by Isobel Chace
Dinner was served out in the open. True, there was a thatched roof overhead. And true, mosquito net walls had been let down to keep out the insects that would otherwise form themselves into suicide squads, throwing themselves against the light, again and again, until they fell exhausted into a heap on the floor. But, despite the al fresco atmosphere, a freshly laundered damask cloth covered the table which was set with heavy, solid silver and cut-glass that looked oddly out of place in such a place.
Hugo sat at the top of the table, with Janice Kemp on his right hand and me on his left. Next to me sat Mr. Doffnang. A man I had not yet met, young and bespectacled, sat next to Janice, and facing Hugo sat Mr. Patel in a resplendent turban that added more than a touch of glamour to the gathering.
Hugo poured the wine, passing over Mr. Patel’s glass, to the latter’s relief, while two Africans served the soup from a gigantic tureen into some bone china soup bowls that were placed in front of each one of us, one by one. How odd it was, I thought, that people should solemnly sit down to a formal dinner miles away from any centre of civilisation. And yet here we were, sipping a French wine and eating food that would not have disgraced any hotel in Europe, and outside was nothing but raw Africa. And then, as if to prove my point, a lion roared not so very far away, and the sound of it filled the whole camp, making the backs of our hands tingle with that primitive fear that is quite pleasurable as long as one knows that one is safe and warm, no matter what is going on elsewhere.
My eyes met Hugo’s and he smiled at me. Quite why, I don’t know, but I found it comforting to think that the lions were his concern. I could hardly imagine them coming into the compound of the camp with him around. It made me feel very safe and calm. But the roaring lion made the others jittery. Mr. Doffnang looked nervously about him.
“What is it? Is it coming here?”
I reassured him as best I could. “No, no,” I said. “It’s only a lion. It’s a long way away from here.”
“A long way? It sounds close to me,” he replied.
“You can hear a lion five miles away,” I said firmly.
The bespectacled young man, who was sitting next to Janice, nodded his head. “I have heard them myself,” he said in German.
Mr. Doffnang was overcome by delight. “Can you understand me also?” he said in simple Dutch.
The young man nodded. “Enough. I don’t speak German very well. I’m sorry.”
But Mr. Doffnang was enchanted. “We must talk together more! ” he insisted genially.
“If you like,” the young man assented. He turned his attention from Mr. Doffnang to myself. “What are you here for?” he asked me in English.
“To translate for Mr. Doffnang,” I told him.
He looked surprised. “Oh,” he said. “I thought you might have a speciality too?”
“What sort of speciality?” I asked, puzzled.
“Like Janice and her photography,” he answered laconically. “Or me, come to that. I fly little aeroplanes about, tracking groups of animals on their migrations. You don’t—”
“No,” I said hastily, “I don’t.”
To my surprise he looked very pleased. “Good. By the way, my name is Johnny Hurst.”
“Mine is Clare deJong,” I responded.
“Dutch?” he said.
“No.” I hesitated. “I’m Kenyan really,” I said. “My father’s people came originally from South Africa and my mother is British.”
“Oh, I see,” he said. I had the feeling he didn’t see at all. “I’m an all-American boy!”
We laughed together, Mr. Patel joined in, though I’m sure he hadn’t the faintest idea what the joke was.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Johnny went on cheerfully. “Abdul here likes flying round with me a good deal better than he likes working on building sites, don’t you, eh?”
Mr. Patel nodded sorrowfully. “It’s all too true,” he agreed. “When I get my own licence to fly, I shall say goodbye to building once and for all!”
Janice winked at me. “Johnny takes too many risks!” she said lightly. “Be warned by me!”
“If he did, he wouldn’t be working for me,” Hugo interposed sharply.
Janice put her hand on his arm and squeezed it “I was only joking, darling.”
I noticed that Hugo didn’t pull his hand away. “I’m not in the mood for such jokes,” he retorted calmly. “Johnny does excellent work and he’s a very good pilot.”
