by Helen Wells
As each blood sample was taken, Kavarondi put a bracelet of adhesive tape around the person’s wrist and wrote his name and number on it. Bob then put the same number on the test tube of blood—the same procedure they had used with the people who were hospitalized. Cherry, Bob, and Kavarondi kept on taking blood samples until midafternoon.
At last Bob said, “I guess that’s as much as we can do this afternoon. Please clean the equipment, Kavarondi, and put it away. Cherry, where are those record forms?” The young doctor wiped his forehead. “I’ll run my preliminary tests later this evening, and we’ll have the whole thing done in a day or two. Whew! Me, I’m for a long, cool glass of iced tea, in this heat.”
As they were finishing up, Ed Smith came in. “Say, this looks interesting.” He bent over the rack of test tubes, peering. “What are all these?”
Bob explained how blood samples were being taken of all the people in the town; how he was running his own tests on them; and, how later, he was going to send them to the Abercrombie laboratory in Washington for a closer analysis.
“Well, I must say, Doc, that you do things pretty thoroughly—even back here in this jungle wilderness.”
The doctor did not look flattered. He said:
“With any medical problem, lab analysis is a must. You know that, Smith, especially with a problem as tough as this one.”
Smith backed off and began to examine possible camera angles of the little lab through a square that he made with his thumbs and forefingers.
“We’ll have some interesting pictures here,” he said when he was finished. “I want to get some of you and Miss Ames actually taking the samples—and of course of this young woman here.” He nodded at Kavarondi. “Now how do you send these test tubes to the States?”
Bob showed him a small cardboard box, divided inside into twelve narrow compartments. “The tubes,” he said, “as you can see, are sealed with these rubber stoppers. Then we’ll pack the whole carton tightly with cotton. And I have made arrangements with the Military Air Transport to fly them directly to our people in Washington.”
“Good planning,” the photographer said.
“Did you find the village interesting?” Bob asked.
“You bet,” Smith said. “I explored all of it. I think I’ll load my cameras tomorrow morning and get down to work.”
After dinner that evening the Americans sat around the table, listening as usual to the KBC newscast.
When the personal messages were over, Bob flipped the switch to “send” and got off a progress report to Tom Gikingu in Nairobi.
“Look,” Ed Smith said. “Since that radio of yours is two way, do you mind if I send a message into town?”
“Help yourself,” Bob told him.
Smith picked up the mike. “This is Ed Smith with the Abercrombie medical party at Ngogo. Could you get this message to Mr. Simon at the New Stanley?”
“Go ahead,” the voice in Nairobi said.
“Here’s the message. Quote. I have my story angle figured out. Contact me here within a few days. End quote.”
He put the mike back on its hook. “Simon is the Click representative for Africa,” he explained. “And by good luck he happens to be in Nairobi this week.”
“Well,” Cherry said to herself, “I guess I was wrong. He really does know the people at the magazine.” And she remembered what Bob had said about her being too suspicious.
CHAPTER VIII
The Pretty Pebble
IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL SUNDAY MORNING. THE SUN BURNED bright and hot over the grove of acacia trees, and songbirds caroled merrily in the thickets.
The past four days had been ones of intense activity for everyone in Ngogo. Cherry and Bob had finished the first round of blood tests. All the patients in the hospital had been given their second injection of Tryparsamide, and a few were showing definite signs of improvement. “But don’t think we have licked the thing overnight,” Bob cautioned Cherry. “Trypanosomiasis strikes like a cobra and leaves like a snail, as the saying goes.”
Bob had taken his initial batch of blood samples to the airport and seen them safely off to Washington. Ed Smith, saying that he wanted to take some film into town to be developed, had gone with him.
But now it was a quiet Sunday; a day of rest for all hands.
Little Kandi had recovered beautifully from his scorpion sting, and now he had taken to following Cherry around like a faithful puppy dog. At the moment he was sitting on the thin grass at her feet, ready to jump up instantly if she needed anything. He persisted in calling himself “Missy Sherry’s house boy,” and as such he had adopted a superior attitude toward the other children in the village.
