The lonely Gols are kopjes of the short-grass prairie, lying off to the north of the Olduvai-Seronera road. The shy cheetah is a creature of the Gols, its gaunt gait and sere pale coat well suited to these wind-withered stones, and one day I saw a glowing leopard stretched full length on a rim of rock, in the flickering sun shade of a fig; seeing man, it gathered itself without stirring, and flattened into the stone as it slid from view. It is said that a leopard will lie silent even when struck by stones hurled at its hiding place—an act that would bring on a charge from any lion—but should its burning gaze be met, and it realizes that it has been seen, it will charge at once. A big leopard is small by comparison to a lion, or to most men, for that matter, but its hind claws, raking downward, can gut its prey even as the jaws lock on the throat, and it strikes fast. It is one of the rare creatures besides man known to kill for the sake of killing, and cornered, can be as dangerous as any animal in Africa. Rural tribes have trouble in the night with leopards that steal into their huts to seize children by the throat and carry them off undetected—a testimony to the sleeping powers of the African as well as to the great stealth of this cat. Ordinarily, the unwounded leopard is not a menace to adults, but this past winter, a night leopard killed an African receptionist, Feragoni Kamunyere, outside his quarters at Paraa, Murchison Falls, and dragged the body, bigger than itself, a half mile or more into the bush, presumably to feed its waiting cubs. The strength of leopards is intense: I have seen one descend the trunk of a tall tree head first, a full-grown gazelle between its jaws.
There are few trees in the Gols, which are low and barren, yet in their way as stirring as the Morus, which rise like monuments in a parkland of twenty-five square miles, and have a heavy vegetation. Impala, buffalo, and elephant are attracted to the Morus from the western woods, and the elephants, which are celebrated climbers, attain the crests of the steep kopjes, to judge from the evidence heaped upon the rock. One day at noon, from this elephant crest, a leopard could be seen on the stone face of the kopje to the south, crossing the skeletal shadows of a huge candelabra euphorbia. In the stillness that attended the cat’s passage, the only sound was a rattling of termites in the leaf litter beneath my feet.
Here near the woods the long grass is avoided by the herds. Lone topi and kongoni wander among these towers, and an acacia is ringed by a bright circlet of zebras, tails swishing, heavy heads alert. The wild horses are not alarmed by man, not yet; all face in another direction. Somewhere upwind, in the tawny grass, there is a lion.
I spent one February day on a small kopje, gazing out over the plain. The kopje overlooks a swampy korongo—not a true stream but a drainage line—that holds water in this season, and is bordered by dense thicket. On this rock, in recent days, I had seen a lioness and cubs swatting around the dried carcass of a gazelle that must have been scavenged from a leopard. I circled the place and studied it before committing myself, and climbing the rock, I clapped my hands to scare off dangerous inhabitants. In daylight, lions will ordinarily give way to man, and snakes are always an exaggerated danger, but care must be taken with the hands, for adders, cobras, mambas all reside here.
The hand claps echoed in a great stillness all around; the intrusion had drawn the attention of the plain. A stink of carrion mingled queerly with the perfume of wild jasmine on the rock. The birds fell still, and lizards ceased their scuttering. Then the early sun was creased by clouds. Standing in gray wind on the bare rock, I had a bad moment of apprehension—the sense of Africa that I sought through solitude seemed romantic here, unworthy. At my feet lay the reality, a litter of big lion droppings and a spat-up hair ball.
I looked and listened. From the fig tree came a whining of the flies. The sun returned, and from the sun came the soft wing snap or flappeting of the flappet lark, and the life of the plain went on again, bearing me with it.
Already the granite was growing warm, and leaves of a wild cucumber strayed on its surface. Squatted by a pool of rain that baboons had not yet found and fouled, I studied my surroundings. By the korongo spurfowl nodded through rank grass inset with a blue spiderwort, crimson hibiscus, a bindweed flower the color of bamboo. Soon a reedbuck, crouched near the stream edge until the intruder should depart, sprang away like an arrow as its nerves released it, scattering the water with high bounding silver splashes. Where it had lain, golden-backed weavers swayed and dangled from long stalks of purple amaranth. A frog chorus rose and died, and a bush shrike, chestnut-winged, climbed about in the low bushes.
