As we draw a little closer to the swamp, bird life proliferates. The delicately pretty lily-trotter, or African jacana, with its enormous clown’s feet, and the black-winged stilt, whose most striking feature is a pair of long, very red legs, pick at the mud with their beaks whilst brown herons and crowned cranes with jazzy yellow crests take a more leisurely approach. Tawny eagles turn and turn above, and swallows, migrated here, like us, from Europe, dart around, low to the ground.
Where there is a stretch of clear water a flock of flamingos has settled. Startled by our approach they peel off into the sky, turning in a perfect curve, wings catching the light. Jackson warns me that snakes like these lakeside conditions. He has seen pythons here and urges me to walk carefully and make heavy footfalls to warn them of my approach. That would be something, a Python killed by a python.
A grazing herd of thirty Cape buffalo regards us warily. These are big animals, weighing in at around 1500 lbs and dangerous. At the back of the herd a buffalo calf is being born. The cow stays standing and as the calf drops to the ground, she turns and begins to lick it extensively and thoroughly, chewing up the placenta. The new-born calf looks around, blinking and startled as if this is the last thing it wanted to happen. Within a couple of minutes it is standing unsteadily, staggering, falling and being urged up again by the mother. Within five minutes it is standing on its own. A domestic calf would take several hours to stand unassisted, but in this hostile environment such helplessness could be fatal.
At the end of the day we climb up to a small steep bluff called Kitirua Hill. Below us the plain is streaked with vivid splashes of crimson and scarlet as columns of Masai herdsmen, driving their cattle before them, return to the boma, their encampment, before nightfall.
Ali pours us all beers but this is Ramadan and he cannot take a drink himself until the sun has set.
It dips close to the horizon, but seems to linger there most provocatively.
‘Has it gone?’ Ali keeps asking anxiously.
Though we tell him it has, near enough, it is not until he’s satisfied that the very last trace of the rim has disappeared that he reaches for a bottle of Sprite. It’s the first food or drink that has passed his lips since ten o’clock last night.
Back at Tortilis camp, I shower and check myself for ticks. ‘Small black things, about this long,’ warns Hans, the manager, parting his thumb and forefinger by at least an inch. We’re treated to Italian food tonight, dispensed by Jackson, who has traded his Masai cloak for a waiter’s black tie.
The exhilaration of a day spent walking in the bush merely confirms that Africa can never be reduced to European intimacy and cosiness. I fall asleep, having struggled to read Green Hills of Africa in the dim lamp-light, listening to the birds and bats above me in the thatch and the occasional indefinable grunt or shriek from much further away and the evening wind that grows hour by hour until, in the middle of the night, it suddenly dies and I am woken by total silence.
I‘m in a twin-engined Cessna 206, built thirty-one years ago, flying east from Tortilis camp towards a low range called the Chyulu Hills, which lie between the National Parks of Amboseli and Tsavo.
Hemingway knew of Tsavo by reputation, for it was immortalised by one J. H. Patterson in his book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, an account of two lions who preyed on men building the Mombasa-Nairobi railway, eating twenty-eight of them before being caught. The lions’ stuffed remains became star exhibits at the Field Museum in Chicago, one of young Ernest’s favourite haunts.
Hemingway knew the Chyulu Hills from direct experience, for in his second African trip, in 1953, he stayed close by when he took on the job of Honorary Game Warden. The man who is flying my plane there today, skimming it over a sand-coloured plain sprinkled with zebra and wildebeest and herds of Masai cattle, is the current Honorary Game Warden in the area. His name is Richard Bonham, a Kenyan with an interest in up-market safari lodges. He’s short, wiry and weathered and somewhere around fifty, though his outdoor complexion and sun-bleached hair make him look much younger. He’s anxious about the fate of two Masai children and their herd of goats who went missing from their village last night.
He’s also very worried about a constipated cheetah, one of a pair which he took in recently after they were orphaned and couldn’t hunt.
