Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (43 page)

“Doesn’t it say on a brass marker somewhere around here that this is where the oceans meet?” we ask him.

“Nothing’s what it seems here,” he assures us, smiling with a bit of indulgence. “A willow branch will turn out to be a boomslang. Black isn’t black and white isn’t white. And what you’re looking for is miles to the east.” He says this over his shoulder as he strolls away, smiling at us, but finished with his explanation.

After he’s gone we look for the marker, but can’t find it. The boulders above the lookout platform smell of urine. The wire waste containers are overflowing. In the breeze of the gathering twilight, we begin to shiver.

So what, we ask ourselves, are we looking at? The Atlantic? We do know that it’s beautiful: grey and rolling, ancient and mysterious, aglow with the last sheen of the day, it invites the eye to gaze on it.

On the launch going across the Nile to Kitchener Island the
khamsin
begins to blow, that hot desert wind. At first it’s just a warm breath, then it picks up and as we begin our little tour of the island it rattles the leaves of the cottonwoods, shakes the palm branches, and becomes a force.

I’ve fallen in with a group of tourists from the hotel boat
Osiris
. The guide is talking history and myth, but soon the rattling branches obliterate his voice, then sand stings us and we begin to turn away, all of us becoming separated from one another, being driven like stray cattle in a sand blizzard among the curved walkways of this famous garden spot. Eventually I’m alone, out of reach of anyone’s voice, and good sense dictates that I should make my way back to the launch, but I take cover behind a broken wall.

There is a way Egypt isn’t Africa, yet is.

It’s a middle kingdom, embracing the European sea, and for thousands of years it has heard the voices of science and reason. The Coptic religion is here, a blend of Greek thought and Christian mysticism, and the pharaohs always admired order and the rational architectures of the mind. Far south beyond the desert, madness prevailed. On some ancient summer night, one can imagine, an old pharaoh, weary with all he knew and didn’t know, might have come to his balcony and thought he heard the drums and soft moans of the continent below him. These would have been fearful notes to his civilized ear, terrifying. Pondering the dark mud of his holy river, he might have considered his origins and destiny. It is a mud, after all, that starts in the lunatic highlands of Ethiopia, that comes out of the heights of the Mountains of the Moon even further south, flowing into the great Nyanza, moving through bloody tribal kingdoms, spreading out into poisonous swamps, then gathering itself once more with feverish vitality in a rush toward Egypt.

If Egypt is the head of Africa, there is a thing in the blood that feeds its brain. The land of the Nile with its carefully tilled fields, its written language, its orderly temples, its yearnings for the philosophic meanings of existence, must have always felt an ancient whisper in the
khamsin
swirling up from the sub-Sahara. If the ancient Egyptians were introspective, if they inhabited a world of moral and spiritual certainties in their simple desert landscape, they surely must have sensed that on their continent was a wild thoughtlessness, a demonic undertow. If they were the intellectuals of Africa, they must have felt the animal pulse in the body of the continent.

With these thoughts I leave the shelter of the broken wall and run back to the launch just before it starts back. The windstorm has kicked up whitecaps on the river and the boat struggles to stay on course.

This extraordinary burst of nature is the real Africa, I’m thinking, and for a moment history seems clear: this is what blew away the temples at Dendera, Oko Kombo, Esna, Karnak and all the rest. Egypt, the great civilization, was subverted by a chaos in the bloodstream of the continent, a primal fire burning out of control. It’s a simple metaphor, I know, but as I cling to the gunwale of the launch and shield my eyes, it seems to hold: we are undone in our progress by something berserk, by the dark jungles, by madness, and it is a madness that is perhaps more truly what we really are.

Lost near Maralal.

Our road became a track, then followed a dry
nullah
for awhile, then became another road, then a small path, then just disappeared. My wife is laughing at us.

Our driver, Patrick, my big cousin Gene and I are all standing on a boulder, passing a pair of binoculars between ourselves, and trying to see where we are. Here in the highlands we can see for thirty miles, but there’s nothing out there. We know the time of day and where the sun is, so we know the general direction, we tell each other, and my wife thinks we look funny up there on that boulder together.

