Ghosts of Tsavo Read online

  The road takes us into a typical rural town: a few shabby shops, a few fruit-and-vegetable stalls, a low, block-brick bar advertising Tusker beer. A sign announces the name of the settlement—Simba, which means “lion” in Swahili. It lifts me out of my melancholy, taking me back to a time, not terribly long ago in historical terms, when wilderness and wildness were considered the adversaries of civilization, and the last thing anyone wanted to do was to preserve them.

  Colonel Patterson tells the story of what happened in The Man-Eaters of Tsavo.

  In 1900, at a whistle stop on the East African railroad called Kimaa, a big male lion had taken up residence in the vicinity and developed a zest for members of the railway staff. Among others, he’d carried off a signalman, a stationmaster, a brakeman, and the driver of the pumping station. At one point, ravenous for a meal, he climbed up on the station house roof and attempted to tear off the corrugated iron plates to get at the telegrapher, who tapped out this message to the traffic manager in Nairobi: “Lion fighting with station. Send urgent succor.”

  Patterson doesn’t say if succor was sent, but the lion gave up, its paws bloodied. Succor did arrive by train on June 6 in the form of a British police superintendent named C. H. Ryall. He was accompanied by two friends, Huebner and Parenti. They were traveling to Nairobi, but when they heard about the man-eater, they decided to stay the night and try to shoot it. Their carriage was detached from the train and bumped off to a siding near the station, where, due to the unfinished state of the line, the carriage did not stand level but listed sharply to one side, a small detail that was to have disastrous consequences.

  The three men spent the afternoon looking for signs of the lion, found none, and returned to the carriage for dinner. Afterward, Patterson writes, “They all sat up on guard for some time; but the only noticeable thing they saw was what they took to be two very bright and steady glowworms. After events proved that these could have been nothing else than the eyes of the man-eater steadily watching them all the time and studying their every movement.”

  Later, Ryall volunteered to stand the first watch while his companions slept, Huebner on a high berth on one side, Parenti on the floor. Evidently, after watching for a long time, Ryall concluded that the lion wasn’t going to appear; he lay down on a lower berth and dozed off. Colonel Patterson conjectures about what happened next.

  No sooner had Ryall fallen asleep, than “the cunning man-eater began cautiously to stalk the three sleepers. In order to reach the little platform at the end of the carriage, he had to mount two very high steps from the railway line, but these he managed to negotiate successfully and in silence. The door from this platform into the carriage was a sliding one on wheels…and as it was probably not quite shut, or at any rate not secured in any way, it was an easy matter for the lion to thrust in a paw and shove it open. But owing to tilt of the carriage and to his great extra weight on the one side, the door slid to and snapped into the lock the moment he got his body right in, thus leaving him shut up with the three sleeping men in the compartment.”

  The lion sprang for Ryall, planting his hind feet on Parenti, his forepaws on the police superintendent. Awakened by Ryall’s loud cry, Huebner leaped from his bunk onto the lion’s back, in an attempt to escape through a second sliding door into the servants’ quarters. He managed this not inconsiderable feat (busy dispatching Ryall, the lion ignored Huebner) and squeezed in with “the trembling coolies.” A moment later, Huebner and the servants heard a crash and the carriage lurched violently to one side: The lion had broken through one of the windows, carrying Ryall in his jaws. Released, Parenti jumped from the floor and through a window on the opposite side of the carriage, fleeing for the safety of one of the station’s outbuildings. Ryall’s remains—and we can be sure they didn’t amount to much—were found the next morning a quarter of a mile away in the bush and taken to Nairobi for burial.

  As for the lion, Patterson writes, “The terrible brute…was caught in an ingenious trap constructed by one of the railway staff. He was kept on view for several days, and then shot.”

  I summarize this tale for the benefit of my wife and traveling companions, and it prompts Iain to recall a missionary’s memoir that he’d read in the library of the Royal Geographic Society in London.

  “He and his wife were camped near the Tsavo bridge after Patterson shot the first lion but before he killed the second. They were kept awake all night by this most awful, evil, mournful wailing and moaning of the second lion. It was mourning the death of its friend.”

