The Last Train to Zona Verde (25 page)

On hearing of Nathan’s death, the Botswana government ordered that Sukiri be destroyed. Michael Lorentz vigorously opposed this, and thus began an imbroglio that ended with Michael quitting Abu for good, the camp resuming business under new management. Sukiri and the two elephants that had been orphaned with her were trucked to Johannesburg and flown in elephantine crates to the United States, where they are now housed together in a cage at the Pittsburgh Zoo.

10
The Hungry Herds at Etosha

I
CROSSED THE BORDER
into Namibia again, got a lift, and descended to the crumbly yellow middle of the country, staying first at a bush camp and then at a hotel. It was one of those inevitable transitions of travel — not travel at all, but stringent captivity and enforced delay. Months later, I couldn’t help but think of what Michael had said of Nathan Jamieson: “He died doing what he loved.” I wondered — and who wouldn’t? — in what circumstances that hopeful consolation might be uttered of my death, and whether it would be true.

The bush camp, north of Grootfontein, had only one other guest, except after dark when five large, well-formed eland crept through the thorn trees to drink at the waterhole near the lodge. The woman manager, who had seemed so taciturn, softened at the sight of them, as misanthropes often do in the presence of animals, saying, “Lovely, aren’t they?” The next day she brightened again, pointing out a golden oriole and a parrot-sized hornbill flitting through those same trees.

An American in charge of an aid program had agreed to meet me in Otjiwarongo, take me to Etosha Pan, and drop me on the road to Angola. From there I would be on my own. I saw the thin and sad widow Helena (“No fun here. No life at all”) again at the Grootfontein supermarket, and in Otjiwarongo stopped in to see Mr. Khan and buy more minutes for my phone. And, welcomed by these friendly people, I was reminded that in much of Africa there are so few main roads that people’s lives continually converge, and there occurs a repeating experience of crossed paths and familiar faces.

Otjiwarongo had seemed a welcoming enough place when I’d breezed through with Tony, the American diplomat and my traveling companion. But after a day and a half there it proved to be somnolent to the point of melancholy, or was this the predictable effect of a rainy weekend in a country town in Namibia? In the bar of my hotel a multiracial crowd howled at a South African rugby match on the wide-screen TV. Some were ranchers, as beefy as their cattle; others worked in the fluorite mine or were farmers. It was their day to drink. My bedroom stank of mildew. The desert rain fell intermittently from the sort of low grimy sky I associated with heavy industry, yet there was no industry in Otjiwarongo.

I asked the hotel clerk the way to the main street. She told me, and added, “Yes, go for a walk. But it’s Saturday. Be careful. There will be drunks.”

Into the drizzle I went, down the dirt sidewalk, past the one-story houses surrounded by high walls — and the perimeter walls made the houses seem more depressing than if they had been shacks. I scuffed through the litter to the only businesses that were open, the gas station and the Shoprite supermarket, where staggering boys and men shouted at passing cars, and at me.

“You!” one of the boys called out, and because he was in a group idling at the side of the Shoprite parking lot, I decided to ask him
what he wanted. Seeing me approach, he skulked among the others, just as a singled-out animal in a herd might do, for camouflage and protection.

“Did you want to ask me a question?” I asked. But he was shy now.

“Where do you come from?” one of the others asked. He was glassy-eyed and a bit unsteady, yet did not seem threatening.

I told them where I was from.

“I want to go to America,” that boy said.

“What will you do there?”

“I can do anything.”

This prompt reply made the others laugh.

“And me, I want to go,” another said. “For work and for enjoying.”

“You can work in Otjiwarongo, or Windhoek,” I said.

“There is no work here. There is nothing here. We have no money.”

“Give us money,” one of the younger ones said.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I said, because they were growing in confidence, and insolence, and were now beginning to surround me.

“He is a clever man,” the first boy said. “He is telling us lies. He is lying because he is fearing us.”

Now I realized it had been a mistake to engage them in any sort of talk. I said, “Thank you! See you tomorrow,” and walked briskly away, down the empty road under the gray sky. I was thinking of the futility of such an encounter, because although we were in Namibia, they were boys I might have met anywhere in the world — aimless, idle, with little education and no work.

I walked for an hour and then returned by a different route to wait out the weekend. It was one of those empty interludes in travel, an airless unrewarding delay, when nothing occurs except a rising sense of loneliness and uncertainty, a darkening of prospects, the condition of being an outsider with all of a stranger’s suspicions.

To take the curse off the rest of the day I sat and read to pass the
time — Melville’s
Benito Cereno
(ships, ocean, deception, mutiny). At such times I am so drawn into the detailed life of the novel that I am startled when I look up from the fiction and see gravel and cactuses and palm trees that remind me I am elsewhere.

I was glad when Oliver showed up in his four-wheel-drive vehicle. It meant a few days of companionship and the pleasure of being on the road again, as well as a chance to find out about his aid mission. His role in Africa involved giving large amounts of money away and supervising its use.

Oliver was the resident country director in Namibia of the American Millennial Challenge Corporation, an agency that financed foreign aid and development. The total fund was considerable, currently running at about $1 billion, and the projects were spread all over Africa — indeed, all over the globe, the dispensing of American taxpayers’ money in an effort to improve other people’s lives. One of the projects in Namibia was helping the tourism infrastructure. In an era of financial hardship for Americans, I wanted to know more.

