The Tree Where Man Was Born Read Online Free

these carved masks might have been just as suspicious, perhaps more so, of his black friends in America, who were also westerners, with a makeshift western sense of life and death.

    Gradually the square huts of mud-brick were replaced by the African beehive hut, a cylinder of mud and sticks topped with straw thatch bound tight into a cone. In mid-afternoon, the truck reached Kosti, where we sat waiting in the suq for thesun to die. Kosti has what might be called a sewing-machine economy; ancient specimens of these instruments, in the smaller villages, are ordinarily the sole evidence of the machine age. We ate strange local sheep off doubtful ware, drank the black tea of the desert, and in the late twilight, started off again, traveling onward intermittently until after midnight, when once again we lay down upon the ground. The night was warmer, warm enough for the mosquitoes, and it came to an end at last. During the night, the hippos bellowed from the Nile, a distant sound, the first murmurings out of the heart of Africa.
    The first light shone on a new land of long grass and small acacia, with occasional great solitary baobab. The feather-leaved, sweet-scented acacias or thorn trees, in their great variety, are the dominant vegetation in dry country south to the Cape, but the tree of Africa is the baobab, with its gigantesque bulk and primitive appearance; it is thought to reach the age of twenty-five hundred years, and may be the oldest living thing on earth. The grassland danced with antelope and birds—tropical hawks, doves, pigeons, guinea fowl and francolins, bee-eaters, rollers, hornbills, and myriad weavers, including the quelea or Sudan dioch, which breeds and travels in dense clouds and rivals the locust as an agent of destruction. At the edge of a slough stood two hundred crested cranes and a solitary ostrich, like a warder; where trees gathered in a wood were the white faces of the vervet monkey. In the afternoon, the savanna opened out on a great plain where gazelles fled to the horizons, and naked herdsmen, spear blades gleaming, observed the passage of the truck through the rushing grass with the alert languor of egrets. All the world was blue and gold, with far islands of acacia and ceremonial half circles of human huts. Toward dusk, the truck arrived at Malakal, where it would turn to go back into the north.

    The two days passed in Malakal, awaiting a ride south, I spent mostly on a long peninsula which cut off a swamp along the Nile edge. There was a footpath to a point on the peninsula where a Shilluk tended a weir; from here, in crude dugout canoes,the tribesmen crossed the river to a large village in a grove of palms. Respecting crocodiles, I did not press to be taken across, for the north wind which blows from November to March was sweeping up the river, and the canoes were desperately overcrowded; instead I watched the people come and go, and listened to the singsong of their voices. Shilluk women who passed along the path bore cargoes on their heads, swaying like cobras through the blowing grass, and bands of girls, straight-backed, high-breasted, flirted and waved. The men were painted in a gray ash or red ocher, and the oldest had several rows of beads raised on their foreheads, but scarification, which is performed at a boy’s initiation into the tribe, is dying out, for few younger men had more than a single row, and some were not scarred at all.
    From the village across the river, on the wind, came a chant and a thump of drums. On the peninsula, bent figures hoed small gardens, and in the swamp behind, two naked fishers, laughing and arguing, handled a cast net. Cisticolas flitted through fierce reeds, and a snake slid out across some rotted sedge into the water, and trees of the river danced with turquoise rollers. In such a setting, in the expectant sunrise, the naked men seemed archetypal: here were dark figures of prehistory. A few centuries ago, the Shilluk lived as far north as