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

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 drydongas 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