‘Pep,’ he said simply, ‘I have been bitten by a burrowing viper. I think I ought to see a doctor.’ His hand was hideously swollen, the skin tight and purplish.
On his instructions, I immediately gave Emanuele anti-histamine and painkillers, but he was so allergic to many things that I did not dare to inject him with anti-venom for fear of a negative reaction. We made an immediate radio-call and sent him down to Dr Lowi in Nyahururu, the closest village, then still called Thompson’s Falls. Dr Lowi was like a man in a story. An old Jew of Czech origin, he had come to Kenya like many other Jews after the Second World War. Old and bent, but with direct unbending manners, he had set up a practice in Thompson’s Falls, where neither hygiene nor modern medical methods were much observed, but where he managed to help numberless people and to save many lives. My mother, who was still staying with us, and a driver went with Emanuele. The shock and horror made my milk go sour. That day Sveva refused the curdled yoghurt I managed to produce.
By the time they reached Thompson’s Falls, the hand was twice its normal size and the pain running up his arm was excruciating. Dr Lowi injected Emanuele with cortisone and serum and he observed him for an hour in case there was any reaction. This time, there was none.
Alone at home with my baby I waited in agony. The only hope was that at least this scare would cure him of snakes forever. I waited until the shadows grew long and the dogs came around me, waiting for the evening walk. The car arrived back finally, and the Emanuele who got out was paler and taller – it seemed to me – than he had been before, and the sun was setting red on the bandaged arm. In his free hand he held … a snake bag. Full.
‘It’s a hissing sand snake, Pep. I got it at the gate. It is huge and blind in one eye.’ He grinned. ‘I’ll call him Loyamuk.’ Loyamuk was an elderly Turkana herder in charge of a boma. One eye was blind and filmed with glaucoma.
My anxious questions about his treatment and how he felt were answered with casual acceptance. ‘Yes, damn painful … still now … I will be all right. Don’t worry. I must put Loyamuk in the pit.’
He walked towards the snake pit in the darkening garden, a new way of walking, it seemed, balancing his brown slim legs in long effortless strides. The short trousers, the khaki shirt sleeves rolled at the elbows, the straight shoulders … I knew that, whatever happened, he would always like snakes. He was no longer a boy. He looked like Paolo.
This accident, and the number of snakes he had by now accumulated, made me realize Emanuele needed someone to help him. It was Emanuele who chose him from among the handful of ranch employees who liked snakes and were not afraid of them. The accepted rule for Africans is that the ‘best snake is a dead snake’. Liking snakes is exceptional. He was a young Turkana by the name of Joseph Ekai. He had been employed as a casual labourer, but in his spare time he volunteered to go out with Emanuele and to help him to catch snakes. Emanuele had been impressed with him, and they got on extremely well together. Now he was allotted, full time, the task of being Emanuele’s ‘snake man’, a job he enjoyed, and in which, consequently, he excelled. He helped him not just to catch the snakes, but to clean the cages and the snake pit, and generally assisted him in looking after this ever-growing snake kingdom. The snake pit had become a place of fascination for guests, who spent much time sitting around it, looking down at the reptile world wriggling at the bottom. Frogs inhabited the pond, surrounded with papyrus and arum lilies, and snakes of all sorts swam in it, sliding along a sandy slope. Green snakes, egg-eaters, sand snakes, white-lips and blue and orange agama sunned themselves on rocks or on the small carissa bush and euphorbia Emanuele had planted in the middle. Insects were attracted to the short succulents blooming with brown fleshy flowers which stank of putrid meat. Birds came for the insects. Snakes started out of their apathy to snap at them. There was a lot going on in that pit.
Eventually Emanuele decided to move the puff-adders into it, and the pit became strangely quiet. Of all snakes, puff-adders are the ones I most disliked. They are sluggish and thick, with none of the sleek grace of the green grass snakes, or the eerie mystical aura of the cobra. There is a dangerous, evil vulgarity about these vipers, and I was revolted by them. Emanuele describes them like this in his ‘A Field Guide to some Common Snakes of East Africa’ which he was compiling at that time, and never quite completed:
COMMON PUFF-ADDER (Bitis Arietans Arieians)
CLASSIFICATION:
Family: Viperidae
Genus: Bitis
Species: Bitis Arietans Arietans (Merrem)
DESCRIPTION:
Shade: Yellow, brownish or grey.
Pattern: Pale stripe on top of head between eyes and a series of pale-edged black chevrons down the back. The tail has cross bands, and the underparts are white with regularly spaced blotches.
The description proceeds in detail for two pages, and continues:
HABITS:
Occasionally basks in the sun during the day, and can often be found crossing roads. Reluctance to move away when approached and excellent camouflage in grass result in large numbers of people and livestock being bitten. Puff-adders responsible for more human deaths than any other African snake, 75% serious snake bites in Africa inflicted by puff-adders. Will usually hiss in warning just before a strike, and are extremely fast, the average striking speed being put at 2.36 m/sec. Puff-adders frequently lie in wait along rat-paths. The prey is bitten, then released, and the snake follows the rat’s trail and when dead animal found, is swallowed head first.
TREATMENT OF BITES:
Poison = haematoxis or cytolitis – destroys blood cells in body and attacks tissues. If lethal dose is injected, and treatment unsuccessful, death occurs within a few days. In case of puff-adders’ bites, rest and immobilization are essential and shock symptoms may be treated with aspirin and codeine painkillers. Tourniquets must NEVER be used in adders’ bites. If symptoms of poisoning occur serum should be administered according to instructions, preferably by somebody with medical knowledge.
E.P.-G. bitten + 3, no symptoms.
I had not known until I read this that Emanuele had been bitten by puff-adders before.
Ekai was not afraid to descend into the snake pit to cut the grass or prune the bushes. He was tall and muscular, strongly built, not lanky and lean as Turkana usually are. Unlike Turkana, who have narrow faces and thin noses, Joseph Ekai had widely spaced cheekbones, which gave his face a rounded appearance. There was a certain roguishness in his eyes and countenance, which I did not find unpleasant, as it was tempered by great natural kindness. When he smiled, which was often, one was startled to see that all his front upper teeth were missing – knocked out in a fight or in a fall, I was never quite sure which – leaving only the two pointed canines, very white, to guard the wide gap. It was quite a shocking sight the first time one noticed, as the large naked gums and the filed fangs gave him the appearance of a spitting cobra.
It is a habit in Africa to give people nicknames. They are usually based on their appearance or characteristic behaviour. They are sometimes dictated by affection, occasionally by irony or contempt: whatever the reason, they are always appropriate and shine with an infallible sense of humour. Predictably, Joseph Ekai was known as Mapengo, which in Swahili means ‘a wide open gap’. He was brave and very loyal, and he really loved adventure. He took off with Ema, sitting on the back of his bike rather as Luka used to do with Paolo, and made use of the skills he had acquired during his free childhood.
African children still living in wild surroundings, where there are no schools or missions, have any amount of time to learn directly from the book of Nature what urban children must attempt to learn from the poor surrogate of badly-printed books. From sunrise to sunset they spend their days roaming the forest and the savannah, often tending small herds of goats or camels. In the hot, lazy hours of the day, when they must repair from the unforgiving sun to the shade of the thorn trees, they naturally observe, and absorb, with the curiosity and receptivity common to
every child everywhere, the unending lessons of the rich world around them. They see the weaver birds build their intricate nests on the safe thin branches downwind, which snakes and predators cannot reach. They watch the minute, intense insect life which goes on all around them, the industrious dung beetles and the busy harvester ants, the termites and the feared siafu which leave death and clean skeletons in their wake, the stick or leaf insects camouflaged to perfection among the dry twigs. They follow the call of the honeyguide birds to the beehives, and learn to steal the precious honey, smoking the bees away without killing them. Their eyes become attuned to every movement of grass and leaves, their ears to every noise. The song of birds and wind, the screeches and shuffles, the roars and trumpetings, the grunts and snorts and whistles, the barks and cries: all sounds in the orchestra and choir of nature hold for them no secret. They witness mating and kills, and learn early the secrets of life and the unemotional acceptance of the necessity of death as part of the whole. They learn survival through the habits of the wildlife, and recognize the edible parts of plants, the ones they can use for medicine. This is the background to their harmonious growth in balance with the laws of Nature.
