A city of the dawn

Front matter

R. KEABLE

A city of the dawn

‘ Then from the dawn it seem’d there came, but faint As from beyond the limit of the world,

Introduction

I

It is something more than a pleasure to me to be asked to say a few words of introduction to this brilliant little book, the work of a friend and former pupil, ‘ Brilliant ’ is the word that keeps recurring to me, because the author appears to me to have actually seen things wonderful and strange, to have caught and retained, out of a thousand rich impressions, whatever it is which constitutes their interest and charm, their strangeness and grotesqueness, their appeal and pathos, their strength and fineness ; and all this, it seems to me, ripples into words both apt and beautiful, till I too see and feel it, swiftly and distinctly — the heat, the colour, the scent, the atmosphere of it all. The book is vivid, picturesque, impressive from end to end.

II

I have often asked myself why it is that a description of Christian mission work is gener-

VI ally so dull, and if it needs to be dull. There is no doubt that such a record too frequently has a dreary solemnity about it which is frankly disconcerting. I wonder now whether the reason is not simply this, that the good men who bring back stories of their work, and try with a pathetic earnestness to enlist the interest of the unconcerned, have not really seen the marvellous quality of what they have lived and toiled among. Perhaps they have been too much preoccupied, too much bent on the organisation and detail of their work, too much absorbed in reproducing a settled scheme of action in the far-off place to attend to what was actually going on about them in heaven and earth. The result is a sense that one need hardly go out into the wilderness to see proceeding, under added difficulties and disadvantages, what is going on more completely and perfectly at home— the school, the hospital, the meeting, the church service ! But here in this book the writer’s eyes are everywhere ; and not only that, but the words flow out to recapture it all, till as I draw to the end of chapter after chapter, it is with the dreamlike sense that some vision has passed between me and the quiet bookshelves of the room where I sit

INTRODUCTION vii

and the close-grown shrubberies of the College Garden.

Ill

There really is no reason why such a life should be dull — it has every element of travel, of risk, of adventure that can make life exciting. Bishop Westcott once said, ‘ A man should be prepared to die for his profession, as in the case of the doctor or the soldier. A shopkeeper must not object if his profession is regarded with less respect, if he cannot die for it.’ That is an obvious truth ; and the life of the missionary has that first touch of honour and chivalry. Of course, all who go out to such countries run the same risk for different reasons, the soldier, the sailor, the official, the trader. But there is added to the life of the missionary a deeper interest still. Soldiers, sailors, and officials go out to keep order as unobtrusively as they can, but still they are there as conquerors. The traveller goes to pick up impressions, the trader to make money — their object is to bring something away. But the missionary goes to understand the heart and mind of the native, to love him if he can, to win his love and trust.

viii

and to persuade him of a great truth, a farreaching idea. He goes to give everything and to gain nothing, and thus the missionary can have a better chance of getting behind the tapestry of life, so to speak. And yet perhaps the dulness sometimes lies in this, that he is not looking out for the difference of the new scene from the old, but for its similarity to the old. He thinks perhaps that visions which seem so glorious to himself must approve themselves to all who own the privilege of humanity ; and thus he can only record what he went out to say. But the relief here is to find that the writer does not so face the new conditions.

‘ They do not think as we think,’ he says ; and why the book strikes so hopeful a note is that he is all alive to the differences — the history, the traditions, the instincts, — which have combined to make these other folk what they are, and which cannot be exchanged for the new ideas by the simple process of changing clothes !

But the adventure of it need be no more dull than The Odyssey or The Pilgrim’s Progress ; and Mr. Keable took with him a zest, a freshness, a lively inquisitiveness, and an eye sensitive to every kind of impression ; so that

INTRODUCTION

IX instead of coming back with a tale half-patient, half-dolorous, of schemes more or less realised, of converts partially conformed to Western ways, of British institutions more or less securely established, he gives us a sense of movement and richness, bare and tragic enough in one glimpse, hopeful and resplendent the next moment, and all full of tropical luxuriance and glowing intricacy.

