Hemingway Adventure (1999) (28 page)

As we climb into the Land Rovers and head off up the hill through trees and green meadows Richard fills me in on the background. Circumcision, both male and female, is still practised by the local Masai. For the boys it is seen as a rite of passage, part of the process of becoming a man, and the operation is not performed until they are in their teens.

It is all done to a carefully prescribed ritual. The circumcision itself takes place, like so much else in Africa, at first light, and outside the main entrance to the
boma
. By the time we arrive it is already underway. A group of six or seven young men surround the boy whose body looks limp and inert beneath a loose black robe. A man in an old coat and a Kenya Tea Company sports hat is kneeling before him. This is the surgeon. His knives and some antiseptic spirit are in a filthy old box beside him.

There is no sound from the boy as, clutching his penis, he is carried back into the compound by his friends and into one of the low mud huts. It is considered to be very important not to cry out or acknowledge the pain. This restraint is known as
emorata
- what Hemingway might have called ‘grace under pressure’ - and is part of what makes a boy into a
moran
, a warrior.

The Masai are nomadic and this
boma
is a temporary refuge for thirty families, some hundred and eighty people, who are joined at night by their livestock. The floor is a soft layer of trodden animal dung. Clouds of flies gather instantly at mouth, nose and eyes.

Three young warriors, only a little older than the boy, select a cow and fire an arrow into its jugular, swiftly placing a gourd beneath the wound to draw off blood. A coagulant on the tip of the arrow seals the incision and not a drop of unwanted blood is spilled. The gourd is carried across to the boy’s hut, where his mother mixes it with milk into a pink slurry, the colour of strawberry yoghurt, which is taken indoors to be drunk by her son.

I am asked into the hut, an invitation which I accept rather gingerly. Bending double, I stoop my way along the short curved tunnel of an entrance and find myself confronted by a scene of unexpected serenity, a bit like a nativity. The mother and grandmother sit beside the fire and the boy is lying silently beneath a rough cloth blanket to one side. Only the tossing and turning of his head indicates what he is going through. The women smile in welcome, and one of them moves to the boy’s bed and pulls the blanket closer around his shoulders. He will stay here for two weeks.

Outside, the young men are lighting a fire by spinning an acacia stick on to a base of cedar. I notice that one of them has a little trouble as his Rolex watch keeps sliding down. It takes ten minutes or more before a little smoke appears, although they break off frequently to be photographed.

Though the Masai in general, and the women in particular, seem to resent the camera, these young boys will pose at the drop of a hat. They may look warlike but it’s all a bit of a put-on. Their faces are beautifully painted, their hair elaborately hennaed, their ear lobes cut and shaped to take a dazzling array of adornment, their beads and bracelets and rich red tunics artfully arranged. Small hand-mirrors hang from straps on their waist.

One of the boys speaks good English. Instead of sending him out with the cattle his father sent him to the local school. He says it is very important to look beautiful.

‘Who is the most beautiful here?’ I ask, hoping to stir up a little local rivalry. It backfires.

He indicates several of his companions, ‘We are all beautiful.’ Then he turns back to me. ‘Except you!’ He breaks into a toothy grin, the others into fits of giggles.

In the background I see the old man who circumcised the boy weaving unsteadily amongst the huts. He is rewarded for his work with as much beer as he can drink and already has the third or fourth bottle of Tusker at his lips. No one talks to him. I ask an older Masai about him. He says that circumcision is always done by the poorest people, usually from another village.

‘Is he good?’

My friend is philosophical. ‘Some are good, some are bad.’

His own circumcision took over an hour. He nods across to the hut where the boy lies. ‘He’ll be all right in five days.’

In
True at First Light
, as they sit outside their mess tent feeling the cool night breeze off Mount Kilimanjaro, Miss Mary (Mary Hemingway), tells the narrator (Ernest):

‘I
want to go and really see something of Africa. We’ll be going home and we haven’t seen anything. I want to see the Belgian Congo.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You don’t have any ambition. You’d just as soon stay in one place.’

