[Bill,
April 18, 2008]
'An implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention'
Even in the blinding sunshine of today, where spring has finally, most definitely sprung, I find my thoughts returning to Africa. The river was the Ogooue, and I only traveled upriver for about four hours near Lambarene, home of Albert Schweitzer's hospital, but I find myself thinking about it, briefly — another existence. And yes, we saw hippos:
Going up the river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an inpenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of the sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side.
The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands, you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself cut off forever from everything known once - somewhere far away - in another existence perhaps. There were movements when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not had a moment to spare to yourself; but it came back in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.