A frightful fiend doth tread

 A frightful fiend doth tread, an African tale

I recall staring lost across the grassland abyss of the Serengeti. A seemingly infinite savannah stretching to curved horizons in all directions, like standing in the middle of a small moon, both deceived by the promise of endlessness and trapped by her curvature. I remember at this moment seeing nothing threatening, but feeling the stalking threat of probabilities.  

Deep in the bush, that’s all there are – possibilities. Infinite realities waiting to collapse into a realized one – just for me, the observer. This wilderness of east Africa wasn’t intrinsically hostile or evil.  But it was cold and dispassionate to those intruders wandering into its kingdom, confused by its void and pleading for its borders.  But not me. In one small moment in time, I found myself walking out towards its flat open horizons like an astronaut stepping off his station into open space. In each step I took away from the SUV that brought me onto this open plain was a feeling of separation from order and protection.  

Today was supposed to be the day I deepened my retreat into this wild rite of passage through Africa.  I had taken the day off from my volunteering assignment, mixing concrete for a school in the village of Endulen, Tanzania; deep in the Maasai territory of Ngoro Ngoro.  I picked up with a few other friends and paid two locals to be our driver and guide for a safari expedition in the local church’s old Toyota 4Runner. We were well off the map on this off-roading day trip to parts unknown of the Serenegeti. The impossibly vast savannah wasn’t a national park the way you would expect to see families out for the weekend, endurance hikers and camper vans clustered about.  This was chaos in every direction, the land that time forgot. The sparsely dotted acacia trees did little to break up the landscape, instead reinforcing the endlessness like a fractal pattern that kept changing and getting further away the closer you looked. This was the surface of Mars, this was outer space, this was the middle of the Atlantic ocean – indifferent to my presence and cruel to my needs.  This was Africa.

And there I was, wanting to get lost in it and scream into its wide open mouth.  As I stood there at the edge of space, I had this overwhelming sense of loneliness and a shudder overtook me with a horrid dread for all the unknown predators in every direction.  They were not in sight but when you are dealing with the infinite you must assume every possibility is out there, lurking and waiting patiently. Wanting to feel this deep surrender into the wild, I took a few more paces away from the car, wondering when I would feel the untethering, like cutting the rope to my liferaft. I was treading water in the middle of the ocean, sharks swimming in the distance, right below me, or hundreds of miles away.  Unaware of my presence or faintly picking up my scent, each pace I took across this tightrope of uncertainty, gave these monsters another spin at being aware of me.  This land was entropy’s playground.

Before long and to the distress of my group, the old Toyota that brought me here was only a small black dot in the distance. I began to dread that it could disappear out of existence entirely behind me, just as new objects could appear blinking from nothingness into my path. Every step felt a deeper descent to chaos, each minute spent wandering brought me deeper into darker possibilities. One step closer to a wild animal, one extra roulette spin to see what hyena will catch my scent, one small agitated air vibration hitting the ears of a leopard. I was perturbing waters that wished only to be impartial.  You could even feel the tension in my guide as he turned over the engine, calling me back in.  He was taking me to the edge of Chernobyl, fulfilling his duty for pay, but growing impatient for me to just take my damn selfies so we could make our desperate retreat. 

Earlier in the day I had been invited to many other moments of horror but had politely declined.  At one point, we were meant to find a spot for lunch so our guides spotted a good little oasis with some long shade and downed trees to sit on.  The safety trick, they explained, was to drive a few laps aggressively around the trees first, revving engines and honking furiously, to flush out anything hiding out in the bushes.  So we did that for a while with no sign of danger and set up our little tourist picnic. Shortly into my sandwich, the guides got a bit jittery and pointed out some leopard tracks circling around where I was sitting.  Based on their freshness and some even fresher droppings, they probably weren’t more than an hour old.  I couldn’t help glancing over my shoulder at the thick brush behind me, expecting that slow fisheye-lens dolly shot you’d sometimes see in a horror movie towards some cloaked and guttural panting.  And yet, I felt nothing, took a bite of the rest of my sandwich and slowly packed back up. 

