Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

A couple of crowned plovers land in the clearing and begin picking their way through the patches of dust and scrub grass. Noel watches them for a moment, their halos of white feathers about their heads, their earth-coloured plumage and their bright red legs. Then he lifts the Keats, clears his throat and begins to read the first verse, the Tennyson ready and open across his knee.

‘Ja, they gave us these Land Rovers isn’t it? Converted to carry two AK47s on either side. If you were ambushed, you hit the red button’—he makes a stabbing gesture with his forefinger—‘and they’d start shooting. Really effective, I’m telling you, and better than what we were doing at the start of the bloody war — just getting out and running at the terrs yelling our bloody heads off and firing.’ Jonathan laughs, shaking his head. He is a white Zimbabwean, in his forties, with large, farming hands and a heavy body, muscle turned to fat. His jowls shake when he laughs, but then, as if remembering a grave matter, he stops and says, ‘You must fire low with those AKs, y’know? Because of the kick, isn’t it?’ He holds an imaginary rifle before him, his forefinger hooked on an imaginary trigger, and demonstrates the kick of an AK47, his right arm vibrating as the imaginary bullets spit from the barrel. The action makes his jowls wobble again, but this time he looks deadly serious.

I am at Heaven Lodge in Chimanimani in the foothills of the Eastern Highlands, waiting to be taken up into the mountains themselves. It is early in the morning and their peaks are still clearing of mist in the distance. Jonathan is staying here too while he oversees the building of his own backpacker lodge down the road. He’s going to call it Paradise.

‘It’ll be a tough choice for you lot, hey?’ he jokes. ‘Between Heaven and Paradise.’ Then he drops his voice to a whisper. ‘But I’m telling you, Paradise will be better.’

For the last half hour he’s been telling me and a group of Americans on an overland tour about the last time he was in this area. It was during the war, when the guerrillas of ZANLA were heavily active throughout the eastern region.

‘They’d come over the border, lay some mines, piggy-back some of them too, the bastards, maybe take out a farm, then bugger off back into Mozambique.’

Jonathan has been telling us he was a member of the Rhodesian SAS, fighting back against the ‘terrs’, but I’m not sure if I believe him.

His stories sound true enough but he retells them with too much eagerness for a man who has really lived through them.

I have come to the Eastern Highlands because this is the area you used to trek to, once a year, for an annual week’s camping with your friend Edgar Lloyd. I read a letter in Rhodes House Library in Oxford in which you referred to that week’s camping as your time to ‘meditate’. In another letter Edgar Lloyd describes how you would arrive for a week in the hills with little more than your blanket, your tin mug and a tin of mealie meal.

I suppose, like you, I have come here to meditate: to think over the story that Canon Holderness told me two days ago, about you, Ada and your child. And that is why I am going up to the Highlands on my own this morning. Some other travellers I’ve met will join me tomorrow, but I want one day up there alone. With you and your story. One day to think it through, to work it out.

Unlike you, however, I am not going into the Highlands so sparsely equipped, even though I’ll be in the hills for just three days. I spent all of yesterday afternoon buying supplies: a paraffin stove and a saucepan, packets of noodles, bread, cheese, some apples, cutlery, a waterproof and a sleeping mat. I also took the opportunity of being in the town to have my hair cut at a barber’s, although the hairdresser there didn’t know how to use scissors on my hair. She said she’d only ever cut African hair, and for that she used clippers. She tried the scissors but we could both tell it wasn’t going to work, so I had my hair cut with the clippers instead.

♦

The Chimanimani range of the Eastern Highlands is a ridge of mountains peaking at over 2,000 metres, running north to south over a distance of 35 kilometres, with a plateau and a flat-bottomed valley in the middle of them. The climb up onto the plateau is steep — a scramble over rocks up a slope thickly covered with ycllowwood trees, protea bushes and ferns. The path is unclear in places and more than once I find myself retracing my steps to find where I have gone off course. My rucksack is heavy with my supplies and I have soon emptied my water bottle. When I reach the top, an hour and a half after I was dropped off at the base camp by the driver from Heaven Lodge, my shirt is drenched and the sweat is stinging in my eyes.

The ground begins to level off. Flat slabs of rock are layered on either side of me, embedded in the slope at the same obtuse angle like the body of a great stone ship, sinking into the mountain. I pick up a path, a narrow red earth track that meanders through acres of bright green, sharp-bladed grass and sparsely spread bushes punctuated with the domes of brown-red termite mounds. I walk through this landscape for about half an hour, the peaks of the mountains on the Mozambique border steep-sided in the distance, sharp-edged against a brilliant blue sky.

Then, coming through a gap between two huge boulders that lean and touch above me as if they are kissing, I am in a sculpture park. The path carries on meandering before me but the bright grass and the bushes have been replaced by a field of granite standing stones, contorted and sculpted by erosion into individual pieces of natural art, standing apart from each other on the sandy, scrub-grass soil. The larger ones look like half-finished Henry Moores (I think of the sculptures on the streets of Harare), while the clusters of smaller ones remind me of the ranked armies of miniature clay soldiers buried with the ancient Chinese emperors. I walk on through these rocks alone, feeling as if I am trespassing, a child in the giant’s garden.

Eventually the alien landscape of stone gives to a more familiar view. For the first time all morning the ground begins to fall away again, and I find myself emerging into the side of a long green valley, flanked with rolling hills that could be in the Brecon Beacons back home. The floor of the valley, though, is African. Blond savannah grass cut through by a thin river, flecked white over patches of rapids. Above the low hills on the other side, the earth gives to stone again; a ragged line of high peaks, cradling the blue sky between them, marking the border with Mozambique.

I stop to make and eat a sandwich at a ranger’s hut a little further down the valley’s side. The ranger is there, a wiry Zimbabwean in the dark green uniform of the national park: safari shirt with sleeves rolled to above his elbows, shorts, walking boots, a bush hat and a rectangular plastic name badge on his chest, with his name, MOSES, printed on it in clear white capitals.

Moses tells me the rangers live up here for up to a month at a time, alone, except for the walkers who come and stay in the park. I ask him how many walkers are in the park today. He says there is an overland tour group due to arrive soon, but they’ll be going back down later.

‘You will be the only person in the park tonight,’ he tells me matter-of-factly.

I ask him if there is anything I should watch out for.