Had the Jew no friends to give him advice?"
     All Somalis have in their countenance something exceedingly dramatic. Farah, with the slightest change of mien and carriage, now took on dangerous aspect, as if he were really in the Court of Venice, putting heart into his friend or partner Shylock, in the face of the crowd of Antonio's friends, and of the Doge of Venice himself. His eyes flickered up and down the figure of the Merchant before him, with the breast bared to the knife.
     "Look, Memsahib," he said, "he could have taken small bits, very small. He could have done that man a lot of harm, even a long time before he had got that one pound of his flesh."
     I said: "But in the story the Jew gave it up."
     "Yes, that was a great pity, Memsahib," said Farah.

 

     The Élite of Bournemouth

     I had as neighbour a settler who had been a doctor at home. Once, when the wife of one of my houseboys was about to die in childbirth, and I could not get into Nairobi, because the long rains had ruined the roads, I wrote to my neighbour and asked him to do me the great service to come over and help her. He very kindly came, in the midst of a terrible thunderstorm and torrents of tropical rain, and, at the last moment, by his skill, he saved the life of the woman and the child.
     Afterwards he wrote me a letter to say, that although he had for once, on my appeal, treated a Native, I must understand that he could not let that sort of thing occur again. I myself would fully realize the fact, he felt convinced, when he informed me that he had before now practised to the Élite of Bournemouth.

 

     Of Pride

     The neighbourhood of the Game Reserve and the presence, outside our boundary, of the big game, gave a particular character to the farm, as if we had been the neighbours of a great king. Very proud things were about, and made their nearness felt.
     The barbarian loves his own pride, and hates, or disbelieves in, the pride of others. I will be a civilized being, I will love the pride of my adversaries, of my servants, and my lover; and my house shall be, in all humility, in the wilderness a civilized place.
     Pride is faith in the idea that God had, when he made us. A proud man is conscious of the idea, and aspires to realize it. He does not strive towards a happiness, or comfort, which may be irrelevant to God's idea of him. His success is the idea of God, successfully carried through, and he is in love with his destiny. As the good citizen finds his happiness in the fulfilment of his duty to the community, so does the proud man find his happiness in the fulfilment of his fate.
     People who have no pride are not aware of any idea of God in the making of them, and sometimes they make you doubt that there has ever been much of an idea, or else it has been lost, and who shall find it again? They have got to accept as success what others warrant to be so, and to take their happiness, and even their own selves, at the quotation of the day. They tremble, with reason, before their fate.
     Love the pride of God beyond all things, and the pride of your neighbour as your own. The pride of lions: do not shut them up in Zoos. The pride of your dogs: let them not grow fat. Love the pride of your fellow-partisans, and allow them no self-pity.
     Love the pride of the conquered nations, and leave them to honour their father and their mother.

 

     The Oxen

     Saturday afternoon was a blessed time on the farm. First of all, there would now be no mail in till Monday afternoon, so that no distressing business letters could reach us till then, and this fact in itself seemed to close the whole place in, as within an enceinte. Secondly, everybody was looking forward to the day of Sunday, when they would rest or play all the day, and the Squatters could work on their own land. The thought of the oxen on Saturday pleased me more than all other things. I used to walk down to their paddock at six o'clock, when they were coming in after the day's work and a few hours' grazing. Tomorrow, I thought, they would do nothing but graze all day.
     We had one hundred and thirty-two oxen on the farm, which meant eight working teams and a few spare oxen. Now in the golden dust of the sunset they came wandering home across the plain in a long row, walking sedately, as they did all things; while I sat sedately on the fence of the paddock, smoking a cigarette of peace, and watching them. Here came Nyose, Ngufu and Faru, with Msungu, — which means a white man. The drivers also often give to their teams the proper names of white men, and Delamere is a common name in an ox. Here came old Malinda, the big yellow ox that I liked best of the lot; his skin was strangely marked with shadowy figures, like starfishes, from which pattern perhaps he had his name, for Malinda means a skirt.
     As in civilized countries all people have a chronic bad conscience towards the slums, and feel uncomfortable when they think of them, so in Africa you have got a bad conscience, and feel a pang, when you think of the oxen. But towards the oxen on the farm, I felt as, I suppose, a king will be feeling towards his slums: "You are I, and I am you."
     The oxen in Africa have carried the heavy load of the advance of European civilization. Wherever new land has been broken they have broken it, panting and pulling knee-deep in the soil before the ploughs, the long whips in the air over them. Where a road has been made they have made it; and they have trudged the iron and tools through the land to the yelling and shouting of the drivers, by tracks in the dust and the long grass of the plains, before there ever were any roads. They have been inspanned before daybreak, and have sweated up and down the long hills, and across dungas and riverbeds, through the burning hours of the day. The whips have marked their sides, and you will often see oxen that have had an eye, or both of them, taken away by the long cutting whip-lashes. The waggon-oxen of many Indian and white contractors worked every day, all their lives through, and did not know of the Sabbath.
     It is a strange thing that we have done to the oxen. The bull is in a constant stage of fury, rolling his eyes, shovelling up the earth, upset by everything that gets within his range of vision, — still he has got a life of his own, fire comes from his nostrils, and new life from his loins; his days are filled with his vital cravings and satisfactions. All of that we have taken away from the oxen, and in reward we have claimed their existence for ourselves. The oxen walk along within our own daily life, pulling hard all the time, creatures without a life, things made for our use. They have moist, limpid, violet eyes, soft muzzles, silky ears, they are patient and dull in all their ways; sometimes they look as if they were thinking about things.
     There was in my time a law against bringing a waggon or cart on the roads without a brake, and the waggon-drivers were supposed to put on the brakes down all the long hills of the country. But the law was not kept; half the waggons and carts on the roads had no brakes to them, and on the others the brakes were but rarely put on. This made downhill work terribly hard on the oxen. They had to hold the loaded waggons up with their bodies, they laid their heads back under the labour until their horns touched the hump on their backs; their sides went like a pair of bellows. I have many times seen the carts of the firewood merchants which came along the Ngong Road, going into Nairobi the one after the other, like a long caterpillar, gain speed down the hill in the Forest Reserve, the oxen violently zig-zagging down in front of them. I have also seen the oxen stumble and fall under the weight of the cart, at the bottom of the hill.
     The oxen thought: "Such is life, and the conditions of the world. They are hard, hard. It has all to be borne, — there is nothing for it. It is a terribly difficult thing to get the carts down the hill, it is a matter of life and death. It cannot be helped."
     If the fat Indians of Nairobi, who owned the carts, could have brought themselves to pay two Rupees and have the brakes put in order, or if the slow young Native driver on the top of the loaded cart, had had it in him to get off and put on the brake, if it was there, then it could have been helped, and the oxen could have walked quietly down the hill. But the oxen did not know, and went on, day after day, in their heroic and desperate struggle, with the conditions of life.

 

     Of the Two Races
   
     The relation between the white and the black race in Africa in many ways resembles the relation between the two sexes.
     If the one of the two sexes were told that they did not play any greater part in the life of the other sex, than this other sex plays within their own existence, they would be shocked and hurt. If the lover or the husband were told that he did not play any greater part in the life of his wife or his mistress than she played in his own existence, he would be puzzled and indignant. If a wife or a mistress were told that she did not play any greater part in the life of her husband or her lover, than he played in her life, she would be exasperated.
     The real old-time men's story that was never meant to get to the ears of women, goes to prove this theory; and the talk of the women, when they sit amongst themselves and know that no man can hear them, goes to prove it.
     The tales that white people tell you of their Native servants are conceived in the same spirit. If they had been told that they played no more important part in the lives of the Natives than the Natives played in their own lives, they would have been highly indignant and ill at ease.
     If you had told the Natives that they played no greater part in the life of the white people than the white people played in their lives, they would never have believed you, but would have laughed at you. Probably in Native circles, stories are passing about, and being repeated, which prove the all-absorbing interest of the white people in the Kikuyu or Kawirondo, and their complete dependence upon them.

 

