I Married Adventure

by Osa Johnson

  The duke and duchess, with their gift of genuine interest in and sympathy with other people’s problems, had us talking by the hour of our work, and especially of our ambition to develop a great film library of Africa’s vanishing wildlife, Animal idiosyncrasies and family habits, especially those of the elephant, filled them with a sort of childish delight, and both regretted genuinely that their stay in Africa this time was too short to permit a trip with us up to our Paradise. The duke expressed the hope, too, that we would not neglect to include the unexcelled grandeur of British East Africa in our pictures.

  “Kenya is the gem of the empire,” he said. Just as the duke and duchess loved Kenya, so were they beloved by all the colony.

  The duke was an excellent shot and altogether a perfect sportsman, as I have found most Britishers to be, but he agreed with us that it was far more satisfying and certainly much more dangerous to hunt with the camera.

  Frequently of late I find myself recalling one little incident of our meeting. We were sitting out under the trees in Isiolo.

  “Albert,” the young duchess said, “I hear something singing.”

  “What is it?” her husband asked.

  “Probably a mosquito,” she replied.

  “And what is it singing?” he asked.

  “ ‘God Save the King,’ ” she laughed.

  At that time, she little knew that one day her husband as King would carry the burden and sorrow of war.

  Chapter 24

  Soon after our return to Lake Paradise, a runner came bringing a telegram from George Eastman, informing us that he, Mr. Daniel Pomeroy, and Dr. Audley Stewart were arriving in Nairobi for their long-promised visit to us. There was also a message telling us that Carl Akeley with his party of taxidermists and artists was already in Nairobi. George Eastman’s coming was something to which we had looked forward for so long that we were on our toes instantly to be off and meet him.

  The Guaso river, scene of my embarrassing immersion in the presence of the duke and duchess of York, decided to assert itself just about as we reached it; it was at flood stage and impossible to ford. Thinking perhaps it would subside, we camped on the bank for three days, but the high water showed no signs of abatement. On the fourth day a Boer convoy rider, carrying supplies to some distant military post, appeared with ten wagons and nearly two hundred Abyssinian donkeys.

  We knew that if we were to reach Nairobi in time to meet the Eastman party we would have to move on, so Martin arranged with the Boer to pull our machines across the river by mules and a cable. It was a terrific undertaking. The stream was so swift that it was all we could do to keep our cars from being overturned and losing our supplies and equipment. As it was, however, only one machine was badly damaged.

  In spite of our delay, we arrived in Nairobi a day ahead of the special train bringing Mr. Eastman and his party from Mombasa, so we got in touch with Carl Akeley immediately and had an exciting reunion. He had taken a big stone house at the edge of town as a camp base, and we were overjoyed to know that he planned to remain in British East Africa for some time.

  I haven’t talked much of Kalowatt, our gray gibbon ape, but she had traveled all over the world with us and was so much a part of our lives that I suppose we sometimes took her for granted.

  We had put up at the Norfolk Hotel, as was usual with us on our short visits to Nairobi. Martin had gone down to the lobby for a cigar, and I was busy unpacking. It was a hot night, the window was wide open, and I caught a glimpse of Kalowatt just as she leaped out onto the roof. I could understand that she would want to stretch a little after being cramped up in the room all day, and I wasn’t particularly alarmed, but she was in a mischievous mood and this time refused to come back when I called her.

  The slope of the roof was such that I couldn’t go out after her, so I ran down into the lobby and called to Martin, and together we rushed into the street to see if we couldn’t coax her down. She chattered to us, scrambled across the roof, jumped into the trees over our heads, and then back to the roof again and beyond our vision. I rushed back upstairs, thinking perhaps she had returned through the window to our room, but arriving there I found it empty. Running to the window, I arrived just in time to see her leap onto two high-voltage wires. There was a puff of smoke and Kalowatt hung limp. I screamed, ran to Martin, who was just coming into the room, and fainted.

