The Book of Secrets Read Free Page B

Africa! …
    4 March
    “Venice has its gondola, London its cab, and Mombasa has its gharry, as I always say,” says Hanning. He is a drifter, who answered the Club’s notice, which was placed in the Cape Town
Times
, and came over to see the place, he says. The gharry is a tram running on rails and pulled by one or two natives. It is the only way to travel on the island, I am told. The PC is away and I might as well enjoy the metropolis while I can, before I get posted somewhere where I’ll be lucky to have a roof over my head. He has given me a list of the sites to visit. The Club has a small guide book, which he has lent me to browse through. The old Portuguese fort is a must. The old name of Mombasa was Mvita, for war.… Then the ancient mosque, the northern harbour where the dhows anchor, the water gate. And, no visitor to Mombasa misses the boat ride around the island …

    The Club verandah looked upon a dense garden of brilliant colours running all the way to the cliff edge, which was demarcated by a wire fence and white stones. Beyond lay the ocean, its shimmering, misty horizon a fitting sight for an expatriate or tourist or colonial servant to contemplate over a cocktail.
    He began his sightseeing the same day. A tram had been called,and it emerged now from under the shade of a bougainvillaea bush. It was rolled noisily to the rail and lifted upon it, after which he sat on the wooden seat under its canopy and was pushed and free-wheeled all the way down the tree-lined shady Kilindini Road.
    If The Point presented meditative vistas — dreamy groves, brightly coloured gardens, vast ocean, coral cliffs — Mombasa town assailed all the senses at once. The smells of overripe pineapples and mangoes, the open drains, animal droppings; costumes of a dozen cultures and the babble of as many languages.
    He played tennis every evening at the Sports Club while he waited for the Provincial Commissioner, the PC . At the new and already potholed cricket pitch he watched a friendly game on the first Sunday he was there: Indians versus the English, one tribe on either side of the pitch. It was a clear rout of the ragged Indians, most of whom had never held a bat before and had merely been assembled for the Englishmen’s pleasure. Dinner parties at the Club degenerated into drunken orgies, after which members had to be assisted into their trams. On the second Sunday of his stay, he participated first in an oyster picnic on the shore, followed by a “cocktail parade,” in which the object was to mix enough drinks to knock oneself out.
    There was one lion trophy on the wall beside the bar. A fierce, huge head, its mouth stretched wide open, the contemplation of which could make your stomach turn, your hair rise. As you turned away uneasily from this meeting you might be told by the barman that this lion had carried off twenty-seven victims in Tsavo: a coolie from an open railway carriage; an unknowing porter from a campfire away over a four-foot fence before his companions discovered him missing, the following day finding his bloodied clothes, some bones, and a severed head; a sleeping labourer dragged out from between two oblivious companionsinside a tent … and so the bloody toll went. If it was late in the afternoon, your attention would invariably drift, from that vanquished terror on the wall to the oversized human head below it, belonging to its hunter, Frank Maynard, who was sitting at a small table holding a whisky. There were stories about him, too, but they were told in his absence.
    He was a big man in army khaki, who came every day for his sundowner. From where he sat he quietly watched all the goings-on in the room — the bluster and chit-chat, the deals and complaints, the dart and card games, of the merchants, the officials, and the engineers. His presence, once he arrived, like the man-eater’s above him, became part of the character of the room. The hair on his large head was brown and sparse, he wore