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By Root 958 0

ramp, anchoring the front wheels in a groove for the purpose, had the loudspeaker fixed on to the window, and looked at the big, white screen that glimmered soft in the moonlight against a blaze of enormous African stars. Then there was a newsreel, and then a British film whose name I forget, but the script was by Mr Priestley, and the main part was played by Alec Guinness. The story was about a young clerk told he was soon to die; so he drew out all his savings and set himself to have a good time in a luxury hotel. I think I might have considered this a good film had I seen it in Leicester Square, but nothing could have seemed more incongruous and pitiful than this cosy little drama of provincial snobberies and homespun moralities played out in front of ranks of tobacco farmers in their big cars, with the African waiters hanging about in the shadows, watching the screen with one ear open for a summons from the verandah whence came the chink of ice in glasses; while behind the screen the Southern Cross moved sideways to make room for Orion, and the crickets chirped incessantly just off in the bush.

We were off along the road next morning while the moon still whitened it. The light changed fast and warmed; and the bush darkened and sprang up on either side of the road as the sun burst over the hills.

The turn-off to Kariba has a big notice that there is no accommodation for sightseers. After the pitted, rutted main road, the new dirt-surfaced road to Kariba was restful to drive on. It winds along through increasingly wild country down towards the Zambezi, for 60 miles or so; and the kloofs and hills and turning points along it have names like Puff-Adder Rise and Buffalo Nek.

From time to time the car was stopped by a tsetse fly post, and the wheels and body of the car were sprayed. When the car stopped for a couple of minutes, it was at once invaded by half a dozen innocent-looking flies, which we swatted at once, reminding ourselves that very few people die of sleeping sickness.

We reached the site at about nine in the morning, a turn off the road into a flat place between hills, which were covered all over with camps, tents and breeze-block huts shining white through thick trees, while land-rovers and bulldozers manoeuvred everywhere, over sun-dried mud-ruts. White men supervised groups of Africans doing this or that sort of work.

It all looked like a gold-rush film; another world from the comfortable conformities of little Salisbury; and I liked it very much. This was the atmosphere of the old days, the good old days that people remember so sentimentally; and I cannot help remembering them sentimentally too.

It took some time to track down the official who would be responsible for us—a young Frenchman from Mauritius who, after a few years here, was already completely Rhodesian and who went out of his way all day to be as helpful and as hospitable as he could be, in the Rhodesian tradition of fine hospitality.

First, he explained that all this scene of chaotic activity was temporary; for affairs were still in the stage of building access roads and permanent housing; and groups of people were being flown in daily from Greece and Italy; and the African labourers were being garnered in from wherever they could be found.

He took us in his land-rover over roads such as I have never even imagined; but they were not roads, merely those parts of a rough terrain that offered the least resistance to locomotion. I was filled with respect for land-rovers; this one climbed up tracks as steep as house-sides without any effort, and finally up a high mountain, so that Paul Hogarth could make drawings of the landscape.

On the top of this mountain we sat, therefore, for an hour or so, while baboons and monkeys swung through the trees and gibbered at us from the bushes; and we threw pebbles down a steep, narrow gully full of boulders, watching them bound off at angles or up into the trees, and we looked at a great expanse of landscape. It was an aeroplane view of the systems of the Zambezi and the Sanyati rivers, winding flat and