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

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 foliagethat 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