I must tell of some of my African adventures which took place shortly after I passed my fortieth birthday.
Africa-what gaudy memories the mere word calls to life: that first evening in the desert south of Biskra, with the grave Arabs sitting round, listening to the story-teller shaping the age-old tale to a new ending, acting the characters the while, mimicking villain and hero, slave and ruler, and with a magic of personality, making the drama live before our eyes.
Or that long ride up Table Mountain with Cecil Rhodes. I still see him standing-a greater Cortez-with his back to the Pacific, starting towards Cairo, six thousand miles away, dreaming of the immense central plateau, three times as large as the United States, as one empire.
That great central plateau where the air is light and dry, like champagne, and mere breathing's a joy; where the blessed sun reigns all through the long day, and the earth grows odorous under the hot embrace, and the sweat dries on the naked back in selvages of salt like the ripples on a sandy beach, while the night is cool and refreshing as the yellow moon comes up over the black forest and turns the camp into fairyland, while sweet airs breathe sleep on weary limbs.
And the freedom of it! Not the freedom of London: freedom to do as others do, dress as others dress, and speak as others speak, parroting phrases that were half lies when first coined, and smearing unctuous sentimentalities on dagger points; no, not that! Africa's freedom is of the wild and waste places of the earth, where one can be a man and can think his own thoughts and speak truth and live truth and stretch yokeless neck and free arms in God's sunlight.
Towards the end of February, 1896, I came to the conclusion that I understood South Africa, and as Rhodes was still absent in London, I determined to make my way up the country, at any rate as far as the Victoria Falls on the Zambesi, which I had always wanted to compare with Niagara. Accordingly, I organized an expedition and set off with one hundred and fifty carriers. I had as lieutenants two Boers, brothers, whom I had met in the Free State, and so long as they were with me, everything went fairly well. But their cruelty to the Negro carriers was almost diabolic, and one day, when the elder brother kicked a Negro and broke his leg and wanted to leave him to die in misery, I revolted. The end of it was that I paid them both for the entire trip and said "Goodbye" to them. We parted good friends, and the elder brother told me to keep my eyes skinned and see that the Negroes always boiled the drinking water or I'd get fever and come to grief. He turned out to be right. I thought kindness would be as efficacious as cruelty, but I was mistaken.
Still, I won through to the Zambesi, and one sunlit morning, for the first time, the great Victoria Falls that dwarf Niagara, burst on me, robed in rainbow mists, as if to hide the depths, while the great Zambesi stretched away to the right, a silver pathway to the far-off sea. The solitude, the scenery, the great river, and the falls, the wild animals of all sorts, and above all, the sense of living in the world as it was a hundred thousand years ago, made this experience the chief event in my life, separating the future from the past and giving me a new starting point.
I was two or three days exploring the falls from every point of view, and at night had divine rest in my tent. A day's journey away, fifteen miles or so north of the falls, and perhaps five hundred feet higher, I could still hear the roar and seemed to feel the earth quake.
This trek fagged us all out; the road was bad and the heat intolerable. The hundred and twenty or thirty Negro bearers I had with me put down their loads and threw themselves on the ground, careless of tsetse fly or mosquito, eager only to sleep and rest, even before eating. It was with difficulty that I got my personal servants to put up even my bell-tent. The big one they professed they could not find; three or four of the bearers, it appeared, had not yet come up. At last the tent was fixed and my mattress put down in it. My little table and stool were brought out and they gave me something to eat, fish and deer's meat, washed down with good whisky and water.
I had had the tent placed, as usual, fifty or sixty yards away from the camp of my carriers. The Negroes had not even cut thorn bushes as a Zareeba or fence to protect themselves. Sleep was the one thing we all wanted.
