Free West with the Night by Beryl Markham Page B

but most of it roofed with the heads of high trees — cedar, ebony, mahogo, teak and bamboo — and their trunks were snared in miles of creeping plants. The creeping plants rose to heights of twelve and fifteen feet and, from the ground, you never saw the tops of the trees until they fell from the blows of axes and were dragged away by teams of oxen handled by Dutchmen with whips that cracked all day.
    People called Wanderobo lived in the forests and hunted in them with bows and poisoned arrows and poisoned spears, but they were never a threat to any of my father’s men or to us. They were not quarrelsome people. They hid in the creeping vines, in the trees, and the underbrush and watched the work of the axes and the teams of oxen and moved deeper into the growth.
    When the farm began to acquire an atmosphere of permanence and the yard in front of the first few huts was trampled hard and dogs sprawled on it in the sun, some of these Wanderobo would come out of the forest bringing the black and white skins of Colobus monkeys to trade for salt and oil and sugar. The skins were sewn together to make soft rugs for the beds, and I remembered them long after they were worn out and forgotten and Colobus monkeys were no longer easy to find — and the farm had become almost an industry.
    By then there were a thousand Kavirondo and Kikuyu working on it instead of ten or twenty, and hundreds of oxen instead of just a few. The forest had fallen back, giving ground with the grim dignity of a respected enemy, and fields were cleaned of the rocks and bush that had lent them the character of wilderness for centuries. Huts had become houses, sheds had become stables, cattle had cut paths in the prairie.
    My father bought two old steam engines and anchored them to make power for a grist mill. It was as if there had never before been a grist mill anywhere, as if all the maize in the world waited to be ground and all the wheat ever grown needed only to be made into flour.
    You could stand on a hill and look down on the dirt-track road that went to Kampi ya Moto, where the maize was so tall that the tallest man seemed like a child when he walked in it, and you could see a ribbon of wagons, each drawn by sixteen oxen, coming loaded with grain to the farm. Sometimes the wagons followed so close upon one another that the ribbon seemed motionless. But at the entrance to the mill, you could see that it almost never stopped.
    The mill never stopped, and the crew of Kavirondo who unloaded the heavy bags and reloaded them again, the coarse grain ground smooth and yellow, moved from dawn until dark, and sometimes after dark, like the lesser members of a great ballet set to the music of steam and turning millstones.
    Nearly all the produce of the mill, the flour, and the posho, went to the Government to feed the labourers of the Uganda Railway.
    This was a good enough railway as far as it went (from Mombasa to Kisumu), but it had an unhappy youth. As late as 1900 its trains were afraid to go out in the dark — and with reason. Lion infested the country it traversed, and a passenger or an engineer was either a brave man or one with a suicidal phobia to disembark at any of the outlying stations unarmed.
    A telegraph line followed the rails to Kisumu about 1902 — or it was intended that one should. The posts were there, and the wire too, but rhino take sensual and sadistic pleasure in scratching their great hulks against telegraph posts, and any baboon worthy of his salt cannot resist swinging from suspended wires. Often a herd of giraffe found it expedient to cross the railroad tracks, but would not condescend to bow to the elevated metal strands that proclaimed the White Man’s mandate over their feeding grounds. As a result, many telegrams en route from Mombasa to Kisumu, or the other way around, were intercepted, their cryptic dots and dashes frozen in a festoon of golden wire dangling from one or another of the longest necks in Africa.
    With the