My heart was still pounding. “It could have been terrorists.”
“Yeah,” Marcus said.
“Gold mining is a disease, you know, like drinking or gambling,” Patrick said. “I saw that in Botswana. It takes control of you, blanks out common sense, and before you know it, you’re old, broken, and penniless, with little more than failed memories.”
“Or dead at a young age,” Marcus added, “as we could be.”
Our food was about gone. That evening we ate cereal with dried milk mixed with stream water.
“It’s stuck to the roof of my mouth,” Patrick said, using his finger to dislodge it. “Do you remember those steaks we had?”
Nobody answered. Smoking our pipes in brooding silence, we knew it was time to move on.
“Perhaps we can come back someday,” Patrick said.
“Maybe there is no mother lode; it’s just an old hunter’s dream.”
“I think it might be like trying to return to our youth. In the years to come we might even doubt we really had adventures like this.”
“I think we would have to be old and batty to forget this past week,” I replied. “Hell, it might be the only thing we remember.”
We packed up and climbed into the Land Rover, slowly finding our way out of the bush toward the east until we intersected the main road, which led back to Bulawayo and its airport. The tarred road ushered in the end of the trip for me, and we became quiet. Soon I would be leaving my friends.
I looked at Patrick with his black beard and Marcus with his red one. Good companions, I thought. They are going back to what I’ve left behind.
I had left the PRU and, with my student visa expired, could not get back into South Africa. Yet I wondered if I had the staying power to do all I planned, to go back to America and then return to South Africa and continue my studies. It seemed like a lot . . .
We shook hands in the airport parking lot and said goodbye. Our parting was quick. There was no need to linger. I envied them driving away and wanted to be with them. I wanted to return to UCT and continue with my studies, as if my problem with the director’s research findings had never happened.
The Land Rover pulled away, heading for a border town and reentry into safe South Africa. I raised my hand in farewell and stared. I wanted them to stop. I wanted it all to go away. It was as though I had to start over again. Did I have the will to complete my dream? Was I being courageous or stupid? Maybe my life would end up like the old hunter’s gold story.
Shit. After five weeks of being with my companions, I’m alone again, I thought, still staring at the now-gone Land Rover. Looking down at the tarmac as I walked toward the airport, the sun cast my silhouette before me. I’m even chasing my own shadow.
Chapter 19
Equatorial Africa: Nairobi and Mount Kenya
I landed in Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi. “Kenya, mysterious Kenya,” I murmured as I deplaned onto the tarmac and into the fierce equatorial sunlight like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon. Shading my eyes, I reached the terminal.
It was full of activity. Women walked with pride in long, colorful robes; some had their heads and necks covered in vivid blue, red, and white muslin veils. Men wore flowing kikois, the traditional wraparound, topped by stoic, bearded faces and gleaming almond-white teeth. Interspersed with the shuffle of people were cosmopolitan city dwellers in not-so-new Western clothes. Uniformed guards milled about, not much caring if they were in the way. White businessmen, some in light-colored safari suits, frequently popped out of the sea of black. I had read that Kenya was independent and fairly stable. I saw no animosity. I wanted to walk the streets of Nairobi, the famous capital, and see Mount Kenya—more dreams of my youth.
In comparison to most others, I looked scruffy. My hair was now long and ragged and bleached from the sun. My skin was tanned dark brown, and I had on worn jeans, a blue denim T-shirt, hiking boots, and a pack on my back. Regardless, the customs officer, wearing a weary-looking uniform, was all white teeth and smiles. “Jambo,” he greeted, then asked only the most indispensable questions. He suggested I read the plastic-coated page of immigration rules, which he was surreptitiously cleaning his thick fingernails with.
I climbed into what turned out to be a high-speed minibus—express speed was the norm, it turned out—that rocked and slid as it turned corners. Swaying the whole trip, the bus pulled up with a jolt at a youth hostel outside the city. As fast as I got out, the minibus, churning dust to hysterical levels, sped off. It was like a get-in, hang-on, get-off circus ride.
