Ghosts of Tsavo Page 20

  They circle around to creep toward the invaders, Othello leading the way, Prince Hal a body length behind. Othello crouches in the tall grass, while his comrade stands upright in the dying light, facing the interlopers. Prince Hal hunkers down, and Othello moves forward a pace or two before crouching again. Prince Hal follows suit. Creep, look, crouch, creep. The whole swamp is still, as if every creature in it is watching to see what the lions will do. Suddenly, Othello lets out a roar, a roar you can feel vibrating in the air. It’s not a single sound, but a succession of sounds, a throaty cough, then a rising, resonant roar, followed by a series of grunts in diminuendo. Wauugh-aaraRRRAR-UNH UNH unh-unh-unh. As his falls off, Prince Hal gives his—Wauugh-aaraRRRAR-UNH UNH unh-unh-unh—and Othello advances slowly. This is OUR TERRITORY—OURS ours-ours-ours. Both lions get down and remain motionless. Ten minutes pass, twenty. Daylight dies, the stars and a quarter moon come out. By their light we see Othello rise up to roar again; then, trailed by Prince Hal, he trots around to Fabio’s flank and gives the dummy a good sniff. The actions declare that he and his pride-mate consider the light-haired Fabio the weaker of their two adversaries. Before they tear the dummies to bits, Craig instructs us to switch on our headlights and engines.

  The sudden noise and glare startle Othello and Prince Hal and send them running into the long elephant grass. We then park our vehicles nose to tail, forming a barricade so Craig and Peyton can load Fabio and Julio back into the trailer, out of the real lions’ sight.

  That done, we retrace the path back to camp, headlights picking out our tire tracks. Peyton and Craig are elated, she especially. Now she has a fourth instance of males avoiding the darker-maned dummy. As for me, I have one more example showing that Tsavo and Serengeti lions, behaviorally, are more alike than otherwise, but I’m not thinking about that. I’m thinking, rather, about Craig’s statement that a two- to three-year study will be needed to draw Tsavo lions out of the shadows of legend into the light of scientific knowledge. I’m not entirely sure that will be a good thing. I must be one of those people Dennis King doesn’t care for, reluctant to surrender the myth.

  Verity Williams has returned from Nairobi to supervise the staff for tomorrow’s move to a new campsite in Tsavo West, where Peyton will continue her work. Craig will be returning to Tanzania to tie up some loose ends at the Serengeti Research Project. I will miss his quick wit and the Packer Lecture Series (a recent one, close to my heart, provided an excellent secular, scientific argument against human cloning). While the cook prepares dinner and the rest of the staff begin packing things up, we head for the showers.

  From the stall just behind my tent, Bob calls out he’s finishing up. I wrap a towel around my waist and step outside.

  Wauugh-aaraRRRAR-UNH UNH unh-unh-unh.

  The roar blasts from a shadowy thicket not 20 yards directly in front of me, and before I have a chance to feel anything, I make a standing broad jump backward into my tent, do up the zipper, and seize my knife.

  Wauugh-aaraRRRAR-UNH UNH unh-unh-unh.

  The lion is off to the left now, a little farther way. The other answers him, Wauugh-aaraRRRAR-UNH UNH unh-unh-unh, from a greater distance. Othello and Price Hal must have followed us back to camp.

  “Bob!” yells Caputo-the-Short to Caputo-the-Tall.

  “I hear ’em!” Bob shouts from his tent, close to mine.

  I feel as ridiculous as I’m frightened, standing naked with a knife in my hand. If one of those monsters charges through the canvas, I’d better hope the impact drives the blade into my heart. I feel more ridiculous hearing the clatter of plates as someone sets the table in the mess, while Verity calmly issues instructions in Swahili to her people.

  “Verity!” I call. “Lion in camp!”

  “Yes, yes, we heard them,” she replies, as if I’m speaking about raccoons knocking over a trash can in the backyard. I recall that this redoubtable woman grew up with lions, on a colonial sisal plantation in Tanzania. The big cats used to come down from a hill behind her parents’ house and walk right past it, roaring so loudly that they rattled the windows. Usually, Verity had told me, they were on their way to the compound where the plantation workers lived; à la the man-eaters of Tsavo, they found the village to be a source of quick and easy meals.

