The Tree Where Man Was Born (32 page)

Frank is anxious to communicate, though he speaks my language poorly, and I scarcely speak his at all. When Vesey isn’t listening he uses my first name. The friendliness is genuine, but there is a hair of aggression in it; he scans my eyes for disapproval or rejection. Knowing this and pained by it, I respond
enthusiastically, but soon we are overtaken by silence. We cannot communicate after all. Even if we could, we have little to offer but good will and our humanity. Even among white East Africans and black who converse easily in English or Swahili, the problem appears to be mutual boredom, which comes about because both find the interests of the other trivial, and their ideas therefore of small consequence.

The volcano filled the night like a great bell. Over Shombole and the Loita there was lightning, vast silent illuminations that hollowed out the heavy clouds until they glowed like fire seen through smoke. This night and the next, the lightning came every few moments, but the thunder was too distant to be heard. I listened to a solitary nightjar, fixed in the rigidity of its shrill song that under Lengai was a part of the moon silence.

With Hawkes at daybreak I set off toward the mountain. Each carried a small knapsack of tea and water, nuts and raisins, notebook and binoculars; Hawkes had a camera. Lengai was clear of clouds, and the distance to the lava fan seemed perhaps six miles. But in the bad light of the night before, we had made camp on the wrong side of a grid of steep ridges, and between the ridges lay steep bush-choked dongas. For the first two hours of the trek, we slid and clambered up and down and up and down, opposed by hidden rocks and head-high grasses. I did not expect trouble with animals, and we had none, but leopard pug marks in the sand bed of a donga were a reminder that we could not forget about them either; the giant grass that was such hard work could hide a rhino.

At eight, already hot and tired, we stopped on the crest of a ridge and stared bleakly about us. At this rate, two more hours would pass before we reached the mountain, and at least five would be required for the climb. Allowing three hours for the descent and none at all for rest or exploration, we would still face a four-hour return across these badlands after dark. Also, Lengai was gathering its clouds, which would make the climb more difficult. But we had worked too hard to give up now; the going could get easier at any moment, and from the mountainside
we might perceive a better route back to the camp. Or so we persuaded each other, trudging on like pilgrims toward the magic mountain. And almost immediately we struck a Maasai cattle track over the ridges to the river of black sand that winds around the base of the volcano. From the black river, the lava plain climbed rapidly to the ridges of Lengai.

Ahead, a dark gorge cleaved the face of the volcano. The ridge that forms the west side of the gorge faces south toward the Highlands, and its lower slope, still visible beneath the clouds on the summit, looked less precipitous than the rest. We walked up the black river bed then climbed the far bank and traversed the ash plain. Here a zebra had once wandered; into one ghostly print the wind had blown the copper shell of a large beetle. Higher still, the beetle husks were everywhere, glinting in the wind waves of the surface. The fire and ash of its last eruption, in 1967, buried Lengai in a gray lunar snow, all but these withered tips of wind-twitched grass. At the ravine edge stood the husk of a whistling-thorn on which the galls have turned to wood, yet ants inhabited the galls, subsisting, perhaps, on the dead beetles that blow across the wastes; in greener times, these ants protected the new tips of the acacia against browsers such as the giraffe. A stray lizard track excepted, the ants are the one sign of terrestrial life. Footsteps resound, for the Mountain of God is hollow; there is no sense of the present here, only the past.

In the spring of 1969, on a flight from Nairobi to Manyara, and again in the winter of 1970, coming from Seronera to Arusha, I got the pilots to circle the volcano. Buffeted by downdrafts, dodging clouds, the light planes came in over the deep furrows of the flanks and made tight circles over the sickening vat. In its brimstone smokes, dead grays, sulfurous yellows, there was no hint of green, no sign of life.

The slope had steepened. We dropped our packs beside the dead acacia, and standing there, leaning back into the hill, I became aware of butterflies and birds. The first butterfly was as orange as the sun, and the wind hurried it from east to west across the falling desert, its fire so intensified by the flat light
that it was still visible where it rounded the mountain and spun away northwest toward Lake Natron. The birds were birds of high rock places—swifts, crag martins, the white Egyptian vulture—riding the drafts and currents. Then a lark came strangely near before bounding down across the deserts. On the wind this morning I had heard an elusive lark song; perhaps this solitary bird had been the singer.

I put a few nuts and raisins in my pocket and took a sip of water. The desert air of the volcano was so dry that one handled the water with the kind of reverence that the Bushman must feel for the water that he stores in ostrich eggs. Then we were off again. I concentrated on slow steady steps, a steady breath, at pains not to look down. On the narrowing ridge, there were no rocks, no sticks, no handholds of any kind, only the slick surface of the ash; it was dusty but hard, and my light boots could find no grip. Hawkes, who had climbing boots, was doing better, but he was not optimistic. Before the eruption, according to its few veterans, the conquest of Lengai had been arduous but not difficult; now, Hawkes felt, this route, at least, was a job for a four-man team with ropes and ice-axes. On our right hand, the ridge dropped sheer into the black ravine; to the left, one would roll and bounce all the way to the black river for want of something to catch hold of. I stared rigorously upward, where the white vulture, stiff-winged as a kite, was suddenly sucked up into the mists.

