The heavenly bodies, in their courses, have it in their power to move human minds to unknown heights of delight. We are not generally conscious of them; when their idea is suddenly brought back, and actualized to us, it opens up a tremendous perspective. Kepler writes of what he felt when, after many years’ work, he at last found the laws of the movements of the planets:
“I give myself over to my rapture. The die is cast. Nothing I have ever felt before is like this. I tremble, my blood leaps. God has waited six thousand years for a looker-on to his work. His wisdom is infinite, that of which we are ignorant is contained in him, as well as the little that we know.”
Indeed it was exactly the same transport which took hold of me and shook me all through, at the time of the earthquake.
The feeling of colossal pleasure lies chiefly in the consciousness that something which you have reckoned to be immovable, has got it in it to move on its own. That is probably one of the strongest sensations of joy and hope the world. The dull globe, the dead mass, the Earth itself, rose and stretched under me. It sent me out a message, the slightest touch, but of unbounded significance. It laughed so that the Native huts fell down and cried: Eppur si muove.
Early next morning, Juma brought me my tea and said: “The King of England is dead.”
I asked him how he knew.
“Did you not, Memsahib,” he said, “feel the earth toss and shake last night? That means that the King of England is dead.”
But luckily the King of England lived for many years after the earthquake.
George
On a cargo-boat to Africa I once made friends with a little boy named George, who was travelling out with his mother and his young aunt. One day, on the deck, he detached himself from his women and, followed by their eyes, walked up to me. He announced that it was his birthday next day, he would be six years old, and his mother was going to ask the English passengers for tea, would I come? he said.
“But I am not English, George,” said I.
“What are you?” he asked, in great surprise.
“I am a Hottentot,” I said.
He stood up straight, and looked at me very gravely. “Never mind,” he said, “I hope you will come.”
He walked back to his mother and aunt and announced to them in a nonchalant way, but with so much firmness that it cut short any objection: “She is a Hottentot. But I want her.”
Kejiko
I once had a fat riding-mule that I had named Molly. The mule—Sice gave her another name, he called her Kejiko, which means “the spoon,” and when I asked him why he called her the spoon, he answered: “Because she looks like a spoon.” I walked all round her to find out what he had in his mind, but to me she did not look, from any side, the least like a spoon.
Some time after I happened to be driving Kejiko, with three other mules, in a cart. When I got up in the driver’s high seat, I had a kind of bird’s eye view of the mules. Then I saw that the Sice had been right. Kejiko was unusually narrow across the shoulder and had broad plump hindquarters, she looked very much like a spoon with the rounded side up.
If Kamau the Sice and I myself had each been painting a portrait of Kejiko, the pictures would have been as different as possible. But God and the angels would have seen her as Kamau saw her. He that cometh from above is above all, and what he hath seen that he testifieth.
The Giraffes Go to Hamburg
I was staying in Mombasa in the house of Sheik Ali bin Salim, the Lewali of the coast, a hospitable, chivalrous old Arab gentleman.
Mombasa has all the look of a picture of Paradise painted by a small child. The deep Sea-arm round the island forms an ideal harbour; the land is made out of whitish coral-cliff grown with broad green mango trees and fantastic bald grey Baobab trees. The Sea at Mombasa is as blue as a cornflower, and, outside the inlet to the harbour, the long breakers of the Indian Ocean draw a thin crooked white line, and give out a low thunder even in the calmest weather. The narrow-streeted town of Mombasa is all built from coral-rock, in pretty shades of buff, rose and ochre, and above the town rises the massive old Fortress, with walls and embrasure, where three hundred years ago the Portuguese and the Arabs held out against one another; it displays stronger colours than the town, as if it had, in the course of the ages, from its high site drunk in more than one stormy sunset.
The flamboyant red Acacia flowers in the gardens of Mombasa, unbelievably intense of colour and delicate of leaf. The sun burns and scorches Mombasa; the air is salt here, the breeze brings in every day fresh supplies of brine from the East, and the soil itself is salted so that very little grass grows, and the ground is bare like a dancing-floor. But the ancient mango trees have a dense dark-green foliage and give benignant shade; they create a circular pool of black coolness underneath them. More than any other tree that I know of, they suggest a place to meet in, a centre for human intercourse; they are as sociable as the village-wells. Big markets are held under the mango trees, and the ground round their trunks is covered with hen-coops, and piled up watermelons. Ali bin Salim had a pleasant white house on the mainland, at the curve of the Sea-arm, with a long row of stone steps down to the Sea. There were guests’ houses alongside it, and in the big room of the principal building, behind the Verandah, there were collected many fine Arab and English things: old ivory and brass, china from Lamu, velvet armchairs, photographs, and a large gramophone. Amongst these, inside a satin-lined casket, were the remnants of a full tea-set in dainty English china of the ‘forties, which had been the wedding-present of the young Queen of England and her Consort, when the Sultan of Zanzibar’s son married the Shah of Persia’s daughter. The Queen and the Prince had wished the married couple such happiness as they were themselves enjoying.
“And were they as happy?” I asked Sheik Ali when he took out the little cups, one by one, and placed them on the table to show them to me.
“Alas no,” said he, “the bride would not give up riding. She had brought her horses with her, on the dhow that carried her trousseau. But the people of Zanzibar did not approve of ladies riding. There was much trouble about it, and, as the Princess would sooner give up her husband than her horses, in the end the marriage was dissolved and the Shah’s daughter went back to Persia.”
In the harbour of Mombasa lay a rusty German cargo-steamer, homeward bound. I passed her in Ali bin Salim’s rowing boat with his Swaheli rowers, on my way to the island and back. Upon the deck there stood a tall wooden case, and above the edge of the case rose the heads of two Giraffes. They were, Farah, who had been on board the boat, told me, coming from Portuguese East Africa, and were going to Hamburg, to a travelling Menagerie.
The Giraffes turned their delicate heads from the one side to the other, as if they were surprised, which they might well be. They had not seen the Sea before. They could only just have room to stand in the narrow case. The world had suddenly shrunk, changed and closed round them.
They could not know or imagine the degradation to which they were sailing. For they were proud and innocent creatures, gentle amblers of the great plains; they had not the least knowledge of captivity, cold, stench, smoke, and mange, nor of the terrible boredom in a world in which nothing is ever happening.