The Tree Where Man Was Born (13 page)

The dancers pack together in a phalanx. As the dance begins, the moran, spears upright, step out whooping one by one, in the long, leaping Maasai trot that in time of war and cattle raids carried the herdsmen three hundred miles or more over the plains. (Adrian remarks that the Giriama of the coast, most of whom have never laid eyes on a Maasai, say to this day that there is no sense fleeing a Maasai, they have legs that can run forever.) The dancers tremble. Now two or three step out at once, and those in the main body begin to leap straight up and down, spears glinting in the sun; they shoot the chin out as they rise and stamp with the right foot as they touch the ground, and on each rise the upright spears and clubs, or rungus, are twirled all the way around. Some dancers make shrill whoops, patting their mouths; others clap hands in rhythm: “N-ga-AY!” The chant is heavy and guttural, repetitive, but one man sings a litany in counterpoint, and another orates fiercely in the background as the dance accumulates its force. The young women and old men become excited, swaying and laughing; an infant in a necklace of tiny dik-dik bones is bouncing on a girl’s bare shoulders. At first these onlookers had teased the dancers but now they are caught up by the dance, eyes shining: “UM-ba-AY-uh! AH-yea-AY-y!” The old women, sullen, sit in the hot shadows of the huts, weaving palm fronds into skirts and nets and harpoon line. Perhaps they sense a condescension in the visitors, or wonder if the village will be paid.

The dance grows ever more excited, more complex, the greased
red faces glistening with sweat. The moran chant in circles and then circles within circles, leaping, twirling, spears and metal arm coils shooting light, and always the chant and whooping, mournful and harmonious, the voice of man crying out to the ascending sky in exaltation and unutterable loss.

When, in 1885, Count Teleki’s party reached the summit of the mountains at the south end of the lake, then made their way down to the shore, they were as stunned by the wind and sandstorms of this “valley of death”
¹⁸
as they were by its fierce beauty. At that time, the near-naked Llo-molo were all living on small islands out of fear of stronger tribes, and especially the Turkana, who made frequent raids against the Rendille of Mt. Kulal. One island village still exists and can be seen from shore, but the huts are so low and amorphous that from afar, in the sun and black sand and hard light, they look more like boulders than human habitations. The small bare island, known to the Llo-molo as Lorian, is composed of two small rises with a flat saddle in between, and the huts on the saddle are outlined on the blue mountains of Turkana Land. The Turkana say that there were formerly Llo-Molo on the great South Island, far offshore, but that over the years the fires there had died out one by one.

With colonial pacification of the nomads, some Llo-molo moved to the mainland at Loiyengalani, the Place of Many Trees, and acquired a few cattle by trading fish to the herdsmen who passed through; the twenty-odd Llo-molo who still cling to Lorian have only goats. The two villages at Loiyengalani, with the remnant huts on Lorian, contain all known Llo-molo, who are scarcely more numerous today than they were in the time of Count Teleki. Their health has improved with the addition to their diet of milk and blood, meat, berries, borassus nuts, and ugali or maize meal, but the Llo-molo, being thought of as inferior, take no wives from outside the tribe, while their own young girls may be sold off to other people for a bride price.

Nguya, whose brother Nanyaluka will be next chief of the
Llo-molo, says that the people who lived on Lorian subsisted entirely upon fish, which are everywhere plentiful; all the tilapia the people need can be netted a few feet away from the legs of the scrawny cattle that browse among the water weeds for want of fodder on the shore. But the fishermen of Loiyengalani go to a sand spit opposite Lorian to catch and dry fish for the village. They plant their spears in the black sand to warn off raiders, and build a fire by spinning a stick in a cleft of softer wood over a tuft of dung, taking turns with this ancient fire drill until the wood dust glows. Then more dung is laid over the spark, and the whole lifted in both hands to the wind, until smoke appears and fire is created.

Lines, ropes, and nets are woven of the fiber of the doum palm. Gill nets, carried looped over the shoulder, are spiked to the lake bottom with an oryx horn, the free end being loosely overlapped with the next man’s net. This process is repeated according to the number of fishermen, and meanwhile the lower mesh line is treaded into the mud, to keep the fish from fleeing out beneath. Now a boy splashes through the shallows, scaring fish into the net. The tilapia, one or two pounds each, are picked out and carried ashore, where a man squatting on his heels strips off the operculum, then draws the guts gently through the gill cavity, after which he uses the hard operculum to scale the fish. All is done deftly, without haste, and in moments the sparkling meat is rinsed off in the lake. Some of the fish are boiled and eaten, but most are split and spread onto palm matting to dry; every little while the fishermen pause to hone soft-iron knives on the glinting stones.

One morning a young man of Lorian came to the mainland on a small raft of two palm logs stabilized by log outriggers and propelled by a short pole used like a kayak paddle. On his raft, for trading purposes, he carried a black goat. After renewing his red ocher and having his hair adjusted by the fishermen, he set off with his goat for Loiyengalani.

