African Nights Read online

  ‘It is a Jackson’s chameleon, Pep,’ he said proudly. ‘I found it in the bamboos.’ He contemplated it admiringly. ‘Don’t you think it looks like a Triceratops? Can I keep it, please? His name is King Alfred.’

  King Alfred was the British king who fought against the Danes. In Emanuele’s history book they wore the horned helmets of the legendary Vikings. I suppose that first chameleon owed his regal name to this association.

  I nodded weakly. A quick glint of triumph lit his eyes.

  So began Emanuele’s love of reptiles, his passion for chameleons, and an extraordinary capacity for finding them wherever he went. He had been born a collector. As a small child he had collected minerals, shells and small model animals. Later, snakes would take over as his abiding passion. When chameleons became the first reptiles he officially owned, I did not know that we had entered a new era, and that there would be no going back. He was six. In a few years snakes would lead him inexorably to his destiny.

  Soon we all liked King Alfred.

  He did indeed look like a gigantic herbivorous dinosaur which had existed in the Cretaceous period, as I learnt from one of Emanuele’s books which I went to check for reference. In fact, dinosaurs had entered our household years earlier, when my father, during his peregrinations, had discovered a sensational deposit of their bones on a fossil river bed in the Ténéré desert. A black and white photograph of Emanuele aged four, reaching out to the tall skeleton of a monstrous Diplodocus, to impress the reader with its size in relation to our miserable human proportions, appeared in a book in which my father wrote his adventure.

  Unlike me, Emanuele knew all about dinosaurs, their looks, names and habits, and undoubtedly there was a very strong similarity between the original Triceratops and its enigmatic descendant which had come to live with us. A chameleon is a creature of marked individuality, and I could easily see how a curious and intelligent boy, fascinated by animals, could be mesmerized by this deliberate and friendly little monster.

  During the day, King Alfred lived in a box full of leaves and small branches. Emanuele fed him with insects which he captured at school, whenever he had a free moment, and kept in an old jam jar. Often, however, he smuggled the chameleon to school in a small perforated cardboard box, and at break time would let him climb on the low shrubs in the school yard, and observe, enraptured, the antics of his hunt.

  King Alfred was a few inches long. His legs ended in hands shaped like pincers, with strong fingers sprouting at opposite angles to allow a sturdy hold on the flimsiest of stems and shoots. His curly and prehensile tail could twist quickly around the most minute asperities of leaves and twigs, with a precarious sense of balance, like a monkey diving from the highest trees in the forest.

  His most striking feature, however, was his eyes, stereoscopic instruments independently rotating to focus, through the holes of the irises, along a narrow field of vision that ensured the infallible aim of the spring of his viscous tongue.

  An unsuspecting grasshopper swayed on a blade of grass; his tongue would dart out faster than our sudden repugnance, which lingered well after the insect had disappeared into the cavernous mouth. We caught our breath in horror.

  In time, however, I grew used to this revolting performance and even found a certain fascination in watching its precision, which reminded me of the skill of a cowboy’s lasso, or of the cruel, mindless catapult that interrupts the free flight of a bird.

  It was the strangest thing of all to watch the colours vary in King Alfred’s grainy skin. Brown in the sun, he changed to unexpected shades of emerald green in the shade. On my yellow bedspread one day, he turned a bright lemon hue in less than a minute, as if invisible brush strokes had gradually repainted him in front of my eyes.

  His presence disrupted somehow the household’s activities, because servants refused to enter the room where they thought he might be. Our cook Gathimu and the house servant Bitu always avoided the study in which Emanuele’s new friend wandered about freely, presiding over his homework in the afternoons, perched on books, scanning the ceiling for flies and mosquitoes, and stalking with silent glee the lazy, sluggish house-insects.

  Many legends are linked to the chameleon in Africa, possibly derived from its mysterious mimetism. Africans therefore traditionally dislike them and prefer not to go near them. In the local legends the chameleon plays the part which, in the Bible, is attributed to the snake who tempted Eve in the garden of Eden: a strange conspiracy with the woman like whom it is variable, fluid, constantly changing into a fantasy of rainbows.

