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

in the thorns looked silver and wintry in a haze and wind that made black rooks shift restlessly on the dead limbs. The silver sun was where the moon had been, in eerie light of day. The coarse bark of a gray zebra woke the plain, and the egrets went undulating southward, and oryx fled in all directions, cold dust blowing.
    To the wood edge along the track where I had walked, a white-haired man had come the night before. He sat in a canvas chair beside his Land Rover, facing west over the Samburu Plain; an old black man, twenty yards away, sat on his heels against a tree trunk, facing south. There was a camp cot but no sign of a tent. Both figures were motionless, transfixed. Adrian recognized George Adamson, who for many years had been senior game warden of the NFD: “Has to be somebody like Adamson who knows what he’s doing in the bush, I reckon, sleeping out like that, without a tent.” I thought of this man’s brother who had slept upon the ground, and the old days gone, and the future unforgiven: “I do hope they let me see it out here—forty years, that’s a long time, you know. They say Botswana—Bechuanaland, really—is all right, but I don’t know. . . .” *
    The Adamson brothers have worked in wild parts of East Africa for nearly a half century, and with Louis and Mary Leakey, who continue their monumental excavations at Olduvai Gorge, are among the last of their generation still active in the bush. Other veterans of the great days such as the white hunter J. A. Hunter, and C. P. J. Ionides, “old Iodine,” of Tanzania, the acerbic ivory poacher turned game warden turned herpetologist, and Colonel Ewart Grogan, who made a famouswalk from the Cape to Cairo at the turn of the century, and “T.B.,” Major Lyn Temple-Boreham, game warden of the Maasai Mara and one of the few white men the Maasai have ever been able to respect (T. B. once remarked to Adrian, “The Maasai care for nothing but cattle, water, and women, in that order”) had all died since Independence came.
    Adrian waved to the figure in the chair, who did not wave back; white man and black, at right angles to each other, remained motionless, as if cast in stone. Like old buffalo, these old men like their solitude, gazing out over the Africa that was.

    At Archer’s Post, the new road crosses the Uaso Nyiro and runs north toward Ethiopia. One day it may actually arrive at Addis Ababa, but as yet it has not reached Marsabit, and none of it is surfaced. The work crews are mostly Kamba and Kikuyu brought up from the south, with a few Turkana mixed among them. The Samburu herdsmen will not work upon the roads. They share the attitudes of true Maasai, whose lands in Laikipia they occupied after the great Maasai civil wars of the 1880s, and to whom they are so similar that they are often called northern Maasai: the Samburu call themselves il-oikop—“the fierce ones,” but to the Maasai are known as il-sampurrum pur (literally, the white butterflies often found around sheep and goat dung) due to their constant movement in search of water. 7 “Our customs are the same as theirs,” says an old Sambur picked up along the way. The Samburu and the road laborers gaze at one another, mutually distrustful and contemptuous.
    The herdsmen are driving their cattle north, humped Asian zebu with a few long-horned Ankole, and each carries his short sword and club and two leaf-bladed spears of the style used by the Maasai until this century, when the javelin-bladed spear came into fashion; also, a leather water bottle and a small leather pouch. One has an elegant wood headrest, bartered, perhaps, from a Turkana. As a morani, or young warrior, he is painted in red ocher, and his greased braids are pulled up from the nape of his neck, jutting out over his forehead like the bill of a cap. The Samburu regard themselves as “the world’s toppeople,” 8 and certainly they are more handsome and aristocratic than most other beings, but perhaps because their