The Shadow of the Sun

The Cobra’s Heart

This mood of elation quickly dissipated in the fact of the realities and riddles of the journey. The first, most important question was, which way should we go? For when we emerged onto the great plain, what was heretofore a single broad trail suddenly forked into several identical-looking dirt paths, all leading in entirely different directions. And no guidepost, sign, or arrow in sight. The plain smooth as a tabletop, overgrown with tall grasses, no mountains or rivers, no natural orientation points of any kind, only this unending, increasingly unreadable, tangled net of trails.

There weren’t even any intersections, but every few kilometers, sometimes every few hundred meters, more and more radiating tentacles, coils, and knots, from which secondary offshoots of the same kind branched out chaotically this way and that.

I asked Leo what he thought we should do, but he just looked about uncertainly and answered my question with an identical one. We drove on randomly, choosing roads that seemed to head west (and therefore toward Lake Victoria), but whichever the road, suddenly, after several kilometers and for no apparent reason, it would begin to turn in some unknown direction. Utterly confused, I would stop the car, wondering, now where? It was an especially urgent question, since we had neither a detailed map nor even a compass.

Soon, a new difficulty developed, for noontime arrived, and with it the hours of the greatest heat, when the world sinks into insensibility and silence. Animals seek shelter in the shade of trees. But the herds of buffalo have nowhere to hide. They are too large, too numerous. Each might be a thousand strong. Such a herd, in the hour of the greatest heat, simply grows motionless, dead still. It so happens that one has frozen this way precisely on the road along which we want to drive. We approach. Before us stand a thousand dark, granitelike statues, firmly set on the ground, as if petrified.

A mighty force slumbers in the herd, mighty and — should it explode anywhere near us — deadly. It is the force of a mountain avalanche, only inflamed, frenzied, driven by foaming blood. The zoologist Bernhard Grzimek tells of flying a small plane over the Serengeti and observing for months on end the behavior of buffalo. A lone buffalo didn’t react at all to the whir of the descending plane: it calmly continued grazing. When Grzimek flew over a large herd, however, it was different. It sufficed for there to be among them a single overly sensitive one, a hysteric, a hothouse flower, who at the sound of the engine would start to thrash around waiting to flee. The entire herd would immediately panic and, in terror, begin to move.

And here is just such a herd. What should we do? Stop and stand? For how long? Turn around? It’s too late for that; I am afraid to turn around, for they might rush us. They are fantastically swift, stubborn, and persistent animals. I make a sign of the cross and slowly, slowly, in first gear, the clutch only half engaged, drive into the herd. It is enormous, stretching almost to the horizon. I observe the bulls, who are at the head. Those who are standing in the path of the car begin drowsily, sluggishly to step aside so that the car can pass. They do not move even a centimeter farther than is absolutely necessary, and still the Land Rover is constantly scraping against their sides. I am drenched in sweat as we drive through this minefield. Out of the corner of my eye I look at Leo. His eyes are shut. One meter after another, meter by meter. The herd is silent. Immobile. Hundreds of pairs of dark, bulging eyes in massive heads, filmy, dull, expressionless. The passage lasts a long time, a crossing seemingly without end, but at last we emerge on the other shore — the herd is now behind us, its deep, dark stain against the green surface of the Serengeti growing smaller and smaller.

The more time passed, the farther we drove, circling and straying, the more anxious I became. We had not encountered any people since morning. We had also not come upon either a larger road or any kind of signpost. The heat was terrifying, and it intensified with every minute, as if the road we were on, and all others as well, led directly toward the sun, and as we drove we were inexorably approaching the moment we would be consumed by fire, like offerings laid at its altar. The burning air started to quiver and undulate. Everything was becoming fluid, each view blurred and washed out as in a film left running out-of-focus. The horizon receded and smudged, as if subject to the oceanic law of ebb and flow. The dusty gray parasols of the acacias swayed rhythmically and moved about — as if some confused madmen were tossing them here and there, at a loss for anything better to do.

But the worst by far was that the tangled net of roads that had held us in its treacherous and suffocating grip for several hours now itself twitched and began to move. I could see that the web, the entire intricate geometry, which admittedly I had not been able to decipher but which nonetheless was a kind of constant, a fixed element upon the surface of the savannah, was now thrashing about and drifting. Where was it drifting to? Where was it pulling us, entwined in its coils? We were all being swept somewhere, Leo, the car and I, the roads, the savannah, the buffalo, and the sun, toward some unknown, shining, white-hot space.

Suddenly, the engine stopped and the car came to an abrupt halt. Leo, seeing that something was wrong with me, had turned off the ignition. “Give it to me,” he said. “I’ll drive.” We continued this way until the heat diminished, and it was then that we spotted two African huts in the far distance. We drove up. They were empty, with no doors or windows. There were some wooden bunks inside. The houses clearly did not belong to anyone, and were simply intended for travelers who happened by.

