Out of Africa: And Shadows on the Grass

by Isak Dinesen

  That night there were between two and three thousand dancers at the dancing-place by my house. The moon was full, and there was no breath of wind, the circle of small fires blazed and glowed a long way into the woods and sent up thin columns of smoke towards the sky. It was a fine Ngoma, I have seen no finer anywhere.

  The Prince made the tour of the forest ball-room, stopping to speak to the old Chiefs one after the other. He spoke to them in Swahili, and they, hanging on to their sticks, gave him their answers keenly from smiling, toothless mouths, after which, for obvious reasons, the conversation ceased. He made an impression on the Ancients; afterwards they liked to speak about him. Africans laugh for reasons different from those of Europeans, most often from sheer spite but often also from mere content—for a long time they laughed when they spoke of the Prince, as if we had been discussing a very precious baby. I believe that the Prince himself was pleased with the Ngoma.

  A fortnight later I again sent for the Kikuyu Chiefs. I had, I said to them, on the day of the Ngoma found myself in a difficult position, I had asked them to help me and they had helped me, now I wanted to thank them. I handed over a present to each of them, but by now I do not remember whether of a particularly fine rug or a goat.

  A very old man, after they had had a few minutes to let my message sink into them, came up and spoke to me. “Now you have told us, Msabu,” he said, “that on the day of the great Ngoma you found yourself in a difficult position, and you asked us to help you and we helped you. Now you wanted to thank us, so you have given each of us a present. May we now say something to you?” This is a common address with Natives; you cannot well refuse the request, but after it you will have to be prepared for anything. I told the old man that he was free to say to me what he liked. “Msabu,” he said with much weight and satisfaction. “I shall, then, like to tell you something of which among ourselves we have talked much, and about which we are happy. We think that on the night when the Toto a Soldani came here to see our young men and virgins dance, among the Msabus present you had on the nicest frock. It pleased our hearts, Msabu, it still pleases our hearts when we think about it. For we all think that here, every day on the farm, you are terribly badly dressed.”

  I did not contradict him. Generally on the farm, I wore old khaki slacks stained with oil, mud and fouling. I felt that my people had dreaded, that upon a historical occasion on the farm and at a moment when I had called upon them to do their utmost, to see me let them down.

  For the sake of my female readers I shall here insert that at the time of the Prince’s visit I had not been to Europe for four years and could have no real idea as to what fashions there were like. So I asked the house in Paris, which had got my measures and was to make my frock, to follow their own notions about what would be truly chic. “Nous sommes convaincus, Madam,” they wrote back, “que vous serez la plus belle.” They had had the good sense to make me, in the heyday of the chemise frock—which was nothing but two vertical lines starting below the armpits and cut off about the knee—a so-called robe de style not likely to go out of fashion, with a hooped skirt of great fullness, in silver brocade. I think that it pleased the hearts of my people to see me, among the lank women of the dinner party, suddenly swell out to an unexpected voluminousness.

  As now the old Chiefs and I in our talk together had got on to that very pleasant theme of my frock, I wanted to hear more of what they thought about it. But at this moment Farah stepped on to the stage, followed by Kamante carrying a wooden bowl that contained tombacco—snuff—for my guests. He looked approving but stern. He was not insensitive to popularity, but he was resolved on keeping the Kikuyu in their place, and me in mine.

  “Wait a minute, Farah,” I said. “I am talking with the old people, they are talking with me.”

  “No, Memsahib,” said Farah. “No. Now these Kikuyus have said enough about this frock. Now it is time that they have this tombacco.”

  Then came the hard times on the farm, and my certainty that I could not keep it. And then began my ever-repeated travels to Nairobi with such sorry aims as keeping my creditors quiet, obtaining a better price for the farm and, at the very end, after I had in reality lost the farm and become, so to say, a tenant in my own house, securing for my squatters the piece of land in the Reserve where according to their wish they could remain together. It took a long time before I could make the Government consent to my scheme. On these expeditions Farah was always with me.

  And now it happened that he unlocked and opened chests of which till then I had not known, and displayed a truly royal splendour. He brought out silk robes, gold-embroidered waistcoats, and turbans in glowing and burning reds and blues, or all white—which is a rare thing to see and must be the real gala head-dress of the Somali—heavy gold rings and knives in silver- and ivory-mounted sheaths, with a riding whip of giraffe hide inlaid with gold, and in these things he looked like the Caliph Harun-al-Rashid’s own bodyguard. He followed me, very erect, at a distance of five feet where I walked, in my old slacks and patched shoes, up and down Nairobi streets. There he and I became a true Unity, as picturesque, I believe, as that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. There he lifted up me and himself to a classic plane, such as that of which the Norwegian poet Wergeland speaks:

  Death follows the happy man like a stern master,

  The unfortunate like a servant,

  Who is ever ready to receive his master’s cloak and mask.

  When I had sold all the contents of my house, my panelled rooms became sounding-boards. If I sat down on one of the packing-cases containing things to be sent off, which were now my only furniture, voices and tunes of old rang through the nobly bare room intensified, clear. When during these months a visitor came to the farm, Farah stood forth, holding open the door to the empty rooms as if he had been doorkeeper to an imperial palace.

  No friend, brother or lover, no nabob suddenly presenting me with the amount of money needed to keep the farm, could have done for me what my servant Farah then did. Even if I had got nothing else for which to be grateful to him—but that I have got, and more than I can set down here—I should still for the sake of these months, now, thirty years after, and as long as I live, be in debt to him.

  BARUA A SOLDANI

  Readers of my book Out of Africa may remember how, on a New Year’s morning, before sunrise—while the stars, on the point of withdrawing and vanishing into the dome of the sky, were still hanging on it like big luminous drops, and the air still had in it the strange limpidity and depth, like well water, of African dawn—together with Denys Finch-Hatton and his Kikuyu chauffeur, Kanuthia, I was driving along a very bad road in the Masai Reserve, and there shot a lion upon a dead giraffe.

  Later on, Denys and I were accused of having shot the giraffe, a thing not allowed by the game laws. The Game Department in your shooting licence gave you the right to hunt, shoot or capture so and so many head of such and such game—I sometimes wondered by what right the Game Department dealt out such rights—and the giraffe was not included. Lions, however, you might shoot at any time, within the distance of thirty miles to a farm. But Kanuthia could bear us up in our statement that the giraffe had been dead a day or two before we came upon it.

  I do not know whether the lion had actually killed the giraffe. Lions kill by breaking the necks of their victims, and in view of the height of the giraffe’s shoulders and neck the thing seems unlikely. On the other hand the strength and energy of the lion are indeed incredible things, and hunters have solemnly assured me that they have seen giraffes being killed by lions.

  The squatters on my farm during the past three months had been up to the house begging me to shoot a lion “mbaya sana”—very bad—which was following and worrying their herds. The lion that I met this morning and which, even on our close approach, remained on the back of his prey, absorbed in his meal and one with it, and only slightly stirring in the dim air, might well be the very same killer, the cause of so much woe over precious cows and bullocks. We were a
bout twenty miles from the border of the farm, but a distance of twenty miles means nothing to a lion. If it were he, ought I not to shoot him when he himself gave me the chance? Denys, as Kanuthia slowed down the car, whispered to me: “You shoot this time.” I had not got my own rifle with me, so he handed me his. I was never keen to shoot with his rifle, it was too heavy and in particular too long for me. But my old friend Uncle Charles Bulpett had told me: “The person who can take delight in a sweet tune without wanting to learn it, in a beautiful woman without wanting to possess her, or in a magnificent head of game without wanting to shoot it, has not got a human heart.” So that the shot, here before daybreak, was in reality a declaration of love—and ought not then the weapon to be of the very first quality?