Later in the day, another moment of danger came knocking.  We had crossed paths with a ranger who was out tracking lions tagged with RFID collars and kindly offered to pull out his antennae equipment and point us in the right direction.  We followed his truck for a while, to find two behemoths, male and female lounging out under a tree.  It was my first time seeing big cats like this in the wild and the tears of joy abounded as I snapped photo after photo. All the excitement ended however when again the guides started to jostle uncomfortably, explaining as delicately as they could to us that that car battery had died.  I sat patiently, marooned in a hot car in the middle of nowhere, watching one of the drivers bang away on the engine with a hammer, while the lions started to circle.  All I could think about was how great the photos were going to be. Again, an invitation for horror, unaccepted.  

As an avid horror fan, I remember reading Stephen King’s description of his defined levels of fear in writing.  The first and probably the most shameless is the ‘gross-out’ level.  That would be when I got to see these lions rip my guides from limb to limb in a bloody orgy of rage. Cinematic, but not very interesting to me.  The second level is called ‘horror’, this is where you see the monster and are confronted with the looming danger, face to face.  This was that moment of those lions pacing about. Scary, sure, but leaving very little to the imagination. Then there’s the third level known as ‘terror’.  This is the monster in your closet, waiting, lurking, unseen. This was the leopards, or probable leopards, uncertainly lurking in the bushes.  They were there and not there, and none so terrifying or teeth so sharp as how they exist in your mind’s eye.  And still, I felt nothing.  

And then finally, there was me at our last stop of the day, wandering far off from the car and staring against a sprawling plain of infinite possibilities.  If I were to write to Stephen King, I would be proposing to him this moment as the prime case study of a 4th level of fear, the one I would name ‘dread’.  This was the monster under your bed times a million.  This was the dread of decisions and indecisions leading to any collision course in your life.  This was swimming in the open ocean and not knowing what hungry jaws, squid leg or drowning fatigue would rise up to snatch you first.  This was living out a thousand deaths in each one of your days, wondering if today would be the day some car sideswipes you on your bicycle.  Dread is the sheer invitation from chaos to let your mind terrorize your very existence.  

It was then that I realized that it was not the seen or known predator that frightened me, not now nor at any time in my life.  What scared me the most is my clinging desperation to know my enemy in a sea of uncertainty. I feared the decay of order by my insistence to scratch at it. Leave it alone. Walk the edge sure, marvel mouth agape at the infinite, OK.  But do not search for teeth and claws in this life unless you want to conjure them from nothingness. I felt pushed forward by the bloodthirsty playwright of time and it was my duty to clench down on the order like sands in my fingers for as long as I could bear it.  And being confronted with that, looking straight down the barrel of the gun, I captured the dread that I was strangely craving.  It was the opportunity to count my fears like the stars in the sky, loose track, mind dizzy and fall to the ground laughing at my minuscule, miraculously rare, impossibly stubborn life. 

I snapped myself back to the moment, horn still beaconing me to come back.  I grabbed hold of my imagined tether, and returned back to that purring 4-wheeler.  My back was to the void now, the thick soup of probability teeming behind me, taunting me to look back over my shoulder and allow this moment of everything to collapse into something. But I refrained. Maybe it was the fear of seeing a charging elephant. Or the eeriness of blurred shapes across the hot dancing light of the horizon, halted with noses in the air.  Maybe it was because I rejected my right to let this realm of the infinite collapse into one observed moment. 

So I denied the abyss behind me and chose a brighter, more sensible path. I borrowed a pocket full of energy and slipped into that bubble that was my ride back home.  Back to my camp under a hot tin roof and mosquito net, back to the familiar, to something preserved from bedlam. Ignoring the dark possibilities and content in the allusion of borrowed purpose. But still in decay, I would go about my days stalked by that old predator with teeth as sharp as time herself.  

In truth, I am in no more danger today walking out my front door, confronting the infinite unknown, than I was staring across those vast high plains in Africa.  And every single day I will continue to put feet to the floor, rolling dice on what collision course I have unknowingly set. But that day scanning the Serengeti plains is the one that haunts me still. It was the purest moment of surrender of my life; feeling engulfed and consumed by an everlasting void, frozen in time, disembodied and profoundly connected to nothingness and everything all at once.  

“Like one, that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread, and having once turned round walks on, and turns no more his head. Because he knows, a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread.” – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner