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

southeast monsoon blew up from the hot nyika, and a haze of desert dust obscured the mountains. But the Uaso Nyiro flows all year, and along its green banks the seasons are the same. A dark lioness with a shining coat lay on a rise, intent on the place where game came down to water. At a shady bend, on sunlit sand bars, baboon and elephant consorted, and a small crocodile, gray-green and gleaming at the edge of the thick river, evoked a childhood dream of darkest Africa. Alone on the plain, waiting for his time to come full circle, stood an ancient elephant, tusks broken and worn, hairs fallen from his tail; over his monumental brow, poised for the insects started up by the great trunk, a lilac-breasted roller hung suspended, spinning turquoise lights in the dry air.
    On a plateau that climbs in steps from the south bank of the river, three stone pools in a grove of doum palms form an oasis in the elephant-twisted thorn scrub and dry stone. The lower spring, where the water spreads into a swampy stream, has a margin of high reeds and sedge; here the birds and animals come to water. One afternoon I swam in the steep-sided middle pool, which had been, in winter, as clear as the desert wind; now the huge gangs building the road north to Ethiopia were washing here with detergent soaps that bred a heavy film, and I soon got out, letting the sun dry me. A turtle’s shadow vanishedbetween ledges of the pool, and dragonflies, one fire-colored and the other cobalt blue, zipped dry-winged through the heat. Despite the wind, there was stillness in the air, expectancy: at the lower spring a pair of spurwing plover stood immobile, watching man grow older.
    In the dusty flat west of the spring, ears alert, oryx and zebra waited. Perhaps one had been killed the night before, for jackals came and went in their hangdog way east of the springs and vultures sat like huge galls in the trees. With a shift in the wind, a cloud across the sun, the rush of fronds in the dry palms took on an imminence. Beyond the springs oryx were moving at full run, kicking up dust as they streamed onto the upper plateau. Nagged by the wind, I put my clothes on and set off for camp.
    Climbing from the springs onto the plain, I crossed a stone ridge where, in winter, a fine lion had made way for my Land Rover; I stared about me. In every distance the plain was sparse and bare. Strange pale shimmers were far oryx and gazelle, and an eagle crossed the sky, and a giraffe walked by itself under the mountains. A Grevy’s zebra stallion (why not “gray” and “common” zebra?) charged with a harsh barking, veered away, then circled me, unreconciled, for the next two miles, unable to place a man on foot in its long brain.
    Northward, over pinnacles and desert buttes, the sky was clear, but directly ahead as I walked south, dark rain arose over Mt. Kenya, fifty miles away. Coming fast, the weather cast a storm light on the plain, illuminating the white shells of perished land snails, a lone white flower, the white skull and vertebrae of a killed oryx.
    I wanted to look at the species of larks that had the dry plain to themselves, but the sun, overtaken by the clouds, was sinking rapidly toward the Laikipia Plateau, and there were still four miles to go through country increasingly wooded; I hurried on. Awareness of animals brought with it an awareness of details—a shard of rose quartz, a candy-colored pierid butterfly, white with red trim, the gleam of a scarlet-chested sunbird in the black lace of an acacia. Set against the sun at dawn or evening, its hangingweaver nests like sun-scorched fruit, its myriad points etched on the sky, there is nothing so black in Africa as the thorn tree.
    In the open wood all senses were attuned to lion, hyenas, elephant, and especially elephant, as in the unlikely event of trouble there is little to be done about lion or hyenas besides climb a tree. The antelope were very shy, yet at one point a string of impala passed close at full