"Engong Mountain Has My Coffee Garden" (I)
"Out of Africa" bilingual graphic edition serial two
The original author of the English version is Karen Blixen (Denmark). The translated version of Chinese was published by Guangdong Tourism Publishing House in 1989 under the auspices of Wu Shaoqiu, a friend of wu. The original photos were photographed and provided by Guangdong photographers Xu Xin and Chen Jia on the spot. Thank you in the same way.
The following text is especially suitable for people with particularly high professional and professional pressures, as well as for those who dream of slow life and pastoral life.
At that time, bison, horned antelopes and rhinos lived in the Engong Mountains; the elderly local people remember that there were elephants in the mountains. The entire Engong Mountains have not been included in the wildlife sanctuary, which is indeed a pity for me. Only a small part of Mount Ngong is classified as a wildlife sanctuary, and the lighthouse on the southern peak marks the boundary of the reserve. When the colony entered a period of prosperity and the capital Nairobi developed into a metropolis, Ngong Hill could have been built into an unparalleled wildlife park in the capital. But in the years before I left Africa, every Sunday, young shopkeepers from Nairobi would flock to the mountains of Ngong Mountain on motorcycles to hunt down the animals they saw. I knew that sooner or later the bulky animals would leave that place and move south through the thorny, rocky wilderness.
In my day, the Buffalo, the Eland and the Rhino lived in the Ngong Hills,–the very old Natives remembered a time when there were Elephants there,–and I was always sorry that the whole Ngong Mountain was not enclosed in the Game Reserve. Only a small part of it was Game Reserve, and the beacon on the Southern peak marked the boundary of it. When the Colony prospers and Nairobi, the capital, grows into a big city, the Ngong Hills might have made a matchless game park for it. But during my last years in Africa many young Nairobi shop people ran out into the hills on Sundays, on their motor cycles, and shot at anything they saw, and I believe that the big game will have wandered away from the hills, through the thorn thickets and the stony ground further South.
Hiking on the beams and peaks is not difficult, the weeds are as short as cut grass, and only the gray stones in between are a little dazzling. Undulating "zigzag" mountain beams are where wildlife is infested. Again, I was camping in the mountains. Early in the morning, I walked up the mountain beam and found the footprints and dung piles that a group of horned antelopes had just left behind. This group of indisputable beasts must have climbed the mountain beam in a column when the sun was rising in the east. It's hard to imagine that they're climbing there for any purpose other than to see the vast expanse of land beneath the beams.
Up on the very ridge of the hills and on the four peaks themselves it was easy to walk; the grass was short as on a lawn, with the grey stone in places breaking through the sward. Along the ridge, up and down the peaks, like a gentle switchback, there ran a narrow game path. One morning, at the time that I was camped in the hills, I came up here and walked along the path, and I found on it fresh tracks and dung of a herd of Eland. The big peaceful animals must have been up on the ridge at sunrise, walking in a long row, and you cannot imagine that they had come for any other reason than just to look, deep down on both sides, at the land below.
We grow coffee on the farm. It was a little too high, and it was a little hard to grow coffee, so we never got rich. But growing coffee is the most fascinating thing, it's hard to get out of it once you get it, and, in general, you always have work on hand that should have been done.
We grew coffee on my farm. The land was in itself a little too high for coffee, and it was hard work to keep it going; we were never rich on the farm. But a coffee plantation is a thing that gets hold of you and does not let you go, and there is always something to do on it: you are generally just a little behind with your work.
The rolling wilderness surrounds a well-shaped, well-cultivated land that is beautiful. Later, every time I flew over the African highlands and looked down on my coffee farm, I was enchanted by it. The lush green landscape of the gray-green earth made me realize that the mortal heart is obsessed with geometric shapes. Nairobi's surroundings, especially the Hara, north of the capital, have a similar topography. People living there are constantly thinking about how to plant, prune, and pick coffee. Even when they go to bed at night, they are still tirelessly working on ways to improve the processing of coffee.
In the wildness and irregularity of the country, a piece of land laid out and planted according to rule, looked very well. Later on, when I flew in Africa, and became familiar with the appearance of my farm from the air, I was filled with admiration for my coffee plantation, that lay quite bright green in the grey green land, and I realized how keenly the human mind yearns for geometrical figures. All the country round Nairobi, particularly to the North of the town, is laid out in a similar way, and here lives a people, who are constantly thinking and talking of planting, pruning or picking coffee, and who lie at night and meditate upon improvements to their coffee factories.
Growing coffee is slow, not as simple and optimistic as young people think. Boxes of coffee saplings had to be removed from the nursery in the drizzle. Call all the farm helpers into the fields and watch them put saplings into the row of tree pits. Then, the branches and leaves must be folded from the bushes to cover the coffee seedlings, and they must be covered tightly to cover the hot sun, because young life inevitably needs strict protection. Then, it will take four or five years for them to flower and bear beans. At the same time, drought, pests, and weeds that grow in the fields — especially black thorns , have thorny sacs hanging from your pants and socks. Some saplings are not well planted, the main root is folded, and they will die before entering the flowering period. I can plant more than six hundred coffee trees per acre, and I planted six hundred acres in total. The cattle dragged the cultivator, back and forth between the rows of coffee trees, walking tirelessly on the road that could never be finished, waiting for the day of the great harvest.