A mile away to the northwest stood the great kopje that the Maasai call Soit Naado Murt. In the southern distance, toward the Morus, zebra and wildebeest passed along the ridges, and where the unseen carnivores were finishing a kill, the vultures were a black pox on the sky. To the east, under a soaring sun, ostriches ran down the grass horizon, five thousand feet above the sea. There came a start of exhilaration, as if everything had rounded into place.
Now it was man who sat completely still. In the shade of the great fig, a soft hooting of a dove—coo, co-co, co-co. The dove, too, had been waiting for me to go, blinking its dark liquid eye and shifting its pretty feet on the cool bark. Now it had calmed, and gave its quiet call. Bushes at the kopje base began to twitch where mousebirds and bee-eaters stilled by the hush were going on about their bright-eyed business, and agama lizards, stone eyes glittering, materialized upon the rock. The males were a brilliant blue and orange, heads swollen to a turgid orange-pink (kopje agamas have been so long isolated on their rock islands that color variations have evolved; those at Lemuta Kopjes, in arid country, are mostly a pale apricot), and they were doing the quick press-ups of agitation that are thought to be territorial threat display. Perhaps man lay across the courtship routes, for they seemed thwarted and leapt straight up and down, whereas the females, stone-colored, skirted the big lump that did not concern them.
As if mistrustful of the silence, a kongoni climbed to the crest of a red termite mound to look about; I focused my binoculars to observe it only to learn that it was observing me. The long-faced antelope averted its gaze first. “The kongoni has a foolish face,” an African child has said, “but he is very polite.”7 Not far away, a Thomson’s gazelle was walking slowly, cocking its head every little way as if to shake a burr out of its ear. It was marking out its territory by dipping its eye toward a stiff prominent blade of grass, the tip of which penetrates a gland that is visible under the eye as a black spot; the gland leaves a waxy black deposit on the grass tip, and the gazelle moves on a little way before making another sign. Once one knows it is done, the grass-dipping ceremony, performed also by the dik-dik, is readily observed, but one sees why it passed unnoticed until only a few years ago.
In the still heat that precedes rain, a skink, striped brown, raised its head out of the rock as if to sniff the flowers and putrefaction. A variable sunbird, iridescent, sipped from a fire-colored leonotis, blurred wings a tiny shadow on the sky; it vanished, and the plain lay still.
A big weather wind from the southeast came up in the late morning, and by noon it was shifting to the east, turning the dark clouds on the Crater Highlands. Once again, the herds were moving. To see the animals in storm, I abandoned my rock and went over to Soit Naado Murt, and climbed the broad open boulders on the south side, away from the road.
Soaring thunderheads, unholy light: at the summit of the rock the wind flung black leaves of twining fig trees flat against the sky, and black ravens blew among them. I straightened, taking a deep breath. From its aerie, a dog baboon reviled me with fear and fury. Puffs of cold air and a high far silent lightning; thunder rolled up and down the sky. Everywhere westward, the zebra legions fled across the plain. But dark was coming, and soon I hurried down off the high places. At the base of the rock, the suspense, the malevolence in the heavy air was shattered by a crash in the brush behind, and I whirled toward the two tawny forms that hurtled outward in a bad late light, sure that this split second was my last. But the lion-sized and lion-colored animals were
a pair of reedbuck, as frightened as myself, that veered away toward the dense cover of the korongo. I stood still for a long time, staring after them as darkness fell, aware of a strange screaming in my ears. Then I came to, and moved away from the shadows of the rock. A pale band in the west, under mountains of black rain, was the last light, and against this light, on the rock pinnacles, rose the hostile cliff tribe of baboons. In silhouette they looked like early hominids, hurling wild manic howlings at my head.
V
IN MAASAI LAND
The primal ancestor of the Masai was one Kidenoi, who lived at Donyo Egere (Mount Kenia), was hairy, and had a tail. Filled with the spirit of exploration, he left his home and wandered south. The people of the country, seeing him shaking something in a calabash, were so struck with admiration at the wonderful performance that they brought him women as a present. By these he had children who, strangely enough, were not hairy, and had no tails, and these were the progenitors of the Masai.
—JOSEPH THOMSON, Through Masai Land
Like many white men that one comes across in Africa, Myles Turner is a solitary whose job as park warden of the Serengeti keeps him in touch with mankind more than he would like, but one day he got away on a short safari, and was kind enough to take me with him. We would go to the Gol Mountains, in Maasai Land, and from there attempt to reach by Land Rover that part of the Rift Escarpment that stands opposite a remote volcano known to the Maasai as ol doinyo le eng ai, the Mountain of the God, called commonly Lengai.
The eighth of February was a day of low still clouds, waxy gray with the weight of rain. On the plain, the herd animals were restless, and the gnu, crazy-tailed, fled to the four winds, maddened by life. At Naabi Hill, the eastern portal of the Serengeti Park, three lionesses lay torpid on a zebra. Vultures nodded in the low acacias, and the hyenas, wet hair matted like filth on their sagging bellies, dragged themselves, tails tight between their legs, from the rain wallows in the road.
We turned off north toward Loliondo, then east again under Lemuta Hill. Between Lemuta and the Gols is a dry valley, in the rain shadow of the Crater Highlands; here the hollow calls of sand grouse resound in the still air, and an echo of wind from the stoop of a bateleur eagle. Where we had come from and where we were going, a pale green softened the short grass, but in the shadow of the rain, despite massed clouds in all the distances, the flicked hoof of a gazelle raised the soil in a spiral of thin dust.
On the far side of the desert valley is the Gol—the “Hard Country” of the Maasai—a badlands of arid thorny hills and high cold wind. The Gol is crossed by a canyon two miles wide, Ngata Kiti, that climbs gradually in a kind of arch and descends again into the Salei Plain. Ngata Kiti is the eastern range of the migrant herds, and theoretically connects the Serengeti populations with those of the Crater Highlands, but in 1959 this “Eastern Serengeti,” which included Ngorongoro Crater, was returned to the Maasai. In addition, the government attempted to close off Ngata Kiti, where a few nomad Maasai kept a few cattle. Heavy posts linked with seven strands of wire were planted straight across the valley mouth. The wildebeest, faced with this fence, were undetterred; the wire held, but the whole fence went over. “Tried to interfere with what thousands of animals had done for thousands of years,” said Myles, a slight wiry man with weary eyes in a weathered face and a wild shock of sandy red hair. He glared at the old fence line with satisfaction. “It’s marvelous the way those animals smashed it flat. I use the posts for firewood now, out on safari.”
At the mouth of Ngata Kiti is Ol Doinyo Rabi—the Cold Mountain—named for the chill wind that sweeps the Gol in summertime, when the herds have gone west to the woods, and the land is empty. This day there were small companies of wildebeest and zebra, and a secretary bird, that long-limbed aberrant eagle that stalks the open ground, but the true habitants of the Gol are the gazelles, which are the first to reach Ngata Kiti and the last to leave it. Probably the thin grass is sweet, since this soil has been enriched by the volcanos, but here in the rain shadow it is stunted for lack of water. The vehicle seemed small and lost between the walls of Ngata Kiti, winding slowly up the valley toward Naisera, the Striped Mountain, named for black streaks of blue-green algae that have formed on its granite face. Halfway up, big fig trees burst from ledges and crevasses, the bare roots feeling their way down to sustenance one hundred feet below. Behind Naisera we made camp in a grove of umbrella thorn and wildflowers; I remember a delicate apricot hibiscus. At Naisera there are highland birds: the anteater chat and the bronzy sunbird, crombecs, tits. . . .
Myles’s Land Rover was packed with gear of all descriptions, and a truck carried tents for each of us and two tents for the staff, as well as stoves, stores, and water. Like most British East Africans, Myles is extremely thorough in his safari preparations, and saw nothing strange at all in having seven pairs of hands to help us through a short trip of three days—what was strange to him was my discomfort. Not that I let it bother me for long. While the tents went up, I watched white clouds cross the black thunderhead behind Naisera; lightning came, and a drum of rain on the hard ground across the valley. On the taut skin of Africa rain can be heard two miles away. Bird calls rang against Naisera’s walls, which on the north are painted white by high nests of hawk and raven. At the summit, in the changing light, the swifts and kestrels swooped and curved, and an Egyptian vulture gathered light in its white wings. Then the sky rumbled and the white bird sailed on its shaft of sun into the thunder.