  Or it may be said that hunting is ever a love-affair. The hunter is in love with the game, real hunters are true animal lovers. But during the hours of the hunt itself he is more than that, he is infatuated with the head of game which he follows and means to make his own; nothing much besides it exists to him in the world. Only, in general, the infatuation will be somewhat one-sided. The gazelles and antelopes and the zebra, which on safari you shoot to get meat for your porters, are timid and will make themselves scarce and in their own strange way disappear before your eyes; the hunter must take wind and terrain into account and sneak close to them slowly and silently without their realizing the danger. It is a fine and fascinating art, in the spirit of that masterpiece of my countryman Sören Kierkegaard, The Seducer’s Diary, and it may, in the same way, provide the hunter with moments of great drama and with opportunity for skill and cunning, and for self-gratulations. Yet to me this pursuit was never the real thing. And even the big game, in the hunting of which there is danger, the buffalo or the rhino, very rarely attack without being attacked, or believing that they are being attacked.

  Elephant-hunting is a sport of its own. For the elephant, which through centuries has been the one head of game hunted for profit, in the course of time has adopted man into his scheme of things, with deep distrust. Our nearness to him is a challenge which he will never disregard; he comes towards us, straightly and quickly, on his own, a towering, overwhelming structure, massive as cast iron and lithe as running water. “What time he lifteth up himself on high, the mighty are afraid.” Out go his ears like a dragon’s wings, giving him a grotesque likeness to the small lap-dog called a papillon; his formidable trunk, crumpled up accordion-like, rises above us like a lifted scourge. There is passion in our meeting, posi-tiveness on both sides; but on his side there is no pleasure in the adventure, he is driven on by just wrath, and is settling an ancient family feud.

  In very old days the elephant, upon the roof of the earth, led an existence deeply satisfying to himself and fit to be set up as an example to the rest of creation: that of being mighty and powerful beyond anyone’s attack, attacking no one. The grandiose and idyllic modus vivendi lasted till an old Chinese painter had his eyes opened to the sublimity of ivory as a background to his paintings, or a young dancer of Zanzibar hers to the beauty of an ivory anklet. Then they began to appear to all sides of him, small alarming figures in the landscape drawing closer: the Wanderobo with his poisoned arrows, the Arab ivory-hunter with his long silver-mounted muzzle-loader, and the white professional elephant-killer with his heavy rifle. The manifestation of the glory of God was turned into an object of exploitation. Is it to be wondered at that he cannot forgive us?

  Yet there is always something magnanimous about elephants. To follow a rhino in his own country is hard work; the space that he clears in the thorn-thicket is just a few inches too low for the hunter, and he will have to keep his head bent a little all the time. The elephant on his march through dense forest calmly tramples out a green fragrant tunnel, lofty like the nave of a cathedral. I once followed a herd of elephants for over a fortnight, walking in shade all the time. (In the end, unexpectedly, on the top of a very steep hill and in perfect security myself, I came upon the whole troop pacing in Indian file below me. I did not kill any of them and never saw them again.) There is a morally edifying quality as well in the very aspect of an elephant—on seeing four elephants walking together on the plain, I at once felt that I had been shown black stone sculptures of the four major Prophets. On the chessboard the elephant takes his course, irresistible, in a straight line. And the highest decoration of Denmark is the Order of the Elephant.

  But a lion-hunt each single time is an affair of perfect harmony, a deep, burning, mutual desire and reverence between two truthful and undaunted creatures, on the same wave-length. A lion on the plain bears a greater likeness to ancient monumental stone lions than to the lion which to-day you see in a zoo; the sight of him goes straight to the heart. Dante cannot have been more deeply amazed and moved at the first sight of Beatrice in a street of Florence. Gazing back into the past I do, I believe, remember each individual lion I have seen—his coming into the picture, his slow raising or rapid turning of the head, the strange, snakelike swaying of his tail. “Praise be to thee, Lord, for Brother Lion, the which is very calm, with mighty paws, and flows through the flowing grass, red-mouthed, silent, with the roar of the thunder ready in his chest.” And he himself, catching sight of me, may have been struck, somewhere under his royal mane, by the ring of a similar Te Deum: “Praise be to thee, Lord, for my sister of Europe, who is young, and has come out to me on the plain in the night.”

