Death in the Silent Places Read online

  For Mary Catharine—Nkosikazi gamina.

  “But there are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm. There is delight in the hardy life of the open, in long rides rifle in hand, in the thrill of the fight with dangerous game. Apart from this, yet mingled with it, is the strong attraction of the silent places, of the large tropic moons, and the splendor of the new stars; where the wanderer sees the awful glory of sunrise and sunset in the wide waste spaces of the earth, unworn of man, and changed only by the slow changes of the ages through time everlasting.”

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  Khartoum, March 15, 1910

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Lt. Colonel John Henry Patterson

  C. H. Stigand

  Major P. J. Pretorius

  Alexander “Sasha” Siemel

  W. D. M. “Karamojo” Bell

  Colonel Edward James Corbett

  And Furthermore …

  Author’s Note

  Also by

  PETER HATHAWAY CAPSTICK

  Critical acclaim for Death in the Long Grass

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  IT HAS BEEN SAID that romantic adventure is violence in retrospect. I am a retrospective man and this, although possibly not romantic, is a book about violent adventure. To what would be the sincere regret of most of the characters portrayed, it is also a work of nonfiction.

  This is not a book about heroes, although some of the people spoken of were unquestionably heroic. It is a collection of extraordinary events and often ordinary men under circumstances of primitive and savage stress. If bravery is the performance of an act despite great personal fear and risk, then we may certainly say that they were all brave. A few may even have been noble, but I’ll let you pass on that.

  As I am a veteran of the silent places through my career as a professional hunter in central Africa and South America, you will understand that the men I have chosen were hunters, either of dangerous animals or the most deadly prey, man. I have shared their way of life to some degree and in many cases spent time where they had years before. I know the terror a man-eating cat can generate, and I know what it feels like to stalk an armed enemy through the long grass and rocky hills. To be privileged to tell these men’s stories in my own words, however, is the closest association I can claim to their deeds.

  Today, in a culture where real physical risk is largely limited to changing lanes on a freeway or being bludgeoned in your bed by some overenthusiastic hophead in dire need of whatever the latest chemical escape from reality may be, the contemplation of a life-style in which you may be pulled down and dragged off at any dark moment by a man-eating lion, tiger or leopard is almost beyond comprehension. But it still happens every day in Africa and Asia, and may be taking place as you read these words. Capsulized as we are in a world in which our electronically vicarious thrills and Hollywoodized “nature” shows are served up over the flash-frozen, microwave-revived, mass-prepared corpse of some long-dead chicken in its disposable aluminum coffin, segmented by insipid feminine-hygiene-product commercials, it’s not all that easy to remember—let alone relate to—the fact that we once were, and still are, hunters. As in predators.

  Because of our largely urbanized existence, I suspect that some readers may find this book “gory.” If this is so, then it is because the truth is gory. In our carefully insulated world of the West, genuinely violent death and its aftermath are visual rarities, although even a few hours of any evening on any network will provide an almost unbelievable casualty list of shooting, explosion, strangling, poisoning, drowning and more thoughtfully disposed-of victims. But not real death. In our society that inevitability is neatly and sanitarily packaged in obituaries, memorial services and checks to charities which seem to vie for evermore unpronounceable and dreaded diseases to stamp out.

  Alas, death is not so neat in the silent places.

  Peter Hathaway Capstick

  Naples, Florida

  August 1980

  Lt. Colonel John Henry Patterson

  IT’S A WARM March night in the East African Protectorate in 1898, the smooth, black air around the compound of Indian workmen soft with the promise of the coming rainy season. If there were more of a moon, the half-completed skeleton of the Tsavo Bridge would jut darkly some hundreds of yards away from the field of tents, which loom like strange, pointed khaki mushrooms clustered loosely about the dying eyes of scores of untended campfires. It has been a hard day of work for the more than 2,000 imported laborers, and now, at midnight, nearly all are asleep.