‘Have you ever been in a better place?’

It’s easy to imagine the real life Hemingways having this conversation as they looked out on Kilimanjaro, the way we do this morning. Right now, as a soft wind blows and the dust rises from the cattle trudging across this magnificent wide-screen landscape, I would back Ernest. I have been in few better places.

But Miss Mary was a tenacious woman and eventually got what she wanted.

On 21 January 1954 the Hemingways, with a bush pilot by the name of Roy Marsh, took off from Nairobi to see the Belgian Congo. Hemingway called it his Christmas present to Mary.

After flying due north to look down on friends in the rich farming belt of the Kenya Highlands they turned south, inspecting the lakes and volcanoes of the Great Rift Valley, the twelve-mile-wide Ngorongoro Crater and the game-filled Serengeti Plains. After a refuelling stop at Mwanza they headed west, out over Lake Victoria and the desolate northern quarter of Rwanda and by the end of the first day they reached the Belgian Congo, putting down for the night at the town of Coster-mansville, now Bukavu.

The next day they flew north over the Rwenzori mountains, a spectacular snow-capped range in the very centre of Africa, known to early explorers as the Mountains of the Moon, and from there to Entebbe in Uganda. Hemingway, in his article ‘The Christmas Gift’, for
Look
magazine, extravagantly praised the comforts of Entebbe’s Lake Victoria Hotel, adding pointedly that he hoped ‘Miss Mary was beginning to lose the claustrophobia she had experienced while being confined to the Masai Reserve and the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro.’

But Miss Mary’s claustrophobia was far from cured and once the mist cleared next morning they were in the air again heading over George and Albert, the lakes of the Western Rift Valley, and on to the Murchison Falls on the River Nile. Diving down to what Hemingway later described as ‘a reasonably legal height’, they had a good look at this spectacular torrent of white water, and were heading back to Entebbe when their tail and propeller clipped a telegraph wire and the plane hurtled down into low scrub beside the crocodile-infested waters of the Nile. This was only the start of the nightmare.

I suppose you could say it’s because of Mary that we find ourselves uprooted from our earthly paradise beside Kilimanjaro, flown north-west across the Equator and deposited, at the end of a long day, in the sticky humidity of lakeside Entebbe. No genets at night, no cups of tea to wake us in the morning, just the putrid stink of corridors sprayed against the ubiquitous lake flies, and a lavatory cistern that shoots a jet of water onto my head whenever I pull the chain.

A
terrific din wakens me. Cannot immediately distinguish the sound. Is it a hurricane or is the building collapsing? It turns out to be thick plummeting rain, drumming on the ground and on the roof, product of a massive tropical storm.

The prospect of a light plane trip in the morning makes me anxious. Pad off to the lavatory. Water on my head again.

On our way to Entebbe airport we are flagged down at a checkpoint. Two security men step out from beside a large notice warning ‘Please Deposit Firearms, Briefcases’.

They examine our mini-bus, especially the bulky camera equipment inside. Whilst one walks alongside with a strange coat-hanger device held in front of him, his colleague questions us.

‘Anything to declare?’

‘No.’

‘No guns?’

‘No. No guns.’

He seems quite taken by surprise and repeats our answer incredulously. ‘No
guns?
’

I rather feel we’ve let him down.

By the time our two single-engined Cessnas take off, the worst of the storm has passed, but an hour out of Entebbe we hit a belt of heavy rain at seven thousand feet. The little plane bucks alarmingly and water streaks across the window below which I can see the outline of our right-hand landing wheel, and far below it occasional glimpses of great curved rocks rising from dense tropical forest. The weather is so bad that we have to put down at a maize-field airstrip close by a game lodge called Semliki, on the edge of the Mountains of the Moon.