  This dubious aura of ‘untouchability’ is what saves chameleons. It allows them to move around with impunity their defenceless prehistoric bodies, whose only natural enemies are snakes and birds of prey, who neither read books nor listen to stories.

  King Alfred was the first of many. There followed various Marshall’s chameleons, small and dark. A couple of rather fat ones, which were in fact named Fatty I and Fatty II: they did not have the protuberances on their noses and looked, more than anything, like hypocritical frogs. After them we had a Robert the Bruce, a Victor, a Kiwi, a ‘Pembe Nussu’ (or ‘half horn’ – it was mutilated), and King Alfred II. There were many more whose names I have forgotten. My son cared for them lovingly, letting them walk in the bamboos and on the gardenia outside my door, which attracted a myriad insects with its rich perfume.

  Then there was the time when three chameleons came with us on an expedition to Lake Turkana – still called Lake Rudolph in those days – because Emanuele refused to leave them behind. It was the hot and dry time before the April rains, during the Easter holidays. The journey from Nairobi took two days on the dusty tracks, and it was slowed further by our stops to look after the chameleons. Each time, their box was opened so that they could breathe fresh air, and be sprayed with cool water. They even managed to catch a couple of flies.

  Yet the heat of the glove compartment in the Land Rover was extreme, overwhelming.

  When, after hours of bumps, in the late afternoon of the second day, the breathtaking expanse of the lake, with its islands and shores of black lava and yellow grasses, appeared below the last bend like a primitive vision, Fatty I was dead.

  In the open box littered with dried flies, his elongated body looked weirdly colourless, like the negative image of what it had once been. It had the temporary and precarious quality of frailness which belongs to small archaeological finds, discovered in the secret recesses of broken, desecrated sepulchres, which may disintegrate with the fresh air of day. It would not have surprised me if what was left of Fatty I had suddenly dissolved into pale dust.

  This drama shadowed our jolliness. When, miles afterwards, we reached the oasis of Loyangalani, we left the car to have a drink and find relief in the shady breeze of the palm grove. Emanuele did not join us. He went off alone amongst the bristling grasses beside the path leading to the hot thermal springs.

  When he came back he did not have the box, and his eyes glinted below the blond fringe. He had let the survivors go free in an environment that could allow their survival. Somewhere, under a lava stone, rested what remained of Fatty I. We matched Emanuele’s sorrow with our silence.

  Not so long ago, looking through his old yellowed papers, which have become precious relics to me now, I found a large blue exercise book roughly bound by himself. On the cover, a childish hand had written in red: ‘My Chameleons’.

  I leafed through it. It was dated July 1975, and it was written in English. Its tidy pages recorded, in his minute neat handwriting, names and dates, families, species, favourite foods and other details of every one of his chameleons; one of the pages was folded, wrinkled up and partly torn in small pieces.

  I unravelled it carefully.

  The passage was almost unreadable. It ended like this:

  … Chameleons are extraordinary animals and fascinating hunters. I began to love them in 1972, and still now, in 1975, I love them. My favourites were Fatty I and Fatty II. They were very fast in eatin
g, but slow in all their other movements. Whenever I let them go or whenever they escaped, I always found them again. Fatty I died of heat at Lake Rudolph.

  On the word ‘died’, the pen had faltered.

  3

  The Brigadier’s Cheetah

  The sleek and shining creatures of the chase

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson,

  ‘The Revenge’, v, 147

  Sometimes in the afternoons of the holidays, when we were in Nairobi, at our house near Rosslynn, Emanuele asked me to go with him to see Tigger: he remembered the night when we had encountered him, and how he had not run away when he saw us.

  Tigger was a male cheetah, a few years old, who lived on the coffee farm of one of our neighbours, a retired army Brigadier.

  We used to jump into the car, and set off, leaving the tarmac road for a red murram track winding through coffee bushes. Soon the usual scene would appear. Along the slope they walked slowly, among the tall dry grasses, their patient black dogs following quietly, wagging their tails in rhythm. A girl pushed a pram from which peered the freckled faces of two children. Next, tall and slightly bent, leaning on a golf club, came the Brigadier, with his wife, and the cheetah.

