Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

158 THINKING BLACK
But, as the natives put it, " there can be no birth
without a pang," so the dawn of the 21st of October sees
us stoically beginning a second day of the desert tramp,
the absolute sameness of the chronicle being repeated
with the certainty of a phonograph. The silent desert
parching in the sun can now be seen to break away in
weary waves of sandhills, and our caravan pace has de-
generated into a crawl, the route really not as ** the crow
flies " but as the snail crawls. And sure, there is some-
thing of the infinite in the very monotony of this waste,
the vast sweep of the horizon only deepening this sense
of infinity. Our roasting English tweeds make us envy
the negro who peels to the waist and wears the merest
wisp of garment round his equatorial regions. Sun and
sand rule the road, the sun smiting your head and the
sand doing its exasperating worst for your feet. Then,
ahead, like a lurking lion, there is the same old perpetual
puzzle at sundown. To wit, how, where, and when to get
the supposititious fire that will boil the supposititious
water locked in the bosom of this desert ?
Splitting the caravan into two, like an orange, the
" water " section is left in camp to wring a few drops of
drink from that dry desert, whilst the faggot-seekers
scatter over the clean-swept sand for fuel. It soon
comes out that, far from thinking this "fire and water"
cleavage a mere accident of desert environment, our
negro argues that these two elements have for centuries
been owned as the great " Kings of Africa." Ask
him to prove his case for the dual kingship of Fire