Travel

Undervalued in his home county? Great War Poet Wilfred Owen – a true Shropshire Lad 1893-1918

“It is fitting and sweet to die for one’s country” Horace, Ode III

“Dulce et Decorum Est “
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under I green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen has been described as the greatest of the Great War poets. He surely was, although in terms of the brutal brevity of his career, it is a dubious honour. The young officer who wrote this poem was killed as he led his raiding party from the Manchester Regiment across the Sambre-Oise Canal on 4th November 1918. At the time, he was twenty five years old and only four of his poems had been published. One week later the war ended. His mother received news of his death in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, just as bells of the county town’s churches were ringing out in joyous celebration of peace. It is hard to imagine the pain of that moment.

Owen, though, believed it was the duty of a poet to tell the truth, to show how it was for the men – this “Pity of War”. He did not have to return to the front after being treated for shell shock in Craiglockhart Military Hospital in 1917. But it was while he was receiving treatment here that he met fellow inmate, Siegfried Sassoon, who became his mentor, and encouraged the young poet to write of the cruel realities of war.

In August 1918 Owen chose to return to the front. In the following October he won the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in the attack on the Fonsomme Line. And of course he did tell the truth, and in stark, excoriating detail.

Wilfred Owen was born and spent his early childhood in Oswestry, Shropshire on the Welsh border, in a gracious villa, Plas Wilmot, owned by his maternal grandfather, Edward Shaw. He was the eldest of four children. His father, Tom Owen, was a railway official, a job that took the family for a time to Birkenhead on the Wirral in Cheshire.

Plas Wilmot, Owen’s birthplace. Photo: Oswestry Family and Local History Group

In 1906 the Owens returned to Shropshire, this time to the county town of Shrewsbury where Wilfred attended Shrewsbury Technical School, now the Wakeman School. His last years of education were spent as a pupil-teacher as he struggled to study and win a scholarship to university. In this he failed, and although he won a place at Reading University his parents could not afford to send him. Instead, between 1913 and 1915 when he enlisted, he was went to work as a teacher in France.

Market Square, Shrewsbury

The Square in Shrewsbury c 1909

The house of his birth is privately owned, and it was only last year, after lobbying by civic groups and historians that it was also given a grade 2 listing by English Heritage; this amid fears of development on the site. In August this year the surrounding gardens were put up for sale with outlined planning permission for the building of seven detached houses on three sides of Owen’s former home. Many have urged that the house and its gardens should be left intact, hoping that one day there might be a museum here. For it is a sad fact that while Wilfred Owen is known of in Shropshire, he is given only scant commemoration.

Yet Wilfred Owen’s words speak to the whole world, for all humanity, a fact recognised at least in France where in the village of Ors, where Owen died, they have commissioned Turner prize nominee, Simon Patterson, to transform La Maison Forestiere (The Forester’s House) into a wonderful place of contemplation and commemoration of Owen’s work. More than this, it is a place to acknowledge the futility of war. It was in this house on 31st October 1918 that Wilfred Owen wrote the last letter to his mother. A few days later he was dead, joining the millions of others lost in the vicious cull of youthful talent and potential. Those of us who come after can only wonder if the full cost of this loss has even now been fully reckoned.

You can see more about La Maison Forestiere in the links below, and a brief biography in the short video at the end.

La Maison Forestiere. Photo: Hektor Creative Commons

FRIZZTEXT’S ‘UUU’ CHALLENGE

Elecommunication: so many connections

Elephants: “The animal which surpasses all others in wit and mind.” Aristotle

Do you remember when you first discovered there were such things as elephants? And didn’t childish intuition tell you at once that these animals were among the world’s most wonderful creatures?

Over the last few decades scientists have proved that they are in fact wonderful – and in all sorts of ways, not least their ability to communicate over large distances. Then there is their highly developed matriarchal society. They are also one of the most intelligent species on earth. They are good at problem solving. There are many cases of their altruistic acts. For instance they have been known to help wounded humans in the bush, even going so far as placing exposed individuals in the shade, and then keeping guard over them against predators.

But proof apart, it is probably anyway beyond most people’s comprehension that some forms of humanity see elephants purely as a resource – killing them for ivory, or a trophy head to brag about to their shooting chums.

The word elephant, I’ve just read somewhere on Google, comes from the Greek word elephas meaning ivory, so already we have a clue as to the literate world’s (one hesitates to use the word ‘civilized’ here) once primary relationship with elephants. But then this is not the only kind of man-elephant relationship. The killing of elephants is not always about the pursuit of luxury goods. Indigenous African peoples, such as the small-statured Mbuti hunters of the the Congo forests, have long hunted elephant for food, and also possibly scavenged dead ones. One beast, killed once in a while would keep a hunting band going for many days as well as providing large amounts of meat to trade with farming neighbours for other goods.

