The Tree Where Man Was Born

by Peter Matthiessen

  The herdsmen are driving their cattle north, humped Asian zebu with a few long-horned Ankole, and each carries his short sword and club and two leaf-bladed spears of the style used by the Maasai until this century, when the javelin-bladed spear came into fashion; also, a leather water bottle and a small leather pouch. One has an elegant wood headrest, bartered, perhaps, from a Turkana. As a morani, or young warrior, he is painted in red ocher, and his greased braids are pulled up from the nape of his neck, jutting out over his forehead like the bill of a cap. The Samburu regard themselves as “the world’s top people,”8 and certainly they are more handsome and aristocratic than most other beings, but perhaps because their territories are surrounded by fierce nomads such as the Boran and the Turkana, the Samburu are not so arrogant as the Maasai.

  To the north, odd pyramids and balanced rocks take form in the blue dust haze of the desert. Low thorn scrub is interspersed with toothbrush bush, combretum,* and the desert rose (Adenium), with its pink fleshy flowers, rubber limbs, and poison sap, a source of arrow poison. Eliot is struck by desert patterns and details, and we stop here and there to record them. From under a bush darts an elephant shrew; it sits on a dry leaf, twitches, sniffs, and vanishes with a dry scatter. At a hole in the red desert is a ring of grain chaff several inches deep; harvester ants gather kernels from the thin grasses and discard the husks. Farther on, where dark ramparts of the Matthews Range rise in the west, the isolated bushes shelter pairs of dik-dik from the heat: this is Guenther’s dik-dik, grayer, larger, and longer in the nose than the common or Kirk’s dik-dik, which is found south of the Uaso Nyiro. (As with the zebras, “common” and “gray” dik-dik seems much simpler: Messrs. Kirk and Guenther, with Burchell, Grevy, and the estimable Mrs. Gray of Mrs. Gray’s lechwe, should be confined to the taxonomic nomenclature, cf. Equus Burchelli, where they belong. And for that matter, why should these ancient rocks of Africa commemorate the unmemorable General Matthews? Why not restore the Samburu name, Ol Doinyo Lenkiyio?)

  From the mountains, which are said to shelter a few Dorobo, comes the Merille River. Samburu are digging water points in the dry river bed, and huge leather bottles, some of them three or four feet high, stand like amphoras near the holes. Other tribesmen squat beneath a big tree on the bank. The young boys, naked but for thin beads and earrings of river shell, have a scalp lock of hair on their plucked heads; the girls wear calf-skin aprons and a cotton cloth tied at one shoulder that parts their pretty breasts. Unmarried girls are painted red, and some have lines of raised tattoos on their fair bellies; an infant in a sling wears a small necklace of green beads. The married women carry a heavy collar of doum palm fiber decorated with large dark red beads, and arms coils of silver steel and golden copper, the gold on the lower arm and the silver above, or the reverse. Men or women may wear metal anklets, bead headbands, copper earrings; one morani has ivory ear plugs and a string of beads that runs beneath his lip and back over his ears. At a little distance, he leans carelessly upon his spear, ankles crossed in a stance that is emblematic among warrior herdsmen from the Sudan south into Maasai Land.

  North of the Merille the first dromedaries appear, a small herd in the shelter of the thorns; their keeper is nowhere to be seen. Far cones jut out of the desert, and a group of peaks has a shark-fin appearance, as if swept back by ancient winds off the High Semien, in Ethiopia. This is called the Kaisut Desert, but in June, just after the rains, the black outcroppings of lava are bedded in a haze of green.

  Tin shacks of the road gangs gleam in the merciless sun at Lokuloko, in compounds enclosed by high barbed wire. Outside are the dung huts of parasitic Samburu attracted to the settlement, and a few cowled Somali women come and go. Some of the huts have rusty tin sheets stuck onto the roof, in emulation of the tin ovens of the workers; the traditional Samburu village compound is reduced here to a litter of loose hovels. Nowhere on the wind-whipped ground, is there a tree or a blade of grass; the thorn scrub has been bulldozed into piles. Dust, rusting oil drums, blowing papers, black requiem birds, a scent of human poverty: in temperate climates, poverty smells sour, but in hot regions it is sickeningly sweet.

