We neared the clouds. Far below, small tornadoes or dust devils whipped ash into the air, and the wind blew it in sheets of smoke across the slopes. The mists descended, and a gathering wind nagged at the nerves; Hawkes called down that the going was getting worse. It was late morning, with the steepest rock of the volcano summit still to go, and already I was reduced to hands and knees. Again and again, my shoes lost their grip, making me throw myself belly down to avoid slipping backward and gathering speed for the ultimate descent; so steep was it where I lay flung against the mountainside that I seemed virtually upright. Breathless, heart pounding, I listened to the fate of the small debris cast loose by my desperate scrabbling—a scaling hiss, a silence, and finally from the depths of the ravine a horrid muttering, quite indescribable, the only sound I ever heard upon Lengai. And having heard it a few times, I rolled over on my back to get my breath, and drank a little water, and when I was rested, I quit.
I lay there wind-burned, scaled with sterile dust, my flask clutched in a brown hand that in this light had the fierce sinew of a talon. And my decision was the right one, for no sooner had I made it than the clouds were parted by a brilliant sun. The sun relaxed my body, and in its warmth I felt myself open outward in immense well-being, as if a red feather had drifted down into my hand. I lay there languid with relief, enjoying the warm wind and the touch of hair that was straying on my brow, the pure rock water from a cool spring at Manyara, the sun on my hot skin, the feel of breathing, all intensified by the wild beauty of the world. From my seat on the Mountain of God, I ruled Embagai and the green shifting shadows of the Crater Highlands, climbing away into black clouds like a mythical kingdom. The clouds guarded old volcanoes, Jaeger Summit and Loolmalassin, whose peaks I had never seen. Broad-backed, motionless on the wind, an eagle descended the black river that isolates Lengai from the Highlands. Seen from above, a bird of prey, intent on all beneath, is the very messenger of silence.
A series of small mounds, like stepping stones, emerged from the smooth surface of the ash; half-blind with effort on the climb, I had scarcely noticed them. The mounds formed a distinct line down the crest of the ridge, like rhinoceros prints elevated above the surface, and as it happens this was what they were. Apparently a rhino high up on the mountain had tried to flee the last eruptions—perhaps in vain, since its tracks vanish near the edge of the ravine. There was no sign of a trail leading upward, only down. Its tread had compacted the hot ash, and afterwards the mountain winds had worn away the uncompacted ash all around, until the prints had risen above the surface.
Holding a hoofprint in my hands, I raised my eyes to where that horned lump, as if spat up by the volcano, had taken form in the poisonous clouds and rushed down the fiery ridge. What had drawn it up into the mists? Had it been blind, like the buffalo found in the snow high on Mt. Kenya? Imagine the sight of that dark thing in the smoke of the volcano; had an African seen it, the rhino might have become a beast of legend, like the hyena, for it is in such dreamlike events that myths are born.
Anxious to transfix so great a mystery, I chipped two prints clean of packed ash and wedged them into my pack. We descended the volcano, crossed the ash plains, circled dust storms. For four hours on sore feet, I carried the stone prints, but they belonged to the dead mountain, for in the journey they returned to dust.
IX
RED GOD
Epwo m-baa pokin in-gitin’got
Everything has an end.
—MAASAI SAYING1
One bright day of August I went south from Nairobi on the road that crosses the Ngong Hills and descends through ever drier country, passing the site of hand-axe man at Olorgesaille, and winding down out of the hills to the magadi or soda lakes in the pit of the Rift Valley. Lake Magadi itself is a blinding white, a snowfield in the desert, but close at hand, under the stacks and litter of the soda factory, the white is somber, crusted and discolored by strange chemistries. Here a road crosses the soda lake on a narrow dike. Some thirty miles west of Magadi, beyond the Uaso Ngiro River that flows south into Lake Natron, a track turns south through long-grass thorn savanna under the Nguruman Escarpment, curving north again as it climbs onto the plateau.
