The Tree Where Man Was Born (35 page)

In this somber kingdom of day shadows and dead smokes, the fresh pinks of flamingos and the desert rose appeared unnatural. What belonged here were those tracks of giant birds, like black crosses in the crystalline white soda, and this petrified white bone dung of hyena, and the hieroglyph of a gazelle in quest of salt that had followed some dim impulse far out onto the flats. I remembered the Grant’s gazelles on the Chalbi Desert, and the rhino that had climbed Lengai, and the wildebeest at a dead halt for want of impulse, in the shimmer of the soda lake,
at noon. What drives such animals away from life-giving conditions into the wasteland—what happens in those rigid clear-eyed heads? How did the hippopotamus find its way up into the Crater Highlands, to blunder into the waters of Ngorongoro? Today one sees them there with wonder, encircled by steep walls, and the mystery deepens when a fish eagle plummets to the springs east of the lake and rises once more against the sky, in its talons a gleam of unknown life from the volcano.

We walked out into the silence of the flats. Somewhere on the mud, our footprints crossed the border of Tanzania, for Natron lies entirely in that country. I listened for the airplane but there was nothing, only the buzzing of these birds that fed with their queer heads upside down, straining diatoms and algae from the stinking waters even as they squirted it with the guano that kept the algae reproducing—surely one of the shortest and most efficient life chains in all nature, at once exhilarating and oppressive in the mindlessness of such blind triumphal life in a place so poisonous and dead. A string of flamingos rose from the pink gases, restoring sharpness to the sky, then sank again into the oblivion of their millions.

Twilight was coming. The boy pointed to a far en-gang under Shombole. “Aia,” he said, by way of parting—So be it—and stalked away in fear of the African night, his red cape darkening against the white. “Aia,” I said, watching him go. Soon he vanished under the volcano. This age-set of moran may be the last, for the Maasai of Kenya, upset at being left behind by tribes they once considered worthless, voted this year to discontinue the moran system and send young Maasai to school. But in Maasai Land all change comes slowly, whether in Kenya or Tanzania. The month before, in the region of Ol Alilal, in the Crater Highlands, there was a new age-set of circumcised boys dressed in the traditional black garments bound with broad bead belts and wearing the spectral white paint around the eyes that signifies death and rebirth as a man, and on their shaved heads, arranged on a wood frame that looked from afar like an
informal halo, black ostrich plumes danced in the mountain wind. When their hair grew out again, the boys would be young warriors, perhaps the last age-set of moran.

One of the Ol Alilal moran was very sick, and we took him in to the government dispensary at Nainokanoka. This tall boy of seventeen or eighteen could no longer walk; I carried his light body in my arms to the dark shack where to judge from his face, he thought that he would die. Yet here at least he had a chance that he might not have had at Ol Alilal. Though the Maasai have little faith in witchcraft, they recognize ill provenance and evil spirits, and a person dying is removed outside the fences so that death will not bring the village harm. Eventually the body is taken to the westward toward the setting sun, and laid on its left side with knees drawn up, head to the north and face to the east, right arm crossing the breast and left cushioning the head. There it is left to be dealt with by hyenas. Should someone die inside a hut, then the whole village must be moved, and it is said that the people listen for the howl of the hyena, and establish the new village in that direction. The Maasai are afraid of death, though not afraid to die.

For a long time I stood motionless on the white desert, numbed by these lowering horizons so oblivious of man, understanding at last the stillness of the lone animals that stand transfixed in the distances of Africa. Perhaps because I was alone, and therefore more conscious of my own insignificance under the sky, and aware, too, that the day was dying, and that the airplane would not appear, I felt overwhelmed by the age and might of this old continent, and drained of strength: all seemed pointless in such emptiness, there was nowhere to go. I wanted to lie flat out on my back on this almighty mud, but instead I returned slowly into Kenya, pursued by the mutter of primordial birds. The flamingo sound, rising and falling with the darkening pinks of the gathering birds, was swelling again like an oncoming rush of motley wings—birds, bats, ancient flying things, thick insects.

The galumphing splosh of a pelican, gathering tilapia from the fresh-water mouth of the Uaso Ngiro, was the first sound to rise above the wind of the flamingos. Next came a shrill whooping of the herdsmen, hurrying the last cattle across delta creeks to the bomas in the foothills of Shombole. A Maasai came running from the hills to meet me, bearing tidings of two dangerous lions—“Simba! Simba mbili!”—that haunted this vicinity. He asked nothing of me except caution, and as soon as his warning was delivered, ran back a mile or more in the near-darkness to the shelter of his en-gang. Perhaps the earliest pioneers were greeted this way almost everywhere by the wild peoples—the thought was saddening, but his act had made me happy.

I built a fire and broiled the fresh beef I had brought for three, to keep it from going bad, and baked a potato in the coals, and fried tomatoes, and drank another beer, all the while keeping an eye out for bad lions. I also made tea and boiled two eggs for breakfast, to dispense with fire-making in the dawn. As yet I had no energy to think about tomorrow, much less attempt makeshift repairs; the cool of first light would be time enough for that. Moving slowly so as not to stir the heat, I brushed my teeth and rigged my bed roll and climbed out on the car roof, staring away over Lake Natron. I was careful to be quiet: the night has ears, as the Maasai say.

