blew back a confetti of smuts as it screeched off slowly over the brilliance of rails. When I took my hand from my eyes I was receding rapidly, alone on the glittering black dust. With a honk the train was gone.
A double white sign, converging on a V, said, KATEMBI RIVER,
17 ft. above sea level, 57
½
miles to Durban.
A tin shed, delicately eroded by rust a foot up from the ground, said, GOODS. It was empty. At the end of the strip of coal grit, like a short carpet abruptly rolled, thick bush green and black green and hard with light reached up and closed in high, singing with hot intimacy far within and dead still to the eye.
A tremendous heat watched everything.
I was conscious of the feel of the sea on my left cheek, where it bumped and exploded white below the roll of green that fell away from that side of the track, but I was still as a lizard, breathing, it seemed, shallower even than the air, not moving my eyes.
The shaking of a human hand unseen broke the authority of the bush as it swayed with the passage of human bodies passing down a grudging pathway I could not see; and the quiet buzzle of two people talking that suggests to the stranger they are preparing to meet a side of themselves he will never know, that will have disappeared in hiding by the time they come forward on a smile, gave a queer misbeat to my heart. I was hot, a little sweat came out and clung my hair to my forehead as I urged smiling to meet them; Mrs. Koch pointing and shaking her head beneath a checked parasol, her feet in menâs sandals, and a man with her.
ââMy dear! Iâm so sorry ⦠shame ⦠what a way to arrive. â¦â The soft, damp kiss, the Eau-de-Cologne. I laughed, shaking my head, hotter, unbearably hot now in the relief of the moment of greeting over. The manâit was a young man, I now saw, in a sort of half-uniform, khaki shorts and an army shirt and sandals, but no capâwore glasses and stood back looking down at us with the polite smile of a stranger watching emotion which he does not share. Thesmile pulled the corners of his mouth down and in a little. âIt was Ludi, he would stop by at the old Plaskettsâ on the way to say hulloâoh, there was plenty of time. I am
so
sorry. ⦠What will your mother think of us?ââHer son, of course; with the German name; the guilty smile of nonrecognition faded comfortably on my face.
In the gaiety of arrival, exchanging questions we did not wait for each other to answer, we trudged up the steep pathway with cinders grinding away under our feet, a hand up to fend off the bush. The young man came up behind, with the luggage. The three of us were packed into the front of an old faded car and he drove away up and down a steep stony road that dipped now between flat-roofed trees where creepers dropped screens over bush secretive with a hidden trickle of stream, now through a cuttingâblack ooze and wet rock with a bunch of tough grasses stuffed in here and there as if to staunch the woundârose and turned and discovered the river away below on the left and the sugar cane. As I talked to Mrs. Koch, my elbow crooked on the open window felt the pull of the sun and the sudden warm wet blow of the river. The river was drawn in a brown hank, shiny like the sheath of a muscle, through the soft hills of cane; one against the other they were folded, soft with deep cane, flattened like fur by the wind, down, silver-pale, up, green; sage and brilliant as the sun blew across.
The cane sang on either side of the road. We could not see beyond it. It was tall as a man and thick as tall grass to an ant. âPhew â¦,â said Mrs. Koch at the still heat, as if it were something she could never meet without faint astonishment. She moved her warm bulk to take out a small handkerchief and touch her cheek beneath her eyes, with the movement of wiping away tears. Ludi moved up a little, to give us more room; it was as if, although he
A double white sign, converging on a V, said, KATEMBI RIVER,
17 ft. above sea level, 57
½
miles to Durban.
A tin shed, delicately eroded by rust a foot up from the ground, said, GOODS. It was empty. At the end of the strip of coal grit, like a short carpet abruptly rolled, thick bush green and black green and hard with light reached up and closed in high, singing with hot intimacy far within and dead still to the eye.
A tremendous heat watched everything.
I was conscious of the feel of the sea on my left cheek, where it bumped and exploded white below the roll of green that fell away from that side of the track, but I was still as a lizard, breathing, it seemed, shallower even than the air, not moving my eyes.
The shaking of a human hand unseen broke the authority of the bush as it swayed with the passage of human bodies passing down a grudging pathway I could not see; and the quiet buzzle of two people talking that suggests to the stranger they are preparing to meet a side of themselves he will never know, that will have disappeared in hiding by the time they come forward on a smile, gave a queer misbeat to my heart. I was hot, a little sweat came out and clung my hair to my forehead as I urged smiling to meet them; Mrs. Koch pointing and shaking her head beneath a checked parasol, her feet in menâs sandals, and a man with her.
ââMy dear! Iâm so sorry ⦠shame ⦠what a way to arrive. â¦â The soft, damp kiss, the Eau-de-Cologne. I laughed, shaking my head, hotter, unbearably hot now in the relief of the moment of greeting over. The manâit was a young man, I now saw, in a sort of half-uniform, khaki shorts and an army shirt and sandals, but no capâwore glasses and stood back looking down at us with the polite smile of a stranger watching emotion which he does not share. Thesmile pulled the corners of his mouth down and in a little. âIt was Ludi, he would stop by at the old Plaskettsâ on the way to say hulloâoh, there was plenty of time. I am
so
sorry. ⦠What will your mother think of us?ââHer son, of course; with the German name; the guilty smile of nonrecognition faded comfortably on my face.
In the gaiety of arrival, exchanging questions we did not wait for each other to answer, we trudged up the steep pathway with cinders grinding away under our feet, a hand up to fend off the bush. The young man came up behind, with the luggage. The three of us were packed into the front of an old faded car and he drove away up and down a steep stony road that dipped now between flat-roofed trees where creepers dropped screens over bush secretive with a hidden trickle of stream, now through a cuttingâblack ooze and wet rock with a bunch of tough grasses stuffed in here and there as if to staunch the woundârose and turned and discovered the river away below on the left and the sugar cane. As I talked to Mrs. Koch, my elbow crooked on the open window felt the pull of the sun and the sudden warm wet blow of the river. The river was drawn in a brown hank, shiny like the sheath of a muscle, through the soft hills of cane; one against the other they were folded, soft with deep cane, flattened like fur by the wind, down, silver-pale, up, green; sage and brilliant as the sun blew across.
The cane sang on either side of the road. We could not see beyond it. It was tall as a man and thick as tall grass to an ant. âPhew â¦,â said Mrs. Koch at the still heat, as if it were something she could never meet without faint astonishment. She moved her warm bulk to take out a small handkerchief and touch her cheek beneath her eyes, with the movement of wiping away tears. Ludi moved up a little, to give us more room; it was as if, although he
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