The Tree Where Man Was Born (19 page)

A cold night wind off the Gols whipped the steep walls of Ngata Kiti, and this wind, by morning, had shifted into the northeast. “Dry weather wind,” Myles muttered, sipping tea at the morning fire. “Blows the dhows south from Arabia.” Though it is generally erratic, the northeast monsoon blows from late October or November through February; the southeast monsoon blows the rest of the year. In summer, the land has dried to tinder, and the dry wind keeps everyone in a bad temper: black man and white actually
grin
, says Myles, at the first sign of the rains.

Leaving camp and the truck behind, we went eastward down the valley, taking along a driver and two rangers. Animals were scarce, and became scarcer. A hyena in the distance had this region to itself, to judge from the number of ungnawed bones along the way. The valley was much rougher than expected, and two hard hours passed before we came onto a rise that descended to the Salei Plain. To the south, in a kingdom of black rains, the Crater Highlands mounted toward the rim of Ngorongoro, thirty miles away; away from the Ngorongoro road, the Crater Highlands, girt by dead volcanoes that rise ten thousand feet and more into their clouds, are little known. Northeast was the rim of the escarpment, and beyond it and
far below lay the great lonely Lake Natron, stretching away to the Kenya border. Straight ahead, lost in the clouds, Ol Doinyo Lengai rose nearly ten thousand feet from the Rift Valley floor.

The Salei Plain, which forms a broad step between the Gols and the brink of the escarpment, is a bitter place of tussock and coarse bush that rises from gray cindery ash of the volcanoes, and for a time it seemed that its creatures were all solitary—one hyena, one giraffe, a rhino—as if only here, in this land too poor to support predators, such outcast animals could survive. The big coarse grass, too high to walk through with impunity, hid stones that could gut a car, and progress, which had been slow all morning, became slower still. In eleven hours of lurching and jarring, with one half-hour stop, we were to travel less than eighty miles.

Once our route crossed an old track of the Somali traders who make their way to the Sonjo villages that overlook Lake Natron; their most popular product is Sloan’s Liniment, taken internally as a beverage and nostrum. The Sonjo are a xenophobic tribe of Bantu-speakers who defend an enclave in this remote corner of Maasai Land. Like many eastern Bantu groups of hill regions, they may have a strong Caucasoid strain in their blood from the Hamitic tillers they displaced, for the average Sonjo is lighter in color than the Maasai. With the digging stick that is their only tool, they practice irrigation farming, eked out by goats and poaching. Maasai still raid their outlying camps, and the Sonjo construct fortified villages and fend off attacks with poisoned arrows. Today, the six villages still existing are built on the escarpment slopes on this west side of Lake Natron, and all overlook Ol Doinyo Lengai, which like the Maasai they consider to be the Mountain of God. It was Ngai who gave the digging stick to the Sonjo and Kikuyu, to whom the Sonjo are linguistically related, although the Sonjo themselves have a tradition of common origin with the Ikoma of Lake Victoria, with whom they still share such obscure customs as scarring infants above the left scapula and under the
left breast.
⁷
The Ikoma and Sonjo are eighty miles and at least two centuries apart, for the tribes were probably separated by the coming of the Maasai.

The Sonjo are bad people, Leite says, teasing the Ikoma driver about Bantu fears of the Maasai and of wild animals; how could it be that people so frightened of animals could be famous poachers, like the Ikoma and the Sonjo? The driver’s tribe is held in low regard by Maasai and white alike, though it must be said that the Maasai despise all Bantu tribes, known collectively as
il-meek
. The most charitable view that one hears of the Ikoma is that centuries of exposure to the tsetse fly have leached away their human virtues. “Murder
everything
,” Myles says. The Ikoma driver, one of the rare survivors of a black mamba bite, remarked that all Maasai were cattle thieves, which of course is true.

