Early Days in East Africa Frederick Jackson.
Despite his appalling experiences of African travel, von Höhnel volunteered to accompany a headstrong, twenty-three-year old American, William Astor Chanler, on an expedition to explore unknown territory east of Lake Rudolf (now Turkana). At Hameye on the Tana river their porters rebelled, and Chanler was forced to limit his ambition to finding a lake into which the Guaso Nyiro (now Ewaso Ng’iro) river was said to flow, and to making contact with the Rendile, a people known to Europeans only by repute.
We crossed the Guaso Nyiro the following morning, and marched four miles along the foot of the plateau. Upon reaching its end we made camp, and Lieutenant von Höhnel and I at once ascended it, this time climbing its northern face. We were rewarded by getting a view of the boundless desert, stretched on all sides to the horizon. Across this desert flowed the Guaso Nyiro, enshrouded in dhum palms and acacias.
In the northeast our eyes were greeted by the sight of what appeared to be an enormous sheet of water, distant about thirty miles. Lieutenant von Höhnel and I turned silently to one another, and with deep feeling clasped hands, delighted to think that the stories of the size of the lake had not been exaggerated. I at once set about guessing the number of days required to reach it, and Lieutenant von Höhnel, taking its bearings with his compass, decided and announced that it must be nearly sixty miles in length….
Following the course of the Guaso Nyiro river, they came upon a waterfall which Chanler named after himself.
On this day the members of my caravan presented a most doleful appearance. Lieutenant von Höhnel and I were both stricken with fever; Sururu groaned from the back of my horse; one porter, borne in a hammock by two of his comrades, was dying of dysentery, and one of the Soudanese staggered along with the aid of a stick, his eyes wildly staring, and his lips muttering senseless phrases: he was unconscious from fever. Onward we silently and doggedly pressed. About noon we passed close to a herd of seven elephants, but looked at them with absolute indifference. Our minds were bent upon the single purpose of getting out of this dreadful country, and resting from our labours upon the shores of the lake. The soil was becoming moist under foot, and the grass wore a greener appearance. Where can the lake be? was our thought.
At one o’clock, seeing a tall sycamore tree across the river (at this point not ten yards wide), we stopped the caravan, crossed the stream, and climbed as high as possible up the tree. From this vantage point we took one long look, and then with half-suppressed curses descended to the ground. There is no Lake Lorian! It is but a vast swamp, overgrown with papyrus and water-grass. The narrowness and shallowness of the river at this point (it was but a foot deep) proved to us that it could not continue beyond the swamp – at least, in the dry season. Here, then, was the end of high hopes and incessant effort – no lake, no Rendile. The vast sheet of water we had seen from the top of the plateau had been a mirage. We felt that we had been tricked and duped by Nature at every turn. Our feelings of dejection were shared by every member of the caravan. They, too, had lived in glad hopes of reaching the lake. Time and again I had promised them that upon reaching it they should have their fill of camels’ milk and goats’ flesh. The burden of their muttered and incessant refrain was: “Wapi?” (“Where?”) “Wapi bahari? Wapi ngamia? Wapi mbuzi? Wapi maziwa? Hapana kitu hapa! Gehennam tu!” (“Where is the lake? Where are the camels? Where are the goats? Where is the milk? There is not a thing here! It is simply hell!”)
Our sympathies were with them, but it was unwise to allow them to remain long in this state; so they were at once set to work getting grass to strew upon the damp ground, while some were sent off in parties to collect what few dried sticks they could find. This work was soon accomplished. Each group of porters had a tiny fire, over which they were able to warm slightly their strips of meat. Lieutenant von Höhnel and I retired to bed, ill with fever. Our spirits were still further depressed by the night’s experience; mosquitoes in myriads swarmed about us. Even the thick skins of the negroes were not proof against the attacks of the tiny denizens of the swamp. No one was able to sleep. Curses and impotent yells echoed throughout the camp. Lieutenant von Höhnel and I each had mosquito curtains; which, however, proved of no service as barriers from the pests. Throughout the long night we turned over in our minds but one project – how to get out as quickly as possible from this abode of pestilence and death.