  One tent, much like the rest, contains seven men: six laborers and one supervisor, Jemadar Ungan Singh, whose title denotes a rank of lieutenant in the Indian Army. He is nearest the open fly of the tent, snoring enough to awaken one of the coolies of his team. Irritated, the man sits up and rubs his eyes, glancing about the murk, over the sleeping forms of his fellows and out the door into the shadowy expanse of the open compound. Wiping away a film of sweat from the close night, he is about to lie back. One does not complain about the snoring of a superior, let alone a jemadar. But something catches his eye, something darker than the pale shadows, creeping slowly toward the open tent. He blinks as fear hooks his stomach with long claws, his eyes growing wider. In rising terror he stares as the form ghosts nearer, a tawny wraith flattened against the ground. It pauses for a heartbeat at the door, then instantly lunges at the sleeping Ungan Singh. Thick white fangs audibly clash against each other as they meet through the flesh of the Jemadar’s neck, yet he manages to give a strangled shout of “Choro!”—“Let go!”—before, with an irresistible lurch, he is pulled from the tent. At the last instant he is seen to wrap his arm around the giant lion’s neck as he disappears into the night.

  Ungan Singh does not die easily. Helpless in the lion’s jaws, he is dragged struggling through the thorns, futilely flailing the man-eater with his fists. It’s likely that the jemadar’s unusual personal size and strength give the Sikh quite a few extra moments of unwelcome life as the cat continues to pull and carry him away from the growing clamor of shouts from the camp. The men back in the tent can clearly hear his repeated gargled attempts to scream, and the sounds of his struggle are terrible. After a hundred yards, fate shows some dark mercy in the shape of another huge lion, which charges forward and bites him deeply in the chest, killing the Indian. Irritated by the poor table manners of his partner, the first lion growls loudly, struggling to keep hold of his prey, tugging with all the steel-muscled power of his 500-pound body. As the long fangs tear and the pressure is increased, the man’s head is torn completely off, rolling away to land, by chance, balanced on the stump of neck, the eyes still open wide and staring, dead pools of dread. Ignoring the head, the big cat snarls and leaps to grasp the decapitated corpse, fighting briefly with the second lion before both settle down to feed hungrily until the body is consumed but for scattered red scraps of flesh and a few bones. The Tsavo Man-eaters have just killed their third official victim, although quite probably Ungan Singh is actually number ten or eleven. This, however, is just a warm-up, a canape before the main course. Over the next nine months these two incredibly deadly animals will actually stall the largest colonial power in the world, that of Victorian Britain, bringing one of its most important construction projects to a complete halt and one of its less likely citizens to the status of an international hero.

  It was known at home, back in Blighty, as the “Lunatic Line,” so dubbed by the London press and generally considered the screwiest exploit of an age not shy of sensationalism. Technically and
officially called the Mombasa-Victoria-Uganda Railway, it was planned to run from damn near nowhere, the sweltering east coast port of Mombasa, to virtually the middle of nowhere, which in those days was a pretty fair description of Lake Victoria. On the face of it, especially in the light of today’s technology, such an undertaking might not seem very unusual. But in the 1890s, things were a mite different. Most work was done by great gangs of hand labor over some of the toughest terrain south of Abyssinia. If the cost in pounds sterling was virtually obscene, it was downright cheap compared to the price in lives paid by the hordes of Indian coolies whose imported skills and experience were required as the only labor pool before the local Wajamousi, WaKikuyu and Masai started going to Yale and Oxford. Of the more than 35,000 Indians imported, nearly 9,000 were killed, died or were permanently maimed. More than 25,000 additional laborers of the same force were injured or taken ill, but recovered. The dark, coy virgin called Africa had a very hard bosom.

