Out of Africa

by Isak Dinesen

  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 camp-fires.

  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 waggon, 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 the 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 war-paint, 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 bathwater 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 Let-tow 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 Rücken 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 to 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 thorn-trees.

  After three months I was suddenly ordered home. As things began to be systematically org
anized 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 then 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, that 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 of 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 the 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 in 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.