Giraffe Reflections. Dale Peterson

groups of perhaps a half dozen to two dozen people, who would temporarily settle near a spring or water hole. They built their small huts far enough from the water to avoid frightening the animals, who also congregated around water, and they relied on a second spring or water hole for the change of seasons and the inevitable drying-up of the first. Getting to the second might require two or a few days’ trek across arid lands, with the migrating group carrying water inside ostrich eggshells.

      They were hunters and gatherers, with the women gathering vegetable foods and the men hunting for meat using small bows and light, poison-tipped arrows. The /Xam poisons were lethal but very slow acting, which meant that the hunter had to track his wounded quarry for hours or even days.⁷ Tracking, then, was an essential skill for these hunters and is expressed in the animal-track motif of so much of their art.

      But the /Xam worked to control their fickle and often hostile environment through shamanism, which is even more of an essential theme for the art. All-night dances brought some of the men, carrying sticks and wearing rattles made of dried seed pods or pebble-filled springbok ears, into a trance state. The dancers, trembling, sweating, bleeding from their noses, became charged with a potent energy that seemed to boil out from within. Through succumbing to this energy they experienced their own death, leaving their physical bodies in order to manipulate the occult forces of the world beyond. They became shamans, in other words, and they used their newly acquired powers to work on three interconnected problems having to do with health, game, and rain. Shamans who acquired the power of healing might pull the illness out of a stricken person and into themselves, then sneeze it out along with a bloody discharge, which was then wiped onto the ill person with the theory that its smell protected against evil. Game shamans—the rock art sometimes shows them wearing caps made from the scalp of an antelope, the ears sewn to stand upright—worked to control the movements of antelope herds and confuse the trickster deity, /Kaggen, who liked to protect the special animals. And finally, the rain shamans tried to outsmart and catch certain mythical rain animals, whose blood or milk, when spilled, would be transformed into water that fell as rain.

      That, in any event, is what I learned at Twyfelfontein and later from considering a handful of books on the subject. I also spoke about such things with Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of the anthropological classic The Harmless People (1958) and, more recently, The Old Way: A Story of the First People (2006), both of which draw on her experiences as a girl visiting and living among four language groups of the still surviving Kalahari Desert Bushmen.⁸ She knew nothing about the rock art, Thomas told me, since the Kalahari Bushmen did not do that kind of art. Their art was in their music—and, for the men, in their hunting and the mythlike stories they told about hunting.⁹ Also, she added, none of the Bushman groups she knew had shamans, at least not in the sense of someone being an elite, professionalized healer.

      It was true that certain men, sorcerers by reputation, were said to possess the power to fly through the air and enter the body of a lion. But any man could become a healer, and the powers for healing would emerge during their all-night dances. As with the /Xam, the Kalahari women sat in a circle and clapped, sharply and rhythmically, while the men danced in a circle around that circle, wearing rattles on their legs. At some time during this dance, often around dawn, a number of the men would acquire the power to draw away sickness. “Several men might fall into trance,” Thomas said. “Then they’d come over and put one hand on your back and one on your front, and they’d suck away the something bad that was in you. They’d suck it into themselves, and then they’d scream it into the air. And what they sucked out they called ‘star sickness.’ They did this for real illnesses too, but a star-sickness healing would be for things that cause jealousy, ill-will: bad things that can make a group disintegrate.”

      The Kalahari Bushmen’s notoriously fickle gods occupied the horizon, especially during those shifting, magical moments just before sunrise and sunset, and the spirits of the dead served those gods. The spirits were anyone who had died, and they were all around. They lived in this world, invisible yet leaving fine trails in the air, like spiderwebs floating about fifteen feet off the ground. People talked to them, sometimes cursed at them, and you knew where the spirits were because you could see where people focused their eyes and projected their voices.

      Did animals become spirits? I asked. Thomas said she never heard that they did, but it was true that men who had gone into a trance would swear at the spirits of the dead and also at the lions—but the lions were really there, in this world. They weren’t spirits. They were just animals who shared a water hole with the people.

      Still, giraffes and certain antelopes (“the large ones, the ones that are a hunter’s special prize”) shared with people something called n!ow. This was a very mysterious thing that had to do with the weather. A man could urinate into a fire, and his n!ow would interact with the fire, causing a change in the weather. When a woman gave birth and her amniotic fluid hit the ground, there would be a change in the weather. Similar things happened when a hunter spilled the blood and thus the n!ow of a giraffe or a large antelope onto the ground. This remarkable substance or energy or force possessed by humans and giraffes and the five next-biggest game animals (elands, wildebeests, kudus, gemsboks, and hartebeests), this n!ow, could change the weather.¹⁰ “It’s so remote from anything we have anything to do with that it’s hard to understand,” Thomas concluded, “but the important thing to me is that people had it, and the big antelopes they hunted had it, and the giraffes. Period. No one else had it. It was an important characteristic.”

      The photograph introducing this chapter was taken in the situation described in the opening text: a moment just before dawn when Karl and I came across three giraffes lying down in the Masai Mara. The photo includes two of those three.

      The images below (all of Masai giraffes in Kenya’s Masai Mara) present an imagined sequence following that predawn wake-up: awakening into a full morning, a midday storm and heavy rain, and a lifting of the weather into late afternoon and evening. The overarching theme is giraffe ethereality as expressed through faint or hidden images and long-distance silhouettes. Note that the giraffes standing in the rain, at first rendered ghostly by the heavy downpour, are driven by the angle of the wind and rain to orient themselves in the same direction. Two of the later images include the forms of hidden giraffes.

      CHIMERAS

      ONE WINTER DAY in the third decade of the third century BC, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the Greek king of Egypt, presented in the capital city of Alexandria the biggest parade in history.¹ This Grand Procession, as it has been called—an all-day event that began with the morning star and ended with the evening star—was intended to express to the entire world the rising power, piety, and glory of old Egypt under her new Greek ruler.

      To project power was essential given that the enemies of Egypt were themselves powerful