Читать книгу My Heart is Africa - Scott Griffin - Страница 14
ОглавлениеMORNING BROKE with rain sheeting the sixteenthcentury roofs of the old city of Lisbon. Water poured from the terra cotta eaves, sloshed along the gutters of the narrow cobble-stoned streets, and swirled into the small, grilled openings of the city’s drains. Pedestrians hurried past ancient doorways, weaving through a field of black umbrellas, grimfaced people on their way to work. What concern had they about flying weather? Under Lisbon’s dreary skies their focus was on getting to the office. We inhabited different worlds.
Peering out the small attic window of my hotel room, I estimated the freezing levels to be somewhere close to five thousand feet, perhaps higher. A nervous wind lashed the wooden shutters which tugged at their pintles. Clouds tumbled over the city skyline. The day argued for staying in bed or reading a book by the fire. I speculated that my proposed route, south over Algeria to Malta, would permit me to fly low enough to avoid picking up ice, and presumably the weather would clear farther south. It was worth going out to the airport to get a detailed weather report.
It turned out that Lisbon International Airport had little time for a private pilot’s deliberation over weather. Jet airplanes fly in bad weather. Pilots and passengers may have an uncomfortable ten-minute climb after takeoff in a commercial jet, but soon after that it breaks out at thirty thousand feet and all is calm. A propeller-driven plane, in contrast, has no choice but to fly through the bad weather at five thousand or seven thousand feet in order to stay below the freezing level and escape the deadly potential of ice.
Nevertheless, I decided to fly. Predictably, within minutes of takeoff I flew into turbulence and zero visibility and immediately regretted my decision. I was tired from the accumulation of hours flown over the previous two days and I toyed with asking Lisbon for permission to return, but that would have required explanations and a full instrument approach; it seemed easier just to maintain course. Two hours later, jolted and buffeted, nerves weary with strain, the plane sluggish under a full load of fuel, I burst without warning into clear skies over the expansive blue of the Mediterranean Sea.
Small-plane flying with its lurking potential for danger is addictive. An irresistible urge draws pilots back into the cockpit again and again to experience the sweet thrill of speed. The power at one’s fingertips is physically pleasing, sensual, and never more so than when a plane explodes from dense cloud into clear blue sky. The close confinement of the cockpit bursts open into the blue to describe parabolic arcs of bank, loops, and spins, defying the laws of gravity and balance. The dream of unrestricted flight—the early flyers, daredevils swooping under bridges, barnstorming stunt flyers and World War II ace fighter pilots understood it, flying their unsafe machines with giddy recklessness. The seduction lies in the freedom of the sky, where only a hint of hubris can reduce a pilot to mortality.
The Spanish controller suddenly interrupted my thoughts with an instruction to change frequency and register with Algerian control. I was leaving Spanish airspace. I tried contacting the Algerians repeatedly. No joy. I was probably too low in altitude and therefore unable to make radio contact, so I continued flying, on course, out of communication with both the Spanish and the Algerian controllers.
Ten minutes later I attempted contact again and this time the Algerian controller responded. My first contact with Africa sounded unfriendly, demanding my flight-clearance number, authorizing me to fly over Algerian airspace. I did not have one. He asked if I was aware of my current position, and told me to evacuate Algerian airspace immediately or be shot down.
I made a quick calculation. To avoid Algerian airspace would mean flying an additional four hundred miles north and east around Algeria to Malta. A diversion of this magnitude would add another two and half hours to my flight. I thought of appealing; however, the controller sounded uncompromising. I quickly dismissed a fleeting temptation to fly low, hoping to avoid radar detection. The thought of being shot down or interrogated in an Algerian prison argued in favour of diversion.
The flight around Algeria’s northern airspace seemed endless. The border extended beyond Africa’s most northern peninsula, almost to the Italian island of Pantelleria in the Sicilian Channel. I rankled at the controller’s mindless adherence to nationalistic and bureaucratic regulations, but at least I was favoured with a sixtyknot tailwind off the starboard quarter.
Late afternoon gradually slipped into an apricot-coloured sunset that took fire. The Mediterranean lay mirrored below, awash in orange and pink ribbons of light. The faint, recumbent outline of Malta emerged on the horizon, its western end bathed in gold from the setting sun. I entered a left-hand downwind visual approach for Luka Airport, touching down as nightfall blanketed the island in darkness.
