A Change in Altitude Read online

  Patrick had gently taken Margaret by the elbow and made his good nights to those assembled in the drawing room. He’d mumbled something about what a hard day it had been for his wife. She’d fallen onto the bed the minute they’d entered the bedroom, and he’d had to slide what clothes he could manage off her. When Margaret woke, she had on a slip and a blouse with complicated fastenings.

  A light was on in the drawing room—a security light, she thought. She sat on the claret sofa. She knew that her notes were inadequate and that Patrick and she would have to piece the meds together from memory.

  Her head ached, and her mouth was dry. Humiliating that she’d shown how little she could handle drink. Rusty nails. Never again. Margaret drained her water glass, got up, found a bowl of melted ice on the cocktail tray, and poured the contents into her glass. She drained that one as well. She went back to the couch and lay down, propping her head on a throw pillow. She reached over for the guidebook and began to read about Mount Kenya. Its history intrigued her.

  The mountain, she read, was the second of the three highest peaks in Africa to be discovered by European explorers. Dr. Johann Ludwig Krapf, a German missionary, was the first to note the mountain, which he viewed from Kitui in 1849. Dr. Krapf learned that the Embu didn’t climb the mountain because of the intense cold and the white matter that rolled down it with a loud noise.

  In 1887 Count Sámuel Teleki of Transylvania was the first European to climb the mountain. He reached 14,270 feet on the southwestern slope.

  In 1893 an expedition managed to ascend Mount Kenya as far as the glaciers. They spent several hours on Lewis Glacier, unable to traverse it.

  In July of 1899 Sir Halford John Mackinder set out for Mount Kenya with six Europeans, sixty-six Swahili, two Masai guides, and ninety-six Kikuyu. They made it as far as the mountain but had difficulties with plague, famine, deserters, and thieves. Two of their party were killed by marauders.

  When a relief party reached the mountain, Mackinder traversed the Lewis Glacier. They reached the summit of Batian, another peak at the top of Mount Kenya, at noon on September 13.

  During the Second World War, three Italian prisoners, led by Felice Benuzzi, escaped from their POW camp in Nanyuki to climb Mount Kenya. They did it because Benuzzi longed to reach the top of the mountain he’d been staring at for months. Later, according to their original plan, they “escaped” back into the prison.

  On the practice hike, they walked in tandem, Willem leading, Saartje behind him; Diana, then Arthur, following; Patrick and Margaret taking up the rear. Margaret asked Patrick to allow her to be last, since she was likely to be the slowest, but Patrick argued that it wasn’t safe. Best to have a man at the head and foot of a climb, he added. Margaret thought of protesting on feminist grounds but wondered if Patrick knew something she didn’t. She looked ahead and saw that no one was carrying any weapon that she could see.

  Margaret discovered her limitations almost at once, the altitude making her breathe hard, causing an audible beat in her chest. The rest had all worn shorts and looked like trekkers in their high socks and weathered boots. Willem and Arthur actually sported khaki shirts and shorts. Patrick had on a well-worn T-shirt that read McGovern.

  Despite the slight punishment to the chest, exhilaration gave Margaret determination and made her light-headed. On the way to the first knuckle, the view of the Rift was beyond anything she had been prepared for—vast and deep and seemingly endless. The temperature down in the valley would be well over a hundred degrees. It might be possible for the inhabitants down there—the Masai, now too far away to be seen—to believe they are the sole people on earth, the chosen, in charge of, if not humbled by, all that surrounds them. To come from such raw beauty would almost certainly instill a sense of superiority. Margaret knew the Nilotic Masai to be intractable in their beliefs and customs: the nomadic life, their adherence to ritual, and their diet of cows’ blood and milk, an unenviable regimen that nevertheless made them enviably lean and long.

  They passed grasslands like English meadows, fields of wild-flowers with dozens of species, some of which no one in the party could name. The climb produced, in addition to exhilaration, a soporific haze, and sometimes Margaret wanted nothing more than to leave the trail and lie down among those flowers. It seemed reward enough. Why climb farther away from paradise? Simply to say she’d done it? She vowed that after the Mount Kenya climb, Patrick and she would return to this spot and linger.