A single wisp of smoke rises in the distance: somebody’s cooking fire. It’s maybe nine miles away.

We get back in the Land Rover and try again. The Land Rover is from Hertz and hardly new. For an additional $10 a day Patrick is included in the deal. He speaks several dialects, but we can’t find anybody for him to talk to.

An hour later we’re on another road and soon it begins to follow a new barbed wire fence.

Then the young Italian baron arrives. He’s barechested — with good-looking pectoral muscles, my wife notes — and riding a Harley Davidson. Strapped on his back is a shiny Winchester rifle and above his tailored safari shorts is an ammunition belt of carved leather. He has a mop of uncombed blond hair and a ready smile. This is all part of his family’s ranch, he tells us in pretty good English, and he’s hunting lion.

Because my wife is still laughing at us, we’re pleased to see him point in the general direction where we assumed Maralal to be. As we chat, my cousin Gene opens a tin of meat and Patrick the driver unwraps a crust of bread he has saved. The baron accepts a beer from our cooler. Suddenly, no one wants to be anyplace else. We enjoy this beautiful young man astride the shiny chrome of his Harley and the day is clear with the special light of the highlands. Maralal is out there, yes, and we’ll find it. The lions are somewhere. We talk about motorcycles. I rented a bike, once, I say, and took it on the ferry over to Capri. This gets us talking about Italy and his family who lives just outside Rome.

Africa is in the present tense. Like most Americans, I live in the future or past, planning ahead most of the time, thinking what job I ought to do next, considering the calendar, or thinking and sometimes writing about where I’ve gone, what I’ve seen, and who I am because of all that. But here one is in the moment. A peculiar African zen: time becomes itself, not a thing pulling us forward or a psychological thing pushing us back. Journeys, often because they’re so difficult, tend to make destinations of little consequence, even foolish.

It is difficult to describe, but Africa is surprise and fate, and all Africans seem to share this sensation and knowledge. In the twilight hush every creature yields to the mystic silence. In a bright noon, a bird of startling primary colors wheels in the sky overhead. Great columns of rain hold up the sky above the Rift Valley. The murmurs of the Jurassic and the Pleistocene surround us. A young Italian arrives on a Harley. The way to Maralal is lost, but no matter.

On the island of Zanzibar we stay in a hotel that used to be the British officers’ club during the Victorian period when all the explorers were searching for the source of the Nile.

Nowadays the place is mostly a brothel, but there are rooms available and the verandah and bar are perched out over the water, so that the dhows seem to sail indoors and carry us away. In that open space between the Indian Ocean and the old hotel one gets a heavy case of African
déjà vu
because there’s no hint of the twentieth century, just the sound of the surf and distant native voices, the bright sails of the dhows, and the odors of beer and the ancient stench of the sea. Downstairs at reception there are black and white tiles on the floors, dying potted palms, and a general seediness. Like the rest of the island, Afrika House hasn’t seen any maintenance since Richard Francis Burton carried on here.

At the top of the landing near the door to our room sits a table with a large spider on it. For the last two mornings our maid has obviously avoided dusting the table, and we give the spider a wide berth when coming or going.

Across town is the other hotel, the somewhat newer one with the ice machine. The building resembles an outworn Holiday Inn and only has a view of the mud flats.

In the late afternoon we stroll through the narrow streets of the town, admiring the studded doors, passing the square near the church, making our way toward the ice machine. By way of saving power, the island authorities don’t turn on the electricity until five o’clock, and all the Europeans and many locals know the routine, so line up at the bar, glasses poised and ready, as the machine begins to hum. The cocktail hours produce two dozen cubes every fifteen or twenty minutes. Everyone graciously waits his turn for a cube. Today there are three Scandinavian engineers, a Russian, and a couple of Canadians. There’s little business on the island, just cloves and coconuts. The rest is the ghostly history of the slave trade.

They want to know why we’re staying at Afrika House. The flies are bad, we admit, and the nights tend to be noisy as the girls ply their trade. The surf has a stench to it, yes, and there’s no restaurant or food service. But there are the dhows, we argue, and we have a resident spider. You’re staying at the whore-house, they say, and even when the laughter ends we really can’t explain it. It has to do with things long ago.

