Going Home - Doris May Lessing [19]
The only creatures that were really a threat to this house were the white ants. All that part of the country was full of ant-heaps. They can be 10, 20 feet high. After the rains, a grass-covered peak of earth which has looked dead will suddenly sprout up an extra foot or so overnight of new red granulated earth, like the turrets and pinnacles of a child’s fairy castle.
A good, hard kick will send the new earth flying and expose a mass of tunnels and galleries leading down far, far into the earth. There is always water under ant-heaps. People digging wells look for a good, old, well-established ant-heap. They follow down the tunnels. Sixty feet, a hundred feet, sometimes deeper, they are bound to come on water.
There was an ant-heap in front of the house, and another to one side; most of the time the ants remained there, but occasionally they sent outriders into the house.
On my white bedroom wall, for instance, would appear a red winding gallery, like an artery, irregularly branching. These galleries were wet at first, and granular, because each particle of earth is brought in the mouth of an ant. It is a mistake to wipe these galleries off while they are still wet, for all you achieve is a smear of red earth and crushed ants on the wall. Once dry, they can be easily brushed off, leaving only a faint, pinkish mark on the white. It is exciting to see a new gallery where none existed three hours before, and to shrink yourself ant-size and imagine yourself scurrying along under fragrant tunnels of fresh, wet earth.
It was the ants, of course, who finally conquered, for when we left that house empty in the bush, it was only a season before the ant-hills sprouted in the rooms themselves, among the quickly sprouting trees, and the red galleries must have covered all the walls and the floor. The rains were heavy that year, beating the house to its knees. And we heard that on the kopje there was no house, just a mound of greyish, rotting thatch, covered all over with red ant-galleries. And then in the next dry season a big fire swept up from the bush at the back, where the kopje fell sharp and precipitous over rocks into the big vlei, and there was nothing left of the house. Nothing at all; just the bush growing up.
One of the reasons I wanted to go home was to drive through the bush to the kopje and see where the house had been. But I could not bring myself to do it.
Supposing, having driven seven miles through the bush to the place where the road opens into the big mealie land, supposing then that I had lifted my eyes expecting to see the kopje sloping up, a slope of empty, green bush—supposing then that the house was still there after all?
For a long time I used to dream of the collapse and decay of that house, and of the fire sweeping over it; and then I set myself to dream the other way. It was urgently necessary to recover every detail of that house. For only my own room was clear in my mind. I had to remember everything, every strand of thatch and curve of wall or heave in the floor, and every tree and bush and patch of grass around it, and how the fields and slopes of country looked at different times of the day, in different strengths and tones of light. When I was working to regain that house from collapse, I used to set myself to sleep, saying, ‘Now you will dream of that room, or that tree, or that turn in the road.’ And most often I did. Over months, I recovered the memory of it all. And so what was lost and buried in my mind, I recovered from my mind; so I suppose there is no need