Tales of guides, gods and volcanoes
‘How harsh and bitter that place felt to me, merely to think of it renews the fear’.
The Divine Comedy, Alighieri Dante.
The djinns in the volcano
I had taken a room on the rim of the sixth largest caldera in the world, a place so magical, so vast and strange and so full of spirits which rose and fell like djinns in the desert. Steam vents hissed and hummed and rasped. Clanging came from the geo-thermal derricks glinting red and white in the black rock sea, whose waves rose and fell as they do in oceans, but here they are statue still, mid break. The view was vast and it was not possible to take in the devil’s pit full twelve kilometres wide in one glance. Sleep that night was stolen from me as I lay beside the depths of earthly hell into which Stephen would take me at first light.
Stephen and Mini-Mouse
Dante, in the Divine Comedy, had had as his guides Virgil (the voice of reason), St Bernard of Clairvaux (the voice of mysticism), and Beatrice. I had Stephen and his new girl-friend, who was wearing Mini-Mouse bedroom slippers and was silent throughout. We stood on the rim in the half-light of dawn, where the trees no longer grew and worked our way down the five hundred metre cliff, through sage bush and through air spiced by plants. We walked wordless on and down, one behind the one ahead, and down onto the night black rocks, pitted, clinkered and sharp.
Venomous snakes
Nothing was stable, every rock moved under each step, groaning like bodies piled but not yet dead. Shoe soles were etched deep, hands cut. We clambered up 10 or 20 metre walls of clinker, unsmoothed by time. It’s a purgatorial mess down here, of dense lava flows some as old as time, some as recent as a hundred years. I had hoped to make for one of the steam vents further round from where we were, but this Stephen told me, was not possible. There were venomous snakes lurking and the vents too inaccessible.
‘The Place of Corpses’
There’d been a war here, in the 1800s he said, between tribes and bodies had been thrown from the rim to the floor where we sat. The spirits of these bodies were still alive. Perhaps I had heard some in the night? Did he believe this about the spirits, I asked him. “Oh certainly”, he said. Menengai means, ‘The Place of Corpses’.
He made me sit for we could not go on. His girl-friend was tired and her slippers torn. It was the longest walk she’d ever done. So we sat and he talked about his god who had made the world in only seven days. He talked of love and perfection in this harsh and unforgiving place, restless and not yet formed. He spoke of finite time and was bemused by my rationality. ‘Surely here is perfect?’ he asked, with the fervent eyes of the newly born.
Only that he knew God
I asked him for the names of plants and rocks and of other prosaic things but he knew them not, only that he knew God. This devil pit was too strange and fantastical a place to be converted to his brand of faith and wearied by his vision, I teased him with the banality of reason. ‘When Cain was expelled and went to an empty land, who became his mate for him to father another people?’ I asked. He said he would ask his pastor. He did not know.
Later with a cup of tea, I sat back on the verandah of my room gazing out in awe at this wonder, where 8,000 years ago an explosion so vast spewed over thirty cubic kilometres of the raw and fiery earth into the air. Yes, that’s correct. Thirty cubic kilometres of earth. With a force so violent and wretched that the chamber of the volcano was emptied and the walls fell in. Lava rivers flow from time to time, creating these enormous rivers of unformed stone, the last one being around a hundred years ago. As fantastical and strange as any place on earth, full of restless spirits searching for their loving gods, this is a mesmerising place.
