by Mary Morris
Peering down from the cockpit at grazing elephant, you have the feeling that what you are beholding is wonderful, but not authentic. It is not only incongruous in the sense that animals simply are not as big as trees, but also in the sense that the twentieth century, tidy and svelte with stainless steel as it is, would not possibly permit such prehistoric monsters to wander in its garden. Even in Africa, the elephant is as anomalous as the Cro-Magnon Man might be shooting a round of golf at Saint Andrews in Scotland.
But, with all this, elephant are seldom conspicuous from the air. If they were smaller, they might be. Big as they are, and coloured as they are, they blend with everything until the moment they catch your eye.
They caught Blix’s eye and he scribbled me a frantic note: “Look! The big bull is enormous. Turn back. Doctor Turvy radios I should have some gin.”
Well, we had no radio—and certainly no gin in my plane. But just as certainly, we had Doctor Turvy.
Doctor Turvy was an ethereal citizen of an ethereal world. In the beginning, he existed only for Blix, but long before the end, he existed for everybody who worked with Blix or knew him well.
Although Doctor Turvy’s prescriptions indicated that he put his trust in a wine list rather than a pharmacopoeia, he had two qualities of special excellence in a physician: his diagnosis was always arrived at in a split second—and he held the complete confidence of his patient. Beyond that, his adeptness at mental telepathy (in which Blix himself was pretty well grounded) eliminated the expensive practice of calling round to feel the pulse or take a temperature. Nobody ever saw Doctor Turvy—and that fact, Blix insisted, was bedside manner carried to its final degree of perfection.
I banked the Avian and turned toward camp.
Within three miles of our communal baobab tree, we saw four more elephant—three of them beautiful bulls. The thought passed through my head that the way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down. Elephant are never within three miles of camp. It’s hardly cricket that they should be. It doesn’t make a hunter out of you to turn over on your canvas cot and realize that the thing you are hunting at such expense and physical tribulation is so contemptuous of your prowess as to be eating leaves right in front of your eyes.
But Blix is a practical man. As a White Hunter, his job was to produce the game desired and to point it out to his employer of the moment. Blix’s work, and mine, was made much easier by finding the elephant so close. We could even land at the camp and then approach them on foot to judge more accurately their size, immediate intentions, and strategic disposition.
Doctor Turvy’s prescription had to be filled, and taken, of course, but even so, we would have time to reconnoitre.
We landed on the miserly runway, which had a lot in common with an extemporaneous badminton court, and, within twenty minutes, proceeded on foot toward those magnificent bulls.
Makula was with us. Neither the safari nor this book, for that matter, could be complete without Makula. Though there are a good many Wakamba trackers available in East Africa, it has become almost traditional in late years to mention Makula in every book that touches upon elephant-hunting, and I would not break with tradition.
Makula is a man in the peculiar position of having gained fame without being aware of it. He can neither read nor write; his first language is Wakamba, his second a halting Swahili. He is a smallish ebon-tinted Native with an inordinately wise eye, a penchant for black magic, and the instincts of a beagle hound. I think he could track a honeybee through a bamboo forest.
No matter how elaborate the safari on which Makula is engaged as tracker, he goes about naked from the waist up, carrying a long bow and a quiver full of poisoned arrows. He has seen the work of the best rifles white men have yet produced, but when Makula’s nostrils distend after either a good or a bad shot, it is not the smell of gunpowder that distends them; it is a kind of restrained contempt for that noisy and unwieldy piece of machinery with its devilish tendency to knock the untutored huntsman flat on his buttocks every time he pulls the trigger.
Safaris come and safaris go, but Makula goes on forever. I suspect at times that he is one of the wisest men I have ever known—so wise that, realizing the scarcity of wisdom, he has never cast a scrap of it away, though I still remember a remark he made to an overzealous newcomer to his profession: “White men pay for danger—we poor ones cannot afford it. Find your elephant, then vanish, so that you may live to find another.”