In the old days, both crocodile and hippopotamus were taken here, and the Llo-molo harpoon, virtually identical in its design
to harpoons still used in the salt waters of the world for ocean fish such as swordfish and tuna, may be a separate invention of these people. A long, straight shaft is carved from the hard root of a thorn tree, then greased and bent straight in the fire and the sun; a barbed harpoon point formerly of bone but now of iron is fastened to the harpoon line, pulling free of the shaft when the quarry has been struck. There is a light harpoon for heavy fish, a heavy one for crocodile, and for hippo the long horn of an oryx; the animal is killed by multiple spearings. For hippo, the Llo-molo must now go north to Allia Bay, where they remain a month or more eating the meat. Sometimes they dry a little to bring back for the women and children. Crocodiles, too, are hunted in the north, although some still occur near Loiyengalani.

This morning the head of a very large crocodile—
“Mkubwa sana mamba!”
—is spotted in the water off the point, a mile away. Through binoculars the surfaced snout and eyes can scarcely be made out; the fishermen cannot have seen the crocodile, only a rock that has no place along a shore that has been memorized for generations. The brute sinks slowly out of sight, to reappear some minutes later farther off; it raises the whole length of its long ridged tail clear of the water before sinking away again. Everywhere else, including the Omo River, this Nile crocodile is very dangerous to man, but here it seems to be quite inoffensive. Lake Rudolf crocodiles can leap clear out of the water, and have no difficulty catching fish; mostly they hunt at night, in the lake shallows. But they also have an excellent sense of smell, and will travel a long way overland for carrion. It is said
¹⁹
that these ancient animals are unable to resist the call
im-im-im
, of a weird nasality attained by closing off one nostril of the caller, but I found no chance to put this predilection to the test.

Sometimes tilapia and Nile perch are taken with the spear, in clear water off the black stone shore south of the settlement. The fish schools are shadows in the water, and the men stalk them along shore, moving ever more quietly until they are
poised, spear shaft balanced in the left hand, butt cupped in the right, line dangling in a neat coil, the harpoon point with its hard glitter in the sun like the bill of a taut heron. Nguya and his brothers squat, knees cocked, black wet legs gleaming, until they are balanced, centered, and in time with all around them; the earth is poised, all breathe as one and hurl at the same moment. Later, Ngwinye, fishing alone, pierces a one-pound fish at least fifteen feet from shore. The stalk, the squat, the wait and rise and throw is a dance more stirring than the spear dance of the moran, which had been taken from another culture. Here was the Llo-molo hunter, the aboriginal man of Africa whose old ways fade among the colors of the people who came after; it was only a glimpse, for I was here too late. Today the three fishers wore mission shorts who only a few years ago had worn fish skins or gone naked.

Hundreds of feet above the lake is a strange old rock with two parallel lines of thirteen holes in its flat surface, carved for the ancient pebble game called bao: the land beneath the rock, eroding, is tilting it gradually into a gully. Forms of bao are still played by primitive people all over Africa, for the game comes down out of the Stone Age. Each stone represents an animal, and each hole a stock corral or boma; the point of the game, like the point of pastoral life, is to acquire more stock than one’s opponent.
²⁰
The bao rock may have lain beside a vanished stream, but more likely it lay by the old shore of the lake, which was markedly higher even in the time of Count Teleki. The gaming rock, perhaps thousands of years old, passed the time of those dim figures whose passage here is marked by the silent cairns.

On the old shore there is no sign of life, no bird, only gray shell and dusty rock and small concretions that hold fossils. All is dead but for a solitary toothbrush bush, mswaki, drawing a magic green from the spent stone. Then out of the emptiness flies a hare with a gaunt jackal in pursuit. The animals whisk back and forth and circle rises; the hare dives into the lone
bush, the jackal close behind. A rigid silence is pierced by a small shriek. Soon the jackal reappears, hare in its jaws, and reverting to its furtive gait, makes off with its quarry down a gully. The rocks are still.

Inland, black boulders climb to far-off ridges that rise in turn to the Kulal Mountains, in Rendille Land. The Kulal is forested, but between the forest and the lake is desert; the only soft note in this landscape is the voice of the crested lark. Down the desert hills, early one morning, came herds of sheep and goats, like far white specks, and by midday the herds were watering at the lake shore, attended by four lithe girls bare to the waist, in red bead necklaces and golden bracelets. Leather pouches swung from their slim shoulders and in the wind their skirts wound gracefully around long legs. These Rendille were wild creatures from the eastern deserts, and when approached they ran.

The Rendille men resemble the Samburu in dress and comportment, but here they mix little with other tribes, perhaps because these despised folk eat fish. A Galla people, they wander the near-desert between Mt. Kulal and Marsabit, and others live between Lorian Swamp and the border of Somaliland. Probably they came originally from Somalia, driven out by the Somali expansion that seventy years ago carried all the way west to Mt. Kenya. The Rendille are desert nomads, and mostly they herd camels instead of cattle: when a man dies, the Rendille say, his brother mourns him with one eye and counts his camels with the other.
²¹