The animals stand motionless in gold-white grasses -- zebras and impala, Thomson's gazelles and Cape buffalo and hartebeests and waterbuck and giraffes, and wildebeests by the thousands, all fixed in art naif, in a smiting equatorial light. They stand in the shadowless clarity of creation.
Now across the immense African landscape, from the distant escarpment, a gray-purple rainstorm blows. It encroaches upon the sunlight, moving through the air like a dark idea. East Africa has a genius for such moments. Wildlife and landscape here have about them a force of melodrama and annunciation. They are the Book of Genesis enacted as an afternoon dream.
In Amboseli, under the snow-covered dome of Mount Kilimanjaro, a herd of elephants moves like a dense gray cloud, slow motion, in lumbering solidity: a mirage of floating boulders. Around them dust devils rise spontaneously out of the desert, little tornadoes that swirl up on the thermals and go jittering and rushing among the animals like evil spirits busy in the primal garden.
Later, in the sweet last light of the afternoon, a lion prowls in lion- colored grasses and vanishes into the perfect camouflage -- setting off for the hunt, alert, indolent and somehow abstracted, as cats are. A rhinoceros disappears: the eye loses it among gray boulders and thorn trees. The rhino becomes a boulder.
To the human eye, the animals so often seem mirages: now you see them, now you don't. Later, just after dusk, Abyssinian nightjars discover the magic wash of the headlight beams. The birds flit in and out of the barrels of light, like dolphins frisking before a boat's prow. The Land Cruiser jostles, in four-wheel drive, across black volcanic stones toward the camp, the driver steering by the distant light-speck of the cooking fire.
And then the African night, which, more than elsewhere, seems an abnegation of the conscious world. MMBA, "miles and miles of bloody Africa," and it all falls into black magic void.
The world stills, for the longest time. Then, at the edge of sleep, hyenas come to giggle and whoop. Peering from the tent flap, one catches in the shadows their sidelong criminal slouch. Their eyes shine like evil flashlight bulbs, a disembodied horror-movie yellow, phosphorescent, glowing like the children of the damned. In the morning, one finds their droppings: white dung, like a photographic negative. Hyenas not only eat the meat of animals but grind up and digest the bones. The hyenas' dung is white with the calcium of powdered bones.
Africa has its blinding clarities and its shadows. The clarities proclaim something primal, the first days of life. The shadows lie at the other extreme of time: in the premonition of last days, of extinction. Now you see the animals. Soon, perhaps, you won't.
Africa is comprehensive: great birth, great death, the beginning and the end. The themes are drawn, like the vivid, abstract hide of the zebra, in patterns of the absolute.
The first question to ask is whether the wildlife of Africa can survive.
The second question is this: If the wild animals of Africa vanish from the face of the earth, what, exactly, will have been lost?