No sign of human life intruded, no smoke of fires, no homing goatherd. This was Africa as it used to be and soon will be no longer, lonely, magnificent and alive with secrets. Away stretches the world for ever, as it seems, into the sunset; empty, as you think, of all life, fresh from the hand of God; yet some movement catches your eye – a herd of impala grazing on a patch of green; across to your left hurries a white-tusked warthog, her four piglets trotting behind in single file; over there something tawny slips into a grove of thorn-trees – an oryx, a waterbuck, a lion? You think you are alone, but eyes are watching every movement; you think you are hidden, but nostrils quiver on the alert; you think all is silent, but a baboon barks from the rocks, a francolin calls, a reedbuck gives his shrill long whistle.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Elspeth Huxley.
Typical of the open plains is the whistling thorn, whose black galls emit a weird sibilance.
The whistling thorn belongs to the acacia family, as do eighty per cent of the trees in the arid plains country of the Rift. But this variety has its peculiarities. On one I noted a large clear globule of sap, the first I had seen on any acacia. More distinctive of this type, however, are its dark round galls. Ants burrow into the galls and through the holes they make, the wind whistles sharply; hence the name for the tree.
But the ants also do the thornbush a service: the formic acid they secrete acts as an irritant to the muzzles of browsing animals. Thus there is a mutually beneficial relationship between these two incongruous parties, the ants getting nourishment from the galls and, in exchange, protecting the thornbush from rhino, giraffe and antelope.
Africa’s Rift Valley Colin Willock.
Laikipia.
It is given to others to yearn for the great grass plains of whistling thorn which stretch for miles down the Great Rift and northwards across Laikipia to the deserts of the Turkana. These are the ranching lands of Kenya with their swamps and their rivers which have their sources in the mountain ranges, with the homesteads clustering beneath the flat-topped thorns beside the watercourses. For much of the year these grazing lands are scorched by the sun and the high north-easterly gales from off the frontier, and they turn to an even brown, scarred only by the trees which follow the winding, dry river-beds. Spouts of dust move slowly across the scene like leeches reaching to the sky, and as the drought holds for month after month, one can marvel at the sleek cattle which live on the sparse but rich stargrass, which, with the passing of the rains, dries into a hay of unsurpassed quality and richness, but which is nonetheless often deficient in trace elements. When the rains at last break, the dry, grey pasture turns to green in a few days, starred with bulbous flowers and of a hue not seen in the higher sourveld. In these lands a man can only see the thorn trees and the clouds, and far away, the snow peaks of Mount Kenya or the towering cliffs of the Rift which light to gold in the evening when the sun sinks into a cauldron of smoke and haze. This is the weft and weave of life for those who love the plains.
Dimbilil: The Story of an African Farm Errol Whittall.
Fire on the plain.
As the dry season advances, fires begin to sweep through the park. Over two thirds of the woodlands and large portions of the long-grass plains are burned annually. Some of these fires are set by pastoralists outside of the park, for burning stimulates green grass to grow on the burn, a nutritious source of food for livestock at a time when otherwise only dry forage remains. Frequent heavy grazing of such green shoots may be detrimental to the grasses. By growing at a time when they should lie dormant, they use up the stored nutrients they need to survive the dry season, and the heavy grazing prevents them from depositing more food in their roots. On the other hand, dry stems may be grazed to the ground by hoofed animals with little effect on the grasses because they have their energy already stored. Other fires start through carelessness – a discarded cigarette, an untended campfire – or from a mere pyromaniacal impulse. As the fires burn, distant hills disappear in the smoke haze and at midday the sun is a pale disk that changes to a fiery, coppery orb as toward evening the earth leans slowly away from it. Fires that in daytime creep inconspicuously up some hill become visible at night as disembodied flames dancing in glowing lines inexorably into the sky. Yellowish smoke and ash permeate the air. On the plains, dust devils spin over the ground now bleak and bare except for a few scorched tufts of grass. In the woodlands flames have swept away the grass, assaulted thickets, and devoured dead trees. With the rocky bones of the hills exposed, the earth dry and cracked, the Serengeti now presents a bleak appearance, its bright colours leached away.
The large mammals almost ignore the advancing fires, casually detouring around flames or moving onto burned ground that is still warm. One male lion fed on a warthog, seemingly oblivious to the line of flames that crackled toward him through the grass. At last, with the fire only three feet from his paws, so close that I was afraid his mane might ignite, he reluctantly dragged his meal to a safer spot. Some birds benefit directly from fires. Marabou storks pace gravely around the edge, their preoccupied mien interrupted by occasional rapid thrusts of their bills, which may net them a mouse, snake, or other small vertebrate fleeing from the flames. Lilac-breasted rollers, spectacular in their iridescent blue plumage, plunge into the smoke to snag grasshoppers. Small animals may be harmed by the flames, and I particularly remember a leopard tortoise dragging its house along on scorched legs, moving even more slowly than usual.
Golden Shadows, Flying Hooves George Schaller.
Divine protection.
