LOST MOUNTAINS
Boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretched far away.
SHELLEY.
NEXT morning we went down to the shore of the lake before Kisumu woke, and poultry were still roosting in the frangipani trees. Before us lay a range of towering clouds. How often has one gazed at clouds and thought they were like mountains. Like Longfellow’s dreaming slave “we saw the roofs of the kaffir huts”: clusters of them like clusters of mushrooms lay with their bomas round them to keep off lions, and the cattle inside the bomas looked as though someone had emptied a child’s Noah’s ark. The red and green plain again, and patches of forest. Then we passed a little lake, and one of the flying officers told us we had entered the Northern hemisphere. Again we passed over part of Lake Victoria, and came down from six thousand feet to Port Bell among dark-blue and purple water-lilies. We were in Uganda now, close to the source of the Nile. In a couple of hundred miles we came to the Murchison Falls, and swooped to see them and swerved round them. So much we swerved that I did not at first quite see which way they were falling, up or down. This is the Nile’s first cataract. It was a holiday among the hippos, and they were all bathing, and rows of crocodiles watched them from the banks. Again I saw the water-buck and the impala, buffaloes, rhinos and warthogs, and nearly all the African game that I knew. Great elephants appeared, and we came down low to look at them; the younger ones sprang away from us and bolted into the high grass like rabbits, but the big bulls stood their ground with their long tusks flashing, and lifted their huge black ears. With another stop at Rejaf we came, about eight hundred miles from Kisumu, to Malakal on the White Nile. And here I saw again those sere and shining grasses that are the very smile of Africa. Fifteen years earlier I had passed Malakal on the journey southward, and here it was again with its wild grass shining, and I was not yet confined entirely to the paved ways of orderly lands, not that there were many orderly lands now left in the world. Had these remained orderly, I suppose I should have continued to enjoy their advantages, such as they are, and should have no more seen except in memory the enchantment that rises up from the uncertainties and discomforts of the lands that no one has tamed. It is curious that the wild look of the grasses going right from the edge of the garden beside the rest-house should have attracted me more than two momentous things, one of them an aerodrome only a hundred and fifty yards away, with a few small craters round it, under a red moon, an objective for the Italians across the Abyssinian border, and the other ten times deadlier, the hum all round us of the mosquito that carries yellow fever, for he had got into Malakal. Double doors of very fine wire protected the rest-house, and mosquito-curtains protected the beds; but the deadliest of the mosquitoes is smaller than all the rest, and he got through the meshes without difficulty and trumpeted all night. A doctor called in the evening and signed some sort of charm that enabled us to proceed next day, for the world beyond was afraid of Malakal. In the morning we went on, and Africa dried as we went. Sparse scrub and sand appeared, then less scrub, then desert where scrub was rare, just north of Kosti; and, after Merowe, sheer savage yellow desert. We came on mountain ranges lost in the desert, with rivers in all their valleys, and tributaries running down to them, and streams winding into the tributaries; and rivers and tributaries and streams were all dry golden sand. Over those streams and down the mountains and on through the desert our moth-like shadow ran, and we came to Wadi Haifa. We did not do this in one flight, but stopped a few minutes at Khartoum on the way. And there a fancy had come to me, remembering that Sir John Maffey had governed the Sudan from Khartoum, and remembering how he had kindly helped me with permits to get over to Kent, but for which I should have been late for the Blitz, an experience I never pretended to enjoy, but which I would not have missed for anything; remembering these things, it occurred to me suddenly how excessively unlikely it would have seemed, when he lunched with us and looked at my Sudanese heads, that my next letter to him would have been from Khartoum; to have suggested such a thing would have been too wild a flight to permit one’s imagination, but I indulged in it now and wrote to him and posted the letter in Khartoum. Of course there was nothing unusual in all this; myriads of men about this time found all the plans carefully made for them, no less than the things they had intended to do themselves, contrasted as sharply with the adventures on which they were now engaged as was the life of Jack in his mother’s garden and the experience that he had at the other end of the beanstalk. Everyone’s fancies had always run to such changes, as all fairy-stories reveal; but now they were coming true. In Wadi Haifa we found a hotel that was not merely welcome to travellers in Africa, but would have seemed comfortable to people coming from anywhere. From its windows we saw the Nilotic sunset that we had known of old, glowing orange as ever over the sandy hills. In the shops of the town we bought one or two of those satchels and purses of bright leather that they work so well in the Sudan. We went on next day at dawn. The sun rose just as we started, and there is no better time to start in a flying-boat than this, for the water that rushes past the windows before one is in the air is then turned all to gold. At Abu Simbul we flew low to see that marvel of the ages, the temple carved out of the deep of the hill, whose altar sees the sunrise on midsummer day. Of course we saw nothing of the temple’s interior, but that I had seen before, and we saw the four colossi seated outside the gate and looking into the sunrise. I had written nothing for some time, for good experiences provide not only material but stimulant, but the drawback of too much stimulant is too well known for me to record it here. And now these four colossi led back my fancy to verse, and I wrote a sonnet to them which I reproduce.
