by Ted Simon
The Spirit Incarnate of the Great World of Dreams meets with the Three Wise Men of Kibwezi, and for forty-eight hours all is light and truth. A man could live up to his ideals for that long. And they did have ideals, these three, so we were equals, and they showed me true courtesy and paid for their share of the beer. And they shed a tear for the moment when the great bird would fly on.
I was becoming a carrier of the dreams of men. I gathered them like pollen, fertilizing as I went. But I had not yet quite realized my power, nor its transforming effect on people, and I still thought they were as I saw them.
Paul had relapsed into mild mournfulness. 'Tomorrow you are leaving, isn't it,' he said. 'Yes. I have to go on to Mombasa.' He came to a decision.
'Tonight you must have a girl,' he said, and called to the nearest bar
girl. He was talking rapidly in Swahili and she came towards us giggling a bit and protesting, but she took several good looks at my grinning face. There were further skirmishes over the next round of Tuskers, and then Paul said, 'The matter is settled. She will come.'
It was too dark to see her face clearly. I saw only that she was small and seemed to be rather fat. I did not worry because I was sure that like the night before, the fear of the dreaded M'zungo would frighten her away.
Soon after, there was no room left on the table for more bottles and it was time to stop. My friends wandered off and I went into my room and lit the hurricane lamp. It was very warm even at midnight and the air was still. Happily there seemed to be no mosquitoes. I took off all my clothes and lay down on the sheet, ready to sleep like that. I thought for a moment about the girl and, although I knew she would not come, the idea excited me. There was a tap on the door. Repeated. I stood up and looked for something to hide my erection. Then I thought 'to hell with that' and walked over to the door as I was and opened it cautiously.
The girl stood there, and she came in and looked at me with an expression of slight wonder. Then she tapped my stiff prick approvingly a couple of times with the knuckle of her forefinger. It stood the test. I was utterly amazed at my own behaviour and enjoying it enormously.
She had a nice young face, though I could not tell how young. She put her finger to her lips, appearing to be listening for sounds.
'Mama,' she whispered. ‘I am coming back soon,' and she disappeared into the night.
When she returned she walked straight into the room and took off her blue overall and sat on the edge of the bed looking a bit shy and uncertain. She was not at all fat. The arching of her back was so pronounced that her firm breasts thrust the big overall out in front, and her prominent behind pushed it out at the back and between the two it seemed to conceal a huge tummy. In fact her body was lithe and lovely. She still had the half slip on, but soon that was off too and another bastion of racial prejudice collapsed, for we seemed to fit each other perfectly well and nothing I did seemed to surprise her terribly either.
My first concern was whether or not to kiss her, but she didn't seem to expect it, and I kissed her body instead because it felt like a nice thing to do.
The main obstacle was not between us but beneath us. The sheet slipped and slid on the plastic mattress cover, and we glided back and forth on the sheet in an ecstasy of unpredictable motion. Perhaps it was like making love on skis. One way or another it seemed that we were bound to wind up in a tangle of limbs on the ground. Several times I saved us from sailing over the edge to disaster, but the voyage was finally and successfully accomplished. After a while she got up, trailing her hand lightly on my face, and left the room without a sound.
I never saw her again. I meant to look for her next morning but I was in great confusion then and did not know what to do. I was very taken with her, but I knew I had to leave and it seemed foolishly sentimental to make a fuss. She had not asked me for anything, not even a hint of it. I wanted to give her something and had nothing to give but money. In the end I simply emptied my pockets and piled what was there on the table. It came to seven shillings and some pennies. I wanted the arbitrariness of it to seem less like a payment, but it never felt right, and I left the hotel unhappy with myself.
I felt a fool for being afraid to look like one, because I wanted to find her and hug her.
How I do tie myself in knots, I reflected sadly.
Riding down the road to Mombasa I saw my first wild elephants.
