by Peter Rimmer
When the fake dawn brought light back to them, the dog was asleep between the two men. The fire had died down. In the long grass on the other side of the fire, thirty yards from the horses, a large animal had lain down in the night. Colonel Voss had a look and said it was an elephant. Jim put another pot of water over the last embers of the fire. When the water boiled, he made them their morning tea. He had dreamed of Jenny Merryl whose name was Justine.
When the sun rose through the trees they continued their journey, on towards the high mountains, far away in the new heat of the day, shimmering in a haze of soft purple.
Jim had carefully covered the embers of the fire with dry earth. Pieces of wood still smouldered from under the soft layer of earth.
The day camp was in a grove of tall trees that gave them shade. At three o’clock they went on again, making camp for the night when the sun went down.
Jim collected wood for the fire and that night they ate cold venison. The lions did not hunt in the night full of stars.
A week later they began the slow ascent of the mountain. The foothills rose gently as the horses pulled on the wagon. The men and the dog walked beside the wagon to lighten the load. They took a path that wound up higher through the wooded hills. Again they saw no sign of man, only the animals and the birds. Looking back, they had a view of the plain they had crossed.
The third night of the climb they heard thunder. They could see the forked lightning away towards Mozambique, behind the high mountains. On the fourth day of the climb, it rained. The road they had taken would take them no further. They turned the wagon wheels with difficulty and began the journey by another route.
That afternoon they found a valley. In the valley was a herd of wild horses. Colonel Voss studied the grazing horses through his field glasses.
“The legend is true! Those are Arab horses. Have a look, Jim. I wonder if anyone has seen them before?” The old man was agitatedly excited.
“Is this the Place of the Legend?” Jim was looking at the herd of horses trying to count them, but the animals kept moving.
“Maybe. There are no indigenous horses in this part of Africa. Those horses are the living proof that the Arabs came. Came and stayed.”
“Can’t we catch a horse?” asked Jim.
“Not in a million years, dear boy. Those Arabs are the fastest horses on this earth. Can you imagine Hamlet racing after one of those? We’ll make camp and watch them. There’s no tsetse fly this high up. No sickness. Why they survived all these years in Africa.”
“Then why aren’t there any people?”
“I rather think the tribes killed each other. The Shona, the Tonga. The Matabele. Before that, tribes with no names. In this part of the world, man fought himself to extinction.”
“Why do we always want to kill each other?”
“Man likes to go to war. It gives him a purpose. To be brave. To pay homage to his God. To champion the downtrodden, to bring him glory. The real reason? Conquest is the easy way to riches… Some even think dying in battle is the only true fulfilment. To die for a cause and for God. Maybe there’s something in it. Only God knows.”
“So much land. So empty.”
“Maybe there’s a curse on it. For man but not those horses.”
“You think we shouldn’t have come? The British, I mean, Cecil Rhodes?”
“Probably not. History will tell. Civilised, Christian Africa? A dream? Or should we have left it all to the free men and the animals?… Are they not beautiful, those Arabs? Free for thousands of years. You’d go like the wind on the back of one of those, Jim my boy. Like the wind. Ah, but then the horse would have a master.”
They made camp in a grove of mukwa trees. Having travelled for so long, when the sun dipped into the plain, they made a fire. The entry to the Valley of the Horses, as Colonel Voss was calling it, gave them the view over the plain, the great sea of flat treetops and grass.
Long after the trees down below were in darkness the light still played in the mountains. The colonel had said they were thousands of feet above sea level. They were halfway up the mountain range. They wondered what the horses would make of the firelight, flickering in the night. They had not approached the horses for fear of frightening them. When the light went completely, they were alone again, the horses no longer existing for them.
Just before the light faded Jim had clubbed two guinea fowl out of their roost for the night in a tree. Once the birds found a perch, they stayed till dawn. The cackling they made flying up to their perch had told Jim where to go.
Jim plucked and gutted the birds and put them over the fire on the spit. He gave the dog some rotten meat that was three days old. Hamlet and Othello had disdained to notice the horses in the valley, not associating themselves with the Arabs. Only the bed of the valley where a river ran through, was grassed. The one slope was well wooded, thick with trees.
“I’ll catch some fish tomorrow,” said Jim. He was on his haunches by the fire. Colonel Voss was seated on his chair, preparing his evening pipe. There was a wind coming down the valley towards them from the horses. Jim thought he could smell the Arabs but was not sure. The start of the night was silent and pitch dark away from the flickering light of the fire. The moon had waned. It would be dark all night with the clouds hiding the stars. There was thunder over towards Mozambique, behind the great range of mountains.
“What makes you think there are fish in the river?”
“My stomach. I’m sick of meat. I’m sure a man could eat only so much caviar.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t… I love the sound of the night winds going through the trees. Why isn’t the dog sick on that meat?”
“You should learn to smoke a pipe.”
“Maybe I will… Where will we look for the ruins of your great, lost civilisation?”
“Anywhere here. And don’t mock me, Jim dear boy. Depends if the horses migrated. We got into their valley so they can get out. What if the ruins are under the trees? In Asia and South America whole cities were lost in the jungle for centuries… How many of them came and stayed? They bring their building skills?… In two thousand years, they will find Salisbury under the trees and nobody will have heard of the English. Or will we still be here like in America and Australia?”
