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Title: Shadows on the Grass
Author: Blixen, Karen [Dinesen, Isak] (1885-1962)
Date of first publication: 1960
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Random House, 1961
   [first U. S. edition]
Date first posted: 19 August 2016
Date last updated: 19 August 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1347

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

Because of copyright considerations, the frontispiece is not
included in this edition: it is a photograph of the author
by Cecil Beaton (1904-1980).






  Books by ISAK DINESEN

  SEVEN GOTHIC TALES
  OUT OF AFRICA
  WINTER'S TALES
  LAST TALES
  ANECDOTES OF DESTINY
  SHADOWS ON THE GRASS





[Illustration: Title page]



  SHADOWS
  on the GRASS

  _ISAK DINESEN_



  _Masai Moran and Ndito_



  RANDOM HOUSE * _NEW YORK_




  _Frontispiece portrait of Isak Dinesen by Cecil Beaton; portraits
  of Abdullahi, Aweru, and an Ndita of the farm by the author._

  _Poem on pages 102 and 103, by Otto Gelsted, translated by
  Isak Dinesen._



  First published in the United States, 1961






  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-15898


  "Barua a Soldani" first appeared in Esquire magazine.



  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




_Contents_


Farah

Barua a Soldani

The Great Gesture

Echoes from the Hills




_Illustrations_


Isak Dinesen . . . _frontispiece_

Kikuyu Ndito from the Ngong farm

The author and her Scotch deerhound, Dusk, in the garden at Ngong, 1919

Aweru, an old Kikuyu squatter of the farm

Abdullahi




Farah


As here, after twenty-five years, I again take up episodes of my life
in Africa, one figure, straight, candid, and very fine to look at,
stands as doorkeeper to all of them: my Somali servant Farah Aden.
Were any reader to object that I might choose a character of greater
importance, I should answer him that that would not be possible.

Farah came to meet me in Aden in 1913, before the First World War.  For
almost eighteen years he ran my house, my stables and safaris.  I
talked to him about my worries as about my successes, and he knew of
all that I did or thought.  Farah, by the time I had had to give up the
farm and was leaving Africa, saw me off in Mombasa.  And as I watched
his dark immovable figure on the quay growing smaller and at last
disappear, I felt it as if I were losing a part of myself, as if I were
having my right hand set off, and from now on would never again ride a
horse or shoot with a rifle, nor be able to write otherwise than with
my left hand.  Neither have I since then ridden or shot.

In order to form and make up a Unity, in particular a creative Unity,
the individual components must needs be of different nature, they
should even be in a sense contrasts.  Two homogeneous units will never
be capable of forming a whole, or their whole at its best will remain
barren.  Man and woman become one, a physically and spiritually
creative Unity, by virtue of their dissimilarity.  A hook and an eye
are a Unity, a fastening; but with two hooks you can do nothing.  A
right-hand glove with its contrast the left-hand glove makes up a
whole, a pair of gloves; but two right-hand gloves you throw away.  A
number of perfectly similar objects do not make up a whole--a couple of
cigarettes may quite well be three or nine.  A quartet is a Unity
because it is made up of dissimilar instruments.  An orchestra is a
Unity, and may be perfect as such, but twenty double-basses striking up
the same tune are Chaos.

A community of but one sex would be a blind world.  When in 1940 I was
in Berlin, engaged by three Scandinavian papers to write about Nazi
Germany, woman--and the whole world of woman--was so emphatically
subdued that I might indeed have been walking about in such a one-sexed
community.  I felt a relief then, as I watched the young soldiers
marching west, to the frontier, for in a fight the adversaries become
one, and the two duellists make up a Unity.

The introduction into my life of another race, essentially different
from mine, in Africa became to me a mysterious expansion of my world.
My own voice and song in life there had a second set to it, and grew
fuller and richer in the duet.

Within the literature of the ages one particular Unity, made up of
essentially different parts, makes its appearance, disappears and again
comes back: that of Master and Servant.  We have met the two in rhyme,
blank verse and prose, and in the varying costumes of the centuries.
Here wanders the Prophet Elisha with his servant Gehazi--between whom
one would have supposed the partnership to have come to an end after
the affair with Naaman, but whom we meet in a later chapter apparently
in the best of understanding.  Here walk Terence's Davus and Simo, and
Plautus' Calidorus and Pseudolus.  Here Don Quixote rides forth, with
Sancho Panza on his mule by the croup of Rosinante.  Here the Fool
follows King Lear across the heath in the storm and the black night,
here Leporello waits in the street while inside the palazzo Don
Giovanni "reaps his sweet reward."  Phileas Fogg struts on to the stage
with one single idea in his head and versatile Passepartout at his
heels.  In our own streets of old Copenhagen Jeronimus and Magdelone
promenade arm in arm, while behind their broad and dignified backs
Henrik and Pernille make signs to one another.

The servant may be the more fascinating of the two, still it holds true
of him as of his master that his play of colours would fade and his
timbre abate, were he to stand alone.  He needs a master in order to be
himself.  Leporello, after having witnessed his scapegrace master's
lurid end, will still, I believe, from time to time in a circle of
friends have produced his list of Don Giovanni's victims and have read
out triumphantly: "In Spain are a thousand and three!"  The Fool, who
is killed by the endless night on the moor, would not have become
immortal without the mad old King, to whose lion's roar he joins his
doleful, bitter and tender mockery.  Henrik and Pernille, if left by
Holberg in their own native milieu of Copenhagen valets and ladies'
maids, would not have twinkled and sparkled as they do against the
background of the sedateness of Jeronimus and Magdelone and the pale
romance of Leander and Leonore.

I had in Africa many servants, whom I shall always remember as part of
my existence there.  There was Ismael, my gun-bearer, a mighty huntsman
brought up and trained exclusively in the hunter's world, a great
tracker and weather prophet, expressing himself in hunter's terminology
and speaking of my "big" and my "young" rifle.  It was Ismael who after
his return to Somaliland addressed his letter to me "Lioness Blixen"
and began it: "Honourable Lioness."  There was old Ismael, my cook and
faithful companion on safaris, who was a kind of Mohammedan saint.  And
there was Kamante, a small figure to look at but great, even
formidable, in his total isolation.  But Farah was my servant by the
grace of God.

Farah and I had all the dissimilarities required to make up a Unity:
difference of race, sex, religion, milieu and experience.  In one thing
only were we equal: we had agreed that we were the same age.  We were
not able to settle the matter exactly, since the Mohammedans reckon
with lunar years.

We wander through a long portrait gallery of historical interest:
portraits of kings and princes, of great statesmen, poets, and sailors.
Amongst all these one face strikes us, an anonymous character, resting
in himself, confident of his own nature and dependent on no one.  The
catalogue that you take up and into which you look tells you: "Portrait
of a Gentleman."  I shall name my chapter on Farah in an unpretentious
way: "Portrait of a Gentleman."

In our day the word "gentleman" is taken less seriously than before, or
seems to us to have once taken itself a bit too seriously.  But so did
Farah take himself seriously.

If the word may be taken to describe or define the person who has got
the code of honour of his period and milieu in his own blood, as an
instinct--such as the rules of the game will be in the blood of the
true cricket or football player, to whom it would not be possible in
any situation to throw the ball at the head of his adversary--Farah was
the greatest gentleman I have ever met.  Only it was, to begin with,
difficult to decide what would be the code of honour to a high-born
Mohammedan in the house of a European pioneer.

Farah was a Somali, which means that he was no Native of Kenya but an
immigrant to the country from Somaliland further north.  In my day
there were a large number of Somali in Kenya.  They were greatly
superior to the Native population in intelligence and culture.  They
were of Arab blood and looked upon themselves as pure-blood Arabs, in
some cases even as descendants of the Prophet.  On the whole they
thought very highly of themselves.  They were all fanatical Mohammedans.

The Natives of the land, the Kikuyu, Wakamba, Kawirondo and Masai, have
got their own old mysterious and simple cultural traditions, which seem
to lose themselves in the darkness of very ancient days.  We ourselves
have carried European light to the country quite lately, but we have
had the means to spread and establish it quickly.  In between, an
oriental civilization, violent, cruel and very picturesque, gained a
foothold in the Highlands through the slave and ivory trade.

The finest ivory in the world comes from East Africa, and the old slave
traffic, a long time before the discovery of America, was carried on
along these coasts.  From here slaves were freighted eastward to
Arabia, Persia, India and China, also northward to the Levant; you will
see little black Negro pages in old Venetian pictures.  From here came
the forty black slaves who, together with forty white, carried
Aladdin's jewels to the Sultan on their heads.  Zanzibar was the great
centre of the trade.  The Sultan of Zanzibar, I was told when I was
there in 1916, was still paid an appanage of 5,000 as compensation for
his loss of income from the slave trade.  I have seen, at Zanzibar, the
market-place and the platform where slaves were put up for sale.

The old commercial intercourse has left its traces in the language of
the country.  Each tribe of East Africa has got its own language, but
all over the Highlands a primitive, ungrammatical lingua franca is
spoken: Swahili, the tongue of the coastal tribes.  Small children
even, herding goats and sheep on the plains, would understand and
answer as we asked our way, or questioned them about water or game, in
Swahili.  I spoke Swahili to my Native servants and labourers on the
farm, but as the farm lay in the Kikuyu district, our particular local
jargon contained many Kikuyu words and turns of phrase.

The trade also brought the Somali to the country.  Most likely Farah's
ancestors had been enterprising buyers-up, very likely also hunters and
robbers in the Highlands, and possibly pirates on the Red Sea.

The Somali are very handsome people, slim and erect as all East African
tribes, with sombre, haughty eyes, straight legs and teeth like wolves.
They are vain and have knowledge of fine clothes.  When not dressed as
Europeans--for many of them would wear discarded suits of their
masters' from the first London tailors and would look very well in
them--they had on long robes of raw silk, with sleeveless black
waistcoats elaborately embroidered in gold.  They always wore the
turbans of the orthodox Mohammedans in exquisite many-coloured
cashmeres; those who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca might wear a
green turban.

The dark nations of Africa, strikingly precocious as young children,
seemed to come to a standstill in their mental growth at different
ages.  The Kikuyu, Kawirondo and Wakamba, the people who worked for me
on the farm, in early childhood were far ahead of white children of the
same age, but they stopped quite suddenly at a stage corresponding to
that of a European child of nine.  The Somali had got further and had
all the mentality of boys of our own race at the age of thirteen to
seventeen.  In such young Europeans, too, the code of honour, the
deadly devotion to the grand phrase and the grand gesture is the
passion urging them on to heroic deeds and heroic self-sacrifice, and
also at times sinking them into a dark melancholy and resentment
unintelligible to grown-up people.  The Somali woman seemed to have
stolen a small march upon her male, and from the time when she can
first walk until venerable high age presents the picture of the classic
_jeune fille_ of Europe: coquettish, wily, covetous beyond belief, and
sweetly merciful at the core.

I had read the old Nordic Sagas as a child, and now in my intercourse
with the Somali I was struck by their likeness to the ancient
Icelanders.  I was therefore pleased to find Professor Ostrup, who is
an authority on both nations, making use of a common term to
characterize Arabs and Icelanders: he calls them "attitudinizers."  The
same ravenous ambition to distinguish themselves before all others and
at any cost to immortalize themselves through a word or gesture, lies
deep in the hearts of the sons of the desert as it did in the hearts of
the untamed, salt young seafarers of the Northern Seas.

On the African plains the picture of Ejnar Tambesklve, the unrivalled
young archer, the friend of King Olav Tryggveson, who was with him in
the naval battle of Svoldr in the year 1002, was brought back to me.
As Ejnar's bowstring burst with a loud boom and the King through the
din of the battle cried out: "What burst there so loudly?" he screeched
back: "The Kingdom of Norway off thy hand, King Olav!"  The wild-eyed
warrior boy, standing up straight in the stern of the ship, may have
felt with satisfaction that now what was to be achieved had been
achieved.  And we who today read about him may agree with him, since by
now few people will remember who won or lost the battle of Svoldr, or
what were the consequences of it, while Ejnar Tambesklve's _grand mot_
has been remembered through a thousand years.

In my dealings with Farah and his tribe I felt that whatever else I
might risk from their hand, I did not run the risk of being pitied--no
more than I would do in my dealings with a young boy at home.

Personally I have always had a predilection for boys, and have at times
reflected that the strong sex reaches its highest point of lovableness
at the age of twelve to seventeen--to get it back, in a second
flowering, at the age of seventy to ninety.  So were the Somali from
the first day irresistible to me.  With the later European settlers,
however, they were not popular.

I myself came out to the Protectorate of British East Africa before the
First World War, while the Highlands were still in very truth the happy
hunting-grounds, and while the white pioneers lived in guileless
harmony with the children of the land.  Most of the immigrants had come
to Africa, and had stayed on there, because they liked their African
existence better than their existence at home, would rather ride a
horse than go in a car and rather make up their own campfire than turn
on the central heating.  Like me they wished to lay their bones in
African soil.  They were almost all themselves country-bred and
open-air people; many of them were younger sons of old English
families, schooled early in life by elderly, dignified keepers and
stablemen and were accustomed to proud servants.  Themselves untamed,
with fresh hearts, they were capable of forming a Hawkeye-Chingachgook
fellowship with a dark, untamed nomad or hunter; they accepted and
trusted the Somali, as the Somali accepted and trusted them.

During the war, and the first years after it, no new settlers landed.
But in the following years an energetic advertising of the Colony of
Kenya as a country of unique economic possibilities was started in
England, and "Closer Settlement" was made the catchword.  It brought
out a new class of settlers, people who had grown up and lived in one
town or one community in England, and who were strangely provincial
compared to the African Natives, who were at any time prepared for
anything.  Plots of land were also given out as rewards to British
non-commissioned officers, most of whom were city people, who in the
loneliness of the great landscapes felt that they had been promised
more than they were given.

To me it was a sad programme.  From the point of view of emigration, I
reflected, Kenya, with an altitude and a climate in which white people
could not take on manual labour, and with a vast Native population,
would never be an area of great moment.  When I first came to the
country there were about five thousand white people there; she might, I
thought, possibly take in ten times as many.  But then, I was told,
Australia and New Zealand and Canada could at the same time take in up
to fifty or a hundred millions.  And from the point of view of the
country itself, the "true home of my heart," a closer white settlement
was a dubious benefit, and it was the quality, not the quantity of
white settlers which we should have at heart.  I laugh, and I suppose I
ought to blush, when I call to mind that at this time I wrote to a very
superior political personage in England and developed my views to him.
I am indeed touched when I remember that he did really send an answer
to my letter, in a courteous, if non-committal note.

To these later arrivals to the country the Somali, her earliest
immigrants, seemed haughty and unmanageable and were, I believe, on the
whole as intolerable as to me and my friends they were indispensable.
So it came that our particular clan of early settlers--arrogantly
looking upon ourselves as Mayflower people--might be characterized as
those Europeans who kept Somali servants and to whom a house without a
Somali would be like a house without a lamp.  Here were Lord Delamere
and Hassan, Berkeley Cole and Jama, Denys Finch-Hatton and Bilea, and I
myself and Farah.  We were the people who, wherever we went, were
followed, at a distance of five feet, by those noble, vigilant and
mysterious shadows.

Berkeley Cole and I, in a private jargon of ours, distinguished between
respectability and decency, and divided up our acquaintances, human and
animal, in accordance with the doctrine.  We put down domestic animals
as respectable and wild animals as decent, and held that, while the
existence and prestige of the first were decided by their relation to
the community, the others stood in direct contact with God.  Pigs and
poultry, we agreed, were worthy of our respect, inasmuch as they
loyally returned what was invested in them, and in their most intimate
private life behaved as was expected of them.  We watched them in their
sties and yards, perseveringly working at the return of investments
made, pleasantly feeding, grunting and quacking.  And leaving them
there, to their own homely, cosy atmosphere, we turned our eyes to the
unrespectable, destructive wild boar on his lonely wanderings, or to
those unrespectable, shameless corn-thieves, the wild geese and duck,
in their purposeful line of flight across the sky, and we felt their
course to have been drawn up by the finger of God.

We registered ourselves with the wild animals, sadly admitting the
inadequacy of our return to the community--and to our mortgages--but
realizing that we could not possibly, not even in order to obtain the
highest approval of our surroundings, give up that direct contact with
God which we shared with the hippo and the flamingo.  Nine thousand
feet up we felt safe, and we laughed at the ambition of the new
arrivals, of the Missions, the business people and the Government
itself, to make the continent of Africa respectable.  A time came when
we began to feel uneasy about the matter.  The Protestant Missions gave
much time, energy and money to make the Natives put on trousers--in
which they looked like giraffes in harness.  The French Fathers were in
better understanding with the children of the land, but they did not
have--as they ought to have had--Saint Francis of Assisi at their
Mission station; they were themselves but frail souls, and at home had
been loaded with a heavy, mixed cultural cargo, which they dared not
throw off.  The businessmen, under the motto of "Teach the Native to
Want," encouraged the African to evaluate himself by his possessions
and to keep up respectably with his neighbours.  The Government,
turning the great wild plains into game Reserves, seemed to succeed in
making the lions themselves take on the look of kindly
patresfamilias--times might come when our old feline friends would have
their regular meals served them from Game Department canteens.  It was
doubtful whether sans them the graminivora would preserve their
innocence of the period before the Fall, whether then the kongoni would
still keep their lonely watcher silhouetted on top of a hill, the eland
their silky skin swaying in the dewlap as they trotted along, and their
moist eyes, the impala their flying leap.  Must there then, even in
Africa, be no live creature standing in direct contact with God?

Ay, but there will be, I consoled myself, as long as I have got Farah
with me.  For Farah, although gravely posing as a highly respectable
major-domo, Malvolio himself, was a wild animal, and nothing in the
world would ever stand between him and God.  Unfailingly loyal, he was
still at heart a wild animal, a cheetah noiselessly following me about
at a distance of five feet, or a falcon holding on to my finger with
strong talons and turning his head right and left.  The qualities with
which he served me were cheetah or falcon qualities.

When Farah first took service in my house, or first took my house into
possession--for from that day he spoke of "our house," "our horses,"
"our guests"--it was no common contract which was set up, but a
covenant established between him and me _ad majorem domus gloriam_, to
the ever greater glory of the house.  My well-being was not his
concern, and was hardly of real importance to him, but for my good name
and prestige he did, I believe, hold himself responsible before God.

Farah was a highly picturesque figure in my house as he stepped forth
on its threshold.  In his relations with my Native servants he was
unwaveringly fair and impartial, and he had a deeper knowledge of them
and their course of thought than I could well account for, for I hardly
ever saw him converse with them.  Farah spoke English correctly, and
French as well, for he had in his young days been cabin-boy on a French
man-of-war, but he had a few expressions of his own which I ought to
have set him right about, but which instead in our talks together I
took to using myself.  He said "exactly" for "except": "All the cows
have come home exactly the grey cow," and I still at times find myself
making use of the word in the same way.

Farah had the typical Somali voice, recognizable among all voices of
the world, low, guttural, with a two-fold ring to it, for it was
friendly but lent itself excellently well to a particular contempt or
scorn.  At times Farah like most Somali annoyed me by having so little
Gemiltlichkeit in his mental make-up.  I accounted for it by the
tribes' abstinence from wine or spirits through a thousand years, and
reflected that the sight of an old uncle dead drunk would have been a
wholesome remedy against the desert dryness of the Somali mind.

He once told me that he did not like the Jews because they "ate
antruss," and for a while I wondered which would be the food that
shocked him in the Jews, since the pork forbidden to Mohammedans is
forbidden to the children of Israel as well.  In the end, however, I
gathered from him that what roused his indignation was the Jewish
practice of charging interest on money lent, a proceeding forbidden to
and despised by the Mohammedans.  He said of an ambitious English
friend of the house: "He never get Sir," meaning that he would never
obtain the honour of being knighted.  At the time when the locusts came
upon us the Natives roasted and ate them; I had a mind to try them
myself, but still somehow doubtful asked Farah what they tasted like.
"I know not, Memsahib," he answered, "I eat not such small birds."  He
had a partiality for the demonstrative adjective: "This Arab horse
dealer offers you this horse at this price," and rarely spoke about his
fellow-men but in the same way: "this Kamante," "this Prince of Wales."
Thomas Mann in his book _Joseph in Egypt_ tells us that the ancient
Egyptians had the same usage, and that Joseph taught himself to speak
according to their taste: "As we came to this fortress this good old
man said to this officer."  It may be a particular African inclination.

Farah strictly saw to it that our Native servants groomed the horses
and polished the silver of the house till they shone.  He drove my old
Ford car as if it had been a Rothschild's Rolls-Royce.  And he expected
from me a corresponding loyalty to the paragraphs of our covenant.  As
a consequence of this attitude he was a highly expensive functionary in
the house, not only because his salary was disproportionately larger
than that of my other servants, but because he did without mercy demand
my house to be run in grand style.

Farah was my cashier, he had charge of all money I took home from the
bank and of my keys.  He never drew up any accounts for me and would
hardly have been able to do so, nor would it ever have occurred to me
to demand it from him.  I never doubted but that he did to the best of
his ability spend my money in the interest of my house.  Only there
always remained to me a strong exciting element of suspense as to his
views of the interests of the house.

I once asked him: "Farah, can you give me five rupees?"  And he asked
me in return: "What do you want them for, Memsahib?" "I want to buy a
new pair of slacks," I said.  Farah shook his head.  "We cannot afford
that this month, Memsahib," he said.  He told me: "I pray to God that
your old riding-boots may last till your new ones arrive out from
London."  Farah had good knowledge of riding-boots and felt it to be
below my dignity to walk about in boots made by the Indians of Nairobi.

To make up for it he was liberal in other matters.  He decreed: "We
must have champagne for dinner tonight, Memsahib."  My English friends,
who in between their long safaris stayed in my house, kept it in wine
at a very high standard, but it happened when they were away for a long
time that I ran short of wine.  "We have got so little champagne left,
Farah," I said.  "We must have champagne," Farah said again.  "Have you
forgotten, Memsahib, that there is a Memsahib coming for dinner?"  My
guests as a rule were men.

When Prince Wilhelm of Sweden was coming for tea to the farm, in his
honour I wanted to make a kind of Swedish cake called _Klejner_, for
which you need a little bit, what the cookery-books call a pinch, of
cardamom.  As Farah was going to Nairobi I added the cardamom to his
shopping list.  "I do not know," I said, "whether the white grocers
will have it.  But if you cannot get it with them you must go to the
Indians."  The great Indian tradesmen, Suleiman Virjee and Allidina
Visram, were personal friends of Farah's and owned more than half of
the native trade-quarter, which was called the Bazaar.

Farah came back late in the evening and reported: "This precious spice,
Memsahib, which other Europeans do not know, but which we must have,
was very difficult to get.  First I went to these white grocers, but
they had not got it.  Then I went to Suleiman Virjee, and he had it.
And then I bought for five hundred rupees."  A rupee was two shillings.
"You are crazy, Farah," I said.  "I meant you to buy for ten cents."
"You did not tell me so," said Farah.  "No, I did not tell you so," I
said.  "I thought you had human intelligence.  But in any case I have
no use for five hundred rupees' worth of cardamom, and you will have to
give it back to Suleiman Virjee where you got it."  I at once realized
that it would be impossible to make Farah carry out my order.  It was
not the inconvenience that he feared, for no kind of inconvenience
means anything to a Somali.  But he would not allow Suleiman Virjee to
believe that a house like ours could do with less then five hundred
rupees' worth of cardamom.

He thought the matter over and said: "No.  No, that would not be good,
Memsahib.  But I will tell you what we will do.  I shall take over this
lot."  So we left it at that, and the Somali are such furious
tradespeople that Farah at once got the hitherto unknown article
introduced on the farm, so that soon every self-esteeming Kikuyu went
about chewing cardamom and dashingly spitting out the capsules.  I
tried it myself and it was not bad.  I feel that Farah will have made a
handsome profit on the transaction.

Farah's knowledge of Native mentality came in useful to me.

Once, at the end of a month, when I had been paying out their wages to
my people on the farm, in going through my accounts I found that a
hundred-rupee note was missing and must have been stolen.  I passed on
the sad news to Farah, and he at once very calmly declared that he
would get me my money back.  "But how?" I asked him.  "There have been
more than a thousand people up here, and we have no idea at all as to
who may be the thief."  "Nay, but I will get you your money back," said
Farah.

He walked away, and towards evening returned carrying with him a human
skull.  This may sound highly dramatic, but was in itself nothing out
of the normal.  For centuries the Natives had not buried their dead but
had laid them out on the plain where jackals and vultures would take
care of diem.  One might at any time, riding or walking there, in the
long grass knock against an amber-coloured thigh-bone or a honey-brown
skull.

Farah rammed down a pole outside my door and nailed the skull to the
top of it.  I stood by and watched him without enthusiasm.  "What is
the good of that, Farah?" I asked him.  "The thief will already be far
away.  And must I now have that skull of yours set up just outside my
door?"  Farah did not answer, he took a step back to survey his work
and laughed.  But next morning, by the foot of the pole a stone was
lying, and underneath it a hundred-rupee note.  By what dark, crooked
paths it had got there I was not told, and now shall never know.

Farah, as already told, was a strict Mohammedan, burning in the spirit.

In speaking about Mohammedans and Mohammedanism, I am well aware that I
got to know in Africa only a primitive, unsophisticated Mohammedanism.
Of Mohammedan philosophy or theology I know nothing; from my own
experience I can but tell how Islam manifests itself in the course of
thought and conduct of the unlearned Orthodox.  All the same I feel
that you cannot live for a long time among Mohammedans without your own
view of life being in some way influenced by theirs.

I have been told that the word "Islam" in itself means submission: the
Creed may be defined as the religion which ordains acceptance.  And the
Prophet does not accept with reluctance or with regret but with
rapture.  There is in his preaching, as I know it from his unlearned
disciples, a tremendous erotic element.

"Sweet scents, incense and perfumes are dear to my heart," says the
Prophet.  "But the glory of women is dearer.  The glory of women is
dear to my heart.  But the glory of prayer is dearer."

In contrast to many modern Christian ideologies, Islam does not occupy
itself with justifying the ways of God to man; its Yes is universal and
unconditional.  For the lover does not measure the worth of his
mistress by a moral or social rod.  But the mistress, by absorbing into
her own being the dark and dangerous phenomena of life, mysteriously
transluminates and sanctifies them, and imbues them with sweetness.  An
old Danish love poem has it: "There is witchcraft on your lips, an
abyss within your gaze."  What the wooer desires is freedom to adore,
what he craves and thirsts for is the assurance of being loved back.
Kadidja's caravaneer, with his eyes on the new moon, in the words of a
later author, even though in a somewhat altered sense, is "God's own
mad lover, dying on a kiss."

I sometimes wondered whether the tribes of the desert had become what
they were by having been in the hand of the Prophet for twelve hundred
years, or whether his Creed has taken such deep roots in them because
from the very beginning they were of one blood with him.  I imagined
that just as the erotic aloofness of the founder of Christianity has
left his disciples in a kind of void, or of chronic uneasiness and
remorse, within this province of life, so has the formidable,
indomitable potency of the Prophet pervaded his followers and made
mighty latent forces in them fetch headway.  Eroticism runs through the
entire existence of the great wanderers.  Horses and camels are
desirable and exquisite possessions in a man's life, and well worth
that he should risk it for their sake.  But they cannot compete or
compare with women.  To the hearts of the ascetic, hardened, ruthless
tribes it is the number and the quality of the wives which decides a
man's success and happiness in life, and his own worth.

[Illustration: _Kikuyu Ndito from the Ngong farm_]

When, on the farm, I was called upon to give judgment in matters
between my Mohammedan people, I looked up rules and regulations in the
manual of Mohammedan law, _Minhaj et Talibin_.  It is a thick and
heavy, highly imposing book to have carried about with you, a
surprising work as well to a North European mind in its taboos and
recommendations, enlightening as to the Mohammedan view of life,
infinitely detailed in its regulations on legal purity, prayer, fasting
and distribution of alms and particularly upon woman and her position
in the community of the Orthodox.  "The law," the classic states,
"forbids a man to clothe himself in silk.  But a woman may wear clothes
of silk and should do so whenever this be in all decency possible to
her."  The Somali whom I knew did, however, wear silk, but Farah
explained to me that they would do so only when outside their own
country and in the service of other people--and surely my old valued
friend Ali bin Salim of Mombasa, or the old Indian high priest who came
to see me on the farm, wore but the finest and most delicate wools.
The book also lays down as law that a husband shall supply his wife not
only with the necessary nourishment, lodgings and clothes, but that he
shall also give her such and such luxuries, within his means, which are
truly worthy of her and will make her truly value her husband.  "In the
case, however," it adds, "of a woman of remarkable beauty, jurists may
find themselves not entirely in accordance and will have to weigh the
matter between them."  The very grave and somewhat pedantic book thus
registers woman's beauty as an indisputable, juridical asset in
existence.

They rush forth, these warriors of the great fantasias, to meet the
will of God--his adorable will--as the Jews rush forth to meet the
Sabbath: "Get thee up, brethren, to welcome the bride!"  Or David, King
of Israel, in his Psalm 119: "O how love I thy law!"  They are a
communion of yes-sayers, they are in love with danger, with death and
with God.

As Job's laments are not silenced by expositions of the justice and
mercy of God, but it is before the revelation of God's greatness that
the complainer surrenders and consents, the Prophet surrenders and
consents: "God is great."  In the same way did Farah consent, when
after three weeks' hard tracking we came up close to a herd of
elephants and I shot and missed, and the elephants marched away so that
we never saw them again.  In the same way did he consent when in a year
of drought, news was brought him from Somaliland that half his camels
had perished, and when I told him of Denys Finch-Hatton's death: "God
is great."

It is a general notion among Christians that Mohammedanism is more
intolerant than Christianity, but such is not my own experience.  There
were three great prophets--_Nebbes_--Farah told me, Mohammed, Jesus and
Moses.  He would not recognize Christ as the Son of God, for God could
have no son in the flesh, but he would agree that he had no human
father.  He named him Isa ben Mariammo.  About Mariammo he spoke much,
praising her beauty and virginity--she had, he said, been walking in
her mother's garden when an angel had brushed her shoulder with his
wing; through this she had conceived.  He smacked his own small son
Saufe because he repeated some words of abuse about the Virgin which
naughty Kikuyu totos from the Scotch Mission had taught him.

When in the thirties I was staying in the south of England with Denys'
brother, the Earl of Winchilsea, the painter John Philpot came down to
paint the portrait of my hostess, who was very lovely.  He had
travelled much in North Africa, and on an afternoon when we were
walking together in the park he recounted to me an experience of his
from there.

In the First World War, he said, he had had a shellshock or a nervous
breakdown; he would never feel sure that he was doing what he ought to
do.

"When I was painting a picture," he explained, "I felt that I ought to
make up my bank account.  When I was making up my bank account, I felt
that I ought to go for a walk.  And when, in a long walk, I had got
five miles away from home, I realized that I ought to be, at this very
moment, in front of my easel.  I was constantly in flight, an exile
everywhere.

"It happened by then that I and my African servant in our travels in
Morocco came to a small town or village.  I cannot really describe the
place to you, it looked like any other North African village.  It stood
in a flat plain, and in itself it was nothing but a number of mud-built
huts with an old, broad mud-built wall round it.  The only particular
thing that I remember about it is its great multitude of storks, a
stork's nest on almost every house.  But at the moment when I had come
through the gate in the wall I felt that this was a place of refuge.
There came upon me a strange, blissful calm, a happiness like what you
feel when a high fever leaves you.  'Here,' I thought, 'one can remain.'

"And as now I had stayed in the village for a fortnight, all the time
in that same sweet peace of soul and giving no thought to the past or
the future, on a day when I was once more painting a picture, an old
man, a priest, came up and spoke to me.  'I hear from your servant,' he
said, 'that you have finished your wanderings and will stay with us,
since here you have found rest.'  I answered him that it was as he
said, but that I could not explain to myself why it should be so.

"'Master,' said the old man, 'I shall explain it to you.  There is
something special about our village, things have happened here that
have happened nowhere else.  It came about, not when I was a boy myself
but when my father was a boy of twelve, and he has related it to me as
it happened.  Turn your eyes to the gate in the wall behind us.  Above
it you will see a ledge, where two men can sit, for in old days
watchmen were here looking out for foes that might approach across the
plain.  To this very ledge above the gate came the Prophet himself and
your Prophet Jesus Christ.  They met here to talk together of man's lot
on earth and of the means by which the people of the earth might be
helped.  Those standing down below could not hear what they said to one
another.  But they could see the Prophet, as he explained his thoughts,
striking his hand against his knee, and thereupon Jesus Christ lifting
his hand and answering him.  They sat there, deep in talk, till night
fell and the people could no longer see them.  And it is from that
time, Master, that our village has got peace of heart to give away.'

"I wonder," said Mr. Philpot, "whether a clergyman of the Church of
England would have told that tale."

Like all Mohammedans Farah was without fear.  Europeans call the
Islamitic view of life fatalism.  I myself do not think that the
Prophet's followers see the happenings of life as predestined and
therefore inescapable.  They are fearless because confident that what
happens is the best thing.

Farah, in one of my first years in Africa, stood beside me when a
wounded lion charged--"charged home" as hunters say, meaning that now
only death will stop him.  Farah had no rifle with him, and at that
time, I believe, but slight faith in my marksmanship.  But he did not
move, I do not think that he winced.  Good luck had it that in my
second shot I hit the lion so that he rolled over like a hare, then
Farah very quietly walked up to him and inspected him.

