The unbroken darkness

It was late in the afternoon and the shadows were growing long when we finally pulled up to the hotel for the evening. My mom, grandmother and I got out of the van, along with the half dozen other tourists who were our traveling companions for the trip. Everyone headed for the front desk to check into their rooms. Each room at this particular hotel was a small detached cottage, made to look somewhat like a straw roofed hut. Once we got settled in, it was dinner time and we proceeded to the main building where the lobby and dining room were located. As we ate our supper, the sun finally set, and the blackness of the night closed in. It was getting late, and it was time to return to our room and get ready for bed. The next day would be long, and we were still suffering from some minor jet lag. But this hotel, and its location, required a very different procedure when it came to leaving the main hall and walking a couple hundred feet to get to the cottages after dark. A guard, armed with a rifle, met us in the lobby to escort us to our room. This man said he was a park ranger who was working a second job as a security guard for the hotel. The hotel grounds were fairly well lit, but beyond the glow of artificial light the night was as black as the bottom of an endless well. Once we reached our cottage, the guard warned us that under no circumstances should we ever leave or even go outside of the cottage until the dawn had come. Predators were everywhere, and they respected no man-made boundaries. There was no fencing or barriers of any kind around the hotel, and these carnivorous creatures of the night were free to wander about. The guard said that in the past some tourists had been snatched away in the darkness and were killed and devoured, never to be seen alive again.

So where was this overnight accommodation that was so dangerous at night that guests needed an armed guard to escort them to their rooms? It was late November in 1981 and my mom, grandmother and I had just embarked upon a wildlife safari in Kenya. That morning we had left Nairobi, the country’s capital, and headed out on our first game drive. After a morning filled with wildlife viewing, we stopped somewhere for lunch. Then we set out on another drive in search of more of the savanna’s iconic animals. And then we taken to that hotel on the edge of the Masai Mara national park for the night. As I laid down in bed that night, I could just imagine lions, leopards and hyenas skulking around outside the cottage windows, hoping that someone might ignore the warning and come out. Of course, that someone wasn’t going to be me, my mom or grandmother! This was far removed from my home in suburbia, where the only thing I might run into at night would be an opossum or a raccoon. There, truly dangerous wildlife could only be found in a zoo, where the animals were locked in cages and exhibits and the people were free to walk about. But here, in Africa, we were in their territory, and the only “cages” were our hotels and the van we were driven around in. Our driver also made it known that we should keep the windows rolled up when were stopped, lest a predator try to seize one of us thru an open window. He told us of an incident where a van of tourists was parked beneath a tree to watch a herd of giraffes. They had the windows rolled down, and while they were preoccupied, a leopard slipped down out of the tree and reached thru a window and grabbed a woman. She was pulled partway out and severely mauled before the other passengers were able to scare the leopard off.

In both of these situations, the dangers, and the ways in which they were protected against, were rather obvious. A ranger carrying a rifle while escorting people to their hotel rooms implies that there is mortal danger present. That threat lurks deep within the darkness, hidden away, unseen by most. Additionally, such hazards were not the sorts of things that most tourists would even want to think about. If not for the warning of the armed guard, most likely some people would have left their cottages and wandered around the grounds, blissfully unaware that lethal predators prowled in the shadows.

Then, later in the trip, our tour group was late getting to the next hotel for the night, due to some sort of mix up. So instead of arriving at the hotel in the late afternoon, it had gotten dark before we got there. This hotel was up in a hilly area, covered in forest, and the very long road leading to it was nothing more than a dirt road. Actually all of the roads we traversed were dirt paths, as there was no pavement outside of urban areas be seen. The night here was just as dark as everywhere else we had stayed, and the road was illuminated only by the van’s headlights. But then one of the tires went flat, and the driver was forced to stop. Everyone, except my grandmother, who was in her 70’s at the time, had to get out. For some odd reason, the driver did not have a flashlight. Luckily, one of our fellow tourists was carrying a penlight. By the dim glow of that penlight, the driver got to work changing the tire. While he was doing this, I took a look around me, away from the light. The sky was incredible, filled with the most stars I had ever seen, a black void scattered with tens of thousands of sparkling diamonds. I could even see that many of them had different colors, some reddish, some white, and some bright blue. This was a far cry from only barely being able to point out the Big Dipper in my suburban backyard. Then I looked away from the sky, and I held my hand in front of my face, maybe a foot or so away. I saw nothing, only blackness. Anything beyond the glow of that penlight was invisible, save for the stars. But that wasn’t the only unnerving thing. The forest that hugged close to the edge of this dusty path was alive with animal sounds. Grunting, growling, and other noises blended with what sounded like snapping twigs and animals slopping thru mud. We weren’t alone there in the road, and although unseen, whatever potential dangers lurked beyond our sight were very real. I looked down at my feet, and just a couple of steps away, barely illumined by the reflected glow of the penlight, was what appeared to be a steep slope at the edge of the road. Briefly I imagined what might happen had I taken a few steps in that direction by mistake. I could see myself tumbling down that incline into the brush, and perhaps into the jaws of a waiting predator. Instead I stayed close to the van and to my mom. Finally the tire was changed, and we all got back in the van and continued on our trip up to the hotel. We checked in and retired to the safety of our room for the night, resting up for the next day’s adventures.