  At first blush, that sounds like excessive anthropomorphizing; however, as any pet owner can tell you, humanlike emotions aren’t unknown among animals. Sage, my English setter hunting dog, expresses affection, happiness, and sadness, and our pet cat, a charming fellow named Ditto, suffers loneliness when we are gone and shows pleasure when we return. Male lions, I’d learned in some of my research, often form bachelor groups before they’re ready to take over a pride, spending years hunting and wandering together. You can assume that some sort of rudimentary camaraderie develops among them. It’s possible that Ghost and Darkness were a pair of hunting brothers, and that Darkness was indeed bereft after his buddy’s death. His sorrow, however, may not have been devoid of the self-interest that rules the natural world. During the three weeks between the shooting of the two lions, there were no known attacks on Patterson’s workers, leading some observers to wonder if Ghost, the larger and presumably the older, did the killing while Darkness merely shared in the spoils. The “awful…wailing and moaning” the missionaries heard may therefore have been Darkness expressing not grief but the loss of his breadwinner.

  Approaching Tsavo, the road improves considerably. It’s wider and smoother, with dividing lines and a recognizable shoulder. The Chinese had rebuilt the highway between the park and the coast, presumably to make it easier for day-tripping tourists from the Mombasa resorts to get to the park and back in time for dinner. To the west, the dark green Chyulu Hills rise to heights of 7,000 feet, and eastward, slate blue in the harsh afternoon light, the Yatta Escarpment looms over the landscape, its top as flat as the deck of an aircraft carrier—the longest lava ridge in the world, Clive informs us. The land slopes gently down toward the Tsavo River. The Tsavo bridge appears ahead, resting on stone pillars against which the reddish brown river pushes and forms dancing riffles. Diesel locomotives hauling freight and passengers still pass over it, more than a century after its construction, testimony that John H. Patterson knew how to build a bridge, and his Indian coolies how to do a job right the first time.

  We stop to take photographs, trying to imagine the scene 102 years ago, the work crews lowering the steel girders and wood beams onto the stone piers, track gangs spiking down the track, their labors interrupted by flash floods that turn the Tsavo into a racing sluice, tearing trees out by the roots—whirling them along like straws,” Patterson wrote. Hard enough without the terror of being attacked by man-eating lions. I picture those anonymous Indians, hearing the news in their home villages that laborers are wanted in far-off Africa, signing up for a few rupees a day but with the hope that those few will put them ahead of life’s curve for once; then the long sail across the Indian Ocean in some stinking steamer, jammed in together, cheek by jowl, until they dock at Mombasa for the overland journey to the railhead and weeks of backbreaking labor in the downpours of the wet, the heat of the dry, and endless nights listening to that sound out in the bush, wauugh-aaraRRAR unh-unh-unh, waiting for the roars to grow silent and the cry to pass from camp to camp, “Watch out, brothers! The devil is coming!” I wish a plaque had been erected to those men, listing the names of the dead. They, too, are ghosts of Tsavo, and I would like to know who they were, though a name doesn’t tell you anything.

  Between the bridge and the Chyulu Hills are the Ngulia Hills, a range of volcanic knobs, covered in scrub, through which beige slabs of gneiss protrude like the ruins of some lost city. Somewhere in them is the “Man-eaters’ Den,” the
discovery of which constitutes one of the more peculiar episodes in Colonel Patterson’s book.

  After he’d eliminated the two “brutes” and work resumed on the bridge, Patterson decided to explore the hills and do some recreational hunting while he waited for a shipment of construction materials to arrive. He was in a dry riverbed, tracking a rhino, when he spotted something that stopped him cold: “I saw on the other side a fearsome-looking cave which seemed to run back for a considerable distance under the rocky bank,” Patterson wrote, in typically melodramatic fashion. “Round the entrance and inside the cavern I was thunderstruck to find a number of human bones with here, and there a copper bangle such as the natives wear. Beyond all doubt, the man-eaters’ den!”

  After taking a photograph (which is printed in The Man-Eaters of Tsavo), he left his find, and from that day in early 1899 until recently its location was lost to history. Patterson’s characterization of it as a lion’s den has aroused controversy and skepticism among naturalists and zoologists for a century: Lions are not known to be denning animals (the tale of the prophet Daniel notwithstanding). They don’t stash their kills in caves or dens because they don’t have to; they eat them on the spot.