At a later time, though, to my surprise I heard Farah speak in deep
admiration of my skill with a rifle.  During one of our long safaris,
when in the morning after a night's shooting I was still in bed in my
tent, a young Englishman who had his camp some miles south of ours, and
who had heard about us from the Natives, came over to enquire about
water and game and to have company.  He and Farah were talking together
outside the tent, and I could follow their conversation through the
canvas.  "What kind of Bwana are you out with?" the Englishman asked.
"Is he a good shot, and are you getting anything?"  "I am with no
Bwana,"  Farah answered, "but with a Memsahib from a distant country.
And she never misses a thing."

On this occasion Farah seemed to enjoy talking about me.  Generally the
Somali will not discuss women and you cannot make them tell you of
their wives and daughters.  Only in regard to their mothers do they
make an exception, and the Koran, Farah said, orders that each time you
name your father with reverence you should name your mother with
reverence twenty-five times.  In this point as in others the Somali are
like the old Icelanders.  Tormod Kolbrunnaskjald was exiled from
Iceland because he had sung the girl he loved, naming her "Kolbrunna."

It is a strange thing that I should have this taboo in me still.  At
times, when people speak or write about me, I feel that I am breaking
my covenant with Farah,

When the Prince of Wales, the present Duke of Windsor, in 1928 came on
his first visit to Kenya, I had been invited by my friend Joanie Grigg,
the Governor's wife, to stay for a week at Government House.  I felt
that this was an opportunity of bringing the cause of the Natives, in
the matter of their taxation, before the Prince, and was happy about
this chance of getting the ear of the future King of England.  "Only,"
I said to myself, "it will have to be done in a pleasant manner.  For
if it does not amuse him he will do nothing about it."

As I sat beside the Prince at dinner I cautiously tried to turn his
interest the way I wanted, and he did indeed on the next day come out
to the farm to have tea with me.  He walked with me into the huts of
the squatters and made enquiries as to what they possessed in the way
of cattle and goats, what they might earn by working on the farm and
what they paid in taxes, writing down the figures.  It was to me later
on, when I was back in Denmark, a heart-breaking thing that my Prince
of Wales should be King of England for only six months.

In the course of another evening I had been describing to the Prince
the big Ngomas on the farm, and as he said good-night to me he added:
"I should Like to dine with you on Friday and to see such an Ngoma."
This was Tuesday night, and for the next two days the Prince would be
up at Nanyuky for the races.

When I came up to my rooms in Government House I found Farah there
waiting for orders for the morrow, for you always bring your own
servant with you when staying in the houses of your friends.  I said to
him: "Something terrible has happened to us, Farah.  The Prince is
coming out on Friday to dine and to see our people dance.  And you know
that they will not dance at this time of the year."  For these Ngomas
were ritual dances connected with the harvest, and all settlers knew
well enough that in this matter the Natives would rather die than break
with a sacred law of a thousand years.

Farah was as deeply shaken by the news as I myself.  For a few minutes
he was struck dumb and turned into stone.  In the end he spoke.  "If it
be indeed so, Memsahib," he said, "to my mind there is only one thing
for us to do.  I shall take the car and go round to the big Chiefs.  I
shall speak to them and tell them that now they must come to help you.
I shall remind them that three months ago you helped them."  I had had
the luck to be able to assist the Natives in a matter between them and
the Government concerning salt-rocks to which they had formerly brought
their cattle to lick salt.  "But then," Farah added with some
misgiving, "I can do nothing about this dinner.  You will have to look
after that, with Kamante, Memsahib."  There was some distance and
hardly any roads between the manyattas of the great Chiefs, and the old
men would seize this opportunity to talk.  I answered: "Nay, give no
thought to that.  I and Kamante will be able to look after it.  For I
think that you are right and that this is the best thing we can do."

I returned to the farm to make preparations for Friday with a somewhat
heavy heart, and Farah drove out from it, an ambassador on a tricky
mission.  When on the morning of Friday he was not back, the entire
household, preparing the lobster up from Mombasa, the spurfowl brought
in by Masai Morani, and Kamante's Cumberland sauce for the ham, was
dead silent.  It would be a dark, eternal shame to our house and to all
of us, were the prince to come out to see an Ngoma, and we to have no
Ngoma to show him.

But already at eight or nine o'clock our own young men and girls of the
farm began to hang round the house, in the mysterious way of the
Natives aware that great things were about to happen.  During the next
few hours dance-loving young people from farms further away followed,
coming up the long avenue in small groups.  Kamante, for once taking an
optimistic view of a situation, remarked to me that this was like the
time when the locusts came: one by one, then a number together, then in
the end more than we would be able to count.  At eleven o'clock we
heard the car coming up the drive asthmatically.  She was all plastered
in mud and dust, and Farah himself as he stepped out of her seemed to
have faded, in the way of dark people when thoroughly exhausted.  I
felt that all through these two nights he must have sat up in unceasing
palaver with the old Chiefs.  Yet at the very first glance we all knew
him to have come back victorious.

"Memsahib," he said in a voice almost as hoarse as that of the car,
"they are coming.  They are coming all of them, and they are bringing
with them their young men and their virgins."

They did indeed follow close on the track of the car, swarming, as
Kamante had predicted it, locust-like, a stream of supple, fiery young
people of both sexes, set on dancing, should it cost them their life.
The small groups of an old Chief and his aged counsellors, in rich,
heavy monkey-skin cloaks, advanced in state, isolated from the common
crowd by ten feet of empty space before and after them.

That night there were between two and three thousand dancers at the
dancing-place by my house.  The moon was full, and there was no breath
of wind, the circle of small fires blazed and glowed a long way into
the woods and sent up thin columns of smoke towards the sky.  It was a
fine Ngoma, I have seen no finer anywhere.

The Prince made the tour of the forest ball-room, stopping to speak to
the old Chiefs one after the other.  He spoke to them in Swahili, and
they, hanging on to their sticks, gave him their answers keenly from
smiling, toothless mouths, after which, for obvious reasons, the
conversation ceased.  He made an impression on the Ancients; afterwards
they liked to speak about him.  Africans laugh for reasons different
from those of Europeans, most often from sheer spite but often also
from mere content--for a long time they laughed when they spoke of the
Prince, as if we had been discussing a very precious baby.  I believe
that the Prince himself was pleased with his Ngoma.

A fortnight later I again sent for the Kikuyu Chiefs.  I had, I said to
them, on the day of the Ngoma found myself in a difficult position, I
had asked them to help me and they had helped me, now I wanted to thank
them.  I handed over a present to each of them, but by now I do not
remember whether of a particularly fine rug or a goat.

A very old man, after they had had a few minutes to let my message sink
into them, came up and spoke to me.  "Now you have told us, Msabu," he
said, "that on the day of the great Ngoma you found yourself in
difficult position, and you asked us to help you and we helped you.
Now you wanted to thank us, so you have given each of us a present.
May we now say something to you?"  This is a common address with
Natives; you cannot well refuse the request, but after it you will have
to be prepared for anything.  I told the old man that he was free to
say to me what he liked.  "Msabu," he said with much weight and
satisfaction.  "I shall, then, like to tell you something of which
among ourselves we have talked much, and about which we are happy.  We
think that on the night when the Toto a Soldani came here to see our
young men and virgins dance, among the Msabus present you had on the
nicest frock.  It pleased our hearts, Msabu, it still pleases our
hearts when we think about it.  For we all think that here, every day
on the farm, you are terribly badly dressed."

I did not contradict him.  Generally on the farm I wore old khaki
slacks stained with oil, mud and fouling.  I felt that my people had
dreaded, that upon a historical occasion on the farm and at a moment
when I had called upon them to do their utmost, to see me let them down.

For the sake of my female readers I shall here insert that at the time
of the Prince's visit I had not been to Europe for four years and could
have no real idea as to what fashions there were like.  So I asked the
house in Paris, which had got my measures and was to make my frock, to
follow their own notions about what would be truly chic.  "_Nous sommes
convaincus, Madam_," they wrote back, "_que vous serez la plus belle_."
They had had the good sense to make me, in the heyday of the chemise
frock--which was nothing but two vertical lines starting below the
armpits and cut off above the knee--a so-called _robe de style_ not
likely to go out of fashion, with a hooped skirt of great fullness, in
silver brocade.  I think that it pleased the hearts of my people to see
me, among the lank women of the dinner party, suddenly swell out to an
unexpected voluminousness.

As now the old Chiefs and I in our talk together had got on to that
very pleasant theme of my frock, I wanted to hear more of what they
thought about it.  But at this moment Farah stepped on to the stage,
followed by Kamante carrying a wooden bowl that contained
tombacco--snuff--for my guests.  He looked approving but stern.  He was
not insensitive to popularity, but he was resolved on keeping the
Kikuyu in their place, and me in mine.

"Wait a little, Farah," I said.  "I am talking with the old people,
they are talking with me."

"No, Memsahib," said Farah.  "No.  Now these Kikuyus have said enough
about this frock.  Now it is time that they have this tombacco."



Then came the hard times on the farm, and my certainty that I could not
keep it.  And then began my ever-repeated travels to Nairobi with such
sorry aims as keeping my creditors quiet, obtaining a better price for
the farm and, at the very end, after I had in reality lost the farm and
become, so to say, a tenant in my own house, securing for my squatters
the piece of land in the Reserve where according to their wish they
could remain together.  It took a long time before I could make the
Government consent to my scheme.  On these expeditions Farah was always
with me.

And now it happened that he unlocked and opened chests of which till
then I had not known, and displayed a truly royal splendour.  He
brought out silk robes, gold-embroidered waistcoats, and turbans in
glowing and burning reds and blues, or all white--which is a rare thing
to see and must be the real gala head-dress of the Somali--heavy gold
rings and knives in silver- and ivory-mounted sheaths, with a riding
whip of giraffe hide inlaid with gold, and in these things he looked
like the Caliph Harun-al-Rashid's own bodyguard.  He followed me, very
erect, at a distance of five feet, where I walked, in my old slacks and
patched shoes, up and down Nairobi streets.  There he and I became a
true Unity, as picturesque, I believe, as that of Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza.  There he lifted up me and himself to a classic plane,
such as that of which the Norwegian poet Wergeland speaks:


  _Death follows the happy man like a stern master,
  The unfortunate like a servant,
  Who is ever ready to receive his master's cloak and mask._


When I had sold all the contents of my house, my panelled rooms became
sounding-boards.  If I sat down on one of the packing-cases containing
things to be sent off, which were now my only furniture, voices and
tunes of old rang through the nobly bare room intensified, clear.  When
during these months a visitor came to the farm, Farah stood forth,
holding open the door to the empty rooms as if he had been doorkeeper
to an imperial palace.

No friend, brother or lover, no nabob suddenly presenting me with the
amount of money needed to keep the farm, could have done for me what my
servant Farah then did.  Even if I had got nothing else for which to be
grateful to him--but that I have got, and more than I can set down
here--I should still for the sake of these months, now, thirty years
after, and as long as I live, be in debt to him.




Barua a Soldani


Readers of my book _Out of Africa_ may remember how, on a New Year's
morning, before sunrise--while the stars, on the point of withdrawing
and vanishing into the dome of the sky, were still hanging on it like
big luminous drops, and the air still had in it the strange limpidity
and depth, like well water, of African dawn--together with Denys
Finch-Hatton and his Kikuyu chauffeur, Kanuthia, I was driving along a
very bad road in the Masai Reserve, and there shot a lion upon a dead
giraffe.

Later on Denys and I were accused of having shot the giraffe, a thing
not allowed by the game laws.  The Game Department in your shooting
licence gave you the right to hunt, shoot or capture so and so many
head of such and such game--I sometimes wondered by what right the Game
Department dealt out such rights--and the giraffe was not included.
Lions, however, you might shoot at any time, within the distance of
thirty miles to a farm.  But Kanuthia could bear us up in our statement
that the giraffe had been dead a day or two before we came upon it.

I do not know whether the lion had actually killed the giraffe.  Lions
kill by breaking the necks of their victims, and in view of the height
of a giraffe's shoulders and neck the thing seems unlikely.  On the
other hand the strength and energy of a lion are indeed incredible
things, and hunters have solemnly assured me that they have seen
giraffes being killed by lions.

The squatters on my farm during the past three months had been up to
the house begging me to shoot a lion "_mbaya sana_"--very bad--which
was following and worrying their herds.  The lion that I met this
morning and which, even on our close approach, remained on the back of
his prey, absorbed in his meal and one with it, and only slightly
stirring in the dim air, might well be the very same killer, the cause
of so much woe over precious cows and bullocks.  We were about twenty
miles from the border of the farm, but a distance of twenty miles means
nothing to a lion.  If it were he, ought I not to shoot him when he
himself gave me the chance?  Denys, as Kanuthia slowed down the car,
whispered to me: "You shoot this time."  I had not got my own rifle
with me, so he handed me his.  I was never keen to shoot with his
rifle, it was too heavy and in particular too long for me.  But my old
friend, Uncle Charles Bulpett, had told me: "The person who can take
delight in a sweet tune without wanting to learn it, in a beautiful
woman without wanting to possess her, or in a magnificent head of game
without wanting to shoot it, has not got a human heart."  So that the
shot, here before daybreak, was in reality a declaration of love--and
ought not then the weapon to be of the very first quality?

Or it may be said that hunting is ever a love-affair.  The hunter is in
love with the game, real hunters are true animal lovers.  But during
the hours of the hunt itself he is more than that, he is infatuated
with the head of game which he follows and means to make his own;
nothing much besides it exists to him in the world.  Only, in general,
the infatuation will be somewhat one-sided.  The gazelles and antelopes
and the zebra, which on safari you shoot to get meat for your porters,
are timid and will make themselves scarce and in their own strange way
disappear before your eyes; the hunter must take wind and terrain into
account and sneak close to them slowly and silently without their
realizing the danger.  It is a fine and fascinating art, in the spirit
of that masterpiece of my countryman Sren Kierkegaard, _The Seducers
Diary_, and it may, in the same way, provide the hunter with moments of
great drama and with opportunity for skill and cunning, and for
self-gratulations.  Yet to me this pursuit was never the real thing.
And even the big game, in the hunting of which there is danger, the
buffalo or the rhino, very rarely attack without being attacked, or
believing that they are being attacked.

Elephant-hunting is a sport of its own.  For the elephant, which
through centuries has been the one head of game hunted for profit, in
the course of time has adopted man into his scheme of things, with deep
distrust.  Our nearness to him is a challenge which he will never
disregard; he comes towards us, straightly and quickly, on his own, a
towering, overwhelming structure, massive as cast iron and lithe as
running water.  "What time he lifteth up himself on high, the mighty
are afraid."  Out go his ears like a dragon's wings, giving him a
grotesque likeness to the small lap-dog called a papillon; his
formidable trunk, crumpled up accordion-like, rises above us like a
lifted scourge.  There is passion in our meeting, positiveness on both
sides; but on his side there is no pleasure in the adventure, he is
driven on by just wrath, and is settling an ancient family feud.

In very old days the elephant, upon the roof of the earth, led an
existence deeply satisfying to himself and fit to be set up as an
example to the rest of creation: that of a being mighty and powerful
beyond anyone's attack, attacking no one.  The grandiose and idyllic
modus vivendi lasted till an old Chinese painter had his eyes opened to
the sublimity of ivory as a background to his paintings, or a young
dancer of Zanzibar hers to the beauty of an ivory anklet.  Then they
began to appear to all sides of him, small alarming figures in the
landscape drawing closer: the Wanderobo with his poisoned arrows, the
Arab ivory-hunter with his long silver-mounted muzzle-loader, and the
white professional elephant-killer with his heavy rifle.  The
manifestation of the glory of God was turned into an object of
exploitation.  Is it to be wondered at that he cannot forgive us?

Yet there is always something magnanimous about elephants.  To follow a
rhino in his own country is hard work; the space that he clears in the
thorn-thicket is just a few inches too low for the hunter, and he will
have to keep his head bent a little all the time.  The elephant on his
march through dense forest calmly tramples out a green fragrant tunnel,
lofty like the nave of a cathedral.  I once followed a herd of
elephants for over a fortnight, walking in shade all the time.  (In the
end, unexpectedly, on the top of a very steep hill and in perfect
security myself, I came upon the whole troop pacing in Indian file
below me.  I did not kill any of them and never saw them again.)  There
is a morally edifying quality as well in the very aspect of an
elephant--on seeing four elephants walking together on the plain, I at
once felt that I had been shown black stone sculptures of the four
major Prophets.  On the chessboard the elephant takes his course,
irresistible, in a straight line.  And the highest decoration of
Denmark is the Order of the Elephant.

