he broadcasts secret signals of ecstasy—Radio Eden—as, gold chains swinging, he penetrates ever deeper into the Selous.
Perhaps it would be helpful could I inform you that the Selous is the size of Rhode Island with a crust of Connecticut tossed in. Unfortunately, such facts are not at my disposal. My East African guidebook contained that sort of information, but I lent it to a fellow rafter and it was never returned. She hints that when our supplies ran low, she’d boiled it for breakfast; talk about your adventure in meat. That same woman also claims to be watched over by the ghost of her recently deceased dog, Juliet, and that it’s this spectral poodle, rather than guides and gods, who’s steering us safely through the hippos. That’s the kind of lady Kitty is, and I, for one, am happy she’s along.
All I can report is that the Selous is extensive, its wildlife density is astonishing, and if its heart (a heart of brightness, to contradict Conrad) is invaded by other than scattered poachers, the annual Sobek expeditions, and an infrequent government inspection team, the evidence is missing. We meet strange insects here, including a sort of miniature science-fiction flying fortress as glossy black as Darth Vader’s mascara, with long, thick, school-bus-yellow antennae, but there isn’t a trace of litterbug.
The Selous is savanna: short-grass, middle-grass, and tall-grass savanna. Some of the plains seem almost manicured, so meticulously have they been mowed by the mouths of munching herds. The green hills roll like surf into a distance, where they turn slowly to purple. From Tagalala on to the sea, elegant palms line the various banks of the river. Occasionally we come upon a Tarzan-esque glade, complete with pool and vines.
Johnny Weissmuller, the consummate movie Tarzan, was the tallest hero of my boyhood, and more often during my life than is socially acceptable I’ve been moved to imitate his famous yell. To some, the Tarzan yodel is corny, campy, childish, and vulgar. To me, it’s more stirring than the bravest battle cry, more glorious than the loftiest operatic aria, more profound than the most silvery outpouring of oratory. The Tarzan yell is
the
exultant cry of man the innocent, man the free. It warbles back and forth across the boundary between human and beast, expressing in its extremes and convolutions all the unrestrained and holy joy of ultimate aliveness.
In the past, unfortunately, I’ve usually bounced my Tarzan yells off the insensitive ears of cocktail-lounge commandos, invariably attracting the wrong kind of attention. Here, at last, in the glades of the Selous, it is released in proper context. It gives me that old Weissmuller Saturday-matinee primal chill as it comes quavering out of my throat to mix in the Selous twilight with the smoker’s coughs of a distant pride of lions, the spooky erotic murmurs of a treeful of waking bats, and that ceaseless, ubiquitous pulsebeat of body Africana, the echoing hoot of the emerald-throated wood dove.
Our last day in the Selous is structured much like the others: up at dawn for a game walk into the bush, breakfast, break camp, two hours on the river, lunch, rest, two more hours playing Dodg’em car with the hippos, set up camp, another game walk before dark, dinner, bed. At the end of such a day, one requires no tsetse injection to speed one’s slumber. On this final eve, however, many of us lie conscious, listening, holding on to every note of the ninety-piece orchestra of the African night. It is as if we dread the morning and our return to what we moderns like to think of as “civilization.”
I’ll bet that Chicago Eddie, supine amidst his ruined tennis whites in the adjacent tent, is recalling the impalas we had seen that dusk, crossing a narrow ridge single file, so that we could count them the way a child at a railroad crossing will sometimes count boxcars. Incidentally, there were exactly sixty-five of them silhouetted against the
Perhaps it would be helpful could I inform you that the Selous is the size of Rhode Island with a crust of Connecticut tossed in. Unfortunately, such facts are not at my disposal. My East African guidebook contained that sort of information, but I lent it to a fellow rafter and it was never returned. She hints that when our supplies ran low, she’d boiled it for breakfast; talk about your adventure in meat. That same woman also claims to be watched over by the ghost of her recently deceased dog, Juliet, and that it’s this spectral poodle, rather than guides and gods, who’s steering us safely through the hippos. That’s the kind of lady Kitty is, and I, for one, am happy she’s along.
All I can report is that the Selous is extensive, its wildlife density is astonishing, and if its heart (a heart of brightness, to contradict Conrad) is invaded by other than scattered poachers, the annual Sobek expeditions, and an infrequent government inspection team, the evidence is missing. We meet strange insects here, including a sort of miniature science-fiction flying fortress as glossy black as Darth Vader’s mascara, with long, thick, school-bus-yellow antennae, but there isn’t a trace of litterbug.
The Selous is savanna: short-grass, middle-grass, and tall-grass savanna. Some of the plains seem almost manicured, so meticulously have they been mowed by the mouths of munching herds. The green hills roll like surf into a distance, where they turn slowly to purple. From Tagalala on to the sea, elegant palms line the various banks of the river. Occasionally we come upon a Tarzan-esque glade, complete with pool and vines.
Johnny Weissmuller, the consummate movie Tarzan, was the tallest hero of my boyhood, and more often during my life than is socially acceptable I’ve been moved to imitate his famous yell. To some, the Tarzan yodel is corny, campy, childish, and vulgar. To me, it’s more stirring than the bravest battle cry, more glorious than the loftiest operatic aria, more profound than the most silvery outpouring of oratory. The Tarzan yell is
the
exultant cry of man the innocent, man the free. It warbles back and forth across the boundary between human and beast, expressing in its extremes and convolutions all the unrestrained and holy joy of ultimate aliveness.
In the past, unfortunately, I’ve usually bounced my Tarzan yells off the insensitive ears of cocktail-lounge commandos, invariably attracting the wrong kind of attention. Here, at last, in the glades of the Selous, it is released in proper context. It gives me that old Weissmuller Saturday-matinee primal chill as it comes quavering out of my throat to mix in the Selous twilight with the smoker’s coughs of a distant pride of lions, the spooky erotic murmurs of a treeful of waking bats, and that ceaseless, ubiquitous pulsebeat of body Africana, the echoing hoot of the emerald-throated wood dove.
Our last day in the Selous is structured much like the others: up at dawn for a game walk into the bush, breakfast, break camp, two hours on the river, lunch, rest, two more hours playing Dodg’em car with the hippos, set up camp, another game walk before dark, dinner, bed. At the end of such a day, one requires no tsetse injection to speed one’s slumber. On this final eve, however, many of us lie conscious, listening, holding on to every note of the ninety-piece orchestra of the African night. It is as if we dread the morning and our return to what we moderns like to think of as “civilization.”
I’ll bet that Chicago Eddie, supine amidst his ruined tennis whites in the adjacent tent, is recalling the impalas we had seen that dusk, crossing a narrow ridge single file, so that we could count them the way a child at a railroad crossing will sometimes count boxcars. Incidentally, there were exactly sixty-five of them silhouetted against the
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