Travels with Myself and Another

by Martha Gellhorn

  At the bar, a couple of sane serene people talked about the weather. The man hoped it wouldn’t rain in the night, the unpaved road had been sticky enough on the way in. “Oh well, it’s only a hundred miles to Nairobi,” his wife said. “Someone will give us a hand if we need it.”

  There might be an unwritten law against talking to strangers in East Africa but I was desperate. “Excuse me,” I said, “if you’re going to Nairobi tomorrow and have room, could you possibly give my boy a lift. He hasn’t been feeling well and I want to stay on here a few days.” Far from telling me to peddle my peanuts, they showed me their blue saloon car in the parking lot, said they were leaving at eight o’clock and would be glad to oblige. I refrained from kissing them.

  The next step was to locate Joshua. A waiter winkled him out and Joshua appeared, wearing the same odious expression.

  “Some people here are going back to Nairobi tomorrow, Joshua. I said you weren’t feeling well and they’ll give you a lift home.”

  The hateful shut-in look evaporated in a beaming smile.

  “Thank you, Memsaab!” It was the first time those words had passed his lips and I thawed slightly.

  “Well anyway, we made it, Joshua.”

  We had indeed, no minor miracle. Neither of us fell sick, we’d had no accidents, not so much as a single puncture, and I drove every foot of the way. Now, thank heaven, I would have one day free of Joshua and his annoying psyche, a lovely light-hearted day in the Amboseli Park, another night in this pleasing hotel, and an easy run to Nairobi. I led Joshua to the car park and pointed out the blue saloon car. He stroked the fender and said, “Oh nice.” Of course; it was a proper city car.

  We shook hands in the morning, Joshua having forgiven me, wished each other luck and I waved them off, delighted to see the last of Joshua. Over breakfast, I ruminated on the strange fact that I had travelled longer with Joshua than with anyone else in my life except U.C. in China and my mother on a journey, which was the opposite of a horror journey, in Mexico. What did Joshua and I know about each other after so much time? I knew that Joshua was a hundred-percent city boy, with very weak nerves. I still didn’t know if he could drive. He knew that when I was tired I was as lovable as a rattlesnake, and I had been increasingly tired every day. Not what you’d call a true meeting of minds. The hell with it. It was over and the next time I chose to circumnavigate the globe I would be more careful in selecting my companion. For a start, I would ask him to drive round the block.

  Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day, I sang silently and with satisfaction. I hadn’t a care, I wasn’t in a hurry and I felt disinfected. As if Joshua’s perpetual fears had been contagious and gradually sickened me, like catching spiritual bilharzia. Impatience leading swiftly to boredom is my vice, not panic. Alone, at ease in my skin, Africa was dandy. I would watch the animals in peace and I would have hours to contemplate Mount Kilimanjaro, a clear view as soon as I got past this low scrub country to the Amboseli plain. I had barely glimpsed that wonder mountain on yesterday’s unpleasant drive, just enough to know it had a mystical meaning for me, all the power and beauty and strangeness of Africa. I chugged along, confident that I could manage whatever happened next.

  What happened next was a rushing stream, a creek really, narrow, shallow, dotted by sizable rocks. The trouble was the banks, far too steep, making a sharp V with water at the bottom. The Landrover would go nose down all right, but how would it go nose up. This was a baby canyon and needed a baby bridge across its top. Still, others passed this way so it must be a possible operation. Sitting here didn’t solve the problem; taking it fairly fast in second gear might be the best method. The Landrover sped down, the front wheels landed past the middle of the stream, the rear wheels stayed on the rear bank, and in this inclined position stopped dead. I shifted to first gear and heard a grinding noise. No movement. In vain I tried to pull the four-wheel gear; either it had jammed or I had run out of muscle.