  “They’re off,” Verity assures me, and, yes, the next roar sounds muffled, farther away. “Get on with your shower. Dinner soon.”

  And I step outside once again, trusting that Othello and Prince Hal don’t have dinner plans of their own, or if they do, that we’re not on the list of tonight’s specials.

  May 29

  I’M WRITING THIS in the shade of a tall salvadora pasca, better known as the African toothbrush tree. The tents have been struck, Verity’s staff are piling them and the other camp equipment onto and into the Land Cruisers and Land Rovers. Craig has left for Tanzania, Peyton and the others are up at Galdessa for two or three days, and I will be off to Nairobi General Hospital as soon as Verity has seen to the move. She will drive me.

  I want to say that I passed out last night at dinner, but apparently I did more than merely pass out. I recall sitting down under the mess fly and taking a sip of wine. It was no more than that, but I suddenly felt as if I’d chugged an entire bottle. The ground seemed to pitch one side to the other, like a small boat in a heavy beam sea. Then I entered a beautiful, peaceful room, painted the most soothing yellow, with high Palladian windows all around, through which shone a light of ineffable purity, a radiance such as I’d never seen. There were presences in the room. I can’t describe them in any other way, for I couldn’t see their faces; but I knew they were all my relatives and friends, dead as well as living, and all were bidding me, “Welcome, welcome.” They weren’t speaking aloud, but communicating telepathically, as it were, and those presences and their greeting and that astonishing light filled me with a bliss deeper and more complete than the serene joy that would come over me when I was wounded and the nurse would shoot me up with morphine. Students of the paranormal will recognize this as what’s come to be known as an NDE, a near-death experience.

  “Phil! Phil!”

  I opened my eyes and saw Peyton, kneeling beside me, her hand on my wrist.

  “He’s got a pulse,” she said. “I can feel his pulse. Phil! Thank God you’re all right!”

  Someone had his hands on my chest, or his arms around me, I was too dazed to figure out which. It was Bob, and I heard him say that my heart was beating again.

  I raised my head, and there were Verity, Craig, and Ogeto, sitting in the same places as when I’d last seen them, faces half lit by the kerosene lanterns. My companions told me what happened. I had raised a fork to eat my salad when one arm shot up reflexively and I keeled over. Bob, thinking I’d choked on something, rushed to seize me around the chest and perform a Heimlich maneuver, while Peyton grabbed my wrist and cried out that I’d lost my pulse. Bob pressed a hand to my chest and, finding no heartbeat, jerked me hard several times. He was about to administer CPR when I came to.

  “How long was I…” I began in a groggy voice, hesitating because I wanted to say “gone.” “How long was I out?”

  Half a minute to a minute, they said.

  Half a minute to a minute? I felt that I’d been in that radiant room for a long time, hours, maybe days.

  It was a windy night, but warm; yet I felt chilled, the way you do when you’re in shock. But the weirdest thing was the depression that settled over me. I was disappointed to be back among the living. I wanted to return to the yellow room where I’d been so impossibly happy. My real-life friends, much as I liked them, were poor substitutes for those faceless beings, calling out their benevolent salutation in a language that wasn’t language. They weren’t uttering the word “welcome,” but filling me with the essence of the thing itself. Welcome welcome.

  Shivering, I could not shake the feeling of letdown for a full quarter of an hour. Everything seemed so dull and pallid and imperfect compared with the yellow room. Finally,
comprehending that I had come close to passing through that luminous space into some other state of being, or possibly nonbeing, I became frightened. The blackout, if that’s what it was, had come on so quickly, with so little warning. It could happen again, and the next time….

  Obviously, something was dreadfully wrong, and there I was in Tsavo, and the nearest hospital way up in Nairobi.

  Craig was at that moment on the sat phone to Nairobi, talking to the flying doctor service. I heard him describe my symptoms, then utter a series of yesses and noes, and then the words, “Yeah, he’s taking Lariam.”

