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ALEXANDRA STOOD IN the observation carriage as the train chugged along the thirty-hour trip from Mombasa to Nairobi. Despite open windows, the air was stifling. Perspiration discolored her white blouse and khaki skirt, no matter how fiercely she fanned herself with a dated issue of Vogue magazine. Thus far, the journey proved disappointing. An occasional hillside and the bare sands of the Taru Desert offered uninspired breaks from the dry scrublands to either side of the rails. Catching a fresh breeze or sight of any wildlife were fleeting pleasures, but at least there was unexpected company to chat up.
“Men of my village built this railway. Those who returned held much fear of the lions.”
Alexandra shifted her gaze from the window to her escort. There was a calming and mystical manner in how he spoke, and she was of the mind he had come not for money, rather a veiled sense of duty.
She wondered if she was crazy for being here.
The endeavor was labeled a case study on insanity upon its inception in 1896, but the completion of a five-hundred-mile railway linking the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria had transformed British East Africa immensely. The “Lunatic Line” opened interior Africa for expansion, and the exploited riches of the continent eased export to the world. Since the end of the Great War, ivory, cattle, coffee, and cocoa were being challenged by a new cash crop: safari tourism. Kenya’s endless savannahs had bloomed into the newfangled playground for adventurers indulging in elaborate treks into the bush and sportsmen testing the steadiness of their aim in big-game hunting. The risk of getting mauled by feral beasts was part of the allure, though it remained wholly unacceptable when such a fate befell a white traveler on holiday.
A sensationalized incident involving rogue lions attacking an eminent safari party had trumpeted its way into the headlines of European newspapers. This made for poor marketing. A vivid demise was owed to these “Killer Lions of Ankole.”
The Uganda Railway had commissioned a renowned “Big-five” hunter to conduct the dirty work and Alexandra to verify the bloody business. They would publish her photographs to placate the local officials and reassure those yet to punch their tickets for the Rift Valley and beyond. Alexandra felt neither surprise nor disappointment that her brother had declined her invitation.
It was a shock, however, to find a colleague of Will’s named Simra awaiting her ship at Port Kilindini.
She knew little about this composed, handsome Sikh other than he worked at a hospital in Maidenhead, where he lived with his wife and two children. With his trimmed beard, impeccably tied blue pagri, and wrinkle-free tunic, he obviously took care to fit in among the British without betraying his inbred ideals.
Alexandra found Simra’s accented English quite pleasing to her ear. He struck her as a serene man, but not one to trifle with. A quote from the Roman poet Horace came to her mind in summing up her initial impressions: “New skies the exile finds, but the heart is still the same.” She was determined to treat him as an equal when social norms permitted... and even when they did not. As she was assigned a first-class berth and he was regulated to a second-class carriage, the observation car was their only venue to share time.
Alexandra said, “Do tell my brother’s instructions.”
Simra spoke direct. “To see you to Nairobi and help you avoid any international incidents.”
When she tried to ship him back to London, he had mentioned having family in Nairobi. That had quashed that. She teased more than asked, “I’m sure Will was remindful to not entertain the many questions I might spring on you?”
“He stated avoiding questions would only prolong my suffering. He then doubled my wages.”
She nodded. “Will has a limber mind to him.”
Simra said, “William is a good man. He has helped my family.”
Before she could pry into that topic, the train slowed. It signaled to Alexandra that it was her turn to sit on the engine seat, but such had not worked out the first two times it to be true. First-class passengers signed a ledger to note their interest in taking in Africa alfresco. They had scheduled her for Voi. Upon reaching the station, a steward named Azrail ushered her forward, only to find that two bellicose Belgians had plopped themselves down, upsetting the order of things. Their drunken discord had held sway, and Azrail had escorted her back into the train.
If there was one thing that Alexandra could not stand, it was a line cutter. Respect for the queue was a cornerstone of civilization and being so impudently bumped left her upset. At the next stop at a village called Manyani, the untenable scenario had played out again.
