But what is “Elelescho”? the reader will ask. “Elelescho”[6] is the name of a peculiar plant, perhaps it would be more correct to say a bush, that has in many ways set its mark on the flora in the very heart of the Masai region. Ranges of hills covered with silvery-leafed Elelescho, the spicy smell of Elelescho, the water at the camping place redolent of Elelescho—and also, in consequence, tea, coffee, cocoa tasting of Elelescho—that is a memory that remains fixed firmly in one’s thoughts of this home of the wild herds and of the Masai. It Was these disappearing nomads who gave the bush its beautiful name.
Possibly the musical sound of the name has not a little to do with reconciling us in memory to the plant. For the bush itself has in process of time monotonous effect not very to the senses, but for this very reason all the stronger and more enduring. Its character is connected by strong links of memory with our experiences of those days, and the sound of its name awakes rose-coloured recollections. For just as it is not given to man to remember exactly the nature of intense bodily pains, so fancy, looking backwards, kindly blots out much that was hard and little that was pleasant in the life we have led. Thus it is that this strange bush, with its silver-grey leaves and aromatic odour, is capable, as hardly anything else is, of awakening in the mind of the traveller a kind of nostalgia—nostalgia for the wilderness, to which he is drawn by so much of beauty and of hardship. We have gained very little by learning that botanists recognise our plant as one of the Compositæ, and name it Tarchonantus camphoratus, L. It is to be found also in other parts of Africa; and Professor Fritsch reported, as early as 1863, that he found it growing in Griqualand, then still an unsettled country, where it was called the “Mohatla.” It would be a pity if its beautifully sounding Masai name were not preserved for future times, and I must do my best to save “Elelescho” from such oblivion.
C. G. Schillings, phot.
THE CARAVAN ON THE MARCH.
One must have learned the word with its sweet-sounding pronunciation from the lips of a proud, handsome, slender Masai warrior in order to understand how so seemingly slight a thing can imbue one’s impression of a whole land.
The Elelescho is as prominent in those regions as the oak and beech or fir in Germany, or as the juniper, the heath, and the broom, and has the same influence on the landscape. But it has a greater and deeper influence upon the imagination, because it so dominates those solitudes, that to him who has long travelled in them the mere memory of it evokes a vivid picture of their once familiar aspect. The strong scent of the Elelescho plant leads the Masai to wear the leaves of the bush as a decoration round their ears for the sake of its perfume. It belongs thus to the plants that because of their scent are used as ornaments by warriors and maidens: “Il-käk ooitaa ‘l muran oo ‘n—— doiye ‘l—— orôpili.”[7] So there pass before us Masai maidens, and Masai warriors decked with Elelescho leaves and Elelescho branches, and received with sympathetic smiles by the caravan leaders—who, however, unlike the Masai, think very little of it. Very simple and naïve are the relations of these natives with nature around them. Only the obvious, the actually useful, comes into their thoughts, and for my black companions the Elelescho always recalls only memories of poor desert regions of the waste—regions in which they must often endure hunger and suffer many hardships. Far different is the influence of the Elelescho region on my feelings. For me this bush is symbolically linked with the plunge into uninhabited solitudes, with self-liberation from the pressure of the civilisation of modern men and all its haste and hurry.
We wish to feel once more, and to give ourselves up fully to, the spell of the Elelescho—the charm of the Elelescho thickets, that are also in South Africa in the lands about the Cape the characteristic mark of the velt, now so lonely, but once alive with hundreds of thousands of wild herds.
A wonderful night has come on.
The moon—in a few days it will be at the full—sheds its beams in glittering splendour over Lake Nakuro.