Out of Africa: And Shadows on the Grass (50 page)

I have told in my book of how I sat and watched Denys and Kanuthia flaying the lion. Going back to that morning after so many years it seems all alive and clear round me, hard to leave once more. I knew then, without reflecting, that I was up at great height upon the roof of the world, a small figure in the tremendous retort of earth and air, yet one with it; I did not know that I was at the height and upon the roof of my own life. The grass on the slope where I sat was
short as a mowed lawn, the Masai having burned it off in patches in order to get fresh grazing for their herds, the Highland air was intoxicating, like wine, the shadows of the vultures ran across my feet. From where I sat I could gaze far away: at a very long distance, by the line of the tall acacia trees somewhat below me, three giraffes came into sight, stood still for a few minutes and walked off. “Praise be to thee, Lord, for Sister Giraffe, the which is an ambler, full of grace, exceedingly demure and absent-minded, and carries her small head high above the grass, with long lashes to her veiled eyes, and which is so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plain in long garbs, draperies of morning mist or mirage.”

Now it fell out that this lion was an exceptionally fine specimen, what out in his own country they call a black-maned lion, with his thick dark mane growing all back over his shoulder-blades. Denys’ gun-bearer, who had seen many hundred lion-skins, declared this one to be the finest he had ever come across. And as in that same spring I was going on a visit to Denmark after four years in Africa, I took the skin with me and on my way, in London, gave it to the firm of Rowland Ward to be cured and set up.

When in Denmark I told my friends that I meant to give King Christian X the lion-skin, they laughed at me.

“It is the worst piece of snobbery that we have ever heard of,” they said.

“Nay, but you do not understand,” I answered them. “You have not lived for a long time outside your own country.”

“But what in the world is the King to do with the skin?” they asked. “He does not mean to appear at New Year’s levee as Hercules! He will be in despair about it.”

“Well,” I said, “if the King will be in despair, he will have to be in despair. But I do not think it need come to
that, for he will have some attic at Christiansborg or Amalienborg where he can put it away.”

It so happened that Rowland Ward did not manage to have the skin ready by autumn when I was going back to Africa, so that I could not myself present it to the King, but had to leave this privilege to an old uncle of mine who was a chamberlain to the Court. If the King was really in despair about it he hid it very nobly. Some time after my return to the farm I had a kind letter from him, in which he thanked me for his lion-skin.

A letter from home always means a lot to people living for a long time out of their country. They will carry it about in their pocket for several days, to take it out from time to time and read it again. A letter from a king will mean more than other letters. I got the King’s letter about Christmastime, and I pictured to myself how the King had sat at his writing-table at Amalienborg, gazing out over a white Amalienborg Square with the snow-clad equestrian statue of his great-great-great grandfather, King Frederic V, in a wig and classic armour, in the midst of it. A short time ago I myself had been part of the Copenhagen world. I stuck the letter into the pocket of my old khaki slacks and rode out on the farm.

The farm work that I was going to inspect was the clearing of a square piece of woodland where we were to plant coffee, a couple of miles from my house. I rode through the forest, which was still fresh after the short rains. Now once more I was part of the world of Africa.

Half an hour before I came out to the wood-fellers a sad accident had taken place amongst them. A young Kikuyu, whose name was Kitau, had not managed to get away quick enough when a big tree fell, and had had one leg crushed beneath it. I heard his long moanings while still at a distance. I speeded up Rouge upon the forest path. When I came to the place of disaster Kitau’s fellow-workers had dragged him
out from beneath the fallen tree and laid him on the grass; they were thronging round him there, separating when I came up but standing close by to watch the effect of the catastrophe on me and to hear what I would say about it.

Kitau was lying in a pool of blood, his leg had been smashed above the knee and was sticking out from his body at a grotesque and cruel angle.

I made the wood-fellers hold my horse and sent off a runner to the house to have Farah bring out the car, so that I might drive Kitau to the hospital in Nairobi. But my small Ford box-body car was getting on in years; she rarely consented to run on more than two cylinders and indeed it went against her to be started at all. With a sinking heart I realized that it would be some time before she came up.