     A War-time Safari

     When the war broke out, my husband and the two Swedish assistants on the farm volunteered and went down to the German border, where a provisional Intelligence Service was being organized by Lord Delamere. I was then alone on the farm. But shortly afterwards there began to be talk of a Concentration Camp for the white women of the country; they were believed to be exposed to danger from the Natives. I was thoroughly frightened then, and thought: If I am to go into a ladies' Concentration Camp in this country for months, — and who knows how long the war is going to last? — I shall die. A few days later I got the chance to go, with a young Swedish farmer, a neighbour of ours, to Kijabe, a station higher up the railway line, and there to be in charge of a camp to which the runners from the border brought in their news, which had then to be telegraphed on to Headquarters in Nairobi.
     At Kijabe I had my tent near the station, amongst stacks of firewood for the railway engines. As the runners came in at all hours of the day or night, I came to work much together with the Goan Stationmaster. He was a small, mild man, with a burning thirst for knowledge, unaffected by the war around him. He asked me many questions of my country, and made me teach him a little Danish, which he thought would at some time come in highly useful to him. He had a small boy of ten, named Victor; one day as I walked up to the station, through the trellis-work of the Verandah, I heard him going on teaching Victor his grammar: "Victor, what is a pronoun? — what is a pronoun, Victor? — You do not know? — Five hundred times have I told you!"
     The people down by the border kept on demanding provisions and ammunition to be sent to them; my husband wrote and instructed me to load up four ox-waggons and to send them down as soon as possible. But I must not, he wrote, let them go without a white man in charge of them, for nobody knew where the Germans were, and the Masai were in a state of high excitement at the idea of war, and on the move all over the Reserve. In those days the Germans were supposed to be everywhere, and we kept sentinels by the great railway bridge of Kijabe to prevent them blowing it up.
     I engaged a young South African by the name of Klapprott, to go with the waggons, but when they were all loaded up, on the evening before the expedition was to start off, he was arrested as a German. He was not a German, and could prove it, so that only a short time afterwards he got out of the arrest and changed his name. But at that hour I saw in his arrestation, the finger of God, for now there was nobody but me to take the waggons through the country. And in the early morning, while the old constellations of the stars were still out, we set off down the long endless Kijabe Hill, with the great plains of the Masai Reserve, — iron-grey in the faint light of the dawn, — spread at our feet, with lamps tied under the waggons, swinging, and with much shouting and cracking of whips. I had four waggons, with a full team of sixteen oxen to each, and five spare oxen, and with me twenty-one young Kikuyus and three Somalis: Farah, Ismail, the gun-bearer, and an old cook also named Ismail, a very noble old man. My dog Dusk walked by my side.
     It was a pity that the Police when arresting Klapprott, had at the same time arrested his mule. I had not been able to recover it in all Kijabe, so that for the first few days I had to walk in the dust beside the waggons. But later I bought a mule and saddle from a man whom I met in the Reserve, and again some time after a mule for Farah.
     I was out then for three months. When we came down to our place of destination, we were sent off again to collect the stores of a big American shooting Safari that had been camping near the border, and had left in a hurry at the news of the war. From there the waggons had to go to new places. I learned to know the fords and water-holes of the Masai Reserve, and to speak a little Masai. The roads everywhere were unbelievably bad, deep with dust, and barred with blocks of stone taller than the waggons; later we travelled mostly across the plains. The air of the African highlands went to my head like wine, I was all the time slightly drunk with it, and the joy of these months was indescribable. I had been out on a shooting Safari before, but I had not till now been out alone with Africans.
     The Somali and I, who felt responsible for the Government's property, lived in constant fear of losing the oxen from lions. The lions were on the road, following after the big transports of supplies of sheep and provisions, which now continually were travelling along it to the border. In the early mornings, as we drove on, we could see, for a long way, the fresh spoor of the lions in the dust, upon the waggon-tracks of the road. At night, when the oxen were outspanned, there was always a risk of lions round the camp frightening them, and making them stampede and spread all over the country, where we would never find them again. So we built tall circular fences of thorn-trees round our outspanning and camping places, and sat up with rifles by the campfires.
     Here both Farah and Ismail, and old Ismail himself, felt at such a safe distance from civilization that their tongues were loosened, and they would narrate strange happenings of Somaliland, or tales out of the Koran, and the Arabian Nights. Both Farah and Ismail had been to sea, for the Somali are a seafaring nation, and were, I believe, in old days, great pirates of the Red Sea. They explained to me how every live creature on the earth has got its replica at the bottom of the sea: horses, lions, women and Giraffe all live down there, and from time to time have been observed by sailors. They also recounted tales of horses which live at the bottom of the rivers of Somaliland, and at full-moon nights come up to the grass-land to copulate with the Somali mares grazing there, and breed foals of wonderful beauty and swiftness. The vault of the nocturnal sky swung back over our heads as we sat on, new constellations of stars came up from the East. The smoke from the fire in the cold air carried long sparks with it, the fresh firewood smelt sour. From time to time the oxen suddenly all at once stirred, stamped and squeezed together, sniffing up in the air, so that old Ismail would climb on to the top of the loaded wagon, and there swing his lamp, to observe and to frighten off anything that might be about outside the fence.
     We had many great adventures with lions: "Beware of Siawa," said the Native leader of a transport going North, whom we met on the road. "Do not camp here. There are two hundred lions at Siawa." So we tried to get past Siawa before nightfall, and hurried on, and as haste makes waste on a Safari more than anywhere else, about sunset a wheel of the last waggon stuck on a big stone, and it could go no farther. While I was now holding the lamp to the people working to lift it off, a lion took one of our spare oxen not three yards from me. By shouting and cracking whips, for my rifles were with the Safari, we managed to frighten off the lion, and the ox, that had run away with the lion on his back, came back to us, but it had been badly mauled and died a couple of days later.
     Many other strange things happened to us. At one time an ox drank up all our supply of paraffin, died on us, and left us without light of any kind until we got to an Indian dhuka in the Reserve, deserted by the owner, where strangely some of the goods were still untouched.
     We were for a week camped close to a big camp of the Masai Morani, and the young warriors, in warpaint, with spears and long shields, and head-dresses of lion-skin, were round my tent day and night, to get news of the war and of the Germans. My own people of the Safari liked this camp, because here they bought milk from the Morani's herd of cattle that trekked about with them and was herded by the young Masai boys, the Laioni, who as yet are too young to become warriors. The juvenile Masai soldier-girls, very lively and pretty, came into my tent to call on me. They would always ask for the loan of my hand-mirror, and, when they held it up to one another, they bared their two rows of shining teeth to the mirror, like angry young carnivora.
     All news of the movements of the enemy had to pass through Lord Delamere's camp. But Lord Delamere was moving all over the Reserve in such incredibly swift marches, that nobody ever knew where his camp was to be found. I had nothing to do with Intelligence Work, but I wondered how the system worked for the people employed in it. Once my way took me within a couple of miles of Lord Delamere's camp, and I rode over with Farah and had tea with him. The place, although he was to break camp next day, was like a city, swarming with Masai. For he was always very friendly with them, and in his camp they were so well regaled that it had become like the lion's den of the fable: all footsteps turning in and none out. A Masai runner, sent with a letter to Lord Delamere's camp, would never show himself again with an answer. Lord Delamere, in the centre of the stir, small, and exceedingly polite and courteous as ever, his white hair down on his shoulders, seemed eminently at ease here, told me everything about the war, and offered me tea with smoked milk in it, after the Masai fashion.
     My people showed great forbearance with my ignorance of oxen, harness and Safari ways; they were indeed as keen to cover it up as I was myself. They worked well for me all through the Safari, and never grumbled, although in my inexperience I asked more of everyone, both men and oxen, than could really be expected of them. They carried bath water for me on their heads a long way across the plain, and when we outspanned at noon, they constructed a canopy against the sun, made out of spears and blankets, for me to rest under. They were a little scared of the wild Masai, and much disturbed by the idea of the Germans, of whom strange rumours went about. Under the circumstances I was to the expedition, I believe, a kind of Guardian Angel, or mascot.
     Six months before the outbreak of the war, I had first come out to Africa, on the same boat as General von Lettow Vorbeck, who was now the highest in command of the German forces in East Africa. I did not know then that he was going to be a hero, and we had made friends on the journey. When we dined together in Mombasa before he went farther on to Tanganyika, and I went up-country, he gave me a photograph of himself in uniform and on horseback, and wrote on it:

 

 

"Das Paradies auf Erde
Ist auf dem Rüken der Pferde,
Und die Gesundheit des Leibes
Am Busen des Weibes."

 

 

     Farah, who had come to meet me in Aden, and who had seen the General and been aware that he was my friend, had taken the photograph with him on the Safari and kept it with the money and the keys of the expedition to show the German soldiers if we were made prisoners, and he attached great value to it.
     How beautiful were the evenings of the Masai Reserve when after sunset we arrived at the river or the water-hole where we were to outspan, travelling in a long file. The plains with the thorntrees on them were already quite dark, but the air was filled with clarity, — and over our heads, to the West, a single star which was to grow big and radiant in the course of the night was now just visible, like a silver point in the sky of citrine topaz. The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent. In a little while on all sides the Cicada would begin to sing. The grass was me, and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorntrees.
     After three months I was suddenly ordered home. As things began to be systematically organized and regular troops came out from Europe, my expedition, I believe, was found to be somewhat irregular. We went back, passing our old camping-places with heavy hearts.
     This Safari lived for a long time in the memory of the farm. Later on I had many other Safaris, but for some reason, — either because we had at the time been in the service of the Government, a sort of Official ourselves, or because of the war-like atmosphere about it, — this particular expedition was dear to the hearts of the people who had been on it. Those who had been with me came to look upon themselves as a Safari-aristocracy.
     Many years afterwards they would come up to the house and talk about the Safari, just to freshen up their memory of it, and to go through one or another of our adventures then.

 

     The Swaheli Numeral System

     At the time when I was new in Africa, a shy young Swedish dairy-man was to teach me the numbers in Swaheli. As the Swaheli word for nine, to Swedish ears, has a dubious ring, he did not like to tell it to me, and when he had counted: "seven, eight," he stopped, looked away, and said: "They have not got nine in Swaheli."
     "You mean," I said, "that they can only count as far as eight?"
     "Oh, no," he said quickly. "They have got ten, eleven, twelve, and so on. But they have not got nine."
     "Does that work?" I asked, wondering. "What do they do when they come to nineteen?"
     "They have not got nineteen either," he said, blushing, but very firm, "nor ninety, nor nine hundred" — for these words in Swaheli are constructed out of the number nine, — "But apart from that they have got all our numbers."
     The idea of this system for a long time gave me much to think of, and for some reason a great pleasure. Here, I thought, was a people who have got originality of mind, and courage to break with the pedantry of the numeral series.
     One, two and three are the only three sequential prime numbers, I thought, so may eight and ten be the only sequential even numbers: People might try to prove the existence of the number of nine by arguing that it should be possible to multiply the number of three with itself. But why should it be so? If the number of two has got no square root, the number of three may just as well be without a square number. If you work out the sum of digits of a number until you reduce it to a single figure, it makes no difference to the results if you have got the number of nine, or any multiple of nine, in it from the beginning, so that here nine may really be said to be non-existent, and that, I thought, spoke for the Swaheli system.
     It happened that I had at that time a houseboy, Zacharia, who had lost the fourth finger of his left hand. Perhaps, I thought, this is a common thing with Natives, and is done to facilitate their arithmetic to them, when they are counting upon their fingers.
     When I began to develop my ideas to other people, I was stopped, and enlightened. Yet I have still got the feeling that there exists a Native system of numeral characters without the number nine in it, which to them works well and by which you can find out many things.
     I have, in this connection, remembered an old Danish clergyman who declared to me that he did not believe that God had created the Eighteenth Century.

