My Log 429 June 22 2014 Visit to Prague (1): Finding one’s way through the maze of travel possibilities in Europe these days is a daunting task

Prague (Photo credit: Moyan_Brenn DeLight (back again))

Prague (Photo credit: Moyan_Brenn DeLight (back again))

I decided the other day that an alternative way home from Dubrovnik, Croatia,  where I am until towards the end of July, would be not to fly from Dubrovnik to Frankfurt, as my return ticket indicates, but to visit Berlin, perhaps, or Prague, and then take a bus to Frankfurt to pick up the remaining part of my ticket to Montreal.

Full of enthusiasm for the idea --- a woman who had lived in Berlin and just returned from there was so enthusiastic about it in comparison to Paris, that she had me hooked right from the start --- and hoping, of course, to keep the costs down to the lowest possible --- a vain hope in this world of modern mass tourism, where all the prices seem to be directed to gouging the maximum out of every class of tourist ---- I spent a lot of time trying to find a cheapish bus route to Berlin, but unsuccessfully. It might be possible once I reached Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, but I had no wish to go to Zagreb, and in face of discouragements I decided to try the lowcost airlines that have proliferated over here, to see what they could offer. I came up on one called easyjet, whose advertised fare, direct from Dubrovnik to Berlin, was certainly cheap. So decided to book it. I booked it and was passed through the signing up to the point where I had to receive a confirmatory email message. But that email message never came.

So, the next day I tried to find my booking on the easyjet web site, only to discover that no such booking existed.  Some foulup, I decided, probably of my own doing, I imagined, and tried again, booked the whole thing through for July 14, the date I wanted, but with exactly the same result, no confirmation, and, on inquiry, no booking. 

Okay, so much for easyjet and their promises. It began to look as if this flight, so much cheaper than anything else available, did not really exist but was merely a come-on to inquiring passengers. I wrote them an email inquiring what might have happened to my booking, but by the time they replied I had decided a lowcost carrier did not seem to be the answer. All easyjet said, in their form letter, was that I should try again. By this time I had expunged lowcost airlines from my lexicon (at least for the moment) and was vigorously pursuing a lead given to my partner-in-crime by a woman friend, born and raised in Prague, who said she knew of  a bus service that was cheap, and that ran direct to and from Dubrovnik to Prague. Pressed for more information she gave us a Prague number, who told us the bus would take off on a Saturday evening at 7 o’clock, arriving the following afternoon in Prague. Now I mean no disrespect either to my partner-in-crime, Sheila, nor to her Prague-born friend when I say that, although I know they have both travelled the world extensively, I would not be prepared to make solid arrangements for my future based on what they might tell me, because they both have a way of adding to a sentence intended to suggest precision, some unexpected additional element that I might call one of vagueness.

For example, when I pressed Sheila whether she knew for certain that the bus would leave every Saturday evening at 7 pm, she said, “Yes, of course….” And after an almost indiscernible pause added, “I think so.”   To me, that “I think so” could have been translated into “no, I’m not really certain.”

So off we went to the bus station, a month ahead of our proposed departure date, where we would surely be able to confirm all this at the information office.

Some hope, compadre!  At the ticket station they said that no such a bus, if it existed, came to the bus station. 

Meantime --- I am sure you, dear reader, are on the edge of your seats at this exciting narrative --- I understood how fortunate I had been that easyjet were  somewhat sloppy on confirming reservations. I had described some of this to my son, Ben, who lives  in Austin, Texas, just as a matter of passing. He makes his living flying around the United States on various musical tours, and can keep you fascinated for hours with his tales of the misdeeds one encounters in the course of modern-day air travel.

“I would strongly advise you against skipping the Dubrovnik-Frankfurt part of your return ticket, because what happens when you don’t turn up for the first leg is that they immediately cancel the whole ticket,” he wrote. “The only way I would do that is if you can get assurances from the airline that you can do it ( and the assurance should come from a managerial person at the airline who will go on record with their policy, ie: get their name etc). I know you used to be able to do that, but after 9/11 everything changed.  Now they won't even allow you to take the first portion of a flight and get off before the second portion.”

So I regarded that as advice from the horse’s mouth, wrote to Croatia Airlines for confirmation, and, needless to say, they confirmed that Ben had it exactly right.

