Manly Pursuits

by Ann Harries

  ‘A lot of slanderous nonsense, that. Don’t bother to read it. The woman should have stuck to writing about Boers on their farms. I’ve probably learnt more about the intractable Boer psychology from her first novel than I have from the Boers themselves. Primitive lot. Phlegmatic, crude. But wily, wily.’ He narrowed his eyes as if trying to drill into the secrets of the wily Boer mind with his pupils. The eyebrows knitted more ferociously than I remembered from his youth; he appeared to have forgotten I was there. But innate good breeding made him suddenly glance at me and ask: ‘So what brings you here, Wills, to this cultural desert? It must be the most tedious spot on earth. You can’t surely have come here voluntarily?’

  Without enthusiasm I embarked upon the somewhat ludicrous explanation as to why I found myself in Cape Town. Upon my asking him the identical question, he replied coolly: ‘Oh, I’ve been sent here to pick up the pieces after the Jameson débâcle. A task not dissimilar to cleansing the Augean stables, on the scale of things.’ He stretched out his long spidery legs, and gazed at the shine on his boots. ‘Do you know, Wills, I find it absolutely astonishing that a country on the edge of war can actually be dull! Those British foreigners in the Boer republic who run the goldfields – and therefore the economy – are no better than a bunch of barbarians: there aren’t a dozen of them who can tell a vegetable from a violin. As for the Boers … You know that most of them believe the earth is flat. Need I say more?’ His eyes glazed over.

  ‘So war is really imminent?’

  ‘Oh, almost certainly.’ One of his legs swung over the other with elaborate gracelessness. He rotated a foot, unembarrassed by the protest of clicks from its ankle. ‘It’s not altogether Jameson’s fault, though quite frankly I don’t rate him highly. It all comes down to the issue of franchise. That old Boer isn’t going to let the foreign Uitlanders vote unless they’ve been living in his wretched republic for seven years –fourteen years – he keeps changing the number, but it’s never the right one. He’s a wily old fox if ever there was one. As for our host, I have to say – if men are ruled by their foibles, then his foible is size. Not his own size, you understand – which is vast enough – but land-size. Territory. Crown territory. He can’t get enough of Africa for the Crown – and after Africa there are four other continents … yes, Huxley?’

  That great slab of a man had materialised in the doorway.

  ‘Your cab has arrived, sir.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Milner stubbed out a cigarette, and then appeared to forget this piece of information at once. ‘But I’m afraid his foible has led to his downfall. The Raid has united all the Boers in the country against him – at one time the Boers in the Cape were very wisely becoming Anglicised, but it’s goodbye to all that now – and the Imperial position has been horribly weakened. And we can’t allow that.’ He grinned beneath his load of moustache. ‘He still seems to believe that every man has his price. His idea of diplomacy is fat cheques slipped under the table. If anything, he’s even more slippery than Oom Paul, as I believe they call the President of the Boer Republic’

  ‘I assume,’ I said evenly, ‘that your job is to achieve some kind of compromise.’

  Milner inhaled deeply, allowed his eyes to explore the ceiling, then sighed. ‘Wills, let me give you a piece of advice. In South Africa it is necessary to be incredulous. This country breeds a special bacillus, nourished on whisky – or, even worse, Cape brandy: the habit of telling lies. Therefore I say to you: don’t believe a thing you hear. I certainly don’t.’ He laced his fingers beneath his chin and looked melancholy.

  There was a pause, during which I attempted to relate his reply to my earlier remark. ‘How soon?’ I asked.

  He laughed outright. His teeth, revealed for the first time, were long and narrow and tapered inwards. ‘Don’t worry, old chap, you’ll be back in Oxford long before we’ve jumped through the last hoop. I’m meeting a delegation of Transvaal Boers in Bloemfontein in two days’ time, and I hear conciliation is once again in the air … or delaying tactics.’ He rose to his feet. Alfred Milner had never known what to do with his arms and legs: beneath the stiff cloth of his dark suit there seemed to be a series of erratically arranged appendages over which he had incomplete control.

  His eyes strayed to my photographic apparatus near the door of the library. The hawkish features suddenly softened. With embarrassment. For a moment the possibility occurred to me that he might be human. Could those be dimples at the edge of his great, fanged moustache?

