FOUR

“In the very beginning, there were no people on the earth, but there was one woman.” A Bushmen saying.

For the first time, at the end of the third day, I emerge from the spaceship, and walk on the cooling sand. A memory meets me; it is a moth I saw once in the change rooms of a swimming pool. Its wings are doused with urine, and its long antenna is caught on a shiny pink marble. Its legs scramble as I release more warm yellow fluid against the cool white urinal. I watch it flow down and gently touch it. Then this thought worms its way through my head:

This is life. It is kind. It is cruel, and it can end like this.

I put this behind me as the cushions of my feet flatten on the soft curls of sand. Each step is painful but the pain is also a good friend telling me that I am still alive. I swallow the last crumb of what I have and try to draw all the energy of the bread and water into me. But then there is a white-hot feeling in my back, and I fall into the bosom of the dune. I try to breathe evenly, and once this is achieved, I am stolen away into sleep once more. The dream that comes now is different.

“Do not be afraid, Andrew.”
I am unable to say anything, and why should I, I am sleeping.
“Now that you have come, you will see many new things, starting with yourself.”
It is like a voice springing, ethereal, from a typhoon, or a mountain. It is soft, like a breeze in a desert, but powerful, like a storm.
“You will go to the island. There you will meet the others.”
I am in no doubt that this is a dream. I am not going anywhere. Certainly not to any island.

“Yes you are. Rraditshipi will show you the way, but you have to walk it.”
This dialogue is unexpected. But, of course, I am partly responsible for it. I am creating it.
This is my dream after all. I am dreaming a dream for myself.
“But to walk here you have to keep your eyes open. Can you do that now?”
Suddenly I am very afraid. The disembodied voice doesn’t seem disembodied at all. I am fully awake, though my eyes are closed, but I sense, behind my eyelids, that someone wraithlike, but real is before me.

When I open my eyes shock shoots through me like electricity. There is no one here. This is almost more of a shock than if someone was here.
Then I feel something on my shoulder. I am turning in my sleep. I am turning in my wakefulness. I see a hand, and my eyes travel up the arm to a face, and lips. She says once more, “Andrew, you are not alone. Do not be afraid.” Something opens inside me, both joy and sorrow at once and I have nothing to build defences with. I weep. It is a wonderful feeling of relief like rain on a fallow field.
“The essence of all things, Andrew, is emptiness.” Her words seem to cover everything, and she seems to take the world in her care and I am merely part of that. She is the cool rain on my hot, charging heart.
I understand and I don’t understand. I don’t think about it, which is something new for me.

“I must leave you now, but I will send a messenger and he will bring you back to me when you are ready.”
“Is this real?” I croak these words to her between my tears. I am pathetic, but I don’t care.

“Most of your life is an illusion. But you have turned from that and you will change what you see when you stop seeking things before you find them, when you stop expecting life to be different from what it is. Life is, but life is also what you make it.”

“Who are you?”
“I am the desert dragon,” she says this with a smile. Gently she says, “Do not follow me now. Find your own path and it will bring you to me.”
Her hand leaves my shoulder and energy departs from me. I feel exhaustion, already, setting in, closing in, and shutting me down. I try to resist it; I try to hold on to the dreamy miasma in my mind.

And then she leaves. She seems to float over the sand and I watch her until long after she has disappeared. Then it becomes very cold above the great sparkling city.

THREE

“There is not one world, but two.” Words attributed to Rraditshipi.

On the third day, I am feeling lonely. I cannot bare to think of the single bun and few drops of water that remain for me. My feelings of peace yield occasionally to feelings of desperation and depression. The pain has worsened, but fasting makes me numb and dizzy, so, when I am not moving, it is easy to sleep and ignore it. I have grown accustomed, in this brief period, to the rhythms of the day. I enjoy the heat, and tear off my clothes to try to absorb it, because the cold at night is less pleasant, and filled, it seems with wild monsters.

I am impressed that the Earth has places like this, where nights are filled with the raucous chatter of wild animals. It is surreal that the Kalahari resembles emptiness and yet is filled, by the sounds of it, with so much. If lions and elephants can live here, there must be more to it than meets the eye. Even the engineers at Orapa know this. They know there is more here than just sand. The sand is filled with diamonds. I wonder what I am not seeing. I wonder how I can make a home of this place, rather than simply trying to endure it. I wonder how one can live daily and happily in the Kalahari. I have come to a place where I believe this is possible. I just do not know how. I am intrigued. I sleep. My body melts against the prickly heat of the seat. I begin to flow through the plastic, through the chemical veins and hard bolts to the silky grains. I fly through a trillian capillaries, and finally bump my head against a thick tubular thing in the ground. I drift up through the soil, along the hard undulations of the tube, upward to breath in the sun filled tree. The tree haunts me. Lions walk by it. Occasionally huge cumulous clouds sail by it, sometimes deploying thick bolts of lightning that rip at the earth and shake the heavens. These bolts turn the grasses into fire. Lines of fire sweep towards the tree. Flames lick against the dark, gutted trunk. But always, the fire has to move on, and the tree survives once more.

