African Nights Read online

  A few giraffe ambled quietly to the shade of a yellow fever tree down in the valley, and to the north the views of pale lilac hills stretched ahead unendingly to the distant horizon.

  From a four-wheel-drive car emerged a girl, dressed in black. She had been driving back to Nairobi on the Mombasa road and there she had found a body thrown into the middle of the tarmac – the killer lorry gone. It had just happened. It was Tim. Courageously she had put him in the back of her car and had driven him straight to the hospital in Nairobi. Only in Africa can such things still happen.

  She moved towards the lady, dressed in white, who was his mother. I introduced them and watched in respect while they embraced. The first woman to see him alive, and the last. Encounters at the limit of human experience.

  People met like this on that hilltop at Lewa Downs on the afternoon of the burial. People who had come from far for this last goodbye; people who knew each other well; people who had never met; some who would later become friends; others who would never meet again. All of them, tomorrow, would go back once more to their diverse, separate lives.

  Then the silence was broken by a strange pulsating sound coming from the sky. I looked up. The vulture had gone, and here, as unexpected to me as the unicorn of legends, was another helicopter.

  It landed on the peak. Music started, like a lament. The doors opened. All the men took off their hats, and his friends approached to take his coffin. They carried it in silence to the very edge of the hill, where they placed it among garlands of heather from the moorlands of Mount Kenya.

  Suddenly, with a tremendous noise of flapping wings, almost from nowhere, two more helicopters converged simultaneously on the hilltop, and for endless moments they stayed still, suspended over the valley, facing the coffin and level with it in a glorious salute, while a man in uniform, tears rolling down his cheeks, played the Last Post.

  18

  The Ring and the Lake

  Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.

  The Book of Job, XII, 8

  There is in Colorado a very special place called The Baca, an immense ranch spreading at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where the air is thin and heady, the sunsets long and deep red, and the light golden and pure as I have only found it before in the Highlands of Kenya.

  In the mornings deer come down from the snowy mountain they call The Mother, and you can see them grazing undisturbed, like impala, on the bleached grasslands which remind me of the savannah. The flowers are yellow and blue and have a dry, long-lasting quality. A wild sage, valued by the Red Indians for their ceremonies, grows on the mountain slopes, and its aroma is the same as that of the lelechwa, the sage which grows wild in Laikipia on the edge of the Great Rift Valley.

  Like Laikipia, from where you can see Baringo, one of the many lakes for which the Rift Valley is famous, The Baca opens up into the great Saint Louis Valley, which was once upon a time an immense lake, now sunken out of view. You can still sense there the proximity of water in the smell of the wind, in the vegetation – pines and cactus and herbs of an almost Mediterranean quality, in the parched sandy terrain which reminds you of the shores of an African lake, and in the astonishing miracle of the Great Sand Dunes, a small everchanging Sahara of breathtaking beauty, whose shivering patterns are like those left by the waves of a receding tide.

  The place has long been renowned for its spiritual power, and since time immemorial was used by the American Indians of all tribes as a healing ground where, their wars forgotten, they could come to bury their hatchets and worship their gods, dedicating themselves to the sacred ceremonies of their traditions.

  It was there that I met Sheelah. She was an Indian priestess of an ancient Vedic sect, one of a number of religious groups who had been welcomed to The Baca by its enlightened new owners, so that the place would continue to be a spiritual retreat on a larger scale, embracing all of the world’s old religions. It was a time of soul-searching for me, after the death of my husband and son. With my small daughter Sveva I had accepted the invitation of Maurice Strong and his wife Hanne who, after visiting Laikipia, had seen the extraordinary similarities between the two places. They suggested that I would find at The Baca something which would help to heal my wounds.

  ‘There is a fire ceremony tomorrow morning at seven down by the creek. Come,’ said Hanne, the first night we were there.

  A fire was lit every night at my graves in Laikipia, at the bottom of my garden. I found fire evocative, purifying and I was intrigued by the idea of a fire ceremony. We went.

