Here in the early afternoon they brought out Denys from Nairobi, following his old Safari-track to Tanganyika, and driving slowly on the wet road. When they came to the last steep slope, they lifted out, and carried the narrow coffin, that was covered with the flag. As it was placed in the grave, the country changed and became the setting for it, as still as itself, the hills stood up gravely, they knew and understood what we were doing in them; after a little while they themselves took charge of the ceremony, it was an action between them and him, and the people present became a party of very small lookers-on in the landscape.
Denys had watched and followed all the ways of the African Highlands, and better than any other white man, he had known their soil and seasons, the vegetation and the wild animals, the winds and smells. He had observed the changes of weather in them, their people, clouds, the stars at night. Here in the hills, I had seen him only a short time ago, standing bare-headed in the afternoon sun, gazing out over the land, and lifting his field-glasses to find out everything about it. He had taken in the country, and in his eyes and his mind it had been changed, marked by his own individuality, and made part of him. Now Africa received him, and would change him, and make him one with herself.
The Bishop of Nairobi, I was told, had not wanted to come out, because there had not been time to have the burial-ground consecrated, but there was another clergyman present, who read out the funeral service, which I had never heard before, and in the great space his voice sounded small and clear, like the voice of a bird in the hills. I thought that Denys would like the whole thing best when it was over. The priest read out a Psalm: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.”
Gustav Mohr and I sat on for a little while, after the other white people had left. The Mohammedans waited till we had gone, and then went and prayed by the grave.
In the days after Denys’s death, his Safari servants came in, and gathered on the farm. They did not say why they came, and did not ask for anything, but sat down with their backs to the wall of the house, and the backs of their hands, resting upon the pavement, most of the time in silence, contrary to the habits of Natives. Malimu and Sar Sita came there, Denys’s bold, shrewd, fearless gunbearers and trackers, who had been with him on all his Safaris. They had been out with the Prince of Wales, and many years after, the Prince remembered their names, and said that the two of them together had been hard to beat. Here the great trackers had lost the track, and sat immovable. Kanuthia, his motor-driver, came in, who had driven over many thousand miles of rough country, a slim young Kikuyu with the watchful eyes of a monkey, now he sat by the house like a sad and chilly monkey in a cage.
Bilea Isa, Denys’s Somali servant, came down from Naivasha to the farm. Bilea had been to England twice with Denys, had been to school there, and spoke English like a gentleman. Some years ago, Denys and I had attended Bilea’s wedding in Nairobi; it was a magnificent feast that lasted for seven days. On that occasion, the great traveller and scholar had gone back to the ways of his ancestors, he had been dressed in a golden robe, and had bowed down to the ground when he welcomed us, and he danced the sword-dance, all wild with the desperado spirit of the desert. Bilea came down to see his master’s grave, and sit on it; he came back from it and spoke very little, after a little while, he sat with the others with his back to the wall, and the backs of his hands resting on the pavement.
Farah went out and stood and talked with the mourners. He himself was very grave. “It would not have been so bad,” he said to me, “that you were going away from the country, if only Bedâr had still been here.”
Denys’s boys stayed for about a week, then one after the other they left again.
I often drove out to Denys’s grave. In a bee-line, it was not more than five miles from my house, but round by the road it was fifteen. The grave was a thousand feet higher up than my house, the air was different here, as clear as a glass of water; light sweet winds lifted your hair when you took off your hat; over the peaks of the hills, the clouds came wandering from the East, drew their live shadow over the wide undulating land, and were dissolved and disappeared over the Rift Valley.
I bought at the dhuka a yard of the white cloth which the Natives call Americani, and Farah and I raised three tall poles in the ground behind the grave, and nailed the cloth on to them, then from my house I could distinguish the exact spot of the grave, like a little white point in the green hill.
The long rains had been heavy, and I was afraid that the grass would grow up and cover the grave so that its place would be lost. Therefore one day we took up all the whitewashed stones along my drive, the same that Karomenya had had trouble in pulling up and carrying to the front door; we loaded them into my box-body car and drove them up into the hills. We cut down the grass round the grave, and set the stones in a square to mark it; now the place could always be found.
As I went so often to the grave, and took the children of my household with me, it became a familiar place to them; they could show the way out there to the people who came to see it. They built a small bower in the bush of the hill near it. In the course of the summer, Ali bin Salim, whose friend Denys had been, came from Mombasa to go out and lie on the grave and weep, in the Arab way.
One day I found Hugh Martin by the grave, and we sat in the grass and talked for a long time. Hugh Martin had taken Denys’s death much to heart. If any human being at all had held a place in his queer seclusive existence, it would have been Denys. An ideal is a strange thing, you would never have given Hugh credit for harbouring the idea of one, neither would you have thought that the loss of it would have affected him, like, somehow, the loss of a vital organ. But since Denys’s death he had aged and changed much, his face was blotched and drawn. All the same he preserved his placid, smiling likeness to a Chinese Idol, as if he knew of something exceedingly satisfactory, that was hidden to the general. He told me now that he had, in the night, suddenly struck upon the right epitaph for Denys. I think that he had got it from an ancient Greek author, he quoted it to me in Greek, then translated it in order that I should understand it. It went: “Though in death fire be mixed with my dust yet care I not. For with me now all is well.”
Later on, Denys’s brother, Lord Winchilsea, had an obelisk set on his grave, with an inscription out of “The Ancient Mariner,” which was a poem that Denys had much admired. I myself had never heard it until Denys quoted it to me,—the first time was, I remember, as we were going to Bilea’s wedding. I have not seen the obelisk; it was put up after I had left Africa.
In England there is also a monument to Denys. His old schoolfellows, in memory of him, built a stone bridge over a small stream between two fields at Eton. On one of the balustrades is inscribed his name, and the dates of his stay at Eton, and on the other the words: “Famous in these fields and by his many friends much beloved.”
Between the river in the mellow English landscape and the African mountain ridge, ran the path of his life; it is an optical illusion that it seemed to wind and swerve,—the surroundings swerved. The bow-string was released on the bridge at Eton, the arrow described its orbit, and hit the obelisk in the Ngong Hills.
After I had left Africa, Gustav Mohr wrote to me of a strange thing that had happened by Denys’ grave, the like of which I have never heard. “The Masai,” he wrote, “have reported to the District Commissioner at Ngong, that many times, at sunrise and sunset, they have seen lions on Finch-Hatton’s grave in the Hills. A lion and a lioness have come there, and stood, or lain, on the grave for a long time. Some of the Indians who have passed the place in their lorries on the way to Kajado have also seen them. After you went away, the ground round the grave was levelled out, into a sort of big terrace, I suppose that the level place makes a good site for the lions, from there they can have a view over the plain, and the cattle and game on it.”