While waiting for her I sat with Kitau. The other wood-fellers had withdrawn some distance. Kitau was in great pain, weeping all the time.

I always had morphia at hand in my house for injured people of the farm carried up there, but here I had neither the medicine nor the syringe. Kitau, when he realized that I was with him, groaned out dolefully: “Saidea mimi”—help me—“Msabu.” And again:
“Saidea mimi
. Give me some of the medicine that helps people,” the while groping over my arm and knee. When out riding on the farm I usually had bits of sugar in my pockets to give to the totos herding their goats and sheep on the plain and at the sight of me crying out for sugar. I brought out such bits and fed Kitau with them—he would or could not move his badly bruised hands, and let me place the sugar on his tongue. It was as if this medicine did somehow relieve his pain; his moans, while he had it in his mouth, changed into low whimperings. But the stock of sugar came to an end, and then once more he began to wail and writhe, long spasms ran through his body. It is a sad experience to sit by somebody suffering so direly without being able to help; you long to get up and run away or, as
with a badly injured animal, to put an end to the anguish—for a moment I believe I looked around for some kind of weapon for the purpose. Then again came the repeated clock-regular moaning of Kitau: “Have you got no more, Msabu? Have you got nothing more to give me?”

In my distress I once more put my hand into my pocket and felt the King’s letter. “Yes, Kitau,” I said, “I have got something more. I have got something
mzuri sana”
—very excellent indeed. “I have got a
Barua a Soldani”
—a letter from a king. “And that is a thing which all people know, that a letter from a king,
mokone yake
”—in his own hand—“will do away with all pain, however bad.” At that I laid the King’s letter on his chest and my hand upon it. I endeavoured, I believe—out there in the forest, where Kitau and I were as if all alone—to lay the whole of my strength into it.

It was a very strange thing that almost at once the words and the gesture seemed to send an effect through him. His terribly distorted face smoothed out, he closed his eyes. After a while he again looked up at me. His eyes were so much like those of a small child that cannot yet speak that I was almost surprised when he spoke to me. “Yes,” he said. “It is
mzuri,”
and again, “yes, it is
mzuri sana
. Keep it there.”

When at last the car arrived and we got Kitau lifted on to it, I meant to take my seat at the steering wheel, but at that he immediately worked himself into a state of the greatest alarm. “No, Msabu,” he said, “Farah can drive the car, you must tell him to do so. You will sit beside me and hold the Barua a Soldani to my stomach as before, or otherwise the bad pain will come back at once.” So I sat on the boards beside him, and all the way into Nairobi held the King’s letter in position. When we arrived at the hospital Kitau once more closed his eyes and kept them closed, as if refusing to take in any more impressions. But with his left hand on my clothes he kept sure that I was beside him while I parleyed with the
doctor and the matron. They did indeed allow me to keep close beside him while he was laid on the stretcher, carried into the building and placed on the operating table; and as long as I saw him he was quiet.

I may in this place tell that they did really in hospital manage to set his broken leg. When he got out he could walk, even if he always limped a little.

I may also here tell that later on, in Denmark, I learned from the King himself that my lion-skin had obtained a highly honourable place in the state-room of Christiansborg Castle, with the skin of a polar bear to the other side of the throne.

But now the rumour spread amongst the squatters of my farm that I had got this Barua a Soldani, with its miracle-working power. They began to come up to my house one by one, warily, to find out more about it—the old women first, mincing about like old hens turning their heads affectedly to find a grain for their young ones. Soon they took to carrying up those of their sick who were in bad pain, so that they might have the letter laid on them and for a while be relieved. Later they wanted more. They demanded to borrow the King’s letter, for the day or for the day and night, to take with them to the hut for the relief of an old dying grandmother or a small ailing child.

The Barua a Soldani amongst my stock of medicine from the very first was accurately and strictly placed in a category of its own. This decision was taken by the Natives themselves without my giving any thought to the matter. It would do away with pain, in this capacity it was infallible, and no ache or pang could hold out against it. But it must be made use of solely in uttermost need.

