The Flame Trees of Thika (31 page)

That was not the end of it, of course. Sammy, Andrew (who gave out that he had sores on his instep), all our herdsmen, and many others were sent in batches to the station to parade before the Indian, in the hope that he could identify the culprits who had brought the cattle to be loaded. But in this the station-master failed.

If you came to think of it, the thieves had done the obvious thing. They had simply driven their booty to the station and loaded it in Mr Roos’s name, all open and above-board; and the one area Mr Roos had never thought of searching was the township and the station holding-ground. At Nairobi station, someone had unloaded the stolen cattle and driven them, no doubt, into the Masai reserve, and down to some
manyatta
which, as Robin said, it was all Lombard Street to a china orange belonged to Sammy’s clan.

What gave the final twist to the screw was that Mr Roos was held responsible for the freight charge from Thika to Nairobi. The railway said there was no proof that the beasts had been stolen, when they were put on rail in his name.

Sammy went away for three months, and came back with a new wife from the reserve.

‘I know I ought to send him packing,’ Robin admitted, ‘but he did have a score to pay against Roos. Besides, there wasn’t a shred of proof that Sammy was mixed up in it.’

‘There never is any proof,’ said Alec.

F
ROM
the veranda of our grass hut we looked over the Kikuyu ridges to Mount Kenya, which could be seen only in the early mornings, and in the evenings, at certain times of the year. Unless you knew it was a mountain you would have thought it a persistent cloud, the shape of a breast, with the twin peaks, Mbatian and Nelion, blending at this distance into the semblance of a nipple. In colour it was a bluish-purple, like a grape, save for a white cap of ice and snow from which arose cold, clear little streams bringing life to the Kikuyu uplands that formed the shoulders of this great mountain, below the moorland and forest surrounding its peak.

The snow and glaciers were also the dwelling-place of God, according to Njombo, and if you wished to pray to God, you looked across towards the peaks and hoped that he would hear
you; though this was only possible if you had offered a sacrifice. ‘Would you expect a chief, or any man of importance, to hear you unless you first gave him a present?’ Njombo explained. ‘How then can God hear without a present?’ No one had ever seen God, Njombo added; he dwelt by himself without a wife, or father and mother, but he had given land and sheep and goats to the first Kikuyu, and he watched over them so long as they obeyed his laws.

The twin peaks of Kenya, Nelion (the lesser) and Mbatian, were called after two great Masai
laibons
, or priests, the real rulers of the tribe. As to Nelion, no one seemed to know much about him, but when Sammy was a boy he had seen Mbatian, who had prophesied the great outbreak of smallpox twenty years earlier that had ravaged the Masai and Kikuyu tribes, and had foreseen also the coming of the white man in the head of a snake. He had told his people not to fight them, and that is why the Masai did not drive away the Europeans when they brought their snake, which was the railway, from the sea, and put an end to the greatness of the Masai people who had held the highlands with sword and spear and the prowess of their warriors.

Every morning the mountain floated in the sky as if sketched in lightly with a pencil, and I thought of Tilly and the safari, for it was somewhere beyond those peaks, to an unimaginable far country, that they had travelled. They would see the face of the mountain that was always turned away from us, and I wondered whether from that unknown angle they might catch a glimpse of something shining in the snow, a bit of God perhaps – a bead on his cloak, or the tip of his spear.

I thought also of Ian when I looked at the mountain, for I had heard him say that he was going to climb it, and drink a bottle of Tokay on the topmost peak on the feast of Stephen. Only two men in the world had ever reached the summit, Sir Halford Mackinder and his Swiss guide, who had scaled Mbatian fifteen years before. With them on this expedition was Mr Campbell Hausberg, a partner of Randall Swift’s, who had been to visit us on the farm, and had only one ear, the other having been torn off when a mule-buggy in which he was travelling over-turned. He had given me some photographs taken among the glaciers, so that I felt a personal interest in Mount Kenya
and could imagine what Ian would see when he stood on the top.

