Tramp Royale (28 page)

When we were a short piece down the road and it was evident that
Felis Rex
was not following she slowed down again. Then I pulled one of the longest double-takes on record: "Hey! That
really was
a lion!"

"Of course," Ticky said coolly. "That's what you came for, wasn't it? Who did you think it was? Bert Lahr?"

Then she stuck a match in her mouth and tried to strike a cigarette. "There was a lion," I said slowly. "There were two of them. They were
lions
."

Shortly I was puffing a cigarette nonchalantly myself and feeling very good about it, as if I had just won a Pulitzer Prize. They said we couldn't find lions! Francis Macomber Quatermain can find lions any day-just step off the train and flag a taxi. When we rounded the next curve and saw a car stopped and people outside it I leaned out and said, "Don't look now but there are two lions just back down the road a block or so."

A man looked up from an open bonnet. "Thank you," came a clipped British voice, "but at the moment my engine is overheated. Tell them to wait; we'll be along shortly, I hope."

We drove on.

No more termite hills stared back at us that morning, though we stared at plenty. But one more alarm took place: I had grown used to the routine of rolling up windows for every overhanging tree and was not especially surprised when Mrs. Morgan started rolling them up once without taking time to stop the car. I looked around, saw that there were no such trees. "What's the matter? Leopard on the ground?"

"Mamba!"

I was too ignorant at the time to be impressed. A green something slithered rapidly down out of a bush beside us and slid across the road with amazing speed-a snake more than six feet long and as thick as my wrist. Even in my ignorance it looked mean. Mrs. Morgan got us well out of the neighborhood as fast as the little car would go.

The mamba is the subject of many grisly stories in the bushveld country, most of them depressingly well authenticated. Its bite is much more poisonous than that of our rattlesnake; seven minutes from being bitten to death in agony seems to be about the average. If struck, you may possibly save yourself by taking a bush knife and whacking off, without any delay at all, the bitten hand or arm or foot. Worse still, this snake is not the peaceloving gentleman the rattler is; it seems to like to kill and it is terribly fast; a mamba has been known to chase and catch a man on horseback, strike from the ground-and kill him.

The Afrikanders seemed very casual to us about the big carnivores; they are not casual about mambas.

We had lunch at a rest camp called Skukuza-tea and sandwiches served by a barefoot black giant who called me "Mahster"-a custom I was never able to get used to. Inside the kraal at Skukuza we saw two large dead trees which nevertheless appeared to be loaded with fruit. A closer look showed that the "fruit" were birds' nests, nests of the weaver bird which constructs a nest not unlike that of the Baltimore oriole. But, unlike the oriole, these birds are destructively sociable; once they pick on a tree, it is doomed; they turn it into an avian slum, building so close together that the tree dies. There is probably some deep moral lesson in this but my philosopher's license has expired.

During lunch it started to drizzle, which depressed me until Mrs. Morgan pointed out that rain would bring the game out; on a hot dry clear day the animals tended to hide in some shady cool place and wait for sundown. Sure enough, we saw more game than ever, mostly varieties of antelope, including eight of the rather scarce water buck, more kudus, roan antelope, wildebeest, eland, the lovely little duiker, and enough impala to cause traffic jams. We were rather bored with impala by now, pretty as they are, but we searched each herd carefully for zebra, as zebra have a habit of hiding themselves among impala in order to evade the lions-no luck, no zebra.

But there were plenty of baboons and swarming families of monkeys and all sorts of strange birds, including one called a bush turkey although he is not one. He is as big as a turkey but has a bill like a toucan, which makes him look as if he had put on a false face for Hallowe'en.

We came to a small natural clearing in which there was a herd which I at first mistook for gnus. Then I realized that these were bigger, thicker through the body, heavier in the horn, and most emphatically did not look like a frivolous cartoon of some other animal . . . most especially the bull of the herd did not look like a joke. He looked like Satan himself headed for a coven.

"Buffalo," Mrs. Morgan said softly.

