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By Root 994 0

they drove over it again and again, till the beasts walked easily, setting their feet down in soft tilthed soil; and the field was flat, without shadows, an even reddish-brown. And so it stood a while, waiting for the rains. During this time the air was full of dust, for the wind-devils danced and played continuously over the field; and sometimes columns of whirling, fiery red dust mingled with fragments of last year’s mealie-stalks that glittered gold and silver, stood in the air higher than eye-level from the house; and the hawks were gone out of the dusty air into the clean air-currents over the far bush. Through the dust that shone a soft red at sunset and sunrise, the great soft-stepping oxen moved, two by two, in front of the planters; Afrikander oxen with their long, snaky horns; and behind the planting machines the small, white, flat seeds popped into the earth and were covered. The flocks of guinea-fowl moved down out of the bush at dawn and at sunset after those precious mealie-grains, flocks of sometimes fifty, a hundred, two hundred birds; and my brother and I, waiting in the bush with our rifles, saw them as industrious as farmyard birds over the hidden mealie-seeds.

Now the long tension of the dry season had built up into a crescendo of bad temper and irritability and anxiety that means the rains will come soon; and at night, lying in bed, I saw the lightning dance and quiver over the mountains while the thunder growled. The long stretches of bush and field were dark; this was the only time of the year the fields were dark, for all the light had gone into the electricity that darted along the edges of the cloud-masses.

And then, one night, I would wake and hear a rushing and a pouring and a rustling all around; the rains had come. Over my head the old thatch was soaking and swelling, and in the weak places the wet seeped through, so that from half a dozen patches of roof over my room came a soft dulcet pattering. I crept out from under the mosquito net to set basins and jugs to catch the drops; and looking out from the door into the wet darkness a battering of rain ricocheting up from the earth came as high as my waist so that I had to step back fast into dryness. But until the lightning drove down through the wet and broken cloud-masses it was dark; when the light came, it drove down the shining rods of white rain, and showed the trees crouching under the downpour and a thick dance of white raindrops like hailstones a foot deep all over the earth.

So I would go back to sleep, lulled by the roar of the rain outside and the splash of the roof-leaks into the basins. In the morning I was woken not by the warmth of the sun on my bed but by a new intenser glare of light on my eyelids: the air had been washed clean of smoke from the veld fires and of dust, and the skies had lifted high and bright, and the trees were green and clean. The sun had come close again, shining free and yellow direct on to the big field, which was now a dark, rich, sodden red, a clear, red space among rich, sodden foliage. The thatch was still dropping long stalactites of shining water, and it was as if the house was enclosed by a light waterfall.

By midday the wetness had been whirled up into the air in clouds of steam; the big field steamed and smoked; and it was as if one could feel the growth being sucked up out of the mealie-grains by the heat and the wet.

During the first days of the wet season the storms and the showers advanced and retreated, and we watched the drama from the kopje-top; the now rich green bush stretching all around for miles would be blotted out suddenly in one place by a grey curtain, or the clouds would open violently overhead, enclosing us in a grey, steaming downpour. Below, the field was already showing a sheen of green. From the path beside the field, walking, the field was again opening and shutting, but now in avenues of green. Each plant was an inch high, a minute, green, divided spear, as crisp as fresh lettuce, and in the heart of each a big, round, shining globule of water.

Now the farmer would