Assegai

They drove into Tandala Camp as the sun was setting, and Graf Otto disappeared with Eva into the luxurious quarters that stood ready to receive them. Ishmael and three of his kitchen staff carried their dinner into their private dining room. The couple did not reappear until after breakfast the following morning.

‘Guten Tag, Courtney. See to it that these letters are delivered at once.’ Graf Otto handed him a bundle of envelopes sealed with red wax wafers and embossed with the double-headed eagles of the German Foreign Office in Berlin. They were addressed to the governor of the colony, and to all the other notables in Nairobi, including Lord Delamere and the officer commanding His Britannic Majesty’s forces in British East Africa, Brigadier General Penrod Ballantyne. ‘They are my letters of introduction from the Kaiserliche government,’ he explained, ‘and must be delivered today, without fail, ja?’

‘Of course, sir. I’ll see that this is done immediately.’ Leon sent for Max Rosenthal and, in Graf Otto’s presence, charged him with delivering the letters. ‘Take one of the motors, Max. Don’t come back until every one has been handed over.’

As Max drove away, Eva came from the private quarters to join them. She was dressed in riding kit and looked fresh and rested, her hair shining in the sunlight, her skin glowing with the sweet young blood under it.

Graf Otto scrutinized her approvingly, then turned back to Leon. ‘And now, Courtney, we will go to the airfield. I will fly my machines.’ During the night the hunting car had been washed and polished. All three of them got into it, and Graf Otto drove through the town to the polo ground.

When they arrived Gustav already had the Butterfly and the Bumble Bee drawn up on the edge of the field. Graf Otto walked around each aircraft, inspecting them carefully, while he engaged in earnest discussion with Gustav. Eventually he climbed up on to the wings to check the tension of the rigging wires and the struts. He opened the engine cowlings and examined the fuel lines and throttle cables. He unscrewed the filler caps of the fuel tanks and used a dipstick to ascertain the levels.

It was the middle of the morning before he expressed his complete satisfaction with the two aircraft, then went to the boarding ladder and climbed into the cockpit of the Bumble Bee. He buckled the chinstrap of his flying helmet then beckoned Gustav. The two men had a muttered conversation, Graf Otto pointing to the hunting car. Then Gustav started the engines. When they had warmed up and were running sweetly, Graf Otto taxied down to the far end of the polo field and swung the huge machine around until its nose was pointing into the breeze.

The sound of the engines had summoned the entire population of Nairobi and, once again, they were lining the field in excited anticipation. The four engines burst into a lion-throated roar and the Bumble Bee started to roll back towards where Eva and Leon stood in front of the hangar. Leon was a few paces behind her, in a position of attendance rather than equality. Swiftly the Bumble Bee gathered speed. She lifted her tail wheel from the ground and Leon held his breath as he watched the massive undercarriage bounce lightly over the turf, then break free of gravity and rise into the air. With a mere twenty feet to spare, the machine bellowed over their heads. The crowd ducked instinctively – everyone except Eva.

As Leon straightened he saw that she had been watching him covertly. A faintly mocking smile lifted the corners of her mouth. ‘Goodness me!’ she taunted him lightly. ‘Is this the intrepid hunter and fearless slayer of wild animals?’

It was only the second time since their meeting that she had looked him full in the face, and the first that she had addressed him directly. He was startled by how her demeanour changed when Graf Otto was not present. ‘Fräulein, I hope this is the only time that I fall short of your expectations.’ He gave her a small bow.

She turned away, deliberately terminating the brief contact, and shaded her eyes to watch the Bumble Bee circle the field. It was a light rebuff, but Leon savoured the memory of her smile, no matter that it had been mocking rather than friendly. He followed her gaze and saw that the Bumble Bee was already dropping towards the field for a landing.