And that is why I believe the book may have a singular value, because it makes an appeal to the imagination, and brings out vividly the romance of mission life, which many most earnest workers hardly care, hardly dare to emphasise.

IV

He touches, too, upon deep problems which cannot be soon or easily solved. If we compare our modern missions with the first outburst of primitive Christianity, we feel at once the immense difference. Then, a few simple, uneducated, unworldly men, of the labouring class, went out to fight the ideas and forces of a vast and infinitely powerful civilisation, as though a band of Russian peasants might bring a new religion to London. Now, it is

X the other way ; and the missionary comes with the wealth, the law, and the prestige of civilisation behind him ; the flag waves over him, and the maxim-gun is not far off. It must be fearfully and inextricably bewildering for unsophisticated and ignorant natives to disentangle the motives of it all, and to believe in the meekness, the affection, the disinterestedness of the missionary, who comes as a mere concomitant of so much secular power and military force. Such condescension, they must think, surely has something sinister about it !

Civilisation brings formidable and disastrous gifts with it — disease and unscrupulous persons and enforced orderliness and dangerous indulgences ; and even Christian ideas and instincts — are they come to transform or to destroy ? Does the Englishman, so strong, so consistent, so self-satisfied, really wish to persuade ? Is there not a menace of some kind behind his innocent overtures ?

V

It all points to the necessity of a deeply scientific and psychological treatment of these problems, a real knowledge of savage inherit-

INTRODUCTION

XI ances and instincts, a delicate conciliatoriness, and a determination, not simply to expel or ridicule deeply rooted ideas, but to show that the new principles are a true and natural development of the frail and fitful hopes that exist. Missions are not merely the fad of enthusiasts ; in spite of natural failure and delay, they are of the very essence of the Gospel spirit. The message of the Cross is to show how the worst that man can do is vitally linked with the best that God can do !

And here, I make no doubt, lies the deeper and stronger appeal of the book, that though the essence of the Faith of Christ is here grasped with overpowering emotion, it is yet not viewed as a cast-iron system, with every detail implacably fixed, which must recommend itself at once to minds whose very texture is utterly and entirely unlike our own, and the strands of which pass dimly and obscurely back into an immemorial antiquity. Mr. Keable, though he holds his creed and his tradition with ardent and unconquerable enthusiasm, yet keeps ever in sight the belief that the principle and the life must carry and evoke the system, and that the system must be shown to have grown unmistakably out of

Xll the principle. It is a strong and wide faith, not dully nor hardly pressed ; and the two aspects of the book here unite — namely, the intense absorption by eye and ear and mind of aU the infinite variety of atmosphere and history and scene, never neglected and yet never allowed either to bewilder and distract ; and on the other hand, the deep conviction that the Incarnation holds in it the end and the solution of all these broken lights and complex threads ; and is not the mere triumphant answer of the West to the East, but the one eternal satisfaction, for Eastern and Western perplexities alike, of the deepest of all human needs, — the need to be set right and justified and given the chance of joining the faint and broken hope of the present to the full glory of the world to come.

Arthur Christopher Benson.

I.

II.

WITHIN THE GATE .

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III.

THE STREETS OF THE

CITY

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IV.

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XIV. The Ghost-pools Of

KOMBENI xiv A CITY OF THE DAWN

CHAP. PAOB

XV. LATIN, HISTORY, AND SCIENCE . , 188

XVI. ROOFS IN THE SUN .... 147

XVII. AMOS IN AFRICA ..... 154

XVIU. SCOUTS, BLACK AND BROWN . . . 164

XIX. NIGHT IN A LAND OF DREAMS . . 172

XX. DOWN THE WORLD’S HIGHWAYS . . 179

XXI. A VESSEL UNTO DISHONOUR . . . 185

XXII. THE COFFEE-SELLER .... 192

XXIII. ‘ THE MOTHER OF THE POOR ’ . . 199

XXIV. ‘ IT SHALL BE LIGHT ’ . . . . 206

XXV. IN FESTA ...... 218

XXVI. THE COMING KINGDOM .... 222

xxvn. BEYOND THE DISTANT HILLS . . . 288

Note, — Some of the above chapters have appeared in The Gommonwealth, The Treasury, and The Churchman, to the editors of which I desire to make acknowledgment.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE ROAD TO THE CATHEDRAL .... FronUtpieee