  The cheetah moved lightly, the fluffy tip of his tail barely brushing the ground. His easy gait had the grace of a dance rhythmed to the silent beat of distant drums. A leash circled his chest. He advanced sure and languid, his small head buried between powerful shoulders, his one eye yellow and alert, its colour matching his coat maculated with regular black spots. Emanuele ran out to hug him, and the rough tongue licked friendly his young neck and cheeks. The eye closed in pleasure, and the cheetah purred like a large happy cat.

  This was the evening walk, amongst the coffee bushes along the slopes behind the house, the same now for years. Ever since he had been found, with two other cubs, after their mother had been killed during a long chase in the savannah, he had been kept and cared for, chosen from among the litter because of a congenital eye defect that would never allow him to hunt alone and to be independent like his brothers.

  When they called him ‘Tigger’ he was just a kitten, as soft as a real toy and defenceless as any rejected puppy. They called him Tigger, a fierce name, but he was gentle. Only when wild rabbits darted from their holes in the red earth to disappear in mad leaps through the undergrowth, did his young muscles tense, and he would coil in the ancestral instinct, ready to spring after a running prey.

  For play companions Tigger had three Labrador puppies, recently born in their mother’s basket behind the outside staircase, which the Golden Shower covered with cascades of orange blossoms, sheltering it like a real lair in the forest. The playful fights with the puppies on the lawn, the habit of sharing bones, the sudden frantic sprints and the deep sleeps of abandon, tummies up on the grass, and eyes closed against the implacable glare of the Equator’s sun, made them brothers and inseparable. He was never alone, and who knows if in the flat compact head dreams ever drifted of runs over plains in the short red sunsets, when the Highlands plains are alive with herds of gazelle, and predators emerge from the shadows of the day with silent steps, to sniff the scent of the preys of the night.

  Often, at a sudden movement, he lifted his head. His round black nostrils vibrated sensitively to imperceptible scents, and the ears tensed to the inaudible shuffle of near, secret lives. The amber-and-honey eye scrutinized the horizon like an eye-glass: even the faintest shiver in the savannah grass did not escape his gaze. A black line circled his eye sockets like a mask and defined his round features, dividing them with two black tears which slid down to the corners of his mouth. In his black war paint his face looked sad.

  He played with the dogs, more dog than cat, lacking retractable claws; he looked like a large greyhound, to which a feline head had been attached. His fine legs were far slenderer than the powerful, stocky ones of a lion; his paws far slighter than the rounded catty ones of a leopard. He moved lightly, with a lazy elegance born of the assurance of being safe.

  His mother had given birth to her cubs alone, in the shade of the large acacia, amongst the low shrubs which protected her from the eyes of her natural enemies, the hyena and the wild dogs. Alone she had brought them up, leaving them for entire days while she stalked the plains, alert and sinewy, her graceful tail flowing like a mane in the winds of adventure.

  They had soon learned to be independent, helped by nature which had given them a crest of odd long hairs on the top of their heads, white and straight to match the long highland grasses bleached by the African sun. This allowed them to hide, camouflaged even amongst the driest of sticks and thorns, until their mother returned at dusk, to feed them with swollen breasts, the smell of a Thomson’s gazelle’s blood still in her breath.

  But one night she did not come back, and the hunter found them, hungry and torpid next day, huddled together for comfort in the shade of the acacia tree.

  He grew with the puppies and he looked funny and out of place among the black coats; his white tuft stood out pathetically on the green lawn, so different from the silvery waves of the savannah grass stirred by sudden winds. He grew swiftly, unaware of his great strength and grace, until he was finally an adult: and in the nights of March Tigger suddenly felt the call of his race, even though the farm where he lived was on the edge of the city, and the noise of passing cars and lorries filtered through the narrow cluster of forest like an intrusion into his loneliness.

  A tame female cheetah lived not far away, in a garden protected by bougainvillea, dogs and high hibiscus hedges.

