Somewhere East of Eden

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Somewhere East of Eden Page 9

by Michael McKeown


  I studied Juno, marvelling at the air of calm Olympian authority emanating from him. Deep in the ancient part of our brains is a memory of once being hunted by lions. Both our species emerged in the crucible of the great East African savanna – they were lords of the plains and we were their prey. As always when confronted by a lion in the wild that sadly overused and abused word awesome comes to mind. The Oxford dictionary defines awesome as being: extremely impressive, daunting; inspiring awe. And lions with their aura of calm, controlled power perfectly tick those boxes.

  Meanwhile, the extent to which we are exacting revenge on our great adversaries from the past can be seen in the following statistics. In the mid-19th century there were more than a million lions in Africa; today there are around 20 000. Incredibly, in the past fifty years the continent has lost 95% of its lions. It is a statistic I find difficulty in taking in. And whilst expanding populations and loss of habitat is certainly one of the causes, so is too is sport-hunting. Lions have always topped the list of desirable trophy prizes and as their population in the wild declines, the status of having a perfect lion to hang on the wall and brag about it multiplies, as epitomised by the exploits of Donald Trump’s two gormless sons.

  Whilst Hans busied himself with complicated adjustments to focal lengths and light sources, I returned to my contemplation of Juno. Could he, I wondered, be a descendant of one of the two notorious man-eating lions who stalked the campsites of the indented Indian workforce during the construction of the railway, dubbed as The Lunatic Line, between Mombasa and Nairobi in 1898 and undertaken during the Scramble for Africa by the great European powers at the end of the 19th century.

  By February of that year, the railroad line had reached Tsavo where a bridge was built to allow the track to cross the river. Soon after work on the bridge began, two enormous, maneless lions began to attack the workers’ camps dragging their victims from their tents and devouring them. Despite the erection of thorn fences around the camp and all-night guards the attacks continued relentlessly, culminating with a mass walk-out by the workforce, halting construction of the bridge.

  The financial consequences to a delay in the project would have been disastrous and with his own reputation at stake Lieutenant-Colonel J H Patterson, who had been commissioned by the railway company to oversee the bridge’s construction, was left with no choice but to hunt down the lions himself. After repeated unsuccessful attempts he finally shot and killed both lions in December. Subsequently, his book The Man Eaters of Tsavo became an immediate best seller. In it Patterson claimed that that over one hundred and fifty people had been killed by the lions, a figure that was quickly disputed by the railway company who maintained it was no more than twenty-eight at the most. Both parties obviously had good reason for advancing their widely different claims, although recent analytical studies point firmly to the latter figure. Whatever the case, Patterson’s lions passed into popular culture with no less than three Hollywood movies being made of the story, the most famous being The Ghost and the Darkness, whose title derived from the local names for the two lions.

  From the start the railway had been mired in political controversy in Britain, with many MP’s questioning its cost to the tax-payer, about £450 million in today’s money, and the uncertain benefits to be gained from it. Critics ridiculed the spiralling costs of a project that had no measurable value and dismissed it as a gigantic folly. One of these was the radical politician Henry Labouchere who wrote a satirical poem called The Lunatic Line, hugely popular at the time, two stanzas of which went like this.

  What will it cost no words can express

  What is its object no brain can suppose

  Where it will start from no one can guess

  Where it is going, nobody knows

  What is the use of it none can conjecture

  What it will carry there’s none can define

  And in spite of George Curzon’s superior lecture

  It is clearly naught but a lunatic line.

  But despite Labouchere’s reservations, the construction of the railway went ahead with thirty-two thousand Indian labourers shipped in from the sub-continent. By the time the six hundred and sixty miles of track between Mombasa and Kisumu, on the shores of Lake Victoria had been laid, 2498 workers had died, roughly four men for every mile. Many of the indented Indians chose to return home but over six thousand decided to remain behind, creating a new community of Indian East Africans.

