On the third day, somewhere beyond Dimma, we began to drop out of the highlands. The fields and the villages fell away. The hills unravelled. The views lengthened. Breaking free of its confinement, the landscape was spilling out on all sides towards distant escarpments. We were falling into an empty world of savannah and acacia. Long waves of grass commandeered the horizons.
After the crowded uplands, the emptiness of this new
country was almost unnerving. The land shimmered in lowland heat. A sentinel
figure appeared, on a rock above the road, silhouetted against a pewter sky – a
tall, naked tribesman with a spear: the archetypal image of Africa, like a
guardian on the frontier of a new world.
Stanley Stewart (to
be continued)