“For which recommendation, many thanks!” the American put in irrepressibly.
Janice made a face at him. “All the same, you shouldn’t take
up more than two people at a time in that aeroplane of yours!” she protested. “It isn’t safe.”
“You mean you were afraid when we swooped down so that we could get that shot of yours of those zebras!” Johnny answered sourly. “It will be some time before I take you up again, let me tell you!”
The plates were changed and we were served with the most enormous pork chops I had ever seen, rubbed in garlic, and served with saute potatoes and cauliflower. This in its turn was followed by bread and butter pudding and a choice of Kenya cheeses, bearing the familiar names of the English counties, with only one or two of the more famous French and Italian types.
It was already after nine when the meal came to an end. I was glad that no one suggested that we should sit under the trees and listen to the night, for I was tired and longing for bed. In less than half an hour I had zipped myself into my tent and had eased myself between the sheets on the bed. The lights flickered ominously and died, but I didn’t care. I plonked the paperback I was reading down on the floor beside the bed and turned over and went fast asleep.
Some time during the night the rain came tumbling down out of the sky. It was too heavy to be of any use. I could imagine it pouring down, washing the precious top-soil into the river and down to the coast. In my mind’s eye I could see the exposed roots of the trees we had driven past that day. It seemed unfair that such badly needed rain should all come at once. What use was it when one had three inches in an hour and then nothing for weeks on end?
Somehow, even after the rain had ceased, I couldn’t get off to sleep again. There was an elephant close by, too close for my comfort, and I could hear a lion hunting on the other side of the river, and some hyenas howling into the night. Yet I must have slept, for it seemed only the next moment that the grey light of dawn came creeping into the tent and the first sounds of movement could be heard in the camp.
As soon as I had washed and dressed, I went in search of breakfast. The net walls of the night before had been rolled up and were hidden under the roof, and the table, without its damask cloth, bore a utilitarian air quite different from the previous evening. Katundi asked me how I would have my eggs and whether I would begin with porridge. I managed to persuade him that eggs and bacon would be quite sufficient, but it was plain that he thought I could do better if I tried.
“Has anyone else had breakfast yet?” I asked him.
“Not yet. Bwana Doffnang comes first,” he told me. “Bwana Four-Eyes is always late!”
“And Memsahib Kemp?”
Katundi shrugged his shoulders. “We call her the Memsahib Golden Syrup,” he confided. “She comes only when she is hungry.”
African nicknames are always apt when they are original, I thought. I thought that Johnny had probably inspired his nickname by making a feeble joke about his shortsightedness, but I couldn’t help wondering how Janice had come by hers. It didn’t only suit the colour of her hair!
“I—I wondered if I should see Bwana Canning?” I said at last, a bit put out by my own interest in his doings.
“But he is not here for breakfast!” Katundi laughed at the thought. “He goes at night to his own house over the hill. It is only while you are here that he comes for the evening meal, and that is because the china and the cooking pots come from his house and the vegetables from his garden.”
“Oh,” I said. “Do you
normally work there too?”
Katundi nodded. “It is easy to find. All you have to do is follow the path by the baobab tree.”
“Perhaps I’ll go and have a look some time,” I agreed in an off-hand voice.
Katundi grinned. “He is usually there to drink tea in the afternoon,” he said slyly.
“You shouldn’t tell me that! He probably likes his privacy!” I reproved him gently.
“Maybe,” Katundi laughed. “Maybe, maybe not!”
I was tempted to go that way on my way back to my tent. The baobab tree stood a little apart from the other trees that surrounded the camp. It was the largest tree and the strangest. They say that the Devil, or so the legend goes, turned this magnificent tree upside down, burying its branches deep in the earth and condemning its roots to be permanently exposed to the air. It certainly looked like that. At best the baobab tree has few leaves, and then only in the wet season, but it does have the prettiest flowers that hang from its stumpy, dead-looking branches. As a tree, it is so easily recognised that it is not surprising that there should be so many stories about it. The ‘upside down’ tree, as my parents were wont to call it, had been a part of my childhood. It seemed fitting now that it should be a baobab tree that guarded the path to Hugo’s house.
