The Flame Trees of Thika (36 page)

Meanwhile, Dirk had not reappeared. Both the Crawfurds began to get anxious; with a stiff leg he would lack agility, a
quality indispensable to trackers of game. Buffaloes were said to double back on their tracks and take their hunter in the rear when they were wounded; a good many people had been killed that way.

‘Poor boy, I do hope nothing’s happened,’ Kate Crawfurd exclaimed. ‘I don’t know what I would say to his parents; if it comes to that, I don’t know who his parents are, or their address or Christian names or anything; perhaps they haven’t got an address but are living in a wagon somewhere, or a laager, whatever that is (apart from a kind of beer); we never ought to have let him go after the buffalo.’

‘We didn’t,’ Humphrey pointed out.

‘Well, that’s quite true, though I don’t suppose his mother would believe us; perhaps he has just got tired and is coming back very slowly; don’t you think we ought to send out a relief expedition, Humphrey, to search for him, with some brandy in case he’s hurt, and a stretcher, in case he’s quite exhausted?’

‘No,’ Humphrey said.

And he was right: Dirk turned up a few hours later safe and sound, but angry and morose, because the buffalo had eluded him. He and the Dorobo had tracked it for miles, and the buffalo had not doubled back at all but gone very quickly; after a while the blood spoor had petered out.

‘It can’t be very badly wounded if it’s gone so far,’ Kate said soothingly. ‘And now you must really go and lie down, Dirk, and rest your leg, goodness knows how you managed to go all that way, I hope you haven’t strained it. You mustn’t go and hunt buffaloes again until your leg has absolutely recovered.’

‘The hide was worth at least a hundred and fifty rupees,’ Dirk grumbled. Humphrey was equally put out to know that a wounded buffalo was at large and might at any moment attack one of his labour force, or indeed attack him.

‘The Dorobo will finish it off and gobble it up,’ Kate Crawfurd said. ‘How very carnivorous they are! But I suppose we are just as bad, only we cook it first, which makes everything a little more restrained, but doesn’t affect the principle, that we all live on dead animals, like hyenas and lions. I used to think that vegetarians were cranks, but now I wonder; perhaps they
have climbed a rung higher on the ladder of civilization. Perhaps it is more
spiritual
, to live on beans and spinach, with possibly an egg now and then. Do you think we ought to try it, Humphrey, and give up being carnivores?’

‘No.’

We ate the buffaloes’ liver and enjoyed it, in spite of Kate’s doubts; but since then I have often wondered whether she was right.

S
OON
after the buffaloes were shot I rode with Dirk to Londiani, which was then railhead for the Uasin Gishu plateau and all the country beyond – the Trans Nzoia, the far and fabulous Mount Elgon, and great valleys and escarpments only visited by hunters, and by very few of them.

The Crawfurds had not wanted me to go with Dirk, whose object was to get some cartridges, but Kate Crawfurd was unwell, Mr Crawfurd was busy, and I insistent, and so they gave way. Dirk had not wanted me either, but he had little choice; I mounted the pony the Crawfurds had lent me, a white one called Snowball, and set out at his side. On the whole he was a good-natured young man, and used to children. He had grey eyes and a skin that, although sunburned, was so fine-grained as to look almost transparent. Years later, I saw a pumpkin hollowed out for Hallowe’en with a lighted candle inside. The pumpkin’s flesh shone with a deep golden glow that suddenly reminded me of Dirk’s complexion as I had noticed it on this long ride.

Dirk had come to the country, as a boy, seven years earlier, with a party of Boers conducted from the Transvaal by a patriarch called Mr van Rensburg, a modern Joshua leading his people to the Promised Land on the last of all the treks of the Afrikaner people. As we rode along, Dirk told me how Mr van Rensburg had chartered a ship in South Africa and filled it with his followers – forty-seven families, all tired of life in the Transvaal and excited by dreams of the freedom, emptiness, and virgin
land of this new part of Africa. They loaded all their wagons, trek-gear, ponies, and possessions into the ship and came to Mombasa, and thence by train to Nairobi, which was not much in those days – a single street of Indian
dukus
made of mud-and-wattle or of corrugated iron, and Government offices on wooden piles of the same harsh material, which used to creak and crack, like a man pulling his finger-joints, in the hot sun. The Boers arrived in a wet July; the streets were deep in mud, and wagons sometimes stuck between the station and the Norfolk. Women walked with their long skirts gathered up, showing thick black boots underneath, and perhaps thick black stockings, but even so the hems of their dresses must always have been bedraggled and dirty. They camped in the garden of a parson’s bungalow – Tentfontein, people called it – until Mr van Rensburg led them on, once more by train, to the small up-country township of Nakuru.