Coffee growing is a long job. It does not all come out as you imagine, when, yourself young and hopeful, in the streaming rain, you carry the boxes of your shining young coffee plants from the nurseries, and, with the whole number of farm hands in the field, watch the plants set in the regular rows of holes in the wet ground where they are to grow, and then have them thickly shaded against the sun, with branches broken from the bush, since obscurity is the privilege of young things. It is four or five years till the trees come into bearing, and in the meantime you will get drought on the land, or diseases, and the bold native weeds will grow up thick in the fields,–the black jack, which has long scabrous seed vessels that hang on to your clothes and stockings. Some of the trees have been badly planted with their tap roots bent; they will die just as they begin to flower. You plant a little over six hundred trees to the acre, and I had six hundred acres of land with coffee; my oxen dragged the cultivators up and down the fields, between the rows of trees, many thousand miles, patiently, awaiting coming bounties.
The coffee plantation has very beautiful and spectacular times. At the beginning of the rainy season, the coffee trees will bloom all over the trees, shrouded in mist and drizzle, and the six hundred acres of coffee trees will resemble large expanses of white clouds. The flowers blooming on the coffee trees, like the flowers of the black thorns, also emit a slightly bitter smell. When the ripe coffee beans stained the entire plantation red, the women on the farm and the children called "beans" in the local vernacular were called out to pick coffee beans with the men. Bullock carts and trolleys then transport the collected coffee beans to the processing plant by the river. The machines in the factory never met the standards, but we designed and installed them ourselves and had high hopes. It was destroyed in a fire, but we built it again. The huge dryer kept turning and turning, and the coffee was rolling around in its tin belly, crackling as if the sea were washing the pebbles on the beach. Sometimes, in the dead of night, the coffee has been dried and waiting to be lifted out of the dryer. This is a particularly exciting time. The large, black-handed factory building, which was full of cobwebs and coffee pods, was immediately illuminated by countless windproof lamps. By the bright lights, I saw radiant, impatient black faces gathered around the dryer. You'll think that this factory building hanging in the African night sky is like a bright jewel hanging from the ears of an Ethiopian woman. Later, after hand-hulling, grading, and selection, the coffee was packed into a sack and sewn with a needle that sewed the saddle and sealed.
There are times of great beauty on a coffee farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist and the drizzling rain, over six hundred acres of land. The coffee blossom has a delicate slightly bitter scent, like the blackthorn blossom. When the field reddened with the ripe berries, all the women and the children, whom they call the Totos, were called out to pick the coffee off the trees, together with the men; then the wagons and carts brought it down to the factory near the river. Our machinery was never quite what it should have been, but we had planned and built the factory ourselves and thought highly of it. Once the whole factory burned down and had to be built up again. The big coffee dryer turned and turned, rumbling the coffee in its iron belly with a sound like pebbles that are washed about on the seashore. Sometimes the coffee would be dry, and ready to take out of the dryer, in the middle of the night. That was a picturesque moment, with many hurricane lamps in the huge dark room of the factory, that was hung everywhere with cobwebs and coffee husks, and with eager glowing dark faces, in the light of the lamps, round the dryer; the factory, you felt, hung in the great African night like a bright jewel in an Ethiope’s ear. Later on the coffee was hulled, graded and sorted, by hand, and packed in sacks sewn up with a saddler’s needle.
Finally, in the early hours of the next day, before dawn, when I went to bed, sack after sack of coffee had been loaded into the cart. Twelve bags each, stacked high, were pulled up the slope in front of the processing plant by sixteen cows. The handlebars ran by the bullock cart, shouting all the way, intertwined with the rattling sound of the wheels. I secretly applauded that this was the only uphill stretch on the way to Nairobi. Other than that, they never had to climb a hill again, because the farm was a thousand feet above sea level than the city of Nairobi. In the evening, I walked out of the farm to meet the returning convoy. In front of him walked a tired "beanie", followed by an exhausted, hunched-headed cow and a cart they dragged, listless handlebars walking at the back, their whips dragged behind them on the dirt road behind them. So far, everything we could do has been done. Within a day or two, the coffee beans would cross the ocean, and all that was left was the hope that the big auction house in London would be the gospel.
Then in the end in the early morning, while it was still dark, and I was lying in bed, I heard the wagons, loaded high up with coffee sacks, twelve to a ton, with sixteen oxen to each wagon, starting on their way in to Nairobi railway station up the long factory hill, with much shouting and rattling, the drivers running beside the wagons. I was pleased to think that this was the only hill up, on their way, for the farm was a thousand feet higher than the town of Nairobi. In the evening I walked out to meet the procession that came back, the tired oxen hanging their heads in front of the empty wagons, with a tired little Toto leading them, and the weary drivers trailing their whips in the dust of the road. Now we had done what we could do. The coffee would be on the sea in a day or two, and we could only hope for good luck at the big auction sales in London.