I hesitated by the tree, a little embarrassed by my own thoughts. I really couldn’t imagine why I should be so interested in Hugo’s home. I reminded myself that I didn’t even like him much—but I was curious, very curious about the house that he had built here where only the animals were at home. I even went a few steps along the path, but I came to an abrupt stop when I saw in the distance a half-grown elephant coming over the brow of the hill towards me.
I took to my heels and ran. And the elephant came trumpeting down the path after me, waving her trunk in the air ahead of her, apparently rather hurt by my attitude. I took refuge in my tent, though what good I thought the frail canvas would be if the elephant came after me, I really don’t know. I tried, with trembling fingers, to do up the zip, but it stuck fast half-way up. I was still struggling with it, in mounting desperation, when I felt the exploratory tip of the elephant’s trunk breathing gently against my skin.
“Give her some sugar and she’ll go away!” someone said from outside the tent.
“I haven’t got any sugar!” I gasped back.
The voice laughed, “I’ve got an orange. She adores oranges!”
The elephant’s trunk disappeared, to my great relief. I undid the zip a little and peered out. The elephant was busy munching up the orange she had been given, while she searched for a second one with her trunk, hopefully looking in Johnny’s pockets. The surprising thing, however, was that Johnny didn’t appear to be in the least afraid of her, despite the fact that her shoulder was rather higher than his head.
“Is she tame?” I asked curiously.
“More or less,” Johnny said. “Hugo brought her up when her mother was killed by poachers. She was only a year old then. She’s free to come and go as she likes now, but she comes in most nights and allows herself to be shut into the boma Hugo had built for her. She finds enough food there to keep her going through the night, without having to do any work herself. Lazy old lady, aren’t you, Karibu!”
I thought ‘Welcome’ to be rather a good name for an elephant, but then I was feeling braver now. I unzipped the entrance to my tent completely and came outside to have a closer look at her. Immediately she saw me, Karibu began rumbling with joy, keeping her eye on my every movement. Her trunk waved over my head and nuzzled me gently towards her. I patted her on the shoulder, marvelling at her thick skin. She didn’t seem to mind what I did to her, she rumbled on, giving every sign of intense pleasure.
“I think she likes you,” Johnny said, smiling. “But be careful of her. She’s still a wild animal.”
I had every intention of being careful!
“Thank you for coming to my rescue,” I said with true gratitude.
“Think nothing of it!” Johnny answered. “Were you on your way up to the site?”
I glanced at my watch. “I suppose so,” I agreed without much enthusiasm.
“I’ll walk up there with you,” Johnny offered.
We set off up a path that led up from the other side of the baobab tree, with Karibu trotting along behind, still rumbling by way of keeping up her end of the conversation. It was a steep and, despite the rain that had fallen in the night, a dusty climb to the top of the great pile of rocks on which it was planned to build the Chui Safari Lodge. At the top of the path, looking rather ridiculous in the middle of nowhere, was a slatted notice-board headed with the picture of a leopard resting in a tree. Underneath were the names of the architect, Mr. Doffnang, and the various contractors for each part of the building.
Of the building itself there was as yet no sign. A group of African labourers had built a temporary road up one side of the rocky plateau and they were busy now, driving up the raw, red soil, a number of bulldozers and mechanical diggers to begin the foundations. Most of them were sitting by the road, gossiping, while the heavy machinery ploughed past them. If there was much more rain, I thought, the road would be a greasy mire and nothing would be able to get up or down at all.
“We’ll have to give that road a top dressing of stone chips,” I said, more to myself than to Johnny. He shrugged his shoulders, plainly uninterested in such considerations.
“I come up here strictly for the view,” he said. “Have you ever seen anything better than that?”