  A mammoth bore if ever I saw one, but no cause for alarm. Someone would come along and help me shove the four-wheel gear or push me or tow me. The place was shady and cool, insects were minimal and not carnivorous; though I didn’t have a view of anything, waiting for aid wouldn’t kill me. Patience. No one came along. Since it had not rained any day on our long journey, I had forgotten the floods. I had also forgotten a newspaper story, casually noticed in Nairobi, about excessive floods in the Amboseli and airlifting stranded rhinos out of the water. The details of that improbable job made no impression and only now, as the solitary hours passed, I began to think that perhaps others knew more than I did and were giving Amboseli a miss. Perhaps the unusual rains accounted for this baby canyon, an earlier torrent having cut away the ground. I ate my picnic lunch.

  With nothing else to do, I read the Field Guide to the National Parks. Under different circumstances, there were certainly remarkable things to see here such as the spectacled elephant shrew, the lesser leaf-nosed bat, the silver-backed jackal, the zorilla, the white-tailed mongoose, the aardwolf, the red duiker, the gerenuk, Coke’s hartebeest, the African dormouse not to mention giraffes, lions, leopards, rhinos, elephants, hyenas, zebras, and a nice selection of antelopes. As a welcome if brief distraction, some monkeys nipped through the trees, either black-faced vervet or Sykes, according to the list of local mammals. Even more birds frequented Lake Amboseli than Lake Nakuru, four pages’ worth, but I was probably twenty miles inside the park and the lake, where the birds flocked, would be farther ahead. I read about the parks I had not seen; I read and read and the afternoon wore on.

  It was four o’clock, time for the regulation knot in the stomach but I was through with anxiety, I had had enough to last a lifetime. The hotel expected me back that night, my suitcase was there, my room reserved. When I failed to return, they would send out a search party, that is if they assumed I had gone into the Amboseli, otherwise it would hardly be practical to search Africa for one lost woman. Of course they would know I had gone where others sensibly did not go, even a nutcase wouldn’t take a picnic to drive back into Tanganyika and there was no other road.

  Five o’clock. I wished I hadn’t left the whisky at the Namanga River Hotel. The Field Guide no longer held my interest. All right, it had to happen sooner or later; before dark, I would find and put up the damned side curtains. The menace hereabouts might be bats, of which twelve different varieties inhabited the Park. No rational animals, with three lakes to drink from, would walk miles to drink at this miserable little stream.

  It hadn’t occurred to me to step into the stream, clamber up the bank, and at least stretch my legs. I had taken a turn recumbent on the back seat; I had lain across the two front seats with my legs hanging out. I was beyond any kind of feeling, stoically numb, when I heard a car. Another Landrover stopped on the far side of the bank and a man got out. He was the perfect safari type, deeply sunburned, wearing clean starched khaki shorts, short-sleeved bush jacket, long khaki socks and old boots. He could have been the Park Warden or a white hunter or simply an old Africa hand.

  He said in a tone of mixed wonder and irritation, “What are you doing there?”

  “Sitting.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can’t move. Why else?”

  “Is your car busted?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t get the four-wheel drive gear shifted.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said and slithered down the bank into the water. I shuffled over to the passenger seat. He shifted the four-wheel drive as easily as if flicking an ant. He put the Landrover into reverse, which produced a horrendous grinding noise but no motion.

  He muttered something in which the word “women” was discernible. He got down on his knees, careless of his lovely clean clothes, and looked under the car.

  “Didn’t you think of moving rocks out of the way before you took a nose dive into this?” he asked crossly. Obviously I had not. “You’re stuck on a whopping big rock, you’ve busted your axle.” Maybe axl
e, I’m not certain of that; I know it was a vital organ.

  He shouted in Swahili and an African I hadn’t seen jumped out of his Landrover with a long spanner. Between them, both wet and far from joyous, they dislodged the rock and any other obstructions. Again in the driver’s seat, he reversed my Landrover up the bank and turned it. “You’ll have to stay in four-wheel drive, it’ll get you to Nairobi and you’ll have a shocking repair bill.”

  I thanked him profusely but he wasn’t charmed by me.

  “If you don’t know your way around, it’s not the best idea to go mooching off by yourself,” he said and waded back to his own car. He had enough room on the track to pass me. He navigated the canyon deftly in four-wheel drive and rattled by. Slowly, slowly, sounding like two tanks, I ground my way back to the hotel.

