The tale of the man with the pink shoes
A climb up an equatorial volcano
There had been problems getting here - my driver Sammy who’d driven guests around Kenya for 11 years but never to the foot of this mountain, had trouble finding the unsigned mud track that would lead us to the gate. Locals had pointed down dead-end tracks in fields. We had trouble with the guards at the Park gate who were reluctant to let me in and a call had to be made to Nairobi.
‘Here’, was Mt Longonot, a classical conical shape of a dormant volcano rising in Kenya’s Rift Valley which was formed 26,000 years ago. It last exploded in the 1860s and although there have been detections of magma activity several kilometres below the park entrance, it was not expected that today, I would be returned to the dust from which I was made.
No map and no idea
I had no map. There was no information about where to go, nothing other than that there were wild animals roaming around the park, including short-tempered buffalo. The walk including the crater rim would total around 13kms under a proper equatorial sun with no shade. A generous wave of a park warden’s arm pointed the way. In essence it was up. The first 100 metres were easy, the track was wide and clear. And then it stopped as tracks so often do. Gullies, some 4 - 5 metres deep like wounds in the earth, had to be negotiated and animal tracks, disguised as the path, ran into dead ends deep in the bush. Every plant had prickles, or large thorns which stretched across the path to scratch my winter-white skin. Leaves were waxy or furry. There were flowers, but none that I knew.
It is both thrilling and unnerving being in an environment that is beyond all experience. Walking up equatorial volcanos was new to me and made a change from suburban woods on the fringes of London. As I began the walk upwards, noticing everything, all senses on high alert and already thirsty, I created stories of lost white men, of thirsting for days with broken limbs in some deeply eroded gully, of weird creatures and man attacking plants.
New pink shoes
As I daydreamed and walked, a young man startled me by coming out from behind a camphor bush wearing a well worn pink t-shirt and beautiful, new soft pink and expensive looking moccasins. The sort you might wear on polished floors in cities. I nodded at him as I passed in some form of salutation. He returned the nod, looked down at the ground and waited for me to pass. Then he began to follow me. I was not in the mood for conversation, as I was getting to a good bit about man-eating plants in the story in my head, so I walked on somewhat faster. And he did too. Step for step he matched me. Where my feet went, so did his. I walked faster, thanking myself for being as fit as I was. He walked faster too, step for step. I was all but running and so was he. Always the same distance behind me.
My imagination ran riot. Ryder Haggard’s, ‘She’, entered my head, unread for 50 years - I am following the footsteps of Leo into ‘the uncharted territory somewhere in Eastern Africa’ and a ‘savage’, Amahagger is following and pushing me towards ‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’, who is up there in the crater somewhere, with her maidens and perhaps Ustane. I am seeing myself, as I pant my way up into the thinning air, before the Pillars of Fire, becoming immortal. Still he follows me.
I am running now, and more than a little alarmed, so to calm myself from Haggard’s tales from a different time, I stop for a ‘Kodak moment’. He stops too, but has no camera. I ask what he wants. He says nothing in reply. He gives a lopsided smile and looks away. And so we continued to the top.
A lost world
There, a huge crater deep down, untouchable, inaccessible, lost to everything is encircled by crater walls so steep that descending down is impossible. Down in the caldron depths, trees are so densely packed that it would not be possible to walk between them. Down there somewhere is the entrance to another world. Pink shoes is standing five metres away. He does not catch my eye, but when I move off to the left on the crater path he moves too. Maybe there is a favourite cliff that he wishes to throw me off, maybe there is the tunnel into the mountain and he’ll be there to block my exit out, maybe there is the place of sacrifice, a little hidden from the path. Whatever, my heart beats fast and I jog the roller coaster path, up and down, up and down, dust powdering my legs red-brown.
Before the final very steep push towards the rim’s summit, I stopped and sat down. Pink shoes passed behind me and I braced for the attack. Needless to say it didn’t happen, which might spoil a good story but at least increased my chances of returning. He pulled himself up the granite paths made slippery and unsure by the beads of quartz that gathered under the soles of shoes. He was nimble and young and was soon lost from view. Finally alone, amidst the dust and heat with water rations diminishing, breath a little short from the altitude, I composed myself, removed all ridiculous fantasies from my head and concentrated on the final push to the summit.
The uncharted territory of East Africa’.
There, I watched crows and eagles lazily drifting in thermals, and saw the vast Lake Naivasha and the hectare after hectare of glass houses preparing roses for the European markets. I descended and was in another reverie when there was pounding behind me. Startled, for I had seen no one all day other than the man in pink shoes, I turned and there he was again. I was not aware that I had passed him. He was on a different track, but parallel to me, and I followed him with my eyes admiring the way the he deftly negotiated every ankle snapping obstacle. Then he disappeared behind a bush. One moment he was running, the next he was not there. The path ahead remained empty. There were no cries for help, no sudden jolt of pain wracking through the hazy air. Nothing. Not even a pair of dusty moccasin shoes neatly placed together under the grey leafed camphor bush. Nothing but me and the silence of a dormant volcano in ‘the uncharted territory of East Africa’.
