Hemingway Adventure (1999) (27 page)

At the end of the day we climb up to a small steep bluff called Kitirua Hill. Below us the plain is streaked with vivid splashes of crimson and scarlet as columns of Masai herdsmen, driving their cattle before them, return to the
boma
, their encampment, before nightfall.

Ali pours us all beers but this is Ramadan and he cannot take a drink himself until the sun has set.

It dips close to the horizon, but seems to linger there most provocatively.

‘Has it gone?’ Ali keeps asking anxiously.

Though we tell him it has, near enough, it is not until he’s satisfied that the very last trace of the rim has disappeared that he reaches for a bottle of Sprite. It’s the first food or drink that has passed his lips since ten o’clock last night.

Back at Tortilis camp, I shower and check myself for ticks. ‘Small black things, about this long,’ warns Hans, the manager, parting his thumb and forefinger by at least an inch. We’re treated to Italian food tonight, dispensed by Jackson, who has traded his Masai cloak for a waiter’s black tie.

The exhilaration of a day spent walking in the bush merely confirms that Africa can never be reduced to European intimacy and cosiness. I fall asleep, having struggled to read
Green Hills of Africa
in the dim lamp-light, listening to the birds and bats above me in the thatch and the occasional indefinable grunt or shriek from much further away and the evening wind that grows hour by hour until, in the middle of the night, it suddenly dies and I am woken by total silence.

I
‘m in a twin-engined Cessna 206, built thirty-one years ago, flying east from Tortilis camp towards a low range called the Chyulu Hills, which lie between the National Parks of Amboseli and Tsavo.

Hemingway knew of Tsavo by reputation, for it was immortalised by one J. H. Patterson in his book
The Man-Eaters of Tsavo
, an account of two lions who preyed on men building the Mombasa-Nairobi railway, eating twenty-eight of them before being caught. The lions’ stuffed remains became star exhibits at the Field Museum in Chicago, one of young Ernest’s favourite haunts.

Hemingway knew the Chyulu Hills from direct experience, for in his second African trip, in 1953, he stayed close by when he took on the job of Honorary Game Warden. The man who is flying my plane there today, skimming it over a sand-coloured plain sprinkled with zebra and wildebeest and herds of Masai cattle, is the current Honorary Game Warden in the area. His name is Richard Bonham, a Kenyan with an interest in up-market safari lodges. He’s short, wiry and weathered and somewhere around fifty, though his outdoor complexion and sun-bleached hair make him look much younger. He’s anxious about the fate of two Masai children and their herd of goats who went missing from their village last night.

He’s also very worried about a constipated cheetah, one of a pair which he took in recently after they were orphaned and couldn’t hunt.

Once we’ve touched down he drives me straight to the cage which has been erected for the cheetah in the shade of two tall, isolated trees. The female of the pair escaped only the day before, adding insult to injury for her constipated companion. He looks very sorry for himself, in marked contrast to the chirpy rabbits in cages nearby. They haven’t yet worked out that their relationship with the cheetah is purely gastronomic.

Richard beckons me to follow him into the cage.

‘They love being stroked,’ he says, as if we’re going to see a baby kitten. As we approach, the cheetah retreats into the corner, which makes me feel a little better.

‘Aim for the top of the head here.’ He moves aside to let me have a go.

‘Is he tame?’ I find myself asking in a curiously husky voice.

‘Well, he’s
half
-tame.’

‘Which half ?’

‘We didn’t want to tame him completely or he won’t be able to survive when we turn him loose.’

Oh, great.

‘That’s good. Approach directly from the front. Let your hand move in a straight line to the top of his head.’ My arm suddenly feels very heavy.

The cheetah bares his teeth and backs up. My hand wobbles. I breathe deeply and keep it moving. It’s almost there, hovering above the big, sad, yellow eyes, when the cheetah delivers a sharp and wholly unexpected right hook to my leg. I reel back, clutching my calf to stem the blood flow. Sadly, there is no blood, indeed the claw marks are barely visible to the naked eye, but I later note two tiny but unmistakable punctures in my Hugo Boss chinos which bear witness to the fact that I can now add ‘Attacked by Cheetah’ to my resume.

