The Shadow of the Sun

Inside the Mountain of Ice

When I opened my eyes, I saw a large white screen, and against its brightness the face of a black girl. Her eyes observed me for a moment, then vanished together with the rest of her face. A moment later the head of an Indian appeared on the screen. He must have leaned over me, for suddenly I saw him in close-up, as if magnified many times over.

“Thank God, you’re alive,” I heard. “But you’re sick. You have malaria. Cerebral malaria.”

I came to instantly. I wanted to sit up, but felt that I didn’t have the strength to, that I was paralyzed. Cerebral malaria is the terror of tropical Africa. Once, it was inevitably fatal. Even now it is dangerous, and frequently still deadly. Driving here, we passed near Arusha a cemetery of its victims, a vestige of the epidemic that had passed that way several years ago.

I tried to look around. The white screen above me was the ceiling of the room in which I was lying. I was in the just-opened Mulago Hospital, one of its first patients. The girl was a nurse called Dora, and the Indian was a doctor, Patel. They told me that an ambulance called by Leo had brought me here the day before. Leo had gone to the north, seen Murchison Falls, and three days later returned to Kampala. He walked into my room and saw me lying there unconscious. He ran to the reception desk for help, but it was Uganda’s independence day, the entire town was dancing, singing, swimming in beer and palm wine, and poor Leo didn’t know what to do. Finally he drove to the hospital himself and arranged for an ambulance. And that is how I found myself here, in a private room, in which everything still smelled of freshness, peace, and order.

The first signal of an imminent malaria attack is a feeling of anxiety, which comes on suddenly and for no clear reason. Something has happened to you, something bad. If you believe in spirits, you know what it is: someone has pronounced a curse, and an evil spirit has entered you, disabling you and rooting you to the ground. Hence the dullness, the weakness, the heaviness that comes over you. Everything is irritating. First and foremost, the light; you hate the light. And others are irritating — their loud voices, their revolting smell, their rough touch.

But you don’t have a lot of time for these repugnances and loathings. For the attack arrives quickly, sometimes quite abruptly, with few preliminaries. It is a sudden, violent onset of cold. A polar, arctic cold. Someone has taken you, naked, toasted in the hellish heat of the Sahel and the Sahara, and thrown you straight into the icy highlands of Greenland or Spitsbergen, amid the snows, winds, and blizzards. What a shock! You feel the cold in a split second, a terrifying, piercing, ghastly cold. You begin to tremble, to quake, to thrash about. You immediately recognize, however, that this is not a trembling you are familiar with from earlier experiences — say, when you caught cold one winter in a frost; these tremors and convulsions tossing you around are of a kind that at any moment now will tear you to shreds. Trying to save yourself, you begin to beg for help.

What can bring relief? The only thing that really helps is if someone covers you. But not simply throws a blanket or quilt over you. This thing you are being covered with must crush you with its weight, squeeze you, flatten you. You dream of being pulverized. You desperately long for a steamroller to pass over you.

I once had a powerful malaria attack in a poor village, where there weren’t any heavy coverings. The villagers placed the lid from some kind of wooden chest on top of me and then patiently sat on it, waiting for the worst tremors to pass. The most wretched are those who have a malaria attack and there is nothing to wrap them in. You can see them by the roadsides, in the bush, or in the clay huts, lying semicomatose on the ground, drenched in sweat, confused, their bodies rent by rhythmic waves of malarial convulsions. But even snuggled under a dozen blankets, jackets, and coats, your teeth chatter and you moan with pain, because you sense that this cold does not come from without — it’s forty degrees Celsius out there! — but that it’s within, inside you, that these Greenlands and Spitsbergens are in you, that all those floes, sheets, and mountains of ice are advancing through your veins, muscles, and bones. Perhaps this thought would fill you with fear — were you able to summon the strength to feel anything at all. But the thought occurs just as the peak of the attack, after several hours, is gradually subsiding, and you start a helpless descent into a state of extreme exhaustion and weakness.

The malaria attack is not merely painful, but like every pain also a mystical experience. We enter a realm about which a moment ago we knew nothing, though it now turns out that it had existed alongside us all the while, finally capturing and incorporating us: we discover within ourselves icy crevasses, chasms, and abysses, whose presence fills us with suffering and fear. But this moment of discovery, too, passes, the spirits desert us, depart, and disappear, and that which remains, under the mountain of the most bizarre coverings, is truly pitiful.

A man right after a strong attack of malaria is a human rag. He lies in a puddle of sweat, he is still feverish, and he can move neither hand nor foot. Everything hurts; he is dizzy and nauseous. He is exhausted, weak, limp. Carried by someone else, he gives the impression of having no bones or muscles. And many days must pass before he can get up on his feet again.