But a lion-hunt each single time is an affair of perfect harmony, of
deep, burning, mutual desire and reverence between two truthful and
undaunted creatures, on the same wave-length.  A lion on the plain
bears a greater likeness to ancient monumental stone lions than to the
lion which to-day you see in a zoo; the sight of him goes straight to
the heart.  Dante cannot have been more deeply amazed and moved at the
first sight of Beatrice in a street of Florence.  Gazing back into the
past I do, I believe, remember each individual lion I have seen--his
coming into the picture, his slow raising or rapid turning of the head,
the strange, snakelike swaying of his tail.  "Praise be to thee, Lord,
for Brother Lion, the which is very calm, with mighty paws, and flows
through the flowing grass, red-mouthed, silent, with the roar of the
thunder ready in his chest."  And he himself, catching sight of me, may
have been struck, somewhere under his royal mane, by the ring of a
similar Te Deum: "Praise be to thee, Lord, for my sister of Europe, who
is young, and has come out to me on the plain in the night."

In old days the lion was likely to come out of the matter triumphant.
Later we have got such effective weapons that the test of strength can
hardly be called fair--still I have had more than one friend killed by
lions.  Nowadays great sportsmen hunt with cameras.  The practice
started while I was still in Africa; Denys as a white hunter took out
millionaires from many countries, and they brought back magnificent
pictures, the which however to my mind (because I do not see eye to eye
with the camera) bore less real likeness to their object than the chalk
portraits drawn up on the kitchen door by our Native porters.  It is a
more refined sport than shooting, and provided you can make the lion
join into the spirit of it you may here, at the end of a pleasant,
platonic affair, without bloodshed on either side, blow one another a
kiss and part like civilized beings.  I have no real knowledge of the
art; I was a fairly good shot with a rifle, but I cannot photograph.

[Illustration: _The author and her Scotch deerhound, Dusk, in the
garden at Ngong, 1919_]

When I first came out to Africa I could not live without getting a fine
specimen of each single kind of African game.  In my last ten years out
there I did not fire a shot except in order to get meat for my Natives.
It became to me an unreasonable thing, indeed in itself ugly or vulgar,
for the sake of a few hours' excitement to put out a life that belonged
in the great landscape and had grown up in it for ten or twenty, or--as
in the case of buffaloes and elephants--for fifty or a hundred years.
But lion-hunting was irresistible to me; I shot my last lion a short
time before I left Africa.

As now on this New Year's morning as noiselessly as possible I got down
from the car and, through the long wet grass that washed my hands, the
rifle, and my face, slowly walked closer to the lion, he stirred, rose
and stood up immovable, his shoulder towards me, as fine a target for a
shot as in the course of a lifetime you would get anywhere in the
world.  The sun by now was just below the horizon, the morning sky
behind the dark silhouette was clear like liquid gold.  I was struck by
a thought: "I have seen you before, I know you well.  But from where?"
The answer came at once: "It is a lion out of the royal coat of arms of
Denmark, one of our three dark-blue lions on gold ground.  Lion posant
or it is called in the heraldic language--he knows it himself."  As I
sat down on the ground, got Denys' rifle into position on my knee and
took aim, I made a resolution: "If I get this lion, the King of Denmark
is to have the skin."

As the shot fell, booming loudly in the still morning landscape and
echoing from the hills, it looked to me as if the lion was carried a
couple of feet straight upwards into the air before he came down and
collapsed.  He had been hit in the heart, it was as it should be.

I have told in my book of how I sat and watched Denys and Kanuthia
flaying the lion.  Going back to that morning after so many years it
seems all alive and clear round me, hard to leave once more.  I knew
then, without reflecting, that I was up at great height, upon the roof
of the world, a small figure in the tremendous retort of earth and air,
yet one with it; I did not know that I was at the height and upon the
roof of my own life.  The grass on the slope where I sat was short as a
mowed lawn, the Masai having burned it off in patches in order to get
fresh grazing for their herds, the Highland air was intoxicating, like
wine, the shadows of the vultures ran across my feet.  From where I sat
I could gaze far away: at a very long distance, by the line of the tall
acacia trees somewhat below me, three giraffes came into sight, stood
still for a few minutes and walked off.  "Praise be to thee, Lord, for
Sister Giraffe, the which is an ambler, full of grace, exceedingly
demure and absent-minded, and carries her small head high above the
grass, with long lashes to her veiled eyes, and which is so much a lady
that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as
floating over the plain in long garbs, draperies of morning mist or
mirage."

Now it fell out that this lion was an exceptionally fine specimen, what
out in his own country they call a black-maned lion, with his thick
dark mane growing all back over his shoulder-blades.  Denys'
gun-bearer, who had seen many hundred lion-skins, declared this one to
be the finest he had ever come across.  And as in that same spring I
was going on a visit to Denmark after four years in Africa, I took the
skin with me and on my way, in London, gave it to the firm of Rowland
Ward to be cured and set up.

When in Denmark I told my friends that I meant to give King Christian X
the lion-skin, they laughed at me.

"It is the worst piece of snobbery that we have ever heard of," they
said.

"Nay, but you do not understand," I answered them.  "You have not lived
for a long time outside your own country."

"But what in the world is the King to do with the skin?" they asked.
"He does not mean to appear at New Year's levee as Hercules!  He will
be in despair about it."

"Well," I said, "if the King will be in despair, he will have to be in
despair.  But I do not think it need come to that, for he will have
some attic at Christiansborg or Amalienborg where he can put it away."

It so happened that Rowland Ward did not manage to have the skin ready
by autumn when I was going back to Africa, so that I could not myself
present it to the King, but had to leave this privilege to an old uncle
of mine who was a chamberlain to the Court.  If the King was really in
despair about it he hid it very nobly.  Some time after my return to
the farm I had a kind letter from him, in which he thanked me for his
lion-skin.

A letter from home always means a lot to people living for a long time
out of their country.  They will carry it about in their pocket for
several days, to take it out from time to time and read it again.  A
letter from a king will mean more than other letters.  I got the King's
letter about Christmas-time, and I pictured to myself how the King had
sat at his writing-table at Amalienborg, gazing out over a white
Amalienborg Square with the snow-clad equestrian statue of his
great-great-great grandfather, King Frederic V, in a wig and classic
armour, in the midst of it.  A short time ago I myself had been part of
the Copenhagen world.  I stuck the letter into the pocket of my old
khaki slacks and rode out on the farm.

The farm work that I was going to inspect was the clearing of a square
piece of woodland where we were to plant coffee, a couple of miles from
my house.  I rode through the forest, which was still fresh after the
short rains.  Now once more I was part of the world of Africa.

Half an hour before I came out to the wood-fellers a sad accident had
taken place amongst them.  A young Kikuyu, whose name was Kitau, had
not managed to get away quick enough when a big tree fell, and had had
one leg crushed beneath it.  I heard his long moanings while still at a
distance.  I speeded up Rouge upon the forest path.  When I came to the
place of disaster Kitau's fellow-workers had dragged him out from
beneath the fallen tree and laid him on the grass; they were thronging
round him there, separating when I came up but standing close by to
watch the effect of the catastrophe on me and to hear what I would say
about it.

Kitau was lying in a pool of blood, his leg had been smashed above the
knee and was sticking out from his body at a grotesque and cruel angle.

I made the wood-fellers hold my horse and sent off a runner to the
house to have Farah bring out the car, so that I might drive Kitau to
the hospital in Nairobi.  But my small Ford box-body car was getting on
in years; she rarely consented to run on more than two cylinders and
indeed it went against her to be started at all.  With a sinking heart
I realized that it would be some time before she came up.

While waiting for her I sat with Kitau.  The other wood-fellers had
withdrawn some distance.  Kitau was in great pain, weeping all the time.

I always had morphia at hand in my house for injured people of the farm
carried up there, but here I had neither the medicine nor the syringe.
Kitau, when he realized that I was with him, groaned out dolefully:
"_Saidea mimi_"--help me--"Msabu."  And again: "_Saidea mimi_.  Give me
some of the medicine that helps people," the while groping over my arm
and knee.  When out riding on the farm I usually had bits of sugar in
my pockets to give to the totos herding their goats and sheep on the
plain and at the sight of me crying out for sugar.  I brought out such
bits and fed Kitau with them--he would or could not move his badly
bruised hands, and let me place the sugar on his tongue.  It was as if
this medicine did somehow relieve his pain; his moans, while he had it
in his mouth, changed into low whimperings.  But my stock of sugar came
to an end, and then once more he began to wail and writhe, long spasms
ran through his body.  It is a sad experience to sit by somebody
suffering so direly without being able to help; you long to get up and
run away or, as with a badly injured animal, to put an end to the
anguish--for a moment I believe I looked round for some kind of weapon
for the purpose.  Then again came the repeated clock-regular moaning of
Kitau: "Have you got no more, Msabu?  Have you got nothing more to give
me?"

In my distress I once more put my hand into my pocket and felt the
King's letter.  "Yes, Kitau," I said, "I have got something more.  I
have got something _mzuri sana_"--very excellent indeed.  "I have got a
_Barua a Soldani_"--a letter from a king.  "And that is a thing which
all people know, that a letter from a king, _mokone yake_"--in his own
hand--"will do away with all pain, however bad."  At that I laid the
King's letter on his chest and my hand upon it.  I endeavoured, I
believe--out there in the forest, where Kitau and I were as if all
alone--to lay the whole of my strength into it.

It was a very strange thing that almost at once the words and the
gesture seemed to send an effect through him.  His terribly distorted
face smoothed out, he closed his eyes.  After a while he again looked
up at me.  His eyes were so much like those of a small child that
cannot yet speak that I was almost surprised when he spoke to me.
"Yes," he said.  "It is _mzuri_," and again, "yes, it is _mzuri sana_.
Keep it there."

When at last the car arrived and we got Kitau lifted on to it, I meant
to take my seat at the steering-wheel, but at that he immediately
worked himself into a state of the greatest alarm.  "No, Msabu," he
said, "Farah can drive the car, you must tell him to do so.  You will
sit beside me and hold the Barua a Soldani to my stomach as before, or
otherwise the bad pain will come back at once."  So I sat on the boards
beside him, and all the way into Nairobi held the King's letter in
position.  When we arrived at the hospital Kitau once more closed his
eyes and kept them closed, as if refusing to take in any more
impressions.  But with his left hand on my clothes he kept sure that I
was beside him while I parleyed with the doctor and the matron.  They
did indeed allow me to keep close beside him while he was laid on the
stretcher, carried into the building and placed on the operating table;
and as long as I saw him he was quiet.

I may in this place tell that they did really in hospital manage to set
his broken leg.  When he got out he could walk, even if he always
limped a little.

I may also here tell that later on, in Denmark, I learned from the King
himself that my lion-skin had obtained a highly honourable place in the
state-room of Christiansborg Castle, with the skin of a polar bear to
the other side of the throne.

But now the rumour spread amongst the squatters of my farm that I had
got this Barua a Soldani, with its miracle-working power.  They began
to come up to my house one by one, warily, to find out more about
it--the old women first, mincing about like old hens turning their
heads affectedly to find a grain for their young ones.  Soon they took
to carrying up those of their sick who were in bad pain, so that they
might have the letter laid on them and for a while be relieved.  Later
they wanted more.  They demanded to borrow the King's letter, for the
day or for the day and night, to take with them to the hut for the
relief of an old dying grandmother or a small ailing child.

The Barua a Soldani amongst my stock of medicine from the very first
was accurately and strictly placed in a category of its own.  This
decision was taken by the Natives themselves without my giving any
thought to the matter.  It would do away with pain, in this capacity it
was infallible, and no ache or pang could hold out against it.  But it
must be made use of solely in uttermost need.

It did happen from time to time that a patient with a very bad
toothache, in his misery cried out to me to let him have Barua a
Soldani.  But his appeal would be met by his surroundings with grave
disapprovement and indignation or with haughty, scornful laughter.
"You!" they cried back to him, "there is nothing the matter with you
but that you have got a bad tooth!  You can go down to old Juma Bemu
and have him pull it out for you.  How could you have the King's
letter?  Nay, but here is old Kathegu very ill in his hut with long,
hard pains in his stomach, and going to die tonight.  His small
grandson is up here to have Barua a Soldani for him until tomorrow from
Msabu.  To him she will give it."  By this time I had had a leather bag
with a string to it made for the King's letter.  So the small toto,
standing up straight on the terrace, would take the remedy carefully
from my hands, hang it round his neck and walk away, with his own hands
upon it.  He would stand up straight on the terrace again next morning.
Ay, his grandfather had died at sunrise, but Burua a Soldani had helped
him well all night.

I have seen this particular attitude, or this particular mentality, in
the dark people in other matters as well.  They stood in a particular
relation to the ways and conditions of life.  There are things which
can be done and others which cannot be done, and they fell in with the
law, accepting what came with a kind of aloof humility--or pride.

When Fathima, Farah's wife, was to give birth to her first child, she
was very ill; for an hour or two her surroundings, and her mother
herself, had given up hope about her.  Her mother, an imposing figure
in my establishment, had arranged for about a dozen Somali ladies of
the first families of Nairobi to be present.  They arrived in Aly
Khan's mule-traps, looking very lovely and lively, like old Persian
pictures, in their long ample skirts and veils, and filled with
sympathy and zeal.  The waves of woman's world closed over Farah's
house, at some distance from the huts of my house-boys.  Farah himself,
grave and more subdued than I had ever seen him, together with all
other male creatures of my household, had been shooed a hundred yards
away.  The women then set to heating up the room in which the birth was
taking place, to an almost unbearable heat, with charcoal in basins,
and to make the air thick with childbed-incense.  I sat out there for a
while, half unconscious, not because I imagined that I could be of any
use whatever, but because I felt it to be the correct thing and
expected of me.

Fathima was a very lovely creature, with big dark eyes like a doe's, so
slim that one wondered where she could possibly be storing her baby,
supple in all her movements and in daily life of a risible temper.  I
felt sorry for her now.  The gentle midwives were busy, bending and
again straightening up the girl and from time to time knocking her in
the small of the back with their fists as if to knock out the child.
For the time that I was there I saw them dealing out only one kind of
medicine: a matron amongst them brought along an earthenware dish, on
the inner side of which a holy man of the town had drawn up, in
charcoal, a text from the Koran; the lettering was washed off carefully
with water, and the water poured into the mouth of the labouring young
woman.

This great event on the farm took place at the time when the Prince of
Wales--the present Duke of Windsor--was on his first visit to the
country.  Among the celebrations in his honour was a _concours
hippique_ in Nairobi, and I had entered my Irish pony Poor-Box for the
jumping competition--he was at the moment in training at Limoru.  In
the midst of the bustle round me and in a moment of things' looking
very dark, I suddenly called to mind that I had promised to bring over
a bag of oats for him there, so I would have to leave for a couple of
hours.  I drove away sadly, taking Kamante with me in the car.

On the way back from Limoru I came past the French Mission and
remembered that the Fathers for some time had been promising me seed of
a particular kind of lettuce from France.  As I pulled up the car,
Kamante, who during our drive had not said a word, spoke to me.
Fathima was a favourite with Kamante, she was the only human being for
whose intelligence I had ever heard him express any kind of respect.
"Are you," he asked me, "going into the church to beg the lady in
there, who is your friend, to help Fathima?"  The lady in the church,
who was my friend, was the Virgin Mary, whose statue Kamante had seen
when on Christmas night he had accompanied me to midnight mass.  I
could not very well say no, so I answered yes, and went into the church
before going to the refectory.  It was cool in the church, and in the
face of the highly vulgar papier mch statue of the Virgin, with a
lily in her hand, there was something soothing and hopeful.

When I came back to my house, Fathima's baby was born, and she herself
was doing well.  I congratulated her mother and Farah in his forest
exile.  The small boy brought into the world that day was Ahamed,
called Saufe, who later became a great figure on the farm.  Kamante
said to me: "You see, Msabu, it was good that I reminded you to ask the
lady who is your friend to help Fathima."

Now, one would have imagined that with knowledge of my intimacy with a
person of such power, Kamante upon some other occasion would have come
back to have me make use of it.  But this never happened.  There are
things which can be done, and other things which cannot be done.  And
we who know the laws must fall in with them.

In the course of time, however, my squatters tried to find out more
about that King of my own country who had written the letter.  They
asked me if he was tall, and were here, I believe, still under the
impression of the personality of the Prince of Wales, who had dined on
the farm, and who had made them wonder at the fact that a person of
such great might should be so slim and slight.  I was pleased to be
able to reply truthfully that there was not a taller man in his
kingdom.  They then wanted to know whether the horse on which he rode
was more _kali_--fierce--than my own horse, Rouge; then again, if he
laughed.  This last must have been a matter of importance to the
Natives in their relations with us.  "Your _kabilla_"--tribe--they said
to me, "is different to those of the other white people.  You do not
get angry with us as they do.  You laugh at us."

I have still got the King's letter.  But it is now undecipherable,
brown and stiff with blood and matter of long ago.

In a showcase at the Museum of Rosenberg, in Copenhagen, the tourist
can see a piece of yellow texture covered with tawny spots.  It is the
handkerchief of King Christian IV, which the King held to his eye
socket when, in the naval battle of Kolberger Heide three hundred years
ago, his eye was smashed by a Swedish shot.  A Danish poet of the last
century has written an enthusiastic ode about these proud, edifying
marks.