Since I had to take off from Dubrovnik in July I  abandoned my project to vary my way home. (Of course, you will be saying, he could have paid to have his ticket changed: but experience proves how costly this procedure is nowadays: the last ticket change I was involved in cost a cool $600 (which amounted to a third of the price of the whole return ticket) merely to change the date of the return leg, and the one before that was $400. They’ve got you at every turn these days.)

Indeed, the pitfalls lying in wait to trap an innocent traveller are manifold.

But by this time my partner-in-crime, Sheila, had the sound of Prague in her ears, the smell of Prague in her nostrils, and no matter how often I said I had abandoned my intention to move north, she acted henceforth as if our trip to Prague was a fait accompli.  Thus, in collaboration with her Prague-born friend, she discovered that the reason the bus information office had denied existence of the Saturday night departures direct to Prague was that the season had not yet started when we inquired, but it would start the very next weekend. Sheila’s friend told her this bus ran back and forth every weekend, and the fare was something around 66 (or maybe that was 56) Euros, which could have been either for the one-way tip or the return  fare.

So determined were we to go by this time that on the assumption we would catch that bus the following Saturday and return the following weekend, I negotiated a five night booking in a central, small Prague hotel, and (full of an uncertain hope) we turned up at the bus station with 200 Euros believing that Sheila’s friend had reserved us two seats, the fare for which  we must pay directly to the driver.

Once again there seemed to be no bus bearing Czech identifications, and only an intensive search by Sheila’s son discovered a smallish minibus, which, it seemed, we would be sharing with two handsome young women with two very small babies in command. They turned out to be Czech girls, one of whom spoke English, and one German. They told us that since the Czech language is very similar to Croatian, they were able to understand the locals easily, my first of many surprises on this trip. Their children turned out to be mercifully well behaved, but the baby around one year of age from time to time exercised his vocal chords vigorously, to such an extent that I suggested to his mother she should put him into training for an opera career, so regularly did he hit the highest of screaming notes. When they left the bus somewhat short of the terminal in Brno, they stood waving and waving to us as our bus pulled away. Perhaps in recognition of our forbearance towards the children: they couldn't have known that between us we had raised seven children, and were accustomed to the squawking and howling of babies.

So, we took our seats, pulled out of Dubrovnik headed north under the command of a driver wearing t-shirt and shorts with a few words of English, giving the whole expedition, I thought, rather the appearance of a freelance, seat-of-your-pants operation, which, in fact, it turned out not to be. The minibus was operated by an outfit here called Tourbus, a well-established line whose prices are known to be lower than those charged by some of the Europe-wide lines that also operate.

We did not appear to go through the Alps, but when once daylight arrived we were in a countryside that appeared to be extremely well-tended, with cultivated fields surrounded by belts of trees for windbreaks, bearing a wide range of crops --- grapes, hops, hay, and many other things that neither of us could identify. We could not be sure what country we were in. At first, when still in the former Yugoslavia, some attention was paid to our passports, but I never remember the driver after collecting them, showing them to anyone. But once past what I imagined to be Slovenia --- formerly part of Yugoslavia, but now a member of the European Community --- no further inquiry was made for passports, and there was no further indication that either of us saw as we travelled on that we had actually passed into or out of, for example, Austria, or the Czech Republic. The thought did occur to me that Europe, after several hundred years of bitter wars, seemed to be in the process of doing away with these national distinctions; whereas in former Yugoslavia, they had fought the most brutal war of modern times (and the stupidest, in my opinion) with the intention of establishing borders just as their northern neighbours were abolishing theirs.  Such is modern Europe.
The driver seemed to be following his own route, once stopped to allow us to relieve ourselves in the early-morning countryside. Once when he was struggling for more English, and his Czech was falling on deaf ears, I put my hand on his shoulder and said "I have two words for you. Jaromir Jagr!"  His face creased in an immense smile, and he said something to the effect that Jagr had finally given up playing hockey, even in Czech Republic." He made gestures indicating how great Jagr was and added, "I play hockey. I play every week," or words to that effect. So from that moment we were friends with the driver.

For many miles as we drove through these meticulously-tended fields the arrangement seemed to be that farmhouses were gathered into small villages, rather than sitting at the end of the farmers’ fields, as is more customary in North America.  Those villages  looked prosperous, full of handsome houses, beautifully kept, painted in various pastel shades, homogeneous in nature with no brilliant colours to disturb the general patterns,  the reddish tiled roofs sloping to take care of winter snowfalls, the whole making a most pleasing spectacle, which indicated a population that has treated its lands with great care. Anyway, to make a long story short, after an overnight drive, in mid-morning we were deposited in Brno, about three hours’ drive south of Prague, to wait for four hours for the bus to Prague, making sure, our retiring driver told us, that we did not have to pay anything extra for the last part of the trip.