THE LONG WATCH
Four kings that sit by Abu Simbul’s fane
Facing the sunrise, you have seen man fly,
I said, and fancied that three made reply
(The fourth being broken at the waist in twain)
As we swept by them in the aeroplane:
Only eternal things I note; and I,
And I; our ancient river floating by,
The gods, the sun and, in due season, rain.
But we have seen, all three, and he now broken
Before he fell saw too, the golden ray,
Which in our youth from one rock had awoken
Our sacred land upon midsummer’s day,
Has moved a little northward at its rising.
No other thing has been that is surprising.
We were in Egypt now, having crossed the frontier at Wadi Haifa, not that the desert knows anything of frontiers. It was still hills and sand, dark rocks set in gold. By the river lay the strip that the sakieh watered, ending as sharply as the edge of a strip of carpet, and there the desert began, and stretched away till it faded into the blue of the sky. We passed over a market in an oasis, and then the pyramids came into sight and we came down on the Nile. There was a certain light in the faces of those who met us, the origin of which was soon explained to us.
“We had our first air-raid this morning,” they said.
But I could not help wondering if they quite knew what air-raids were. We went to that pleasant hotel beside the pyramids, on the desert’s edge, called Mena House, which I knew of old, and even before resting I went to see the Great Pyramid, or rather I should say to be shown the Great Pyramid, for no one ever goes there alone. And, as the dragoman who secured me began to tell me wonderful tales, I was suddenly tempted to say something wonderful to him, something that seemed indeed to me to be among the wonders of the world, and I said: “I saw Abu Simbul this morning.”
Of course the Arab may have been familiar with such wonders, but five hundred miles in a morning was still new to me and I still wondered at it, and I trust the Arab had in him enough sense of wonder not to believe me. And then came a note to ask if we would attend a party that afternoon. My wife was horrified, for, whatever may be the cause, flying the length of Africa is fatiguing, but she never thought of refusing to go to the party. And I was rewarded, for I met there my friend Aly Ismail Bey, with whom I afterwards had some very fine shooting.
And now, as I look at a rough diary that my wife wrote of these strange times, I realize that one of the requisites of an autobiography is to keep away from all diaries; for to look at life through a diary is not merely to fail to see the wood because of the trees; but is like trying to look at a wood by putting one’s head into thick undergrowth. If there is to be any chance of interesting any reader with such a book it can only be by passing on to him, if one can succeed in doing so, the light of a few of those events that to oneself appear to stand up above the mist of the years. The first page of a diary shows one what a vast amount of good material one has forgotten, and the next page teaches one that there is too much material to use. The other day, in this month of December 1943 an idea for a tale came to me, and I put aside this book for a day to write the tale, which flowed with a light ease, for to work with fiction after working with truth is to turn from a ponderous material to that bright essence of which the arts are made. Life may be said to be a heap of facts: art is an essence distilled from them, and that essence is truth. And this would seem to indicate that the reader who has followed through this book the slow movements of my heavy body, slow even when in a Sunderland, compared to the flight of a fancy, might do better to follow the track of dreams that have gone through my other books.