  Mt. Marsabit rises from the desert haze like a discolored cloud. Grassy foothills climb in steps toward isolated cones, and the air cools. In a meadow, like a lump from the volcanoes, stands a bull elephant with great lopsided tusks curved in upon each other, the ivory burnished bronze with age like a stone font worn smooth by human hands. This high oasis far from the old trade routes and new tourist tracks, and cut off in recent years by shifta raids, is the realm of the last company of great-tusked elephants in Africa. Many have tusks of a hundred pounds or better on each side, and those of a bull known as Ahmed are estimated at 150 and 170 pounds, and may soon cross, as in the extinct mammoth.

  Marsabit in June: great elephants and volcanoes, lark song and bright butterflies, and far below, pale desert wastes that vanish in the sands. On Marsabit are fields of flowers, nodding in the copper-colored grass: blue thistle, acanth, madder, morning glory, vetch and pea, and a magnificent insect-simulating verbena, its flowers fashioned like blue butterflies, even to the long curling antennae. The blossoms of the different families are all of mountain blue, as if born of the same mountain minerals, mountain rain. One cow pea has a large curled blossom, and to each blossom comes a gold-banded black beetle that consumes the petals, and each beetle is attended by one or more black ants that seem to nip at its hind legs, as if to speed the produce of its thorax. Next day I came back to investigate more closely, but the flowering was over and the beetles gone.

  The roads of Marsabit are patrolled by the Kenya Rifles, there to protect the tribesmen from the shifta, and also an anti-poaching force whose quarry is often the same. They waved us to a halt. A vast elephant had been located not far from the road; they imagined it was Ahmed, who had not been seen for several weeks. All was invisible but a granite dome that rose out of the bush, and black men and white ones, creeping up, stood in a line before the gray eminence as before an oracle, awaiting enlightenment. Eventually the dome stirred, a curled trunk appeared, and modest tusks were elevated from the foliage that brought a jeer from the disappointed Africans, though they laughed gleefully at their own mistake.

  Ahmed eluded us, as did the greater kudu. In size, this striped antelope is only exceeded by the eland, but the animals are not easily seen, having retreated into the retreating forest, restricted now to high Mt. Marsabit. “Moja moja tu,” said the Boran ranger who led us to its haunts—one sees one here and there. The Samburu crowd them with their herds, and so do the Galla—the Boran, Gabbra, and Rendille. (The Galla tribes, found mostly in Ethiopia, are modern Hamites, related to the Egyptians, desert Tuareg, and Berbers of the north.) Boran men wear the Moslem dress of the Somali, though most are pagan; the women dress also like Somali, but their faces lack the oriental cast that make the Somali what some consider the most beautiful women on this continent.

  Three of the dead volcanoes on Mt. Marsabit contain crater lakes, of which the largest is Gof Bongole. From the high rim of Bongole, looking south, one sees the shark fin mountains of Losai; eastward, the desert stretches away into Somalia. Of late, it was said, the mighty Ahmed, formerly unassailable in his serenity, had become vexed by the attentions of mankind, and perhaps he was bothered also by the roar of the machines that were bringing the new road from the south, for now he remained mostly in these forests behind Bongole, where he came to water. I awaited him one morning by an olive tree, sheltered from the monsoon wind by the crater rim. From the desert all around came a great silence, as on an island where the sea has fallen still. An amethyst sunbird pierced my eye, and a butterfly breathed upon my arm; I smelled wild jasmine, heard the grass seeds fall. From the crater lake hundreds of feet below rose the pipe of coots, and the scattering slap of their runs across the surface. But no great elephant came down the animal trails on the crater side, only a buffalo that plodded from the crater woods at noon and subsided in a shower of white egrets into the
shallows.

  Sun and grass: in my shelter, the air was hot. Mosque swallows, swifts, a hawk, two vultures coursed the crater thermals, and from overhead came a small boom, like the sound of a stooping falcon. But the bird hurtling around the crater rim was a large long-tailed swift of a uniform dull brown. This bird, described as “extremely uncommon and local . . . a highlands species which flies high, seen only when thunderstorms or clouds force them to fly lower than usual”9 is the scarce swift. Though not the first record at Marsabit, the sighting of a bird called the scarce swift gave me great pleasure.