The Kenya Colony had forty separate tribes within its borders and many spoken dialects, with most of its native population practicing Christian or indigenous religious beliefs. Adherents to Islam lived along the coast and the borderlands with Somalia. Alexandra was not concerned for her safety in the Anglophile regions of Nairobi, but the prospect of going unescorted in Mombasa had troubled her. The city remained under the authority of the Sultan of Zanzibar and yet divorced from its history as an underpinning of the slave trade.
During the voyage through Suez and the Red Sea, she learned some Swahili to help navigate the city. Upon boarding, she had observed Azrail kneeling on a small rug in the salat posture, praying in Arabic. She had later warmly greeted, “Jambo! Habari gani?”
“Salamu, memsahib,” he had politely responded.
Alexandra’s greeting to him on this occasion was silence. She had left the episodes of being back-benched with unspent venom and a suspicion that her status as a “memsahib” was at the root of Azrail’s conduct. He waved her to come. She asked Simra to join her. They stepped onto the tracks and proceeded forward.
The Belgians were walking back. A layer of dust coated their faces and clothing. One goaded, “The seat is ready for you and your wog.”
Alexandra poked the man’s chest. “Mind your manners, sir!”
The dust-covered Belgian grumbled something in Flemish to his colleague and continued walking.
A spotter armed with a buffalo rifle lent down his hand to assist Alexandra’s climb onto the engine seat. It was a simple slab of wood mounted above the metal pilot that jutted out to knock obstacles off the tracks. In Africa, obstacles meant foraging animals with hearing problems or Cape buffalo, which as a species were too ornery and stubborn to move along. The spotter was an older Bantu man with gray hair and windburned skin. He motioned for Simra to step up.
After hesitating, the Sikh did.
“I sit this seat with President Roosevelt!” the spotter asserted.
“Bully for you!” Alexandra settled in. Theodore Roosevelt’s 1909 excursion to Africa had opened the minds of the American public to the grandeur of the continent. She sorted through her satchel to retrieve her binoculars, not knowing if the next stop was ten minutes, three hours, or an incalculable hit of a waterbuck away.
The engine hissed and kicked up steam. Those on the platform waved farewell. The whistle blew, and they were off. Azrail yelled up, “Behind us, dust. Ahead, Africa most beautiful!”
Alexandra realized that she was dreadfully wrong about her assumptions. Azrail had supplied a huge favor in delaying her turn.
She yelled back, “Asante, Azrail!” and settled in to fill her heart with Africa.
With the engine thumping and vibrating behind her, Alexandra kept one hand over the brim of her straw sun hat; its extended black tassels fluttering the wind like the tail of a kite.
The train crossed the Tsavo River.
The spotter informed her the bridge’s construction had been briefly suspended in 1898 when two lions of diabolical cunning started terrorizing the workers. By the time the man-eaters were killed, over a hundred laborers had been devoured.
“And then crept the lions through the grasslands, night and day. Tore our men to pieces and then dragged them on their way,” Simra recited. It seemed he was repeating a bedtime story heard as a boy or recalling a pinch of Rudyard Kipling. “They moved as shrouded as a ghost and as silent as the darkness. A roar, a scream, circling vultures left to feast upon their carcass.”
“You know of this place, Simra?” asked Alexandra.
“My father died here,” he said with no bitterness or anguish. He turned and almost managed a smile. “I thank you for allowing me to visit him in this manner.”
“This is evil land,” said the spotter. “In Kikamba, Tsavo means ‘place of slaughter.’”
Alexandra trembled. Sometimes beautiful places held ugly secrets if one dared to look under the rosy veneer. If two lions could kill that many robust men, she had much to fear in the coming weeks.
Rolling hills soon replaced the arid plains; flushed in green with the advent of the rainy season. All manner of God’s creation fell into view of Alexandra’s camera lens. Herds of duiker, reedbuck, and the deer-like dik-dik, reaped the grasslands. Bush elephants and a lone black rhinoceros drank at a waterhole. Colorful birds poked for bugs upon sausage-looking baobab trees, while a pride of lions lazed under the shade of a flowering Acacia. She observed through her binoculars a cheetah run down an ill-fated eland, and a blue-furred lesser-kudu outrun hyenas to live another day.
