The Tree Where Man Was Born (30 page)

Buffalo and a solitary rhino took mute note of us; the world stood still. Flat wet dung raised its reassuring smell in halos of loud flies. We turned west across wild pasture—cropped turf, cabbage butterflies, and cloven prints filled with clear rain—that rings the sedge swamp in the pit of the caldera. A hawk rose on thermals from the crater floor, and white egrets crossed the dark walls; in the marsh, a golden sedge was seeding in the swelling light of afternoon. More buffalo lay along the wood edge at the western wall, and with them rhino and an elephant. The rhinos lay still, but the elephant, a mile away, blared in alarm, and others answered from the galleries of trees, the screams echoing around the crater; the elephant’s ears flared wide and closed as it passed with saintly tread into the forest. Bushbuck and waterbuck lifted carved heads to watch man’s coming; their tails switched and their hind legs stamped but they did not run. Perhaps the white-maned bush pig saw us, too, raising red eyes from the snuffled dirt and scratching its raspy hide with a sharp hoof. Another time I glimpsed it from the rim at twilight, a ring of white in the dim trees, and one night a year later, descending the mountain, my headlights penned a family band, striped piglets and all, between the high sides of the road, but today it remained hidden.

The buffalo rose and split into two companies, and twelve hundred hoofs thundered at once under the walls. The thunder set off an insane screeching of baboons that spread the length
and breadth of Ngurdoto, and a blue monkey dropped from a lone tree in the savanna and scampered to the forest. Some of the milling buffalo plunged off into the wood, but others turned and came straight at us, the sunlight spinning on their horns. Buffalo have good eyesight, and we expected these to veer, but a hundred yards away, they were still coming, rocking heavily across the meadow. We turned and ran. Confused by our flight, they wheeled about and fled after the rest into the thickets. There came a terrific crack and crashing, as if their companions had turned back and the two groups had collided. In the stunned silence, we headed once more for the western wall, but were scarcely in the clear when the rumbling increased again, and the wood edge quaked, swayed, and split wide as the tide of buffalo broke free onto the plain and scattered in all directions.

The hawk, clearing the crater rim, was burnt black by the western sun. From the forest, the hollow laugh of the blue monkey was answered by the froggish racketing of a turaco. Parting leaves with long shy fingers, Serekieli probed for sign of an animal trail that might climb to the western rim. We pushed through heavy growth of sage and psidia, stopping each moment to listen hard, then clap our hands. More than an hour was required to climb out of the heat and thicket to the gallery forest under the crater rim, and all the while the elephants were near in enormous silence.

The leaves hung still. Bright on the dark humus lay a fiery fruit, white bird droppings, the blood-red feather of a turaco. When, near at hand, an elephant blared, the threat ricocheted around the walls, counterpointed by weird echoes of baboons. Serekieli offered an innocent smile and moved quietly ahead. In another hour we were on the rim, and rested on cool beds of a pink balsam. The wood smell was infused with scents of the wild orange and wild pepper trees, and of Tabernae montana, a white-flowered relative of frangipani. Where the western sun illumined the high leaves, a company of colobus and blue monkeys, silhouetted, leapt into the sky, careening down onto the canopy of the crater’s outer wall. Somewhere elephants were
moving. It was near evening, and in every part the forest creaked with life.

On certain rare mornings at Momela, Mt. Kilimanjaro rises high and clear out of clouds that dissolve around it. From the north, in Kenya, it looks celestial, benign; from Momela, it is dark and looming. Such massifs as the Ruwenzoris on the Congo-Uganda border and the High Semien of Ethiopia lack the splendor of Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya, which stand all alone: at 19,340 feet, Kilimanjaro is the highest solitary mountain in the world. Mt. Kenya is a shard of rock thrust upward from the earth, but Kilima Njaro, the White Mountain, has ascended into the sky, a place of religious resonance for tribes all around its horizons.

The glacier glistens. A distant snow peak scours the mind, but a snow peak in the tropics draws the heart to a fine shimmering painful point of joy.

Kilimanjaro is the easternmost of the Great Caldron Mountains, which were born fifteen to twenty million years ago, in the early Pleistocene, when widespread eruptions and tectonic movements buried the ancient rock of Africa beneath volcanos, volcanic highlands, and the lava plains of what is now Maasai Land. The cones extend east and west from Kilimanjaro to the Crater Highlands, and from Shombole, just north of the Kenya border, south to Mt. Hanang. The last active volcano in the Great Caldron Mountains is Ol Doinyo Lengai, which stands by itself between the Crater Highlands and Lake Natron. One travels there by way of Mto Wa Mbu (Mosquito River), a raffish settlement on the dusty road to Lake Manyara and Ngorongoro. From Mto Wa Mbu a dirt track turns off along that part of the Rift wall formed by the Crater Highlands, arriving eventually at the village of Engaruka, thirty-five miles north; from there, it was said, a Maasai cattle path wound around the ramparts of the Highlands to Lengai.

