The mottled lizard, p.1
The Mottled Lizard, page 1
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Dedication
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Copyright
About the Book
In this sequel to The Flame of Thika, Elspeth Huxley takes up her story after the family returns to Kenya after the First World War. Her family and friends, their home and their travels, the glorious wildlife and scenery, described in rich and loving detail, all spring to life in this enchanting book.
About the Author
Elspeth Huxley was born in 1906, the daughter of Major Josceline Grant of Njoro, Kenya, where she spent most of her childhood. She was educated at the European School in Nairobi and at Reading University where she took a diploma in agriculture, and at Cornell University, USA. In 1929 she joined the Empire Marketing Board as a press officer. She married Gervas Huxley in 1931 and travelled widely with him in America, Africa and elsewhere. She was on the BBC General Advisory Council from 1952 to 1959, when she joined the Monckton Advisory Commission on Central Africa. She wrote novels, detective fiction, biography and travel titles, and her books include The Flame Trees of Thika (1959), The Challenge of Africa (1971), Livingstone and His African Journeys (1974), Florence Nightingale (1975), Scott of the Antarctic (1977), Nellie: Letters from Africa (1980), Whipsnade: Captive Breeding for Survival (1981), The Prince Buys the Manor (1982), Last Days in Eden (1985, with Hugo van Lawick) and Out in the Midday Sun: My Kenya (1985). She died in 1997.
FOR V.G.
WHO REMEMBERS ROBIN
Put forth to watch, unschooled, alone,
’Twixt hostile earth and sky –
The mottled lizard ’neath the stone
Is wiser here than I.
RUDYARD KIPLING
Chapter 1
JUST before she sailed, Tilly got a telegram from Robin saying: ‘Please bring shaving brush and windmill.’ With everyone being demobilized, even the shaving brush was difficult, a windmill impossible; it was hard enough to get passages for the wife and daughter of a repatriated soldier, let alone for a large metal construction. Tilly had only managed to squeeze us both into a ship by a combination, as she said, of sucking up to shipping clerks and bullying managers. So she left the windmill and took instead a cigar-box full of silkworm cocoons. These were to pioneer a new industry in East Africa; now that the First World War had ended everyone would be crying out for luxuries, the market would expand.
In the Red Sea the sticky heat was appalling. At night we took our mattresses on deck and tried to sleep, impeded by lascar sailors and even more by rats, which abounded. After Aden, we noticed that, about five o’clock every morning, and with a great deal of clanking and creaking, the ship swung her bows round to face backwards. The engine stopped for a few minutes and then started up again, and the vessel swung back to resume her course.
Tilly was puzzled by this and so was Randall Swift, a fellow farmer also returning from the wars. Three days out of Aden he came to Tilly with as grave a look as any countenance so merry could assume to say that, despite the heat, we had better sleep in our cabins.
‘We couldn’t sleep,’ Tilly pointed out.
‘We can spend the night there, for if we don’t, we’ll be spending it in kingdom come, from what I hear. There’s bubonic plague on board.’
The purpose of turning the ship round, it appeared, was to allow the bodies of those committed to the deep to avoid entanglement in the screw. Randall had found this out by sleuth-work; the bubonic plague was a secret, for if the health authorities at Mombasa heard of it, we should be kept in quarantine for weeks, at a heavy cost to the owners, and no one would be allowed to land. So those of the passengers who suspected anything were just as anxious to keep the matter quiet as the Captain and crew, and there was no ship’s doctor.
We went about drenched in Keatinge’s Powder, of which Tilly had brought a liberal supply, our eyes alert for dead rats. Luckily we were due at Kilindini in less than a week.
‘It’s touch and go with the cocoons,’ Tilly observed, two days before our hoped-for arrival.
‘Don’t tell me they’re starting to hatch,’ Randall said.
‘I think, if the ship’s punctual, they may just hold out. I don’t know what the Customs would say to a lot of grubs crawling about the baggage.’
Each morning Tilly examined the cigar-box with mounting anxiety. Whether she had miscalculated, or whether the ship had taken longer than was expected, or whether the Red Sea’s heat had disarranged the hatching schedule, I do not know. The day before we were due at Kilindini, she observed unmistakable signs of activity among the cocoons.
‘They can’t possibly hatch now,’ she exclaimed, frowning at them with entreaty and dismay.
But they had made up their collective mind. Not only that, in their new-found freedom no cigar-box was going to keep them confined. On our next visit to the cabin, which Tilly said was hot enough to cook a rice pudding or a meringue, we found little black grubs crawling about all over the drawers.
‘We must catch them, that’s all,’ Tilly said firmly. She was not going to let a lot of silkworm grubs defeat her on the threshold of their new career. So she and I, Randall and the bride he was taking back with him, chased grubs among handkerchiefs and underclothes, on the floor and in the bunks, and put them into a tin in whose lid Randall punched tiny holes.