From the Crater Highlands rose the Southern Cross; the Pleiades, which the Maasai associate with rains, had waned in early June. July is the time of wind and quarrels, and now, in August, the grass was dry and dead. In August, September, and October, called the Months of Hunger, the people pin grass to their clothes in hope of rain, for grass is sign of prosperity and peace, but not until the Pleiades returned, and the southeast monsoon, would the white clouds come that bring the precious water. (The Mbugwe of the southern flats of Lake Manyara resort to rainmakers, and formerly, in time of drought, so it is said, would sacrifice an unblemished black bull, then an unblemished black man, and finally the rainmaker himself.)
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The light in my small camp under Shombole was the one light left in all the world. Staring up at the black cone that filled the night sky to the east, I knew I would never climb it. There was a long hard day ahead with nothing certain at the end of it, and I had no heart for the climb alone, especially here in this sullen realm that had held me at such a distance. The ascent of Lengai and the descent into Embagai Crater had both been failures, and the great volcanoes of the Crater Highlands had remained lost in the clouds. At Natron, my friends had failed to come and my transport had broken down, and tomorrow I would make a slow retreat. And perhaps this came from the pursuit of some fleeting sense of Africa, seeking to fix in time the timeless, to memorize the immemorial, instead of moving gently, in awareness, letting the sign, like the crimson bird, become manifest where it would.

From where I watched, a sentinel in the still summer, there rose and fell the night highlands of two countries, from the Loita down the length of the Ngurumans to the Sonjo scarps that overlook Lake Natron. In the Loita, so the Maasai say, lives Enenauner, a hairy giant, one side flesh, the other stone, who devours mortal men lost in the forests; Enenauner carries a great club, and is heard tokking on trees as it moves along.
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A far hyena summoned the night feeders, and flamingos in crescents moved north across a crescent moon toward Naivasha and Nakuru. Down out of the heavens came their calls, a remote electric sound, as if in this place, in such immensities of silence, one had heard heat lightning.

Toward midnight, in the Sonjo Hills, there leapt up two sudden fires. Perhaps this was sign of the harvest festival, Mbarimbari, for these were not the grass fires that leap along the night horizons in the dry season; the twin flames shone like leopard’s eyes from the black hills. At this time of year God comes to the Sonjo from Ol Doinyo Lengai, and a few of their ancient enemies, the Maasai, bring goats to be slaughtered at Mbarimbari, where they howl to Ngai for rain and children.

The Sonjo, isolated from the world, know that it is coming to an end. Quarrels and warfare will increase, and eventually
the sky will be obscured by a horde of birds, then insect clouds, and finally a shroud of dust. Two suns will rise from the horizons, one in the east, one in the west, as a signal to man that the end of the world is near. At the ultimate noon, when the two suns meet at the top of the sky, the earth will shrivel like a leaf, and all will die.

One winter day in 1969, returning to Seronera from Arusha, Myles Turner flew around the south side of the Crater Highlands, which lay hidden in its black tumulus of clouds. The light plane skirted Lake Manyara and the dusty flats of the witch-ridden Mbugwe, then crossed Mbulu Land, on the Kainam Plateau. Soon it passed over a great silent valley. “That’s the Yaida,” Turner told me. “That’s where those Bushman people are, the Watindiga.” Down there in that arid and inhospitable stillness, cut off from a changing Africa by the ramparts of the Rift, last bands of the Old People turned their heads toward the hard silver bird that crossed their sky. There was no smoke, no village to be seen, nor any sign of man.

Later that winter, at Ndala, Douglas-Hamilton had suggested
a safari to Tindiga Land, where his friend Peter Enderlein had lived alone for several years, and was in touch with wild Tindiga still living in the bush. But Iain was never able to get away, and a year had passed before I crossed paths with Enderlein in Arusha, and arranged to visit his Yaida Chini game post in the summer. In July of 1970 I picked up Aaron Msindai, a young Isanzu from the Mweka College of Wildlife Management at Moshi, who had been assigned to Yaida Chini. We loaded Aaron’s kit into the back of the Land Rover—a rifle and an iron bed, clothes, lantern, fuel, food for a month—and headed west, spending that night at Manyara, and at seven the next morning climbing the Rift wall into the clouds of the Crater Highlands. In the dense mist, trees shifted evilly, and slow cowled figures with long staves, dark faces hidden in the gloom, moved past the ghostly fields of maize and wheat. These are the agricultural Mbulu of the so-called Irakw cluster, a group still unclassified in the ethnographic surveys, whose archaic language, related to Hamitic, suggests that they have been here in the Highlands a very long time, perhaps well before the Iron Age. Like the Hamitic tribes, the Mbulu practice circumcision and clitoridectomy, but they lack the age-set system and other customs of modern Hamites such as the Galla. Doubtless they have mingled with the waves of Bantu and Nilotic peoples who came later, but many retain a Caucasoid cast of feature: the volatile narrow faces of the men, especially, are the faces that one sees in Ethiopia. The Mbulu live in pits dug into hillsides and covered over with roofs of mud and dung; in former days these pit dwellings or tembes, like low mounds in the tall grass, are said to have hidden the people from the Maasai. Today the tembes give way gradually to tin-roofed huts.