THE OLD PORTUGUESE FORT To fact page IQ

THE CREEK, SHOWING LIVINGSTONE’S HOUSE „ „ 24

ON THE BRIDGE „ 44

THROUGH A CLOVE PLANTATION . . . „ „ 49

THE COLLEGE ON THE CLIFF ,.74

A GOVERNMENT ROAD 84

THE DEVIL POOL 130

THE CLIFF OF A CORAL ISLAND ,,136

A STREET IN THE CITY „ „ 138

TO ARMS ! „ „ 143

INDIAN CHILDREN „ 160

COCOA-NUT WOODS „ „ 169

A SOMALI OF THE QUAY . . . . . . ,, „ 180

BOYS ON THE QUAY ,,227

AN AFRICAN STREAM „ 240 xv

I

One’s first impression of this part of Africa is that she is a great siren. Less than a quarter of a mile away, across a stretch of still, blue, translucent water, the sea is rippling on a white, coral-sand beach, and, beyond, the trees come down to meet the shore in a tangle of verdure, pricked out, here and there, with masses of colour. We round a headland, and Kilindini lies before us. On the shore the cocoa-nut palms give way to a grove of baobab trees, which stretch out naked, silvery branches unbendingly against the azure sky, and robe their enormous trunks and lower boughs with hanging festoons of some coarse creeper. We slip by, and clutch a buoy, to swing round in the grip of the current. Then comes the' landing experience, of which it takes some time to tire ; and presently we dismiss our half-naked boatman, with his rough-timbered boat, alongside the landing-stage of squared coral blocks. Right

A ahead is the Uganda railway with its insignificant permanent way, all ludicrously unprotected and raw, yet, nevertheless, the artery of a-continent and the life of a protectorate. But we board a ‘ ghari ’ and are pushed up the sandy road at a double. Dark, long-leaved mangoes show like Western trees in the distance ; lighter bananas lift wide graceful fans on either side ; cool, impenetrable almond trees make a grateful shade ; and scarlet acacias, their blaze of blossom crowning bare branches, lend a colour to it all. The rich scent of frangipanni is in the air, and here and there a bougainvillea runs riot in a blaze of purple upon some decaying trunk. And these are the skirts of the siren.

To penetrate, you leave the road and take the path that follows round the island from Kilindini to Mombasa. Hard by the sea, at the head of the baobab grove, stands a sentinel to keep the way. No one knows how old the grey-stone, pointed round-tower is that marks, with its twenty odd feet of pierced pencil, the grave of some Arab chief, but it stands at the entrance of a ruined city. Now and again a wrecked bastion shows above the mass of verdure, and a tumbled wall marks some public building. Where the shade of a strong tree has thinned the bush beneath it, lie the stones of a house where once men loved and hated, a house caved in and broken as by the blow of a giant fist. Africa has covered the most of them with her green mantle, but you stumble through a labyrinth of remains. And all the way along it is the same.

The outline of the part that they have played in the story of the ways of men is plain enough. True, the veil of seven centuries of history is the most that you can lift with any certainty, but even that is a grim business. For seven centuries ago this little island was inhabited by native races, of whom the memory only has survived, but who loom with a certain dignity in that dim light. They were tall strong men, for whom there might have been a future if the thread of their fate had been woven otherwise in the shuttle ; maybe another Tyre or Carthage lay in embryo here. But Africa is a sorrowful mother, and she breeds children who slay each other. Anyway, in the dawn of that day came Arab dhows, not so different, I imagine, from those our gunboats still watch in the Persian Gulf ; and ‘ The Island of Wars,’ as the natives name Mombasa, saw another bloody page turned in her chronicles. It was part eddy of a tide that had swept to Tours and Delhi, yet it did not wash these Africans away without an effort. Those bastions tell their own tale. But the naked warriors, who were too proud to bend, broke at last before the storm. Maybe the coral strand, yonder, is in some way their tomb, and the Swahilis of to-day have drops of blood which once ran in those forgotten veins. Figure that deadly strife if you will, of days in which this same sunlight broke on bodies straining in the fight for home and hearth, of nights in which this same moonlight made possible the bitter agony of night alarm and raid. It was over, you say, when the Portuguese sailed into the bay ; was it ? It is never over in Africa.

