African Nights Read online

  The pain began to pulsate. Borau’s mouth was parched and dry, his leg wet with blood and urine. He tried to move, to crawl towards the direction of the track, but he could not.

  Perhaps the people back at the camp would notice that he was missing; when night came they would come and look for him and find him. But when night came so would the hyenas, and the lion, and the little silver-back jackals with their greedy mouths. If a sheep or a steer were lost, he knew it would never survive a night outside the boma.

  The smell of blood, the smell of fear would attract all the scavengers. It was strange that there were no vultures yet; only the formidable presence of the elephant could have discouraged them, but he knew they would not be long in coming. In Africa there was always a vulture circling high, close to the sun, looking down with its telescopic eye for a dying animal on the plains.

  The vultures would come from the sky, free-falling fast like bombs, and land on a branch, gathering their wings about them – first one, then another and another, until all the trees around would be black with them. While the air filled with the sinister sounds of their presence, the vultures would sit and wait with undertakers’ patience, and they would not have to wait long. Then one would come close, with awkward leaps, flapping his wings with raucous chortles of anticipation – the grotesque vulture that goes for the eyes first.

  Visions of death and carnage filled Borau’s mind – a sense of his own total vulnerability, crushed, unable to move, dying alone in the bush, an easy prey to any animal of the African night. He wondered at his own destiny, he who so many times had escaped malaria and the grip of high fevers, and infections and wild animals. Was it the wish of Allah that his road had reached its end in such a way?

  The sun was setting now, he knew by the changed sounds of the bush; the sun he saluted every morning and to which he prayed every night. He tried to talk to Allah. Was God too remote from this lelechwa country?

  He prayed for company, for any company. And he soon realized that God had listened.

  He was not alone.

  Slowly, through the fog of his total misery, Borau became aware of presences round him. They were gathering quietly, betrayed only by a noise of a broken branch, by a stomach gurgle, a shuffle, a deep breath, a rustle of leaves. They were extraordinarily quiet, and they were coming towards him. Their large feet did not hammer the ground. They waded through the bush with great ease and the calm of creatures who are unafraid. Soon their vast grey shapes cast vast shadows over him.

  And Borau knew, without fear, that the herd of elephant had come back.

  Earlier they had stopped feeding to watch what was happening. Now they came curious and unfrightened, to see what it was, this small trembling animal on the ground. First, came the young ones, tended by the matriarchs; they ran to him with open ears and stopped a few feet away, to observe him with attentive eyes. Then, one by one, the entire herd approached until they all stood round him, watching.

  With feverish eyes, Borau looked up at the elephants as they looked down at him. He gazed into their yellow eyes, which examined him with benevolent attention, and he could feel that they would not harm him. In a weird way, he knew that, on the contrary, they would shelter him from the nocturnal dangers, and that for as long as they were there to guard him, no predator would dare to approach.

  For a very long time, they stood in silence, as if studying him, and during that time, Borau talked to them. Heads lowered towards him, ears wide open, while they appeared to listen to the universal language of pain and surrender.

  A trunk lifted, stretched, reached out and then another, Tentatively, smelling him and feeling him as gently as the caring hand of a nursing friend, they all touched him with their trunks. Quietly, they inspected him, carefully, unhurriedly, as if to reassure him.

  Night had now fallen, with calls of guinea-fowl, grass-crickets, tree-frogs and nightjars. The elephant began to feed around him, like silent guardians. Now and again they each came back to stroke him. They ate, and then they came and checked, as if to reassure themselves that he was still there and fine, as if to reassure him that they were there to protect him.

  Time drew on; Borau curled up on the cool spiky grass, trembling now with fever and shock, almost unconscious, but feeling utterly safe in their mighty protection.

  They waited there around him while night approached. And who knows for how long they might have stayed. Even when the sound of an engine broke the silence, they still waited, alert now, with heads held high to smell the wind, ready to flee from the only animal of which they were scared. Car lights pierced the night and human voices; the engine droned closer now, advancing wheels opening up the shrubs.