“Oliver goes everywhere in Namibia,” I had been told. “He loads up his vehicle with food and water and extra gas and drives into the wilderness. If there’s no road, he drives up dry riverbeds. He spends weeks in the bush.”

He was young, mid-thirties, and quietly hearty. I liked his energy and admired his disposition. He biked and ran, even on the hottest Namibian days. He was married, with an infant son, and lived in Windhoek when he was not traveling. He had been associated with the Millennial Challenge for four years.

Also in the car was Trevor, a lanky, good-humored Texan whose wife was a medical officer in Windhoek, specializing in the administration of HIV/AIDS programs. Trevor was contemplating his next move, but was not sure what that might be. He was nearer my age, well traveled, ironical, and, as I was to find out, knowledgeable about African wildlife. His mellow mood showed in his loose and
jaunty way of walking. He was a thoughtful person but not a worrier. He said he was just coming along for the ride, interested that I was eventually heading to Angola.

“Have you been up there?” I asked him.

He said no. Neither he nor Oliver had been over the border, nor did they know anyone who had. Oliver had been in touch with an Angolan on the other side who said he might be able to help me, but when pressed for a definite answer, the Angolan lapsed into silence and became unobtainable.

We drove north through small, narrow, road-straddling cattle towns, Hartseer and Vrindskap and Outjo, past the gravy-colored ridge of Fransfonteinberge, and after sixty miles or so we were rolling through the bush. The terrain was the unchanging semidesert and low thornbush that characterized much of Namibia, and it looked sterile until an ostrich strutted into view or a herd of buffalo shadowed forth to flare their nostrils. Passing not far from here 150 years ago, Francis Galton wrote in his diary, “The country is remarkably uniform, intersected with paths, and quite destitute of natural features to guide us. It is also slightly undulating, enough so to limit the view to a mile or two ahead.”

That was true today. The few Victorian travelers who had dared to march across these parts would find much of rural Namibia unchanged, because it is so thinly populated and undeveloped. Many of Galton’s descriptions in
Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa
, the account of his 1851 journey in what was then an unmapped country, would still apply to this enduring, crystalline, and seemingly steamrolled landscape.

Nowhere was that truer than at Etosha, which we entered a few hours later. Apart from the gate and checkpoint, it was as Galton had sketched it:

Galton had gone north with two companions, John Allen and Charles Andersson, and a caravan of bearers following a file of heavily laden oxen. Galton was only twenty-eight, but he was high-spirited, in pursuit of David Livingstone’s Lake Ngami. At that time, European travelers in Africa, like Galton, were searching for the source of the Nile and denouncing the slave trade. For almost two years, Galton wandered up and down what is now Namibia, the first Englishman to report on it. He did not find Lake Ngami, but he penetrated deep into the country, very near what is now the Angola border (“four or five days’ easy journey ahead”), where slaves were routinely rounded up and shipped to Brazil from the Angolan port of Benguela. Galton noted the customs of the Damara, the Ovambo, and the Bushmen; he inquired about slave trading in Angola; he shot birds and big game; he crossed and recrossed the desert; and in the Victorian manner he asserted himself.

“A man whom I had taken from Chapupa’s
werft
became impudent,” he wrote. “So I took active measures upon his back and shoulders, to an extent that astonished the Ovampo and reformed the man.”

There were a few roads in what was Etosha National Park now,
but the rest was bush and water and a salt pan. Galton, who first brought Etosha to the notice of the English-speaking world, would have found much of the area familiar. Twenty-five years after Galton’s visit, a young American trader-wanderer named Gerald McKiernan camped at the edge of Etosha and wrote in his diary, “It was the Africa I had read about in books of travel. All the menageries in the world turned loose would not compare to the sight I saw that day.”

In prehistory, Etosha had been a vast inland sea and still gave that impression, as if at low tide the sea drained away, leaving the sand and crusted sea floor exposed as flats to glitter under an empty sky. Much of it was now a pan, part of it with year-round water and other sections seasonal lakes. In the open areas it was a vastness of blinding white, and it shimmered as far as the horizon and was so thoroughly bleak it seemed that we had landed on a planet made entirely of crushed coral.

Farther east the land was more varied, with occasional clumps of trees and some parched but wooded glades, where svelte springboks sprinted and white rhinos lowered their armored heads and fitted their wide shovel mouths to the ground to tear at brown grass.

“Giraffe at ten o’clock,” Trevor said. He raised his binoculars to his eyes and frowned under them in concentration. “And another. With a baby. Beautiful. She’s saying, ‘I think I’ll try the leaves on this branch up here.’ ”

Two-toned herds of zebra with stiff, upright, brushlike manes trotted together shoulder to shoulder, then lifting their knees broke into a clopping gallop.

We came to a waterhole where three honey-colored lions lay sleeping, their fatigued bodies slackened on the gravel in the late afternoon sun.

Oliver said, “Siesta time.”

Trevor said, “Wait.”

We watched for a while: two slender sinewy lionesses and a
broad-shouldered male lying between them with a fluffed-up mane like teased hair.

Trevor said, “Big boy is stirring. He knows what he wants.”

Yawning, the big lion got to his feet, tossed his mane, and padded over to the lioness on his left. Then he squatted in a regal pose behind her, raised his noble head, and thrust himself against her. This took but seconds. As he returned to his sleeping spot, the lioness he had covered rolled over and raised her dangling hind legs and shimmied on her back.