The blood on my sheet of paper is not proud or edifying.  It is the
blood of a dumb nation.  But then the handwriting on it is that of a
king, _mokone yake_.  No ode will be written about my letter; still,
today it is, I believe, history as much as the relic of Rosenberg.
Within it, in paper and blood, a covenant has been signed between the
Europeans and the Africans--no similar document of this same
relationship is likely to be drawn up again.




The Great Gesture


I was a fairly famous doctor to the squatters of the farm, and it
happened that patients came down from Limoru or Kijabe to consult me.
I had been, in the beginning of my career, miraculously lucky in a few
cures, which had made my name echo in the manyattas.  Later I had made
some very grave mistakes, of which I still cannot think without dismay,
but they did not seem to affect my prestige; at times I felt that the
people liked me better for not being infallible.  This trait in the
Africans comes out in other of their relations with the Europeans.

My consultation hour was vaguely from nine to ten, my consultation room
the stone-paved terrace east of my house.

On most days my activity was limited to driving in the sick people to
the hospital in Nairobi or up to that of the Scotch Mission at Kikuyu,
both of which were good hospitals.  There would almost always be plague
about somewhere in the district; with this you were bound to take the
sufferers to Nairobi plague hospital, or your farm would be put in
quarantine.  I was not afraid of plague, since I had been told that one
would either die from the disease or rise from it as fit as ever, and
since, besides, I felt that it would be a noble thing to die from an
illness to which popes and queens had succumbed.  There would likewise
almost always be smallpox about, and gazing at old and young faces
round me, stamped for life like thimbles, I was afraid of smallpox, but
Government regulations strictly kept us to frequent inoculations
against the illness.  As to other diseases like meningitis or typhoid
fever, whether I drove the patients into Nairobi or tried to cure them
myself out on the farm, I was always convinced that I should not catch
the sickness--my faith may have been due to an instinct, or may have
been in itself a kind of protection.  The first _sais_ that I had on
the farm, Malindi--who was a dwarf, but a great man with horses--died
from meningitis actually in my arms.

Most of my own practice was thus concerned with the lighter accidents
of the place--broken limbs, cuts, bruises and burns--or with coughs,
children's diseases and eye diseases.  At the start I knew but little
above what one is taught at a first-aid course.  My later skill was
mostly obtained through experiments on my patients, for a doctor's
calling is demoralizing.  I arrived at setting a broken arm or ankle
with a splint, advised all through the operation by the sufferer
himself, who very likely might have performed it on his own, but who
took pleasure in setting me to work.  Ambition a few times made me try
my hand at undertakings which later I had to drop again.  I much wanted
to give my patients Salvarsan--which in those days was a fairly new
medicine and was given in big doses--but although my hand was steady
with a rifle I was nervous about it with a syringe for intravenous
injections.  Dysentery I could generally keep in check with small,
often-repeated doses of Epsom salt, and malaria with quinine.  Yet it
was in connection with a case of malaria that I was nearest to becoming
a murderer.

On a day in the beginning of the long rains Berkeley Cole came round
the farm from up-country, on his way to Nairobi.  A little while after,
Juma appeared to report that an old Masai Chief with his followers was
outside, asking for medicine for a son of his who had been taken ill,
evidently--from the symptoms reported--with malaria.

The Masai were my neighbours; if I rode across the river which formed
the border of my farm I was in their Reserve.  But the Masai themselves
were not always there.  They trekked with their big herds of cattle
from one part of the grass-land--which was about the size of
Ireland--to another, according to the rains and the condition of the
grazing.  When again they came round my way and set to patch up their
huts of cow-hide for a sojourn of some time, they would send over to
notify me, and I would ride over to call on them.

If I had been alone this afternoon, I should have gone outside to talk
the case over with the old Chief, to hand him the quinine and
altogether to get Masai news.  But Berkeley, dried after his drive and
revived by a glass or two, was in one of his sweet, dazzling moods and
entertaining me on old Ireland memories of his, so that I sat on with
him.  I just handed over the keys of the medicine chest to Kamante, who
was the skilled and deep amanuensis to my doctor and had dealt out
quinine to our patients a hundred times, telling him to count up the
tablets to the father of the sick boy and to instruct him to give his
son two of them in the evening and six in the course of the next day.
But after dinner, while Berkeley and I by the fireside were listening
to my records of Petrouchka just out from Europe, Juma once more stood
in the door, an ominous spectre in his long white _kansu_, to inform me
that the old Masai was back with a small lot of his people.  For his
son, after having taken my medicine, had got very ill indeed, with
terrible pains in his stomach.  I called in the Masai Chief, and found
that he was an old acquaintance of mine.  I knew his son well too, his
name was Sandoa; like the big Masai Chief, he was a Moran of two years
ago, and it was he who had taught me to shoot with a bow and arrow.
Calling to mind that the most inexplicable fits of idiocy might occur
even in the most intelligent Natives, I had Kamante woken up and
ordered him to show me the box from which he had taken the quinine.
And it was Lysol.

Berkeley said: "We had better go out there at once."  But it was
raining heavily; the road round Mbagathi Bridge was impassable, so that
it would be useless to think of starting a car, and we should have to
take the shorter cut across the river on foot.  I collected the
bicarbonate and oil which I used against accidents with corrosives, and
we took two boys with hurricane lamps with us.  The Masai also had
brought lamps.  The descent to the river, in the tall wet bush and long
wet grass, was steep and stony, but the Masai knew of a better way than
my riding-path, and when we came to the river itself, which had swelled
high with the rain, they carried me across.

On the way none of us had spoken.  As now, to the other side of the
river, we were ascending the long slope of the Masai Reserve, I said to
Berkeley: "If Sandoa is dead by the time we get there, I shall not go
back to the farm.  I shall stay on with the Masai.  If they will have
me."  I had no answer from Berkeley, only, the next moment, a sudden,
wild, extremely rude curse straight in my face.  For he had in that
second put his foot into the long marching column of an army of Siafu.
The Siafu are the universally dreaded, man-eating ants of Africa, the
which, left to themselves, will eat you up alive.  My dogs in their hut
at night when they had got the Siafu on them would yell out miserably
in their agony, until you rushed out to save them.  My friend Ingrid
Lindstrom of Njoro at one time had her whole flock of turkeys devoured
by the killers.  They are about mostly at night, and in the rainy
season.  If you happen to get the Siafu on you, there is nothing for
you but to tear off your clothes and have the person nearest at hand
pluck them out of your flesh.  Now, turning round to see what was
happening to Berkeley, I saw him, in the midst of the infinite black
African night and of the Masai plain, his trousers at his heels,
changing feet as if he were treading water, with one toto holding up a
hurricane lamp and another picking out the burning, ferocious creatures
from his strangely white legs.

When we came to the Masai manyatta we found Sandoa still alive.  By a
stroke of luck, or by some kind of intuition, he had taken but one
tablet of Kamante's medicine--possibly also the intestines of Masai
Morani are hardier than those of other human beings.  I administered
the bicarbonate and oil to him, feeling that I ought to be on my knees
with gratitude, and I saw him well on his way to recovery before, in
the grey light of dawn, Berkeley and I returned to my house.

Snake-bites were frequent, but although I lost oxen and dogs from
snake-bite I never lost a human patient from them.  The spitting cobra
caused pain and distress; I still have before me the picture of an old
squatter woman staggering up to the house wailing and blind after
having her face spat in while cutting wood in the forest--she must have
been chopping with her mouth wide open, for her tongue and gums were
swollen to suffocation and had turned a deadly pale blue.  But the
effect of the poison could be relieved with bicarbonate and oil and
would pass after a while.

[Illustration: _Aweru, an old Kikuyu squatter of the farm_]

Fashion--the ambition to be _comme il faut_--made itself felt in the
ailments on the farm, as in other departments of Native life.  At one
time the truly chic thing was to come to the house for worm-medicine.
I did not myself taste the mixture, which looked very nasty in its
bottle, like green slime, but the people, old and young, drank it down
with pride.  After a while I warned my patients that I had no faith in
their need of worm-medicine, and that if they wanted to go on taking it
as an aperitif they would in the future have to pay for it
themselves--and I thereby put an end to that particular kind of
dandyism.  A very old squatter a couple of years later presented
himself at the house and begged to have the "green medicine."  His
wife, he informed me, had got a _nyoka_--which word really means a
snake--in her stomach, and at night it would roar so loudly that
neither he nor she could sleep.  On my doorstep he looked _dmod_, the
last adherent to a fashion of the past.

My patients and I thus worked together in good understanding.  Only one
shadow lay over the terrace: that of the hospital.  During my early
days in Africa, till the end of the First World War, the shadow was
light like that of trees in spring; later on it grew and darkened.

For some of my years on the farm I had been holding the office of
_fermier gnral_ there--that is, in order to save the Government
trouble I collected the taxes from my squatters locally and sent in the
sum total to Nairobi.  In this capacity I had many times had to listen
to the Kikuyu complaining that they were made to pay up their money for
things which they would rather have done without: roads, railways,
street lighting, police--and hospitals.

I wished to understand them and to know how deep was their reluctance
against the hospital, and to what it was really due, but it was not
easy, for they would not let me know; they closed up when I questioned
them, they died before my eyes, as Africans will.  One must wait and be
patient in order to find the right moment for putting salt on the tail
of the timid, dark birds.

It fell to Sirunga, in one of his little quicksilver movements, to give
me a kind of information.

Sirunga was one of the many grandchildren of my big squatter Kaninu,
but his father was a Masai.  His mother had been among those pretty
young girls whom Kaninu had sold across the river, but she had come
back again to her father's land with her baby son.  He was a small,
slightly built child with a sudden, wild, flying gracefulness in all
his movements and a corresponding, incalculable, crazy imagination of a
kind which I have not met in any other Native child, and which maybe
will have been due to the mixture of blood.  The other boys kept back
from Sirunga, they called him "_Sheitani_"--the Devil--and at first I
laughed at it--for even with a good deal of mischief in him Sirunga
could be nothing but a very small devil--but later on I realized that
in the boys' eyes he was possessed by the Devil, and his smallness then
made the fact the more tragic.  Sirunga suffered from epilepsy.

I did not know of it until I happened to see him under an attack.  I
was lying on the lawn in front of the house talking with him and some
other totos when all at once he rose up straight and announced: "_Na
taka kufa_"--I am dying, or literally, I want to die, as they say in
Swahili.  His face grew very still, the mouth so patient.  The boys
round him at once spread to all sides.  The attack, when it came upon
him, was indeed terrible to watch, he stiffened in cramp and foamed
from the mouth.  I sat with my arms round him; I had never till then
seen an epileptic attack and did not know what to do about it.
Sirunga's amazement as he woke up in my arms was very deep, he was used
to seeing everybody run away when he was seized with a fit, and his
dark gaze at my face was almost hostile.  All the same after this he
kept close to me--I have before written about him that he held the
office of an inventive fool or jester and followed me everywhere like a
small, fidgety, black shadow.  His mighty uncontrolled fantasies and
whims were totally confused and highly confusing to listen to.
Sirunga, at a time when we had an epidemic on the farm, explained to me
that once--long long long ago--all people had been very ill.  It was,
Msabu, when the sun was pregnant with the moon--walked with the moon in
the stomach--but as the moon jumped out and was born, they grew well
again.  I did not connect his fantasy with hospitals, from which no
such universal cure could rightly be expected; it was the words "long
long long ago" which gave me my perspective.

At the time when the Natives of the Highlands were free to die as they
liked, they would follow the ways of their fathers and mothers.  When a
Kikuyu fell ill, his people carried him out of his hut on his bedstead
of sticks and hides, since a hut in which a person had died must not
again be lived in but had to be burned down.  Out here under the tall
fringed trees his family sat round him and kept him company, squatter
friends came up to give the news and gossip of the farm, at night small
charcoal fires were made up on the ground round the bed.  If the sick
man got well he was carried back into the hut.  If he died he was
brought across the river out on the plain, and was left there to the
quick and neat cleaning and polishing of jackals and vultures, and of
the lions coming down from the hills.

I myself was in sympathy with the tradition of the Natives, and I
instructed Farah--who showed himself deeply averse to the idea, for the
Mohammedans wall up the graves of their dead and perform solemn rites
by the side of them--if I died on the farm to let me travel in the
track of my old squatters across the river.  There were so many of the
true qualities of the Highland country in the _castrum doloris_ out
there under the big firmament, with its wild, free, gluttonous
undertakers: silent drama, a kind of silent fun--at which after a day
or two the main character himself would be smiling--and silent
nobility.  The silent, all-embracing genius of consent.

The Government prohibited and put an end to the funeral custom of old
days, and the Natives gave it up unwillingly.  The Government and the
Missions then undertook to build hospitals, and, seeing the reluctance
of the people of the land to go into them, were surprised and
indignant, and blamed them for being ungrateful and superstitious, or
for being cowards.

The Africans, though, feared pain or death less than we ourselves did,
and life having taught them the uncertainty of all things, they were at
any time ready to take a risk.  An old man with a headache once asked
me if I might not be able to cut off his head, take out the evil from
it, and set it back in its right place, and if I had consented I think
that he would have let me make the experiment.  It was other things in
us which at times set their nerves on edge.

For they had had our civilization presented to them piecemeal, like
incoherent parts of a mechanism which they had never seen functioning,
and the functioning of which they could not on their own imagine.  We
had been transforming, to them, Rite into Routine.  What by now most of
all they feared from our hands was boredom, and on being taken into
hospital they may well have felt that they were in good earnest being
taken in to die from boredom.

They had deep roots to their nature as well, down in the soil and back
in the past, the which, like all roots, demanded darkness.  When, in
his small confused Kikuyu-Masai mind, Sirunga had given me a small
contorted key, the reference to a past--"long long long ago"--an
African past of a thousand years, I took it into my course of thought.
We white people, I reflected, were wrong when in our intercourse with
the people of the ancient continent we forgot or ignored their past or
did indeed decline to acknowledge that they had ever existed before
their meeting with us.  We had deliberately deprived our picture of
them of a dimension, thus allowing it to become distorted to our eyes
and blurred in its Native harmony and dignity, and our error of vision
had caused deep and sad misunderstandings between us and them.  The
view to me later on was confirmed as I observed the fact that white
people to whom the past was still a reality--in whose minds the past of
their country, their name and blood or their home was naturally
alive--would get on easier with the Africans and would come closer to
them than others, to whom the world was created yesterday, or upon the
day when they got their new car.

The dark people, then, as the clever doctor from Volaia approached, may
well have gone through the kind of agony which one will imagine a tree
to be suffering at the approach of a zealous forester intending to pull
up her roots for inspection.  Their hearts in an instinctive deadly
nausea turned from the medical examinations of the hospitals, such as
they did from the _kipanda_, the passport giving the name and data of
its bearer, which some years later the Government made compulsory to
each individual Native of the Highlands.

We Nations of Europe, I thought, who do not fear to floodlight our own
inmost mechanisms, are here turning the blazing lights of our
civilization into dark eyes, fitly set like the eyes of doves by the
rivers of waters (Song of Solomon 5:12), essentially different to ours.
If for a long enough time we continue in this way to dazzle and blind
the Africans, we may in the end bring upon them a longing for darkness,
which will drive them into the gorges of their own, unknown mountains
and their own, unknown minds.

We may, if we choose to, I thought further, look forward to the day
when we shall have convinced them that it be a meritorious and happy
undertaking to floodlight a whole continent.  But for that they will
have to get other eyes.  The intelligent, efficient and base Swahili of
the coast have got such eyes.

The outcome of these various circumstances was this: that I would from
time to time find myself unemployed as a doctor, and my consulting room
empty.

It would most often happen after I had been taking a patient into
hospital.  But it might be brought about, suddenly, by reasons unknown
to me and probably unknowable, like the sudden pause which may occur
amongst labourers in the field.  They would then, after a week, bring
me up a patient or two with a high fever or a broken limb, too far gone
for treatment.  I would feel that I was being made a fool of, and lose
patience with my people, I would speak to them without mercy:

"Why," I asked them, "must you wait to come to me with your broken arms
and legs until they are gangrenous, and the stench, as I am driving you
to Nairobi, makes me myself sick?--or with a festering eye until the
ball of it has shrunk and withered so that the cleverest doctor of
Volaia will not be able to cure it?  The old fat Msabu matron in the
Nairobi hospital will be angry with me once more and will tell me that
I do not mind whether my people on the farm live or die--and in the
future she shall be right.  You are more obstinate than your own goats
and sheep, and I am tired of working for you, and from now on I shall
bandage and dose your goats and sheep and leave you yourself to be
one-legged and one-eyed, such as you choose to be."

Upon this they would stand for some time without a word, and then, very
sullenly, let me know that they would in the future bring me up their
injuries in good time, if on my side I would promise not to take them
into hospital.

