The Tree Where Man Was Born (16 page)

The unseasonal rains of late January continued into February, falling mostly in late afternoon and in the night; many days had a high windy sun. In this hard light I walked barefoot on the plain, to feel the warm hide of Africa next to my skin, and aware of my steps, I was also aware of the red oat and red flowers of indigo-fera, the skulls with their encrusted horns (which are devoured like everything else: a moth lays its eggs upon the horns, and the pupae, encased in crust, feed on the keratin), the lairs of wolf spiders and the white and yellow pierid butterflies, like blowing petals, the larks and wheatears (Olde English for white-arse), the elliptical hole of the pandanus scorpion and the round hole of the mole cricket, whose mighty song attracts its females from a mile away, the white turd of the bone-eating hyena, and the pyriform egg of a crowned plover in water-colored
camouflage that blends the rain and earth and air and grass.

Bright flowers blowing, and small islets of manure; to the manure come shiny scarabs, beloved of Ra (god of the Sun, Son of the Sky). The dung beetles, churning in over the grass, collide with the deposits of manure, or attach themselves to the slack ungulate stomachs full of half-digested grass that the carnivores have slung aside. They roll neat spheres of ordure larger than themselves and hurry them off over the plain. Here dung beetles fill the role of earthworms: the seasonal droppings of hundreds of thousands of animals, most of which is buried by the beetles, ensures that the soil will be aerated as well as fertilized.

By morning the ground is soaked again and the tracks muddy. Frogs have sprung from fleeting pools, and the trills of several species chorus in the rush to breed. Companies of storks, nowhere in evidence the day before, come down in slow spirals from the towers of the sky to eat frogs, grass-mice, and other lowlife that the rains have flooded from the earthen world under the mud-flecked flowers.

The grassland soil is built of ash blown westward from the volcanoes of the Highlands. Beyond the ash plain, in the vicinity of Seronera, the soil is derived from granitic rock and supports an open woodland vegetation. This is some of the oldest rock on earth—certain granites here are two to three billion years old—and on the plain the bone of Africa emerges in magnificent outcrops or kopjes, known to geologists as inselbergs, rising like stone gardens as the land around them settles, and topped sometimes by huge perched blocks, shaped by the wearing away of ages. The kopjes serve as water catchments, and in the clefts, where aeolian soil has mixed with eroded rock, tree seeds take root that are unable to survive the alternate soaking and dessication on the savanna, so that from afar the outcrops rise like islands on the grass horizons. In their shadows and still compositions, the harmonious stones give this world form.

When the sun has risen and the morning’s hunt has slowed, the cats may resort to the rock islands. Perhaps they seek shade, or the vantage point of higher elevation—for the leopard its kopje is a hideout between raids—or perhaps, like myself, they like their back to something, for especially in summer, when the herds have withdrawn into the western woodlands and a dry wind blows in the dry grass, the granite heads are a refuge from the great emptiness of the plain. Kopjes occur in isolated companies, like archipelagoes—one group may be ten miles from the next—but most groups are related to a rising spine of rocks that emerges more or less gradually from the ash plain, from the low Gol Kopjes in the east to the majestic Morus at the edge of the western woodlands. Highest of all is Soit Naado Murt (in Maasai, the Long-necked Stone), nicknamed Big Simba Kopje, which juts straight up a hundred feet or more near the center of the spine, just off the main road from Olduvai to Seronera.

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.”
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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.