Amboseli is a national park on a dusty old lake bed in southern Kenya, and its swamps never dry up even though almost no rain falls on them. The water belongs to a mountain in another country. Rain and melting snow soak into the porous rock of Kilimanjaro, over the border in Tanzania, travel north underground and surface here as springs. They make green papyrus islands in a plain of pale dust, and every animal in the park comes to them. Elephant families cross the flats in the morning and wade in to their shoulders to feed. Some of the old bulls carry tusks so long they nearly drag the ground, the last of the great tuskers, a sight all but gone elsewhere in Africa. Hippos and buffalo share the water, and fish eagles and bright grey-headed kingfishers work the reeds.
The mountain shows itself early and late, before the cloud builds, and a herd crossing under its snow dome is the photograph that has stood for African wildlife for fifty years. Observation Hill is the one place you may leave the vehicle, and it puts all of it around you. The pale flat at the park's heart is the bed of the old lake, bone dry most years and blowing as salty powder, until heavy rain turns it to shallow water and brings flamingos in to feed. Away from the swamps, zebra, wildebeest and gazelle graze the open savanna with oxpeckers riding their backs, and the flat horizon lets you watch a chase from a long way off. Researchers tell the elephants apart by the notches and tears in their ears and can name most of the animals you meet, so the bull crossing in front of you has a recorded life. The park is too small for them anyway. Their routes run out over Maasai group-ranch land, and those corridors stay open by lease, not by any boundary. The water they are all standing in fell as rain and snow on Kilimanjaro decades ago, well before the oldest bull was born.