I try to go back. I feel raked out of the soil and wake but I seek the dream again. My discomfort and my thirst is very great now, so I begin to imagine that I need to leave the ship. I see I am going to die here. Before I do, perhaps I should at least try to cover some distance. I plan to inspect the engine in the afternoon, and try to bring her back to life. If this proves unsuccessful, I will have to drag myself over the dunes, and I know, lie in the sand at night, while lions lurk nearby.
It occurs to me suddenly that the dream is trying to tell me something. It hits me like a slap on my cheek.

You are the tree. The fire represents your suffering, and you can endure it. If you are to survive, you must stay where you are. Listen. Stop trying and Remember who you are.

At this, I melt. It is a reassuring thought, but to know that I must remain here, and do nothing, fills me with unutterable grief. I know that my suffering will become excruciating. How long must I wait?

I find myself waiting, and occasionally, resisting the urge to cry, to shout, to scream. Always, something draws me away. A big spider on the seat, or a bird with a big beak that visits me. I return to a condition of waiting, and then the agony returns. I decide to stop waiting. It is a difficult decision, because I often forget it. It is a subtle contract I have with myself now. I decide to touch…I touch my own fingers, my nose, my tongue…the glass. I feel. I get lost in this. Somehow I feel irresponsible. I feel like I am playing, when I should be walking or analysing something. But I continue. The day hardens, then softens and is gone.

TWO

“When a sorcerer (medicine man) dies, his heart comes out in the sky and becomes a star.” A Busman interviewed by W.H.I. Bleek and L.C. Lloyd, 1870-1880.

Outside the spaceship is the redness of Mars. The sand seems to swell, to glow with light. The fields of lava redden and breathe, as though the wind stirs their fires within. I hear, under my shirt, a loud growl from my belly. Air pockets bubble through my intestines. Slowly I am able to expel the gas, first from my mouth, and soon from the other end. I am preoccupied with this for time, and then I try to comfort myself that the hunger I feel is nothing compared to the gnawing malnutrition millions of African children, and their parents, endure every day. And you don’t hear about them in the news bulletins. Thus, I reason, I can endure this without trouble.

I wonder where John is? I am grateful that he is gone. I still cannot decide who is in a better position. I guess that he must be, but I am not convinced. Where would he have slept last night? Perhaps he’d not slept at all?

The last time I was this isolated, I remember, was when I was six years old. I had gastroenteritis. They put me in an oxygen tent to bring my life threatening fever down. Because my mother was pregnant she was not allowed to touch me. I was naked, and in pain, and when you are six years old and bedridden, a day feels like a week. So you see Andy, you’ve been through this sort of thing before.

I shut the door on any rebuttal, but eventually one slips through. You don’t get discharged and walk into a parking lot with someone holding your hand. Here, you’ve either got to be rescued, or…you’ve got to find your own way.

I watch Venus sparkle in the bright blue heavens. I watch the dunes fill with red light, and then soften to shades of sulphur, ivory and ochre. It is magnificent, rather than beautiful. Again, this feeling of needing to cry overwhelms me. I resist it.
I drift off, dreaming about my big black spaceship, and how it brought me here, to all this space. I dream I am drifting over the ship, and through it, like a ghostly astronaut (but even in my dream I am stiff, and my neck throbbing). I dream that hordes are moving from afar towards the ship. They believe it can save them, that this is not just another derelict spacecraft in the desert. When they are much closer I see that they are not coming to be saved, but are shaking their tiny little fists at the sky. They want me to leave, except I can’t.

Their anger turns to despair as, despite their gesticulations, this machine that has sullied their graceful field, merely remains. They cry like the children of grossly negligent parents. The Mi-26, haunting their world, draws their deepest despairs like poison from a wound. Once spent, they turn and return, unburdened, lightened, to their homes on the horizon somewhere. I know now that they came to the machine to exorcise their hatred of all the inhuman things they have seen and known. They exculpate themselves here, at this symbol of the Empire. I see further, across Africa, through my ghostly eyes, to all the woe and untold desolation that is Africa.

