The Tree Where Man Was Born

by Peter Matthiessen

  Then the suspense got to the buffalo, and the hidden herd rushed away down the mountainside with a heavy cracking, and a long rumbling like a mountain torrent past big boulders. Immediately, another Meru voice called out, “Kifaru!” and Vesey mopped his brow. The Meru were pointing at a rhino print as fresh as a black petal, and within seconds a rhino crashed into the brush off to the east. The crash started up a buffalo lying low in the wild nightshade to our left. This lone animal was the one we were afraid of, and as it was much closer than the others, its explosion through the branches caused the Wazungu to rush in all directions. Beasley sprinted past, bound for the same tree as myself, as the askari Serekieli, standing fast, fired his gun to turn the charge. The black blur whirled away, and the echo died.

  On foot in Africa, one will have this experience sooner or later, and Thomson’s encounter with a buffalo in this region could have described our own:

  Men were running on all sides as if the ground had yawned to swallow them up. Some were scrambling up trees, others, paralyzed, hid behind bushes, or any other object. Terror seemed to permeate the air with electric effect, and the short, quick cries of excited, panic-stricken men were heard on all sides. Almost paralyzed myself at this extraordinary but as yet unseen danger, I stood helpless till I was enlightened by one of my men screaming out to me in a warning voice, “Bwana, bwana, mboga!” (Master, a buffalo.) “Good gracious! Where?” I said, as I skipped with agility behind a tree, and peered cautiously past the side in the direction indicated—for be it known that there is not a more dangerous or dreaded animal in all Africa.2

  The relative menace of what hunters know as “the big five”—elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion, and leopard—is a popular topic of discussion in East Africa. J. A. Hunter, for example, ranked the leopard first, then lion, buffalo, elephant, and rhino, in that order. C. P. J. Ionides also thought the leopard more dangerous than the lion. This prejudice in favor of the carnivores is the prejudice of hunters who have had to finish off wounded animals, and might not be shared, say, by a farmer or field zoologist, who is more likely to be attacked by a large herbivore. In Ionides’ opinion, the most dangerous animal to an unarmed person in the bush is a tuskless elephant. Lion attacks are now quite rare, but in the days of widespread game slaughter for tsetse control, a number of lions in these devastated regions turned on man in desperation, and bags of fifty, sixty, and in one case ninety human beings were recorded.3 For people like myself who lack experience, it is purely a subjective business. I fear all five of the big five with all my heart, but I have least fear of the rhino, perhaps because one may leap aside with a reasonable hope that the rhino will keep on going. Unlike the other beasts of the big five, the rhino, with its poor vision and small powers of deduction, is only anxious to dispel an unsupportable suspense, and is probably as frightened as its foe.

  In the next thousand feet of the descent there were rhino wallows and buffalo sign on every side; one kept an eye out for hospitable trees even before an emergency had been declared. In a mahogany, Meru tribesmen had placed a beehive, essentially a hollowed cedar log with a removable bottom, hung from a limb by a wooden hook. (The Dorobo add to the hive’s efficiency by hailing the bees in strange high-pitched tones: “Bees, bees, all you who are in this country, come now and make honey here!”)4 In the honey harvest, the bees’ wits are thickened with a smoke flare; when the hive is lowered to the ground the addled bees collect where it had hung. Easing his nerves, Vesey hypothesized the converse of the bees:

  “Where the bloody hell’s the hive?!”

  “Right here, you idiot—it’s always here.”

  “Well, it bloody well isn’t!”

  By the time they get through discussing it, the hive is back in place:

  “You see? Right there under your nose! Damned bloody fool!”

  The great trees, fallen, have opened glades in a wild parkland, and silver deadwood is entwined by a climbing acanth with blossoms of light lavender. In stillness, in wind-shifted sun and shadow, a papilio butterfly, deep blue, is dancing with a Meru swallowtail, black and white, which ascends from the black and white remains of a colobus monkey, knocked from its tree by a leopard or an eagle. . . .

  “Kifaru!”

  At six thousand feet, in a mahogany grove, a rhino digging is so fresh that it seems to breathe; we hurry past. “I must say,” Vesey huffs, “on leave in England, it’s nice to walk about a bit and not have some bloody ungrateful beast rush out at you.” Once Vesey was chased by an irate hippopotamus that took a colossal bite out of his Land Rover.

