by Wilbur Smith
Other letter writers added their voices to the chorus, with one even suggesting a special South African prize for popular fiction to recognize me and pacify Kenny. It was an unusual and unsolicited affirmation. I had never set out to write high literature—not since The Gods First Make Mad had I made that mistake—but I enjoyed the idea that my characters and stories could make a difference to people’s lives. It was all much ado about nothing, and I found it amusing, and gratifying for showing me what incredible fans I have. I have always tried to ignore critics. In the early days, it had been terrible when they hated my novels—and the idea that they were the arbiters of good taste was always galling to me—but now it didn’t matter. I was no longer a new writer. Whatever the critics thought, my readers were not going away. They are the people who buy my books, read them, and tell their friends all about them. They are the only ones I think of whenever I pick up my pen.
Sometimes fellow authors, especially the literary types, turn puce at the thought of my popularity. I have always thought that we should be standing together—the literary writers and all the other authors—but instead they deride us for being “airport writers,” and sneer at our commercial success.
Yet, William Shakespeare was a popular writer in his day. Perhaps he would be surprised to know about the lasting place he has in English literature. His audiences at the Globe were made up of the working masses; this was a place that Londoners could come to laugh at the ribald Falstaff, and not necessarily gape in awe at the beauty and imagery of the language. Shakespeare’s crowds wanted to see the story at the beating heart of the play. Centuries later, the same was true of Charles Dickens, one of the greatest storytellers in the English language. As Andrew Kenny had said, it is the popular author who has the chance to really touch hearts and minds.
I had a fan in the highest office of the land: former president F. W. de Klerk, the man who eventually freed Nelson Mandela, unbanned the ANC and set South Africa on the path to democracy. I first met him in 1995, after he had stepped down as deputy president in the new government of national unity, and we chatted for some time. He took me to task for Rage and my portrayal of Manfred De La Rey, who he recognized as being inspired by B. J. Vorster, the prime minister interned during the Second World War for his membership of the Ossewa Brandwag, the right wing pro-Nazi militia. Many years later, when I met F. W. again at Alfred Mosimann’s private dining club in London, I greeted him heartily. “Hello, F. W.!” I exclaimed, and he looked up and said, “Hello, old Wilbur, it’s good to see you again.” I was flattered that he’d remembered me.
On one occasion, I went up to the north of England to visit an independent bookshop which, although small, had been selling a lot of my books. Halfway through the afternoon, the owner, a lady, came up to me and said, “There’s a retired colonel who lives in the village and he relies on me to pick him four books a month to send to him. I think it would be a lovely touch if you could inscribe a copy for him and I’ll send him one of yours. His name’s Colonel Bailey . . .”
“Sure,” I said.
I duly inscribed the flyleaf, “To Colonel Bailey, with best wishes, Wilbur Smith.” And that was the end of the story—or so I thought. A year later, I popped into the same shop for a cup of tea and a chat with the owner. “You’ll never believe what happened with that book you signed for Colonel Bailey,” she said.
“Oh yes, what was that?”
“It came back the next day, with a note from him, saying, ‘Dear Mrs. Smith, I’ve been dealing with you for fifteen years and this is the first time you have ever sent me a spoiled copy. Please take this book back and send me a clean copy.’”
I collapsed in laughter. So much for the allure of my signature.
Sometime later, I had the opposite experience while on a flight from New York to London, after a fishing trip in Alaska. I had a proof copy of my latest book and was going through it, correcting typos, when the fellow sitting next to me leaned over.
“I see you’re reading Wilbur Smith,” he said.
I nodded.
“Tell me honestly, what do you think of him as a writer?”
I feigned deep thought for a moment and then said, “Well, I think he’s a fine writer. I’d place him alongside Hemingway and John Steinbeck.”
My neighbor warmed visibly and leaned in closer. “I know him,” he beamed. “I know Wilbur Smith . . . he’s a close friend of mine.”
“No, really!” I said, never having met this gentleman before.
“Yes,” he went on. “And I’ll tell you something else. You know the character of Sean Courtney, the hero of When the Lion Feeds?”
I played along. “Do I know him? Of course, he’s one of my favorites.”
“Well,” said my newfound friend. “Wilbur based him on my life!”
“No!” I said, with just the right amount of incredulity.
“Yes,” said the man. “I’ll tell you what, if you give me your card, I’ll go to Wilbur and get him to send you a signed photograph of himself. We’re so close, there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for me.”
So I gave him my business card, which he pocketed without a glance. I haven’t heard from him since.
•••
Leopard Rock: even now, these two words return me to the perfection of a night obliterated by stars.
In our old Rhodesian-style farmhouse, reminiscent of my childhood home, I lay awake, listening to the animal sounds. Intermittently, I slept, only to be woken by the bark of a kudu, or roused, in the morning, by the beauty of birdsong around the ranch house windows. At Leopard Rock, I was in practice a game farmer—doing game counts, checking populations and, if necessary, arranging for the extra numbers to be sold at auction for transfer to other farms. But the recompense was huge. In the morning, the blare of city life long forgotten in the stillness of the wild, I would go out into the veld. Sometimes I would spot the occasional leopard, or sit quietly and watch the herds interact. I particularly enjoyed observing them after the ewes had lambed, and the cows calved, to see how the little ones adapted to their new environment. There is no better feeling in the world than seeing a young animal take its first steps and knowing that the land around them, the only world they will ever know, is safe and free because you have made it that way.
