Blood and Weetabix
Geographical note on Descent
Where lurks the lurker?
The only episode which provides any real clues is "Villains". There's a shot of an acacia tree. Spike walks across a sandy plain, with a round thatched hut in the background. Some women are chatting but pay Spike no heed. A man accosts Spike and warns him away in Luganda. Spike then enters some dry, spacious caves which feature gruesome wall art.
The acacia tree indicates Africa. Luganda indicates southern Uganda. The round hut is indeed a local architecture. The caves and cave art suggests Mount Elgon, an extinct volcano in the east of Uganda---some of the lava tubes there are large enough for elephants to walk in and I can't find caves anywhere else in the country. So far, so good.
But there are no sandy plains anywhere in Uganda. Zip. Nada. Nor are there wide beaches as far as I can tell. This is equatorial Africa and even the driest parts of the country, such as the Karamojo plain, are grassland. No desert. So I say that this is an exposed salt dome. This very nearly makes sense because those elephants that go into the Mount Elgon tunnels do so in search of salt. All we need is enough salt mixed in the soil to inhibit plant growth.
(Or I could just blame Lurky. Maybe it's like the Bringers and nothing can live within a certain radius of him/her/it.)
So, why are people camped out on the only unproductive piece of land in the whole of Uganda? Clearly the people aren't farmers, so they're probably not Bagisu, who live on the lower slopes of the ex-volcano. Nor are they forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers, so they ain't Ogiek. Most likely they're pastoralists, maybe Sabei. The Sabei graze cattle, sheep and goats on the more remote northern slopes of Elgon. Maybe the livestock want salt or maybe the livestock is grazing nearby. Maybe they're camped out on unproductive land to fool cattle rustlers, because along the Uganda-Kenya border the cattle rustlers have AK47s. Maybe they like bathing in the hot springs near the caldera.
Why do the women ignore Spike and why does the man speak in Luganda, which is spoken in a different part of the country? It seems strange that the women pay Spike no attention, as white people are rare in rural Uganda. Chalk-palor white people with bleached hair and no backpacks or escort are rarer still. Maybe these Sabei don't care about Spike because, feh, demons and foreigners come to visit Lurky all the time, they just never come back. Only a park ranger, who is not a local and speaks the language of the capital, tries to stop Spike, as he might be held responsible if some tourist goes missing in his park.
So, on the basis of this shaky set of hypotheses strung together from scattered websites, I postulate:
Lurky's cave is on the northern slopes of Mount Elgon, near an undocumented exposed salt deposit within the National Park, perhaps not too far from the Piswa trail. After that, Spike travels along the trail to Sipi Falls, then to Mbale where he catches the train to just outside of Jinja, where he climbs aboard a bus to Kampala and Entebbe.
But if anyone who actually knows anything about Uganda happens to
read this, I'd be estatic if they sent me an email.
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Screencaps are from buffyguide.com, Sounds of Silence and theslayer.net.