I had one more flight to reach Africa. The next morning I clambered into the cockpit and set about the familiar routines for the twelve-hour flight to Luxor, Egypt. The sun rose rapidly over the table-flat horizon of the Mediterranean as I started the long slow climb to ten thousand feet. A slight headwind added an hour to my estimated time of arrival in Luxor. I had fuel for over seventeen hours of flying time, easily enough for this leg of the flight. Dependent on winds, travelling at approximately 120 knots, I could fly nearly three thousand miles without stopping.
I was now more than halfway to Nairobi from Toronto; the navigation and flying had become routine. Although exhausted by three consecutive long-distance flights, I was increasingly familiar with the workings of the cockpit and excited by the slow countdown of the instruments, drawing me closer and closer to the African continent.
Gazing through the pilot’s-side window I sighted an old freighter bucking a stiff sea, ten thousand feet below on a southwesterly heading—probably making for Alexandria. My thoughts drifted into every pilot’s nightmare: what to do in the event of an engine failure over water. Procedures unfold according to a prescribed order: reconfigure the flight controls; trim the plane for a glide; circle the freighter several times; lose altitude while not losing sight of the chance for rescue; cross the freighter’s bow fifty feet above the water; contact control by radio and transmit my latitude and longitude; prepare to ditch into the sea—one has to get it right.
Suddenly, the controller’s voice from far off sifted into my consciousness, momentarily confusing me. He repeated instructions to switch over to Cairo control. I was approaching the coast of Africa, entering Egyptian airspace. The hours had slipped by unnoticed and the freighter, my one chance of rescue in the event of a crash, was plunging through mountainous seas now four hundred miles behind me.
A reddish haze lay indistinct, barely discernible below. I was flying over Africa at last. The ancient city of Alexandria emerged through the liquid haze of noon. The languid, flowing Nile meandered through its enormous delta, disgorging silt and history into the Mediterranean.
I flew due south over the undulating desert to the sprawl of Cairo which sat like an enormous blister enveloping the smoky haze of the slums, industrial plants, warehouses, and railways. The green Nile twisted like a serpent over the sand to the desert city of Luxor where I needed to refuel.
Luxor sat, desiccated by the sun, enveloped in the stink of dust. I shut down the engine and heard the muezzin’s wailing call to prayer. In the town the chaotic clatter of buses belched diesel fumes into the air, mixed with the smells of urine and rotting garbage. Men in white flowing djellabas gathered in the cool doorways, women in black bui-buis scuttled like crows through the narrow streets; electrical wires and lines of laundry looped overhead; donkeys, carts, and street urchins pushed between the sweet-smelling spices, ochre, green, and blood-red mounds piled in woven baskets; vendors cried out for buyers, voices ululating over the din; the daily commerce of the Nile remained timeless and unchanging.
I walked along the riverbank. Flotillas of “bateaux-mouche,” garishly lit, poorly maintained, lay moored alongside the quay, muscling aside the elegant Nile feluccas, older than history. Luxor, it seemed, had embraced the shoddy commerce of mass tourism. Only in the back alleys, beyond the street vendors and the neon-lit food stalls, into the Moslem quarter, where the dilapidated multi-storeyed buildings pressed against the narrow streets, did one discover the human cry of that impoverished city.
I crossed to the west side of the Nile: the Valley of the Kings and the smaller Valley of the Queens, where the hills shimmered in the translucent heat of the desert, magnificently still. There, the dead haunt the living. Only time bore witness to the passage of civilizations: the Phoenicians, the Syrians, the Greeks, the Romans under Caesar, the Turks, the Mamelukes, the French under Napoleon, the English under Kitchener; they all came and fell under the spell of this royal burial ground.
On the east side of the Nile stood the temples of Luxor, ancient city of Thebes: Karnak, Dendora, and Kom Ombo. Enormous blocks of pink granite, exquisite, massive in stature and grace, towered above the tourists, guides, and beggars. Statues of Hatshepsut and Ramses gaze across the river; seamless links to the past. Ancient Egypt remains eternal.
And yet, even more impressive is the night sky over the desert at Luxor. It fires the imagination. The sun sinks below the western hills of the city in a conflagration of red and orange, painting the desert. Suddenly, a fall of midnight-blue ushers in the first magnitude stars—the early arrivals. A curtain of darkness spreads over the sky, hosting a crowd of lesser stars, the smaller stitches of heaven. One by one the constellations rise over the horizon, tracing their arcs across the heavens, a nightly procession across the firmament.
