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.” ’
XVIII
Captives of the Rivers
THE ONLY DISADVANTAGE IN surviving a dangerous experience lies in the fact that your story of it tends to be anticlimactic. You can never carry on right through the point where whatever it is that threatens your life actually takes it — and get anybody to believe you. The world is full of sceptics.
Blix is the only man I know who could write posthumously about a fatal happening without arousing doubtful comment. He went about for years in Africa with enough malaria in his system to cause the undoing of ten ordinary men. Every now and then, when the moment seemed propitious, the malaria demon would go through all the formalities of a coup de grâce and then walk away, leaving Blix, more often than not, huddled motionless on a forest path without even Doctor Turvy for comfort. A day later, Blix would be on his way again, resembling a half-brother to Death, but shooting just as straight as he always had and performing his job with his usual competence.
Like the Irish, of whom it is said that they never know when they are beaten, Blix never knew when he was dead. He was charged by a bull elephant once and fell against a tree in attempting a sidestep. Blix lay flat on his back while the bull tore the tree from its roots, ground most of it into the earth within inches of Blix’s body, and then stormed away in the blind conviction that his puny enemy was dead. To this day, Blix argues that the bull was wrong, but everybody is aware that Nordic blood sometimes bestows a stubbornness, impervious to conviction, upon its bearers.
But there were occasions when Blix was the victim of more commonplace, even tedious, hardships.
Winston had got the elephant that had almost got Blix and me. That elephant was big, but not big enough for the dynamic Mr. Guest, who seems to wring from each moment of his life its ultimate squeal of excitement, so Blix and I took off together again and went scouting toward a place called Ithumba.
For a long time we saw nothing, but on the way back, flying over the Yatta Plateau, we found a colossal bull grazing in majestic loneliness amongst the thorn trees and the thicket.
A bull like that is a challenge to a hunter. It is one thing to track down a herd with its cows and calves and its republican method of formulating communal policy, but it is another thing to tackle a seasoned individualist unfettered by responsibility — selfish, worldly-wise, and quick to act.
We returned to camp about mid-afternoon and Winston decided to go straight after the bull. Big as Winston is and physically powerful as he is, he could hardly have hesitated, with honour, in ordering the advance. There was the elephant and there was Winston — with a possible fifteen miles between them. Man and beast, notwithstanding, it brought to mind those two mutually respectful sons of Greece who meet so often in print without anybody’s ever knowing the outcome. Winston heard, in our description of the lone colossus, the call of Destiny. Late as it was, he commanded action.
Blix fixed up a light safari, using about fifteen porters. This contingent, organized for mobility, carried mostly non-edible supplies, and would strike out across country, while, with Farah and Arab Ruta in joint command, a couple of lorries were sent around, over what roads there were, to establish new headquarters at Ithumba. The plan had an almost military flavour.
Some idea of the kind of terrain and difficulty of organization may be got from the fact that, while the foot party might expect to force its way a distance of only thirty miles in order to reach Ithumba, the lorries would have to travel more than two hundred miles in a great circle to reach the same point.
The Yatta Plateau, rising about five hundred feet from the plain, is caught between the Athi River on the west and the Tiva on the east. The plateau itself is a man-trap of bush, thicket, and thorn trees fifteen to twenty feet high, interlocked like steel mesh, dark enough and deep enough to swallow an army.
Blix’s strategy had to be simple, and was. The party would camp on the banks of the Athi for the first night, climb the plateau at dawn, hunt down the spoor and, with luck, bring Winston’s bull to bay before dark in a kind of lightning manoeuvre. Having been successful (any other expectation was of course fantastic), the party would descend the eastern slope of the plateau, wade the narrow Tiva, and arrive at Ithumba joyously bearing its treasure of ivory.
For my part, needing some servicing on the Avian, I prepared to fly back to Nyeri (about sixty miles north of Nairobi) and then return to Ithumba within three days.
‘When the plane is ready,’ Blix said, ‘fly straight to Ithumba. We’ll be waiting there.’
I took off from our camp near Kilamakoy just as Winston and Blix, like the twin heads of a determined dragon, made off through the bush with a long tail of burdened porters dragging closely behind.
I flew the hundred and eighty-odd miles up to Nyeri and landed at John Carberry’s coffee farm, Seramai.
Lord Carberry, an Irish peer with an African anchorage and an American accent, was a brilliant flyer in the days when it was still considered a noteworthy feat to drive an automobile a hundred miles and then be able to walk away from it reasonably erect. Carberry was a pilot in the First World War — and before it. After the war, he came out to British East Africa and bought and developed Seramai.
The place borders the Kikuyu Reserve near the southern hem of Mount Kenya’s foothills and lies at an altitude of nearly eight thousand feet. The country is cool, misty, and lush with rich soil and a wealth of rain. Blue-green coffee trees cover it like a geometrically tufted counterpane.