  Only then, like a school of dolphins going back to their ocean, leaving the shipwrecked sailor they have brought ashore to the care of a rescuing boat, did the elephants disappear, noiselessly, into the dark.

  16

  Aidan’s Return

  I am waiting for a welcome sound, the tinkling of his camel bell.

  Isobel Burton, Letter to Lady Paget

  The magic of the Highlands of East Africa is the evenings, when the noises and the colours and the very essence of the air change, and a wind begins to blow in sudden blasts, bringing with it tales of places far away.

  It is then that we can imagine anything may happen, and while the sun takes on a light of deep red before setting, all the memories, all the prayers, and all the tears we have ever shed flock around us, squeezing our hearts with often unbearable pain.

  I walked out facing the wind, all my dogs running ahead, in a flurry of tails and joyous barking. I walked up the airstrip at Kuti towards the green hills where euphorbias grow thick, and watched a herd of elephant slowly moving through the bush, towards the water-tank hidden by trees.

  The dogs took off, all at once, after a gigantic male wart-hog, their fierce barking swallowed by the growing shadows. I found an old anthill, big enough to sit upon, and crouched there, gathering my shawl about me, my feet on a twisted mutamayo bleached by age, to write my diary. Harvester ants hurried down their hole, carrying the last yellow seeds of the day. In the crepuscular sky, huge clouds shone, of the deepest coral. The hill of Mugongo ya Ngurue looked black in the twilight.

  So often, over the years, this had been my familiar evening walk. Alone; sometimes with Sveva; in the recent past with Robin, and his hair had been the colour of the bleached grass at sunrise, his laughter fresh, sincere and a balm on my wounds. Since our paths had gently parted as it was written, the dogs were my only companions, and my deep longing for Aidan, the man who had eluded me.

  A couple of years after Paolo’s death, and a secluded, lonely life filled only by the presence of my children – Emanuele, then a teenager, and Sveva, who had been born after Paolo’s fatal accident – destiny had one day guided me to a country wedding, and there I had met him for the first time.

  Tall in the crowd stood my love, and I recognized him. In his strange, secret way he recognized me too. For a time we shared the music of my sheltered room, we knew our faces by candlelight, and the smells were of incense, of love, and cut flowers in vases.

  What I knew more about him was the intent look of his stirring blue eyes, the deep voice in the poems he read to me, the feeling of his strong, demanding body, his arm outstretched from the window of his white car in the grey light of early morning.

  I gave him all I could, but the time was not ripe yet. He had to go, leaving me waiting, at the bottom of my solitude, but taking with him the key to my door, just as he held tight, already and for ever, in his long fine hands, the key to my inner self.

  Of Aidan I missed the masculine presence, the deep voice and the searching eyes, the subtle poetry and inexplicable appeal of the solitary nomad, the adventurous man who walked alone and to whom the wild was familiar. Aidan had no fear in the bush. His confidence came from his knowledge and love of things untamed, of plants unknown and of paths not yet trodden by human feet.

  I missed him with a
longing to which I could give no name. With a patience which was most uncharacteristic of me, and with unreasonable faith, I waited for years for the time when he would be back. Evening after evening, when I was in Laikipia, I walked up this airstrip with only one hope. If the power of my yearning could be a magnet, I knew that he would be drawn back. When the time was right, I would be ready.

  I listened to the noises that every African night always brings: guinea-fowl and nightjars, a far whine of hyena, a faint mooing of cattle being herded to an invisible boma behind Kuti hill. The elephant, the largest, were as ever the quietest of all. Only a broken branch and a stomach rumble betrayed their closeness. On the horizon a white sliver of moon began to rise.

  I waited quietly, with a sense of encompassing peace, for the friendly darkness. My dogs, now back, formed a protecting circle of warm panting bodies round me. Silence. From the top of the termite hill, I could watch with no fear.

  The sound came suddenly from behind the treetops, in a still pearly sky. It was like the distant buzz of a persistent insect, approaching fast and growing louder in the stillness of dusk. I knew instantly what it was and at the same time I saw it. A small white aeroplane approached from the east, suspended in the sky, flying low over the trees, gliding over the hills, and straight towards me.

