West With the Night

by Beryl Markham

  Leopard nights — lion nights. The day the elephant trekked from the Mau to Laikipia, hundreds of them in a great irresistible phalanx, crushing the young grain, the fences, crumbling huts and barns while our horses trembled in their stables; the aftermath — the path of the elephants, broad and levelled like a route of conquest through the heart of the farm.

  Lion in the paddocks — the bawling of a steer, a cow, a heifer; the rush for hurricane lamps, rifles, the whispering of one man to another; the stillness; the tawny shape, burdened with its kill, flowing through the tall grass; bullets whining away against the wind; the lion leaping, bullock and all, over the cedar fence; the lowered rifles.

  And leopard nights — moonlit nights; my father and I crouched by the bulk of a Dutchman’s wagon on the edge of the water tank; the smooth snick of cartridges in long guns; the wait, the tightened muscles; the gliding prowler sleek as a shadow on still water; eyes along the black barrels, the pressure of a finger.

  All things to remember; some dark, some light. I nudge Pegasus into a gentle canter where the trail flattens through an open glade. The reins are threaded between the fingers of my right hand, the whip rests between my palm and the reins in the same hand. I have slipped into a thin, buckskin jacket, for, as the sun climbs, the forest deepens, the upward path finds thinner, colder air, and the green aisles are fresh with the smell of it.

  I smile to myself, remembering Bombafu. What brings him to mind, I do not know, but suddenly there he is. Bombafu means fool in Swahili; at Njoro it meant my father’s parrot.

  Poor Bombafu! — one day he whistled for destruction, and it came. How sad, how naked, how disillusioned he was after the moment of his greatest triumph had shone upon him like a gleam of light, then abandoned him to the darkness of despair!

  They were proud feathers Bombafu gave to the Cause of his Learning, pretty feathers, long and rich and stained with jungle colour. How proudly he wore them!

  How proudly he clasped the perch in the square room outside my father’s study, day after day, looking with truculent, or bemused, or falsely philosophic eyes, on all who entered — on all the dogs of the motley pack my father fancied then!

  And these were the undoing of Bombafu. Dogs were simple things, he saw, controlled by a single sound. A man would stand in the doorway of the house and make that sound with his lips — and the pack would come.

  But who could make sounds if not Bombafu? Was he to remain a bird on a stick the whole of his long, long life? Was there to be nothing but seeds and water and water and seeds for a being as elegant as he? Who had such feathers? Who had such a beak? Who could not call a dog? Bombafu could. He did.

  He practised week upon week, but so cleverly that we seldom heard him; he practised the abracadabra of calling dogs until he knew, as well as he knew the shape of the bar he clung to, that no dog that ever sought a flea could resist his summons. And he was not wrong. They came.

  One morning when the house was empty, Bombafu slipped his perch and called the dogs. I heard it too. I heard the quick, urgent whistle that was my father’s whistle, though my father was a mile away. I looked across the courtyard and saw Bombafu, resplendent, confident, almost masterful as he trod the doorsill on hooked, impatient toes, his brilliant breast puffed and swelling, his green, and all too empty head cocked with insolence. ‘Come one, come all,’ his whistle said — ‘it is I, Bombafu, calling!’

  And so they came — long dogs, short dogs, swift dogs, hungry dogs, running from the stables, from the huts, from the shade of the trees where they had dozed, while Bombafu danced under the portal of his doom and whistled louder.

  I could run too in those days, but not so fast as that. Not fast enough to prevent the frustration of an anticipant dog from curdling to fury at the sight of this vain mop of gaudy feathers committing forgery of the master’s voice — insulting all of dogdom with the cheek of it, holding to ridicule the canine clan, promising even (what could be worse?) a scrap, or a bone, yet giving nothing! That was the rub; that was the injury heaped on insult.

  Bombafu went down; he went under; he disappeared only to rise again, feather by feather. His blaze of glory was no abstract one. It floated on the air in crimson and chrome yellow, in green and blue and subtler shades — a burst, a galaxy, a comet’s tail of scraps and pieces.