Each year in Africa malaria afflicts tens of millions of people, and in those areas where it is most prevalent — in wet, low-lying, marshy regions — it kills one child out of three. There are many types of malaria; some, the gentle ones, you should be able to recover from as you would from the flu. But here, even those can lay waste whoever succumbs to them. First, because in this murderous climate one endures with difficulty even the slightest indisposition; second, because Africans are often malnourished, attenuated, hungry. Time and again you encounter here drowsy, apathetic, benumbed people. They sit or lie for hours on end on the streets, by the roadsides, doing nothing. You speak to them and they do not hear you; you look at them and have the impression that they do not see you. It is unclear if they are ignoring you, if these are just idle lazybones and do-nothings, or if they are being ravaged by a malaria that is slowly and inexorably killing them. You do not know how to behave toward them, or what to think.

I lay for two weeks in the Mulago Hospital. The attacks recurred, but each one less intense and exhausting than the preceding. I got countless injections. Dr. Patel came every day, examined me, told me that when I was better he would introduce me to his family. He has a wealthy family, owners of large stores in Kampala and in the provinces. They were able to educate him in England, and he received his medical degree in London. How did his ancestors come to find themselves in Uganda? At the end of the nineteenth century, his grandfather and thousands of other young Indians were brought by the English to eastern Africa to build the railway line from Mombasa to Kampala. It was a new phase of colonial expansion: the conquest and subjugation of the continent’s interior. If you look closely at old maps of Africa, you will notice a peculiarity: inscribed along the coastlines are dozens, hundreds of names of ports, cities, and settlements, whereas the rest, a vast 99 percent of Africa’s surface, is a blank, essentially virgin area, only sparsely marked here and there.

The Europeans clung to the coasts, to their ports, eating houses, and ships, reluctantly and only sporadically making incursions into the interior. They were hampered by the lack of roads, fearful of hostile tribes and tropical diseases — malaria, sleeping sickness, yellow fever, leprosy. And although they inhabited the coasts for more than four centuries, they did so in a spirit of impermanence, with a narrow-minded goal of quick profits and easy spoils. Their ports were really only leeches on the body of Africa, points of export for slaves, gold, and ivory. Their goal: to carry away everything, and at the lowest possible price. Consequently, many of these European beachheads resembled the poorest sections of old Liverpool or Lisbon. In the course of four hundred years in Luanda, the Portuguese did not dig a single well for potable water, or illuminate the streets with lanterns.

The construction of the railway line to Kampala was the symbol of a new, more paternalistic approach to Africa on the part of the colonial powers, especially London and Paris. With the division of Africa among the European states already securely accomplished, they could turn their attentions to investing in those parts of their colonies whose rich and fertile soils held the promise of huge profits from coffee, tea, cotton, and pineapple plantations, or, in other places, from diamond, gold, or copper mines. But there were no means of transport. The old way — porters carrying everything on their heads — no longer sufficed. Roads, railway lines, and bridges had to be built. Yes, but who would do this? They could not bring in white workers: the white man was master here, he could not do physical labor. Initially, the local African worker was also out of the question: he simply did not exist. It was impossible to induce the local population to work for wages, because they didn’t yet understand the concept of money (for centuries, trade here was based on barter, and one paid for slaves, for example, with firearms, lumps of salt, calico fabrics).

With time, the British introduced a system of forced labor: the tribal chief had to supply a given number of people to work for free. They were placed in camps. Large concentrations of these gulags indicated places where colonialism had settled for good. Before this occurred, however, other quick alternatives had to be found. One of them was to import to eastern Africa cheap labor from another British colony: India. In this way Dr. Patel’s grandfather found himself first in Kenya, and then in Uganda, where he later settled permanently.

During one of his visits, the doctor told me how in the course of the railroad’s construction, when the tracks began to draw away from the shores of the Indian Ocean and enter the vast territories covered with dense bush, terror began spreading among the Hindu workers: lions had started to attack them.

A lion in his prime does not like to hunt humans. He has his own predatory customs, his favorite tastes and gustatory preferences. He loves the meat of antelope and zebra. He also likes giraffe, although they are difficult to hunt, being so tall and large. And he doesn’t turn his nose up at beef, which is why at night shepherds gather their herds within enclosures built in the bush out of thorny branches. But even such a fence is not always an effective barrier, for the lion is a superb jumper and can soar over the goma, as they call it, or just as adroitly crawl under it.

