/ 27 November 2008

Where God stepped down

In Africa, there is a small bright star that hangs beside the sliver of the new moon as it sets. As the yellow cast of the sunset gives way to the purple onset of the night that settles so quickly in the tropics, they appear almost side by side above the western horizon. The thin and the bright — they are an incongruous but bewitchingly compatible couple, lingering only briefly on the stage before being swallowed by the dark presence of the land. With their going, the courtiers of the night are set free.

The hyena are first, that distinctive whoop, so bold an utterance, a single-line hymn to “wild”. It may perhaps seem strange that the hyena are here at all, for this is neither a game reserve nor a park. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is a declared World Heritage Site, but even its most famous component, the Ngorongoro Crater, with one of the densest concentrations of wildlife in the whole of Africa, is not a game reserve. From within the thorn-branch enclosure of the Maasai manyatta, outside of which the hyena stalks, the Ngorongoro Crater is only faintly discernible on the profile of the far southern horizon by the cluster of clouds that gathers to tumble over its rim.

The hyena calls again, closer than before, and the goats packed tightly within their own enclosure inside the manyatta can be heard shuffling in the darkness. The sweet tang of their fresh dung brings a farmyard familiarity to the night. A light breeze whispers through the thorns of the enclosure, carrying with it the fragrance of the dry savannah beyond and a sound not quite heard from the night on the other side. Sitting still to listen, there is nothing but the sound of a Maasai child asking something in a soft intimacy from within one of the three low, dome-shaped huts in the manyatta. It receives a curt answer and then all is still again except for the occasional sighing of the breeze. Even the hyena has gone quiet.

There is no light issuing from any of the huts, for the Maasai, like most of Africa’s rural people beyond the reach of electricity, have turned in not long after darkness settled. They will rise, long before we are accustomed, at the first promise of light in the eastern sky. Between the huts the embers of the fire glow like dull red eyes in the black face of the night but offer no light.

This is these sleeping people’s permanent home and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area is Maasai land. The Maasai tribe are spread between central Kenya and central Tanzania, but it is the area on either side of the Kenya-Tanzania border that is their heartland. They are a fiercely traditional people and it is to their inimitable and singular cultural perceptions that much of East Africa’s most important wilderness owes its existence. Hunting for meat is traditionally frowned upon in Maasai culture, for only a poor or hungry man hunts, and this reflects a failure in his managing and tending his herds. Cattle are more precious than gold to traditional Maasai.

For the more than 2 500 Maasai who live within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area it is more than just a heartland for it contains some of their most important spiritual places. Strangely, however, the most sacred of places to the Maasai, “the place where God stepped down on to earth”, the mountain of Ol Doinyo Lengai, lies just outside the north-eastern border of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. At 2 878 metres, Ol Doinyo Lengai is still an active volcano, spewing a fetid breath of mud and steam into the tepid air of the tropics.

It is the last in a line of now-extinct volcanoes that stretches away to the south, leaving only passive, nutrient-rich craters as a reminder of their heyday. Empakaai, with its beautiful forest-fringed lake, Olmati and, most famous of them all, Ngorongoro.

Dawn on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater is a close, opaque world suffused with gold as clouds settle on the rim and the world becomes a passage of swirling mists. The moisture the mists have to offer is frugal, but it is gathered drop by drop, drip by drip, by a dense green forest that crowds the southern crater rim and walls. Softly, the moisture falls to the ground and feeds a secret world beyond the sunlight where timid footfalls follow secret paths and the earth smells of dawn.

The mists play a game of hide-and-seek with reality, revealing sporadic moments of delight before jealously concealing them again; a giant spider- web hung with dew delivers a jewel-like radiance in the momentary presence of the sun; an elephant, huge and still, swathed in a garland of green, standing silent in a muted world where the translucent curtain closes too soon on the wonders of its stage. Moving around the rim, the cloud draws back to reveal a glimpse of a land far below, briefly obscures it again before offering a window through which the glint of water and a stand of trees appear clearly in the warmth of the early sun. Suddenly, close by, an apparition appears like none before, three Maasai youths stand beside the road with painted faces, wraith-like, as if some ancient ancestor of the land had come to give us pause. The road starts downwards.

To descend the steep rim of Ngorongoro from the height of the clouds is to step through the looking glass of an African wonderland. The broad crater floor appears as a stage where the cast is an almost fantasy-like parade of Africa’s wild denizens, a concentration of beasts almost without peer. All of the most beloved are here — the bloody and the stately, the stoic and the swift, the ugly and the cute. There are forests of towering, yellow­barked acacias where the tusks of other giants have gouged the history of their passing, and there are savannahs wide enough for a herd of wildebeest to walk away until the sight of them becomes a possession of the imagination, eclipsed by the dancing waves of heat. And all of this is bound by the dramatic backdrop of the sheer sides of the walls.

Flocks of rose-pink flamingos chatter and squabble in the shallows of the lakes and move as one body in response to hyenas that patrol the muddy shore searching for signs of the weak. A long-horned rhinoceros and her calf rest on their sides in a patch of cracked clay, their short-snorted breath raising rhythmic puffs of dust from the earth. Two cheetah stalk a gazelle from the cover of a gully, while high overhead vultures ride a thermal and watch and wait.

It is a world of the watching and the watched, the content and the hungry, the restful and the wary, the great, the quick and the dead. The tension eases only as one climbs the crater walls again to the sanctuary of the rim and the soft influences of the clouds.

In a lodge of truly eccentric design there is a grand bath where a bubble bath, scattered with rose petals and lit by a bank of candles eases away the heat and hard roads of the day, while crystal glasses of champagne tease recollections with their effervescence.

It seems a distant world to this Maasai manyatta, where the senses have become so instinctively tuned. The breeze has strengthened and grown colder. The enclosure that encircles us is made from layered branches of whistling thorn, sharp, hostile, impenetrable. The base of the thorns are bulbous and, bored through by beetles, they whistle in the wind. They issue now a soft, eerie, fluted note in the rising wind whose chill breath seems to be fanning the stars to an icy brightness. The cattle have become restless; the hyena, silent, must be patrolling close by in the dark.

A spear glints in the meagre light. The Maasai man is here, his cloaked body vague in the dark. He peers for a long while into the night. Nothing can be seen until a shadow moves, softly outlined against the pale grass. It moves closer, pauses, and then comes closer still. Some stones and a stick thud against the ground out there and in an instant the shadow is gone and there is only the sound of something running steadily away into the rolling plain beyond.