The sole purpose of Leopard Rock was to preserve the game I had been systematically introducing: the springbok, kudu, eland and impala, all of them imported from game farmers and released to live wild and give rise to greater herds. Our staff lived on the farm, maintained the land, and, wherever possible, protected the game from poachers, as well as from the leopards who sometimes wandered through. When we first founded the farm, some of the locals were living in very poor conditions, almost in cattle stalls, and our immediate order of business was to build proper houses, install hot and cold running water, electricity and television. We made sure everyone had access to medical checkups each year, enlisted the staff in pension schemes and helped their children enroll in school. Every Christmas, the staff and their families would gather at the farm house to share gifts and party together, long into the night.
I’d discovered that Leopard Rock was not only a place where I would conserve animals, it was a way of helping the local African people as well. It gave me great pleasure to be the laird of the estate—or, as they would say in central and East Africa, “Bwana”—but being laird came with responsibilities. Once, I was in the middle of an interview when the phone rang. The farm manager was frantic on the other end of the line. One of our laborers had driven his tractor through the electric cables and severed power to the whole of Leopard Rock. Calamities like these would often pluck me out of the isolated world of writing, but what Leopard Rock took from me, it gave back in abundance.
14
THIS DESERT LIFE
We had set out from Luxor into the glare of the sun in October 1989. Now, just before our first nightfall, I saw stars blossom across the sky, and felt the first chill of the desert. Gone were the monuments and t
emples of the West Bank Necropolis, the splendor of the Valley of the Kings, the thousands of tourists who flocked to Luxor, so many more than when I had first traveled to Egypt in the early 1970s. Ahead of us were the rolling dunes and undulating sands of the dry wadi that we were following. I was traveling with my companions, the Bedouin we had taken as guides, and the three snorting camels laden with our packs. This was a trail the Bedouin knew well, passed down from their forefathers: a caravan route for the merchants of ancient Egypt to ferry their wares; a route along which African slaves had been driven by their Arab masters many centuries before. Every step I took I shared with those people plucked out of history. I could feel their ghosts and forgotten stories swirling around me as keenly as I felt the lacerations of the desert sand in the wind.
In two weeks, we would arrive at the turquoise waters of the Red Sea, to dive into the magnificent coral reefs and swim with the thousands of species of fish unique to that part of the world. Between now and then, however, there were two hundred miles of desert, and already the sand was caked to my face, riming my nostrils, scouring the back of my throat. Soon, I thought, I would look like Lawrence of Arabia—only not as good looking as Peter O’Toole in the film. In many ways, I had lived with the desert all my life. It is a part of Africa as vital to me as the bush in which I loved to lose myself and hunt. For the past decade, I had been inspired by it as a source of stories, the deserts of northern Africa as important to my novels as the bush of the south had been when I started my writing career. In this trek, I was going to reaffirm my love for this most inhospitable landscape. I had, I suppose, been building up to this pilgrimage my entire life.
•••
My father inspired my love of the hunt: he stood in my eyes for all the heroes of southern Africa; but it was my mother who made me consider the past and understand that Africa was a place of ancient civilizations, customs lost to the mists of time, and wild unknowable gods. She told me tales of the Pharaohs who once ruled northern Africa, of the cursed tombs they had left behind, and of the treasure hunters who still toiled in the desert to uncover the secrets of that damned land.
My mother’s fascination with Great Zimbabwe had led me to create Benjamin Kazin and The Sunbird, and it was her enchantment with Ancient Egypt that would open another door through which a eunuch slave named Taita would introduce himself to the world. Nothing had captured my mother’s imagination more fiercely than the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. The nineteen-year-old Pharaoh had been discovered eleven years before I was born, when my mother herself was a young girl filled with dreams, and the memories of the discovery had stayed with her ever since. Lying in bed at night, she told me about Howard Carter and George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, descending into the darkness of the tomb, how the flickering lights of their flaming brands revealed by degrees the mummified remains of the boy king. “It was waiting in the deep caves, Wilbur. Not a stone had been moved. Not a figure out of place. Lying on his back with his golden death mask hiding his face, was King Tut himself . . .”
On November 26, 1922, Howard Carter had chiseled a small hole in the corner of the doorway of the tomb, and by the light of a candle could see that the many gold and ebony treasures were undisturbed. Lord Carnarvon asked, “Can you see anything?” and Carter replied with the now famous words: “Yes, wonderful things!”