  Starting at daylight, I ground through eighty-seven miles of thick mud, slightly faster than walking, the unpaved stretch between Namanga and Nairobi. I stopped frequently, to let the motor recuperate from heatstroke. I poured water into the radiator. I used the emergency petrol cans. Any moment, I expected the four-wheel drive to give up the ghost. From Athi River to Nairobi the road was paved and felt like velvet. When I parked the Landrover outside the New Stanley Hotel, I bore no resemblance, living or dead, to the proud sunburned well-pressed citizens who returned triumphant from their chaperoned safaris.

  Quite apart from African politics, cause enough for sorrow, I feel a special sorrow for Africa which doesn’t affect white statesmen or Africans, high or low. The beautiful wild animals. They have no value except as Chartres and the Prado have value and they will not be saved. No powers will think their continued existence is of prime importance.

  The elephants in Kenya have been decimated so that their ivory can enrich a Top African Person. No one knows what has become of the elephants in Uganda but where people are murdered so readily why spare money-bearing beasts. The last rhino has already been shot in Amboseli because rhino horn, ground to powder, is worth a fortune as an alleged aphrodisiac. The giraffe, sweet and strange as the unicorn, is easily killed to make a thin bracelet from the hairs of its tail. You can see signs of the dead animals in curio shops anywhere, everywhere, just look around you. If you are as rich as an Arab, you can buy elephant tusks mounted in silver at Harrod’s.

  The superb wild four-footed creatures of Africa haven’t a hope. We will preserve sad jailed animals in zoos, for our children. I know this will happen, and it is unbearable to think of the loss. We are really a terrible species; the greediest predators.

  “I’m afraid it’s going to cost you a packet,” Mr Whitehead said and listed the damage to hidden parts of the Landrover. I said I was terribly sorry to cause this trouble and please have it fixed before the white hunter came back and the price didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. My hair was washed, my nice Nairobi dress was clean, I had slept twelve hours, but I did not feel renewed. One of the kind helpful people I met during the first Nairobi days sauntered in, greeted Mr Whitehead, and took a thoughtful look at me.

  “You’ve been through the wars, haven’t you?” he said. “You better go to the coast and rest up before you go home. They’d have to take you off the plane in a stretcher.”

  Go to the coast? Where was the coast? I didn’t know anything about the coast. The idea of more African travel was blood-curdling. He insisted, he’d have the tickets sent to my room, a friend of his would meet the plane tomorrow morning in Mombasa, the Nyali Beach Hotel would put roses in my cheeks. I obeyed like a zombie, grateful to be taken in charge, grateful to let someone else think and plan for me. Like a zombie, I stepped from the plane into a hot green world, was whisked off in an air-conditioned Mercedes by a large friendly man, followed my suitcase to an air-conditioned room and fell into bed. When I woke in the late afternoon, weariness and strain had been slept away.

  The Nyali Beach Hotel was then a spacious Edwardian building with dark-panelled public rooms and wood ceiling fans. The bedrooms were done up in the depressing navy blue rep curtains and brown varnished furniture so popular in Africa. I had been given the first redecorated room, a modern luxury nest of imitation white leather and pale wood and the air-conditioner which I quickly turned off, opening the windows to look at the sea and breathe the soft air. This was the only hotel on miles of wide white sand beach and now, past the high season, it was nearly empty. I dumped out my suitcase to find the bathing suit and ran down long steps through gardens scented by frangipani and camellias to the Indian Ocean and into the clear silky water.

  Wine connoisseurs, those crushing bores, go on and on about the different subtle flavours of wine. I am a connoisseur of swimming water and able to bore anyone in great detail. Only the best of the Caribbean—around St Martin and Virgin Gorda—could rival the Indian Ocean here. Swimming had never been more deliriously pleasing; my body was returned to me after endless imprisonment in cars.

  Africans walk in Africa if they have to or if it is their lifestyle, the nomadic cattle-herding tribes. Europeans do not, the distances are forbidding. They exercise in European style, tennis, golf, polo, swimming pools. I can’t hit any ball in any direction and swimming pools are a necessity for health, but the spirit does not soar while ploughing dutifully back and forth. At last, the intimidating size of Africa could be used: a beach that stretched out of sight, an ocean to myself.