From the mist surrounding snow-capped Kilimanjaro to the untarnished flatlands of the Maasai, it was indeed Africa: most vicious, most wild, and most beautiful.
—‡—
UPON ENTERING THE CARRIAGE, Alexandra’s finagler reflexes activated. She held no interest in upsetting others or being the subject of scurrilous gossip yet wanted her way no less.
She regarded her audience with toying eyes and loudly cleared her throat. “My uncle, Baron Niles Bathenbrook, who some of you might affectionately know as ‘Squibbly,’ has dictated to this manservant the need to accompany me every waking step in most perilous Africa. Thus, he shall dine with me. I thank you all for your understanding.”
Once her announcement circulated across all linguistic channels, the still atmosphere greeting her and Simra’s arrival returned to its previous loquaciousness. A steward settled them at their table. The dining carriage featured unimpeachable service, and the menu’s tidings of orange-glazed chicken and vegetable rice arrived steaming hot. Simra ate fastidiously, as if a man experienced to the pangs of famishment. Over dinner, Alexandra came to terms that the only practical location to set up her photography business was London. It was favorable for language, shipping access, and would allow her to check in on Will. City life would overwhelm, but she’d just need to tolerate it when not away.
Knowing her tendency to allow things to drift amiss, Simra seemed a good bet for mature guidance. After her debauchery in Jerusalem, she felt spiritually cleaner in his company.
“Tea or coffee with dessert, Miss Bathenbrook?” asked the steward while clearing her plate.
“Tea, please.” Alexandra gasped at her own words, and it all became brilliantly clear. No one except the key founders of America had made the connection—the British ruled the world by doping tea. It was a sinister plot for global domination likely started by the East India Company, and to this day, played a role in assimilating the masses. It was why America, the coffee-chugging behemoth of the twentieth century, stood primed to claim rule of the world. The only people who seemed immune were the Chinese, but she’d need more caffeine to sort that out. She vowed this to be her last cup of the subjugating potion and took a sip.
“I never partook in tea in America but have found it a pleasant diversion whilst traveling. How much tea do you drink?”
“Three cups daily.” Simra briefly smiled and looked out the window at the setting sun enveloping the plains.
Alexandra thought him too far gone to salvage. “Tell me of your war experience.”
Simra cleared his throat and stated matter-of-factly, “I was a medic in the Sixth Poona Division. We landed in Mesopotamia in 1915 and failed to reach Baghdad. We endured siege and starvation at Kut along the Tigris. I weighed ninety-five pounds when the Turks took us prisoner and marched us through the desert. Before my death, they conscripted me into an Ottoman unit that had lost its medical staff.”
“What you’ve endured sounds ghastly.” She’d fail to believe such a tale coming from a lesser man. “How did you make way to France?”
“I treated the Turkish wounded before deserting. I walked across the Nefud to rejoin the Anglo-Indian units advancing up the Levant. Arabs captured me under the command of T.E.—”
“Lawrence!” A third witness! Alexandra asked, “Perchance, did you meet Colonel Lawrence?”
“Briefly, to administer a bandage to an arm wound.”
“Are you aware he now serves in the Royal Air Force under the name John Hume Ross?”
Simra expressed surprise at this. “It may be so, but I have heard he is serving at Miramshah in Waziristan under the name T.E. Shaw. A brother-in-law served at the fort and wrote this.”
Alexandra crunched her eyes. The cloak-and-dagger of this enigma required satisfaction, even if it meant storming Parliament upon return to England. Either Lawrence rejoiced in being an international man of mystery or was a terribly clumsy spy.
“Pardon my interruption.”
Simra continued. “They sent me to the Western Front. I was first to take William off the battlefield.”
His story touched her heart. One day, she would need to serve as a correspondent to witness the horrors of war firsthand, but for now, it satisfied her she knew a little more about Simra.
“Do you enjoy hospital work? Seeing to the care of others?”
“I am a janitor. I’m grateful to work it.”
