The Tree Where Man Was Born (12 page)

Lake Rudolf glimmered in the west, a silver sliver down among dark mountains. Still fifteen miles inland from Allia Bay, the track turned north toward Koobi Fora. This cauterized region, in wetter climates of the Pleistocene, attracted huge companies of animals, including early hominids whose stone tools, dated at 2.6 million years, are the oldest known. Last year near Ileret, a frontier post just south of the Ethiopian border, Leakey’s expedition found a skull of
Australopithecus boisei
which he believes to be 850,000 years older than the celebrated cranium of this man-ape uncovered by his parents at Olduvai Gorge. In Richard’s opinion, this land east of Lake Rudolf is the world’s
most important archeological site, not excluding Olduvai, though others say that finds of comparable significance are being made by a French expedition to the Omo River, at the north end of the lake, in Ethiopia, which has come upon remains of
Homo sapiens
that have been dated at two hundred thousand years, or about twice the age of former estimate.

At twilight the track passed an oasis of borassus palms known as Derati that was the water source for Leakey’s base camp at Allia Bay in 1968 and 1969. Beyond Derati, gray zebra and oryx clattered across stone ridges, and a black-bellied bustard rose in courtship, collapsing its wings on the twilight sky like a great cinder in the wind. Then a striped hyena rose out of the rock, a spirit of the gaunt mountain: it turned its head to fix us with its eye before it withdrew into the Shadows. This maned animal of the night, with its cadaverous flanks and hungry head, is the werewolf of legend come to life.

The striped hyena is less uncommon than unseen. Even Jock Anderson, who was born in Kenya and has traveled the bush country all his life, had only glimpsed one once before, at Amboseli. But the pleasure we took in it was shadowed by the knowledge that the estimated distance to Koobi Fora was long past, with dark upon us. We stopped for a conference. At midday, I had felt uneasy about travel in desert country with two gallons of water for nine people—what would happen in the event of an engine breakdown, a wrong turning, one car separated from the other? But Leakey had made things sound so simple that Anderson had not anticipated the slightest trouble. Not that we were in trouble now, but we were down to two quarts of water and a ration of beer and fruit juice, and could not be sure that the eight gallons of spare gasoline would carry both vehicles back to North Horr, much less Loiyengalani, even if we turned around right on the spot. Presumably we were close to the Koobi Fora track, but side tracks are no more than shadows on this stony ground, and if the search failed, our only course was to go north to Ileret and radio for help. “We’d have to get in contact with somebody,” Jock said shortly. “Assuming we make it,” Adrian added, “past the blood shifta.” In the
frustrating knowledge that Richard’s camp was within fifteen miles of where we stood, it was decided to make camp at Derati and retreat to North Horr or Loiyengalani the next day.

Jock Anderson was grim and quiet; he is a man who dislikes turning back. But Jock had more to worry about than gas and water. We had been warned at Marsabit that an armed escort was desirable in this country, and at North Horr the police had described a gun battle that had taken place in the past month at Derati, where Leakey’s supply caravan, with its armed guard, had come upon camped shifta, and five shifta had been killed. For the moment, Jock spared the party this ominous news. He was amazed at Leakey’s claim that he had traveled from Marsabit to Koobi Fora in a single day, and annoyed that Richard had been so casual in his directions.

In the dark, at Derati, lacking a decent lantern, we could find no water, only foul-smelling pits of algal murk under the roots of the borassus. We rationed out the beer. Everyone was hot and dirty, and Eliot Porter cut his leg badly in the darkness, and nobody looked happy. There was more discomfort than emergency, but trouble, once started, has a way of unraveling until it is out of control, and when Stephen Porter said, “It’s not a game, we could die of thirst out here,” his wife told him to hush up, but nobody contradicted him.