  It was too late for a small plane to fly. In a few minutes it would be dark; nowhere could a small plane land over the shady precipices and valleys of the Great Rift, unless …

  I stood slowly, and all the dogs with me.

  The wind, again, took away the noise and there it was, circling over Kuti hill, pointing towards Nagirir, lower, much lower, white wings outstretched like a bird flying home. Before I could gather my thoughts, and calm the surging emotions and the wild thumping of my throat, here it was, landing in a cloud of dust.

  I walked uncertain to the centre of the strip, my back to the silver moon. In the last glimmer of dusk the plane glinted, turned towards me and came to a stop. Shading my eyes, my heart just pounding, I moved slowly towards it, unbelieving. I had dreamed for years that this might one day happen.

  A few weeks before, there had been a letter, inserted in a musty old book, a rare first edition of an autobiographical novel by his favourite uncle. So enthralling was the story, and so masterly the passionate style of writing, that the book had been haunting me since, as had the note – the first in years – with its elusive promise.

  ‘I often talk to you, who are sitting on my shoulder. Things have changed. One of these evenings I will come to find you. If you would ever …’

  Now there he was, as ever unexpected, landing for the first time on the strip I had built for him in past days of misery, as only happens in those tales in books.

  Even before the tall shadow jumped out, I was running. I stopped a few steps away. He had changed little: a slender living statue with broad shoulders, searching eyes in the serious sunburnt face, straight nose, tight curly hair, firm soft lips. He moved a step. I moved a step. We moved together, and he caught me, crushing me against his breast without a word.

  ‘I’ll never leave you again,’ he whispered on my mouth.

  So came back Aidan.

  17

  Upon the Wings of the Wind

  In memory of Tim Ward-Booth

  Yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind.

  Psalms XVIII, 10

  Life in Kenya, with its extraordinary beauty and variety of opportunities, its unbounded space and spectacular landscapes teeming with wild animals, its lakes and deserts, mountain ranges and countless beaches, its savannah, forests and windswept Highlands, attracts people of an unusual quality, who regard risk and challenge as an intrinsic part of the safari of existence. They fly with the moonlight and land in the dark; they hunt alone for lion and buffalo in thick bush, or for crocodile, wading waist-deep into rivers and lakes; alone they climb deceiving mountains; they explore on foot waterless deserts and forbidding country where bandits are known to attack travellers; they dive in shark-infested waters, or sail with light craft in turbulent seas; they defy malaria, yellow fever and tropical disease; they approach dangerous animals to study or film them. They gaily court danger, and, although a number of them perish, quite a few manage to survive.

  But for too many, as for some who live more conventional lives, the end of the adventure is simply a road and a lorry which does not stop.

  Kenya’s tarmac roads are notoriously unsafe, populated as they are by unworthy vehicles and irresponsible drivers, who race at full speed careless of rules, leaving chaos and tragedy in their wake. Among them the worst by far is the Mombasa road, where hundreds die every year in terrible accidents, the majority of which could have been avoided. So died Paolo, and dozens of people I have known. One of them was Tim.

  When I think of Tim, now that his time on earth has gone, and his body rests on a hilltop overlooking the desert of Kenya’s Northern Frontier, as close to the sky as when he lived, what I remember most is the beat of his last helicopter, and that of my first. It was an afternoon years ago, soon after we had met, when he flew me down through the shadows of the Mukutan gorge.

  The deafening noise of a helicopter’s propeller always reminds me of a struggling gigantic insect flapping its wings in a last frantic attempt to fly. Over that noise his voice sounded clear and deep.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  He turned towards me, grinning. I noticed the curls on his straight head, the handsome and masculine features, the Roman nose, reminiscent of Paolo’s. Like all men who fly, his eyes had a different quality – penetrating and yet at peace, shining with the innocence and cleanness of the space over the prairies of clouds, infinitely remote from the polluted world of the crawling creatures below.