These are the people who can use their unique, instinctive skills to protect – or to kill – the animals they are so familiar with.
But now in the times we call modern, like the large herds of animals which once roamed the Highlands, like the forests and the indigenous plants of Africa, these people are endangered because their space and their way of life are disappearing fast and for ever. Since the mission came, with the school and the church, and the shop full of strange things which one needs money to buy, life has changed for the worse for the free pastoral African people. They have been given seeds of alien plants to sow in the virgin forests and of alien beliefs to confuse the innocence of their minds. They wear the discarded garish nylon rags of the white man, which cost money they do not have, rather than the traditional shukas made of animal hides, camouflaged and resistant to the wear-and-tear of bush life, which need not be washed with the chemical soap they cannot afford and which offends their pure streams of clear water.
Their culture endangered, their minds filled with notions and rules they do not need and cannot understand, the new generation is forgetting – no time to sit under the thorn tree now – what allowed their immediate ancestors to survive and thrive in their unspoilt surroundings. In the recent past, when life was still as in their forebears’ days, African children grew up with the extraordinary privilege of learning instinctively through experience and mastering the secrets of their land, which, in turn, survived intact because they existed and cared.
Such still were Luka, Mirimuk, Hussein, Silas, Ekiru, Lother, Cypriano, Sabino, and such was Emanuele’s snake man, Mapengo.
One of Emanuele’s – and Mapengo’s – favourite haunts were the steep cliffs down the Mukutan Gorge. This is the most spectacular feature of Ol Ari Nyiro, just at the edge of the Great Rift Valley. It is formed from a series of converging canyons thick with vegetation, and precipitous rock surfaces favoured by eagles and griffons, meeting in a larger and deeper gorge which zigzags all the way down to Lake Baringo. Appropriately, Mukutan means in fact ‘the meeting’. The Mukutan stream, fed by Ol Ari Nyiro Springs, runs at the bottom. The abundance of water, the shelter from the winds and the difference in altitude and climate allow for a tremendous variety of vegetation and bird life, and snakes abound there.
Emanuele loved walking down to the waterfalls, a dramatic drop of about a hundred metres of granite boulders, hung with liana and wild aloe, where he could find masses of green grass snakes. Mapengo was particularly good at catching them. One needed to be fast, and ready to dive into the water and through the tall undergrowth where they tended to disappear like green wriggling darts, these handsome, harmless, jewel-like creatures with beady, alert black eyes.
Another favourite place was Maji ya Nyoka (‘the water of the snakes’), also known as Python Pool. This was an idyllic large pond, surrounded by date palms and papyrus, with a smaller waterfall running into it from massive grey stones to which fig trees clung tenaciously, growing out of every crevice. Rare aloes, alight with orange clusters of flowers, and spidery orchids hanging from the tallest trees, made Maji ya Nyoka a place of magic. A few boulders emerged from the water, and, if one managed to approach it very quietly, one could often surprise pythons sunning themselves there. Unless they had been made heavy and torpid by a recent meal, they usually slid down into the water, disappearing almost without a ripple. Emanuele and Mapengo captured many, thicker than a man’s leg, almost all of them over twelve feet in length, and immensely strong, and managed to bring them home to measure them. For this purpose they always carried bags of assorted sizes, as, curiously, once the head is covered and the eyes cannot see, snakes quietly slide inside a bag of their own accord, and succumb to a torpor until the light wakes them again. For smaller snakes the technique is to cover one’s right forearm with the bag, like an inside-out glove, and, having grabbed the snake’s head with the free hand, reverse the bag gently and let the snake slide inside: in Kaa’s days I myself had become quite adept at this trick.