 

     "I Will Not Let Thee Go Except Thou Bless Me."

     When in Africa in March the long rains begin after four months of hot, dry weather, the richness of growth and the freshness and fragrance everywhere are overwhelming.
     But the farmer holds back his heart and dares not trust to the generosity of nature, he listens, dreading to hear a decrease in the roar of the falling rain. The water that the earth is now drinking in must bring the farm, with all the vegetable, animal and human life on it, through four rainless months to come.
     It is a lovely sight when the roads of the farm have all been turned into streams of running water, and the farmer wades through the mud with a singing heart, out to the flowering and dripping coffee-fields. But it happens in the middle of the rainy season that in the evening the stars show themselves through the thinning clouds; then he stands outside his house and stares up, as if hanging himself on to the sky to milk down more rain. He cries to the sky: "Give me enough and more than enough. My heart is bared to thee now, and I will not let thee go except thou bless me. Drown me if you like, but kill me not with caprices. No coitus interruptus, heaven, heaven!"
     Sometimes a cool, colourless day in the months after the rainy season calls back the time of the marka mbaya, the bad year, the time of the drought. In those days the Kikuyu used to graze their cows round my house, and a boy amongst them who had a flute, from time to time played a short tune on it. When I have heard this tune again, it has recalled in one single moment all our anguish and despair of the past. It has got the salt taste of tears in it. But at the same time I found in the tune, unexpectedly surprisingly, a vigour, a curious sweetness, a song. Had those hard times really had all these in them? There was youth in us then, a wild hope. It was during those long days that we were all of us merged into a unity, so that on another planet we shall recognise one another, and the things cry to each other, the cuckoo clock and my books to the lean-fleshed cows on the lawn and the sorrowful old Kikuyus: "You also were there. You also were part of the Ngong farm." That bad time blessed us and went away.
     The friends of the farm came to the house, and went away again. They were not the kind of people who stay for a long time in the same place. They were not the kind of people either who grow old, they died and never came back. But they had sat contented by the fire, and when the house, closing round them, said: "I will not let you go except you bless me," they laughed and blessed it, and it let them go.
     An old lady sat in a party and talked of her life. She declared that she would like to live it all over again, and held this fact to prove that she had lived wisely. I thought: Yes, her life has been the sort of life that should really be taken twice before you can say that you have had it. An arietta you can take da capo, but not a whole piece of music, — not a symphony and not a five-act tragedy either. If it is taken over again it is because it has not gone as it ought to have gone.
     My life, I will not let you go except you bless me, but then I will let you go.

 

     The Eclipse of the Moon

     One year we had an eclipse of the moon. A short time before it was to take place I had the following letter from the young Indian Stationmaster of Kikuyu station: —

 

 

     HONOURED MADAM, — I have been kindly instructed that the light of the sun is going to be put out for seven days running. Leave alone the railway trains, I beg you kindly inform me, as I believe that nobody else will kindly inform me, whether during this period I shall leave my cows to graze in the surroundings, or shall I collect them into the stable? — I have the honour to be, Madam, Your obedient servant.
     PATEL

 

 

 

     Natives and Verse

     The Natives, who have a strong sense of rhythm, know nothing of verse, or at least did not know anything before the times of the schools, where they were taught hymns. One evening out in the maize-field, where we had been harvesting maize, breaking off the cobs and throwing them on to the ox-carts, to amuse myself, I spoke to the field labourers, who were mostly quite young, in Swaheli verse. There was no sense in the verse, it was made for the sake of rhyme: — "Ngumbe na-penda chumbe, Malaya-mbaya. Wakamba na-kula mamba." The oxen like salt, — whores are bad, — The Wakamba do eat snakes. It caught the interest of the boys, they formed a ring round me. They were quick to understand that the meaning of poetry is of no consequence, and they did not question the thesis of the verse, but waited eagerly for the rhyme, and laughed at it when it came. I tried to make them themselves find the rhyme and finish the poem when I had begun it, but they could not, or would not, do that, and turned away their heads. As they had become used to the idea of poetry, they begged: "Speak again. Speak like rain." Why they should feel verse to be like rain I do not know. It must have been, however, an expression of applause, since in Africa rain is always longed for and welcomed.

 

     Of the Millennium

     At the time when the near return of Christ to the earth had become a certainty, a Committee was formed to decide upon the arrangements for His reception. After some discussion, it sent out a circular which prohibited all waving and throwing about of palm-branches as well as all cries of "Hosanna."
     When the Millennium had been going on for some time, and joy was universal, Christ one evening said to Peter that He wanted, when everything was quiet, to go out for a short walk with him alone.
     "Where do you want to go, my Lord?" Peter asked.
     "I should like," answered the Lord, "just to take a walk from the Praetorium, along that long road, up to the Hill of Calvary."

 

     Kitosch's Story

     Kitosch's story has been in the papers. A case rose from it, and a jury was set to go through it from beginning to end, searching for enlightenment; some of the enlightenment will still be found in the old documents.
     Kitosch was a young Native in the service of a young white settler of Molo. One Wednesday in June, the settler lent his brown mare to a friend, to ride to the station on. He sent Kitosch there to bring back the mare, and told him not to ride her, but to lead her. But Kitosch jumped on to the mare, and rode her back, and on Saturday the settler, his master, was told of the offence by a man who had seen it. In punishment the settler, on Sunday afternoon, had Kitosch flogged, and afterwards tied up in his store, and here late on Sunday night Kitosch died.
     Upon the matter the High Court was set in Nakuru, in the Railway Institute, on the 1st of August.
     The Natives who gathered and sat round the Railway Institute, will have been wondering what it was all about. To their mind the case was plain, for Kitosch had died, of that there was no doubt, and, according to Native ideas, a compensation for his death should now be made to his people.
     But the idea of justice of Europe varies from that of Africa, and, to the jury of white men, the problem of guilt and innocence at once presented itself. The verdict in the case might be one of murder, of manslaughter, or of grievous hurt. The Judge reminded the jury that the degree of an offence rests upon the intentions of the persons concerned, and not upon the results. What, then, had been the intentions, and the attitude of mind, of the persons concerned in the Kitosch case?
     To decide upon the intention and attitude of mind of the settler, the court had him cross-examined for many hours a day. They were trying to make up a picture of what had happened, and brought in all the details that they could lay hands on. It is in this way written down that when the settler called Kitosch, he came, and stood three yards away. This insignificant detail in the report is of great effect. Here they are at the opening of the drama, the white and the black man, at three yards' distance.
     But from now on, as the story advances, the balance of the picture is broken, and the figure of the settler is blurred and grows smaller. It cannot be helped. It becomes only an accessory figure in a great landscape, a pale puny face, it loses its weight, and looks like a figure cut out in paper, and it is blown about, as by a draught, by the unknown freedom to do what it likes.
     The settler stated that he began by asking Kitosch who had given him permission to ride the brown mare, and that he repeated this question forty to fifty times; he admitted at the same time that nobody could possibly have given Kitosch any such permission. Here his perdition begins. In England he would not have been able to ask a question forty to fifty times, he would have been stopped, in one way or the other, long before the fortieth time. Here in Africa were people to whom he could shriek the same question fifty times over. In the end Kitosch answered that he was not a thief, and the settler stated that it was as a result of the insolence of the answer that he had the boy flogged.
     At this point the report has got a second irrelevant, and effective, detail. It says that during the flogging, two Europeans, who are designated as friends of the settler, came over to see him. They looked on for ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour, and walked away.
     After the flogging the settler could not let Kitosch go.
     Late in the evening, he tied Kitosch with a rein, and locked him into his store. When the jury asked him why he did so, he gave an answer that he had no sense, he said that he wanted to keep such a boy from running about on the farm. After supper, he went back to the store, and found Kitosch lying unconscious a little way from where he had tied him up, with the reins loosened. He called in his Baganda cook, and with his assistance tied up the boy tighter than before, with his hands fastened to a post at his back, and with his right leg tied to a post in front. He left the store, locking the door, but half an hour later went back there, got hold of his cook and the kitchen Toto, and let them into the store. Then he went to bed, and the next thing he remembered, he said, was that the Toto came from the store, and told him that Kitosch had died.
     The jury kept in mind the words that the degree of an offence rests upon the intention, and looked for an intention. They went into a number of detailed questions about the flogging of Kitosch, and about what happened after, and as you read the papers you seem to see them shake their heads.
     But what now had been the intention and the attitude of mind of Kitosch? This, when gone into, was found to be a different thing. Kitosch had had an intention, and in the end it came to weigh in the scales of the case. It can be said that by his intention, and his attitude of mind, the African, in his grave, saved the European.
     Kitosch had not much opportunity for expressing his intention. He was locked up in the store, his message, therefore, comes very simply, and in a single gesture. The night-watch states that he cried all night. But it was not so, for at one o'clock he talked with the Toto, who was in the store with him. He indicated to the child that he must shout to him, because the flogging had made him deaf. But at one o'clock he asked the Toto to loosen his feet, and explained that in any case he could not run away. When the Toto had done as he asked him, Kitosch said to him that he wanted to die. At four, the child said, he again said that he wanted to die. A little while after, he rocked himself from side to side, cried: "I am dead!" and died.
     Three doctors gave evidence in the case.
     The District Surgeon, who had done the post mortem examination, pronounced death to be due to the injuries and wounds that he had found on the body. He did not believe that any immediate medical attention could have saved Kitosch's life.
     The two doctors from Nairobi, called in for the defence, were, however, of a different mind.
     The flogging in itself, they held, was not sufficient to have caused death. An important factor came into the matter, not to be ignored: that was the will to die. On this point, the first doctor stated, he could speak with authority, for he had been in the country twenty-five years, and knew the Native mind. Many medical men could support him that the wish to die, in a Native, had actually caused death. In the present case the matter was particularly clear, for Kitosch had himself said that he wanted to die. The second doctor bore him up in this point of view.
     It was very likely, the doctor now went on, that if Kitosch had not taken this attitude, he would not have died. If, for instance, he had eaten something, he might not have lost courage, for starvation is known to reduce courage. He added that the wound on the lip might not be due to a kick, but might be just a bite by the boy himself, in severe pain.
     The doctor, furthermore, did not believe that Kitosch would have made up his mind to die till after nine o'clock, as by that time he seemed to have tried to escape. Neither had he died till after nine o'clock. When he had been caught in the attempt to escape, and had been tied up again, the fact of being a prisoner, the doctor said, might have weighed on his mind.
     The two doctors from Nairobi summed up their view of the case. The death of Kitosch, they held, was due to the flogging, to starvation, and to the wish to die, the latter being the subject of special emphasis. The wish to die might, they considered, have been caused by the effects of the flogging.
     After the doctors' evidence, the case turned upon what was called in Court "The wish-to-die theory." The District Surgeon, who was the only one who had seen Kitosch's body, rejected the theory, and gave examples of cancer patients of his practice who had wished to die, but all the same had not died. These people, however, were found to have been Europeans.
     The Jury in the end gave a verdict of: Guilty of grievous hurt. The same verdict was applied to the Natives accused, but it was considered that as they had acted under the orders of their master, a European, it would be an injustice to imprison them. The Judge imposed a sentence of two years R.I. on the settler, and of one day on each of the Natives.
     It seems to you, as you read the case through, a strange, a humiliating fact that the Europeans should not, in Africa, have power to throw the African out of existence. The country is his Native land, and whatever you do to him, when he goes he goes by his own free will, and because he does not want to stay. Who is to take the responsibility for what happens in a house? The man who owns it, who has inherited it.
     By this strong sense in him of what is right and decorous, the figure of Kitosch, with his firm will to die, although now removed from us by many years, stands out with a beauty of its own. In it is embodied the fugitiveness of the wild things who are, in the hour of need, conscious of a refuge somewhere in existence; who go when they like; of whom we can never get hold.

