African Nights Page 5

  I looked around and found the objects that nature had created and left, like a generous, careless artist, exposed for us to discover and to enjoy. I loved to use these local materials, rocks from the river and boulders from the hills, logs cut from the forest’s red cedar, or old twisted olive trunks, bleached by generations of suns and sculpted into fantastic forms by the insuperable art of strong winds.

  Langat knew what he could achieve and was able to put into practice my architectural whims. He let his dormant, instinctive, tribal fantasy prevail, yet blend with the stereotyped European building notions that had been hammered into him in the days of his apprenticeship. In this combination of inspired intuition and acquired skill lay the roots of his excellence.

  He was infallible in finding exactly what I wanted. After the first few times, when we had driven out together, looking for a special shape in the stones or grain in the trees, he was quick to pick up and interpret this new European extravagance: the preference for rough rocks to neat smooth cement; for old twisted mutamayo, forgotten by termites or too hard for them to devour, to planks of sawn factory timber; for grass thatch and palm roofing, reminders of breezes and savannah, instead of the shining corrugated iron sheets which today scar the African plains.

  We began to build the main house with its sitting room and verandah. When some difficult spot was reached, Langat and I had a thinking session, considering the problem together, and together finding aesthetically appropriate solutions. A stone added to, or taken from a partition, a lower rather than a higher wall, a steeper slope to the roof; a door encased in a wooden frame to blend with the walls; a crafty shelf; the proportions of the raised fireplace, in the Venetian tradition, but with cedar pillars; the curve of a sunken bath. Arap Langat and I shared the pleasure of building something which felt good. We went into the Enghelesha forest to search for a long dead tree to make into a post, for olive wood for our dining table, or for a huge flat stone to fashion into a seat.

  When the house was finally built, the makuti roof thatched, the furniture put in place, the brass polished, our antique Ethiopian carpets arranged on the red tiled floors and flowering plants placed in copper pots, I felt a great sense of achievement. Yet I soon realized there was something not quite right, something disturbing and indefinable, some creeping noise which filtered down from the palm thatch and to which I dared not give a name. But Langat did.

  ‘Memsaab,’ he gravely told me one day, pointing a short chubby finger to the roof, ‘iko nyoka kwa rufu.’ ‘There are worms in the roof.’

  I looked at him pleadingly. He went on.

  ‘Wewe hapana sikia sawti? Hawa nakula pole-pole.’ ‘Don’t you hear their noise? They are eating slowly, slowly.’

  In the silence – or was it the rustle of the hibiscus in the breeze – I thought I heard the chomping of a million minute mouths eating away at the roof overhead. I touched the wooden frame made of poriti posts cut out of mangrove trees from Lamu. I shook it, and an infinitesimally fine powder fell, formed, alarmingly, of thousands of round pellets of digested thatch. It was a horrible thought and I had to tell Paolo.

  When he chose, Paolo could be totally detached. Admitting the presence of worms in our roof would mean taking cumbersome, messy, and, most of all, immediate action to remove them.

  ‘No, I do not think so,’ he said, with a studied indifference that could not fool me. He too had been listening. He shook a beam unconvincingly and the powder fell, but with no real evidence of actual worms.

  ‘Dust. I think it is some sort of dust from the brittle leaves.’ We both knew there was more to it than this, and Langat knowingly shook his head. But for a time we left it at that.

  Yet in the pauses of conversation, when the silence of the embers followed the jolly crackling of the fire, we thought we heard the haunting noise of countless creatures chewing away at our house.

  Before long we had to face it.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Jasper Evans phlegmatically one afternoon when he had dropped in for a drink, peering amused into his beer mug. We looked. A fat pale worm swam in it, frantically.

  When another worm plopped in my mother’s soup that same night, Paolo surrendered to the evidence that our roof was infested by them, and decided to spray it.

  Assisted by Langat and his team of fundis, perched on the yellow tractor especially driven from Enghelesha, Paolo, like an ancient squire in a modern tournament, mounted on an improbable destriero, manoeuvred the hose-pipe, aiming the potent jet of insecticide towards the roof.

  Inside, all the furniture had been removed and the house was once again bare.