The second ranger was Corporal Nyamahanga, an Ikuria from the Mara province at the Kenya border. Last year a poacher fired two poison arrows at Myles and the corporal, and Myles said, “Pot him,” which Corporal Nyamahanga did. “Had three great whacking buckshot holes in his forehead. Bandaged him up, but I thought he was a goner. Couldn’t get him to hospital that night, we were twenty miles from our vehicles, and next morning I said to Corporal Nyamahanga, ‘Is he dead?’ ‘No sir, he’s eating a good breakfast!’” Myles turned to gaze at me, disgusted. “Survived a charge of buckshot in the head, he did; took him to hospital at Musoma.” He contemplated the corporal, a very strong big serious man whose black laced boots curled up sharply at the toes. “Good people, the Ikuria, and Corporal Nyamahanga is a good man—great runner, too. I’ll make him sergeant as soon as there’s a place.”

The Land Rover groaned on through a thickening heat, but the rim of the escarpment kept retreating; each ridge disclosed new gullies and rough broken ground. Up one gully that deflected us off to the north came a lone Maasai, with a few cattle; he disdained to show surprise at meeting a vehicle in this waste where no vehicle, it seems certain, had ever been before. In his faded red toga, face a mask, the only human figure that
was seen on the safari to the Gol Mountains scarcely turned to watch us pass. On a journey, the Maasai say, if a man is met who walks alone, the journey will be unsuccessful. So it proved this day, for we never reached the rim of the escarpment.

Ol Doinyo Lengai, though shrouded, was a heavy presence in the sky. Lost bands of kongoni and gazelle, wandered down out of the highland clouds, waited for everything and nothing on the edges of the cinder plain, and on a rise stood a stone oryx with one horn. The horn was long and straight and whorled; here was the unicorn. The beisa oryx is a strong gray antelope, wary and quick and spirited; oryx have been known to kill attacking lions. This one, given sudden life, went off at a fast trot. Far down the slope its herds were already moving at our approach. Myles said that in this region, where the animal is rare and wild, the hunter who killed an oryx usually earned it.

On the level ground, the game trails radiated out in cracks from the dry waterholes. Near one hole a dead zebra, still intact, had drawn a horde of griffons from the sky. The zebra did not look diseased, and we searched it for sign of Sonjo arrows, but there was nothing; it had merely died. Straightening up again, black men and white stood stunned beneath a leaden firmament, awaiting impulse: there was no sound but our own boots on the cinders. At midday Lengai loomed through the clouds and again vanished. Heat and silence became one. Adding their silence to the silence, the griffons waited.

The Land Rover retreated westward, toward the east face of the Gols. A band of green lined the bases of these cliffs, where the rare rains came down out of the mountains, and plains game stood expectant in the low still woods. Under the cliffs was a Somali track, headed south toward the mouth of Ngata Kiti, where we climbed out of the Salei in late afternoon. Soon the air was cool, and we paused on the slope, gazing back toward Lengai, which had come up out of its clouds to watch us go. The Mountain of God is a magnificent pure cone, a true mythic volcano, shrouded in pale ash so fine that it mists into the canopies of clouds, making the whole mountain an illusion.

Now the sun appeared, and the air dried; the pale tones of Ngata Kiti came to life. Round-haunched zebra stood, tails blowing, on a round curve of a hill, each wild horse in silhouette against the sky. A cheetah appeared, and then two more, moving westward up the valley; the animal survives in such dry country by lapping blood from the body cavity of its kill. The walk of lions is low-slung and easy, and leopards move like snakes, striking and coiling; the cheetah’s walk looks stiff and deadly as if it were bent on revenge. The three cats were traveling, not hunting, and did not look back.

Three miles from Naisera, we got down from the Land Rover to walk home. Bouncing away, the Africans stared back at us as if we had gone mad. Then the car stink was gone, and the motor; the twilight valley rang like a great bell.