  After hanging up, Craig told me that the service thought I was suffering from Lariam toxicity but didn’t think I warranted an evacuation by air. The closest airstrip, at any rate, was at Manyani, 30 miles away by dirt road. I was to get plenty of rest, and if I wasn’t any worse by morning get myself to Nairobi General by road straightaway. During the night, someone should keep an eye on me.

  Peyton volunteered, which pleased me a great deal. Sick men turn into little boys, and they want a woman next to them. Her cot was moved into my tent for the night. Shivering from unnatural chills and scared of dying, I lay with my shirt on, the sleeves rolled down, under a wool blanket, and I was still cold. I couldn’t sleep, convinced that if I closed my eyes I would never open them again. Peyton offered to read me to sleep, but her book was a murder mystery, and I didn’t think it would do me any good. Soon, she was breathing deeply in a sleep that continued to elude me. I stared at the black ceiling, pondering metaphysical questions. In my bicameral mind, voices on the right side of the aisle argue that the yellow room had been the waiting room to heaven, if not heaven itself. I’d been given a glimpse of the afterlife. The representatives on the left shout, No! That glorious, blissful state was the product of endorphins rushed into my brain by a system in shock, beyond it lying only oblivion. Perhaps, these voices cried, mankind’s belief in life after death, persisting through the ages despite lack of evidence, began when some Cro-Magnon survived an NDE and reported that there is something that lies beyond this existence. There was one way to resolve that dispute, but that was an expedition I wasn’t ready to make.

  Finally, around three, I passed into unconsciousness, woke up in a fairly cheerful frame of mind, thanked everyone for being so switched on, and got a laugh at breakfast when I said to Peyton, “Thanks for sleeping with me—literally.”

  May 31—Galdessa Camp, Tsavo East

  DR. MAURO SAIO, an Italian physician who specializes in tropical diseases at Nairobi General, diagnosed Lariam toxicity. He gave me a month’s supply of Valium to combat the anxiety reactions caused by the drug and a prescription for Malarone, an anti-malaria medication with less severe side effects. It has to be taken once a day, however, compared with the once-weekly dosages of Lariam, which, I learned from Saio, has a half-life of 21 days. Having made three long trips to Africa in less than a year and a half, it’s possible that the drug had accumulated in my system, hence, the acute reaction this time around. Saio regaled me with horror stories about patients he’d treated with Lariam poisoning (he’s much opposed to the drug, effective though it is in preventing malaria), to which Verity added several equally terrifying accounts about clients who’d suffered paranoid delusions and suicidal impulses from taking Lariam. It would require at least four months for the drug to pass out of my system, Saio had forecast, so the effect of his and Verity’s tales was to heighten the anxiety the Valium was supposed to combat. If I didn’t drop dead again, I might suddenly turn into a raving lunatic.

  Anyhow, pronounced fit for duty, I flew back to Tsavo yesterday in a single-engine Cessna piloted by a white Kenyan named Tom. As Tom was just getting back into flying after a 13-year layoff and did reassuring things like touch each switch on the instrument panel while moving his lips, apparently memorizing what each switch did, I popped an extra Valium for good measure. Still, flying was preferable to driving; not only quicker, but less dangerous. The move to the new campsite on the 29th took longer than expected, so Verity and I weren’t able to get on the road till late afternoon and made most of the trip at night. Kenyan truck drivers are maintenance averse and their big rigs break down frequently. The Nairobi-Mombasa highway lacking a shoulder, the drivers simply park their disabled trucks on the road. Naturally, they don’t put out flares or reflectorized warning signs, so on at least a dozen occasions, as we came over a hill or around a curve, 20 tons of stalled 18-wheeler would materialize only yards in front of us, which made me feel pretty much like the lookouts on the Titanic when they saw the iceberg loom out of the fog.

  As accustomed to African road hazards as she is to lions in camp, Verity would deftly pilot the Land Rover into the opposing lane at the last possible second, then deftly back, dodging, again at the last possible second, the trucks bearing down on us at 50 miles an hour. How ironic, I thought, that I should escape being trampled by elephants and mauled by lions and survive a drug-induced NDE only to be killed in a head-on collision.

