“What about lunch?”
“We’ll have some good Tommy broth and mashed potato. You’re going to knock this thing right away and it’s not so bad that you shouldn’t eat. They say that Terramycin kills it better than Yatren in the old days. But I’d feel better if we had Yatren. I was sure we had it in the medical chest.”
“I’m thirsty all the time.”
“I remember. I’ll show Mbebia how to make rice water and we’ll keep it cool in a bottle in the water bag and you drink all of that you want. It’s good for the thirst and it keeps your strength up.”
“I don’t know why I had to get ill with something. We lead such a wonderful healthy life.”
“Kitten, you could just as well have got fever.”
“But I take my antimalarial medicine every night and I always make you take yours when you forget it and we always wear our mosquito boots in the evening by the fire.”
“Sure. But in the swamp after the buffalo we were bitten hundreds of times.”
“No, dozens.”
“Hundreds for me.”
“You’re bigger. Put your arms around my shoulders and hold me tight.”
“We’re lucky kittens,” I said. “Everybody gets fever if they go in country where there is a lot of it and we were in two bad fever countries.”
“But I took my medicine and I made you remember yours.”
“So we didn’t get fever. But we were in bad sleeping sickness country too and you know how many tsetse flies there were.”
“Weren’t they bad though by the Ewaso Ngiro. I remember coming home in the evenings and they would bite like red-hot eyebrow tweezers.”
“I’ve never even seen red-hot eyebrow tweezers.”
“Neither have I but that’s what they bite like in that deep woods where the rhino lived. The one that chased G.C. and his dog Kibo into the river. That was a lovely camp though and we had so much fun when we first started hunting by ourselves. It was twenty times more fun than having somebody with us and I was so good and obedient, remember?”
“And we got so close to everything in the big green woods and it was like we were the first people that were ever there.”
“Do you remember where the moss was and the trees so high there was almost no sunlight ever and we walked softer than Indians and you took me so close to the impala that he never saw us and when we found the herd of buffalo just across the little river from the camp? That was a wonderful camp. Do you remember how the leopard came through the camp every night just like having Boise or Mr. Willie moving around the Finca at night at home?”
“Yes, my good kitten, and you’re not going to be sick really now because the Terramycin will have taken hold of that by tonight or in the morning.”
“I think it’s taking hold now.”
“Cucu couldn’t have said it was better than Yatren and Carbsone if it wasn’t really good. Miracle drugs make you feel spooky while you are waiting for them to take hold. But I remember when Yatren was a miracle drug and it really was then too.”
“I have a wonderful idea.”
“What would it be, honey my good kitten?”
“I just thought we could have Harry come with the Cessna and you and he could check on all your beasts and your problems and then I’d go back with him to Nairobi and see a good doctor about this dysentery or whatever it is and I could buy Christmas presents for everyone and all the things we should have for Christmas.”
“We call it the Birthday of the Baby Jesus.”
“I still call it Christmas,” she said. “And there are an awful lot of things we need. It wouldn’t be too extravagant do you think?”
“I think it would be wonderful. We’ll send a signal through Ngong. When would you want the plane?”
“How would day after tomorrow be?”
“Day after tomorrow is the most wonderful day there is after tomorrow.”
“I’m going to just lie quiet and feel the breeze from the snow on our Mountain. You go and make yourself a drink and read and be comfortable.”
“I’ll go out to show Mbebia how to make the rice water.”
Mary felt much better at noon and in the afternoon she slept again and in the evening felt quite well and was hungry. I was delighted with how the Terramycin had acted and that she had no bad reactions from it and told Mwindi, touching the wood of my gun butt, that I had cured Miss Mary with a powerful and secret dawa but that I was sending her into Nairobi tomorrow in the ndege in order that a European doctor might confirm my cure.
“Mzuri,” Mwindi said.
So we ate lightly but well and happily that night and it was a happy camp again and the disease and misfortune through the eating-of-lion-meat party, which had made a strong bid for power in the morning, dissolved as though the subject never had been raised. There were always these theories that came to explain any misfortune and the first and most important thing was someone or something that was guilty. Miss Mary was supposed to have extraordinary and unexplainable bad luck herself, which she was in the process of expiating, but she was also supposed to bring great good luck to other people. She was also well loved. Arap Meina actually worshipped her and Chungo, G.C.’s chief Game Scout, was in love with her. Arap Meina worshipped very few things as his religion had become hopelessly confused but he had moved into a worshipping of Miss Mary that, occasionally, reached peaks of ecstasy that were little short of violence. He loved G.C. but this was a sort of schoolboy fascination combined with devotion. He came to care greatly for me, carrying this affection to the point where I had to explain to him that it was women that I cared for rather than men though I was capable of deep and lasting friendship. But all his love and devotion which he had scattered over one whole slope of Kilimanjaro with complete sincerity and almost always with returned devotion, giving it alike to men, women, children, boys and girls and to all types of alcohol and the available heroic herbs, and they were many, he now concentrated this great talent for affection on Miss Mary.
Arap Meina was not supremely beautiful although he had great elegance and soldierliness in uniform with his ear-laps always coiled neatly over the tops of his ears so that they formed a knot of the sort Greek Goddesses wore their hair in a sort of modified Psyche knot. But he had to offer the sincerity of an old elephant poacher gone straight and into a straightness so unimpeachable that he could offer it to Miss Mary almost as though it were a virginity. The Wakamba are not homosexual. I do not know about the Lumbwa because Arap Meina was the only Lumbwa I have ever known intimately but I would say that Arap Meina was strongly attracted by both sexes and that the fact that Miss Mary, with the shortest of African haircuts, provided the pure Hamitic face of a boy with a body that was as womanly as a good Masai young wife was one of the factors that channeled Arap Meina’s devotion until it became worship. He called her not Mama, which is the ordinary way an African speaks of any married white woman when he does not feel up to saying Memsahib, but always Mummy. Miss Mary had never been called Mummy by anyone and told Arap Meina not to address her in that way. But it was the highest title he had salvaged from his contact with the English language and so he called her Mummy Miss Mary or Miss Mary Mummy, depending on whether he had been using the heroic herbs and barks or had simply made contact with his old friend, alcohol.
We were sitting by the fire after dinner talking of Arap Meina’s devotion to Miss Mary and I was worrying about why I had not seen him that day when Mary said, “It isn’t bad for everybody to be in love with everybody else the way it is in Africa, is it?”
“No.”
“Are you sure something awful won’t come out of it suddenly?”
“Awful things come out of it all the time with the Europeans. They drink too much and get all mixed up with each other and then blame it on the altitude.”