While they were camped near Nakuru, the
D.C.
arranged a sale of raw native oxen. Everyone bought at least one span of beasts, for about fifteen rupees each, and some men bought two spans, and then everyone settled down for several weeks to train these oxen, which had never even seen a yoke before, to pull the half-tented wagons they had brought with them.

I should have liked to have seen the cavalcade of nearly fifty wagons and teams setting off from Nakuru; but although I was born then, I was only about a year old, so would not have seen much. While most of the Boers had been training oxen, a few others had gone ahead on horseback to spy out the land. They had climbed three thousand feet, using elephant tracks through the forest, and had stood at last upon a rock (so Dirk’s brother, who was one of them, had told him) silent with wonder, so noble did their promised land appear, teeming with animals who lacked the fear of man. Herds of kongoni, he said, browsed on the sweet green grasses, he saw wildebeeste and zebra by the thousand, and oribi wandering about wagging their tails, and the loping giraffe, like tiger-lilies bending with dignity before a gusty breeze, and the big biscuit-coloured eland with their drooping dewlaps and striped withers, and the red, nimble-footed impala walking in single file. And many birds: spurfowl, francolin, and guinea-fowl, as well as pigeons cooing in the trees;
and smaller animals like reedbuck and duiker, all feeding together without enmity or fear. Even the lions excited no alarm unless actually hunting, and were ignored, and sunned themselves peaceably. A man had no need to stalk and crawl, he had only to stand still and shoot and something would fall.

Years later, I saw a picture of the Garden of Eden, with all the beasts consorting together in a park of great beauty, painted with meticulous richness and care. I thought at once of this vision of the Uasin Gishu plateau as the Dutch first saw it, and as no one was ever to see it again. The difference was that in the picture, Adam and Eve walked at peace with the animal creation; but that was only a vision. The artist should have painted Adam setting a trap, and Eve chewing a morsel of liver. The Dutch, of course, had rifles, and fingers that itched to press the triggers. This they did as soon as they had recovered from their astonishment. They shot a kongoni, and had a good meal.

The scouts returned to say the promised land was all and more than they had hoped for, but the way to it was hard. There was not even a track. With their raw oxen, they would have to get the wagons up a mountain steeper than the Drakensberg. The ground was wet and treacherous, there was danger from elephants and buffaloes, and also from lions. These were just facts to be reckoned with, that was all. Having come so far, there was no retreat.

Their method was to trek for three or four days and then rest for two, partly for the sake of the oxen, partly to let the women wash the children’s clothes and bake bread. They would scoop a hole, sometimes in an ant-heap, sometimes in a river bank, and in it light a fire, rake out the ashes, and deposit a big iron pot containing dough. The smell of fresh bread, Dirk said, would draw him, and all the children, as if it were a kill and they were young lions, and they would stand with their mouths watering until their mother called them to the meal and broke the bread. But they must wait for the whole family to gather round and for their father to ask the blessing of God. Their father had the first helping, then they could eat. Biltong, bread, and lard was their food, and fresh meat when it could be shot. And coffee, black and strong, and very bitter, because it was partly made of roots and herbs. When Dirk’s father shot a buck, his mother would
melt down the fat to use for cooking, and also to rub into the hide, which was dried, treated with alum, and then cut into strips to make thongs.

Beyond Eldama Ravine, everyone waited while the men cut a track through the forest clothing the steep western wall of the Rift Valley. The ground was moist, and the narrow wagon wheels cut in so deeply, and so roughly churned the path, that those in the rear stuck fast again and again. Then a span would be unhitched from another wagon and sixteen pairs of oxen, panting and straining, would heave at the yokes; the forest would be startled by a great cracking of whips and by hoarse shouts of encouragement, women and children would trudge up the muddy track to lighten the load, and at last the wheels would edge painfully forward, inch by inch. A few yards farther on, the whole thing might start again. It took the wagons at the tail of the column four long days to cover the first seven miles.

Then they came to bamboos, and then to hidden swamps so treacherous that the oxen sank up to their bellies before their drivers saw the danger. The men chopped down bamboos to make a causeway, built it up with earth and leaves, and coaxed the teams across. When one of the wagons slid off, Dirk said, the men of the party spent a whole day extricating it. One of the oxen gashed itself so badly that it had to be shot, and several others were injured by the terrible strain. The air was damp and clammy, a Scotch mist came down, the sun vanished, and the folk were silent, wondering how they could find good country right away on the roof of the world.