  A shy lemon dove in a pepper tree . . . more spoof . . .

  “Kifaru!”

  At the crash, we scatter. Horn high, tail high, a rhino lumbers forth out of the undergrowth thirty yards away. The rhino is said to hoist its tail when wishing to depart, but no one appears confident that this is so. From behind my tree, too big to climb, I see Beasley on the limb of a wild coffee, with Vesey crouched below, as the rhino, trotting heavily across the glade, emits three horrible coughing snorts. The askari Frank is somewhere out of sight, but Serekieli stands bravely, legs apart, ready to fire. There is no need—the rhino goes, and keeps on going.

  The Africans permit themselves a wild sweet laughter of relief, watching the whites come down out of the trees. Vesey, treed twice in half an hour, is not amused, not yet; he will be later.

  “Get on! Get on!” he says, anxious to be off this bloody mountain.

  I hoped to see the white-maned Kilimanjaro bush pig, and one afternoon I went down into Ngurdoto Crater with Serekieli, accompanied by a silent boy whom we met along the road; like many people on the paths of Africa, the boy had no appointments and no destination of his own.

  Ngurdoto, like the famous Ngorongoro, is extinct, and both have the graduated bowl known as a caldera, which is formed when the molten core of a volcano subsides into the earth and the steep crater sides fall inward. Ngorongoro was unknown to the outside world until 1892, and not until early in this century did the white man find this smaller caldera to the east of Meru. Ngurdoto is larger than it appears—seen from the west rim, the farthest animals on the crater floor are two miles away—but the distance seems more temporal than spatial. Unlike Ngorongoro, there are no tracks or paths inside the crater, and as one peers down from the rim at remote creatures grazing in peace, oblivious of man, there rises from this hidden world that stillness of the early morning before man was born.

  An elephant path of pressed humus and round leather-polished stones wound down among the boles of the gallery forest. The sun was high and the birds still, the forest dark and cool. Under the steep rim, out of the reach of axes, rose the great African mahogany and the elegant tropical olive, loliondo. We descended through the forest single file. The steep path leveled out into grassy glades which, being ponds in time of rain, are mostly round. We followed them eastward, under the crater rim, working our way out of the trees. Serekieli, in forest green, carried a shotgun. Like many people come lately to boots, Serekieli tends to clump, but he clumps quietly and is very sure-footed; he is a lean handsome man of sad eyes and enchanted smile. Every little while he stopped to listen, giving the animals time to move away. Baboon and wart hog stared, then ran, the hominoids barking and shrieking as they scampered, the wild pigs departing the field in a stiff trot. Moments later we stood exposed in a bowl of sunlight.

  Buffalo and a solitary rhino took mute note of us; the world stood still. Flat wet dung raised its reassuring smell in halos of loud flies. We turned west across wild pasture—cropped turf, cabbage butterflies, and cloven prints filled with clear rain—that rings the sedge swamp in the pit of the caldera. A hawk rose on thermals from the crater floor, and white egrets crossed the dark walls; in the marsh, a golden sedge was seeding in the swelling light of afternoon. More buffalo lay along the wood edge at the western wall, and with them rhino and an elephant. The rhinos lay still, but the elephant, a mile away, blared in alarm, and others answered from the galleries of trees, the screa
ms echoing around the crater; the elephant’s ears flared wide and closed as it passed with saintly tread into the forest. Bushbuck and waterbuck lifted carved heads to watch man’s coming; their tails switched and their hind legs stamped but they did not run. Perhaps the white-maned bush pig saw us, too, raising red eyes from the snuffled dirt and scratching its raspy hide with a sharp hoof. Another time I glimpsed it from the rim at twilight, a ring of white in the dim trees, and one night a year later, descending the mountain, my headlights penned a family band, striped piglets and all, between the high sides of the road, but today it remained hidden.