Graf Otto touched down and taxied back to the hangar. He cut the engines and clambered down. The watching crowd cheered him wildly and he acknowledged them with a wave of his gloved hand. Gustav rushed to meet him, and the two men walked across to the Butterfly deep in conversation. Graf Otto left him at the foot of the ladder, climbed up into the cockpit and started the engines. He taxied her to the end of the polo field, turned her and came thundering back towards them. Once again Leon marvelled at the miracle of flight as the Butterfly left the ground and swept low over his head. This time he stood stock-still, and when he glanced at Eva she was watching him again. She inclined her head and her violet eyes sparkled with wicked fun. Her voice was drowned by the hubbub of the spectators, but he could read her lips as they formed a single word: ‘Bravo!’ The mockery was softened by another small, secret smile. Then she turned away to watch the aircraft circle the field twice before it lined up into the wind for the landing. It touched down and taxied to where they stood in front of the hangar.

Leon expected Graf Otto to cut the engines and disembark, but instead he leaned over the side of the cockpit and scrutinized the faces in the crowd below. He picked out Eva and signalled to her to come to him. She moved quickly to do his bidding, Gustav and two of his men running ahead of her with the boarding ladder. Halfway to the Butterfly the slipstream from the propellers caught her and flogged her skirts around her legs. Her broad-brimmed hat was whisked off her head, and her long dark hair tumbled around her face. She laughed and continued to run. Her hat was carried to where Leon stood and he caught it as it rolled past him.

Eva reached the bottom of the ladder and climbed lightly up the rungs. Clearly she had done it many times before. Leon watched her disappear over the rim of the cockpit. Then Graf Otto’s helmeted head turned towards him and he beckoned. Taken by surprise, Leon touched his own chest in an interrogatory gesture. ‘Who? Me?’ Graf Otto nodded emphatically and beckoned again, this time more imperiously.

Leon ran through the slipstream, his heart pounding with excitement, and scrambled up the ladder. As he dropped into the cockpit he handed the hat to Eva. She barely turned her head in his direction as she took it from him. The playful exchanges of a few minutes earlier might never have taken place. From somewhere she had found herself a leather flying helmet, which she strapped under her chin. Then she covered her eyes with the smoked lenses of the goggles.

‘Pull up the ladder!’ Graf Otto shouted, and reinforced the command with a hand signal. Leon leaned over the side, lifted it and hooked it into the retaining brackets on the fuselage.

‘Good. Sit here!’ Graf Otto indicated the seat beside him. Leon sat in it and fastened the safety strap across his lap. Graf Otto cupped his hands into a trumpet and bellowed into his ear, ‘You will navigate for me, ja?’

‘Where are we going?’ Leon shouted back.

‘To the closest of your hunting camps.’

‘That’s more than a hundred miles away,’ Leon protested.

‘A short hop. Ja! We will go there.’ He opened the throttles and taxied back to the far side of the field, paused to check the dials on his dashboard, then slowly pushed the four throttle levers forward to their full extent. The thunder of the Meerbach engines was deafening. The Butterfly bounded forward, bumping and thumping over every irregularity in the ground, her wings rocking and swaying as she gained speed swiftly. Leon clung to the rim of the cockpit, peering ahead. Tears started from his eyes as the wind ripped at them, but his heart was singing almost as loudly as the engines. Then, suddenly, all the rocking and bumping stopped with dramatic suddenness. Leon looked over the side and saw the earth dropping away below him. ‘We’re flying!’ he shouted into the wind. ‘We’re really flying!’ He saw the town below him but it took him moments to recognize it. Everything looked so different from that angle. He had to take his bearings from the snake of the railway line before he could pick out other landmarks: the pink walls of the Muthaiga Country Club; the shining corrugated-iron roof of Delamere’s new hotel; the whitewashed bulk of Government House and the governor’s residence.

‘Which way?’ Graf Otto had to shake his arm to get his attention.

‘Follow the railway line.’ Leon pointed westwards. With both hands he was trying to shield his eyes from the hundred-mile-an-hour wind that tore at his face. Graf Otto prodded his ribs with a bony finger and pointed at a small cubby-hole in the side of the cockpit. Leon opened it and found another leather flying helmet at the back. He pulled it over his head and buckled the strap under his chin, then adjusted the goggles over his eyes. Now he could see, and the side flaps of the helmet protected his eardrums from the roar of the rushing wind.