‘They’ll die of starvation,’ Tilly said in distress. ‘I wonder if I can find any mulberry leaves in Mombasa? Or if they would accept a substitute?’
On the morning we were due to dock the entire cabin appeared to be a mass of little grubs. Assisted by Randall, Tilly hauled our luggage into the passage and stood guard to prevent any member of the crew from penetrating into the insectory she had established. Our feelings of relief as we at last walked down the gangway, our heavy double-felt hats (called terais) clamped firmly down on our heads, were immense. Both the bubonic plague and the silkworms were still concealed from the authorities, and once we were ashore we were safe.
The up-country train left about four o’clock. The smell of dust, the crowds of jostling, sweaty Africans in tattered shirts or red blankets, the beaded women thrusting bananas, oranges, scrawny live fowls and gourds of gruel up at the passengers from a gravel platform, the clean bright air, the hard bright sunshine, the brilliant creepers, the monstrous glistening baobabs – all these had not changed. Soon coconuts and cultivation gave way to nondescript and spiky bush, harsh as old iron, reduced by extremities of climate to a vegetable equality where no bush rose above its fellow, no proud tree threw its shade, all was level, featureless and sterile; there was no water, and patches of red gritty soil, leached of all enriching humus, gaped from the bush like raw wounds.
At Voi the train stopped for about an hour while its passengers were fed, or fed themselves. It was dark by now, the soft velvet darkness of the tropics we had not felt for four years. You walked as through a warm conservatory whose great dome was encrusted with all the diamonds in the world, and all the scents in the world were there too, changing like currents in the sea, from the overwrought sweetness of frangipani to the crisp pungency of dried cattle-dung, from smoke of brushwood fires to heat-baked sand and stones, from the rich oiliness of fat-smeared bodies to the alien twang of the oxtail soup which awaited us in the dak bungalow with our evening meal.
On level ground serving as a platform, and behind the goods shed, a lot of little fires sprang up, as native passengers concocted their meals of maize-flour, rice and bananas. Firelight flickered like a snake’s tongue over bronze or coppery limbs and caught the gleam of white teeth bared in laughter. Our fires, our lamp-lit bungalow, our little knot of sound and movement, must have seemed from above like a tiny prick of light in a great encircling darkness, a firefly flashing out and then vanishing. Close by, we could hear two hyenas calling to each other and, farther off, the throaty grunt of a lion. The slave and ivory route to the Great Lakes that had crossed this waste of thorns long before railways were invented did not seem far distant in time, you could sense a ghostly trudge of feet bound for exile; indeed, less than thirty years earlier you might have come upon an Arab caravan camped near the site of our station. Bleached skulls and thigh-bones, overlooked by hyenas, might still be found to mark this long and bitter road.
‘A lot of things have changed in the last four years,’ Randall Swift remarked, ‘but not the Uganda Railway.’
‘No, it’s just the same, only more so,’ Tilly agreed. And indeed the little wood-burning locomotives, brought out to pull the first trains less than twenty years ago, were still manfully puffing their way up to
‘Perhaps we shall see a lion tomorrow morning,’ suggested Tilly, who was always ready for some stirring event. ‘Then we can stop the train, and go after it.’
‘We’re hardly important enough,’ Randall objected.
‘We can always pretend to be. No one knows that you’re not a new Colonial Secretary, or I’m not a cousin of the Governor’s.’
‘They might make a shrewd guess at it,’ Randall said, glancing at our clothes. After nearly four weeks in the crowded little vessel, these appeared serviceable rather than elegant. ‘That’s what we should have to look like, to be believed,’ he added, indicating a young man at a nearby table dressed in the official uniform, a khaki suit with shiny brass buttons and a collar and tie. His clean new suit was perfectly pressed; a big cork helmet, with a long sweeping stern shaped like an otter’s tail and with a flashing badge in front, lay by his side next to a debe – a four-gallon paraffin tin – of water. The conversation he was holding with one of the waiters did not appear to be going well.
The young official was giving an instruction in flawless Swahili, the kind that everybody knew they ought to speak, but no one did. After a while the waiter, still looking baffled, said ‘ndio, bwana,’ went away and returned with a bottle of Worcester sauce.
The young man was patient and verbose. At last the waiter, grasping at least part of the order, removed the debe in which some oysters awaited their doom.
‘It must be difficult for him to understand that oysters must be eaten raw,’ Randall observed, ‘when we’re always insisting that everything else must be cooked or boiled, even water.’
‘What an odious young man,’ concluded Tilly, who did not like displays of privilege. Meanwhile the waiter was in difficulties with another passenger, a red-faced North-countryman who could speak nothing but English. He explained slowly, loudly and repeatedly that he did not like steamed sponge, but wanted cheese instead. The waiter brought a bottle of Worcester sauce. It was perhaps a relief to the waiter to encounter our clumsy, basic version of the language, which at least he understood. The words were Swahili, but by ignoring all the grammar everything was greatly simplified, provided that no profound, complex or subtle thoughts had to be conveyed. Our gastronomic needs were not profound, subtle or complex and we avoided the Worcester sauce.
