And Miles to Go Before I Sleep E-Book

Hugh Cran

• Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 864

Beschreibung

After three years working as a young vet in rural Aberdeenshire, Hugh Cran decided that it was time for a change. He got it. He took a post in Kenya and, forty years later, he's still there, still working, still loving every exasperating, challenging, unexpected moment. This is a page-turning account of working as a vet at the sharp end. Cattle owned by the Maasai herdsmen or the white settlers might take up most of Hugh's time, but these cattle are assailed by lightning strike, snake bites, disease passed on by zebra and wildebeest. He's up against sun cancer, witch doctors - who knows what to expect next? Travelling miles on rough roads, Hugh never knows if he will be performing surgery on dirty sacks, besieged by every species of Kenyan insect, by the light of a failing car-headlamp! But the colourful people who frequent Hugh's Nukuru practice, the sheer vitality of the Kenyan scene and the rewarding nature of the grinding task in hand, keep him answering that persistent phone, day and night, and heading off into the unknown.

Leseprobe

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

AND MILESTO GO BEFORE I SLEEP

A British Vet in Africa

Hugh Cran

CONTENTS

Title PageDedicationMapPART I AN INNOCENT ABROADCHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTPART II UNTO THE BREACHCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENCHAPTER ELEVENCHAPTER TWELVECHAPTER THIRTEENCHAPTER FOURTEENCHAPTER FIFTEENCHAPTER SIXTEENCHAPTER SEVENTEENCHAPTER EIGHTEENCHAPTER NINETEENAlso published by Merlin Unwin Books:About the AuthorCopyright

PART I

AN INNOCENT ABROAD

CHAPTER ONE

In early December in the Year of our Lord 1966, while Britain lay blanketed in snow and darkness I boarded an East African Airways jet and was flown in moderate discomfort from London to Nairobi.

I had never flown before and perhaps it was fortunate that I hadn’t, as the novelty of the experience had the concentrating effect of preventing me from brooding on whether I was really doing the right thing. I knew that most people back in Scotland thought I was mad to be going off to the land of the Mau Mau, to a country hissing with man-eating lions, gin-swilling colonials and machete-swinging natives, abandoning a solid, safe career in solid, safe Scotland, not to mention the wilful desertion of my recently widowed mother, left to fend for herself in the wilds of Edinburgh.

I told people that I was only going for a trial period, perhaps a year at most, just to test the waters. They laughed. They were right to laugh – it was to be eleven years before I saw the grey roofs and jagged skyline of Edinburgh again.

I was 26 and single, and, for the past three years I had, since graduation from the Royal Dick School of Veterinary Studies in Edinburgh, worked as an assistant veterinary surgeon in a large-animal practice in the north-east of Scotland. The land was bleak, treeless and windswept. The people were equally bleak and windswept, suspicious of strangers, although hospitable and kind in a dour and introspective way. The winters were hard and cold with icy winds and heavy falls of snow which often lay for weeks before melting. Sometimes when going out to a distant farm on a winter’s night, when the snow lay deep and banked in the fields and the wind was blowing and the snow ploughs not out, I could not be sure of returning before dawn as the roads filled with snow behind me. Then I had to spend the night in my freezing car or seek refuge in a farm-house.

Winter and summer the leaden cloak of the lowering sky seemed to sink ever closer to the brooding earth until, by the time I left, I felt I could almost touch it. In their squat cottages, the present-day Picts sat and supped their porridge. I liked porridge, but I hankered after a slice of paw-paw for breakfast. Stocks of fresh paw-paw were scant in rural Aberdeenshire and I would have to venture forth if I were to find some.

But the work was rewarding and my employer and other colleague in the practice were of inestimable value in consolidating my knowledge and furthering my experience. Sheep, pigs, dogs, cats and black Angus cattle made up the bulk of the animals in the area. During the lambing season, hundreds of visits would be made to farms to attend to ewes or their lambs. The workload was heavy and demanding; the experience gained, invaluable.

The thought of practising tropical veterinary medicine had, however, for a long time lain dormant in my mind and, after an offer of a post as a veterinary officer in Uganda had fallen through because of a lack of funds, I applied for a job in a practice a hundred miles from Nairobi. After a brief correspondence I was on my way. No interview, no phone call, just a couple of blue see-through aerogrammes and that was it. The job was mine.

The plane flapped and rattled through the night. It made an unexplained detour to Rome – presumably to refuel. I studied my fellow-passengers, of which there were few – the plane was half empty. Apart from a couple of pallid tyros like myself, the rest were a mixture of well-dressed Africans, turbaned Asians and sunburnt Europeans. To my ingenuous eyes the latter looked distinctly bizarre, especially as it had been snowing when the plane left London. The men were wearing khaki, sleeveless bush jackets sporting dozens of bulging pockets containing I knew not what. Their wrists were hidden beneath copper bangles, wiry bracelets which I later learnt were made from the hairs of an elephant’s tail, and the sort of beaded things I imagined might look better on a Maasai warrior. The women were raw-boned, sun-bleached and rather less flamboyant than the men. I fervently hoped that they were the exception rather than the rule as far as white Kenyan females were concerned. My visions of Ava Gardner look-alikes in damp linen slacks slinking through the bush had taken a bit of a knock.

My preparations for life in the tropics had been scant. A shot against yellow fever, a vague directive from the quack about malaria and that was it. My wardrobe was even more destitute and had nothing in it at all suitable for the tropics. Shorts were not on the shelves in Aberdeen in December, and Ambre Solaire was not an item in much demand in the north of Scotland at any time of year, let alone mid-winter. Sartorially and medically I was singularly ill-equipped.

My African experience was limited to student trips to Morocco, and Algeria during the last frantic years of the French occupation. Once again I had the disturbing feeling that I was an innocent abroad.

The thoughts which passed through the brain of my future employer as he penned his advertisement will never be known, but it can plainly be stated without fear of contradiction that they were not of a philanthropic or benevolent nature. A large man of about sixty, supporting a well-established paunch, his prominent blue eyes glared aggressively and resentfully at the world around him. To compare his bald dome with that immortal structure built by Sir Christopher Wren would be to cast a monumental slur upon the latter.