Through Jungle and Desert W. A. Chanler.
Get out they did, and subsequently made contact with the Rendile, nomads owning camels and horses whom Chanler thought might be descended from the Shepherd Kings of Egypt (some had blue eyes). On their return journey von Höhnel was crushed almost to death by a charging rhino. After an agonizing nine weeks carried on a jolting stretcher with suppurating wounds and no drugs, he was operated on by a missionary doctor at Kibwezi and miraculously recovered.
In June 1892 Dr Walter Gregory, a professor of geology, with twelve porters, made a resolute attempt to reach the summit of Mount Kenya.
Through this dark and dismal forest we had to force a way. Occasionally an elephant path would run in our direction, and we could then make comparatively rapid progress…. The elephants, however, did not obey the rules of mountaineering, and their tracks soon ran down into valleys, so that most of the way we had to cut a path step by step. Every blow of the matlocks upon the bamboos shook the sodden canopy overhead, and continual shower-baths of water kept us wet and miserable. My clothes were soon soaked through, while the raw, damp cold chilled the porters to the marrow. We had to stop every hour to light fires to warm them, and even then they found the climate almost unbearable, and one or two cried like children….
On the evening of the second day we had to pitch the camp on a slope, where the bamboos were so dense that we had to clear every foot of ground we wanted, while it was so swampy that we had to spread out the bamboos as a platform on which to support the tents. Determined not to lose a moment’s time next morning, Omari, Funi and I went ahead at daybreak to cut the path, leaving the porters to follow as soon as it had become less cold. We made a desperate effort to get out of the forests, but when night fell we were still within them, and the bamboos as thick as ever. We were so exhausted that, when the order to camp was given, we all lay down where we stood; and it was not till some time afterwards that we could rouse ourselves to light fires and prepare food. So far the work had been simply miserable. We had not once seen or felt the sun since we left the meadows of Laikipia. We had never once seen more than 20 yards ahead, and it was only rarely that we could see up to the tree tops. The natural history had also been disappointing.
On the fourth day they emerged from the bamboos.
With a cheer we hurried forward. The bamboos became smaller and scarcer, and were soon left behind. The forests gave place to scattered clumps of trees, and the rank undergrowth to a firm rich turf; the long monotonous slope broke up into a belt of undulating ground, which, with its numerous swampy, mossy hollows, its irregularly scattered boulders, and its stiff, greasy clay, reminded me of a glacial moraine. The men threw down their loads and basked in the sunshine, while I examined the sections in the stream banks, and collected the flowers in the meadows.
A hailstorm assailed them on the next stage of their climb, and one of the porters named Wadi Sadi was found to be missing.
I rushed back at once; but as the snow had hidden our trail, I missed it, and had to search for an hour before I found him. He was lying on his load about three hundred feet below the level of the camp; he was covered with snow and nearly frozen to death. A little brandy revived him, but he was too weak to stand. As it was still snowing it would have been useless to have returned for help, for the porters were so cowed that they would have refused to move. I recollected that Wadi weighed less than the burdens some of my men had to bear all day long, so I resolved to carry him. He was able to cling to my back, and slowly, and with many halts, I struggled with him up the slope. If the porter had left his loa
d when he first became too weak to carry it, he could no doubt have walked on with the others. I thought his action in staying out in the snow with it simply Quixotic, and, annoyed at the trouble it had given me, I rather brutally told him next morning that he was a fool. It is a point of honour among Zanzibari never to leave their loads, and I shall not forget the man’s reproachful look as he asked, “How could I leave my load without my master’s orders to do so?”
