Word: angeli
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...laibon has been chased by lions many times. The worst attack came one evening when he was walking to another enk'ang to see his girlfriend. (The visitor savored the idea of a witch doctor going to pick up his girlfriend for a date.) The lion stalked and menaced him for a long distance, the laibon jabbing with his spear, the lion never quite attacking...
...time to begin the six-hour drive from Nairobi to Moses' enk'ang (small village) in the Loita Hills. The Land Cruiser travels for three hours over paved road to the dusty frontier town of Narok, then follows a rutted washboard road across an empty and chokingly dusty plain until it shifts into four-wheel drive and begins the slow climb up into the hills. It is lovely in the hills. They look somewhat like the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. Part of their beauty is their pristine remoteness. One rarely encounters a white man there...
...visitor came first to the enk'ang of Moses' older brother Joseph, who, surrounded by children and dogs and friends, strode out from the boma -- a tall thorn-and-cedar enclosure, the feudal African fortress against lions and leopards -- to meet him. Joseph was smaller and more delicately boned than Moses. He had the fine, intelligent head of a Talmudic scholar, the visitor decided, an Ethiopian head, a fastidious head, given to complex distinctions. Joseph and the visitor set out in the evening light to walk across the hills to Moses' boma. Joseph wore a handsome red blanket hung over...
Sometimes it seems that there are no straight lines in Africa or that Africa at any rate resists them. Things curve and undulate: the landscape, the rivers, the gaits of the animals, the design of the enk'ang, the trajectory of the spear (although the spear itself is straight). Logic is also curved. At the same time, everything in Africa seems sharp and pointed, given to punctures and ripping. It is a land of teeth and thorns. The whistling- thorn acacia has spikes that can penetrate a six-ply tire...
...where Moses and his family kept their goats at night was covered with a grid of heavy wire. When a visitor wondered about it, Moses explained, "Leopard comes at night to take the goat." Around every Masai enk'ang is built a sturdy fence of thorn and cedar to keep the lions out. One day, walking in the forest, Moses shouldered an enormous slab of cedar to add to his boma. "The lion makes me do a lot of work," he remarked. Sometimes the barricades do not hold, and the Masai wake to the bawl and crashing of cattle...