IN THAT EARLY dusk of a bewildered age,
When God in scorn of his own workmanship
Violently shook his head at his primitive efforts,
An impatient wave snatched you away, O Africa,
From the bosom of the East,
And kept you breeding in a dense enclosure of niggardly light,
Guarded by giant trees...
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Serengeti Plain, Tanganyika Trust Territory, 1923
They walked eastward for many days in the endless plain, far from any sign of human presence.
Theodore could tell which part of Africa they had found themselves in, though he had never been there; his world-famous African trip for the National Museum of Natural History had taken him hundreds of miles to the north, in what was now the Colony of Kenya.
In the decade since that expedition, the Great War had not spared this most beautiful part of the world. It was here that over 200.000 Indian and South African troops had been diverted in the fruitless pursuit of an army of only about 18.000 (of which only 3000 Germans) under General von Lettow-Vorbeck, the Lion of Africa. An army that fought a guerrilla campaign for four years after having decisively beaten the initial British assault in the Battle of Tanga, where the Schutztruppe had found themselves outnumbered eight to one.
...
After several days, Charlie and Vaggie had visibly changed somewhat, no doubt as a result of their otherworldly bodies being exposed to Earth's air and to sunlight for the very first time.
The first change was in Charlie's hair: they grew an even brighter shade of gold, as if the African sun had imbued them with some of its brilliance. Her pearly white skin took a warmer tone, though light enough that it would not have been out of place in Scandinavia. Her bright red eyes slowly shifted to a bright blue.
Vaggie could only vaguely remember the body she once had, but it must had been not unlike her new appearance: brown-haired with sun-kissed skin and dark brown eyes.
They looked more human overall, as they became attuned to the environment of Earth.
And the more human Charlie looked, the more at ease the animals of the savannah were around her; because she's a Princess, of course she has the power to talk with cute critters!
She started to understand them, to hear the stories of the mighty herds, tens of thousand strong, that traversed the endless plains each year, with each changing of the seasons...
One morning, they saw mountains in the distance ahead, no doubt part of the eastern branch of the Rift Valley; mountains they had to cross to reach civilization and to find a railroad that would lead them to the Swahili Coast.
Upon seeing the sun rising from the mountains in the east, Charlie started to sing:
There's a land of promise ahead
Though now it's far away
Journey with all of our friends
To a place where we can stay
So leave all your worries behind
BECAUSE NEW LIFE AWAITS US
Fields that are green
Keep moving forward
Hard as it seems
A new road to Freedom
Let's follow the sun
On a trail to Hope
We've only begun
No matter how far we've gone
This trail keeps leading us on
In the end, we will see our destiny
As long as we believe
As long as we believe
THAT NEW LIFE AWAITS US
Fields that are green
Keep moving forward
Hard as it seems
A new road to Freedom
Let's follow the sun
On a trail to Hope
We've only begun
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Days later, they finally encountered the unmistakable sign that this vast land wasn't completely devoid of people...
...in the form of a steady, echoing sound.
...ngoro ngoo ngoro...
"What is that?" asked Charlie.
"A cowbell!" Having been a rancher, Theodore could not possibly mistake that sound for anything else.
And there she was; a humped cow, or East African Zebu.
"She's lost!" Charlie had started to talk with the massive beast, "Poor thing! We must find the others!"
"Sure, our priority is finding people..." said Vaggie, "...but I suppose we can help a stupid cow..."
...
And so the first human they encountered in the mortal realm was a grateful Maasai cowherd, name Naeku, who told them the way to reach his people's village in the crater.
"A crater?" asked Vaggie.
"You'll see" Naeku replied.
...
"It must be on the other side!" Charlie said as she run to the top of a hill.
"Charlie, wait!" Vaggie couldn't keep up with her girlfriend.
Charlie reached the top of the hill and-
It wasn't a hill.
She was at the top of a six hundred meter high cliff.
Seventeen kilometers ahead of her, there was another, equally immense cliff.
A vast, flat expanse, like the world's greenest floor in-between a circle of dark-green walls.
And on the right side of the plain there was a wide but shallow lake. On its blue surface one could see large patches of pink, where the flocks of flamingoes rested.
...