I don’t know how I found myself on one of the bunks. I was half dead. My head was pounding from the sun. To overcome drowsiness, I lit a cigarette. It didn’t taste good. I wanted to put it out, and when I looked at my hand, which was reaching instinctively for the ground, I saw that I was about to extinguish the cigarette on the head of a snake lying under the bed.

I froze. Froze to such a degree that instead of quickly pulling back my hand, I left it suspended, cigarette burning, over the snake’s head. Slowly, the reality of my position dawned on me: I was the prisoner of a deadly reptile. I knew one thing for certain: I could not move a muscle, because then the snake would attack. It was an Egyptian cobra, yellowish gray, neatly coiled on the floor. Its venom brings death quickly, and in our situtation — with no medicines, and the nearest hospital probably a day’s driving away — death would be inevitable. It was possible that at that very moment the cobra was in a state of light catalepsy (a condition of numbness and lethargy apparently typical of these reptiles), because it did not stir. My God, what should I do? I thought feverishly, by now completely wide awake.

“Leo,” I whispered loudly. “Leo, a snake!”

Leo had been in the car, getting our luggage out. We stared at each other silently, not knowing how to proceed. Yet time was running out: Were the cobra to awaken, it would probably attack instantly. Because we had no weapons of any kind, not even a machete, we decided that Leo would get a metal canister from the car and with it we would try to crush the cobra. It was a risky plan, but it was all we could come up with. We had to do something. Our inaction was giving the snake an advantage.

The canisters, from old British army supplies, were large, with sharp, protruding edges. Leo, who was a powerful man, grabbed one and started to creep toward the hut. The cobra was still just lying there, motionless. Leo, grasping the canister by its handles, lifted it up and waited. He was calculating, positioning himself, aiming. I lay still as stone on the bunk, tense, ready. And then suddenly, in a split second, Leo, holding the canister before him, threw his entire weight upon the snake. At which moment I too fell with my whole body on top of him. In these seconds, our lives hung in the balance — we knew this. Actually, we only thought of it later, for the instant the canister, Leo, and I came down on top of the snake, the interior of the hut exploded.

I never suspected there could be so much power within a single creature. Such terrifying, monstrous, cosmic power. I had assumed that the canister’s edge would easily cut through the snake — nothing of the kind! I now saw we had beneath us not a snake, but a throbbing, vibrating steel spring, impossible to either break or crush. The cobra was thrashing and pounding the ground with such demented fury that the hut’s interior grew dark from the dust. Under the powerful blows of its tail, the clay floor was crumbling and scattering, blinding us with clouds of debris. At one point it suddenly occurred to me with horror that we wouldn’t manage, that the reptile would slip out from under us and, in pain, wounded, enraged, would start to bite us. I pressed down even harder on my friend. He was groaning, his chest crushed against the canister, unable to breathe.

Finally, but this took a long time, an eternity, the cobra’s blows started to lose their impetus, vigor, frequency. “Look,” Leo said. “Blood.” Indeed, into a crevice along the floor, which now resembled a shattered clay dish, a narrow trickle of blood was slowly seeping. The cobra was weakening, and the vibrations of the canister, which we felt the whole time and by means of which the snake signaled us about her pain and her hatred, vibrations that terrified and panicked us, were also diminishing. But now, when it was all over, when Leo and I rose and the dust began to settle and thin out and I gazed down again at the narrow ribbon of blood being quickly absorbed, instead of satisfaction and joy I felt an emptiness inside, and something else as well: I felt sad that that heart, which inhabited the very pit of hell we had all shared through a bizarre coincidence only a moment ago, that that heart had stopped beating.

The next day we stumbled upon a wide, rust-colored track that, in a wide arc, circumscribed Lake Victoria. Driving several hundred kilometers through a green, luxuriant, fertile Africa, we reached the Ugandan border. It wasn’t really a border. A simple shed stood by the side of the road, with the sign “Uganda” burned out on a wooden board above the door. The shed was empty and shuttered. The kinds of borders for which blood is spilled were still to come into being.

We drove on. Night had already fallen. Everything that in Europe is called dusk and evening here lasts only a few minutes, if it exists at all. It is daytime, and then night, as if someone has turned off the sun’s generator with one flip of the switch. All at once, all is black. In one instant we are inside the night’s darkest core. If this change surprises you as you are walking through the bush, you must stop immediately: you can see nothing, as if somebody has unexpectedly pulled a sack over your head. You become disoriented, you don’t know where you are. In such darkness people converse without seeing one another. They might call out to one another, not realizing they are standing side by side. The darkness separates people, and thereby intensifies all the more their desire to be together, in a group, in a community.

The first hours of the night are the most social time in Africa. No one wants to be alone then. Being alone? That’s misfortune, perdition! Children don’t go to sleep early here. We enter the land of dreams together — as a family, a clan, a village.