The storm arrived in early afternoon. I lay content beneath the raining canvas, head propped upon my kit, and gazed through the tent flap down past Naisera into the dry valley below Lemuta where no rain fell. In the thunder, wildebeest were running. When the rain eased, I crossed the grove to a cave in Naisera’s wall that had a small boma of thorn brush at the mouth, and a neat dry hearth. In a similar cave in the Moru Kopjes, shields, elephants, and abstract lines are painted on the walls in the colors that are seen on Maasai shields; the white and yellow come from clays, the black from ash of a wild caper, and the red ocher is clay mixed with juice from the wild nightshade. Presumably the artists were a band of young warriors, il-moran, who wander for several years as lovers, cattle thieves, and meat-eaters before settling down to a wife, responsibilities, and a diet based on milk and cattle blood. According to Leite, a young Maasai ranger, this cave in the Gol Mountains was also a place of meat-eating, which is forbidden in the villages, and which no woman is allowed to watch. Those women who see it are flogged, he told Myles, who nodded in approval. Leite is tall and brown, with a stretched ear lobe looped into a knot; he gazed about him with an open smile, happy to be here in Maasai Land.
Leite’s people were part of the last wave of lean herdsmen to descend upon East Africa from the north. Perhaps five centuries ago the present-day Nandi tribes invaded western Kenya, driving earlier herdsmen known as the Tatog south from the region of Mt. Elgon; the Maasai tribes were farther to the east, in the grasslands and surrounding plateaus of the Rift Valley, and they, too, appear to have displaced an earlier people, known to the Dorobo as the Mokwan,1 who had long hair and enormous herds of long-horned cattle, and who may be the same herdsmen as the Mwoko, recorded by the Meru Bantu of Mt. Kenya.
In regard to the coming of the Maasai, the Dorobo say2 that a Dorobo hunter at the Narok River saw great companies of people coming down out of the north, and hid; he was caught by the Maasai, and guided them to water for their cattle. The Maasai are thought to have reached Nakuru and the Ngong Hills near Nairobi in the seventeenth century, and their heaven-born first laibon or medicine man was found as a youth in the Ngong at a time thought to have been about 1640. Subsequently they continued south along the Rift, and in the vicinity of the Crater Highlands held great battles with a people that their tradition calls il Adoru3—conceivably the Barabaig, a tribe of the Tatog so fierce that they are known to present-day Maasai as il Ma-’nati or “Mangati,” the Enemy, a name reserved, so it is said, for a worthy foe.
Oth
erwise, the Maasai met with small resistance. By the nineteenth century, they had driven the Galla tribes northeast across the Tana, and Maasai Land extended east and west one hundred and fifty miles and five hundred miles north and south, from the region of Maralal on the Laikipia Plateau to the south end of the Maasai Steppe in Tanzania. Their raids, which spread from Ikuria Land on Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean coast, were feared by Bantu, Arab, and European alike, so much so that Maasai Land remained unexplored until less than a century ago. Avoided by the great slave routes and trails of exploration into the interior, it was the last terra incognita in East Africa.
Linguistically the Maasai are closest to the Bari of the Sudan,4 and the many customs that they share with other tribes of Nilotic origin include male nudity, the shaving of females, the extraction of two middle teeth from the lower jaw, the one-legged heron stance, the belief that the souls of important men turn into snakes, and the copious use of spit in benediction. Like the Nuer, the Maasai believe that all cattle on earth belong to them, and that taking cattle from others is their right. Originally it was God’s intent to give all cattle to the Dorobo, but the great Maasai ancestor Le-eyo tricked the Dorobo, and God into the bargain, receiving the cattle in their place. Hence the Dorobo must live by hunting and gathering, which the Maasai despise. Eland and buffalo may be eaten by Maasai, since these are thought of as wild cattle, but no other animal, or fish or fowl, is ever hunted except for decorative or ceremonial purposes—ostrich head plumes, monkey-skin anklets, ivory earplugs, and the great helmets of lion mane that once identified a proven warrior. (An exception, the rhino, is poached for its horn, which is bought from the Maasai by Asian traders and sold in the East as an aphrodisiac; this commerce is at least as old as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, an account of a trading voyage to the east coast in the first century A.D. In a six-month period of 1961, the Leakeys found over fifty speared rhino in the Olduvai region alone, each stripped of a horn that may be worth a few shillings a pound to the Maasai but far more to the trader. A recent increase in the trade has threatened the black rhino with extinction, all to no purpose, since despite its shape and dynamic angle, the horn—not true horn at all, but hard-packed hair—can do nothing to spur the love-bent oriental, who may pay as much as two hundred dollars per pound to ingest it as a powder.)