Gradually they drew away from the bamboos and into more open country, but still they climbed. The grass grew in thick, tufty patches which made oxen slip and wagons jolt and sway. A great fire had ravaged the forest, and charred stumps stood round them, Dirk said, like ant-heaps made of ebony. In the midst of this unearthly, haunted landscape they came upon Sugar Vlei, so named because its tall, green reeds reminded the Boers of the Natal plantations. They built another causeway, and this time fifteen wagons sank in up to the rails, with only the tops of their wheels showing. The women, their small children huddled round them, watched dumbly, fearing the loss of all they possessed in the world, while men, boys, and oxen together
called out the utmost effort from every muscle and nerve. Three teams, in all forty-eight oxen, were hitched to each wagon and, in the end, almost by force of willpower, they got the wagons over Sugar Vlei.

More swamps lay ahead, more causeways, more stuck wagons; oxen were beginning to fail, children to sicken, women to wonder whether their men had been deceived. Food was scarce, for forest-dwelling game kept out of sight. One day Dirk’s father shot a waterbuck. Its flesh was sour, but his mother roasted the bones and they feasted on the marrow. Nights were bitter cold, hyenas’ eyes, red as embers, ringed their camp and the oxen huddled together, hungry and afraid.

At last the day came when the ground was firmer and the wagons moved more easily. Now distant hills appeared ahead, the land levelled out, the sun shone in their faces, and their hearts were lifted by the sense of freedom that belongs to the plains. Here at last was highveld, and they felt at home.

Next day they camped beside a river, the Sosiani, and shot guinea-fowl, and ate well. Their talk was all of where they would go, where they would settle. Each man could pick his own land. They trekked on to the great rock of Sergoit which stands above the plain, where they saw lions, and camped beyond it at a place they called Rooidrift, from the colour of the stream. There the column broke up, each family choosing for itself the direction it would take.

Dirk’s father went on until they reached a gulley with a rocky bank, and trees, near a stream, and here they outspanned. Next morning, Dirk’s father and his eldest son began to quarry stone for a house, and to fell trees. For nails, they used wooden pegs cut from olives. They made a harrow, Dirk said, from acacia logs and spikes of olive wood, bound with kongoni thongs.

‘We are not rich like the English, to buy everything in a
duka
,’ Dirk said. ‘If we want something, we make it. If it is a house, we build it ourselves.’

Dirk told me a lot more about his life on the plateau, and how his father cleared and ploughed land, and bought a few cows from the Nandi in exchange for tobacco, and now was slowly building up their farm. They lived on the maize they grew and ground themselves in a small hand-mill, on meat they shot, on
milk from the little native cows. All they had to buy for cash was salt, paraffin, coffee, and tobacco. Even the paraffin could be done without, at a pinch; the Boer women could make candles out of boiled-down eland fat.

After a while the Boer settlers began to make the few rupees they needed by trading with the Nandi, by transport to the railway, by shooting game for hides, and, if they were young men like Dirk, by working for the British. However poor a British farmer thought himself, the Dutch looked upon him as a sort of Croesus.

What had become, I asked Dirk, of Mr van Rensburg? He was still there, a respected man who owned a black coat and took a leading part in church affairs. For already these few Dutch families, who had brought two Predikants with them, had divided into factions for the worship of their God. As soon as a town was established, two rival little churches went up, each built by its congregations, without any pay.

When the farms occupied by the Dutch were surveyed and numbered by the Government, one was set aside to become a township. This was number sixty-four. The first man to live there was a Scotsman, MacNab Mundell, who opened a little store. This became the post office, mainly by virtue of a safe provided for the takings. Dirk said that when the Postmaster-General, Mr Gosling, arrived one day to inspect his post office, and opened the safe, a lot of 10
US
fell out, and that was all he found; for Mr Mundell was a great one for poker. Later on, a bank was opened, and this also consisted of a safe, so large and heavy that when it was pushed off the back of the wagon, no one could shift it again, and the bank had to be built round it. This bank had two rooms, one for the manager, Mr J. C. Shaw, and one for the safe and a counter. As Mr Shaw’s room was cramped, he took his morning bath behind the counter, where customers would sometimes find him (for he was not an early riser) wrapped in a towel. This did not embarrass him; he would put on a brightly coloured dressing-gown and walk next door to Eddie’s Bar to have a quick one before the start of the day’s work Most people, Dirk included, called the township Sixty-Four, but by now it had received an official name, and was becoming known as Eldoret.