African Nights by Kuki Gallmann

Author:Kuki Gallmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241018408
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

13

Fifty Guineas’ Pike

The seamed hills became black shadows … sounds ceased, forms vanished – and the reality of the universe alone remained – a marvellous thing of darkness and glimmers.

Joseph Conrad, Tales of Unrest, ‘Karain: A Memory’

‘Next full moon, I would like to show you and Sveva Fifty Guineas’ Pike,’ said my friend Hugh Cole. ‘The sun will set and the moon will rise, and we will watch from the most fantastic kopje. The view is terrific. Pack some sandwiches. I’ll bring the fishing rods. Yeah.’

He grinned. I found his Antipodean accent quite funny for a Cole.

I liked Hugh Cole. He was a true friend of mine, since the old days in Laikipia. The Coles lived, then, on Narok Estate, a large and efficient ranch situated east of us at Ol Ari Nyiro and, by Kenyan standards, they were our neighbours. Often Hugh and our friend Jeremy Block appeared with the specific aim of going after a buffalo with Paolo. They would be out all afternoon, and in the evening we would sit talking until late round the fire.

Hugh was not much older than a boy then – perhaps nineteen or so – and he had dreams, like boys have, and grown-ups too, sometimes.

He was tall and lanky, with straight, dark hair inherited from his Irish ancestors, pale skin with some freckles, and a strange, veiled, deep voice. His most peculiar characteristic was the dancing look of mischief that crept into his disturbing blue eyes, which never blinked and focused on his interlocutor with the disconcerting fixity of a bird. Yet he was much too polite and far too well bred to stare.

Hugh had the flair for words of the June-born. His stories had colour and force, a cutting poignancy which I found entertaining, and in our long talks lay the core of our friendship.

Like the sons of the Delameres, of the Longs and of the Powys families, and of a few others, Hugh had been brought up to farm one day the vast family estates on the Kenya Highlands. They were families who belonged to Kenyan history, and to that earlier generation of eccentric, adventurous or aristocratic Kenyan pioneers who had walked their way through Africa against all odds at the beginning of the century, defying disease and heat, wild animals and tsetse flies, unvisited country and unfriendly tribes. Driven by the invincible curiosity to discover the unknown, they followed the dream of adventure and the need to explore intrinsic to the British soul, and they found a new Eden in the Highlands and on the plains of the Great Rift Valley, where they established their dominion.

They went everywhere on horseback, carving tracks and roads over virgin unwelcoming land. They died of malaria, of mysterious tropical diseases, of septic wounds and festering sores, of native spears or predator’s attack. But they cleared the bush and tilled the fields. They bred prize sheep and pedigree cattle, and they shot the lions or rustlers that tried to kill or steal their livestock.

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