I arrived at the old Embakasi airport soon after dawn and, having passed through customs, scanned the crowd for Arthur Owen-Jones, my new employer. He found me, probably recognising me as a new boy to Africa by the pallor of my epidermis and by the fact that my nether limbs were encased in grey flannel trousers. Old Africa Hands tend to wear shorts, an open-necked shirt, safari boots, and are burnt by the sun to the colour of lightly-done toast, the lot being surmounted by a well-bashed and fairly shop-soiled bush hat. Owen-Jones broke all of these rules, despite the fact that he had been living in Nakuru, the former capital of the White Highlands in the Great Rift Valley, for over eight years. He wore a loud checked shirt, his cavalry twill trousers were suspended by a pair of braces, on his feet he wore a pair of elastic-sided boots, while his bald head, exposed to view, shone in the rays of the early-morning sun now streaming through the plate-glass windows of the airport.

After establishing identities and after Owen-Jones had enquired as to whether I was suffering from anaemia, we repaired to the Simba Grill, on the second floor of the airport, for breakfast. Just below the window stood a flat-topped acacia, the archetypal tree of East Africa. The Athi Plains stretched away, grey and brown, to the horizon.

During the course of the meal, Owen-Jones berated the waiter in what I later learned was execrable Swahili but which seemed to my then untutored ears to be a fluent rendering of an exotic African tongue. Delivered in a loud Welsh accent, Owen-Jones seemed to derive much satisfaction from this, and, belching contentedly, settled back in his chair.

Following the meal, I collected my unaccompanied baggage from the customs shed. It included my climbing gear – ropes, ice-axe, crampons and boots. Having done some mountaineering in Scotland and the Alps, I hoped to be able to pursue my hobby, in a modest way, among the mountains of East Africa. I shouldered these items with what I hoped was a nonchalant air, but the smirks and mocking grins cast in my direction by other baggage collecting passengers suggested that I was not altogether successful in my endeavour. I loaded my things into Owen-Jones’ Peugeot 404 station-wagon and we set off.

Later, on the road to Nakuru, my employer expounded at length on the innumerable imperfections of the native population, their inherent unreliability, their indolence, their ability to swing the lead on every possible occasion, while comparing and contrasting them with their erstwhile colonial masters. Having been reared on a diet of David Livingstone and Mungo Park, I was stunned by this outburst and remained silent.

Built by Italian prisoners during the Second World War, the road from Nairobi wound its way upwards through the country of the Kikuyu to the edge of the Rift Valley Escarpment. Narrow, unsurfaced, rust-red tracks snaked across the densely populated hills, green even in December, when usually little or no rain falls. Banana plantations sprouted everywhere. Copses of tall blue eucalyptus bent in the wind on the skyline. Lorries belching stygian clouds of diesel fumes groaned up the incline ahead of us. Mouthing fearful oaths, Owen-Jones overtook these monsters, headlights blazing, horn blaring. Battered buses, bursting with passengers, top heavy with luggage, crates and wickerwork containers crammed with poultry, hurtled downhill towards Nairobi. ‘Matatus’, small privately-owned commercial vehicles with a body built onto the back and a couple of benches inside, supplemented the buses and replaced taxis. Normally designed to hold about a dozen people, they usually contained double that number. So overloaded were they that the front wheels in many cases appeared to be barely in contact with the road. Sometimes the chassis would be broken so that the vehicle appeared to be moving sideways like a crab, an alarming spectacle to a newcomer used to the orderly procession of roadworthy motors along the highways and byways of Britain. A wild eyed youth was usually perched on the back step of the matatu, ready to leap off at each stop to cram more passengers into the fetid interior, rather like a professional pusher on a Japanese railway station during the rush hour. When obliged to move inside because of inclement weather or for fear of his own safety, the wretched turn-boy, as he was called, was obliged to stand crouched in a sort of vertical foetal position, as normally every seat was occupied.

Weaving through the potholes we passed the road to Limuru, a township hemmed in by tea and coffee plantations. Heavily laden donkeys tottered along the roadside. Kikuyu women, bent almost double under enormous loads of firewood or drums of water held in place by a leather strap across the forehead, plodded by. Boys leaned out from the grass verge, proffering plums, pears, baby rabbits and chickens to passing vehicles, holding them aloft as though they were sacred tribal totems, and whistled in derision as we swept by.

To the south and left of the road the four-peaked ridge of the Ngong Hills crouched, looking down on Nairobi. Clumps of thatched huts lurked in patches of maize surrounded by litters of hairy sheep, speckled goats, and small, hump-backed cattle. The road passed through plantations of pine and then suddenly, without warning, emerged onto the lip of the escarpment. Two thousand feet below lay the tawny floor of the Rift Valley. Forty miles to the west could clearly be seen the blue-black wall of the opposing Mau Escarpment, covered with a shaggy pelt of forest. The extinct volcanoes of Longonot and Suswa rose from the plain, which, from this altitude, appeared level and featureless, broken only by the green of vegetation along watercourses or the red of a dirt track. The air was crystal clear, the breeze cool and refreshing, the sky dotted with fleecy white clouds. I felt as though I could launch myself into space.

As we descended the wall of the escarpment, the features of the floor of the valley came into sharper focus. Apparently flat when seen from a height, it was rolling and undulating, covered at this point with scattered low thorn trees, cut by rust-red ravines, dry and apparently waterless. Beside the road at the foot of the escarpment stood a tiny chapel, built by the Italian prisoners of war who had laboured on the road. A few antelope and gazelle could be seen grazing in the distance. The head of a giraffe reared above the thorns. Birds of prey perched on the telephone poles, gazing into the far distance. Black and yellow weaver birds crossed our bows, diving into adjacent thickets. A brightly coloured lizard darted into the grass. My companion stared ahead, apparently oblivious to the passing scene, answering my eager questions in a cursory manner. Perhaps it’s just his way, I thought, a rough diamond with a heart of gold, beating strong and true beneath his rough-hewn carapace, or perhaps it was due to his having had to rise at 4am to meet me at the airport.

Presently the road rose to a saddle lying at about 7,000 feet, between the 9,000 foot high crests of Mt. Longonot and the eastern wall of the Rift Valley. Fringed by papyrus swamps and tall fever trees, Lake Naivasha lay sparkling in the sun. One of the largest of Kenya’s freshwater lakes, it supported large numbers of tilapia and introduced black bass, and the sails of fishing boats could be seen dotted about on its limpid blue surface.

