by Robert Ruark
They even had to build a slipway to launch her and a dock to shelter her. Every nail, every plank, every piece of equipment, except thatch, came up from Nairobi by truck, for Selby to rear his village for a scientific expedition that was intent on charting the lake, its fish, and its birds.
“How long does it take to fly there?” I asked.
“Oh, ‘bout an hour and a half,” Selby said. “Maybe two. But we can’t fly. We haven’t any vehicles up there. Everybody’s left, and we’ll need some food and some transport for the boys. Anyhow, it’s terribly interesting country, and the fish are something really extraordinary.”
He cited me some statistics. One day very recently they had boated fifteen Nile perch—only one under twenty-five pounds and the rest ranging from twenty to sixty—in three-quarters of an hour. Some other people had caught sixteen perch over one hundred pounds at the south end of the lake. The record was two hundred and forty pounds.
“Sounds like action,” I said.
“You’ll like it. The air’s so dry that you really don’t mind if it gets to be a hundred and twenty degrees around midday.”
Brian Burrows, an Irishman who sunburns easily, paled a mite at this information, but he had already signed on for the trip. Our noble caravan, consisting of a Dodge Power Wagon, one Mercedes diesel truck, and a dozen unhappy natives, set off to catch a fish. To catch a fish you drive about ninety miles from Nairobi until you turn right at a place called Gilgil. This road eventually brings you to Thomson’s Falls, about a hundred and sixty miles from Nairobi.
If you’re a lucky little chap you can go from Thomson’s Falls to Maralal, another seventy-five miles, before you pitch your camp after dark. You have sent the lorry on ahead and you camp at the foot of the mountain, because it’s about fourteen thousand feet high at the top, and though it is cold at the bottom it is considerably colder at the top—even in the daytime.
You will have inhaled plentiful dust and suffered a great many bumps on the base of the spine, and seen a power of dull, drab country. Juma and the other boys have made a fire, and you thank heaven for it when you dismount from the Power Wagon. You have just left a luxury safari, with iceboxes and pretty girls and mess tents and forty-odd assorted attendants. You have shot nothing, and you pitch no tents. You dine sumptuously off hot whisky, cold beans, and clammy bread, and hit the feathers without benefit of any tentage whatsoever.
Nothing is as unhappy looking as a bunch of freezing Africans loading one lonesome lorry in the cold gray crack of dawn, feeding you makeshift ham and eggs, and literally whisking the chair out from under you in order to cram it onto the truck. Nothing is as miserable as three white fishermen, who have slept in their clothes and have decided that teeth cleaning can wait for a hotter clime. Nothing is as miserable—until you check with me later.
So now we tackle the escarpment, which is really a very lovely thing, if you like driving a clanking vehicle straight up to the sky around impossible curves. We hit the summit and paused to see the view, but the wind blew us right away from the view and suicidally down a hill that twisted around the badly sutured scar of the Rift, product of a great volcanic upheaval.
We clambered down the escarpment and stopped for a drink. Burrows was pale and so was I, because no parachutes had been issued with the Power Wagon. A young Samburu warrior, who looked like Lena Horne’s twin brother, stopped to pass the time of day. He asked, in Swahili, where we were going.
“Fishing,” Selby said.
The Samburu moran shook both his head and his spear. He had now heard it all. He looked around him at the lava-strewn desert, at the escarpment behind us, and toward Baragoi, which he had left a couple of days earlier, about sixty miles t’other way.
“I have never seen a fish,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll find any around here. Perhaps if you go far enough, my father says, to the other side of Baragoi, you will come to a great lake. Perhaps there will be fish there.”
We gave the Samburu warrior a candy bar and bade him fond adieu.
“Let us press on, men,” I said. “The fish are waiting.” And I knew I would hate myself in the morning. I did.
We stopped off at Baragoi village to buy some gin, which the dukah owner naturally forgot to put into the truck. We had a small libation of cold beer and then took off, ginless in Gaza, so to speak, figuring that we would lunch when we got down the hill.
Immeasurably cheered by a couple of beers I asked the Scoutmaster how far were we from our destination, where we would fish.