It is frightening and ghastly and bewitching. I see, through all this, beyond yellow rivers of tears, something magnificent. I see a tree in the desert. Other broken trees, scattered and wrecked and mere skeletons under the sun surround it. This one has survived the elephants, its own thirst, and bursts of lightning above its head. Though mostly burnt, I see it is managing to produce fresh green buds, and small new shoots. This capacity to survive inspires me, even in my dream. When I awake my heart is beating like a drum. I want to get up, and run. I know I have dreamt this dream before, before I even came to the desert. I feel a pang as I realise that this dream came from here, and perhaps, has brought me here. I am suddenly filled with a sense of well being, and peace, and purpose. I am happy to know that me being here is not a fluke. I look out over the Kalahari with a little more love in my eyes, and watch the sands fill with light and heat

The Half Full Moon

The story of a man’s journey into the desert wilderness of the most endangered people on Earth – the Kalahari Bushman. He discovers that in order to attempt a rescue for these people, and to survive himself, he must find the courage and confidence to step beyond all he knows, to change what he can and do what he has never done before.

“…it is in the distinct self-interest of the affluent to find ways of extending new systems to include, rather than exclude, the less affluent.” – Alvin Toffler, in Powershift





“There we wept,
When we remembered Zion…
Now how shall we sing the Lord’s song
In a strange land…
Let the words of our mouths
And the meditations of our hearts
Be acceptable in thy sight…” – From the BoneyM song, Rivers of Babylon

INTRODUCTION

Shakespeare, in Richard II:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demiparadise
This fortress built by nature for herself

A desert is a place where you will find silence and space. Science has a different description: A desert is a desert if it gets less than 12 inches (30cm) of rain per year. Deserts are generally understood today to be desolate, far flung places: “barren tracts with little or no water". In fact, a third of the earth’s surface is classed as desert. Chances are, wherever a man or woman stands, a desert is not far off.

Most deserts are made out as wastelands filled with emptiness. Eden’s do exist beyond the biblical archetype: California’s Silicon Valley is one and in the desert of Nevada is another, glimmering Las Vegas. Both are models of a demiparadise erupting out of mere waterless soil. There are better things to do and see in deserts than make memory chips or spin roulette tables. These areas boast eye-popping spectacles, such as in the Pinnacles Desert of Western Australia with its 30,000-year-old limestone pillars (the remains of an ancient forest).

Deserts are more than just sand dunes; they are often journeys through very ancient worlds. Egypt’s Western desert and the Grand Canyon are prime cases, as is the Gobi with its fossilised remains of dinosaurs. Salt flats such as the very dry Atacama in South America have a haunting lunar beauty about them, so too do the shores of the Jordan’s Dead Sea. Desert locations (such as Death Valley in the Mojave, Morocco and Tunisia) frequently form impressive backdrops for commercial filmmaking, often with science fiction and ancient historical themes.

The biggest and most breathtaking deserts in the world are in Africa. The principal desert is the Sahara, 25 times the size of Great Britain, spanning over 2,000,000 square miles of the earth's surface and still spreading. One of the oldest deserts, The Namib in southern Africa, has the world’s highest sand dunes at Sossusvlei. The Namib is famous for its “Skeleton Coast", a centuries-old killer of ships and men that forms the western part of the world’s largest continuous mantle of sand, the Kalahari Desert.

The Kalahari is more accurately described as a "thirstland" because of the lack of surface water, but it boasts the most astonishing Eden of all– the Okavango Delta, the largest inland delta in the world. Not far to the East is the Makgadigadi Salt Pans, the world’s biggest saltpans. Both the delta and the pans are visible on satellite imagery and high definition weather photos. The Kalahari extends from Namibia into Zimbabwe and South Africa, and forms most of a country called Botswana.
In the centre of the African plateau, in line with the Tropic of Capricorn, is the landlocked country of Botswana, Africa’s most successful democracy. This is the heartland of the Kalahari. The word ‘Kalahari’ is believed to have come from a marginalized community in Botswana called the BaKgalagari.

Botswana nowadays produces almost a third of the world's diamonds by value, far more than any other state. This represents about half of government revenue. The world’s largest and second largest diamond mines – Jwaneng and Orapa, are to be found in the Kalahari region of Botswana. Orapa, slightly smaller than Jwaneng, is situated in a more ecologically sensitive area, close to the edge of the massive Makgadigadi Salt Pans, some hundred miles east of the delta.

In 1997, the Botswana government began a large-scale evacuation of the Kalahari’s aboriginal people from their familial lands in the Kalahari. These evacuations continue today. They have been carried out under the semblance of the Bushmen's 'development', and also for the protection of the areas animals. But while more and more Bushmen are driven out, or their water supplies removed, the number of concessions granted for diamond mining operations is skyrocketing. De Beers is a major actor in this show of voracity and self-indulgence.

The Kalahari Bushmen's dilemma is tied directly to Botswana's diamond trade. Pressure from the police is routine. Virtually all the Bushmen now live in bleak resettlement camps. About 100 still hold out in the Reserve. This story is for them.

ONE

“New Moon come out and give us water,
New moon let it thunder down on us,
New moon shake water down on us.” -Traditional Bushmen song.

