African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [146]
PLEASURE
Today rain threatens from every quarter of the sky. Rain fell in grey sheets behind us, then around us, then–as we ran through the hills–we emerged into sharp stinging downpours that kept pace until we left them in sullen purple-black masses that blotted out the mountains: saw an intense orange sunlight ahead and thought we would reach that but no, at another turn of the road the bruise-coloured clouds were ahead, and we were into a new storm that lashed the car with hail. At midday, in a space of sun, we stopped by a river at a place that combined wildness and remoteness with the convenience of a picnic table and a bench. While we sat there three men emerged from a landrover and came to look at the river. Two tourists and their tour-guide. We guessed Swedish, German, Danish, American, but heard Italian. These were rich Italians in elegant clothes, and they could afford an individual guide who had brought them to stand above a tempestuously-running river, full of rain, before speeding on up to Mutare. Then on we drove in the opposite direction, through wilder and more mountainous country, with never a car in sight, while the storms still deployed around us until finally everything was grey rain. We arrived at the Chimanimani Hotel in rain and found a vast fire burning in a vast living-room. The hotel is spacious, every room large with high ceilings, the bedrooms large with verandahs from which you look at mountains and more mountains, and, close to, the decorous blue swirls of a swimming bath. Old Colonial, which has made some of the pleasantest hotels in the world, but it was nearly empty. How can such a hotel not be permanently full? It seems one of the problems is that it is near Mozambique and a couple of years ago a party of Renamo Terrorists came through these mountains. Well, and what of it? No one stops using the roads when they read the statistics for car accidents. There is no accounting for what people choose to be afraid of.
We ate dinner in the capacious and almost empty dining-room, listening to the laughter and hullabaloo of general enjoyment coming from the outside bar–for that is packed every night, even when bars inside the hotel remain underused. That night the hotel was enclosed in a hush of rain, but by morning the rain had become mist. We drove around and around mountains, each known intimately to the two men who had walked over them. Then, from the mountains, to the Bridal Veil Falls. (In every part of the world savagely beautiful falls of water are diminished and domesticated by being called bridal veils.) The water smashes, crashes, plunges, in cascades of white hundreds of feet over rocks into a pool. On either side of the falls are steep escarpments full of the homes of birds, and the place is enclosed in that silence that is made by a continuous rushing noise. Banana trees grow there showing all the cycles of their lives. For when they have flowered at last they die: new saplings spring up among giants whose sagging limbs show they are due to rejoin the soil. They have red ribs and a glossy jewelled look. We were sitting on a grassy lawn between rocks when the Coffee Farmer remarked, ‘During the War a bunch of ‘terrs’ murdered some tourists here. The locals won’t come near the place. Just near where you are sitting actually.’ We did not rise to this. Whatever vibrations of fear or horror there were have long ago left this place: