Nothing happened.
A moment later I caught sight of the snake. It was lying full-length along the skirting of the right-hand wall, but hidden from the snake-man’s view by the back of the sofa. It lay there like a long, beautiful, deadly shaft of green glass, quite motionless, perhaps asleep. It was facing away from us who were at the window, with its small triangular head resting on the matting near the foot of the stairs.
I nudged Fuller and whispered, ‘It’s over there against the wall.’ I pointed and Fuller saw the snake. At once, he started waving both hands, palms outward, back and forth across the window hoping to get the snake-man’s attention. The snake-man didn’t see him. Very softly, Fuller said, ‘Pssst!’, and the snake-man looked up sharply. Fuller pointed. The snake-man understood and gave a nod.
Now the snake-man began working his way very very slowly to the back wall of the room so as to get a view of the snake behind the sofa. He never walked on his toes as you or I would have done. His feet remained flat on the ground all the time. The cowhide boots were like moccasins, with neither soles nor heels. Gradually, he worked his way over to the back wall, and from there he was able to see at least the head and two or three feet of the snake itself.
But the snake also saw him. With a movement so fast it was invisible, the snake?
??s head came up about two feet off the floor and the front of the body arched backwards, ready to strike. Almost simultaneously, it bunched its whole body into a series of curves, ready to flash forward.
The snake-man was just a bit too far away from the snake to reach it with the end of his pole. He waited, staring at the snake and the snake stared back at him with two small malevolent black eyes.
Then the snake-man started speaking to the snake. ‘Come along, my pretty,’ he whispered in a soft wheedling voice. ‘There’s a good boy. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Nobody’s going to harm you, my pretty little thing. Just lie still and relax …’ He took a step forward towards the snake, holding the pole out in front of him.
What the snake did next was so fast that the whole movement couldn’t have taken more than a hundredth of a second, like the flick of a camera shutter. There was a green flash as the snake darted forward at least ten feet and struck at the snake-man’s leg. Nobody could have got out of the way of that one. I heard the snake’s head strike against the thick cowhide boot with a sharp little crack, and then at once the head was back in that same deadly backward-curving position, ready to strike again.
‘There’s a good boy,’ the snake-man said softly. ‘There’s a clever boy. There’s a lovely fellow. You mustn’t get excited. Keep calm and everything’s going to be all right.’ As he was speaking, he was slowly lowering the end of the pole until the forked prongs were about twelve inches above the middle of the snake’s body. ‘There’s a lovely fellow,’ he whispered. ‘There’s a good kind little chap. Keep still now, my beauty. Keep still, my pretty. Keep quite still. Daddy’s not going to hurt you.’
I could see a thin dark trickle of venom running down the snake-man’s right boot where the snake had struck.
The snake, head raised and arcing backwards, was as tense as a tight-wound spring and ready to strike again. ‘Keep still, my lovely,’ the snake-man whispered. ‘Don’t move now. Keep still. No one’s going to hurt you.’
Then wham, the rubber prongs came down right across the snake’s body, about midway along its length, and pinned it to the floor. All I could see was a green blur as the snake thrashed around furiously in an effort to free itself. But the snake-man kept up the pressure on the prongs and the snake was trapped.
What happens next? I wondered. There was no way he could catch hold of that madly twisting flailing length of green muscle with his hands, and even if he could have done so, the head would surely have flashed around and bitten him in the face.
Holding the very end of the eight-foot pole, the snakeman began to work his way round the room until he was at the tail end of the snake. Then, in spite of the flailing and the thrashing, he started pushing the prongs forward along the snake’s body towards the head. Very very slowly he did it, pushing the rubber prongs forward over the snake’s flailing body, keeping the snake pinned down all the time and pushing, pushing, pushing the long wooden rod forward millimetre by millimetre. It was a fascinating and frightening thing to watch, the little man with white eyebrows and black hair carefully manipulating his long implement and sliding the fork ever so slowly along the length of the twisting snake towards the head. The snake’s body was thumping against the coconut matting with such a noise that if you had been upstairs you might have thought two big men were wrestling on the floor.
Then at last the prongs were right behind the head itself, pinning it down, and at that point the snake-man reached forward with one gloved hand and grasped the snake very firmly by the neck. He threw away the pole. He took the sack off his shoulder with his free hand. He lifted the great, still-twisting length of the deadly green snake and pushed the head into the sack. Then he let go the head and bundled the rest of the creature in and closed the sack. The sack started jumping about as though there were fifty angry rats inside it, but the snake-man was now totally relaxed and he held the sack casually in one hand as if it contained no more than a few pounds of potatoes. He stooped and picked up his pole from the floor, then he turned and looked towards the window where we were peering in.
‘Pity about the dog,’ he said. ‘You’d better get it out of the way before the children see it.’
The Beginning of the War
Breakfast in Dar es Salaam never varied. It was always a delicious ripe pawpaw picked that morning in the garden by the cook, on to which was squeezed the juice of a whole fresh lime. Just about every white man and woman in Tanganyika had pawpaw and lime juice for breakfast, and I believe those old colonials knew what was good for them. It is the healthiest and most refreshing breakfast I know.
On a morning towards the end of August 1939, I was breakfasting on my pawpaw and thinking a great deal, like everyone else, about the war that we all knew was very soon going to break out with Germany. Mdisho was moving around the room and pretending to be busy.
‘Did you know there is going to be a war before very long?’ I asked him.
‘A war?’ he cried, perking up immediately. ‘A real war, bwana?’
‘An enormous war,’ I said.
Mdisho’s face was now alight with excitement. He was of the Mwanumwezi tribe and there wasn’t a Mwanumwezi anywhere who did not have fighting in his blood. For hundreds of years they had been the greatest warriors in East Africa, conquering all before them, including the Masai, and even now the mere mention of war caused such dreams of glory in Mdisho’s mind that he could hardly stand it.
‘I still have my father’s weapons in my hut!’ he cried. ‘I shall get the spear out and start sharpening it immediately! Who are we going to fight, bwana?’
‘The Germani,’ I said.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘There are plenty of Germani around here for us to kill.’
Mdisho was right about there being plenty of them. Only twenty-five years ago, before the First World War, Tanganyika had been German East Africa. But in 1919 after the Armistice, Germany had been forced to hand the territory over to the British, who renamed it Tanganyika. Many Germans had stayed on and the country was still full of them. They owned diamond mines and gold mines. They grew sisal and cotton and tea and ground-nuts. The owner of the soda-water bottling-plant in Dar es Salaam was a German and so was Willy Hink, the watchmaker. In fact the Germans greatly outnumbered all the other Europeans in Tanganyika put together, and when war broke out, as we now knew it must, they could present a dangerous and difficult problem to the authorities.
‘When is this enormous war going to begin?’ Mdisho asked me.
‘They say quite soon,’ I told him, ‘because over in Europe, which is ten times as far away as from here to Kilimanjaro, the Germans have a leader called Bwana Hitler who wishes to conquer the world. The Germans think this Bwana Hitler is a wonderful fellow. But he is actually a raving mad maniac. As soon as the war begins, the Germani will try to kill us all, and then, of course, we shall have to try to kill them before they can kill us.’