I am not sure whether the name Seramai is an ancient one bestowed by the Kikuyu or whether John Carberry thought of it himself; it means ‘Place of Death.’ If the name did have a Kikuyu origin, though, it is not likely that Carberry would have been intimidated by its hardly subtle significance. He would, I believe (if the price were reasonable and the opportunity existed), be happy to purchase, and live in, Mr. Poe’s House of Usher — granted permission to build a landing field beyond the tarn. John Carberry is an extremely intelligent and practical man, but his unorthodox sense of humour makes him, at times, almost literally a bedfellow of the dead French author who liked to use a human skull for an inkpot. ‘J. C.’ is a man who snickers when circumstances pointedly indicate the propriety of a shudder.
‘J. C.’ is what he likes to be called. Lord of the realm or not, he is fired throughout his lanky frame with a holy passion for democratic ways and manners. He has lived in the United States and loves it. He will never write one of those books comparing England and America, only to conclude that the c
ulture of the latter offers the same clinical interest as a child prodigy born of congenitally daft backwoods parents. When John Carberry says that something has gone ‘haywire,’ he says it with full appreciation of the succinct quality of American expression — with such enthusiasm, in fact, that a New York taxi-driver might count him as no more alien than a visitor from Tennessee after a month’s exposure to Times Square.
J. C. had a wonderful airplane mechanic in a Frenchman by the name of Baudet, and beyond that he had an adequate runway, a good hangar, and facilities for making minor repairs on planes. Since Tom had gone to England, it was, regardless of the distance, easier for me and more pleasant to fly to Seramai for servicing on the Avian than to use Wilson Airways. The Carberry house was always open to friends and its landing field to pilots.
June Carberry, small, nimble-minded, and attractive, presided over evenings at Seramai like a gracious pixy over a company of characters snatched from an unfinished novel originally drafted by H. Rider Haggard and written by Scott Fitzgerald, with James M. Cain looking over his shoulder. Conversation drifted from phantom elephants to the relative potency of various cocktails, to Chicago gangsters — but usually ended on aeroplanes.
John Carberry, in spite of his wife’s lack of enthusiasm for flying, could (and would) talk straight through three highballs on an aeronautic subject so relatively simple as wingflaps.
‘Watch the Amurricans,’ said J. C, ‘their commercial planes have got it over ours like a tent. Say! Listen! when I was in California …’
And we listened.
On the morning I was to return to Ithumba, I listened to J. C.’s almost gleeful chortle as we regarded the weather out of the sitting-room windows of Seramai. Normally, you could see Mount Kenya and the Aberdares; abnormally, you could at least see the Gurra Hill, not ten miles from the runway.
But on that morning you could see nothing; mountain mist had stolen down from Kenya during the night and captured the country.
J. C. shook his head and affected a deep sigh. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve always maintained that nobody could get out of here unless he could see the Gurra. Of course I’m not sure about it, because nobody has ever been jackass enough to try. I wouldn’t do it for a million dollars.’
‘That’s encouraging. What do you suggest?’
J. C. shrugged. ‘Well, there always has to be a first time, you know. I think if you bear a bit to the west and then a bit to the east, you might just get through all right. That’s only a guess, you know, but hell, Burl, you’re a good blind flyer and with a little luck — who can tell? Anyway, if you get through, just give this bottle of gin to Old Man Wicks, will you?’
It has always been a question in my mind as to whether J. C.’s nature is sadistic, or if only he prefers to paint a gloomy picture in the hope that the subsequent actuality will seem brighter by contrast. Many German flyers, having a superstition that to wish good luck brings bad luck, will see a fellow pilot off with the cheering remark, ‘ Farewell — but I hope you break your arms and legs!’ Perhaps J. C. has that superstition. At least, when I did take off, his longish face — more aristocratic, I suspect, than suits his humble taste — had a grin. But his grey eyes, in spite of it, had a flyer’s concern for a flyer’s worries.
They needn’t have had. I was pretty good at hedge-hopping. It’s only natural to be pretty good when you’re flying two feet above the treetops beneath sixty miles of fog. Your sense of self-preservation becomes extremely acute if you know that your margin of safety is barely wider than your own shoulders. You feel trapped. You can’t allow yourself any altitude or you’ll be absorbed in the fog, just as the mountains somewhere ahead of you are absorbed in it. So you manage to hang just under the roof of the narrow corridor of visibility and above the tops of the trees that look like inverted clouds, black and ready to rain. I coasted down the slopes that run from Seramai to the plains, swinging east or west to round the swell of a hill or to cling on the misty curves of a valley. And in a little while I found a blue hole and went up and through it and consulted my compass — and got to Ithumba.
The runway there was better than most and the landing was easy. Our camp was set up in the lee of a hill of rock and the tents were open and waiting. The canvas chairs were out, the lorries were side by side and empty. Everything was ready — and had been for two days. Neither Bwana Blixen, reported Arab Ruta, nor Bwana Guest had been seen or heard from since the moment they had so bravely set forth to storm the Yatta.