The hostel was superficially clean. A weighty spice smell, like precipitation, lingered over everything. A few young people lay on the steel bunks lining a larger room. Some scattered travel literature littered the timber furniture. This would be home for a while.
I lay on a bed too, thumbing through the literature but really thinking about my situation. Two hours passed. Then I went to explore the city.
Nairobi was founded in 1899 by colonial authorities in British East Africa as a railway stop on the Uganda Railway. It later burned down after an outbreak of the plague. Nairobi was named after a water hole known in Maasai as Ewaso Nyirobi, which means “cool waters.”
The famed New Stanley Hotel, a holdover symbol of grand British living, was a watering hole itself; famous people on safari from all over the world, like Ernest Hemingway, had stayed there. They left messages tacked to the Acacia xanthophloea adjacent to the legendary Thorn Tree Cafe. White hunters and others sat beneath the tree while smartly dressed black men served food and drinks. It was the old Africa I’d read about, the Africa of hunters, gin and tonic, and evening bush dinners in dark silence gripped by captivating fires. The image swept into me like the air I breathed. It was magic.
Back in the 1950s, the local Mau Mau, mostly members of the Kikuyu ethnic group, began killing white settlers in gruesome ways in the name of revolution against the British colonialist rule of Kenya. The uprising lasted until 1960, when the British army, white settlers, and the local Kenya regiment defeated the internally divided Mau Mau contingency. When I was a teenager, the uprising was so shocking that stories of the viciousness reached my hometown news halfway around the world.
More than eight hundred thousand people lived in stable, modern Nairobi in the late 1970s. People filled the sidewalks, mostly in groups, waving their arms as they talked, picking their broad noses, going in all directions, excited, dressed in both tribal and Western attire. Young girls wore short dresses and tight tops showing long, strong legs and firm breasts. A few stared at me and smiled. Always their bright white teeth, like fresh snow, captured my attention first.
Items were sold on the street everywhere. The smell and taste of fresh Kenyan coffee beans pounded with a blunt stick in a worn wooden bowl was captivating. I drank it and ate spicy Indian samosas, followed by small, sweet yellow corn on the cob. Macadamia nuts, curried eggs, biltong, chicken legs, and meatballs were all for sale. Most people were nibbling on something.
As I walked, I stared at the nearby undulating purple peaks of the hills to the southwest. My God, they were the Ngong Hills . . .
“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills,” is the first sentence of Out of Africa by Karen Blixen. It enchanted me. Her life was particularly out of the ordinary, if not decidedly odd, as she was a Danish baroness. She didn’t have to come to Africa; her family had wealth and status. It was 1913, and she discovered a certain freedom in Kenya and saw a chance to accomplish something, so she stayed. Her memoirs said Africa was a place where one accepts the inexplicable.
Blixen and the adventurous pilot Beryl Markham knew each other. Markham was the first person to fly solo from London to North America. At one point during her older years, she lived in poverty in Nairobi. Later, she too was recognized as a great writer. It seemed to me that she and Blixen lived life in flashing moments.
The next day, as I walked the streets, I saw the crowd abruptly veer to one side of the sidewa
lk. A step later I halted and looked down at a man sitting on the concrete with rags wrapped around his hands. Some of his fingers were gone, and his face was disfigured. He was rotting.
I had never seen leprosy before. His half-hand was out begging. I dropped a coin in it, afraid to touch him. I was shocked. Weren’t people with leprosy isolated? It used to be their presence had to be announced by a bell, I recalled reading. Hell, I could have fallen over the poor man. I shuddered. I kept walking, and just down the sidewalk I saw a man sitting with a huge leg stretched out; he had elephantiasis. Another older man had a gangrenous leg, freely exposed for viewing to elicit contributions to his tin can. It was incredible from a Western perspective, but I learned that some preferred to have disease, as it gave them an income otherwise not possible; they didn’t even seek treatment. No one interfered with the beggars; it was understood they needed money to live. Disease was part of life and had been for generations, and I marveled at the African people’s acceptance of it.