We were now in what was known as, until independence in 1963, the White Highlands. Most of the land surrounding Lake Naivasha in late 1966 was owned by white farmers and indeed at the time of writing most of the land around the lake is still farmed by Europeans. Much of the land near the lake was irrigated and grew flowers and vegetables for sale in Nairobi or for export to Europe. Some of the larger farms grew lucerne which was fed to herds of dairy cattle – Friesians, Ayrshires, and Guernseys.

Naivasha township lies about fifty miles from Nairobi. It was then a grey, nondescript collection of stores and fly-blown hovels, scoured by a gritty, eye-searing wind, blowing clouds of dust and litter before it, and quite unworthy of the dramatic and beautiful country surrounding it. A few Indian-owned shops, some African stalls selling fish, a small hotel, a gust of desiccating breeze and we had left Naivasha behind and were soon crossing the muddy Malewa river, which loses itself in the papyrus swamps encircling the lake. The river has its origins in the Aberdares, a range of mountains rising to over 13,000 feet in the peak of Satima, and forming part of the eastern edge of the Rift Valley. Clothed in dense forest and bamboo up to 10,000 feet, it afforded refuge and shelter to Mau Mau guerrillas during Kenya’s euphemistically-termed Emergency. Above the forest lie vast areas of moorland, broken by rocky outcrops, thickets of giant heather and expanses of bog and tussock grass. Overshadowed by the bulk of Satima, 10,000 foot Kipipiri in some lights is difficult to distinguish against the bulk of the range behind it. Covered in dark, almost black forest, it dominates the Wanjohi valley and the surrounding area, former home of the often unjustly maligned Happy Valley set.

About twenty miles beyond Naivasha we reached the little town of Gilgil which, to my appalled gaze, was even more of an eyesore than the rural slum we had left behind. The surrounding country was rolling ranchland, much of it covered in grey leleshwa scrub and owned by wealthy white farmers, many of them titled. The area between Nakuru, whither I was bound, and Gilgil and Naivasha, appeared to be regarded with especial favour by Counts and Lords of the Italian and English aristocracy.

The road now dropped over another escarpment and below lay another lake, Elementaita, shallow and alkaline, the southern shore bespeckled with white outcrops of soda. To the west, Lord Delamere ranched some 50,000 acres of mostly open plain. The eastern shore was presided over by Arthur Cole, whose father, Galbraith, was one of the very early pioneers. Scattered drifts of flamingos lay on the water’s limpid surface. To the south of the lake a number of dramatic volcanic remnants broke the surface of the plain – cones, craters and combinations of both. One, called the Sleeping Warrior or less flatteringly, Lord Delamere’s Nose, appeared to be a single, knife-edged ridge. In fact, this is only one side of its circular crater. Further south, the land reared up to the forested crest of Eburru, a spur of the western wall of the Rift Valley, here known as the Mau Escarpment. The lower slopes of Eburru, first explored by the Scot, Joseph Thomson, at the end of the 19th century, are peppered with steam jets, and have no running water. Water for stock has to be condensed from the steam and led through aluminium pipes to distant troughs. Despite the lack of surface water, game is plentiful and the area is much frequented by buffalo, eland, warthog, dik-dik, and impala. A railway, part of the Lunatic Line to Uganda, used to run along the foot of Eburru before turning north to Elementaita and Nakuru, and one night, many years later, I came across a leopard in one of the old railway cuttings.

Baboons perched on fence posts watched us with an indifferent eye as we descended the escarpment. Others were too intent upon their social grooming to spare us a glance.

Presently the bulk of Menengai, the extinct volcano overlooking the town of Nakuru, rose ahead. To the left, the low ridge of Lion Hill hid the famous lake. When it eventually came into view, I could see that its shores were indeed fringed with pink – the famous flamingos I had read about. Above the lake, flights of pelicans soared and circled with majestic ease, turning in unison on thermals of warm air. The far shore was hemmed in by broken cliffs which opened out to the south into wooded plains. The nearer shore was darkly forested and looked lush and faintly sinister, suggesting pythons lurking in the undergrowth and apes chattering in the branches.

A hot, acrid wind, heavy with the aroma of soda and bird droppings, blew in through the open car window. A few miles before Nakuru we turned off at a place called Lanet. Brown and dusty, it was a suburb of the town. Numerous bungalows, each surrounded by several acres of tree-shaded land, lay on either side of the bumpy road. On top of a low hill stood Owen-Jones’ house, red-roofed and white-walled. A copse of tall blue eucalyptus trees lay behind it, bending in the strong breeze. Before it sloped several acres of open land covered in wiry brown grass.

The barking of dogs from behind a high wooden palisade indicated the presence of the boarding kennels which Owen-Jones had mentioned during the drive from Nairobi. I was to become familiar with the finer details of its management sooner than I expected.

A few tired-looking flowers and shrubs grew in front of the house. There was no garden.

An elderly gap-toothed African came down the steps grinning broadly. ‘Jambo, Opondo,’ said Owen-Jones. ‘Kwisha lete daktari mpya.’ (I’ve brought the new doctor). Opondo was a Luo from Nyanza Province on the shores of Lake Victoria. Aged about sixty, he had worked for Owen-Jones and his wife for the past five years as cook and general house-servant. He rushed forward and grabbed my bags and staggered into the house with them. Owen-Jones smiled fondly at his retreating figure.

Gwyneth, Owen-Jones’ wife, appeared. Tall, pale, with dark-dyed hair greying at the roots, in her late forties, she exuded an air of businesslike efficiency. Smiling genially, she ushered me into the house. I was shown into a small bedroom set aside for me. After scraping off the by now well-risen field of bristles from my chin, watched with some curiosity by a bushbaby in a huge wire netting enclosure, which seemed to occupy most of the available space in the bathroom, I joined Mr and Mrs Owen-Jones in the lounge. A large black labrador lay snoring on the parquet floor. Another occupied most of a sagging sofa. The room was sparsely furnished, the walls almost devoid of pictures. The windows looked out over the desiccated acres of withered brown grass. Birds chirruped in the gum trees. Unknown and unseen insects could be heard through the open windows which were meshed on the inside with a wire grill.