  Sad bird! Unhappy bird! He lived, he sat again upon his perch, his eyes half-closed and dull, a single tattered wing to hide his nakedness, a single moment to remember.

  And the immortal line so rightly his, the only word he might have uttered, was stolen too. Surely this was tragedy — this was irony — that not Bombafu, but a dour and morbid raven, a creature of the printed page, a nightly nobody, had discovered first the dramatic power of those haunting tones, those significant syllables, that ultimate utterance — Never — Nevermore!

  So suffered Bombafu — and suffers still for all I know. Parrots are ageless — though blessed, I suspect, with memories too short to be fatal.

  While I think of him, the trail I ride finds the verge of the plateau, curls over it, and Pegasus and I move in a place no longer Africa.

  A country laved with icy streams, its valleys choked with bracken, its hills clothed in the green heather that wandered Scotsmen sing about, seems hardly Africa. Not a stone has a familiar cast; the sky and the earth meet like strangers, and the touch of the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things.

  Such is Molo. Its first glance presages the character I later learn — a stern country, high and cold, demanding from those who live upon it a tithe of toil, a recompense of labour fuller than full measure and a vigour of heart against the stubborn virginity of its earth.

  Sheep run here, but they are native sheep with the weather in their blood. Cattle graze, mulling the sweet grass to rhythmic cuds, staring into the full-grown day with calm eyes. There is game — scattered reed-buck, impala, smaller things that rustle the bracken but never part it; a buffalo now and then emerges from a copse to scan the fresh hills with dubious approval, then turns, shouldering a path to less austere and more familiar levels.

  There are farms — and farmers scattered like the builders of a new land, each hugging to himself all that spreads from the door of his hut to the horizon he marks with a sweep of his arm.

  Yes, this too is Africa.

  I dismount, slip the bit out of Pegasus’ mouth and let him drink from a stream that rolls from nowhere, washing rocks immaculate for ages — rounded rocks, sleek with the wear of water. He paws at them, snorts bubbles into the clear eddy that stings with cold, then sucks his fill.

  It is not his country, not the country he knows or likes. He moves back, away from the stream, and regards with tilted ears and bold, clear eyes what he hears and sees. He scuffs the ground and lowers his head to nudge my shoulder, coaxing me gently, suggesting, I suspect, that we go back the way we came.

  But, for a little while, this is the place for us — a good place too — a place of good omen, a place of beginning things — and of ending things I never thought would end.

  XII

  Hodi!

  THE TREES THAT GUARD the thatched hut where I live stand in disorganized ranks, a regiment at ease, and lay their shadows on the ground like lances carried too long.

  They are tall trees shouldering the late sun on its way before its light is done, urging the evening into their circle. Sun shafts pry through the close guard and touch the door of the hut, or the window, or the chimney, but they are as weak as the glow of my hurricane lamp, smug and dowdy in the centre of my cedar table. Night comes early at Molo. In my house it comes earlier still, but the stables are unshaded and I can see them from where I sit. I can see the safely closed doors, a stretch of the paddock fence, a tired syce trudging to his dinner. The workday is finished, dead as the calendar page that bore its number. But the year is thick with other pages, full with other work.

  There are orders for tomorrow. The girth gall on Collarcelle requires a di
fferent saddle — item for her syce. Wrack, the chestnut colt, is coming along — I’ll send him a mile and a quarter, three-quarter speed; carries head too low for running martingale — rings only — chain snaffle.

  There’s Welsh Guard. He’ll do — he is the son of Camciscan. Tendon boots? His legs are as sound as steel hinges. Gallop day tomorrow, but not for him; there’s weight in his neck — slow work with sweating hood. He’ll pull — the good ones always pull. I’ll ride Welsh Guard, and that’s three.