While he had been engrossed with fitting his helmet Eva had risen from her seat and moved to the front of the cockpit where she was standing, holding the handrail that ran around the rim. She resembled a figurehead on the bows of a man-o’-war, as she balanced gracefully against the motion of the Butterfly.

At that moment the aircraft plummeted sickeningly and unexpectedly. Leon grabbed at the nearest handhold in panic. He knew, without a shadow of doubt, that they were about to fall out of the sky and die a swift but violent death in a pile of wreckage on the earth far below. But the Butterfly was unperturbed: she waggled her wings in a dignified gesture of contempt at the forces of gravity and flew on serenely into the west.

Eva was still standing in the nose, and only then did Leon notice the safety-belt buckled around her waist and the karabiner snap-link at the other end of the lanyard hooked into a steel eye bolt in the floorboards between her feet. It had prevented her being hurled over the side when the Butterfly had dropped.

Graf Otto was still handling the controls with gentle touches of his big, freckled hands. He grinned at Leon around the unlit Cohiba cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth. ‘Thermal!’ he shouted above the wind. ‘It is nothing.’

Leon was mortified by his own panicky display. He had read enough about the theory of flight to know that air acted in the same way as water, with all its unpredictable currents and eddies.

‘Go forward.’ Graf Otto gestured. ‘Go forward to where you can see ahead to guide me.’ Leon edged gingerly to the front of the cockpit. Without a glance in his direction Eva moved aside to make room for him and he took up his position beside her and fastened his safety belt to the ring bolt. They braced themselves with both hands on the rail. They were so very close that he fancied, despite the wind, that he could smell a trace of her special perfume. Facing forward, he glanced at her from the corner of his eye. The slipstream flattened the blouse and long skirt against her body and limbs so that every curve and contour was accentuated. For the first time he was able to make out the shape of her legs, long and slender, and then he looked to the twin mounds of her bosom under the velveteen jacket. He saw at once that her breasts were larger than they had seemed, rounder and fuller than Verity O’Hearne’s had been. He forced himself to tear his eyes away and look ahead.

Already they were approaching the rim of the Great Rift Valley. He picked out the glint of the steel tracks where the railway began its descent of the escarpment to the volcanic steppe of the valley floor. He looked back at Graf Otto and gave him a hand signal to turn ninety degrees southwards. The German nodded and the Butterfly dropped one wing and went into a lazy left-hand turn. Centrifugal force pushed Eva lightly against him, and for a long, exquisite moment Leon felt the outside of her warm thigh press against his. She seemed oblivious to this for she made no move to pull away. Then Graf Otto lifted the port wing and the Butterfly came back on to even keel again. The contact was broken.

The Great Rift Valley opened before them. From this altitude it was a vista that belonged not to petty mankind but to God and his angels. Now Leon could truly appreciate the immensity of the land: the seared and rocky hills, the lion-coloured plains blotched with dark expanses of forest, and the blue palisades of hills and mountains stretching away into infinite distances.

Suddenly the deck canted under their feet as Graf Otto lowered the Butterfly’s nose and she dropped into the airy void. The cliffs of the escarpment rushed under them, so close that it seemed her wheels must bounce off the rocks. The valley floor loomed up to meet them. Leon saw Eva’s fists tighten into balls on the handrail. He could see that the tension in her body was arching her back. To pay her back for her earlier sauciness he released his own grip on the rail, and placed his hands on his hips, leaning easily into the dive as the aircraft dropped. This time she could not ignore him, and shot him a quick glance as he balanced against the disparate forces that dragged at his body. Then she looked ahead, but lifted one hand from the rail and turned it palm upwards in a gesture of resignation.

Graf Otto pulled the Butterfly’s nose up out of her dive down the valley wall. Leon’s knees buckled under the force of gravity and Eva was pushed against him once more. She swayed away as the Butterfly came back again on to even keel. They barrelled along the escarpment with the wall flashing past on the port side, so close that it seemed the wing-tip might touch it at any moment.

