The Flame Trees of Thika Read Online Free PDF Page B

leaves.
    ‘It needs a lot of capital,’ Robin said wistfully. ‘How do you manage about that?’
    ‘The bank, of course,’ Randall replied, roaring with laughter. ‘At first we shot game and dried the meat and sent it to the coast. Then we got hold of a tractor weighing eight tons. When it came it broke all the P.W.D. bridges and we got a contract hauling sand to build new ones.’
    The tractor’s fastest speed was four miles an hour and he and his partner, Ernest Rutherfoord, had taken turns to haul sand, day and day about, from Punda Milia to the bridge by the Blue Posts. It consumed prodigious quantities of wood, and at intervals the driver would dismount with a hatchet and hack more fuel from the bush. Once the tractor ran out on a treeless stretch; at the opportune moment, there came into sight a column of porters, each of whom carried a pole. Waving his axe, Randall halted the safari, commandeered the poles, chopped them up, and proceeded on his tractor. A few days later, an angry official arrived at Punda Milia demanding restitution for the telegraph poles that had been on their way to establish a new line. Both partners had brewed beer at Mortlake before they came to Africa. Randall was like a robin, with a bright eye and friendly manner and a habit of cocking his head on one side.
    He gave us some good advice about labour.
    ‘Get hold of the local chief,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, I’ll give you a tip. Put a safari lamp up on a pole outside your tent at night. These people have never seen lamps before. Once they get over thinking it’s a spirit, they can’t resist a closer look at such a remarkable thing.’
    When the gramophone failed him, Robin remembered this. For the first two or three nights nothing happened, except that droves of insects beat and scorched themselves to death against the glass. It was always dark by half past six or seven and, after I was sent to bed, I lay awake and watched people moving about by lantern-light and the flickering of the camp fire, a small speck of warmth and comfort amid a great encircling continent where cities, friends, and civilized ways were not to be found, not for thousands and thousands of miles across plain and bush and forest.
    At such times, when all the furtive noises of the night beyond that speck of firelight crept unasked like maggots into your ears, you could feel very isolated and lonely. At such times, I think,Robin and Tilly, although they did not say so, wondered why they had come, and what they were doing, and whether they had set their hands to a hopeless task. For until you actually saw it and travelled across it on foot or on horseback or in a wagon, you could not possibly grasp the enormous vastness of Africa. It seemed to go on for ever and ever; beyond each range of hills lay another far horizon; always it was the same, pale-brown grass and bush and thorn-trees, rocky mountains, dark valleys, sunlit plain; there was no break and no order, no road and no town, no places even: just marks on a map which, when you got there, turned out to be merely an expanse of bush or plain exactly like the rest of the landscape.
    And here they were, on all sides only blankness, committed to the task of somehow shaving off a patch of bush in the middle of nowhere and ploughing it up and getting little plants put in, and a house built in the wilderness: surely a daunting task for two people not at all well equipped to tackle it. Like rusty hinges, frogs croaked from surrounding
vleis,
the air was pierced by the ceaseless cry of cicadas: how many between here and the Indian Ocean? More, perhaps, even in the few miles around us, than stars that prickled in such millions overhead, clear, transcerulean, and indifferent, each the centre of an unbelievably remote universe of its own.
    On the third night, a new sound came from beyond the golden circle, something to mingle with the queer whispers and stirrings and insect calls that came out of the darkness and seemed to