On the plain lay a tawny pipit, dead, raked by a hawk. Somewhere jackals were keening, and a restless lion roared from across the valley. Then owls emerged, and in the growing dark, the white bellies of gazelles flashed back and forth like flags in a ghostly dance. From the mouth of a burrow peered four faces of bat-eared foxes, and from Naisera came a troop of mongoose, looping out in single file over the plain; it was the time of the night hunters.

Today we were beaten, but another day we would come back. At the evening fire, we planned a foot safari that would take us southeast across the wild Loita Hills of Kenya to the Sonjo villages, and down along the western shore of Natron; we would climb Lengai, then continue south into the Crater Highlands, to Ngorongoro.

At dawn we left the Gol behind, turning north toward Loliondo. A wind from the northeast was high and cold, a wind of hawks and eagles, and beyond Lemuta, the delicate pearl-and-chestnut kestrels dipped and rose, snatching dung beetles from the hard-caked ground. Farther on, four steppe eagles in a half-circle at the mouth of a hole fed with ravenous dexterity on a hatching of termites. Africa is a place of incongruities, as if its species were still evolving—kingfishers that live in the
dry woods, owls that seize fish, eagles that eat insects. And doubtless the great variety of raptors here is accounted for by their versatility of habit: nothing is overlooked, and nothing wasted.

Across the plain came a strange hyena that behaved like no hyena we had ever seen. Though unpursued, and pursuing no other creature, it ran hard, and though its head was half-averted in the manner of hyenas, its tail was raised, not tucked in the usual way between the legs, and it came straight for the car instead of fleeing it, only turning off in the final yards, still unafraid, still searching.

Myles stared after it in real surprise: he would demand a scientific explanation of such behavior from his friend Hans Kruuk. (Dr. Kruuk, the hyena specialist at Serengeti, has a high opinion of the charm, playfulness, and cleanly habits of these creatures in captivity, and keeps one as a pet). Hunters and game wardens are the traditional authorities on animal behavior, but today their opinions are regularly challenged by biologists and ecologists, and Myles, who works closely with the people at the Serengeti Research Institute, feels obsolete, “Scientists are in charge of the animals these days,” he said shortly. “We just keep things going for them. But now and then we catch them out—there are still a few things they don’t know.”

The vehicle traversed the lonely rises, rolling a thin dust cloud toward the west. Myles wished to show me an enormous fig that stands by itself far off beyond Barafu Kopjes. These hard plains are bare and bony, with only a whisper of grass, yet the animals keep to the ridges, where the grass is shortest. In a tilted world, the wildebeest went streaming down the sky, black tail tassels hung on the wind behind, all but a solitary bull, thin-ribbed and rag-tailed, old beard blowing. Perhaps he felt his death upon him, for he paid no attention to our intrusion. Soon he had the whole sky to himself.

The giant fig, which looks like a small grove in the distance, is at least as old as man’s recorded history on this plain. Its spread is not less than one hundred and fifty feet, the size of six ordinary figs, and it is a tree of life. Cape rooks, kestrels, owls,
and the shy brown-chested cuckoo were in residence, and none would willingly leave the tree because there are no other trees for miles around. One owl that moved onto a nearby rock was punished by the kestrels; at each blow from above, it shifted its feet and shuffled its loose feathers.

The tree has a Maasai hearth built into its thick base, and a flat stone near at hand for sharpening spear blades. One day I would like to sit under this tree that has drawn so much fat wood and fleshy leaves out of near-desert, and stare for a week or more into the emptiness. One understands why these monumental figs take on a religious aura for the Africans; they are thought to symbolize the sacred mountains, and the old ways of close kinship with the earth and rain, Nature and God. The Mau-Mau leader Kimathi used such figs for prayer as well as message depots, and his people said of one great tree that it would fall of its own accord when Kimathi was taken. In the police inspector’s unsuperstitious account
⁸
of the hunt for Kimathi, the tree in question fell within that hour.