The fact that there have always been hunters like the Mbuti who will tackle an elephant, makes them in turn desirable allies and trading partners to less brave outsiders who crave only the ivory. In East Africa, from at least the start of the first millennium AD, Arab dhow merchants relied on locals like the Akamba people to bring ivory to the coast to trade. In the nineteenth century the Swahili slavers set off into the interior to grab for themselves a combination haul of humans and ivory, the poor human captives being forced, while they still lived, to carry the elephant tusks hundreds of miles back to the coast.

There are far older stories too. The tomb biography of Prince Harkhuf of Elephantine records that four thousand years ago this Ancient Egyptian general headed at least four major expeditions into the African interior. One objective was to test the waters for a take-over of the neighbouring Kingdom of Nubia. But there were also valuable resources to garner: ivory, leopard skins, ebony, precious stones. One expedition went beyond the Mountains of the Moon, the Rwenzori Mountains on the borders of Uganda and Eastern Congo, and so into the territory of Mbuti hunters.

The tomb account includes a letter from Harkhuf’s Pharaoh, Pepi II Neferkare who, on becoming Egypt’s ruler at the age of six, longed for nothing more than his own pygmy, he “who danceth like the god”. The letter contains strict instructions as to the pygmy’s care, and especially on the voyage back down the Nile so that he does not fall in the river. Anyone who has read Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People, will know that the Mbuti are renowned for their performances of complex polyphonic singing and energetic dancing conducted in praise of their Forest Creator. Neferkare’s letter would suggest that the Mbuti were already well known to the Egyptians thousands of miles away, and the primary source of this relationship was mostly likely to have been the Mbuti’s provision of forest produce including ivory.

But the biggest assault on elephant-kind has all to do with the arrival of the gun. A major killing spree began in the late 1800s in the Congo – then a private fiefdom of Leopold II of Belgium (think Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Congo River stations set up especially to export ivory and wild rubber from the forest hinterland). In East Africa the slaughter began at a similar time under British colonial rule – first British and European aristocrats out to make their fortunes, then by hunters,like John Hunter, employed by the colonial administration to protect settler plantations from elephant damage. The ivory hunters of course always sought out the animals with the biggest tusks. So much so, that when the likes of Denys Finch Hatton and aviator, Beryl Markham began scouting for ivory from the air, the big bulls of Tsavo were reputed to hide their tusks in the undergrowth whenever they heard a plane.

What was taking place, then, was a most unnatural selection. The biggest and best elephants had the biggest and best ivory. The gene pool of present day elephants has thus been ravaged by a century of mass killing. After the colonial era, the armies of civil war conflicts across the continent, continued the job started by colonial sportsmen and administrators. After the Idi Amin regime in Uganda when much wildlife was decimated, the tusks of the elephant population that gradually re-established itself were either puny or did not develop at all. And an elephant needs his tusks – not least for rearranging the landscape (clearing trees to favour grass growth) and mining for water sources and essential mineral salts.

And why did this killing begin? Because humans thought that ivory re-fashioned into billiard balls, piano keys, and objets d’art was more valuable than embedded in living, breathing elephants. Some people still think this.

But back to the elephants and those extraordinary things that scientists have been discovering about them. For one thing, the infra-sound throat rumbles that vibrate through the earth can convey information to other elephants at least six miles away. It would appear, too, that they can pick up seismic movements over far greater distances than this. Researchers have observed that when it started thundering in Angola, thus signalling the start of the rains and fresh browse in that quarter, elephants one hundred miles away in Etosha National Park, Namibia, set off there. Apparently the tips of trunks, toes and heels are especially sensitive to vibration. Working Asiatic elephants have also been known to detect tsunamis and make for higher ground, thus saving any humans who happened to be riding on them at the time.

When it comes to communicating amongst the immediate herd or with potential predators, elephants have a whole range of calls and gestures, depending on the circumstances. These include ear-splitting screams and trumpeting, rumbles and grunts, crying and barking, head shaking and ear-flapping, trunk slapping, dust-kicking, throwing missiles, ear spreading, standing tall, and making mock and real charges.

While their eyesight is not acute, and especially in bright light conditions, they have a keen sense of smell. An elephant will thus continuously read its environment and, using the tip of its trunk like an antenna, decode all manner of messages by scanning urine, faeces, saliva, and the secretions from their fellows’ temporal glands (found on the side of the head mid way between the eye and ear). Also, when it comes to acts of aggression from humans, elephants will remember these and continue to identify such aggressors by their smell.