A little farther than our baobab grove, a bank of orchids marks where recently they cleared the ground for a golf course and discovered the most significant remains of that new invasion. Hacked out by rough native tools in the living rock is an old flight of steep steps that leads down to a cave and a sheltered inlet. You plunge into the darkness until the water laps deep at your feet in a green light, but ahead the passage pierces upward to an old fort that crowns the headland a few hundred yards away. It was part, it is guessed, of a yet longer gallery that led to Fort Jesus, half a mile farther round the coast at the head of the gulf that makes Mombasa harbour, and you may imagine the secret gang that carried munitions and victuals into that old beleaguered castle. For it was more often beleaguered than not. Yes, the Portuguese landed — between the devil and the deep sea. It was they who ruined the Arab city yonder, ay, and crucified its inhabitants in the sun for sport. Grim sport for all ! Grim for the men who dared, with a bravery the wonder of our modern enterprise, a venture such as this ; who landed, with the tropic sun above them, in suits of mail and with arms almost ludicrous in their clumsiness ; who dared malaria with no notion of its cause and less of its remedy ; and whose nearest reinforcements were no nearer than two years — if God were kind. They carved out their foothold with blood and tears, and they knew no other way to keep it. Ever and again they were swept into the sea ; and those reinforcements, for which dead eyes had strained in vain for help, had to land upon the bloodstained beach, and build anew walls which had fallen to the cries of their tortured countrymen who had built them first. And there could be no return. . . .

The story might be pieced together at length by the aid of documents in Europe and a vivid imagination, but it were better left untold. The end of all was but the last link in a chain of like occurrences. Vasco da Gama had built Fort Jesus, whose shell, beyond the destruction of even Arab vengeance, remains to-day ; and for years its grim strength had given the colonists a rare security. Then, somewhere behind the mainland hills, the hordes of Islam mustered, and this part of Portuguese East Africa was reduced to the area of that old fort. Thirteen hundred men, women, and children, it is said, were shut up there, and they held out for fifteen months, thanks, perhaps, to that dim passage and the little sheltered cove. No one knows the progress of the siege, but one pictures it. . . . When the headland bastion went, with its chapel still to be made out among the weeds, the very sight of the open homeward sea was gone, and despair must have settled upon them. The rains, if they filled their cisterns, doubled the victims of malaria, and the sun, when it followed, sent them panting to the walls in the hot moist damp we fear to-day.

Maybe they killed their own women before the end ; they were white, so I hope so. Be that as it may, the garrison numbered but eleven before they were too weak to load the guns again, and then the red flag of the Sultan floated where it floats to-day — for Mombasa still pays a nominal suzerainty to Zanzibar. But where the armed Sudanese warder, guarding what is now the jail of our administration, shows ever and again in his beat against the waving palms across the creek, those eleven paid dearly for their venture. A man may take long a-dying, and the art was well learned then.

I saw the old fort first by night, when an African moon shone white on the reef a mile at sea and threw spectral shadows on battlement and moat. There is no stillness like the stillness of an African night, for, by a curious trick of which I have no explanation, every sound seems detached from the night itself and serves to emphasise its stillness. Across the water, in some village, the tom-toms were sounding, and from that almost unexplored territory the low boom of them broke on our ears. Thick bush and forest to the marge of the sea is pierced by those African tracks which make a road for safaris from east to west across the continent, but still that bush covers ruins, actually Egyptian, Persian, and Chinese among them. No man can tell the story of those comings ; but the siren’s skirts may be lifted to show the bones that mark their end.