Another trait in the Zanzibari character was shown at the same camp. In the morning the men came to tell me that the water they had left in their cooking-pots was all bewitched. They said it was white, and would not shake; the adventurous Fundi had even hit it with a stick, which would not go in. They begged me to look at it, and I told them to bring it to me. They declined, however, to touch it, and implored me to go to it. The water of course had frozen solid. I handled the ice and told the men they were silly to be afraid of it, for this change always came over water on the tops of high mountains. I put one of the pots on the fire, and predicted it would soon turn again into water. The men sat round and anxiously watched it; when it had melted they joyfully told me that the demon was expelled.
Leaving everyone else in camp, Gregory continued upwards with Fundi, who had been on Teleki’s expedition, and one of the porters. They bivouacked at the foot of a glacier and Gregory and Fundi continued the climb.
That morning he [Fundi] was weak and ill, but he plodded steadily, though painfully, upward. He had often asked me about the great white fields he had seen with Dachi-tumbo [Teleki] and how bitterly disappointed he had been at nor reaching them. He had taken a keen personal interest in this expedition, and his influence with the men had been most useful. I therefore waited for him to pass me, that he might be the first man to set foot on the glaciers of Kenya. He came up, laid his load upon the ground, kicked off his zebra-hide sandals, and mounted upon a boulder. Then, with his hands together before him, he began to pray. I could not understand all he said, but sufficient to know that he thanked Allah for having enabled him to come where neither native nor white man had ever been before, and to stand on the edge of the great white fields he had seen with Dachi-tumbo from afar. He assured Allah that he was now more anxious to return in safety to the coast than he had ever been before, so that he might tell his friends of the wonders he had seen.
After the prayer was over, I told Fundi to go on to the glacier. He went a few steps farther, and then, with a pleading look, said, “No farther, master; it is too white.”
There we lighted a fire, and boiled the thermometers, obtaining data which placed the altitude at 15,580 feet. As soon as the instruments had cooled, I prepared to continue the ascent. But Fundi, whose curiosity was now satisfied, begged to be allowed to return. He complained that his head was aching, that his stomach was very bad, that he felt very sick, and that his legs would not do what he told them. It was obvious he was suffering from mountain sickness, and it was not fair to take him farther. I therefore added his share of the load of instruments, firewood, and “pitons” (or pegs on which to fasten the rope) to my own, and let him go back. Before doing so, I fear I completely ruined any reputation for sanity I might have had left, by executing a Masai war-dance on the snout of the glacier, and then pelting Fundi with snowballs.
The Great Rift Valley J. W. Gregory.
Eight years later the summit was scaled by Mr (later Sir) Halford Mackinder and his Swiss guides César Oilier and Joseph Brocherel.
At last, on 12 September 1899, César, Joseph, and I left our top camp at noon to make the final attempt to reach the summit. The journey round the peak, made by Hausburg, had clearly shown that no way was practicable up the northern precipice, and we had already failed twice on. the southern side, once on rock and once on ice. We now planned a route partly over rock and partly over ice. We followed our first track up and across the Lewis glacier, and up the face of the southern arête, near the top of which we spent the night under a Mummery tent. We were up at earliest dawn, and away as soon as the sun rose out of the cloud roof to eastward, thawing our hands so that we could grasp the rocks. A traverse, with steps across the head of the Darwin glacier, brought us to a rocky rib descending from the western corner of Nelion, and up this we crept for a short way. We then decided to cross the glacier which hangs from the Gate of the Mist between the two points, and drains by a couloir into the Darwin glacier below. It proved very steep and intensely hard, so that three hours were consumed in cutting steps on a traverse which we had hoped to make in twenty minutes. A final rock scramble enabled us to set foot on the summit of Batian precisely at noon on 13 September. The view from the Gate of the Mist had been magnificent. At the summit we were a few moments too late, for the mist, driving up, gave only momentary glimpses into the valleys beneath.
