The Tree Where Man Was Born

  There is more than a trace of a vanished race in the Bantu-speaking Sonjo, who still practice stone terracing and irrigation only sixty miles away to the northwest, above Lake Natron, and build fortified palisades around their villages that are found nowhere else south of western Ethiopia, where the Neolithic Hamites are thought to have emerged. One recalls that such non-Bantu peoples as the Hima and Tusi herdsmen of Uganda and Ruanda-Urundi have adopted the Bantu tongue, and the name Sonjo brings to mind the “Enjoe,” as the Kikuyu called that vanished northern people, known to the Dorobo as the Mokwan, who built stone “hut circles” on the Uasin Gishu Plateau, and were said to have been scattered by the Maasai. These “hut circles,” often mere depressions, may have served also as bomas for the long-horned cattle,9 and are known as “Sirikwa holes”: perhaps the Mokwan, Enjoe, and Sirikwa are all one.10 Present-day Sonjo stone construction cannot compare with the clean unmortared work at Engaruka, but this people have a legend of a lost city known as Belwa, and inevitably one wonders if the light-skinned Sonjo—they are even lighter than the “Nilo-Hamitic” Maasai—retreated to their remote escarpment after the fall of Engaruka.

  Tribal traditions being unreliable, one cannot trust the memory of the Maasai, nor count on Belwa, but it is fine, unscientific fun to try to match the pieces of all the traditions in this region of archaic peoples, which are generally supported by the Somali belief that the stonework in the Crater Highlands region is the work of those early engineers who carved the deep wells at Wajir and Marsabit, in the Northern Frontier Province of Kenya—a race of giants, so they say, that came out of Arabia two thousand years ago, and were the ancestors of the tall Tusi. If Engaruka is more than a few centuries old, it may have been an inland settlement that like Zimbabwe traded with the coast. If so, what brought it to an end? Were the Engaruka builders the fierce il Adoru of the Maasai tradition of settlement of this region? Or did the end come before the appearance of the Maasai? According to chronicles of the Portuguese, the coastal town of Kilwa was destroyed in 1589, and three thousand of its four thousand inhabitants devoured by marauding hordes of cannibals known as the Zimba. The Zimba, who also sacked Mombasa and were finally routed at Malindi, are another mystery, since the modern Zimba are a Bantu tribe of the savannas of the lower Zambezi among whom cannibalism is not known (though they are related to cannibalistic Bantu of the central forests).11 No one can say where the historic Zimba came from, nor what caused their locust-like advance, nor where they subsided once their rage was spent, but possibly they brought an end to Engaruka.

  Engaruka today is a shady village of irrigation ditches, banana shambas, dogs and chickens, and here the last traces of good track were left behind. The cars wound down along the river, then headed off into dense thicket. The cattle track diminished in the sun and dust, and for miles the cars forced a way through tough acacia scrub with a fierce shriek of thorn on metal. Then footpath became cattle trail again, tending away from the highlands as before, and emerging eventually in a stony plain that extends to the foot of Kitumbeine. Off to the west, the rainy greens of Kerimasi loomed and passed, and then the gray cone of Lengai came into view, drifting out from behind the Crater Highlands like a moon.

  In the distance were the hard white spots that in African landscapes signify far herds of cattle, but here the livestock and wild animals were still in balance, as once they were throughout Maasai Land. Everywhere along the track trailed zebra, gazelle, and wildebeest, with a few eland; outside the parks and their environs I had never seen plains game so common since leaving the Sudan nine years before. The plain was inset with fleeting pools, and a hoof-pocked track wandered from water to water. In a land so hard and flat, the pools had no more depth than mirrors, refracting the changing weathers in the sky, and but for the trees and the tramped margins, the water would have seemed a trick of light that would fade as the sun turned. Water lines of teal and dabchick cracked the mirror, and the long-stemmed silhouettes of wading birds stood still. The edges teemed with sandpipers, feeding avidly before night fell; at dark, under the moon, these Palearctic migrants would cross the equator into the Northern Hemisphere, and tomorrow might find them on Lake Rudolf or the Nile. Marabous, sitting back upon their hinges, digested some unspeakable repast, and in the new grass all around, the prosperous insects had drawn down upon their heads great companies of European storks; the tall white birds stood solemnly on every side. Storks are birds of holocaust—they dance in the heat shimmer of fires, peering down among the sparks for fleeing lizards, grass mice, snakes—and at one time, they attended locust plagues. Now the locusts can be kept under control except in those unstable regions where man has lost control over himself.12

  At noon two days later, the stork companies rose motionless on the thermals, curling like smoke in tight flocks of many hundreds, higher and higher over Kerimasi and the Crater Highlands, until the flocks were wisps against the clouds. At the crest of a mile-high column of white birds, they set their course, blown down the sky toward the hard blue of the north horizon. The shorebirds were already gone, and of the native water birds, a solitary grebe remained. On the black margins milled thousands of small Zebu cattle, mixed with a few giant-horned Ankoles and the gaunt twist-horn kine of archaic kingdoms, all of these crowded by low pushing dung-stuck troops of sheep and goat. At the edge of the dust, in earthen robes, the herdsmen leaned upon their spears, faces in shadow. Swallows coursed the dusty herds, snatching hot insects, and the noon air danced with the drum of hoofs, wails, whistles, whoops, and tink of bells, bone clicks, bleating, and yelled laughter.

  By the water’s edge man squatted, worn rags pulled low over his brow against the sun. Manure smell, flies, the stamp and lowing of the herds, the heat. In the shallows a naked dancing boy darted and splashed. Then cloud shadow dimmed the water shine on his round head, and he turned black. In foreboding he paused; the water stilled, and clouds gathered in the water. He picked at his thin body, one-legged in the evanescent pool that will vanish in summer like the haze of green on this burning land.

  Grasslands. Eland, swallows, clouds, and wind. A lone Maasai, stalking across the foothills of Kerimasi like a prophet, staff raised, red robe blowing.

  The vehicles forsake the track and cut due west across the slopes toward Lengai. These foothills are mostly parasitic cones of the volcanoes; the cones are grassy, with neat craters. Other craters are inset in the level ground, as if the earth had fallen in, and swallows circle around the rim under the blowing grass.

  Two tall Maasai rise from the grass, casting wild smiles and their few scraps of Swahili: “Jambo! Habari gani?” (What sort of news?) They point toward the volcano, their clubs or rungus like extensions of long bony arms: “Kilima cha Mungu!” they cry. Mountain of God! I shake my head and name the mountain in Maasai: “Ol Doinyo Lengai!” And they smile and wave: “Ngai! Ngai!” In Tanzania, in 1968, the wild herdsmen were ordered to give up their airy shukas and wear pants, but the Maasai pay small attention to such laws; far from the roads, they stand exposed, like the wild people of the Sudan. Their cloth is clean and their beads bright, their ornaments of wrought copper and tin are of a quality not found in the curio shops of Arusha and Nairobi, and the holes in their ear lobes, pierced by the hard thorn of the desert date, are stretched by wooden ear plugs that, nearer the roads, are being replaced by aluminum film canisters dropped by the tourists (in a Maasai village between Makindu and Amboseli, I once found some discarded wooden plugs, silken-smooth with years of human grease). At Mto Wa Mbu, Ngorongoro, Namanga, and Narok the Maasai loiterers are much given to begging and jeering outside the Asian dukas, where they squat on their heels in vulture-like congregations and try halfheartedly to hawk to the tourists old beads and spears and milk gourds and rungus and the short double-edged simis in red scabbards. Such tribesmen bear small resemblance to the people so admired by Thomson, and in fact the suppression of their ways led very quickly to the decline of the Maasai, whose fate much resembles that of the Plains Indians of North Americ
a. A government report of 1939, hardly a half-century after Thomson saw them first, notes a decline in birth rate and a high incidence of sterility and venereal disease, as well as pervasive alcoholism, license, and general apathy. Efforts to enlist Maasai in the police or King’s African Rifles were mostly a failure, and even the few who became educated often returned afterwards to the life of the grasslands, unable to put aside that fierce pride and independence that caused them to reject white settler and missionary alike. Also, in their effort to regain stability after years of plague, famine, and disruption, they clung all the more tenaciously to their old ways. “Mentally impervious to new ideas, and incapable of adapting to new conditions,” they were now adjudged inferior in all respects to the peoples they had formerly ruled. But once again, like the Indians of North America, they were measured by western standards—the downfall of the Maasai had been pride, not inferiority, which was the bureaucratic way of accounting for a wild people’s disdain for western values. At the same time Maasai aloofness was much romanticized and admired, since unlike the abominable Bantu, and the Kikuyu especially, who dared to resent the usurpation of their lands and were forever underfoot, the tribe kept itself out of the path of progress. “It has often been proved in other parts of the globe that the native, in the advent of the white man, alters his habits or ceases to exist, and it is to be hoped that the Maasai will choose the first of these alternatives,” an observer wrote, as early as 1904.13 The Maasai, having no choice, altered his habits, but in a spiritual sense, he has ceased to exist as well.