“You’re rambling, Colonel Voss.”
“I like to ramble. Let me just enjoy my Arab horses. Youth is so important. Gordon was too impatient. Took a train from London for the Sudan with one officer to salvage British pride among the heathen. Should have taken an army. Pride and impatience cost him his life. He believed in God. I envy him. A man of honour. There was a German mercenary who wanted to defect from the Mahdi. He had denounced Christ and become a Muslim. Gordon would have nothing to do with the man on principle. Would have saved his life and Khartoum. Honour. Some men prize it more than life.”
Jim waited for more, for some time. The pipe glowed intermittently.
“Were you there?” asked Jim into the silence. He got up and turned the guinea fowl on the spit. With a small shovel, he heaped more coals under the birds. He was thinking of the fish in the river. A pair of owls were calling to each other from somewhere in the darkened trees. He was content, at peace with himself. Only conscious of the now. The old man was a wonderful companion.
“In a way. Kitchener tried to get to Khartoum. He was a major then. The glory of Omdurman was thirteen years away.”
“Were you with Kitchener?”
“I think I was for a while. Oh yes. In the desert. Riding camels. They are the nastiest animals on this earth.”
“Tell me.”
“We rode and rode. Gladstone thought Gordon could hold Khartoum on his own. The lines were down. It was all politics. British and Egyptian. The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. That bit of the empire we took with a partner. To stop the slave trade. Then the Mahdi rose from obscurity and declared a Jihad. A holy war… They were much the same, the Mahdi and Gordon. Or so Gordon thought. Men of God. Men of hon
our. Like everything, there was truth and lies. We never got to Gordon. To Khartoum. Not that time. But we did in the end. And blew the tomb of the Mahdi to pieces. They were both dead by then. Gordon and the Mahdi. Revenging a dead man. Killing a dead man. Pride. Honour. The British public demanded revenge. Took Kitchener two years the second time. Though then he came with an army. They’ll still be slaving and still be fighting in that part of the world for a thousand years.”
“Were you there?”
“Yes, I was there. I watched the last great British cavalry charge. The 21st Lancers. Stupid pride. All they had to do was sit their horses and watch the infantry with their Lee-Metfords shoot down the dervishes. The Lee-Metfords were the first rifles to have detachable magazines.”
“I know them well.”
“I forget. You had those rifles in your war… Lost five officers and sixty-five men. A glorious charge. Pride. Stupidity. They’ll remember that charge of the 21st Lancers to the end of British history. Winston was there. A young lieutenant. He saw the charge… Did I tell you I knew Winston Churchill?”
Jim waited in silence, not wishing to interrupt, but the story had stopped. Some of the claims were too preposterous. How could this old man have known a British cabinet minister by his first name?
“He wasn’t famous then?” asked Jim, trying to get the story going again.
“No, he wasn’t. But his father was Chancellor of the Exchequer. His first cousin the Duke of Marlborough.”
“Did you ever meet him again?”
“Once.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. He did not recognise me. He would have done were I important, but I wasn’t. Politicians. He liked the limelight. You have to be important to be recognised by politicians. Unless they are just shaking hands, courting votes.”
“Did you try to speak to him?”
“Of course I didn’t. You can’t just remind a man he was your friend.”
“Why didn’t he recognise you?”
“It didn’t suit him at the time… Like your noble friends with your ten pounds. I’d bet he’d cut you dead and not just because he owes you money. He forgot the money when it was spent.”
“I’ll ask him for my money.”
“And he’ll make you feel like a fool. To him, just giving you the time of day, let alone lunching with you, was worth more than ten pounds. If he remembered, which I doubt, he’d just laugh at you. Right in your face. I spared Winston from laughing in my face.”
“You make me feel very small.”
“Good. It never hurts. Feeling small.”
“Doesn’t worry you?”
“Not anymore.”
There was no more mention of General Gordon or Winston Churchill or anything else from the colonel’s past. Jim respected the silence. He wondered if Barnaby St Clair would cut him dead when he asked for his ten pounds. He had been a fool that day. It was much clearer now. It made him blanch thinking about his naïvety. She was the prettiest girl he had ever seen. Or the sexiest. In future in his mind, he would blame the girl and the erotic movement of her breasts. Men gave away money to girls without feeling foolish, even if they got nothing in return. He could still see her wavy cropped hair and the dress that clung to her legs. He was glad it was dark but crossed legs just the same. It happened every time he thought of Tina Pringle. In daylight, he tried not to think of her. The thought of the embarrassment made him blanch again. He no longer needed to cross his legs.
He got up and turned the spit, tripping over the dog. While standing in the glow of the firelight he forced himself not to think of the girl. In half an hour the meat would be cooked. It was better to cook the bird slowly, so they cooked right through to the bone.
He put on the three-legged iron pot with the pap stirred up inside. He had not found wild spinach in the valley. Just some mushrooms that he had added to the pot with the pap. The colonel knew which ones to eat. They had eaten the same brown mushrooms twice before. The tops looked like the top of a small bun when it came out of the oven.
