They Had Dug Two Graves

I've had to live with myself, said Jordan, and I've always wanted to be fit for myself to know. That's a quotation from somewhere, but it was tailored for what little philosophy I have, and I have tried to live by it. There is another quotation: that all things grow old but greed. If you read that in one way it may mean that the young are always greedy, and certainly I was young and I was greedy when I went hunting for gold. But I was greedy for life as much as the gold, and I had not yet learnt to live with myself.

We had a hundred dollars between us, Jack Wriggles-worth and I, when we went gold-hunting, and we had a camping outfit that a Boy Scout would sneer at. I was twenty-one or so, and that is a very good age to be, because you have the Law to confirm what you have known since you were fifteen: that you are a man.

I have always found life a challenge, and I have accepted that challenge. Is there any other way to live ? I followed a pattern cut by the men of my family. My grandfather took up land in Oregon when that beautiful land was young, and I have been in Oregon and hunted there. It is a good land, and I know that it gave my grandfather what Africa gave me. My mother's brothers were horse-ranchers in Montana, and another of my uncles went to Canada and had so much of the man in him that he drowned himself trying to swim his horse across a river in flood.

I went to school in Worcestershire. I ran away to sea three times. In the 'eighties boys were always running away to sea, and I had no more luck than the majority. The third time I did get taken on as a cabin-boy to a three-master berthed at Bristol. But the boy who had run away with me wrote home to his aunt for money, and they came and found us, and my father got so

Mongaso

damned angry with me that he made me walk all the way back to Bath. I was ten or eleven then, I suppose.

The last attempt I made to run away was successful. I was older and more resourceful, and I got to South Africa and enlisted as a constable in the Cape Mounted Police. Very fine I looked in breeches and strapped-up hat. I rode with Gorringe's Flying Column, and the Boers gave me a bullet in the leg to remember it by. I got my discharge and went fishing for Cape salmon with some Malays, and all the salmon we caught had to go in wages to the Malays.

I met Jack Wrigglesworth in Port Elizabeth. He reminded me of the heroes in the old Boy's Own Paper. He was handsome and clean and very English. He could be cold with a hard, aristocratic coldness, and then he would smile as he saw the ridiculous side of his own appearance. He was about my height, six feet two inches, and he could box just as well as I could, or at any rate neither could knock the other down. We were both very young, and our youth made us allies in a world which, we were sure, was run by and for the old.

An engineer from a Union Castle ship told us that there had been gold finds up in British and German East, and we listened and we counted our money. We bought a bell tent, some kit, two tickets on the Printz Regent, and were left with £20 between us. But that was enough for two boys who were going to find gold.

When we got to Mombasa they said, what gold strike ? You mean that dream a Hindu storekeeper had when business was slack?

But we knew better. We slept in the bell tent. We spent most of our money on rail tickets to Port Florence. There we hired a canoe and paddled it two miles across the bight of Lake Victoria to Kisumu, and there we got a passage in a dhow to the German port of Shirati. I lost my heart to Africa, to the great green lake and the blue

They Had Dug Two Graves 151

sky, the dark frame of the forest, the islands like jewelled studs, the night-calls and the empty, resounding silences of the day. We passed an island where thirty thousand natives had died of sleeping sickness that year, and I knew that Africa had all the beauty and the brutality a boy's spirit could need.

It had gold too, and to find this we had first to see the Kommandant at Shirati. He was very korrekt. He issued us hunting licences and prospecting licences, and he was happy to inform us that one of his countrymen had already found gold and was now at Muanza, fitting out an expedition to search for the main reef.

We were in a great hurry. We hired guides and porters and we made futile forced marches that blistered our feet, and hid the blisters from each other. When we got up among the Wachise we were told that this German had gone through two days before. So we hurried and we caught up with him, and he said he was not looking for gold, he was a hunter.

He was hunting with very strange equipment, and we smiled at him in our youthful cynicism, and we left before dawn and pushed on, glad to be ahead of him.

Two days later we awoke to find that our porters and our guides had deserted us. There was only Jim, a Kikuyu who had come over the lake with us as our personal boy.

I think we were frightened, but we did not speak of this to each other, and we went alone down the yellow plain to a Wachise village where an old chief was holding council in his striped blanket. The colour of it took my breath in my throat; the sun on copper bands, on spear points and ruddy plumes, on the blue smoke and the purple bloom of the old chief's skin. He looked at us gravely out of his wrinkled face and talked to us as if we were as old and as wise as he. He scratched his chest and

I've had to live with myself, said Jordan, and I've always wanted to be fit for myself to know. That's a quotation from somewhere, but it was tailored for what little philosophy I have, and I have tried to live by it. There is another quotation: that all things grow old but greed. If you read that in one way it may mean that the young are always greedy, and certainly I was young and I was greedy when I went hunting for gold. But I was greedy for life as much as the gold, and I had not yet learnt to live with myself.