 

     Some African Birds

     Just at the beginning of the long rains, in the last week of March, or the first week of April, I have heard the nightingale in the woods of Africa. Not the full song: a few notes only, — the opening bars of the concerto, a rehearsal, suddenly stopped and again begun. It was as if, in the solitude of the dripping woods, some one was, in a tree, tuning a small 'cello. It was, however, the same melody, and the same abundance and sweetness, as were soon to fill the forests of Europe, from Sicily to Elsinore.
     We had the black and white storks in Africa, the birds that build their nests upon the thatched village roofs of Northern Europe. They look less imposing in Africa than they do there, for here they had such tall and ponderous birds as the Marabout and the Secretary Bird to be compared to. The storks have got other habits in Africa than in Europe, where they live as in married couples and are symbols of domestic happiness. Here they are seen together in big flights, as in clubs. They are called locust-birds in Africa, and follow along when the locusts come upon the land, living high on them. They fly over the plain, too, where there is a grass-fire on, circling just in front of the advancing line of small leaping flames, high up in the scintillating rainbow-coloured air, and the grey smoke, on watch for the mice and snakes that ran from the fire. The storks have a gay time in Africa. But their real life is not here, and when the winds of spring bring back thoughts of mating and nesting, their hearts are turned towards the North, they remember old times and places and fly off, two and two, and are shortly after wading in the cold bogs of their birth-places.
     Out on the plains, in the beginning of the rains, where the vast stretches of burnt grass begin to show fresh green sprouting, there are many hundred plovers. The plains always have a maritime air, the open horizon recalls the Sea and the long Sea-sands, the wandering wind is the same, the charred grass has a saline smell, and when the grass is long it runs in waves all over the land. When the white carnation flowers on the plains you remember the chopping white-specked waves all round you as you are tacking up the Sund. Out on the plains the plovers likewise take on the appearance of Sea-birds, and behave like Sea-birds on a beach, legging it, on the close grass, as fast as they can for a short time, and then rising before your horse with high shrill shrieks, so that the light sky is all alive with wings and birds' voices.
     The Crested Cranes, which come on to the newly rolled and planted maize-land, to steal the maize out of the ground, make up for the robbery by being birds of good omen, announcing the rain; and also by dancing to us. When the tall birds are together in large numbers, it is a fine sight to see them spread their wings and dance. There is much style in the dance, and a little affectation, for why, when they can fly, do they jump up and down as if they were held on to the earth by magnetism? The whole ballet has a sacred look, like some ritual dance; perhaps the cranes are making an attempt to join Heaven and earth like the winged angels walking up and down Jacob's Ladder. With their delicate pale grey colouring, the little black velvet skull-cap and the fan-shaped crown, the cranes have all the air of light, spirited frescoes. When, after the dance, they lift and go away, to keep up the sacred tone of the show they give out, by the wings or the voice, a clear ringing note, as if a group of church bells had taken to the wing and were sailing off. You can hear them a long way away, even after the birds themselves have become invisible in the sky: a chime from the clouds.
     The Greater Hornbill was another visitor to the farm, and came there to eat the fruits of the Cape-Chestnut tree. They are very strange birds. It is an adventure or an experience to meet them, not altogether pleasant, for they look exceedingly knowing. One morning before sunrise I was woken up by a loud jabbering outside the house, and when I walked out on the terrace I saw forty-one Hornbills sitting in the trees on the lawn. There they looked less like birds than like some fantastic articles of finery set on the trees here and there by a child. Black they all were, with the sweet, noble black of Africa, deep darkness absorbed through an age, like old soot, that makes you feel that for elegance, vigour and vivacity, no colour rivals black. All the Hornbills were talking together in the merriest mood, but with choice deportment, like a party of inheritors after a funeral. The morning air was as clear as crystal, the sombre party was bathing in freshness and purity, and, behind the trees and the birds, the sun came up, a dull red ball. You wonder what sort of a day you are to get after such an early morning.
     The Flamingoes are the most delicately coloured of all the African birds, pink and red like a flying twig of an Oleander bush. They have incredibly long legs and bizarre and recherche curves of their necks and bodies, as if from some exquisite traditional prudery they were making all attitudes and movements in life as difficult as possible.
     I once travelled from Port Said to Marseilles in a French boat that had on board a consignment of a hundred and fifty Flamingoes, which were going to the Jardin d'Acclimatation in Marseilles. They were kept in large dirty cases with canvas sides, ten in each, standing up close to one another. The keeper, who was taking the birds over, told me that he was counting on losing twenty per cent of them on a trip. They were not made for that sort of life, in rough weather they lost their balance, their legs broke, and the other birds in the cage trampled on them. At night when the wind was high in the Mediterranean and the ship came down in the waves with a thump, at each wave I heard, in the dark, the Flamingoes shriek. Every morning, I saw the keeper taking out one or two dead birds, and throwing them overboard. The noble wader of the Nile, the sister of the lotus, which floats over the landscape like a stray cloud of sunset, had become a slack cluster of pink and red feathers with a pair of long, thin sticks attached to it. The dead birds floated on the water for a short time, knocking up and down in the wake of the ship before they sank.

 

     Pania

     The Deerhounds, from having lived for innumerable generations with man, have acquired a human sense of humour, and can laugh. Their idea of a joke is that of the Natives, who are amused by things going wrong. Perhaps you cannot get above this class of humour, until you also get an art, and an established Church.
     Pania was Dusk's son. I walked with him one day near the pond where there was a row of tall, thin blue-gum trees, when he ran away from me up to one of the trees and came back again half-way, to make me come with him. I went up to the tree, and saw a Serval-cat sitting high up in it. The Serval-cats take your chickens, so that I shouted to a Toto walking by, and sent him up to the house for my gun, and when I had it brought, I shot the Serval-cat. She came down from her great height with a thump, and Pania was upon her in a second, shaking her and pulling her about, very pleased with the performance.
     Some time after I again came by the same road, past the pond; I had been out to shoot partridge, but had got none, and both Pania and I were downcast. All at once Pania flew up to the farthest tree of the row, barking round it in a state of the highest excitement, then rushed back to me, and again back to the tree. I was pleased that I had got my gun with me, and at the prospect of a second Serval-cat, for they have got pretty, spotted skins, I ran up to the tree. But, when I looked up, there was a black domestic cat sitting, very angry, as high up as possible in the swaying top of the tree. I lowered my gun. "Pania," I said, "you fool! It's a cat."
     As I turned round to Pania, he stood at a little distance, looking at me and splitting his sides with laughter. When his eyes met mine he rushed up to me, danced, wagged his tail, whined, put his feet on my shoulders, and his nose to my face, then jumped back again to give free course to his laughter.
     He expressed by pantomime: "I know. I know. It was a tame cat. I knew all the time. Indeed you must excuse me. But if you only knew the figure you cut, rushing up to a tame cat with a gun!"
     All that day, from time to time, he went through the same agitation of mind, and the same behaviour, expressing the most overwhelmingly friendly feelings towards me, and then withdrawing a little to have an unhindered laugh.
     An insinuating note came into his friendliness. "You know," he said, "that in this house it is only you and Farah that I ever laugh at."
     Even in the evening when he was asleep, in front of the fire, I heard him in his sleep groaning and whimpering a little with laughter. I believe that he remembered the event a long time after, when we passed the pond and the trees.