It is difficult to imagine today, but the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb was a huge event. The tomb had been found almost intact, a scene untouched for millennia, and then the men who entered the tomb died in quick succession, giving rise to the belief that the tomb had been cursed. It was the perfect set-up for a media frenzy. Lord Carnarvon died six weeks after the tomb was opened; George Jay Gould, an American financier, developed a strange fever and died in France six months after entering the tomb; Prince Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey of Egypt was shot dead by his French wife of six months in London’s Savoy Hotel shortly after he was photographed visiting the tomb; Sir Archibald Douglas-Reid, a radiologist who X-rayed Tutankhamen’s mummy, died from a mysterious disease just over a year later; and Carnarvon’s two half brothers both passed away—one from blood poisoning, and the other from malarial pneumonia. Later, Carter’s personal secretary was found smothered in his bed; his father committed suicide by throwing himself from his seventh story apartment—and the most inexplicable story of all came when Carter’s messenger discovered a cobra, the symbol of the Egyptian monarchy, sitting in the bird cage in Carter’s house, having already devoured Carter’s canary. It was an entertaining confection, a grisly but addictive spectacle, just like the best stories. Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, blamed “elementals” created by the boy king’s priests, while one newspaper printed a legend that would solidify the curse in the public consciousness for generations to come. Death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the king! it declared—leaving aside the fact that these words never appeared on the hieroglyphs found in the tomb. Like all good fabulists, the newspapers didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. Tutankhamen’s curse had the nation gripped.
To a boy who had experienced the desert infrequently—the arid expanse of the Kalahari stretching into an infinite horizon when we went out on our annual safaris—the idea of desert kingdoms, of supernatural curses, and a boy king not much older than myself, contained the elements of thrilling fantasy. In stories like these, the desert became a place of magic and mysticism. I did not write a desert story of my own for many years, but the tales my mother recounted excited and inspired in me new narratives of wonder.
•••
It was not until I crossed the Namib as a student that I truly understood how merciless the desert can be. The Kalahari supports more life than most deserts, its plains green and fertile when the rains come, but the Namib is featureless to all except those who know it best, a place of scorched earth beneath an inferno of a sky.
In those early years, I had a child’s view of Egypt as a place of pharaohs and queens. It was only after When the Lion Feeds was accepted for publication, and I was en route to London to meet my publishers, that I was able to visit the country for the first time, when BOAC stopped off in Egypt.
Cairo in those days was a very different city to that which greets visitors today. There were few tourists wandering the streets or hordes laying siege to its monuments. The feluccas plying the waters of the Nile were sailed by local travelers and fishermen, not tourists eager to touch the water of this ancient river. I stood on the river bank all those years ago, looking upstream, and imagined the intrepid travelers who had followed the watercourse in ages past, seeking its fabled source—not just the Victorian explorers whose stories I had loved, but also the Roman legionaries and Greek soldiers. This was the birthplace of civilization and, over the decades to come, it would keep calling me back.
Alone, I wandered through the City of the Dead. It was a corner of Cairo where hundreds of tombs were occupied as dwellings for the poorest people of the city, a place where the living and the dead mingled, where the modern and the ancient worlds met. Later, I spent long hours in the Egyptian Museum with its unrivaled collection of pharaonic exhibits. These days it is a grand museum, home to one of the greatest treasure hoards in the world, but back then it was more of a repository, an echoing warehouse through which I was permitted to wander and let my imagination roam. Nothing was labeled, priceless items were piled haphazardly in obscure rooms, even Tutankhamen’s famous death mask was housed in a ramshackle glass cupboard of the kind you might find in a rundown jeweler’s store. In a corner, a guard had propped his rifle against the wall and was casually smoking a cigarette, seemingly unconcerned by the magnificent history all around him. As I made my way along the halls, I imagined myself as a pioneer—unearthing little-known and overlooked gems, walking a few paces behind Howard Carter and the Earl of Carnarvon as they revealed to the world what had remained hidden for nearly four thousand years.
My first visit to Egypt was fleeting, but
my return trips became longer and longer. I went back in 1974, while I was researching Eagle in the Sky, and thereafter, whenever the deserts called, I would jump on a plane and land in this extraordinary country. Part of my excitement was caused by the Nile itself, a mythical feature of Africa, a river which had bewitched many before me. The Nile had given sustenance to settlers since the dawn of time. Gradually, various tribes of hunter-gatherers came face to face with each other, forced to the verdant riverbanks by the encroaching desert, and there they peacefully commingled, building structured societies in order to survive.
I explored the ruins and ancient places, the kind you can only visit now under the watchful eyes of sentries and guards. On those early visits, I was allowed to clamber wherever I wanted. At Giza, where the Pyramids rose vertiginously into the sky, my guide helped me to the zenith of one of those fabulous constructions. At the pinnacle, heaving and out of breath, I gazed from horizon to horizon, absorbing a space so vast and empty, yet crowded with the intense bustle of the past. I ventured off the beaten track to see the old Coptic Christian monasteries deep in the desert—where all that was needed to see a glimpse of life inside was to open your wallet—and the magical Faiyum Oasis beyond Cairo, where for a brief moment the desert is green and alive, and the ducks are plentiful and waiting to be picked off.