West with the Night (6 page)

In the end, and in refutation of all the principles of justice, both animal and human, Balmy was triumphant.

I managed at last to bring her under control and head her toward the farm, but at her heels followed the little zebra foal, still a bit dazed and I think struggling against his own shame, and perhaps even against a minute twinge of remorse.

Behind us on the slope of the Green Hill, silent and trembling, stood the old dam surrounded by a few of her clan, and I suppose some of them must have been saying, ‘You shouldn’t take it too hard. Children are an ungrateful lot anyway, and it may be all for the best.’

Months later, after the zebra foal had got the run of the farm, not to say the domination of it, through exercising the same quality of instant decision and unswerving determination he had shown on the morning of his desertion, I went on a visit to Nairobi with my father, and when we returned, the foal was gone, nobody knew where.

Like a dog he had trotted into my bedroom each morning to nuzzle me out of sleep; he had established a reign of terror in the kitchen by threatening to attack the servants whenever tribute was withheld him. Because of his youth, I had at first pampered him with bottles of warm milk — an error of judgement which resulted in the often-repeated scene of my poor father, his evening pint of beer clutched grimly in his hand, flying through the house and into the garden with the little striped monster, to whom all bottles were now as one, in menacing pursuit.

In his adoration of Balmy, which never waned, the foal made her stall his own and invested her with such a sense of matronly responsibility that she could be handled even by the syces, and she never rolled in the mud again.

Punda, as I called him because it is the Swahili word for donkey, went away as he had come, even perhaps with less reason. He may have been received into the herd again like the prodigal son, or he may have been drummed out of it. Animals are not much given to sentiment, so I think it must have been the latter.

Since then, when I have seen a great herd like that which stampeded under my wings on the Serengetti, I have sometimes watched for an outcast zebra lingering at a distance from its edge. I have thought he would be full-sized now and getting along in years, but that, friendless or not, he would be content in his half loneliness because he could remember that as a mere child he had been a kind of jester and mascot at court.

What aimless dreaming! The drone of the plane, the steady sun, the long horizon, had all combined to make me forget for a while that time moved swifter than I, that the afternoon was almost spent, that nowhere was there any sign of Woody.

Or at least there had been a sign — an unmistakable sign which, but for such errant thoughts on an equally errant zebra foal, I might have seen a little sooner.

I
F YOU WERE TO
fly over the Russian steppes in the dead of winter after snow had fallen, and you saw beneath you a date palm green as spring against the white of the land, you might carry on for twenty miles or so before the incongruity of a tropical tree rooted in ice struck against your sense of harmony and made you swing round on your course to look again. You would find that the tree was not a date palm or, if it still persisted in being one, that insanity had claimed you for its own.

During the five or ten minutes I had watched the herd of game spread like a barbaric invasion across the plain, I had unconsciously observed, almost in their midst, a pool of water bright as a splinter from a glazier’s table.

I knew that the country below, in spite of its drought-resistant grass, was dry during most of the year. I knew that whatever water holes one did find were opaque and brown, stirred by the feet of drinking game. But the water I saw was not brown; it was clear, and it received the sun and turned it back again in strong sharp gleams of light.

Like the date palm on the Russian steppes, this crystal pool in the arid roughness of the Serengetti was not only incongruous, it was impossible. And yet, without the slightest hesitation, I flew over it and beyond it until it was gone from sight and from my thoughts.

There is no twilight in East Africa. Night tramps on the heels of Day with little gallantry and takes the place she lately held, in severe and humourless silence. Sounds of the things that live in the sun are quickly gone — and with them the sounds of roving aeroplanes, if their pilots have learned the lessons there are to learn about night weather, distances that seem never to shrink, and the perfidy of landing fields that look like aerodromes by day, but vanish in darkness.

I watched small shadows creep from the rocks and saw birds in black flocks homeward bound to the scattered bush, and I began to consider my own home and a hot bath and food. Hope always persists beyond reason, and it seemed futile to nurse any longer the expectation of finding Woody with so much of the afternoon already gone. If he were not dead, he would of course light fires by night, but already my fuel was low, I had no emergency rations — and no sleep.

I had touched my starboard rudder, altering my course east for Nairobi, when the thought first struck me that the shining bit of water I had so calmly flown over was not water at all, but the silvered wings of a Klemm monoplane bright and motionless in the path of the slanting sun.

It was not really a thought, of course, nor even one of those blinding flashes of realization that come so providentially to the harried heroes of fiction. It was no more than a hunch. But where is there a pilot foolhardy enough to ignore his hunches? I am not one. I could never tell where inspiration begins and impulse leaves off. I suppose the answer is in the outcome. If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.

But before considering any of this, I had already reversed my direction, lost altitude, and opened the throttle again. It was a race with racing shadows, a friendly trial between the sun and me.

As I flew, my hunch became conviction. Nothing in the world, I thought, could have looked so much like reflecting water as the wings of Woody’s plane. I remembered how bright those wings had been when last I saw them, freshly painted to shine like silver or stainless steel. Yet they were only of flimsy wood and cloth and hardened glue.

The deception had amused Woody. ‘All metal,’ he would say, jerking a thumb toward the Klemm; ‘all metal, except just the wings and fuselage and prop and little things like that. Everything else is metal — even the engine.’

Even the engine! — as much of a joke to us as to the arrant winds of Equatorial Africa; a toy engine with bustling manner and frantic voice; an hysterical engine, guilty at last perhaps of what, in spite of Woody’s jokes and our own, we all had feared.

Now almost certainly guilty, I thought, for there at last was what I hunted — not an incredible pool of water, but, unmistakable this time, the Klemm huddled to earth like a shot bird, not crushed, but lifeless and alone, beside it no fire, not even a stick with a fluttering rag.