The desert cools. The camels are fresh, capable of great distances at night. Tents are folded and the barking and mewling of departure signals the start of the caravans on their long trek across the sand. Nomadic tribes, wanderers of the desert, depart on well-footed tracks over an ocean of undulating dunes. Overhead, the stars serve as way stations, constant companions, intensely personal, guiding the camel drivers through the darkness. The telling of stories passes from father to son, generation to generation. Under a starlit vault these wanderers of the desert grow older, edging closer and closer to God.
Shortly after dawn, I got into a clapped-out old Ford taxi, which inched its way out of town, passing donkeys, camels, and buses bound for the chaotic bustle of the market. I had hoped to be airborne within three hours of waking—too optimistic a goal for Egypt. Interminable delays plagued my departure; officials thumped their stamps on my passport, exit visa, declaration of entry, landing and navigation clearances. Two hours of painstaking procedures led me through the depressing halls of the airport. Authorities sat like spiders spinning their bureaucratic web of ordinances, waiting for under-the-table payments.
By nine in the morning, the sun was burning the desert. High above the hills east of Luxor the cyanic blue of a cloudless sky beckoned. I was late, and a long flight remained ahead of me. I had decided to avoid flying over Sudan, the largest country in Africa, because of the ongoing civil war in the south and the extortionate overflight fees demanded by Khartoum. Instead, I would fly across Egypt’s eastern desert and south along the Red Sea to Djibouti.
The temperature had climbed to forty-nine degrees centigrade on the ground. My electronics, rated for temperatures far lower, were inoperative, leaving me without navigational instruments or communications. I climbed for one and a half hours after takeoff, dead reckoning on the compass, before reaching a cruising altitude of eleven thousand feet—and cooler temperatures which revived the instruments.
The plane’s controls felt unresponsive with the weight of full tanks in the thin hot air. I was buffeted by hot-air thermals rising eighteen thousand feet above the desert. I flew out of Luxor’s airspace without communication. Only the drone of the engine and the occasional bang of the ferry tank expanding under altitude pressure punctuated my progress over hundreds of miles of empty desert.
I watched the plane trace its shadow on the sand below. Slowly a few scattered veins of black and red lava rock coursed their way into the eastern foothills of Kosseir. There was no sign of human existence anywhere.
In the distance, dark, threatening clouds walled the western banks of the Red Sea. Electrical discharges sprouted tiny crosses of warning on the green-lit screen of my storm scope. The approaching cloud bank gradually turned black and yellowish-green. The warm air of the desert clashed with the cooler air over the sea to form lightning with repeated flashes over the fuselage.
I diverted from a southerly course to avoid entering the massive storm clouds. Thunderheads, powered by the heat of the desert, created dangerous updraughts capable of tearing the wings off the plane. Since I didn’t have permission to fly over Saudi Arabian airspace and Sudan was also out of bounds, I had little room to manoeuvre between the thunderstorms that spread over the Red Sea before reaching the latitude of Port Sudan.
By five-thirty the setting sun had thrown a shadow over my port wing. The faint tinge of the instrument lights marked the end of day. The cockpit gradually evolved into the warm glow of numbers and gauges as I plunged deeper into the night. The GPS indicated four more flying hours to Djibouti. I had not communicated on the radio for nine hours. My body ached with stiffness from the lack of movement. I needed to rest.
Two hours later I detected small pinpricks of light on the horizon from the Eritrean coast north of Djibouti. The contour map indicated a coast that was ringed with steep mountains; I needed to gain altitude immediately.
The coastal mountains of Eritrea, majestic and rugged, rise dramatically from the sea to form the eastern wall of the Great Rift Valley. This valley is part of an enormous geological fault that extends from the island of Madagascar through East Africa and Ethiopia to the Red Sea; the spine of Africa, massive in scope and beauty.
Moist warm air from the Red Sea pushes up the sides of these Eritrean mountains, cooling the moisture into thick cumulus cloud, which produces turbulence and potential for icing. Soon the plane’s running lights reflected a halo of light off the first bank of cloud, which obscured all visibility. I climbed higher, well above thirteen thousand feet, to safely cross the mountain range north of Djibouti. The plane laboured under the constant buffeting of air currents and thick cloud. Sharp, short jolts jerked the plane’s control cables, which alternated from slack to tense with a snap. Flying became more and more challenging.