 

     Esa's Death

     Esa, who was taken away from me during the war, after the armistice came back and lived on the farm peacefully. He had a wife by the name of Mariammo, a thin, black, hard-working woman, who carried firewood to the house. Esa was the gentlest servant I ever had, and quarrelled with nobody.
     But something had happened to Esa in his exile, and he had come back changed. Sometimes I was afraid that he might imperceptibly die on me, like a plant that has had its roots cut through.
     Esa was my Cook, but he did not like to cook, he wanted to be a gardener. Plants were the only things for which he had preserved a real live interest. But while I had another gardener I had no other Cook, and so held back Esa in the kitchen. I had promised him that he should go back to his garden-work, but I kept him off from month to month. Esa on his own had dammed in a bit of ground by the river, and planted it as a surprise to me. But as he had been alone at it, and was not a strong man, the dam was not solid enough, and in the long rains it went away altogether.
     The first disturbance of his quiet non-existence came upon Esa when his brother died in the Kikuyu Reserve and left him a black cow. By then it became evident how much Esa had been sucked out by life, he could no longer stand up to any strong manifestation of it. In particular, I believe, he could not quite stand happiness. He asked me for three days' leave to go and fetch the cow, and, on his return I saw that he had been stirred and harassed, like the hands and feet of people who have been benumbed by cold, and brought into a warm room.
     All Natives are gamblers, and under the illusion, created by the black cow, that from now fortune was going to smile on him, Esa began to develop a terrible confidence in things, he had great dreams. He felt that life was before him still; he decided to take a new wife. When he told me of his plan, he was already negotiating with his future father-in-law, who lived on the Nairobi road, and had a Swaheli wife. I tried to make him change his mind. "You have got a very good wife," I said to him, "and your head is already grey, you cannot be needing another. Stay with us now and live in peace." Esa took no offence at my arguments, the little gentle Kikuyu stood up erect before me, and in his vague way stuck to his decision. Shortly after, he brought his new wife, Fatoma, to the farm.
     That Esa should ever hope for any good to come from his new marriage, showed that he had lost his judgment. The bride was very young, hard, and sulky, dressed in the Swaheli fashion, with the lasciviousness of her mother's nation, but with no gracefulness or gaiety in her. But Esa's face was radiant with triumph, and great plans; he was behaving, in his innocence, like a man on the verge of General Paralysis. Mariammo, the patient slave, kept in the background, and seemed unconcerned.
     It is possible that Esa had now a short time of greatness and rejoicement, but it did not last, and his peaceful existence on the farm went to pieces through his new wife. A month after the wedding she ran away from him, to live with the Native soldiers in the barracks of Nairobi. For a long time Esa used to ask for a day's leave to go into town and fetch her back, and in the evening returned with the dark, reluctant girl. The first time he went confidently and very decided, he would get her, — what about it, was she not his lawful wife? Later he walked off in a bewildered, sad research of his dreams and the smile of fortune.
     "What do you want her back for, Esa?" I said to him. "Let her go. She does not want to come back to you, and no good will come from this."
     But Esa had not got it in him to let her go. Towards the end he came down in his expectations of life, and it was simply the monetary value of his woman that he sought to retain. The other boys laughed at him, when he trudged off, and told me that the soldiers laughed at him, too. But Esa had never paid much attention to what other people thought of him, and in any case he was past it now. He went in persistently and faithfully to recover his lost property, as a man will go in search of a runaway cow.
     One morning Fatoma informed my houseboys that Esa was sick, and could not cook that day, but he would be up next day, she said. But late in the afternoon the boys came in and told me that Fatoma had disappeared, and that Esa had been poisoned and was dying. When I came out, they had carried him, on his bed, out in the square between the boys' huts. It was obvious that he had not got long to live. He had been given some sort of Native poison, similar to strychnine, and must have suffered terribly in his hut, under the eyes of the murderous young wife, until she felt that she had safely finished him, and had made off. He still had a few spasms that contracted his body, but he was all rigid and cold, like a dead man. His face was much changed, and froth, mixed with blood, ran out from the corners of his pale-blue mouth. Farah had gone to Nairobi in the car, so that I could not get Esa in to the hospital, but I do not think that I should have done that in any case; there was no help for him.
     Before he died Esa looked at me for a long time, but I do not know if he recognized me. With the consciousness in his dark, animal-like eyes now went the remembrance of the country such as I had always wished to have known it, when it had been like a Noah's Ark, with the game all round the little Native boy herding his father's goats on the plain. I held his hand, a human hand, a strong ingenious tool, which had held weapons, planted vegetables and flowers, caressed; which I had taught to make omelettes. Would Esa himself hold his life to have been a success or a failure? It would have been difficult to tell. He had gone along his own little, slow, twined paths and had been through many things, always a peaceful man.
     When Farah came home he took much trouble to have Esa buried with the full orthodox ceremonial, for he had been a pious Mohammedan. The Priest, whom we called out from Nairobi, could not come till next evening, so that Esa's funeral took place at night, with the Milky way on the sky, and lamps in the funeral procession. His grave was walled up, in the Mohammedan way, under a big tree in the forest. Mariammo now came forward and took her place amongst the mourners, and bewailed Esa loudly in the night air.
     Farah and I held a council as to what we ought to do about Fatoma, and we decided to do nothing. It evidently went against Farah to take steps to have a woman punished by the law. I gathered from him that the Mohammedan law does not hold a woman to account. Her husband is responsible for what she does, and must pay the fine for what misfortunes she causes, as he must pay the fine for what damage his horse may do. But if the horse throws the owner and kills him? Well yes, Farah agrees, that is a sad accident. After all, Fatoma herself had had reason to complain about her fate, now she would be left to fulfil it as she chose to, in the barracks of Nairobi.

 

     Of Natives and History

     The people who expect the Natives to jump joyfully from the stone age to the age of the motor-cars, forget the toil and labour which our own fathers have had, to bring us all through history up to where we are.
     We can make motor-cars and aeroplanes, and teach the Natives to use them. But the true love of motor-cars cannot be made, in human hearts, in the turn of a hand. It takes centuries to produce it, and it is likely that Socrates, the Crusades, and the French Revolution, have been needed in the making. We of the present day, who love our machines, cannot quite imagine how people in the old days could live without them. But we could not make the Athanasian Creed, or the technique of the Mass, or of a five-act tragedy, and perhaps not even of a sonnet. And if we had not found them there ready for our use, we should have had to do without them. Still we must imagine, since they have been made at all, that there was a time when the hearts of humanity cried out for these things, and when a deeply felt want was relieved when they were made.
     Father Bernard came over on his motor bicycle one day, his bearded face all beaming with bliss and triumph, to lunch with me, and to bring me tidings of great joy. The day before, he told me, nine young Kikuyu, from the Church of Scotland Mission, had come and asked to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, because they had, upon meditation and discussions, come to hold with the doctrine of the Transubstantiation, of that Church.
     All the people, whom I told of this happening, laughed at Father Bernard, and explained that the young Kikuyus had seen a chance of higher wages, or lighter work, or of getting a bicycle to ride on, at the French Mission, and had therefore invented their conversion in regard to the Transubstantiation. For we ourselves, they said, cannot understand it, and we do not even like to think about it, so that to the Kikuyu it must be altogether inadmissible. But it is not quite sure that it is so; Father Bernard knew the Kikuyus well. The minds of the young Kikuyu may now be walking on the shadowy paths of our own ancestors, whom we should not disown in their eyes, who held their ideas about the Transubstantiation very dear.
     Those people of five hundred years ago, were in their day offered higher wages, and promotion, and easier terms of life, even sometimes their very lives, and to everything they preferred their conviction about the Transubstantiation. They were not offered a bicycle, but Father Bernard himself, who had got a motor bicycle, attached less value to it than to the conversion of the nine Kikuyus.
     The modern white people in Africa believe in evolution and not in any sudden creative act. They might then run the Natives through a short practical lesson of history to bring them up to where we are. We took these nations over not quite forty years ago; if we compare that moment to the moment of the birth of the Lord, and allow them, to catch up with us, three years to our hundred, it will now be time to send them out Saint Francis of Assisi, and in a few years Rabelais. They would love and appreciate both better than we do, of our century. They liked Aristophanes when some years ago I tried to translate to them the dialogue between the farmer and his son, out of "The Clouds." In twenty years they might be ready for the Encyclopaedists, and then they would come, in another ten years, to Kipling. We should let them have dreamers, philosophers and poets out, to prepare the ground for Mr. Ford.
     Where shall they find us then? Shall we in the meantime have caught them by the tail and be hanging on to it, in our pursuit of some shade, some darkness, practising upon a tomtom? Will they be able to have our motor cars at cost price then, as they can now have the doctrine of the Transubstantiation?

