by Osa Johnson
Chapter 19
Blayney Percival came to say good-bye and wish us Godspeed. After four weeks of preparation we were ready to start on the long safari that would take us north across the Kaisoot Desert and into the unknown lands along the Abyssinian border. We were standing in the driveway beside our safari Fords.
“Don’t take any unnecessary risks to find that blasted lake, will you?” Blayney urged. “I don’t know what possessed me to tell you about it until I could go with you, I swear I don’t!”
He was so distressed and reluctant to see us go that Martin thumped him on the back and shook hands at least five times before we got in our cars to leave.
“We’ll not only find your ‘phantom’ lake, Blayney,” he said, “we’ll bring back pictures to prove we found it!”
Our good friend studied us both for a moment and then nodded. “I believe you will at that,” he said.
“That’s what I always tell Martin,” Father Johnson said, joining us. He was wearing his pith helmet and a new khaki outfit and boots, and carrying Kalowatt on one arm and his faithful .22 on the other. “They’re a pair that can’t be beat.”
Blayney looked at him, startled. “Stop a bit,” he said almost sharply. “You’re not going on this trip, are you?”
Father Johnson twinkled. “I’m going till I see a lion,” he said, “or anyhow a rhinoceros.”
Martin explained then that his father had consented to turn back at a place called Rattray’s.
“Yes,” the elder Johnson sighed, “and then I guess I’ll have to start home.” He shook his head regretfully, “I kind of wish now I hadn’t told everybody down in Independence that I was going home by way of Paris and China. Rather stay here a while longer—but you know how folks are: They’d be disappointed if I didn’t do the whole thing up brown.”
Blayney stood back and raised his hand in a sort of salute as our heavily burdened cars started to roll.
“Give my regards to Rattray,” he called out to Father Johnson, “and tell him I said he was to take good care of you!”
The preparations for this safari had literally staggered us.
“It’s a good thing,” Martin had said one day, sitting for a moment on the edge of a provision box and wiping his sweaty, grimy face, “it’s a good thing Blayney told us about that lake of his.” He grinned. “You know, sort of like a bunch of hay on a stick in front of our noses?”
And so it was as we had worked day and night, parceling our stuff out, weighing it, and packing it into sixty-pound loads. There were tents, ammunition, photographic equipment and supplies, food, clothing, and items too numerous to mention that would be needed on the long journey. On Blayney’s advice we had planned for a six-months’ trip, and the itemizing of the food supplies alone—a responsibility which I assumed—would have taxed the ingenuity, or so it seemed to me, of a well-organized commissary department. My list of provisions was many pages long, and for days on end, big trucks from town unloaded groceries at our bungalow sufficient to stock a good-sized store.
We had added a truck to our motored vehicles and an eager, resourceful young man by the name of Cotter to drive it, but most exciting of all, it seemed to me when I first saw them, were the four ox wagons, each drawn by twelve beautiful oxen. We had rented these, together with experienced drivers, and had sent them on a week ahead of us, carrying the bulk of our supplies. Their journey was to end at Meru, a government station two hundred miles north, where we were to meet them. The load from that point on was to be transferred to the backs of a hundred porters, most of whom would be drawn from the hills in the vicinity of Meru. In addition to our headmen, Jerramani and Ferraragi, and the rest of our men, we also included twelve experienced safari men from Nairobi.
Our cars were so heavily loaded that they sagged on their axles, and we were obliged to curb our impatience and drive slowly. Martin was at the wheel of one of the Fords with Zabenelli and Jerramani as passengers, Cotter carried Aloni and Toto in his truck, and I drove the other Ford, accompanied by Father Johnson, Mpishi, and Ferraragi.
