Lake Tritriva

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The rain comes to the Vakinankaratra highlands from November into March, and it comes hard: the rivers of the plateau brown and swell, the rice terraces brim, the tracks out from Antsirabe wash to mud. In one place the water does the reverse. Ringed in vertical cliffs of gray gneiss, its surface some fifty meters below the rim, the green pool of Tritriva sinks through the wet months while everything around it rises — and through the dry season, when the rains have gone and the land goes brown, it climbs. The families who keep the lake have watched this for as long as anyone recounts. They do not read it as a trick of the water table. They read it as the lake keeping its own calendar.

The lake in the crater

Tritriva — also written Lac Tritriva, sometimes Tritiva — sits in the vent of an extinct oval volcanic cone in the highlands of the Vakinankaratra, in south-central Madagascar, near the commune of Belazao in the district of Betafo. It lies roughly fifteen kilometers from the thermal town of Antsirabe and is reached from it by National Road 34. The setting is volcanic through and through: the same geothermal country that gives Antsirabe its warm baths is studded with hot springs, and the lake is a crater lake proper, filling the throat of the old cone. Its walls are sheer gneiss, dropping to water that reads a strange, dense green — un vert opaque, in the French account, a color that admits no bottom to the eye (Lake Tritriva).

The measurements are what first mark the place. The rim of the cone stands about two thousand meters above the sea, and the water lies some fifty meters below it, at roughly nineteen hundred and fifty. From that surface the lake goes down — up to about a hundred and sixty meters at its deepest, which makes it the deepest lake in Madagascar, deeper than it is long, since its greatest length runs only on the order of two hundred meters and a walker can circle the rim in something near four kilometers. It is, in plain terms, a narrow shaft of water in a plug of highland stone: not a broad sheet spread over a plain but a deep green cylinder sunk in a cliff. The coordinates place it near 19°55′ south and 46°55′ east — southern latitude, eastern longitude — on the plateau that the Betsileo and the Merina share along their old border.

The country around it explains the shape. The Vakinankaratra is one of the young volcanic districts of the central plateau, a field of cones and craters and warm springs raised where the highland floor was broken and reworked; Antsirabe, the town below, is a spa built on that heat, its name — the place of much salt — and its thermal baths both drawn from the same underground fire. Tritriva is that field’s most dramatic single vent: not a shield or a cinder heap but a cone whose throat filled with water and never drained, so that where a traveler might expect a summit there is instead a drop, and at the bottom of the drop a lake. The gneiss that walls it is older than the volcanism — the ancient metamorphic basement of the island, through which the cone pushed up — and it is that hard gray rock, not soft volcanic ash, that gives the crater its sheer, unforgiving sides.

The lake reaches the written record along two tracks that seldom meet. One is geographic and geological: the crater and its cone, the gneiss, the depth soundings, the elevation, the hot-spring field, all of it set down in the ordinary survey-and-encyclopedia manner and secure as far as it goes. The other is the living tradition of the surrounding highlands, carried by mouth and by the guides who still recount it at the rim, and gathered secondhand into the tourist and heritage literature — the travel accounts, the French- and English-language site pages, and the two Wikipedia entries that lean on them. Tritriva is not a dynastic shrine, and it does not sit inside Callet’s court-and-mission-era compilation of the royal histories. It is a locally sacred natural site whose telling survives chiefly in oral and heritage form. That is worth saying plainly at the start, because it governs how the rest should be read: the lovers’ names and the more marvelous claims are the local and tourist telling, not the deposit of a single authenticated primary text, and spellings and details shift from source to source.

Masina ground, and the two who drowned

Within the local frame the lake is masina and fady — holy ground, and ground hedged by prohibition. It is charged with hasina, the sacred efficacy that runs through the powers and places of the Malagasy world, and it is set about with the taboos that such charge draws to itself. The plainest of these is on the water itself: swimming and bathing are forbidden. Tritriva is not a scenic pool to be entered but a threshold not to be crossed, and the ban is stated flatly in every account of the place. To it the local telling adds a second, narrower rule of conduct — that one must not go into the water after eating pork — and carries with it a cautionary story of a man who broke that fady and drowned, his body never given back by the lake.

To call the lake fady is not to call it merely off-limits. Fady is the whole order of the forbidden in the Malagasy world — the acts and the places and the days that must be kept apart because to cross them is to disturb something that carries hasina, the efficacy that runs through the ancestors and the sacred powers and the ground they hold. A fady is not an arbitrary rule but the outer edge of a charge; where the charge is dense, the prohibitions gather. On Tritriva they gather thickly. The water is not to be entered; the pork-eater is not to approach it; the trees are not to be cut. Each is a wall around the same holiness, and the man who drowned for breaking the pork fady is, in the telling, not the victim of an accident but the proof of a boundary — a boundary that held, and did not give his body back.

The presiding tradition is a love story, and outsiders reach at once for Romeo and Juliet to gloss it. Two young people of the country fell in love: Rabeniomby, whose name carries the highland sense of the one of many cattle, a marker of wealth and rank, and Ravolahanta. Difference of birth and the will of their families stood between them — one of high station, one poor, though the accounts do not agree which of the pair was which, one telling making the woman the highborn and another the man. Kept from marrying, they bound themselves together and gave themselves to the water rather than be parted; the French telling sets their last hours over a game of fanorona and puts in their mouths the vow that only death would divide them (Lac Tritriva). They went over the cliff into the green together.