Well, we have railways and hospitals and Maxim guns to-day, and the few often povertystricken Arabs who are still ignorant enough in their impotence to hate us, are here on sufferance now. Their slaves of yesterday supply the jail, and their women walk the streets by night. It is a theme for the moralist, and a problem for the politician ; the old riddle is asked in a new way, that is all ; but one thing has not changed. As you retrace the way to Kilindini, you pass the railings and white gateway of the English Cemetery, and you may push in. There are only two classes here — men and women of middle age, and children. Scarce a stone is fifty years old, yet many a grave hides dust whose friends have forgotten to clear the weeds above him. Life is short in East Africa, and man’s memory likewise. Only the siren never forgets and never changes ; she spreads her lure with gold as yesterday ; and she covers with the beauty of her garment the victims of her pitilessness.

n

The sluicing of the deck beneath the seat which a tropical night had bidden me exchange for my berth, awoke me early on the day of our coming. The wide, still sea was as yet but silver-grey in the dawning, and Mombasa lay eight hours’ steam behind; but the mail steamer was slipping by a long, low, slightly hilly island, upon which could be easily distinguished the big green leaves of banana plants, the wavy tops of cocoa-nut palms, and the dark close-set foliage of mangoes beyond a sandy coral shore. Ahead, where the land bends out to sea, lies a white patch which soon resolves itself into a huddle of houses, low for the most part against the rapidly deepening blue of the harbour, but broken by the spire of the English Cathedral, the twin towers of its Catholic brother, the tall roof of the Sultan’s Palace, and the flag-staff of the English Residency. The boat passes among a scattered handful of rich green islets. And just beyond a grim reminder of the last bombardment in the shape of a broken masthead that pricks up out of the water, between H.M.S. Pandora and a British India mail steamer, our anchor runs out as cheerily as it did in the halcyon days before there was steam.

One is used by now to the medley of boats which immediately swarm about the ship as if by magic, for one has had them at Mombasa, Aden, and Port Sudan already ; but the streets of an Arab city are less familiar. A first impression is that they are very narrow, very devious, very long, and very smelly. The unending white of it all is broken, here at least, by the green of some tropical tree at every turn, especially where an ancient fig rambles up the white crenellated bastion of the old Portuguese fort, or a tangle of gorgeous creeper leans over a high-enclosed Arab house. But the infinite variety of the native is most bewildering. A Swahili woman in the latest fashion of blue ; an Arab whose dress differs scarcely at all from that of the first Ihrahim ; a Hindi woman in a long brick-red veil, yellow or green breast-cloth, and much silver at feet and ankles ; a genuine African in a black skin

THE OLD PORTUGUESE FORT and a loin-cloth ; these are but a few of the types in the street. And presently you dive between a couple of shops, pass a sign-board in English and Arabic, and some one says that this is Mkunazini. It was the slave-market, and it is now a kind of square, planted between the houses with trumpet-shaped hibiscus, richscented frangipanni, and great red acaeia trees. The Cathedral is on the left ; and right in front are two parallel rows of buildings, eonneeted by an overhead verandah, which house the priests in eharge. The big red-roofed ladies’ mission house is beyond, rising above a thatched white-walled printing establishment. The Hospital, looking above all things cool and clean, is to the right ; and far ahead, aeross the glint of water in a creek, rise the tiers of brown, thatched hut-roofs and tall green cocoa palms which make up the native town. It is very hot and beautiful. Natives pass, each bewildering because of that impenetrable something with which the new-comer is as yet unfamiliar, and the hum of an Arab city just penetrates the enelosure. One slips gratefully into the Cathedral, which is admirably proportioned in general effect and rather like a big college chapel. Here is the grave of that scholar and gentleman who came here to the teaching of slave children ABC and the keeping of petty accounts, but who lived to build an altar upon the very spot where he had seen the children bought, and at it to ordain them ; and before that altar, in that cool and holy sanctuary, it is not hard to pray.