  The exercise took a few days, but the stench lingered for weeks. At night we ate where we slept, in our bedroom, and during the day under the large yellow fever tree on the lawn. The roof never recovered its original well-combed appearance, and the children laughed, comparing it to an unkempt, windblown hairstyle.

  The years went by, and destiny struck twice. On both occasions Langat was in the group of men who came to fetch the grave stones from the bush. Strange to stand straight, alone, watching the crowd of ranch people – twenty? thirty? – trying to lift them from the place where they had lain since the beginning of the earth. Two boulders – two among millions – chosen to leave the parched bush to mark forever the heads of my men in a garden of green and flowers. Langat oversaw these operations, a small erect figure with a greying round head, and swishing pendulous lobes swinging at its sides.

  Since those times, he developed the habit of taking my hand in his for long moments whenever we met, holding it there without shaking it. His slate grey, shining eyes did not smile, but he managed to infuse into them a depth of liking for me which gave me a warm pleasure, as if they were dark friendly ponds, mirroring my smile.

  There was a fine dignity and poise about Langat, a quiet certainty of his worth. He looked old, wise, and it was with great surprise that we learnt one day he had taken a new wife. She was a fat girl, with small strange slanting eyes, almost oriental, young enough to be twice his daughter. She spent most of the time standing around the office block at Centre, chatting away with the other wives, knitting complicated patterns in bright yarns, looking well pregnant. Langat went about pleased with himself. His old wife, as is the custom, went back to look after his shamba in Nandi.

  In recent years, I decided to add to the original hut overlooking the Mukutan stream, now worn by weather and termites, to make it into a permanent retreat for me, a place where I could go and rest alone, and find again my inner voice.

  Langat put all his heart into this task: a free house with no doors or windows, open to winds and suns and moons. Perched on a cliff, like a nest, it followed the contour of the landscape, watching over the hills and the green bush, soon to be black with buffalo. It looked down on the stream, beloved by hammerkops and woolly-necked storks, and listened to the frogs and giant toads and the million crickets. Together, Langat and I built in it a sunken bath patterned with shells, a four-poster bed of dead trees rising from the rocks, and a roof to host wandering swallows.

  Then one day, when the construction was about to be finished, Langat was taken sick, of malaria they thought, and he was sent to the hospital in Ol Kalau. Before he left he wanted a photograph, of himself, Lwokwolognei and me, within the enclosure of the stone bed-to-be.

  A few days later I flew up to Laikipia from Nairobi in the middle of the week with an Italian friend, who had come on a brief visit. I took him to the Mukutan, to have a look at the progress of our work. Nobody spoke when we got out of the car. They lifted their heads, and lowered them again, without a word.

  Lwokwolognei was plastering a stone seat, with slow careless strokes. He looked up, his one eye full of pain, like a wounded antelope. I saw with a sense of shock that something sad, terribly sad, had happened. I put my hand firmly on his shoulder, so that he had to turn his long thin neck and look up at me with his one good eye, the empty socket gaping pitifully, as if he were lost, or angry at some evil and i
ncomprehensible god’s wrongdoing.

  ‘Kitu gani? Kitu gani naharibu roho yako?’ ‘What is it? What has happened to spoil your heart?’ I inquired quietly.

  They had all stopped working and waited, with that bated silence that we grow to understand, living in Africa. Only then did I realize something was missing: Langat was not back. And even before Lwokwolognei spoke I knew his answer.

  Langat’s malaria had been a minor stroke which had been followed by a terminal one. I would never see him again.

  ‘Langat is dead. His hour has struck,’ Lwokwolognei said simply, and he went back to work.

  I felt in my own heart that familiar squeeze, anger, sense of loss. Another tie with my past gone forever. Another friend passed on. Those wise twinkling eyes, those stretched lobes, his face when Ema had died. Yet what he had built will be there for as long as there are hills.

  ‘Ni shauri ya Mungu.’ ‘It is the will of God,’ – the African explanation of the unexplainable and of the unavoidable – I murmured, small and vulnerable in the presence of infinity and I felt, again, the wisdom and comfort of believing it.

