The Last Great Ape Read online

  Stanley hesitated and then held out his hands when I gave him a few shillings and all of our food. He headed south. The chief and I walked east to Maralal. He paid for my hotel room without telling me and negotiated a deal to sell Lapa to a white Kenyan who raced camels. Selling the camel for slaughter would have brought more money, but I felt I didn’t have the right.

  EXODUS

  In Maralal, I pushed my new monster by the horns, a bicycle I’d designed and had welded with baskets for holding jerricans. Shacks filled the unpaved town, temporary solutions to the absence of a roof—for Turkana and Samburu who’d left the bush behind, who’d been lured by modernization, pushed by poverty or both. The new paint on my bike frame was still wet, but I was too impatient to pass another minute in town where packs of orphaned street boys wandered in the dust; and I found that I loathed even the sight of light bulbs. I pedaled up a dirt road, weak from diarrhea that had struck just hours after I’d sold Lapa. The bike bore the weight of my backpack, thirty liters of water and two and a half kilograms of sugar. I put a postcard into the mail to my parents and pushed off at the edge of town, down a hill as steep as a ski jump. The bike rattled and jerked over the uneven road, instantly out of control as it shot downhill through the trees, the seat ramming my inkulal, the brakes useless and the back tire in the air, as I held on for dear life and planned how best to crash. The road finally flattened and began up a hill, and my momentum carried me not to the top but just three meters up, where the overloaded bike stalled and flipped over backwards.

  I kicked it aside and climbed onto a boulder to eat bread drizzled with Samburu honey. Ragged children rushed at me from plastic-roofed roadside shacks, two boys wearing T-shirts that were hardly more than collars. “Give me sweets,” they screamed. “Give me one bob!” A boy lunged for my backpack. I jumped down and chased him off. A small boy approached. He wore a yellow shirt and sat against a tree at the bottom of the hill. He waited. And I watched him, wishing he’d make his move so I could drive him away; in bomas no one had to beg. I wrapped my bread up and continued with the bike. When I looked back, the small boy in the yellow shirt was searching where I’d sat for crumbs. I took all my bread, smothered it with honey, and left it for him on a rock.

  I dumped much of my water and pushed the bike for hours on foot up the road to Poror, and a French bird researcher stopped his jeep and asked if I needed help. When I told him I’d designed the bike to carry water through Turkana, he said, “No, no. You can drink water from the lake. Just add acid.”

  I could hear laughter rumbling out of the pit of Lapa’s stomach.

  I sold the bike in Poror, bought lemons I hoped could deliver this acid, and descended into the Suguta Valley, where I crawled through acacia fields that tore from my backpack the wet socks I’d tied to the outside to dry. I drank from puddles full of tadpoles and got caught in a storm and learned that the Great Rift Valley, here, was a refuge for gun runners, road bandits, cattle raiders, fugitives, and watu simba, lion men, as the villagers in Moridjo called them. I hitchhiked around Suguta, suppressing the thought that the spirit of my journey across Kenya had been lost.

  Back on foot, I aimed for the black mountains said to “cork” the lake’s southern end. The terrain was gentle grassland. Willow trees, with shadows shaped like the hairdos of Rastas, offered shelter from the sun. I’d learned from a Somali family in South Horr that a bore hole lay somewhere between the black mountains and the road. I headed for it, more or less, hoping the presence of villagers would make it possible to find this speck within a hundred square kilometers.

  The ground became black, barren, contorted, as strange under my boots as a place I might have reached in a dream. I struggled to hold a direction, to judge distance. After an hour I came upon four Turkana women. Two were yelling at each other, shaking fists, their bracelets clattering on their arms—until they spotted me. All four Turkana wore oversized metal earrings and leather loincloths. The lip ring of one woman dangled below her chin like a golden beard. The two young women stood before me as unembarrassed as the grandmothers, all with their breasts exposed. I stammered and stared at the ground, and they spoke to me, as though trying keys, in full Turkana sentences.

  “Mama,” I said in Swahili to one grandmother, just glancing at her, “where is the water, the way to the water, the hole in the ground?” I pointed in three directions.