All of our experimental trips had been to the south and east of Nairobi. Now we were going straight north, and by late afternoon we were in country entirely new to us. So far we had seen very few animals, and Father Johnson voiced the opinion—humorously, of course—that there were no lions in Africa, or rhinos either, for that matter. This started a somewhat disjointed argument with Ferraragi, who apparently felt it his duty, and quite passionately, to defend Africa. Father Johnson baited him on in a Swahili that was purely experimental, and I, on the sidelines, had a lovely time. Presently we came on a stream of natives trudging along the side of the road. That is to say the women trudged, with great loads of garden produce on their heads. The men, painted, decorated dandies, were completely unburdened and dawdled idly. Father Johnson was hotly indignant over this and for the time being forgot all about his lions.
Native villages along the way, sometimes of no more than four or five huts, arrested his scornful attention. Men lolled in these flimsy shelters of leaves and grass; women everywhere tended the children and did the work.
“I thought it was only Indians made their women do all the work, like I saw when I was a young man back in the States. Why, these fellows are lazier than they were,” Father Johnson fairly sputtered. Ferraragi and Mpishi tried to make out what it was that gave him so much concern, and stared at the villages we passed as hard as he did, but everything was perfectly normal and all right to them, so they merely shook their heads and fell into a pleasant doze.
At dusk we came to hill country, and rolled through native markets where blacks squatted along the roadside and swapped skins, vegetables, and gossip. This was the land of the Kikuyu tribe of Kenya Colony. A pastoral people, they live mainly on goat’s milk and vegetables. A one-piece skin and a G-string complete their costumes.
Toward noon of the next day we ran into a powwow. Some three hundred warriors were seated in a wide circle by the side of the road holding what seemed to be a serious executive session. They wore headdresses of ostrich plumes that were at once fierce, handsome, and enormous, and they carried six-foot metal spears topped with a ball of ostrich feathers. This ball, we learned, signified that at the moment the warriors were at peace with the world. Their bodies, crudely decorated with red clay, glistened and smelled of castor oil.
Martin, delighted with this as picture material, stopped his car, set up his camera, and started to grind out some shots of the group. He had taken but a few feet when still another crowd of Kikuyus came rushing down the road and surrounded us, making great gestures and a lot of noise. Zabenelli translated for us and said an old chief had been deposed and a young one put in his place. We had been taking pictures of the latter’s group in conference, it seemed, and the old chief and his adherents had come to warn us against having dealings with the impostor. The young chief lost his temper, snatched the ostrich-feather ball from his spear, and made a lunge at his predecessor. There was a wild, savage uproar as six hundred natives became a whirling mass of resentment. Martin and I ran for our cars and started the motors. Looking back, we expected to see the ground littered with dead and dying. Apparently there was not so much as a scratch among the entire six hundred.
We started on our way, whereupon their political differences were forgotten and they raced after us demanding baksheesh. Martin threw them a handful of coppers, and when we last saw the battling braves they were scrambling for pennies in the road.
* * *
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Mount Kenya rises almost abruptly out of the plain to a height of 17,040 feet and has the distinction of being the only snowcapped mountain straddling the equator. At its foot we found Fort Hall, a group of government rest houses constructed of split bamboo plastered with mud and having mud floors and high grass roofs tapering to a point. The half-dozen white officials who made this their headquarters were very cordial, and presented us
with milk and eggs.
Our ox wagons, they said, had passed there in good condition the night before and by now doubtless were circling Mount Kenya to the west. Eyeing our heavily weighted cars doubtfully, they were of the opinion we would never get through to Meru on the rough mountain roads. They advised us to leave part of the load behind and make a return trip, but since we were impatient of delay, they then suggested that we take the road on the eastern slope through Embu. It was a little longer than the road taken by our ox wagons but less hazardous for motored vehicles.
How we reached Embu with springs and axles intact I never shall know. We consoled ourselves, however, with the idea that the eastern slope was the lesser of two evils, and we were thankful we hadn’t attempted the road on the west. Here we found mountains that were wilder and more rugged than our own Rockies, with roads that twisted and turned and seemed to follow the most astonishing caprices.
