Part 9

Out of the many memories of those days, that still work on me like magic, there is one above all that has a special meaning, for me: “Elelescho!”

But what is “Elelescho”? the reader will ask. “Elelescho” is the name of a peculiar plant, perhaps it would be more correct to say a bush, that has in many ways set its mark on the flora in the very heart of the Masai region. Ranges of hills covered with silvery-leafed Elelescho, the spicy smell of Elelescho, the water at the camping place redolent of Elelescho--and also, in consequence, tea, coffee, cocoa tasting of Elelescho--that is a memory that remains fixed firmly in one’s thoughts of this home of the wild herds and of the Masai. It Was these disappearing nomads who gave the bush its beautiful name.

Possibly the musical sound of the name has not a little to do with reconciling us in memory to the plant. For the bush itself has in process of time monotonous effect not very to the senses, but for this very reason all the stronger and more enduring. Its character is connected by strong links of memory with our experiences of those days, and the sound of its name awakes rose-coloured recollections. For just as it is not given to man to remember exactly the nature of intense bodily pains, so fancy, looking backwards, kindly blots out much that was hard and little that was pleasant in the life we have led. Thus it is that this strange bush, with its silver-grey leaves and aromatic odour, is capable, as hardly anything else is, of awakening in the mind of the traveller a kind of nostalgia--nostalgia for the wilderness, to which he is drawn by so much of beauty and of hardship. We have gained very little by learning that botanists recognise our plant as one of the Compositæ, and name it Tarchonantus camphoratus, L. It is to be found also in other parts of Africa; and Professor Fritsch reported, as early as 1863, that he found it growing in Griqualand, then still an unsettled country, where it was called the “Mohatla.” It would be a pity if its beautifully sounding Masai name were not preserved for future times, and I must do my best to save “Elelescho” from such oblivion.

C. G. Schillings, phot.

THE CARAVAN ON THE MARCH.]

One must have learned the word with its sweet-sounding pronunciation from the lips of a proud, handsome, slender Masai warrior in order to understand how so seemingly slight a thing can imbue one’s impression of a whole land.

The Elelescho is as prominent in those regions as the oak and beech or fir in Germany, or as the juniper, the heath, and the broom, and has the same influence on the landscape. But it has a greater and deeper influence upon the imagination, because it so dominates those solitudes, that to him who has long travelled in them the mere memory of it evokes a vivid picture of their once familiar aspect. The strong scent of the Elelescho plant leads the Masai to wear the leaves of the bush as a decoration round their ears for the sake of its perfume. It belongs thus to the plants that because of their scent are used as ornaments by warriors and maidens: “Il-käk ooitaa ‘l muran oo ‘n---- doiye ‘l---- orôpili.” So there pass before us Masai maidens, and Masai warriors decked with Elelescho leaves and Elelescho branches, and received with sympathetic smiles by the caravan leaders--who, however, unlike the Masai, think very little of it. Very simple and naïve are the relations of these natives with nature around them. Only the obvious, the actually useful, comes into their thoughts, and for my black companions the Elelescho always recalls only memories of poor desert regions of the waste--regions in which they must often endure hunger and suffer many hardships. Far different is the influence of the Elelescho region on my feelings. For me this bush is symbolically linked with the plunge into uninhabited solitudes, with self-liberation from the pressure of the civilisation of modern men and all its haste and hurry.

We wish to feel once more, and to give ourselves up fully to, the spell of the Elelescho--the charm of the Elelescho thickets, that are also in South Africa in the lands about the Cape the characteristic mark of the velt, now so lonely, but once alive with hundreds of thousands of wild herds.

A wonderful night has come on.

The moon--in a few days it will be at the full--sheds its beams in glittering splendour over Lake Nakuro.

The little camp is soon wrapped in silence. The weary bearers sink into deep and well-earned slumber. Only the sentries, pushed far out, are on the alert. It was but a few days since the rebel Wakamassia hillmen were a source of danger to us, and nightly precautions are not yet forgotten. The moonbeams flicker ghost-like over the lake. Night-jars give forth their songs close to the camp all round us. Strange sounds and cries ring out from the throats of the waterfowl on the lake margins, and not far away one hears the snorting of the hippopotami. Jackals and spotted hyenas prowl round the camp, betraying themselves by their voices. The hyena’s howl and jackal’s wailing bark mingle strangely with the deep bass note of a bull-hippopotamus. Here in the wilderness there is hardly any sound that is louder than the mighty voice of these giants of the water.

