Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Roosters woke me. They began at dawn, echoing each other's cries from across the town. My sleep-
ing mind seemed to unravel, pulled little by little back into the world. Occasionally there were lulls
and I dozed off, but then the crowing started up again.
It took me a moment to remember where I was. When I'd first moved to a city in my early
twenties, to downtown Montréal, I lived in an apartment whose windows faced an inner courtyard.
I sometimes awoke at night, disoriented, and had to go out to the street, to stand on the sidewalk in
my socks, just to find my bearings, to see which direction was north. I wasn't sure what startled me
awake those nights, at two or three o'clock—if I was used to freedom and big spaces, to sensing my
place on the earth.
I often had a similar experience during my travels, a desire to look at a map and see how the
landscape made sense, where the rivers originated, whether the mountains I was seeing were the
beginning of a higher, more dramatic range, or just ragged, stony outcroppings stripped of earth by
millennia of wind. The rises and curves on the map, and the winding human paths that conformed to
them, remind me of something I once read, that the ancient Greeks perceived knowledge as a means
of expanding the self, of feeling connected to existence. I couldn't name the African trees, the ferns
and flowers and reeds, or say how they interacted, which roles they played within the ecosystem,
but I was sure that if I could, my world would have seemed larger and more open.
Now, as roosters crowed and I woke up in a room the length of my too-short bed, I tried to
connect this landscape with all I'd learned about it, to make sense of this spot on the map—Djolu,
mud huts and dusty footpaths, a town harder to reach than the vast majority of places on earth.
It lay at the heart of the Congo River basin, an immense territory covering more than 1.4 million
square miles, its tributaries draining from Gabon, Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Cameroon, Equatorial
Guinea, Central African Republic, Congo-Kinshasa, and Congo-Brazzaville. Half of the basin's ter-
ritory is rainforest, nourished by the tributaries on their way to the Congo, the fifth-longest river
on earth carrying the third-largest volume of water. Djolu lies to the south of the Congo's arc, just
north of the equator, near the Maringa River, in the middle of a landscape that has been forested
almost continuously for millions of years.
Long before my first trips to Africa, from numerous photographs, I'd sensed something different
about the continent, so visually unlike anywhere else: its high, rolling plains, its undulating land-
scapes and gradual, expansive basins, all unmistakable.
It hasn't been shaped in the same way as the other continents. Though it separated from South
America about 126 million years ago, Africa remained largely unchanged for 100 million years,
with virtually no rifting or volcanism. By 65 million years ago, erosion and the lack of volcanic
activity had turned it, as geologist Kevin Burke writes, into “a low-lying continent with widespread
deep weathering.” I liked this image and found it easy to picture the endless, worn-out ranges of
ochre dust, the landscape wind-scarped and cut with rivers.