And that’s the other marvellous thing. Elephants do remember. For much of the year the males and females live separately usually only congregating for mating purposes. The females roam in small family groups led by an old matriarch. Within that matriarch’s head is a lifetime’s accumulated wisdom that she uses to manage her daughters, granddaughters and their offspring, and so keep them healthy and safe. Elephants left bereft of their elders through culling or poaching, are known to flounder and panic without the old ones’ guidance.

As you can see from some of these photos, mostly taken outside the national park in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, elephants are not only highly sociable, but also very tactile. They spend much time wiggling against each other and touching each other with their trunks. Even older elephants like to play, and there are a whole range of gestures that they use to invite general romping. As the work of Daphne Sheldrick has shown at her Nairobi elephant orphanage, an orphaned elephant will die, not so much because it is short of food, although the right infant milk formula is very important, but because it does not have a continuous show of affection and reassurance from family members.

Sheldrick has learned how to provide for this vital need by assigning a human keeper-parent to every baby; duties, apart from feeding and playing, include spending the night with their charges. When the time comes to repatriate adolescent elephants to the wild, the lack of matriarchal knowledge creates a considerable challenge to making a viable transition. This was well shown in the BBC series The Elephant Diaries.

The Elephant Orphanage, Nairobi

More sobering to learn is the fact that elephants, not only have a similar life-span to us, but they also do understand death. In the past, conservationists have found to their cost that elephants are utterly traumatized by witnessing culling events. Where elephants have been wounded by poachers, their comrades will stay beside them and try to lift them or feed them grass. Once an elephant has died, the herd may remain with the corpse of several days. The young ones have been seen to cry. The survivors will then cover the dead one with branches, leaves and grass. During colonial times, a Kenyan district officer once confiscated a poachers’ stash of ivory, only to find that in the night, the local elephants broke into the store and carried off the tusks.

There is, though, another side of the elephant-man story, and especially where they compete for the same territory. In a single night’s foraging, elephants can wipe out a whole season’s crops in a farmer’s smallholding, and that means starvation for the family concerned. They will also kill humans if they consider themselves provoked. Bulls in must are quickly irritated and are especially dangerous at such times, as are mothers with small calves. In poor communities poaching ivory can become an attractive proposition where local bigwigs and foreign buyers seem to be offering them a small fortune to do so. The only way to protect both elephants and would-be local poachers is to give communities reasons to protect elephants. That means a fair cut of tourist dollars to provide for schools and clinics and a a better standard of living all round.

There are many thousands of elephants still roaming African, but they are always under threat. Most nations’ wildlife parks are under-resourced when it comes to vehicles, equipment and manpower. Much protection of wildlife is in fact done by owners of private game reserves in conjunction with local communities. In the meantime, we need to thank those African rangers, men and women, who daily risk their lives for often little pay, to protect their countries’ wildlife from human rapine. They are indeed true heroes. We might also stop to ponder on whether some of the resource grabbers funding the poachers might not have closer connections to our own lives than we care to admit.

Ailsa’s Travel Theme: connections

For more about ivory poaching:

Dear Kitty. Some blog Ivory trade legal in the USA

For more about elephants in general: Elephant Voices

Elephants, E-books and Enticing Reluctant Readers #amwriting

Two by Two in Maine: too many reasons not to go

Two whooshes of spray Portland Head

Two yellow gables in Ocean Park

Two windows on the Downeaster – Boston to Portland ME

Two azure light streaks on Portland Library

A bear and her bucket, Boothbay Botanical Gardens

Two ‘Ls’, a Bean and a Boot in Freeport

Two spans over the Kennebec River, Richmond

Pumpkins two by two with a few extra ones, Portland

Two blurry men or is it the photographer?

Two fences with dangling bits, keeping the beach tidy at Orchard Park

Beach house supper: lots of things in twos

Two watch the sea on Old Orchard Beach

Two embrace, Ogunquit Museum of American Art

Two zinnias and a monarch

Two chairs and another chair in Ocean Park

Two promontories on the way to Portland Head

Two armchairs with art by Matt Hausmann, family collection, Richmond

Only One Ogunquit: the little gallery by the sea

Marvellous Multicoloured Maine

Posted in response to:

A Word A Week Challenge: Two

More twosomes here:

Island of Old Ghosts

There are ancient, bloody-minded spirits here on Ynys Môn, the island where the Celtic druids made their last stand during the Roman conquest of Britain. This place, otherwise known by its Viking name of Anglesey, lies just off the coast of Wales, the narrow Menai Straits between. One Christmas morning we came here to Penmon on the island’s north-east tip. The light was very strange that day, darkness already gathering at noon. Then across the Straits, above the mainland, the sun bore down like a searchlight.