There were ten of them, about three hundred yards away, gathered close together under a tree. They were quite still. The tree was a Baobab, and its smooth fat trunk rose well above the animals before narrowing abruptly and sprouting a broad fan of branches. The Baobab is also called the Bottle Tree; its young leaves are used for soup, and its fruit makes a drink.
I stopped the bike and watched the elephants in silence for a long time, my heart bursting with emotion, not quite knowing why I was so profoundly affected. Although they were some way off there was nothing to obstruct my view. The land was savannah, grassy and lightly wooded.
The sight of those elephants touched me with a yearning that seemed to stretch back for ever. I could even believe that I was seeing again something once observed through a remote ancestral eye.
The elephants were brown, and I did not question the colour at the time. It seemed quite right, it matched my image perfectly, and only afterwards did I remember that elephants were grey. Evidently they had sprayed themselves with dust. They were nuzzled up to each other, wonderfully satisfying shapes, smooth and solid, superimposed in a cluster of curves; all the more alive for being so utterly still.
Elephants sheltered under a Baobab tree, a familiar sight on this earth for millions of years, and one I had waited all my life and travelled so far to see.
Africa.
The road was easy, with no traffic. I could watch the country as I went. I saw more giraffe. Then an abandoned petrol station apparently inhabited
by a tribe of baboons. I stopped again, to watch them; the mothers nursing their babies, the older children playing boisterously, the fathers preserving their dignity. They were oblivious to me, couldn't give a damn.
Aren't they supposed to be vicious? What would I do if they rushed me?
The road dropped to sea level. Clouds formed overhead, and I brought the first rain of the season to Mombasa, a few fat drops in the dust.
I stopped in the middle of town and an open Mini with a tasselled canvas top drew up beside me. The driver was a Dane called Kaj, teaching at the polytechnic. We went to the Castle Hotel for lunch, a seven-course blow out for fourteen shillings with enough hors d'oeuvres to choose from to make the other six courses redundant. Afterwards I got a cheap room at Jimmy's. Everyone was saying how hot it was but I didn't feel it for the first two days. Then it got very sticky.
Kaj took me to the Sunshine Club on Kilindini Street. The moment I stepped inside my senses began to tingle, and I knew why I never went to night clubs. It had what clubs in London and New York can never have, however much they spend trying to simulate it, because it's illegal. The Sunshine had Life. Lusty, licentious, disgusting, decadent life. It was a big, untidy place full of people and happy noise. There was a bandstand and a band going full blast behind a soul singer. There was a floor and tables and a long polished bar, all under a high roof, and at the end of the room there was more stuff going on that you couldn't quite see. The place had depth and intrigue, and a hint of danger.
There were sailors and tourists and hustlers and bar girls. For all I knew there were arms dealers, ivory poachers, currency swindlers, slave traders, Cuban military advisers and agents of the IMF. There were even men who just came for a beer.
The bar girls did not even pretend to serve beer at the Sunshine, they had waiters to do that. The girls swanned about in outrageous wigs and long slit gowns of silver lame, or fishnet tights or whatever other glamorous junk came their way, drumming up interest and heating the atmosphere. Kaj knew most of them. He lived in the Sunshine Club the way Toulouse-Lautrec lived in the Moulin Rouge, and the comparis
on was not too far-fetched. When the girls had no pressing business, they would go back with him for pleasure. He said the girls had fun there. They came from Nairobi or somewhere round there, leaving their kids with the other wives, and spent a few months in Mombasa having a good time and making some money to send home. Nobody was interested in telling them it was wicked, and they did not look as though they thought it was either. They had their blood test every week, and got their green health cards stamped. As far as I could tell, they were free agents and nobody had the bite into them, but I couldn't be sure, and anyway it was obviously going to change and get nastier.
A big German travel agency had already discovered 'Sun and Sex' in Mombasa. With revolting Teutonic logic it was running a package tour for 'bachelors' with a hotel on the beach and a black girl thrown in. There was bigger money in it, and the girls went, but they hated it. They hated losing their freedom to those creepy bachelors.