The story does not end with the drowning, because in the tradition the lovers did not leave. Two trees grow intertwined from the rock at the water’s edge, and these are read as the pair themselves, their bond made visible in the twist of two trunks grown into one. The trees are said to run red, like blood, if a branch or a leaf is cut — so that the fady guarding the trees is of a single cloth with the fady guarding the water, and a knife taken to the one is as grave as a body lowered into the other (Lake Tritriva — MadaMagazine). The love is held to persist among the living things of the place, and to be defended by the same order of prohibition that defends the pool.

Above the story of the lovers stands the lake’s office toward the country. Tritriva is held to answer the life of the nation and the villages that ring it, and to answer it in sign. Its water is said to turn red before great events, and before a death: the whole lake reddening for a young man of Rabeniomby’s village, half the lake for a young woman of Ravolahanta’s, so that the color reads not only that something has happened but whose it is and where. And there is the sign that most sets the lake apart, its contrary calendar. Its level is said to fall in the rains, when every river in the Vakinankaratra is swelling, and to rise in the dry season, when the rains have gone. In the tradition these are not oddities of hydrology. They are the visible speech of a place that remembers — the lake telling, in water and in color, what it holds.

That grammar is not peculiar to Tritriva. Across the highlands the sacred waters are set apart by exactly this logic of fady and hasina — the springs a farmer will not foul, the pools no one fishes, the unmarked graves of the first people kept under prohibition. The vazimba, the first masters of the land, are remembered above all as keepers of water, the vazimba andrano who hold the rivers and the lakes and the sacred springs; and the wider Malagasy world is dense with such charged pools. Tritriva belongs to that world without being reducible to it. It is not a vazimba pool, holding a first and nameless memory of the ground. It is one named crater lake, holding two named lovers and one country’s omens.

Lake Tritriva, the deep crater lake of the Vakinankaratra highlands near Antsirabe. Bernard Gagnon, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

A living site, and an uneven record

Tritriva is not a relic. It is one of the fixtures of the Antsirabe hinterland, reached on a day’s outing from the town, and it is worked as a living sacred place rather than shown as a dead one. Local guides walk visitors the roughly four-kilometer circuit of the rim, and in the same breath keep the fady and press the lovers’ story on newcomers — so that the telling is transmitted at the point of the visit, at the cliff-edge, and not only in books. The prohibition on swimming is enforced as a live rule, not recalled as an old one. The intertwined trees and the reddening water remain the charged features that a guide will name, and the story of Rabeniomby and Ravolahanta is told at the rim as the plain sense of the place. This is a matter of the present tense: the families of the surrounding highlands and the guides who carry the tradition keep it now.

The documentary weight, though, is uneven, and honesty asks that the seam be marked. The physical facts are securely attested — the volcanic crater, the gneiss walls, the depth of about a hundred and sixty meters that makes it the country’s deepest lake, the rim near two thousand meters and the water near nineteen hundred and fifty, the Vakinankaratra setting near Belazao and Betafo. The marvels are another kind of claim. The contrary seasonal level, the blood-red water, the bleeding trees, the very names of the lovers — these reach the record chiefly through the oral tradition and the tourist and heritage literature, and they are set down here as that tradition tells them, not as verified observation. The names Rabeniomby and Ravolahanta recur with fair stability across the French and English accounts, and so are reported as the tradition names them; but their stability is the stability of the heritage record, not the authority of a scholarly primary source, and the spellings and the details wander from one page to the next.

The tourist and heritage literature has done to the story what such literature tends to do: fixed it, flattened it a little, and pressed it into a shape a visitor will recognize. The Romeo-and-Juliet gloss travels with almost every retelling, and it does real work — it makes the drowning legible across a language barrier — but it also lends the Malagasy telling a European frame it did not begin with. The particulars that resist the gloss are the ones worth holding: the fanorona board over which the last day is set; the vow that only death would part them, spoken in a land where the ancestors are never wholly gone; the trees that carry the lovers forward into the living world; and above all the lake’s public office, its reddening for a death and its contrary rise and fall, which have no counterpart in the borrowed story at all. A pair of doomed lovers is a tale the world tells everywhere. A lake that answers a village death in the color of its water, and keeps a calendar against the seasons, belongs to this place and this plateau.

Tritriva has not drawn the dedicated ethnography that the ancestral rites and the Sakalava spirit-mediumship have. It has no Bloch or Lambek of its own, no monograph fixing its tradition against fieldwork. It belongs instead to the broader Malagasy world of sacred waters and prohibition that scholarship describes in general terms — the order of taboo and sacred efficacy by which springs and old tombs and vazimba pools are set apart across the island, the subject of Jørgen Ruud’s study of Malagasy custom and belief, Taboo (1960). Placed against that literature the lake is legible: a charged place, a fady-bound threshold, a pool that carries hasina and answers with sign. Credited instead to a Tritriva-specific authority, it would rest on a text that does not exist.

What is left, then, is a single place doing a single work. Where Ambondrombe gathers the dead of a whole people on its wooded ridge, and the vazimba waters hold a first memory that belongs to no one family, Tritriva holds something narrower and, in its way, more particular: two lovers who would not be parted, one village’s sons and another’s daughters counted in the color of the water, and a country whose great turns the lake is said to announce before they come. For the highland families and the guides of the Malagasy borderland who keep it, the pool that falls in the rains and rises in the drought is not a paradox to be solved. It is the lake doing what the tradition has always said it does — keeping its own time, and keeping faith with its dead.

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