Too Close to the Sun (21 page)

Denys soon found that it was almost impossible to achieve anything in Nairobi. After a brief and unsuccessful attempt to deal with the business of Finch Hatton and Pixley, he therefore turned his attention to his ambitious plan to travel to Cairo for his flying course via Uganda and the White Nile. He wanted Billea to accompany him. Denys had left his servant behind when he sailed home to England with Hoskins, as it seemed unlikely that the Somali would be allowed to accompany him on whatever posting was in store. After “frantic wiring to all the heads in GEA and PEA [Portuguese East Africa],” Denys located him, and the loyal Billea returned to service. Denys then set about enjoying his leave. Berkeley, at least, was in evidence. In early May, he and Denys went to the Nairobi station to greet Galbraith and his new bride, Nell, née Balfour (she was the niece of the foreign secretary and former prime minister, Arthur), on their return from their wedding in England. Nell had been profoundly touched by the war: her first fiancé had died at Kut. She took to Denys straightaway and invited him down to Kekopey, the new house that Galbraith had built on his farm at Gilgil. “A very attractive person with a delightfully wide range of interests,” Nell reported to her mother. “We went ‘pigging’ with him several times but the pigs were very wild and he was not shooting well so we got none. We got three buck one day—meat for the boys who badly wanted maize meal or posho as it is called and is very expensive owing to the shortage in this country….” It was a difficult year on the farm, with sheep and cattle dying off, and porcupine were eating the beans to boot. Galbraith was debilitated by the long journey out from England. But the roses were in bloom, and it was difficult to be sad with Denys in the house. He had bought an old Ford, which he referred to as a
sufuria,
the Swahili word for a tin cooking pot. “It was nice to be in the country again, and I covered wonderful distances,” he wrote to Kermit.

There was a dinner at Muthaiga. It was two weeks before Denys left for Cairo. His friend Algy Cartwright, who had been posted to another front, invited him to a valedictory meal. Two women made up the numbers. One was a daughter of the previous governor. The other was Karen Blixen. April 1918 was a bone-weary time to be in Nairobi. In the weak electric light of the dining room, Denys talked at length of his expedition to Somaliland, of elephant-stalking through wet mimosas, and of nights spangled with stars. Karen Blixen found him “an unusually charming person.” The following week, Denys joined a hunting party on the Blixens’ farm and stayed the night. The next day he drove back to Nairobi with Karen, and they had lunch. “It is seldom that one meets someone one is immediately in sympathy with and gets along so well with, and what a marvellous thing talent and intelligence is,” she wrote to her mother. But her words failed to convey the
coup de foudre
that had taken place. In November, she wrote to her brother, expressing the hope that he might one day meet Denys, “for I have been so fortunate in my old age to meet my ideal realised in him….”

ON MAY 14, DENYS
and Billea started on their long inland journey to Cairo and the flying course. As most of the trip was on the Nile and its various tributaries, Denys sold the cooking pot (he got £50 more than he had paid for it)—though at Nimule, on the Ugandan-Sudanese border, he discovered “quite a nice piece of country which one walks.” This hundred-mile trek ended at Rejaf, near Juba at the southern end of the sudd, the floating mass of reed and weed that clogs the White Nile. It was lush, tropical country shadowed by the Imatong Mountains, the sparse villages more African than settlements in the dry, Arab-flavored north. “I heard elephant all one night, but I had to leave them without a visit to push on and catch the boat at Rejaf,” Denys wrote to Kermit. They traveled by steamer through 250 miles of swampy lowland drained by the headstreams of the White Nile. The sudd was a prehistoric crucible of slime, a return to an earlier stage of evolution. Dense aquatic vegetation dispersed river water over the saucerlike clay plain into a labyrinth of steamy channels inhabited by dark and menacing forms and fringed with fifteen-foot papyrus. In some places weeds had built up into islands, necessitating artful navigation and motionless hours in temperatures in excess of a hundred degrees. Late in the evening, semi-amphibious sitatunga marsh antelope emerged from the papyrus to feed, their elongated, flexible hooves springing off the decayed green matter. It was a relief to reach Khartoum. Still run as a military administration (the hundred officers of the Sudan Political Service ruled a million square miles of territory in nominal partnership with Egypt), it was more or less a white man’s town. The Sudanese lived in mud huts across the Nile at Omdurman, which Denys visited to inspect the Mahdi’s tomb. Overgrown with vegetation, it had not yet been repaired, and there was still a hole in the roof marking the entrance of a shell fired by one of Kitchener’s gunboats.

Stewards plundered the mean little stores of Khartoum to replenish supplies of tinned sausages, Eno’s Fruit Salts, and Reckitt’s Blue (a washing powder that dealt with stains largely by dyeing them blue), and then they left. The steamer continued through the deserts of northern Sudan, entering Egypt while the Bolsheviks were busy murdering the tsar and his family in Ekaterinburg. When Denys reached Cairo, on June 21, he checked in to Shepheard’s Hotel. But he had been mistaken about the date of the flying course and had missed the beginning. If he had known, he would have stayed in Sudan longer. He was furious; the journey had been a glorious break from the tension of the previous four years. In the weeks in the sudd, Denys had wandered in an interior no-man’s-land, allowing his thoughts to drift downward, through layers and layers of consciousness, until they reached something solid, and he touched again the sense of self dislodged by the meaningless horror of war. Wilderness offered him a glimpse of the inner world. It was incoherent, as inner worlds always are, but it was preferable to no glimpse at all.

