West with the Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

people only wanted news of London.
    Wherever you are, it seems, you must have news of some other place, some bigger place, so that a man on his deathbed in the swamplands of Victoria Nyanza is more interested in what has lately happened in this life than in what may happen in the next. It is really this that makes death so hard — curiosity unsatisfied.
    But if contempt for death is correctly interpreted as courage, then Ebert’s dying friend was a courageous man.
    He lay on a camp bed under a thin, sticky blanket and he had no recognizable face. What the Egyptians had done with chemicals to dead bodies, malaria and the subsequent blackwater had done to him.
    I have seen baskets of raw animal skin stretched over sticks and left to dry in the sun, and these baskets were no more empty or fleshless than the half corpse Ebert presented to me in the darkened hut.
    It was a tiny hut with the usual single window blocked with corrugated iron, the usual thatched roof, old and dropping its leaves like a rotted tree, and the usual earthen floor paved with burnt matchsticks, paper, and shreds of tobacco.
    There never seems to be any reason for filth, but there are occasions, like this one, where it would be hard to find a reason for cleanliness. ‘Poverty,’ an old proverb says, ‘is not a disgrace, but a great swinishness.’ Here was poverty — poverty of women to help, poverty of hope, and even of life. For all I knew there might have been handfuls of gold buried in that hut, but if there were, it was the poorest comfort of all.
    The sick man’s name was Bergner — a Dutchman, perhaps, or a German. Not English, I thought, though whatever racial characteristics had once distinguished him were now lost in the almost Gothic contours of his shrunken head.
    His eyes alone appeared to live. They were enormous, seeming to move in their sockets independently of the body they served. But they stared at me from the bed with something that was at least interest and might almost have been humour. They seemed to say, ‘This is a hell of a way to receive a young lady just in from Nairobi — but you see how things are!’
    I smiled, a little wanly, I think, and then turned to Ebert — or at least to the spot where he had been. With dexterity that might have done credit to the most accomplished Indian fakir, Ebert had vanished, leaving me alone with Bergner.
    For a moment I stood in the centre of the room experiencing, in spite of myself, some of the trepidation one might feel hearing the door of a burial vault close on one’s back.
    The comparison seems exaggerated now, but the truth is that all my life I have had an abhorrence of disease amounting almost to a phobia.
    There is no reason in this; it is not fear of infection, because Africa has accorded me my full share of malaria and other illnesses, from time to time, along with a kind of compensating philosophy with which to endure them. My phobia is an unaccountable physical repulsion from persons who are sick rather than from sickness itself.
    Certain people are repelled even by the thought of snakes and I can only compare my feeling toward the aspect of unhealthiness to this — mambas, pythons, puff-adders, and some of their brethren have frequently popped into my life either on treks through the forests or during elephant hunts, or when, as a child, I wandered in the bush seeking small adventure. But while I have learned to avoid snakes and have even, I think, developed a sixth sense for the purpose, I feel I could, if necessary, still face a mamba with greater calm than I can face a human being swathed in the sickly-sweet atmosphere of disease and impending death.
    Here in this hut, at the side of a strange, bedridden man, I had to fight back an impulse to throw open the door and bolt across the runway into the protecting cockpit of my plane. Coupled with this was the realization that each moment the sun rose higher, the day grew hotter, and if Woody were by some miracle still