The Tree Where Man Was Born (34 page)

Two buffalo, tracing their old winding ruts, had ambled up into our campsite from the west. Confronted with the Land Rover, they stopped to study it a while, the last light glinting on their horns. Then they wheeled and rolled away, dropping from view; the mountain horizon, as dark came, was empty.

By morning, clouds had settled heavily into the crater, making the descent impossible. We returned south fifty miles to
Ngorongoro across a waste of coarse tussock, wind and bitter cinder where the swirls of ash, puffing through each crack, burned nose and throat. In summer the moors are parched despite dark stagnant clouds that shroud the circle of old volcanoes, ten thousand feet and more, that in many trips across the Crater Highlands, summer and winter, I had never seen. The three villages here are the highest in Maasai Land, and once the car was caught in a tide of milling cattle, a maelstrom of shrouding dust and rolling eyes and a doomed bawling, as if at last the earth had tipped on end. At one time there was forest here, and water was more plentiful, but the Maasai have cut and burned the trees to make more pasture, as they have done also on the west slopes of the Mau Range, and so far they pay no heed at all to those who tell them they are ruining their country.

The three villages between volcanoes have some seventy people each, and because the moors are treeless, the villages are fenced with long split timbers brought up from the ravines; the bony staves, bent black on the barren sky, give a bleak aspect to the human habitations. But inside the stockade, out of the wind, the village called Ol Alilal is a snug place of sun-blown weeds and sheep bleats, warm manure scent, goat kids, new puppies, and grains spread upon a hide—the finger millet, eleusine, domesticated long ago in the highlands of Ethiopia. As in all Maasai villages, the corral is surrounded by low oval huts, ovens of dung stuck on a framework of bent saplings. We crouched to enter. The interiors are intricate, with small wicker-walled compartments, and the innermost chamber has a three-stone hearth and a small air vent for the smoke, with two raised beds inset in the wall, one for the father and mother and the other for children. The woman of the house was hospitable, perhaps because I was there with a Maasai; the next time we came, she said, she would prepare fresh blood-and-milk. Everyone was bold and cheerful, and though white travelers must be rare in this far place, they pretended to take no notice of me. Only the beaded infants stared through the dark circles of flies at their infected eyes. Ordinarily the eyes
are never treated, so that many Maasai become blind. One pretty woman wore a necklace of lion claw and a bit of old leather that Martin said was dawa or medicine prescribed by the laibon, and a few trading cowries worn in hope of fertility, since the cowry aperture resembles the vagina.
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In East Africa the cowry, which was brought here first from the Maldive Islands and had spread all across Africa by the fourteenth century, is used ceremonially in the first three of the great rites of passage, birth, circumcision, and marriage, the fourth rite being death.

Sun, heat, stillness were all one. The dying sun in the Ngurumans gave color to the cooking fire, and after dark came a hot wind that fanned night fires all around the horizon, and drove one tongue of flame onto the ridge above the lifeless lake. Though ready to break camp at a moment’s notice, I slept poorly—the moon and wind and fire made me restless. But in a red dawn, the wind died again, and the fire sank into the grass, waiting for night.

South of Magadi the road scatters, and wandering tracks cross the white lake bed. There is water where the wading birds are mirrored, and in the liquid shimmer of the heat, a still wildebeest wavers in its own reflection. An hour later, from the west, the ghostly beast was still in sight; it had not moved.

The track winds southwest toward Shombole. Huge termitaria slouch here and there in the dry scrub, and over toward the Nguruman Escarpment, a whirlwind spins a plume of desert dust up the Rift’s dark face into the smoky sky of East African summer. Eventually the track descends again, between the dead volcano and the marsh of Uaso Ngiro. In a water gleam that parts the fierce bright reeds, a woman and a man are bathing. The woman squats, her small shoulders demure, but the man stands straight as a gazelle and gazes, body shining, the archetypal man of Africa that I first saw in the Sudan.

The Shombole track comes to an end at three shacks under the volcano, where a duka serves the outlying Maasai with beads and wire for ornament, red cloth, sweet drinks, and
cocoa. I gave a ride to a young morani who guided me with brusque motions through the bush to a stony cattle trail that winds between hill and marsh, around Shombole. Farther on, we picked up two Maasai women, and all four of us were squashed into the front when, in the full heat of the desert afternoon, on hot rocky ground at the mud edge of a rotting swamp in this lowest and hottest pit of the Rift Valley floor, my faithful Land Rover, thirty-five miles from Magadi and ninety-five beyond Nairobi, gave a hellish clang and, dragging its guts over the stones, lurched to a halt.

In a bad silence, the Maasai women thanked me and departed. The boy stood by, less out of expectation of reward or even curiosity, I decided, than some sense of duty toward a stranger in Maasai Land. Squatting on my heels and swatting flies, I peered dizzily at the heavy iron shaft, the sand and stone and thorn stuck to raw grease where the shaft had sheared at the universal coupling, cutting off the transmission of power to the rear wheels. In front-wheel drive, the car would move forward weakly, but my limited tools were not able to detach the revolving shaft from the transmission: dragging and clanging in an awful din of steel and rocks, it threatened to shake the car to pieces.

