Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen Page A

again.
    One night as I looked up I met these profound attentive eyes and after a moment he spoke. “Msabu,” he said, “do you believe yourself that you can write a book?”
    I answered that I did not know.
    To figure to oneself a conversation with Kamante onemust imagine a long, pregnant, as if deeply responsible, pause before each phrase. All Natives are masters in the art of the pause and thereby give perspective to a discussion.
    Kamante now made such a long pause, and then said, “I do not believe it.”
    I had nobody else to discuss my book with; I laid down my paper and asked him why not. I now found that he had been thinking the conversation over before, and prepared himself for it; he stood with the Odyssey itself behind his back, and here he laid it on the table.
    “Look, Msabu,” he said, “this is a good book. It hangs together from the one end to the other. Even if you hold it up and shake it strongly, it does not come to pieces. The man who has written it is very clever. But what you write,” he went on, both with scorn and with a sort of friendly compassion, “is some here and some there. When the people forget to close the door it blows about, even down on the floor and you are angry. It will not be a good book.”
    I explained to him that in Europe the people would be able to fix it all up together.
    “Will your book then be as heavy as this?” Kamante asked, weighing the Odyssey.
    When he saw that I hesitated he handed it to me in order that I might judge for myself.
    “No,” I said, “it will not, but there are other books in the library, as you know, that are lighter.”
    “And as hard?” he asked.
    I said it was expensive to make a book so hard.
    He stood for some time in silence and then expressed his greater hopes of my book, and perhaps also repentance of his doubts, by picking up the scattered pages from the floor and laying them on the table. Still he did not go away, butstood by the table and waited, and then asked me gravely: “Msabu, what is there in books?”
    As an illustration, I told him the story from the Odyssey of the hero and Polyphemus, and of how Odysseus had called himself Noman, had put out Polyphemus’ eye, and had escaped tied up under the belly of a ram.
    Kamante listened with interest and expressed as his opinion, that the ram must have been of the same race as the sheep of Mr. Long, of Elmentaita, which he had seen at the cattle-show in Nairobi. He came back to Polyphemus, and asked me if he had been black, like the Kikuyu. When I said no, he wanted to know if Odysseus had been of my own tribe or family.
    “How did he,” he asked, “say the word,
Noman
, in his own language? Say it.”
    “He said
Outis
,” I told him. “He called himself Outis, which in his language means Noman.”
    “Must you write about the same thing?” he asked me.
    “No,” I said, “people can write of anything they like. I might write of you.”
    Kamante who had opened up in the course of the talk, here suddenly closed again, he looked down himself and asked me in a low voice, what part of him I would write about.
    “I might write about the time when you were ill and were out with the sheep on the plain,” I said, “what did you think of then?”
    His eyes wandered over the room, up and down; in the end he said vaguely: “
Sejui
”—I know not.
    “Were you afraid?” I asked him.
    After a pause, “Yes,” he said firmly, “all the boys on the plain are afraid sometimes.”
    “Of what were you afraid?” I said.
    Kamante stood silent for a little while, his face became collected and deep, his eyes gazed inward. Then he looked at me with a little wry grimace:
    “Of Outis,” he said. “The boys on the plain are afraid of Outis.”
    A few days later, I heard Kamante explain to the other houseboys that in Europe the book which I was writing could be made to stick together, and that with terrible expense it could even be made as hard as the Odyssey, which was again