From the Field Notes of Colonel Aubrey Fitch-Harrington, FRS

Observations Upon the Fauna of Southern Africa — Volume III (In Preparation)

“The Baobab (Adansonia digitata) has been in the author’s field notes since the first camp — noted as large, distinctive, and significant of aspect. Individual specimens reach three thousand years of age. They store up to one hundred and twenty thousand litres of water in their trunks. The bat pollinates them at night. The elephant strips their bark for moisture. Several generations of humans have camped under specific trees without knowing it was the same tree. The author has been writing about this tree’s size since the first volume. He is writing about its age now. Three thousand years ago, this specimen was a seedling. Everything that has happened since was happening while this tree was growing. The author finds this requires sitting down.”

He had not looked up properly before.

That was the honest accounting: he had been under the baobab for three seasons across two volumes of field notes and he had looked at it from the outside, from the position of someone noting a significant landmark, and had not looked at what it was from underneath.

The morning was warm and smelled of baobab country — dry and slightly sweet, the bark releasing something in the sun that the Colonel had been calling Africa in his field notes without identifying the source. He was sitting at its base now, looking up. From here the canopy was different. The internal structure of it — the specific way the branches went, the logic of them, the three thousand years of decision about which direction each branch needed to go to reach the available light.

The trunk beside him was wider than his tent. He put his hand against it.

It was warm. The water inside it was warm. One hundred and twenty thousand litres, stored through every dry season that had passed since before the Colonel’s country existed, drawn on in the lean seasons, replenished in the good ones, managed with a sophistication that the Colonel’s camp water arrangements did not approach.

“How old,” he said.

“This one,” Cetshwayo said. “Old. Before the oldest thing you know.”

The Colonel looked at the trunk. At his hand against it.

Three thousand years. Before the Norman Conquest. Before the Crusades. Before the Portuguese rounded the Cape. Before anything in the Colonel’s history that had a name had happened, this tree had been here, in this country, doing what it does.

He wrote: The baobab has been here for three thousand years. The author has been noting it as a landmark for two volumes. A landmark is the wrong word. A landmark is something you use to navigate. This tree was here before the paths that use it as a landmark existed. It is not a landmark. It is the country.

He sat back and looked at the canopy. Three thousand years was not a number that announced itself usefully. He had heard three thousand years. He had written it in the field note. The number did not convey the experience of being beside something three thousand years old, which was a different thing from the number.

He tried it a different way. He was in his late fifties. This tree was approximately fifty times older than he was. Its first three hundred years — the time it took to become a reasonable tree — had been completed before the printing press existed. He had been at this camp for three weeks. The tree had been at this location for one hundred and fifty-six thousand weeks. It had stood here through every drought and flood and fire that had moved across this landscape, drawing on its own stored water while the rains failed and the animals moved away.

"The elephants," Cetshwayo said, unprompted. "They know this one. The ones before them knew it. The ones before those.”

The Colonel looked at the base of the trunk. The elephants that currently knew this tree had learned it from elephants that had learned it from elephants, in an unbroken chain of knowledge about a specific tree extending back beyond any available record. The tree had been a landmark for elephants for longer than it had been a landmark for maps.

He wrote one more line: The tree is three thousand years old. The elephants have known it for longer than the field notes have known anything. The author notes that this is the correct hierarchy and that he has been at the bottom of it for the duration of his field work. He is not sure this requires correction. It may simply require acknowledgement.