Chapter 50Through the Lion Desert to VoiDURCH DIE LÖWENWÜSTE NACH VOI
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No, I wanted to go by hammock through the Serighetti desert to Voi on the Uganda Railway. Dr. Förster showed it to me on the map. “But,” he said, “you will find no porters, no tent, no company, and besides, the boma will not allow it, for the Serighetti swarms with lions, is, as the English say, positively ‘the place for lions1.’” All that began to tempt me more and more. “That, now, would at last be an African ‘saffari,’ as such a foot-journey is called in Suaheli, the traffic-language between Negroes and whites.” I had, after all, never yet travelled at all if I did not learn in my own flesh what a saffari meant.
When I spoke of my new plan at the Freitags’, they were ready to laugh themselves dead over it. It was quite impossible, quite apart from all the lions; I could not even make myself understood. Well, yes, if some other European were along who was master of Swahili. Then it would be no feat, said I.
In Dr. Förster’s loft they discovered a palsied old hammock. “The English commissioner, Mr. Edward, has a tent,” said Dr. Förster. And set about putting up the provision chest for me. “In the normal course of the thing you will travel eleven, at most twelve days, but you must take provisions for 3—4 weeks, for unforeseen cases.”
That I did not like to hear.
When they saw at the boma that I was not to be talked out of my resolve, they wanted to have me sign a paper stating that I was undertaking this saffari against their will, on my own responsibility. But that I did not do. In the end they brought themselves, with endless pains, to procure me porters. From the Wadschagga, from the Wataweta, from the picturesque Masai, who look exactly like the pictures of the old Egyptians on the pylons by the Nile2. (By oral tradition they are said to have come over from the Nile as well.)
The boma gave raffia poles and soldiers’ blankets. Förster had had curtains sewn against the burning sun. At last the journey could begin.
The lions, in truth, frightened me least of all. First, I did not quite believe in them; second, I knew that with night watch-fires and shouting not a single cowardly lion dares an attack. Third, I wanted for once— in all my supposed safety — to learn how to shudder3.
So at sunrise, with the summit of “Kibo” aglow in rose-light, I set out on my way. But the men had never yet carried anyone in a hammock. The two at the head end let it hang low; the men in front carried my feet high.
We had soon left the temperate mountain zone; down on the plain the sun burned quite murderously. But all my sign-language could not manage to bed my legs low and my head high.
At last we came to water, and gourd bottles and casks were filled (we were four days walking through a thirst stretch).
Then we rested at the shamba of an Italian. Thank God, he spoke Swahili and could make my wishes intelligible to the men. Even so they forgot it again and again and hauled me along their own way, head downward.
Here at the Himo brook Herr Mengardi visited with me a highly interesting Masai kraal, the dwelling place of this dying-out nomad tribe, whose members nourish themselves on nothing but milk and ox-blood.
In the evening at Taveta4 the porters hauled me, head-down once again, up to Mr. Edwards’ feet. He was rigid with astonishment.
The German Negroes with their askari now turned back, and Mr. Edwards had for his part to provide English Negro subjects. That was very difficult. And succeeded only after the second night, on the third day. These new porters, however, simply dropped me at the trial carry.
In Taveta it was very strange. Herr Edwards had shot all manner of wild beasts around his bungalow, and a snake in the toilet. The rafter-work of the house was nested full of bats. Their fearful stench gave me constant seasickness. I was to become still more thoroughly acquainted with it later, in Cambodia.
At last, though, we could go on. “Heia Saffari5” (off on the journey), cried the porters; “Heia Saffari,” Mr. Edwards, well-meaning and consoling; and “Heia Saffari,” somewhat small-voiced, I too.
So now I was delivered over, for at least ten days, to the goodwill or displeasure of seventeen, with the English askari eighteen, wholly uncivilized creatures. To be sure, they knew that if they bent so much as a hair on my head, all the punishments of hell awaited them. But for me it was all easier said than done.
The first night in the tent — in the hammock again. Already I could no longer feel my limbs — or rather — I felt them all too much.
The wild men had kindled fires. Then came a growling like soft, far-off thunder. What was that? “Simba, simba,” the men cried, and began a hellish din. “Simba” means lion, as I learned with time to understand. At three in the night, by full moonlight, the askari's whistle shrilled, the porters staggered up — I crept battered out of my hammock, and the tent was packed.
Twenty paces from the watch-fires the askari then showed me, in the damp sand (after the little rainy season6), fresh lion tracks. “Simba,” he said again. The horror ran through me quite pleasantly.
At daybreak I saw glorious, strange blossoms in the sand. At my sign the men brought them to me. Then I formed the plan of painting and cataloguing these blossoms somewhere in Africa the next year. For to me they were wholly new plants, seeming to come out of a fairy tale. I never got to it, of course — one lives far too short a time. And a thousand everyday nothings so often rob one of joy, strength and courage. And then came the war. —
So it went now for ten days — unwashed and uncombed. I looked wilder than the wild men. What did I care! All culture seemed lost, sunken. I lived only in the strange, monstrous present. Dearest to me was the hour before my tent by the watch-fires, in the evening, before the lions came. For they always appeared only toward midnight, and prowled secretly and shyly around our resting place. Every morning we saw the tracks, and I might well have seen their eyes light up, too, in the glow of the fire. But I preferred, after all, not to see them light up. Strangely enough, I felt safer in the open tent.