  ‘I say, Wills, I wonder if you could do me a favour?’

  (Why do I have this feeling that as the end of the century draws near, the human race is about to slide off the edge of the world, into the abyss to which it rightfully belongs? And once again the land will be occupied only by fish, fowl and four-legged flesh, and Darwin’s Theory, God help us, will be given another chance.)

  After leaving Milner, I had a bowl of nutritious gruel and fell asleep upon my bed. I cannot survive without an afternoon nap, and the morning had been particularly eventful.

  I awoke at 5 p.m., dreaming of crocodiles. The crocodile, I am told, has consumed more missionaries, hunters and explorers than all the other African predators put together. Challenger told me this on the voyage out, waving the stub of his arm as some kind of proof. His eyes are yellow with malaria, his skin chewed to rags by armies of red ants. He plans to return to Ujiji next year. I believe he knows Stanley.

  Voyage

  I chose to travel with my twittering cargo through Suez, and thus down the east coast of Africa, a somewhat lengthier route, but one that offered the wonders of the ancient world along the Mediterranean Sea. Our ship picked up colonial administrators from Portugal, France and Italy, so that I was able to take advantage of organised tours around the famous ports and harbours of these bastions of civilisation. Like all Englishmen, I feel at home in Italy. Perhaps it would have been wiser for me to spend a few weeks prodding among ruins, drinking good coffee in the sun, slowly piecing together my own breakages … At that stage my birds were happy, purring in their cages, even laying eggs. They gave me no warning.

  To my annoyance, I was obliged to share a table with a young Cambridge man and his wife. He had been employed to help administer the building of a railway from the port of Mombasa to Lake Victoria. He was tired already: his cabin was too close to the steerage class with its cargo of settlers and soldiers (why so many soldiers?) who kept him awake at night with drinking songs and unseemly revelry. He could furnish me with no very clear explanation as to why it was necessary for the British to build a railway from Mombasa to the Great Lakes, other than that railways were the key to civilisation on a continent filled with people who still lived in the Stone Age. With one exception, we met only at the dining-table. We spoke mainly of the wonders of the Suez Canal and the brilliance of de Lesseps, who had so elegantly detached Africa from Arabia for us travellers, and his foolishness in trying to split the two Americas by the same method.

  The young woman could speak only of the possibility of malaria, and consumed her quinine tablets with a tragic intensity which suggested that she had already contracted the disease. The fact that the cause of this dreaded scourge has at last been attributed to the bloodlust of the female anopheles mosquito (and not to sleeping in the African moonlight, as Burton opined) did nothing to allay her fears: I gave up trying to explain to her the various species of the Protozoan blood parasite which belongs to the single genus Plasmodium.

  We kept away from the dining-table during a series of squalls that hit us just south of the Equator. The release from tedious conversation more than compensated for the uneasiness in my stomach. One night, as I tried to regain my sea-legs by strolling on the now steady upper deck, I bumped into the young couple whose faces were strangely radiant. The woman laid her hand on my arm and bade me look up. The sky flickered with a fiery life never visible to those who live in the Northern hemisphere. I averted my eyes from the shooting stars.

  The young woman pointed. ‘
The Southern Cross!’ she breathed. ‘Now we really have left Europe behind!’

  A new constellation blazed on the horizon, an asymmetrical cross of five bright stars. I am not a spiritual man, but this moment took me unawares. For a dizzying minute the five points of my own bodily extremities swung up into that busy firmament and I found myself giddily crucified among the galaxies. Call it a religious experience: perhaps it prepared me for my new role of father confessor to the Southern hemisphere.