  The plateau declines toward the pale misty vat of Natron. Around the inland sea, thirty-five miles long, rise lonely mountains: the volcano called Gelai, on the eastern shore, the dark Rift to the west, and at the northern end, in Kenya, Shombole and the Nguruman Escarpment in an horizon of half-mountain and half-cloud, and over all the Mountain of God, presiding.

  It is nearly sunset, and Lengai still far away. Seasonal stream beds and ravines that carry the rain off Kerimasi trench the foothills, and time is lost scouring each gully for a place to cross. Already the motors are too hot and finally it is dark; we make camp under the highland walls, hopefully within walking distance of the great black cone that surrounds itself with stars. Two tents are pitched on the grassy slope, and a fire made. Once this is done, we have a glass of rum. Altogether we are six: besides myself, Vesey-FitzGerald and his friend George Reed and a wildlife photographer and mountaineer named Brian Hawkes, and the cook Chilufia, and the Meru ranger Frank who was with us last year on the Chaperro. Vesey is furious with Chilufia and Frank, who have brought along their water bottles as instructed—they hold them up in proof—but have neglected to put water in them. “You’re a pair of idiots, do you understand that? I told you so last safari and now I’m telling you again and I expect I’ll have to tell you next time, too—you’re a pair of idiots!” Vesey manages to laugh before he finishes, and so do the Africans, but all know that this is not a laughing matter, since there is no good water to be found between here and Engaruka, twenty-five hard miles back. Yet two days later, when water is low, Frank fills his bottle from the jerry can in my Rover, then replaces the cap so carelessly that half of our remaining drinking water leaks away.

  It is often said that Africans cannot lay straight paths or plow straight furrows, screw bottle caps, use rifle sights—in short, that they have no sense of geometric order, much less time, since there is nothing of this sort in nature to instruct them. “Have to watch these chaps every minute,” white East Africans will tell you. “Can’t do the first thing for themselves.” But perhaps the proper word is “won’t.” Most Africans are so accustomed to having decisions made for them by whites, and to carrying out instructions to the letter to avoid abuse, that only rarely do they think out what they are doing, much less take initiative. Rather, they move dully through dull menial tasks—working automatically, without thought, may be all that makes such labor bearable—preferring to be thought stupid than to get in trouble, and at the same time gleeful when calamities occur. Stubborn, apathetic, and perverse, they observe the letter of their instructions, not the spirit of them (Bring your water bottles!). They are not responsible for filling the bottles unless told to do so; if the whites will treat them as children, they will act that way.

  Chilufia’s heart is still in Zambia, and no doubt his mind as well, but I am puzzled by Frank, who is young, ambitious, and alert. Chilufia seems indifferent to being called an idiot; such words are to be shrugged off, like rain. Shauri ya Mungu, he might say—this is the affair of God. But Frank dislikes it; he smiles a strange bad smile as if warning me to understand. One difference between Frank and Chilufia is the name Frank—his real name is Kessi.

  Frank is anxious to communicate, though he speaks my language poorly, and I scarcely speak his at all. When Vesey isn’t listening he uses my first name. The friendliness is genuine, but there is a hair of aggression in it; he scans my eyes for disapproval or rejection. Knowing this and pained by it, I respond enthusiastically, but soon we are overtaken by silence. We cannot communicate after all. Even if we could, we have little to offer but good will and our humanity. Even among white East Africans and black who converse easily in English or Swahili, the problem appears to be mutual boredom, which comes about because both find the interests of the other trivial, and their ideas therefore of small consequence.

  The volcano filled the night like a great bell. Over Shombole and the Loita there was lightning, vast silent illuminations that hollowed out the heavy clouds until they glowed like fire seen through smoke. This night and the next, the lightning came every few moments, but the thunder was too distant to be heard. I listened to a solitary nightjar, fixed in the rigidity of its shrill song that under Lengai was a part of the moon silence.

  With Hawkes at daybreak I set off toward the mountain. Each carried a small knapsack of tea and water, nuts and raisins, notebook and binoculars; Hawkes had a camera. Lengai was clear of clouds, and the distance to the lava fan seemed perhaps six miles. But in the bad light of the night before, we had made camp on the wrong side of a grid of steep ridges, and between the ridges lay steep bush-choked dongas. For the first two hours of the trek, we slid and clambered up and down and up and down, opposed by hidden rocks and head-high grasses. I did not expect trouble with animals, and we had none, but leopard pug marks in the sand bed of a donga were a reminder that we could not forget about them either; the giant grass that was such hard work could hide a rhino.

  At eight, already hot and tired, we stopped on the crest of a ridge and stared bleakly about us. At this rate, two more hours would pass before we reached the mountain, and at least five would be required for the climb. Allowing three hours for the descent and none at all for rest or exploration, we would still face a four-hour return across these badlands after dark. Also, Lengai was gathering its clouds, which would make the climb more difficult. But we had worked too hard to give up now; the going could get easier at any moment, and from the mountainside we might perceive a better route back to the camp. Or so we persuaded each other, trudging on like pilgrims toward the magic mountain. And almost immediately we struck a Maasai cattle track over the ridges to the river of black sand that winds around the base of the volcano. From the black river, the lava plain climbed rapidly to the ridges of Lengai.

  Ahead, a dark gorge cleaved the face of the volcano. The ridge that forms the west side of the gorge faces south toward the Highlands, and its lower slope, still visible beneath the clouds on the summit, looked less precipitous than the rest. We walked up the black river bed then climbed the far bank and traversed the ash plain. Here a zebra had once wandered; into one ghostly print the wind had blown the copper shell of a large beetle. Higher still, the beetle husks were everywhere, glinting in the wind waves of the surface. The fire and ash of its last eruption, in 1967, buried Lengai in a gray lunar snow, all but these withered tips of wind-twitched grass. At the ravine edge stood the husk of a whistling-thorn on which the galls have turned to w
ood, yet ants inhabited the galls, subsisting, perhaps, on the dead beetles that blow across the wastes; in greener times, these ants protected the new tips of the acacia against browsers such as the giraffe. A stray lizard track excepted, the ants are the one sign of terrestrial life. Footsteps resound, for the Mountain of God is hollow; there is no sense of the present here, only the past.

  In the spring of 1969, on a flight from Nairobi to Manyara, and again in the winter of 1970, coming from Seronera to Arusha, I got the pilots to circle the volcano. Buffeted by downdrafts, dodging clouds, the light planes came in over the deep furrows of the flanks and made tight circles over the sickening vat. In its brimstone smokes, dead grays, sulfurous yellows, there was no hint of green, no sign of life.

  The slope had steepened. We dropped our packs beside the dead acacia, and standing there, leaning back into the hill, I became aware of butterflies and birds. The first butterfly was as orange as the sun, and the wind hurried it from east to west across the falling desert, its fire so intensified by the flat light that it was still visible where it rounded the mountain and spun away northwest toward Lake Natron. The birds were birds of high rock places—swifts, crag martins, the white Egyptian vulture—riding the drafts and currents. Then a lark came strangely near before bounding down across the deserts. On the wind this morning I had heard an elusive lark song; perhaps this solitary bird had been the singer.

  I put a few nuts and raisins in my pocket and took a sip of water. The desert air of the volcano was so dry that one handled the water with the kind of reverence that the Bushman must feel for the water that he stores in ostrich eggs. Then we were off again. I concentrated on slow steady steps, a steady breath, at pains not to look down. On the narrowing ridge, there were no rocks, no sticks, no handholds of any kind, only the slick surface of the ash; it was dusty but hard, and my light boots could find no grip. Hawkes, who had climbing boots, was doing better, but he was not optimistic. Before the eruption, according to its few veterans, the conquest of Lengai had been arduous but not difficult; now, Hawkes felt, this route, at least, was a job for a four-man team with ropes and ice-axes. On our right hand, the ridge dropped sheer into the black ravine; to the left, one would roll and bounce all the way to the black river for want of something to catch hold of. I stared rigorously upward, where the white vulture, stiff-winged as a kite, was suddenly sucked up into the mists.