In Magadi I had been joined by Lewis Hurxthal, a young biologist studying the ostrich, and his beautiful wife Nancy, an artist and designer in charge of educational material put out by the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation in Nairobi. The Hurxthals live on the edge of the Aathi Plain where his favorite birds stalk by, and it was Lew who first instructed me in the esoterica of the cock ostrich, which is unique among birds in the possession of a penis. At this time of year, the cock ostrich flushes red and tumescent in the neck and legs, and both sexes writhe and flounce and run. Careening about, they shuffle their fat wings on their backs like maids tying up apron strings while rushing to answer a bell. Once Lew interrupted a discussion of querencia, that territory in the bullring where the bull feels safe, acts defensively, and is therefore dangerous: “Ostriches”—and he emphasized the word in a soft reproachful tone, as if his great birds had been slighted—“have charisma, too.”
We made camp under big sycamore figs where a clear stream coming down off the Ngurumans flows over shining stones. There are few clear streams in East Africa, and we enjoyed a cool bath in its current, which washed away the danger of bilharzia. Squalls of finches—fire finches, mannikins, cutthroats, rufous-backs, queleas, cordon bleus, gray-headed social weavers, all intermixed like autumn leaves—blew in and out of a bare acacia, descending in gusts to the water’s edge and whirring away again, oblivious of the human presence just across the stream. The quelea, or Sudan dioch, is known also as the plague finch, since it sometimes appears in clouds that descend like blowing smoke upon the crops, in the way of locusts. Toward evening some Maasai came down to bathe. These men were descendants of those who fled to Ngurumani, “the farms,” after the disastrous civil wars of the nineteenth century; their losses made worse by cattle famine in the wake of a locust plague, they were forced to till the soil or die. Today they are found mostly in the Nguruman region, at Engaruka, and under Mt. Meru, where they are called “Warusa.” In dress and customs, the agriculturalists still emulate the pastoral clans, and these arranged themselves in the middle of camp activities, so that everything might take place around their legs. “Nowhere have I met such pleasing and manly natives over the whole extent of country I have yet traversed in Africa,” wrote Joseph Thomson of this people.
A pleasing and manly native, Legaturi, came along next day on an expedition up the rough track that climbs onto the higher steps of the Ngurumans, from where one has a mighty prospect of the broad green swamps of the lower Uaso Ngiro, the volcano of Shombole, and Lake Natron. Farther on, the track loses itself in tsetse bush, and the going got so rough that Nancy, who was four months pregnant, soon felt sick. While Lew tended to her beneath a tree, I went on with Legaturi up the track, which ended eventually at a safari camp set up by Philip Leakey. Beyond, the Nguruman Escarpment mounted northwestward into the wilderness of the Loita Hills.
Feeling uneasy about the Hurxthals, I turned around immediately and started back. In the hot gray day the tsetses were biting without stint; the mute oval shapes made by their overlapping wings speckled the inside of my windshield, and one smooth brute with bristled eyes lit confidingly upon my arm. Despite the thick heat I put on a shirt—Legaturi was swathed like a mummy in his red toga—though I would have been better off had the shirt been white: tsetses prefer dark animals to light, and apparently abhor the zebra, whose stripes appear to disconcert their dim perceptions.
That dipterid biting flies of the genus Glossina were vectors of the trypanosomes that caused nagana in cattle and sleeping sickness in man was discovered in Uganda in 1905, and two years later human beings were evacuated from Murchison Falls and many other regions, including the shores of Lake Victoria, where two hundred thousand people—two-thirds of the regional population—had been wiped out in a great epidemic. To this day, the tsetse fly, w
hich also infests much of Kenya and the greater part of Tanzania, remains unrivaled as an impediment to human progress in East Africa. Yet there is reason to believe2 that “fly,” by eliminating susceptible animals, opened up an ecological niche for ground-dwelling primates and thereby permitted the debut of baboons and man; quite possibly it also discouraged early forms of man that had as much promise as Homo sapiens and very likely more. Tsetse has determined man’s migration routes and settlements, and defended the interior from invasions from the coast; in regions like western Maasai Land in Kenya, where elimination of tsetse has attracted settlers of the politically powerful Luo and Kikuyu, or in Ruanda-Urundi, where the overthrow of the tall Tusi herdsmen by their Bantu serfs has permitted great areas of grassland to revert to tsetse bush, the fly still nags at the course of Africa.
I returned within the hour to the tree, where Hurxthal rose and came solemnly to meet me. Nancy, eyes wide in a face the color of magadi, was having cramps and feared she might be in labor. We were seven miles beyond our camp, and twenty miles from the Uaso Ngiro game post, which might or might not have a radio that worked; from there it was thirty miles more into Magadi. The first seven miles would be the worst, but all of this track was an ordeal for a girl who might be losing her first child. To calm her and rest her for the journey, it seemed best to make camp where we were. Lew worked unceasingly to soothe his wife and make her comfortable against the heat. Although she kept her head throughout, she was badly frightened, and with damned good reason, or so it seemed to me. Privately, I had lost hope for the child, and there was a period in the first few hours of that endless afternoon when I was very worried about Nancy, who never left the sickbed that we constructed in the back of the Land Rover. I racked my brain to make certain we understood what we would do and in what order in a crisis, at the same time marveling at our heedlessness in taking a pregnant girl so far from help. Most of all, I dreaded that my battered Land Rover would break down beyond repair at a crucial moment. In this gloomy hollow of sere thornbush, the gray rainless sky of African summer seemed to weigh upon the earth, I remembered the words of a girl born here in Tanzania: “Africa overwhelms me so, especially at twilight, that sometimes I burst into tears.”
There is no wealth without children, Africans say, and children are especially precious to the Maasai. “The Kikuyu themselves told me how in the old times the Masai had thought it beneath them to intermarry with Kikuyu. But in our days the strange dying nation, to delay its final disappearance has had to come down in its pride, the Masai women have no children and the prolific young Kikuyu girls are in demand with the tribe.”3 On their fourth day of life, Maasai children are taken outside and presented to the sun, and in the days of the civil wars, so it is said, peace among the tribes was made when mothers from the opposing sides suckled one another’s babies.
Legaturi, with an air of lofty detachment, was watching closely from beneath a large commiphora, the bark of which, boiled, is a Maasai medicine. His gestures made plain that Nancy’s belly should be rubbed in a certain way, but unfortunately we could not understand him, and as for his commiphora infusion, we had nothing to cook with. Excepting a very light small tent and some canned food, our gear had all been left behind at the camp beside the stream.
By evening Nancy was calmer and more comfortable, despite her dread of the journey the next day. We heated some food tins in a fire, and lacking a lantern, went to bed at dark, the Hurxthals in the Land Rover, and I in their small tent under the tree. Legaturi, disdaining the offer of a place in the two-man tent, had made himself a shelter out of thorn branches, but soon he came tugging at the tent fly, murmuring excuses, and once inside, spat all over its triangular doorway of mosquito netting, to bless this transparent stuff against the passage of night animals. Near Leakey’s camp, we had come upon a black-maned lion in the grass, and Legaturi, seated beside me, had hurled defiance at the king of beasts, splitting my ears with the blood-curdling whoops and chants used by the lion-killing moran of other days. The lion gazed at him, unmoved. When I drove closer, Legaturi subsided, grabbing up my binoculars and pressing them at me, imploring me to stop right there and take a picture: “Simba! Simba mkubwa!” (Big lion!) Closing the car window tight, he had shrunk into his blanket, glazed with fright. If Legaturi is a fair example, the agricultural Maasai have lost that aplomb with wild animals for which the tribe is so well known.
In the middle of the night, a rhino blundered into us. A rude Chough! Chough! Chough! at the quaking canvas brought us both upright, and Legaturi seized my knee in a famished grip as if fearful that l’Ojuju, the Hairy One, might rush out to do single combat with the huge night presence whose horn was but a few feet from our faces. He did not let go until the rhino wheeled and crashed away. “Kifaru!” Legaturi whispered, finding his voice at last. “Kifaru mkubwa!”
At daylight, slowly, the Land Rover jolted down off the Ngurumans, Nancy cradled in her husband’s arms. Near our first camp we made tea, and for an hour or two she rested. Here Legaturi left us, extending a warm invitation—“Karibu! Karibu! Karibu!”—to visit him one day in his en-gang. Then we toiled onward, mile by slow mile, arriving at the Uaso Ngiro in the early afternoon. A professional hunter, Robert Reitnauer, camped there with clients on safari, was able to contact Nairobi by radio-telephone, and Frank Minot of the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation was waiting with an airplane at Magadi, where we arrived just before twilight. Nancy was flown out to Nairobi Hospital, and after a few days’ rest was permitted to go home. (The baby was born on December 23, and on Christmas Day Nancy wrote me a letter “propped up in my Nairobi Hospital bed, plied with toast and marmalade, and just having handled and breast fed our daughter for the first time, I’m at a loss to describe my wonder and happiness. . . . She was literally my Christmas present . . . a small pink pumpkin-like creature looking remarkably like Lew.”)
I made camp south of Magadi, on a ridge that rose from the white soda. In the sinking sun the flats were red and gray. I washed myself and washed my clothes and hung them from the limbs of a squat commiphora full of young skinks, and in moments the damp clothes crawled with wizened bees that came out of nowhere to suck at the precious moisture. The heat was awesome, as if the bleached grass all round had caught on fire, but the air was so dry that it was comfortable so long as one was naked and moved carefully. I made myself a cup of rum and sat on a rope camp stool under the tree, gazing out across the south end of Magadi toward the Nguruman Escarpment and beyond, to the Loita Hills. Tomorrow I would walk the lunar shores of the great Lake Natron that I had seen so many times off in the distance.
Two winters before, in the Gol Mountains, Myles Turner and I had planned a foot safari over the Loita Hills, which are roadless and little known; George Schaller or Hans Kruuk and the wildlife photographer, Alan Root, might go as well. So far as Myles knew, nobody had ever attempted this trek, which he had dreamed about for many years: “One day I’ll do it,” he kept saying, as if forgetting that we had already made a plan. Our route would continue southward over the Ngurumans to the Sonjo villages, just across the Tanzania border, then down along the west shore of Lake Natron. A day would be taken to climb Ol Doinyo Lengai, after which we would continue into the Crater Highlands, passing by way of Embagai Crater, and coming out eventually at Nainokanoka or Ngorongoro. But this journey, potentially so much more exciting and rewarding than a shooting safari, had never come about, though Myles and I still talk about it, and hope it will.
The reasons given for the indefinite postponement of the foot safari—length of time involved, conflict of schedules, logistics, leave time, my own failure to maintain touch while away from Africa—were understandable enough, but perhaps there was a part of Myles that did not want the safari he had dreamed of for so long to be over and done with. For then some image of that epic Africa of hope and innocence that lay off there in the blue, the Africa of the ivory hunters, Selous and Neumann, Jim Sutherland and Karamoja Bell, would no longer lie safe in the past and future
but in the reality of the present, and with the evaporation of the image, hope would end, and with it a sense of his own life too vital to relinquish. For Myles’s tough laconic manner hides the romanticism of a man addicted fatally to the past.
A year ago, before the enterprise came all apart, I sensed that the Loita safari was a dream, and another man’s dream at that, and attempted to make the journey in pieces, on my own. I went first to Lengai, for the Mountain of God was the beacon in this strangest and most beautiful of all regions that I have come across in Africa. Later, in the Crater Highlands, with a Maasai friend named Martin Mengoriki, I camped on the rim of Embagai, in the hope of going down into its crater. The rim was an alpine meadow dense with flowers, like a circlet around the cloud in the volcano, and under the cloud a crater lake lay in deep forest. All day we waited for a clearing wind, to locate a way down the steep sides, but instead the cloud overflowed onto the meadow, smothering the senses. Uneasy, Martin said: “It is so quiet,” and was startled by the volume of his gentle voice: we could hear a mole rat chewing at the grass roots and the tiny wing flutter of a cisticola across the mist. In a bed of lavenders and yellows, cloud curling past the white bands of its ears, lay a big serval. The cat remained there a long moment, shifting its haunches, before sinking down into the flowers and away.