During the last few months that I was still on the farm, at the time
when very slowly it was being made clear to me that my fight of many
years was lost, and that I should have to leave my life in Africa and
go home to Europe, I had as a patient a small boy of six or seven named
Wawerru, who had got bad burns on both legs.  Burns are an ailment
which you would often get to treat in the Kikuyu, for they built up
piles of charcoal in their huts and slept round them, and it happened
that in the course of the night the coals slid down on top of the
sleepers.

In the midst of a strangely non-real existence, unconnected with past
or future, the moments that I spent in doctoring Wawerru were sweet to
me, like a breeze on a parched plain.  The French Fathers had presented
me with a new kind of ointment for burns, just out from France.
Wawerru was a slight, slant-eyed child, late-born in his family and
spoilt, in so far as he believed that nobody would do him anything but
good.  He or his elder brothers who carried him up to the house had
managed to grasp the idea of a treatment every third day, and his sores
were yielding to my cure.  Kamante as my amanuensis was aware of the
happiness that the task gave me, his lynx eyes every third day would
seek out the small group amongst the patients on the terrace, and one
time, when they had missed a day, he gave himself the trouble to walk
down to Wawerru's manyatta and to admonish his family about their
duties.  Then suddenly Wawerru did not appear, he vanished out of my
existence.  I questioned another toto about him; "_Sejui_"--I know
not--he answered.  A few days later I rode down to the manyatta, my
dogs running with me.

The manyatta lay at the foot of a long, green grass-slope.  It
contained a large number of huts, for Wawerru's father had got several
wives, with a hut to each of them and--in the way of most wealthy
Kikuyu--a central hut of his own, into which he could retire from the
world of femininity to meditate in peace, and there was also an
irregular suburb of bigger and smaller granaries to the settlement.

As I rode down the slope, I saw Wawerru himself sitting on the grass,
playing with a couple of other totos.  One of his play-fellows caught
sight of me and notified him, and he at once, without so much as a
glance in my direction, set off into the maze of the huts and
disappeared to my eyes.  His legs were still too weak to carry him, he
scuttled along with wondrous quickness on all fours like a mouse.  I
quite suddenly was thrown into a state of flaming anger at the sight of
such ingratitude.  I set Rouge into a canter to catch up with him, and
at the moment when, in the exact way of a mouse with its hole, he
slipped into a hut, I jumped from the saddle and followed him.  Rouge
was a wise horse; if I left him, the reins loose round his neck, he
would stand still and wait for me till I came back.  I had my riding
whip in my hand.

The hut to my eyes, as I came into it from the sunlight of the plain,
was almost dark; there were a few dun figures in it, old men or women.
Wawerru, when he realized that he had been run to earth, without a
sound rolled over on his face.  Then I saw that the long bandages, with
which I had taken so much trouble, had been unwound, and that from heel
to hip his legs were smeared with a thick coat of cow-dung.  Now
cow-dung is not actually a bad remedy for burns, since it coagulates
quickly and will keep the air out.  But at the moment the sight and
smell of it to me were nauseating, as if deadly--in a kind of
self-preservation I tightened my grip on the whip.

I had not, till now, in my mind associated my success or failure in
curing Wawerru's legs with my own fate, or with the fate of the farm.
Standing here in the hut, adjusting my eyes to the twilight of it, I
saw the two as one, and the world round me grew infinitely cheerless, a
place of no hope.  I had ventured to believe that efforts of mine might
defeat destiny.  It was brought home to me now how deeply I had been
mistaken; the balance-sheet was laid before me, and proved that
whatever I took on was destined to end up in failure.  Cow-dung was to
be my harvest.  I bethought myself of the old Jacobite song:

  _Now all is done that could be done.
  And all is done in vain._


I spoke no word, I do not think that I gave out any sound at all.  But
the tears all at once welled out from behind my eyelids, and I could
not stop them.  In a few moments I felt my face bathed in tears.  I
kept standing like that for what seemed to me a long tune, and the
silence of the hut to me was deep.  Then, as the situation had to end
somehow, I turned and went out, and my tears still flowed abundantly,
so that twice I missed the door.  Outside the hut I found Rouge
waiting; I got into the saddle and rode away slowly.

When I had ridden ten yards, I turned round to look for my dogs.  I
then saw that a number of people had come out from the huts and were
gazing after me.  Riding on another ten or twenty yards, I was struck
by the thought that this in my squatters was an unusual behaviour.  In
general, unless they wanted something from me and would shout for
it--as the totos, popping from the long grass, screeched out for
sugar--or wanted just to send off a friendly greeting: "Jambu, Msabu!"
they let me pass fairly unnoticed.  I turned round again to have
another look at them.  This second time there were still more people
standing on the grass, immovable, following me with their eyes.  Indeed
the whole population of the manyatta would have got on their legs to
watch Rouge and me slowly disappearing across the plain.  I thought:
"They have never till now seen me cry.  Maybe they have not believed
that a white person ever did cry.  I ought not to have done it."

The dogs, having finished their investigation of the various scents of
the manyatta and their chasing of its hens, were coming with me.  We
went home together.

Early next morning, before Juma had come in to draw the curtains of my
windows, I sensed, by the intensity of the silence round me, that a
crowd was gathered at short distance.  I had had the same experience
before and have written about it.  The Africans have got this to
them--they will make their presence known by other means than eyesight,
hearing or smell, so that you do not tell yourself: "I see them," "I
hear them," or "I smell them," but: "They are here."  Wild animals have
got the same quality, but our domestic animals have lost it.

"They have come up here, then," I reflected.  "What are they bringing
me?"  I got up and went out.

There were indeed a great many people on the terrace.  As I kept
standing silent, looking at them, they, silent too, formed a circle
round me; they obviously would not have let me go away had I wanted to.
There were old men and women here, mothers with babies on their back,
impudent Morani, coy Nditos--maidens--and lively, bright-eyed totos.
Gazing from one face to another I realized what in our daily life
together I never thought of: that they were dark, so much darker than
I.  Slowly they thronged closer to me.

Confronted with this kind of dumb, deadly determination in the African,
a European in his mind will grope for words in which to formulate and
fix it--in the same way as that in which, in the fairy-tale, the man
pitting his strength against the troll must find out the name of his
adversary and pin him down to a word, or be in a dark, trollish manner,
lost.  For a second my mind, running wildly, responded to the situation
in a wild question: "Do they mean to kill me?"  The moment after I
struck on the right formula.  My people of the farm had come up to tell
me: "The time has come."  "It has, I see," in my mind I assented.  "But
the time for what?"

An old woman was the first to open her mouth to me.

The old women of the farm were all good friends of mine.  I saw less of
them than of the small restless totos, who were ever about my house,
but they had agreed to assume the existence of a particular
understanding and intimacy between them and me, as if they had all been
aunties of mine.  Kikuyu women with age shrink and grow darker; seen
beside the cinnamon-coloured Nditos, sap-filled, sleek lianas of the
forest, they look like sticks of charcoal, weightless, desiccated all
through, with a kind of grim jocosity at the core of them, noble,
high-class achievements of the skilled charcoal-burner of existence.

This old woman of the terrace now, in the grip of her left hand, held
forth her right hand to me, as if she were making me a present of it.
Across the wrist ran a scarlet burn.  "Msabu," she whimpered into my
face.  "I have got a sick hand, sick.  It needs medicine."  The burn
was but superficial.

An old man with a cut in the leg from his wood-chopper's axe came up
next, then a couple of mothers with feverish babies, then a Moran with
a split lip and another with a sprained ankle, and an Ndito with a
bruise in one round breast.  None of the injuries were serious.  I was
even pressed upon to examine a collection of splinters in the palm of a
hand, from a climb for honey in a tree.

Slowly I took in the situation.  My people of the farm, I realized,
today, in a common great resolution had agreed to bring me what,
against all reason and against the inclination of their own hearts, I
had wanted from them.  They must have been grappling with, imparting to
one another and discussing between them the fact: "We have been trying
her too hard.  She clearly is unable to bear any more.  The time has
come to indulge her."

It could not be explained away that I was being made a fool of.  But I
was being made so with much generosity.

After a minute or two I could not help laughing.  And as, scrutinizing
my face, they caught the change in it, they joined me.  One after
another all faces round me lightened up and broke in laughter.  In the
faces of toothless old women a hundred delicate wrinkles screwed up
cheeks and chin into a baroque, beaming mask--and they were no longer
scars left by the warfare of life, but the traces of many laughters.

The merriment ran along the terrace and spread to the edge of it like
ripples on water.  There are few things in life as sweet as this
suddenly rising, clear tide of African laughter surrounding one.

  Legend has it that a Gaul
  seeing wild, fierce Gallic courage
  mowed down round him by the rigid
  discipline of Roman legions,

  heavenwards shot his last arrow,
  at the God whom he had worshipped,
  at the God who had betrayed him.
  And then fell with cloven forehead.

  From the bones of fallen Gauls
  peasants of the land built fences
  round their fair and fruitful vineyards.
  No one had a nobler burial.




Echoes from the Hills


I have the great good luck in life that when I sleep I dream, and my
dreams are always beautiful.  The nightmare, with its squint-eyed
combination of claustrophobia and _horror vacui_, I know from other
people's accounts only, and mostly, for the last twenty years, from
books and theatre.  This gift of dreaming runs in my family, it is
highly valued by all of us and makes us feel that we have been favoured
above other human beings.  An old aunt of mine asked to have written on
her tombstone: "She saw many a hard day.  But her nights were sweet."

But our beautiful dreams are not confined to the spheres of the idyll
or the child's play, or to any such sphere as in the life of day-time
is considered safe or pleasant.  Horrible events take place in them,
monsters appear, abysses open, wild turbulent flights and pursuits are
familiar features of theirs.  Only, on entering their world, horror
changes hue.  Monstrosity and monsters, Hell itself--they turn to
favour and to prettiness.

I have read or been told that in a book of etiquette of the seventeenth
century the very first rule forbids you to tell your dreams to other
people, since they cannot possibly be of interest to them.  I do not
want to sin against seventeenth-century good manners and am not, here,
going to report to my readers any particular dream of mine.  But since
dreams in general to me are a matter of interest, I shall set down a
few general remarks about them.  Should these remarks turn out somewhat
vague and hazy, as if shimmering to the eyes, the reader will have to
forbear with me.  It is in the nature of things.  Dreams, like smells,
decline to yield up their inmost being to words.



The first characteristic of my dreams is this: I move in a world deeply
and sweetly familiar to me, a world which belongs to me and to which I
myself belong more intensely than is ever the case in my waking
existence.  Yet I do not in the dream meet anybody or anything which,
outside of it, I know or have ever known.  It has happened to me, as a
child, to dream of a particularly dear dog--then I at once realized
that Natty Bumppo had gone from the world of the living--but otherwise
those cherished places within, or towards, which I travel, those
friends, infinitely dear to my heart, whom I am rushing forward to meet
and from whom I cannot bear to part, I have never seen.

Only during one time of my life, and only in connection with one kind
of places and people, have phenomena of an outer world found their way
into my dreams.  It was in itself to me a strange and stirring
experience.

The second characteristic of my dreams is their vastness, their quality
of infinite space.  I move in mighty landscapes, among tremendous
heights, depths and expanses and with unlimited views to all sides.
The loftiness and airiness of the dream come out again in its colour
scheme of rare, luminous blues and violets, and mystically transparent
browns--all of which I promise myself to remember in the day-time, yet
there can never recall.  Dream trees are very much taller than day-time
trees; I vow to myself to keep in mind that such be the real height of
trees, yet when I wake up I fail to do so.  Long perspectives stretch
before me, distance is the password of the scenery, at times I feel
that the fourth dimension is within reach.  I fly, in dream, to any
altitude, I dive into bottomless, clear, bottle-green waters.  It is a
weightless world.  Its very atmosphere is joy, its crowning happiness,
unreasonably or against reason, is that of triumph.

For we have in the dream forsaken our allegiance to the organizing,
controlling and rectifying forces of the world, the Universal
Conscience.  We have sworn fealty to the wild, incalculable, creative
forces, the Imagination of the Universe.

To the Conscience of the world we may address ourselves in prayer, it
will faithfully reward its faithful servants according to their desert,
and its highest award is peace of mind.

To the imagination of the world we do not pray.  We call to mind how,
when last we did so, we were asked back, quick as lightning, where we
had been when the morning stars sang together, or whether we could bind
the sweet influences of Pleiades.  Without our having asked them for
freedom, these free forces have set us free as mountain winds, have
liberated us from initiative and determination, as from responsibility.
They deal out no wages, each of their boons to us is a gift, baksheesh,
and their highest gift is inspiration.  A gift may be named after both
the giver and the receiver, and in this way my inspiration is my own,
more even than anything else I possess, and is still the gift of God.
The ship has given up tacking and has allied herself to the wind and
the current; now her sails fill and she runs on, proudly, upon obliging
waves.  Is her speed her own achievement and merit or the work and
merit of outside powers?  We cannot tell.  The dancer in the waltz
gives herself into the hands of her skilled partner; is the flight and
wonder of the dance, now, her own achievement or his?  Neither the ship
nor the dancer, nor the dreamer, will be able to answer or will care to
answer.  But they will, all three, have experienced the supreme triumph
of Unconditional Surrender.

One last word about dreams:

Some people tell me that the capacity of dreaming belongs to childhood
and early youth, and that as your faculties of seeing and hearing ebb
away your talent for dreaming will go with them.  My own experience
tells me that it is the other way.  I dream today more than I ever did
as a child or a young girl, and in my present dreams things stand out
more clearly than ever, and more to be wondered at.

At times I believe that my feet have been set upon a road which I shall
go on following, and that slowly the centre of gravity of my being will
shift over from the world of day, from the domain of organizing and
regulating universal powers, into the world of Imagination.  Already
now I feel, as when at the age of twenty I was going to a ball in the
evening, that day is a space of time without meaning, and that it is
with the coming of dusk, with the lighting of the first star and the
first candle, that things will become what they really are, and will
come forth to meet me.

The unruly river, which has bounced along wildly, sung out loudly and
raged against her banks, will widen and calm down, will in the end fall
silently into the ocean of dreams, and silently experience the supreme
triumph of Unconditional Surrender.

During my first months after my return to Denmark from Africa, I had
great trouble in seeing anything at all as reality.

My African existence had sunk below the horizon, the Southern Cross for
a short while stood out after it, like a luminous track in the sky,
then faded and disappeared.  The landscapes, the beasts and the human
beings of that existence could not possibly mean more to my
surroundings in Denmark than did the landscapes, beasts and human
beings of my dreams at night.  Their names here were just words, the
name of Ngong was an address.  It was no good, it might even be bad
manners, to talk about them.

Fate had willed it that my visitors to the farm by that time had
already gone, or were just about to go.  They were none of them people
to stay for a long time in the same place.  Sir Northrop MacMillan,
Galbraith and Berkeley Cole and Denys Finch-Hatton had set out before
myself; shortly after my departure Lord Delamere, Lord Francis Scott
and Hugh Martin followed them.  The Swede, Eric von Otter, who had
distinguished himself in the war in Africa, died in his faraway post up
north, my gallant young friend and helpmate, Gustav Mohr, was drowned
ferrying his safari across a river.  There they were, all of them, nine
thousand feet up, safe in the mould of Africa, slowly being turned into
African mould themselves.  And here was I, walking in the fair woods of
Denmark, listening to the waves of Oresund.  To the southeast, a long
way off, the plains of the farm, where in years of drought we had
fought the wild, gluttonous grass-fires, and the squatters' plots, with
the pigeons cooing high about the chattering and the sounds of cooking
below, were being cut up into residential plots for Nairobi business
people, and the lawns, across which I had seen the zebras galloping,
were laid out into tennis courts.  These things were what are called
facts, but were difficult to retain.

What business had I had ever to set my heart on Africa?  The old
continent had done well before my giving it a thought; might it not
have gone on doing so?  As I myself could not find the answer, a great
master supplied it.  He said: "What is Africa to you or you to
Africa...?"  And again, laughing:

    If it do come to pass
    That any man turn ass,
    Leaving his wealth and ease,
    A stubborn will to please,
  Ducdame...
    Here shall he see
    Gross fools as he,
  An if he will come to me.


Dear Master, you have never failed me, your word has been a lamp unto
my feet and a light unto my path.  Now I shall tell you, and prove to
you, how right you have been in speaking about the stubborn will.

For a while, after I had published my book _Seven Gothic Tales_, I
considered the possibility of running a children's hospital in the
Masai Reserve.  There was much disease among the Masai, mostly such as
we had brought upon them; on my safaris I had seen many blind children.
But the Masai refused to take their sick to hospital.

The Masai did not like us and had no reason to do so.  For we had put
an end to their bird-of-prey raids on the agricultural tribes, we had
taken their spears and their big almond-shaped shields from them, and
had splashed a bucket of water upon the halo of a warrior nation,
hardened through a thousand years into a personification of that ideal
of Nietzsche: "Man for war, and woman for the warrior's delight, all
else is foolishness."