Suddenly, the engine faltered. Its familiar, constant vibration and tonal pitch stuttered, threatening to stop altogether. For an instant I was transfixed, paralyzed, in total disbelief. Every nerve jangled, every muscle tensed, as I focused on this life-threatening and unexpected development. I pulled on the carburetor-icing knob. The engine continued to stumble, dangerously close to a stall. There had been no icing all day, so instinctively I dismissed icing as the cause of the problem. The engine coughed again, caught once more in a valiant attempt, and then fell silent—leaving only the sound of rushing wind through the airframe. It was startling the way the silence broke in.
I quickly set the controls into a glide, watching the altimeter unwind at a rate of eight hundred feet per minute. I could scarcely believe it. This was no practice drill, no routine exercise. Alone, no communication, no visibility, dropping into an unfamiliar, uninhabited mountain range at night. This was a flying nightmare—as bad as it gets.
My mind raced over the available options and there were precious few. Crashing into a remote set of mountains in the dark with no visibility meant the chances of survival were negligible. I was struck by a sudden overwhelming sense of weariness that dulled the threat of impending disaster. A sense of resignation took hold, the end was unavoidable. I was so close to completing the trip. All the effort, the calculation of risk, the preparation, the hours of flying—to have it end like this was so utterly futile. I thought of Krystyne. How would she ever know what had happened? A wave of regret washed over me at the unfairness of it all. Was this really taking place?
I forced myself to get a grip, to concentrate, to do everything possible until the last second before the plane slammed into the mountainside. There are prescribed procedures for engine failures, starting with a review of instruments and gauges, one by one, starting left to right. I methodically went through the routines, conscious of the pressure of depleting time and altitude.
The port fuel tank gauge read empty. The fuel selector valve pointed to the left tank . . . “God Almighty, I forgot to switch over to the starboard fuel tank. I’ve run out of fuel. How could that have happened?” Switching to the full fuel tank, I reset the mixture to restart the engine. The Cessna Continental O47J engine is susceptible to flooding when hot; it needs careful coaxing. “Please God, let it start.” Fully anticipating a flash of mountainside to suddenly fill the windscreen as the plane continued its downward plunge into darkness, I reached for the ignition.
The engine restarted. I eased the stick back in an effort to regain the thirty-five hundred feet I had lost over the previous four minutes. I was below the highest mountain peaks, in danger of flying blindly at full power into the side of one of several mountains that towered nine thousand feet into the night. I set the controls to maximum power and pitch for the steepest climb speed, waiting with bated breath during the three minutes of climb it took to reach eleven thousand feet and safe clearance. It was long enough to dwell on my oversight, a sure sign of fatigue. I badly needed to reach Djibouti, to get my feet on the ground.
An hour later, I started the descent into Djibouti through a corridor of mountains. Minimum navigational aids into Djibouti made the approach tricky, one any pilot would prefer to make in daylight. With a renewed sense of concentration I entered into the instrument approach, passed the directional beacon outbound, and a minute later circled into a teardrop turn, back across the beacon inbound on the final descent, breaking through cloud three hundred feet above the runway lights that shone like a diamond bracelet directly before me.
Safe on the ground at last, I shambled across the tarmac, glanced back at my plane, sitting with its nose in the air, and reflected on what could have been our last flight. We had flown so many hours together, she and I, as faithful companions. How could I have endangered us in such a slipshod way? I turned away, documents in hand, and headed over to the airport tower encircled by barbed wire.
The whole airport at Djibouti was abandoned save for a lone controller, locked in the airport tower along with his Second World War instruments and a small sleeping cot. It was ten-thirty at night, and there were no officials, no taxis, and nowhere to go. Resigned to spending the night on an airport bench, bitten by mosquitoes, I was nevertheless grateful to be alive. Neon lights hanging from the ceiling cast a greenish, funereal glow over the vast hall as they buzzed and flickered. A driving thirst had me drinking tap water that smelled and tasted polluted. I had completed thirteen and a half hours of difficult flying, only to end up sleeping on an airport bench. Still, I was safe, and my final destination, Nairobi, was now only one more long-distance flight away.
An hour later, a car drove up to the airport. After protracted negotiations, I was able to convince its driver to take me into town to the Hotel du Ciel. Too tired to find food, I fell into bed reflecting on my good fortune to be alive in Djibouti, Africa.
Djibouti is an unlikely country. Tucked within the folds of overlapping mountain ranges it guards the western portal of the strait, Bab Al Mandeb (Gate of Tears), the narrow entrance at the southern end of the Red Sea, which sits at the base of the Horn of Africa. Only thirty-five miles separate this part of Africa from Arabia and both sides are visible on a clear day.
