Jonny Bealby's books
Running with the Moon:
Chapter 22: Crossing Kenya’s Plains of Darkness, closing in on Ethiopia’s southern border…
The truck bumped and bunched down the gravel track. The suspension squeaked the body shook. Next to me an old man stirred and pulled his blanket closer to his chest. I wrapped my cheche a little tighter round my face and stared out across the desert plains.
There had been no twilight that evening – there seldom is in the desert – day and night simply swap places like scene shifts in a play. It was moonless but the scrub and rocks of the desert floor could still be seen, lit up by a million stars. It was as if we were travelling through a huge planetarium, the domed sky, encrusted with tiny diamonds, reaching far away on every side.
In Europe we tend not to notice the moon and stars and are often in ignorance of their movements; the horizons are frequently obscured and the nights either too cold to observe or too pale to heed, but out here on the equator, where the heat of the day can be fatal, night becomes a time to work and move. The stars and their names are known to most and their patterns give guidance, friends to the traveller since the beginning. The Plough stood ahead with the Southern Cross behind. Away to the west, just above the horizon, Orion lay on his back waiting for time to raise him to his feet. A sudden flash of a shooting star sped across the heavens, dissolving into the streaky blur of the Milky Way, which rested like a cloud directly above us.
As I looked east my eyes were greeted by lights of a different kind. Tiny orange specks, like fireflies, zipped through the darkness. At first I didn’t realise their significance but as another arc appeared and died I realised that this beautiful display held a sinister sting – tracer bullets.
‘Shifta,’ said a quiet voice beside me. ‘It be Shifta… bandit from Ethiopia.’ I could hardly make out the face in the darkness. He prodded my arm with a packet of cigarettes. I took one and crouched down out of the wind. The fire from the match flared in his eyes, which were big and brown, moist form the cold night air. Then a gust extinguished the flame and his face was once more cast into shadow.
From the little I’d read about the Shifta I had no desire to be as close to them as this. The Shifta warrior is know for removing the private parts of those he has killed – or, even worse, has injured – as a present for his intended bride. Mine twitched at the thought.
‘Are you sure?’ I pulled hard on the reassuring cigarette.
‘If not them, it be army patrol, drunk. Whichever, we be okay. Them shots are a long way away.’ I hoped he was right.
‘Are there many bandits up here?’
‘Oh yes, all the way from here to the border, and further if you go on.’ The cigarette glow lit up his face. He was young, with frizzy hair and pale skin. He certainly wasn’t Kenyan – Ethiopian, I presumed. ‘Further north it get worse. We have to take army patrol last hundred miles.’
I crawled back into the hold of the truck and lay down on the dusty boxes it was carrying to the border. The harnessed bike bounced up and down next to me, crunching against the side with every pot-hole we hit. I was in a truck in the dead of night moving once again towards the unknown. In all my life I’d never felt more alive.