We had enough time to mooch through a nearby shopping mall, which contained a really impressive book store whose range of translations into Czech of every sort of book really astonished me. This must be, I decided, a highly literate nation.

In Prague we were deposited at the bus station, taken by taxi through a maze of small streets free of traffic jams, and set down before the hotel in which we had booked for five nights. Somewhere along the route of this saga of indirection and uncertainty, we had discovered that the return trip by this Tourbus company would be leaving the following Friday at noon, which enabled us to book a hotel with some degree of certainty that we would turn up at the appointed time. The Betlem Club Hotel, stands in Betlem square, which is graced by the Bethlehem Chapel, where Jan Hus, a follower of the Englishman,  John Wycliffe,  in 1402 denounced the corruption of the contemporary church, giving rise to much of the nation’s later religious experience. The hotel is one of the tens of thousands of four or five storey buildings, almost all of them heavily ornamented by modern standards,  that distinguish Prague from any other city I have ever seen, and is within walking distance of the many interesting attractions of the Old City, a section of Prague into which we plunged for the next four days.

Believe me, the journey to Prague was worth it, as I hope to prove in a later piece.

My Log 428 June 9 2014: Inconvenient indeed, those Indians! Thomas King’s remarkable book provides an unanswerable case against colonialism

Karl Bodmer: Indians hunting the bison. Maximilian Prince of Wied's Travels in the Interior of North America, during the years 1832–1834; published London 1843–1844. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill, 1885 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Novelist Thomas King’s remarkable book about his people, the indigenous of North America, was published two years ago, but somehow or other I never picked up on it until this last week, when, on vacation in Europe, I finally found time to read it. It is called The Inconvenient Indian, a slightly throw-away title that gives a clue to the humorous, ironical tone in which the book is written.

King has sub-titled his book A Curious Account of Native people in North America and again here the use of the word “curious” is rather ambiguous. Curious, in what way?

His early chapters --- curiously enough, as I thought while reading them --- contained long lists of Indians who had been actors in Hollywood movies, of non-Indians who had portrayed Indians in Hollywood movies, and various other things like that which to a serious-minded student of the history of these people all seemed slightly facetious.

Maybe it was King’s way of suggesting that  one shouldn’t be too solemn about these things, but the serious purpose appeared to be the emphasize that non-Indian people throughout North America had been schooled to see Indians as stereotypes, not as real, live people, but as constructs of someone’s entertainment sources (for example.)  This point was more than adequately made when he revealed that by 1883, when Buffalo Bill Cody started his famous Wild West show, the self-perception of North American indigenous people was already so degenerated, even among those who had led the resistance,  that many of the latter-day “Indian” heroes were lining up to join Cody’s show.  Before the 1880s were out, such leaders as Red Cloud had joined the circus, followed in 1885 by Sitting Bull, later the Metis leader Gabriel Dumont (1886), while heroes such as Chief Joseph and Geronimo had joined Col Frederick T. Cummins’s Life on the Plains exposition when it opened in New York in 1903.

“Whatever else these shows were,” comments King, “they were an intriguing alternative to being locked down on a reservation or sitting alone in a prison cell. Keep in mind, many of these individuals were considered dangerous by North America. After all the Battle of the Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee were still in the rear-view mirror, and at the turn of the century, no one was quite sure what might appear up ahead through the windshield.”

Allow me to draw attention to King’s  use of yet another ambiguous adjective:”intriguing.”   Like “inconvenient” and “curious” in his book’s title, these three words are used in an ambiguous sense, and since King is an expert novelist, we can assume his use of them in this way was deliberate.