Djibouti is really a city state, a border town between North and sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam and the Christian Coptic religions meet. The Jewish community has virtually disappeared. North African Arabs rub shoulders with black Africans, exchanging goods and services in Arabic, French, and Swahili. The restaurants, mostly empty, still produce good food, influenced by the French. Ethiopian girls in brightly coloured skirts have a saucy look in their eyes, fully prepared to meet you later in a bar. Prostitution is rife, but the lack of paying customers a problem. The occasional out-of-place European youth wanders lost and dirty along the broken sidewalks of the main street. Djibouti, it seems, is a cosmopolitan dumping ground of human misery.
Historically, the city has been one of the principal gateways into Africa. Arab dhows loaded with merchandise arrive with the monsoon, seeking trade. Times are tough and trading thin. Nevertheless, enormous quantities of cheap goods from as far as China pass from trader to trader before reaching Djibouti’s sprawling open-air market. Prices rise and fall with the monsoon, like so much else along the Indian Ocean coast. Arrivals and departures, fortune and misery, seem dependent on the trade winds.
The city stirred before dawn. I wandered through the back alleys surrounding the massive open-air market where Ethiopians, Somalis, and Arabs struggle to eke out a meagre living in a world of sellers with no buyers. Men sat cross-legged, pencil thin, behind piles of wood, corrugated iron, hardware, electrical supplies, pots and pans, and plastic trinkets. Women with carefully arranged pyramids of oranges, dates, limes, spices, and nuts; colours and shapes, designed to appeal, were crammed into ridiculously small stalls. Liquid doelike eyes peered out from above the ubiquitous veils. The market sprawled as far as the eye could see, a teeming mass of humanity.
A soft rain fell, turning the red earth into rivers of mud. I tracked through the slippery narrow passages between stalls, surveying the array of goods on offer. Vendors silently endured the trickle of water dripping from old umbrellas and bits of plastic covering their wares. The lack of buyers said it all. Djibouti is a small and desperate world on its own, forgotten by its former colonial masters, the French—a country no longer of use or concern to the world.
My ancient Renault taxi sloshed along the main road to the airport. The car’s radio wailed Arabic songs, while beads and pompoms hanging from the mirror danced drunkenly across the driver’s line of vision. As the car pulled up under a regal line of tall and graceful doum palm trees fronting the Djibouti Airport, rainwater spurted from the open crevices of the old cement building. Pools of brown muddy water swirled over the murram (mud) road into swollen ditches. The humid air was suffocating. I was anxious to leave Djibouti, to be airborne again.
The airport administration office was cluttered with files, damp and smelling of mildew. Two soldiers slouched in swivel chairs, smoking and talking, guns across their thighs. They eyed me vacantly as I tried to open one locked door after another in an attempt to reach my plane. Unhelpful and sullen, they shrugged their shoulders at my inquiries. “Le capitaine vient bientôt. Il faut l’attendre.” I settled down to wait.
It took self-discipline and patience to wait three-quarters of an hour for the captain’s arrival. Eventually, a pompous little man with short-cropped hair and a self-important moustache burst through the door and strode directly into his office, without glancing to either side. Five minutes later, unable to contain myself any longer, I knocked on his door and requested a clearance to fly to Nairobi. I was informed he had important business to attend to and that I must wait. Fuming, I returned to my seat, contemplating revenge. Twenty minutes passed without development.
Two Swedish pilots and a Canadian Forces lieutenant joined the queue. The Swedes, flying a King Air, were on their way to Mogadishu, while the Canadian was attempting to make arrangements for refuelling a Hercules 130 that was due to land later that day. I now understood why pilots hated flying into Djibouti, wrestling with police, immigration, and airport officials. The four of us decided to join forces and take the captain on.
We marched into his office, refusing to leave until he processed our clearances. He immediately called for his soldiers, who shambled in through the door and appeared startled by the apoplectic look on their captain’s face. We stood our ground, refusing to leave. The captain’s options were limited; he could shoot us or find some face-saving compromise. Finally, he assigned one of his illiterate soldiers to our needs, so that he might continue with important military matters. We ended up processing the forms ourselves.
On the ramp, I discovered a fuel cap was missing and my wing tanks had been drained of fuel. In a fury, I returned to remonstrate with the captain, who smiled with enormous satisfaction at my misfortune. He took great delight in directing me to the east-side hangar where I could buy replacement fuel, pumped from unsealed drums at a cost of $1.75 a litre—more than three times the cost of fuel in Luxor. I was probably repurchasing my own fuel, but I had no choice but to pay the price and cast a special curse on Djibouti.