'And if I give that man a dose, that's my pleasure and he just gettin' what he's payin' for, isn't it!'
Mombasa is a great trading port on a beautiful coast, and seemed the ideal of what a tropical city should be. Since ancient times, Arab, Indian and African worlds had mixed here. The Portuguese called it Mombaca and planted a massive fort, and later the English provided order and a minimum of amenities.
It had a genuine cosmopolitan life and you could find it in the faces, the food, the music, the buildings and the stores. It was far less infected than Nairobi by the trashy images of international business, credit card culture, banker's baloney, ersatz ethnic, Hilton hybrid, and the rest of the fungus that spreads from the airports to rot away the world's capital cities. The sea trade kept the spirit of Mombasa alive.
Kaj drove me round the port one night, under the lights. A Kikuyu guard in a sentry box said 'You can pass'. We drove for a mile among the sheds and sidings, weaving among piles of copper ingots from Zaire, drums of oil from Kuwait, sacks and crates and long lines of Yugoslav trucks and trailers. Brilliantly lit freighters bristled with derricks, unloading under floodlights. A locomotive with one vast Cyclopean eye pursued us for a while.
Later we went along the coast to Fort Jesus and walked around it in the moonlight. It loomed above us, too massive to comprehend, huge and black and cruel, staring out into the Indian Ocean, and four hundred years were wiped away without trace.
Going home that night, under the street lamps, an African boy with a bright, appealing face came up to me, dragging a twisted leg.
T am not asking for help,' he said. T merely want to find a kind-hearted person to appreciate my problem. I have certificates in Maths, Geography, History, English, Woodwork, and I have to look for help where I can. I believe God will look after me. You cannot understand now, but one day when you are in trouble you will see. Do not offer me a cigarette. How can I want a cigarette when I am starving? Even though I have not a cent in my pocket I will not ask for money, only some food. But if I had my fare to go back to my shamba I would not be forced to look here for help. Four shillings and fifty is all I need.'
I appreciated his talent more than his problem and gave him a shilling.
'Now give me a cigarette,' he said.
I did, and he lit it, and limped away smoking. A few yards down the road his leg became miraculously untwisted, and he began to dance.
The coast of Kenya is irresistible. I rode up to Malindi, and hopped on a small plane to Lamu. There I met the first motorbike traveller who had gone anything like the distance I meant to cover. Meeting him was intensely interesting to me. He was a young New Zealander from Hamilton, called Ian Shaw. In four years he had moved through South East Asia, India and Africa, doing some sixty thousand miles.
He had had one bad accident. A high speed wobble in Thailand had sent him rolling a hundred feet on a dirt road and skinned him like a potato'. A Thai hospital had stretched him out and poured salt over him, then washed him, put on mercurochrome and sent him off. He rode as fast as he could for Malaysia hoping to get to more tender care before he set rigid.
He showed no signs of his ordeals when I met him, nor of the sleeping sickness he had caught and almost died of in Botswana. The Tanzanian police had threatened to shoot him, a mob had chased him through the streets of Karachi, but he was alive and thriving, though he thought he might have picked up bilharzia.
Naturally I was wondering how my experience would compare with his. I always assumed that, sooner or later, something very painful was bound to happen to me. Perhaps my appetites would be less aggressive than his, though. And already I thought I recognized how many incidents, especially those involving 'hostile natives', seemed to be brought on by the victim's behaviour. His riding style was certainly more extrovert than mine.
In other respects we understood each other really well. I knew from his way of describing places, people and events that we had both learned and felt similar truths. We were both having a rather comfortable time there on the coast, and we met like soldiers on leave from the trenches. When we left to ride off again, but in opposite directions, he said with half a sigh: 'Oh, well, back into it again.'
I knew he meant time to sweat out the beer and replace it with water, to shrink his stomach back to a handful of millet and mutton sauce, to forget about washing for a while and get back to the bare essentials. How good that will feel, I thought, once the withdrawal symptoms have gone and I'm comfortable again with the least I need to survive.