We drove through an already sleeping Uganda, invisible behind the curtain of night. Somewhere nearby must have been Lake Victoria, somewhere the kingdoms of Ankole and Toro, the pastures of Mubende, Murchison Falls. All this surrounded by a night black as soot. A night full of silence. The car’s headlights pierced the darkness, and in their glow whirled a frenzied swarm of little flies, beetles, and mosquitoes, which appeared as if out of nowhere, for a fraction of a second played out before our eyes their role of a lifetime — the insect’s demonic dance — before perishing, splattered mercilessly upon the windshield of the speeding car.

Every now and then an oasis of light appeared in the undifferentiated blackness — a roadside shack lit up colorfully as though at a fair, glittering from afar: an Indian shop, a duka. Above the mounds of biscuits, tea bags, cigarettes, and matches, over the cans of sardines and the sticks of butter, we could make out, illuminated by a fluorescent lamp, the head of the proprietor, who sat motionless, waiting with patience and hope for late clients. The glow of these shops, which seemed to appear and disappear as if at our command, lit for us, like solitary lampposts on an empty street, the whole road to Kampala.

Kampala was readying for celebration. In several days, on October 9, Uganda was to receive its independence. The complicated deals and maneuvers continued up to the very last minute. Everything about the internal politics of Africa’s states is intricate and entangled. This stems directly from the fact that European colonialists, dividing Africa among themselves under Bismarck’s leadership during the Berlin conference, crammed the approximately ten thousand kingdoms, federations, and stateless but independent tribal associations that existed on this continent in the middle of the nineteenth century within the borders of barely forty colonies. Meantime, many of these kingdoms and tribal groups shared a long history of conflict and wars. And here, without being asked their opinion on the matter, they suddenly found themselves within one and the same colony, subject to the same (and foreign) authority, the same laws.

Now, with decolonization, the old interethnic relationships, which European rule only froze or simply ignored, suddenly sprang back to life and were becoming relevant again. The chance for liberty appeared, yes, but liberty with a proviso: that yesterday’s opponents and enemies form one nation and become its joint managers, patriots, and defenders. The former European colonial capitals and the leaders of Africa’s independence movements adopted the principle that if bloody internal conflicts erupted within a given colony, that territory would not become free.

The process of decolonization was to occur through what were stipulated as constitutional methods, at a round table, without great political dramas, ensuring the preservation of that which was most important: the uninterrupted flow of goods and riches between Africa and Europe.

The circumstances under which the leap to the kingdom of liberty was to be accomplished presented many Africans with a difficult choice. Colliding within them were two sets of considerations, two loyalties, in painful, almost insoluble conflict. On the one hand lay the deeply encoded remembrance of the history of one’s clan and people, of the allies one could turn to in times of need and of the enemies one had to despise, and on the other hand was the awareness that one was supposed to be entering the community of independent, modern societies, a precondition of which was the renunciation of all ethnic egoism and blindness.

It is this very problem that existed in Uganda. As defined by its current borders, it was a young country, barely several decades old. But its territory encompassed parts of four ancient kingdoms: Ankole, Buganda, Bunyoro, and Toro. The history of their mutual animosities and conflicts was as colorful and rich as anything between the Celts and the Saxons, or the Montagues and the Capulets.

Preeminent among them was the kingdom of Buganda, whose capital, Mengo, made up one of Kampala’s neighborhoods. Mengo is also the name of the hill upon which the royal palace stands. For Kampala, a city of extraordinary beauty, full of flowers, palm trees, mango trees, and poinsettia, is laid out across seven gentle green hills, several of which descend directly to the lake.

Once, royal palaces kept springing up on these hills, one by one: when a king died, his residence was abandoned and a new one was built on the next hilltop. The object was to not disturb that ongoing rule of the deceased, which continued, albeit from the other world. Thus the entire dynasty held power at once, with the actual living king as its guardian, its temporary representative.

In 1960, two years prior to liberation, people who did not consider themselves subject to the king of Buganda formed the UPC party (Uganda People’s Congress), which won the first elections. At its head stood a young civil servant, Milton Obote; I met him while he was still in Dar es Salaam.

The journalists who were expected in Kampala were to live in the barracks of an old hospital, situated slightly outside of town (the new one, a gift from Queen Elizabeth, was awaiting its dedication). We were the first to arrive; the barracks, white and clean, were still empty. In the main building, I was handed the room key. Leo was driving north to see Murchison Falls. I envied him, but had to stay behind to gather some material for my story. I found my building, which stood at some remove, on a slope amid luxuriant cinnamon and tamarind trees. The entrance to the room was at the end of a long corridor. I walked in, set down my bag and suitcase, closed the door. And at that moment I noticed that the bed, table, and chest of drawers were rising, and high up, beneath the ceiling, starting to whirl faster and faster.

I lost consciousness.