Once we’ve touched down he drives me straight to the cage which has been erected for the cheetah in the shade of two tall, isolated trees. The female of the pair escaped only the day before, adding insult to injury for her constipated companion. He looks very sorry for himself, in marked contrast to the chirpy rabbits in cages nearby. They haven’t yet worked out that their relationship with the cheetah is purely gastronomic.
Richard beckons me to follow him into the cage.
‘They love being stroked,’ he says, as if we’re going to see a baby kitten. As we approach, the cheetah retreats into the corner, which makes me feel a little better.
‘Aim for the top of the head here.’ He moves aside to let me have a go.
‘Is he tame?’ I find myself asking in a curiously husky voice.
‘Well, he’s half-tame.’
‘Which half ?’
‘We didn’t want to tame him completely or he won’t be able to survive when we turn him loose.’
Oh, great.
‘That’s good. Approach directly from the front. Let your hand move in a straight line to the top of his head.’ My arm suddenly feels very heavy.
The cheetah bares his teeth and backs up. My hand wobbles. I breathe deeply and keep it moving. It’s almost there, hovering above the big, sad, yellow eyes, when the cheetah delivers a sharp and wholly unexpected right hook to my leg. I reel back, clutching my calf to stem the blood flow. Sadly, there is no blood, indeed the claw marks are barely visible to the naked eye, but I later note two tiny but unmistakable punctures in my Hugo Boss chinos which bear witness to the fact that I can now add ‘Attacked by Cheetah’ to my resume.
Later, at Richard’s lodge, Ol Donyo Wuas (which means the Spotted Hills in the Masai language): like Tortilis, this place is constructed with local materials and in local style. One end of my room, cantilevered ten feet or so off the ground, is open to the elements. As we are on the slopes of the hills, the view from my bed is enormous, stretching across the plain to the cloud bank fifty miles away, behind which lurks Kilimanjaro.
It’s the magic hour of sunset. Sounds of cow bells and distant voices. I run a shower with water heated by a wood-burning kiln, then sit for a while and watch vervet monkeys watching me from nearby trees. A small herd of hartebeest springs out of the bushes and stops, warily, to munch the grass in the clearing below me. Examine my cheetah wound and for an embarrassing moment cannot even remember which leg it’s on.
Woken, with tea, at twenty past five. Dawn comes like an old television set warming up. Every time I look outside there’s a little more light in the darkness. By six-thirty we have the full picture and Kilimanjaro is clear enough for Richard to suggest we fly out to the mountain and get our pictures as soon as possible. By ten o’clock it will be hidden again.
As we drive down to the airstrip at the bottom of the hill the cattle are being moved out of the bomas to catch the morning dew on the grass. The Masai way of life looks idyllic on this dry, sun-sharpened morning, but Richard says it is much more like the Wild West than it looks. Twenty per cent of the Masai own seventy per cent of the cattle. These cattle barons are rich by African standards, some owning a truck or even a tractor.
Once we’re airborne we head south-east across grass so dry it seems to take on the colour and texture of sand. This prairie soon gives way to green scrub and thorn tree cover, but as the mountain comes nearer, the landscape changes with dramatic speed from lush, tropical farmland through rainforest to timber plantations, moorland and eventually alpine desert. The transitions are fast and exhilarating, but not without a cost. As we rise through ten thousand feet I feel the disadvantages of an un-pressurised cabin: shortage of breath, difficu
lty in writing, a touch of nausea.
We shall never be able to fly high enough to look down on the mountain (it’s just short of twenty thousand feet, and the safe operating altitude for our two small planes is no more than fifteen), but we’re close enough to see vivid detail.
In geological terms Kilimanjaro is a baby, formed by massive volcanic activity less than a million years ago, and far from extinct. On closer examination it is in fact two mountains in one, the wide table-top dome, called Kibo, and on the eastern edge, the much more jagged and dramatic outline of Mawenzi, with sheer sides and precipitous plunging crevasses. The north face of Kibo rises steep, black and fissured to the highest point on the African continent. A glacier runs down from the summit and I can see thick snow walls. It was in these snows that the carcass of a leopard was found in the 1920s.
No one knows what the leopard was doing at such an altitude, but the legend inspired ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, one of Hemingway’s finest short stories.