  A woman smiled and walked, and I followed, hoping it would be easy for her to point me to the bore hole. She stopped, reached down behind a bush, then stood up holding a cup of water.

  The terrain morphed almost as soon as I said good-bye, into a reddish bedrock of tiny columns, carved as if by acid. Columns three at a time cracked under my boots soles. I stumbled, cut my hands. How could people walk, much less live here? My right boot lodged in a rut and I broke off a chunk of rock prying myself free. I got stuck again, and it seemed I’d become either a giant for whom the world was too small or an insect who could travel but a meter in a day. The land was full of ridges that peaked at the level of my eyes, an endless series of obstacles. The rocks sliced into my boots, drew blood from my arms, as though the ground itself rejected the premise of being crossed. The ridges ran north to south, dipping and rising like the spines of a herd of extinct and petrified animals who’d died in some great migration.

  One massive spine after another.

  I couldn’t see the horizon or guess how close I was to the lake. But I found a path when the sun was high. Then lost it a dozen steps on as though it were merely a landing strip for birds. A cluster of hot, wind-polished boulders gave views of a ribbon winding through the desolation where feet or hooves had trampled the rock to gravel. I lost and re-found the path through the afternoon, which led me away from the volcanoes at the lake’s southern tip. The landscape morphed again, from black rock to yellow grass to eroded, column-filled bedrock, as if under the spell of a sorcerer.

  I approached a village, slowly, my body feeling with chills what my brain was slow to tell me—the village was abandoned. Several domed huts, with full, shaggy coats of hay, might have been used just days before. Others, shedding their thatch, sat on the gravel like balding skulls. None were large enough to shelter adults.

  I knelt by a ring of rocks encircling charred chunks of wood, then lifted my head. The silence was like a pressure in the ears. Neither an insect nor a rustling tree. Had the villagers been raided, forced to leave? Had they left while a fire was still burning? As I kicked through thatch blown to the ground, I understood why the Maasai burned the bomas they abandoned: so not to leave their legacy to the elements and shame.

  I searched for tracks, for ribbons of crushed gravel. I cut back toward the black mountains, east to west across the rocky spines, fearing I was in a dead land. The ground was breathing, its heat in my throat. The backpack jockeyed up and down on my back, exaggerating and mimicking the movements of my body. Turkana would have killed Lapa had he not killed me first, and the reddish rock would have melted, shredded the tires off my bike. What plans I’d had!

  When I reached the last barricade, I found that I stood on a ridge. Whatever might have betrayed the people of the abandoned village was not the lake. Calm as a mirror and waveless from above, Lake Turkana flared into the distance, a turquoise treasure worthy of the land’s effort to guard it. The lake was too tranquil not to be older than everything. And I stood, humbled by the thought that the taste of its waters had been known by first men. I followed the lakeshore with my eyes—three days crossing to the black mountains, which plunged into the water, and three days more as the shoreline ran over ridges and boulders before disappearing in the sunlight.

  I spotted calabashes below me: women marching up from the lake, five Turkana whose massive bodies said more strongly than the land that I had not been born here. The women wore leather loincloths. Red beads. Ochre. Hooped necklaces. They didn’t chat or joke or look at each other as they moved. They held their shoulders back and scowled and stopped, it seemed, only because I stoo
d in their path.

  “Ejyo’k,” I said, greeting them as I’d been taught in South Horr.

  They didn’t respond. Sweat dotted their scalps at the base of their mohawks. Water splashed in the blackened, silver pot atop one woman’s head. Another women spoke to her. Then she spoke to the next, as though an order were passing down the line. They stood in formation, naked, as unwelcoming as the rock. I reached into my backpack for a bag of crumbling biscuits the size of a soccer ball. A woman balanced the calabash on her head with her right hand and extended her left. Two women reached out with both hands, calabashes steady. They swallowed the biscuits and motioned for more.

  The women turned and walked single file on a path as narrow as a goat trail, headed for what I could only imagine was some austere place. As I followed, I thought, Why weren’t their children with them? And where were all the men?