The trouble is that God forgot to erect any landmarks. From the air every foot of the Yatta Plateau looks like every other foot of it, every mile is like the next mile, and the one after that, and the one after that.
Years of free-lancing, scouting for elephant and flying the mail in Africa, have made me so used to looking for a smudge of smoke that even now I have a particular affinity for chimneys, campfires, and stoves that puff.
But nothing puffed on the morning I looked for Winston and Blix; nothing stirred. It seemed to me that two intelligent white men with fifteen black porters could have managed a small corkscrew of smoke at least, unless the whole lot of them had been struck dead like the crew of the Flying Dutchman.
I knew that the hunting party had taken only enough food for a couple of meals, which, according to my calculations, left them about seven meals short. That might, unless something were done about it, lead to sad, not to say morbid, consequences. What I could not understand was why they had insisted on remaining on top of the plateau when the camp at Ithumba lay just across the Tiva River. I banked and lost altitude and flew low over the Tiva to see if I could find them, perhaps in the act of fording it.
But the river had swallowed itself. It wasn’t a river any more; it was a proud and majestic flood, a mile-wide flood, a barrier of swift water defying all things that move on legs to cross it. And yet, beside the Athi, it was a lazy trickle.
The Athi, on the other side of the plateau, had got illusions of grandeur. It was sweeping over the parched country above its banks in what looked like an all-out effort to surpass the Nile. Far up in the Highlands a storm had burst, and while the sky I flew in was clean and blue as a Dutch rooftop, the Yatta was a jungle island in a rain-born sea. The gutters of Mount Kenya and the Aberdares were running deep. Winston and Blix and all their men were caught like kittens on a flooded stump; they were marooned in driest Africa.
In all likelihood the elephant they hunted was marooned as well if he had not already been shot. But in either case, dead or alive, he would have afforded small comfort.
Edible game is scarce on the Yatta, and the swollen rivers would hardly subside within a week. Given time, I knew Blix would be resourceful enough to figure a way out — possibly on rafts built of thorn trees. But, in order to work, men must eat. I nosed the Avian down toward the endless canopy of bush and zigzagged like a homeless bee.
In twenty minutes I saw their smoke. It was a wizened little string of smoke, sad and grey, and looking like the afterglow of a witch’s exit.
Blix and Winston stood by a fire, frantically heaping it with weeds and branches. They waved and swung their arms, and signalled me to come down. They were alone, and I saw no porters.
I swung lower and realized that a narrow clearing had been sculptured out of the jungle growth, but a landing seemed impossible. The runway was short and walled with thicket and rough enough to smash the Avian’s undercarriage.
If that happened, contact with the camp at Ithumba — and everything beyond Ithumba — would be cleanly broken. And if it didn’t happen, how could I take off again? Getting down is one thing, but getting up again is another.
I scribbled a note on the pad strapped to my right thigh, popped the note into a message bag, and aimed the bag at Blix.
‘Might get down,’ I said, ‘but runway looks too short for take-off. Will return later if you can make it longer.’
It seemed a simple message — clear and practical; but, judging from its reception, it must have
read like an invitation to arson or like an appeal to warn the countryside by beacon that the fort had been stormed and massacre was imminent.
XIX
What of the Hunting, Hunter Bold?
BLIX HEAPED FOLIAGE AND wood on his fire until the smoke from it could be smelled in the cockpit as I flew over the clearing, and I think that in the end he cast his terai hat into the blaze, or perhaps it was Winston’s. The smoke rose in enormous grey mushrooms, and I could see pink whips of flame snap in the sunlight. Both men leapt up and down and gesticulated with their arms as if, for months past, they had fed altogether upon flowers that conferred a kind of inspired lunacy.
Quite plainly I was to have no larger runway, and just as plainly, there was a reason for it. Blix would not ask me to chance a landing in a spot like that unless other possibilities had first been explored.
By now I was pretty sure I could land if I had to, but not at all sure I could get off again in the same space. There was no wind to check a landing nor to aid a take-off. I had to think.
I banked the plane and circled several times, and each time I did it the dark balloons of smoke grew fatter and soared higher and the dance below achieved the tempo of ecstasy. I still could see no porters.
It breaks my heart to land a plane on rough ground; it is like galloping a horse on concrete. I considered side-slipping in, but remembered Tom’s admonition that to do it expertly (to straighten up from the slip and flatten out a few inches from the earth) is impracticable when you have to land on a broken surface. More often than not this is courting a damaged undercarriage or a cracked longeron. ‘Save your sideslips for a time when the approaches are such that you can’t possibly get in any other way,’ Tom used to say, ‘or for a day when your motor has quit. But so long as your motor can help you — fly in.’ So I flew in.
I flew in and the Avian hit the roots and clods and buried stumps with gentle groans and creaks of protest. She churned the loose dust to billows that matched the billows of the fire. She roared to the edge of the thicket as if she meant to leap it, but decided not. Eventually the drag of the tail-skid and manipulation of the rudder pulled her up, and she stopped with a kind of apprehensive shudder.
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