  The landscape was green and fertile and rolling, and she understood at once why the Brits had settled here. They passed remnants of old farms: foundations, stone walls, and paths that seemed made by animals. Patrick came round from behind and put his arm over Margaret’s shoulder.

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’m loving it,” she answered, aware of the breathless quality of her words.

  “Stop when you want and take a rest. We can always catch up. The trail is easy to follow.”

  Margaret wanted to say yes, let’s leave the others, experience this as a couple, but something inside her (conformity? not wanting to cause a scene? pride?) made her smile and shake her head.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  When they finally stopped for a picnic, Margaret felt as though she couldn’t take another step. The altitude had made the steady pounding beat more insistent. She needed water, and she wanted it soon. She forgot who had the water. In her own backpack, she carried a bottle of wine and a loaf of fresh-baked bread—delicious in other circumstances, of little use to her now.

  She sat down where she stood. The lovely grass was deceptive: not soft but sharp and spiny and painful. She drew her knees up and bent her head to them. It was a defeated posture that embarrassed her, but it was the best she could manage. Patrick touched her back.

  “Water,” she whispered.

  Patrick handed Margaret a canteen, and she held it with both hands, letting the water fall into her mouth.

  “Easy, Margaret,” he said. “This has to last the whole hike.”

  She stopped and held the canteen upright. She had drunk perhaps two-thirds of the water. She reasoned that the worst was over, that they had accomplished the long hike to the top of the Ngong Hills and had conquered at least one peak. She thought about her pompous pronouncement to Arthur in the car.

  I didn’t come here to conquer.

  Arthur and Willem, who had been carrying wider packs than the rest, produced, as if by sleight of hand, canvas stools to sit on.

  “Never sit directly on the grass,” Arthur said when he delivered Margaret’s. He helped her to stand and then to sit. She began to forgive him his pretentious khaki outfit. He didn’t tell her why she couldn’t sit directly on the grass.

  Several feet away, Diana and Saartje had produced a magic canvas table. Everyone was to move closer to it and deliver his or her provisions. Below the table lay a piece of blue-and-red oilcloth the size of a large quilt. No one reclined on it. Margaret moved her stool to be within the gathering, and she sat, appreciating the give of the canvas seat. Saartje and Diana spread out a picnic worthy of the best safari expeditions: four kinds of sandwiches, the crusts removed; scones with butter and blackberry jam; tea for six; fresh loaves of bread such as Margaret had pulled out from her backpack to have with cheese; several bottles of wine; and a pineapple that Arthur sliced with expertise.

  Margaret chose a little of everything, relishing the slices of pineapple handed to her: juicy, succulent pieces of fruit that seemed the most delicious food she’d ever eaten. The needy beast inside her tamed a bit, and she had a delicate cucumber sandwich, a cup of tea from a thermos, and a tear of bread with a slice of crumbly cheese that someone informed her was Caerphilly. Imported, it was pointed out. The Dutch and the British opened the wine almost immediately and drank from plastic cups, roughing it. When the wine was offered to Margaret, she declined on prudent grounds. She believed everything Arthur and Willem had said about alcohol and altitude. Patrick accepted a cup of wine and hand
ed it to Margaret for a small sip, which she took. His manners and his understanding of her body—its possibilities and its limitations—were impeccable.

  “I suppose the question… well, it’s always the question, isn’t it… is whether or not we ought even to try to bring the Masai into the twentieth century.”

  Willem laid the quandary on the table for all of them to admire and perhaps nibble at.

  “I happen to think the effort essential,” Arthur said. “They look regal, don’t they, in their robes and maridadi, but if you travel to the manyattas, as I’ve done, you’d be horrified. Clusters of flies the size of tennis balls hover over the infants’ eyes. The smoke in the huts is suffocating. Medicine is so primitive, it does more harm than good.”

  Margaret wondered why Arthur had had reason to visit the manyattas. Had he been trying to sell toothpaste to the Masai?