  * * *

  G.B. Challenger was carried on board in a cloud of pale-blue butterflies. As our ship nosed towards Zanzibar, the sky had scissored apart, and those who knew Africa suggested locusts. The flock of Lepidoptera descended silently on to every available space on the upper and lower decks, and shimmered on handrails, doorways, coils of rope. (This phenomenon mirrored almost exactly the young Darwin’s experience on the Beagle en route for Patagonia, even to the exclamation made by the seamen: ‘It’s snowing butterflies!’) A day earlier we had dropped off the young couple at Mombasa, together with some hundred young men who had been given millions of acres of excellent land to farm in central Kenya. While reloading in Mombasa, the captain had received an SOS to pick up Challenger from the spice island a hundred miles south, whence he had been forced to return after having lost both an arm and all his porters in a bloody onslaught somewhere between Lakes Albert and Victoria. Challenger was himself suffering from at least three tropical diseases and had to be borne up the gangway on a stretcher, followed by an endless stream of Zanzibar ex-slaves who carried on their sullen heads unimaginable bundles of booty. A strong smell of cloves wafted upwards with them. The hapless butterflies, with no regard for their own survival, were crunched underfoot. They made no attempt to fly away. Their genocide was unobserved by the horizontal Challenger, who bellowed out a torrent of instructions, curses and queries, as he bobbed across the sky-blue deck.

  Once he had disappeared into his cabin, the tusks arrived. These were carried in huge caskets by a fresh set of Negroes – probably porters who had accompanied him on his expeditions into central Africa. They had already been grouped according to size and weight; the passengers (including myself) watched with awe as casket after casket of tusks, ten feet in length, descended into the hold of the ship, followed by as many containers of smaller tusks of the purest ivory. The ladies among us demurred at the number of elephants that must have been shot to provide such vast quantities of ivory, but the gentlemen were quick to remind them of the keys of their beloved pianos, their fans, and the knife handles with their intricate inlay work.

  The next day, to my astonishment, Challenger invited me to his cabin. He had observed my cages of birds and had something to tell me. A mere skeleton of a man, with wild, protruding eyes, he was nevertheless in feverish good humour, dismissing his condition as a temporary inconvenience.

  ‘I spotted your birds, Wills!’ he exclaimed jovially as I edged into his cabin, which was already crammed with gigantic teeth, antlers, hoofs, horns, tails, beaks and feathers. Leopard skins hung on the walls; a couple of monkeys screamed at me from cages, but of Challenger’s poodle, Mary, there was no sign. ‘Find yourself a space, man –push those snakeskins aside – I shot that cobra between the eyes myself – the last bullet I fired before the croc got me!’

  Great beads of sweat rolled freely down his face as he spoke, and his shivering was so violent that I feared he was suffering an epileptic seizure. From the tumble of his suitcases the head of a full-grown lion bared its teeth hopelessly at the rigid carcass of a young zebra.

  ‘You have an interest in birds?’ I murmured.

  ‘Not so much for myself, old chap – I’m a big-game man as you can see – but I saw something you as a bird person might find interesting. Ever been up to the Lakes?’

  For one foolish moment I thought he was referring to the spiritual and physical home of William Wordsworth and his sister, and recalled a day trip to Grasmere with a colleague. But Dove Cottage was not what Challenger had in mind.

  ‘I’m talking about Lake Bangweolo, which poor old Livingstone thought would prove to be the source of the Nile. He died in the surrounding swamps, you know, convinced that the four fountains of the Nile described by Herodotus were just around the corner. My God, what a place! Up to my waist in swamp and mud for the best part of a week. Had to carry my guns and bullets over my head – thank God I had both arms then! Now I’ve seen, oh, a thousand different species of beast up there – shot most of ‘em too, by Jove! – but the strangest creature I ever laid eyes upon was the bird of the Bangweolo swamp!’ His voice had modulated into a different key: the key men speak in when they sit round campfires in Africa or smoking rooms in the clubs of Pall Mall. Even the monkeys were affected by his change of pitch, and clung to their bamboo bars, watching first his face, then mine, with their bright eyes.

  During the pause that followed, Challenger lit a cigarette with his five remaining fingers and blew out a stream of smoke into whose blue depths he stared as if winged phantasms might appear within them. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped a full minor third.