It did happen from time to time that a patient with a very bad toothache, in his misery cried out to me to let him have Barua a Soldani. But his appeal would be met by his surroundings with grave disapprovement and indignation or with
haughty, scornful laughter. “You!” they cried back to him, “there is nothing the matter with you but that you have got a bad tooth! You can go down to old Juma Bemu and have him pull it out for you. How could you have the Kings letter? Nay, but here is old Kathegu very ill in his hut with long, hard pains in his stomach, and going to die tonight. His small grandson is up here to have Barua a Soldani for him until tomorrow from Msabu. To him she will give it.” By this time I had had a leather bag with a string to it made for the King’s letter. So the small toto, standing up straight on the terrace, would take the remedy carefully from my hands, hang it round his neck and walk away, with his own hands upon it. He would stand up straight on the terrace again next morning. Ay, his grandfather had died at sunrise, but Barua a Soldani had helped him well all night.

I have seen this particular attitude, or this particular mentality, in the dark people in other matters as well. They stood in a particular relation to the ways and conditions of life. There are things which can be done and others which cannot be done, and they fell in with the law, accepting what came with a kind of aloof humility—or pride.

When Fathima, Farah’s wife, was to give birth to her first child, she was very ill; for an hour or two her surroundings, and her mother herself, had given up hope about her. Her mother, an imposing figure in my establishment, had arranged for about a dozen Somali ladies of the first families of Nairobi to be present. They arrived in Aly Khan’s mule-traps, looking very lovely and lively, like old Persian pictures, in their long ample skirts and veils, and filled with sympathy and zeal. The waves of woman’s world closed over Farah’s house, at some distance from the huts of my house-boys. Farah himself, grave and more subdued than I had ever seen him, together with all other male creatures of my household, had been shooed a hundred yards away. The women then set to heating up the room
in which the birth was taking place, to an almost unbearable heat with charcoal in basins, and to make the air thick with childbed-incense. I sat out there for a while, half unconscious, not because I imagined that I could be of any use whatever, but because I felt it to be the correct thing and expected of me.

Fathima was a very lovely creature, with big dark eyes like a doe’s, so slim that one wondered where she could possibly be storing her baby, supple in all her movements and in daily life of a risible temper. I felt sorry for her now. The gentle midwives were busy, bending and again straightening up the girl and from time to time knocking her in the small of the back with their fists as if to knock out the child. For the time that I was there I saw them dealing out only one kind of medicine: a matron amongst them brought along an earthenware dish, on the inner side of which a holy man of the town had drawn up, in charcoal, a text from the Koran; the lettering was washed off carefully with water, and the water poured into the mouth of the labouring young woman.

This great event on the farm took place at the time when the Prince of Wales—the present Duke of Windsor—was on his first visit to the country. Among the celebrations in his honour was a
concours hippique
in Nairobi, and I had entered my Irish pony Poor-Box for the jumping competition—he was at the moment in training at Limoru. In the midst of the bustle round me and in a moment of things’ looking very dark, I suddenly called to mind that I had promised to bring over a bag of oats for him there, so I would have to leave for a couple of hours. I drove away sadly, taking Kamante with me in the car.

On the way back from Limoru I came past the French Mission and remembered that the Fathers for some time had been promising me seed of a particular kind of lettuce from France. As I pulled up the car, Kamante, who during our
drive had not said a word, spoke to me. Fathima was a favourite with Kamante, she was the only human being for whose intelligence I had ever heard him express any kind of respect. “Are you,” he asked me, “going into the church to beg the lady in there, who is your friend, to help Fathima?” The lady in the church, who was my friend, was the Virgin Mary, whose statue Kamante had seen when on Christmas night he had accompanied me to midnight mass. I could not very well say no, so I answered yes, and went into the church before going to the refectory. It was cool in the church, and in the face of the highly vulgar papier mâché statue of the Virgin, with a lily in her hand, there was something soothing and hopeful.