C. G. Schillings, phot.

A HERD OF ZEBRAS TAKING REFUGE FROM THE HEAT OF THE MIDDAY SUN.]

C. G. Schillings, phot.

FLAMINGOES ON THE MARGIN OF A LAKE. THEY MUST BE VERY LONG-LIVED BIRDS, SOME OF THEM NOW LIVING IN THE COLOGNE ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS HAVE BEEN THERE THIRTY YEARS.]

A strange feeling came over me. Amid all the ever-varying sensations of the last year my capacity for enjoyment, my sensitiveness to outside impressions, had been developed and enhanced. A short time since I was between life and death, struggling with the treacherous infection of fever. Now I was well. I was breathing the air some three thousand feet higher than the place where I lay ill near Victoria Nyanza. I was again in a region whose vast volcanic solitudes contrasted strongly with its abundance of highly developed organic life, and exercised a strange influence upon me.

Is there such a place as Europe? Is it possible that thousands of miles away there is a centre of civilisation whose teeming millions would fain imprint their image on the whole earth, and even lay covetous hands on this far-off wilderness, and that in time this must happen?

A world of which I myself am a unit! How strange that I can delight so deeply in all this wild charm! And how quickly the wishes of men change! A while ago, in the long nights of fever, I had but one desire--that my heart, my heart alone, should not be buried in a foreign soil, but be taken back to the Fatherland.

And now, only a few weeks after my recovery, how different seems to me all I may hope for from Fate, and how much more complex, how much more difficult to accomplish!

I yield myself up entirely to the spell of the wilderness, to the mood of the night.

That was ten years ago, before the Europeans had banished it--when it ached on the senses like the nocturne of some great tone-poet. But I know well that to-day it is no longer in existence; Lake Nakuro is now only a lake like any other, and the railway whistle wakes its echoes.

That night the spell must have been exceptionally strong. It seemed to me as though I were under some charm, as if I were carried back into the far-off times. There came before my mind much of what the lake had seen in the long vanished past. The lands around me heaved and quaked. Mighty earth-shaping forces were doing their work. I seemed to see before my eyes what happened here in primeval times--how volcanic forces, strange, boundless, and terrible, had built up and given form to the country around me here, destroying all living things, and yet at the same time preparing the conditions for the hotly pulsating waves of life of later days. In my mind I saw pass before me wondrous mighty forms of the animal world of the past, long since extinct. Then--suddenly I started up. What was that?

C. G. Schillings, phot.

FLAMINGOES FLYING DOWN TO THE LAKE MARGIN.]

A loud trumpeting ran in my ears! Elephants! Were there still extant such herds of elephants as those that I saw coming down there to the lake to drink, rolling themselves in the mud of its banks, and openly making friends with the hippopotami? Just as in the daytime I had noticed the different kinds of antelopes and the zebras, so here I saw again the elephants and hippopotami living their life close together, moving round or beside each other without fear or hesitation. The herd, numbering many hundred heads, was guided to its drinking-place silently and slowly by its aged leader, a female elephant of most exceptional size. Many young elephants were there in company with their mothers. Some very little ones, only a few weeks old, played with their comrades, or knowingly imitated the movements of the older animals in the water, while the old ones took care to prevent the tender young creatures from taking any harm.

But it all seemed somehow impossible! Veterans among the most experienced black elephant-hunters had assured me that such huge herds were not to be met with. And if I saw aright in the shimmering moonlight, what a great mass of hippopotami were moving about there before me! And now, paying, no attention to the elephants that were peacefully bathing farther out in the muddy water, they clambered on to the land, and began to graze like cows on the bank among some more of the elephants. It was exactly the same friendly relation that I had seen between the dwarf gazelles and the zebras during the day. Could I be only dreaming? Such a multitude of huge creatures here close to my camp--it could hardly be a reality!

C. G. Schillings, phot.

NILE GEESE ON THE LOW BANK OF THE NATRON LAKE (LAKE NAKURO). DWARF GAZELLES IN THE BACKGROUND.]