  We followed a shady path along a stream, beside the gentle murmur of running waters, to a glade where a group was assembled around a large fires built in a pit in the ground. Symbolic offerings of fruit, flowers, rice and honey were assembled on one side, a large shining rock crystal reflected the morning light, and fine incense smoke drifted in the cold, clean air. People were sitting in a circle, and among them, dressed in a red sari, was a small woman.

  Instantly I had the odd feeling of having met her before; and when she turned to look straight at me and smiled, I felt I had known her for ever.

  ‘I am Sheelah Devi Singh. Welcome to our fire ceremony.’

  Her eyes were brown and simmering with a bright, hot light. She took my hand, and her fingers were hot and dry and burning too. An arrow with a red tip was painted on her forehead, like a flame; the fire cast orange reflections on her olive skin and short cropped white hair; my feeling about Sheelah, from the beginning, was that she was made of the substance of fire.

  It was a simple ritual with mantras and ancient songs in Sanskrit, to thank Mother Earth for her gifts, to give her back symbolic offerings and to ask for simple wishes of peace and healing to be bestowed upon us. I found it soothing and timeless, and I gained from it a sensation of lasting harmony, a quiet in my soul. It was right to give back some of what we took. I have learned since, in fact, that what one gives always comes back, often in various forms and different ways.

  I saw Sheelah often after this, during subsequent visits to The Baca over the years, and occasionally attended her fire ceremonies in the early mornings. She belonged to the Rajput tribe, the most noble of all, whose warriors ride into battle carrying spears. She had followed her religious calling after an unusual life, and, although my rational and independent mind has never allowed me to adopt a specific faith, nor to give my spiritual search a definite label, I found her philosophy and her music a soothing and positive presence at that time of my life.

  A bond older than friendship seemed to grow between us. With her I went through the unforgettable experience of transcendental meditation through deep breathing, which lifted me out of my own body and made me go back into a forgotten past, where images of former lives disclosed themselves to me, and left me with an accomplished feeling of great peace, of total happiness.

  Indian beliefs had always fascinated me. Sheelah explained them to me with a mystic simplicity which I found ineffable, and when she sang with her harmonium, the sounds of the unknown words dug in my soul odd echoes of reminiscence.

  When Sveva was about to be eight years old, we went to The Baca for a few weeks in the summer. Unknown to us, Sheelah travelled all the way from Bombay, where she now lived, to be there for her birthday. Eight is an auspicious number in Eastern tradition.

  Sveva would be eight on the eighteenth day of the eighth month of 1988; we were at 8,000 feet; there were many people, and when we counted them it did not seem like a coincidence that they were eighty-eight. I gave Sveva eight presents, and the last was a magic wand.

  Sheelah had brought gifts of old silver, incense and silk, and Hanne had arranged for an old hippie from Boulder to come and play his cymbal to Sveva for good omen. Its vibrations reverberating in the morning air sent shivers down our spines.

  At a special fire ceremony for her birthday that morning Sveva, dressed in red, with a flower behind her ear, fair hair streaming down her back, was arrestingly beautiful. She took all this with a
serious grace that was exquisitely hers, and I felt that allowing her the opportunity of experiencing, while still so young, many aspects of the human search for the infinite, could only add to her inner growth.

  On the day before we left to come back to Africa, Sheelah unexpectedly knelt in front of me and took from her own feet the two gold rings which adorned her middle toes. Without a word she put them on mine. In her brown eyes was a loving warmth mixed with an inscrutable sibylline detachment. Her voice had a singsong accent and an almost hypnotic quality.

  ‘You will wear these as if you were a Rajput, and you will never lose them. You must have courage. You are my sister, and we shall meet again, perhaps in other lifetimes. You will travel the world, and many people will be around you. You are going to write a book, and the next few years are going to be full of action. You will succeed in your dream through your hard work. It will be up to you, and you will make it. Remember that the choice is always yours. Never give up. You have much to do. Emanuele is at peace now, and Paolo …’

  She looked at Sveva, who smiled at her and at me with Paolo’s eyes.

  I wore my rings on my toes always, after that day. When people remarked on them, I told them it was a long story.