  There are two others. I train them in exchange for my hut and stable space. Dull horses, too old and ‘handicapped out’ but a job’s a job. Let me see …

  I think. I scribble notes. I wonder about the high price of feed, and chew my pencil. I am a trainer of race-horses, I have already got my licence. Six weeks to the Race Meeting at Nairobi — the little hotels filled, the streets humming, each day the grandstands mottled with the costumes and the colour of a dozen tribes and peoples. Winners. Losers. Money changing hands. Trainers big-chested, trainers flat-chested, explaining how it might have happened, ‘except just for this.’ All of them men. All of them older than my eighteen years, full of being men, confident, cocksure, perhaps offhand. They have a right to be. They know what they know — some of which I have still to learn, but not much, I think. Not much, I hope. We shall see, we shall see.

  Pencil-chewing leads to nothing. My scribbles are complete, the price of feed is adamant; it is hard, it can’t be changed by thinking.

  I rise from my chair, stretch, and look once more toward the stables, once more toward the humourless regiment of trees that surround me. But it is not so bad. Next week I am promised two more horses to train, so my stable is growing. Only the work grows too.

  I am as fond of my syces as it is possible to be. Each has followed me from Njoro, knowing that salaries might be slow in coming, food and other things not so plentiful as they had been. But still they followed, barefoot up the long trail, ragged, shyly presenting themselves for work and, of course, finding it.

  Yet syces can do only certain things. They are stable boys; they can ride, they can groom, they can clean what has to be cleaned. They cannot apply a pressure bandage, or treat lameness, or judge fitness, or handle an overwilling horse, not even a sulky one. These things belong to me, but five o’clock in the morning until sundown, long as it seems, is not long enough. If only there were someone to trust — someone I know. But, of course, there isn’t. Not now. This is not Njoro in past days when I was a child and had a friend or two. This is Molo in the new days with new friends still in the making. Where are the old? Where are they ever?

  I take the alarm clock off the shelf near my iron bed and begin to wind it. The hurricane lamp on the table no longer has competition from the sun. It squats in the amber corona of its nearly futile light, twisting decent shadows into tortured shapes, shedding yellow on the walls of the thatched hut, the chair, the earthen floor.

  It is an ancient lamp, not of my own things. Its base is cheap metal, nicked in places, its chimney is smudged with soot. How has it lighted the hours of how many men? How many men have scribbled under it, eaten under it, got drunk under it? Has it ever seen success?

  I think not. It is crumpled and slatternly, enured to failure, as if no man with hope in his fingers had ever trimmed its wick. It gives a joyless light; it is a dissolute eye. Watching it burn I am at last depressed. I make it a symbol of despair, only because it is not brighter, perhaps because it cannot talk.

  But at least I can talk, if only on paper. I rummage in a saddlebag swung from a nail on the wall, find my father’s last letter from Peru, spread it open to read again and answer.

  Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it. I sit in a labyrinth of solitude jabbing at its bulwarks with the point of a pen — jabbing, jabbing.

  As always, my door is open. It may as well be closed — there is nothing to see but night. There is nothing to hear for a long time, and then I hear what I know to be naked feet walking toward me. But there is no stealth in the sound, neither is there any noise. It is the honest sound of one used to darkness, moving through my palace guard of trees.

  I do not lift the pen from the paper nor raise my head. I wait for a word, and it comes.

  ‘Hodi.’

  The voice is soft. It is deep with a timbre I almost remember, but do not know. It is respectful and warm and there is shyness in it. Through the single Swahili word it says, ‘I am here,’ and the echo of it adds, ‘Am I welcome?’

  I do not have to think. Now I leave the pen and raise my head from the half-covered sheet of paper. Somehow that word is always to be trusted. ‘Hodi’ — we who have used it know it would scorch the lips of a liar and make a cinder of a thief’s tongue. It is a gentle word, a word of honour, asking an answer gently. And there is an answer.

  I rise from the chair and look out through the door, seeing no one, and give the answer.

  ‘Kaaribu!’

  I have said, ‘ Come — you are welcome.’

  I do not know the man who appears — the young man who halts at my threshold draped in a warrior’s shuka. He is tall, and he wears a belt of beads hung with a club, and a sword in a bright red scabbard. The tails of Colobus monkeys circle his ankles; a strand of chain supporting a hollowed lion’s claw swings from his throat. He is tall and as silent as the night at his back. He does not move forward; he stands at the threshold.