  “But they aren’t confused about who they are,” Patrick countered. “They have an ancient nomadic society that has been largely unbroken for centuries. They are serious about protecting what is theirs, but they are a contented people. They are not listless or lazy or bored. They have deep beliefs in their gods and rituals and ceremonies.”

  “They have no education!” Arthur exclaimed.

  “True. But they are educated within the mores of their tribe.”

  “But we live in the twentieth century. It’s not the sixteenth century, for heaven’s sake. People need to adjust, adapt, in order to progress. Anyway, Patrick, yours is a very unlikely position coming from a physician.”

  “Well, let’s take the Kikuyu,” Patrick said. “They’ve been brought into the twentieth century—kicking and screaming, some of them. They, too, before the advent of the British, had a cohesive society. Then they had their land taken from them, were dragged into slavery—”

  “Not slavery,” Arthur said, having torn off a hunk of bread with his teeth. “Don’t overdramatize.”

  “Servitude, then. As good as indentured, in my opinion. The men flocked to the cities to earn European wages, which, though pitifully small by our standards, represented progress to certain Kikuyu families. But those families, still on the shambas, no longer had fathers and brothers at home. Shantytowns built up in the cities, prostitution arrived, and some essential fabric that was Kikuyu life was torn.”

  “The Kikuyu run the country and are bloody corrupt,” Arthur said with some vehemence.

  “Are you arguing that James, for example, was better off back at the shamba, never having traveled to Nairobi at all?” Diana challenged.

  Diana, by mentioning James, had effectively ended the discussion. Patrick could not respond as he might have, that James lived the bleakest of lives, cut off from his wife and children fifty-one weeks a year in order to serve another family and live in a concrete box. Such a person, Patrick might have argued, could be forgiven for wondering what the Mau Mau Rebellion had been about and what exactly uhuru meant. Not freedom for James, surely. Patrick sipped his wine, unwilling or unable to use another example to prove a point that the British and possibly the Dutch would never concede anyway.

  “Finch Hatton is buried here somewhere,” Saartje said, gesturing in a vague direction toward the grave site of Karen Blixen’s lover. “We must be sure to visit the obelisk.”

  “Arrogant philanderer,” Arthur pronounced with a moue of disdain. “Bloody awful to Tanne while she was here.” He spoke as though he had personal knowledge of Karen Blixen’s bloody awful treatment, even though he was a long generation removed from her.

  “I, for one, would love to see the grave,” Margaret said.

  “Women,” Arthur said. “Hopeless romantics. Well, if one goes, we all go,” he said with reasonably good cheer. “Have to stay together. Can’t break up the team.”

  “I’d like to see the spot, too,” Patrick said, rising. “But I hope I’m allowed to take a leak without the team,” he added, walking toward the nearest stand of trees.

  “We’ll send the girls to watch,” Willem called, and chuckled at his own joke.

  Girls, Margaret thought.

  No one seemed eager to leave the picnic. When Patrick returned, he took from his backpack a kite of teal and yellow and red. He tied on the tail and let out a bit of string from a spool. He started to run sideways to give the kite a lift, and within seconds, the wind from the Rift caught it and took it aloft. It stuttered wildly as it tried to stabilize itself, but then it lifted into a different altitude and settled in with long, lazy swoops. They all watched, necks straining. Patrick returned and hitched the string to a leg of his stool.

  “Marvelous,” Arthur said. “The children would love it. Wouldn’t they, Diana?”

  “Love it,” she repeated.

  For fifteen minutes, perhaps twenty, Margaret photographed the kite, the landscape, the assembled. Around them, there was an easy silence. Patrick watched the kite, occasionally letting out string. Arthur sat, staring out into space, his elbows resting on his knees. Willem, who was slightly too big for his canvas chair, appeared nevertheless to be in the same trance as the rest of the group. He picked up a wine bottle and poured the dregs into his glass. Saartje, chin resting on hand, seemed to be trying to take in the Rift in one glance, which couldn’t be done. Diana was simply resting, her posture loose and gentle.

