Stop and look

Lass Geel caves

From the Times Literary Supplement: Writers recall formative encounters with the natural world

Read one of these short pieces and you will read them all.

MAAZA MENGISTE

Tucked inside the rocky shelters of Laas Geel are spectacularly detailed drawings. Located just outside of Hargeisa, Somaliland, they are some of the oldest in the Horn of Africa. They depict cattle, giraffes, and even a domesticated dog. 

The humans that appear carry a bow or a stick, sometimes a spear. One, empty-handed, is clothed in a splendid white shirt, with arms flung wide as if caught in a moment of exuberance. 

The figures decorate the stones in bold shades: red, ochre, white, deep blue, brown. They are breathtakingly detailed: the delicate lines of a giraffe’s neck, the ornamental cloth on a cow’s back, the halo-like circles around the heads of cattle. 

Though I was with companions that day at the site in July 2019, all noise dropped away as I gazed at the walls and ceilings, overcome by the care with which the drawings had been rendered. 

I was profoundly changed by something that I cannot fully explain, even now. Something sacred. As if some fragment of the inspired imagination that made the drawings still vibrates there, alive and urgent. 

During the pandemic, I have thought of this moment often, reminded of the debt we owe to those who recognized the world’s natural beauty and insisted that we stop and look.