Makula always vanished. He went ahead in the bush with the silence of a shade, missing nothing, and the moment he had brought his hunters within sight of the elephant, he disappeared with the silence of a shade, missing everything.
Stalking just ahead of Blix through the tight bush, Makula signalled for a pause, shinned up a convenient tree without noise, and then came down again. He pointed to a chink in the thicket, took Blix firmly by the arm, and pushed him ahead. Then Makula disappeared. Blix led, and I followed.
The ability to move soundlessly through a wall of bush as tightly woven as Nature can weave it is not an art that can be acquired much after childhood. I cannot explain it, nor could Arab Maina who taught me ever explain it. It is not a matter of watching where you step; it is rather a matter of keeping your eyes on the place where you want to be, while every nerve becomes another eye, every muscle develops reflex action. You do not guide your body, you trust it to be silent.
We were silent. The elephant we advanced upon heard nothing—even when the enormous hindquarters of two bulls loomed before us like grey rocks wedded to the earth.
Blix stopped. He whispered with his fingers and I read the whisper. “Watch the wind. Swing round them. I want to see their tusks.”
Swing, indeed! It took us slightly over an hour to negotiate a semicircle of fifty yards. The bulls were big—with ivory enough—hundred-pounders at least, or better.
Nimrod was satisfied, wet with sweat, and on the verge, I sensed, of receiving a psychic message from Doctor Turvy. But this message was delayed in transit.
One bull raised his head, elevated his trunk, and moved to face us. His gargantuan ears began to spread as if to capture even the sound of our heartbeats. By chance, he had grazed over a spot we had lately left, and he had got our scent. It was all he needed.
I have rarely seen anything so calm as that bull elephant—or so casually determined upon destruction. It might be said that he shuffled to the kill. Being, like all elephant, almost blind, this one could not see us, but he was used to that. He would follow scent and sound until he could see us, which, I computed, would take about thirty seconds.
Blix wiggled his fingers earthward, and that meant, “Drop and crawl.”
It is amazing what a lot of insect life goes on under your nose when you have got it an inch from the earth. I suppose it goes on in any case, but if you are proceeding on your stomach, dragging your body along by your fingernails, entomology presents itself very forcibly as a thoroughly justified science. The problem of classification alone must continue to be very discouraging.
By the time I had crawled three feet, I am sure that somewhere over fifty distinct species of insect life were individually and severally represented in my clothes, with Siafu ants conducting the congress.
Blix’s feet were just ahead of my eyes—close enough so that I could contemplate the holes in his shoes, and wonder why he ever wore any at all, since he went through them almost in a matter of hours. I had ample time also to observe that he wore no socks. Practical, but not comme il faut. His legs moved through the underbrush like dead legs dragged by strings. There was no sound from the elephant.
I don’t know how long we crawled like that, but the little shadows in the thicket were leaning toward the east when we stopped. Possibly we had gone a hundred yards. The insect bites had become just broad, burning patches.
We were breathing easier—or at least I was—when Blix’s feet and legs went motionless. I could just see his head close against his shoulder, and watch him turn to peek upward
into the bush. He gave no signal to continue. He only looked horribly embarrassed like a child caught stealing eggs.
But my own expression must have been a little more intense. The big bull was about ten feet away—and at that distance elephant are not blind.
Blix stood up and raised his rifle slowly, with an expression of ineffable sadness.
“That’s for me,” I thought. “He knows that even a shot in the brain won’t stop that bull before we’re both crushed like mangos.”
In an open place, it might have been possible to dodge to one side, but not here. I stood behind Blix with my hands on his waist according to his instructions. But I knew it wasn’t any good. The body of the elephant was swaying. It was like watching a boulder, in whose path you were trapped, teeter on the edge of a cliff before plunging. The bull’s ears were spread wide now, his trunk was up and extended toward us, and he began the elephant scream of anger which is so terrifying as to hold you silent where you stand, like fingers clamped upon your throat. It is a shrill scream, cold as winter wind.