“Only sixty-five miles or so,” Mr. Selby said, taking a hairpin curve that headed us back to Baragoi. “It’s really nothing until we come to the Valley of Death. That’s something. The nice thing, though, is that we’ll do it after dark. You won’t be able to see where I’m driving.” He chuckled darkly. “But then, of course, neither will I,” he said.
I could hear Burrows gulp.
We progressed until we passed a place called South Horr. There is another place at the other end of the lake called North Horr. We played tag with a herd of elephants, and we had what could be called a miserable lunch. This was about the time we discovered that our friend in the dukah had forgotten to pack the gin. Even the Horr Valley, which was pretty green, was still miserable country.
“There’s a police post up there,” Selby said, pointing to a mountainside. “Once in a while there is a pretty good chance of getting through to it on the radio. If you have a two-way radio, of course.”
“Do we have a two-way radio?”
“No,” Selby said.
“That’s nice,” Burrows said. “It’s one thing we won’t have to worry about if the Gelubba come over from Abyssinia to kill us.”
“Oh,” Selby said, “they’d have to pass the police post at North Horr first. Unless they decided to by-pass it. They do that, you know. They can move about forty-five miles a day on foot, and generally strike and move out before the police find out about it.”
“We could have fished the streams in Nanyuki,” I said.
“The fishing’s pretty good down Mombasa way,” Burrows said.
“Oh,” Selby said, “but it doesn’t have the stark drama of the north. In 1957 and ‘58 the Gelubba concentrated on the western shore of the lake. About a hundred and sixty deaths among the Turkana were reported. There must have been more. Tomorrow, when it’s light, I’ll show you a hill called Porr where they wiped out a whole tribe of Turks in 1954.
“It’s rather a rough bit of country,” Selby went on, narrowly avoiding a plunge to our mutual deaths. “Anything bearing arms on this side of the Kenya-Abyssinia boundary, up to a line between Porr and South Horr, is shot on sight. Any government official making his rounds on the other side of North Horr must carry an escort of ten men. This makes it a bit sticky when you consider that there are only forty-eight Kenya police for all of the Marsabit District, which includes Lasames—you know how far away that is, Bob—and the whole eastern shore of Rudolf. But, of course, there’s the recoup.”
“And what exactly is the recoup?”
“A sort of flying squad, a camel corps, made up of Somalis, Wakambas, everybody—fighting people. It’s an elite troop. You can’t do much with vehicles around here”—for emphasis he rattled our teeth on a block of stone—”because of the lava rocks. The recoup takes off in the black dawn to the trouble spots, siestas in the heat of the day, and generally arrives at its destination from nine to ten at night. More or less like the spahis in the old Beau Geste books. Tell the truth,” Harry said, “we are not terribly civilized around here.”
“The catfishing is pretty good on the Mara River,” I said.
“Malindi’s nice,” Burrows said. “The fishing’s fine in Malindi, and you can always hop over to Zanzibar or up to Lamu to watch the dhows smuggling the elephant tusks. I hear the fishing is fine around Malindi.”
“Ah, but they haven’t got the real sense of the country anymore,” Selby said, feeling the bitter hatred that swirled around him and loving
every moment of it. “Too many tourists. Not enough mythology. Now you just take the goats.”
“What goats?” That must have been me speaking.
“The goats on South Island. South Island is kind of haunted. Nothing on it but goats—great big goats—and nobody really knows how they got there. Goats and ghosts. But they’re there, all right. Seen ‘em myself, the ghosts, and shot some and trapped some. The goats, I mean.”
We clanked along in the mobile iron maiden, while Selby elaborated. “The locals,” Harry said, “they believe that South Island was once connected to the mainland by a peninsula. At the base of the island was a spring where the Samburu cattle watered. The spring was sacred, and everybody was forbidden to tamper with it when it dried. But one day a pregnant Rendille woman came along with a flock of goats and started digging for water, and the spring burst forth and swallowed the whole countryside.
“She climbed the hill with her goats and eventually gave birth to a son, who, the natives said, later married his own mother and had children. As a matter of fact somebody did live on the island, because Sir Vivian Fuchs, in 1921, found remnants of huts and quite a lot of artifacts. And goats. Some other scientists—two men—tried to go over there and were never seen again. But George Adamson and his wife—you know him, Bob, he’s the New Frontier District game warden who has the tame lioness—were over there about three years ago and they found a cairn of rocks and a whisky bottle, so the two scientists must have been lost on their way back to the eastern shore.
“Also,” Harry said, “you can see firelight over there, although there’s nobody living on the island.”
“I don’t want to see any firelight on a place nobody lives on,” said I. “How about the goats?”
“You wouldn’t believe them,” Harry said. “They got horns twice as tall and beards twice as long as any goats I ever saw. Sort of trophy goats.”
“I believe the fishing is wonderful on the Athi River,” Burrows said. “And it has the advantage of being very close to Nairobi. Very few goats, though, I’m told.”
“We’d better stop,” Harry said. “It’s about night-time and that damned lorry seems to be too far behind us. A pity, really, that we have to get there in the black of night. As a true experiment into fear that descent into the Valley of Death really wants seeing by day.”
We had come through some more horrid country and were now perched atop a high hill. Hill? Hell’s delight, it was a mountain. We looked hopefully for the flickering yellow tongues of the lorry’s lights. Nothing showed. The wind howled.
“I wish I was back there with the camels,” Burrows said. “They at least look like contented camels.” We had passed through a vast herd, numbering into the thousands, of Samburu wealth, which in that area is camels. For pure wealth you can’t beat a camel. You can milk it, eat it, wear its hair, ride it, make it carry your belongings, and it has the definite advantage of getting fat on thorns and only drinking every other semester.
“Here comes the lorry,” Selby said finally. “Brace yourselves, chaps. Into the Valley of Death.”
It was midnight when we hit the camp on the little sweet-water stream. It had taken us fourteen hours of driving to cover sixty-five miles. The last three hours was absolutely straight down a lava-strewn mountain, with the vehicles hanging onto the rocks by their heels—like klipspringers. The last few miles were along the lake’s beach, which was composed of slippery shale on which the autos skidded as though on ice.
“Home,” Harry said, as we came up to what appeared to be a thatched palace. “I’ll just go cut in the generator and we’ll have some lights.”
In a moment he was back, smiling cheerfully—the bearer of ill tidings. “The generator won’t cut in,” he said. “I guess we’ll make it on the hurricane lamps.”
Juma, the headman, came in and said something rapidly in Swahili. I could sort out the word “Ramadan,” used several times over.
“Boys ain’t pleased,” Harry said. “It gets hot here, and on the Moslem national holiday month, Ramadan, you can’t drink or eat from dawn to dusk. Also, most of the blokes spent six months here with the expedition, and they’ve been out with you for three months. Juma’s face looks like an old boot.”
“So does mine,” I said.
“I hear the fishing is very good outside of Denver, Colorado,” Burrows said. “In the time we’ve spent we could have gone there.”
“Ah, you’ll love it by daylight,” Harry said, “when the freezer gets going—that’s if the generator works—and we go out on the lake in the boat. Her name’s Lady of the Lake—that is, if she’s not sunk.”
“Let’s eat something before we turn in,” I said. “What’ve we got that is quick and easy?”
“Well, I know there’s some tinned salmon and some sardines,” Harry said.
That’s when Burrows and I both bore him savagely to the floor, intent on murder. Fish.
“Well,” I said when Juma came early next morning with the tea, “so this is where we are. Finally.”
“Mbaya,” Juma said. (In Swahili mbaya means “bad.”) “Rudolf mbaya”
“Hapana mbaya,” I said. “Hi m’zuri sana.” That means, “Very good, any amount.”
“Fish!” Juma said, making a cuss word out of the noun. “All this way to go fishing. When I could be with my wives. I have been here before. I have been here for maybe six months before. The face of the place doesn’t change, the water doesn’t change, and the people don’t change. Mbaya kapisa sana.”
This was the third phase of one of the longest non-fishing trips in history. We were now into the third day of torture and we had not yet wet a line. We had not seen the lake, which is a lake that very few people have seen. It is by survey 365 feet deep in spots, and 135 miles long by 35 miles wide at its broadest. It is crammed with leaping tiger fish, Nile perch, and tilapia, a very fine-tasting fish. Supposedly.
“Mbaya,” Juma said, all the laughter gone from his snub-nosed, half-Congolese Arab, half-Kikuyu face. “Bad people the other way. Gelubba that kill. Rendille that kill. Turkana that kill. Borron, bad. Samburu, bad. Locals, stupid. All bad. Also too hot. Hot as a fire all day and the Muslimi can’t drink.” Juma’s face now looked like a melted rubber boot. “Not until sundown the Muslimi can’t drink.”
The staff was not only beat but frustrated rich from a year’s steady safari employment, and no chance to spend any money; beat and wanting to go home to their wives and cattle and goats. Beat and not wanting to be again in the haunted hot country with its strewn lava rocks that looked like the mountains of the moon, its mysterious tricky lake full of crocodiles and hippo, and the murderous tribe called Gelubba just around the corner in Ethiopia.
“You won’t like the people here,” Juma said. “All shenzis. Burri. Fish-eaters. Savages.”
“But the fishing’s good,” I said. “And it’s very comfortable here.”
“I would rather live in a tent with the hyenas and the baboons outside,” Juma muttered, and shuffled away in his working clothes.
The camp was the former site of a scientific expedition mounted by the University of Miami, and as far as I was concerned, when we got around to inspecting the area, an absolutely charming camp, by far the most lavish I have seen in Africa. Harry Selby and John Sutton, in the interest of the expedition, had created a palm-and-grass-thatched paradise in the middle of nowhere, with a chuckling stream running coolly through the middle. Great palms shaded the enormous main hut; its ridgepole must have been twenty-five feet high. There was a lab where the scientists had worked, a great dormitory for the men, a lockable kitchen, and several scattered cottages for married couples and the occasional female guests.
The generator was cut in now; the freezer and die refrigerator were humming, and all the lights working in the various buildings. The showers functioned, and the radio brought the BBC news from London. Selby and his assistants had built themselves about the deluxiest fishing camp in show business. There was even a barber’s chair wit
h a prospect of the lake and a magic island in clear view.
“We ain’t so crazy,” said Brian Burrows, the hotelkeeper, “now that we’re here. I ain’t going home no more.” He gestured at the vast, cool main building with its low-sweeping eaves, designed like lifted skirts so that a constant breeze was swept in and over the thwarts to circulate air in the room. “Even if there ain’t any fish,” said the Liverpool Irishman, “I ain’t going home no more.”
“There will be fish,” said Selby, appearing well-shined, shaved, and showered. “Don’t fret your heads about the fish. How do you like my layout?”
“Great,” said I, “if I can fly in the next time. And if there are any fish. I have to wait until I see the fish.”
“You’ll see the fish,” Selby said. “We’ll go down to the lake in a minute and see if the Lady of the Lake is still with us. If she’s sunk we can still surf cast. The big ones come into the weeds anyhow. All you have to do is mind the crocodiles. They come into the weeds too.”
“I think I shall stay clear of the weeds,” Brian Burrows said. “I ain’t lost nothing in them there weeds.”
“Somebody’s going to have to teach this chap to speak English again,” Selby said. “Ever since he’s known you he’s a vast discredit to his rearing.”
“Look who’s talking,” Burrows said. “I mind well that an ‘ain’t’ or so creeps into your occasional context, me beamish boy.”
“I ain’t knockin’ the word ‘ain’t,’” Selby said. “Ruark makes money off it. Let’s go fishin’.”
The Lady of the Lake, after having her bilges pumped, was an agreeable girl. We endowed Selby with the title of the Cautious Captain, because he was unwilling to go outside El Molo Bay. And smartly so, because Rudolf runs up a wind you wouldn’t believe until you picked up your teeth.
“Inside is good enough for me,” I said. “I ain’t lost nothing outside that big hill.”
Evidently we were a caravan of cowards. Nobody dissented, including Metheke, my old and trusted gunbearer, who wouldn’t get on the boat at all. This gap-toothed Wakamba, who may be the bravest man I ever met, said that he was an elephant hunter and a cannibal, but he hadn’t lost nothing on that big magi either. Metheke would sit at the shore and pluck the whistling teal and the occasional knob-nosed goose I had shot. He was content to watch the boat from a distance. He had been along when they freighted her overland. Metheke is very rich, and has a lot of wives, sheep, goats, and cattle. He wanted to live to enjoy them.