“I have an idea,” Jeff Jordan said. “Let’s go on a picnic. You remember that little pool we found up on the bend in the river, Chuck? It would be a perfect spot.”
“Wonderful!” Cherry beamed. “I haven’t been on a picnic since I don’t know when.” She jumped up. “Come on, Kandi. Let’s go help Tomi fix some food.”
“Not me, pal,” Chuck said. “I’m not gonna move out of this shade. You all have fun.”
“Count me out, too,” Ed Smith added. “This sun is just right for color pictures—and I don’t want to let it go to waste.”
“Well, how about you, Doctor?” Jeff asked.
“No,” Bob replied. “I have things to do. But why don’t you take Kavarondi? She’s been working hard, and I’m sure she’d enjoy the outing.”
Half an hour later, Cherry, Kavarondi, and Jeff rounded a bend in the river and approached the quiet pool. Jeff carried the lunch basket. Kandi tagged along, stopping now and then to pick wildflowers. Suddenly Jeff grabbed Cherry’s arm and pulled her to a halt. “Sh-h!” he whispered. “Don’t make a sound! Just look at that!”
A small, tan antelope that had been swimming in the river sank down out of sight at the sound of their approach. Presently he emerged, with only his eyes, his ears, and his nostrils protruding above the water. Then he disappeared again, and they saw no more of him.
“My gracious!” Cherry gasped. “Did the poor thing drown?”
“No, he’s O.K.,” Jeff said. “That was a sitatunga. He’s the only antelope in the world that can swim under water. When he senses danger, he just submerges like a submarine, and away he goes. They are so rare that the natives say it’s good luck to see them. I’ve heard about them, but I never figured I’d ever actually run into one.”
They walked on to the small beach that rimmed the pool. Papyrus-like reeds grew at the water’s edge, and huge purple flowers blossomed from thick vines that climbed up the trees. Great butterflies, three or four times as large as any that Cherry had ever seen, hovered in the sweet-scented air.
Jeff spread out a blanket and put the lunch basket down upon it. Kandi had wandered down to the water and began to play along the bank. Kavarondi sat in the shade of a tree, reading the nursing manual Cherry had loaned her. Cherry and Jeff leaned back and let the bright sun shine into their faces.
“What’s your girl like?” Cherry asked.
“My girl?”
“The one back in the States.”
“Where did you get the idea that I had a girl back in the States?” Jeff wrinkled his brows.
“The other day you asked Mr. Smith to be sure and take a good picture of you so you could send it home to your girl.”
Jeff laughed. “Oh, I was just saying that for fun. But now if I did have a girl back home, she’d be—let’s see”—he studied Cherry’s face with mock seriousness—“she’d have coal-black hair, and dark eyes—And, oh yes, she’d be a nurse so that she could take good care of me if I caught a cold or broke an arm or something.”
“Well,” Cherry interrupted, smiling, “ask a silly question and you get a silly answer.”
“I don’t know what is so silly about that,” Jeff said. “I was just describing my idea of a pretty girl.”
As Jeff spoke, Kandi ran up from the water’s edge calling excitedly. “Missy Sherry! M
issy Sherry! Look at the pretty pebble Kandi find!”
In his hand he held a white, oval-shaped stone, about the size of a bird’s egg, which he dropped proudly into Cherry’s palm. The stone sparkled and glistened in the sun, reflecting rays of the bright sunlight from its smoothly polished surface. The thought of diamonds flashed through Cherry’s mind as she turned the stone round and round and looked at it closely.
“Jeff,” she said, “you remember the news story we heard on the radio the other night—about the diamond strike somewhere around here? Do you think that this could possibly be a rough diamond?”