Suddenly Leon saw what appeared to be a swarm of large black scarab beetles crawling along a mile or so ahead. It was only when the Butterfly raced down on them that he saw it was a large herd of buffalo charging away in panic from their approach. He made another hand signal to Graf Otto, and the Butterfly banked steeply towards the fleeing herd. Once again Eva was pressed against him, but this time she gave him a deliberate bump with her hip. With a surge like electricity through his loins, he understood she was letting him know that she was just as aware of these physical contacts as he was.

They flashed over the heaving backs of the buffalo, so close that Leon could see each pellet of dried mud sticking to their hair, and clearly discern the parallel pattern of scars across the shoulders of the leading bull, left by the raking claws of a marauding lion.

They flew on until Eva waved excitedly and pointed out on her side of the fuselage. Graf Otto banked in the direction she was pointing. Then the Butterfly was straight and lined up on five huge elephant bulls, wading through the dense thorny undergrowth a short distance ahead. Although she no longer had the excuse of gravity, Eva gave him another cheeky little bump with her hip. It was a titillating but dangerous game they were playing, right under Graf Otto von Meerbach’s nose. Leon laughed into the wind and, without moving her head, Eva peeped at him through lowered lashes and smiled secretly.

They bore down on the running elephant. Leon saw that they were all old bulls and at least two carried tusks of more than a hundred pounds a side. Another had only a single, the other broken off at the lip, but the remaining one was colossal and dwarfed those of his companions. Otto dropped lower, then lower still, until it looked as though he meant to fly straight into the herd. The elephant seemed to realize that they could not outrun the Butterfly: they turned back and bunched up, shoulder to shoulder, forming a solid phalanx to confront this threat from the skies. Trumpeting so loudly that Leon could hear them above the engine, they charged headlong to meet the aircraft. As she skimmed over them they reared up, flaring their ears, and stretched out their serpentine trunks as though to snatch her out of the air.

Graf Otto climbed several hundred feet above the ground and flew on southwards. New and unexpected vistas opened before them. They flew over hidden valleys, secret re-entrants and salients in the walls of the Rift, some of which were not reflected on any survey map Leon had ever studied. Two or three valleys were fed by streams and pastured with green grass on which herds of large mammals, from giraffe to rhinoceros, had congregated. Leon tried to memorize the exact location of each one so that he could return to explore them, but they were flying so fast he found it difficult to keep track of their progress.

They climbed higher still until they could make out the vast massif of Kilimanjaro looming on the southern horizon a hundred miles or more ahead. The mountain was blue with distance, its crest wreathed in silver cloud through which the sun threw golden blades of light. Then Graf Otto waggled the wings to attract Leon’s attention and pointed out a closer mountain, only twenty or thirty miles off. The table top was unmistakable, and was probably what had attracted his notice.

‘Lonsonyo Mountain!’ Leon cried, but his voice was lost in the roar of wind and engines. ‘Go there!’ He made vehement hand signals, and Graf Otto opened the throttles wide. The Butterfly rose upwards, but the table of Lonsonyo stood almost ten thousand feet above sea level, near the aircraft ceiling. At first she climbed rapidly, but as the altitude increased her speed bled off. She became so sluggish that they cleared the top of the cliffs by no more than fifty feet.

Before them, Lusima’s cattle were spread out as they grazed on the sweet grasses of the high table land. Beyond them Leon picked out the pattern of the huts and cattle pens that formed the manyatta, and signalled to Otto to turn towards the village. Goats, chickens and naked herd-boys scattered at their approach. It was easy to single out Lusima’s hut from the others, for it was the largest and grandest, closest to the spreading branches of her council tree. There was no sign of Lusima until they were almost directly overhead. Then, suddenly, she appeared, ducking out of the low doorway of her hut and staring up at him. She was naked except for her tiny red loincloth, and the colourful bangles and necklaces around her ankles, wrists and neck. She gazed up at the Butterfly with an expression of comical bewilderment.

‘Lusima!’ Leon yelled, and ripped off his helmet and goggles. ‘Lusima Mama! It is me! M’bogo, your son!’ He waved frantically and suddenly she recognized him. He was so close that he saw her face light up and she waved with both hands, but then they were past and dropping down the far side of the mountain.

Once again Graf Otto waggled the wings and, with hand signals, asked Leon to point out the course he should take to reach the hunting camp. They had left it on the far side of Lonsonyo Mountain, so Leon directed him into a right-hand circuit of the sheer cliffs below the table land. He had never seen this side of the mountain before. Up until now, he had always approached and ascended from the southern side.

The rock was as sheer and impregnable as the outer wall of some monumental medieval fortress and lichen had painted on it a patchwork of many colours. Then, unexpectedly, the Butterfly came level with a break in the wall, a vertical chimney of rock, splitting the cliff from the summit right down to the scree slope at the foot of the mountain. Over the lip of the cliff at the top of the chimney spilled a bright cascade of water, a stream that drained the rain-sodden table land above and fell in undulating lacy curtains down the moss-blackened stone. As they passed, the wind blew eddies of fine spray into their faces. It dewed their goggles, and was cold as snowflakes on their cheeks.

The waterfall fell several hundred feet into the pool at the base of the cliff. The sun’s rays did not reach into that dark and mysterious gorge: it was filled with shadow that turned the pool black as an inkwell. It was so perfectly circular that it might have been built by ancient Roman or Egyptian architects. They were only able to gaze on this grand sight for a few short seconds before the Butterfly had sped past it; the rock flue seemed to close behind them with the finality of a massive cathedral door, shutting from view all trace of the waterfall.

When they flew out of the shadow of the mountain, the sun was already turning red as it passed through the haze of dust and smoke that hung low to the horizon. Leon gazed out over the purple plain, searching for his first glimpse of the hunting camp. At last, far ahead, he picked out the silver sausage of the windsock that marked the airstrip floating at the peak of its mast. He signed to Graf Otto to turn towards it, and soon they could make out the cluster of canvas and newly thatched roofs of what Leon had named Percy’s Camp. Just behind it stood a small kopje, no more than a few hundred feet high but visible for many miles.

Graf Otto circled the camp to check the wind direction and the orientation of the landing strip. As they banked around on the far side of his camp, Leon looked down the wing on to a dense, seemingly impenetrable wilderness of hookthorn bushes. It stretched for many miles, and in its midst he spotted another cluster of those dark shapes. By their bulk he knew at once that they were buffalo bulls, three old bachelors. One thing was certain, and that was that those old recluses would be cantankerous and highly dangerous. When they raised their heads and stared malevolently up at the aircraft, Leon evaluated them quickly, then muttered to himself, ‘Not a decent head among them. They’re all wearing yarmulkas.’ It was an irreverent reference to the Jewish prayer cap, used by the old hunters to describe a pair of buffalo horns so old and worn away that the points had gone, leaving only a skullcap of horn.

As Graf Otto touched down and let the Butterfly run out to the far end of the strip, they saw a cloud of dust tearing down the rutted track from the camp. A truck clattered into view with Hennie du Rand at the wheel, Manyoro and Loikot perched standing in the back.

‘So sorry, boss!’ Hennie greeted Leon, when he came down the ladder from the cockpit. ‘We were not expecting you to arrive for another few weeks at least. You’ve taken us by surprise.’ He was visibly flustered.

‘I’m as surprised to be here as you are to see me. The Graf works to his own timetable. Is there food and liquor in camp?’

‘Ja!’ Hennie nodded. ‘Max brought plenty from Tandala.’

‘Is there hot water in the shower? Are the beds made up, and is there paper in the thunderbox?’

‘There will be before you can ask again,’ Hennie promised.

‘Then we shall be all right. The Graf’s family motto is “Durabo”, I shall survive. We’ll put it to the test this evening,’ Leon said, and turned to Graf Otto as he came down the ladder.

‘I’m pleased to be able to tell you that all is in readiness for you, sir,’ he lied blithely, and led the couple to their quarters.