  ‘I’d thought that the Dodo was dead, Wills. We’d been told the Dutch sailors shot them off the face of Mauritius: poor beasts were too fat and short legged to run for it. Stumps for wings, as you’d know. I have to say I wouldn’t know what a Dodo looked like if I hadn’t read Alice in Wonderland at my nurse’s knee and goggled at Tenniel’s illustrations along with a million other brats of my age. Care for a cigarette?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘One day, having finally reached a piece of terra firma on the swamp, my men and I sat picking the leeches off our arms and legs, and swatting away the myriad mosquitoes that breed in this kind of swampland. I heard a kind of grunt, and motioned to my men to be quiet. Strutting from its nest, in an awkward, pigeon-toed sort of way, was none other than Alice’s Dodo! Of course, my automatic response was to reach for my rifle, but then I thought, hold on, old chap. Remember nanny’s tears: this might be the world’s last Dodo. Damn fool, actually. The swamp’s crawling with ‘em.’ He drew on his cigarette, awaiting my response.

  ‘Dodgson died last year,’ I said. ‘Dodo Dodgson. Or Lewis Carroll to the world outside Oxford.’

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘We shared an interest in photography.’

  ‘Tell you what, Wills.’ Challenger’s eyes swivelled in their sockets. ‘When I return to the Lakes next year with a new arm, damme, you must accompany me and we will capture that Dodo. We’ll bring back cages full of ‘em, Wills, alive – alive as a Dodo, what d’ye think? We’ll show ‘em!’

  I thought his eyes might start right out of his head as he extended his lips into a livid line about his teeth, and howled. The sound was as wild as any that might come from the jaws of any of the animals whose carcasses crowded around us. For a moment I felt myself turned to stone, as if by black magic. But when Challenger’s famous poodle (whose sleeping form I had mistaken for a stuffed monkey) leapt upon her master’s lap and bared her sharp, cat-like teeth at me, a high-pitched growl throbbing in her throat, I screamed aloud in panic so profound that every hair on my body uncurled and stood on end, while a ghostly mewing sound escaped my own lips. I knew I must escape at all costs and extended a shaking hand to ring a bell placed at hand for emergencies.

  Afterwards, when I felt calmer, I considered Challenger’s invitation.

  To photograph the Dodo – that would be something. A gesture of reconciliation, perhaps, towards poor dead Dodgson.

  Our ship bore a treacherous cargo. The Captain told me straight out when he heard where I was going. Or rather, when he heard who would be receiving the birds. He promised to show me a sample after dinner one night.

  One evening the heat was such that I forbore to attend dinner, and leaned over the deck rails in my shirt-sleeves, grateful for the small movement of air I could enjoy in this position. The sun was low in the sky, which had assumed a reddish hue, reflected in the brimming waters of th
e Indian Ocean. A certain mistiness dissolved the horizon, but I guessed we must be near land because of the large numbers of seagulls (a species of bird in which I have no interest whatsoever) that screeched and fluttered above the steaming funnels of the boat. In spite of the oppressiveness of the weather I felt strangely at peace, suspended as it were among all four elements, a passive product of sun, water, land and ether. It was then that a most sublime vision began slowly to emerge from the rosy haze.

  One by one, spotlit by the brilliant rays that emanate from the sun only at dusk, the spires of Oxford appeared against the skyline: Tom Tower in all its Wrennish glory; the bronze dome of the Radcliffe Camera; twenty different spires and steeples of churches and colleges and libraries –even the newly built Town Hall with its weathervane in the shape of a horned ox. I actually fancied I could see Her Imperial Majesty seated in the apex of the central pediment! Needless to say I realised at once that I was the victim of a superb hallucination, a mirage such as rises mysteriously before the eyes of over-heated desert travellers. But then I heard the church bells. Not the glorious cacophony in the fine English tradition of bell-ringing, but the more orderly, some would say more melodious, chimes that tumble from the steeples of Italy, France, Portugal. Passengers began to emerge excitedly from the dining-saloon, blotting their still-chewing mouths with their table napkins, in their desire to view this phenomenon off the coast of Africa.

  ‘Ilha de Lisboa!’ cried a small Portuguese man, upon which a great purple mist enveloped both us, and the island, and for a few moments we held our breath, confused by the improbable mixture of fact and fantasy and waiting for the cloud to lift like a curtain. When it did we found we had drifted close to the shores of the island and were nudging the base of a massive flight of white marble steps that led, in a triumphant esplanade, to a magnificent Baroque piazza, in which played a fountain composed entirely of spouting dolphins.