To cool my nerves, I drank a quart of Tusker beer. The Land Rover had picked a poor place to collapse, but at least it had got me to my destination, and the sun if not the heat would soon be gone. Any time now, the airplane of Douglas-Hamilton, coming to meet me, would be landing on the bare mud flats at the north end of Natron. Tomorrow we were to climb Shombole, and after that, if no repairs seemed possible, Iain could fly out to Magadi and leave word of my straits and whereabouts. But as it happened, Iain and Oria were never to appear: they had sent word to Nairobi that has not reached me to this day. Next morning I rigged a whole series of rope slings, held in place by stay lines from the side, that carried the rotating shaft just off the ground, although they burned through regularly from friction. Setting off at sunrise at three miles an hour, with the frequent stops to repair or replace the sling giving the straining car
an opportunity to cool off, I arrived in two hours at the duka. A length of soft iron wire presented me by the proprietor was better than the rope, but not much better, and the last of it wore through as I reached Magadi in mid-afternoon, having made not less than fifteen trips beneath the car, in terrific heat, measuring my length in the fine volcanic ash that a hellish wind impacted in hair, lungs, and fingernails. The kind Asian manager of the Magadi Store and his driver-mechanic replaced the sheared bevel pinion with an ingenious makeshift rig that would see the car safely to Nairobi, but all of this still lay ahead as I stood there looking as stupid as I felt under the gaze of that young herdsman by the shores of Natron.

The time had come for a hard look at my old car’s parts and contents. This Land Rover that has seen me so faithfully through East Africa is essentially an enclosed pickup truck with no back seats, preceded everywhere by two racks bolted to its front bumper; each rack holds four gallons of spare gasoline. The broad flat hood or bonnet is designed for a spare wheel, but as a precaution against theft I carry the spare in the back, leaving the bonnet free for pressing plants and preparing food. Inside, the steel shelves that flank the wheel hold books and maps, an adjustable wrench, screw drivers, pliers, knife, long-beam flashlight, distilled water for the batteries, electrical tape, disinfectant, Band-Aids, and a roll of tissue for binocular lenses, window-wiping, oil sump dip stick, doubtful forks, and bottoms. There are three seats in the front, and a compartment under the left seat (the steering wheel is on the right) holds a foot pump, tire bars, tube patches, spare fan belt, coil, spark plugs, points, distributor cap and condenser, a siphon tube, a tube of stop-leak for the radiator (raw egg white may be tried in an emergency), yellow elephant soap for fuel line leaks, lacquer thinner (emergency nostrum for failed clutch, when dumped into clutch housing), and four quarts of motor oil. Behind the seats is a large lever jack, a shovel, a long engine crank in case of battery failure, and a panga or machete, useful for meat, firewood, and chopping brush to pile under the wheels when mired.

In the days when this car belonged to the Serengeti Research Institute, the roof was fitted with two hinged viewing hatches that open upward and fall flat on the car roof, one forward and one back, for passengers standing on the truck bed. The hatches permit the entry of fresh air at night, if one is sleeping in the car, and when required a mosquito net can be suspended. Across the narrow benches on each side, which cramp the floor space, I have laid loose boards, from the front seat back to the rear door. The spare wheel is kept beneath the boards, and also rope, insecticide, and kerosene, a two-by-four used as a jack base in sand or mud, an all-purpose tin washbasin, two feet in diameter, bought for sixty cents in the Arusha marketplace, and a spare six gallons of water. On top are two mattresses with bedding and mosquito net, a tin chest of provisions, a carton containing kerosene lamp, stove, pot, pan, teapot, and utensils; a small duffel, a rope-seat stool, a plant press. At night, should space be needed, these things may be stowed beneath the car or in the front, and the two mattresses laid side by side, and when special cargo or many people must be transported, the boards are taken up and stacked, for I have carried at one time or another a whole butchered zebra, drying elephant ears, innumerable townspeople and tribesmen, tortoises, birds, chameleons, and a diseased baboon.

In retrospect, I would recommend this additional equipment: a spare half-shaft, an asbestos filament lantern, a spare fuel pump (or a spare diaphragm, if you are a good mechanic), and a nineteenth-century tract called Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life, which includes such critical information as the proper method of mounting a small cannon on the hind end of a camel, to repel boarders and deal crisply with shifta or other unsavory individuals who might be gaining on one from the rear.

Since the disabled car was inland from the lake, it seemed best to walk the last mile to the flats, to greet Iain and Oria and to make certain that I was not overlooked; already I was listening for the droning of the motor that would draw to a point the misty distances down toward Lengai. Accompanied by the
morani, I followed a cattle trail between the marsh and a thorny rock strangely swollen by thick pink blossoms of the desert rose. Near the mouth of the Uaso Ngiro, green reeds give way to open flats where the Natron leaves a crust crisscrossed by ostrich tracks. Here the young warrior, mounting the rock, made a grand sweeping gesture of his cape toward the horizons of Maasai Land, and sighed with all his being. The red and blue beads swinging from his ears stood for sun and water, but now the sun was out of balance with the rain, and the grass was thin. The Maasai speak of the benevolent Black God who brings rain, and the malevolent Red God who begrudges it, the Black God living in dark thunderheads and the Red in the merciless dry-season sun; Black God and Red are different tempers of Ngai, for God is embodied in the rain and the fierce heat, besides ruling the great pastures of the sky. Looming thunder is feared: the Red God seeks to pierce the Black God’s kingdoms, in hope of bringing harm to man. But in distant thunder the Maasai hear the Black God saying, “Let man be. . . .”

From where we stood, awed by the view, white flats extended a half-mile to the water’s edge, where the heat waves rose in a pink fire of thousands upon thousands of flamingos. All around the north end of the lake the color shimmered, and for some distance down both shores; on the west shore, under the dark Sonjo escarpments, an upside-down forest was reflected. Southeast, the outline of Gelai was a phantom mountain in an amorphous sky, and in the south, the lake vanished in brown vapors that shrouded Ol Doinyo Lengai.