  The buffalo rose and split into two companies, and twelve hundred hoofs thundered at once under the walls. The thunder set off an insane screeching of baboons that spread the length and breadth of Ngurdoto, and a blue monkey dropped from a lone tree in the savanna and scampered to the forest. Some of the milling buffalo plunged off into the wood, but others turned and came straight at us, the sunlight spinning on their horns. Buffalo have good eyesight, and we expected these to veer, but a hundred yards away, they were still coming, rocking heavily across the meadow. We turned and ran. Confused by our flight, they wheeled about and fled after the rest into the thickets. There came a terrific crack and crashing, as if their companions had turned back and the two groups had collided. In the stunned silence, we headed once more for the western wall, but were scarcely in the clear when the rumbling increased again, and the wood edge quaked, swayed, and split wide as the tide of buffalo broke free onto the plain and scattered in all directions.

  The hawk, clearing the crater rim, was burnt black by the western sun. From the forest, the hollow laugh of the blue monkey was answered by the froggish racketing of a turaco. Parting leaves with long shy fingers, Serekieli probed for sign of an animal trail that might climb to the western rim. We pushed through heavy growth of sage and psidia, stopping each moment to listen hard, then clap our hands. More than an hour was required to climb out of the heat and thicket to the gallery forest under the crater rim, and all the while the elephants were near in enormous silence.

  The leaves hung still. Bright on the dark humus lay a fiery fruit, white bird droppings, the blood-red feather of a turaco. When, near at hand, an elephant blared, the threat ricocheted around the walls, counterpointed by weird echoes of baboons. Serekieli offered an innocent smile and moved quietly ahead. In another hour we were on the rim, and rested on cool beds of a pink balsam. The wood smell was infused with scents of the wild orange and wild pepper trees, and of Tabernae montana, a white-flowered relative of frangipani. Where the western sun illumined the high leaves, a company of colobus and blue monkeys, silhouetted, leapt into the sky, careening down onto the canopy of the crater’s outer wall. Somewhere elephants were moving. It was near evening, and in every part the forest creaked with life.

  On certain rare mornings at Momela, Mt. Kilimanjaro rises high and clear out of clouds that dissolve around it. From the north, in Kenya, it looks celestial, benign; from Momela, it is dark and looming. Such massifs as the Ruwenzoris on the Congo-Uganda border and the High Semien of Ethiopia lack the splendor of Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya, which stand all alone: at 19,340 feet, Kilimanjaro is the highest solitary mountain in the world. Mt. Kenya is a shard of rock thrust upward from the earth, but Kilima Njaro, the White Mountain, has ascended into the sky, a place of religious resonance for tribes all around its horizons.

  The glacier glistens. A distant snow peak scours the mind, but a snow peak in the tropics draws the heart to a fine shimmering painful point of joy.

  Kilimanjaro is the easternmost of the Great Caldron Mountains, which were born fifteen to twenty million years ago, in the early Pleistocene, when widespread eruptions and tectonic movements buried the ancient rock of Africa beneath volcanos, volcanic highlands, and the lava plains of what is now Maasai Land. The cones extend east and west from Kilimanjaro to the Crater Highlands, and from Shombole, just north of the Kenya border, south to Mt. Hanang. The last active volcano in the Great Caldron Mountains is Ol Doinyo Lengai, which stands by itself between the Crater Highlands and Lake Natron. One travels there by way of Mto Wa Mbu (Mosquito River), a raffish settlement on the dusty road to Lake Manyara and Ngorongoro. From Mto Wa Mbu a dirt track turns off along that part of the Rift wall formed by the Crater Highlands, arriving eventually at the village of Engaruka, thirty-five miles north; from there, it was said, a Maasai cattle path wound around the ramparts of the Highlands to Lengai.

  The track to Engaruka, impassable in rain, parts the high grasses of the plain, branching and regathering according to the whims of its rare travelers, and tending always far out to the eastward, to skirt the gullies that snake down from the ravines in the Rift wall. Turning west again toward the mountains, the track arrives at the rim of Ol Kerii, where the land falls a last few hundred feet to the floor of the Rift Valley. In East Africa, one is never far from the Great Rift, which splits the earth’s crust from the Dead Sea south to the Zambezi River, and east and west in broken cracks from the Gulf of Aden to the Valley of the Congo. In places, the Rift is forty miles across, a trench of sun and tawny heat walled by plateaus. The floors that contain the Rift’s long, narrow north-south lakes were created long ago when the earth sank between parallel fractures, and they are on different levels: Manyara is eleven hundred feet higher than Lake Natron, to the north.