  Tsavo is perfect elephant country, a huge slice of African bushland, the size of Wales and nearly three times as big as Yellowstone Park. Even today the northern region remains dauntingly far-flung and distant as to match the Czech idiom, ‘where the foxes say goodnight,’ a phrase used to describe a remote, deserted place in the middle of nowhere, so isolated that even the foxes have nothing to say to it but goodnight.

  For administrative reasons, the park is divided into two regions: Tsavo West and Tsavo East, divided by the Nairobi-Mombasa railway. Although contiguous, their physical composition differs markedly. Tsavo West consists of grassy woodlands and low green hills with Mount Kilimanjaro brooding over its western border whereas the larger eastern park is an immense tract of dry thorn scrub country, magnificently remote and still largely untouched, stretching northwards to distant mauve horizons. It is ideal elephant country and home to Kenya’s largest population of elephants – over ten thousand.

  The park’s relatively short history can be traced from the time, seventy years ago, when a young assistant game warden, David Sheldrick, was appointed to transform the previously uncharted five thousand miles of Tsavo’s eastern sector in to a national park. The area was as close to genuine wilderness as one can get, devoid of even the most rudimentary tracks, and it is safe to say that nothing like it compares in the country today. His unwavering dedication and steadfast principles laid the foundation for the future of the park, now recognised as one of the finest in Africa. For Sheldrick, wildlife was part of a constantly evolving ecosystem in which everything; insects, mammals, reptiles, birds, plants and flowers are connected. Sound conservation policies, he contended, should be directed to achieving a natural ecological balance. “You can usually count on one thing and that is that Nature usually knows best and can provide the best solution under any set of circumstances,” he once said. “All too often when Man intervenes, he messes things up and creates another set of problems.”

  Today, his name is remembered in the eponymous wildlife trust that bears his name and the world-famous elephant orphanage on the outskirts of Nairobi founded by his wife Daphne. Nearly all the orphans brought there are badly traumatised, having fallen down a well or a man hole, or after being found huddled by the side of their mother who has been killed by poachers. Some arrive broken and so wrapped up in their grief that they give up after a day or two, lacking the will to stay alive. It is then that the role of the keepers, who literally act as a surrogate mother sleeping with their charges at night on a specially raised platform and replicating as far as possible their lost family herd, becomes so vital.

  “Winning their trust is the key to success,” one of the keepers had explained to me at the time of my visit to the orphanage, a week earlier. “They quickly sense if someone understands them and respond to it. When we have earned that trust, they start to heal and become like normal elephant babies.”

  Once they are psychologically stable, usually after two years, the nursery elephants are transferred to one of the two rehabilitation centres in Tsavo, where they begin their long and gradual re-integration back into the wild elephant community. During this rehabilitation stage, the orphans walk in the bush daily with their keepers, meeting up with some the ex-orphans who are now fully integrated into the wild, and return to their stockade in the evening. Ultimately the whole project is about, helping baby elephants to return to the wild in their own time and on their own terms. The transition can take as long as ten years and is in accordance with David Sheldrick’s belief that ‘any wild orphan was only on l
oan during its dependant years, but ultimately must go free.’

  The old maxim about elephants never forgetting is strikingly illustrated in the story of Eleanor, who had begun her life as an orphan in the Nairobi nursery and was later transferred to Voi, where ultimately, she was released and became reunited with one of the wild herds. Years later and now in her early forties she returned to the stockade, as she regularly did to visit the keepers and enjoy some of the titbits that might be on offer. As she approached, an unknown man appeared walking down a track from the opposite direction. Eleanor stopped, then raised her trunk and to everyone’s dismay ran straight at him before skidding to a halt and wrapping him in her trunk. It turned out that the man had been her keeper when she was four years old. Thirty-eight years had passed but her recognition was immediate.

  I recounted the story to Hans who had put his equipment to one side and was watching a small herd of elephants drinking on the other side of the river.

