Crocodiles and Men
Wright, Lawrence
Crocodiles and Men I EYELIDS OF MORNING: THE MINGLED DESTINIES OF CROCODILES AND MEN, by Alistair Graham. Photographs by Peter Beard. New York Graphic Society. 260 pp. $22.50. reviewed by...
...The Turkana are truly the most selfcentered people in the world...
...it is fantasy turned erotic, even carnal, through Peter Beard's photography...
...Mr...
...The windy distances of Lake Rudolf will be shortened and obscured by roads and planes and hotels and sightseers and fishermen and game wardens and scientists and town planners and all the other conquistadores of the superior civilization of today and tomorrow...
...The Turkana and the crocodiles of Lake Rudolf have already met the agents of manifest destiny: the authors of this book...
...The spears and necklaces of the Turkana will be exported to satisfy the atavistic curiosity of the tourists on their travels through the curio shops of Africa...
...So this book, in part, is an expiation to the crocodiles and men of Lake Rudolf, and, in part, it is ballast for those who want to face the cruelty of the natural world and the consequences of civilization...
...So informed, he never lapses into sentiment...
...Their language has no word for "yes" because the affirmative is assumed...
...Since a crocodile is an evil creature, an agent of the devil, a man with a clear conscience has nothing to fear...
...Lake Rudolf is a completely harmonious world, in balance with the needs of crocodiles and men...
...Crocodiles and Men I EYELIDS OF MORNING: THE MINGLED DESTINIES OF CROCODILES AND MEN, by Alistair Graham...
...What makes the crocodile more symbolic of evil than other creatures that may pose more real danger is that crocodiles actually eat people...
...Graham tells of an American visitor to Turkanaland who expected to dazzle the natives with his airplanes...
...Worse still, to be eaten by an evil creature is to be consumed by evil itself...
...rather he pursues with tough-minded detachment the consequences of his actions, making the telling of it all the more poignant...
...The women adorn themselves with leather aprons and an enormous amount of jewelry, and the naked men "strut about as if clothed by the very finest raiment, such that all must glory in the sight of them...
...It seems in fact an assault on childish illusions...
...Eyelids of Morning is meant to disturb you—and it does, but on the way it is thrilling...
...Yet there is nothing adolescent about Eyelids of Morning...
...it is romantic adventure written by a scientist, Alistair Graham, who suspects adventure and despises romance...
...The Turkana are indifferent to the outside world and its representatives...
...They make you feel not just insignificant, but downright redundant...
...Because it can't leave Lake Rudolf alone, technological society will destroy the Turkana with "benevolence," and, in remorse, remake the wilderness into a national park...
...Remnants of sentiment are constantly flushed out by quoting the windy accounts of previous adventurers or by the whimsical etchings and scribblings that decorate the book...
...All depend on the resources of Lake Rudolf in Kenya...
...The result is an adult adventure, a bracing account of natural cruelty which has about as much to do with counting crocodiles (the reason for the expedition) as Walden had to do with planting beans...
...the crocodiles, perennial symbols of evil which are themselves half-starved and stunted by over-population...
...and the authors, "emissaries of Technopolis," whose study of the crocodiles ostensibly will benefit the Turkana...
...Typically, a Turkana will wade confidently in the murky water of Lake Rudolf, sometimes in sight of a crocodile, with no fear of attack...
...Graham realizes that his research on crocodiles will hasten their extinction and the destruction of the Turkana way of life...
...the only use the Turkana found for the contraptions was the shade cast by the wings...
...There is little that damages our sense of self-importance more than the realization that we are, after all, food...
...Graham foretells the remote control of the savage world by an affluent society motivated by what it considers to be its best instincts...
...reviewed by Lawrence Wright This is a splendid book, a book that awakens reading pleasures as acute as the most treasured discoveries of adolescence...
...Three sets of characters populate this book: the Turkana, a tribe of arrogant nomads whose culture recently has been destroyed by famine...
...Wright is a free lance writer based in Nashville...
...Your trappings, your philosophy, and your curiosity are treated as coldly as brass by a magnet...
...Yet it is a living anachronism about to be swamped by civilization: ". . . the seething cities and towns must feed off the country...
...They preen, they posture, they spit in contempt...
...the fish of Rudolf are needed to feed those who will never see the lake...
...The Turkana cropped by crocodiles each year obviously are killed by design...
...They believe the earth is flat...
Vol. 38 • April 1974 • No. 4
