Together Ngui and I passed another brush patch where a cobra had his hole. The cobra was either still out or had gone visiting leaving no address. Neither of us were great snake hunters. That was a White Man’s obsession and a necessary one since snakes, when trodden on, bit the cattle and the horses and there was a standing reward of shillings for them on Pop’s farm; both cobras and puff adders. Snake hunting, for pay, was as low as a man could fall. We knew cobras as quick, lithe-moving creatures who sought their holes which were so small that it seemed impossible for them to enter them and we had jokes about this. There were tales of ferocious mambas that rose high on their tails and pursued the helpless colonists or intrepid Game Rangers while they were mounted on horses but these tales left us indifferent since they came from the south, where hippos with personal names were alleged to wander across hundreds of miles of dry country seeking water and snakes performed biblical feats. I knew these things must be true since they had been written by honorable men but they were not like our snakes and in Africa it is only your own snakes that matter.
Our snakes were shy or stupid or mysterious and powerful. I made a great show of snake-hunting fervor which deceived nobody except, possibly, Miss Mary, and we were all against the spitting cobra since he had spat at G.C. This morning when we found that the cobra was absent and had not returned to his hole I said to Ngui that he was probably the grandfather of Tony anyway and that we should respect him.
Ngui was pleased at this since the snakes are the ancestors of all the Masai. I said the snake might well have been the ancestor of his girl at the Masai Manyatta. She was a tall, lovely girl and had a certain amount of snake about her. Ngui being cheered up and slightly horrified at the possible ancestry of his illegal love I asked him if he thought the coldness of the Masai women’s hands and the stranger occasional coldness of other parts of their bodies could be due to snake blood. First he said that it was impossible; that Masai had always been like that. Then, we were walking side by side now and heading for the high trees of camp that showed etched in yellow and green against the brown wrinkled base and the high snow of the Mountain; camp not visible but only the high trees marking it; he said that it might be true. Italian women, he said, had cold and hot hands. The hand could be cold and then become warm as a hot spring and in other ways they were as scalding as a hot spring if one could remember it. They had no more bubo, the penalty for relations, than the Masai. Perhaps the Masai did have snake blood. I said that the next time we killed a snake we would all feel the blood and see. I had never felt the outrush of snake blood since they were antipathetic to me and I knew they were to Ngui too. But we agreed to feel the blood and have others, if they could control their repugnance, feel it too. This was all in the interests of our anthropological studies which we pursued each day and we kept on walking and thinking of these problems and of our own small problems which we tried to integrate with the greater interests of anthropology until the tents of camp showed under the yellow and green trees which the first light of the sun was now turning to bright dark green and shining gold and we could see the gray smoke of the fires at the lines and the camp breaking of the Game Scouts and, seated by the fire before our own tents now deep under the trees and the sunlight of the new day, the figure of G.C. seated in a camp chair by a wooden table reading with a bottle of beer in his hand.
Ngui took the rifle and shouldered it with the old shotgun and I walked over to the fire.
“Good morning, General,” G.C. said. “You were up early.”
“We hunters have it rugged,” I said. “We hunt on our own two feet and the chips are always down.”
“Somebody ought to pick the damned chips up sometime. You’ll tread on them with your own two feet. Have some beer.”
He poured a glass very carefully from the bottle bringing the head up to the point of running over and then delicately holding it bubble by bubble until the glass was full.
“Satan will find work for idle hands to do,” I said and lifted the glass which had been filled so that a swell of the amber beer seemed to hang like the lip of an avalanche and conveyed it gently and unspilling to my lips taking in the first sip with the upper lip.
“Not bad for an unsuccessful hunter,” G.C. said. “Such steady hands and red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes have made our England’s greatness.”
“ ‘Neath twisted shards and iron sands we drink it down as God commands,” I said. “Are you across the Atlantic yet?”
“I passed over Ireland,” G.C. said. “Frightfully green. I can all but see the lights of Le Bourget. I’m going to learn to fly, General.”
“Many have said it before. The question is how are you going to fly?”
“I’m going to straighten up and fly right,” G.C. said.