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“Is he useless?” I heard Kaixu exclaim.
We’d lastly discovered a lion. However he was napping, his again to us about 20 yards away, his darkish mane quivering within the wind.
We rumbled up out of the amphitheater simply earlier than sundown and pulled right into a glade close to a Maasai village. One in every of its warriors, Maleton Oleriro, tall and draped in a purple blanket, can be our information for the subsequent two days. We talked as the fireplace of damp wooden hissed and smoked.
Maleton informed us how his late father had six wives, how his personal organized marriage three years in the past included a dowry of 20 cows, and the way he skilled to be a Maasai warrior with different boys by working towards spear-throwing whereas herding cows.
The subsequent morning, we rattled over to the rim of Empakaai Crater, a fascinating round caldera about 4 miles extensive and 1,000 ft deep, largely lined by a lake. The wind, solar and clouds created an impressionistic canvas on the gleaming floor.
We traipsed down a steep, dusty path, by way of a thick forest and onto a shoreline of stubby grass and sand. We had been alone however for a number of thousand flamingos rimming the sting of 1 / 4 of the deep lake in a pink arc.
I tasted the water (not too brackish) and requested Maleton if swimming was allowed. He didn’t know: “Maasai don’t swim,” he stated. That ambiguity, and the truth that a stream fed into the lake, settled it. I stripped down in a heat breeze, squished into the muddy shallow and dove into the cool, rust-colored water. I closed my eyes and swam freestyle, feeling the tender, buoyant water and the way the salinity stung my tongue.
Heading towards a flamboyance of flamingos on the appropriate facet of the shore, breast-stroking as stealthily as doable, I approached a number of massive birds that paddled out near me, however they all of a sudden lifted off. I put my head down and pulled towards the shore, and, once I regarded up, a number of hundred had been streaking throughout the sky. I swam backstroke, noticing how darkish their wings had been beneath and the way their pink stick legs acted like tails.
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