For I did not doubt that what he set out to do, Ian would achieve. Yet when an exploit was behind him, he seemed to take no further interest in it. Before he came to Africa, I had heard Lettice say, he had done many remarkable things; in the Rocky Mountains he had killed a ferocious bear by stabbing it, and won some great cowboy contest in Canada, for which the prize had been a pair of silver spurs. Once Lettice had asked him what, in his heart of hearts, he wanted most to do. After some thought, Ian had lit one of the small cheroots he smoked, no larger than short pencils, and replied that his true ambition was to be a lock-keeper on the Thames.

‘There life would flow past you in an orderly manner, and you would stand among your snapdragons and phloxes and watch it go by,’ he had told her, ‘instead of going forth to seek it in the raw places, and perhaps being swept like a twig out to sea.’

‘That is an ambition it should be possible to satisfy’, Lettice had said, ‘by the pulling of strings.’ Ian had replied that lock-keepers’ posts were reserved for retired master mariners, so that to get one you must first serve thirty or forty years at sea.

At this time of year Mount Kenya seemed to move closer to us, the base became more purple, the outlines darker, the crest more white. By eight o’clock the peak had always disappeared behind a cloudy muffler. The cumulus clouds that drifted all day long across a sun-filled sky reminded me of huge swirls of whipped cream, but these clouds were heavier and denser, like bands of curd, and the colour of rosemary flowers. All this meant the approach of the rains, and the planting of many more coffee seedlings. In the shamba, big holes had been dug, at intervals of nine feet, to receive them. In Sammy’s absence, the organization of the labour was in some confusion; the office work, Tilly’s province, had been left largely to Kamau, and confusion was doubtless a mild word to describe the state it was in. In order to keep the household up to scratch – or so he hoped – Robin announced every morning that Tilly would be back next day, and the house was in a state of constant readiness, at least in theory; in fact, the Kikuyu had their own secret antennae to pick up the vibrations of coming events, and did no more than
say: ‘Yes, bwana, we will get ready,’ and continue in their own ways undisturbed.

The long rains, which in those days were expected on 25 March exactly, arrived punctually at two o’clock in the afternoon. A deluge of enormous chilly drops beat with a noise of thunder on Mrs Nimmo’s iron roof, turned our surroundings into a mess like melted chocolate, poured in rivers down every slope, and swept through the unglazed windows of the rondavels on to sacks laid on the mud floor to absorb it. I could not ride over that day to the farm, but next morning was cold and drizzly, Mrs Nimmo was busy supervising the repair of leaking roofs, and I was allowed to go.

Rain had stirred the people on the farm as it stirred the
siafu
, they too were scurrying about in a black stream, although not of course in such numbers. They carried on their heads boxes of bright-leaved young coffee trees, dumped them in the shamba and hurried back to the nurseries for more. The shamba-boys placed each seedling carefully in a hole and packed in the chocolate mud, which they pressed down with their naked feet. Most of them had discarded their blankets, and their bare satin skins glistened with moisture and made them look like seals. No African could perform any action of this kind for long without setting it to rhythm; some of them punched down the earth with a swaying motion, intoning a chant whose beat ended with a grunt as they threw their weight on to the foot whose toes were feeling round the infant tree to bed it in, as a mother might tuck in her child. Although they disliked the wet, they took an interest in this work, for they could see the plantation coming into existence before their eyes, and arising out of the labours of their bent backs and squeezing feet.

There was an art in planting young coffee, because if the little tap-root was not put in absolutely straight, if it had the least kink in it, the tree would die; so Robin hurried to and fro among the planters trying to ensure that every root was true. All the Kikuyu on the farm had been pressed into service, even Kamau, who had for the moment forgotten the cabalistic insignia of his art, the pens and digits and ruled papers, and was levering treelets gently from boxes with his fingers with a look of great concentration on his scraggy face. Njombo was there also, in the
capacity of a self-appointed overseer, shouting encouragement and enjoying himself very much indeed.

‘Now the rains have come and we will make a coffee shamba like a forest,’ he cried. ‘As big as a forest, with trees taller than the olive or the cedar, and their fruit will fill many, many wagons and our bwana will be richer than King George.’

Robin would not let me plant any trees, I suppose because he did not trust me with the tap-roots; however, I was allowed to help scoop moist earth round the seedlings, and press it in with my fingers, which had all the delight of making mud pies with the added pleasure of utility; for children are bored with pointless things and, when they play, attempt by pretence to add the dimension of reality to their actions. Now there was no need to pretend, the mud pies had a purpose and so the making of them was delightful, at least until I grew tired.

