"The Welwitschia (Welwitschia mirabilis) produces exactly two leaves in its lifetime. These two leaves grow continuously from the basal meristem, splitting and weathering over centuries into the accumulated fibrous mass that characterises the mature plant. The oldest confirmed specimens are over 1,500 years old; some estimates reach 3,000 years, though carbon dating of the largest cannot be precise. It grows only in the Namib Desert, principally within the fog belt of the Atlantic coast, and collects water from the fog through microscopic pores in its leaves. It occupies its own order in the plant kingdom — Welwitschiales — its own family, its own genus. Nothing else alive is closely related to it. Charles Darwin, who received specimens in 1863, described it as 'unlike any other plant.' The author's initial field assessment, prior to investigation, read: 'dead vegetation.' He is revising this."
He had walked past it.
It was low to the ground and brown and appeared to be a collection of dried, twisted, fibrous material that had accumulated around a low central point — the kind of dead vegetation that the Namib produced in quantity and that required no further investigation than confirming its deadness and moving on. He had noted it in the margin as dead vegetation and continued toward the gravel plain to the north.
Cetshwayo had stopped walking.
The Colonel turned. Cetshwayo was standing beside the pile of dead vegetation looking at it with the specific quality of attention he applied to things the Colonel was about to misidentify. The Colonel returned.
He crouched.
He touched a leaf.
It was not dead. It was leathery — thick, fibrous, the surface worn and weathered but not dead, the tissue beneath the surface intact and, when he pressed it between his fingers, faintly yielding. He followed the leaf toward the base, past the fraying edges, past the sections that had split along their length into ribbon-like strips over what he was now understanding had been a very long time, to the growing point at the base of the plant where the leaf was still being produced, incrementally, continuously, the same leaf it had always been and had always been adding to.
He moved to the other leaf. He followed it to its base.
There were two leaves.
He moved back to the first. He counted.
Two leaves.
"Two leaves," he wrote. "The author counted twice. The botanists who classified the species counted also. Two leaves. The same two leaves since the plant germinated. They have been growing — splitting, weathering, accumulating, continuing — for as long as this plant has been alive, which is a very long time and which the author is now calculating."
He sat with the reference material for an hour.
The carbon dating: the specimen before him, by its size alone, was consistent with an age of between five hundred and a thousand years. The Messum Crater specimen, the large ones on the gravel plains, the famous plants near the coast — these ranged from fifteen hundred years to estimates approaching three thousand.
He made a list.