The Flame Trees of Thika Read Free

Oram as a gushing woman, Mrs Oram was condemned. Yet the Orams were hard workers, their hospitality was always unstinted, and their craving for the wilder places of the earth was genuine. But everything had to be twice as big as life size.
    ‘They are romantics,’ Robin suggested later.
    ‘They are fools,’ Tilly replied. She disapproved of romantics, but of course was one herself, though she concealed it like a guilty secret. It is always our own qualities that most appal us when we find them in others, and for this reason Mrs Oram entered into her bad books. Nevertheless she was grateful, and later on sent Mrs Oram a turkey and several packets of English seeds.

Chapter 2
    B EFORE the sun was really hot next morning the little weather-beaten oxen with their humps and sagging dewlaps were in-spanned and we set off again down the wagon track.
    On our right the tawny plain stretched away, a bowl of sunlight, to the Tana river and beyond: you felt that you could walk straight on across it to the rim of the world. On our left rose a long, dark-crested mountain range from which sprang rivers that watered a great part of Kikuyuland. These rivers, no larger than streams, had dug down through soil red as a fox and rich as chocolate to form steep valleys whose sides were now green with young millet and maize. So numerous were these streams that on a map they looked like veins and arteries in a diagram of anatomy. Our track crossed them at the point where the intervening ridges flattened out into the great plain, so we had to ford several streams; but their banks were no longer steep, and their water was becoming sluggish. Instead of mossy rocks and ferns and trees bending over rushing water, we traversed incipient swamps with papyrus and reeds.
    Sometimes we passed or encountered Kikuyu travellers, thebacks of the women always bent low under enormous burdens suspended by leather straps that bit into their sloping foreheads. They wore pointed leather aprons and trudged along looking like big brown snails. As a result, no doubt, of this pack-animal existence you never saw a good figure, except among the young girls; once married, the women’s breasts sagged like empty purses and their legs moved in a quick, shuffling gait.
    The men, on the other hand, were slim and upright and often had a remarkable look of fragility; their bodies were hairless, shining, and light. The young warriors wore their locks embellished with sheep’s fat and red ochre and plaited into a large number of short pigtails to hang down all round, like the fleece of a long-haired sheep; they walked with a loping stride quite different from the women’s plod. By now the influence of missionaries and Government combined had put them into blankets, which they wore like togas, knotted over one shoulder. Most of the blankets were red with black stipes and looked well against coppery skins and gay red and blue ornaments. Ear-lobes were pierced, and the hole enlarged to take plugs of wood, coils of wire, or bead necklaces that hung down to their shoulders; the young bloods wore a beaded belt from which depended a a slim sword in a leather scabbard dyed vermilion with an extract from the root of a creeper.
    We had with us in the cart a cook-cum-houseboy called Juma lent to us, as a great favour, by Roger Stilbeck to see us in. He was used to grander ways and, the farther we travelled from Nairobi, the more disapproving he became of the local inhabitants, who to me looked as wild and exciting as the gazelles and antelopes.
    ‘They are small like pigeons,’ he said loftily. ‘They eat chickens, which make them cowardly. Look at their legs! Thin like a bustard. And their women are like donkeys, with heads as smooth as eggs. They are not to be trusted. Why do you wish to live amongst such stupid people? Here your crops will not prosper, your cattle will die….’
    Juma was a Swahili from the Coast, or said he was: Swahilis were fashionable, and quite a lot of people