Once when I was on safari deep in the Reserve, a very old Masai came up
and seated himself by my campfire; after a while he began to speak, and
it was like hearing a boulder speak.  I myself spoke sufficient Masai
to enquire about game and water, and no more.  For it is to my mind a
language impossible to learn, maybe because the course of thought of
the tribe speaking it is alien to our own.  When on a path in the
Reserve you meet a Masai you greet him: "Saubaa."  If you meet a Masai
woman you salute her: "Tarquenya."  I have never succeeded in learning
what was the meaning of the difference.  But on my safaris I had an
interpreter with me.  "Nowadays," according to him, the
Moran--warrior--of sixty years ago told us, "it is no pleasure to live.
But in the old days it was good fun.  When then the Kikuyu or the
Wakamba had got a fat piece of land, and fat herds of cattle, goats and
sheep on it, we Morani came to them.  First we killed all men and male
children with steel"--the Masai warriors had long, fine spears and
short, strong swords--"and we were allowed to stay on in the village
until we had eaten up the sheep and goats there.  Then before going
away again, we killed off the women with wood"--for the Masai also in
their belts carried wooden clubs, surprisingly light and effective.  I
do not know if our old guest was actually calling up a past, or if in
his long nocturnal monologue he was picturing to himself an ideal state
of things, and was slowly getting drunk on his vision of it.  He walked
away at last and disappeared into the night, a bald, skinny bird of
prey of a dying species.

Neither did the white settlers in general like the Masai, who refused
to work for them and kept up a sullen and arrogant manner in their
dealings with them.  But I myself had always been on friendly terms
with my neighbours of the Masai Reserve, and they might, I felt,
consent to bring their sick children to a nursing home of mine.  I
travelled to London to see Dr. Albert Schweitzer on one of his visits
to England and to learn about conditions from him.  He kindly gave me
the information I wanted.  But I soon realized that the expenses of the
undertaking would by a long way exceed my means--you do not make as
much money on writing books as is generally believed.  The images of an
existence nine thousand feet up, under the long hill of Bardamat, among
Masai children, dissolved like to other mirages above the grass.

The letters from my old servants in Africa would come in, unpredictably
making their appearance in my Danish existence, strange, moving
documents, although not much to look at.  I wondered what would have
made my correspondents feel just at that moment the necessity of
walking in fifteen or twenty miles to Nairobi in order to send off
these messages to me.  At times they were dirges or elegies, at other
tunes factual reports or even _chroniques scandaleuses_.

Two or three such epistles might follow quickly upon one another, then
there might be many months in which the old continent was dumb.

But once a year at least I would be certain to get news of all my
people.

From the time when I left Africa until the outbreak of the Second World
War, every year before Christmas I sent out a small amount of money to
my old firm of solicitors, Messrs. W. C. Hunter and Company, of
Nairobi.  They would always be able to get Farah's address, for he had
his home and family in the Somali village of the town, even when he
himself was away trading horses from Abyssinia or following some great
white hunter on his safaris, and Farah would look up and collect his
old staff.  Thus in the white-washed Nairobi office my household was
gathered together once more, each member of it was handed my Christmas
present and was told to deliver in return, for my information, a short
report on how he was and on what had happened to him in the course of
the year.  The bulletin, probably very slowly drawn from him, was put
down by the clerk of the office in sober English and was easy to read,
but had no voice to it.

But my people, inspired by what to them might seem an actual, renewed
meeting with me--for the African has a capacity for disregarding
distances of space and time--on leaving the solicitor's quarters laid
their way round by the post-office, looked up the Indian professional
letter-writer in his stall there and had this learned man set down for
them a second message to me.  In such way the letter, first translated
in the mind of the sender from his native Kikuyu tongue into the lingua
franca of Swahili, had later passed through the dark Indian mind of the
scribe, before it was finally set down, as I read it, in his unorthodox
English.  Yet in this shape it bore a truer likeness to its author than
the official, conventional note, so that as I contemplated the slanting
lines on the thin yellow paper, I for a moment was brought face to face
with him.

Juma wrote: "Some fire came into my house and ended one excellent
goat."  He also acquainted me with the negotiations around his daughter
Mah's marriage, speaking with scorn of the purchase price offered by
her Kikuyu suitor.  The moving passage about my predilection for little
Mah and the trouble I had taken to teach her to read obviously called
for a reply from me, which might prove useful in the bargaining.

Ali Hassan, who had been personal boy to my mother when she had come
out to visit me on the farm, during the Italian-Abyssinian war had
accompanied General Llewellyn to Addis Ababa, and wrote: "Things was
not very good here.  If the old Memsahib was been in this place, this
people would not behaved such as they do."  Ali had Swahili blood in
him, and the swift, incalculable manner of the Swahili.  At first I had
found him somewhat incongruous in my house.  But he was steadier than
he looked, a good worker, observant and with an unexpected mildness of
mind.

Kamante wrote: "I got newly female infant from my wife, who is somewhat
good sort."

Farah did not lay his way by the post-office.  He will have dictated
his letters in English himself.  They were much like him, gravely and
gracefully standing on his own dignity and mine, avoiding any
manifestation of pity for any of us.  He wrote about a parrot which he
had purchased from an Indian friend as a present for me, and which
could speak.  When, he wrote, he had taught it a few more phrases and
names of old mutual friends and acquaintances, if I was not coming back
to Africa he would try to get it sent to Denmark.  As in the end it
proved to be impossible to realize this scheme, Farah gave the parrot
to his mother-in-law, who all the time had much admired it, and sent me
a few feathers plucked off it to show me what colour it had been.  His
personal feelings towards me, and the remembrance of our long
acquaintance, came out in these letters, suddenly, and as in a new key,
in the prayers to God for me preceding his signature.

Through these years I also kept up a correspondence with Abdullahi, my
Somali servant, who by now was back in his own country.  I have
mentioned Abdullahi only very briefly before.  Still he had for some
years been a picturesque figure on the farm, with his own colours to
him.  I feel that he ought by now to be brought into the picture.

[Illustration: _Abdullahi_]

Abdullahi was Farah's small brother.  He will have been ten years old
by the time when Farah decided that the house needed a page more
consistent with its dignity than the Kikuyu totos who till now had held
the office, and had him sent down from Somaliland.  Farah at first had
asked for another boy, his sister's son, but the grandmother of the
child, Farah's mother, had refused to part with him, for he was, she
sent us word, of too high value to the tribe on account of his talent
for tracking down camels which had strayed away at night.  His mother's
decisions to Farah were always unappealable, so it was Abdullahi Ahamed
who one day appeared on my doorstep, and who for some years became one
with the house.

In order to show his impartiality, Farah treated his little brother
with sternness; a couple of times in the beginning of our acquaintance
I felt called upon to take the side of the child.  But in this, as in
much of Farah's attitude and activity as major-domo, there was a good
deal of pose, for the bond of blood to all Somali is supreme and
sacred, and when at the time of the Spanish flu Abdullahi lay ill,
Farah worried over him like a cat with her kitten.  The two together
made me think of Joseph and Benjamin, the Viceregent of Egypt laying
his hand on the shoulder of the little Bedouin and speaking: "God be
gracious to thee, my son."

Abdullahi had a round, chubby face, an unusual thing in a Somali, and a
self-effacing manner, behind which one guessed weighty latent reserves.
He was a loyal servant to the house, particularly pleasant to me
because he was personally so clean and neat, and because I found in him
a rare talent for gratitude.  His individuality first manifested itself
in an unexpected skill as a chess player.  He stood by, quiet as a
mouse, while Denys and Berkeley, who both considered themselves
superior players, sat by the board.  When questioned he told them that
he knew the game of chess, and when, experimentally, they took him on
as an opponent, he played in unbroken silence and almost invariably won
his game.  Later on I found him to be a talented arithmetician as well.
Denys had left an Oxford book of mathematics in the house.  If I read
out to Abdullahi one of its problems: "Divide up a number in four
parts, so that the one part plus 4, the second part divided by 4, the
third multiplied by 4, and the fourth part minus 4 will produce the
same result," he sank into a kind of dumb ecstasy, and the next day
would bring me the solution without being able to explain how he had
arrived at it.

When Abdullahi had been at Ngong for a year he confided to me his
passionate ambition to go to school.  I felt it to be in a way
legitimate, but since there was no Mohammedan school in the Highlands,
I should have to send him to the Islamic school in Mombasa, and at the
time I could ill afford to do so.  When I told him: "I have not got the
money, Abdullahi," he took in the fact resignedly, but from time to
time, on an evening when Farah was not in the house, he came up to ask
me: "Have you got more money now, Memsahib?"

Abdullahi's period of service in the house was marked by one dramatic
event.  I had been ordered by the doctor to take six drops of arsenic
in a glass of water with my meals.  When one day at lunch I had
forgotten to do so and sat reading in the library, I asked Abdullahi to
prepare and bring the dose, took the glass from him without looking up
from my book, and at the moment when I drank down its contents realized
that it must have been filled with pure arsenic.  I asked Abdullahi
about it, and he told me, stiffening, that it was so.  I did not feel
ill at the time, only strangely stunned, as if I had received a blow.
"Then I think that I shall die, Abdullahi," I said, "and you must send
Farah in to me."  Later on, Farah told me that his little brother had
come rushing into his house, had cried out: "I have killed Memsahib!
Go in to her, you!  And goodbye to you all, for I am going away and am
never coming back," and with these words had vanished.  By the time
when Farah came, I myself had really begun to believe that I was going
to die.  I made him carry me on to my bed, and my agony there grew
worse and lasted for more than twelve hours.  I had no knowledge of
arsenic poisoning and no instructions in my books of how to treat it.
But after a while I bethought myself of Alexandre Dumas' novel _La
Reine Margot_, which I had got in the house.  This book tells of how
treacherous enemies of King Charles IX smear the pages of a book on
stag-hunting with arsenic, so that the King, continuously wetting his
finger to turn them, is slowly poisoned, and it also mentions the
remedy by which the physician-in-ordinary tiles to save the King's
life.  I had Farah find _Queen Margot_ on my bookshelf, managed to look
up the cure of milk and white-of-egg used, and started upon it, Farah
lifting up my head so that I might swallow the medicine.  In the midst
of the treatment I remembered having been told that great quantities of
arsenic will turn the patient a livid blue.  In case it was really so,
I reasoned, it was hardly worth struggling for life, so I sent for
Kamante and had him stand by the bed, from time to time holding up my
mirror to me.  About midnight I began to think that I might after all
remain alive, and about dawn to wonder about how we were to get
Abdullahi back.  Only after three days did the Masai scouts set on his
track bring him in, the picture of a run-down, stunned scapegoat
pardoned back from the desert.

When Abdullahi had been with me for three or four years, an event,
small in itself, changed his fate.

In those days it was difficult to get a book to read in Nairobi.  My
bookseller would tell me that he had just got a beautiful consignment
of books out from home, and then place before me a pile of such poor
printed matter as seemed a shame to have good, seaworthy ships bring
out.  All the same it has twice there happened to me to pick up a book
by an entirely unknown author, and the day after to write home telling
my people to note down the author's name.  The first of the two was
Aldous Huxley's _Crome Yellow_, the second Ernest Hemingway's _The Sun
Also Rises_.  Now Huxley's _Little Mexican_ was published.  Among the
tales of this book is the story "Young Archimedes," telling of a little
boy with a genius for mathematics, by a vain and silly adoptive mother
prevented from studying it and driven into such despair that in the end
he throws himself from a balcony and dies.  The night after I had read
it I woke up almost as terrified as when I had left the baby bushbuck
Lulu to her fate in the hands of Kikuyu totos.  Within the following
week I managed to scrape money together, and had Abdullahi sent off to
the high school of Mombasa.  He was very happy there, and his teachers
wrote me that he was progressing steadily and beautifully.

Abdullahi travelled up from Mombasa a couple of times to visit us on
the farm.  He wore the clothes in which he had left us, and which by
now had become somewhat scanty in length and short at the sleeves; he
was evidently saving up his modest pocket-money for more books.  These
holiday visits after a year were rendered difficult by the fact that
Farah had married, so that it had become illegal for Abdullahi to stay
beneath his roof.  In Somaliland, as in Jewry, when a man dies his
younger brother marries his widow in order to raise up his seed, and I
gathered that the close connection between a youthful brother and
sister-in-law is considered dangerous as a possible incentive to
fratricide.  In a nation of such strict loyalty in family affairs the
rule betrays a strange belief in the fatality of passion.  I was sorry
about the taboo, for I felt that Abdulluhi and Fathima, of the same age
and both clear-eyed and easy-going, would have got on very well
together _en tout bien tout honneur_.

When I left the country, Abdullahi did not care to stay there any
longer either, but went back to Somaliland.  From there he wrote to me,
and I wrote back.  He had not got Kamante's gift of letter-writing; his
epistles to Denmark, beyond the fact that he was alive, gave little but
a firm determination to hold on to me.

In the summer of 1936 I told him: "I am now writing a book about the
farm.  You are in it, and Farah, and Pooran Singh, and Bwana
Finch-Hatton, and the dogs and Rouge.  If I have good luck with this
book, maybe I shall come back to Africa.  So now you must pray to God
for me."  Abdullahi wrote back: "You need not tell me to pray to God
for you, for that I do every day.  But since in your letter you tell me
that you are now writing a book about the farm, and that I am in it,
and Farah and Pooran Singh, and Bwana Finch-Hatton, and the dogs, and
Rouge, and that if you have good luck with this book maybe you will
come back to Africa, I have set three very holy men on to pray for you
every day.  Then when these prayers are helpful to you, will you give
me a typewriter?"  What the three holy men were to get out of the
arrangement I knew not, but felt that this must remain a matter between
them and Abdullahi.  My book _Out of Africa_ was published in 1937 and
had sufficient good luck, I decided, to bring me under an obligation
towards Abdullahi, so I ordered a model typewriter for him in London,
with his name on it.  When the firm informed me that they could not
guarantee its delivery, since from the last place to which they could
forward it by post it must still travel for nine days on camel-back, I
wrote to Abdullahi that he would have to arrange about the camel
himself.  He must have done so, for three months later I had a very
neatly typed letter from him.



In the spring of 1939 I received a travelling grant, and began making
up plans for travelling, in the month of Ramadan, with the pilgrims to
Mecca, together with Farah and Farah's mother.  On the farm Farah and I
had many times discussed how, when we grew rich, we would go on such a
pilgrimage, and had pictured to ourselves how we were to purchase
excellent Arab horses, to obtain an escort from Ibn Saud and to journey
happily through fair Arabia.  Now I got as far as establishing contact
with the Arabian Embassy in London.

Then with the Second World War, and with the German occupation of
Denmark in April, 1940,1 was quite suddenly cut off from both Arabia
and Africa, as from humanity altogether.

The next two or three years stand out by nothing but their nothingness;
they look, today, like the Coalsack in the firmament of time.  The King
in his proclamation had enjoined us to maintain an attitude of calm and
dignity, a prize was set on lying dead, a penalty on being alive.

All the same, impressions and reminiscences would drift into the
Coalsack.  A cultural gospel forced upon one, the status and name of
protectorate imposed upon one's country.  A new recognition of the
importance of ancient traditions, of a three-thousand-year-old truth:
"Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the
land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."  In the Coalsack I
unexpectedly encountered an old acquaintance, the _kipanda_, in the
shape of that identification-card which each inhabitant of the country
had to carry wherever he or she went.  Through it I came to know for
certain--what till then I had only guessed--that to be thus turned
perfectly flat, two-dimensional, is extremely boring and may well make
you feel the risk of being bored to death.

For my own part, in order to save my reason, I had recourse to the
remedy which, for that same purpose, I had used in Africa in times of
drought: I wrote a novel.  I advised my friends to do the same, for it
took one's mind off German soldiers drilling in gas-masks round one's
house and setting up their barracks on one's land.  When I started on
the first page of the book, I had no idea whatever what was going to
happen in it, it ran on upon its own and--as was probably inevitable
under the circumstances--developed into a tale of darkness.  But when
in the summer of 1943 the German persecution of Danish Jews set in, and
most homes along the coast of the Sound were housing Jewish fugitives
of Copenhagen waiting to be got across to Sweden, I slackened in my
work; it began to look crude and vulgar to me to compete with the
surrounding world in creating horrors.  Also, as in the following
months the Danish resistance movement fetched headway, we all began to
rise from our sham graves, drawing the air more freely and ceasing to
gasp for breath.  My life-saving book on its own put on a happy ending
and--since I looked upon it as a highly illegitimate child--it was
published under the pseudonym of Pierre Andrezel.

I gave much thought, all during those dark years, to my African
servants.  I held on to them to have them prove to me that they were
still there.  They would be moving about and talking; I tried to follow
their movements and to hear what they were talking about.  On their new
Dagoretti farms, would they be discussing old days and asking one
another, gravely, in the manner of the priest in church: "Do you
believe in the communion of the past?  Do you believe in life gone by?"