We neared the clouds. Far below, small tornadoes or dust devils whipped ash into the air, and the wind blew it in sheets of smoke across the slopes. The mists descended, and a gathering wind nagged at the nerves; Hawkes called down that the going was getting worse. It was late morning, with the steepest rock of the volcano summit still to go, and already I was reduced to hands and knees. Again and again, my shoes lost their grip, making me throw myself belly down to avoid slipping backward and gathering speed for the ultimate descent; so steep was it where I lay flung against the mountainside that I seemed virtually upright. Breathless, heart pounding, I listened to the fate of the small debris cast loose by my desperate scrabbling—a
scaling hiss, a silence, and finally from the depths of the ravine a horrid muttering, quite indescribable, the only sound I ever heard upon Lengai. And having heard it a few times, I rolled over on my back to get my breath, and drank a little water, and when I was rested, I quit.

I lay there wind-burned, scaled with sterile dust, my flask clutched in a brown hand that in this light had the fierce sinew of a talon. And my decision was the right one, for no sooner had I made it than the clouds were parted by a brilliant sun. The sun relaxed my body, and in its warmth I felt myself open outward in immense well-being, as if a red feather had drifted down into my hand. I lay there languid with relief, enjoying the warm wind and the touch of hair that was straying on my brow, the pure rock water from a cool spring at Manyara, the sun on my hot skin, the feel of breathing, all intensified by the wild beauty of the world. From my seat on the Mountain of God, I ruled Embagai and the green shifting shadows of the Crater Highlands, climbing away into black clouds like a mythical kingdom. The clouds guarded old volcanoes, Jaeger Summit and Loolmalassin, whose peaks I had never seen. Broad-backed, motionless on the wind, an eagle descended the black river that isolates Lengai from the Highlands. Seen from above, a bird of prey, intent on all beneath, is the very messenger of silence.

A series of small mounds, like stepping stones, emerged from the smooth surface of the ash; half-blind with effort on the climb, I had scarcely noticed them. The mounds formed a distinct line down the crest of the ridge, like rhinoceros prints elevated above the surface, and as it happens this was what they were. Apparently a rhino high up on the mountain had tried to flee the last eruptions—perhaps in vain, since its tracks vanish near the edge of the ravine. There was no sign of a trail leading upward, only down. Its tread had compacted the hot ash, and afterwards the mountain winds had worn away the uncompacted ash all around, until the prints had risen above the surface.

Holding a hoofprint in my hands, I raised my eyes to where that horned lump, as if spat up by the volcano, had taken form in the poisonous clouds and rushed down the fiery ridge. What had drawn it up into the mists? Had it been blind, like the buffalo found in the snow high on Mt. Kenya? Imagine the sight of that dark thing in the smoke of the volcano; had an African seen it, the rhino might have become a beast of legend, like the hyena, for it is in such dreamlike events that myths are born.

Anxious to transfix so great a mystery, I chipped two prints clean of packed ash and wedged them into my pack. We descended the volcano, crossed the ash plains, circled dust storms. For four hours on sore feet, I carried the stone prints, but they belonged to the dead mountain, for in the journey they returned to dust.

One bright day of August I went south from Nairobi on the road that crosses the Ngong Hills and descends through ever drier country, passing the site of hand-axe man at Olorgesaille, and winding down out of the hills to the magadi or soda lakes in the pit of the Rift Valley. Lake Magadi itself is a blinding white, a snowfield in the desert, but close at hand, under the stacks and litter of the soda factory, the white is somber, crusted and discolored by strange chemistries. Here a road crosses the soda lake on a narrow dike. Some thirty miles west of Magadi, beyond the Uaso Ngiro River that flows south into Lake Natron, a track turns south through long-grass thorn savanna under the Nguruman Escarpment, curving north again as it climbs onto the plateau.

In Magadi I had been joined by Lewis Hurxthal, a young biologist studying the ostrich, and his beautiful wife Nancy, an artist and designer in charge of educational material put out by the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation in Nairobi. The Hurxthals live on the edge of the Aathi Plain where his favorite birds stalk by, and it was Lew who first instructed me in the esoterica of the cock ostrich, which is unique among birds in the possession of a penis. At this time of year, the cock ostrich flushes red and tumescent in the neck and legs, and both sexes
writhe and flounce and run. Careening about, they shuffle their fat wings on their backs like maids tying up apron strings while rushing to answer a bell. Once Lew interrupted a discussion of querencia, that territory in the bullring where the bull feels safe, acts defensively, and is therefore dangerous: “Ostriches”—and he emphasized the word in a soft reproachful tone, as if his great birds had been slighted—“have charisma, too.”

We made camp under big sycamore figs where a clear stream coming down off the Ngurumans flows over shining stones. There are few clear streams in East Africa, and we enjoyed a cool bath in its current, which washed away the danger of bilharzia. Squalls of finches—fire finches, mannikins, cutthroats, rufous-backs, queleas, cordon bleus, gray-headed social weavers, all intermixed like autumn leaves—blew in and out of a bare acacia, descending in gusts to the water’s edge and whirring away again, oblivious of the human presence just across the stream. The quelea, or Sudan dioch, is known also as the plague finch, since it sometimes appears in clouds that descend like blowing smoke upon the crops, in the way of locusts. Toward evening some Maasai came down to bathe. These men were descendants of those who fled to Ngurumani, “the farms,” after the disastrous civil wars of the nineteenth century; their losses made worse by cattle famine in the wake of a locust plague, they were forced to till the soil or die. Today they are found mostly in the Nguruman region, at Engaruka, and under Mt. Meru, where they are called “Warusa.” In dress and customs, the agriculturalists still emulate the pastoral clans, and these arranged themselves in the middle of camp activities, so that everything might take place around their legs. “Nowhere have I met such pleasing and manly natives over the whole extent of country I have yet traversed in Africa,” wrote Joseph Thomson of this people.