Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [3]
THE ICE CAP OF KILIMANJARO floats like a bubble, the blue of its lower slopes dissolving into the blue of heat haze. Somewhere in that southern swim, parallel with the line of the railway, runs the uneasy border between British and German East Africa. He has no plans to cross it. Having spent much of his presidency perfecting Anglo-American relations, and much of his life visiting and corresponding with well-placed English friends, he is almost an honorary British citizen. “I am the only American in public life whom the Europeans really understand,” he says. “I am a gentleman and follow the code of a gentleman.”
Right now he is the guest of His Majesty’s Colonial Office, as an honored collector of specimens for the National Museum in Washington, D.C. King Edward VII has sent him an official telegram of welcome to the Protectorate. Fifty-six eminent English peers, parliamentarians, naturalists, and men of letters are the donors of his Holland & Holland rifle. Given a high state of alarm in Parliament over Germany’s current arms buildup (the Reichstag has announced the construction of three new dreadnought battleships), it would be undiplomatic of him to quit one empire for another, even if a record rhinoceros beckons.
Packed among his safari gear is the typescript of a speech he has been asked to make at Berlin University next spring. In it, he praises the Wilhelmine Reich for its “lusty youth”—a compliment he feels unable to bestow on France or Britain, in similar addresses written for delivery at the Sorbonne and Oxford. He has taken pains to make all three speeches sound as academic as possible, not wanting to exacerbate the rivalries of Europe’s main powers. Like it or not, he will still be listened to as an American foreign policy spokesman.
So much for his fantasy of fading from popular memory in Darkest Africa. His safari has generated worldwide interest. British East African authorities have extended him special privileges: this train, for instance, comes courtesy of the acting governor. For as long as he roams the Protectorate, he must pay reciprocal respects to every district commissioner who flies a Union Jack over a hut of mud and wattle.
The East African phase of the expedition will end sometime in early December. If personal funds permit, he will then lead a smaller safari through Uganda to the headwaters of the Nile. In the new year, he will cruise down the great river to Egypt, stopping at leisure to hunt northern big game, not reconnecting with civilization until his wife meets him at Khartoum. That should be about eleven months from now. He wants to show her Aswan and Luxor and Karnak, where as a boy he first felt himself regressing in time. (She has somehow always figured in his recall: at twelve, the mere sight of a photograph of little Edith Kermit Carow was enough to stir up in him “homesickness and longings for the past which will come again never, alack never.”) From Alexandria, they plan to sail to Italy and revisit the scenes of their honeymoon. After that, his northern speech engagements beckon. He does not expect to return to the United States until the early summer of 1910.
Roosevelt’s safari route through British East Africa, 1909–1910. (photo credit p.1)
“JAMBO BWANA KING YA AMERIK!”
The shout comes from more than three hundred porters, gunbearers, horse boys, tent men, and askari guards. They stand in two lines outside the little station of Kapiti Plains, five and a half thousand feet above sea level. Pitched