  The last woman in line turned and poked me and opened her hand. I left them, veering off trail as fast as if I’d been told to go. I descended to the lake and was soon splashing my face with water. The lake bottom was a collage of glittering pebbles—tan, red, and black—bits of shell and quartz. I cupped my palms and dipped them between waves. The water was electrified with the taste of minerals—fresh, cold, and good—which yielded to an aftertaste of dead fish.

  For half an hour I followed the shoreline, stepping between stones, until I saw, perched above the lake, an old man draped with a maroon and gray blanket. I quickened my step, excited by the sight of an elder, hopeful he might help me to understand what had happened here. He had frizzy white hair, a face lined with the passing of years, and he sat bare-assed on a rock. Scars ran down his calves nearly to his sandals, which were made of twine, fishbone, and tire. The man’s massive flat feet seemed to belong to an animal far heavier than he, and his robe looked like the kind of covering that in the army we’d called a “scabies blanket.”

  Where were his daughters, his sons? Where was his village? And why was he here so far from a settlement?

  With a chisel-shaped knife he gutted a wildcat, an animal that barely looked like food. Sight of him was as inconceivable as the thought of Kakuya lying alone on the savannah eating a rat, with his people lost to him. The old man jutted his arm at me, then bunched his fingers at his mouth and held them there. Then stuck out his hand again to beg as he sat utterly alone.

  Lake Turkana was a vast and silent companion. I spent a sweaty night on the shore in my tent. Ugali crumbs, which I tossed into the water to test for fish, floated untouched and drifted back ashore at my feet. I walked toward the black mountains. An elder passed on the lakeshore and did not look up. Half an hour later, a woman appeared carrying nothing but a small wooden headrest. A naked man walked by with a spear. Then an old woman cradling an infant. They were all moving in the same direction opposite me, traveling alone toward Loyangalani, some three days away, migrating as if a battle had been lost and there were nothing left to do but leave for the nearest town.

  Could I imagine Isaac on this path, were the story of his people to end? Would he rush to find refuge at a safari lodge? Or cling to the wreckage and try to rebuild?

  The exodus of Turkana stretched through the afternoon, solitary figures who would not address me beyond begging for food. The hostility and coldness of the people tore away any pretense that I should have been headed into the land they’d fled.

  The heat was heavy on my face. I raised my eyes to find a boy herding goats up in the rocks. Naked, around eight years old, the boy smiled when I spoke Swahili. He bounded up the cliff, rock to rock, showing me the path to a plateau. A girl in a leather skirt herded the goats into a corral. A fishing net lay over a hut. Two naked children covered in white dust stood on goatskins, and a young woman looked up when she heard the boy and me talking. She wore a white skirt and one necklace, and her bare chest was streaked with the same dust that coated the children, as if they’d been holding on to her.

  Taking my hands and keeping her gaze on my eyes, she pulled me into the space between three small huts as impermanent as bales of hay. An old man lay on the ground, too weak to rise but thrilled to shake my hand. He spoke in Turkana as the children sat around the fire. The young woman translated his words into Swahili. “He says you’re the first outsider to come in thirteen years.”

  The woman stared at me, grinning. She was eighteen years old. The two larger children were her siblings, though she didn’t say whether the small ones were her own. The longer I watched her work the fire, boil water, and make tea, the more beautiful she became, her sweetness a salve for the hardness of so many others who were leaving these mountains.

  I asked her to teach me “thank you” in KiTurkana when she handed me a teacup.

  “Ej’ok enoi.”

  She said her name was Elizabeth.

  “Have you been to church?” I said, confused. “Or to school?”

  She shook her head.

  How in such a place could she have gotten a name like Elizabeth?

  I stepped to the edge of the cliff. The lake was brilliant in the evening light, its shores rimmed in a halo of salt left by waves. Beyond the mountains on the far shore, the land seemed to end, as if the lake marked the world’s true edge. I looked back at Elizabeth, at the children, and saw a spear propped against one of the huts. I imagined a moran waking on the day he was to leave his boma and begin his quest. And I wondered what it was like for one’s culture to protect within it an elemental question of a man’s worth. Pulling Lapa to the river seemed a year in the past. Leaving the road with Ofer felt like a memory a decade old. I struggled to imagine that people could pass a lifetime without knowing such a place existed.

