Going Home - Doris May Lessing [81]
We drove through Banket fast. There is a new hotel there, built just where at one time the mealie sacks used to be laid out waiting for the train to take them to Salisbury and the markets. The sacks were of a new, strong, golden-brown stuff, with a double line of bright blue down them, smelling strongly of ink from the farmers’ brand-marks. They were stacked up on each other 10 feet high, with dirt lanes between; so the children in for the afternoon from the farms used to play on them, jumping perilously from one barricade to another. The sacks were hot and smooth; and sitting on them the hard, small grains inside gave to one’s weight like shifting sand. The smell was of sun-heated red dust, and ink, and jute and fresh, sweet mealies. The sacks were laid at either end of the rows in such a way that they made a bulging staircase; and if one sat on the top and let oneself go, one slid very fast and, bumping over the sacks, landed with a thud in the soft, warm dust.
But now there is a large, modern hotel. Because this is the main road north, along which cars come up all the way from the Cape, through to Northern Rhodesia, and so to Kenya, and ultimately, if they wish, to Egypt, there are hotels building all along it. This is the road from Cape to Cairo: but it is still a rough and primitive road; and thus, for me at least, enjoyable to drive over. Sinoia is twenty miles up the railway line from Banket; and that is no longer a station merely, but a small town. I remember sitting in the car waiting for my father when he had to drive there to get a spare part for the car, or for the farm machinery, or to take a labourer into the Native Hospital. It used to be just a station, a few buildings, the iron roofs glittering with heat, the earth rocking with heat-waves. Sinoia is extremely hot; all my memories of it are of that truly withering heat. But on this evening we drove through it fast, past another fine new hotel, and along to Karoi. I had not before driven farther than Sinoia, for me it was the end of the stations; and beyond that there was the Zambezi escarpment.
The road became sharply worse, badly potholed and swirling with dust. The plan was to drive until the turn-off to the Kariba Gorge, and then find some hotel to stay the night. I was imagining the little hotels, lines of rooms built side by side under a low roof off a verandah, whose existence depended on the bar, which was what Banket hotel used to be like. The children of the district would stand on the verandah and watch the Government officials and the commercial travellers and the insurance men, in their correct town clothes, standing at the bar drinking with the farmers in their khaki and their bush-shirts.
The road was twisting, swerving up and down; the air was full of reddish dust as the sun went down, so that as the car turned at a bend a blaze of red, glinting with particles of light, blinded us and made the car rock. That grass known as redtop, a soft, feathery, reddish-pink grass, was growing everywhere; and the sun swung over it, so that it was like soft flames springing up, or the sweep of a veld-fire with the wind behind it, when sun-thinned flames lap forward over unconsumed stems. The autumn green of the trees was gilded and burnished with the low sunlight. Once a small buck sprang across the road, and its coat was heated to a warm, reddish-brown. The tree-trunks flashed up dark, showing red wakes of the rose-red grass behind; and the sun-heat slid fast up their solid heaviness, roughening the bark so that it held pockets of red glow.
Just before the sun sank, and a red blaze