West, west . . . Somewhere a river with broad, clean banks to ease my passage to the sea . . . Thud of hoofs, shuttling of shadows . . . The night air upon my face . . . A glimpse of bright beings on high, dark walls, shining towers . . . The air is sweetened . . . Vision swims . . . Shadows . . . We are merged, centaur-like. Star and I, under a single skin of sweat . . . We take the air and give it back in mutual explosions of exertion . . . Neck clothed in thunder, terrible the glory of the nostrils . . . Swallowing the ground . . . Laughing, the smell of the waters upon us, the trees very near to our left . . . Then among them . . . Sleek bark, hanging vines, broad leaves, droplets of moisture . . . Spider web in the moonlight, struggling shapes within . . . Spongy turf . . . Phosphorent fungus on fallen trees . . . A clear space . . . Long grasses rustling . . . More trees . . . Again, the riversmell . . . Sounds, later . . . Sounds . . . The grassy chuckling of water . . . Closer, louder, beside it at last . . . The heavens buckling and bending in its belly, and the trees . . . Clean, with a cold, damp tang . . . Leftward beside it, pacing it now . . . Easy and flowing, we follow . . .
To drink . . . Splashing in its shallows, then hockhigh with head depressed, Star, in it, drinking like a pump, blasting spray from his nostrils . . . Upriver, it laps at my boots . . . Dripping from my hair, running down my arms . . . Star‘s head turning, at the laughter . . . Then downriver again, clean, slow, winding . . . Then straight, widening, slowing . . .
Trees thickening, then thinning . . . Long, steady, slow . . . A faint light in the east . . . Sloping downward now, and fewer trees . . . Rockier, and the darkness made whole once again . . . The first, dim hint of the sea, lost an odor later . . . Clicking on, on, in the nightsend chill . . . Again, an instant‘s salt . . . Rock, and an absence of trees. . . Hard, steep, bleak, down. . . Ever-increasing precipitousness . . . Flashing between walls of stone . . . Dislodged pebbles vanishing in the now racing current, their splashes drowned in the roar‘s echoes . . . Deeper the defile, widening . . . Down, down . . . Farther still . . . Now pale once more the east, gentler the slope . . . Again, the touch of salt, stronger . . . Shale and grit . . . Around a comer, down, and brighter still . . . Steady, soft and loose the footing . . . The breeze and the light, the breeze and the light . . . Beyond a crop of rock . . . Draw rein.
Below me lay the stark seaboard, where rank upon rank of rolling dunes, harassed by the winds out of the southwest, tossed spumes of sand that partly obliterated the distant outlines of the bleak morning sea.
I watched the pink film spread across the water from the east. Here and there, the shifting sands revealed dark patches of gravel. Rugged masses of rock reared above the swell of the waves. Between the massive dunes—hundreds of feet in height—and myself, there high above that evil coast, lay a smashed and pitted plain of angular rocks and gravel, just now emerging from hell or night into dawn‘s first glow, and alive with shadows.
Yes, it was right.
I dismounted and watched the sun force a bleak and glaring day upon the prospect. It was the hard, white light I had sought. Here, sans humans, was the necessary place, just as I had seen it decades earlier on the shadow Earth of my exile. No bulldozers, sifters, broom-wielding blacks; no maximum-security city of Oranjemund. No X-ray machines, barbed wire, or armed guards. None of these things here. No. For this shadow had never known a Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, and there had never been a Consolidated Diamond Mines of South West Africa, nor a government to approve their amalgamation of coastal mining interests. Here was the desert called Namib in that place some four hundred miles to the northwest of Cape Town, a strip of dunes and rocks ranging from a couple to a dozen miles in width and running along that forsaken coast line for perhaps three hundred miles on the seaward side of the Richtersveld Mountains, within whose shadow I now stood. Here, unlike any conventional mine, the diamonds were scattered as casually as bird droppings across the sand. I, of course, had brought along a rake and a sieve.