The next day, I asked at the hostel how to get to Mount Kenya, some ninety-five miles away on the equator. At more than seventeen thousand feet high, it’s the second highest mountain in all Africa after Mount Kilimanjaro, located just to the south.
“You can see it in the early morning before eight o’clock and in the evenings now,” I was told. “Most of the time it’s in a purple haze, except for a white cap of ice and snow above its timberline. Otherwise, it hides in the unrelenting cumulus clouds drifting by all day. You would almost think it wasn’t there.”
There was a lodge near the mountain, which offered a camping area with cheap lean-tos. Fellow hikers there advised me that for safety reasons I should not climb the mountain by myself. Two other travelers happened by: a Western man and woman about my age. We agreed to climb together and take the Naro Moru Route to Point Lenana, 16,355 feet high. It was one of several main peaks and named after a chief medicine man of the Maasai people who lived around the mountain.
The medicine man must have been greatly revered, as the local people often thought of the mountain as home to their spirits. Some, like the Kikuyu, with wire coils on their arms wrinkling in the equatorial heat, built their homes with the doors facing it.
In the late 1970s, not all routes to the peaks of the mountain had been defined and climbed. The mountain was a huge old stratovolcano—composed of alternative layers of lava and ash—worn down over the last two to three million years. The craggy “nipple” was in fact two volcanic plugs made of more resistant rock than those that surrounded it.
We walked five miles gently uphill before reaching the point where the actual climb began. The mountain can be ascended comfortably in three days, but we decided to try for two. Our goal was simply to climb rather than sightsee. But were we fit enough? We didn’t consider altitude sickness, which can occur in a severe form above twelve thousand feet; nor did we consider taking a slow climb to alleviate its effects. We each had only a canteen or so of water.
The lower slopes were very fertile due to volcanic ash deposition rich in iron and other minerals. As a result, coffee, tea, bananas, and other notable cash crops grew all around the mountain, as did massive forests with thick, tall trees. The climate, of course, would change with the elevation. We walked up what looked like a logging road through a hardwood forest at the foot of the mountain. Circling the mountain was a zone in which juniper matured. Growing on a wetter section of one slope were groves of tall bamboo. At the timberline, the trees—and we—were in the clouds. We spent the first night in a climber’s lean-to eating meaty sandwiches and other food I’d agreed to buy as my share.
Mostly, our climb was simple and steady, but the trail was faint and seemingly twisted all over the side of the mountain. We just kept going. My heart has the capacity to recover very quickly from exertion, but during one very steep and gravelly portion of the climb called the Vertical Bog, it pounded like a hammer on a rain barrel. Maybe the thinner and drier air exacerbated this; it was something new to me. We all stopped repeatedly, gasping. Crawling on all fours like the residential rodent, the hyrax, was the only way to climb this section. Disturbed rocks, demonstrating our peril, rolled downward a hundred feet, stopped only by the trees below.
We reached the top at dusk and found a small bunkhouse. Before leaving the lodge, my companions had agreed to supply food for that evening. As it turned out, the fellow had selected packages of dried soup. I understood then why he was so thin. It was like drinking a cup of water with a few astonishingly thin, lonely noodles. I could strain it through my teeth. I knew energy was vital. Hell, we were sixteen thousand feet up a mountain!
With nothing much more to do and the night getting colder, we crawled into our bags and slept soundly. Morning came. All was covered in a thick blanket of snow, and more was falling. Everything was white. No tracks, no path, nothing. We had arrived in semidarkness and did not know the way down. I shared the three candy bars I had left.
Shit, I mumbled, this is not good.
That was an understatement. Without a trail we could very well end up lost on the other side of the mountain. I had read that some ten climbers a year die on nearby Kilimanjaro and some likewise each year on Mount Kenya. And nobody knew we were here.
We decided to wait a few hours in our sleeping bags, hopeful the snowfall would stop and at least allow us to see better. It did not.