  In 1996, Chap Kusimba, who was working at an archaeology site near Mombasa, took a break to visit Tsavo National Park and get permission to search for the cave. His belief was that Patterson had not uncovered a lion’s den but a burial ground belonging to the Taita people, who had once inhabited the park. He got permission but couldn’t find the cave. Early the next year, Kerbis Peterhans made an attempt, accompanied by his wife, Pamela Austin, and Samuel Andanje, a Kenyan zoologist. They also failed. Then, in March 1997, Kerbis Peterhans returned with Gnoske to find the cave and determine if it really had been occupied by lions. Kerbis Peterhans was fairly sure that it was a hyena den, but he couldn’t be positive until he examined the bones Patterson had uncovered for the distinctive gnaw marks made by hyena teeth. He, Gnoske, and Andanje, joined by four KWS rangers, made extensive searches southwest of the Tsavo River bridge—the direction Patterson said he’d followed on his excursion. They battled ferocious heat and slashing wait-a-bits, crawled up streambeds and into offshoots on a quest that was regarded as quixotic. The hunt was even mentioned in a guidebook, which characterized it as “absurd.” Indeed, it seemed so: The men found nothing that remotely resembled the cave in Patterson’s book.

  Having covered so much ground, they began to wonder if Patterson had erred in his descriptions of where the cave was located. One night, frustrated, unable to sleep, Gnoske decided to review the book. He made a startling discovery. Wherever Patterson gave directions, he was consistently 90° off, writing that from Tsavo he could see Kilimanjaro to the south, when it was to the west, that the Ndungu Escarpment was to the east instead of to its true direction, the north, and that the N’dii Range was to the south, when it was to the west.

  The next morning, he told his colleagues about his late-night epiphany. It seemed strange for a trained engineer to make so gross an error; they speculated that Patterson, writing eight years after discovering the cave, had incorrectly oriented the hand-drawn map he was using as a reference by 90°. Either that, or the book’s editors had erred in transcribing Patterson’s notes.

  Whatever the cause of the mistake, the team now had renewed confidence that they could find the cave. Splitting up into four teams, they worked their way up a dry streambed lined with doum palms, one group following the left bank, another the right, a third down the middle, and the fourth all three. Forty-five minutes later, Gnoske, in the fourth group, heard Kerbis Peterhans shouting from across the ravine. Clawing his way through the thorn bushes, he found his colleague standing before a cave that perfectly matched the one in Patterson’s photograph. The man-eaters’ den had been rediscovered after 97 years. Their feat made them heroes at the Field Museum, which hadn’t experienced anything quite like it since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when its scientists returned from unexplored parts of the world with tales of discovery and adventure.

  But had the two men found a man-eaters’ den? Their initial joy turned to disappointment when they entered the cave and found it empty. No bones, no copper bangles, nothing but a layer of red sand coating the cave’s rocky floor. It became immediately clear why the cave was empty: In the middle of a seasonal streambed, its contents had long ago been washed away.

  Undeterred, Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans got permission from KWS authorities to excavate the cave. Work began in 1998 and is still under way as we drive toward the park’s Manyani Gate. Graduate students working under Kusimba are sifting through the dirt to recover human bones and examine them for teeth marks; if there are any, the team will be able to determine if they had been made by lions, hyenas, or leopards. They are also looking for human teeth, to distinguish between Asians and Africans; Asian teeth would be all but incontrovertible proof that the victims had been the Indian railway workers.

  I am to interview Kusimba sometime during our safari to learn what, if anything, all the sifting and searching has produced. Regardless of his findings, Gnoske believes that Patterson may not have been off base in calling the cave a lion’s den. Some modern lions use dens, Gnoske asserted in one of our many long-distance conversations; that, he added, tends to support his and Kerbis Peterhans’s theory that there are two distinct forms of lions living in Africa—the lions of the plains and lions that are throwbacks to the cave-dwelling cats of prehistoric times.