 

     The Earthquake

     One year, about Christmas, we had an earthquake; it was strong enough to turn over a number of native huts, it was probably of the power of an angry elephant. It came in three shocks, each of them lasted a few seconds, and there was a pause of a few seconds in between them. These intervals gave people time to form their ideas of the happening.
     Denys Finch-Hatton, who was at the time camped in the Masai Reserve, and was sleeping in his lorry, told me when he came back, that as he was woken up by the shock he thought, "A rhino has got underneath the lorry." I myself was in my bedroom going to bed when the earthquake came. At the first tug I thought, "A leopard has got up on the roof." When the second shock came, I thought, "I am going to die, this is how it feels to die." But in the short stillness between the second and the third shock, I realized what it was, it was an earthquake, and I had never thought that I should live to see that. For a moment now I believed that the earthquake was over. But when the third and last shock of it came, it brought with it such an overwhelming feeling of joy that I do not remember ever in my life to have been more suddenly and thoroughly transported.
     The heavenly bodies, in their courses, have it in their power to move human minds to unknown heights of delight. We are not generally conscious of them; when their idea is suddenly brought back, and actualized to us, it opens up a tremendous perspective. Kepler writes of what he felt when, after many years' work, he at last found the laws of the movements of the planets:
     "I give myself over to my rapture. The die is cast. Nothing I have ever felt before is like this. I tremble, my blood leaps. God has waited six thousand years for a looker-on to his work. His wisdom is infinite, that of which we are ignorant is contained in him, as well as the little that we know."
     Indeed it was exactly the same transport which took hold of me and shook me all through, at the time of the earthquake .
     The feeling of colossal pleasure lies chiefly in the consciousness that something which you have reckoned to be immovable, has got it in it to move on its own. That is probably one of the strongest sensations of joy and hope the world. The dull globe, the dead mass, the Earth itself, rose and stretched under me. It sent me out a message, the slightest touch, but of unbounded significance. It laughed so that the Native huts fell down and cried: Eppur si muove.
     Early next morning, Juma brought me my tea and said: "The King of England is dead."
     I asked him how he knew.
     "Did you not, Memsahib," he said, "feel the earth toss and shake last night? That means that the King of England is dead."
     But luckily the King of England lived for many years after the earthquake.
     

     George

     On a cargo-boat to Africa I once made friends with a little boy named George, who was travelling out with his mother and his young aunt. One day, on the deck, he detached himself from his women and, followed by their eyes, walked up to me. He announced that it was his birthday next day, he would be six years old, and his mother was going to ask the English passengers for tea, would I come? he said.
     "But I am not English, George," said I.
     "What are you?" he asked, in great surprise.
     "I am a Hottentot," I said.
     He stood up straight, and looked at me very gravely. "Never mind," he said, "I hope you will come."
     He walked back to his mother and aunt and announced to them in a nonchalant way, but with so much firmness that it cut short any objection: "She is a Hottentot. But I want her."

 

     Kejiko

     I once had a fat riding-mule that I had named Molly. The mule - Sice gave her another name, he called her Kejiko, which means "the spoon," and when I asked him why he called her the spoon, he answered: "Because she looks like a spoon." I walked all round her to find out what he had in his mind, but to me she did not look, from any side, the least like a spoon.
     Some time after I happened to be driving Kejiko, with three other mules, in a cart. When I got up in the driver's high seat, I had a kind of bird's eye view of the mules. Then I saw that the Sice had been right. Kejiko was unusually narrow across the shoulder and had broad plump hindquarters, she looked very much like a spoon with the rounded side up.
     If Kamau the Sice and I myself had each been painting a portrait of Kejiko, the pictures would have been as different as possible. But God and the angels would have seen her as Kamau saw her. He that cometh from above is above all, and what he hath seen that he testifieth.

 

     The Giraffes Go to Hamburg

     I was staying in Mombasa in the house of Sheik Ali bin Salim, the Lewali of the coast, a hospitable, chivalrous old Arab gentleman.
     Mombasa has all the look of a picture of Paradise painted by a small child. The deep Sea-arm round the island forms an ideal harbour; the land is made out of whitish coral-cliff grown with broad green mango trees and fantastic bald grey Baobab trees. The Sea at Mombasa is as blue as a cornflower, and, outside the inlet to the harbour, the long breakers of the Indian Ocean draw a thin crooked white line, and give out a low thunder even in the calmest weather. The narrow-streeted town of Mombasa is all built from coral-rock, in pretty shades of buff, rose and ochre, and above the town rises the massive old Fortress, with walls and embrasure, where three hundred years ago the Portuguese and the Arabs held out against one another; it displays stronger colours than the town, as if it had, in the course of the ages, from its high site drunk in more than one stormy sunset.
     The flamboyant red Acacia flowers in the gardens of Mombasa, unbelievably intense of colour and delicate of leaf. The sun burns and scorches Mombasa; the air is salt here, the breeze brings in every day fresh supplies of brine from the East, and the soil itself is salted so that very little grass grows, and the ground is bare like a dancing-floor. But the ancient mango trees have a dense dark-green foliage and give benignant shade; they create a circular pool of black coolness underneath them. More than any other tree that I know of, they suggest a place to meet in, a centre for human intercourse; they are as sociable as the village-wells. Big markets are held under the mango trees, and the ground round their trunks is covered with hen-coops, and piled up watermelons. Ali bin Salim had a pleasant white house on the mainland, at the curve of the Sea-arm, with a long row of stone steps down to the Sea. There were guests' houses alongside it, and in the big room of the principal building, behind the Verandah, there were collected many fine Arab and English things: old ivory and brass, china from Lamu, velvet armchairs, photographs, and a large gramophone. Amongst these, inside a satin-lined casket, were the remnants of a full tea-set in dainty English china of the 'forties, which had been the wedding-present of the young Queen of England and her Consort, when the Sultan of Zanzibar's son married the Shah of Persia's daughter. The Queen and the Prince had wished the married couple such happiness as they were themselves enjoying.
     "And were they as happy?" I asked Sheik Ali when he took out the little cups, one by one, and placed them on the table to show them to me.
     "Alas no," said he, "the bride would not give up riding. She had brought her horses with her, on the dhow that carried her trousseau. But the people of Zanzibar did not approve of ladies riding. There was much trouble about it, and, as the Princess would sooner give up her husband than her horses, in the end the marriage was dissolved and the Shah's daughter went back to Persia."
     In the harbour of Mombasa lay a rusty German cargo-steamer, homeward bound. I passed her in Ali bin Salim's rowing boat with his Swaheli rowers, on my way to the island and back. Upon the deck there stood a tall wooden case, and above the edge of the case rose the heads of two Giraffes. They were, Farah, who had been on board the boat, told me, coming from Portuguese East Africa, and were going to Hamburg, to a travelling Menagerie.
     The Giraffes turned their delicate heads from the one side to the other, as if they were surprised, which they might well be. They had not seen the Sea before. They could only just have room to stand in the narrow case. The world had suddenly shrunk, changed and closed round them.
     They could not know or imagine the degradation to which they were sailing. For they were proud and innocent creatures, gentle amblers of the great plains; they had not the least knowledge of captivity, cold, stench, smoke, and mange, nor of the terrible boredom in a world in which nothing is ever happening.
     Crowds, in dark smelly clothes, will be coming in from the wind and sleet of the streets to gaze on the Giraffes, and to realize man's superiority over the dumb world. They will point and laugh at the long slim necks when the graceful, patient, smoky-eyed heads are raised over the railings of the menagerie; they look much too long in there. The children will be frightened at the sight and cry, or they will fall in love with the Giraffes, and hand them bread. Then the fathers and mothers will think the Giraffes nice beasts, and believe that they are giving them a good time.
     In the long years before them, will the Giraffes sometimes dream of their lost country? Where are they now, where have they gone to, the grass and the thorn-trees, the rivers and water-holes and the blue mountains? The high sweet air over the plains has lifted and withdrawn. Where have the other Giraffes gone to, that were side by side with them when they set going, and cantered over the undulating land? They have left them, they have all gone, and it seems that they are never coming back.
     In the night where is the full moon?
     The Giraffes stir, and wake up in the caravan of the Menagerie, in their narrow box that smells of rotten straw and beer.
     Good-bye, good-bye, I wish for you that you may die on the journey, both of you, so that not one of the little noble heads, that are now raised, surprised, over the edge of the case, against the blue sky of Mombasa, shall be left to turn from one side to the other, all alone, in Hamburg, where no one knows of Africa.
     As to us, we shall have to find someone badly transgressing against us, before we can in decency ask the Giraffes to forgive us our transgressions against them.

 