Now any reasonably objective person who has examined the historical record of European colonialism, wherever it manifested itself, would surely have to agree with the following proposition:   wherever the colonialists landed, they wanted the land, and everywhere they took it.  That is what happened in Africa, Australia, New Zealand and throughout North and South America. And the differences between these places were merely ones of degree, all within the ambiance of their wanting and taking the land, and to hell with the consequences. Finding the lands in these places populated by peoples whom they considered inferior, they used every stratagem at their disposal, including the mind-blowing assumption that these lands were unoccupied, to justify what was, in effect, their theft of someone else’s property. It was fortunate for the colonialists that the indigenous people whom they found already in occupation did not think of the land and their ownership of it in the same, grasping, greedy way as did their invaders. In the words of a Cree hunter whom I interviewed in the 1970s, their concept of “ownership” was entirely different, all wrapped up with their subsistence on the land, along with that of the animals on whom they depended for their food. “Do you own the land?” I asked him, a question that was asked in the middle of a hurricane-like assault on his land by  invading Euro-Canadians.  “Well,” said Sam Blacksmith, who had lived his entire life in the northern Quebec bush as a hunter and trapper, “people tell us we own it. But in the end everybody dies, so nothing can be predicted.” Talk about ambiguity: one understands where Thomas King gets it from!

Around the 100-page mark, King gets serious, and I noted these two vigorous paragraphs:

“…for the (English) or (French)…. Indians were simply humans at an early point in the evolution of the species. They were savages with no understanding of orthodox theology, devoid of complex language, and lacking civilized manners. Barbarians, certainly, and quite possibly minions of the devil. But human beings, none the less. And as such, many colonists believed that Native people could be civilized and educated, believed that there was, within the Indians, the possibility for enlightenment.

“Extermination dominated the early contact period, assimilation the latter, until finally, in the nineteenth century, they came together in an amalgam of militarism and social theory that allowed North America to mount a series of benevolent assaults on Native people. Assaults facilitated by force of arms, deception and coercion, assaults that sought to dismantle Native culture with missionary zeal and humanitarian paternalism, and to replace it with something that Whites could recognize.”

The rest of Thomas King’s book is an eloquent filling-in of the details of these various assaults. In the following paragraphs he gives primacy to the warrior work of the Christians --- Jesuit, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Puritan, Baptist, Quakers, Franciscan and even Russian Orthodox --- all of them played their part in the conquest of North America. Bruce Trigger’s monumental historical masterpiece The Children of Aataentsic (1975), establishes beyond a doubt the efficacy with which these Christian groups --- in his case he was dealing with the Jesuits, and their impact on the Hurons --- as soon as they came in contact with indigenous Americans, completely undermined their belief systems, weakening them to such an extent within 20 years that, attacked by the Iroquois, they collapsed like a pack of cards, all their certainties about their lives having been demolished.

I have read a lot of the written record and I cannot say I found a single fact or opinion in King’s book with which I do not agree. In some places he seems to have been too soft in his denunciations. For example, at one point unless my memory betrays me, he says various efforts were made to turn Indians into farmers, and here I thought he could have been even tougher, more condemnatory than he was, because of the the historical record (read Sarah Carter’s studies of  Western Canadian history, particularly Lost Harvests  written in 1993.)  In that carefully researched book she shows that, having responded to the call to them to become farmers, indigenous people were then deliberately deprived of markets for their produce. In other words, the colonizers were determined that the indigenous people could never win, no matter what they did.

In this infamous tale King gives equal billing to the United States and Canada, the major difference being that in the United States military means were the major weapon of assault, in  Canada it was all done rather by legislation,  generation after generation  of legislation designed to deprive indigenous people of everything that meant anything to them --- rituals, beliefs, languages, and above all, their economies, especially those like that of the Ojibway of the Lake of the Woods area which were diversified and soundly based.  King’s indictment is severe, but it could have been even more severe, if proving the infamy of the attackers had been his primary object.

These are not serious criticisms of King’s book, which is beautifully written, entirely convincing, and a major weapon for public education on a subject that, somehow or other --- we cannot suppose this was accidental --- has somehow fallen between the cracks of our educational system.

My Log 427 June 1 2014: Matthiessen book The Tree Where Man Was Born, written half a century ago, is a wonderful wistful plea for a better world

tsetse fly which transmits sleeping sickness (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Peter Matthiessen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Julius Nyerere (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cover of Tree Where Man Was Born

It is a sign of the power of the late Peter Matthiessen’s books, and of his stature as a writer, that on his death, my second-hand bookshop in Montreal, The Word, one of the best I have encountered anywhere, could find only one of his books in their huge collection of the finest literature.

