The Tree Where Man Was Born (28 page)

At Ndala I lived happily in a thatch-roofed banda, like an African beehive hut with windows and a cement floor. The hut was perched on the high river bank just beside the falls, which washed away all noises but the clear notes of forest birds. Sometimes I climbed the stream above the falls, with its hidden rock pools and small sandy beaches shaded by figs and tamarind, and massive boulders of the ancient rock of Africa laid bare by the torrents of the rainy season. In the winter, a pair of Egyptian geese flew each day into the ravines above the falls; one watched them appear out of the sun over Manyara and vanish into the Rift wall.

In the ground-water forest, a green monitor lizard, four feet long, crosses a brook, and the speckled
Charaxes
butterflies flicker through the shades. In an open glade a fastidious impala lifts its hind leg to shed big drops of rain. At daybreak a dog baboon, taking his ease atop a termitarium, picks his breakfast from a plucked branch of red berries; finding himself observed, he cocks his head, then dismisses his fellow hominoid with a
cynical nod. At evening a white-browed coucal, called the water-bottle bird, neck feathers raised, whole body shuddering, delivers that liquid falling song that only intensifies the stillness.

In the winter drought of 1961, Manyara was a pale dead place of scum froth and cracked soda; in 1969 and 1970 the water level was so high that many of the tracks behind the shore were underwater, and much of the umbrella thorn was killed. At twilight one late afternoon near the drowned forest, a herd of elephants fed on mats of dead typha sedge blown over from the far side of the lake. The animals waded to their chests in the greasy waves, trunks coiling in and out, ears blowing. Night was falling in the shadows of the Rift, which rose in a black wall behind the elephants, and from dusky woods came a solitary fluting. As the sun sank to the escarpment, the western sky took on a greenish cast, and the last light of storm caught the whiskers on the pointed lips, the torn flutings of the ears, the ragged switch of a wet tail on ancient hide. The dead forest, the doomed giants, the wild light were of another age, and made me restless, as if awakening ancestral memories of the Deluge.

Between Kilimanjaro and Mt. Meru, off the road that winds around the side of Ngurdoto Crater, are soft ponds where hippos push and blow, and here vast beds of floating vegetation, papyrus and pale sky blue petals of nymphea drifting with the
wind, may cause a pond to form or vanish before one returns along the road: I noticed this one afternoon while walking homeward to Momela. On my left as I went along, the clouds lifted from the shattered side of black Mt. Meru, revealing the jagged walls and the great cinder cone of its exploded crater. Before long, I heard the somber crack of a snapped branch, and rounding a bend, found my path barred by elephants. They were feeding on both sides, and one stood foursquare on the road, legs like stone columns. I was sorry about this, as dark was coming, and there was an elephant in this region that last year, having been approached incautiously, destroyed John Owen’s friend, Baron Von Blumenthal. But Desmond Vesey-FitzGerald, who had seen these elephants earlier and anticipated the confrontation, came to fetch me. I was glad to see his Land Rover, for night came down before we reached his camp.

Vesey, who is the ecologist for Tanzania’s national parks, had been kind enough to invite me to Momela, at the foot of Mt. Meru, to learn some “bush botany” from himself and his dear friend Mary Richards, a beautiful Welsh lady of eighty-three who, like Vesey himself, had transferred her botanical field work into Tanzania when the political situation in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, became a nuisance. (“Can’t tell what they’ll ask you at the borders anymore—doubt if they know themselves. Used to ask what sex your wife was—probably still do.”) But Vesey and Mary were much too busy to bemoan the passing of the grand old days, for he was completing his work on East African grasses, while she was negotiating the purchase of a new Land Rover for a botanical safari into the remote plains behind Kilimanjaro. She had brought along from Zambia her cook Samuel, and as Vesey already had two Samuels in residence, and as these old friends are much given to good-humored shouting, their household is a lively place. Three Samuels or none might appear when one was called, whereas Vesey’s cook Chilufia was apt to be there whether wanted or not, agitating in stricken silence for a chance to lay bare a calamity.
The gloom of Chilufia is eternal as fire or water, and would no doubt be passed on from father to son.

“That banana pudding, Chilufia! We don’t wish to see that again!”

And Chilufia rolls a yellow eye in resignation; one suspects Chilufia of laughter in the dark.

Toward Africans, Vesey and Mary have the good will of the earlier generations, recognizing the dignity and loyalty and courage with which Africans repay respectful treatment. Their manner is one of mixed love and exasperation, and just as the African eases his nerves with laughter at the mzungu, the European, so Vesey calms his own, when he can manage it, by laughing at the blacks. Because there is mutual loyalty in this household, blacks and whites may amuse one another in a way that is forgiven on both sides.

“. . . frightfully smart! Stumbling about on the stones, slapping his rifle butt about—practically knocked himself down!” Vesey’s cheeks, in mirth, are merry and red and round, under round glasses. “Didn’t you see him? Trouble was, he’d lost his gun sling again, had his rifle all tied up with a fearful bit of string. . . .”

