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Africa, the elephant is as anomalous as the Cro-Magnon Man might be shooting a round of golf at Saint Andrews in Scotland.
Nobody ever saw Doctor Turvy — and that fact, Blix insisted, was bedside manner carried to its final degree of perfection.
having gained fame without being aware of it. He can neither read nor write; his first language is Wakamba, his second a halting Swahili. He is a smallish ebon-tinted Native with an inordinately wise eye, a penchant for black magic, and the instincts of a beagle hound. I think he could track a honeybee through a bamboo forest.
‘White men pay for danger — we poor ones cannot afford it. Find your elephant, then vanish, so that you may live to find another.’
with the silence of a shade, missing nothing, and the moment he had brought his hunters within
sight of the elephant, he disappeared with the silence of a shade...
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under your nose when you have got it an inch from the earth. I suppose it goes on in any case, but if you are proceeding on your stomach, dragging your body along by your fingernails, entomology presents itself very forcibly as a thoroughly justified science. The problem of classification alone must continue to be very discouraging.
‘I think you’re the best hunter in Africa, Blickie, but there are times when your humour is gruesome. Why in hell didn’t you shoot?’
He will never write one of those books comparing England and America, only to conclude that the culture of the latter offers the same clinical interest as a child prodigy born of congenitally daft backwoods parents.
June Carberry, small, nimble-minded, and attractive, presided over evenings at Seramai like a gracious pixy over a company of characters snatched from an unfinished novel originally drafted by H. Rider Haggard and written by Scott Fitzgerald, with James M. Cain looking over his shoulder. Conversation drifted from phantom elephants to the relative potency of various cocktails, to Chicago gangsters — but usually ended on aeroplanes.
was a wizened little string of smoke, sad and grey, and looking like the afterglow of a witch’s exit.
Farah, who is a lean, energetic Somali, inclined to talk so fast that you are still coping with his first sentence while he is waiting for an answer to the last, was of the opinion that his Bwana Blixen was
But we needed Makula. I remembered an old Swahili phrase, and I said it: ‘A wise man is not more than a woman — unless he is also brave.’
‘As much as you saw today, Makula?’ ‘Not so much at one time, Baba Yangu. Today, it is true, I saw the great sea down there by Mombasa, and the top of Kilamanjaro, and the place where the Mau Forest ends — but those things I had seen before, by myself.’ ‘You saw all those things today?’ Farah’s scepticism went undisguised. ‘You could not have seen those things, Makula. You did not fly so far, and we all know that your head was wrapped in your own blanket! Can men see, then, through darkness?’ Makula let his long fingers caress the little bag of witchery that hung from his waist. He turned to
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Each humid, tropic day is stillborn, and does not breathe, however lustily pregnant the night that gave it birth.
I take off in dead air with the accessories of my singular occupation arranged in their proper places.
Work hard, trust in God, and keep your
bowels open — Oliver Cromwell
sitting here dreaming of England? Why am I gazing at this campfire like a lost soul seeking a hope when all that I love is at my wingtips? Because I am curious. Because I am incorrigibly, now, a wanderer.
That aroma and the smell of the smoke that follows it are to me the quintessence of memory.
But memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will, and my father knows it. He is sixty-four years old now, and well deserving of deep chairs and care and dottle dreams and carping cronies — should he desire these. He might say, with ample reason: ‘I’m old now. I’ve earned my rest.’
been. However, or whatever it was, Pegasus — so expectantly christened so long ago — is gone now, yielding his ethereal wings to the realization of wood and steel ones that fly as high and higher, but, for all that, are never so buoyant or capable of bearing quite such cargoes of hope.
It seems wonderful, but not strange to me. There are men whose failures surprise nobody, and others whose successes are as easily anticipated — Tom was of these.
Fog had spilled out of the sky by night and the morning found Nairobi and the Athi Plains bundled in mist. The town, the sunrise, and the ship were isolated each from the other by clouds that had no edges and refused to roll. They lay on the earth like sadness come to rest; they clung to people like burial clothes, white and premature. Blix found them gay.