     In the Menagerie

     About a hundred years ago, a Danish traveller to Hamburg, Count Schimmelmann, happened to come upon a small itinerant Menagerie, and to take a fancy to it. While he was in Hamburg, he every day set his way round the place, although he would have found it difficult to explain what was to him the real attraction of the dirty and dilapidated caravans. The truth was that the Menagerie responded to something within his own mind. It was winter and bitterly cold outside. In the sheds the keeper had been heating the old stove until it was a clear pink in the brown darkness of the corridor, alongside the animals' cages, but still the draught and the raw air pierced people to the bone.
     Count Schimmelmann was sunk in contemplation of the Hyena, when the proprietor of the Menagerie came and addressed him. The proprietor was a small pale man with a fallen-in nose, who had in his days been a student of theology, but who had had to leave the faculty after a scandal, and had since step by step come down in the world.
     "Your Excellency does well to look at the Hyena," said he. "It is a great thing to have got a Hyena to Hamburg, where there has never been one till now. All Hyenas, you will know, are hermaphrodites, and in Africa, where they come from, on a full-moon night they will meet and join in a ring of copulation wherein each individual takes the double part of male and female. Did you know that?"
     "No," said Count Schimmelmann with a slight movement of disgust.
     "Do you consider now, your Excellency," said the showman, "that it should be, on account of this fact, harder to a Hyena than to other animals to be shut up by itself in a cage? Would he feel a double want, or is he, because he unites in himself the complementary qualities of creation, satisfied in himself, and in harmony? In other words, since we are all prisoners in life, are we happier, or more miserable, the more talents we possess?"
     "It is a curious thing," said Count Schimmelmann, who had been following his own thoughts and had not paid attention to the showman, "to realize that so many hundred, indeed thousands of Hyenas should have lived and died, in order that we should, in the end, get this one specimen here, so that people in Hamburg shall be able to know what a Hyena is like, and the naturalists to study from them."
     They moved on to look at the Giraffes in the neighbouring cage.
     "The wild animals," continued the Count, "which run in a wild landscape, do not really exist. This one, now, exists, we have got a name for it, we know what it is like. The others might as well not have been, still they are the large majority. Nature is extravagant."
     The showman pushed back his worn fur-cap, underneath it he himself had not got a hair on his head. "They see one another," he said.
     "Even that may be disputed," said Count Schimmelmann after a short pause. "These Giraffes, for instance, have got square markings on the skin. The Giraffes, looking at one another, will not know a square and will consequently not see a square. Can they be said to have seen one another at all?"
     The showman looked at the Giraffe for some time and then said: "God sees them."
     Count Schimmelmann smiled. "The Giraffes?" he asked.
     "Oh yes, your Excellency," said the showman, "God sees the Giraffes. While they have been running about and have played in Africa, God has been watching them and has taken a pleasure in their demeanour. He has made them to please him. It is in the Bible, your Excellency," said the showman. "God so loved the Giraffe that He created them. God has Himself invented the square as well as the circle, surely your Excellency cannot deny that, He has seen the squares on their skin and everything else about them. The wild animals, your Excellency, are perhaps a proof of the existence of God. But when they go to Hamburg," he concluded, putting on his cap, "the argument becomes problematic."
     Count Schimmelmann who had arranged his life according to the ideas of other people, walked on in silence to look at the snakes, close to the stove. The showman, to amuse him, opened the case in which he kept them, and tried to make the snake within it wake up; in the end, the reptile slowly and sleepily wound itself round his arm. Count Schimmelmann looked at the group.
     "Indeed, my good Kannegieter," he said with a little surly laugh, "if you were in my service, or if I were king and you my minister, you would now have your dismissal."
     The showman looked up at him nervously. "Indeed, Sir, should I?" he said, and slipped down the snake into the case. "And why, Sir? If I may ask so," he added after a moment.
     "Ah, Kannegieter, you are not so simple as you make out," said the Count. "Why? Because, my friend, the aversion to snakes is a sound human instinct, the people who have got it have kept alive. The snake is the deadliest of all the enemies of men, but what, except our own instinct of good and evil, is there to tell us so? The claws of the lions, the size, and the tusks, of the Elephants, the horns of the Buffaloes, all jump to the eye. But the snakes are beautiful animals. The snakes are round and smooth, like the things we cherish in life, of exquisite soft colouring, gentle in all their movements. Only to the godly man this beauty and gracefulness are in themselves loathsome, they smell from perdition, and remind him of the fall of man. Something within him makes him run away from the snake as from the devil, and that is what is called the voice of conscience. The man who can caress a snake can do anything." Count Schimmelmann laughed a little at his own course of thoughts, buttoned his rich fur-coat, and turned to leave the shed.
     The showman had stood for a little while in deep thoughts. "Your Excellency," he said at last, "you must needs love snakes. There is no way round it. Out of my own experience in life, I can tell you so, and indeed it is the best advice that I can give you: You should love the snakes. Keep in your mind, your Excellency, how often, — keep in mind, your Excellency, that nearly every time that we ask the Lord for a fish, he will give us a serpent."

 

     Fellow - Travellers

     At the table on the boat to Africa I sat between a Belgian going to the Congo, and an Englishman who had been eleven times to Mexico to shoot a particular kind of wild mountain-sheep, and who was now going out to shoot bongo. In making conversation on both sides, I got mixed up in the languages, and when I meant to ask the Belgian if he had travelled much in his life, I asked him: Avez-vous beaucoup travaillé dans votre vie? He took no offence but, drawing out his toothpick, he answered gravely: Enormément, Madame. From this time he made it his object to tell me of all the labours of his life. In everything that he discussed, a certain expression came back: Notre mission. Notre grande mission dans le Congo.
     One evening, as we were going to play cards, the English traveller told us about Mexico and of how a very old Spanish lady, who lived on a lonely farm in the mountains, when she heard of the arrival of a stranger, had sent for him and ordered him to give her the news of the world. "Well, men fly now, Madame," he said to her.
     "Yes, I have heard of that," said she, "and I have had many arguments with my priest about it. Now you can enlighten us, sir. Do men fly with their legs drawn up under them, like the sparrows, or stretched out behind them, like the storks?"
     He also, in the course of our talk, made a remark about the ignorance of the Natives of Mexico, and of the schools there. The Belgian, who was dealing, paused with the last card in his hand, looked piercingly at the Englishman, and said: Il faut enseigner aux nègres à être honnêtes et à travailler. Rien de plus. Laying down the card with a bang on the table, he repeated with great determination: Rien de plus. Rien. Rien. Rien.

 

     The Naturalist and the Monkeys

     A Swedish Professor of Natural History came out to the farm to ask me to intervene for him with the Game Department. He had come to Africa, he told me, to find out at what phase of the embryo state the foot of the monkeys, that has got a thumb to it, begins to diverge from the human foot. For this purpose he meant to go and shoot Colobus monkeys on Mount Elgon.
     "You will never find out from the Colobus monkeys," I said to him, "they live in the tops of the cedar trees, and are shy and difficult to shoot. It would be the greatest luck should you get the embryo you want."
     The Professor was hopeful, he was going to stay out till he had got his foot, he said, even if it was to be for years. He had applied to the Game Department for permission to shoot the monkeys he wanted. The permission he was, in view of the high scientific object of his expedition, certain to get, but so far he had had no reply.
     "How many monkeys have you asked to be allowed to shoot?" I asked him.
     He told me that he had, to begin with, asked for permission to shoot fifteen hundred monkeys.
     Now I knew the people at the Game Department, and I assisted him to send in a second letter, asking for a reply by return of post, since the Professor was keen to get off on his research. The answer from the Game Department did, for once, come by return of post. The Game Department, they wrote, were pleased to inform Professor Landgreen that, in view of the scientific object of his expedition, they had seen their way to make an exception from their rules, and to raise the number of monkeys on his license from four to six.
     I had to read the letter over twice to the Professor. When the contents at last were clear to him, he became so downcast, so deadly shocked and hurt, that he did not say a single word. To my expressions of condolence he made no reply, but walked out of the house, got into his car and drove away sadly.
     When things did not go so much against him, the Professor was an entertaining talker, and a humorist. In the course of our debates about the monkeys he enlightened me upon various facts and developed many of his ideas to me. One day he said: "I will tell you of a highly interesting experience of mine. Up at Mount Elgon, I found it possible to believe for a moment in the existence of God, what do you think of that?"
     I said that it was interesting, but I thought: There is another interesting question which is, — Has it been possible to God, at Mount Elgon, to believe for a moment in the existence of Professor Landgreen?

 

     Karomenya

     There was on the farm a little boy of nine named Karomenya who was deaf and dumb. He could give out a sound, a sort of short, raw roar, but it was very rare and he did not like it himself, but always stopped it at once, panting a few times. The other children were afraid of him and complained that he beat them. I first made Karomenya's acquaintance when his playfellows had knocked him on the head with the branch of a tree, so that his right cheek was thick, and festering with splinters that had to be dug out with a needle. This was not such a martyrdom to Karomenya as one would have thought; if it did hurt him, it also brought him into contact with people.
     Karomenya was very dark, with fine moist black eyes and thick eyelashes; he had an earnest grave expression and hardly ever a smile on his face, and altogether much of the look of a small black Native bull-calf. He was an active, positive creature, and as he was cut off from communicating with the world by speech, fighting to him had become the manifestation of his being. He was also very good at throwing stones, and could place them where he wanted with great accuracy. At one time Karomenya had a bow and arrow, but it did not work well with him, as if an ear for the ring of the bowstring were, by necessity, part of the archer's craft. Karomenya was sturdily built and very strong for his age. He would probably not have exchanged these advantages over the other boys for their faculty of speech and hearing, for which, I felt, he had no particular admiration.
     Karomenya, in spite of his fighting spirit, was no unfriendly person. If he realized that you were addressing him, his face at once lightened up, not in a smile but in a prompt resolute alacrity. Karomenya was a thief, and took sugar and cigarettes when he saw his chance, but he immediately gave away the stolen goods to the other children. I once came upon him as he was dealing out sugar to a circle of boys, himself in the centre, he did not see me, and that is the only time when I have seen him come near to laughing.
     I tried, for a time, to give Karomenya a job in the kitchen or in the house, but he failed in the offices, and was himself, after a while, bored with the work. What he liked, was to move heavy things about, and to drag them from one place to another. I had a row of white-washed stones along my drive, and, with his assistance, I one day moved one of them and rolled it all the way up to the house, to make the drive symmetrical. The next day, while I was out, Karomenya had taken up all the stones and had rolled them up to the house in a great heap, and I could never have believed that a person of his size would have been capable of that. It must have cost him a terrible effort. It was as if Karomenya knew his place in the world and stuck to it. He was deaf and dumb, but he was very strong.
     Karomenya, most of all things in the world, wanted a knife, but I dared not give him one, for I thought that he might easily, in his striving for contact with other people, have killed one or more of the other children on the farm with it. He will have got one, though, later in life; his desire was so vehement, and God knows what use he has made of it.
     The deepest impression I made on Karomenya was when I gave him a whistle. I had myself used it for some time to call in the dogs. When I showed it to him he took very little interest in it; then, as on my instruction he put it to his mouth and blew it, and the dogs, from both sides, came rushing at him, it gave him a great shock, his face darkened with surprise. He tried it once more, found the effect to be the same, and looked at me. A severe bright glance. When he got more used to the whistle, he wanted to know how it worked. He did not, to this purpose, look at the whistle itself, but when he had whistled for the dogs and they came, he scrutinized them with knit brows as if to find out where they had been hit. After this time Karomenya took a great liking to the dogs, and often, so to say, had the loan of them, taking them out for a walk. I used, when he walked off with them on a lead, to point to the place in the Western sky where the sun should be standing by the time that he must be back, and he pointed to the same place, and was always very punctual.
     One day, as I was out riding, I saw Karomenya and the dogs a long way away from my house, in the Masai Reserve. He did not see me, but thought that he was all on his own and unobserved. Here he let the dogs have a run, and then whistled them in, and he repeated the performance three or four times, while I watched him from my horse. Out on the plain, where he thought that nobody knew, he gave himself up to a new idea and aspect of life.
     He carried his whistle on a string round his neck, but one day he had not got it. I asked him by pantomime what had become of it, and he answered by pantomime that it was gone, — lost. He never asked me for another whistle. Either he thought that a second whistle was not to be had, or else he meant, now, to keep away altogether from something in life that was not really his affair. I am not even sure that he had not thrown away the whistle himself, unable to reconcile it with his other ideas of existence.
     In five or six years, Karomenya is either to go through much suffering, or he will suddenly be lifted into heaven.

