We also utilised our stay here to film what afterwards proved to be one of our very best dramas. We called it The Outlaw of the Sudu Mountains, and in the beginning we merely intended to use the play as a sort of setting for the beautiful scenery around Aledjo, much of which is, as I have already intimated, grand beyond description. When, for example, the harmattan is not in evidence, and the atmosphere is consequently clear, one can see right away to the Bassari Mountains, and the lofty outstanding peak of Mafakasa, meaning "Long Gun." At night, too, when the moon is shining as only it does in the tropics, the landscape takes on a new, mysterious beauty, on which I was never tired of gazing. Other nights, when there was no moon, the grass fires lit up the country for miles around, so that I thought I had never seen anything so awe-inspiring and magnificent. These grass fires are started by the natives at regular intervals during the dry season, as otherwise the country would be covered with an altogether too luxuriant vegetation. It is simply marvellous how quickly nature repairs the ravages of the flames. After two or three days, new green grass shoots up through the ash-covered soil, and clothes the whole of the burnt areas with a beautiful carpet of verdure three or four inches high, on which the antelope, and other small four-footed game, feed greedily. The natives call this "the sweating of the country," a most expressive phrase. The flames did not as a rule sweep onward with a wide front, but ate broad streets and roads, as it were, through the bush; and we used to amuse ourselves after dinner of an evening by making imaginary comparisons between these fiery thoroughfares and places we knew. "There is the Strand," we would say, "and over there the Unter den Linden. Yonder are the long-drawn-out lights of the Thames Embankment, and that is the Boulevarde des Italiens. This is the White City, that is Earl's Court, and so on." It was all very amusing, and served to recall memories of home and friends, and of happy hours spent in far different surroundings. Later on, I may add, when our caravan had to make long detours to avoid these same grass fires, I was not so greatly in love with them. Our horses, however, were not in the least frightened of them, which was one comfort. They would even gallop through some of the lesser ones, and seemed to have a perfectly marvellous knack of finding openings in the advancing line of dancing flames, through which they trotted unconcernedly. The reason for this is, of course, that these African horses have been used to grass fires all their lives. An animal fresh from Europe would probably go wild with terror, if confronted with one for the first time.
We evolved the plot of the Outlaw film practically on the spot, and I have very good reason to remember it, for while playing in it I met with yet another of those mishaps which seem to be inseparable from the profession of cinema acting. Briefly the story of the play is as follows. A white man is outlawed from amongst his fellows, and takes to the bush, living as a native amongst the natives. Prowling about one day in the vicinity of a settlement, he approaches a farmer's homestead, and is ordered off by the farmer's wife—myself. Cursing and threatening, he goes away to his lair in the hills, where he has collected together a lot of black scalliwags, of whom he is the self-elected chief. He sits apart on a knoll, brooding over the slight that has been put upon him, and vowing revenge.
His chance comes sooner than he had anticipated. From his eerie in the hills he sees me walking along a lonely path, decides to kidnap me, and does so, carrying me, struggling wildly, to his lair, over steep and dangerous mountain tracks. Part of the way led along the brink of a precipice, where the foothold was extra precarious, but of course I had to keep on struggling and squirming, as obviously a robust young woman of two-and-twenty is not going to submit to be abducted in this rough-and-ready fashion without making a fight for it.
Reproduced from Cinematograph Films
1. Hair-dressing
2, 3. Baby's Bath
4. Better than the Tango. A curious bumping dance
5, 6. Scenes from "The White Goddess"
It was this that was the cause of the accident. The camera man was grinding away at his machine, and calling out "Capital! Capital! Keep it up! Keep it up!" while Schomburgk sat a little way off on a rock out of range and beamed approval. Everything, in short, was going on first-rate, when suddenly Nebel, who was playing the part of the outlaw, stumbled over a boulder that lay in his way. At the same moment I, over-anxious perhaps to do perfect justice to the situation by making it as realistic as possible, gave a more than usually energetic wriggle. The result was that he lost his balance completely, and we tumbled head over heels on the very brink of the precipice. As the scene had been originally mapped out, he ought to have been carrying me in his arms. But he had insisted that this was not the way an outlaw would carry off a woman, and had hoisted me across his shoulder. As a result, when he fell, I flew clear of him, and landed within less than a foot of the edge of the cliff. Had I gone over, it goes without saying that I should most certainly never have played in a cinema drama again. As it was, I was cut and bleeding, and pretty badly bruised, but my professional instinct caused me to ask almost automatically as they picked me up, "What sort of a picture did it make?" As a matter of fact, except that it did not show the depth of the precipice, it made a very good one, for the operator had never ceased all the while turning the handle of his machine. Nothing short of an earthquake, and a pretty big earthquake at that, would, I am convinced, upset the equanimity of a cinema photographer to the extent of making him stop grinding away at his beloved camera.