Penmon is the site of an early Christian monastery, founded in the 6th century by St Seiriol, but the roots of Ynys Môn’s sacred, and now mysterious practices, are far older than this. Across the island there are Neolithic and Bronze Age chambered tombs, and then there is the spectacular Celtic Iron Age hoard from Llyn Cerrig Bach, a seemingly sacrificial lake offering of weapons, chariots, slave chains, and highly crafted regalia. The Romans claimed that in their groves the druid priests made human sacrifices, but little is known of these people beyond the gory account in the Annals of Tacitus. What is known is that the Romans conducted a ruthless campaign against the Celtic clans of Wales. Anglesey, with its powerful druid priests, was the last bastion of British resistance. Here is how Tacitus describes the Menai Straits battle of nearly 2,000 years ago. Suetonius Paulinus, Governor of Britain, was in command.

He therefore prepared to attack the island of Mona which had a powerful population and was a refuge for fugitives. He built flat-bottomed vessels to cope with the shallows, and uncertain depths of the sea. Thus the infantry crossed, while the cavalry followed by fording, or, where the water was deep, swam by the side of their horses.

“On the shore stood the opposing army with its dense array of armed warriors, while between the ranks dashed women, in black attire like the Furies, with hair dishevelled, waving brands. All around, the Druids, lifting up their hands to heaven, and pouring forth dreadful imprecations, scared our soldiers by the unfamiliar sight, so that, as if their limbs were paralysed, they stood motionless, and exposed to wounds. Then urged by their general’s appeals and mutual encouragements not to quail before a troop of frenzied women, they bore the standards onwards, smote down all resistance, and wrapped the foe in the flames of his own brands. A force was next set over the conquered, and their groves, devoted to inhuman superstitions, were destroyed. They deemed it indeed a duty to cover their altars with the blood of captives and to consult their deities through human entrails.

Annals of Tacitus translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb 1884. XIV chapters 29-30. You can read the original work by following the link.

For more about Anglesey

Old Stones of Wenlock: repurposing the Silurian Sea

I like the idea that I, like many in and around Much Wenlock, live inside blocks of repurposed, and well-travelled seafloor – the compressed and decomposing shells, sponges, bony fish, sea scorpions, trilobites and corals of the Silurian Sea. It is also intriguing to know that some 400 million years ago, this shallow tropical ocean was part of a land mass that lay off East Africa, somewhere near the Comoros Islands. We even have our own geological epoch – The Wenlock that lasted from 428 to 423 million years ago. And yes, I know, it is hard to fathom – this mind-boggling vastness of geological time, the tectonic shunt and shift across the globe to create the continents we all now recognise.

My own view of the world, I find, is firmly fixed, and distinctly two-dimensional, being the usual flat configuration found in an atlas. And of course, when I consult the world map I can surely see that Much Wenlock is definitely in the northern hemisphere, in England’s Midlands to be exact, nudging towards Wales. Yet the proof that this was not always so, is all around me – in the stones of church, priory, and the many barns and cottages, even in my chimney breast – this place, this ground beneath the wooded ridgeback of Wenlock Edge, where the stone was quarried, WAS ONCE IN THE TROPICS. And since I once lived in the tropics myself, I like to think that returning to Shropshire has brought me back to the place where I was in Africa, but in a different time zone – a bit like a Time Lord, a Doctor Who without a Tardis.

The Farrell Silurian fireplace built c 1830

But back to the stones. The circular sections you can see in the first photo are the remains of crinoids or sea lilies. These were animals, echinoderms, not plants, and looked something like this:

From McGraw-Hill Science and Technology Encyclopedia; Articulata

Bony fish also made their first appearance during the Silurian:

Artist’s impression of Silurian Fish (creative commons copyright expired) from Nebula to Man by Joseph Smit 1905

And the landscape may have looked like this, although was apparently entirely inhospitable above water, with roaring winds and hot flying dust, and no signs of life.

Silurian Sea reconstruction by Richard Bizley: http://www.bizleyart.com/

And here is bed of the Silurian Sea today, the upthrust levels that form the fifteen-mile wooded ridge of Wenlock Edge. Its geology is of international importance. (For more on Wenlock Edge, see its Facebook page here.)

The Edge has been quarried for centuries, but the quarries lie mostly empty now, waiting to be repurposed themselves. In the town our earliest surviving stone buildings date from monastic times. (In Much Wenlock An Inspector Calls.) But old buildings have always been recycled into new buildings, and you can see signs of this as you walk along the streets nearest the priory ruins.