  Ol Kerii, the last great step in the descent into the Rift, has a prospect of lost mountains: Kerimasi, at the northeast corner of the Crater Highlands, and Kitumbeine, a shadow in the ancient haze beyond, and Gelai, due north, that guards the lonely sea of Natron. In every distance stand strange shrouded landscapes of the past and future. The present is wild blowing light, the sun, a bird, a baobab in heraldic isolation, like the tree where man was born.

  The track descends to the riverain forests and slow swamps of the Engaruka Basin, steeping—no sign of man, no smoke nor habitation, only two giraffes still as killed trees far out in the savanna—and the sense of entering a new world is quickened by new birds. For the first time I behold the bright, marvelous mechanisms known to man as the rosy-patched shrike, white-throated bee-eater, and Fischer’s widow-bird, named in honor of Thomson’s rival, the German naturalist Gustav Fischer, who in 1882 discovered strange ruins at Engaruka in the course of an attempt to cross Maasai Land. But his good name only encumbers the effect of this airy thing that can draw a landscape taut with its plumed tail.

  Down the track comes a loud party of Fischer’s countrymen, staring bald-eyed from the windows of a white hunter’s vehicle—here was one reason why game had been so scarce along the way. And seeing these tourists trundled forth to blaze away at the very last concentration of great animals left on earth, imagining the pollution of their din, the smoke and blood and shocked silence of the plain, and the wake of rotting carcasses, I stared back at them as rudely, filled with rage. Such sport made it all the harder to wean Africans away from contempt for wildlife, which is a matter of education and not culture: the British and South African soldiers stationed at Marsabit during World War II left thousands of animals to rot that had been idly shot down with automatic weapons from the backs of trucks.5

  The gorges in the west Rift wall are the shadows of dead rivers that in the pluvials came rushing from the highlands, forming a lake in what is now the Engaruka Basin. For centuries, the surviving stream, thought to come from Embagai Crater in the clouds above, has attracted man to Engaruka, which is a settlement of agricultural Maasai (now known as the Arusa) as well as some Sukuma Bantu from the south. Earlier it was inhabited by people skilled in irrigation who left behind an extensive ruin of stone circles, cairns, and walled terracing for cultivation, as well as a dam one hundred feet long; the terracing on the hills above is visible from the track. The remains of another dam lie near the Ngorongoro-Olbalbal road, and some terracing near the north end of Lake Eyasi, but there is no other ruined city.

  Engaruka is scarcely touched by archeologists, and its origins are presently unknown. I
t lies far off the traditional trading routes, an isolated stone-working community of an estimated thirty to forty thousand souls, the largest such ruin in central and south Africa except Zimbabwe in Rhodesia. Zimbabwe was constructed over centuries, beginning no later than the twelfth century and lasting until 1834, when it was overrun by tribes of Zulu, but according to preliminary investigations,6 Engaruka may be less than three centuries old. If this is true, who were the people who constructed it, and what became of them?

  The Maasai say that Engaruka was occupied by an Irakw people when they descended on this region in the eighteenth century. The Irakw tribes, which include the pit-dwelling Mbulu cultivators of the plateaus behind Lake Manyara, are that obscure group of strange archaic language that has been tentatively7 related to those proto-Hamite hunters who were the first to invade East Africa from the north. Or perhaps the Engaruka masons, Irakw or otherwise, derive from the Neolithic Hamites who brought domestic plants and animals into the country and were scattered in the arable highlands of East Africa until a few centuries ago, when they appear to have been surrounded and absorbed by the waves of Negroids, Nilote as well as Bantu, who came after. In Kenya’s Kerio Valley, for example, the Maraket people of the Nandi tribes still maintain elaborate irrigation systems, including conduits woven across the steep faces of cliffs, which they say were made by a northern people of strange language, the Sirikwa, who later died in plague: “They built the furrows, but they did not teach us how to build them; we only know how to keep them as they are.”8 (The similar sound of “Sirikwa” and “Irakw” is interesting, considering the obscure history of both groups.)