I picked up my camera and rather shakily started to take pictures. We had not expected to find buffalo. Having found them I was not sure that I was glad we had. The African buffalo is mean, treacherous, stupid, and unpredictable. A high-velocity, steel-jacketed bullet will bounce off the boss of horn that protects his idiot brain. In size and muscle he gives much the impression of a medium tank.

I took several pictures while the herd gazed and the bull of the herd stared at us. Finally he started ambling toward us, then broke into a trot. Mrs. Morgan let in the clutch and we got away from there as fast as possible. Apparently the bull decided that his duty was done in chasing us away from his family; he did not follow us down the track. I do not know whether or not a Henry J. can outdistance an African buffalo on a straight-away or not, and I don't ever want to find out.

About twenty minutes and two hundred impala later we spotted two cars ahead of us, stopped under some trees. A car at rest is always a signal to approach cautiously and stop to see what they have stopped to look at; we did so. I craned my neck. "What are they look-
umph
!"

I found myself so close to a male lion that I could look down on the top of his head.

About ten feet beyond him was another male in the same pose, couchant. There should have been a flight of public library steps between them. There they lay, as steady as stone statues, and stared back at the dozen or so humans staring at them. They were both big, magnificent, black-maned beasts. I won't attempt to estimate their dimensions; I feel sure that the fact that they were uncaged distorted my judgment. But they were not small.

Nor can I explain why three out of three males that we saw were black-maned, since black manes are supposed to be scarce.

I should have been able to take a perfect close-up, save for one thing: the light was too poor for color film . . . late afternoon, under trees, and a fine drizzle. It would have required a flash bulb, and I certainly would not have fired off a flash in a lion's face even if I had had one-I don't claim to be bright but I am not suicidally stupid. Sure, sure, it says right here in the book that lions will not molest people in automobiles, but the lion might regard a flash bulb as a violation of protocol. Anyhow, lions have been known to take umbrage at the automobile itself and claw all four tires to ribbons. With lion no farther away than a parking meter I felt not at all anxious to call attention to myself.

So we stared and they stared. I don't know how long we stayed. The lions seemed perfectly willing to sit through a second show. After a long time Mrs. Morgan suggested that we had better be moving on if we were to get to the hippo pool before dark.

Either somebody moved the hippo pool or there was something wrong with the map we were using; we never did find it. Hippopotami are the only animals you are assured of seeing when you visit Kruger Park, because they always stay home in one curve of the Sabie River. Our guide had been there many times before; nevertheless we could not find it and lost so much time looking for it that we barely made it out the gate before sundown closing time.

I didn't care-we had seen four lions.

The booking clerk at the railroad station in Johannesburg had refused to give us a return booking from Nelspruit to Johannesburg and had given me a lecture instead. I had attempted to book our return as soon as we arrived in Nelspruit but had been told by the station agent there that it was too late to book except directly with the train conductor; he advised me to come down a bit early and see the conductor.

I was baffled. How it could always be the wrong time to make a train reservation, when we disembarked in Cape Town, when we arrived in Johannesburg, and when we arrived in Nelspruit, I did not understand and still do not. But there it was-jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, never jam today. So we hurried through an excellent dinner at the Hotel Paragon in Nelspruit-the Paragon deserved its name-and Mrs. Morgan took us down to the train in good time. When the conductor stepped off the train we planned to buttonhole him.

So did fifty other people. We didn't even get close to him.

Not that it mattered, he was letting no one on. We did hear him tell one woman with a baby that she could stand up all night in the vestibule but that was the best he offered. It was a holiday crowd, returning from the seaside; even the seats in the dining car were occupied. The next train was twenty-four hours later and we had no assurance that we would be able to get on even that train-the station master either could not or would not issue reservations for it.

The railroads in South Africa are atrocious, not because of equipment but because of management-sort of a Long Island Railway on a grand scale. True, the equipment could be better in many ways, but the real defect seems to be a total absence of any notion of traffic management. The bureaucrats who run it seem to have borrowed a slogan from an earlier, ruggeder day in American industry: "The public be damned!"