Looking up from my book, I would see the herds of cattle being driven up from the water and browsing through the glade on their way inland to pasture. They were small and humped, mostly black and white or tawny, and some carried magnificently sweeping horns. But I watched them anxiously as they pushed and jostled and bellowed, and the dust rose under their stamping feet, while the herdsmen whistled through their teeth, and the dogs yapped in and out; for a little partridge had her nest somewhere in the grass they trampled. Every evening on my way home from hunting, I used to pass by that way to see how she was getting on, till she became so tame that she would eat the crumbs I brought her while sitting on the nest. One evening I could not help exclaiming in wonder to find that the nest had still escaped, though the cattle had trampled there all day; but Mohamed answered, with naïve simplicity: “For every creature, God is there” (killa kitu, Mungo iko).
Speak to the Earth Vivienne de Watteville.
Forests
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
It is one of the noblest forests in the world. It is not like the Ituri forest of the Congo, a sky occluding vegetable growth. Always there are openings with glimpses of the heathland peaks or vistas of long blue distance. It has many kinds of trees, perhaps a score of the olive family, one of which, the Elgon olive, soars with straight pale-stem branching to a heavy crown anything up to a hundred and fifty feet above the ground. I, who love woodland, could write page after page in its description. Sometimes the trees are burdened almost to extinction by thorny lianas, some with yellow flowers or red wait-a-bit thorn in due season. But the forest king on Elgon is Podocarpus gracilior, called for short a Podo tree. No other mountain has Podos to equal Elgon’s. The odd one is found in wooded spruits at 6,000 feet, but the great Podo belt on Elgon begins about 8,000 feet. It is evergreen, has a narrow foliage looking like pine needles in the distance. It has green ball-shaped seeds, not cones. At lower altitudes it looks like a mighty oak in shape, rising about ninety feet, with a huge rough bole and a many-branching crown. In its perfect habitat on Elgon it dwarfs all else in majesty. It can grow over fifteen feet in diameter at shoulder height and rises clear in one huge stem for over a hundred feet and then branches to a great oaklike crown another fifty feet and more above. The foresters reckon their life at over fifteen hundred years. I have seen a grove of Californian Redwood
trees. They are older, larger and taller, but I think for sheer majesty the Podo claims equality. Medium-sized Podo makes a timber of fine larchlike quality. Every night we dine off a wide table made of one Podo plank. Thanks be to God no Kenya saw-miller has yet been able to tackle some of the great forest monarchs.
There are great twenty-foot bamboo brakes in the forest, mostly between 8,000 and 9,000 feet, eerie stretches with only elephant trails among them, silent places and hard with their fallen stems to traverse. In the distance they look like downs of pale grass. At about 11,000 feet the forest thins to scrubby lichen-bearded trees and ends in heath with giant senecios and everlasting plants to mark your path to one of Elgon’s many summits surrounding its seven-mile-wide crater. It is broken by volcanic cliffs and at least one giant gorge. Yet from the crater’s lip the whole crater really looks like a downland subsidence a million years away from our own time. Once I climbed to its flat-topped summit, the most prominent feature on the Kenya side of the crater. It was walking-climbing only except for a few yards on hands and knees in a narrow fissure. Although there was a slight haze, distance from this summit was beyond comprehension, because it is the lonely mountain. We camped for two nights on the forest’s upper edge at about 11,000 feet. It was a safari with donkeys for porters. Three miles away, and perhaps five hundred feet below us, were two Elgon Masai flat-roofed long huts made of peat and heath. It was all the life we saw except for the odd bird and one red forest duiker racing head low to escape us. All night there were seven great fires kept blazing to keep the heathland lion from eating our donkeys. On the wetter trails were buffalo and elephants’ tracks. The district commissioner and the forest officer were my companions. I shared a tent with the elderly forest officer. I remember that as the tent-flaps flickered in the counter-lion fires and the southern cross showed through the opening, the forest officer lulled me to sleep with observations on Aristotle, Epictetus and Apollonius of Tyana. He was a great classical scholar, utterly charming, but vague and woolly as a forest officer. He was glad to find an understanding audience. Next morning we broke the ice on our water-pitchers, and no donkeys had been eaten….
The forest is always unexpected. Once, sitting quiet in a gentle dream, I suddenly caught a flutter in the bush and turned my eyes but not my head. Only a few yards away was a green and gold and carmine smallish turaco with his crested head. He shifted suddenly from branch to branch about me as turacos do. Then I lost sight of him in thicker foliage. I waited but he did not return, and I have never seen his sort again. He was one of the forest species with a small territory of his own; it is only by rarest luck that he appears, and only when one is still for a long time.
A Knot of Roots Earl of Portsmouth.
In the forests of the night
William Blake
Somehow or other these bamboo forests seem mysterious and uncanny. The noise of the panga as it cuts through the stout stems; the noise of the fallen bamboos being hauled out of the way or stamped underfoot; the noise of the wind among the bamboo tops – somehow they all disturb and irritate the mind. Even the noise of the porters, the cheerful laughter and the chaffing and the squabbling, sounds hollow and unnatural. You move along with an undefined sense of insecurity. You feel as though you were walking through a tunnel. The stout stems of the bamboos rattle together, swayed by a wind you cannot feel; above you in the thickest parts, their grass-like leaves interlace with beard-moss and climbing plants, until the canopy almost keeps out the sun, whose light breaks fitfully on to your path. A steady drizzle sets in, the thick mist comes down and hangs like a pall over the forest. The mossy turf underfoot becomes sodden as a sponge and the column advances with muffled tread, almost without sound. And still you carry with you the vague sense of discomfort, almost of danger….
Perhaps at the end of an hour’s march you may sit down with your back to a friendly tree trunk, a rarer find now, and watch the resting porters and listen to their chatter. Even then, you are still oppressed by the surrounding silence. You feel that you are in a small circle of sound and that all around is utter silence, a silence before some indefinite catastrophe. Yet there is no feeling that you and your men are alone, for as you idly sit against your trunk you feel that somewhere watching eyes are observing you through the impenetrable growth, watching until you all pass on, until you hand back the forest to immemorial silence. You stare through the close columns of bamboos, but you see no movement; you only feel that something is there. You contemplate the fretwork of the bamboos against the sky, but your mind is disturbed by the gentle swaying of their canopy. You watch the porters cutting young bamboo shoots. Suddenly your eye is caught by a long frond on one of the bamboo stems near by; without warning it has become unaccountably agitated. You look again. You see that all the other fronds from the same stem preserve the pervading stillness of their surroundings, and only this one is waved this way and that, up and down and round and round, like a signaller’s flag. You watch more closely. You can see no reason for this behaviour. At first you think there must be a lizard, or perhaps a rat, among the leaves that lie heaped up around the roots. But there is nothing at all. And even while you are vaguely puzzling at this mystery, the movement stops as suddenly as it had begun. It stops, but its impress is left with you; and even this small happening, mysterious and incomprehensible, troubles your mind. But in sober reality it is not the waving frond, not the chance of becoming lost, not the tremendous presence of unseen elephants and buffaloes and leopards, but a feeling of littleness among vast, silent, incalculable surroundings that steals from you confidence and even peace of mind. You become as one in a dream, who traverses a nightmare forest, waking and falling asleep by turns, a prey to unimaginable fears.
Kenya Mountain E. A. T. Dutton.
Mountains
The silence of Mount Kenya’s peaks.
Their ethereal beauty holds you breathless. The great silence, the subtle stillness that broods over all, the dazzling serenity, sets you gasping. The peaks struck us then as something incomparably beautiful, something dazzling and hard, unmoved and invincible, waiting for us to come and go, and leave them again to their unending solitude. Prometheus might have been chained here…. And then, look down at your feet, and there you will see those glorious ones reflected in the green and brown waters of the tarn. A moment passes, and that dream view will fade and pass away. A glance upwards will show you that it has been obscured by clouds drifting high above. You look back once again, over the way you have come, and you will see hurrying, flying mists setting out for the snows from the valley below. They stream through the Nithi Gorge like banners of the pagan gods. What are these flying phantasies? Their speed, their strange shapes, their unending evolutions make them unlike anything you have witnessed below. Surely, you say, surely they must be evil exhalations prepared in the dark caverns far below the earth, and sent forth through the grey abyss of the nether world, to obscure the clear air and cloudless skies above.
And, at the end of the day, when the sun drops behind the peaks, the sky becomes a miracle of colour…. When it is all over, I have felt as though I have listened to the beautiful voice of a fine singer. There is a point in the sun’s setting which is the highest, most poignant note before the voice dies away into an enchanted silence. Everything for one moment is still; it is a stillness made the deeper by the desolate and void surroundings. For some reason, sunset in Africa always brings a momentary silence, a pause – a silence “when you may hear the shadows of the leaves as they fall on the ground” – and then, in less empty surroundings, there is a happy chorus from frogs, and grasshoppers and night birds and the hyrax, and the many prowlers of the night. Sometimes you may hear the deep note of the lion, or the bark of the leopard, or the inhuman cackle of the hyena. But here on the mountain the silence is complete. When that still moment has passed, when the sun’s reflection no longer lights up the sky, perfect silence begins her reign and the peaks stand out, strongly silhouetted against the cold blue of the western sky.
Kenya Mountain E. A. T. Dutton.
The flowers of the forest.
Towards evening we were within sight of Marsabit Mountain, and near enough to get some idea of the vast extent of the forest. At dusk we reached the “kudu board”, which forbade the shooting of greater kudu within thirty miles of the government station. Here the road began slowly to rise. There had been enough rain showers on the mountain to cause some boggy patches which accounted for our taking nearly five hours to cover the last thirty miles. After the dust and heat of the day the forest-scented air was cool and delicious, and the moon was beautiful. I think Gerald had stage-managed my arrival to coincide with the full moon. The lichen-festooned forest looked magnificent, and it was bright enough to see many many miles when a break in the cosy little grass-covered hills on the other side of the road gave one an uninterrupted view over the desert country below.
Nine Faces Of Kenya Page 30