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.”
“There is something about the altitude or it being altitude on the equator. It’s the first place I’ve ever known where a drink of pure gin tastes like water. That’s really true and so there must be something about the altitude or something.”
“Sure there is something. But we who work hard and hunt on foot and sweat our liquor out and climb the damned escarpment and climb around this Mountain don’t have to worry about liquor. It goes out through the pores. Honey, you walk more going back and forth to the latrine than most of the women who come out here on safari walk in the whole of Africa.”
“Let’s not mention the latrine. It has a wonderful path to it now and it’s always stocked with the best reading matter. Have you ever finished that lion book yet?”
“No. I’m saving it for when you’re gone.”
“Don’t save too many things for when I’m gone.”
“That’s all I saved.”
“I hope it teaches you to be cautious and good.”
“I am anyway.”
“No you’re not. You and G.C. are fiends sometimes and you know it. When I think of you a good writer and a valuable man and my husband doing what you and G.C. do on those terrible night things.”
“We have to study the animals at night.”
“You don’t either. You just do devilish things to show off to each other.”
“I don’t think so really, kitten. We do things for fun. When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.”