This weekend was the end of a school holiday; any traffic engineer owning a slipstick, having access to the records of previous years, and possessed of enough savvy to figure his own retirement pay could have predicted the service needed that weekend after finishing the morning paper and still have had time to take a long coffee break. But oh no! they had to run it like a game of musical chairs, with children left standing when the music stopped as an expected part of the game.

I have already noted that it was Sam's hospitality and Sam's Pontiac that got us out of Cape Town; all trains were booked solid three days ahead-with no intention of adding more equipment. The same conditions prevailed all over the country. Compounding the annoyance was the barely veiled insolence of Afrikander civil servants, an attitude of who the hell are you to even expect to ride our railroads.

I would have no right to complain if it were not that South Africa maintains tourist bureaus in our own country which publicize, among other things, how wonderful their railroads are.

Sure, sure, I'm just a sorehead tourist who could not manage to get on the train he wanted-but note this: South Africa has plenty of coal and exports it. But Cape Town imports foreign coal, it being cheaper to do so than to bring it down from the north. Inasmuch as the country has a markedly unfavorable balance of trade and the government has a firm policy of preventing the importation of anything at all where it can possibly be avoided, this one fact seems to me to underline the inadequacy and inefficiency of their railroads.

The same Transport Commission which runs the railroads also runs the bus lines and the air lines. Competition is intentionally eliminated.

Never mind-I admit that their railroads, or any railroads, are better than the means Allan Quatermain used. Mrs. Morgan drove us back to the hotel; during the ride I arranged with her for her to drive us to Johannesburg the following day. We checked back in at the hotel and went into the bar lounge. We were soaked through from a drizzling rain while standing on the station platform, exhausted from a long day in the bushveld, disappointed at not being able to board the train, and we each needed about two ounces of universal solvent in a tall glass to place a warm glow over our homesickness.

The bar was closed.

It was the first time we had run into the British Commonwealth customs of "hours." I have been assured by others that "hours" are carefully arranged throughout the Queen's domain to keep a weary man from taking a drink when he needs it most. Actually, closing hours are not much trouble to travelers; they are exempt from most of the restrictions. I don't know how we got caught at Nelspruit as I don't know the rules.

Presently the manager-owner, a very nice chap, found us, condoled with us at not getting the train, and was hospitable-so much so that I never did get up the courage to say, "Hey, Mac, how about a drink?" After a while we went to our room. The beds were good, there was plenty of hot water; the Paragon really is a good hotel.

Mrs. Morgan picked us up in the morning and we set out for Johannesburg. This meant that we paid for another five hundred miles of taxi service, or a total of three days. One day by taxi to see lions seemed reasonable; that was what we were there for and we had already invested much time and money in the preparation. Two more days (one for her to drive us to Johannesburg, a second to return empty at our expense) seemed a little steep, especially as we held train tickets which had not been honored and which we could not cash. But it was either that or be stuck in the interior of Africa with a strong likelihood of missing our ship for Singapore.

Actually Mrs. Morgan charged about half what the same service would have cost us in Colorado, even though her little Henry J. represented an investment equal to a Cadillac and petrol cost more (and gave poorer mileage) than does gasoline in the States.

I have been told by South Africans that the Afrikander farmer is the laziest man on earth, given to sitting on his stoep, smoking his pipe, and watching his black farmhands make him rich. If so, Mrs. Morgan and her husband must have been exceptions. They owned and lived on a farm, which they worked through a black foreman. As is usual, his compensation was permission to crop part of the land for himself. They owned a general store for the natives, which was managed by a "coloured." Mrs. Morgan ran the Nelspruit Taxi Service and was its principal driver, although she had three children at home including a young baby whom she had to stop by to feed occasionally-she had, of course, a Bantu housekeeper-cook. And Papa had a full-time job as a boiler inspector on the railroad.