The mountain-top is like a stunted tower rising from among ruins and crowned by three or four low turrets, upon which we sat, feet inward. There was no snow there, and the thermometer slung in the air gave a temperature of 40°F, while several kinds of lichen grew on the rocks. We dared, however, stay only forty minutes – time enough to make observations and to photograph – and then had to descend, not from any physical inconvenience due to the elevation, but for fear of the afternoon storm. We made our way downward from step to step cautiously in the mist, and reached our sleeping-place of the previous night at sunset; but we continued down the rocks by the moonlight, and arrived in camp after 10 pm, exhausted, but victorious. We supped by the fire at midnight, with the sound of the Nairobi torrent ringing on the rocks and swelling and falling in the breeze, and from time to time with the hoot of an owl or bark of a leopard, yet none of them seeming to break the silence of the great peak which rose among the stars, sternly graceful, in the cold light of the sinking moon.
“A Journey to the Summit of Mount Kenya, British East Africa”, The Geographical Journal, Halford Mackinder.
Fifty years mere to elapse before the peaks mere scaled again, by Eric Shipley and P. Wyn Harris in 1929.
Captain Frederick Lugard, ordered in 1899 to impose the Pax Britannica on the war-torn kingdom of Buganda, describes his preparations for the long march from Mombasa to Kampala.
There is a charm in the feeling of independence which a farewell to civilization brings with it, and in the knowledge that henceforward one has to rely solely on one’s own resources, and that success or failure depend on one’s self. At rare intervals opportunities may occur of sending mails and reports to the coast, but between these times – few and far between – the tyranny of the pen is overpast, saving only for the daily diary and the mapping work.
Daybreak brings a stir among the sleeping forms; in later expeditions the Sudanese reveille roused the camp generally before the earliest sign of dawn. You tumble out of your last unfinished dream and your camp-cot, and substitute the realities of a heavy pair of boots, leggings, knee-breeches, and karki jacket, with a pith “solar” hat, shaped like the substantiation of the ethereal halo round the head of a saint in a stained-glass cathedral window. You buckle around you the belt, which contains your hunting-knife and rounds of Winchester ammunition: you fill your haversack with the paraphernalia which only long experience has taught you to select – a tobacco-pouch and pipe, matches, a small file, a spare foresight, a bit of bee’s-wax, a measuring-tape, the road-book for surveying, a couple of dry biscuits, and a cloth cap (in case accident or design should keep you late), two or three small straps, a bit of whip-cord, a tiny bit of chalk, a small screw-driver, and I know not what queer knick-knacks besides, understandable only “by the trade.”
The man you call your gun-bearer presents himself, and you proceed to dress him up like an (African) Christmas tree. The costume would delight our gilded youth at a fancy ball. In front of his loin-cloth he ties an untanned goat-skin to save him somewhat from the thorns and spear-grass, and the creepers he will have to brush through in the narrow path or in the jungle, should you diverge from the march to follow game. As he leads the way in the early dawn th
rough the high matted grass this skin will be soaked with the dew, and become as it was the moment it left its parent goat, plus a smell. Later in the day it will become a petrified board in the scorching sun. But to return to our Christmas tree. Over his shoulders we sling the haversack, the aneroid, and the prismatic compass, each with its separate strap; round his waist he fastens his own belt and hunting-knife; over this comes the belt and cartridge-pouches, containing the ammunition of the gun he carries; fixed somehow among these appurtenances is a huge calabash for water – his inevitable companion. In it he probably carries the balance of his day’s ration of dry grain. If your caravan is heavily loaded, and his own gear has to be carried as well, he will have a bundle on his head or strapped across his shoulders, consisting of his mat, his little tent, and a bone or two of the last beast shot (probably “high”). Nailed on, so to speak, wherever he can find a few inches of space about his person, you will see a native pipe, a flageolet made from a hollow reed, a chunk of meat, possibly a cooking-pot, and other ornaments. Above all he shoulders your rifle, and “stands confessed,” “a thing of shreds and patches” and whatnots innumerable.
Nine Faces Of Kenya Page 7