  In itself, the “Lunatic Line” was a master stroke of nineteenth-century engineering and execution. Started at the coast in 1896, it was not completed until December 19, 1901. Ostensibly, it was created to help combat the slave trade, although the commercial advantages of a wilderness railroad running deep into the heart of Africa’s lake country are also obvious. In all, it twisted snakelike for 580 miles through the most indescribable nyika, or wilderness, northeast from Mombasa, across plains and over highlands, spanning rivers and gorges, passing through exotic stops such as Voi, Nairobi and the lakes of Naivasha, ending at last at Kisumu on Lake Victoria. To carve and burrow the “Lunatic Line” through the swamps and highlands by hand labor was an awful undertaking, but, despite the price, it struggled inexorably farther inland every day, foot by foot, rail by rail, mile by murderous mile until, in March of 1898, it touched the Tsavo River, 132 miles up the line. But of the 162 bridges that would have to be built, none would ever bear a name so synonymous with terror and abject human misery as Tsavo.

  It doesn’t look like much if you care to climb the steep N’dungu escarpment and gaze over the savage wasteland below. Your vista is a rock-studded desert of pale, leafless thorn and snaggled wait-a-bit bushes making a lousy living from the thick red soil, the only hint of green life the winding crest of feathery hardwoods along the river. Over there, away to the south where the frosty glow of Kilimanjaro’s snows catches the equatorial sun in the distance, you will still see the bridge across the twinkle of cool running water and the glitter of smooth-worn iron flashing off into the bush. The old rails and weather-beaten bridge certainly don’t appear very imposing now, hardly worth the horror their building caused. But there was a time when these few square miles were the center of the greatest animal ring of terror in all of Africa.

  Obviously, where a railway meets a river, there must be a bridge. The man whose responsibility it became to see the project through turned out to be a Lt. Colonel John Henry Patterson, some years later adding the Distinguished Service Order to his monicker. He arrived at Tsavo from Mombasa on March 1, 1898, blissfully oblivious to the lurking panic about to descend upon the site over the next nine months. Although he later wrote a smashing best-seller about his misadventures with the Tsavo Man-eaters, published by Macmillan in 1907, J. H. was very casual about his own life and career, to the extent that it took me several months to determine what his initials stood for.

  An Englishman raised in India who spoke fluent Hindustani, he looks from contemporary photographs to have been somewhere in his thirties at the time of the man-eating outbreak; a perfect pukka Sahib in white pith helmet, jodphurs and riding boots, slenderly built and with a most proper mustache. His style of writing, bearing in mind that he was an engineer by trade and not a journalist, is classically Victorian, often charmingly stilted. It’s hard to find two paragraphs in a row that don’t have some reference to the lions as “the savage brutes.” Yet, with the story he had to tell from what was frequently on an uncomfortably first-hand basis, he could hardly have written less than a best-seller.

  Considering the importance of the Tsavo Bridge and the necessity of its completion within weather-dictated schedules, _Patterson must have been a well-qualified engineer to have been placed in charge of the whole project. Also, from the way in which he attempted to handle the man-eaters, it’s almost certain that he had hunted tiger or leopard while in India, as did most British officers when there. In 1909, well after the events of Tsavo, he wrote another book called In the Grip of the Nyika (also Macmillan), which deals with some reminiscences of the Tsavo episode as well as hunting experiences of a later trip to East Africa, during which he killed a new species of eland, that continent’s largest antelope. It still bears his name as Patterson’s Eland. The point is that he was not inexperienced in big-game hunting, although the difficulties he was to have in trying to kill the lions and the number of times he very nearly became a blue-plate special on their menu seem to indicate he was not possessed of any uncanny skill at the hunting arts besides great persistence.

  So much for the times and the man. What about the lions?

