staff—astrologers, priests, philosophers, advisors, physicians, secretaries, cooks, and so on—as well as loads of personal effects and opulent gifts of the sort one would expect from the world’s wealthiest person, the great monarch of a great civilization, an official goddess, and Julius Caesar’s lover. Those royal gifts could very well have included a giraffe.
His size was about that of a camel; his skin, like that of a leopard, was decorated with spots in a floral pattern. His hindquarters and belly were low and like a lion’s; the shoulders, forefeet and chest were of a height out of all proportion to the other members. The neck was slender, and tapered from the large body to a swanlike throat. The head was shaped like a camel’s and was almost twice as large as that of a Libyan ostrich. The eyes were brightly outlined and rolled terribly. His heaving walk was unlike the pace of any land or sea animal. He did not move his legs alternatively, one after the other, but first put forward his two right legs by themselves, and then the two left, as if they were yoked together. Thus first one side of the animal was raised, and then the other. Yet so docile was his movement and so gentle his disposition that the keeper could lead him by a light cord looped around his neck, and he obeyed the keeper’s guidance as if the cord were an irresistible chain. The appearance of this creature astonished the entire multitude, and extemporizing a name for it from the dominant traits of his body they called it camelopard. –HELIODORUS, CA. AD 220
Cleopatra should have been satisfactorily ensconced in Caesar’s country estate, just outside the city walls, by the time the Roman dictator opened his eleven days of triumph, on September 21. The festivities consisted of grand parades, enormous feasts, spectacular entertainments, bloody gladiatorial contests, horse races, forty elephants lighting up the night with forty flaming torches held in their trunk tips, lions by the hundreds, leopards, panthers, baboons, monkeys, flamingoes, ostriches, parrots . . . and one giraffe.
The clearest report we have of that tall and undulatory beauty, the first of his or her kind ever to set foot on the European continent, comes from the poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65–8 BC), who chided his fellow Romans as “a throng gazing with open mouth” taking foolish pleasure in the spectacle, particularly Caesar’s giraffe, which was “a beast half camel, half panther.”18 Caesar climaxed that memorable presentation, unfortunately, with blood: sacrificing the giraffe to hungry lions in an arena.
Later Roman worthies would parade a few more giraffes before the plebeian masses—ten of them together in the circus of AD 247, when the emperor Gordianus III celebrated Rome’s first thousand years19—but the essential rarity of giraffes may well account for the paucity of accurate descriptions we have. What notably remains, in the classical record, is a pair of evocative passages from two writers of the early third century AD. The first writer, Oppian of Apamea (in Syria), portrays giraffes, in his poem on hunting, Cynegetica, as animals of “a hybrid nature and mingled of two stocks,” the camel and leopard. The poem is dated by its dedication to the Roman Emperor Caracalla, meaning it would have been finished a few years after AD 210.
The second work is the Ethiopian Romance, a fictional entertainment that appeared around AD 220 and was written by someone using the pseudonym Heliodorus. Set in a North African world as imagined to have existed several centuries earlier, a giraffe appears in a grand procession marking the conclusion of a major war. Here, the triumphant Ethiopian king Hydaspes receives tribute from defeated enemies as well as congratulatory gifts from his friends and allies, the latter including the Auxomites, who offered “a marvelous animal of extraordinary appearance.”20
“Chi-me-ra: 1) In Greek mythology, a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. 2) Any mythical animal with parts taken from various animals” (New Oxford American Dictionary).
The ancient Greeks may have originally decided to call giraffes camel-leopards as a quick and simple reference to physical appearance: an animal with camel-like face, camel-like gait, camel-like legs, who is, however, covered with spots roughly suggesting a leopard. The name could have been nothing more than an easy shorthand for appearance. The description was sooner or later accompanied by a theory of giraffes as true hybrids: a remarkable cross leading to the rather miraculous convergence of physical features in the way that chimeras were imagined as miraculous conglomerations.
The opening photograph for this chapter shows a lone Masai giraffe standing near his reflection in a pool of water. The seguence below is a visual fantasy based on a concept of chimeras and the theme of reflections and resolutions, separations and convergences. The photographs show both Masai giraffes (in Masai Mara, Kenya) and reticulated giraffes (in the Samburu National Reserve, Kenya). Note how different the patterning is between the Masai and the reticulated: two groups of giraffes who live in the same general area of East Africa but have not interbred for more than a million years.
UNICORNS
IN THE HISTORICAL ANNALS of the Chinese, the earliest known reference to Africa appears in the Yu-yang-tsa-tsu, written by the scholar Tuan Ch’eng-shih, who died in AD 863.
Relaying stories and information that had been provided by travelers from the West, Tuan described a land called Po-pa-li, which probably corresponds to a coastal portion of today’s northern Somalia. This hostile, faraway land was home to some strange animals, the scholar wrote, including “the camel-crane” (ostrich), the “mule with red, black, and white stripes wound as girdles around the body” (zebra), and “the so-called tsu-la, striped like a camel and in size like an ox. It is yellow in colour. Its front legs are five feet high and its hind legs are only three feet. Its head is high up and is turned upwards. Its skin is an inch thick.” Both these odd quadrupeds—the striped mule and the tsu-la—are “variations of the camel,” which “the inhabitants are fond of hunting and from time to time they catch them with poisoned arrows.”1
The tsu-la, then, was probably a giraffe.
At various times following that earliest reference, the Chinese traded with African countries through intermediaries, particularly as, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, their trading ships sailed as far as southeastern India to exchange their own valuables for such luxury goods as elephant ivory, rhinoceros horn, pearls, and precious aromatics. But the Chinese would not see or touch an actual giraffe until AD 1414.
That gorgeous creature arrived during China’s Age of Exploration, a great if brief period that lasted from AD 1405 to 1433 and was inspired—or commanded—by the Ming emperor Yongle, who opened China to an assertive form of maritime trade with countries to the south and west. This new orientation may have been a natural consequence of the disintegration of the Mongolian Empire, which ended the Silk Road and an extensive overland trade between China and countries to the west. Under Yongle, the Chinese turned to the seas in seven enormous expeditions that eventually reached halfway across the world, through the Indonesian archipelago to India, the Arabian Middle East as far as Mecca, and on to the eastern shores of Africa as far south as the coast of today’s Kenya.
Guided by magnetic compasses and complex star charts, the expeditions carried huge quantities of Chinese-made goods—copper and iron products, furniture and porcelain, cloth
