Sunday 27 November 2005

Inspired singing last night. Tonight we are accompanied by distant detonations of lightning for hours on end, flaring celestial grace over and over again. As I drift to sleep, light caresses my closed eyelids to remind me of the wonders I am missing and I am compelled to sleepily watch the sky dance for me some more.

28/11
Endless green canyon. Wide limpid liquid obsidian. Progress slowed due to petrol rationing arising from combination of poor engine placement and earlier petrol
snafflement by the electoral commission. Lost in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s biography and teaching a one-rand piece to cartwheel over my knuckles. According to schedule, we should have arrived in Mbandaka this evening to complete our epic journey. But how do you make the African gods laugh? Tell them your plans. Instead, we’ve pulled into another little fishing camp for dinner and children singing and a sky full of fireflies, bats and stars and the flicker of distant lightning in at least three cardinal points and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. A four year old keeping impeccable rhythm on an old blue plastic motor oil container. A mother, little more than a girl herself, joyfully carries the tune, with a horde of children accompanying. One tiny toddler, barely old enough to walk, was doing a bouncy baby dance in the middle and, out of sympathy, joined me in my pedestrian 1-2 clapping, rather than the polyrhythms running through everybody else’s veins. A baby pet monkey, a red-tailed guenon named Kiki, ran around making mischief, dragging a long string tethered to a small stick like a ball and chain.

The lightning that was before merely an atmospheric backdrop to the night clouds that thickly collared the horizon eventually became a shock-and-awe display, the fee-fi-fofum of an approaching giant storm. We bunkered down in the boat, patching leaks and prodding away pooling rainwater, as lightning exploded through the blue tarp like falling shells. Thus, I fell asleep in yet another night of unexpected wonders.