  The children curled up on goatskins, and Elizabeth showed me where to lie on a tarp. The tiny hay igloos, akai, that seemed built for children, I now saw were for the storage of pots and fish traps. The only roofs they had were above their tools and not their heads. I stripped to my trousers and lay back without blankets, exposed to the stars, the warm wind our cover. Elizabeth sat and began to sing in KiTurkana. Her voice, like a flute, drifted over her brothers and sisters as they fell asleep.

  At sunrise, the girls separated a goat from the herd, slaughtered it with a spear, and cooked a feast to celebrate my visit.

  “If I had money,” Elizabeth said, “I would buy a pen and notebook like yours.”

  I’d been writing details in my diary. “You know how to write?” I said.

  She looked at me as if offended. “Yes.”

  I ripped the middle pages from my notebook and gave her my pen. “It’s for you.”

  She folded the paper and held it in her lap, then started to interview me as I had done her. “Where are you coming from?”

  “Central Kenya,” I said, playing along, though she knew the answer.

  She wrote and glanced up. “Where are you going?”

  “North to Ethiopia.”

  As Elizabeth asked me questions and wrote on the page, I walked around and looked over her shoulder. Her tight lines ran perpendicular to the lines of the page. The hundreds of characters she’d drawn were all U’s turned sideways.

  She put the paper in my hand and smiled proudly.

  “Very nice!” I said.

  She took the paper back and continued the interview.

  “Elizabeth,” I said, “where are all the men?”

  “Wamekufa,” she said, pointing north. They’re being killed.

  In the days I walked beside the lake, my skin darkened and my body strengthened. When I happened to hit my arm or leg on a rock I could feel I was becoming as hard as the ground. The barbs of a low hanging palm branch sliced into my stomach as I walked one evening, and sight of the blood made me happy.

  The shoreline plunged into the lake as a cliff, forcing me to climb around, to climb for hours on treacherous slopes. Where the banks ran smooth, I strode near flamingoes, and water seeped through cracks in my boot soles. My trousers turned the color of dirt and shredded at the knees because I wetted them to
stay cool during the day. Onshore were fins and bones, jagged ribs I couldn’t fathom were from fish. I built small fires and cooked ugali, plain or with a salt cube. And lay back exhausted on my sleeping bag, no longer using the tent and thankful that a dearth of animals made night a time of total rest. I woke, though, from the old reflex of needing to add wood to the night’s fire.

  Without a tent to block the light, I rose the instant the sun began to mute the darkness. Fishermen’s camps stood days apart on the lakeshore, settlements of two or three men. From afar the huts were indistinguishable from boulders, as nondescript as rounded and hardy shrubs. The naked men wore fishbone necklaces. They mended nets and worked their drying racks. And they greeted me with silence and stares. In one camp a bag of sugar solved the problem of getting me fed, and a bowl of mush was put into my hands. We slept side by side on burlap sacks. And the family-less, village-less, hermitic fishermen sent me on with smoked fish and ugali powder for the days I traveled where no one lived, for the days I saw no signs of men but for burned wood washed up onshore and a broken headrest in the rocks, for the days I opened my mouth only to eat a small meal and sip from the lake.

  A man and boy walked above me on a ridge. Across the man’s shoulders was a G3 assault rifle. One of his arms was draped over the stock, the other over the barrel. He looked like he’d been put into a yoke. Cattle raiding, banditry, and warfare, intensified by weapons pouring over the border from Sudan and Somalia, had drained Turkana of its men. The lawlessness and the militias stretched back a century to the British. And extended drought was hammering the people.

  The boy noticed me, and his father turned with the gun.

  “Hakuna,” I called out. I have nothing. I walked quickly but without running, swinging my arms in a show of strength, not turning my head to look back. If he became aggressive, I wanted him unsure of the outcome, for even lions avoided prey that put them at risk. The weak were eaten first.