Jeff examined the pretty pebble. “I wish it was,” he said at last. “I’m no mineralogist, but I know enough about stones to know that this is just a nice piece of quartz crystal, worth about a dollar as a rock collector’s item. It’s been rolling around on the bottom of this river for maybe a thousand years or more—scraping against sand and other rocks—and that’s how it got its high polish.” He shook his head and grinned. “Africa is full of diamonds—that’s for sure. But this isn’t one of them. And besides, you don’t find diamonds north of Tanganyika.”
Cherry gave the stone back to Kandi. “Keep it for your little sister,” she said. “Now let’s dig into that lunch basket. I’m hungry.”
They got back to the hospital just as the fiery sun was setting over the western mountains. Bob, Chuck, and Ed Smith were lounging in canvas chairs in front of the outdoor fire. Bob was reading a medical journal, but put it aside.
“We were lucky,” Cherry told them. “We saw a sitatunga.”
“A what?”
Jeff explained about the diving antelope.
“And Kandi found a diamond,” Cherry went on.
Ed Smith jumped up from his chair. “You found a diamond? What do you mean a diamond?” His eyes popped with excitement.
“Oh, you needn’t get so excited, it wasn’t a real diamond,” Cherry said. “Although it looks like one. It’s just a pretty piece of—what did you say, Jeff?—quartz. Show the gentleman, Kandi.”
The photographer settled back into his chair with a sigh of relief. Cherry wondered whether Smith was always so excitable. Or only on certain subjects, like diamonds?
“You know,” Bob said reflectively, “that was how the first African diamond was found—by a boy playing along a riverbank. And it was that diamond that caused the rush of European settlers, and built Africa up to the great country it is becoming now.”
“Maybe Africa would be better off today,” Jeff said, “if the boy had thrown the diamond back into the water and white men had never come here at all.”
Bob shrugged. “Who knows? Speaking of white man’s civilization, how would you like to drive Cherry into Nairobi tomorrow? There are a few things I need, and she hasn’t been out of camp since we first got here. Cherry, can Kavarondi and Sara manage the clinic without you for a few hours?”
Cherry thought. “Yes, if I have two hours first to set up the day’s work. And I must give three treatments. And if no emergencies! Mondays can be busy. With all those ifs—hmm—Yes, can do.” She smiled. “A girl likes to go shopping now and then, even if she really doesn’t need anything.”
Nairobi’s streets were bustling with traffic as always when Jeff drove the Land Rover up in front of the New Stanley Hotel and parked.
“Go get the shopping out of your system,” Jeff told her, “and I’ll meet you back here in an hour or so.”
Walking along the broad sidewalk, Cherry felt like a Kenya veteran. Her face was browned from exposure to the broiling sun, her khaki clothes had been laundered just often enough not to look brand new like a greenhorn’s, and her hair—That’s what she’d do! She’d stop in at the first beauty shop she saw!
Two hours later, as she sat on the wide hotel veranda reflecting that nothing perked up a girl quite so much as having her hair done, Jeff came bounding up the steps. His face was flushed and his voice rang with excitement.
“Come on and see the fun! There’s a lion loose at the airport.”
“You’re joking!” Cherry gasped. “A real, live wild lion?”
“That’s what a fellow down the street said. Hop in the car and we’ll go see for ourselves.”
At Eastleigh Airport a cordon of police was holding back the small crowd that had gathered. A dozen men, some of them with guns, had lassoed the lion and were tugging and pulling to get it into a large iron-barred cage. The animal was a small male, Cherry saw, with just the beginnings of a black mane, and he was putting up a stubborn, if losing, battle for his freedom.
“It seems the little beggar wandered in from the parkland last night,” a tall man with an English accent replied to Jeff’s question. “And he frightened a group of tourists half out of their wits this morning just as they were disembarking from a BOAC plane.”
Cherry smiled to herself, thinking that a lion rampaging around the airport was a good introduction to Africa for tourists. “They’ll be telling the story to their grandchildren,” she said to Jeff.
“Yes,” Jeff replied, “and when we tell Smith about this, he’ll be mighty sorry he didn’t come with us. Boy! What a picture this would make for his magazine story!”