One day in 1981 news came of an unusually large snake seen in the lugga between the Nyukundu Dam and Lwogwagipi. Emanuele describes the episode in Italian in his diary:
31 January
Ndegwa told me he saw an enormous python close to the Nyukundu Dam. When approached, he did not move, as he had just eaten a gazelle or a sheep. We’ll go and check tomorrow as tonight is too late …
1 February
We woke at five and went to look for the python, with Ndegwa and four other people. Colin came too. We walked about ten minutes before we found him asleep, behind the dam wall, bloated and coiled under the leleshwa… We took lots of photographs while he tried to strike … it took us half-an-hour to catch him, and six people to carry him to the car. I noticed a long quill skewered through the skin, so what he has in his stomach must be a porcupine … I held his head, but when we reached the car he darted towards Mapengo, and sunk his teeth in his coat, luckily without reaching the flesh … we measured him at the Centre (14’11”), weighed him (112 lbs), and let him go again in the same place …
Every evening now, when in Laikipia, Emanuele would come into the sitting-room after his shower, having changed into fashionable jeans and shirt, tall and serious, with a natural elegance and way of moving. Fitting gracefully into his task of host, he served drinks to everyone, exchanged a few words with all, and sat always in the same place to write his diaries. Mapengo now looked after his reptiles in Laikipia when Emanuele was away, but even in Nairobi he pursued this interest. He started a popular Snake Club at school.
After Paolo’s death, Emanuele and I had agreed that, rather than going to England for the last two years as we had planned, so as not to split the family further he would continue attending school in Nairobi. He had passed his Common Entrance exams with flying colours, and after Pembroke he had gone straight to Hillcrest, where his step-sister Valeria had been before continuing her studies in Switzerland.
Dear Mrs Gallmann, [wrote his Headmaster from Hillcrest]
I would be grateful if you could persuade your son not to leave bags containing dangerous reptiles in the classrooms.
A typical example of his passion is an episode which occurred one Sunday spent in Nairobi, when we went to visit Carol Byrne at her house in Kitengela. While I chatted with Carol before lunch, Emanuele and her son Sam climbed down the slopes to explore the rocky shores of the Mbagathi River, obviously searching for snakes. Our conversation was interrupted by Emanuele’s voice screaming from the bottom of the ridge:‘Come! Come quickly!’ The urgency in his tone, and the fact that Emanuele never screamed, conveyed that there was no time to lose.
Carol and I dashed down the slope, loose stones rolling under our running feet. Deep in water up to his waist, Emanuele was fighting with some huge wriggling creature. Water splashed in all directions
. A mottled tail, thicker than an arm, slashed the air, spraying us. Perched on a stone, Sam watched the scene with a mixture of admiration and worry. It was a python, of more than remarkable size, and it was clear that it was not going to surrender easily. Emanuele half-disappeared under water. I recalled the story of Philip Leakey, whose house was just a short distance down the same river. A few years back, he had been caught by a large python while swimming and had almost drowned. The strength of even a small constrictor is uncanny in proportion to its size: this one looked well over ten feet long.
‘Quick!’ Emanuele emerged spluttering. ‘Carol, you take the middle. Pep, you take the tail. I have the head. I must measure it. Do you have a tape?’
Neither Carol nor I thought for a moment of disobeying. Emanuele had a way with him which made the most improbable things sound normal. We entered the water, and grabbed the snake as instructed. It was heavy, wet, slippery and immensely powerful. Quite rightly, it had no intention of letting us catch it.
‘Our neighbours are closer than our house,’ said Sam excitedly. ‘They will certainly have a tape measure.’
He led the way up the twisting track and we followed, carrying the contorting snake – an odd procession, wet and dishevelled, panting up the steep rise. It was quite an ordeal. This python was a fighter, and we had nothing with which to cover its head and quieten it. Halfway up the slope, its cloaca contracted and opened and a foetid spurt missed us by inches.
‘Never,’ gasped Carol, bewildered, ‘not even for my own children, would I have dreamed of doing such …’
I Dreamed of Africa Page 16