  A moment of perfect compatibility and ease. The last the six of them would have together.

  Without warning, Diana stood. “Leave nothing. No food, no utensils, no trash.”

  Patrick reluctantly reeled in his kite.

  “We’ll do it again,” Margaret said, reflecting, not for the first time, that Patrick would make a great father. He genuinely liked to play.

  Margaret’s backpack was considerably lighter; the bottle empty, the bread gone. She carried her own canteen now, not having realized that Patrick had carried it for her on the way up. Prior to the big climb, she vowed, she would spend the entire day drinking water. She might have to pee constantly, but she didn’t ever want to experience that kind of urgent thirst again.

  The oilcloth removed, Margaret stood, ready to carry on, while Willem and Arthur collapsed the stools and then tried to return them to their backpacks, an activity that proved more difficult than taking them out. As Margaret let her eyes roam over the Rift, she felt the first sting on her leg, the initial bite followed within seconds by dozens of others, as if she were being pricked hard by needles.

  “Oh,” she said, slapping at her jeans.

  The men looked puzzled, but Diana, running in Margaret’s direction, knew exactly what the problem was. “Shit!” she shouted. “Fire ants. She’s standing in a nest.”

  Margaret swatted frantically. She looked down. A red mass was moving around her feet.

  “Run!” Diana commanded. “Get your clothes off and run!”

  “Oh,” Margaret said, and then again. Ants had invaded her boots and her jeans and were nearing her crotch. She felt as though she were being assaulted by Africa itself, the ground rising up to sting her to death.

  “I need a towel, someone!” Diana shouted.

  Margaret peeled off her clothes, unbuckling her belt and slipping the jeans to her calves, while Saartje and Diana tried to get her boots off. Red welts had already risen on her legs. There were dozens of trails of the red ants, some of which Margaret could see through the nylon of her underpants. She tried to fetch them out but then realized it would take too long. She pulled the underwear down and ran away from it. After that, her blouse, her bra. Diana and Saartje brushed off every ant they could find. They inspected her hair.

  “Oh God,” Margaret said as they flicked ants from her back and neckline.

  “Saartje,” Diana said. “I have extra clothes in my pack.”

  Margaret wanted to levitate so that her feet no longer touched the ground. She knew that her clownlike antics would have seemed funny had the situation not been so painful. She noticed, in her nakedness, that Willem had turned away (Diana and Saartje seemed to have the situation well in h
and) but that Arthur and Patrick were looking straight at her. Her husband, she understood, but what was Arthur up to? She shook the towel with a hard snap and wrapped herself in it. Arthur swiveled his head away but not before Diana saw the move.

  Diana’s clothes were too small on Margaret, the shorts tight, the blouse not long enough.

  “What do I do about these?” Margaret asked, pointing to her clothes, strewn in a nearly straight line as she had danced away from the nest of red ants. They reminded her of garments abandoned on the way to a bed.

  “Leave them where they are,” Diana said. “Don’t go near them. They’re still full of ants.”

  Patrick ran and snatched the hiking boots, holding them out in front of him, shaking them, tossing away the socks. He slapped at his wrists. The boots had to be saved.

  The welts on Margaret’s body began to swell. She had them on her face and arms, torso, legs, and back.

  “They’ve been known to kill people,” Diana said, putting her hand to Margaret’s forehead as if she expected fever already. “Good thing you weren’t alone.”

  The image of herself alone in the Ngong Forest was one Margaret dismissed at once.

  She thought about Arthur’s face and wrapped the towel around her waist as if it were a khanga. She put on the hiking boots that Patrick had so painstakingly inspected. Margaret walked with care, never looking up, wary of another sting from a hiding ant. Her lips swelled, which required a stop, during which Patrick inspected them. He asked if anyone had any Benadryl, but no one did. “Add that to the list,” Willem said, but all Margaret could do was nod. It was too painful to speak. Patrick let her lean on him as they made their way back to the Rover. There would be no visit to Finch Hatton’s grave that day.