Later, at Richard’s lodge, Ol Donyo Wuas (which means the Spotted Hills in the Masai language): like Tortilis, this place is constructed with local materials and in local style. One end of my room, cantilevered ten feet or so off the ground, is open to the elements. As we are on the slopes of the hills, the view from my bed is enormous, stretching across the plain to the cloud bank fifty miles away, behind which lurks Kilimanjaro.

It’s the magic hour of sunset. Sounds of cow bells and distant voices. I run a shower with water heated by a wood-burning kiln, then sit for a while and watch vervet monkeys watching me from nearby trees. A small herd of hartebeest springs out of the bushes and stops, warily, to munch the grass in the clearing below me. Examine my cheetah wound and for an embarrassing moment cannot even remember which leg it’s on.

W
oken, with tea, at twenty past five. Dawn comes like an old television set warming up. Every time I look outside there’s a little more light in the darkness. By six-thirty we have the full picture and Kilimanjaro is clear enough for Richard to suggest we fly out to the mountain and get our pictures as soon as possible. By ten o’clock it will be hidden again.

As we drive down to the airstrip at the bottom of the hill the cattle are being moved out of the
bomas
to catch the morning dew on the grass. The Masai way of life looks idyllic on this dry, sun-sharpened morning, but Richard says it is much more like the Wild West than it looks. Twenty per cent of the Masai own seventy per cent of the cattle. These cattle barons are rich by African standards, some owning a truck or even a tractor.

Once we’re airborne we head south-east across grass so dry it seems to take on the colour and texture of sand. This prairie soon gives way to green scrub and thorn tree cover, but as the mountain comes nearer, the landscape changes with dramatic speed from lush, tropical farmland through rainforest to timber plantations, moorland and eventually alpine desert. The transitions are fast and exhilarating, but not without a cost. As we rise through ten thousand feet I feel the disadvantages of an un-pressurised cabin: shortage of breath, difficulty in writing, a touch of nausea.

We shall never be able to fly high enough to look down on the mountain (it’s just short of twenty thousand feet, and the safe operating altitude for our two small planes is no more than fifteen), but we’re close enough to see vivid detail.

In geological terms Kilimanjaro is a baby, formed by massive volcanic activity less than a million years ago, and far from extinct. On closer examination it is in fact two mountains in one, the wide table-top dome, called Kibo, and on the eastern edge, the much more jagged and dramatic outline of Mawenzi, with sheer sides and precipitous plunging crevasses. The north face of Kibo rises steep, black and fissured to the highest point on the African continent. A glacier runs down from the summit and I can see thick snow walls. It was in these snows that the carcass of a leopard was found in the 1920s.

No one knows what the leopard was doing at such an altitude, but the legend inspired ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, one of Hemingway’s finest short stories.

Not that Richard regards the story as legend. He says his father pointed out the bones of the leopard when he took him up the mountain as a child. If we have time he can show me the remains of a Dakota aircraft that smashed into the side of Mawenzi with a valuable haul of emeralds on board. Part of the fuselage still hangs there, and no one has yet been able to reach the emeralds.

One man recently hauled himself up to the top of Kilimanjaro to attempt the world para-gliding record.

‘And did he do it?’

Richard makes a quick adjustment to keep us alongside the camera plane.

‘He was never seen again.’

By now the cloud is rolling up the walls of Kilimanjaro like a shroud and there is no time for Dakotas or emeralds. By ten o’clock it has enveloped us and the mountain might just as well not be there.

Richard turns the Cessna and heads back across the plain. On the way home he takes me low over game grazing on the salt licks and skims the tops of the acacia orchard where the white rhino which Hemingway hunted were once found in abundance. Now they’re virtually gone. Poachers have reduced their numbers from several hundred to six, maybe ten. The demand from Asia for rhino horn has killed its source.