  I wrote my book, and this kept me away from The Baca for some years. The Gallmann Memorial Foundation grew, and its activities took all my time, all my attention. I wrote at night, like an owl, so as not to steal time from my daily work. I established the education project in Emanuele’s memory and I developed many others too in Laikipia. Aidan flew back into my life, to bring passion and adventure. Sveva grew harmoniously, and I felt fulfilled.

  I never saw Sheelah again. A few years later I heard that she had died as a result of falling from her horse at The Baca. I felt her loss, but I knew that it was a fit way to move ahead, for a proud Rajput.

  The rings became even more precious. Occasionally it happened that one or the other got caught in the grass, or in the thick fabric of a carpet when I was walking barefoot, or among my blankets; but uncannily they were always found again. So much so, that I came really to believe that I could never lose them, and this became a joke among my house staff in Laikipia.

  ‘Pete yangu ulipotea tena.’ ‘I have lost my ring again,’ I would tell Julius.

  ‘Sisi tapata, tu. Wewe awesi kupotea hio pete kamili.’ ‘We shall find it. You cannot really lose that ring for good,’ he would answer with a smile.

  And, sure enough, a few hours later he, or Simon, or Rachel, or one of the gardeners, would appear with my toe-ring in their hand.

  Sheelah’s rings became a sort of special talisman, and looking at them glinting on my toes I never failed to feel pride, gratitude, and a certain comfort.

  Last summer Sveva, Aidan and I flew to Lake Tanganyika. We left the plane on a tiny airstrip cut out of the tropical bush, next to a village, built only with natural materials; plastic, tin and cement had not yet reached the lake shores. It was an amazing place, still belonging to a remote time that so-called civilization had not managed to alter. On a peninsula outside the village we saw, while passing in the boat bound for our camp, a weird scene of witchcraft, as if in an account of Burton’s early explorations. Seven dead cats were hanging on shrubs to propitiate the spirits of the water.

  Extraordinary trees grew along the lake, and tangles of rare plants to Aidan’s delight, and the time was one of bliss, love and sheer happiness.

  We stayed in a fantastic camp of white tents, like a sultan’s, that stood on a white beach, where we were the only guests. It was a place of pure enchantment. Every day we walked up into the forest to look for elusive chimpanzees. We swam in the cool water and went for sunset expeditions in the boat, fishing in unvisited rivers for small yellow and black fish that appeared surprised to see us.

  On the last day we went for a long walk up the mountain, alive with butterflies and strange creepers and liana. It was extremely hot, and after trekking up and down the hills we welcomed the freshness of the lake water, which is as transparent as the most crystal-clear sea. We took off our shoes and our clothes, left them in the spreading shade of a large mango tree, and ran into the lake to swim.

  It was while walking back to the camp along the shore, our feet in the waves, that I realized one of my rings was missing. The currents were powerful, with a swell that was curiously similar to the ocean tides. The sand was coarse, with small shells and pebbles, and it sloped steeply down below the water. My feet had sunk into it, and there was no way a small, non-floating object could ever be found again once it had been captured by the sucking waters. It looked as if this time my ring was lost for ever. I felt deeply sad, deprived.

  We walked up and down the beach many times, searching in vain amongst the debris for a golden glint: but we knew that there was no point. Turbulent waves continuously swept the shores clean. The proverbial needle in the haystack would have been infinitely easier to find than my toe-ring in the lake. A white depression on my toe marked the ring’s place. It would fade in time, as I should not substitute it with another.

  I was crestfallen for part of the day, but then, as the shadows grew long, I became resigned to this irreversible loss and understood that it was up to me to accept it, and let go. I decided that I should make a special, positive gift of it to Lake Tanganyika in Sheelah’s memory. In her fire ceremony she spoke to the earth and gave it back symbols of what humans thanklessly took: plants, water, scent, minerals. A golden ring was the perfect offering.

  At sunset I went with Sveva to the waterside. We both noticed that, in an eerie way, the colours in the sky were the same deep blood red as the Colorado sunsets. We recited ceremonially an almost forgotten mantra that Sheelah had taught us in the old days, the mantra of giving, which ends with ‘Swaha’, the word which was pronounced after each offering.