There were runways now, and hangars, and no audience to see the midnight landing of a plane or a dawn take-off; no Kikuyu youths to watch Ruta at his wonderful and mystic tasks. All was commonplace now. Adventure for Nairobi came in celluloid rolls straight from Hollywood, and adventure for other parts of the world went out from Nairobi in celluloid rolls straight from the cameras of professional jungle-trotters. It was a good time to leave.
‘An aviator who shows an interest in our fortresses is guilty of espionage, and one who does not is guilty of disrespect.’ I think the latter crime was, of the two, the more repugnant to the legionnaires of the flowing tunic and the gleaming button.
The symbols of war — impressive desert forts, shiny planes, beetle-browed warships — all inspire the sons of Rome, if not to gallantry, then at least to histrionics, which, in the Italian mind, are synonymous anyway. I sometimes think it must be extremely difficult for the Italian people to remain patient in the face of their armies’ unwavering record of defeat (they looked so resplendent on parade). But there is little complaint. The answer must be that the country of Caruso has lived a symbolic life for so long that the token has become indistinguishable from the fact or the deed. If an aria
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However futile the Italian military, there is real striking power behind the rubber stamps of petty Italian officials
‘there is no hell like uncertainty, and no greater
menace to society than an Italian with three liras worth of authority.’
friend and a gentleman of doughty stock. He was the younger brother of Captain John Alcock (who, with Lieutenant Arthur Brown, made the first successful Atlantic flight), and moreover he was a crack pilot for Imperial Airways. Alcock the younger, who has rarely if ever been put hors de combat by anything that can be poured from a decanter,
was the realization of one of Blix’s most fervent hopes — a man to whom the undermost side of a table was an unexplored region.
There are various techniques for coping with people who say things like that. Possibly the most effective is to catch them just under the ear with a bronze book-end (preferably a cast of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’) and then scream — remembering always that the scream is of secondary importance to the book-end.
I had thought that the most redoubtable White Hunter in Africa would have survived it a little longer. And yet, as I sat on the edge of the bed, there was Blix leaning against the wall of my room with the vitality of a bundle of wrinkled clothes awaiting the pleasure of the hotel valet. I sighed with the sorrow of it all.
‘Are you giving up all-night parties, Blix?’ He shook his head. ‘Oh, but I think that would be so very rash and so very unsociable. Walking home from them is the thing to avoid — I promise you!’
also supported, we observed, the official posterior for which the canvas chair had been spread. He sat down and began to study our papers.
pinned vaingloriously, if with doubtful permanence,
the great grey torso of the desert.
The sky has stars — the desert only distance. The sea has islands — the desert only more desert; build a fort or a house upon it and you have achieved nothing. You can’t build anything big enough to make any difference.
But now, though this castle and this monastery still stand, their shadows are dissolved in the angular blur of modern buildings.
Her own face held the lineage of several races, none of which had given it
distinction.
It was just a husk w...
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‘All the diseases of the world live here,’ I said to Blix. He was laconic. ‘So do we, until tomorrow.’
She had long since forgotten the meaning of a smile, but the physical ability to make the gesture remained.
Like the smile of a badly controlled puppet, hers was overdone, and after she had disappeared and the pad of her slippers was swallowed somewhere in the corridors of the dark house, the fixed, fragile grin still hung in front of my eyes — detached and almost tangible. It floated in the room; it had the same sad quality as the painted trinkets children win at circus booths and cherish until they are broken. I felt that the grin of the brothel keeper would shatter if it were touched and fall to the floor in pieces.
The surface of our wooden table had the culinary history of the house inscribed upon it in grease.
was a life better left in synopsis — too sordid and too miserable even to afford a framework for romance.
suppose that any man who attempted to cheat Blix out of a shilling would do it at the risk of life and limb, but if the same man asked for a shilling, he would doubtless get twenty.
Africa is never the same to anyone who leaves it and