There was wild fruit in a bowl beside the colonel’s chair. Monkeys had been eating the small fruit. There were discarded husks under the trees. The colonel had said if the monkeys had eaten the fruit, so could they. The pips were large and there were four of them. More like nuts. Jim tried to crack one with his teeth and gave up. The thin film of flesh around the four pips that fitted together to make the fruit was sweet and tasted like lychee.
The water he had taken from the river was sweet and tasted of minerals. There had been hoof marks in the river sand and Jim hoped the tart taste in the water was not from the horses. The taste went when he poured the hot water over the tea leaves… They had brought a whole chest of tea from Salisbury. The chest was the size of a very small trunk and Jim had laughed then but not anymore. The tea was precious. They enjoyed it twice during the day and once after supper. If he had had his way, Jim would have brought enough to last them a year.
They heard the horses run once during the night. To Jim, it sounded like the whole herd thundering in the valley. Then the sound stopped as quickly as it started. In the silence, Jim fell back into sleep.
Both of them missed their turns that night to stoke the fire. When Jim woke, stiff from sleeping on the hard earth, he got up to put the big, black kettle on the fire. He had to blow up the embers with dry kindling to get a flame hot enough to boil the water.
Far away at the end of the valley that ended up against an unclimbable cliff were the horses. He looked at them through the field glasses. They were grazing peacefully. Jim wondered what had spooked them during the night. The wind was still in the same direction, blowing towards him directly from the horses. Again Jim thought he could smell the Arabs. They were further away, but the smell was strong. Jim told himself the wind must be stronger. The horses were in the gully. A dead-end gully with high cliffs on three sides. Jim and the colonel would be able to get up close. The horses would have to run back past them to escape. With second thoughts Jim saw the idea as not such a good one.
When the water boiled, he put in a heaped spoonful of tea and let the tea stew, resting the kettle on the ground a little way from the fire. They would drink the tea without milk or sugar.
The colonel was still asleep, snoring gently, when Jim took him his morning tea. All sign of the thunderclouds had gone. It was a beautiful morning where they were halfway up the slope of the great range of mountains. It was cool and fresh. Back down on the plain, Jim knew it would be hot and humid. The sun had just reached the flat tops of the trees in the plain down below through the cleft made by their valley. That view was as beautiful to Jim as looking back up at the purple-topped mountains. The sun was touching the one side of the valley that was without trees, bathing the long grass yellow. Strangely, Jim thought there were terraces following the contours of the valley, rising in undulating rings above the river to halfway up the slope. It was a trick of the light; when he looked again, all he saw was flowing grass, the heads pushed towards him by the oncoming breeze.
When he finished his tea, he found his fishing rod in the wagon and walked down to the river. He had taken maggots from the dog’s meat to use as bait. Then he had buried the meat. Behind him at two paces’ distance followed King Richard the Lionheart. Jim was whistling in the dawn. To show no favouritism he had stroked the soft mouths of Othello and Hamlet. The horses had watched him for a moment. Jim walked off down towards the small river that flowed from the source in the high mountains back through the Valley of the Horses to a waterfall that spilt out over the plain, thousands of feet below. By the time the river water reached the flat tops of the trees down below, Jim thought, the river he was going to fish would be nothing but a damp mist from heaven.
For the first time since the war ended, he didn’t hear the guns of the Western Front in his head or smell the stench of the trenches, the sickly smell of decaying men blown up again and again in the putrid mud of no man’s land. He reached the small river that was real
ly a stream before he realised it. Then he smiled. The colonel was right. The filth of war was washing from his mind like the oil from an anointed king. And he felt like a king. King of all he surveyed.
The horses were still grazing peacefully down the end of the valley half a mile away. Jim baited the hook with a squirm of maggots and forgot the horses. The dog sat down in the grass that came to halfway up Jim’s legs and fell asleep on its side. The dog had eaten the remains of the guinea fowl, bones and all, without choking. The bones had been soft and full of a rich red marrow.
To Jim’s surprise, he felt a bite. Striking the second time, Jim hooked his first fish, the size of a dinner plate.
By the time Colonel Voss had drunk a second cup of black tea, Jim was back with their breakfast. He had never seen such fish before. They were more like a carp than a trout. Like a trout and salmon, there were no scales. He was not sure if any freshwater fish had scales. There were more bones than a trout when he cut down the length of the fish before putting them over the fire on a wire mesh he had made at the stable before they had started the journey. The flesh of the fish was white. Jim lightly sprinkled the fish with salt. The sun had risen in the sky.
The wind had changed since Jim went down to fish and was now blowing across the valley. The old man had released the horses from their nightly tether. Hamlet and Othello were grazing the spring grass below the line of trees that covered the one side of the valley for five hundred yards of the steep gradient. They seemed content. When he had muzzled their mouths earlier, their flanks had been shivering. Jim thought the shivering had gone with the warmth of the morning sun. He went halfway towards the horses to check but neither of them took any notice. Surprisingly, King Richard was chewing a bone from the rotten meat that Jim had tried to bury. He let the dog alone. If the dog wanted to be sick, it was the dog’s business.