The Tree Where Man Was Born (10 page)

At Archer’s Post, the new road crosses the Uaso Nyiro and runs north toward Ethiopia. One day it may actually arrive at Addis Ababa, but as yet it has not reached Marsabit, and none of it is surfaced. The work crews are mostly Kamba and Kikuyu brought up from the south, with a few Turkana mixed among them. The Samburu herdsmen will not work upon the roads. They share the attitudes of true Maasai, whose lands in Laikipia they occupied after the great Maasai civil wars of the 1880s, and to whom they are so similar that they are often called northern Maasai: the Samburu call themselves il-oikop—“the fierce ones,” but to the Maasai are known as il-sampurrum pur (literally, the white butterflies often found around sheep and goat dung) due to their constant movement in search of water.
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“Our customs are the same as theirs,” says an old Sambur picked up along the way. The Samburu and the road laborers gaze at one another, mutually distrustful and contemptuous.

The herdsmen are driving their cattle north, humped Asian zebu with a few long-horned Ankole, and each carries his short sword and club and two leaf-bladed spears of the style used by the Maasai until this century, when the javelin-bladed spear came into fashion; also, a leather water bottle and a small leather pouch. One has an elegant wood headrest, bartered, perhaps, from a Turkana. As a morani, or young warrior, he is painted in red ocher, and his greased braids are pulled up from the nape of his neck, jutting out over his forehead like the bill of a cap. The Samburu regard themselves as “the world’s top
people,”
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and certainly they are more handsome and aristocratic than most other beings, but perhaps because their territories are surrounded by fierce nomads such as the Boran and the Turkana, the Samburu are not so arrogant as the Maasai.

To the north, odd pyramids and balanced rocks take form in the blue dust haze of the desert. Low thorn scrub is interspersed with toothbrush bush, combretum,
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and the desert rose (
Adenium
), with its pink fleshy flowers, rubber limbs, and poison sap, a source of arrow poison. Eliot is struck by desert patterns and details, and we stop here and there to record them. From under a bush darts an elephant shrew; it sits on a dry leaf, twitches, sniffs, and vanishes with a dry scatter. At a hole in the red desert is a ring of grain chaff several inches deep; harvester ants gather kernels from the thin grasses and discard the husks. Farther on, where dark ramparts of the Matthews Range rise in the west, the isolated bushes shelter pairs of dik-dik from the heat: this is Guenther’s dik-dik, grayer, larger, and longer in the nose than the common or Kirk’s dik-dik, which is found south of the Uaso Nyiro. (As with the zebras, “common” and “gray” dik-dik seems much simpler: Messrs. Kirk and Guenther, with Burchell, Grevy, and the estimable Mrs. Gray of Mrs. Gray’s lechwe, should be confined to the taxonomic nomenclature, cf.
Equus Burchelli
, where they belong. And for that matter, why should these ancient rocks of Africa commemorate the unmemorable General Matthews? Why not restore the Samburu name, Ol Doinyo Lenkiyio?)

From the mountains, which are said to shelter a few Dorobo, comes the Merille River. Samburu are digging water points in the dry river bed, and huge leather bottles, some of them three
or four feet high, stand like amphoras near the holes. Other tribesmen squat beneath a big tree on the bank. The young boys, naked but for thin beads and earrings of river shell, have a scalp lock of hair on their plucked heads; the girls wear calf-skin aprons and a cotton cloth tied at one shoulder that parts their pretty breasts. Unmarried girls are painted red, and some have lines of raised tattoos on their fair bellies; an infant in a sling wears a small necklace of green beads. The married women carry a heavy collar of doum palm fiber decorated with large dark red beads, and arms coils of silver steel and golden copper, the gold on the lower arm and the silver above, or the reverse. Men or women may wear metal anklets, bead headbands, copper earrings; one morani has ivory ear plugs and a string of beads that runs beneath his lip and back over his ears. At a little distance, he leans carelessly upon his spear, ankles crossed in a stance that is emblematic among warrior herdsmen from the Sudan south into Maasai Land.

North of the Merille the first dromedaries appear, a small herd in the shelter of the thorns; their keeper is nowhere to be seen. Far cones jut out of the desert, and a group of peaks has a shark-fin appearance, as if swept back by ancient winds off the High Semien, in Ethiopia. This is called the Kaisut Desert, but in June, just after the rains, the black outcroppings of lava are bedded in a haze of green.

Tin shacks of the road gangs gleam in the merciless sun at Lokuloko, in compounds enclosed by high barbed wire. Outside are the dung huts of parasitic Samburu attracted to the settlement, and a few cowled Somali women come and go. Some of the huts have rusty tin sheets stuck onto the roof, in emulation of the tin ovens of the workers; the traditional Samburu village compound is reduced here to a litter of loose hovels. Nowhere on the wind-whipped ground, is there a tree or a blade of grass; the thorn scrub has been bulldozed into piles. Dust, rusting oil drums, blowing papers, black requiem birds, a scent of human poverty: in temperate climates, poverty smells sour, but in hot regions it is sickeningly sweet.