Though within the tropics, we were some thousands of feet above the sea level, so the air was quite cool at night, though the sun in the daytime was scorching. After my meal, I told the head man he could go and sleep. I went into my tent, put on pyjamas and lay down. The tent was small and the cool air so delicious that I left the flap open. In the evening air it waved a little, the elastic that held the square of it back being a little worn. Lying down on my mattress in front of the opening, I could see the great purple vault of sky, and on the right, the edge of the wood, perhaps a hundred yards away.
In a minute I was asleep, plunged into the dreamless slumber of absolute bodily exhaustion.
Suddenly I was annoyed by a noise. I was pulled out of my dreamless sleep by a repetition of it. Very cross, I tried to blink open my eyes. At first I could hardly see anything.
Again the flip! What was the noise?
At the camp everything was in deepest peace and silence. The mosquito netting was all around my head and my hands were gloved. I could hear the insects humming.
Again the flip! At length I was wide awake, more than awake.
The flap of the tent had closed and then opened again. And again the sound.
The flap of the tent, three-quarters closed for a moment, was then pulled back by the elastic. I could have reached it by stretching out my hand, but I was now too full of anxious curiosity.
What could it be that made the flap of the tent go back and forth so regularly?
Suddenly my curiosity was steeped in fear. I did not know why. Instead of getting up and stepping out to see what caused the flap to act so strangely, I put my head to the ground and peered underneath the tent.
Gradually my eyes became accustomed to the dark and I soon could see outlines a bit more clearly.
There was something there against the sky, and as I looked along it I saw a tail with a tuft on the end of it.
What could it be?
All of a sudden the flap of the tent was driven to again and then pulled back by the elastic. I peered more closely at the object, made out the outline, and realized the whole affair.
It was a full grown lion, lying on the ground playing with the flap of my tent, like a big cat. He had evidently crept up to the tent, probably attracted by my odor, seen the flap moving a little in the wind, and struck it with his paw.
It went and came back again, and after a moment or two he had struck it once more.
A lion playing with the flap of my tent, two feet from me!
Quickly I drew up my Westley Richards rule that was always loaded at my side, and lay down to try to get an exact line on his head and ear.
Then I thought: Why should I kill him? The big cat was really doing no harm.
The something cat-like, childish, in his play made me smile. This feeling of pity and friendliness probably saved my life, for just as I was hesitating-Gr- r-r-m-I heard a long, rumbling sort of moan to the left, and as I looked out through the tent, I saw distinctly the outline against the sky, perhaps four yards away, of another lion, or rather a lioness, as she had no mane.
How many were there?
I had seen a dozen together before then. They might be all around my little tent, for all I knew. One blow of one of their paws would carry the tent away and leave me exposed in the center.
It was perhaps wiser to keep quiet and await developments. The lioness moved a few feet forward and then stretched herself, yawning. I could see her as distinctly as possible, not ten feet away now.
Suddenly my lion at the flap joined her, stood opposite her for a moment, then turned his head slowly towards the flap and my humble person.
Again the rifle went to my shoulder, and I wondered, looking straight at the lion, whether he saw me as plainly as I saw him. Then I reflected that against the black of the tent he could not see me at all. That was my solitary advantage over him. Both beasts were uneasy, curiously watchful, especially the lioness.
Suddenly a sound came from the camp, and her head went round at once, turned towards the sound. The next moment she crouched down close to the ground and moved stealthily out of my limited field of vision.
The sound was repeated. Probably a Negro had got up for something in the camp, for at the second sound the lion turned, and walked slowly out of my vision after his mate.
I found it quite impossible to sleep. I tried to, but the proximity of the big beasts was too disquieting. I found myself listening, on the thin edge of expectancy, with nerves stretched for every sound.
I grew more and more wakeful. Again and again I peered along the ground, but could see nothing.
The lions had either gone to the woods or to the camp. I could not tell which.
No sign of them.
Suddenly, I began to see the trees on the right more distinctly. The night was over. Two minutes afterwards long arrows of light: it was day.
I went outside and clapped my hands. A couple of headmen came to me and I pointed to the ground by the flap. They read the signs quite plainly- "big lion"; and when I pointed a few feet away, they found the spoor of the lioness and followed it down to where the pair had gone into the wood.
The marks of a half-grown cub were with the lioness.
I told them what had happened, that the lion had been playing with the flap, and I still hear their "Woo-oof" of wonderment.
The second day of our trek I fell ill with malaria, which soon developed into blackwater fever. I treated myself with big doses of quinine and arsenic and went on, but the third day I must have been given another drink of ordinary unboiled river water.
I found it almost impossible to get the Negroes to boil the water: they told me lie after lie. That evening my temperature was over 105°. I had learned, with Bilroth in Vienna, that at 105° the fever begins to feed on the heart itself, and one must at all costs diminish the fever, even with icepacks. But I had no ice, and that day and the next, in spite of large doses of quinine and arsenic, my temperature continued very high. For two or three days I was out of my mind and raved in delirium. My head man, a big Negro, told me with tears that the men said the spirits who spoke through me were determined to take me; and one morning I found that no one answered my call. Fortunately, the evening before I wanted some tins of soup, and my Negro kept bringing me tins of sardines, which I tossed in the corner of the tent; in the morning, when I awoke and rang my bell, no one answered; and when I crawled on hands and knees outside the tent, I found the camp deserted and my medicine chest broken in pieces and strewn all over the ground. I was deserted by the carriers who had smashed up my medicine chest before going, believing that all my power was to be found in the medicines.
There was further evidence that kindness was not understood by the ordinary Negro. I had made it a rule from the beginning to keep my tent fifty yards from their encampment, and I soon found it necessary to make a further order: that they should go about their private business one hundred yards from the ordinary encampment; now, when they thought I was about to die and they were resolved to steal all my belongings and bolt, they had been dirty first all over the place as a sign of contempt, I suppose.
At any rate, here I was in the wilderness with nothing but my rifle and revolver and a knife and perhaps twenty cartridges in the belt around my waist, and nothing to eat, and so weak that I couldn't stand. I said to myself at once: "This is the end; the sooner I put a bullet through my head the better. No use writing anything; it would never be seen. If any white people come to the place and find my dead body, my rifle will tell them the tale. Had I anything to say of any value to anybody?" I decided that I had not. I took up the rifle to end it all, when suddenly my eye caught sight of the five or six tins of sardines which I had tossed the night before into the corner of the tent.
Six boxes of sardines and one of soup meant life for a good while, and after all I was quite close to the Zambesi, to the river that ran to the sea and to civilization, say, six hundred miles away. If I had been well, twenty miles a day would have gotten me to the sea in a month, but even ill, surely I might do it in two months! I tied my most necessary things into a bundle, took several boxes of matches and a little tin kettle, strapped the whole on my back, and two mornings after I came again to the Zambesi. I determined to
stick to the river and look for a canoe: some dug-out or canoe might be abandoned and I might have the luck to find it.
Next morning I began to make my way to the sea: at first the fever was very high, but I kept on taking daily doses of quinine and nightly doses of arsenic.
But alas! I had only the one package, picked from the box which had been by my bedside: I had to be content with small doses.
Perhaps the hard exercise or the starvation did me good: in two or three days I reckoned I had made about fifteen miles down the river, and I was certainly stronger, so I took my first meal of three sardines. All the afternoon I was ill, and the next day could scarcely crawl. Wherever I saw the semblance of a path through the reeds to the river I looked out for a canoe, but for many days I saw nothing, except some hippos in the river and deer in the distance. The less I ate, however, the less fever I had. But the weakness persisted, my legs seemed to have no bones in them, and half an hour's walk tired me out. What I suffered, I can never tell. I couldn't have made much more than sixty or seventy miles in the month; and it was a month before I found a canoe, three days after I had wolfed my last sardine.
But the dug-out was salvation, and as I lay in it, I realized that I should now be able to make fifty or sixty miles a day; one lucky shot would give me food, and the current would bring me to civilization in ten days or a fortnight: the mere hope gave me new life. In an hour I had made a couple of rude paddles and had waded through the reeds and pushed into the full stream. No more painful walking or crawling-thank God!
Luck held with me. That day, or the next, I saw a small hippo standing on the bank. I took most careful aim and fired and he fell to the shot; in a few dozen strokes I was into the bank and beside him: he was dead-the bullet had gone clean through his head just behind the eye. Once only in my life did I feel more of a murderer, but necessity is the first law, so I opened his mouth and cut out his tongue, and went down the river half a mile with it before I lit a little fire and boiled it in my kettle, boiled and boiled and boiled it till it was more than cooked; and I had my first real meal in five or six weeks. It was the turning point-my fever got less from day to day and I slept interminably; one thing only bothered me: my beard grew inordinately and there were some grey hairs in it-there were not many-I could still count them, and I was over forty-but I resented their appearance and swore to myself that I wouldn't mount the white feather until I was over sixty, if I could ever get out of Africa.
I have nothing more to recount of any interest till I got to the first Portuguese settlement, and there I had an amusing experience. I secured my canoe on the bank but I couldn't make up my mind to leave the kettle and a few odds and ends, so I carried them with me. As soon as I got into the street of the little village, every one I came across had a good look at me and then bolted incontinently: children, women, men-everybody. As I passed a barbershop, I thought I would make myself decent before trying to get anything in a restaurant. The barber was shaving a man, but as soon as he saw me he dropped his razor and shot into the back room; the man, half-shaved, got up, indignant, but after one look at me, he slipped out into the street and disappeared; so I went over and looked at myself in the glass. Never was there such an appearance: nose and eyes and a long ill-grown beard on the face of a corpse-I had never seen any human face so thin, and my dirty shirt and clothes, and the kettle in one hand, and all my belongings in the other; I don't wonder that the people fled. I knocked at the inner room and the barber ventured out as soon as he saw the gold sovereign — I had a good deal of money about me. In a little while he cut off my beard and shaved me, but even then my face frightened me: it was emaciated, a skeleton-face. I asked the barber for a restaurant and he pointed on down the street to one, and in five minutes I was seated at a table with a beefsteak in front of me. I ate very little because I was afraid of indigestion, and with good reason: in an hour I had thrown up most of what I had eaten; and I was back in the restaurant to try something else, till I saw it was useless. My stomach had been ruined by the berries and leaves I had eaten: I could digest scarcely anything; meanwhile, half the town came to the restaurant to see me.
In spite of the heat, I bought an overcoat which covered my rags, and got a room for the night in a decent hotel and had a long hot bath: it seemed impossible to get clean. Before going to bed, I saw the doctor, who was a Portuguese and knew some English. He told me to eat only soup and brought me little arsenic pills that did me a great deal of good. What I weighed then I have no idea, but a month later on the German steamer taking me up the coast, I weighed less than eighty pounds, although my normal weight was then about one hundred and sixty.
I must explain why I didn't get stouter. Only on the first day was I able to eat and digest a little food. On the second day everything disagreed with me; I had acute spasm after spasm of indigestion. I tried everything, but my stomach was hopelessly enfeebled, partly by the berries and partly by the other indigestible things I had eaten. If any reader wants to know the best thing I had in weeks-it was a small snake, the head of which I cut off and then boiled the body; and the worst thing I ever attempted to eat was a caterpillar; there was a certain red berry which really poisoned me, but the taste of the caterpillar will live with me as long as I live: it was disgusting.
The doctor on the German liner tried everything to help my digestion, but nothing did me any good. In Germany, Schweninger made me believe that a fast of ten or fourteen days would bring my stomach into good order. I tried the fast and prolonged it till I found my legs failing on going down some stairs; then I began to drink milk and afterwards vegetable soup, and so brought myself gradually to a normal diet. But as soon as I began to eat solids again, I had unbearable indigestion.
Schweninger taught me nothing except the science of getting thin, which he had proved on Bismarck: his discovery was that drinking with one's meals alone makes fat. If you drink nothing for half an hour before your meals and for two hours after, you will lose weight at the rate of a couple of pounds a day, after the first day or two. By following this regimen, Bismarck, when already old, lost some sixty pounds and came to better health. Later I, too, tried this cure and found it efficacious. Since then, whenever I want to bring my weight down to normal, I simply follow Schweninger's regimen for a few days.
When I found that I could get no relief from Schweninger, nor, for that matter, from doctors all over Europe, I returned to London. That summer a wellknown specialist told me to put my house in order, for I had only a short time to live. He said, "I cannot hear your heart, and," pointing to some steps on the other side of the road, "if you ran up those steps it would probably kill you."
The Princess of Monaco had brought me to him, and so when we got out into the street, I ran up and down the steps three times as hard as I could, and laughed with her afterwards.
A year later, in passing the doctor's house, I went in to call on him. After examining me carefully, he told me that my heart was in perfect condition, my arteries like those of a boy; and he wondered why I had come to him.
When I referred him to his prediction, he turned my case up in his diary and said he had written that my heart was almost inaudible, weaker than any woman's. He begged me to tell him what I had done and how I had brought about the change.
I have already explained that it was my house doctor in London who first made me acquainted with the stomach pump. It taught me what I could digest and what I ought to shun, thus giving me a complete and scientific dietary. As I made it a rule to leave off everything that disagreed with me I soon came to almost perfect health.
Of course, every now and then I sinned a little. If, inspired by company, I drank a little more than I should, the washing out of my stomach cured the evil and gave me perfect rest. If I ate a little too much starch or oil, and the first water of the purging was colored or impure, I gave my stomach another bath, but always went to bed with my stomach as clean as my mouth.
One fact I may give here, which doctors and scientists may seek to explain.
After some years of careful dieting I found that I could eat and digest little bread or even butter. Of course, I would only eat the butter or bread at lunch, but sometimes a slight pain in my forehead a couple of hours afterwards taught me that I had indulged too freely: the pain passed away and I took my usual light dinner. Four hours or so later I would wash my stomach out and suddenly the butter, eaten at lunch twelve hours before, would appear. The stomach had allowed all the rest of the lunch and dinner to pass on into the intestines, but had retained the butter to be washed out in due course.
This fact has made me almost believe that the individual cells of the stomach are semi-rational in some sort, and will act in the interests of the general health.
One other factor should be mentioned in connection with the stomach pump, and that is the intestinal bath of warm water, which is taken once or twice a week to regulate the bowels and keep them healthy.
But even the most careful dietary did not bring perfect health without regular exercise. From boyhood on I had exercised pretty carefully both morning and evening. I recognized early that indigestion in adults usually comes from the fact that they do not move the middle part of the body enough. The child is always bending and stooping, and so exercises the abdomen; but the adult keeps the stomach and bowels almost quiescent. I found that exercising this part of the body was better for health than developing the muscles of the arms and legs and chest. And so for many years my exercises were all taken with a view to bettering my digestion.
I may note here that I was nearly forty before I had the first attack of indigestion; it was really the dreadful experience on the Zambesi that ruined my stomach. As I grew in years from forty on I found that exercise could easily be too violent: I began to leave off the heavy clubs and large dumbbells I had loved to use in youth.
Strangers, and even those who know me, are continually surprised and astonished at my almost perfect physical health and a comparative youthfulness of appearance that goes with it. When I explain that my health is due to study of the body and to careful observance of the rules which are conducive to healthy living, they all beg me to publish some of the facts.