  One night we came back late from a party, and, at the corner of our road, amongst sisal and giant poinsettias, Emanuele’s sharp eyes distinguished a motionless shape, outlined by the full moonlight in all its wild beauty.

  He sat perfectly still, like a statue of a sphinx, under the pepper tree, next to the sign board inscribed with our name. His neck was tense, his nostrils flared to sense the breeze. A low, breathy noise, a deep intermittent growl, perhaps a mating call, came from his splendid throat.

  The dogs in the neighbourhood began to bark furiously from all the gardens, howling their unrest to the moon. Neither this commotion nor our approaching car seemed to disturb him.

  ‘Tigger,’ whispered Emanuele softly from the car window.

  Tigger turned his head slowly, to look straight at us, fearless, remote, surrounded by his mystery.

  A moment, and he was gone, swallowed by the darkness.

  It was after then, I imagine, that the legend of the leopard of Rosslyn was born. Someone else saw him, and gave out an imprecise description. Everybody locked in their dogs at night for a time, as the leopard’s predilection for eating dogs is well known.

  Not us. We knew it was simply Tigger who wandered for miles and miles, from his safe dog’s bed and warm blanket to answer the call of his dormant, never fulfilled instinct. We had phoned the Brigadier, and he saw that the gate was still locked but the basket was empty in the moonlit night. Even if there was no need, as a cheetah can jump high and swift, he left the door of the enclosure open.

  Next morning Tigger was there, impassive and tame, as if nothing had happened, to play with the dogs, and to wait for the leash and his evening walk among the coffee bushes: like in an old print, sunlit from the back.

  Some time later, to everyone’s wonder, our neighbour’s female cheetah gave birth.

  One of the cubs had an inherited eye defect, and we all knew what had happened.

  4

  A Maasai Woman

  In the face of some Masai matriarchs could be read the tale of a people whose iron code of tradition makes them unique among the earth’s beings.

  Robert Vavra, A Tent with a View

  The woman who came through the camp was lean and tall. She could have been of any age between eighteen and thirty. She marched straight towards me in the yellow August dawn, while I stretched to chase away the shadows of sleep, shivering in the early-morning air of the coldest month of the year on the Kenya Hi
ghlands. It was 1973, when hunting was still allowed in Kenya.

  She greeted me in Swahili and in a high clear voice, without any shyness, she asked me immediately for salt.

  ‘Chumvi. Mimi nataka chumvi.’ She smiled with even, well-spaced teeth.

  All creatures in the Highlands need salt to supplement their diet. Rock salt mixed with the soil creates a salt lick irresistible to elephant, rhino, antelope and buffalo. They walk long miles at dusk, drawn by its subtle scent, imperceptible to human nostril. But before leaving the shelter of the shrubs around the area of the salt-lick, which generations of converging animals’ hooves have made barren of vegetation, they pause and sniff the air with quivering muzzles, with tentative trunks, to detect any smell of danger in the wind. Reassured, they move on, head down, eager to lick the salt trapped in the earth.

  Chumvi. A handful of the precious salt is a treat that few humans, even, can resist in wild Africa.

  I smiled up at her, and nodded. She came close on elegant legs, and sat in the dust next to me.

  We had camped in the late afternoon, not far from a manyatta in the area of Narok, one of the main centres of the proud Maasai tribe. It then consisted of a couple of petrol stations, a general store kept, like most other stores, by Indian merchants, and a few primitive dukas, shops where one can find a bit of everything, from tea to blankets, from dark sugar-cane to snuff, from tinned beans to tablets to fight – often in vain – the endemic malaria.

  We had chosen a spot in the shade of some yellow fever trees, and at nightfall had lit a fire of sticks and dry branches. There we had barbecued, on some rudimentary iron wire, the tender fillet of a Thomson’s gazelle that had not been fast enough.

  The manyatta was a large one, composed, like all others, of longish low huts rounded like loaves. Made from a mixture of mud and dung plastered on a frame of curved sticks, they reminded me of dried-out chrysalises. The huts were surrounded by a thick barricade of acacia and ‘wait-a-bit’ thorn branches, arranged so that the spikes were impenetrable by animal or man.