  Someone called up the power company, the current was shut off, and the little gibbon’s body was removed from the wires. We wrapped it in a blanket and laid it in a chair.

  “We’ve got to be sensible about this,” I said to my husband.

  “Of course we have,” he said, but I saw his chin quiver, and I could fight the tears no longer. Sleep was impossible, so we took one of the cars, drove out to the plains, and paced up and down until daylight. We then returned to the hotel, got an officer’s rubber-lined tin dress case, and, using it as a casket, buried our pet under a large tree in a forest reserve ten miles from town.

  * * *

  —

  It took something over a week to get the Eastman-Pomeroy things out of customs and plan the first safari. We had expected to take our guests straight to Lake Paradise, but as luck would have it, the rains were early this year, and we knew that high and turbulent as the river had been on the way down, both it and the roads would be even worse by now, so on Carl Akeley’s advice we decided to go to the Kedong Valley, about thirty-five miles south of Nairobi.

  Martin and I were glad of a quiet interlude. Too, I felt that Mr. Eastman’s physician, Dr. Audley Stewart, was glad to have this African trip open up in easy stages for his distinguished patient and friend. At any rate, it gave us all time to enjoy camp life for itself alone, and also to enjoy one another.

  The name of George Eastman is high on the list of America’s great industrialists, and, like others of his stature, he was extremely kind, sensitive, resourceful, and versatile. He loved to cook, and it was grand fun to see him take a turn at our clumsy little camp stove. Even Mpishi stood and watched in awe as one after another there emerged delicious muffins, corn bread, beaten biscuits, graham gems, lemon tarts, and huckleberry pie. Mr. Eastman also rigged up an ingenious device for a shower bath in our temporary camp and was proud as Punch over his accomplishment.

  Mr. Pomeroy, who was a patron of the American Museum of Natural History and devoted many years and a great deal of money to building the African Hall, was fully as eager as Mr. Eastman, I think, to get to our Lake Paradise. As a matter of fact, we talked of little else as we sat around our campfire at night. The plan with regard to the African Hall was to complete the groups if possible within the next year. To that end, Mr. Pomeroy had offered to obtain the difficult kudu group, while Carl Akeley was making up the water-hole and other groups. William Leigh and his colleague Arthur Jansson, both fine artists, were to paint the habitat groups in their natural settings, and Mr. Eastman had undertaken to complete the buffalo group. I was assigned by Mr. Pomeroy to collect the impala group.

  Reports came finally that the rains to the north had let up a little, so we pushed off with our guests and long caravan of cars and trucks. We found that the Guaso Nyiro had decided to behave itself and that the road, most of the way, was passable.

  To our great relief, we found everything at the lake in good order, and once more, as on so many occasions, I was grateful for our small army of loyal, well-trained employees.

  We already had built several very nice guest houses, but Mr. Eastman’s, we had determined, must be larger, nicer, and better equipped in every way. We had taken extraordinary pains to choose the site—too extraordinary, perhaps, for, in order to provide Mr. Eastman with the full thrill and every opportunity to photograph, we had picked the elephant trail leading to the lake, which doubtless proved not only puzzling to the big animals but at times a bit lively for our guest, as day and night the magnificent creatures lumbered by.

  O
ur good friend Phillip Percival (Blayney’s brother), whom Mr. Eastman had chosen as his professional hunter, accompanied us, and this pleased us very much, for we knew that this safari, with its many animal objectives, would be subjected to extraordinary risks to life and limb, and we felt responsible for the safety of our guests.

  I doubt that there are many places of interest or scenic beauty in the world that both Mr. Eastman and Mr. Pomeroy hadn’t visited, but our Lake Paradise held them when first they saw it, exactly as it did us, in a breathless, silent spell.