  He sent me a tape of a program describing a 1998 Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans expedition that investigated incidents of man-eating in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park. There, they learned that an official of the Ugandan Wildlife Authority, one George Bwere, had been attacked by an angry lioness two years before while surveying hiking trails along the Kyambura River, a Nile tributary. The Kyambura flows through a gorge of the same name. Thickly jungled, the gorge bisects the savannas of the Albertine Rift Valley in western Uganda. Bwere was rushed by the lioness as he pushed through the dense tropical vegetation. He narrowly escaped with his life and observed a male lion retreating into a cave with young cubs. Soon after, he was joined by a second male, and Bwere (who must have been a cool customer to stick around after such an encounter) observed them patrolling the gorge while the lioness entered the cave to guard the cubs. Over the next several months, there were numerous reports of two male lions attacking vehicles and people who got too near the cave.

  The stories piqued Gnoske’s and Kerbis Peterhans’s curiosity. Could this cave be an example of modern lions using a den? They got permission from Ugandan authorities to explore the Kyambura in October 1998. Accompanied by a ranger armed with an AK-47, they descended into the gorge until they reached the river. It was an enchanted world, wholly different from the dry savannas above, its silence broken by the whoops of chimpanzees in the trees, the cries of rain forest birds. The lush vegetation looked like typical leopard habitat, not lion country.

  They approached the mouth of the cave warily, then crawled inside on their hands and knees, their hearts pounding, their flashlights sweeping the darkness, revealing dripping stalactites and a small waterfall. What they hoped not to see was the reflected glow of feline eyes: At such close quarters, even an AK-47 would not be much defense against two big male lions and an enraged female guarding her young.

  The flashlights’ beams fell on something white—a bone. Kerbis Peterhans examined it and determined that it was a buffalo bone. Several more were lying around. None bore the gnaw marks from hyena predation, and both men recalled that Ugandan wildlife authorities had told them of eyewitness reports of two male lions dragging a buffalo carcass down the steep bank of the gorge. Then the search turned up something that confirmed the accounts: blond hairs from a lion’s mane.

  “We have no doubt that this cave was a lion’s den,” Gnoske had told me. “It’s the first modern documentation of a lion den.”

  But why would those lions in the Kyambura use a cave, whereas lions on the s
avanna did not? One answer was obvious—there aren’t any caves on the open plains. Yet, even if there were, Gnoske said, the lions wouldn’t hole up in them. The real answer lay in his theory that different kinds of habitat give rise to different social systems—small prides in densely vegetated regions, large ones on the savanna. Without the safety provided by big families, cubs in environments like the Kyambura are more vulnerable to predation, particularly by hyenas. Taking aggressive action against intruders (the lioness’s attack on Bwere) and rearing them in dens could give them the protection that cubs on the plains don’t need.

  Iain is intrigued by all this—he’s never seen the “den” Patterson found. He has no idea where it is. Nor do I, except that it’s somewhere up in that jumble of rock and scrub, and I’m not entirely sure I’m ready to go looking for it.

  We approach the Manyani Gate to enter Tsavo East (for administrative purposes, the park is divided into Tsavo West, a mostly hilly, forested region west of the highway, and Tsavo East, which is larger, flatter, more desolate). While Iain and Clive tend to such matters as permits and park fees with a park ranger, Leslie, Rob, and I watch an agama lizard doing push-ups on the exposed root of a large acacia—an elata abyssinia tree, the encyclopedic Clive informs us after the paperwork has been sorted out. We head down a laterite road, a gash of rust-red dust in the scrub. Golden pippets flit from the bushes, and a European roller flies past, a migrant from central Europe, its plumage a gorgeous palette of pale turquoise and white and rufous brown. The land reaches away, meadows of dun-colored grass, vast stretches of bristling commiphora scrub overlooked by acacia, their wide-spreading branches ornamented with the gourd-shaped nests of weaverbirds. No towns or farms or highways or fences, wild country at last—wild country of a particular kind. This is the Pleistocene surviving in all its primeval grandeur, the world as it looked to our remote ancestors, Australopithecus afarensis, hairy-bodied and small-brained, but walking upright as they wander the savanna, foraging, scavenging, copulating, evolving ever so slowly toward the creature that will develop an opposable thumb and a capacity for reason and language and art and laughter. Also for hate and war and a conscious cruelty beyond all the creatures that creep, crawl, and fly.