And finally (below) is the Farrell establishment – a blend of old and new construction. Hopefully the inhabitants are not yet as fossilized as their surrounding walls, although clearly it is only a matter of time.

Travel theme: stone

Blue Lagoon

Weekly Photo Challenge: Horizon

DP Daily Prompt: The Golden Hour

Beyond the shore, the reef, the sea, and then the sky: dawn one Christmas off Tiwi Beach, Mombasa

Other striking horizons:

Fractions of the World

Wind Against Current

Jolie Petite Maison

Hope*the happy hugger

Be Happy

Belgrade Streets

Artifacts and Fictions

vastlycurious

Northwest Frame of Mind

DARK CIRCLES, ETC

Kind of blue and other colours

Weekly Photo Challenge: the hue of you

Stained glass by Marc Chagall, musée national Marc Chagall, Nice

Another of the world’s great little galleries, currently celebrating its 40th anniversary. I went there one October. It left its colours imprinted on my retina and in my heart. If ever you are in Nice, be sure to go there. Also posted with reference to Miles Davis and his ‘Kind of Blue’ album.

And some other good hues:

http://flickrcomments.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/weekly-photo-challenge-the-hue-of-you/

http://dewetswild.com/2013/10/18/the-hue-of-us/

http://windagainstcurrent.com/2013/10/18/weekly-photo-challenge-the-hue-of-you/

http://angelinem.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/weekly-photo-challenge-the-hue-of-you/

http://jampang.wordpress.com/2013/10/19/weekly-photo-challenge-the-hue-of-you/

http://retirenicaragua.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/weekly-photo-challenge-the-hue-of-you/

http://teepee12.com/2013/10/19/weekly-photo-challenge-color-me-orange-wrap-me-in-autumn/

Paul Kabochi, Path-finder, Pharmacist 1942-2003

It was dawn on the muddy shores of Lake Elmenteita in Kenya’s Rift Valley, and I was walking alone, listening to the endless grunting of flamingos as they grazed the algae-rich water. Suddenly a safari truck swung out onto the mud flats. A Japanese tourist jumped out and began taking photographs of the distant flamingos. His driver and guide Paul Kabochi, also got out, moving more softly as was his way. He came over to me while his guest went on shooting. “Hello,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

It wasn’t a question that expected an answer; it was just Paul being Paul, the wry smile, and the glittering eyes that missed nothing. On several visits to Elmenteita’s Delamere Camp he had taken me out on dawn walks, and he had been our guide on night drives around the Soysambu estate. And so, as I had my camera with me, I asked him to pose by the lake, which he was more than pleased to do.

Paul Githinji Kabochi was a man I am lucky to have met, and I mourn his tragic loss in what was, for him, the strangest of accidents. He was a true path-finder, and not only for the likes of me, a traveller, wanting to experience the African bush with someone who knew it intimately, but also for august naturalists such as David Attenborough. Paul had been one of the expert guides during the making of The Life of Mammals, and his special knowledge was often called upon by the BBC’s outpost in Nairobi.

I first met him on the afternoon ethnobotany walk run by Delamere Camp to keep guests amused until the night drive around Lord Delamere’s private estate (now Soysambu Conservancy). That day, on the walk, we did not get beyond the camp grounds. There were too many plants that required our attention.

Paul knew about the medicinal properties of both indigenous and introduced plant species. I remember him telling me to pick some lavender from the bush outside the camp dining room when I told him I had a headache; this after ascertaining whether it was “a headache of the stomach, or of the weather.” He told me to make tea with it. On other occasions he also explained how he treated skin cancers with a mixture of, among other things, baked sodom apple (Solanum family) and avocado. Then there was the little blue flowered Wandering Jew (Commelina) that was especially good for clearing adolescent acne. He also once told me that he had successfully treated a typhoid outbreak in the locality with decoctions of (I think) fever tree bark. He meant to write a book, imparting all he knew, but when I last met him he was struggling with finding ways to fund the venture.

When he was not acting as guide for Delamere Camps, he had his own clinic in Rumuruti, and was also called on from time to time to consult at the prestigious Nairobi Hospital.

Lake Elmenteita looking towards the exploded volcanic crater known as The Sleeping Warrior. Large numbers of flamingos come to feed here, but it is more important as a breeding ground for white pelicans. Like many of the Rift lakes, the water is exceedingly alkaline. This particular lake is also very shallow, being only around 1 metre deep. At times it has been known to disappear altogether, leaving a dusty basin. The name comes from the Maasai ol muteita meaning dust place.

There were around twenty ‘thatched-roof’ tents – all with bathrooms. On cool evenings we would return from the night drive to find hot water bottles in our beds.