  Reveling in my duties as hostess, I settled down in earnest to helping our native servants adjust themselves to the routine necessary for the comfort of our expanding community. I made out menus; we churned butter, cooked, and baked; and altogether our little village on the lake fairly buzzed with pleasant activity. Our guests were delighted with my fresh garden fare, which they all swore was the finest they had ever tasted, and, of course, my eleven humpbacked milk cows kept everybody well supplied with fresh milk, cream, cottage cheese, and buttermilk, to Mr. Eastman’s special delight.

  Every time I think of our second dinner after our guests arrived, a little chill creeps up my spine. Our dining-room windows overlooked the lake, it was a perfect evening, there were the lovely smells of night-blooming flowers and the curious blend of silence and sound of the wilderness, and we were all completely happy. I chanced to notice that Mr. Eastman’s water glass was empty and signaled for one of our servants to fill it, when I saw a cobra crawling straight for Mr. Eastman’s foot. Instead, then, of signaling for water, I signaled the house boy to do something about the snake, which he did promptly, and quietly, with a heavy club.

  “A fine hostess you are,” laughed George Eastman. “Snakes for dinner.” That this was the first time a cobra had intruded into the house nobody would, of course, believe.

  We organized our hunting parties these days always with a view to completing the African groups for the museum. Martin was firm about one thing, however, and I could see everybody loved him for it. He would permit no animals to be shot, no matter how fine as specimens they might be, anywhere near the lake itself.

  “They all know they’re safe here and that they can trust us,” he said, a little defensively, the first time he laid down the rule, “and I wouldn’t betray their confidence for anything.”

  On our fourth day out to one of the blinds, I had a fright which I didn’t soon get over. Mr. Eastman was very much interested in the new, 16mm cinecamera which he had recently developed and carried everywhere with him. Rounding a clump of thornbushes, we came on an old rhino. He was grazing with that smug air of disdain for the rest of the world which these peculiar animals have, when suddenly he became aware of us. We had had no way of knowing what Mr. Eastman would do under the circumstances and were completely unprepared when he started toward the animal, taking pictures with his little camera as he went. As a matter of fact, he walked right up to within twenty yards of the ugly beast. We, meantime, stood completely frozen.

  Suddenly the big beast decided to resent Mr. Eastman, snorted, lowered his head, and charged.

  Never have I seen a greater exhibition of coolness than Mr. Eastman now displayed. Instead of turning and running, which anyone else would have done, he stood quietly, still facing the animal, and then when, snorting and ferocious, it was within perhaps fifteen feet of him, he simply sidestepped it, like a toreador, and actually touched its side as it passed. All of which Martin caught with his own camera.

  This, of course, was not the end of the incident. The rhino, growing momentarily more enraged, whirled to make a second charge, when Phillip Percival’s gun brought him down.

  * * *

  —

  “Come along, Osa,” Mr. Eastman said two or three mornings later. “Suppose you drive me around today and be my little big-game hunter.”

  I was delighted and proud as could be, of course, and decided I was going to make this a big day. I told myself that I’d find some specimen for him, that I’d do something the professional game hunters thought I, being a woman, couldn’t do.

  We wound up with one warthog!

  Mr. Eastman pretended great delight and proposed that we go home and celebrate by baking a couple of lemon pies. If this amazing man was intemperate about anything—he almost never drank—it was about lemon pie. He never ate less than two large pieces, and poor Martin, who actually disliked lemon pie, followed suit, proving to me that he could, if necessary, be a perfect host.

  I’ve never known a man to have the downright love of a kitchen that Mr. Eastman had, and whenever I was there, giving attention to some special dish, he was usually right at my elbow, giving professional pointers and checking my methods and recipes.

  All these years since then I have cherished the memory of those hours. He treated me exactly as though I were a young and slightly unpredictable daughter and never could seem to get over what he called my “pink-silk-dress-little-girlness,” as contrasted with my ruggedness on safari. My husband always laughed when this came up, and said he had married me young and trained me that way. And so he had!

  The friendship and understanding that grew up between those two always made me very happy. They were always “George” and “Martin,” but somehow I stuck to the formality of “Mr. Eastman.” On the one occasion when I did vary this salutation, I was so ashamed I didn’t know what to do.