  Our camp was in the mountain forest, a true forest of great holy trees—the African olive, with its silver gray-green shimmering leaves and hoary twisted trunk—of wildflowers and shafts of light, cool shadows and deep humus smells, moss, ferns, glades, and the ring of unseen birds from the green clerestories. Lying back against one tree, staring up into another, I could watch the olive pigeon and the olive thrush share the black fruit for which neither bird is named; to a forest stream nearby came the paradise fly-catcher, perhaps the most striking of all birds in East Africa. Few forests are so beautiful, so silent, and here the silence is intensified by the apprehended presence of wild beasts—buffalo and elephant, rhino, lion, leopard. Because these creatures are so scarce and shy, the forest paths can be walked in peace; the only fierce animal I saw was a small squirrel pinned to a dead log by a shaft of sun, feet wide, defiant, twitching its tail in time to thin pure squeakings.

  The Game Department people say that we should not travel beyond Marsabit without armed escort, but to carry more people is not possible: the two Land Rovers and the truck are full. We drove out from beneath the mountain clouds, descending the north side of Marsabit into the Dida Gilgalu Desert, where a raven flapped along a famished gully and pocked lava spread like a black crust across the waste.

  Ahead, volcanic cones rose from the sand haze like peaks out of low clouds; the day was overcast with heavy heat. Larks and ground squirrels, camel flies and ticks; the camel fly is so flat and rubbery that it flies off after a hard slap. Occasional dry dongas support bunch grass and the nests of weavers; in this landscape, the red rump of the white-headed buffalo weaver is the only color. Though animals other than snakes are not a problem here, a lone traveler had made a small thorn shelter at the side of the road, to ward off the great emptiness. Round lava boulders, shined by manganese and iron oxides, and burnished by wind and sand, looked greased in the dry light—a country of dragons.

  To the north, the Huri Mountains rose and fell away again into Ethiopia. We took a poor track westward. In the wall of an old river bed was a cave of swifts and small brown bats where man had lived, and from the dust of the cave floor I dug an ancient digging stick with a hacked point. Not far away, on the bare rock of a ridge, were tattered habitations of dung and straw where silhouettes of goats and man came together in a knot to watch us pass. Here where nothing grows, these primitive Gabbra subsist on blood and milk, in a way that cannot be very different from the way of the first pastoralists who came here many centuries ago.

  The Gabbra mission at the Maikona oasis is a litter of huts patched with tin and paper, on a barren ground stalked by rooks and curs. Here children gnaw on the thin bitter skins of borassus palm nuts from the foul oasis. The nuts lie mixed with withered livestock turds around the huts, and they will be here when man has gone; such nuts are found in Old Stone Age sites that are fifty-five thousand years old. The people go barefoot on the stones, rags blowing, and they are idle, all but the smith, who pumped his fires with twin bellows made of goat skin: from scavenged car springs and an angle iron, he was beating a lean spear. As in all the Galla tribes, the smith has been despised and feared since the advent of the Iron Age brought this strange element to man, yet he seemed more cheerful than the aristocratic idlers who stared away over the desert.

  Maikona lies at the south end of a black lava field that stretches north a hundred miles into Ethiopia; the lava ends in an abrupt wall where the wave of stone, thirty feet high, came to a stop. The lava flow forms the north wall of an ancient lake bed called the Chalbi Desert, a vast reach of ash and dead white soda that gives off the heat waves of mirage: for fifty miles, brown columns of dust pursued our caravan westward. Gazelle in quest of salt moved slow as ghosts across white fields of alkali, and a jackal overtaken by the heat lay with sick calm in the ash and watched men pass. The sun turned orange in a tawny sky, then luminous in the strange way of desert suns; it melted the Bura Galadi Hills on the horizon.

  At dark, in the northwest corner of the desert, the cars reached the oasis at North Horr, where a police post protects the Gabbra of the region from shifta and from bands of nomad raiders out of Ethiopia. The women here have strong desert faces in black shrouds, metal arm coils and cobra-head bracelets, piled trading beads hand-fashioned from aluminum, ancient amulets; one necklace has a Victoria coin, worn thin by intent hands across a century of desert cooking fires. Perhaps it had come from the Sudan, snatched from the torn pockets of dead English at Khartoum.

  Children come, with fireflies in their tight hair; the lights dance through the blowing palms. Far from the world, they play at being airplanes, which they know only from the lights that pass over in the dark, north out of Africa. Tonight there were no airplanes, but an earth satellite of unknown origin arched over the Southern Cross, followed toward midnight by a shooting star that died in a shower of ethereal blue light over the High Semien, in Ethiopia.

  I slept under the desert stars, content to be somewhere called North Horr, between the Chalbi Desert and the Bura Galadi Hills: the lean sinister names evoked medieval legends, desert bandits, and the fierce grotesque old Coptic kingdoms of Abyssinia.

