The Flame Trees of Thika Read Online Free PDF Page A

have expected, and managed to get the mine into production, as he put it, though I think that consisted only of persuading some of the cannibals to hack at a hillside with picks and wash the resulting rock in a stream. In a romantic moment he sent Tilly a ring made of gold from his own mine and a diamond from a digging in which he had owned a share; looking at it sadly some years later, he remarked that it represented the total output of his mining career.
    This cannot have been quite true, for he managed to sell his portion of the interior of Mozambique at a profit, which would have been larger had the buyers paid more in cash and less in shares in a syndicate which went broke soon afterwards. But the cash payment was enough to take him on a dubious cargo-boat to British East Africa. All the good reports he had heard about the country seemed to him more than justified. Letters that might have been penned by Roger Stilbeck himself fired Tilly, also, with a longing for this land of splendour and promise that offered sunshine, sport, and adventure, with the prospect of independence and the rebuilding of lost fortunes; and here we now were, again united, and the owners of a ninety-nine-year lease of five hundred acres of land.
    If it was not quite all that Tilly, at any rate, had expected, it was nevertheless there, under all that coat of grass and bush.With hard work and patience, the vision could become real: a house could arise, coffee bushes put down their roots and bloom and fruit, shady trees grow up around a tidy lawn; there was order waiting to be created out of wilderness, a home out of bush, a future from a blank and savage history, a fortune from raw materials that were, as they then existed, of no conceivable value at all.
    All this would take, perhaps, longer than Tilly and Robin had at first counted on, it would need more money than they had, it would be a harder struggle than they had anticipated; but they were young, hopeful, and healthy, and what others had done before them could be done again. Their spirits had rallied by the time they got back to the Blue Posts, and although we were sore, hot, exhausted, and bitten, although no cool grass hut awaited us, no span of oxen ready for the plough, by the time I was sent off to bed they had already harvested their first crop, bought a motor-car, built a stone house, and booked their passages for a holiday trip home, when they would stand their relations expensive meals and take a grouse-moor in Scotland for the rest of the summer.

Chapter 3
    R OBIN’S plan to take the Scotch cart to the new land had to be abandoned because of all the pig and ant-bear holes, and the unbridged rivers. Everything was unpacked and made into loads for porters to carry on their heads. Robin was to make a camp, enrol some labour, and start to clear land, and we would follow in a few days when tents were pitched and everything in order.
    Robin rode off on a mule at the head of a peculiar cavalcade. Bedding, tents, chairs, tables, and boxes of stores made loads that were conventional if uncomfortable; as well as these, we seemed to have a lot of oddments, like a side-saddle, a grindstone, an accordion, the Speckled Sussex pullets, an amateur taxidermist’s outfit, a pile of enamel basins, a light plough with yokes and chains, rolls of barbed wire, and a dressmaker’s dummy which afriend of Tilly’s had given her, assuring her it was indispensable for a woman in the wilder parts of Africa.
    ‘I wonder what the porters think about it all,’ Tilly speculated, watching one of them stagger off underneath a tin bath containing a sewing-machine and a second-hand gramophone.
    ‘They don’t
think
,’ said Major Breeches, dismissing the notion as absurd. They sang, however, and marched off in fine style, though they were only what Major Breeches called a scratch lot, and did not get far before various loads fell off, or got tangled in trees, and several of the carriers grew disheartened,