英国卫报：肯尼亚的学校有河马和鳄鱼出没(5)（在线收听）

One of the children who had guided us into the school said that a hippo usually sleeps next to one of the classrooms.

带领我们进入学校的一个孩子说，河马经常睡在教室旁边。

I asked him if it sleeps inside.

我问他它是不是睡在里面。

“Haizetosha mlango,” another child said. (“It doesn’t fit past the door.”) We all laughed.

另一个孩子说：“Haizetosha mlango”（它进不去门）。我们都笑了。

I looked to my right.

我朝我的右边看了看。

There was a stretch of water, and then a series of classrooms with elevated verandas.

那里有一片水域，然后是一排排带有高阳台的教室。

Two fishermen were using one of the classrooms to dock off.

两名渔民正在利用其中一间教室停靠。

Because they didn’t want to make too much noise and scare away the fish, they were using rafts which they propelled using plastic oars.

因为他们不想制造太大的噪音和吓跑鱼，他们使用了用塑料桨推进的木筏。

The boys got excited.

男孩们变得兴奋起来。

They pointed to it in the water, its head visible.

他们指着水中的河马，它的头是可见的。

Chelimo was unmoved.

奇利莫无动于衷。

He told me that there were a lot of the hippos where the teachers’ quarters had been, swimming around the rows of houses that were now underwater.

他告诉我，在教师宿舍的地方有很多河马，在一排排现在被水淹没的房子周围游泳。

He and the deputy, Kibet Zakayo, looked out across the lake, surveying what used to be their school.

他和副手基贝特·扎卡约眺望着湖对岸，看着曾经是他们学校的地方。

Everywhere I went, people had theories about what was happening to the lakes.

我所到之处，人们都有关于湖泊发生的事情的理论。

One explanation is that the rise of the lakes is cyclical.

一种解释是，湖泊的上升是周期性的。

“I hear that it happened in the 1940s, but I wasn’t alive to know,” a local in Ahero, near Lake Victoria, told me.

“我听说这发生在20世纪40年代，那时候我还没意识到，”维多利亚湖附近的一位当地人告诉我。

When I spoke to Lawrence M Kiage, a professor of geography at Georgia State University, who studies the history of climate breakdown in east Africa, he said something similar:

当我与研究东非气候崩溃历史的佐治亚州立大学地理学教授Lawrence M Kiage交谈时，他说了类似的话：

“If we go back in time, the Rift valley lakes have had higher levels.

“如果我们回到过去，裂谷湖泊的水位可能更高。

What we are seeing now is not something new.”

我们现在看到的并不是什么新鲜事。

Sean Avery, a hydrologist who has lived in Kenya since 1979, has pointed out that the current level of Lake Turkana is no higher than it was in the 1970s or in the 1900s.

自1979年以来一直居住在肯尼亚的水文学家肖恩-艾弗里指出，图尔卡纳湖目前的水位并不比20世纪70年代或20世纪初的水位高。

Other popular explanations focus on the lakes’ location: the rising Kenyan lakes are almost all situated along the eastern branch of the Great Rift valley.

其他流行的解释集中在湖泊的位置上：上升的肯尼亚湖泊几乎都位于大裂谷的东部分支。

(The western branch stretches from the north of Uganda to the south-east of Tanzania, and its lakes are rising, too, albeit more slowly, displacing families in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Uganda.)

(西部分支从乌干达北部延伸到坦桑尼亚东南部，它的湖泊也在上升，尽管速度较慢，但却使刚果民主共和国、布隆迪和乌干达的家庭流离失所）。

Many observers find this too striking to be a coincidence: they feel that the rising lakes must be connected to tectonic activity.

许多观察家认为这太令人惊讶了，不可能是一个巧合：他们认为上升的湖泊一定与地质构造活动有关。

The Great Rift valley is splitting apart at a rate of roughly 2mm a year, and will at some point in the next tens of millions of years eventually separate east Africa from the rest of the continent.

大裂谷正在以每年大约2毫米的速度分裂，并将在未来数千万年的某个时间点最终将东非与非洲大陆的其他地区分开。