The Tree Where Man Was Born (29 page)

Dark Meru is gaunt in a pearly sun that illumines the high shards of the blasted crater, and under the peaks the cotton clouds, filling with light, nudge and nestle like balloons in the corners of the dead volcano. Meru is the fifth highest mountain in all Africa, and may once have been highest of all. It is dormant, not extinct; it may have erupted as recently as 1879. An earlier explosion collapsed this eastern wall, and the glacier or crater lake cascaded down the mountain; the walls, still crumbling, raise clouds of dust on windless days.

On the northeast flank of Meru lies a mountain wilderness still relatively unexplored called the Chaperro. I went there with Vesey and John Beasley, the warden of Ngurdoto, and two askaris of the Meru tribe, Serekieli and Frank. A certain Podocarpus species with a finer bark pattern than the more common species occurs on Kilimanjaro, and Vesey was anxious to find out if it was native to Mt. Meru as well. Podocarpus belongs to a primitive group of conifers related to the yews and, with the East African cedar, forms forests of relict
evergreens well over one hundred feet tall. These big trees, in East Africa, are now confined to Meru, Kilimanjaro, and Mt. Kenya.

There is a track up into the crater that crosses the fallen crater wall, and one is able to drive a vehicle with four-wheel drive to eighty-four hundred feet, where the forest opens out into a black lava tumulus, with a true montane flora of such Palearctic forms as heath, barberry, crotalaria, bracken fern, and usnea. Under the peak called Little Meru, where elephants mount stolidly to heights of eleven thousand feet, the track works around the rim to the northern face. Here we would descend through the high forest. In the silver sun of the crater mists, a dusky flycatcher, silver gray and dun, on a limb tip silvered with orchid swords and lichen, was utterly in place. This was cloud forest, with violets and buttercups, clover and geranium, and the mossy tree limbs carried ferns and yellow star flowers of stonecrop. Wild coffee and wild orange filled the clouds with scent, and here and there, like giants in the mist, stood arborescent lily and lobelia. Although animals wander high onto the mountain—the eland, klipspringer, and mountain reedbuck occur commonly at twelve thousand feet—the only antelope we saw on the descent was a lone bushbuck, and the birds were scarce: a bar-tailed trogon, red and blue, poised a moment on a limb, and John Beasley picked out an evergreen forest warbler and a broad-ringed white-eye at the edge of a sunny clearing. Meanwhile, we searched in vain for the uncommon conifer.

The forest was opening into glades where the grass, cropped short, was littered with fresh buffalo dung. “They can’t be far ahead of us,” John Beasley said. Last year Beasley had two ribs broken by a buffalo that caught him as he swung into a tree; he escaped the horn tip but was struck by the heavy boss. The buffalo is said to be the most aggressive animal in Africa, much more dangerous than the rhino, since that beast will often thunder past its target and keep right on going until, at some point in its course, having met with no obstacle and having forgotten what excited it in the first place, it comes to a ponderous
halt. The buffalo, on the other hand, turns quickly and is diligent in its pursuit. It is keen of nose and eye and ear, and like the lion, is very difficult to stop once it attacks, often persisting in the work of destruction for some time after the object of its rage or fear is dead. It will even stalk a man, especially when wounded, coming around on its pursuer from behind, and last year near Momela a man was killed by a lurking buffalo in his own garden.

“Mbogo!”

Serekieli, in the lead, was calling back to us, and a buffalo skull, as if in sign, lay in the grass, surrounded by fresh spoor. We stood and listened. Before making their move, buffalo may lie in wait until whatever approaches them has gone past. This is customarily ascribed to malevolence or low cunning, but dull wits and slow reaction time may be an alternative explanation. “If they’re good-natured, you don’t see them,” Vesey said crossly. “If they’re not, they rush out at you. Terrific nervous tension, I must say.” At sixty-two, Vesey is strong and energetic, but feels himself at a disadvantage when it comes to nipping up trees.

Then the suspense got to the buffalo, and the hidden herd rushed away down the mountainside with a heavy cracking, and a long rumbling like a mountain torrent past big boulders. Immediately, another Meru voice called out, “Kifaru!” and Vesey mopped his brow. The Meru were pointing at a rhino print as fresh as a black petal, and within seconds a rhino crashed into the brush off to the east. The crash started up a buffalo lying low in the wild nightshade to our left. This lone animal was the one we were afraid of, and as it was much closer than the others, its explosion through the branches caused the Wazungu to rush in all directions. Beasley sprinted past, bound for the same tree as myself, as the askari Serekieli, standing fast, fired his gun to turn the charge. The black blur whirled away, and the echo died.