Over a refreshing glass of passion fruit juice and ice, Owen-Jones summarised the work of the practice. He had a surgery in town, his wife acted as secretary cum book-keeper, he employed a Goan clerk, a lay assistant to help him during calls and while doing operations, and an office ‘boy’ aged about 45. He seemed to cover a vast geographical area dealing mostly with cattle and horses. Nearly all the farms were still owned by European settlers although a buy-out scheme financed by the British Government was in operation. Their stock appeared to be under constant attack by a frightening number of hideous diseases – East Coast Fever, Anaplasmosis, Heartwater, Sweating Sickness, Contagious Bovine Pleuropneumonia, Babesiosis – the list seemed endless. Ticks and tsetse flies sucked their blood from without while intestinal parasites assailed them from within. Their sheep were attacked by flies which deposited their larvae in their nostrils. Midges brought Bluetongue during the rains and ticks were the bearers of Nairobi Sheep disease. Rift Valley Fever, a viral disease affecting both sheep and cattle and occasionally man, and carried by mosquitoes and other insects, appeared periodically during years of heavy rain. Horses regularly succumbed to African Horse Sickness while pigs were virtually impossible to keep because of African Swine Fever. Dogs were under constant threat from Tick Fever.

‘Ye Gods,’ I thought, ‘I’ll never master this lot!’

Then there was the matter of communication with the local people. The lingua franca was Swahili, widely spoken all over East Africa and of which the only word I knew was ‘jambo’. This wasn’t going to get me very far.

With a plethora of unknown diseases facing me and unable to converse with most of the local inhabitants, it didn’t look as though I would be of much use to my employer for a long time to come.

The town of Nakuru lay at an altitude of 6,000 feet. To the east and west the land rose to even greater heights. In between was some of the finest farming country in Kenya, fit to rival the best in Britain. Dairy and coffee farms abounded. Wheat and maize flourished. Most of the farmers were British but there was a sizeable Danish and Italian contingent. Many had come to Kenya after the last world war, encouraged to do so by the British government and had learned the rudiments of agriculture at Egerton College near Njoro, a small town about a dozen miles from Nakuru. Confident and self-reliant, their independent way of life was coming to an end. Uhuru had come to Kenya and the exclusive White Highlands were no more. Africans were buying farms, either as individuals or as companies and the Europeans were leaving, going to Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Southern Africa, even South America, taking their knowledge and hard-won expertise with them. A few of the white farmers had become Kenya citizens and were determined to stay and brave the difficulties ahead.

The African farm workers came from several different tribes, because before the arrival of the white man, this area had been almost empty of people, except for the nomadic Maasai herding their cattle on the plains and the Wanderobo hunting game and searching for wild honey in the forests. Most of the people today were Kikuyu and Kalenjin, with smaller numbers of Luo, Abaluya and Maasai.

The Kikuyu, numerically the largest tribe in the country, were Bantu and came from the highlands to the west and south of Mt. Kenya, stretching in an arc to the northern outskirts of Nairobi. Mentally agile and quick to realise the advantages to be gained by adopting the new ideas and methods introduced by the Europeans, many were progressive farmers and businessmen, administrators and politicians.

Kalenjin is a generic name for a group of separate Nilo-Hamitic peoples living in north-west Kenya, from the escarpments overlooking Lake Victoria to the arid plains north of Lake Baringo. Mainly pastoral by inclination, they included the Kipsigis in the green tea country around the town of Kericho, the fierce Nandi on their hills overlooking the steaming Nyanza plains, the Tugen of the mountains and plains to the south and west of Lake Baringo and the nomadic Pokot to the north, herding goats and camels across their semi-deserts. All spoke a similar if not identical language.

The Luo, of Nilotic origin, came from the province of Nyanza on the shores of Lake Victoria. Second in number only to the Kikuyu they were easily recognisable by their strong build, greater than average height, dark complexion and jutting upper front teeth with frequently a gap between the lower incisors, a relic of the days when tetanus was common and victims had to be fed through a gap in their clenched jaws. Great fishermen and cultivators, their country is one of the most densely populated areas of Kenya.

The Abaluya are a large Bantu group comprising various groups such as the Bukusu, Tiriki, and Maragoli who live to the north of lake Victoria and west to the Uganda border. Short of stature, cheerful and hard-working, they often found employment on farms or in towns, working as domestic servants or as waiters in hotels.

The Maasai are probably the best known tribe in Kenya, certainly to outsiders, partly because of their reputation as warriors, their good looks and their way of life. They are Nilo-Hamites and live in south-west Kenya down to the border with Tanzania which bisects their territory. Formerly they also lived in Laikipia, an area north of the Uganda railway, but in 1911 the northern Maasai were forcibly moved south to be united with those in the Southern Reserve, as it was then called. Much of Maasailand is fertile and well watered and in recent years has attracted the attention of wheat farmers. It is also home to Kenya’s finest game reserves. The Maasai were never hunters, except perhaps for eland which they regarded as wild cattle, or for lion which the young men hunted as proof of manhood. They lived for their cattle and in harmony with their surroundings. Those who left Maasailand to come to the farms and towns of the Highlands often worked as herdsmen or watchmen.

All this information was not acquired until later in my career. Meanwhile Owen-Jones announced with jocular pride that his own knowledge of Swahili was still at a very rudimentary stage, despite his eight years in the country. He employed an excellent African lay assistant, a Kikuyu called Moses Mwangi, to help him on his rounds and during operations. Moses spoke good English and helped his master to communicate with those whose knowledge of English matched his master’s own deficiencies in Swahili. I apparently would have to do without such assistance but I would be able to turn to Up-Country Swahili, a slim volume written by an ex-Indian Army colonel for the benefit of soldiers, settlers, miners and their wives, a copy of which Owen-Jones handed to me. I noticed that several pages were missing and hoped that no vital information had been contained therein. Glancing through it I observed useful phrases such as ‘Boy! You have been using my razor again! There are black hairs in it!’ and ‘Sergeant Major, give that man ten strokes with the kiboko. He has been caught stealing sugar for the third time this week!’ This, I could see, was going to help me immensely.

Owen-Jones had bought a second-hand Volkswagen Beetle for me to use, and had rented a cottage about ten miles from Nakuru for 300 Kenya shillings per month. With the cottage went a cook cum house-servant and two aged gardeners. The former received a monthly emolument of 119/- and the latter the princely wage of 53/- per man. How they were expected to survive on such a miserly sum beggared my imagination but Owen-Jones, with a hearty guffaw, dismissed the subject with a reference to the smell of the proverbial oil rag.

