The Flame Trees of Thika Read Online Free PDF

dumped their burdens, and fled. But the distance was only five miles, so the safari did not have to be highly organized.
    The gramophone had been suggested to Robin as a convenient way of breaking the ice with the natives. It enticed them, as a light attracts insects; once, as it were, captured, the advantages of signing on for work could be explained, and some would feel bold enough to try the experiment. So Robin took the gramophone and, when we were installed in tents, hopefully played ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ and ‘The Lost Chord’ over and over again. As the records were scratched and the gramophone an old one, extraordinary sounds emerged from its trumpet to be lost very quickly in the surrounding bush and long grass. Its only effect was to deflect Juma from his labours; he listened entranced; and one of the mules was found gazing pensively down the trumpet.
    The local inhabitants, however, remained aloof. No one seemed to live anywhere near. But the reserve was said to hold a great supply of able-bodied young men who did nothing all day but grease their limbs and plait their pigtails while their mothers and sisters toiled in shambas, and who would be a great deal better employed (according to their prospective employers) in useful work like clearing bush, ploughing land, and building houses. These young men were not to be lured, it seemed, even by the magic of sound coming out of a trumpet, which was generally held, by those unfamiliar with the invention, to issue from a familiar spirit held captive in the box.
    Before we left the Blue Posts, a young Irishman arrived one day on a bicycle, with a broken fly-wheel strapped to his back. He paused for a drink, which he must indeed have needed; thesun was vicious, the fly-wheel must have weighed at least fifty pounds, and pedalling along a wagon track deep in dust and ruts, and full of holes and tree-roots, cannot have been easy.
    He came, he said, from Punda Milia, a stretch of country about fifteen miles farther on and called after the zebra that infested it, and he was taking the fly-wheel to Nairobi to be repaired. He was not much larger than a well-grown jockey, but as tough as hippo hide, and he had the quick, gay smile and bright eyes of many Irishmen, with a trace of the brogue, but not enough to make him sound as if he was putting it on, which is often the effect created by the genuine article.
    The bicycle, he said, was shared between himself and his partner. If both young men wanted to visit the town together, they took it in turns to walk and ride. One went ahead on the bicycle, left it ten miles along the road and proceeded on foot. The second walked the first ten miles, found the bicycle, and caught up his friend. In this way they reached Nairobi, a distance of fifty miles, in one day. No one ever molested the bicycle, which they had bought second-hand for ten rupees.
    His name was Randall Swift, and he found life so entertaining that he was very seldom without a laugh and a smile, so that he endeared himself to everyone, and became one of my parents’ closest friends. Moreover he was now an old hand, having arrived in the country in 1904, so they looked upon him as a kind of oracle.
    ‘All the same, he’s been here eight years and his only form of transport is a ten-rupee bicycle,’ Tilly mused when he had gone. ‘He hasn’t made
his
fortune very quickly.’
    ‘He’s a splendid fellow, but he hasn’t stuck to one thing,’ Robin explained. ‘All his trial trips were no good. But now he’s settled on sisal, he’s sure to do well. There’s big money in sisal.’
    Randall Swift had told us how he and his partner had secured the last consignment of bulbils (the young sisal plants) to leave German East Africa the day before the Germans put an embargo on their export. Now they would be able to supply other aspiring sisal planters with bulbils at a profit, and they had built a factory to extract fibre from the long, tough, prickly-tipped