We had a hundred dollars between us, Jack Wriggles-worth and I, when we went gold-hunting, and we had a camping outfit that a Boy Scout would sneer at. I was twenty-one or so, and that is a very good age to be, because you have the Law to confirm what you have known since you were fifteen: that you are a man.

I have always found life a challenge, and I have accepted that challenge. Is there any other way to live ? I followed a pattern cut by the men of my family. My grandfather took up land in Oregon when that beautiful land was young, and I have been in Oregon and hunted there. It is a good land, and I know that it gave my grandfather what Africa gave me. My mother's brothers were horse-ranchers in Montana, and another of my uncles went to Canada and had so much of the man in him that he drowned himself trying to swim his horse across a river in flood.

I went to school in Worcestershire. I ran away to sea three times. In the 'eighties boys were always running away to sea, and I had no more luck than the majority. The third time I did get taken on as a cabin-boy to a three-master berthed at Bristol. But the boy who had run away with me wrote home to his aunt for money, and they came and found us, and my father got so damned angry with me that he made me walk all the way back to Bath. I was ten or eleven then, I suppose.

The last attempt I made to run away was successful. I was older and more resourceful, and I got to South Africa and enlisted as a constable in the Cape Mounted Police. Very fine I looked in breeches and strapped-up hat. I rode with Gorringe's Flying Column, and the Boers gave me a bullet in the leg to remember it by. I got my discharge and went fishing for Cape salmon with some Malays, and all the salmon we caught had to go in wages to the Malays.

I met Jack Wrigglesworth in Port Elizabeth. He reminded me of the heroes in the old Boy's Own Paper. He was handsome and clean and very English. He could be cold with a hard, aristocratic coldness, and then he would smile as he saw the ridiculous side of his own appearance. He was about my height, six feet two inches, and he could box just as well as I could, or at any rate neither could knock the other down. We were both very young, and our youth made us allies in a world which, we were sure, was run by and for the old.

An engineer from a Union Castle ship told us that there had been gold finds up in British and German East, and we listened and we counted our money. We bought a bell tent, some kit, two tickets on the Printz Regent, and were left with ■£20 between us. But that was enough for two boys who were going to find gold.

When we got to Mombasa they said, what gold strike ? You mean that dream a Hindu storekeeper had when business was slack?

But we knew better. We slept in the bell tent. We spent most of our money on rail tickets to Port Florence. There we hired a canoe and paddled it two miles across the bight of Lake Victoria to Kisumu, and there we got a passage in a dhow to the German port of Shirati. I lost my heart to Africa, to the great green lake and the blue

They Had Dug Two Graves 151

sky, the dark frame of the forest, the islands like jewelled studs, the night-calls and the empty, resounding silences of the day. We passed an island where thirty thousand natives had died of sleeping sickness that year, and I knew that Africa had all the beauty and the brutality a boy's spirit could need.

It had gold too, and to find this we had first to see the Kommandant at Shirati. He was very korrekt. He issued us hunting licences and prospecting licences, and he was happy to inform us that one of his countrymen had already found gold and was now at Muanza, fitting out an expedition to search for the main reef.

We were in a great hurry. We hired guides and porters and we made futile forced marches that blistered our feet, and hid the blisters from each other. When we got up among the Wachise we were told that this German had gone through two days before. So we hurried and we caught up with him, and he said he was not looking for gold, he was a hunter.

He was hunting with very strange equipment, and we smiled at him in our youthful cynicism, and we left before dawn and pushed on, glad to be ahead of him.

Two days later we awoke to find that our porters and our guides had deserted us. There was only Jim, a Kikuyu who had come over the lake with us as our personal boy.

I think we were frightened, but we did not speak of this to each other, and we went alone down the yellow plain to a Wachise village where an old chief was holding council in his striped blanket. The colour of it took my breath in my throat; the sun on copper bands, on spear points and ruddy plumes, on the blue smoke and the purple bloom of the old chief's skin. He looked at us gravely out of his wrinkled face and talked to us as if we were as old and as wise as he. He scratched his chest and advised us to go no further. He said that the least we would suffer if we went on would be thirst.

We had never been thirsty, not the thirst when you have no water and know there will be no water, and so he did not alarm us. He shrugged his shoulders sadly and said that he would give us porters, but we should take much water.

The land was dry, dry, shifting earth and parched grass clasped in clumps. The trees, what trees there were, crouched on the earth as if they wished to shelter in their own shadows.

The water ran out. We travelled a day without water. We awoke the next morning to find the porters gone, and once more we were alone with Jim.

Now we understood thirst. Water became more important than gold. We could not have looked as hard and as desperately for gold as we looked for water. Yet it was gold we found.

Our tongues were swelling in our mouths, but we found quartz outcroppings with distinct gold traces.