  Released from the tyranny of time-distance, I walked on the hard sand at the water’s edge and watched the sunset colours, pale green streaked with banners of mauve and pink, watched the sky turn into translucent sapphire, l’heure bleue, and the first stars. I walked back to the hotel in the sudden equatorial dark. There was no terror in the blazingly brilliant night, the air felt like satin on my skin. Happiness swept me at gale force. This place was different from anywhere else in Africa. It was easeful.

  Bright and early, I donned mask and snorkel, breast-stroked and floated, gazing at underwater wonders finer than any I had seen before. Brain coral, mushroom-shaped, as big as round dining tables, waving forests of fern coral, purple and rose, tall white antler coral, and thousands, tens of thousands of reef fish. There must be an ecological reason for their colours and design but to my uninformed eye they look like the creation at play, fantasies invented for the delight of invention. Time passed unnoticed, one hour, three hours, I was buoyed by the water and enchanted. Thirst finally drove me ashore. Already, climbing through the gardens to my room, I felt heat. A backward look in the bathroom mirror showed my skin painted bright red from neck to heels.

  Burns are graded by degree; I don’t know what degree I had achieved, but I was burned rigid. Lying flat on my stomach, I swallowed aspirin for fever and Vitamin A as recommended by the English housekeeper, and from time to time a little African maid doused my flaming body with vinegar. I was in pain and I despaired of myself. Some mechanism, which I imagined in the shape of a hand-brake doubtless due to my recent relation with cars, had been left out. Adults were equipped with this mechanism; it restrained them from folly. They used it unconsciously; without thought, they avoided excess and imbecility. I was an incurable fool. I didn’t have enough common sense to fill a teacup. I would grow old but never grow wise.

  “Cheer up, dear,” said the visiting English housekeeper. “You aren’t the first to get in this fix. Foreigners don’t realize how strong this sun is.”

  “But through water?” I asked, struggling not to whine with self-pity.

  “Yes indeed, as you’ve found out. It’s best to wear a T-shirt if you mean to stay in for any time. And wear a hat when you walk on the beach. You really haven’t got the colouring for this climate. But never mind, the blisters are coming up nicely, you’ll peel in a day or so and be right as rain.”

  I’ll never be right as rain, I thought, sunk in gloom, I’ll always find some new way to be idiotic. And meanwhile I was losing precious days and my neck muscles hurt from lifting my head enough to read and if I tried to drown my sorrows in drink, probably I would catch fire.

  But
I did recover, though I had doubted it, and swam with a T-shirt and wore a hat to walk on the flawless beach in the cool of the morning and in the late afternoon. When the sun was straight overhead, I lay in my pleasant room and read Jane Austen who had come into her own here. There was not a speck of litter or a pellet of oil on the beautiful beach, no pollution in the perfect water. Only fifteen years ago, I would have been scandalized by either; now both are readily available everywhere, even there.

  I climbed the steps into the airplane with reluctance. I had fallen in love with the land and the sky, the fauna and flora, the weather of East Africa. This adoration of the natural world did not extend to mankind in Africa or its differing ways of life. Like a lover, I wanted to know all of the beloved, in every mood and aspect; I wanted to live with Africa. Anywhere else would be passionless, a dull substitute. Ten months later, I returned to that coast and established my ninth permanent residence. The task was as grim as it always is but I endured the daily turmoil with unusual hope. Once the house was fixed I would put my feet up, except for gardening, and rest in happiness. I believed I had found final heart’s desire.

  The love affair with Africa was long, obsessed and unrequited, lasting off and on for thirteen years. Africa remained out of reach except for moments of union, when walking on the long empty beach at sunrise or sunset, when watching the night sky. Or later, when I had built my two-room tenth permanent residence high in the Rift Valley and could look at four horizons, drunk on space and drunk on silence. Or always, driving alone on the backroads, when Africa offered me as a gift its surprises, the beautiful straying animals, the shape of the mountains, wild flowers.