Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

“Drink?” He ignored her last remark.

“I’d love one, but do they serve alcohol here? I thought you said that Lamu was mainly Muslim.”

“Mainly, yes, but not only. That’s why I chose this hotel, if you can call it that. How many rooms did they say they had—nine?”

She nodded. “Plus a pool, a restaurant and a shop. But the rooms are very comfortable, soft spongy beds. I’m sure I shall sleep well here.”

“What about the smell?”

“After the gorge? Oh no, it doesn’t matter, doesn’t even register. How many donkeys are there here?”

Lamu had been a surprise to Natalie in more ways than one when they had arrived.

The journey up from Kihara had been enjoyable and only mildly adventurous.

“How do we avoid the storms?” she had asked that morning, as they were loading their luggage onto Jack’s plane, with the aid of Mgina, who had turned up on her own initiative. In truth, Natalie had been rather thrown, the evening before, when he had announced, baldly, that she would be going with him to Lamu. But she hadn’t relished being virtually alone in the camp over Christmas, especially as that was the time of year her parents had always been happiest, when their choir was busiest. And, since Christopher was marooned in Nairobi, and not there to be upset, she had acquiesced.

“Simple,” Jack had replied. “We leave in the morning, before the storms build up in the afternoon. If we do meet any big clouds, we go round them, or above them, not through them. In any case, I’m going to fly east to the ocean, then up the coast. The clouds tend to gather over land, especially high land. The coast, as the saying goes, should be clear.”

So it had proved, though the journey had taken closer to three and a half hours, rather than the two hours had they flown direct. During the journey she had had her first proper flying lesson. Jack had let her handle the controls, explained some of the instruments, the mysteries of air-traffic-control jargon, and shown her what the lines and numbers meant on the maps he kept in the plane. She had practiced turning the Comanche, climbing, descending, slowing down, speeding up. She had been content to watch when they had reached the coast and turned north. They flew low, saw shoals of shark, wrecks of ships half hidden in the sand, clouds of white geese cruising in unison over the coral reefs.

Forms of beauty, she thought, that could be seen in no other way. She had to learn to fly, once the trial was over. Jack had sparked something in her.

Flying at two thousand feet, a thousand feet, showed how small the world was, how everything was connected to everything else. Villages, towns, rivers, farms, factories, churches, mosques, roads. You got the bigger picture from the air, Natalie realized. In a funny way she understood that being a pilot of your own small machine, a few hundred feet up, helped you to see things politically.

They had landed on an airstrip that seemed to have an island to itself and been ferried to Lamu proper—another island—in a small skiff.

Lamu had been a revelation, too. An old town dating back to the fourteenth century, its streets were too narrow for cars—none, in fact, were allowed on the island and all transport, human or freight, was carried out by donkeys.

“I think there are about two thousand donkeys in Lamu,” said Jack. “And all together they send out quite a smell. Ah, here’s someone.” He gestured to the waitress who had just appeared. “Two beers, please.”

She nodded and disappeared again.

He turned back to Natalie. “Now, we haven’t talked about it, I wanted to get you here in one piece first, and so I’m sorry if you feel I dragooned you here, but you would have been miserable all by yourself in the camp, having to prepare your own food, make your own bed, fix your own shower. Lots of rain and mud and you’d have missed me.”

“I’m not a complete wastrel, you know. Only children learn to look after themselves in all sorts of ways.” She paused. “But yes, I’d rather be here than there.” She passed her fingers through her hair. “Sorry if that sounds grudging. I didn’t mean it like that.”

The beers arrived.

“I’ll let that go,” said Jack, swallowing some beer. “Now, ahead of tomorrow, how good a swimmer are you? The reef is not at all deep but there’s one channel where the current comes in at about five knots—that’s quite strong.”

“I don’t know how good I am. I have only ever swum in pools, when I was at school, in the North Sea, off the Lincolnshire coast, where it was so cold we never stayed in the water for very long, and in the Mediterranean, off Palestine, when I was on a dig, and where it was very warm and there were no tides or currents so far as I remember. I’ve never even seen a reef. Is there any danger?”

“You’ll be amazed by the colors of the fish, but we’ll steer clear of the inlet where the current is stronger. There’s no danger as such but you should avoid sea urchins. They are not scary but if you tread on one, or knock against one, their spikes are very very painful and can break off and get under your skin. It’s not life threatening but the pain is excruciating.”

The waitress brought some salad and took their main order.

“It has to be fish,” Jack said, looking up at her. “We’ll have whatever was caught this morning. And two more beers, when we’ve finished these.”

He leaned forward, so that his hand was nearly touching Natalie’s. “Years and years and years ago, Lamu used to be a center of the slave trade. We all know that slaves went from West Africa to America, but here they were brought down the Duldul and Tana rivers, sold at the market in Lamu, a site now occupied by a mosque, and sent north to the Middle East. That’s what the prosperity of this town is—or was—based on, slaves and fishing and furniture making. The mahogany around here is second to none.”

Jack ate some lettuce. “Zanzibar was the main center of slavery, and Malindi. But Lamu was quite bad enough—archaeologists have discovered dungeons here, with iron shackles, and cemeteries with bodies piled up. They had obviously died on the way downriver, or were so malnourished by the time they got here that they couldn’t survive.”

He wiped his lips with his napkin. “America gets a bad press over its history of slavery, but the sultans of the Middle East were almost as awful. They used male slaves as soldiers or sailors in their armed forces—dangerous but possibly more interesting than being stuck on a plantation. Women were used as domestics or as sex slaves. Later, a lot were taken to Brazil. The British, who in the early nineteenth century had outlawed slavery, were intercepting the North Atlantic trade, so the Brazilians came round the Cape of Good Hope and put ashore here.”

She sipped some beer. “Have you … have you ever been out with a black girl, a black woman?”

“Good question.” Jack nodded. “And the answer is no. You do see it, of course, though it’s mainly older white men with younger black wives or, more likely, mistresses. In some quarters, with some people, a black mistress is all right, whereas a black wife isn’t. Mistresses don’t go to cocktail parties, wives do.”

He thought for a moment. “In theory, mixed-race couples are the ideal, in practice it would be difficult. There’s prejudice on both sides, and there are still big cultural differences. When you see it, and as I say you do see it, there’s obviously a very strong bond, very often a strong sexual bond, I suspect, but the couples lead solitary lives, relatively solitary anyway.”

The fish was brought. “How about you?”

“Don’t be silly, there are very few black people in Britain and those I met at Cambridge all turned out to be princes or kings from Nigeria or Ghana. The last thing they wanted was a white wife when they went back home.”