It occurred to me that this was the instant to shoot.
Blix never moved. He held his rifle very steady and began to chant some of the most striking blasphemy I have ever heard. It was colourful, original, and delivered with finesse, but I felt that this was a badly chosen moment to test it on an elephant—and ungallant beyond belief if it was meant for me.
The elephant advanced, Blix unleashed more oaths (this time in Swedish), and I trembled. There was no rifle shot. A single biscuit tin, I judged, would do for both of us—cremation would be superfluous.
“I may have to shoot him,” Blix announced, and the remark struck me as an understatement of classic magnificence. Bullets would sink into that monstrous hide like pebbles into a pond.
Somehow you never think of an elephant as having a mouth, because you never see it when his trunk is down, so that when the elephant is quite close and his trunk is up, the dark red-and-black slit is by way of being an almost shocking revelation. I was looking into our elephant’s mouth with a kind of idiotic curiosity when he screamed again—and thereby, I am convinced, saved both Blix and me from a fate no more tragic than simple death, but infinitely less tidy.
The scream of that elephant was a strategic blunder, and it did him out of a wonderful bit of fun. It was such an authentic scream, of such splendid resonance, that his cronies, still grazing in the bush, accepted it as legitimate warning, and left. We had known they were still there because the bowels of peacefully occupied elephant rumble continually like oncoming thunder—and we had heard thunder.
They left, and it seemed they tore the country from its roots in leaving. Everything went, bush, trees, sansivera, clods of dirt—and the monster who confronted us. He paused, listened, and swung round with the slow irresistibility of a bank-vault door. And then he was off in a typhoon of crumbled vegetation and crashing trees.
For a long time there wasn’t any silence, but when there was, Blix lowered his rifle—which had acquired, for me, all the death-dealing qualities of a feather duster.
I was limp, irritable, and full of maledictions for the insect kind. Blix and I hacked our way back to camp without the exchange of a word, but when I fell into a canvas chair in front of the tents, I forswore the historic propriety of my sex to ask a rude question.
“I think you’re the best hunter in Africa, Blickie, but there are times when your humour is gruesome. Why in hell didn’t you shoot?”
Blix extracted a bug from Doctor Turvy’s elixir of life and shrugged.
“Don’t be silly. You know as well as I do why I didn’t shoot. Those elephant are for Winston.”
“Of course I know—but what if that bull had charged?”
Farah the faithful produced another drink, and Blix produced a non sequitur. He stared upward into the leaves of the baobab tree and sighed like a poet in love.
“There’s an old adage,” he said, “translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages—‘Life is life and fun is fun, but it’s all so quiet when the goldfish die.’ ”
ELLA MAILLART
(1903–)
The author of several travel books, Ella Maillart was one of the first writers to consider the inner journey. She strove to interweave political and historical details with the personal and the everyday, to create a form of travel writing that cuts deeper into issues not normally associated with the genre. In her quest for personal discovery, she lived among Kirghiz and Kazakh tribesmen in the 1930s and, in Forbidden Journey, she recounts a trip across the Gobi and Takla Makan deserts to the Hindu Kush. Part of what motivated the trip from Geneva to Kabul to Peshawar, Pakistan, during the Second World War recounted in The Cruel Way was her wish to confront and better understand the dark side of her friend, Christina, who was seeking freedom and a personal cure for her severe drug addiction. Maillart has curtailed her travels in the last two decades, and now lives in Geneva, Switzerland.
from THE CRUEL WAY
At dusk we slipped through the mat of dust that hung motionless above the road. Under our headlights, riders clothed in white seemed to be moving silently through smoke. Later we thought with excitement that we were overtaking majestically pacing elephants, their narrow and sloping hindquarters ending in a tiny tail. But they were only tall camels, their grey bulk made of two vertical sacks that built a massive ridge above their backs.