‘Well, there’s work to do I’m afraid,’ Owen-Jones suddenly said. ‘An African farmer at Rongai, about twenty five miles from here, phoned up while I was collecting you from the airport. He’s got a cow stuck calving. Probably been on the go for a couple of days so God knows how long it might take. Afraid we’ll have to have lunch when we get back.’

As it was only about noon, this didn’t strike me as an undue hardship, but little did I know then just how long a really difficult calving in Kenya could take. The journey, however, a fifty mile round trip, seemed vast. In Scotland the furthest we ever travelled from base was 17 miles. In this, too, the scales were soon to be lifted from my as yet uninitiated orbs. Immense distances separated farms, towns and settlements. The roads were relatively unfrequented and a journey which in Britain would be considered a weekend expedition, would often be completed in a few hours in East Africa.

We drove through Nakuru, first along an imposing avenue lined by lovely lilac-blossomed jacaranda trees, past the impressive railway station, skirting the bazaar and on to the metalled road which led towards distant hills. The bulk of the town lay out of sight over a rise which sloped down to the lake. Dust rose in the air. The smell of sewage and rotting fruit mingled with other unidentifiable odours. Kites circled over the buildings, calling plaintively. Pied crows perched on rooftops squabbling with each other.

The pavements were crowded. Colourfully clad African women, their men more soberly dressed in European clothes, rivalled their Indian cousins in their brilliant saris. Settlers in khaki rubbed shoulders with long-lobed, shaven-headed Maasai. Turbaned Sikhs drove like demons possessed down the streets. Country buses, bursting at the seams, heads protruding from every open window, their roofs a mountain of luggage, bags of charcoal, and wicker baskets full of squawking chickens, rattled over the potholes.

The town behind now, the road rose over breezy uplands. An immense blue sky dotted with fleecy white clouds covered the landscape like a huge dome. Nearby farms looked neat and well-ordered. Feathery grey gum trees lined the roads and surrounded the farm buildings. The trough of the Rift Valley stretched immeasurably into the distance, mysterious and inviting. Ahead loomed the forested bulk of Mount Londiani.

As we approached the base of the mountain we turned left onto a dirt road. After a couple of miles a farm track forked to the right. A sagging sign said ‘Mbama Farm.’ Owen-Jones swung the wheel and the car lurched and rocked over the ruts, jets of fine dust appearing from several points until it lay thickly over the dashboard and seats.

‘Good cars, Peugeots,’ Owen-Jones grunted. ‘Best car by far for this country, but they have two faults. One is letting in the bloody dust. The other is that the bloody exhaust pipe is always breaking on rough roads, with the result that the car sounds like an old traction engine. It’s high time the Frogs did something about it.’

I made sympathetic noises.

Owen-Jones explained that the farm we were approaching was owned by a co-operative, run by a committee of elected members with certain individuals made responsible for various selected tasks. In theory it appeared to be an excellent idea, but frequently in practice that necessary feeling of personal involvement, so vital to the land-owning African, was lacking, leading to a gradual abrogation of responsibilities and a slow but inevitable decline in farming standards.

We passed the farm-house once occupied by the former white owners and turned into a small field where stood a small wooden dairy with a corrugated iron roof, built on a rough plinth of stone blocks. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before and apart from the modern refinement of the tin roof, brought to mind something I had come across in one of the novels of Thomas Hardy describing rural Dorset in the mid-1800s. No rustic swains or apple-cheeked milkmaids were in evidence here, however. Instead there was a small group of Africans hunkered down under a thorn tree, apparently awaiting our arrival. One, the headman or neopara, as he was called in Swahili, came forward. His earlobes had been perforated and the greatly distended loops were snugly coiled ever the tops of his ears. The effect to my ingenuous eyes was bizarre, as it gave the impression that the lower halves of his ears had been cut off.

‘Jambo, daktari,’ he said to Owen-Jones.

‘Jambo,’ Owen-Jones replied. ‘Wapi ngombe nashinda kusaa?’

(Where is the cow which is unable to calve?)

‘Inakuja,’ the headman answered. (It’s coming).

‘So’s Christmas!’ muttered Owen-Jones, not under his breath.

A man appeared driving an Ayrshire cow through a gate. The ‘gate’ was a flexible antediluvian affair consisting of several vertical strips of wood connected with fencing wire. It was closed by inserting the endmost strip of wood into a wire loop projecting from the bottom of the gate post and looping another circle of wire over the top of the post. In years to come I was to curse these gates with much fervour. They would either be constructed in such a way that one needed the strength of Samson to open them, or they were ramshackle affairs festooned with spaghetti-like hanks of rusty barbed wire which took interminable minutes to unravel, with the ever-attendant risk of shredding vital digits in the process.

The cow staggered up to the dairy, pausing at regular intervals to arch her back and strain with grim concentration. Each time she did so she uttered a hoarse bellow. Her tail was raised and over her hindquarters hung a cloud of buzzing flies, which circled and dived like a swarm of miniature predatory birds.

‘Jok! Jok!’ one of the men cried, referring to the yoke in the dairy. The cow compliantly put her head through the wooden bars which were then closed with a metal rod inserted into a hole in the yoke.

‘Naweza shika mkia? Can you hold the tail?’ Owen-Jones asked one of the labourers, who obediently hoisted the tail skywards. A large nose and two hooves projected through the patient’s vulva, which looked small and under considerable tension. Owen-Jones had by now donned a pair of wellington boots and a waterproof calving overall. He soaped his left arm vigorously and then applied a layer of grease from a large tin proffered by one of the Africans. The disintegrating label proclaimed it to be milking salve for the lubrication of cows’ teats.

‘I always use this stuff when calving cows,’ Owen-Jones grunted as he inserted his large hand into the vulva. He seemed to be having some difficulty as several minutes elapsed before it vanished from sight. A light film of perspiration glistened on his bald pate.

‘It’s damned tight in here,’ muttered Owen-Jones. ‘There’s a hard, fibrous ring just inside the vulva and it shows no sign of relaxing.’

After another twenty minutes of effort he managed to get a calving rope made of soft cotton onto each foreleg but the head remained immobile. The ends of each rope had loops which were slipped over a couple of batons of wood, two to three feet long and about the diameter of a broomstick. Two men pulled on each leg alternately.

Slowly each leg emerged as far as the elbows and then a few inches more. The head however refused to budge. Two nostrils protruded from the vulva, but, despite strenuous efforts by the pullers, further progress appeared impossible.

Owen-Jones withdrew his arm and washed his hands, with difficulty removing the milking grease. Without uttering a word he walked to his car and rummaged in his surgical bag. He returned carrying a scalpel. Still without speaking, he inserted the blade above the calf’s nose and suddenly cut upwards through the cow’s vulva.

I watched horrified as the calf’s head came into view. It was obvious that as soon as the men resumed their pulling, the incision would rupture upwards into the rectum and that a monumental recto-vaginal fistula would be created. And that is just what happened. The men pulled, the calf slowly emerged, dead now, the incision widened and then split upwards through rectum and anus.

Owen-Jones watched unmoved, re-washed his hands and arms, and returned his scalpel to his bag. He made no attempt to stitch the wound and when I offered to do it for him I was brusquely informed that once I started doing my own calvings I could stitch them up myself. In other words shut up, mind your own business or do things my way.

‘I don’t think she’ll recover,’ Owen-Jones told the headman, ‘so you’d better get hold of a butcher. Even if she does, it’s unlikely she’ll be able to conceive or calve again.’

And with these words we took our leave of Mbama Farm, bumping our way back down the rutted track. I wondered what I had come to, and I also wondered about my new employer and his seemingly brutal brand of veterinary medicine and what the future would hold. But I had been in the country less than twelve hours so I decided to hold my peace and wait and see.

CHAPTER TWO

One month after my arrival in Kenya, Arthur Owen-Jones and his wife announced their intention of taking three weeks’ vacation at the Coast.

This came as something of a shock.

From the moment I had stepped onto the tarmac at Nairobi Airport I had been fully occupied in attempting to assimilate the mass of new information with which I had been bombarded.

This I had barely swallowed, far less digested. Now I had to put it to the test.

It all seemed a bit premature.

The second-hand Volkswagen formed my transport. Although robust and basically reliable, it was not the most ideal of vehicles for veterinary work. The boot, in which was kept the bulk of my drugs and instruments, occupied that space which in most cars is filled by the engine. The boot’s cubic capacity, as a result, was niggardly in the extreme and, when reaching to the farthest depths to retrieve some much-needed item, one was in constant danger of dismemberment or decapitation from the collapse of the precariously supported lid.

The roads, deep in dust and cratered with potholes, were less than kind to the engine. When moving at slow speeds, easing one’s way into and out of the yawning cavities which littered the highways and byways like something out of a dentist’s nightmare, the car was frequently overtaken by its own cloud of choking dust, which slid over and down the domed roof and into its moving parts. This at times would interrupt one’s journey in a way which would have been irritating enough in more sophisticated corners of the globe, but here, it was calculated to raise one’s blood pressure to dangerous heights. After a while I began to accept these little annoyances with a degree of qualified resignation, enabling me to observe with a cynical smile those slogans so often painted on lorries in Kenya – ‘No Hurry In Africa’ or even, if the sign-writer was less linguistically gifted, ‘No Harry In Africa.’

A close study of Up Country Swahili for Soldiers, Settlers, Miners and their Wives enabled me to communicate in a fashion, albeit rather a basic one, with those members of the animal-owning public whose main language was not English.

Of almost equal importance was the problem of navigation. Although most European-owned farms had a plough disc emblazoned with the owner’s name positioned at the farm entrance or at the nearest road junction, few Africans had then reached this level of erudite advertisement. So I had to rely either upon verbal or written instructions from others who had gone before, or make enquiries once I was within what I hoped was striking distance of my destination. With my level of Swahili this was no mean feat.

A further difficulty arose from the fact that local knowledge, especially among the peasantry, appeared to be pretty sparse. If one was within spitting distance of one’s objective and asked a fellow hoeing his beans in the shamba next door where so-and-so lived, it was ten to one he would reply with the stock answer ‘Sijui’, (I don’t know) even if one was referring to his next door neighbour.

A scrutiny of the available maps, including a large scale one produced during the Emergency, did help, at least in ensuring that I set off in approximately the right direction.

For about 10 days I accompanied Mr Owen-Jones on his rounds and as a result I was able to obtain some idea of the extent and form of the practice area. It extended from Lake Naivasha in the south-east to Londiani township in the north-west. Both areas were about 45 miles from Nakuru and between them lay a great variety of farming country lying at altitudes of six to ten thousand feet. The south-westerly limit was bounded by the airy upland district of Mau Narok, rich in wheat, sheep and cattle, on the western wall of the Rift, about thirty miles away. To the north-east, the practice area extended to Rumuruti on the edge of the Laikipia plateau, sixty miles from base. This was a semi-arid region whose undulating plains, covered in scrub and whistling thorn, stretched from horizon to horizon.

From my arrival in the country, until their return from their coastal holiday, I lived in the Owen-Jones’ house at Lanet. This was because, during their absence, in addition to my veterinary duties, I was required to attend to the canine and feline inmates of their boarding kennels, which lay adjacent to the house.

Christmas came and went. Things were fairly quiet, due in part to the plethora of public holidays during December and to the annual migration of European farmers and their families to the sun-drenched beaches of Mombasa and Malindi.

Owen-Jones seemed keen to get away to the seaside.

On the Monday morning of his departure to the Coast he came to the surgery, accompanied by his wife. Exuding an air of bonhomie and goodwill to all men, he burst through the swinging door into the waiting room. His elastic-sided boots sparkled in a shaft of sunlight. Opondo had obviously put his back into it on this particular morning. His braces gamely took the strain over his freshly filled paunch, clothed in a suitably summery shirt, while his nether limbs were covered in the inevitable but well-pressed cavalry twill. His bald head gleamed as though Opondo, finished with the boots, had spent twenty minutes polishing his master’s cranium.

Observing that all members of staff were present and correct, he bade us farewell in characteristic fashion.

‘Over to you!’ he bellowed, ‘and the best of luck!’ and, clambering into his 404, gunned the motor, and was gone.

We (or rather I) were on our own.

No sooner had his car disappeared round the corner than the telephone rang.

I jumped.

I had hoped for at least a few minutes’ respite before the onslaught – perhaps twenty minutes or half an hour in which to prepare myself for the struggle which I envisaged lay ahead.