I throttled down and banked the Avian in slow, descending circles.

I might have had a pious prayer for Woody on my lips at that moment, but I didn’t have. I could only wonder if he had been hurt and taken into a manyatta by some of the Masai Murani, or if, idiotically, he had wandered into the pathless country in search of water and food. I even damned him slightly, I think, because, as I glided to within five hundred feet of the Klemm, I could see that it was unscathed.

There can be a strange confusion of emotions at such a moment. The sudden relief I felt in knowing that at least the craft had not been damaged was, at the same time, blended with a kind of angry disappointment at not finding Woody, perhaps hungry and thirsty, but anyhow alive beside it.

Rule one for forced landings ought to be, ‘Don’t give up the ship.’ Woody of all people should have known this — did know it, of course, but where was he?

Circling again, I saw that in spite of a few pig-holes and scattered rocks, a landing would be possible. About thirty yards from the Klemm there was a natural clearing blanketed with short, tawny grass. From the air I judged the length of the space to be roughly a hundred and fifty yards — not really long enough for a plane without brakes, but long enough with such head wind as there was to check her glide.

I throttled down, allowing just enough revs to prevent the ship from stalling at the slow speed required to land in so small a space. Flattening out and swinging the tail from side to side in order to get what limited vision I could at the ground below and directly ahead, I flew in gently and brought the Avian to earth in a surprisingly smooth run. I made a mental note at the time that the take-off, especially if Woody were aboard, might be a good deal more difficult.

But there was no Woody.

I climbed out, got my dusty and dented water bottle from the locker, and walked over to the Klemm, motionless and still glittering in the late light. I stood in front of her wings and saw no sign of mishap, and heard nothing. There she rested, frail and feminine, against the rough, grey ground, her pretty wings unmarked, her propeller rakishly tilted, her cockpit empty.

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.

With the water bottle swinging from my hand on its long leather strap, like an erratic pendulum, I walked around Woody’s plane. But even with shadows flooding the earth like slow-moving water and the grass whispering under the half-spent breath of the wind, there was no feeling of gloom or disaster.

The silence that belonged to the slender little craft was, I thought, filled with malice — a silence holding the spirit of wanton mischief, like the quiet smile of a vain woman exultant over a petty and vicious triumph.

I had expected little else of the Klemm, frivolous and inconstant as she was, but I knew suddenly that Woody was not dead. It was not that kind of silence.

I found a path with the grass bent down and little stones scuffed from their hollows, and I followed it past some larger stones into a tangle of thorn trees. I shouted for Woody and got nothing but my own voice for an answer, but when I turned my head to shout again, I saw two boulders leaning together, and in the cleft they made were a pair of legs clothed in grimy work slacks and, beyond the legs, the rest of Woody, face down with his head in the crook of his arm.

I went over to where he was, unscrewed the cap of the water bottle and leaned down and shook him.

‘It’s Beryl,’ I called, and shook him harder. One of the legs moved and then the other. Life being hope, I got hold of his belt and tugged.

Woody began to back out of the cleft of the rocks with a motion irrelevantly reminiscent of the delectable crayfish of the South of France. He was mumbling, and I recalled that men dying of thirst are likely to mumble and that what they want is water. I poured a few drops on the back of his neck as it appeared and got, for my pains, a startled grunt. It was followed by a few of those exquisite words common to the vocabularies of sailors, airplane pilots, and stevedores — and then abruptly Woody was sitting upright on the ground, his face skinny beneath a dirty beard, his lips cinder-dry and split, his eyes red-rimmed and sunk in his cheeks. He was a sick man and he was grinning.

‘I resent being treated like a corpse,’ he said. ‘It’s insulting. Is there anything to eat?’

I once knew a man who, at each meeting with a friend, said, ‘Well, well — it’s a small world after all!’ He must be very unhappy now, because, when I last saw him, friends were slipping from his orbit like bees from a jaded flower and his world was becoming lonely and large. But there was truth in his dreary platitude. I have the story of Bishon Singh to prove it and Woody to witness it.

Bishon Singh arrived in a little billow of dust when there was nothing left of the sun but its forehead, and Woody and I had made insincere adieus to the Klemm and were preparing to take off for Nairobi and a doctor — and a new magneto, if one could be had.

‘There’s a man on a horse,’ said Woody.

But it wasn’t a man on a horse.

I had helped Woody into the front cockpit of the Avian, and I stood alongside the craft ready to swing her propeller, when the little billow made its entrance into our quasi-heroic scene. Six wagging and tapered ears protruded from the crest of the billow, and they were the ears of three donkeys. Four faces appeared in four halos of prairie dust, and three of these were the faces of Kikuyu boys. The fourth was the face of Bishon Singh, dark, bearded, and sombre.

‘You won’t believe it,’ I said to Woody, ‘but that is an Indian I’ve known from childhood. He worked for years on my father’s farm.’

‘I’ll believe anything you tell me,’ said Woody, ‘if only you get me out of here.’

‘Beru! Beru!’ said Bishon Singh, ‘or do I dream?’

Bishon Singh is a Sikh and as such he wears his long black hair braided to his long black beard, and together they make a cowl, like a monk’s.

His face is small and stern and it peers from the cowl with nimble black eyes. They can be kind, or angry, like other eyes, but I do not think they can be gay. I have never seen them gay.

‘Beru!’ he said again. ‘I do not believe this. This is not Njoro. It is not the farm at Njoro, or the Rongai Valley. It is more than a hundred miles from there — but here you are, tall and grown up, and I am an old man on my way to my Duka with things to sell. But we meet. We meet with all these years behind us. I do not believe it! Walihie Mungu Yangu — I do not believe it. God has favoured me!’