We passed within inches, it seemed to me, of waterfalls that tumbled a thousand feet; we crept up spiral inclines miles long with the great weight of our loads dragging us back; we coasted down precipitous grades with our loads pushing us almost out of control, across narrow, flimsy bridges that seemed to sag under us and around hairpin curves that left no room for bad judgment or error of any sort.
We were all day in reaching Embu, a distance actually of only thirty-three miles from Fort Hall. My knees crumpled under me as I got out of our car. My muscles set up an involuntary shaking and were numb at the same time.
Father Johnson was white as paper through his recently acquired tan—and, bless him, hadn’t offered a single word of advice on the whole trip. He had just sat quietly and in a soothing monotone had said over and over again, “Good girl, Osa. Good girl.”
The next day we twisted and turned a tortuous but less hazardous course toward Meru. Once we climbed for ten miles through the forest and when we emerged into the open saw, not more than a hundred yards across the deep valley, the road we had left an hour before.
We traveled through what might have been fairy-tale forests with foliage of such brilliant and varied greens as I have seen nowhere else in the world. Then clearings gradually took the place of forests as we neared Meru.
We passed several squads repairing the roads. These were made up for the most part of plump, pretty native girls from twelve to sixteen years of age—happy young tomboys who shouted to us and hitched onto our cars wherever they could find a brief hold.
In the late afternoon we arrived in Meru, which is by far the loveliest of all the beautiful government stations of British East Africa. There were neat lawns of close-cropped grass, a polo field, and a golf course, and the forest in the immediate neighborhood of the station was cleared of underbush and clean as an English park. This was all the work of a former official named Home who went to Meru many years ago. He had pacified the warring natives and put them to work planting and landscaping. When he was transferred to another district, he left to his successor in office, Mr. Crampton, one of the most orderly regions in Africa.
We didn’t expect the rest of our safari for several days, so we borrowed tents, engaged experienced Meru porters, and for a week searched the forest for elephants, but with no luck whatever. The recent chill rains had driven them southward.
Our safari, covered with a thick coat of red dust, caught up with us just two weeks after our arrival at Meru, and we pitched a temporary camp just outside of town. Mr. Crampton sent some of his native aides into the hills for porters, and they returned with seventy strapping young men, all in the gorgeous feather headdresses of their tribe and a brand-new coat of red and blue paint. With the thirty-odd porters we already had, these new men brought our safari company up to a hundred men. I was a little staggered when I saw the Johnson personnel all gathered together around our campfires that night.
“You know, Dad,” I said, slipping my arm through his, “a hundred people are a lot of people.” Then I laughed. I guess I was a little nervous at the size of the whole thing. “To feed and everything, I mean.”
“Gosh, yes,” he replied. His eyes popped with excitement. “It’s a lot of people anyplace, and—well, just think, this is all yours and Martin’s!”
“And yours,” I reminded him, “and Chic Sale’s and some more people back in New York.”
Martin joined us, and there was a look of such happiness and quiet competence about him that all my fears left me. He said nothing, just put his arms around us both where we stood. The firelight was ruddy on his face.
“Only trouble is,” Father Johnson said, shaking his head, “I don’t know how I’m going to make the folks in Independence believe it! Here I am, looking at the whole thing, those natives and all, and I can’t believe it myself!”
We were planning to move on to Isiolo in the morning, so we went to bed early that night. A marrow-chilling drizzle set in somewhere around nine o’clock, and I called to Aloni to take some extra blankets in to Father Johnson. I threw three extra ones over Martin and heaped probably five on my own bed, then crawled in shivering and proceeded to worry about the natives lying outdoors on the bare ground. With no more cloth among the entire seventy than would make a pair of trousers, they simply built a fire and lay beside it, miserable and shaking.
I was both sorry for them and annoyed. If they hadn’t been so lazy, they would have put up some grass shelters for themselves. The more I thought about this, the more annoyed I became. They’d probably be down with pneumonia in the morning, the lot of them, but they’d get no sympathy from me.