When I drew his death to their attention they put his book on his travels to the Antarctic in their window, and, having never read that one, I snapped it up.  A couple of days later the owner Adrian came at me on the street waving a large book by Matthiessen called The Tree Where Man Was Born, a beautiful book printed in 1972 by Dutton of New York, in which the writer recorded several trips he had made to the African continent, where he observed the wildlife and the human inhabitants with the same practised anthropological eye.

Along with the 100,000 words of Matthiessen’s text the book contains magnificent photos taken by Eliot Porter, who is given equal billing on the book’s title page.

I snapped up this book as well, and am just finished reading it. As usual Matthiessen’s prose is of such quality that one is constantly tempted to reproduce great quantities of it. But what amazed me more in this book is the depth of his knowledge of the wildlife of the relatively small area of Africa in which he travelled, and his profound knowledge of the history of each of the small groups of people --- often displaced people from some other area of the continent --- whom he encountered.

His journeyings took him down Kenya into the northern reaches of Tanzania, or Tanganyika, as it was known when he first visited it.  I remember clearly as a correspondent in London, being told by the Colonial secretary of the time that this large country was given its independence, Iain Macleod, that the decision was made “entirely because of Julius Nyerere.” It is true Nyerere was a sterling fellow, educated at Edinburgh university, but he was almost the only university graduate in the whole country, and I seem to remember that at the time of the handing over, the annual budget of Tanganyika was something  around 20 million pounds. Not much wonder that a few years later I was told by an amiable Canadian diplomat who had been our high commissioner there for some years, that “I am in favour of Julius Nyerere….of course nothing works in his country….but he deserves our support.”

Of course, Matthiessen was neither seeking, nor offering,  political insight, but was keen to investigate the actual conditions of the African tribesmen, their relations with their animals and land, and the extent to which the imposed ideas of Western-educated people were making life for them more or less impossible.

“In Tanzania,” he writes (remember, this book was published 52 years ago!), “ intensive agriculture is seen as the solution to malnutrition and unemployment, and a population increase is encouraged.But except in the highlands the red earths of East Africa are too poor to support permanent agriculture, and where they are fertile, the soils are soon impoverished by the plow, which lays them bare to cycles of fierce sun and leeching rain. In the wet season the ground is muck, and in the dry a hard-caked dusty stone. Wind and rain erode a soil that may have taken centuries to form, and there is desert. In Ethiopia, Madagascar and throughout East Africa one sees this fatal erosion of thin fragile lateritic soils; the rust red of the laterite comes to the surface of the African landscape like blood welling in scraped skin.”

This is so beautifully described one almost feels there is nothing more to be said.

But elsewhere in the book Matthiessen devotes a lot of time to observing elephants:

“I can watch elephants for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange such as mow grass with its toenails or draw the tusks from the rotted carcass of another elephant and and carry them off into the bush There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, an ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.”

Still Matthiessen appears to have almost given up hope that the elephant will survive:

“…even very honest governments may not be able to withstand political pressure to provide meat for the people….park revenues from meat and hides and tusks could be considerable, and this temptation may prove impossible to resist for the new governments….A stubborn fight for animal preservation in disregard of people and their famine-haunted future would only be the culminating failure of the western civilization that through its blind administration of vaccines and quinine has upset the ecologies of a whole continent… Thus wildlife must be treated in terms of resource management in this new Africa which includes, besides gazelles, a growing horde of tattered humans who squat for days and weeks and months and years on end, in a seeming trance, awaiting hope.”

The elephant problem is the reverse side of the problem of livestock. Matthiessen observes that in small numbers cattle were no threat to the African landscape, but with the coming of the white man, a conflict has emerged. “The Europeans saw livestock as a sign of promise in the heathen: what was good for the white in Europe was good for the black in Africa, and that was that.” Thus was undertaken a vast campaign of wholesale slaughter of wild game, in the hope of ridding the country of the fatal tsetse flies, a useless slaughter as it turns out because it has become known that the tsetse prefers warthog, giraffes and buffaloes, so that “the vast majority of victims died in vain.”