Now, stuck in Cairo, he was instructed to wait at the Abouktir depot until the next course started, but he didn’t like that idea at all (“About eight in a tent I suppose and
such
an eight probably”), so he made a successful attempt to prolong his leave. He was concerned that he might not be able to have Billea with him on the course: other officers weren’t used to the African colonial’s habit of surrounding himself with servants. “I may have to part with him, as I’m going to school and it seems a shock to them that anyone can want a servant of his own,” Denys explained to Kermit. “However I shall make a pretty determined attempt to retain him.” And he did. Meanwhile, there was Cairo to enjoy, once he had shaken off a touch of fever. Shepheard’s was the nexus of European life and a venerable institution in its own right, its Italianate façades overlooking the noisy streets of Ezbekieh in one direction and the hotel’s own gardens, filled with tufty date groves and crows, in the other. It was one of the palatial hotels built along the great trade routes of the empire, subsequently colonized, in peacetime, by rich Europeans and Americans seeking winter sun. Denys knew many people in Cairo that summer, and breakfasted in company on the broad terrace at Shepheard’s before visiting Coptic churches and inspecting gold workshops in the Khal Khaleel, where the rutted alleys were too narrow to walk two abreast and the merchants wore long vests of sea-green Syrian silk. At night, he had dinner under Shepheard’s rigid-tentacled chandeliers before vanishing into the honeycombs of Cairo. He got leave to go up to Alexandria while waiting for his course to begin, and there, too, he “had rather fun meeting a lot of fellows I knew.” Decanting from the Mohamed Ali Club into the afternoon sunlight, he found the unpaved streets thronged with dervishes in patchwork cloaks, veiled beauties filling their water jars, and white-skinned pickets doing their rounds to keep the troops in order. While he was there, he got a wire from Hoskins. Denys had been trying to establish his whereabouts; he knew that his former commander had moved up to the front in Mesopotamia and was now somewhere in Palestine, where Allenby was pushing north through the Turkish garrison. It turned out that Hoskins was on the line near Jaffa, three hundred miles away. Denys rushed up and found him. “He was in good form,” Denys wrote to Kermit. “I had a great time with him for two days and visited J’lem and B’hem.”

THE THIRTY-EIGHTH TRAINING WING
of the Royal Air Force had commenced functions at Heliopolis in the environs of Cairo toward the end of 1917. Besides basic flight training, it ran aerial bombing, navigation, and gunnery schools, the students billeted, as Denys feared, in a cluster of yurtlike tents surrounded by barbed wire and blasted five times a day by calls from the adjacent minaret. Denys’s course began with nine weeks in the classroom. This didn’t suit him at all. “So far it is like being back at Oxford except that one’s companions are rather different and one has to attend the lectures,” he wrote. It was hard (“They work us morn to morn”), and the classrooms were crowded. But, as usual, Denys found a means of escape. “We keep going by slipping in to Cairo to have a meal and wine at the Turf and Sporting Club fairly frequently,” he told Kermit, who was now fighting in France. But on account of his heart the medics passed Denys fit to fly only in warm climates. He was disappointed that he would not be able to serve on a European front even in summer. Once qualified, he had planned to return to England for a spell, but it was now clear that this would be at the coldest time of year, and he admitted to Kermit that he was not sure his health could stand it (“Am a little doubtful about how I should winter there these days”). “Good luck, and don’t get killed,” he ended the letter.

The nine weeks ground on, but in September, before the course was over, Denys injured his right foot when a piece of barbed wire jammed under the nail of his big toe. The Cairo doctors, “after chopping and burning it about for some time, eventually reduced the unfortunate limb to such a condition that they hastily rushed me into hospital and tore off the nail.” He was sent to Helonaus, where the Grand Hotel had been converted into a convalescent hospital, and his toe immediately turned septic again. One might have been relieved that one was not about to be dispatched to be burned alive or smashed to dust in France. But Denys was disappointed. He was missing an opportunity to take the greatest risk so far. “It begins to look as though the war will be over now before I am fledged,” he wrote morosely. Kermit sent him a book of short stories by the American writer H. G. Dwight, which he enjoyed, and he was mightily cheered up by Hoskins, who came down to visit “in wonderful form.” (Already a major general, Hoskins was knighted in 1919 and awarded the Order of the Nile by the sultan of Egypt.) The “show” in the north was over. Allenby had continued north through Palestine and met the Turks at Megiddo, where they finally collapsed. The Allies had also cleaned up in Mesopotamia. “I am very glad that Marshall rounded off the Mespots show so neatly,” Denys commented, “and that we walked into Nineveh, that great city.”
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But he was sour about the progress of the war elsewhere. He felt that the Germans were refusing to lie down and die nobly. After a decisive French victory on July 18, the Allies had been making steady daily advances in France against a hungry and demoralized enemy. By the end of September, they had swept along the whole western front, though the Germans fought a dogged rearguard action virtually all the way through France and Belgium. “The Boche in defeat,” Denys wrote, “is making it plainer than ever that he possesses neither a sense of humour nor of dignity, eg he has just announced through the Swiss government that he wishes to make an arrangement by which both sides shall cease to bomb behind the lines: that
he
intends to cease this ill-advised practice forthwith. And then his delightful note to the Tscecko-Jugo Slavs reorganising them as a nation and saying that Berlin will be delighted to welcome their Ambassador! Boche humour is another name for horseplay and Boche dignity is another name for bombastic pride.” As for his own news, Denys was cross about that, too, especially as the weather was perfect for flying. “If my toe had not let me down I should by now be well on my way through towards completing,” he told Kermit. “As it is the next few days may see a German collapse and with it the end of any point in my remaining a sodjer.”