In grand comfort, under a tall thatch roof, we have lunch and, after the rain passes, set off again, flying north. The long thin finger of Lake Albert separates Uganda from what is now the Republic of the Congo. The Congo shore is hidden in a haze of smoke from land-burning fires, but the eastern shore of the lake is clear. A long cliff wall folds gracefully down to the water as the escarpment meets the Western Rift Valley. Waterfalls cascade down the rock-face splashing onto narrow beach settlements, inaccessible from the landward side. Fishermen’s boats are drawn up on the shore and the huts are simple straw shelters. As we fly lower and closer I’m surprised to see these tiny villages are full of people. They wave up at us and the children caper around as we fly over them. The sun breaks through for the first time today, sending an imprint of our fragile little plane skimming across the waters below.

At the head of Lake Albert, on its eastern shore, is our first sight of the Nile, snaking east and north, a coil of silver in the late afternoon sun. When we get closer I can see large herds of elephant in the shallows, and the heads of innumerable basking hippos. Fish-eagles looking like lords in ermine with their white head and neck feathers fly below us as we slowly descend toward the falls.

The Murchison Falls are not high and they’re so enclosed in rocks and forest that you don’t see them until you’re almost on top of them. What makes them so special is the sheer power of the water-flow. This is no elegant sheet of falling water, it’s more like a power-jet. The Nile, a third of a mile wide as it flows off the plateau, is squeezed into a tortuous gorge only twenty or thirty yards across. Some of the water spills over a precipice further away, but the bulk of this throttled river blasts its way downwards in a corkscrew spiral, the water tossed from one rock face to another until it crashes out of the gorge in a carpet of foam a quarter of a mile wide and half a mile long.

We land at a dirt airstrip nearby then take the ferry over the river to put up for the night at the Nile Safari Camp.

There is no respite from the heat, no evening breeze like the one that cooled us in the Chyulu Hills. Instead, the chatter of crickets and the drone of mosquitoes and, echoing up from the river below, a frog chorus interspersed with the chuckle and splash of the hippos.

W
hen the Hemingways passed their unscheduled night in the undergrowth beside Murchison Falls, with Mary in considerable pain, they spent it building fires and scaring off elephants whilst Roy Marsh sent out Mayday signals and desperately repeated the plane’s call sign: ‘Victor Love Item! Victor Love Item!’

The call didn’t reach the crew of a BOAC Argonaut which flew over the scene, reported seeing wreckage and presumed whoever was down there was dead. They didn’t know it was Ernest Hemingway, and he was already making survival plans.

We rationed the Carlsberg beer, which was to be consumed at the rate of one bottle each two days shared among three people. We rationed the Grand MacNish [whisky] which was to be issued one drink each evening. The water we planned to renew from the Murchison Falls where there seemed to be a plentiful supply
.

‘A Christmas Gift’

A local man named Francis Oyoo Okot, who works for the Uganda Wildlife Service, says he knows exactly where the Hemingways’ plane came down. His father had shown it to him when he was ten years old, which must make Francis, a gentle beaming man, almost my own age. The site is a mile or two up-stream from our camp and he takes me there in a converted Lake Albert fishing-boat, called
Overtime
, for reasons I can’t quite work out.

Shoals of leathery pink hippo lie in the water in family groups, some with only their ears and eyeballs above the water. They snort, propel themselves gently about and occasionally get into a short-lived scrap, but basically they lie there in the shallows exuding a placid atmosphere of deep, vaguely erotic contentment.

We pass the time talking of our families. It’s a rather onesided conversation as Francis has twelve children to my three. When I ask him their ages his brow furrows.

‘The oldest is twenty-two and the next …’ His voice tails off apologetically. ‘Well, there are so many.’

He has been working for the park service for over thirty years and his activities have not been confined to boat trips and bird-spotting. He has three gun-shot wounds from run-ins with poaching gangs. He pulls up his shirt and rolls up his yellow trousers to show me the scars. One bullet is still embedded in his left thigh.

We turn into a small bay about a mile down-stream from the falls, passing uncomfortably close to a rock entirely covered by the largest, most evil-looking crocodile I’ve ever seen. Two or three persistent kingfishers dive-bomb the frothy water around us as we pull into the shore.