And then this passage: “Game control, tsetse control, fenced water points, poaching --- everywhere wild animals made way for creatures which even from the point of view of economics seem very much less efficient than themselves. The ancestors of the wild animals have been evolving for 70 million years; the modern species, three quarters of a million years old, form the last great population of wild animals left on earth. Over their long evolutionary course, they have adapted to the heat and rain, to poor soils and coarse vegetation, and because they had time to specialize, a dozen species can feed in the same area without competing; rhino, giraffe and gerenik are browsers of leaves and shrubs, while zebra, topi and wildebeest are grazers; buffalo, elephant, eland, impala, and most other antelope do both. Zebras eat standing hay, and wildebeest and kongonis half-grown grass, leaving the newest growth to the gazelles; the topi has a taste for the rank meadow grass that most other antelopes avoid…..all have water-conserving mechanisms that permit them to go without water for days at a time….Cattle by comparison must be brought to water every day or two, and waste coarse grasses used by the wild animals.” It struck me during the many years that, as a journalist, I spent fiddling around environmental issues, how little we know of how Nature works. And this book is evidence for that belief. 

In one passage he gives a catalogue of the equipment needed before anyone ventures out into the African bush in a motor vehicle. Surrounded by wild animals, many of which can be extremely dangerous, fear of breakdown is real: and it reminded me of a trip I took once between Hay River and Fort Smith, in the Northwest Territories, to deliver a small weekly newspaper published in the first of these two small towns. The owner of the truck (and publisher of the newspaper) we were travelling in across the empty 180 mile distance, needed a panoply of extra materials in case of breakdown. In the event, his tail pipe dropped off in the middle of the night, and in below minus 30 degree weather he had to get down with his supplies of mending wire, to fix the problem. In Africa, it was the dry, dusty land and the wildlife that demanded immense caution; in Canada, it was the cold we had to confront.

There is so much meat in this book, informationally speaking, that I feel I  am incapable of making a more measured judgment of it, informed as it is by the author’s profound knowledge, allied to his unique capacity to describe what he was observing. It is interesting that for all his respect for these pre-industrial people of Africa, Matthiessen also describes a profound admiration for the strange assortment of white adventurers, ecologists, wildlife enthusiasts, who were among the first to bring the outside world detailed descriptions of the needs and the joys of this unique continent. Matthiessen himself benefitted immensely from the help of many of these pioneering people and is unstinted in his praise of them, while not neglecting to point out the sometimes wild aspects of their view of their roles.

His last chapter is  wonderful, an account of travelling among two groups of almost extinct people, small people, who appear to have intermarried along the way with people coming into their district, but who, when Matthiessen encountered them, were living so fundamental a life that they did not even have real houses, but merely sheltered in times of rain under makeshift shelters that they erected. One of these peoples, called the Hadza, would appear to require, if they are to have a future, game-cropping arrangements of some kind. They were encouraged in this by a Swedish man living among them, Peter Enderlein, who would like to try game-ranching to support them. “But he has received little support for this scheme, or any other and for the moment must content himself with shooting the animals instead.” Meantime he spends most of his time supplying food for the impounded Hadza, who are not supposed to leave their settlement, much less revert to their old lives in the bush. Matthiessen got the impression the man was almost at the end of his tether, and was hardly surprised when, some months later he received a note from him saying: “It seems my time in Hadza Land has come to an end. I was recently called to a meeting in Mbulu to discuss my project but I found myself the witch in a medieval  witchhunt where the bonfire was built and the match already lighted.” He was accused of wanting to keep the Africans primitive and naked and turn them back to the bush, and various other accusations of an unsavoury kind, none of which was remotely true. Such people as he was trying to defend do not find favour with modern governments, either in Africa or elsewhere.

In the last two paragraphs Matthiessen records that the Hadza women were out gathering roots and tubers, and also the nut of the baobab tree which, “pounded on a stone and cooked a little, provides food for five months of the year. The still air of the hillside quakes with the pound of rock on rock, and in this place so distant from the world, the steady sound is an echo of the Stone Age.” Traditionally the baobab provided shelter, fibre thread,  honey and water, as well as material for baby rattles and drinking cups. But today young baobab are killed by fires, set by the strangers who clear the country for their herds and gardens “and the tree where man was born is dying out in Hadza Land.”

“Soon the young hunters, returning homeward, come in single file between the trees, skins black against black silhouetted thorn. One has an imbra (a marimba) and in wistful monotony, in hesitation step, the naked forms with their small bows pass one by one in a slow dance of childhood. The figures wind in and out among black thorn and tawny twilight grass and vanish. Once more as in a dream, like a band of the Old People, the small Gumba, who long ago went into hiding in the earth.”

Such is the writing of one of our great masters.

This is a book to be cherished by anyone.