Vesey and Mary are pioneer African botanists, self-taught, and they are spirited competitors, decrying each other’s botanical techniques, deploring the absence of word from “Kew” (the British Botanical Museum at Kew Gardens), fussing over each other’s needs, such as proper tags and a decent supply of “polly bags” for collecting specimens. In the evening, over a stiff drink, they compare notes, recalling old times in Abercorn, and old friends like Ionides, called “Iodine,” and J. A. Hunter, the hunter and game warden, and Wilfred Thesiger, the desert traveler, and Peter Greenway, the eminent botanist at the Coryndon (for their generation, Nairobi’s National Museum, which acquired its new name at the time of Independence, will always be the Coryndon, just as this land will always be Tanganyika). In the back buildings of the Coryndon, I once met Dr. Greenway, a dogged bachelor in baggy plus
fours and bow tie who was kind enough to sort out a crude collection I had made in the Dahlak Islands in the Red Sea; he is of the same vintage, more or less, as Mary Richards, and was greatly annoyed at young Vesey for failing to stay in touch with him. “I don’t know what Vesey thinks he’s doing down there,” Dr. Greenway said, “but you may be sure it isn’t botany.”

I lived in a tent west of the house, which overlooks the Momela Lakes, in a saddle of green hills under Mt. Meru. Looking northeast toward Kilimanjaro, there is a broad prospect of the N’gare N’erobi region where Joseph Thomson of the Royal Geographic Society first met with the Maasai; Thomson, in 1883, was the first European to cross Maasai Land to Lake Victoria and return. “We soon set our eyes upon the dreaded warriors that had been so long the subject of my waking dreams, and I could not but involuntarily exclaim, ‘What splendid fellows!’ as I surveyed a band of the most peculiar race of men to be found in Africa.” But soon the Maasai were behaving with the aggressive arrogance for which they are well known, and two days later, having gotten word that the Maasai in the country ahead were up in arms, Thomson felt obliged to beat a retreat around the south side of Kilimanjaro. Originally he had planned to go west over the Nguruman region to the lake, but now he was deflected, coming around by way of Loitokitok and Amboseli and heading northwest to Naivasha, Lake Baringo, and Kusumu on a route very close to today’s main road from Namanga to these destinations. En route, he named the Aberdare Mountains for the president of the society that had sponsored him and a lovely falls in honor of himself.

It has been said that Thomson’s peril was exaggerated by the Chagga people of the foothills of Kilimanjaro, who hoped to relieve him of the trading goods intended for the Maasai. The Chagga were and are today an intelligent, ambitious tribe of Bantu-speaking cultivators who practiced irrigation in the rich highlands; like the Kikuyu, they were driven inland from the coast by northern invaders and they, too, are supposed to have displaced a small race of men with big bows and unintelligible
speech, who were driven higher and higher on Mt. Kilimanjaro and eventually vanished. Subsequently the Chagga were harassed by the Maasai and displaced by Europeans, yet later became the most powerful tribe in the country. Whether the Chagga and Kikuyu got control of the best land because they are intelligent and ambitious, or whether their intelligence and ambition is a consequence of favorable environment and good nutrition would make an interesting study.

At daybreak, through the tent fly, I could see giraffe heads swaying over the small rises around camp, like giant flowers shot up overnight; the bell note of a boubou shrike distills the windless morning. Giraffes gaze raptly, one ear flicking, before moving off in that elegant slow rhythm that is tuned to the old music of the elephants. Elephants, too, convene here in the night, and sometimes buffalo, chewing their cud as they contemplate man’s habitations. Below the camp, the water trails of courting coot melt the surface of Momela, and beyond the lakes, in a realm of shadow, Kilimanjaro’s base forms a pedestal for its high cumulus. Birds fly from this dark world into the sunlight of Momela—a quartet of crowned cranes, wild horn note calling from across the water, and ducks that hurry down the clouds—pintail, Cape widgeon, Hottentot teal. In rain, the lakes have the monotone alpine cast of mountain lakes across the high places of the world, but here the monotone is pierced by fierce rays of African color—a rainbow in a purple sky, an emilia blossom, tropic orange, or a carmine feather, drifted down from a diadem of birds crossing the heavens in the last shreds of sunset.

His people tell of a young Bushman who came upon a rock pool in the desert. Kneeling to drink, he saw reflected in the pool a red bird more brilliant than anything he had ever seen on earth. Determined to hold it in his hand, he sprang up with his bow, but there was no sign of the red bird in the sere desert sky. Wandering from place to place, inquiring after the vanished bird, he strayed farther and farther from his homeland. Days gathered into months and years, and in this way, without
ever having found what he was seeking, he became old. He had hunted the land over, and talked to the few who might have glimpsed the bird as well as the many who had not, and still his heart could not give up the search. At last, on the point of turning home, he heard that the red bird had been seen from the peak of the north mountain, and he took up his bow and resumed his journey one more time. The mountain was far away across a desert, and when he reached the foothills the old hunter was mortally tired. With the end of his strength, he climbed and climbed into the sky, and on the peak he lay down upon his back, for he was dying. One last time he gazed into the distances, hoping to glimpse the splendid thing in the mountain sky. But the sky was empty, and he sighed and closed his eyes, wondering if his life had been in vain, and died with the sun upon his eyelids and a vision of the bird as he had seen it long ago, reflected in the bright pool of his childhood. And as he died, a feather of a burning red drifted down from the great sky, coming to rest in his still hand.
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