‘Memsabu will be back tomorrow,’ Njombo said. ‘The safari is not far away.’

If this was so, it was time I came home; so when the planting was over, I asked Robin if I could stay, instead of riding back to Mrs Nimmo’s.

‘Not until your mother returns.’

‘Njombo says she will be back tomorrow.’

‘Then Njombo knows a great deal more than I do,’ Robin replied. ‘I have heard nothing about it, and you must stay where you are.’

When I got back to Mrs Nimmo’s, I could see at once that something unexpected had occurred. Several Africans I had never seen before were there, none of them Kikuyu, but blacker and fiercer, with a musky smell, large flat noses, and big sandalled feet; and two strange mules were in the stable, and safari kit was lying around. When I reached the living-room, I heard a man’s voice, not that of Alec, but deeper and gruffer. Two men, in fact, were there with Mrs Nimmo, both brown and travel-stained. One had a shirt with little slots to hold cartridges above the pockets, and both wore hunting-knives, boots, and puttees; a big white bull-terrier with many scars lay by the fireplace, pricked his stubby ears, and gave a faint growl.

‘This is the bairn,’ Mrs Nimmo cried, and she looked flustered and excited. ‘Come and say how do you do to Mr
Nimmo, dear. My goodness, whatever have you been doing now! Bringing all that dirt into my clean sitting-room! Mr Nimmo will think I’ve got a savage in the house! Go and change at once, dear, and put on your nice new frock, and show Mr Nimmo that he’s got a little lady to welcome him, and not a Red Indian.’

Although I liked the dress to look at, I did not in the least want to put it on. However, there was no avoiding it, and I returned feeling awkward and self-conscious, although cleaner, and curious to see in the flesh a person who had for so long been a myth, like my bearded grandfather in England, or King George V. It was some time before I discovered that Mr Nimmo was the shorter of the two men, not so tall in fact as Mrs Nimmo, but very solid, like hardwood, with broad shoulders, an unexpressive, pugnacious-looking, red but not unkindly face, and a hard blue eye with a suspicion in it of a wink or a twinkle. He spoke in a dry, pawky Scots voice, and looked about him in a quiet, appraising manner, and said several times to Mrs Nimmo: ‘That’s new since I was here’, or: ‘You’ve treated yourself to a fine rug, when there’s plenty of old sacks in the store’, or, to his companion: ‘You see, Jim, what it’s like to keep a wife in luxury while you’re walking after elephants with your only pair of boots worn through. There’s two knives on the table for each of us, and a spoon and fork, and a different plate for meat and pudding; next time I come perhaps there’ll be wine-glasses and finger-bowls. If you marry a wife, Jim, first she’ll take one tusk for every elephant you kill and then she’ll have them both off you, and you’ll be left with what you can get for the tail.’

Next morning, Mr Nimmo seemed quietly to take charge of everything; the boys came to him for orders, and he was out early on his mule riding round the farm. At breakfast he found fault with a number of things on the grounds of extravagance, and Mrs Nimmo took it all very meekly, which was unlike her, and did everything she could to please him, getting up to pour out his tea and herself making hot scones for him, and hoping that the eggs were done to his liking. In fact a great change had taken place in Mrs Nimmo overnight and it was a surprise to me that Mr Nimmo, who did not impress one much to look at, had been able to bring this about while he said little that was amiable,
and never thanked her for her attentions, and might even have been making fun of her in a quiet, wooden, underground sort of way.

Mrs Nimmo was delighted when I asked permission to ride over to the farm and see if there was any news of Tilly. And there was: Njombo had been right, although Robin could not imagine how, for he had only heard himself the night before when a syce sent tc Thika to collect the mail had brought a telegram dispatched from Fort Hall. This said that Tilly was getting a lift by car for the last stage of the safari, and would be at the Blue Posts by lunch-time. So Robin and I rode down, leading Lucifer, and there she was, sitting on the veranda in her divided riding-skirt, her tight waist, and a clean blouse for the occasion, a little thinner than when she went away, but with her bright hair shining over its wide frame, and her skin still rosy in spite of the deserts she had tramped over and the heat she had endured.