 

     Pooran Singh

     Pooran Singh's little blacksmith's shop down by the mill was a miniature Hell on the farm, with all the orthodox attributes of that place. It was built of corrugated iron, and when the sun shone down upon the roof of it, and the flames of the furnace rose inside it, the air itself, in and around the hut, was white-hot. All day long, the place resounded with the deafening noise of the forge, — iron on iron, on iron once more, — and the hut was filled with axes, and broken wheels, that made it look like some ancient gruesome picture of a place of execution.
     All the same the blacksmith's shop had a great power of attraction, and when I went down to watch Pooran Singh at work I always found people in it and round it. Pooran Singh worked at a superhuman pace, as if his life depended upon getting the particular job of work finished within the next five minutes, he jumped straight up in the air over the forge, he shrieked out his orders to his two young Kikuyu assistants in a high bird's voice and behaved altogether like a man who is himself being burnt at the stake, or like some chafed over-devil at work. But Pooran Singh was no devil, but a person of the meekest disposition; out of working hours he had a little maidenly affectation of manner. He was our Fundee of the farm, which means an artisan of all work, carpenter, saddler and cabinet-maker, as well as blacksmith; he constructed and built more than one waggon for the farm, all on his own. But he liked the work of the forge best, and it was a very fine, proud sight, to watch him tiring a wheel.
     Pooran Singh, in his appearance, was something of a fraud. When fully dressed, in his coat and large folded white turban, he managed, with his big black beard, to look a portly, ponderous man. But by the forge, bared to the waist, he was incredibly slight and nimble, with the Indian hourglass torso.
     I liked Pooran Singh's forge, and it was popular with the Kikuyus, for two reasons.
     First, because of the iron itself, which is the most fascinating of all raw materials, and sets people's imagination travelling on long tracks. The plough, the sword and cannon and the wheel, — the civilization of man — man's conquest of Nature in a nut, plain enough to be understood or guessed by the primitive people, — and Pooran Singh hammered the iron.
     Secondly, the Native world was drawn to the forge by its song. The treble, sprightly, monotonous, and surprising rhythm of the blacksmith's work has a mythical force. It is so virile that it appals and melts the women's hearts, it is straight and unaffected and tells the truth and nothing but the truth. Sometimes it is very outspoken. It has an excess of strength and is gay as well as strong, it is obliging to you and does great things for you, willingly, as in play. The Natives, who love rhythm, collected by Pooran Singh's hut and felt at their ease. According to an ancient Nordic law a man was not held responsible for what he had said in a forge. The tongues were loosened in Africa as well, in the blacksmith's shop, and the talk flowed freely; audacious fancies were set forth to the inspiring hammer-song.
     Pooran Singh was with me for many years and was a well-paid functionary of the farm. There was no proportion between his wages and his needs, for he was an ascetic of the first water. He did not eat meat, he did not drink, or smoke, or gamble, his old clothes were worn to the thread. He sent his money over to India for the education of his children. A small silent son of his, Delip Singh, once came over from Bombay on a visit to his father. He had lost touch with the iron, the only metal that I saw about him was a fountain pen in his pocket. The mythical qualities were not carried on in the second generation.
     But Pooran Singh himself, raging above the forge, kept his halo as long as he was on the farm, and I hope as long as he lived. He was the servant of the gods, heated through, white-hot, an elemental spirit. In Pooran Singh's blacksmith's shop the hammer sang to you what you wanted to hear, as if it was giving voice to your own heart. To me myself the hammer was singing an ancient Greek verse, which a friend had translated:

 

 

"Eros struck out, like a smith with his hammer,
So that the sparks flew from my defiance.
He cooled my heart in tears and lamentations,
Like red-hot iron in a stream."

 

 

 

     A Strange Happening

     When I was down in the Masai Reserve, doing transport for the Government, I one day saw a strange thing, such as no one I know has ever seen. It took place in the middle of the day, while we were trekking over grass-country.
     The air in Africa is more significant in the landscape than in Europe, it is filled with loomings and mirages, and is in a way the real stage of activities. In the heat of the midday the air oscillates and vibrates like the string of a violin, lifts up long layers of grass-land with thorn-trees and hills on it, and creates vast silvery expanses of water in the dry grass.
     We were walking along in this burning live air, and I was, against my habit, a long way in front of the waggons, with Farah, my dog Dusk and the Toto who looked after Dusk. We were silent, for it was too hot to talk. All at once the plain at the horizon began to move and gallop with more than the atmosphere, a big herd of game was bearing down upon us from the right, diagonally across the stage.
     I said to Farah: "Look at all these Wildebeests." But a little after, I was not sure that they were Wildebeests; I took up my field-glasses and looked at them, but that too is difficult in the middle of the day. "Are they Wildebeests, Farah, do you think?" I asked him.
     I now saw that Dusk had all his attention upon the animals, his ears up in the air, his far-seeing eyes following their advance. I often used to let him have a run after the gazelles and antelopes on the plains, but today I thought that it would be too hot, and told the Toto to fasten his lead to his collar. At that same moment, Dusk gave a short wild yell and jumped forward so that the Toto was thrown over, and I snatched the lead myself and had to hold him with all my might. I looked at the game. "What are they?" I asked Farah.
     It is very difficult to judge distances on the plains. The quivering air and the monotony of the scenery make it so, also the character of the scattered thorn-trees, which have the exact shape of mighty old forest trees, but are in reality only twelve feet high, so that the Giraffes raise their heads and necks above them. You are continually deceived as to the size of the game that you see at a distance and may, in the middle of the day, mistake a jackal for an Eland, and an ostrich for a Buffalo. A minute later Farah said: "Memsahib, these are wild dogs."
     The wild dogs are generally seen three or four at a time, but it happens that you meet a dozen of them together. The Natives are afraid of them, and will tell you that they are very murderous. Once as I was riding in the Reserve close to the farm I came upon four wild dogs which followed me at a distance of fifteen yards. The two small terriers that I had with me then kept as close to me as possible, actually under the belly of the pony, until we came across the river and on to the farm. The wild dogs are not as big as a Hyena. They are about the size of a big Alsatian dog. They are black, with a white tuft at the tip of the tail and of the pointed ears. The skin is no good, it has rough uneven hair and smells badly.
     Here there must have been five hundred wild dogs. They came along in a slow canter, in the strangest way, looking neither right nor left, as if they had been frightened by something, or as if they were travelling fast with a fixed purpose on a track. They just swerved a bit as they came nearer to us; all the same they hardly seemed to see us, and went on at the same pace. When they were closest to us, they were fifty yards away. They were running in a long file, two or three or four side by side, it took time before the whole procession had passed us. In the middle of it, Farah said: "These dogs are very tired, they have run a long way."
     When they had all gone by, and were disappearing again, we looked round for the Safari. It was still some way behind us, and exhausted by our agitation of mind we sat down where we stood in the grass, until it came up to us. Dusk was terribly upset, jerking his lead to run after the wild dogs. I took him round the neck, if I had not tied him up in time, I thought, he would by now have been eaten up.
     The drivers of the waggons detached themselves from the Safari and came running up to us, to ask us what it had all been. I could not explain to them, or to myself, what had made the wild dogs come along in so great a number in such a way. The Natives all took it as a very bad omen, — an omen of the war, for the wild dogs are carrion-eaters. They did not afterwards discuss the happening much among themselves, as they used to discuss all the other events of the Safari.
     I have told this tale to many people and not one of them has believed it. All the same it is true, and my boys can bear me witness.

 

     The Parrot

     An old Danish shipowner sat and thought of his young days and of how he had, when he was sixteen years old, spent a night in a brothel in Singapore. He had come in there with the sailors of his father's ship, and had sat and talked with an old Chinese woman. When she heard that he was a native of a distant country she brought out an old parrot, that belonged to her. Long, long ago, she told him, the parrot had been given her by a high-born English lover of her youth. The boy thought that the bird must then be a hundred years old. It could say various sentences in the languages of all the world, picked up in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the house. But one phrase the old China-woman's lover had taught it before he sent it to her, and that she did not understand, neither had any visitor ever been able to tell her what it meant. So now for many years she had given up asking. But if the boy came from far away perhaps it was his language, and he could interpret the phrase to her.
     The boy had been deeply, strangely moved at the suggestion. When he looked at the parrot, and thought that he might hear Danish from that terrible beak, he very nearly ran out of the house. He stayed on only to do the old Chinese woman a service. But when she made the parrot speak its sentence, it turned out to be classic Greek. The bird spoke its words very slowly, and the boy knew enough Greek to recognize it; it was a verse from Sappho:

 

 

"The moon has sunk and the Pleiads,
And midnight is gone,
And the hours are passing, passing,
And I lie alone."

 

 

     The old woman, when he translated the lines to her, smacked her lips and rolled her small slanting eyes. She asked him to say it again, and nodded her head.