Not that Richard regards the story as legend. He says his father pointed out the bones of the leopard when he took him up the mountain as a child. If we have time he can show me the remains of a Dakota aircraft that smashed into the side of Mawenzi with a valuable haul of emeralds on board. Part of the fuselage still hangs there, and no one has yet been able to reach the emeralds.
One man recently hauled himself up to the top of Kilimanjaro to attempt the world para-gliding record.
‘And did he do it?’
Richard makes a quick adjustment to keep us alongside the camera plane.
‘He was never seen again.’
By now the cloud is rolling up the walls of Kilimanjaro like a shroud and there is no time for Dakotas or emeralds. By ten o’clock it has enveloped us and the mountain might just as well not be there.
Richard turns the Cessna and heads back across the plain. On the way home he takes me low over game grazing on the salt licks and skims the tops of the acacia orchard where the white rhino which Hemingway hunted were once found in abundance. Now they’re virtually gone. Poachers have reduced their numbers from several hundred to six, maybe ten. The demand from Asia for rhino horn has killed its source.
Richard raises his voice over the noise of the engine, ‘The days of the wild rhino are over. Finished.’
Back on the ground he’s rewarded with the news that the two Masai children are safe. Their goats did a runner in the night and they went after them. But there are other headaches for the Honorary Game Warden. Cattle poachers are laying traps in the hills and he will have to take a group of rangers to investigate.
When Hemingway first came to Africa in 1933, the idea of him becoming a game warden was faintly ludicrous. His wife Pauline’s diary of that trip hardly reveals a conservationist at work: ‘They killed four Thompson gazelle, eight Grant, seven wildebeest, seven impala, two klipspringers, four roan, two bushbucks, three reedbucks, two oryx, four topi, two water-buck, one eland and three kudu. Of dangerous game, they killed their licensed limit: four lions, three cheetahs, four buffalo, two leopards and two rhinos. They also killed one serval cat, two warthogs, thirteen zebra and one cobra. For amusement forty-one hyenas were also killed.’
Twenty years later Hemingway, though famous enough to be gratefully offered the title of Game Warden, was less desperate for trophies. And there were other diversions. He became infatuated with a girl called Debba, from the Wakaba tribe. She and he canoodled and at one time broke Mary’s bed when she was away. There are rumours, only partly cleared up by True at First Light, that they may even have undergone a sort of marriage ceremony.
I think of this as Richard shows me lethal cattle traps of tree trunk and coils of wire left by today’s Wakamba who kill the trapped cattle and ship the meat back over the hills to their territory.
As Richard and his rangers dismantle the traps he tells me that poachers would not have been called poachers in Hemingway’s time. What the Wakamba were doing then was practising the right to hunt, part of a long and ancient tradition. Now the law has separated them from their hunting grounds without recompense and without an alternative way of life. The traps are cruel but almost inevitable. Rivalry with the neighbouring two tribes has always been intense. They have always been different, the Wakamba hunting with bows and arrows, the Masai with spears (which they cannot make for themselves, they are forged by another tribe on the foot-hills of Kilimanjaro).
In True at First Light, Hemingway, even allowing for a bit of romantic bias, has his own characteristic views on what makes the Wakamba different.
Their warriors had always fought in all of Britain’s wars and the Masai had never fought in any. The Masai had been coddled, preserved, treated with a fear that they should never have inspired and been adored by all the homosexuals … who had worked for the Empire in Kenya and Tanganyika because the men were so beautiful … The Wakamba hated the Masai as rich show-offs protected by the government.
In the evening, back at Ol Donyo Wuas, it’s chilly enough for a log fire. As we discuss the sort of day we’ve all had, Alex, the young Englishman who runs the lodge, rolls up his sleeve to show a mass of claw marks, sustained whilst trying to befriend the constipated cheetah.
Maybe I should look at my wound again. With a stronger magnifying glass.
In the middle of the night I’m woken by the sound of light scuttling, followed by a crash and the rapid dripping of water on to my suitcase. I feel around blearily beneath the pillow, find my torch and shine the beam through the mosquito net in the direction of the noise.