Then the last evening had come.
I lay on my plaid — with my cigarette — and stared into the starry sky. Was that really I, living through all these strange sensations — I, the civilized owner of the Tempio Hermione? Why did I feel so well in this wild picture? The robber-knight in me had now, perhaps, slain the paschal lamb7 for good. Now there is no more longing for love and understanding and companionship, now there is only a deep savouring-to-the-full of this wonderful, short, ah, so short life. And therefore — more and more — ever more! There is no growing sated on all life's wonders except through death alone. But perhaps only after that do the true wonders begin. —
I had taken the double ration of quinine today; we were camped by the fever-pregnant Bura river. Was that, then, already an attack of fever?
Again the soft growling in the distance, our daily evening music. Today I was to hear it for the last time. And I fell asleep quite peacefully to it, with a soft regret that this beautiful, wild time would now soon be gone forever! The next day our way led through paradises; glorious tropical trees, twined round with wild blossoms, stood about them, and the rigid fingers of the euphorbias towered between.
Then the first faint traces of culture showed themselves, though they soon multiplied: sisal plantations8, factories — and there already lay Voi, the goal of our journey.
At the bungalow my porters wordlessly opened the door of a room and simply tipped the hammock over. Like a stone I plumped down onto the hard bed.
And after a few hours I took the most beautiful bath of my life.
After that came the “great reckoning.”
Everything had already been fixed with Mr. Edwards. The men set off again toward the Serighetti. But that night I could not rightly sleep; my cradle-song was missing — the growl of the lions. —
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑the place for lions — Not today's great Serengeti: the small Serengeti Plains between Taveta and the Tsavo, whose lions had just been made the most famous on earth. Her spelling Serighetti is kept. The route ran from the Kilimanjaro border country across the waterless plains to Voi, through what is now Tsavo West. The English phrase was earned honestly: in 1898, at the Tsavo bridge a day's march from Voi, two man-eating lions killed dozens of workers and halted construction of this same Uganda Railway for weeks. Colonel Patterson's book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo (1907) was a fresh bestseller when she set out to walk their ground.
- ↑pylons by the Nile — The era's ethnography agreed with her eye — and dressed the likeness up as the “Hamitic hypothesis.” European science of her day classed the Masai as “Nilo-Hamites,” half-Egyptian wanderers from the north, which is why every traveller saw pylon profiles in their faces. The racial frame was fantasy, but the kernel of her parenthesis is sound: Maasai tradition and modern scholarship alike bring them south along the Nile valley from what is now South Sudan, reaching these plains only a few centuries ago.
- ↑learn how to shudder — The Grimms' tale of the boy who went forth to learn what fear was — proverbial in German. Das Gruseln lernen: in the fairy tale, the fourth in the Grimms' collection, a boy too dull to shudder sets out to learn it among gallows and haunted castles, and no horror can teach him. She casts her lion desert as that errand — and, like the boy, she will come through it more charmed than frightened, falling asleep to the growling and missing it on the far side.
- ↑Taveta — The border oasis: with this evening she has walked out of German East Africa into British East Africa. Hence the change of porters that follows — a German caravan could not simply carry on across the line. Taveta had a future she could not know: in August 1914 it was the first piece of British soil German troops occupied in the war, and the Voi–Taveta military railway the British then built ran the very route of her saffari. The lion desert she crossed for the shudder of it became a battlefield two and a half years later.
- ↑Heia Saffari — Swahili haya, safari — “up, and march!” Within a decade the cry would carry very different freight in German ears. She hears the phrase in its innocent working sense, a caravan's starting call. After the war it became the badge of German colonial nostalgia: General von Lettow-Vorbeck titled his 1920 memoir of the East African campaign Heia Safari!, and the marching song of that name kept the lost colonies ringing in German ears for decades — into their darkest uses. By the time she wrote this page, her caravan cry had become a slogan.
- ↑little rainy season — East Africa's short rains, roughly November to December — just ending at this camp, one more quiet clock-hand pointing to December 1911. East Africa keeps two wet seasons: the short rains around November and December, and the long rains from about March. Damp sand “after the little rainy season” puts the saffari at the close of the short rains — agreeing with the other pins of this run, the flamboyants blooming at Beira, the Usambara line open to Moshi since October, and the Christmas she keeps at Mombasa two chapters on.
- ↑robber-knight in me had now, perhaps, slain the paschal lamb — The memoir's founding emblem, closed out by the watch-fires of the lion desert. In the first chapter she set her two natures against each other — the robber-knight blood of her Hessian line and the gentle, pious paschal lamb: “Robber-knight and paschal lamb! It was the signature of my soul, the curse of my life.” Four hundred pages on she declares the duel settled, and the renunciation that follows — no more longing for love, understanding, companionship, only the savouring of a short life — is the program of everything the memoir still holds.
- ↑sisal plantations — Her spelling Sesal. Sisal was East Africa's boom fibre — brought in as sixty-two smuggled seedlings in 1893, and by her visit big business on both sides of the border. Mexico guarded its agave with an export ban; in 1893 the agronomist Richard Hindorf shipped a thousand bulbils out of Yucatán by roundabout ways, and the sixty-two plants that survived the voyage to Tanga founded German East Africa's greatest export industry. The plantations greeting her at Voi are the British echo of that coup, and sisal country is what these plains have remained.