  By morning the wind was blowing up in sandstorms. Flights of sand grouse, seeking water, hurtled back and forth over the cracking palms, and a train of camels etched a slow crack into the desert to the south.

  Beyond North Horr, the track is too poor for the truck, which lacks four-wheel drive; it would meet us some days hence at the El Molo village, Loiyengalani, near the south end of Lake Rudolf. The eight white people in the party, with the Kamba cook, Kimunginye, would travel light in the two Land Rovers, since the plan was to arrive that night at Richard Leakey’s archeological camp at Koobi Fora, some one hundred ten miles beyond North Horr. We carried our own food and bedding, and Richard, who expected us, would furnish the gasoline and water that would carry us back south again to Loiyengalani.

  In the gravel beds of a dead river one car, towing a small trailer, had to be unhitched and pushed: beyond the river, the track made by Leakey’s annual caravan was indistinct. The region is less hostile than the deserts farther east, and less monotonous. Dry river beds intersect broad dry grass plains broken here and there by sand dunes, brimstone outcrops, and ridges of dark volcanic rock scattered with bits of chert and gypsum, and the animals are tame and common, for there is no one here to hunt them. But farther on all creatures vanish, and the arid plain under a gray blowing sky seems more oppressive than bare desert, as if life had been here and had gone. In this wind is the echo of cataclysm: this is how the world will look when man brings all life to an end.

  The land east of Lake Rudolf appears to have been a main migration route of early peoples, for here and there upon the landscape are strange stone heaps four or five feet high, ten feet across, encircled at the base by a ring of larger stones that gives them form. Some of these cairns or graves, most common near the water points to which the old track winds, have been identified as Galla. Others, like the tracks themselves, may be thousands of years old, growing gently in size from pebbles cast on them out of respect by passing nomads. In such silence one still hears the echo of those pebbles, tinkling to rest on the side of the mute heap.

  African prehistory is an edifice of probabilities, and its dates are continually set back as new archeological sites emerge: it is now thought that Caucasoid wanderers came south into East Africa at least as early as ten thousand years ago,
perhaps much earlier,10 when all men on earth were still hunters and gatherers. These “Kenya Capsians” or “Proto-Hamites” whose remains have been found near the Rift Valley lakes used obsidian tools for working wood, bone, and hides, and were among the first peoples known to have possessed the bow and arrow, but essentially they were sedentary fishermen, like their contemporaries, the Negroid fishermen of Khartoum. Strangely, although one group was clearly Negroid and the other Caucasoid, both had the same barbed bone harpoons and curved arrowheads called lunates, made open pottery incised with wavy lines, and removed the two central incisors from the lower jaw, as all peoples of Nilotic origin, including the Samburu and Maasai, do to this day. A later people living near Lake Elmenteita11 used two-edged stone blades and more symmetrical lunates, and made fine pottery before the Egyptians had learned to do so, but there is still no real evidence of a Neolithic culture based on domestic plants and animals before 1000 B.C., at least a millennium after the red cattle people of the rock paintings had left their traces in the Sahara.

  South of the Sahara, Neolithic civilization was confined to certain hillsides of East Africa, and the evidence suggests that its peoples brought their animals and cereals out of southwest Ethiopia. Although the stone bowls and pestles that symbolize their culture might have been used for the grinding of red ocher and wild cereals, the Proto-Hamites surely had domestic grains as well. Meanwhile related peoples, discovering that they could live on milk and blood, were moving into a nomadic cattle culture of the sort still seen today: a Greco-Roman account of 200 B.C. tells of herdsmen south of the Sahara who worshipped their cattle, fed on blood and milk, practiced circumcision, and buried their dead in a contracted position “to the accompaniment of laughter.”12 (The “worship” of the cattle by the herdsmen, then as now, is better understood as deep affection—expressed in odes and lullabies, pet names and the like—for a life-giving force that is seen as the people’s special gift from God; in the same way, the Pygmies sing to the forest and the Bushmen to the desert that gives them sustenance, not in worship but in gratitude.) The nomad herdsmen, like the Bedouin Arabs who would later sweep across the northern continent, were the true barbarians of Africa, preying on others and ravaging the land. Very likely they obtained their animals and spears from the tillers they came to despise, but the prestige attached to the ownership of the precious animals that came south under their sticks was everywhere extended to their customs, which still survive in the great cattle kingdoms from the Sudan south into Tanzania, and are imitated by many tilling tribes as well.