A few feet away, on the wooden work-top that runs at the back of the cabin, a furry creature with a beautiful black and white striped tail is lapping away at a small pool of water. It carries on quite unconcerned until I utter a grunt of indignation, at which it flits away behind the cupboard, where it hides very badly, leaving most of its tail sticking out.
I tell the story at breakfast and Alex shakes his head with mild exasperation.
‘It’s the genet again,’ he says, as if it had been an ant on the toothbrush. ‘Large-spotted genet. They love the water, you see. We put covers on top but they just take them off and tip the jug over.’
While I’m mulling this over, Richard arrives in a state of great elation. He’s just heard that the cheetah has had a movement.
Things continue in this visceral vein as he tells us that he is on his way to the local village to attend a circumcision ceremony and would we like to come along.
Well, there’s nothing on television, so why not.
As we climb into the Land Rovers and head off up the hill through trees and green meadows Richard fills me in on the background. Circumcision, both male and female, is still practised by the local Masai. For the boys it is seen as a rite of passage, part of the process of becoming a man, and the operation is not performed until they are in their teens.
It is all done to a carefully prescribed ritual. The circumcision itself takes place, like so much else in Africa, at first light, and outside the main entrance to the boma. By the time we arrive it is already underway. A group of six or seven young men surround the boy whose body looks limp and inert beneath a loose black robe. A man in an old coat and a Kenya Tea Company sports hat is kneeling before him. This is the surgeon. His knives and some antiseptic spirit are in a filthy old box beside him.
There is no sound from the boy as, clutching his penis, he is carried back into the compound by his friends and into one of the low mud huts. It is considered to be very important not to cry out or acknowledge the pain. This restraint is known as emorata - what Hemingway might have called ‘grace under pressure’ - and is part of what makes a boy into a moran, a warrior.
The Masai are nomadic and this boma is a temporary refuge for thirty families, some hundred and eighty people, who are joined at night by their livestock. The floor is a soft layer of trodden animal dung. Clouds of flies gather instantly at mouth, nose and eyes.
Three young warriors, only a little older than the boy, selec
t a cow and fire an arrow into its jugular, swiftly placing a gourd beneath the wound to draw off blood. A coagulant on the tip of the arrow seals the incision and not a drop of unwanted blood is spilled. The gourd is carried across to the boy’s hut, where his mother mixes it with milk into a pink slurry, the colour of strawberry yoghurt, which is taken indoors to be drunk by her son.
I am asked into the hut, an invitation which I accept rather gingerly. Bending double, I stoop my way along the short curved tunnel of an entrance and find myself confronted by a scene of unexpected serenity, a bit like a nativity. The mother and grandmother sit beside the fire and the boy is lying silently beneath a rough cloth blanket to one side. Only the tossing and turning of his head indicates what he is going through. The women smile in welcome, and one of them moves to the boy’s bed and pulls the blanket closer around his shoulders. He will stay here for two weeks.
Outside, the young men are lighting a fire by spinning an acacia stick on to a base of cedar. I notice that one of them has a little trouble as his Rolex watch keeps sliding down. It takes ten minutes or more before a little smoke appears, although they break off frequently to be photographed.
Though the Masai in general, and the women in particular, seem to resent the camera, these young boys will pose at the drop of a hat. They may look warlike but it’s all a bit of a put-on. Their faces are beautifully painted, their hair elaborately hennaed, their ear lobes cut and shaped to take a dazzling array of adornment, their beads and bracelets and rich red tunics artfully arranged. Small hand-mirrors hang from straps on their waist.
One of the boys speaks good English. Instead of sending him out with the cattle his father sent him to the local school. He says it is very important to look beautiful.
‘Who is the most beautiful here?’ I ask, hoping to stir up a little local rivalry. It backfires.
He indicates several of his companions, ‘We are all beautiful.’ Then he turns back to me. ‘Except you!’ He breaks into a toothy grin, the others into fits of giggles.
Hemingway Adventure (1999) Page 13