  He smiled and nodded his head. “Elephants, and I don’t care how many times I say this, are astonishing. And you know what is really amazing about them?”

  “Go on.”

  “That you never stop being amazed by them. Just when you think that you know almost everything about them there is to know, they surprise you by doing something different.”

  I nodded in agreement. It was a pretty good description of this unique mammal. Over three centuries before Christ, Aristotle had provided a summary of them in his Historia Animalium that can hardly be bettered today. He noted: their high intelligence that passes all others in wit and mind, their peaceful nature; how they care their young and never abandon their sick or wounded.

  We sat and watched the elephants. High clouds drifted weightlessly by in a sapphire blue sky; emerald spotted doves called seductively to one another from a nearby baobab tree under which an elderly male buffalo brooded balefully. Juno and his companion had long ago retreated into the shade of a commiphora thicket. In rare, sequestered moments such as these it is easy to imagine that a landscape, so vast and uncluttered as this will remain changeless. But for the elephants living under the Damoclean sword of the illegal ivory trade, the future was clouded with uncertainty. As, for that matter, so it was for Juno and his off-spring to be.

  “Cheer up. Your chin looks as if it’s dropped around your ankles,” Hans quipped sardonically, handing me a soft drink from the cooler. “There are worse places to be.”

  No argument there I thought. Sarajevo, for example, as it had been when Hans was there, twelve episodes of Coronation Street at a single sitting, dinner a deux with Theresa May, a Top Gear programme with Jeremy Clarkson and his two petrol-head colleagues careering across some sunlit savanna in a latest Highlander SUV, uttering moronic ‘out-of-the-way-please calls to the animals, and so on. Rousing myself from my profitless musings, I joined Hans who was photographing two young bull calves enthusiastically pushing and wrestling with each other under a doum-palm on the far side of the river bank. Two lesser-kudu with ivory tipped spiral horns picked their way delicately down the slope and began drinking. Peace enveloped the scene like the white wings of a seabird. It was overwhelmingly lovely, timeless and tranquil. Doomsday would have to wait.

  * * *

  3Robert Capa. Hungarian photographer who made his name in the Spanish Civil War and went on to become arguably the greatest war photographer of all time.

  ABSENT FRIENDS

  The world is as delicate and complicated as a spider’s web and like a spider’s web, if you touch one thread you send shudders running through all the other threads that make up the web. But we’re not just touching the web, we’re tearing great holes in it; we’re waging a sort of biological war on the world around us.

  - Gerald Durrell

  To the first-time visitor the most striking thing about wildlife on Mauritius is how little there is of it. All those birds and animals that in tropical islands lend a heightened sense of expectancy to a visit – parakeets, sunbirds, iridescent butterflies and exotic turtles – are all conspicuously absent. Apart from the ubiquitous and noisy domestic dogs, the island’s sole indigenous species is confined to the endearingly fox-faced Mauritius fruit bat.

  It was here on this Indian Ocean island aeons ago that a plump, ungainly bird the size of a goose evolved, a relative it is now widely believed of the South Pacific pigeon. Secure on its island paradise and with no predators to fly from it remained on the ground and lost the power of flight. Lacking all fear, it made no attempt to run for safety when the first Dutch sailors arrived on the island in 1508 and within something like sixty years from first encountering man the hapless Dodo was annihilated. Its passing was unlamented and, for the most part, unnoticed. Then, in 1878 Alice in Wonderland was published with a line drawing of the Dodo leaning on a cane and talking to Alice. With that single black and white illustration, the Dodo was rescued from oblivion and less than a hundred years later had become a global icon for extinction.

  I had been invited to Mauritius to write the script for a travel documentary and in order to learn more about this singular bird and its unhappy demise I took myself off to the National History Museum in Port Louis. This small and, for the most part, sadly neglected museum in Chaussée Street houses a reconstructed Dodo along with the now extinct Bourbon crested starling, the Mascarene parrot and the Rodriguez solitaire. All of which may go some way to explaining the faint air of melancholy it exudes.