Very few people realize how completely it is within the power of a fairly strong man to make himself perfectly healthy. After my breakdown in health in 1896, I began, as I have said, to study health and digestion in every way possible. In the autumn of this year, I found I was growing bald: a bald spot had appeared on the top of my head. I immediately set myself to think out a remedy. Advancing years, of course, was the real cause, and my spell of ill health; but now that I had regained my health, what was I to do to get rid of the baldness? It seemed to me that the bald spot came chiefly through the use of the hat, which prevented the hairs being blown about and the roots of them exercised; accordingly, I thought of a substitute and I began to scratch my head so as to excite the hairs surrounding the bald spot. In a little while I found that I was right, because the hairs came back and the baldness gradually disappeared: six months did the trick and I have had no trouble since.
In much the same way, later still, I found my eyes tiring with much reading and writing. I went to the best oculists and got glasses which helped me a little, but soon again, in spite of the glasses, I began to suffer. I had always been short-sighted from astigmatism, but I saw well near at band, and up to about fifty could read for ten or twelve hours a day without noticing any fatigue; now, after four or five hours reading or writing, my eyes used to get blurred for minutes together; I had to put the book down and wait. These weak spells grew more and more frequent at an alarming rate, I went to the oculists, but found they were just as ignorant as the doctors: one recommended different glasses, but no change helped me; another told me that I should be very proud of being able to read two hours at a stretch without suffering. In fact, I got no satisfaction from any of the so-called specialists; whereupon I took the matter up for myself. "You are suffering," I said, "because your eyes move mechanically up and down a page and so grow tired." Thereupon I began to exercise my eyes every morning, casting them from one end of the room all over it to the other, for a quarter of an hour a day. At the end of a month I threw away all my reading glasses and now find that at over seventy I can read or write twelve or fourteen hours a day without trouble, just as I could as a boy. A change of work is almost as good a rest for the eyes as for the other parts of the body.
I am often asked where I get my knowledge of the body. As a German student fifty years ago, I heard of the celebrated doctor Bilroth in Vienna, and went there and studied under him. I would rather at that time have been a doctor than anything else. There were two sacred orders of mankind to me always: those who diminish pain and those who increase pleasure. I didn't think my self good enough to be a writer or scientist and so give enjoyment, but I did think I could be a great doctor; I soon found that I was taking the science much more seriously than the ordinary students or doctors or even professors.
I could give dozens of shocking instances of the careless indifference to human suffering, not only of the students and doctors, but also of the nurses; but I will simply give the final one, which made me leave the university. I came into the operating-room one day and found that a doctor had just carried out the difficult operation of cutting a cancer from a woman's breast.
The room was half-filled with students, which astonished me, and I asked what was the occasion? I was told the doctor had bet a fairly large sum that he would cut the cancer out and finish the operation in a certain number of minutes; I think it was fifteen. I was horrified when he turned around and smiling remarked that he had won. When I looked at the patient I suddenly saw a small trickle of blood on her breast. I pointed and said to the doctor:
"You have been too hasty." His face changed: he had immediately to take the stitches out, open up the wound again and tie up the artery, which he had forgotten or overlooked because of the constant application of the ice-bag.
By the time the breast was open, the blood was already spurting from the artery; and as he took it up to tie it, the woman made a slight movement and was dead.
"It might have happened to any one," he remarked.
"You are a brute," I cried, "and should be charged with worse than murder." I left the room or I would have struck him. I spoke of it to the superiors, which all the students resented, but the superiors consoled me and themselves with the fact that she was a poor woman and really couldn't expect such treatment as was given to those who paid.
The whole incident, coming on top of fifty lesser experiences, made me see that I would always be at odds with the whole of the profession and that I might as well give up my wish to be a surgeon, so I left Vienna and went on to Greece.
Before I leave this question of health, I must say just one thing: the wisest of French proverbs is une fois n'est pas coutume — (once is not a habit), which, being interpreted, means that you can do a great many things once which, if you attempted to do frequently, would bring you to utter grief. I have known the time that a drinking bout did me real good, but if I had continued it every night for a week I should have been a pitiable object; and so there are many things one can eat once in a while which one can't eat every day. Une fois n'est pas coutume is a great rule of physical health.