Besides I caught that on the dirty boat out from Marseilles. P.O.M, hadn’t been ill a day. Neither had Karl. I loved this country and I felt at home and where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go. Then, in my grandfather’s time, Michigan was a malaria ridden state. They called it fever and ague. And in Tortugas, where I’d spent months, a thousand men once died of yellow fever. New continents and islands try to frighten you with disease as a snake hisses. The snake may be poisonous too. You kill them off. Hell, what I had a month ago would have killed me in the old days before they invented the remedies. Maybe it would and maybe I would have got well.
It is easier to keep well in a good country by taking simple precautions than to pretend that a country which is finished is still good.
A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives I live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out, and next it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited.
A country wears out quickly unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts. When he quits using beasts and uses machines the earth defeats him quickly. The machine can’t reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he cannot raise. A country was made to be as we found it. We are the intruders and after we are dead we may have ruined it but it will still be there and we don’t know what the next changes are. I suppose they all end up like Mongolia.
I would come back to Africa but not to make a living from it. I could do that with two pencils and a few hundred sheets of the cheapest paper. But I would come back to where it pleased me to live, to really live. Not just to let my life pass. Our people went to America because that was the place to go then. It had been a good country and we had made a mess of it and I would go, now, somewhere else as we had always had the right to go somewhere else and as we had always gone. You could always come back. Let the others come to America who did not know that they had come too late. Our people had seen it at its best and fought for it when it was well worth fighting for.
Now I would go somewhere else. We always went in the old days and there were still good places to go.
I knew a good country when I saw one. Here there was game, plenty of birds, and I liked the natives. Here I could shoot and fish. That, and writing, and reading, and seeing pictures was all I cared about doing. And I could remember all the pictures. Other things I liked to watch but they were what I liked to do. That and ski-ing. But my legs were bad now and it was not worth the time you spent hunting good snow any more. You saw too many people ski-ing now.
Now, the car making a turn around a bank and crossing a green, grassy field, we came in sight of the Masai village.
When the Masai saw us they started running and we stopped, surrounded by them, just below the stockade. There were the young warriors who had run with us, and now their women and the children all came out to see us. The children were all quite young and the men and women all seemed the same age.
There were no old people. They all seemed to be our great friends and we gave a very successful party with refreshments in the shape of our bread which they all ate with much laughing, the men first, then the women. Then I had M’Cola open the two cans of mincemeat and the plum pudding and I cut these into rations and passed them out.
I had heard and read that the Masai subsisted only on the blood of their cattle mixed with milk, drawing the blood ‘off’ from a wound in a vein of the neck made by shooting an arrow at close range. These Masai, however, ate bread, cold mincemeat, and plum pudding with great relish and much laughter and joking. One very tall and handsome one kept asking me something that I did not understand and then five or six more joined in. Whatever this was they wanted it very badly.
Finally the tallest one made a very strange face and emitted a sound like a dying pig. I understood finally: he was asking if we had one of those, and I pressed the button of the klaxon. The children ran screaming, the warriors laughed and laughed, and then as Kamau, in response to popular demand, pressed the klaxon again and again, I watched the look of utter rapture and ecstasy on the women’s faces and knew that with that klaxon he could have had any woman in the tribe.
Finally we had to go and after distributing the empty beer bottles, the labels from the bottles, and finally the bottle caps, picked up by M’Cola from the floor, we left, klaxoning the women into ecstasy, the children into panic, and the warriors into delight. The warriors ran with us for a good way but we had to make time, the going was good through the park-like country and, in a little while, we waved to the last of them standing straight and tall, in their brown skin garments, their clubbed pigtails hanging, their faces stained a red-brown, leaning on their spears, looking after us and smiling.
The sun was almost down and as I did not know the road I had the runner get up in front to sit with the Wanderobo-Masai and help direct Kamau and I sat in the back with M’Cola and Garrick. We were out of the park country and on to the dry bush-spattered plain before the sun went down and I had another bottle of the German beer and, watching the country, saw, suddenly, that all the trees were full of white storks. I did not know whether they were there in migration or were following the locusts but, in the twilight, they were lovely to see and, deeply moved by them, I gave the old man a good two fingers of beer that was left in the bottom of the bottle.
On the next bottle I forgot and drank it all before I remembered the old man. (There were still storks in the trees and we saw some Grant’s gazelles feeding off to the right. A jackal, like a grey fox, trotted across the road.) So I told M’Cola to open another bottle and we were through the plain and climbing the long slope toward the road and the village, the two mountains in sight now, and it almost dark and quite cold when I handed the bottle to the old man, who took it where he was crouched up under the roof, and nursed it tenderly.
At the village we stopped in the road in the dark, and I paid the runner the amount it said to give him in the note he had brought. I paid the old man the amount Pop said to pay him and a bonus. Then there was a big dispute among them all. Garrick was to go to the main camp to get his money.
Abdullah insisted upon going along. He did not trust Garrick. The Wanderobo-Masai insisted pitifully that he go. He was sure the others would cheat him out of his share and I was fairly sure they would, too. There was petrol that had been left for us to use in case we were short and for us to bring in any event. We were overloaded and I did not know how the road was ahead. But I thought we might carry Abdullah and Garrick and squeeze in the Wanderobo-Masai. There was no question of the old man going. He had been paid off and had agreed to the amount, but now he would not leave the car.
He crouched on top of the load and hung on to the ropes saying, ‘I am going with B’wana’.
M’Cola and Kamau had to break his handholds and pull» him off to re-load, him shouting, ‘I want to go with B’wana!’
While they were loading in the dark he held on to my arm and talked very quietly in a language that I could not understand.
‘You have the shillings,’ I said.
‘Yes, B’wana,’ he said. That was not what it was about. The money was all right.
Then, when we started to get in the car he broke away and started to climb up through the back and on to the loads. Garrick and Abdullah pulled him down.
‘You can’t go. There isn’t room.’
He talked to me
