The Tree Where Man Was Born by Peter Matthiessen, Jane Goodall

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 threeor 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