Paul was responsible for many of the features that made staying at the Elmenteita camp so special. One of them was the tree house he built in a fever tree, and on whose roof terrace he is standing in the photo above. Small numbers of guests could spend the night there in the hopes of spotting the leopard that came to drink at a nearby water hole. We stayed there once, but saw no leopard. Instead we were kept awake by chattering tree squirrels who spent all night raiding the sugar bowl which we had carelessly left uncovered. The night drive out there, though, had been fun. We had seen both a zorilla and an aardvark. And in the morning the camp staff drove up with a full hot breakfast, so we could dine on the roof amongst the bird call.

Paul said he came from the Ndorobo community, or Ogiek, a small, but remnant population of hunter-gatherers, who traditionally lived by honey gathering and hunting. These slight-framed people were possibly among the indigenous inhabitants of East Africa before the arrival of the Bantu farmers and Maasai pastoralists. Many became assimilated with the newcomers, adopting their languages, but there are still groups living in the forests of the Mau Escarpment, where they struggle to have their rights acknowledged by the Kenyan Government. Top on their list of priorities is preserving their forest domain, now constantly under threat from agriculture.

Before he became a guide, Paul worked for many years as an animal trapper for the National Museums of Kenya, capturing animals for museum study and display. He told me that he and his party had once been set on by bandits while he was trapping up in remote and arid Turkana. The works Land Rover was stolen at gunpoint and they were left to die. He survived on that occasion, but blamed the loss of many teeth on the days of near starvation in the wilderness.

In the years before he died, Paul was working down at Taita Ranch near the border with Tanzania. There he liaised with film crews and scientific expeditions of all kinds, giving them the benefit of his wisdom and wit. It was on the 8th February 2003, while he was out alone, and on foot, tracking dwarf mongoose, that he was surprised by a lone elephant and killed. It was some years after the event that I heard what had happened, and oddly, too, from a friend of a friend in rural Shropshire, someone whose sister lived in Kenya and whom I met while she was briefly over in England on a visit. It was a strange way to discover this sad news. Even now, I find it hard to believe that someone as smart and wily as Paul Kabochi could have been caught unawares by an elephant. They have such a strong smell for one thing, and he was not a man to take anything for granted.

Many academic research papers have been dedicated to him, but I notice, as time passes, internet references to Paul Kabochi grow fewer. This makes me wonder, too, about the loss of all his pharmacological knowledge. I know he had children, but did he pass it on? In 2000 German documentary film maker Ralf Breier made a short film about Paul. Its English title is ‘Animal Magician’. Now that’s a film I would like to see.

The photo above was taken from the Sundowner Look-out, above Lake Elmenteita.This was another of Paul’s ideas: that in late afternoon guests would either walk or be driven up to the cliff top behind Delamere Camp. There they would be given a few roast ‘bitings’ of game meat and a beer or soft drink, and sit on tree-stump seats and watch the sun go down. We have sat up there and viewed this scene with some of our dearest friends. Now I look at the photo and think of Paul Kabochi. It is hard to think that he is not still treading softly along Africa’s wilderness trails.

P.S. Delamere Camp is no more. Much of the former Delamere estate at Soysambu is now part of the Soysambu Conservancy. The soda lakes of Elmenteita and nearby Nakuru are now World Heritage Sites.

Nakuru is the next lake up the Rift from Elmenteita.

The Smoke that Thunders

We inhabitants of Great Britain, that one-time source and bastion of Empire, somehow take it for granted that other people’s geography should be named after our explorers, our lords and our monarchs. It was part and parcel of the colonizing process, this laying claim to territory, the ‘making it ours’ rather than theirs, the indigenous inhabitants’. Also, much as a head-hunter gains spiritual power by consuming the brains of his enemy, so explorers, lords and monarchs accrued grandeur by bestowing their names on natural-world-wonders. It was one way of acquiring grand-scale permanence over frail bodily transience. Some might say it was a form of megalomania.

All of which is to say that the photo above shows one of the most famous examples of colonial misappropriation – the great southern African cataracts of Victoria Falls. They were ‘discovered’ by missionary, David Livingstone, in November 1855. This was in the days before the British map-makers had staked out the colonial territories of Northern and Southern Rhodesia, (named after the mineral-hungry Cecil Rhodes), and now known (respectively) as Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Livingstone is thought to be the first European to set eyes on the falls, and his presence is commemorated both in the name of Livingstone Island, just above the falls, and in the town of Livingstone on the Zambian side of the cataracts.

