Kenya
Are amateur of mountains rather than a mountaineer, Major Dutton has written a rare and a lovely book. He has avoided the technical jargon of the professional mountaineer,
and given us instead something far more satisfactory and enduring. His defeat therefore (for he did not achieve the summit) falls into perspective : it 1111S not a tragedy, not a matter for tears, but an incident no greater than the waving of a frond :—
" Suddonly your eye is caught by a long frond on one of the bamboo stems near by ; without warning it has become unaccountably agitated. You look again. You see that all the other fronds from the same stem preserve the pervading stillness of their surroundings, and only this one is waved this way and that, up and down and round and round, like a signaller's flag. You watch more closely. You can see no reason for this behaviour. . . . And oven while you are. vaguely puzzling at this mystery, the movement stops as suddenly as it began. It stops, but its impress is left with you."
In this small incident Major Dutton reveals his whole outlook. Indeed, he expressly states : " I have a wayward imagination which takes the slightest hint to dash off and build me the most enchanting castles in the air. . . I do not see why I should deny myself these happy moments."
It is just this quality of imagination, this engaging interest in the substance of things rather than in their material shadow, which gives to the book its delightful fascination, this quality and the simple distinction of utterance which is its appropriate medium.
Major Dutton writes with the elusive charm of an essayist. Kenya mountain is to him as much a subjective reality as it is to the Mwimbe who live under its awe-inspiring shadow : it is not merely a geological formation, but has a spirit and a personality, inviting confidence and wonder, fear it may be or love, but above all understanding. It is this quality which makes Major Dutton write : There is no place for a sore heart like a mountain stream. . . . There is a benediction about the noise of a stream." And it is this quality which enables him to see in the everlasting and exhausting ridges of Kenya the truth of the old Sato legend
of Thaba Bosiu, the Hill of Night ; which carries his thoughts to klbatian, the great magician of the Masai, as he surveys the lowlands from the shoulder of Kenya. A breath of wind transports him from the exquisite Nithi falls to new castles
in Spain.
It would be doing Major Dutton an injustice, however, to suggest that Kenya mountain did not demand his practical attention. Its difficulties are such that only once has the
summit been reached before the failure of Major Dutton and his companion, Mr. J. D. Melhuish, whose very beautiful
photographs make the use of the word failure a travesty. Major Dutton is generous in his appreciation of others, more successful than himself, and this is what he has to say about one of his own failures :-
" And yet, failure as it was, there had been nothing simple about our climb : most of the way up you can take your choice of an almost sheer drop of several hundred feet on either side of you ; most of the way up you climb outrageously bad rock ; and all the way up you crawl along a narrow knife-edge, a few feet across at the most, and formed of rocks so roughly thrown together that you believe a touch will send them careering hundreds of feet below, taking masses of other rock with them. . . . It may well be that the adept would laugh at these difficulties. They defeated us."
And Major Dutton has a sense of humour : he really enjoys laughing at himself and at the small petulancies which come of living at high altitudes. More than once we read some- thing like this :— " Melhuish, so it seemed to me, displayed a revolting obtuseness and I, so he said, was arguing foolishly because I was tired and angry. Cursed be those who make excuses for you! We argued fiercely, and then we laughed and walked back to camp. All the same, we said it was about time that we got down to lower levels again."
" One more invasion had come and gale, and the mountain seemed to be waiting for the next." Such is Major Dutton's valediction, and in its suggestion of immutability it recalls the old African story which makes the mountains masters of transient man. It also points the moral of Mr. Hobley's book, which is an epic of transition. Mr. Hobley is an optimist where Major Dutton is a romanticist. He hopes for high. success out of change ; Major Dutton prefers the high failure of permanence. Mr. Robley was one of that band of pioneers, many alas ! now dead, who have helped to make Kenya what it is. His story of dangers overcome, of personalities and names, now almost mythological, gives his book an emotional appeal which is almost irresistible. All that part of the book is intensely interesting : it is personal, .historical, and dramatic. But Mr. Hobley has deliberately,- and perhaps wisely, avoided controversy, though he has his prejudices. the chief of which appear to be Germans, " native agitators " and " sloppy sentimentalists." The full story of certain episodes, therefore, still remains to be written, and for that reason we doubt whether his final—and what many will consider his most important—chapter on the " Outlook of Kenya " is altogether satisfactory. We elk) are optimistic, for we find in Kenya mountain a symbol of con- tinuity in transition, and to Mr. Hobley's Quo Vadis? reply in Major Dutton's words : " Surely we can find some better way of teaching our subject peoples our faith and our civilization than by turning them into clerks."
J. H. DRIBERG.
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