Chapter 52On the Uganda Railway to Mombasa, and by Way of Aden to CeylonAUF DER UGANDABAHN NACH MOMBASA UND ÜBER ADEN NACH CEYLON
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
This inner Africa, altogether. How soon it will be soaked up and coated over by the all-the-world mud that nestles so smoothly and prettily into every gap. But now it is still glorious and wonderful, and I thank God that I have seen it.
In Nairobi there was a throng of peoples as many-coloured as at the building of the Tower of Babel.
Mombasa lies in a hollow greened round with palms and still has many Portuguese remains. Thus the old stronghold, the present prison1.
I did very well for myself in an old Portuguese house newly done up by a German innkeeper. That was, however, just about the first time I have had good experiences with a German innkeeper abroad.
Above all I languished for my luggage; I was completely in rags. But alas! My luggage was not there. Where might it be floating? I should therefore have to fit myself out anew in Ceylon — a fairly costly business. And then I found a months-old letter from Franz Cäsar Jentsch, Johanna's housemate at the Tempio, saying that because of his wife's illness he had had to move into the upper rooms at the doctor's command, “because down below the water was dripping from the walls.” Both of these were of course lies.2 I foamed, and gave myself over to dark forebodings. How would they house themselves, the ruthless ones, among my treasures! —
Ah, reality was to exceed my boldest forebodings by far, far more!
We kept Christmas very cosily on the flat house-roof3 of the hotel in Mombasa, which offered a splendid view over town and sea. Then I was at the Christmas masses, to which the pious Negroes of Mombasa thronged. In the market “pombe” was being sold everywhere, the intoxicating beer-like drink of these Negroes. One noticed its effect everywhere, sadly, at the great masked processions too.
Then we went on by ship to Aden. It was quite embarrassing to me to go about so ragged amid the luxury of the first class, but what was to be done? At Aden I drove again to the tanks of King Solomon4 in the wild rock terraces. My German steamer, on which my cabin was already booked, I had missed.
And now I was left the choice of either waiting ten days here or travelling on with a new ticket by the English “P and O.” I decided head over heels for the latter and only just managed it, by the skin of my teeth.
The food was frightful. I had telegraphed to the Freudenbergs at Colombo, and the sons fetched me from the steamer, sadly with a motor car and not with the beloved rickshaw. Progress here too! I stayed two days and kept a reunion with a great deal. Colombo seemed to me already something like a home. A fair number of letters awaited me. An express letter from Mombasa: my luggage had been found and had now gone off direct to Hongkong. So I did not need to fit myself out anew. But another letter shook me to the depths. It came from Herr Zappe and brought news of the Tempio.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑the old stronghold, the present prison — Fort Jesus, built by the Portuguese in the 1590s — and in her day still exactly what she says, a working jail. Raised between 1593 and 1596 to hold the Portuguese grip on the Swahili coast, the fort changed hands more often than almost any building in Africa — Omani sieges, recapture, Baluchi garrisons — before the British made it a prison in 1895. It stayed one until 1958, and is now a museum and a World Heritage site. The sentence is right about the fort and misleading about the town: Mombasa's layers are overwhelmingly Swahili, Omani and Indian, and most of them are older than the Portuguese.
- ↑Both of these were of course lies. — The plot moving under her at four thousand miles' distance — and she reads it off a single sentence in a single letter. Jentsch writes that a doctor had ordered him upstairs because his wife was ill and water ran down the walls below. She knows her own house: nothing runs down those walls, and the upper rooms are where the collection is. What the letter actually reports is that he has moved into her museum. Herr Zappe, who had mistrusted Jentsch from the first and told her she should never have taken him in, is the man whose letter closes this chapter — and the next chapter is called Tempio-Raub.
- ↑We kept Christmas very cosily on the flat house-roof — The African journey's one unambiguous date, and it pulls the whole run back into the autumn of 1911. Everything from the Cape northward has had to be dated by inference — Botha living in Groote Schuur, flamboyants in bloom at Beira, damp sand after the short rains. A Christmas kept in Mombasa fixes it, and the railway settles it from the other side: the Usambara line reached Moshi on 26 September 1911 and opened to traffic on 4 October, so the train she calls “only just opened” was some two months old when she rode it, and would not be officially inaugurated until February 1912. The whole of Africa therefore falls inside the fifteen weeks between the Tempio farewell after the Moon Festival of 3 September and this rooftop — the Cape in October, Rhodesia and the Rand through November, the coastal steamer in early December, Kilimanjaro and the lion desert in mid-month, Uganda in the week before the feast. It is a punishing pace, and it is the pace she keeps everywhere in this book.
- ↑the tanks of King Solomon — The Tawila cisterns at Aden, cut in tiers into the crater wall — ancient, probably Himyarite, and credited by legend to Solomon or the Queen of Sheba. Built to catch the rare torrential rains of a city with almost no water, the tanks had silted up for centuries before the British dug them out and restored them in the 1850s; they are among the oldest engineering works still standing in Arabia, and nobody knows who made them. Two things in the sentence are worth keeping. Her “again” means she had come this way on an earlier voyage. And the legend has followed her right across the continent: the same queen was invoked over the ruins at Khami, where she alone thought to ask whether the builders might have been African.