As a matter of fact, there wasn’t so much as a sniffle among them. For my own peace of mind, however, I persuaded Martin to go to the store in Meru and buy them a blanket apiece. He did so; they cost a dollar apiece and the color he had chosen, unfortunately, was bright red. The hill men were delighted, not because the blankets represented protection against the elements but because of their garishness, and our seventy good dollars, we soon found, had gone to ornament the porters, not to keep them warm. Martin also stocked up with a supply of flour, potatoes, and mealy-meal before setting out for Isiolo.
* * *
—
Isiolo is a quarantine station for the control of the many cattle diseases which, if not checked, play havoc with both the domestic and wild animals of Africa. Dr. Macdonough was the veterinarian in charge, and we notified him by runner that we were coming and asked his permission to store our extra supplies in his care. This he cordially granted us.
We were all very gay and confident as we left Meru with our picturesque caravan. The skies had cleared, and we assured one another that all our troubles were behind us. After traveling ten miles through the forest, we came to an open plain literally covered with game. Here we saw oryx for the first time, graceful gray animals with long, straight, black horns that glistened in the sun. In profile they had the look of the legendary unicorn. We also saw our first gerenuk, a grotesque little animal with a giraffe-like neck and long, thin legs, which lives in waterless country and, so far as I was able to find out, has never been seen to drink.
In addition, we saw many game birds—quail, sand grouse, guinea fowl, spurfowl, bustard, vulturine guinea fowl—all of them good eating. We thought it would be a very nice gesture to take a few to Dr. Macdonough, and we were quite proud of ourselves when we presented him with an assortment of twenty-five. Then we learned that he had done the very same thing for us, going out himself and bagging nearly sixty. This was but one instance of his thoughtfulness on our behalf, for he had tents up and ready for our occupancy and a big, new, grass storehouse for our supplies.
It was the last week in December, and Dr. Macdonough, together with Lieutenant Douglas, the only other white resident at Isiolo, pooled with us on Christmas Day, and on our community table there appeared an amazing assortment of tinned delicacies, some that had been sent only recently from England to this forsaken outpost and treasured for association as well as contents.
In addition to game we had fine, juicy steer steaks, we introduced our British friends to hominy grits, and the royal feast wound up with English plum pudding ablaze with choice brandy.
The day after Christmas, Major Pedler, head of transport of the East African Army, came to Isiolo on a tour of inspection, and we decided to go with him on a lion hunt. Father Johnson was beside himself. At last he was going to see a lion, but all day long, astride government mules, we followed various trails and saw no sign of one. We had gone farther than we thought and had to make the last half of our homeward journey in total darkness.
I felt worried about the men on foot but was comforted by the fact that they had our guns in case of an emergency. About a half hour after we had reached camp, one of the men rushed up to us with the news that Ferraragi had shot himself. With lanterns we took the back trail and found Ferraragi, covered with blood and his clothes in tatters. We took him, moaning and groaning, to Dr. Macdonough, who found his wounds were caused by gravel. It seems that as the men trudged along in the dark they heard, quite close at hand, the roar of a lion. Ferraragi cocked the gun to be ready for an emergency, then stumbled. The muzzle of the gun went into the ground and both barrels went off, sending a shower of sharp gravel flying through the air. It was almost like shrapnel, and one pebble went clear through Ferraragi’s arm. He was sure he was going to die. Dr. Macdonough cleaned and dressed his wounds, and the next day Ferraragi was playing the role of an interested invalid when Martin discovered that the stock of a brand-new gun (he had never shot the second .470 Bland, which had cost us $500) was broken. He was furious and fired Ferraragi on the spot for carrying a cocked gun. More than that, he didn’t hire him back for three days! I felt really sorry for Ferraragi as he moped about the camp, the image of grotesque despair.