The track to Engaruka, impassable in rain, parts the high grasses of the plain, branching and regathering according to
the whims of its rare travelers, and tending always far out to the eastward, to skirt the gullies that snake down from the ravines in the Rift wall. Turning west again toward the mountains, the track arrives at the rim of Ol Kerii, where the land falls a last few hundred feet to the floor of the Rift Valley. In East Africa, one is never far from the Great Rift, which splits the earth’s crust from the Dead Sea south to the Zambezi River, and east and west in broken cracks from the Gulf of Aden to the Valley of the Congo. In places, the Rift is forty miles across, a trench of sun and tawny heat walled by plateaus. The floors that contain the Rift’s long, narrow north-south lakes were created long ago when the earth sank between parallel fractures, and they are on different levels: Manyara is eleven hundred feet higher than Lake Natron, to the north.

Ol Kerii, the last great step in the descent into the Rift, has a prospect of lost mountains: Kerimasi, at the northeast corner of the Crater Highlands, and Kitumbeine, a shadow in the ancient haze beyond, and Gelai, due north, that guards the lonely sea of Natron. In every distance stand strange shrouded landscapes of the past and future. The present is wild blowing light, the sun, a bird, a baobab in heraldic isolation, like the tree where man was born.

The track descends to the riverain forests and slow swamps of the Engaruka Basin, steeping—no sign of man, no smoke nor habitation, only two giraffes still as killed trees far out in the savanna—and the sense of entering a new world is quickened by new birds. For the first time I behold the bright, marvelous mechanisms known to man as the rosy-patched shrike, white-throated bee-eater, and Fischer’s widow-bird, named in honor of Thomson’s rival, the German naturalist Gustav Fischer, who in 1882 discovered strange ruins at Engaruka in the course of an attempt to cross Maasai Land. But his good name only encumbers the effect of this airy thing that can draw a landscape taut with its plumed tail.

Down the track comes a loud party of Fischer’s countrymen, staring bald-eyed from the windows of a white hunter’s vehicle—here was one reason why game had been so scarce
along the way. And seeing these tourists trundled forth to blaze away at the very last concentration of great animals left on earth, imagining the pollution of their din, the smoke and blood and shocked silence of the plain, and the wake of rotting carcasses, I stared back at them as rudely, filled with rage. Such sport made it all the harder to wean Africans away from contempt for wildlife, which is a matter of education and not culture: the British and South African soldiers stationed at Marsabit during World War II left thousands of animals to rot that had been idly shot down with automatic weapons from the backs of trucks.
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The gorges in the west Rift wall are the shadows of dead rivers that in the pluvials came rushing from the highlands, forming a lake in what is now the Engaruka Basin. For centuries, the surviving stream, thought to come from Embagai Crater in the clouds above, has attracted man to Engaruka, which is a settlement of agricultural Maasai (now known as the Arusa) as well as some Sukuma Bantu from the south. Earlier it was inhabited by people skilled in irrigation who left behind an extensive ruin of stone circles, cairns, and walled terracing for cultivation, as well as a dam one hundred feet long; the terracing on the hills above is visible from the track. The remains of another dam lie near the Ngorongoro-Olbalbal road, and some terracing near the north end of Lake Eyasi, but there is no other ruined city.

Engaruka is scarcely touched by archeologists, and its origins are presently unknown. It lies far off the traditional trading routes, an isolated stone-working community of an estimated thirty to forty thousand souls, the largest such ruin in central and south Africa except Zimbabwe in Rhodesia. Zimbabwe was constructed over centuries, beginning no later than the twelfth century and lasting until 1834, when it was overrun by tribes of Zulu, but according to preliminary investigations,
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Engaruka may be less than three centuries old. If this is true, who were the people who constructed it, and what became of them?

The Maasai say that Engaruka was occupied by an Irakw
people when they descended on this region in the eighteenth century. The Irakw tribes, which include the pit-dwelling Mbulu cultivators of the plateaus behind Lake Manyara, are that obscure group of strange archaic language that has been tentatively
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related to those proto-Hamite hunters who were the first to invade East Africa from the north. Or perhaps the Engaruka masons, Irakw or otherwise, derive from the Neolithic Hamites who brought domestic plants and animals into the country and were scattered in the arable highlands of East Africa until a few centuries ago, when they appear to have been surrounded and absorbed by the waves of Negroids, Nilote as well as Bantu, who came after. In Kenya’s Kerio Valley, for example, the Maraket people of the Nandi tribes still maintain elaborate irrigation systems, including conduits woven across the steep faces of cliffs, which they say were made by a northern people of strange language, the Sirikwa, who later died in plague: “They built the furrows, but they did not teach us how to build them; we only know how to keep them as they are.”
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(The similar sound of “Sirikwa” and “Irakw” is interesting, considering the obscure history of both groups.)

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,
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and are known as “Sirikwa holes”: perhaps the Mokwan, Enjoe, and Sirikwa are all one.
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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.