—‡—
ALEXANDRA SIPPED A cocktail on the front verandah of the Norfolk Hotel, ever-vigilant not to abuse her after-dinner alcohol privileges. Nairobi had a temperate climate due to its altitude, yet it was still malaria country. Apart from her quinine, gin and tonic would be the poisons for the duration. Single dining during her travels always felt awkward, but at least tonight she had learned that antelope, while gamy meat, held good flavor if smothered in a mushroom demi-glace.
The Norfolk was an oasis of urbane comforts built five years after Nairobi was founded in 1899. The city had rapidly evolved from nothing more than a desolate railroad depot into the administrative center of the Kenya Colony. A postwar influx of soldiers seeking cheap land, expatriates fleeing the blasé ethos of Europe, and other colonial types had spiked its population.
Tourism revenue was filling the coffers.
Alexandra had taken in parts of the city during a rickshaw ride from the train station to the reception desk. Its municipal buildings and shops were coated in a dusty red film roused by each passing vehicle. Well-ordered houses and meager thatch huts stood beyond, with larger plantation estates lost in the bushlands. She had checked in late afternoon. From her terrace, she had viewed wildlife grazing the plains, and this stirring backdrop beckoned her.
Alexandra had washed up and dressed down in record speed, eager to take it all in after two days idle on a train. The glowing cusp of the African sunset, however, put an end to that notion. The hotel staff had warned that spotted hyenas and leopards still wandered into town under the cover of night. She was stuck; a single young woman among clannish gatherings of foreigners. The Norfolk was the prime refuge for safari parties plotting their pending escapades or celebrating their successful return. It felt odd enough to dine alone in such company. Standing at the bar, like some harlot looking to trap a rich drunkard in a fiscally rewarding affair, rang as intolerable.
She overheard a man’s recollection of the Harry Thuku incident of 1922. An angry mob had been gunned down while protesting for the prison release of the nationalist. The man boasted over having shot from this very verandah his share of the hundred so natives killed. His boorish compatriots chuckled heartily.
Africa was forever a harsh continent in which to live: rife with famine, disease, tribal conflict, and fearsome beasts listing “human” high on the menu. The British espoused the overriding benevolence of colonial rule in bringing peace, infrastructure, medicine, and Occidental modernity to woeful lands. While having a train to ride or a stable banking system proved accommodating, Alexandra did not believe it to be worth the gift of freedom. The sorry state of the proud Shoshone, Blackfoot, and Crow tribes in Montana was evidence enough. She felt it preferable to experience a shorter life on one’s own terms than a longer one under the thumb of others. It was how she would proceed.
“Is she waiting on a rich chap or here to bag one?” was overheard.
“Shhh,” the woman whispered back to her man. “They say she’s American... And stop gazing at her bum!”
Alexandra rolled her eyes. She descended the steps to pass through the lobby. After firing off a telegram to Montana, she departed to share company with the papyrus trees filling the interior courtyard. She had arrangements to rendezvous tonight with a hunter who would see her to Uganda. Simra was now off among his people, as Nairobi had a small Sikh community living amidst the city’s white residents and native Kikuyu. And why are there so many German soldiers walking around? she continued to mull over.
An odd-looking fellow approached.
“Would you be Miss Bathenbrook? I am Jean-Luc De Pauw, your humble servant.”
“Hello,” she greeted as he kissed her hand. He was a short, square, robust chap with a fuzzy beard that rendered any determination of his chin inconclusive. His bushy eyebrows likely hosted their own ecosystems. De Pauw spoke with a Frankish accent, which made it ever the more curious why he wore a spiked German pickelhaube helmet.
Alexandra took a quick liking to him. “We won the war here, too? I have not heard differently.”
“We have peculiar ways of celebrating the armistice. Would you care to join me at the club?”
Alexandra looked down at her dress, which was a simple gray cotton V-neck, thinking it would suffice. “Will they force me to drink Weizenbier and eat sauerkraut? They make me terribly gaseous.”
“I think not, but at Muthaiga, anything is possible.”
De Pauw removed his helmet to place it upon her head and offered a favorable review of the finished product. “Parfaite!”