Shortly after takeoff I was instructed to fly at flight level 140 (fourteen thousand feet), as high as the plane, fully loaded, could climb. I circled for an hour before reaching my designated altitude; anything lower was not permissible south of Djibouti under instrument flight rules. I soon understood why as I caught a glimpse of the mountainous terrain through broken cloud less than four thousand feet below me.
The Ethiopian mountains rose in spectacular ridges up to ten thousand feet from sea level along that section and I was amazed to see telltale signs of cultivation on their upper reaches, almost always in cloud. What kind of people lived at those high altitudes?
The same impenetrable terrain was traversed by Sir Charles Napier, the British general, with an army of thirty-two thousand men in 1868. Under Queen Victoria’s directive, General Napier had been sent to defeat Emperor Theodore, the Abyssinian warrior king, whose outrageous defiance of the British Empire and her Sovereign Queen was considered intolerable. General Napier’s trek, complete with fifty-five thousand animals, including elephants shipped from India, took him across those mountain ridges below me, surely some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain.
A British emissary, Charles Cameron, held hostage by Emperor Theodore for five years, was the casus belli for that incredible expedition. Napier’s route from the coastal town of Magdala into central Ethiopia took almost six months, but the battle that followed lasted less than twenty minutes. Emperor Theodore lost the battle, his kingdom, and his life. The British recovered their emissary, their honour, and their reputation, leaving Ethiopia to sort out its own future through tribal warfare and natural anarchy—at a time before airplanes had even been invented.
At Mandera I flew into Kenyan airspace. After ten hours of flying I was closing in on my destination. Shards of sunlight pierced the towering clouds of cotton wool. The ground fell away from the mountains into forest clearings, spotted with thatched makutis (roofs) and the smoke of cooking fires whose wisps of smoke curled into the bluish haze of an African sky. The number of settlements multiplied, laced by red earthen paths through a patchwork of small farms with their bomas (thorn-bush corrals for herding goats). Corrugated tin roofs glinted in the sunlight, through the emerald-green baize of tea and coffee plantations. In the distance, the city of Nairobi rose faint against the murk of a polluted skyline. My heart beat faster.
The instrument approach into Wilson Airport, the smaller of the two airports servicing Nairobi, is linked to that of the larger, Kenyatta International Airport. Instructions on the approach plate for landing are confusing: midway through the procedure for Kenyatta Airport, the pilot is expected to break away and enter the approach for Wilson Airport—a most unusual arrangement and a lot to ask of a pilot after ten hours of flying at fourteen thousand feet.
My head ached from dehydration and the lack of oxygen. I had to rely on the controller’s limited patience as I stumbled through his instructions and eventually touched down on Wilson Airport’s Runway 07. I taxied the length of the field, crossed Runway 14 and pulled up in front of the Flying Doctors Service hangar.
A number of Flying Doctors Service pilots had gathered outside the hangar to watch as I cut the engine and swung out of the cockpit. Tousled, dirty, and lacking in sleep I could hardly make my legs work as they were stiffened from so many hours of flying. I approached the pilots, who were waiting at a respectful distance from the plane. So this was the consultant, come to help reorganize the Flying Doctors Service. At least they were impressed by my having flown from North America to Africa in a single-engine plane. That was a good start.
We shook hands and, after a brief discussion, I informed them that I needed food and sleep; their questions would have to wait for morning. They understood, offered to place my plane in the hangar, and helped me call a cab.
As the taxi careered and swayed along Milimani Road towards the city, my driver, who introduced himself as Michael, talked nonstop. He persuaded me to stay at the Nairobi Club, a perfect club for a gentleman from Canada, he claimed. He would vouch for it and for me—I had only to leave everything to him. What’s more, he would meet me the next morning in order to show me the city.
I gazed abstractly out the window at Nairobi, large and bustling under the white gold of a setting sun, and all very peaceful. I had flown eight thousand miles from Toronto to Nairobi in seventy-six hours’ flying time. The excitement of flying solo to Kenya to work on an aid project in Africa suddenly seemed less romantic, even mundane—but then I was tired, very tired. I needed sleep. Tomorrow, I thought, would be time to rekindle my spirits, to seek adventure in Africa, and whatever else lay ahead, over the next two years.