Lions hunt at night, usually in a pride, organizing approaches and ambushes. Immediately before a hunt, a division of roles takes place. There are those who are in charge of driving the prey, directing it toward the jaws of the executioners. The lionesses are the most active, and it is they who attack most frequently. The males are the first to feast: they slurp the freshest blood, swallow the most tender morsels, lick up the fatty marrow.

The daytime hours are spent digesting and sleeping. The lions lie drowsily in the shade of the acacias. If one doesn’t irritate them, they will not attack. Even if one approaches them, they will get up and walk farther away. This is a risky maneuver, however, for a predator like this can execute a leap in a split second. Once, on the drive across the Serengeti, we got a flat tire. Instinctively I jumped out of the car to change it, and suddenly realized that around us in the tall grass, next to the bloody shreds of an antelope, lay several lionesses. They watched us but didn’t move. Leo and I sat shut in the car, waiting, wondering what they would do. After a quarter of an hour they rose and, tawny, shapely, beautiful, calmly ambled off into the bush.

Lions going forth to hunt announce this with a mighty roar that carries over the entire savannah. The sound frightens, panics the other animals. Only elephants are oblivious to these battle horns: elephants are not afraid of anyone. The others scatter wherever they can, or else stand, paralyzed with terror, waiting until the predator emerges from the darkness and delivers the mortal blow.

The lion is an efficient and formidable hunter for about twenty years. After that he begins to show his age. His muscles weaken, his speed diminishes, his leaps grow shorter. It is difficult for him to chase down a skittish antelope, a swift and vigilant zebra. He walks around hungry, a burden to the pride. It is a dangerous moment for him — the pride does not tolerate the weak and the ill, and he can fall prey to it himself. More and more frequently, he fears that the younger ones will bite him to death. He gradually detaches himself from the pride, lags behind, and finally is alone. He is tormented by hunger, but can no longer chase game. He has only one recourse: to hunt humans. Such a lion is commonly referred to here as a man-eater, and he terrorizes the local population. He lurks near streams where women go to do the wash, near paths along which children walk to school (being hungry, he now hunts by day as well). People are afraid to walk out of their huts, but he attacks them there, too. He is fearless, merciless, and still relatively strong.

It was lions like these, Dr. Patel continued, that started to attack the Indians building the railway line to Kampala. The men slept in cotton tents, which the predators easily slashed to pieces as they pulled out a steady supply of victims. No one protected these people, and they didn’t have their own guns. In any event, to battle a lion in the African darkness is a losing proposition. The doctor’s grandfather and his companions heard at night the screams of men being torn apart, for the lions feasted fearlessly, in close proximity to the tents, and then, sated, vanished into the gloom.

The doctor always found time for me and conversed willingly, for which I was grateful since even several days after an attack I would still be unable to read, the print blurring, the letters swimming about, as if lifted up and rocked on invisible waves.

“Have you seen a lot of elephants already?” he asked me once.

“Oh, hundreds,” I answered.

“And do you know,” he said, “that long ago, when the Portuguese first arrived here and started buying up ivory, they were struck by the fact that Africans didn’t have a great deal of it. Why, they wondered? After all, the tusks are very rugged and long-lasting, and if it is difficult for them to hunt down a live elephant for its ivory — they usually did this by chasing the animal into a hole they had dug earlier — then why don’t they collect the tusks from elephants that have already died, and whose corpses are doubtless lying somewhere? They suggested this idea to their African middlemen, but heard something astonishing by way of reply: there are no dead elephants, there are no elephant cemeteries. The Portuguese were intrigued. How do elephants die? Where are their remains? At issue were the tusks, the ivory, and the large sums of money they commanded.

“The manner in which elephants die was a secret Africans long guarded from the white man. The elephant is sacred, and so is his death. Everything sacred is surrounded by an impenetrable mystery. What caused the elephant to be so admired was that he had no enemies in the animal world. No other beast could conquer him. He could die (in the past) only a natural death. It occurred usually at dusk, when the elephants came to the water. They would stand at the edge of a lake or river, reach out far with their trunks, and drink. But the day would come when a tired old elephant could no longer raise his trunk, and to drink clear water he would have to walk farther and farther out into the lake. His legs would sink into the muck, deeper and deeper. The lake pulled him into its cavernous interior. He fought for a time, thrashed about, attempted to extricate himself from the bog and get back to the shore, but his own weight was so great, and the pull of the lake’s bottom so paralyzing, that finally the animal would lose its balance, fall, and vanish under the water forever.

“There,” Dr. Patel finished, “on the bottoms of our lakes, are the age-old elephant cemeteries.”