For many years after this day the Colony felt Denys’s death as a loss which could not be recovered. Something fine then came out in the average colonist’s attitude towards him, a reverence for values outside their understanding. When they spoke of him it was most often as an athlete; they would discuss his exploits as a cricketer and a golfer, and of these things I had never heard myself, so that it was only now that I learned of his great fame in all games. Then when the people had been paying tribute to him as a sportsman, they would add that, of course, he had been very brilliant. What they really remembered in him was his absolute lack of self-consciousness, or self-interest, an unconditional truthfulness which outside of him I have only met in idiots. In a colony, these qualities are not generally held up for imitation, but after a man’s death they may be, perhaps, more truly admired than in other places.
The Natives had known Denys better than the white people; to them his death was a bereavement.
When, in Nairobi, I was told of Denys’s death I tried to get down to Voi. The Airway Company was sending down Tom Black to report on the accident, and I drove to the Aerodrome to ask him to take me with him, but as I got into the Aerodrome, his aeroplane lifted and sailed off, towards Voi.
It might still be possible to get through by car, but the long rains were on, and I had to find out what the roads were like. While I sat and waited for the report on the roads, I remembered how Denys had told me that he wished to be buried in the Ngong Hills. It was a strange thing that I had not recollected it before, but it had been so far from my thoughts that they should mean to bury him at all. Now it was as if a picture had been shown to me.
There was a place in the Hills, on the first ridge in the Game Reserve, that I myself at the time when I thought that I was to live and die in Africa, had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills, from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: “Let us drive as far as our graves.” Once when we were camped in the hills to look for Buffalo, we had in the afternoon walked over to the slope to have a closer look at it. There was an infinitely great view from there; in the light of the sunset we saw both Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro. Denys had been eating an orange, lying in the grass, and had said that he would like to stay there. My own burial-place was a little higher up. From both places we could see my house in the forest far away to the East. We were going back there the next day, for ever, I thought, in spite of the widespread theory that All must die.
Gustav Mohr had come from his farm to my house, when he heard of Denys’s death, and when he did not find me there he looked me up in Nairobi. A little while after, Hugh Martin came and sat down with us. I told them of Denys’s wish, and of the burial-place in the hills, and they wired to the people at Voi. Before I went back to the farm they informed me that they would bring Denys’s body up by train next morning, so that the funeral could take place in the hills at noon. I must have his grave ready there by then.
Gustav Mohr went with me to the farm, to sleep there, and help me in the morning. We would have to be out in the hills just before sunrise to decide on the place, and to have the grave dug in time.
It rained all night, and there was a fine drizzling rain in the morning when we went away. The waggon-tracks on the road were full of water. Driving up in the hills was like driving into clouds. We could not see the plains below to our left, nor the slopes or peaks of the hills to our right; the boys who came with us in a lorry disappeared behind us at a distance of ten yards, and the mist grew thicker as the road mounted. By the sign-board on the road, we found where we got into the Game Reserve, so we drove on a few hundred yards and then got out of the car. We left the lorry, and the boys, on the high-road, until we should have found the place we wanted. The morning air was so cold that it bit the fingers.
The place of the grave must not be too far away from the road, nor where the ground was too steep to bring up a lorry. We walked together for a little while, talking of the mist, then we parted and went along by different paths, and after a few seconds we could no longer see one another.
The great country of the hills opened up reluctantly round me, and closed again, the day was like a rainy day in a Northern country. Farah was walking with me with a wet rifle; he thought that we might walk into a herd of Buffalo. The things close by, that suddenly appeared just before us, looked fantastically big. The leaves of the grey wild-olive bush, and the long grass, higher than ourselves, were dripping wet and smelled strongly,—I had on a mackintosh and rubber boots, but after a while I was drenched as if I had been wading up a stream. It was very still here in the hills, only at times when the rain came down stronger, there was a whisper to all sides. Once the mist parted, and I saw a stretch of indigo blue land before me and beyond me, like a slate,—it must have been one of the tall peaks far away,—a moment after it was again covered by the drifting grey rain and mist. I walked and walked, and in the end I stood quite still. There was nothing to do here until the weather cleared up.
Gustav Mohr shouted to me three or four times to find out where I was, and came up to me, the rain on his face and hands. He told me that we had been going about in the mist for an hour, and that if we did not settle the place for the grave now, we would not have it ready in time.
“But I cannot see where we are,” I said, “and we cannot lay him where the ridges close up the view. Let us wait a little longer.”
We stood in silence in the long grass, and I smoked a cigarette. Just as I was throwing it away, the mist spread a little, and a pale cold clarity began to fill the world. In ten minutes we could see where we were. The plains lay below us, and I could follow the road by which we had come, as it wound in and out along the slopes, climbed towards us, and, winding, went on. To the South, far away, below the changing clouds, lay the broken, dark blue foot-hills of Kilimanjaro. As we turned to the North the light increased, pale rays for a moment slanted in the sky and a streak of shining silver drew up the shoulder of Mount Kenya. Suddenly, much closer, to the East below us, was a little red spot in the grey and green, the only red there was, the tiled roof of my house on its cleared place in the forest. We did not have to go any further, we were in the right place. A little while after, the rain started again.
About twenty yards higher up than where we stood, there was a narrow natural terrace in the hillside, here we marked out the place for the grave, by the compass, laying it East to West. We called up the boys, and set them to cut the grass with pangas, and to dig the wet soil. Mohr took some of them with him to make a road tor the lorry, from the highroad to the grave, they levelled out the ground, cut off branches from the bush and heaped them on the path, for the ground was slippery. We could not bring the road all the way up to the grave, near it the ground was too steep. It had been silent up here till now, but when the boys began to work, I heard that there was an echo in the hills, it answered to the strokes of the spades, like a little dog barking.
Some cars came out from Nairobi, and we sent down a boy to show them the way, for in the great country they would not notice the small group of people by the grave in the bush. The Somalis of Nairobi came out, they left their mule-traps on the highroad, and walked slowly up, three or four together, mourning in the Somali way, as if wrapping up their heads and withdrawing from life. Some of Denys’s friends from up-country, who had had news of his death, came driving from Naivasha, Gil-Gil, and Elmenteita, their cars all covered with mud from the long fast drive. Now the day grew clearer, and the four tall peaks of the hills showed above us against the sky.