  In old days the lion was likely to come out of the matter triumphant. Later we have got such effective weapons that the test of strength can hardly be called fair—still I have had more than one friend killed by lions. Nowadays great sportsmen hunt with cameras. The practice started while I was still in Africa; Denys as a white hunter took out millionaires from many countries, and they brought back magnificent pictures, the which however to my mind (because I do not see eye to eye with the camera) bore less real likeness to their object than the chalk portraits drawn up on the kitchen door by our Native porters. It is a more refined sport than shooting, and provided you can make the lion join into the spirit of it you may here, at the end of a pleasant, platonic affair, without bloodshed on either side, blow one another a kiss and part like civilized beings. I have no real knowledge of the art; I was a fairly good shot with a rifle, but I cannot photograph.

  When I first came out to Africa I could not live without getting a fine specimen of each single kind of African game. In my last ten years out there I did not fire a shot except in order to get meat for my Natives. It became to me an unreasonable thing, indeed in itself ugly or vulgar, for the sake of a few hours’ excitement to put out a life that belonged in the great landscape and had grown up in it for ten or twenty, or—as in the case of buffaloes and elephants—for fifty or a hundred years. But lion-hunting was irresistible to me; I shot my last lion a short time before I left Africa.

  As now on this New Year’s morning as noiselessly as possible I got down from the car and, through the long wet grass that washed my hands, the rifle, and my face, slowly walked closer to the lion, he stirred, rose and stood up immovable, his shoulder towards me, as fine a target for a shot as in the course of a lifetime you would get anywhere in the world. The sun by now was just below the horizon, the morning sky behind the dark silhouette was clear like liquid gold. I was struck by a thought: “I have seen you before, I know you well. But from where?” The answer came at once: “It is a lion out of the royal coat of arms of Denmark, one of our three dark-blue lions on gold ground. Lion posant or it is called in the heraldic language—he knows it himself.” As I sat down on the ground, got Denys’ rifle into position on my knee and took aim, I made a resolution: “If I get this lion, the King of Denmark is to have the skin.”

  As the shot fell, booming loudly in the still morning landscape and echoing from the hills, it looked to me as if the lion was carried a couple of feet straight upwards into the air before he came down and collapsed. He had been hit in the heart, it was as it should be.

  I have told in my book of how I sat
and watched Denys and Kanuthia flaying the lion. Going back to that morning after so many years it seems all alive and clear round me, hard to leave once more. I knew then, without reflecting, that I was up at great height upon the roof of the world, a small figure in the tremendous retort of earth and air, yet one with it; I did not know that I was at the height and upon the roof of my own life. The grass on the slope where I sat was short as a mowed lawn, the Masai having burned it off in patches in order to get fresh grazing for their herds, the Highland air was intoxicating, like wine, the shadows of the vultures ran across my feet. From where I sat I could gaze far away: at a very long distance, by the line of the tall acacia trees somewhat below me, three giraffes came into sight, stood still for a few minutes and walked off. “Praise be to thee, Lord, for Sister Giraffe, the which is an ambler, full of grace, exceedingly demure and absent-minded, and carries her small head high above the grass, with long lashes to her veiled eyes, and which is so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plain in long garbs, draperies of morning mist or mirage.”

  Now it fell out that this lion was an exceptionally fine specimen, what out in his own country they call a black-maned lion, with his thick dark mane growing all back over his shoulder-blades. Denys’ gun-bearer, who had seen many hundred lion-skins, declared this one to be the finest he had ever come across. And as in that same spring I was going on a visit to Denmark after four years in Africa, I took the skin with me and on my way, in London, gave it to the firm of Rowland Ward to be cured and set up.