Ashes of a Madman

Chapter 10 - Ada's Embrace

The disjointed notes sung by the whistling thorn tree can sympathize with any temper. When the wind blows through the holes, which are the Kenyan ants' labyrinth, and the thorns cut the smoothness of the breeze, the tree finds its voice and commiserates with your melancholy, your fear and emptiness. If you look for hope, you can find it in the high, sweet notes; if you look for pain, it is discovered in the sunken tones that eat at your stomach. The real beauty of the thorn tree's songs can only be perceived by lying beneath one for hours at a time. The endless blue sky has known it since time began, the birds cry out gruff hints to explain its song. But you cannot learn from these, you must sit at the foot of the tree, master and apprentice. The secrets are not found in the noises that remind you of blowing air across the tops of wine bottles. The tree whispers it in the hushed tones that it speaks only to you, an oracle that speaks to your soul, and comforts from the heart to the brain and compels you to sneeze out your conflict and begin anew.

Njobo had brought me back to Mombasa safely, as he promised Mme. Gravot. His knowledge of medical dawa not only saved my life but also healed my wounds without much scarring. He cared more than I at this point. The long journey back seemed all the more endless when half of you wants to run as fast and as far away as you can and the other half looks back in fear and in hope that another has made it out safely. What a conflict of desire. What maddeningly worthless second thoughts. Epimetheus meets Pandora. Curiosity wishes otherwise; Epimetheus, the useless friend. My foot had become callous against danger and I walked about as carelessly upon needles as upon down feathers. My oracle, the tree, dried my eyes and softened my feet and promised nothing more than what I created with my own hands.

While we made our final trek through Masailand, my tongue and brain untied themselves from the Bantu language. The distance was not the only way to remove myself from this place. I could only remember it in the Pygmy tongue and in the dense green forest. In the dusty highlands of Kenya, I felt that it must have been another that saw such evil. It was not Rebecca that ran about Stourhead. Not a well-bred girl who was raised in a Palladian mansion. Not the same as the child who swam in the little lake or played at the Temple of Apollo or picked at the rocks on the stone bridge that separated Stourhead from the rest of the world. I looked at my dirty feet and could only see how once they wore delicate shoes that crossed beneath the Coughton Court archway with a two-tiered oriel above. Geoff's family home in Warwickshire with its gatehouse tower built in 1509, the wings of which were refaced a hundred years ago in Georgian Goth could not be the birthplace of the man that nearly murdered me. Murderers cannot come from a place like Coughton Court. Such estates bred patient, nearly effeminate men. Not so with my husband. I did not feel prepared to enter my life in England yet. Perhaps the strange atmosphere Mme. Gravot's home offered would provide the transition for me.

The bustle of Mombasa took me by surprise. Njobo was my silent guide along the familiar thoroughfare, Vasco de Gama Street. In the distance was the Indian Ocean. Old Harbor teemed with Afro-Oriental vessels. I did not need to speak. The inhabitants shouted to each other, drowning out anyone less important than they imagined themselves to be. Kikois, the tawdry garb of the Swahili, and the kanzus, which looked like a comfortable nightshirt beneath multicolored vests, made Mombasa seem festive. It was not the fearsome and strange place that I once perceived it to be. It was the callousness of my feet. Donkeys the size of Great Danes, camels, barred windows, arched doors of mvule timber, warehouses and Government offices. This place was a melting pot of Africa with a dash of European to appeal to the palate.

Njobo possessed none of the trepidation I felt as we came to the Gravot's home. He smiled a little as we listened to the echo of the doorknocker and the ensuing footsteps and voices. Njobo was shown into one room and I into another. I watched Mme. Gravot hand Njobo money in exchange for my life. It is strange how I attached a bit of friendship to him when it was just a business agreement. He nodded to me briefly and disappeared. I knew I would never see him again and I felt slightly hysterical. I brushed away the tears from my cheeks a number of times. I was afraid to sit in my dirtied condition. So I folded my hands and waited for the woman who was my former foe. Strange, it was all strange and unreal, beginning to end.