Livingstone Monument

But the fact remains that when Livingstone arrived this, the largest falling curtain of water in the world, already had at least one very fine name. The rainbow spray from the toppling cascades rises like smoke that can be seen for miles, and the Zambezi, as it drops through 110 metres, simply roars. And so it is fittingly known by the indigenous Tonga people as Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders. Also fittingly, and by way of restitution, this is also the name that UNESCO puts first in its World Heritage Site citation for the falls.

The falls from the Zimbabwe side at Victoria Falls town. The spray is a challenge to the the photographer.

The photo below shows the falls from the Zambian side. The rains had been poor when the shot was taken, and much of the water from the Zambian side of the Zambezi is anyway abstracted for industrial purposes. It is hard to convey the scale, but it shows well how the Zambezi has cut through the basalt plateau over which it flows. Over the last hundred thousand years the river has repeatedly carved out new gorges, wearing down cracks of softer sandstone within the basalt and creating a zigzag of massive fissures. The current falls go over the eighth gorge, but there are already signs that the ninth is beginning to form.

I have the foolhardy distinction of almost hang-gliding off the falls’ knife-edge courtesy my kanga-wrap, just then being used as an umbrella. G had business in Livingstone and we were staying in a hotel near the river, or I should say near the absence of river. I saw people walking across the waterless river bed towards the Zimbabwe side of the falls, and one Sunday afternoon, urged G. to set off on an outing. In no time we had a young Zambian boy offering to be our guide. He led us through a maze of huge boulders and oily stagnant pools. At one point I noticed fresh elephant droppings and fully expected the massive stones to transform into pachyderms, since that’s the sort of thing elephants do. All around the sky was turning from brilliant blue to a steely grey. I forgot about elephants and thought of flash-floods instead. I was beginning to wish we had not come.

But the boy pressed on, heading we later discovered for Livingstone Island. He had promised to show us the best place to view the falls. And so we followed. And then came the deluge. In seconds we were soaked to the skin by very cold, hard rain. When I looked back across the river, our hotel seemed very far away, and the empty river bed so very wide. We ran after the boy into the trees on Livingstone Island, and there we huddled under the dripping vegetation. Time passed. And more time passed. We grew colder and wetter.

Finally, when there was no sign of the rain letting up, G. asked the boy how far was this viewpoint. Oh, not very far, he told us. We followed him out into the driving rain. And sure enough, in a few paces, there we were on the knife edge. I held my kanga high above my head, fly-sheet style, in a bid to fend off the downpour. But as I craned over the precipice, the wind gusted and I felt the threatening lift as it filled the kanga…

After that there could only be a swift retreat. Shaken by my close shave with the abyss, I turned for the distant shore and tried to run. But the rocks were slippery, and every boulder looked like an elephant, and the more it rained the more I glanced upstream for that wall of rushing water. By now our guide had disappeared. I don’t think we had even given him a tip, and that was even more worrying. To leave without his kwacha? What did he know that we did not?

Of course it was all panic and no substance. After a hot shower and a bottle of Mosi back at the hotel, it seemed like a great adventure, though we did wonder if Livingstone Island was in Zambia or in Zimbabwe, and if, in the rainstorm, we had become illegal immigrants into Zimbabwe. Of course we hadn’t, but it added a little more spice to the story.

The Victoria Falls bridge, built in 1905 in a bid towards fulfilling Cecil Rhodes’ dream of the Cape to Cairo railway line. He insisted it was built where the falls’ spray would fall on passing trains.

UNESCO World Heritage Site

Sun, Steel and Spray: A History of the Building of the Victoria Falls Bridge by Peter Roberts

Where’s My Backpack Ailsa’s Travel Theme: Height

More takes on height:

http://suejudd.com/2013/10/04/weekly-travel-theme-height/

http://cosytravels.wordpress.com/2013/10/04/travel-theme-height/

http://laavventura.wordpress.com/2013/10/04/travel-theme-height/

http://bastet1952.wordpress.com/2013/10/04/travel-theme-high/

http://sustainabilitea.wordpress.com/2013/10/04/travel-theme-height/

Grouchy Hippo, Laid-out Lions

It always seemed astonishing to me that, should you be lucky enough to locate them, you can simply drive up to dozing lions and take their photographs. Even if you sit doing this for half an hour or more, they will barely deign to register your presence. These big cat shots were all taken in Kenya, but it was while we were living in Zambia, and visiting South Luangwa, that our young South African guide briefed us on the proper protocol when encountering lions.

At the time we were driving around a Luangwa salt pan where we had come upon a pride of lions lying about in the thorn scrub. The guide told us that as long as our profiles remained within the frame of the vehicle (in this case an open-topped safari truck) the lions would not give two hoots about us. To them we would appear to be part of the truck and from which they perceived no particular threat.