Mt. Marsabit rises from the desert haze like a discolored cloud. Grassy foothills climb in steps toward isolated cones, and the air cools. In a meadow, like a lump from the volcanoes, stands a bull elephant with great lopsided tusks curved in upon each other, the ivory burnished bronze with age like a stone font worn smooth by human hands. This high oasis far from the old trade routes and new tourist tracks, and cut off in recent years by shifta raids, is the realm of the last company of great-tusked elephants in Africa. Many have tusks of a hundred pounds or better on each side, and those of a bull known as Ahmed are estimated at 150 and 170 pounds, and may soon cross, as in the extinct mammoth.

Marsabit in June: great elephants and volcanoes, lark song and bright butterflies, and far below, pale desert wastes that vanish in the sands. On Marsabit are fields of flowers, nodding in the copper-colored grass: blue thistle, acanth, madder, morning glory, vetch and pea, and a magnificent insect-simulating verbena, its flowers fashioned like blue butterflies, even to the long curling antennae. The blossoms of the different families are all of mountain blue, as if born of the same mountain minerals, mountain rain. One cow pea has a large curled blossom, and to each blossom comes a gold-banded black beetle that consumes the petals, and each beetle is attended by one or more black ants that seem to nip at its hind legs, as if to speed the produce of its thorax. Next day I came back to investigate more closely, but the flowering was over and the beetles gone.

The roads of Marsabit are patrolled by the Kenya Rifles, there to protect the tribesmen from the shifta, and also an anti-poaching force whose quarry is often the same. They waved us to a halt. A vast elephant had been located not far from the road; they imagined it was Ahmed, who had not been seen for several weeks. All was invisible but a granite dome that rose out of the bush, and black men and white ones, creeping up, stood in a line before the gray eminence as before an oracle, awaiting enlightenment. Eventually the dome stirred, a curled trunk appeared, and modest tusks were elevated from the foliage
that brought a jeer from the disappointed Africans, though they laughed gleefully at their own mistake.

Ahmed eluded us, as did the greater kudu. In size, this striped antelope is only exceeded by the eland, but the animals are not easily seen, having retreated into the retreating forest, restricted now to high Mt. Marsabit. “
Moja moja tu
,” said the Boran ranger who led us to its haunts—one sees one here and there. The Samburu crowd them with their herds, and so do the Galla—the Boran, Gabbra, and Rendille. (The Galla tribes, found mostly in Ethiopia, are modern Hamites, related to the Egyptians, desert Tuareg, and Berbers of the north.) Boran men wear the Moslem dress of the Somali, though most are pagan; the women dress also like Somali, but their faces lack the oriental cast that make the Somali what some consider the most beautiful women on this continent.

Three of the dead volcanoes on Mt. Marsabit contain crater lakes, of which the largest is Gof Bongole. From the high rim of Bongole, looking south, one sees the shark fin mountains of Losai; eastward, the desert stretches away into Somalia. Of late, it was said, the mighty Ahmed, formerly unassailable in his serenity, had become vexed by the attentions of mankind, and perhaps he was bothered also by the roar of the machines that were bringing the new road from the south, for now he remained mostly in these forests behind Bongole, where he came to water. I awaited him one morning by an olive tree, sheltered from the monsoon wind by the crater rim. From the desert all around came a great silence, as on an island where the sea has fallen still. An amethyst sunbird pierced my eye, and a butterfly breathed upon my arm; I smelled wild jasmine, heard the grass seeds fall. From the crater lake hundreds of feet below rose the pipe of coots, and the scattering slap of their runs across the surface. But no great elephant came down the animal trails on the crater side, only a buffalo that plodded from the crater woods at noon and subsided in a shower of white egrets into the shallows.

Sun and grass: in my shelter, the air was hot. Mosque swallows, swifts, a hawk, two vultures coursed the crater thermals,
and from overhead came a small boom, like the sound of a stooping falcon. But the bird hurtling around the crater rim was a large long-tailed swift of a uniform dull brown. This bird, described as “extremely uncommon and local . . . a highlands species which flies high, seen only when thunderstorms or clouds force them to fly lower than usual”
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is the scarce swift. Though not the first record at Marsabit, the sighting of a bird called the scarce swift gave me great pleasure.

Our camp was in the mountain forest, a true forest of great holy trees—the African olive, with its silver gray-green shimmering leaves and hoary twisted trunk—of wildflowers and shafts of light, cool shadows and deep humus smells, moss, ferns, glades, and the ring of unseen birds from the green clerestories. Lying back against one tree, staring up into another, I could watch the olive pigeon and the olive thrush share the black fruit for which neither bird is named; to a forest stream nearby came the paradise fly-catcher, perhaps the most striking of all birds in East Africa. Few forests are so beautiful, so silent, and here the silence is intensified by the apprehended presence of wild beasts—buffalo and elephant, rhino, lion, leopard. Because these creatures are so scarce and shy, the forest paths can be walked in peace; the only fierce animal I saw was a small squirrel pinned to a dead log by a shaft of sun, feet wide, defiant, twitching its tail in time to thin pure squeakings.

The Game Department people say that we should not travel beyond Marsabit without armed escort, but to carry more people is not possible: the two Land Rovers and the truck are full. We drove out from beneath the mountain clouds, descending the north side of Marsabit into the Dida Gilgalu Desert, where a raven flapped along a famished gully and pocked lava spread like a black crust across the waste.