  If we want to second-guess more than eighty years after the events, the Man-eaters of Tsavo were probably rank amateurs, only learning the specialized skill of hunting and killing man through trial and error. The whole area along the track as it passed through southeast Kenya had long been notorious for man-eaters before anybody dreamed of building a railroad there, so their depredations were certainly not without precedent, or later sequel. It would be impossible to surmise what the total number of victims of the Tsavo Man-eaters aggregated; however, they were mature animals when they began giving the railroad problems, and the fact that their den was found, sometime after their deaths, littered with human remains from Africans would indicate that they may have been responsible for nearly one hundred killings. Because outbreaks of man-eating often follow war, plague or slaving caravans, all of which litter the bush with dead bodies, there is no reason to believe that these particular man-eaters did not begin their career by feeding on the coolies dead of disease or injury, who were not buried as ordered but dumped in the heavy bush along the right-of-way. This practice would be the same as teaching lions to eat people and seems to have done precisely this. If a lion happens to eat people and seems to have a healthy streak of free enterprise, he learns quickly that man-eating for fun and profit isn’t as easy as it looks. To develop a really first-class reputation takes patience and perseverance; one inherent occupational hazard being that the prey has a disturbing tendency to throw spears and shoot once a good shopping route has been established. However, if he works hard, sacrifices, learns from his mistakes and really pays attention, he may become the subject of a best-selling book, provided he doesn’t actually eat the author in his enthusiasm.

  When Patterson arrived by train at Tsavo, then the end of the line, he found between 2,000 and 3,000 coolies ganged at the railhead, ready to start work. From the record, it seems that the lions got there about the same time and began the festivities quietly and fumblingly at first, but clearly recognizing the setup as a literally movable feast. The railroad laborers still had no idea of the peril to which they were now exposed.

  Within his first few days there, Patterson had been told that two men had been carried off by man-eaters, but, since both were known to be excellent workmen and to have accumulated decent savings, he decided that they had much more likely been murdered for their money. Since such skullduggery was common, he gave the matter little more thought. He didn’t know it then, but he was soon to begin thinking of nothing but the lions.

  An embarrassed blush of dawn was creeping through the bush when Patterson was shaken awake and told of the snatching of Ungan Singh. Taking another officer who happened to be at the railroad, a Captain Haslem (who shortly thereafter was murdered by the Kikuyu and his body savagely mutilated), the two men found the pug marks of the killer lion with no difficulty in the sand and followed them bloodily to the point where the second lion had entered, stage right. A few
more yards and they were feeling fortunate not to have had breakfast. I can personally assure you that what is left of a human being after a pair of man-eaters have done their act would give a garbage grinder the gags. The presence of the Jemadar’s head, untouched but for the ragged stump of neck, the open eyes staring at them with a horrified expression, was a touch that undid them both to the core, even though, with Indian service, they would not have been naive to the more unsettling aspects of violent death. With a few coolies, they gathered up the chewed bones and overlooked scraps of the lieutenant and buried them under a cairn of rocks, carrying the surprisingly heavy head back to camp for identification by the medical officer. Realizing the degree of potential disaster the lions represented to the project as well as to the personnel, the shaken Patterson swore to “rid the neighborhood of the brutes.” This was to be one hell of a lot more easily vowed than accomplished.

  This same evening marked the beginning of one of the most incredible extended episodes ever to occur between man and beast as adversaries. Patterson, with few options open, climbed a tree near the tent where the Jemadar had been taken and began a vigil, waiting for the killer to return to the place where he had last found food. After several uncomfortable hours, in company of his .303 service rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with one barrel of slug and the other ball, he heard the lions begin to roar some distance away, the blood-chilling thunder slowly coming closer and closer. If there’s anything more courage-draining than listening to a pair of man-eaters advertising as they close on your position, then it is the sudden stop of the roaring, leaving you no idea of their location, although their silence means they have begun to hunt. Minutes crawled to a half hour as Patterson stared with aching, unseeing eyes into the darkness, body screaming from the torture of the hard tree-limb perch. Silence. Not even a murmur came from the terrified men below in their closed tents. Then, from half a mile away, unearthly screams and shouts razored the night as the man-eaters broke into another tent in a different section of the railhead camp and dragged off a laborer. Frustration welling up, Patterson realized that there was nothing to be done but wait until dawn to investigate. Surely, there would be no sign of the lions around this area tonight, now that they had made a kill. Disgusted and discouraged, he climbed back down and returned to his tent, which he was sharing with Dr. Rose, a medical officer.