  There was this aura about Tim that I had only sensed before in men I remembered long after the echo of their steps had faded down the corridors of time. Men who did not live for long, whom I could not imagine growing old. It was a presence both warm and aloof, strong yet gentle, which commanded instant respect. He did not talk much. He moved straight, with no effort of his long lean legs, his skin tanned golden by the Equator’s sun.

  I looked out of the convex glass window, at the sheer cliffs of rock hung with aloes and thorny euphorbias, and down at the dense carpet of palm tops and fig trees which covers the bottom of the Mukutan gorge. For years I had wanted to explore the depths of the canyon, which are impenetrable to humans, fit only for eagles, vultures and daring helicopters of silver.

  The occasion was during the period, soon after Emanuele’s death, when Robin had come into my life. He was working on a film about a jungle adventure which involved a scene with a helicopter, to be shot at Nyahururu, formerly Thomson’s Falls, about forty miles from Ol Ari Nyiro. Tim was the helicopter pilot. I went to visit the set, and in the evening I invited Tim to spend the night in Laikipia with Robin and me, and to fly us down the Mukutan gorge. He was quick to agree, and we went.

  I was ready and nodded. My heart beat hard in my head, and there was a rush of heat to my face, as we began to plunge into a vertical dive, encapsulated in that precarious metallic machine which sounded so much like a crazed dragonfly. I looked at the back of Robin’s head. He was in the front seat. His neck hardened in tension, a rivulet of sweat trickling down into his blue shirt.

  The gradients of rugged rocks were so precipitous, so mercilessly steep that only Tim’s skill, refined in the time when he had served in the Falklands war, could carry us through the narrow passages. But I had suddenly no fear at all. He was totally at one with his machine, poised and completely in charge, as balanced and light and precise as the bird perched on a slight swaying treetop I had once watched with wonder in the Seychelles.

  Tim concentrated on the command panel, his ancient profile still and timeless like the portraits of warriors engraved on Roman coins. His eyes narrowed, and we were dropping along the sheer walls of pink and grey stone towards the tufts of the treetops 3,000 feet below. I felt the same mixture of elatio
n and worry, of being physically winded and mentally exhilarated that I had as a child, on my first wild swoop down the highest, steepest slide at the Luna Park.

  The green leaves were suddenly too close, almost touching the keel. For a few moments we were tentatively brushing the treetops, like a bird searching for a safe branch to perch on. Then we glided horizontally along the narrow bottom of the valley, past waterfalls, tangles of liana and dracaena, monkeys and eagles and quiet unvisited ponds. Soon we were surging again up high, to the top of the canyon, where boulders of granite had for millennia guarded the silence and mysteries known only to the African creatures. There we emerged into the different windswept world of the Highlands plateau, the vast limitless expanse of the ridges of Jaila ya Nugu, Nagirir, Kurmakini, Mlima ya Kissu and the familiar favourite promontory of Mugongo ya Ngurue.

  The sun was swallowed by the valley, and the shadows spread fast on the hills. We had veered obliquely towards my house at Kuti, low over the bushes, scattering some outraged elephants, while buffalo looked up, rooted on their stocky legs, more puzzled than aggressive for once.

  We landed on my lawn. The staff and all the dogs had gathered together in a bewildered group to watch in awe, from a distance, the flying object from another star descending in the dusk. They clapped their hands and jumped up and down and laughed on discovering that it was Robin and me who disembarked, running, our hair windblown, with Tim following. And he was laughing too.

  Years later came the afternoon at Lewa Downs. This time I stood at Aidan’s side. Tim had been his cousin. The scene was unreal, the beauty and the pathos of Africa were at their most dramatic.

  In the haze of noon, one after the other, cars of all descriptions drove up the hill. They parked in neat lines, just below the four army helicopters which rested incongruously on the grassy slope. People got out in silence, and climbed up to the summit, where half a dozen armed African rangers in khaki-green uniforms stood to attention, a depth of sadness in their still features. The women’s skirts and hair moved in the light wind. In the pure sky, unblemished by clouds, a solitary vulture flew, close to the sun.