An African Story

In East Africa there was a young man who was a hunter, who loved the plains and the valleys and the cool nights on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. In September 1939 war had begun in Europe and he had travelled over the country to Nairobi and was training to be a pilot with the RAF. He was doing quite well, but after five weeks he got into trouble because he took his plane up and flew off in the direction of Nakuru to look at the wild animals when he should have been practicing spins and turns. While he was flying there, he thought he saw some rare animals, became excited and flew down low to get a better view of them. He flew too low and damaged the wing, but he managed to get back to the airfield in Nairobi.

After six weeks, he was allowed to make his first cross-country flight on his own, and he flew off from Nairobi to a little town called Eldoret two thousand meters up in the Highlands. But again he was unlucky; this time he had engine failure on the way, due to water in the fuel tanks. He kept calm and made a beautiful forced landing without damaging his aircraft, not far from a little hut which stood alone on the highland plain with no other building in sight. That is lonely country up there.

He walked over to the hut, and there he found an old man, living alone, with only a small garden of sweet potatoes, some brown chickens and a black cow.

The old man was kind to him. He gave him food and milk and a place to sleep, and the pilot stayed with him for two days and two nights, until a rescue plane from Nairobi found his aircraft, landed beside it, found out what was wrong, went away and came back with clean petrol which enabled him to take off and return.

But during his stay, the old man, who was lonely and had seen no one for many months, was glad of his company and of the opportunity to talk. He talked a lot and the pilot listened. He talked of his lonely life, of the lions that came in the night and of the elephant that lived over the hill in the west, of the heat of the days and of the silence that came with the cold at midnight.

On the second night he talked about himself. He told a long, strange story, and as he told it, it seemed to the pilot that the old man was lifting a great weight off his shoulders by telling it. When he had finished, he said that he had never told that to anyone before, and that he would never tell it to anyone again, but the story was so strange that the pilot wrote it down as soon as he got back to Nairobi. He wrote it in his own words, although he had never written a story before. Of course he made mistakes because he didn't know any of the tricks that writers use, but when he had finished writing he left a rare and powerful story. We found the story in his suitcase two weeks later when we were packing his things after he had been killed in training. The pilot seemed to have had no relatives and because he was my friend, I took the story and looked after it for him. This is what he wrote.