Vincent, the Goan clerk, answered it. As he spoke in English I assumed that whoever was at the other end of the line was European. Perhaps it’s only advice he’s after, I thought hopefully, or perhaps he’s placing an order for drugs.

Vincent replaced the phone on its cradle.

‘That was Claus Jorgensen from Njoro,’ he said. ‘He’s got an Ayrshire cow with what he thinks is cancer of the eye. He wants you to go out and have a look at it and if necessary operate on it – remove the cancer, or, if that’s impossible, take its eye out.’

I gulped. Cancerous eyes were a rare condition in Scotland. In fact I had never even seen one, let alone operated on one. I had enucleated a dog’s eye once, so I presumed the principles were the same. I hoped so.

Claus Jorgensen was a tall, good-looking Dane in his late 40s. He spoke excellent English with a strong Danish accent and had a son and a daughter by his stunningly attractive wife. Although his hair was snow white he had a commanding presence and an ever-ready eye for the girls. Before moving to Njoro he had farmed on the Kinangop plateau. Life there, he later told me, was a never-ending round of all night parties. So much so that he got into the habit of visiting his dairy just before dawn, on his return from the latest carousel, in order to ensure that his workers were doing what he paid them to do. On these occasions Claus was invariably clad in dinner jacket and tie. As he never attended the evening milking, his dairy workers concluded that this was his normal and only garb.

The farm lay just beyond the township of Njoro on the murram road to Egerton College, which had been established to train fledgling colonial farmers. Leaving Moses behind to assist in dealing with any clients who might call in at the surgery, I chugged off in my Beetle.

As it was only about half past eight, it was much too early for Claus to be out and about, but his headman was waiting in the dairy. He shuffled over as I drove into the yard. He gave me a grin, revealing an alarming collection of umber tusks. One eye was a sinister milky-blue. His hair was grey and brushed the wrong way, back to front. He looked like a black, middle-aged Shock Headed Peter and not the sort of person one would want to bump into on a dark night.

His command of English was impressive and vastly superior to my primitive grasp of Swahili and his manner, I was relieved to note, was friendly and welcoming.

‘Are you the new daktari?’ he asked.

I explained that I was.

‘Jambo, kijana!’ (Hello, young fellow!) His fangs shone in the sunshine.

‘Karibu!’ (Welcome!)

‘Where’s Ndegwa?’ Seemingly this was the title bestowed upon Mr Owen-Jones by the local Africans and meant something like ‘big bull’ on account of his impressive bulk and aggressive manner. I sympathised with their choice of title and wondered what they might call me.

I said that Mr Owen-Jones and his good wife were even now en-route to Mombasa to enjoy a spell of well-earned rest and relaxation and that I was in charge during what I hoped would be their brief absence, and where was the cow?

In the crush, he said.

So we walked through the dairy and out into a small field on the other side where a short, wooden, cattle race had been constructed next to a fence. Its framework was of a form seen all over Kenya and was one which never failed to irritate me. Whether by design or because it was easier to build it that way, the sides, instead of being driven vertically into the ground, were inserted at an angle, so that the crush had a V shape, narrower at the bottom than at the top. Examining an animal in such a crush was a laborious business. If an animal became cast it was often extremely difficult to get it back onto its feet. On some occasions the crush had to be partially dismantled in order to extricate a fallen animal. It was obvious that it was much less demanding to drive the side-posts in at an angle, but a good cattle crush should be just wide enough to accommodate a fairly large animal and have solid, vertical sides. Some of the jerry-built structures I saw later would have made one weep: ramshackle contraptions made of discarded off-cuts, tied together with pieces of string and wide enough for an elephant to turn round without touching the sides.

On this occasion the crush was reasonably robust. The patient was standing at the far end. She was a large Ayrshire cow with a white head.

A pair of hadada ibis suddenly flew overhead. Their harsh cries sounded over-loud and mocking in the still morning air and lingered in the soft sunshine long after the birds had disappeared.

I walked round to the front of the crush and my heart sank. A mass about the size of a large strawberry protruded from the inner aspect of the cow’s eye. It was growing from the nictitating membrane, or third eyelid, and closer examination revealed that it had spread along the inner surfaces of both upper and lower eyelids and onto the cornea. The animal’s eyelids were pink and non-pigmented. The tumour, for such it was, was a squamous cell carcinoma, a malignant growth induced in this case by the continuous effects of the ultra violet rays in the tropical sunshine on the non-pigmented skin surrounding the eye. Well, this was no quick-snip job.

The eye would have to come out.

I returned to the car. My employer had left me his surgical bag and instruments for the duration of his leave and I selected what I judged I would need – cotton wool, bandage for packing, local anaesthetic, syringes, gentian violet spray, artery forceps, scissors, Allis tissue forceps, suture material and Dettol solution. I hoped it would be enough, as once begun I wouldn’t be able to nip back to the car to replenish my supply. I also brought a cotton rope which I fashioned into a halter. Ropes always seemed to be a rare commodity on farms in Kenya. With the amount of sisal grown in the country one would have thought that every farm would have been well endowed with them. Such was rarely the case and unless one provided one’s own, one was left kicking one’s heels and grinding one’s teeth, while a couple of incompetents constructed a rope by tying together lengths of binder twine and twisting them together into something resembling a giant hank of spaghetti and of about equal strength.

By this time three other men had appeared.

One held the cow by the nose while I slipped the halter over her head. The headman brought a bucket of warm water from the dairy, into which I sloshed some Dettol. After having scrubbed the patient’s eyelids and surrounding skin with a wad of cotton wool, I filled a 10 ml syringe with local anaesthetic and injected several mls around and under both eyelids. This done, I waited for a few minutes before anaesthetising the muscles attached to the eye itself. Finally, using a long needle, I injected several more mls at the back of the orbit to desensitise the optic nerve.

I arranged my instruments on a clean towel laid on the grass and waited for 15 minutes. This was partly in order to allow time for the anaesthetic to work but mainly to give me time to formulate the finer details of my plan of attack.

My rustic assistants lay or lolled about, chattering to each other, seemingly confident that I knew what I was about.

My companions were lightly clad in rags. I felt over-warm in gum boots and overalls.

The time had come.