  ‘Ni shauri ya Mungu,’ Lwokwolognei repeated.

  They all nodded, in sad patience. Thus, in Africa, one accepts the strokes of fate. I shook all their hands in silence and drove off. My Italian friend had understood nothing.

  8

  The Story of Nungu Nungu

  For Gilfrid

  They left a great many odd little foot-marks all over the bed, especially little Benjamin.

  Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny

  In the early days at Laikipia, I decided to carve a vegetable garden and an orchard out of a shrubby area behind the house. It was close enough to the kitchen to ensure some sort of protection from the various pests which would attempt to eat the produce.

  Elephant loved bananas and oranges, gazelles lettuces, spinach and broccoli, moles fennel, potatoes, carrots and all the tubers. An astonishing variety of little vermin devoured just about anything, and birds wiped out everything else, including, thank God, insects.

  An ingenious and noisy – if primitive and rather messy – contraption of tins rattling on poles, vibrating strings, floating net and long strips of plastic that flapped in the breeze, was devised to discourage the birds. It was set up, tested, and discarded in turns. It was supervised by a formidable spaventapasseri. Dressed in one of Paolo’s old jackets and topped with one of my mother’s forgotten straw hats, it conducted, like a veritable wizard, this ill-assorted orchestra from the height of an old broomstick.

  Nasturtiums and tagetes were planted around the vegetable beds to discourage the flying insects with their effluvia; ashes from the fireplace were scattered round tomatoes and courgettes, and hay round strawberries, to deter crawling bugs; while a wire net, practically dik-dik proof, was set on posts round the whole compound.

  At night the Tharaka askari stood guard with a primitive catapult, of ancient design and time-proven accuracy – identical, I suspected, to the one David had used to kill Goliath. Like his biblical predecessor confronting the mythical giant, Sabino, creeping in the shadows, knocked round stones smartly on the backs of any elephant approaching the guava. Outraged trumpeting piercing the night meant he had hit the target, and became a picturesque feature of our evening meals, and cause of bewildering entertainment for our European guests.

  The elephant did not seem to mind.

  One night an extraordinary commotion made us run to look. A young elephant, one of a group of fifty which had lately been foraging on my bananas, had fallen into the septic tank. His companions were pushing him out. As always on these occasions, nobody could find a camera, but next day we ordered an electric fence.

  A wire mesh cage was eventually erected to keep away even the most daring mouse birds, and my vegetable garden became an unconquerable fortress. Yet …

  ‘Muivi alikuja kukula mboga.’ ‘A thief has come to eat the cabbages,’ the gardener Seronera announced mournfully one morning, holding out to me a half-eaten cabbage leaf. Cabbages took ages to grow.

  ‘He dug a tunnel below the enclosure,’ he offered by way of explanation. We had not thought of this. He shook his head in knowing admiration.

  ‘What! That thing is quite clever.’ He produced a long quill, striped cream and brown, grinning.

  ‘Ni nungu nungu: yeye napenda mboga saidi.’ ‘It is a porcupine: he is wild about cabbages.’

  I went to look, and sure enough, in the crumbly fat earth, lovingly manured and watered, little prints like a toddler’s hand marked the soil. A large hole had been dug below the netting, and the tracks went inexorably to and from the cabbage patch. The thief had helped himself liberally. Another quill, like a signature, was stuck in the softened earth. It was a porcupine sure enough.

  The net was repaired, but a few mornings later, Nungu Nungu came again. Another few cabbages were munched away. The little child’s marks told the tale. This time we dug the netting deeper into the soil. It did not seem to help. Some weeks, and quite a few cabbages later, I decided to catch the thief with a trap. We already had one.

  Nguare and Lwokwolognei had built it, to catch a leopard that had been killing sheep and which we let go in Samburu Park. The leopard had not liked being trapped, and had snarled furiously from behind the canvas with which we had covered the cage to protect him from the light and the unsettling sight of humans. How deep had been his bronchial roar. How much its sound had been for me the voice of Africa, and of all the unknown, untamed world around me.