I turned to where he was pointing. It was true that it was a fantastic view. From the top of this outcrop of rock one could see a hundred miles of Africa before one. Above was the blue and gold of the hot sky, bleaching the colours from the grass and brush below. But nothing could take away from the colours of the rust soil and the deep purple shadows. The horizon was so far away, it looked as though the land gave way to water, but it was sheer distance that turned the far-off hills a vivid, deeper blue than the pale sky. And in all that space nothing apparently moved. It was only after one’s eyes had grown accustomed to the sheer size of the land before one that one could make out some elephants crossing the river to go up to the plateau, some warthogs trooping from one place to another, and the olive baboons that played on the slopes at our feet, drinking from the dripping irrigation pipes that were to bring the water from the river to a permanent artificial lake below.
“Oh well,” said Johnny, “I’d better take myself off. See you this evening!”
I nodded abstractedly. Karibu rumbled gently in my ear, calling herself to my attention. With a sigh, I leant against the grey pillar that was her foreleg and pulled my hat down over my eyes against the glare. Karibu’s trunk embraced my waist.
“It’s all home to you, isn’t it?” I said to her.
She rumbled her assent, reluctantly letting me go as Mr. Doffnang came toiling up the steep path towards us.
“So Miss deJong, you are already here,” he said fussily. “Are you sure that elephant is safe?”
Karibu rumbled some more. “I hope so,” I said in Dutch. “Mr. Doffnang, we’ll have to do something about that road. That murram surface will be washed off in no time as soon as the rains come in earnest!”
Mr. Doffnang and I happily inspected the road in question and there began my first full working day on the site. I was kept pretty busy. Mr. Doffnang’s orders had to be translated to Abdul Patel, and the men’s comments had to be translated back again. More often than not, there were messages to be run as well from one end of the site to the other, explaining in detail exactly where a trench was to be dug, either in Swahili, which most of the men understood, or in Kikuyu, or sometimes in the few words of Masai that I had at my disposal. There were not many Masai workers on the site, however. They preferred to live their own free, untrammelled existence, untouched by
the remotest touch of civilisation, in their own lands. Most of the men were Kikuyus, Embus, and Wakamba, who had come away from their own homelands t
o earn the big money that building hotels in the middle of nowhere could bring them.
In the middle of the day, when the heat shimmered over the land and even the elephants huddled together seeking the pathetic shade of the nearest thorn tree, the work came almost to a stop. Mr. Doffnang and I sat under a tree and shared our sandwiches and coffee.
Mr. Patel, visibly wilting, confided that he was in the middle of the Moslem feast of Ramadan and could partake of nothing, not even a drop of water, until sunset. Without his turban of the night before, he looked smaller and much less impressive, if rather nicer. He wore a pair of sand-coloured shorts that I suspected he had inherited from the British Army, for they came well down to his knees. On the top part of his body he wore a bright pink shirt, the tail of which hung down over his shorts, for he refused to tuck it in, giving him an oddly doleful look. He talked, when he talked at all, of his wife and children sadly left behind in Mombasa, which was where he normally lived.
We were still resting under the tree when Janice came up the steep path to take a look at us, her camera slung over her shoulder.
“Johnny said I might get some good shots of Karibu up here,” she said by way of greeting.
Mr. Doffnang leapt furiously to his feet. “No, no!” he said harshly in Dutch. “It is too much! Please tell the young lady that she is to leave us alone!”
Janice paid him no heed at all. “It doesn’t look to me as though you are doing anything at all!” she remarked coolly. “Where is Karibu?”
“Down by the river,” I said.
Janice gave me a cool look. “Hugo is fond of her,” she said lightly. “I don’t think he’ll like it if you cut him out with her.”
I laughed. “There’s not much danger of that!” I protested. “She was sorry this morning that she had given me a fright.” I stopped, puzzled. How had Janice known about that? She hadn’t been there when I had made my spectacular dash for my tent. “J-Johnny introduced us,” I added, not quite truthfully.
“Johnny would!” she said dryly.