And then we could not move. We lay in the tent and let the fever hit us, while Jim padded out to look for water. We were delirious that night, having swallowed enough quinine to kill us. We lived. But in the morning Jack was raving. I lay beside him, my eyes hardly able to see the cone of the tent, the flies coming in and crawling over the sweat on my face, and I listened to Jack raving. First he would laugh, and then he would cry, and then he would moan, and he went on talking, and crying, and laughing and moaning.

Toward noon the fever dropped in me, and I pushed myself up on my elbow and saw a line of trees on the horizon, a long, long way off, and I reasoned simply that where there were trees there must be water. I don't know how far away those trees were. Perhaps I never saw them at all, for if I saw them then why had we not

They Had Dug Two Graves 153

seen them before ? But I got up and I took a rifle and a water-bottle, and I walked toward the trees that might not have been there.

I found trees. I found them so dry that the bark turned to dust when I touched it, and they were dropping over a dry gully. The pebbles burnt my hands when I fell on them. I prayed. I prayed aloud and I prayed for water. I offered nothing. I asked for water. I got up and walked along the donga.

I walked along the donga and I found water. A stagnant hole that the sun had sucked lower and lower until the sides were almost vertical, scraped by the hooves of zebra and gazelle. It stank but I drank from it, and I filled the bottle. The water gave me strength, and although I had prayed for it, I thanked no one when I found it.

The water refreshed my desire for gold. I found more quartz, a fine reef of it, and in the fever that was still in me I thought cunningly of the German, that hunter with the innocent face. I collected sticks and pegged claims for myself and Jack, and I made a drawing of the place in my notebook. And I lay down and slept.

It was night before I saw the tent-fire again, and between us a fine gazelle, with head erect and elegant horns. I shot it, and the shot brought out Jim who carried it into camp.

Jack did not recognize me. I forced some water, some soup, and some more quinine into him, and he was calm and looked at me and spoke to me rationally. That is all I remember, his face looking at me and smiling, until I saw it again and it was no longer smiling. He told me that I had been raving for a day and a night since I brought in the water.

Thus it went on, a damnable see-saw. When I was conscious he raved. When I raved he was conscious, and neither could cheer the other with the thought of the gold up there in the reef, by the water-hole that was keeping us alive.

The old Wachise chief came at last. I saw him a long way off, two hours after I had awoken and found Jim gone and believed that Jack and I were now completely abandoned. But Jim had gone for the Wachise and the old chief's face was dark with shame because of the desertion of our porters. He brought us food and water, and Jack sat up and began to talk coherently, which means that we both talked about gold again.

We had both walked around death, and nodded to it, and yet we still talked of gold, and perhaps we were justified for a man should be rewarded for his suffering. We knew that we must get to Ikoma, the German post fifty miles away, and register our claims.

We were carried in two hammocks, but the fever came over us again on the evening of the first day, and when I came to I heard German being spoken around me. I saw Jack stepping from his hammock and collapsing.

Then a day, maybe two more days out of my life, before I awoke to the sound of Jim crying. He was sitting on his heels beside me, crying, and touching me gently. I called to him, and he looked into my face and ran. He brought a German sergeant of askaris to me, and this sergeant said that Jack Wrigglesworth was dead.

I said, you're a liar. I thought it was a trick to rob us of the claim. I said, you're a liar, and he shook his head. Show me the grave, I said, show me the grave, and they carried me in the hammock.

They had dug two graves, and mine was still empty beside Jack's.

I said they could have the gold if they found it. I did not want the gold or the country. In two days I asked for porters to carry me on an eight-day trek to Muanza. When the porters reached the town they put me down by the roadside outside, and they went away to get

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drunk. Jim stayed, he stayed until at last he went into Muanza and bullied and threatened the porters so that they came back and carried me to hospital. He was loyal, and his loyalty makes nonsense out of the fact that he later ran away with my equipment and most of my clothes.

Blackwater fever, said the doctor. He seemed surprised that I was still alive.

I remembered the gold when I was healthy, that is the way with gold. I registered the claims, and the filing was valid, but the Germans never recognized it. I came out of hospital in rags, and no one knew where Jim had gone, except that he had run away with everything I had.

I was twenty-two, and Africa stretched to the north and the south and the east and the west of me. I was twenty-two and in rags, but I knew that I had found Africa and it had found me.

I went into the town and there a rolling, smiling, sweating Greek trader called Antonies, but who should have been called Bacchus, bought me a bottle of champagne. We drank it and I knew that champagne is not for rich men. It should be drunk by young men of twenty-two who are broke and in rags. Antonies said, take what you want from the store and pay me when you can.

In the store was an Italian whose name I cannot remember. I know he worked for a skin company in Ikoma, which seems an oddly inconsequential thing to remember about the Samaritan who once lent me twenty pounds when I was broke.