On foot in Africa, one will have this experience sooner or later, and Thomson’s encounter with a buffalo in this region could have described our own:

The relative menace of what hunters know as “the big five”—elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion, and leopard—is a popular topic of discussion in East Africa. J. A. Hunter, for example, ranked the leopard first, then lion, buffalo, elephant, and rhino, in that order. C. P. J. Ionides also thought the leopard more dangerous than the lion. This prejudice in favor of the carnivores is the prejudice of hunters who have had to finish off wounded animals, and might not be shared, say, by a farmer or field zoologist, who is more likely to be attacked by a large herbivore. In Ionides’ opinion, the most dangerous animal to an unarmed person in the bush is a tuskless elephant. Lion attacks are now quite rare, but in the days of widespread game slaughter for tsetse control, a number of lions in these devastated regions turned on man in desperation, and bags of fifty, sixty, and in one case ninety human beings were recorded.
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For people like myself who lack experience, it is purely a subjective business. I fear all five of the big five with all my heart, but I have least fear of the rhino, perhaps because one may leap aside with a reasonable hope that the rhino will keep on going. Unlike the other beasts of the big five, the rhino, with its poor vision and small powers of deduction, is only anxious to dispel an unsupportable suspense, and is probably as frightened as its foe.

In the next thousand feet of the descent there were rhino wallows and buffalo sign on every side; one kept an eye out for
hospitable trees even before an emergency had been declared. In a mahogany, Meru tribesmen had placed a beehive, essentially a hollowed cedar log with a removable bottom, hung from a limb by a wooden hook. (The Dorobo add to the hive’s efficiency by hailing the bees in strange high-pitched tones: “Bees, bees, all you who are in this country, come now and make honey here!”)
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In the honey harvest, the bees’ wits are thickened with a smoke flare; when the hive is lowered to the ground the addled bees collect where it had hung. Easing his nerves, Vesey hypothesized the converse of the bees:

“Where the bloody hell’s the hive?!”

“Right here, you idiot—it’s always here.”

“Well, it bloody well isn’t!”

By the time they get through discussing it, the hive is back in place:

“You see? Right there under your nose! Damned bloody fool!”

The great trees, fallen, have opened glades in a wild parkland, and silver deadwood is entwined by a climbing acanth with blossoms of light lavender. In stillness, in wind-shifted sun and shadow, a papilio butterfly, deep blue, is dancing with a Meru swallowtail, black and white, which ascends from the black and white remains of a colobus monkey, knocked from its tree by a leopard or an eagle. . . .

“Kifaru!”

At six thousand feet, in a mahogany grove, a rhino digging is so fresh that it seems to breathe; we hurry past. “I must say,” Vesey huffs, “on leave in England, it’s nice to walk about a bit and not have some bloody ungrateful beast rush out at you.” Once Vesey was chased by an irate hippopotamus that took a colossal bite out of his Land Rover.

A shy lemon dove in a pepper tree . . . more spoof . . .

“Kifaru!”

At the crash, we scatter. Horn high, tail high, a rhino lumbers forth out of the undergrowth thirty yards away. The rhino is said to hoist its tail when wishing to depart, but no one appears
confident that this is so. From behind my tree, too big to climb, I see Beasley on the limb of a wild coffee, with Vesey crouched below, as the rhino, trotting heavily across the glade, emits three horrible coughing snorts. The askari Frank is somewhere out of sight, but Serekieli stands bravely, legs apart, ready to fire. There is no need—the rhino goes, and keeps on going.

The Africans permit themselves a wild sweet laughter of relief, watching the whites come down out of the trees. Vesey, treed twice in half an hour, is not amused, not yet; he will be later.

“Get on! Get on!” he says, anxious to be off this bloody mountain.

I hoped to see the white-maned Kilimanjaro bush pig, and one afternoon I went down into Ngurdoto Crater with Serekieli, accompanied by a silent boy whom we met along the road; like many people on the paths of Africa, the boy had no appointments and no destination of his own.

Ngurdoto, like the famous Ngorongoro, is extinct, and both have the graduated bowl known as a caldera, which is formed when the molten core of a volcano subsides into the earth and the steep crater sides fall inward. Ngorongoro was unknown to the outside world until 1892, and not until early in this century did the white man find this smaller caldera to the east of Meru. Ngurdoto is larger than it appears—seen from the west rim, the farthest animals on the crater floor are two miles away—but the distance seems more temporal than spatial. Unlike Ngorongoro, there are no tracks or paths inside the crater, and as one peers down from the rim at remote creatures grazing in peace, oblivious of man, there rises from this hidden world that stillness of the early morning before man was born.

An elephant path of pressed humus and round leather-polished stones wound down among the boles of the gallery forest. The sun was high and the birds still, the forest dark and cool. Under the steep rim, out of the reach of axes, rose the great African mahogany and the elegant tropical olive, loliondo. We descended
through the forest single file. The steep path leveled out into grassy glades which, being ponds in time of rain, are mostly round. We followed them eastward, under the crater rim, working our way out of the trees. Serekieli, in forest green, carried a shotgun. Like many people come lately to boots, Serekieli tends to clump, but he clumps quietly and is very sure-footed; he is a lean handsome man of sad eyes and enchanted smile. Every little while he stopped to listen, giving the animals time to move away. Baboon and wart hog stared, then ran, the hominoids barking and shrieking as they scampered, the wild pigs departing the field in a stiff trot. Moments later we stood exposed in a bowl of sunlight.