At last the game wardens managed to haul the young lion into the cage, lock it, and get it onto a truck. “Well, I guess the show is over,” Jeff said. “They’ll take the youngster back out to the park—and I’ll bet he will never wander off the reservation again.”
As they turned to walk back to their car, Cherry saw a bright orange plane sitting beside a hangar. With that color, it could only be the plane that Gus Fisher had flown into their camp. And, sure enough, she recognized the tall, skinny pilot, leaning against the lower wing, talking to a slightly built man. The pilot reached into the cockpit and brought out a small briefcase which he handed to his companion. When the man reached for it, he turned halfway around and Cherry saw his face. With a start, she recognized the little Greek trader they had seen in the Cairo café. What was his name? Suddenly she remembered—Krynos! That was it. She waved a greeting to them. The motion of her arm caught their eyes. Both men looked up, and when they saw her, quickly turned their faces away without any sign of recognition. Krynos strode off and climbed into a waiting car. The scarecrow pilot squeezed into the orange plane.
What a strange way to act, Cherry thought. She was sure they must have seen her. She tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter. But for both of them to avoid her—it was odd.
“That pilot sure was right,” Jeff said, cutting into her thoughts. “You can spot his plane a mile away. But he didn’t recognize us when you waved.”
CHAPTER IX
Visitors
WALKING THROUGH THE COMPOUND AFTER LUNCH THE next day, Cherry was encouraged by all the changes she and the others had helped to make in the little village of Ngogo. The inner walls of the native huts gleamed with their coats of whitewash. The flower seeds that had been planted in the dooryards had already begun to sprout, thanks to the hot African sun and the rich, black African soil.
The hospital and the day clinic were busier than ever. But Kavarondi and Sara had proved to be apt pupils, and they had taken much of the routine work off Cherry’s shoulders, making daily progress reports on every patient. One of Cherry’s chief responsibilities—and one that she didn’t feel she could yet pass along to the student nurses—was helping Dr. Bob take regular blood samples from each sleeping-sickness patient for analysis.
Sometimes, in the evenings, she gathered groups of the children around her on the hospital steps, or in front of Tomi’s fire, and told them stories—Aesop’s fables, Mother Goose, and tales from American folklore like Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, and Davy Crockett. Often the older people of the village would come up quietly and sit around the edges of the group. And now and then one of them would respond in kind by retelling the age-old legends of Africa. Since the tribes of this part of Africa had no written language, such tales as these were their only way of handing down past histor
y from generation to generation. And from them, Cherry thought, she learned more about the real Africa, in terms of its people and its customs, than from any of the books she had read.
Today, as she rounded the clinic building, she heard the roar of a motor and the screech of tires. When she got to the front steps, she saw Bob and Jeff standing beside the jeep that had just pulled up.
“Look who’s here, Cherry,” Bob shouted. “It’s our old friend from Cairo.”
Sure enough, the man behind the wheel was Spiro Krynos.
“Good afternoon, Miss Ames,” the Greek said with his slight accent. “It is most pleasant to see you once again.” He stepped out of the car and offered his hand.
“We almost met yesterday afternoon,” Cherry said. “Out at the Nairobi airport when the men were chasing that lion.”
Krynos shook his head, a puzzled look on his face.
“No-o,” he said slowly, “it couldn’t have been me. I’ve spent the last two days up north and haven’t been in Nairobi for a week.” He smiled his friendly smile. “You must have seen someone who looked like me. Although I wouldn’t wish that resemblance on anyone.”
Cherry knew that the man was lying, but she couldn’t imagine why. Well, she reasoned, it was his business—although it troubled her. What had he received from Gus Fisher, in that briefcase?
“What brings you out this way, Mr. Krynos?” Bob asked.
“You may recall,” Krynos replied, “that I told you I was a dealer in pyrethrum. I came down here to look over the new crop. When I remembered that you were going to establish your hospital here, I thought to stop by and say hello.”