But it is not always easy to do so after all. The glamour of the landing soon passes, and early fears are soon deepened. True, it is all one great ‘ magic ’ from day to day ; how could it be other when Mr. Kipling’s Parsee with his cake is just round the corner, and the ‘ Miracle of Purun Bhagat ’ might happen to-morrow ! But there is another aspect of it after all. Here is the real East, packed away in narrow streets where the half-naked workman sits almost continuously at his work, simply going to sleep in his open shop surrounded by his working brethren when he is tired, and waking to go on by the guttering light of an oil lamp all through the Eastern night ; the real East, in festival on some marriage night perhaps, when the street is crowded with a sitting, smoking, drinking crowd, excited by an unmusical din in their own strange fashion, an excitement which only shows itself in glittering eyes and much expectoration as you press your way through after a black policeman who clears the road in native fashion with feet and hands ; or the East in worship, when you lie awake at night to catch snatches of the hour-long sing-song of

Rasulu — ’allah.’

(There is no god but God ; Mohammed is the apostle of God.) That fierce creed has echoed from the south of France to the China Sea, and from the Siberian Steppes to the Congo forests, and it has rung in the ears of men since Romans heard it on the borders of Syria, and Gordon died to the sound of it in the palace at Khartoum. And it is not mere romance which talks about the ‘ impenetrable East.’ The thing that struck me most on landing first at Port Sudan, and which has grown upon me every day since, is the fact that these men live in what is no less than a different world from that world which we know. It is so hard to express, but there it is. They do not live as we do ; that were a little thing ; but they do not think as we think. Our needs are not, by nature, theirs materially or spiritually ; and what moves us, leaves them unmoved. Rudyard Kipling’s famous couplet is a kind of knell to the missionary — or at least to me, — from which he finds it harder to escape than many know in England.

And yet one knows not only where East and West meet, but Who is the common link between. The problem is to discover how we may identify ourselves with Eastern thought so as to become a medium through which our Lord may express Himself to Easterns. We shall not do it by ceasing to be ourselves, or by treating what the West has won of Truth through centuries past as if it were merely a local expression of Truth ; nor, I suspect, shall we do it in any other way than that in which a medium of revelation was given to us in the Person of our Lord — the way whieh Raymond Lull designated six centuries ago, that of ‘ love and prayers and the pouring out of tears and blood.’ I cannot in anywise forget this. Personally it seems to me that the Mohammedan world is nothing else, now as then, than a challenge to faith ; and that a creed which is explicitly based on the denial of our Lord as we know Him, and which has won victories for that denial, over the Cross, even in our day, constitutes in itself not only a challenge, but a challenge which the Church as a whole should take up. Perhaps to forge a sufficient answer needs more of the iron of authority and of faith than the Anglican Church can give. But where it is claimed that freedom has given that body intellectual progress and scope denied elsewhere, and Western blood that zeal so conspicuously lacking among the Eastern Orthodox Churches, surely there should be some to constitute a modern crusading Order against Islam, armed with such weapons, and animated, in this age, not by hate but by love.

I do not know ; it may be that it is given to young men to dream what are after all but dreams. I will not say that it is not so. But anyway here, in this island, are a hundred and fifty thousand of those two hundred millions throughout the world for whom Good Friday is a lie, under our flag, at our doors. Whoever attempts anything must essay long silence, seemingly temporary uselessness, and wearisome labour for years at two languages at least, of which one is the hardest in four continents ; and since he will probably come from a busy parochial life, with varied activities and infinite opportunities, he had better be sure of the plough before he put his hand to it. Alas for the men whose plough deceives them ! And yet even they may hope. As I write it is getting late, and all the varied sounds of an African night, not shutting out the ceaseless song of the sea, come through my windows. There is no moon, but now and again, over a stark black world, the vivid lightning breaks the darkness into light. Though all the hopes of men go out as the flashes which seem to do so little, still for a while they rent the night with promise of the power above.