Out on the Luangwa salt pan, me in the back seat. The lions had been spotted earlier before the sun came up.

Not a good photo, but the light was poor and I had only my Olympus trip.

However, I was scarcely reassured by this newly acquired knowledge of how-not-to-upset-a-lion when the next day, at 5 a.m., the same guide took us on a hike through the bush. It is all so very different on foot. For one thing, it can be hard to see far ahead, what with all the tall grasses and potato bushes. The guide, though, seemed perfectly relaxed. He had already led us to within thirty paces of a browsing elephant, and assured us that it was entirely peaceable since its ears were not out, nor its trunk thrust to the side in charge mode. He had explained, too, how elephants move silently, in effect walking on tiptoes, the backs of their feet cushions of fat. For a time I kept looking behind me. It had never occurred to me before that something as large as an elephant could sneak up on me.

Our guide then spotted a herd of buffalo. This pleased him because he said that in Luangwa lions preyed on buffalo and the big cats were thus never far behind. And so keeping a careful watch on which way the wind was blowing our scent, he and our accompanying park ranger, White, set out to find some. This involved much careful manoeuvring, first around a small group of passing elephants, and then around the buffalo herd.

Clearly, being on foot, the keeping-one’s-profile-inside-the-vehicle strategy would be quite useless. We had no vehicle. Instead we were told to stake out likely trees to scramble up. I eyed the leadwood and sausage trees doubtfully. A few decades had passed since I had done any tree-climbing. I did not think I could do it – not even to escape a charging lion or buffalo.

Later I was to read a white settler tale of how if you were ‘treed’ by buffalo, they would lick any appendage you had not managed to haul high enough into the branches, and go on licking until your flesh was abraded to the bone. I’m glad I did not know that then. I already knew that buffalo were probably the most dangerous beasts in Africa, and it did not do to cross them- ever.

In the end we did not find lion. I was both disappointed and relieved. By then we had been out walking for several hours, and had only stopped for a tea break. The late morning sun burned down overhead, and we headed back to camp along the Luangwa River, me thinking mostly of breakfast. The members of our small party chatted amiably, enjoying the shimmering meanders of the river. We might have been walking in a city park for all the care we were taking. It was lucky, then, that we had White, the park ranger with us. It was he who drew our guide’s attention to the big bull hippo further along the track. The great beast was attempting to negotiate a shelving river bank, and having some difficulty. Several times he slithered half way down, but could not bring himself to take the final plunge.

The guide said it was most unusual to see a hippo out of the river so late in the day. They liked to be back in the river before sun-up, this after the night spent foraging for grass. He was clearly upset, but we were still some way off, so we stood and watched. Some of us were even laughing at the hippo’s dilemma. The bank was simply too steep. His huge bulk gleamed an angry red under the sun.

Then someone must have laughed too loudly, for suddenly the bull gave up trying to slide into the river. With a bellow he swung towards us and came charging down the path. While White took up a position behind a thorn bush, the guide urged us to move several hundred yards back along the path, across an old lagoon to where a fisherman’s big dug-out had been beached. We were to stand behind the dug-out until he came for us.

We did not need to be told twice. The boat looked reassuringly substantial, although it reminded me of the guide’s earlier tea break tale. We had stopped at a fisherman’s old campsite, and it was there that he told us how a fisherman had recently been mangled to death by a hippo. As we reached the dug-out I vaguely wondered if this boat had belonged to the poor man.

Meanwhile the ranger and the guide, held their position behind the thorn bush, and began to clap very loudly.

For too many seconds the bull came on. The ranger had his rifle at the ready. The guide kept clapping. Then at the last moment, the hippo ran out of steam and veered off into the undergrowth. There were sighs of relief all round. When the guide came to round us up, he informed us that White had been more than ready to, as he put it, part the bull from his brains, but they were nonetheless glad that this had not been necessary. Apart from being scared, the incident made me uncomfortable. I saw then that safari-going had its responsibilities, and was not simply an exciting jaunt. If White had been forced to shoot the hippo it would have been because we were intruding at a moment when the bull saw himself at great disadvantage. Who could blame him for charging?

The hippo when first sighted. You can just spot him under the tree on the right. Thereafter, I was running not snapping.

The dug-out refuge point, and White leading us back to the path, the hippo now vanished from sight.

Watching more peaceful hippo near our camp.

Back in camp it was of course a case of ‘travellers’ tales’. We could sit around over a late breakfast, talking of all the things we had seen that morning, and especially of our near miss with one very angry hippo. At such times, and as so often happened in Zambia, life did not seem altogether real.

The dining room at Tena Tena camp, beside the river and under a rain tree

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge