She and Fritz were the only whites on the old rickety poorly-put-together bus that lurched and hopped along the dusty hole-spattered road from Kenya to Tanzania. The bus was crowded. Men, women and children of every size and every shade of black wobbled and tilted, chattered and sang, gestured at one another and looked out the windows. The trek to Moshi and legendary Kilimanjaro in this cast-off motorized contraption had become a rolling festival on wheels.
Fritz had paid the nominal fare for them when they boarded the bus in Nairobi. She noticed that only a few of the other passengers had paid. Jarred and aching, she wondered if her goal, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, was becoming that of survival only: survival of this bus and of Fritz, who constantly metamorphosised, or so it seemed to her.
The driver, a slender, laughing, self-assured young African, without slowing the bus down, kept turning around to talk with the passengers seated behind him. His cap was shoved back on his head where it sat precariously on the edge of his skull.
Shouts from the back of the bus jerked the vehicle to a stop. Several men lumbered up the aisle, slapping friends on the back as they went. Once out the door, they disappeared into the fields of high grass at the side of the road.
"Now what?" Fritz grumbled and wiped perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand. It seemed hotter now that the bus had stopped. He kicked at the backpack at his feet.
In a few minutes the men returned and the bus hobbled on. She had not looked at the men as they left the bus and she didn't look at them when they returned. She was afraid to look at them, afraid they would take offense. This was the real Africa, not white South Africa, and things were different here. She had heard all about these Africans, these Kenyans. Probably all of them belonged to that Mau Mau and who could ever forget what the Mau Mau had done to the English in Kenya. So she kept her head down except to steal glances at Fritz or to look through her eyelashes straight ahead at nothing in particular.
She dozed, succumbing to the heat and the swaying of the bus, and woke to loud laughter and shouting. The passengers stamped their feet, pounded on the sides of the bus, and flung their arms through the open windows, pointing at something outside. Could it be the mountain at last? Timidly she raised her eyes and turned her head to see several tall, perfectly-postured Africans, wearing only red-colored blankets thrown about their shoulders, loping alongside the bus. Their paint-splotched faces startled her, as did the long spear grasped by each one of them.
The bus bounced to a halt and the driver jumped out. Ceremonial greetings passed between the driver and the spear-carriers. The runners then boarded the bus and raised their spears high to greet the passengers. The dark faces of the new arrivals were immobile but broke into soft smiles when the passengers responded with guttural approval, clapping and laughter. After laying their spears in the aisle, the runners wedged themselves into the crowded seats.
"Mein Gott," Fritz breathed by her side. "Savages!" He bent over to touch one of the spears.
"Don't!" she whispered, catching his hand. "I'm scared. The guy who owns it might run it through you."
Fritz looked up at her, then sat back in the seat. He smiled and did not pull his hand away. He's changed again, she thought. She looked down at their clasped hands. Is this why I'm still with him?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Being with him was not a thing she had planned; it was a thing that just happened. He and another Austrian friend were her seat mates on the flight from Johannesburg to Nairobi. The friend was on his way to Switzerland and Fritz was heading for Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. They spoke to each other in German, ignoring her completely. She might never have spoken to either one of them if she had not discovered an unsent letter in her purse and muttered her disappointment. She feared that the letter to a South African friend either could not be sent from Kenya or, if sent, would not be accepted in South Africa with Kenyan postage.
The friend, sitting between her and Fritz, turned and sympathized with her, offering to mail the letter for her in Switzerland. He refused her offer to pay for the Swiss stamps that would have to go on the letter. During this exchange in which she expressed her relief that the friend spoke English, Fritz stared out the plane window. When she mournfully replied that she did not speak German, Fritz turned his head to look at her.
"You are American, ja?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, looking across the friend to him. "Why?"
Fritz smiled. She almost missed it, it was so quick. He shrugged his shoulders as he turned away again to look out the window.
She and the friend talked until the plane landed late at night in Nairobi. The friend seemed impressed with the round-the-world odyssey she was making on her own, working where she could to finance the next part of her journey.
"And no plans," he kept saying, "no plans. Just going and taking the day-by-day, ja?"
"Ja," she said, laughing.
She trailed after the two of them through customs in Nairobi. She planned to sit out the rest of this night in the airport as she had done in many airports, pretending, if confronted by any officials, that she was waiting for another flight. It was cheaper than paying for a whole night to sleep somewhere and it made more sense, too, when half the night was already gone.
Fritz and the friend waited for her to get through customs. The friend said goodbye and she shook his hand. Fritz said nothing and the two of them began to walk away. Fritz then suddenly turned and walked back to where she was looking for the best place to sit out the rest of the night.
"Where will you stay now?" he asked.
"Here, until morning, then some youth hostel. And you?"
"I will wait here with Hans for one hour," he said. "His plane then will go. You will wait for me, ja?"
She agreed, as she always seemed to do; people with real plans always impressed her. She was glad, too, to have the company of someone her own age with whom to wait for morning.
When he returned, he told her he was going to hitch a ride to the Kenya Mountain Club on the outskirts of Nairobi. She could stay there too, he said, if she wrote in the register that she was going to climb Kilimanjaro. She decided she would climb the mountain, a thing she had never tried before. Dawn had come as they rumbled in the back of an old truck on their way to the club. She told him she had come to Nairobi intending to climb Kilimanjaro; this was only a little twist of the truth because she really had wanted to go see it. He said they must go together.
Mountain climbing was a serious business, he told her. She nodded her agreement. He had climbed throughout Switzerland and his native Austria mostly all his life. He knew all of Europe's mountains and had studied both Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya which he was also going to climb. He did not ask her if she had climbed before and she did not tell him that this would be her first experience. He seemed to take for granted she was a climber but said that of course being an American climber not living with mountains was a different thing than being an Austrian climber. Again she agreed.
"It will be so much fun, so exciting," she said. "I can't wait." He gave her a strange look and said no more.
That was how it began two weeks ago and in the beginning it was exciting and fun. He was meticulous about helping her get together all the things she would need for the climb. She put up with his impatience, his rudeness, and his overbearing ways, partially attributing them to his way of impressing on her just how serious a business mountain climbing was. Several times when she felt she could not spend another minute listening to his lectures, his patronizing of her, she would trail off outdoors or to another room inside the large cabin and he would come after her, a completely different and charming person. It was wonderful then because he would shed his prickliness and ask her about America and the rest of the world she'd seen. Bit by bit, too, he would let fall pieces of himself that she, in the beginning, believed excused his dark and gruff behavior.
It was during several of these times that she pieced together the overriding horror of his very young years that pushed him toward the admiration for Hitler he often expressed now: World War II victorious Russian soldiers had strangled his National Socialist father in the kitchen of his Austrian home while he, his sister and his mother at gunpoint were forced to watch. His mother eventually had died in the asylum where his sister still lived.
In the beginning, too, they were seldom alone for extended periods because there were many who came and went at the club. Those others either were climbing or had climbed both Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya. In the evenings by the fireplace, she and Fritz with shoulders touching and exchanging smiles now and again, listened intently to the stories of every climber. Like Fritz, all of them acknowledged the serious side of mountain climbing, but unlike him most of them seemed fired with passion for the beauty of the mountain and the challenge it threw them.
At last they set out for their own climb. The beginning was over. Now they were alone with no preparations to make and no one else around to act as a buffer between them. She had thought that now they actually were on their way with all the getting together behind them, he would loosen up and drop a lot of his brusque and hurtful ways. They would draw closer, they would talk and laugh. After all, they were tied together by this wonderful adventure that now at last really had begun.
It had not been like that, she thought as they bumped and rolled along. If anything, his worst part is worse and there is more of it than there was before. Much of the time, she could not even get him to talk to her, and when he did talk, there was no real conversation. What passed for conversation from him was a continual diatribe against her country, her religion, and the western world in general (Germany, the whole Germany, excepted). He made it very clear that he was one Austrian who was German first. Yet just when she had had enough and was ready to sling her backpack on her shoulders and walk off in the opposite direction, he would stop talking and awkwardly reach out to touch her shoulder or her hand and look away, leaving her dumfounded. She pitied him and knew not why nor for what. She had never known anyone like him. And she had to stay with him now because there was nowhere else to go until they'd been up and then down the mountain.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Calls and shouts brought the bus to a stop. Again several men got off and plunged into the high-grass fields.
"What are they doing?" she asked Fritz.
"I'll get off and see," he answered, his twitching lips suppressing a smile.
"No," she said, frightened. "Maybe it's some sort of ritual."
"Hnnh," he grunted, and scowled in the old familiar way. "Savages. Children. Fooling around, that's all it is."
"Don't go, please," she begged.
An older black man seated ahead of them turned around in his seat. He raised his shapeless cap. "I speak English," he said. "Work for English in Nairobi. Many years. Not to be frightened. Those men," he pointed to the fields, "they go peeing."
"Oh," she said, startled, wondering why she hadn't thought of that. And what did the women do? she wanted to ask the old African but did not want to further annoy Fritz.
Fritz guffawed. It was the first time she had ever heard him laugh at all, much less with such vigor. When he finally caught his breath, he said, "I, too, go peeing," and he began to laugh again.
Her face felt hot and she knew it was red as she turned away. Fritz headed down the aisle to the cheers and clapping of the Africans. She turned again and tapped the old African on the shoulder who leaned back in his seat and turned his head to look at her. He smiled.
"Memsaab?" he said softly.
"Those," and she pointed to the red-blanketed passengers, "Who ... what ... ?"
"Masai," he said proudly. "Very brave warriors."
"Some have gone away now. Where are they going? Why did they get off the bus here?"
"They are finished riding the bus," he said. "They do not go anywhere. They do not ride to anywhere. White man's bus is fun animal. They ride to ride, then run back to village. For fun, for learning, they ride."
"Oh," she said again. "They did not pay to ride. Many of these other people did not pay either, but we paid."
He smiled. "Very soon, more pay. We get out of gas. Then all pay. You pay too."
"We already paid," she said. "Why will we pay again?"
"You have money, you pay," he said patiently. "Masai no have money. These," and he swept his arm forward, "they have only little money. You have much money."
"Why does the driver let people on the bus who don't have the money to pay?" she asked, her confusion mounting.
"The people, they go to Marengu," he said. "The way is long for walking. The bus goes to Marengu, so the people go with the bus to Marengu. People, bus, all going same. Why not?"
"Oh," she said. "Thank you."
Fritz and the others got back on the bus. Again they jolted along. Suddenly she knew what the women did about peeing as a small trickle of wet came rolling down and under the seat across from her. Its obvious starting point was the big, black woman shaking with laughter in a seat several rows ahead. She hoped Fritz would not see this because he would make more insulting remarks about the Africans. This would only add to her growing impatience with his coldness which was increasingly isolating him in the midst of the Africans' warmth.
He was holding her hand again, having reached for it when he returned to the bus. This time the pleasure was submerged in the strange and distant sense of sadness she was feeling. Suddenly he squeezed her hand hard and she gasped with pain.
"Look, look!" he said hoarsely. "The mountain!"
"Ay-ee, ay-ee," the Africans shouted, "Keeleemenjaruu." They pointed and cheered and turned to look at her and Fritz, the two whites whose no-color faces bobbed like marshmallows on a sea of hot chocolate. They pointed again at the mountain's snow-rounded top, which was all that could be seen, and shouted its name over and over.
"Kibo," Fritz kept saying. "It's Kibo. That's its name, that peak, Kibo, and there's Mawenzi peak and ..."
But she was not listening to him. She was awed by this initial appearance of the mountain and the intensity and depth of the Africans' reaction to it. Fritz kept turning around in his seat, his eyes never leaving the mountain, until the curve in the road made it vanish.
"Tomorrow we go up, we take it," he said, tremors running through the words. He was looking at her at last and he appeared feverish. He still held her hand but he no longer smiled.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Very early the next morning they began their climb. The base of the mountain was a dirt road out of the town of Moshi along which at varying intervals appeared a village. From each village, children and dogs ran and skipped alongside of them for a short distance. She wanted to stop and talk with the children and pet the dogs but he coldly ordered her to "Go, go, keep up with me, rest time is far off." The last village had been passed and the little villagers were turning back.
Suddenly she was forced to stop by a very small child who had run ahead of her and now blocked her way. The little girl held out a tiny blue flower.
"For luck, Memsaab," the child said softly, and then darted away to join her companions.
She took the blossom, marveling at its beauty shimmering before her tear-filled eyes, and stuck the stem of it beneath her watch band. Then she ran to catch up with Fritz.
"Look at this beautiful thing," she panted, showing him the flower. "Isn't it a marvel?"
"A weed," he said, not breaking his stride. "And now you are not breathing right because of the running."
"Wait, wait," she said, grabbing his sleeve.
"What?" He looked at her coldly. "Wait for what?"
"I ... I don't know," she said miserably. "I mean you're missing so much, the beauty, the wonder of it all, I mean the reason for going and all ..."
"The reason for going is one reason, the top," he said. "The top, to take the top. All is for that, all. Come."
How can he be that way? she wondered. Here, with all this beauty, this magnificence, where the soul must bow in wonder no matter how erect the body remains. At the club, he did not say things like this, the top is all, all for the top. Why does he climb? How can the top be all?
She said no more and trudged behind him. The pack on her back grew heavier as if empathizing with her thoughts. The small stones beneath her boots felt like rocks. She began now and again to slightly stumble. Her breathing grew heavier. Perspiration collected at the roots of her hair. The blue of the sky pained her eyes. There was a dull ache in her chest. Insect sounds grew louder. She thought she heard water running.
"We will rest," he suddenly announced at her side. He handed her a tin cup from his pack and stretched his arm, pointing ahead of them. "There's water up ahead. Don't drink a lot."
She sat down, a tangled heap on the side of the path. Her legs ached. She finally got up and followed him to the stream hidden beneath the tall grass. They filled their cups and she sat down again. He continued to stand, aloof, and almost unreal to her tired eyes.
"We will be at Bismarck Hut in a few hours," he said. "We should have been there already. We have been walking for more than three hours. We will stay the night there." He knocked the cup against his leg, shaking from it the last drops of water. "Come," he said, and slung his pack on his back. He bent over, picked up her pack and slung it on top of his own. "Come," he said again.
She nodded, getting to her feet. "Thanks," she rasped.
Another hour passed. Her mind felt disordered. Tears burned her eyelids, or was it perspiration. Who knew? Who cared? Suddenly Bismarck Hut materialized on the ridge ahead. Joy brought a burst of strength that enabled her to run the last few paces to the large cabin and fling herself down on one of the cots. Fritz was right behind her, never breaking his stride. He said nothing but his eyes gleamed with a strange triumph.
"We are here," he announced.
"Isn't it grand to think that we are really on this famous mountain?" she asked. "I want to see what it looks like all around us."
She went to the door and stepped out. Evening had come and mist was descending all around. The world had shrunk to only this ether and this ground, this cabin and him. Oh, if she but had someone to tell her thoughts to about it all.
"Come in," he said. "It is time to eat." He struck a match to the wood in the fireplace. He pulled foodstuffs from the packs and began to fix supper. Two old Africans suddenly appeared at the door. He looked up sharply after noticing them and then went outside to speak with them.
"What did they want?" she asked him when he returned.
"Money, food," he said, and continued to fix supper.
She was afraid to ask him if he had given them anything because she did not want to know the answer she was certain would be a negative one. She watched him work, not offering to help for fear of the same kind of negative response. The firelight blazed on his forehead reminding her of the statues carved in pink marble she had seen last year in Italy. Even his blond hair took on a pinkish cast from the yellow-blue streaks of firelight. He's good-looking enough and certainly efficient, she mused, but something's missing in him, something. Feeling uneasy, she again stepped outside the door and shivered slightly in the cold that was always Africa after the sun left it.
Dimly through the mist she could make out the tiny lights below that had to be Moshi. How small they seemed, how far away, like fallen stars brooded over by an all-encompassing shroud, the mist. She threw her head back to gaze up at the real stars overhead. Their bright nearness stunned her. They seemed to be falling on her.
"The food is ready," he said behind her. "What are you looking at?"
"The mountain," she said vaguely, no longer wanting to share her thoughts with him.
"You can not see the top of it from here," he said. "And we are on it except for the top. You will see the top from the fields tomorrow when we go. You see, you are getting the idea, too, now. It is the top, the top we must get to."
"Oh," she said vaguely, not even trying to explain her wonderment to him or to understand his obsession with conquering or having or taking or whatever it was that drove him. She didn't bother to ask him why he thought she had been pulled into his obsession with 'the top' either.
They ate supper in silence, and cleaned up after the meal. She felt as if she were becoming invisible. He had already spread the sleeping bags out on the cots but she was too numb, physically and otherwise even to thank him.
"Now, for tomorrow," he said slowly, staring at a point above her head. "We must go very early in the morning and we must walk faster. I am thinking it is too much for you. You Americans are not healthy. I am healthy, you see."
"There is nothing wrong with my health," she snapped, fury dissolving her feeling of invisibility. "It is not too much for me and I am going, so there!"
The next day they waded again through knee-high grass. The grass slashed at her jeans and clutched at her boots but it did not seem a hindrance to Fritz who literally marched through it, looking neither right nor left. Sometimes she could not see him ahead of her. Through no conscious effort of her own, she began to walk even slower, concentrating on the minute life beneath and alongside her. She was dimly aware that now and again Fritz deliberately halted and waited until she came within a reasonable distance of him before he turned away to continue his determined assault on the mountain.
If only I could see the damned mountain! she thought, battling despair as well as physical exhaustion. I don't believe there is a mountain anymore. It's just a dream, Hemingway's dream. O God I'll be tramping through this awful grass forever!
Fritz finally called a halt for lunch but she could eat very little. If he wasn't such a bully, I'd tell him I was going back, she thought, but I can't quit now, can't let him get the best of me. It's all so meaningless going up a mountain that isn't even here. If only we could do it together, if only we had the same reason for doing it at all ...
Lunch over, they went on. Another hour went by. She was weeping silently, too weary to even try to brush away tears he was too far ahead to sneer at anyway. He was completely out of sight when suddenly a blazing whiteness filled her vision. It was Kibo again, the top of the mountain, undulating and blanketed with glittering snow, set off by its jagged whitened sister peak, Mawenzie. She gaped with astonishment, riveted to the spot.
Fritz, looking back and not seeing her even in the distance behind him, retraced his steps. There she was, farther back than ever, and not even moving, for the love of God! Furious, he marched toward her. He glared down into her shining face, sweat and tear-streaked, and the eyes that lived there. The eyes did not see him, as close as he was; he was of no account to those eyes.
"What's wrong with you?" he finally asked, his anger gone. "Do you have the altitude sickness?"
"Didn't you see it?" she asked, puzzled. "There. Turn around. Look."
He turned around. "Oh, you mean Kibo, the top. Yes," he said.
"Is that all you can say?" her voice trembled. "Isn't it beautiful, magnificent?" she choked. "There it is, there it really is. Don't you feel overwhelmed, awed by it all? Don't you feel anything at all?"
"It is very far away," he said. "We are only halfway there. At Peter's Hut we will be two-thirds there but Peter's Hut is very far away too. We are walking too slowly. Come. I thought something was wrong with you. We must walk faster. It is the top you see, that is all."
"O God," she cried out, clutching at her heart where she felt her soul to live in pain. "Not with me. There's nothing wrong with me."
For the next hour, she stumbled toward the beauty that reached for her. To hell with him, she thought, to hell with him. He makes everything so ugly and hard. He sees nothing, nothing. So beautiful, you're so beautiful, she nodded to Kibo. I won't leave you to the likes of him, I won't! Anybody that can't see this beauty hasn't got any business here. Beautiful, so beautiful, beautiful ...
Another hour passed. Her legs were numb. She sipped water constantly from her canteen. Her lips were swelling. Her eyes seemed to be swelling, too, and almost closed. The vision that was Kibo blurred and faded, crept closer and then fled. Nausea rose in the back of her throat. Her breathing became more labored. She could not hold her head up anymore to watch the antics of Kibo. Weariness pressed her chin to her chest and she saw blobs she knew were her booted feet come and go, come and go. For one moment, she stopped stumbling and stood still, forcing her head up to see Kibo one last time but the path had curved in such a way that the peak was not visible.
"O God," she sobbed aloud. "It's gone, gone. I've lost it. All for nothing, nothing. I've lost it."
Fritz came upon her at last, sobbing and distraught, gasping for breath, crumpled into a small ball hidden in the tall grass. He put his hand beneath her head and raised her up. A too-cool wind had begun to blow and daylight was nearly gone.
"We must go on," he told her. "We cannot stay on the mountain at night. We must get to Peter's Hut. It is not any higher, just farther. Come on. You must try. Get up. I will help you, come on. It is only a little way now, not even an hour. You are sick from the altitude, I think."
"I am sick from life," she said brokenly. "I've lost the mountain, I've lost it. It's gone. I can't go on anymore."
"We can't sleep on the mountain at night," he said harshly. "There are animals. Come."
"I can't," she said, and she couldn't. Her legs would not go, not even after he got her on her feet. She could not make them move 'though she strained with all her will.
"Then we must make the best of it," he said, and went off to find a suitable
camping spot. Finding one on a slight slope, he built a large fire and spread
out the sleeping bags. The wind blew cold and sharp now. In the open, they
had no protection against it. They crawled fully dressed into the sleeping
bags after he made her drink some hot soup. She could not stop crying.