It was then that my old companions began to put in an appearance in my
dreams at night, and by such behaviour managed to deeply upset and
trouble me.  For till then no living people had ever found their way
into those dreams.  They came in disguise, it is true, and as in a
mirror darkly, so that I would at times meet Kamante in the shape of a
dwarf-elephant or a bat, Farah as a watchful leopard snarling lowly
round the house, and Sirunga as a small jackal, yapping--such as the
Natives tell you that jackals will do in times of disaster--with one
forepaw behind his ear.  But the disguise did not deceive me, I
recognized each of them each time, and in the mornings I knew that we
had been together, for a short meeting on a forest path or for a
journey.  So I could no longer feel sure that they did still actually
exist, or indeed that they had ever actually existed, outside of my
dreams.

People work much in order to secure the future; I gave my mind much
work and trouble, trying to secure the past.

And then, in the end, the Liberation came.



As now the dark, slimy waters began to decrease, Noah from his Ararat
gazed round towards the four corners of the earth for a sprig of green.

The first live leaf was brought me all across the Atlantic.  I had
finished my _Winter's Tales_ in 1942, when it had been out of the
question to get the manuscript off to England or America from Denmark.
By rare good luck, and with the aid of mighty friends, I managed to get
it with me to Stockholm and to make the British Embassy there forward
it by their daily plane.  I wrote to my publishers in London and New
York: "I can sign no contract and I can read no proofs.  I leave the
fate of my book in your hands."  For three years I lived in the
ignorance of that irresponsible person who shot an arrow into the air
and left it to fall to earth he knew not where.  Now, in the fair month
of May, 1945, by one of the very first overseas mails, I received my
book in the Armed Services Edition and shortly after, through the Red
Cross, a number of moving and cheering letters from American officers
and soldiers who had happened to read _Winter's Tales_ just before or
after some attack in Italy or the Philippines.  I gave one of my two
copies to the King, who was pleased to know that from his dumb country
one voice at least had been heard in far places.

I sent a dove off south: I wrote to Messrs. Hunter and Company for
information about my servants.  They wrote back to inform me that Farah
had died, and that without him they were unable to get on to any of the
others.



The news of Farah's death to me was hard to take into my mind and very
hard to keep there.  How could it be that he had gone away?  He had
always been the first to answer a call.  Then after a while I
recognized the situation: more than once before now I had sent him
ahead to some unknown place, to pitch camp for me there.

As to the others of my staff, now that I should no longer have Farah to
look them up, it would, I reflected, be for them to find me.  At the
same time I could not be sure whether they would indeed set to do so or
not.  For they might not have grasped the fact that my long silence had
been involuntary, but might quite well have taken it as a sign of my
displeasure with them.  "I shall have to sit still and wait for them,"
I thought, "as I waited at sunset for the bushbuck to step out into the
glades of my grounds."

A few months later I had a letter from Government House in Nairobi,
with the very coat of arms of Great Britain on it.  Sir Philip
Mitchell, the then Governor, told me that he was writing upon the
repeated request of his boy Ali Hassan.  Ali, he said, was the best
servant he had ever had, but from the beginning he had made it clear to
his master that he looked upon himself as still being in my service,
and that if ever I came back to Africa he would feel free to leave
Government House without notice.

Here Ali at least had come forth, then, in great state, accompanied by
the Lion and the Unicorn.  He would order the others back as well, and
we would all be gathered together once more.  I started on a
correspondence with Ali.  From the style of his letters I gathered that
for these years he had--in contrast to earlier days--been living in a
household with no financial worries.  But he was faithful to the past,
naming the horses and the dogs and bringing back things that I myself
had forgotten.  "Do you remember," he wrote, "how the people give you
name and call you: She who first of all see the New Moon?"  In his
repeated "things have changed" there was a gentle melancholy, which I
recognized from the recollections of other Africans, who will dwell
with preference on sad things.  There was in his letter the sound of a
lonely horn in the woods, a long way off.

He generously forgave me my own _faux pas_.  "Do you remember,
Memsahib," he wrote, "the time when you dismissed us all because of
this bitch?"  I remembered it very well.  I had brought out a Scotch
deerhound bitch for my dog Pania, travelling, for her sake, in the
midst of winter from Antwerp on a cargo boat.  The first time she was
in heat I had had to go into Nairobi, so had instructed all my
servants, whatever they did, not to let her out of her hut.  I came
back tired and went to bed, and I there received a note from my manager
regretting the fact that Heather had been let out, and that now most
likely his Airedale terrier King would be the sire of her puppies.  I
at once flew into such anger that I walked straight from my bed on to
the pergola, in which my entire household, sitting peacefully together,
were having a sunset chat.  But when I opened my mouth to tell them
what I thought of them, I had no voice, I had to go back into the house
to find it, and even to repeat the manoeuvre.  As soon as I could
speak, I dismissed all my people at one time, for I felt that I could
not bear to see any of their faces again.  None of them went, or--I
believe--for a moment thought of going, and no catastrophe followed.
Whatever had happened in my absence, Heather's puppies turned out
pure-bred, and very lovely.

Juma, Ali wrote, was now a very old man, with grandchildren and
great-grandchildren.  He lived upon the plot in the Masai Reserve that
I had obtained for him.  His son Tumbo was a lorry-driver in Nairobi.

Saufe, Farah's son, was doing well as a horse-trader.  He was soon
going to marry, and as he was only seventeen years old by then, the
fact was a sign of his prosperity.

The news of Kamante, Ali wrote, was good, then bad, then a little
better, then again somewhat sad.  He had been clever all these years,
"same as he been in the house," and on his land near Dagoretti he had a
fine herd of cattle, sheep and goats.  But he had gone blind.  This,
according to a clever doctor of Nairobi, might be bettered by an
operation.  But an operation would cost much money.

I found, as I laid down Ali's letter, that I was not surprised to learn
that Kamante had gone blind.  His watchful eyes, so keenly observant
that he had at times made me think of that "loyal servant" of Grimm's
fairy-tale who had to wear a cloth round his eyes in order not to
destroy what he gazed at, at the same time in an eerie way had in them
the introspectiveness which you will find in the eyes of a blind man.
I remembered, from our very first meeting, when I had knocked against
the dying child on the plain, those glassy, patient eyes turned towards
me, and I felt that I must have them light up once more, even although
I myself was never again to meet their unbiased, stock-taking glance.

I have had news from my old servants later on, through other people,
and at last from themselves.



Sir Philip Mitchell in the beginning of the fifties looked me up in
Denmark.  "I dare not come home from Europe to Ali," he said, "without
having seen you."  While we dined together we had a sad little talk
about the changes in the world.  I realized to what extent my own book
about Africa had become history, a document of the past.  It was, I
thought, as I listened to Sir Philip describing present-day conditions
in Kenya, as much out of date as a papyrus from a pyramid.

My old friend Negley Farson in his book of 1950, _Last Chance in
Africa_, speaks of Ali as Sir Philip's major-domo and reports how, at
his and Sir Philip's fishing camp on the Thika, Ali repeats his
statement that he is Memsahib Blixen's boy.  "I rose," Mr. Farson
tells, "high in Ali's esteem when I told him that I had lunched in
Denmark with his Memsahib.  After that I could do no wrong."

The Danish author John Buchholzer in 1955 travelled in Somaliland to
collect Somali folklore and poetry, and published a book, _Africa's
Horn_, on his journey.  One chapter of the book turns upon the new
national and religious movement against the Europeans and relates how,
in the market-place of the small town of Hargeisa, the author is being
stoned by an angry crowd and is saved from their hands through the
intervention of a passing young Somali official.  The young man next
day looks him up in his quarters and asks him if really, as has been
said, he is a Dane.  He presents himself as Abdullahi Ahamed, for many
years in the past the servant of a Danish lady known to all tribes of
Somali.  Abdullahi here, in the book, goes through the long list of my
benefactions towards him, including the typewriter.

It was pleasant to come across this passage of the book.  It was more
pleasant still to receive a letter from Abdullahi himself, inspired by
his meeting with Mr. Buchholzer.  For ten years, Abdullahi states, he
has been deeply grieving not to hear from me; it now gives him much
satisfaction that I have sent out such a nice gentleman to re-establish
contact between us.  He has actually married Farah's young widow and
has a small son by her.  The whole family, however, he informs me, is
at the moment sunk in deep sadness over the death of Fathima's mother,
the child's grandmother--so that old women appear to play as great a
part in the life of the tribes as in my day.  In his letter to me, too,
Abdullahi remembers the typewriter.  It gave him, he says, a decisive
advantage over competitors in the career, and he owes to it that he has
now for three years been holding the office of judge in Hargeisa.

"I am," he concludes his letter, "carrying my official duties
successfully, with dignity and popularity."

There lives in Copenhagen a talented young journalist, Mr. Helge
Christensen, who from boyhood has been keen on ornithology and many
years ago got my mother's permission to study bird life in the woods of
Rungstedlund.  Mr. Christensen in an international competition won a
flying trip to Nairobi and came to Rungstedlund to ask me whether I
wanted him to take out greetings to friends of mine in Kenya.  I asked
him, if possible, to look up Juma and Kamante.  But Ali Hassan being
away at the time, I felt that it might be a difficult task to pick out
by their names only two Kikuyu among two millions.  Mr. Christensen,
though, held on to his promise and was successful.

Juma he tracked down by going out to the residential district of Karen,
named after me, and making enquiries at its central club-house,
formerly my own house.  He was here told that an old man by the name of
Juma from time to time would come up and ask permission to walk in the
grounds, "to think, there, of the time that had once been," for an
afternoon would walk on the paths beneath the tall trees and then again
would disappear.  A kitchen toto from the club believed that he knew
from where the old man came, and was taken into the car to point out
the rough grass-track winding into the Masai Reserve--a long way, the
traveller thought, for an old man to walk in order to meditate on the
past.  Juma's manyatta here, below the blue hills of Ngong, surely is
one of the loveliest spots in the world.  It had, Mr. Christensen told
me, grown into a big place and was swarming with young people and
children, who thronged round the car.  Juma himself was called forth
from his hut, a patriarch, full of days, somewhat long in the teeth, a
little vague about the present but brightening up as he got on to days
gone by, and in the end explaining to his wives and his offspring that
his Memsahib had sent out this good Bwana with gifts, thanksgivings for
his excellent service in her house.  Two eagles, Mr. Christensen told
me, circling high above the heads of host and visitor, were pointed out
as old friends of the Memsahib's, eager to have news of her.  Juma once
had heard them cry "God bless her."  The scream of an eagle, as I
myself heard it on a day when I was flying with Denys Finch-Hatton, is
like anything but a blessing.

Kamante was found further away from Nairobi, in the midst of the maze
of shambas with hemp, corn and sweet potatoes, and of grass-land.  I
was told that he received his visitor as if he had been expecting him
this very afternoon, which may well have been the case, for Kamante was
resourceful.  Kamante had never shown any faith whatever in my
intelligence, yet he now enlarged upon my wisdom and competence,
pointing out to my countryman the wide area of land which, against all
resistance and intrigue, I had forced the Government of Kenya to yield
up to him.  Like Abdullahi and Juma he took it that his guest had been
sent out as a personal ambassador of mine to get his news and enquire
into his wants.  He was anxious to send back by him such news and
information as I should be interested in, weighing his words and from
time to time making a pause to collect his thoughts.  The operation on
his eyes had been successful, inasmuch as he could now see his cows.
He could not count them, he said, which was a sad thing, but when in
the evening they had been brought back into their boma he could make
them out dimly, like a multitude of sweet potatoes within a pot of
furiously boiling water, thronging and rolling about and jumping upon
one another, which was pleasant.

Mr. Christensen has published a small book, _Juma and Kamante_, on his
visit to my two old servants.  It contains two woodcut portraits of the
title-characters; the one of Juma is very good.

Quite recently, and quite by chance, I have in another Danish paper
come upon a later interview with Kamante, whom the journalist has
succeeded in tracing and running to earth.  Kamante is well, and would
like to come to Denmark to take service with me once more, at the same
time he fears that he is too old, and that it might be better to send
me one of his sons.  Somewhat uneasy at giving the information--as I am
uneasy at passing it on here--Kamante tells the Danish journalist that
he has been a year in prison for taking the Mau-Mau oath.  I did not
know of the circumstance; it has given me matter for thought.  Has the
deep, unconquerable sceptic here at last met with something in which it
was possible to him to have faith?  Has the eternal hermit, the "rogue"
head of game, by his own choice totally isolated from the herd, here at
last through a dark inhuman formula experienced some kind of human
fellowship?  In order to make up for the awkwardness of the situation,
Kamante brings out from his pocket a letter from me to him and shows it
to my countryman.  "Look," he says, "Msabu writes to me: 'My good and
faithful servant Kamante.'"  As again he folds up the letter and sticks
it into his pocket, he adds: "And so I am."

I have had news of another former resident of the farm, the blind Dane,
Old Knudsen, who for some time lived in a small house on it, all salted
and embittered through the experiences of a tragic life, but with great
flaming inner visions to make up for his loss of sight, a grey and bent
indomitable optimist.

Last March I had a letter from an American lady of the University of
Maryland.  A fortnight before, she had been dining with a Danish
economist just back from a recent mission to East Africa; they had been
talking about me and my book _Out of Africa_, and he had told her that
at the Danish Consulate to Tanganyika he had been given information
which he wanted to bring to my attention.  When a few days later he had
died in his hotel in Washington, Mrs. Stevenson passed on this
information to me.  "What he had learned from the Danish Consul," she
wrote, "and what I feel that he would want you to know, was that Old
Knudsen's scheme for extracting phosphate from the bottom of Lake
Naivasha was not wild.  Some discovery has been made which verifies his
theory.  I did not get the details, but I feel that you should know."

Thus, with deep satisfaction, I now see before me Old Knudsen righted,
for a while laying down his harp in order to grip old fishermen's and
mariners' tools, laughing out in triumph over Old Knudsen's enemies.



I hear, these days, with intervals of one month, or half a year, from
my old servants in Africa.

So there they are, out from their coverts in the woods, in the rays of
sunset, treading cautiously still, but looking round them more
confidently than when they first came into sight, lifting and turning
their heads.  It is content to watch you so, friends and comrades, I
wish you may wander and gaze there, so high up in the air, in the
strange freedom of your hearts, for a long time still.  You have kept
me company through many years; I shall not again frivolously doubt your
actuality, I shall, from now, leave to you the rich world of reality.
And you may hand me over to those dreams of mine which will take charge
of me.

Juma has died.  But I have recent news of Ali and Kamante.

Ali writes good English now.  He has seen my photograph in the paper.
"Really and truthfully it makes my heart very much pleased to see your
photo.  Really and truthfully it fills all my heart with joy when I
hear your name spoken.  Or when I speak your name."

As I admire his handwriting and grammar, I sometimes seem to see
Berkeley's little wry smile as in his mind he followed a line of wild
duck on the glass-clear sky.  And I wonder whether one more of them,
fascinated by the decoys below, will here be slowing its flight to
drop, in the end, like an arrow-head let off backwards by some heavenly
archer, into the water of the pond, in order to become respectable.

But Kamante, all through a triple layer of idiom, in a
many-times-folded note, manages to preserve his originality.  His last
letter, of a month ago, ends up:

"I certainly convinced when I pray for you to almighty God that this
prayer he will be stow without fault.  So I pray that God will be kind
to you now and then."




About the Author

ISAK DINESEN is the _nom de plume_ of Baroness Karen Blixen of
Rungstedlund.  Born of an old Danish family, she has carried forward
its tradition of making contributions to Danish literature while
establishing a distinguished niche for herself in English as well as
Danish letters.  Her father gained distinction as a writer after he had
served as an army officer and had come to America, where he lived for
several years as a trapper with the Pawnee Indians in Minnesota.  Two
of his books were published in Denmark under the pseudonym of Boganis,
a title conferred upon him by the Pawnees.  Her brother, Thomas
Dinesen, a soldier in the First World War and also an author of repute,
was awarded the Victoria Cross for extraordinary valor.

The author of _Anecdotes of Destiny_ was married to a cousin, Baron
Blixen, in 1914 and went with him to British East Africa, where they
established and successfully operated a coffee plantation.  In 1921 she
was divorced from her husband, but she continued to manage the
plantation for another ten years, until the collapse of the coffee
market forced her to sell her property and go back to Denmark.  Her
book _Out of Africa_ records many of her experiences in the Colony with
a painter's feeling for its sweeping landscapes and a sure-handed
wizardry in communicating the character of its people.  It was selected
by the Book-of-the-Month Club and was received with acclaim by critics
and readers alike.

Prior to the publication of _Out of Africa_, Isak Dinesen had
established a firm place for herself in America with her first book,
_Seven Gothic Tales_.  That volume and _Winter's Tales_, her second
collection of stories, were also Book-of-the-Month Club selections.
Her third collection, _Last Tales_, was published in 1957.

In 1957 Isak Dinesen was elected to honorary membership in the American
Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters.  Reserved for
foreigners who have made unusual contributions to the arts, honorary
memberships in the academy-institute are limited to fifty.






[End of Shadows on the Grass, by Karen Blixen]