I instructed the men to hold on tight, seized my instruments and set to work. First I clipped the eyelids together with a couple of tissue forceps in order to tighten the skin and maintain traction on the eye. Then I made two elliptical incisions in both upper and lower eyelids enclosing the tumour and meeting on either side. The skin above and below both incisions was then grasped with tissue forceps whose handles I gave to one of my assistants. As forcefully as it was politic to do so, I requested him to hold the handles only, not to pull them and to please keep his filthy fingers out of the wound.

I next began to dissect the skin back to the rim of the bony orbit and almost at once cut through a major artery. The blood struck me in my eye. Temporarily blinded, I blinked furiously. I grabbed a pair of artery forceps and clipped off the severed vessel. Feeling even warmer, I continued by making a circular incision within the orbit, close to the bone but outside of the eyeball, severing the muscles attaching it to the skull. Finally, with a long pair of curved scissors, I cut through the remaining muscles at the back of the eye and snipped through the optic nerve.

The patient suddenly struck me as being ominously still.

I glanced up.

Four black faces, eyes goggling, mouths open, stared at me as though hypnotised. None was paying any attention to the patient. The men on the rope appeared to be in a trance, still hauling on the cow’s head and neck. She was prevented from moving forward out of the crush by two wooden poles across the front and her head had been pulled over the upper of these – and pulled and pulled by my open-eyed but unseeing assistants until she had lost consciousness and was on the point of choking to death. Her head hung over the pole, jugular veins bulging.

It was my own fault. I should have been watching more closely.

‘Toa miti mara moja!’ I bellowed. What little Swahili I did know was being put to use. ‘Get that pole out at once!’ I yelled.

My roar galvanised the men into action. Like a group of robots lying limp and inert until the switch is pressed, they sprang to life, seized the pole and tore it to one side.

The cow dropped to her knees, shaking and trembling, her one good eye blinking convulsively.

Blood began to pump into the empty socket of the eye just removed, as of course it should have done, immediately it had been enucleated, had she not been in a state of near-asphyxia at the time. I grabbed a handful of cotton wool and thrust it into the gaping cavity. Within seconds it was soaked in blood.

The patient staggered to her feet, shaking her head and spraying everyone with blood. I was glad of my overall. My assistants weren’t quite so fortunate. I saw them looking ruefully at their bespattered raiment.

I seized a handful of artery forceps and began clipping off the sources of supply. It was like working at the bottom of an inkwell. The crimson flood seemed never-ending. A mutilated fragment of Macbeth rose to mind – ‘Yet who would have thought the old cow had so much blood in her.’ At this rate she’ll be dying from exsanguination, I thought. What a splendid start to my tropical career!

I shoved in a few more artery forceps for good measure and then began, not without difficulty, to tie off the major offenders. All the while the pool of blood at my feet grew larger and larger. After a while the flow began to ebb and finally slowed to a trickle. At first I thought she had run out of blood, but she still looked hale if not exactly hearty.

As rapidly as I could I folded a bandage concertina-wise, sprayed it with gentian violet from an aerosol can and inserted it into the socket, leaving about twelve inches protruding from the inner corner. I then stitched the skin edges together with monofilament nylon – actually strong, sterilised fishing line – leaving an extra-long stitch closest to the protruding bandage. I trimmed this to a more manageable length to prevent it from snagging on long grass or bushes.

I instructed the headman to remove the single long stitch after four days and thereafter every day to pull out and cut off about twelve inches of the bandage folded within the socket until none was left. I would return after two weeks to remove the remaining stitches.

He appeared to understand. I hoped so. The patient had by now recovered from her ordeal by garrotte and stood quietly in the crush while I gave her an intra-muscular injection of antibiotic. Upon being released she strolled out into the field, put down her head and started grazing.

I walked back to the car with my toes curled up inside my boots, wondering just what Claus Jorgensen would have thought, and said, if he had come up to the dairy after a late and leisurely breakfast to be informed that the cow the young vet had come to operate on was dead – choked to death in the crush. I went hot and cold in rapid succession. They say that a miss is as good as a mile but that was a pretty close shave. It just showed that one should never relax while on the job. Eternal vigilance must be the watchword from now on.

Back at the surgery, which was conveniently sited in Club Lane and separated from the rather splendid club buildings by a high thorny hedge, I found the doorway blocked by a knot of blanket-clad Maasai. Insinuating my way through the crowd and through an almost palpable miasma of equal parts of the ripe smell of sheep’s fat, body odour and je ne sais quoi, I pushed open the chest-high swing door into the waiting room.

Moses was conversing with an individual who appeared to be the spokesman of the group. He was a tall, lean fellow wrapped in a coarse, hairy blanket, his hugely distended, perforated ear lobes sagging beneath the weight of copper ornaments. On his head he wore a knitted woollen cap resembling a tea-cosy.

‘Jambo, Moses,’ I said. ‘What do these chaps want?’

‘They’re Maasai from Mau Narok and they want vaccine for their cattle. Several big calves have died recently and from what they say it sounds like blackquarter.’

Both Moses and the Maasai were familiar with the symptoms of the more common diseases and the means of their prevention.

Blackquarter is an unpleasant bacterial disease causing gas gangrene in living muscle, most commonly in young cattle and the spores responsible are picked up by mouth from the ground in which they can lie dormant for years. Death usually occurs within 12 to 48 hours so treatment is not usually an option.

In Kenya, years might pass without the disease being seen in a certain district. Then, without warning, cases would occur simultaneously over a large area, sometimes also affecting older animals. Why this should be was difficult to explain – perhaps some particular combination of climatic conditions, temperature, humidity, soil acidity or alkalinity favoured the organism and its ability to invade healthy living muscle. Perhaps it was associated with certain facets of ruminant digestion.

Whatever the reason behind these periodic outbreaks of blackquarter, their occurrence meant a heavy loss to livestock owners. Although large doses of penicillin were occasionally curative, the disease was so acute that it was rarely possible to start treatment soon enough to be effective.

An excellent vaccine was available, however. This gave protection for twelve months. The Maasai knew this, but like people world-wide, they tended to get rather slack when things were going well and frequently neglected to vaccinate their stock on a routine basis.

The Maasai explained that several well-grown calves aged between six and nine months had died suddenly. One had been seen to be acutely lame in a hind leg before it, too, had died, and when a rudimentary post-mortem was carried out swollen, gaseous, blackened areas were found in the heavy muscles between the hock and the hip.

‘A hind leg was very swollen, and there was a blackened area, with gas and the whole thing stank to high heaven!’: Moses did the translation.