  For no reason at all, I was feeling quite hilarious as I stood over the pastry board in the kitchen putting the finishing touches to the bitter-plum pie.

  “Hey,” said Mr. Eastman, striding in, “that’s no way to pinch that piecrust!”

  “What say, Pop?” said my tongue before I could check it.

  Mr. Eastman was just as astonished as I was. “Wha-a-at did you say?” he asked.

  “Oh—why, I said ‘Old Top.’ You know, that familiar English expression.”

  He knew perfectly well what I had said, but his eyes twinkled, and from then on—just as a reminder, I suppose—he often addressed me as “Old Top.”

  Slowly but with gratifying results, the specimens for the museum groups were obtained. Martin, as always, worked steadily away at his film record. At length we decided to go down to Nairobi and join Carl Akeley on a safari in lion country, the Serengeti plains of Tanganyika.

  Much as we loved Lake Paradise, we were forced to face the fact that sooner or later we would have to leave it. We had built up as complete a record as seemed possible of the animals that made it, and the surrounding country, their sanctuary. As for our elephant record, both Mr. Eastman and Mr. Pomeroy said they didn’t see how it was possible to hope for greater perfection either of detail or fact.

  The lion, we knew, would be our next study, and this safari with Carl would be valuable as a preliminary step.

  Making an impressive array, with the Eastman, Pomeroy, and Akeley parties, Messrs. Leigh, Rockwell, Raddatz, and Jansson, and all our own following and equipment, we set out toward a section southeast of Nairobi in Tanganyika Territory. A desolate waste in the foothills at the edge of the great plains, it is a rough, practically waterless section and quite different from the northern country. While not far from civilization, these foothills are isolated by natural barriers and, at the time of our first visit at least, were considered among the best game areas in the world.

  Martin and I and the Eastman party selected a campsite sheltered by a grotesque rock formation, while Carl Akeley and his hardworking little group set up tents nearby.

  While we were getting our camp settled, Phil Percival and Martin reconnoitered for traces of lions and returned on the run to report a big-game migration only a few miles distant.

  The next morning we were out early, and it was not very long before we witnessed one of the most amazing sights of our travels. Stretched far and wide as far as the eye could see were animals. It was breathtaking. There were tens of thousands of wildebeeste.
Those who have seen but one or two isolated animals such as ostrich, zebra, or giraffe in zoos or circuses can have no conception of what it would mean to see miles and miles of unfamiliar animals. There were countless wildebeeste, Thompson’s gazelle, Grant’s gazelle, warthog, topi, zebra, kongoni, giraffe, hyena, ostrich, and jackal. High overhead, vultures floated in wide circles on motionless wings.

  We all took pictures like mad, and it wasn’t until we returned to camp that night, tired and quite beside ourselves with excitement, that we realized we hadn’t seen a single lion. This was going to be something to tease Carl Akeley about, we said, and we remembered Father Johnson and his wistful longing to see “just one lion.”

  We had just finished dinner that evening, however, when Carl Akeley rushed into our camp.

  “I’ve found them,” he announced excitedly.

  At dawn the next morning we were on our way with Carl in the lead. “I don’t believe this pride has ever been disturbed,” he said.

  I could see that Martin was dubious; one only spoke of animals “not being disturbed” up at Lake Paradise.

  We trudged for hours up the dry, rocky plains, sweating and miserable. The blazing tropical sun produced heat waves that fairly frizzled us, while fine dust rose to torture our nostrils. I could see that Mr. Eastman’s physician was quite worried, but whether or not our good friend suffered particularly, he made no sign. I think his sole comment was something to the effect that the temperature was just about right for the baking of a lemon pie.

  We followed Carl into a shallow depression between two hills. Here he stopped and motioned us to be silent, and a lion crossed our path not ten yards away. If it was aware of us, it didn’t even bother to look around. And then, to our astonishment, eleven full-grown lions emerged.