  There is nothing for me to say. I stand and wait, letting the deceitful light make a fool of my memory. I advance around the cedar table. I look at the dark hair, plaited to a heavy pigtail, the forward-tilted chin — the eyes — the cheekbones — the hands …

  My own hand goes forward as if it were no part of me. The young man says, ‘I have come to help — to work for you, if you can use me. I am Arab Ruta.’

  But now I see; now I know.

  It is little Kibii of the Egret’s secret, Kibii of the vanished days, born once again.

  I wonder now how long we talked, how long we sat at the cedar table with the lamp at our elbows — the good lamp, the gay lamp transformed in character, no longer bent, but only leaning toward us to lend its light to an old companionship? Perhaps an hour — perhaps three. Each of us had a diary to read, unwritten but remembered well, and each had an audience.

  I told of Njoro, of the farm’s end, of things that had been and of things I hoped would be. We laughed at some things because we had grown so much older; we were serious about others because we were still so young.

  He spoke of his life since they had given him that spear he had always wanted and had made a Murani of him — and had renamed him Arab Ruta. Kibii was someone he barely knew. Kibii was gone, Kibii was literature. This was a warrior and a man of solemn thoughts.

  ‘The world is a big place,’ he said. ‘I have been north as far as the Uasin Gishu, farther south than Kericho, and. I have walked on the slopes of Ol Donia Kenya. But everywhere a man goes there is still more of the world at his shoulder, or behind his back, or in front of his eyes, so that it is useless to go on. I have hunted buffalo and lion, and traded sheep near the place called Soyamu, and I have talked with other men in all these places. After such things a man comes back to his home, and he is not much wiser.’

  ‘Then you are disappointed — Arab Ruta? When you were a boy — when you were Kibii — you did not speak like this.’

  ‘A boy does not speak like a man. The world has taught me not more than my father taught me — and not more than I learned from Arab Togom.’

  ‘I do not know Arab Togom.’

  ‘It was he my father chose to prepare me for my circumcision, and I think he prepared me well. He is a Murani of my father’s age-grade and a very wise man. He told me the history of my people and of how a man should live his life, keeping his voice soft and his anger sheathed until there is just need for it — like this sword that hangs from my belt. He told me how God delivered the first seed of all the cattle that li
ve into the keeping of my people and of how my tribe cannot die if they husband this gift. He told me of war and of how the soul of a man withers like the face of an aged woman if the will to fight is lost. Arab Togom told me these things. What shall a man eat and how shall a man love so that he remains a man and is yet not like a bull in the herd or like a hyena clawing at a feast?

  ‘I am married now, at last — but first I learned these ways of life. Obedience to law is among them; obedience to my own heart is a part of them. I have met men that have seen more of the world than I. One I know has even stood up to his knees in the water that never ends and tastes like salt on the tongue; another has lived in a village so big that only one man out of a hundred men knows the name of his neighbour. These men have wisdom too. It is another wisdom, and I do not say it is bad wisdom, but that which I have learned from my father, Arab Maina, whom you remember well, and from Arab Togom, seems enough to live by.

  ‘Have you in these years, Memsahib, learned more than this?’

  Kibii into Arab Ruta — Beru into Memsahib! — this stilted word that ends my youth and reminds me always of its ending —

  What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker’s rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta, who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.

  No, my friend, I have not learned more than this. Nor in all these years have I met many who have learned as much.

  So the days that followed at Molo became easier days. Arab Ruta had not forgotten what he knew about horses. Part of my work became his work, in time he brought his wife to live there. In time my responsibility grew from five to eight horses, then to ten, until my thatched hut, the modest stables, even the quarters of Ruta and the syces, seemed no longer the place for us and I thought of other places. I thought of Nakuru, deep in the Rift Valley — a place where there were bigger stables, a race-course of sorts, and warmer weather. And in this I conceded to Pegasus the argument he never left, but still pressed home, day after day, by stubbornly striving, whenever I mounted him, toward the trail that had brought us to Molo. This, he continued to say, this of all places is no place for us!