Derati is a gloomy place in the shadow of a mountain, and the one bright element in that evening there was the old Kamba cook, Kimunginye, who made supper without benefit of lamp or pot. With a panga he cut neat sticks by shearing palm sections from the central stalk of a fallen frond, and these he laid crossways on paired logs to make a grill; in the wood ash, deftly, one by one, he laid potatoes. Strips of meat were broiled upon the sticks and a can of string beans heated in the fire. For lack of liquid we ate lightly, but the food was good. Kimunginye is a calm old African who at midday had not asked for water, even in the 100-degree heat: the Kamba are tough—tough as the hyena’s sinew, as the Maasai say. Perhaps Kimunginye recalled how, in his parents’ time, these “red people,” ugly
as raw meat, had caused the great locust famine by running a railroad through his country (the man-eaters of Tsavo were seen by the Kamba as the spirits of dead chiefs protesting the encroachment on Kamba Land) and brought an end to the ivory trade by forbidding the Kamba to hunt elephant. If so, he gave no sign. This day was no different from another, and he went on about his work, as one felt certain that he would even if the next day were his last, his movements slow an gentle because so sure, without waste motion. The Kamba know that man dies “like the roots of the aloe,” and dying was serious enough, so said his manner, without putting one-self to extra trouble over it. Kimunginye was the embodiment of what the Samburu call
nkanyit
,
¹⁶
or “sense of respect”—that quiet that comes from true awareness of the world around, with all its transience and strange significations. And I was filled with admiration, knowing, too, that Kimunginye was not exceptional, that his qualities are shared by many Africans who, seeing no need to emulate the white man, have remained in touch with the old ways.

Overhead, the crashing palms lashed wildly at the stars. In this bleak land the wind seems constant, with gusts that come as suddenly as avalanche. Grimy from a long day in the heat, we put our cots down in the fire smoke to discourage lions and mosquitoes; we would travel after midnight, to avoid the desert heat of day and its demands upon the water. Wind, discomfort, apprehension made sleep difficult for everyone except Adrian, who was so tired from the long day’s drive that he went to sleep without his supper. Jock and I scarcely slept at all. He had confided to me the news of shifta, and my mind kept turning on the fact that there were two women to look out for in the event of trouble.

The wind still blew at 3:30 a.m. when we rose and broke camp and drove southward without breakfast. No water could be spared for tea, but if anyone was thirsty, he did not say so. Progress on the stony track was very slow, and it was near daylight when we passed the track down to Allia Bay, barely discernible in the cinder waste. From a visit by air last year to
Allia Bay, Anderson knew of a rock pool inland, at the head of a rocky gorge; here, just after sunrise, we found water. In celebration, washing and drinking, we remained at the place two hours, then went on southeastward toward North Horr. The lonely sea, still silver, still remote, vanished behind its somber walls. Twenty-five miles from North Horr, just past the well called Hurran Hurra, a track turned off toward Loiyengalani, and as the spare gasoline was still intact, we took it; it was better to walk the last miles into Loiyengalani and send the truck back to the Land Rovers with fuel than to be stuck indefinitely at North Horr, where no fuel was available, nor transport out. The track went south along the Bura Galadi Hills, then west again, and at mid-afternoon Lake Rudolf reappeared, some seventy miles south of where we had last seen it.

Lake Rudolf, one hundred and fifty miles in length, was once connected to the Nile, and still contains the great Nile perch, two hundred pounds or better, as well as Kenya’s last significant population of the Nile crocodile. Today the brackish lake is six hundred feet below the former channel to the Nile, and still subsiding, its only important source being the Omo River, which flows in the Rift fracture that crosses Ethiopia from the Red Sea. The prevailing winds of the southeast monsoon drive waves onto the west shore, in Turkana Land, 23,000 square miles of near-desert wilderness extending west to the Uganda Escarpment, which forms the divide between the Rift Valley and the Valley of the Nile.

In the western light, the lake was a sea blue, choppy with wind. The foreshore was littered with water birds—flamingos, pelicans, cormorant, geese, ducks, sandpipers and plover, gulls and terns, ibis, egrets, and the Goliath heron, largest of all wading birds in Africa. Behind them ran herds of feral ass, big-headed and wild as any zebra. At one time, the Turkana say, this shore had wild animals and good grassland, but generations of domestic stock have eaten it down to thorny stubble.

The first human beings seen since leaving North Horr were Turkana nomads, camped in a dry stream bed. To the south rose a forest of borassus palms that was sign of a large oasis;
the two vehicles rolled into Loiyengalani with three gallons of gasoline between them. Word had come by radio to the police post that a truck from Koobi Fora had been shot at the day before in the region of Derati, and neither the North Horr police post nor the people at Koobi Fora had any idea where we might be. Subsequently Leakey told me that the killing of five shifta had occurred, not at Derati, but at the spring a few miles south where we had found water.

Loiyengalani is composed of a police post and a small Asian duka that serves the nomad herdsmen and El Molo; often these Indian shopkeepers were the first to penetrate unsettled regions, and few urban Africans with the training to replace them would care for the loneliness of their life. At the source of the spring, not far away, a safari lodge had been constructed, but in 1965 three men were killed here by the shifta, including the lodge manager and a priest who had come here to set up a mission. Since then, a mission has been established, but the Loiyengalani lodge subsides into the weeds. An old African sweeps the fading paths in the hope of a future, and hastened to fill the swimming pool in honor of our arrival. One of his tasks, as he conceives it, is to keep the lodge grounds clear of Samburu, Turkana, and Rendille, whose grass huts, like clusters of small haystacks, litter the oasis. None of these people of bare open spaces takes shelter from the sun and wind among the trees, preferring to build their thatch ovens on the round black stones between the oasis and the shore. The region abounds with a small venomous snake known as the carpet viper, and palm fronds left lying even for a day or two are sure to harbor one—hence the preference for the bare stones. Anyway, as one man says, the wind keeps the huts cool enough, and with one hand, one can make a window anywhere one likes.

The man who said this was an El Molo, or, more precisely, in their own pronunciation, Llo-molo; the name, he said, came from the Samburu Loo Molo Osinkirri,
¹⁷
the People Who Eat Fish. The main village of the Llo-molo, perhaps twenty huts in all, is situated still farther from the oasis than the huts of the
herdsmen, on a bare black gravel slope above the lake. Stuck onto the rocks like swallows’ nests, the huts have triangular mouths protected from the heavy wind by a screen of palm fronds. The black gravel all around is littered with tattered fronds and livestock dung, fish bones, old hearths, bits of rope and netting, rags. Fish dry on the thatch roofs, and on the rocks above wait rooks and gulls. Below, a smaller village stands outlined on the inland sea.

The Llo-molo, who pride themselves on honesty and hospitality, accommodate the nomads in their village even though they do not like them. The Samburu and Turkana here are forever pilfering and fighting, and a few may linger for weeks at a time as guests of the Llo-molo, who have plenty of fish and cannot bear to eat with all these strangers hanging around looking so hungry. Other tribes, the Llo-molo say, know how to eat fish better than they know how to catch them, although the Turkana fishermen on the west shore, who use set nets and fishing baskets, would dispute this. “We have to feed them,” one Llo-molo says, “so that they will feel strong enough to go away.”

The Llo-molo are mostly smaller than the Samburu, and many have bow legs, apparently as a result of rickets caused by their specialized diet. The men have white earrings carved from the vertebrae of cattle or Nile perch, and the women wear skirts of braided doum-palm fiber under the red trading cloth, but otherwise they imitate the Samburu, to whom they claim relationship: their moran are indistinguishable from the Samburu moran who joined them in a dance to honor the strangers. The faces of both were outlined in red masks of livid ocher, the dress and ornamentation were identical, and both carried paired spears with cowhide sheaths on the honed edges.

The dance, essentially similar in all the cattle tribes, was joined by a few Turkana warriors and women; no other women danced. Alone in East Africa, the women of the Turkana are treated as individuals worthy of respect. Though less elegant than the Samburu women, they have a bold stride and gay manner, and great character in dark, strong faces set off by
beadwork and thick metal earrings. Turkana men wear black grease in their hair instead of red, and the hair is balled up in a wad of blue clay into which black ostrich feathers are inserted, and they are not circumcised. Between 1909 and 1926, the Turkana, who trade cattle into Ethiopia for rifles and to this day stage cattle raids against other Karomojong, resisted the combined authority of Kenya, Uganda, and the Sudan. But repression was less damaging to the Turkana than the drought and overgrazing in their arid lands, and today the tribe sends its men southward, seeking work.