As they made their way to the village at the bottom of the crater, they realized just how many different animals inhabited this enclosed, green world; from the buffalo and the antelope to the zebra and the black rhino and the elephant, to the lion and the leopard.
At the village, they were greeted by a Laibon -a priest- name Olomunyak, who had learned from the spirits of their ordeal before the Throne of Shadows. He told them the way to reach the town of Arusha, and of recent events that concerned the Maasai people of Ngorongoro Crater.
Things were going to change all over East Africa, and not only for the Maasai. Two years earlier, not long after the former German colony had been handed over to the British Empire by the League of Nations, the Game Preservation Ordinance had been introduced. Following after earlier wildlife conservation legislation under the Germans, it really was a continuation of much older practices that governed attitudes towards wildlife back in Europe...
For centuries, European feudal elites had wildlife reserved to themselves, since hunting and hawking were sport. The whole practice of preservation consisted in excluding commoners from access to wildlife. In modern times things hardly changed and the upper classes of Europe exported those same attitudes to the colonies they ruled. After centuries of native African peoples' coexistence with the most dangerous wild animals in the world, colonial administrators entered the scene armed with their persistent delusion that they knew better. They even formed aristocratic societies, like the aptly named Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire. And with their rules, a new narrative about African wildlife emerged; one where collection of fuel wood was 'wood theft', hunting was 'poaching' and pasturing cattle was 'grazing trespass'.
All of this while the same animals they were supposed to protect were being over-hunted to benefit white settlers, since the colonial Game Departments, hampered by inefficiencies, struggled to actually implement any policy on the ground...
By undermining the Maasai people's ancestral ties to their own land (much of which had been taken from them with the Crown Land Ordinance of 1902) the colonial policy-makers were seeking to get rid of the one thing that would have helped conservation efforts in the region the most.
...
With the help of a few Maasai guides, Charlie and Vaggie (followed by Theodore, though he was invisible to anybody else) followed an eastward path through the mountains for 180 kilometres before they arrived in Arusha, in sight of Mount Meru. Life in the town was in stark contrast to the pastoralist customs of the Maasai to the west; here people traded grains, honey, tobacco and beer instead of livestock, milk and skins. Also the farms were, obviously, owned by British settlers, who had replaced the German owners after the war.
They walked further east to Moshi, on the southern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. From there they descended towards the coastal plain, crossing the border into Kenya while travelling south of the Tsavo River.
As they arrived in the small town of Voi, Theodore was met with a sight that he fondly remembered from his travels; the Uganda Railway. Built through some of the wildest terrain imaginable, running from the sea to Lake Victoria, it was, in Teddy's own words, "the embodiment of the eager, masterful, materialistic civilization of today".
Not far to the north of Voi, there was the bridge on the Tsavo River. An infamous bridge; in the course of several months during its construction in 1898, dozens of Indian and African workers had been killed and eaten by the legendary Lions of Tsavo, called the Ghost and the Darkness.
"My friends," said Theodore near the train station, "here is where we part ways, I'm afraid. I must return to my duties, and it's only a short journey from here to the port city of Mombasa; there you'll certainly be found like Prince Stolas said."
Charlie hugged him, "Thank you, for everything!"
"We'll meet again soon." Teddy said.
"Sì," added Vaggie, "Asta la Muerte."
Teddy walked away, whistling...
Shrouded in shadow, O Africa,
Which obscures your human dignity
To the darkened vision of contempt.
With man-traps stole upon you those hunters
Whose fierceness was keener that the fangs of wolves,
Whose pride was blinder that your lightless forests.
The savage gree of the so-called civilized
Stripped naked its unashamed inhumanity.
You wept and your cry was smothered,
Your forest trails became muddy with tears and blood,
While the spiked boots of the bandits
Left their indelible print
Along the history of your indignity.
Behold today, in the West,
There rises a storm, thunder rolls,
In the dust laden sky
When the beasts, creeping out of their dark dens,
Proclaim with ghastly howls the death of daylight,
Come, you last poet of the dark era,
Stand at that ravished woman's door,
"Forgive", you plead, hoping to be forgiven.
May it be in the midst of the wild delirium of your brutal civilization
The last word holy.