I fixed on a Sunday morning to leave Mombasa, to pack my things and go. When that morning came I was reluctant. The weather coincided with my mood. It was gloomy and uncertain. Any excuse would have done to keep me there another day, but none appeared and I did not have the wit to invent one.
The bike also felt off balance, as usually happened when my mood was unstable. I got an impression of confusion, as though the power was not being transmitted cleanly, and my ear picked up noises and vibrations that fed my doubts. The responses were fractionally less positive, the gears less than crisp, the handling felt off, and the whole thing seemed to rumble along in a disconnected fashion, instead of being the tightly integrated machine I was used to.
I was unwilling to believe that all this proceeded from my own mind, and I tried to diagnose faults. I checked the timing, the plugs, looking for loss of power, speculating whether a jet was clogged or whether the humidity was affecting the mixture. I looked at the wheel alignment and several times snatched a glance at my rear tyre, convinced that it must be flat.
There was nothing wrong and none of my speculations made sense, but my anxiety only increased. The road was wet from a recent shower and I moved over it gingerly, expecting to slide at any moment. There is a ferry crossing south of Mombasa, and I approached the steeply sloping ramp of wet planks with such nervousness that it almost led to a fall.
The road south was a good one and gave me no reason for concern but I watched it as though it were a venomous snake, and felt presentiments of disaster growing in me. The cloud thickened ahead. Within minutes it grew black as pitch, and thundered ominously, and I seemed to be heading for the heart of the storm. I felt imprisoned by the route, as though it were a one-way tunnel and I was doomed to go down it, come what may.
Waves of foetid air swept across the road from the forest which had been newly drenched. It was the first time I had smelled that characteristic warm odour of rotting vegetation which previously I had known only in the hot-houses of botanical gardens. It roused me and reminded me of the wonder and excitement I used to feel as a boy among those strange lush plants from the tropics, and I realized with a shock that I was sinking so deep into my state of alarm as to forget how fortunate I was to be experiencing these wonders for myself.
So, for a while, I rescued myself from my despondency. At that same moment the road veered abruptly off to the west and took me safely round the storm, and the bike seemed to run much better. I could hardly resist the odd feeling that I had been rewarded by some invisible trainer, nudging and cajoling me with lumps of s
ugar and a touch of the whip.
I set myself to look for the sources of my anxiety. What was I afraid of?
Was I afraid of having an accident? It felt like that. I felt as though I expected to fall off at any moment. But why? The road was good. There was no traffic. The bike was functioning perfectly well, for all my imaginings. Was it the wet surface? How could it be? My tyres were brand new,
and gripping the road fine. In Libya I had ridden hundreds of miles through rainstorms at much greater speeds without a qualm. And I had never fallen off in the rain yet. What was it then? Come on, dig! Was it the stories that Ian Shaw had told me? Had they unnerved me in some way? Surely not. I had always imagined that accidents would happen. I had imagined far more gruesome accidents than any he had described. If anything, his example was reassuring. Well, what about his nasty moment with the Tanzanian police? The border was only a few miles away now. What about that?
For a moment that looked likely. I always approached borders with great caution. They were potentially dangerous. Too much power in a few hands. Too much greed. Too little control. I was always wary of uniforms. And yet, I had never let the prospect of a border frighten me before. I had crossed five borders already in Africa, twice in quite unpredictable circumstances, and each time I was pleasantly surprised. My system clearly worked. I arrived early, ready for anything and quite willing to spend the day there if necessary. I was always received with curiosity and good humour. Why should this border be any different? And even if it was ... I shrugged. That was not what was bothering me. I felt sure of it.
Well then, what? I tried to pretend that it was nothing, just a passing fancy to be dismissed, but I knew that was untrue. And I wanted to find out. It began to seem passionately important to root this thing out. There was a nameless dread in me, and now was the time to put a name to it.