  Like many people, my idea of the dodo had been formed from illustrations by seventeenth century artists with little or no knowledge of natural history, and who based their works on descriptions of the bird from the journals and log books of Dutch merchant ships that docked in Mauritius. One of the best known of these is by is by a Dutch water-colourist, Roeland Savery, that depicts a fat, clumsy looking grey-coloured bird with long hooked beak and hardly any wings to speak of. Almost certainly it fell a long way short of the real thing, as can be seen from the reconstruction of recently discovered bones which reveal the Dodo to have been considerably slimmer and less ponderous than depicted by early artists.

  I stood there contemplating a portrait painted in oils by an unnamed artist. The dodo was standing on a sandy beach, looking out over a stormy sea to distant blue mountains with a comical look of surprise on its normally lugubrious face. I was jotting down some notes on the back of my catalogue when I noticed a tall, slightly stooping man, impeccably dressed in a grey suit and with a neat Van Dyke beard, standing a little to the left of the picture. He returned my glance and moved a step or two closer. He wore a wry, whimsical expression and looked as if he had just stepped out of a Noel Coward play.

  “I sometimes think of it as the museum of shame,” he said with a gently deprecating smile. “Ours’s that is,” he added in case there was any misunderstanding and introduced himself as Antoine de Freitas, a marine biologist and a former curator of the museum.

  “Ours?”

  “Yes, Homo sapiens.” His eyes twinkled. “The uber-predator, as the dodo found to his cost.”

  Until then I had never given much thought to the cause of the unfortunate Dodo’s passing. The bird was a prime example of natural selection and had become extinct as evolution decreed.

  Clearly de Freitas felt my abysmal zoological ignorance would benefit from some instruction for he shot me an evaluating glance from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles.

  “Perhaps, if you like…. Er…. that is if you have a few minutes, “we can chat about it over a coffee on the waterfront,” he suggested tentatively.

  “I should love to,” I said, accepting with alacrity. Clearly, I had fallen into the right hands I reflected as we walked down the palm-lined avenue of Place d’Armes, past the grandiloquent statue of Bertrand Françoise Mahe de la Bourdonnais, the first French governor of Mauritius. After all it’s not every day that one is invited to a private natural history lesson by an eminent marine biologist.

  We took a table at one of the Caudan’s many coffee bars with its view over the
harbour and its fashion shops, colourful arts and craft market and multi-ethnic restaurants. High on the list of Mauritius’s many attractions are its wonderfully diverse and delicious cuisine. To eat here is to experience a blend of some of the world’s great dishes – French, Creole, Chinese and Indian and, not for the first time, I found myself reflecting that there were few places on earth where people from so many different races, cultures and religions have so successfully harmonised into a working political entity as they have here.

  Antoine, I quickly discovered was a gifted conversationalist. He began with a brief account of the molten upheaval and giant tidal waves that had lifted Mauritius out of the sea in a succession of titanic seizures some ten million years earlier, part of the now sunken volcanic chain that stretches across the Indian Ocean from the Seychelles to Reunion. Out of this fiery genesis had emerged an island covered with lush rainforests of ebony and teak, fertile lava soils and dramatically shaped mountains watered by countless streams and encircled by an almost unbroken coral reef.

  Into this unique, peaceful, ecological paradise came birds and bats, blown on to the island by gale force winds, whilst reptiles and other invertebrates arrived on floating masses of tangled branches uprooted from the shores of distant lands and cast adrift on the ocean. Over the millennia, they evolved along their own genetic lines and the Dodo, whose closest living relative was the Nicobar pigeon from the Indian Ocean, came into being. Secure in its tropical Eden, undisturbed by predators, the Dodo abandoned flight and remained on the ground where it nested in safety, limiting its off spring to a single chick.

 

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