the right of us the Indian Ocean, invisible from the road, to the left first the massif of Nguro, and then, for the rest of the way, the plain of the Masai. Both sides of the road are dense with greenery. Tall grasses, thick, fleecy shrubs, spreading umbrella trees. It’s this way all the way to Kilimanjaro and the two little towns nearby, Moshi and Arusha. In Arusha we turned west, toward Lake Victoria. Two hundred kilometers on, the problems started. We drove onto the enormous plain of the Serengeti, the largest concentration of wild animals on earth. Everywhere you look, huge herds of zebras, antelopes, buffalo, giraffes. And all of them are grazing, frisking, frolicking, galloping. Right by the side of the road, motionless lions; a bit farther, a group of elephants; and farther still, on the horizon, a leopard running in huge bounds. It’s all improbable, incredible. As if one were witnessing the birth of the world, that precise moment when the earth and sky already exist, as do water, plants, and wild animals, but not yet Adam and Eve. It is this world barely born, the world without mankind and hence also without sin, that one can imagine one is seeing here.
The Cobra’s Heart
T his mood of elation quickly dissipated in the fact of the realities and riddles of the journey. The first, most important question was, which way should we go? For when we emerged onto the great plain, what was heretofore a single broad trail suddenly forked into several identical-looking dirt paths, all leading in entirely different directions. And no guidepost, sign, or arrow in sight. The plain smooth as a tabletop, overgrown with tall grasses, no mountains or rivers, no natural orientation points of any kind, only this unending, increasingly unreadable, tangled net of trails.
There weren’t even any intersections, but every few kilometers, sometimes every few hundred meters, more and more radiating tentacles, coils, and knots, from which secondary offshoots of the same kind branched out chaotically this way and that.
I asked Leo what he thought we should do, but he just looked about uncertainly and answered my question with an identical one. We drove on randomly, choosing roads that seemed to head west (and therefore toward Lake Victoria), but whichever the road, suddenly, after several kilometers and for no apparent reason, it would begin to turn in some unknown direction. Utterly confused, I would stop the car, wondering, now where? It was an especially urgent question, since we had neither a detailed map nor even a compass.
Soon, a new difficulty developed, for noontime arrived, and with it the hours of the greatest heat, when the world sinks into insensibility and silence. Animals seek shelter in the shade of trees. But the herds of buffalo have nowhere to hide. They are too large, too numerous. Each might be a thousand strong. Such a herd, in the hour of the greatest heat, simply grows motionless, dead still. It so happens that one has frozen this way precisely on the road along which we want to drive. We approach. Before us stand a thousand dark, granitelike statues, firmly set on the ground, as if petrified.
A mighty force slumbers in the herd, mighty and—should it explode anywhere near us—deadly. It is the force of a mountain avalanche, only inflamed, frenzied, driven by foaming blood. The zoologist Bernhard Grzimek tells of flying a small plane over the Serengeti and observing for months on end the behavior of buffalo. A lone buffalo didn’t react at all to the whir of the descending plane: it calmly continued grazing. When Grzimek flew over a large herd, however, it was different. It sufficed for there to be among them a single overly sensitive one, a hysteric, a hothouse flower, who at the sound of the engine would start to thrash around waiting to flee. The entire herd would immediately panic and, in terror, begin to move.
And here is just such a herd. What should we do? Stop and stand? For how long? Turn around?
The Cobra’s Heart
T his mood of elation quickly dissipated in the fact of the realities and riddles of the journey. The first, most important question was, which way should we go? For when we emerged onto the great plain, what was heretofore a single broad trail suddenly forked into several identical-looking dirt paths, all leading in entirely different directions. And no guidepost, sign, or arrow in sight. The plain smooth as a tabletop, overgrown with tall grasses, no mountains or rivers, no natural orientation points of any kind, only this unending, increasingly unreadable, tangled net of trails.
There weren’t even any intersections, but every few kilometers, sometimes every few hundred meters, more and more radiating tentacles, coils, and knots, from which secondary offshoots of the same kind branched out chaotically this way and that.
I asked Leo what he thought we should do, but he just looked about uncertainly and answered my question with an identical one. We drove on randomly, choosing roads that seemed to head west (and therefore toward Lake Victoria), but whichever the road, suddenly, after several kilometers and for no apparent reason, it would begin to turn in some unknown direction. Utterly confused, I would stop the car, wondering, now where? It was an especially urgent question, since we had neither a detailed map nor even a compass.
Soon, a new difficulty developed, for noontime arrived, and with it the hours of the greatest heat, when the world sinks into insensibility and silence. Animals seek shelter in the shade of trees. But the herds of buffalo have nowhere to hide. They are too large, too numerous. Each might be a thousand strong. Such a herd, in the hour of the greatest heat, simply grows motionless, dead still. It so happens that one has frozen this way precisely on the road along which we want to drive. We approach. Before us stand a thousand dark, granitelike statues, firmly set on the ground, as if petrified.
A mighty force slumbers in the herd, mighty and—should it explode anywhere near us—deadly. It is the force of a mountain avalanche, only inflamed, frenzied, driven by foaming blood. The zoologist Bernhard Grzimek tells of flying a small plane over the Serengeti and observing for months on end the behavior of buffalo. A lone buffalo didn’t react at all to the whir of the descending plane: it calmly continued grazing. When Grzimek flew over a large herd, however, it was different. It sufficed for there to be among them a single overly sensitive one, a hysteric, a hothouse flower, who at the sound of the engine would start to thrash around waiting to flee. The entire herd would immediately panic and, in terror, begin to move.
And here is just such a herd. What should we do? Stop and stand? For how long? Turn around?
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