Just reading a little tonight and I came across this passage and found myself reading it over and over.

"I think that if one lived to be a hundred, and watched the dawn break and the sun rise over the highveld of Africa every morning, one would never tire of it, just as a sailor will always find delight in watching the sea. And indeed there is the same play of light, the same endless changing, forming and reforming of cloud and shadow, the same sense of the creation of the world before ones's eyes. The rolling up of long shadows thrown by rocks and trees never fails to enthrall; their tips race in utter silence across the plain; behind them, trees and grass and bush and ant hills spring into a new golden life of their own. It is like watching the rolling up of a gigantic carpet at an incredible speed, The fascination of beginnings- of the daisy that opens its petals to the sun, the yellow chick drying from the egg, the spring that trickles from the rock, the clenched bud parting on a twig- all this wonder is packed every morning into the birth of an African day. Heat and sweat and weariness come later, but all that is forgotten at the start; it was four years since we had seen this miracle and we gloried in it again."

Elspeth Huxley from: On The Edge of The Rift


There are lots of things in books that make one smile and remember things they have done and things they have seen. This one really did that for me and I remembered what that first morning in Africa is like when you have been thinking about it for so long and you finally realize it is no longer in the future ...but right now.

Very nice!

quote:

Originally posted by Grafton:
I remembered what that first morning in Africa is like when you have been thinking about it for so long and you finally realize it is no longer in the future ...but right now .

Not so much my first morning, but rather the first evening for me. My first time in Namibia I was so young and green. I felt that I was walking on air. Somehow we failed to see a single animal the entire evening but I did not really notice because I just kept repeating in my head, "I'm here. I am really here."

Until the birth of my daughter, nothing had ever come close to that first evening in Namibia.

I used to base in a place called Lokichoggio, Kenya, up in the northwest in Turkana country. We were billited in a classic safari camp, flying relief missions into central and southern Sudan.

The sunrises there in that desert country were the most remarkable sunrises I have ever seen, anywhere, and I've seen a lot of sunrises in strange places, many quite beautiful.

Just before the sun would rise, the sky was shot through with radii of pink, yellow, and lavender. I used to sit on my tent's front porch and just soak it up. That was back in 1992/93, and I will never forget the raw majesty of that place.