  I thought vaguely of the Venetian Doges who every year threw a precious ring into the Lagoon, in a symbolic marriage with the sea.

  Now with a light heart I offered to the great lake the ring that it had already taken; with thanks for its beauty and the happiness we had experienced there.

  ‘Lake Tanganyika, I offer you my ring. I am glad that, if it had to go, you took it. Swaha.’

  I felt somehow relieved after this, as I knew it was the right thing to have done. Hand in hand, I walked with Sveva back to Aidan and our tents.

  We had finished packing, the next morning, and the boat was waiting to take us back to the airstrip carved out of the forest. I was in my tent having a last look round before going.

  The man came running from the mess tent and stopped a few feet from me.

  ‘Memsaab,’ he said, ‘nafikiri hio ni yako.’ ‘I think this is yours.’ ‘Ulikwa kwa mchanga.’ ‘It was on the sand.’ He held out something in his hand. It glittered, and in the morning sun it seemed to wink. Behind him, the lake was glimmering, benign and generous, with all its secrets.

  With a thumping heart, while Aidan and Sveva watched in total silence, I reached out to take back my ring.

  19

  The Rain-Stick

  For Isabella

  There was a roaring in the wind all night;

  The rain came heavily and fell in floods.

  William Wordsworth,

  ‘Resolution and Independence’

  The aeroplane came to a halt in a cloud of red dust, roaring its engines while it turned towards us. The girl jumped out, dressed in beige linen, beautiful, still pale from the journey and the strain of an American winter.

  ‘I heard you had a drought,’ were her first words, and she held out to me a long object, wrapped in brown paper.

  She looked around. On every side of the strip at Kuti, skeletal shrubs and dusty yellow stubs of grass painfully broke the hard crust of murram, mute witnesses to her words. It was the second year of a harsh and painful drought. Thorns and dust were all that was left of the green, vibrant bush.

  ‘Here is my present; it is a rain-stick. I bought it at an American Indian shop in New York. Th
ey say it is infallible.’ She grinned. Her stunning eyes glinted with gold mischief.

  ‘I hope it works. It looks as if you really need it.’

  It was the morning of 24 December, and in my large verandah, below the thatched makuti roof, the Christmas tree glittered its unexpected tinsel reflections in a merciless equatorial sun. The air was hot, and still, and dry, with no hope of moisture. The sprinklers turned and turned slowly, tired on my lawn, spraying the flower beds with perfunctory jets of water which were instantly absorbed by the thirsty soil. Birds flew in to shower, shaking and ruffling up their feathers with chirping trills of pleasure; and the go-away birds cried from the treetops their raucous noon calls, querulous as ever.

  I did not want to unwrap the rain-stick yet, as it was a Christmas gift, but when I took it in my hands an extra-ordinary noise of running water came from it, a liquid sound of droplets streaming through its length with a passionate intensity. It sounded like a shower of rain falling on a thatched roof with powerful abundance: a forgotten sound. If anything could attract rain, it was surely this.

  When had our last rainfall been? It did seem ages. The worst drought ever was killing Kenya’s crops, animals and people. A famine of unrecorded cruelty was ravaging the Northern Frontier, where parched camels’ carcasses lay on the sand beside desiccated water-holes in the quivering heat, and people died like ants day after day, of malnutrition and thirst and nameless disease and lost hopes.

  It had been a terrible time. Over a period of two years with practically no rain our water-holes had dried out. Islands had emerged from the large dams that had reached their lowest level, and were rimmed with dusty patches of unhealthy green reeds where the water had once been. Algae grew on the surface, suffocating the life below. Clouds of dead tilapia appeared bloated on the surface, poisoning the depths. Our cattle had lost condition and many had to be sold; the remaining animals struggled to survive on a sparse diet of sticks and dust and salt. Buffalo were found dead every day. Skinny gazelles, with sad eyes and unhealthy coats, stood in forlorn groups, licking the dust. Even the mighty elephants looked thin, their ribs showing beneath the corrugated skin, and each night herd after herd persistently attacked my garden, the only oasis of green in a vast area.