Akcha loomed splendidly out of the night, a pale angular citadel surrounded by low flat-roofed houses. Men were stretched on their stringed charpoys; a group of brightly painted buses rested their tired bones, their bonnets touching. Once more we had that direct physical feeling of being in a remote corner of the world.
It was four in the morning, we had drunk our tea and wanted to start, hoping to reach Mazar-i-Sharif before the heat of noon. Since the road was now easy, we dismissed the escort who so cramped our style. But our man began to shout and soon we had many stalwart Afghans around us. Wearing a stylish khalat with brown stripes, an “old beard” who spoke excellent Russian tried to settle the controversy. He understood our point: we were giving a letter to our escort saying he was not to be blamed because we had left him behind. In such a heat, when the slightest pressure exasperated our skin, we could not long bear to be squeezed three in front, especially when the man’s dirty socks forced us to live with a handkerchief to our noses. (I do not know if all this was translated, but the sympathy of the crowd was certainly not with our horrible policeman.)
Meanwhile, because we did not want to lose face, the precious morning hours drifted away. The escort would only let us go if the mayor of Akcha ordered him. The interpreter went to the mayor. At last he returned accompanied by a new escort and a tray of figs for us! Defeated and impatient to start, we took the new man on board.
He was very tall and did not know how to keep his knees steady; he was prognathous and did not know how to keep his mouth shut. He had to keep it open anyhow, to be sick from the motion of the car: it was a change from his predecessor’s spitting of tobacco-juice. This was enough to spoil the quaint charm of travelling through what looked like a lunar country asphyxiated by too much dry heat. It was the nature of the soil and the lack of relief, no doubt, that were responsible for the deadly whiteness of the light. Moving with the wind, the car was unbearably hot.
The country was quite flat, sometimes furrowed by great irrigation channels which disturbed waters born high and far among the hills of central Afghanistan, in the cool lakes of the Band-i-Amir which we were to visit.
To give some respite to our policeman, we halted at a hut in the desert where an Uzbek tending his samovar sold us some thirst-quenching chai sabz or green tea. The shade cast by the hut was all that could be found. A decent Afghan was sleeping there on the beaten earth, and before we could prevent it he was kicked awake and sent away by our man. It filled us with anger.
And that on the morning when we were approaching the ruins of Balkh, Bactres, the Mother of Cities, known to h
ave been twenty miles in circumference, but dead now in this plain of the Oxus which, in the sixteenth century B.C. so they say, witnessed the first Aryan migration on its way to India by way of Herat, Kandahar and the Bolan pass south of Quetta. Balkh, where the religion of Zoroaster was for the first time adopted by a king, Balkh, where according to Marco Polo, Alexander the Great married the daughter of Darius, the town whose satrap Bessus had killed that Darius while he was escaping through Khorassan.
In the second century B.C. Chang Kien was at the head of a Chinese mission sent to the Yue-chi of Sogdiana (which is the same as Bactria); his journey seems to mark the beginning of the silk trade across Asia. The Yue-chi were Indo-Scythians who had recently invaded the country, until then a great outpost of Hellenism. “It is because these successors of Alexander the Great were so forceful and active that you are going to excavate Græco-Buddhist remains,” I said to Christina.
The white Huns were the next to invade Bactria in the fifth century A.D. In spite of their ravages, the country was still Buddhistic in style when two centuries later Hsuan Tsang the pilgrim arrived from China on his way to India “in search of wisdom”—Hsuan Tsang whose tracks I have crossed during three journeys to Central Asia and whose writings had so greatly helped me to appreciate what I saw. There were still, in Balkh, a hundred monasteries rich in relics of the Buddha when he arrived from Kunduz, the capital of the Western Turks who ruled over Afghan Turkestan or Tokharestan.
At Balkh, Hsuan Tsang admired “a magnificent plateau”: there must have been more water in the country then than there is nowadays. The change may be due to the fact, affirmed by geologists, that the crust of the earth is still rising in this part of the world.