Richard raises his voice over the noise of the engine, ‘The days of the wild rhino are over. Finished.’

Back on the ground he’s rewarded with the news that the two Masai children are safe. Their goats did a runner in the night and they went after them. But there are other headaches for the Honorary Game Warden. Cattle poachers are laying traps in the hills and he will have to take a group of rangers to investigate.

When Hemingway first came to Africa in 1933, the idea of him becoming a game warden was faintly ludicrous. His wife Pauline’s diary of that trip hardly reveals a conservationist at work: ‘They killed four Thompson gazelle, eight Grant, seven wildebeest, seven impala, two klipspringers, four roan, two bushbucks, three reedbucks, two oryx, four topi, two water-buck, one eland and three kudu. Of dangerous game, they killed their licensed limit: four lions, three cheetahs, four buffalo, two leopards and two rhinos. They also killed one serval cat, two warthogs, thirteen zebra and one cobra. For amusement forty-one hyenas were also killed.’

Twenty years later Hemingway, though famous enough to be gratefully offered the title of Game Warden, was less desperate for trophies. And there were other diversions. He became infatuated with a girl called Debba, from the Wakaba tribe. She and he canoodled and at one time broke Mary’s bed when she was away. There are rumours, only partly cleared up by
True at First Light
, that they may even have undergone a sort of marriage ceremony.

I think of this as Richard shows me lethal cattle traps of tree trunk and coils of wire left by today’s Wakamba who kill the trapped cattle and ship the meat back over the hills to their territory.

As Richard and his rangers dismantle the traps he tells me that poachers would not have been called poachers in Hemingway’s time. What the Wakamba were doing then was practising the right to hunt, part of a long and ancient tradition. Now the law has separated them from their hunting grounds without recompense and without an alternative way of life. The traps are cruel but almost inevitable. Rivalry with the neighbouring two tribes has always been intense. They have always been different, the Wakamba hunting with bows and arrows, the Masai with spears (which they cannot make for themselves, they are forged by another tribe on the foot-hills of Kilimanjaro).

In
True at First Light
, Hemingway, even allowing for a bit of romantic bias, has his own characteristic views on what makes the Wakamba different.

Their warriors had always fought in all of Britain’s wars and the Masai had never fought in any. The Masai had been coddled, preserved, treated with a fear that they should never have inspired and been adored by all the homosexuals … who had worked for the Empire in Kenya and Tanganyika because the men were so beautiful … The Wakamba hated the Masai as rich show-offs protected by the government
.

In the evening, back at Ol Donyo Wuas, it’s chilly enough for a log fire. As we discuss the sort of day we’ve all had, Alex, the young Englishman who runs the lodge, rolls up his sleeve to show a mass of claw marks, sustained whilst trying to befriend the constipated cheetah.

Maybe I should look at my wound again. With a stronger magnifying glass.

I
n the middle of the night I’m woken by the sound of light scuttling, followed by a crash and the rapid dripping of water on to my suitcase. I feel around blearily beneath the pillow, find my torch and shine the beam through the mosquito net in the direction of the noise.

A few feet away, on the wooden work-top that runs at the back of the cabin, a furry creature with a beautiful black and white striped tail is lapping away at a small pool of water. It carries on quite unconcerned until I utter a grunt of indignation, at which it flits away behind the cupboard, where it hides very badly, leaving most of its tail sticking out.

I tell the story at breakfast and Alex shakes his head with mild exasperation.

‘It’s the genet again,’ he says, as if it had been an ant on the toothbrush. ‘Large-spotted genet. They love the water, you see. We put covers on top but they just take them off and tip the jug over.’

While I’m mulling this over, Richard arrives in a state of great elation. He’s just heard that the cheetah has had a movement.

Things continue in this visceral vein as he tells us that he is on his way to the local village to attend a circumcision ceremony and would we like to come along.

Well, there’s nothing on television, so why not.