“Well, okay,” I said, standing in my shorts and attempting to look out a snow-covered windowpane. “We have to find the path, as it looks as though it will snow all day—and then it will be even harder to get out.”
Slowly we climbed down, spacing ourselves out like breadcrumbs, one able to see the other, the last knowing the direction leading back to the hut. After an hour of searching, I found two oddly shaped boulders lying together—boulders I’d seen on the way up. Our path lay next to them. Confident we were on the trail, we spaced ourselves out from that point and stumbled through the snow, looking for another sign. Finally, the full path emerged as the snow disappeared—a relief, to say the least.
Miles later, at the base of the mountain, with nothing around us except nature and a dirt logging road to follow, we took our leave of one another without feeling. We were dizzy from hunger and exertion. I went into the woods by the logging road, wanting to get away. I had been bound up for over a week, and the last two days of tension had only made it worse.
Glad to be off the mountain and by myself, I was a bit giddy but relieved. With that, my body functioned again as I squatted. I stood and admired the truly superb specimen I’d deposited on the woodland carpet—like a giant eggplant. I visualized the forest creatures stopping to stare. They would wonder what magnificent beast had staked its territory there.
Chapter 20
Self-Loathing in Lamu
The dark machine was hissing steam in the evening shadows as if it were in rivalry with its colleagues lined up on adjacent tracks. I was about to head to the old Kenyan port of Mombasa on the Indian Ocean on an inexpensive overnight train leaving from Nairobi. Plaintive siren whistles pierced the station, people yelled in strange languages, and colored lights blinked messages. Anticipation filled the atmosphere.
Pack on my back, I twisted my way down the train’s narrow aisle to my designated compartment. The countryside passed by—clickety-clack, clickety-clack—as speed was maintained. It was mysterious, dark, and wonderful outside—patches of emptiness broken by great trees, the silhouettes of round huts, shacks, and hills with blinking fires in the distance. Occasional eyes and shapes of forest creatures and men all blended into a land the train punctured and surprised with its great surging headlight. Everything glowed with adventure.
Mombasa . . . It had been the major Portuguese trading center along the entire east coast of Africa in the 1500s. They constructed the prominent Fort Jesus, which served as a trading post and a slave prison, as the area was part of the Indian Ocean slave trade.
From the city’s train station, I walked along the flat coastal terra
in to the old-town section. The alleys were a window into life, with the smells of spices, standing water, children playing, and discarded things. Friendly Swahilis traded and sold clothing and food. Some presumably Muslim Arab women wore the buibui, the nun-like garment of crow black with heads and faces covered. The men wore vividly colored clothing, some with a white turban of cotton muslin knotted loosely around their heads. People brushed against each other as they passed.
Fort Jesus was a main attraction. The fort’s naval cannons were capable of firing missiles from three to twenty pounds in most directions. What kind of men had stood on those thick walls, ready to die? What were they protecting with their lives? The slave and ivory trades, it seemed. Somewhere around four million people were sold in the region. The East African trade—the Indian Ocean trade—concentrated on women and children, until the need came for men to work on plantations in the nineteenth century.
In the evening, I walked along the harbor, enjoying the smell of the Indian Ocean. With its dress of seaweed, it rocked in and out, stroking the sand. Seagulls floated in the temperate breezes over the warmest ocean in the world. From time to time the birds swooped down to kiss the water and cry in thanks for the fish.
In the morning, I boarded an old bus for Lamu. Before reaching the island, the bus rolled onto a wooden raft that bobbed from its weight. To my surprise, the passengers, including me, got out to haul on a rope connected to the other side of the large Tana River. We were the engine.
Lamu was small and indeed populated by Islamic Swahili. It had quite a few mosques and veiled women, but some wore whatever they liked. The town’s streets were narrow and its buildings strongly made of coral. Patient-looking donkeys were the main transport, going from one palm-and-limestone hut to the next.
The island is very close to the equator. That meant monsoon winds blew northeast from November to February and southwest from April to September. They helped support back-and-forth trade of the triangular-sailed dhows that came in from the horizon.
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