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

360 THINKING BLACK
minutes representing as many dissolving shades in the
softening scheme of colour : step by step, shade by shade,
working up from monochrome through tint after tint,
through rose into pale lemon, through sea-green into the
ultimate azure. Tell me, please, is plain Peter Bell my
negro neighbour taking it all in as he looks moodily at
vacancy ? Apparently, I am observing while he is only
seeing, for a beam of light in the eye is not charged with
thought, is it ? Or can it be that he, a landsman, is
thinking of this Lake as the murderer of fishermen in
their coggly dug-outs, the red sunrise symbolic of the
red blood of its victims ? To him this painted poetry is
the plainest of plain prose, for in cruelty this Lake is feline.
It licks your feet and purrs very pleasantly, but it will
crack your bones for all that—then wipe its foaming lips
as if naught had happened. But the grandest bit of
Geography in the whole landscape is the glorious West
side, away up North towards Luanza, where the sharp
headlands have given the West marshes the slip. Rising
sheer from the Lake, these bluffs are seen buttressing the
whole North-Western Coast, dozens of little streams vying
with each other how to leap over the cliff gracefully with
waterfalls like a white mare's tail. The last of these is a
gaunt spike of headland called Chipuma, alongside which
the river Luanza flows into Mweru—our home in the far
future.
But in Africa you too, like plain Peter Bell, must get
all your poetry out of the prose of life. So off we go
jolting down the hillside, heading for the first town in