After supper, a little drunk, we make our way back through the dark and eerie town, entering its maze of streets and passages, but then at last we emerge near Afrika House to see the moonrise on the ocean. It’s an immense yellow object tonight, so large that if I extend my hand, stretching out my arm to its full length, my fingers don’t even cover the golden surface.

Last night coming back from a swim in the lake our host suddenly put out his arm, stopping my wife. She had narrowly missed stepping barefooted on a sand viper. After that we had trouble sleeping in the heat, breathing becoming a kind of suffocation. We were hungry, too, and worried about drinking up the last of our water and beer.

But this morning, exhilarated, I get into the twenty-foot fishing boat with Ali and Kobo. I’ve given them petrol for the outboard motor and paid them in advance, so although the wind is too high we’re going to brave the whitecaps. They badly need to catch fish and I want to go along to photograph all the crocodiles over on South Island.

The wind gusts to fifty miles an hour all day here, blowing hot out of the east. It remains at our backs this morning, though, and pushes us over the rough waters of the lake.

The visitor to Lake Turkana descends out of the cool highlands of Kenya into desert. The gigantic lake is an elongated mirror held up to the sky. And this morning everything is a torture chamber: a hard sun beating down, a brassy reflection off the water, the swells and whitecaps that pound the boat. Ali, dressed in a pair of jockey shorts and his knitted Moslem skullcap, smiles as he steers us forward. Kobo, the wiry Molo fisherman, rigs our two fiberglass rods.

The tribes here — the Molo, the Turkana, and a few remnants of other tribes including a couple of Dinka — call the lake simply
Ngiza,
the darkness, and their pronunciation is always rich in evil connotations, for this is a relentless environment with powdery volcanic ash in the air, bramble and gorse over the ground, and thousands of crocs infesting the lake and its shores. In the neolithic period the lake was part of the Nile system, but all its links and tributaries dried up in centuries of drouth. As the desert encroached and established itself, a severed body of water more than 150 miles in length remained, and the Nile crocodiles, trapped, multiplied and thrived.

There is an overwhelming solitude here.

Both Ali and Kobo seem to feel it, going about their tasks with very little said. We all seem frail in this immensity of sky and lashing waves.

As we approach the island the crocs slide off the shoreline rocks, avoiding my camera. There are some big specimens: fifteen feet in length and very agile. The tribesmen eat croc, of course, but hunting it is tricky business: they have to flank one of the brutes, cutting off its path back to the lake, and fight to keep it hemmed in while attacking and killing it. They prefer casting their nets when the lake is calm, but this is the season for the east winds. They depend on visitors to the fishing camp, then, but this torrid, windy season few of them show up.

Kobo prepares the lines, attaching big spinners, hooks, cut bait, and lots of weights. When the trolling begins, the boat slows with the drag.

We hope for a catch because the camp food last night — and in the adjacent village — depended largely on provisions out of our Land Rover. A handsome young Kenyan, Jim Robertson, who runs the camp, was in the process of striking the last tents when we arrived, but agreed to stay on as our host. He’s the one who suggested the swim and who kept my wife from stepping on the viper. But his supplies are gone and he remarked that even some of the Molo swore they were leaving. They live in small huts that look like sad bird nests thrown upside down to the ground, and their existence up here is precarious at best. Our arrival was virtually a cause for celebration. We brought most of last night’s dinner and petrol for the big fishing boat.

If nature is treacherous and uncaring in the bush, it’s also occasionally generous. Cassava, the staple root eaten in one form or another by almost everyone in the sub-Sahara, grows whether or not the rains come, whether it’s planted properly, and whether it’s tended or left to grow wild. In some places antelope are still available. The rivers and lakes provide fish. Apart from the cassava harvests, all over Africa there’s a makeshift subsistence farming. Nature remains a paradox in all this, unrelenting and cruel, generous and forgiving: a land of vipers and edible fish, of famine and occasional feasts.