  On the flight back, Tom had some trouble finding certain landmarks and had to break out his map to locate the Manyani airstrip. Dying in a plane crash in the bush, I guessed, would have a little more flair than a highway accident—Finch-Hatton did it, and Hemingway almost did it on his last safari—but when we landed and I spied Sammy waiting at the airstrip with the Land Cruiser, I practically ran into his short, round arms.

  He brought me here, where I rejoined Bob, Ogeto, and Peyton. I was very glad to see them and they to see me. Marcus Russell had installed Peyton in the banda next to his, but I gathered that he’d been a perfect gentleman. My companions had not seen any lions during my absence. The country is densely wooded with doum palms, saltbush, and thorn thickets, and the lions in these parts are far more shy and secretive than even those of the Ndololo pride. One of Marcus’s staff escorted me to my banda, but the camp’s resident elephant, unimaginatively called Tusker, stood right in front of it, browsing on tree limbs. I was informed that Tusker isn’t tame and would charge if I got too close, so I had to wait till he finished his snack before moving in. Very cushy, with its indoor shower and toilet, the comfortable bed with mosquito net, the veranda on which I whiled away the afternoon, looking out at the sun-brightened Galana, the palms and tamarinds moving in the wind, and the Yatta Escarpment, rising on the far side of the river like a huge, long tidal wave of earth and rock that is ever poised to come crashing down.

  In the evening, before dinner, we tried calling up the big lion Marcus had mentioned before. Setting up at the Ashoka water hole, on the Hatulo Bisani, Peyton played the hyena medley. A clear sky and a half moon gave us light to see by, and it was aided by her night vision scope, which presented the landscape bathed in an eerie, greenish glow. No luck. A lone jackal was all that showed up.

  A feast of curried chicken and roast potatoes followed in the mess, where we were joined by Marcus, young Blade, and the commander of the local KWS ranger unit, a beefy lieutenant named Oliver. Blade cuddled up to Peyton again, happy to see her. So was Marcus, who could not have concealed that he was a bit ga-ga over her even if he tried.

  Post-dinner conversation, however, was not romantic. Asked by Marcus if she’d come to any conclusions yet, Peyton related her ideas and Craig’s about why Tsavo lions are maneless or short-maned. Marcus and Oliver bought none of it and told her why they thought she was wrong. Peyton told them why she thought they were. The poor woman sounded as if she were defending her Ph.D. thesis before a board of skeptical faculty. I thought she got the better of the argument, but the two bush naturalists did have a point or two.

  “I’ve seen Tsavo males without a hair of mane who looked in a perfect nick,” said Marcus, his tongue again on full automatic. “Seen ’em take down buffalo and even small elephant, and you don’t do that if you’re sick or under stress. I think it’s something else, and you know what that is. They’re genetically different.”

  Oliver leaned back in his chair, his dark face burnished in the flicker of kerose
ne lamps, the shadows deepening the furrows in his broad forehead. A hippo’s call, part bellow, part honk, came from the river, and, from somewhere across it, the sawlike roar of a prowling leopard.

  “I was raised in the Taita Hills, and I recall what my grandfather told me when I was a boy,” Oliver said in a profound tone of voice. A hyena whooped close by. “ When you are in the bush, don’t worry too much about lions with manes—they will leave you alone. But the lions without manes are very dangerous. They will attack. Be careful of them.’”

  The atmospherics—the sounds of wild beasts, the buffalo horns hanging above the mantlepiece, the skulls with gaping eye sockets on varnished pedestals, the lamplight on Oliver’s face and the way he spoke the words “The lions without manes are very dangerous. They will attack. Be careful of them”—conspired to banish everything I’d learned observing Peyton’s experiments. Just when I was ready to accept that Tsavo lions are not a breed apart, the chimera returned.

  June 1

  VENUS BLAZES ABOVE the escarpment. We heard lions east of camp at four this morning, and now, at half past five, we’re looking for them, Ogeto, Peyton, and I, following the Galana downstream, toward the twilight shimmering on the horizon. We stop, try a call-up, which fails, and continue on as the river turns from black to pearl to golden brown in the sunrise. We then turn south to a place called Punda Milia, where Marcus saw a pride a few days ago. An old track takes us alongside a lugga that has pools of water in it, and good graze above it; but no herd animals are seen, nor lions, and we head back to Galdessa.