At last the engine-driver, who had a table to himself, rose to his feet, fastened a belt loosened for the meal, nodded to the oyster-eating official and remarked that we had better be on our way. There was a general gathering together of hats and bags and equipment, a scraping of chairs and settling of bills, and we strolled across to mount the train, while the guard shouted at the native passengers, whistles blew and people scurried about getting either in or out of carriages. With a great deal of chugging and huffing the locomotive pulled itself together, digested a mawful of logs, emitted a cascade of sparks and heaved the crowded carriages away from the friendly little station into the encircling blackness of the Taru desert.
When we awoke next morning, we felt that we had really come home. During the night the red dust had drifted in through open windows and settled over everything. Our faces had become a milk-chocolate colour, with white circles round the eyes, like coons, and the peculiar, tingling, feathery smell of the dust, as native to this high country as the whistling thorn, the twisted olive, the flat-topped acacia or the lolloping giraffe, was never out of our nostrils. And with it through open windows came the smell of early morning, the essence of the fresh and young: of dew on biscuit-shaded wiry grasses, of wind off distant grape-blue hills, of innumerable acacias, of lees of century-accumulated sunshine, of hidden moisture in silent sand-rivers, and simply of freedom and space, the smell of the highveld of Africa that one can never forget.
Away across a rolling and ravine-creased plain speckled by twisted thorn-trees more numerous than the stars, there floated in the soft early-morning sky, and in a most unlikely manner, a mighty mound or hump the colour of mother-of-pearl above a great ruff of pale lavender cloud. This cloud masked the base of a mountain which did not seem attached to the ground, but rather to have been created out of light and space and fancy where it floated, like the sail of some great celestial ship. The sun’s early beams now lanced the plain in shafts that seemed a thousand miles in length, giving rise to shadows longer than the spires of the tallest cathedrals; and as for our train, we could see a moving replica of it, in silhouette, gliding across the golden grasses on our left-hand side. We gazed in silence at the majesty of Kilimanjaro, pink and delicate as a flamingo’s breast-feather, and might have imagined it to be a trick of light and cloud that would dissolve in full daylight had we not known of its reality.
I think that if one lived to be a hundred, and watched the dawn break and the sun rise over the highveld of Africa every morning, one would never tire of it, just as a sailor will always find delight in watching the sea. And indeed there is the same play of light, the same endless changing, forming and reforming of cloud and shadow, the same sense of the creation of the world before one’s eyes. The rolling up of long shadows thrown by rocks and trees never fails to enthrall; their tips race in utter silence across the plain; behind them, trees and grass and bush and ant-hills spring into a new golden life of their own. It is like watching the rolling up of a gigantic carpet at an incredible speed. The fascination of beginnings – of the daisy that opens its petals to the sun, the yellow chick drying from the egg, the spring that trickles from the rock, the clenched bud just parting on a twig – all this wonder is packed every morning into the birth of an African day. Heat and sweat and weariness come later, but all that is forgotten at the start; it was four years since we had seen this miracle and we gloried in it again.
And, of course, the animals were a major part of it. These great herds of moving, unhurried, innocent creatures, at home in their element, numerous as buttercups in an English May meadow and as beautiful, were like the heart that gives life to a body; without them, the features of the landscape would still be there and still be shapely, but they would be lifeless as the contours of the dead.
The wonders of this journey to Nairobi have been described many times, the tens of thousands of animals to be seen from the train, the sense of travelling through some tremendous park full of tame beasts, almost as if one had journeyed through the Garden of Eden, before the fall. It would be tedious, therefore, to repeat all this and to dwell upon the great shining herds of zebra and wildebeeste, the close-packed, gracefully-horned gazelles with tails always a-wag, the patchwork giraffe arching their necks to nibble a tree-top, the red, lyre-horned impala, the cow-like eland with their dewlaps swaying, the lithe hunting cheetahs and ungainly hyenas and silver-backed jackals.
I searched with hopeful eyes for a lion, or even a pride of lions sloping off into a thick-bushed gully, or sunning themselves on a cluster of rocks. It was always an event if one saw a lion, a small triumph scored. It was not a rare event, but on this occasion lions eluded us; we saw, however, a procession of three rhinos, a father and mother and half-grown child, walking in single file, their insect-like heads weighed down by their long curved horns, like a prehistoric frieze. When the leader heard or smelt the train he halted and swung a lowered head round to face it, pawing with one big foot on the ground, searching for something on which to vent his irritation, like a Victorian father whose privacy is invaded not by an individual but by an untoward event. Rhinos had been known to charge the train itself in sheer outraged fury, and I hoped this family party would not decide to do so, for they could only stub their noses and get themselves shot. They did not realize that all their heavy armour, which for centuries had protected them from every hazard Africa could offer, had become a mere encumbrance in their last and hopeless battle agains a species infinitely more ruthless, ferocious and clever than their own.