  This cage was sturdy, made out of thick timber, with heavy duty wire sides and a trapdoor, craftily connected to a bait. The door would slide down with a bang capturing the thief when he took the lure. Formidable, I thought, for a porcupine. In the leopard’s case, the bait had been the almost rotten carcass of a sheep. This time, it was a cabbage.

  We set the trap meticulously, careful not to leave any human scent to reveal the plot to Nungu Nungu’s suspicious mind. The most inviting fresh cabbage was placed in the middle. Nungu Nungu did not resist. Next morning, he was there.

  Nungu Nungu was huge, with brown liquid eyes. He was covered in long quills which stood out, erect, while, at our approach, the hollow ones of his tail made a curious dry noise of frantically shaken castanets. He was pacing his prison, trailing his spiky train with the hauteur of an outraged great Red Indian chief. The closer we came, the louder, more threatening, the noise seemed to grow. But, all in all, he appeared remarkably quiet for what must have been a disconcerting experience.

  And he had eaten the cabbage.

  We put the cage on my pick-up, not without difficulty, and drove off. I stopped in a bushy area several miles away. With the help of all the gardeners, our tracker Luka, and a grinning Emanuele we lowered the cage with great caution in the shade of some shrubs. Then I opened the door, and walked some distance away.

  After a time, feeling safe, a little face peered out, and we watched Nungu Nungu zig-zag rapidly off through the undergrowth.

  A few nights after this episode, the cabbages were eaten once more. We set the trap, and again, we found a porcupine inside next morning.

  How could we tell porcupines apart? Seronera suggested it might be Nungu Nungu’s mate; perhaps there was a family of them?

  But Colin, my ranch manager, said it would be the same one, who had come back. Leopard, like some domestic cats, were known to have walked hundreds of kilometres back to their territory. It did not seem possible, yet who could know what instinct might not guide this creature back home?

  This time I sent the pick-up to release him further away still, well over the Ol Morani boundary, on a vast grassy mbogani dotted with low carissa bushes, a long long way even for a determined Nungu Nungu.

  ‘Kwisha rudi.’ ‘He has come back,’ announced Seronera some while after.

  Was he really the same one? It was hard to believe.

  Driven by curiosity, determined to solve the riddle, I found a tin of paint, and, through
the wire mesh, sprayed the crackling quills a vivid green.

  This time I drove the cage up to the Pokot boundary, with the usual assortment of giggling spectators in the back.

  At sunset, when the shadows are long, and the flocks of guinea fowl settle on the highest branches of the acacia to sleep, and the swifts dart low piercing the sky with their screeches, and the tree-frogs wake up with a sound of fresh bells, we set a green Nungu Nungu free over the boundary line.

  ‘Kwisha rudi tena,’ murmured in awe Seronera a week later. He held a long quill, partly covered in bright green paint. I laughed and laughed. We all did. Such persistent, pig-headed greed commanded respect.

  After all, I never liked cabbages. We tried artichokes, instead.

  9

  The Tale of Two Bushbabies

  And the elves also,

  Whose little eyes glow

  Like sparks of fire, befriend thee.

  Robert Herrick,

  The Night Piece, To Julia

  Nights in Africa are never silent. If you listen carefully an entire orchestra of diverse sounds and secret voices reaches you from the grass and the hills, the dunes, the ponds and the trees. And if you look for the unseen creatures which animate the night you can often, for a moment, glimpse their eyes, piercing the blackness. If they seem to dance high upon the treetops like mischievous elves, faster than your sight can catch them, and if their voices sound like the whine of a child lost in the forest, probably they are bushbabies. Related to lemurs and monkeys, nocturnal, arboreal, they feed on insects and fruit.

  The first I met was Koba. From the dark of the store you could only see his eyes: shiny and round, and in some odd way disturbing. Opening the door I brought the sun with me, and in its white blinding light the pupils of his huge eyes contracted, and the irises stood out dull in the tiny face.

  He was clasping the shoulder of the man who wanted to sell him; a string of plaited palm leaves circled his narrow waist and underlined the difference between the upper part of his body – slim, with frail arms – and the lower half, with powerful, muscled legs, ready to jump. He looked like a small kangaroo with a squirrel’s tail.