Chapter Five

I HAD looked forward eagerly to the part of the journey we had now begun. We had to fly south-east from Khartoum over country I knew comparatively well and which I had not seen for several years. In particular I had hoped to see for the first time from the air some of the country which I had so slowly, painfully and rather precariously crossed with my camels on the way into Abyssinia nine years before. But I was to be disappointed.

Once in the air over Khartoum the pilot of our plane wisely put it at once into a steep climb. Even an amateur like myself could see that it was not the sort of day for hovering close to the ground, and that the sooner we got into steadier air the better. For a while I was able, despite the wind and the dust below, to distinguish a few landmarks in that featureless country, but very soon, as we steadily gained height, the land lost all character and coherence.

Little more than a mild, yellow, unrelieved glare stared back at me from the earth. Soon we had again the sharp sting of air in our nostrils that we had had the night before.

One of the elder women in the plane suddenly went very white, started to moan to herself, and had to be given oxygen. The plane flattened out and the engines got back to their more comforting deep-throated roar. We had stopped climbing, but even at that height the air, although not so agitated as it had been the night before, was far from steady. The machine kept lurching, staggering and dropping unpredictably. I do not think that anyone felt really comfortable, and many of the passengers were sick. The element of the unpredictable in the external circumstances of our flight now seemed to enter into the minds of the passengers. They began to do things which they would not normally have done.

The men suddenly started drinking. Although it was only seven-thirty and although we had all just eaten far more than was good for us, bells were suddenly rung for the stewards, and beers, whiskies, gins, brandies and sherries were ordered, as if we were about to be served with lunch. One of the commercial travellers, while drinking a double brandy, began pulling letters and documents out of a case and tearing them to bits. I heard him say afterwards that he did not know what possessed him for he had destroyed several important papers.

The Army nurse said later: “I don’t know what happened. I seemed to have a black-out and then came round to find myself sitting on the lap of a strange man, drinking a large whisky.” The plumber, I am sure, did not usually have so much beer at that hour, nor did he normally chain-smoke in that manner. On solid earth the business man would not have swallowed so much whisky. And certainly he would not have stared so at strangers, particularly not through horn-rimmed spectacles placed, in such a precarious and unmilitary fashion, on the tip of his nose.

For a while something unexplained and irrational appeared to dominate the actions of all of us. My own reaction was to concentrate more than ever on what I could see of the world outside. With my maps handy on my knees, I continued to look down with fierce concentration as if I expected the haze and dust to vanish at any moment and a promised land to appear. After an hour or two I had my reward.

I noticed that the dust had gone and that a world of level, white cloud had appeared beneath us. Far to the east a peak or two of the formidable Abyssinian escarpments pierced through the cloud. I could not identify them from my map. The maps of Africa betray how young and incomplete is our knowledge of the continent. Beyond the peaks on the horizon to which we were heading, and above this white, level world of cloud below us, I saw a tremendous array of curling, twisting and turning cumulus cloud. It stretched as far as the eye could see, like a battle formation at the twilight hour of the Nordic gods.

It was a most beautiful and impressive sight, but at that hour it made me fear for this lap of our journey In our kind of plane, with the load we carried, I could not see how we could possibly fly over those far-flung, those dense electric Himalayas of cloud, and through them we could hardly attempt to go with any degree of safety.

They were very like the great monsoon clouds that sweep down from Burma and Northern Malaya over the Bay of Bengal. Once, on an occasion like this, a pilot of a flying-boat I was in refused to fly into them because he had known a flight of five R.A.F. planes attempt it once, and only one had emerged intact on the other side.

Shortly afterwards I realized that the pilot of this aircraft must have reached a similar conclusion, for suddenly we changed course. Instead of flying south-east as we had been doing, the plane was now going due south, and for several hours we flew parallel to that great range of cloud. Nevertheless, without a split, a break, a pass or a valley appearing anywhere in its formation, it pushed steadily towards us. The atmosphere grew slowly darker, chillier and more ominous because of its grim encroaching presence.

Morning tea-time, that abiding, almost fanatical ritual of Southern Africa, was observed elaborately on the plane with trays full of fruit cakes, chocolate cakes, cream-sponge and walnut cakes, pastries rich with cream, with jam, custards, marzipans and icing, with half a dozen varieties of sandwiches, with fresh fruits and, of course, with cups of Nile-red tea. Just after all this had been consumed, at about noon, the clouds below us were suddenly parted and Victoria-Nyanza appeared.

Kampala and the airport were almost exactly underneath us; a long way down but unmistakable, the blue-waters of the greatest of the African lakes, unrippled and serene, stretched away south of us as far as we could see, unimpeded by land of any kind. With the view I felt a rush of affection for Africa. Africa is great and majestic in all it does, there is nothing mingy or mean in its methods, no matter whether it is producing desert, mountain, lake or plain. One could, at the same time, almost hear the relief which filled the cockpit at that moment. The aircraft, losing no time, immediately did a determined and quick bank to the east, and put its nose into a long decline.

The range of cumulus came up dead in front of us. The pilot clearly intended to fly underneath it, now that he knew precisely where he was. The green hills and the green valleys, the well-watered succulent vegetation of this part of Africa lay there for our desert-worn and cloud-dazed senses to enjoy. But not for long. Wherever one looked, the horizon was black, purple-silver and pearl-grey with cloud. The far hills were already grey with rain and mist.

Up the valleys and down the plains, over mountain-tops and across rivers, the storms came striding towards us. Those lovely smaller lakes of the highlands of Kenya, whose deep-blue waters are so heavily burdened with sunlight and cloud and pink flamingos along their shores; those snow-capped towers of Mount Kenya; those snug homesteads and blood-red roads going from nowhere to nowhere through bush and plain, were now all hidden from view as completely as if it had been night. Bumping and driving hard through heavy rain, we hardly saw land again until some hours later we climbed with relief out of the plane at Nairobi.

I said good-bye to my companions at the aerodrome. From now on our ways divided. I had to spend the night in Nairobi and then take a smaller plane on towards my destination, early the following morning.

It is one of the more unjustifiable pretensions of our age that it measures time and experience by the clock. There are obviously a host of considerations and values which a clock cannot possibly measure. There is above all the fact that time spent on a journey, particularly on a journey which sets in motion the abiding symbolism of our natures, is different from the time devoured at such a terrifying speed in the daily routine of what is accepted, with such curious complacency, as our normal lives. This seems axiomatic to me; the truer the moment and the greater its content of reality, the slower the swing of the universal pendulum.

Let me give an instance. I could imagine a moment denied to a life as soiled as my own—a moment so real that time would come to a standstill within it, would cease to exist despite all the ticking of clocks that went on. I do not want to claim too much for this humble, this unwinged moment there on the aerodrome at Nairobi. But I must emphasize, as best I can in dealing with a reaction that is beyond the normal use of words, that there was more to it than a mere twenty-four hours measured on the clock. Somehow the barriers between all of us had been down, the masks over our eyes had been lifted and we had become genuinely and unusually well-disposed to one another.

I now found myself borrowing pen and paper from a reluctant and harassed immigrations officer in order to give to the plumber addresses of some of my oldest friends in Johannesburg. I also gave him a note of introduction to the managing director of a group of mines.

I exchanged addresses with the business man. We shook one another warmly by the hand and promised, without fail, to meet again. At the barrier his motor car was waiting. The business man pointed to his black chauffeur who was grinning with delight, his eyes shining with excitement: “Send me a telegram, any time. Doesn’t matter how far, I’ll send him to meet you,” he said.