When I walk into his camp, I find him without his shirt, sitting by a small fire. I have walked for many days to find him, the cool air around us, now that the Kalahari day is dying. There is also the sigh of the veld, telling me how thirsty it is here.
He looks at me and I see something, small stars and blackness, shining in his eyes.

“Don'’t you remember what happened to you?”
I feel something slowly forming.
“
It is strange to see my father here, and he feels it too, I can tell immediately. I know that feeling of wanting to be in the wilderness, on my own, and yet, here I am, an invader of space. There is nothing to say, for the moment.

The spaceship is gargantuan, and my brother, I suddenly realise, the wise, but alien pilot. Now he is a stranger to me again. Not vulnerable but powerful, not cheerful, but brooding and guarded, and absent. There is nothing to say to him now.
I am gazing at the gleaming aluminium floor when my blue memory yields, for some reason, my mother. I have not seen her or even dreamed of her in years, but a vision of her descends on me now, in this place.

She is softer and more beautiful and I am only a seven-year-old sitting cross-legged and crying on the skin pinching red brick patio. The fun is sapped from me by the fiercely hot December day. The cicadas are sizzling, the lawn is humming under an electric mower, and she is pressing her red fingernails lightly over the burnt red crust forming on my knee.

The gleaming aluminium is back. I feel the metallic spike of pain; I taste my own blood off my grubby fingertips, just as I did then. I am even more despondent, because I know I am old enough to have to live with no mother in the world and my childhood is now inconceivably lost.

I hear my father's distant voice, I hear the tremor through the sandpaper: “There is nothing here.
I say: And the radio’s?
Don'’t work.”
“And your phone?”
At that moment it chirrups to life. It's a big satellite phone. I strain to reach and then flip it open. When I recognise the number my heart puffs a few small blue-green butterflies, and I notice a full strength signal.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hi lover. I just called to say I'’m already missing you. I know you'’ve only been gone a few hours butuRRRppppp.”
I frown at the display. The full strength signal is gone, and so is Robin’'s singsong voice. I shake the phone but it is no use. I prod the display like an infant reaching out to the unreachable snowy images pixalating through a television screen.
”
My father appears below me, on a sand dune. Grass brushes his brown legs like dry feathers. I hear the crunch of diminishing footsteps.
“
Thank God you're gone.
I don't understand what he means.
There is a diary on his chair. I glance up as I open it, to make sure he is gone.

My brother's familiar scrawl.
Day 1
My hands begin to sing with blood, and my foot also fills with pins and needles. I lie there, feeling life flow in and out of me. I see a stream of blood drying on my fingers. I look closely and see that my nails must have banged against the ceiling when we landed, and my fingernails sank into their beds of skin like spades in sand. I put my middle finger in my mouth and suck it. Then I lick my index finger. My other hand is fine. Soon fresh blood flows out of the pink crevices over my still glistening nails.
I sink into darkness and when I awaken, the dust has turned to dusk, and darkness has fallen on everything close to me. I am surrounded by my own doubts. I slip away once more and only snap awake because an icy wind is snaking against my neck. This time I feel more awake, and stunned by my condition, and that I have chosen to stay here. A movement confirms that walking even a few steps is out of the question.
I see my fingers are covered in red again. I open them and they feel sticky. I feel something itchy on my eye and prod it with a bloody finger, and then feel my lip tickle and prod my lip, smearing blood there too.
For some reason someone’s philosophy begins to play softly in my ear.
Welcome to the desert of the Real.

When I find it takes time to put a face and a context to those words, I give up. There are other ideas distracting me. My mind is racing, even though my body is trapped.

And then my eyes travel beyond the dead instruments, the rubbery seats, the bright seatbelts, the flares and fire extinguishers. I see beyond this. I look further beyond the door, I see the heavens. I see the cosmos, sparkling, bright and magnificent. I only see a quadrant of it, a sweep of stars and planets. This is what ancient men watched every night, over the millennia. They learnt which stars were planets, by following their movement. They gave the stars names. I would one day learn that the ancients, some of them, believed that the stars are great hunters.
I look and gasp. I am so stirred by the stars, that, despite my agony, I move through the pain, I emerge from the black ship, and walk out of the reach of the black blades.

My neck still hurts when I turn it, and I clutch a big coat, thin but long like a blanket, around my shoulders. I glance upward. I feel like a bat, stuck to a massive dark, undulating ceiling spanning an incredibly far below city, with its swathes of stars, and hotspots. I shuffle awkwardly, and glance beyond nearby diamonds, to smaller, deeper pinpricks that the fogs and pollutions of Europe, America and Asia have always hidden away.

What did my brother say once? I have not realised our significance in the universe for some years now. I have been lost in my errands. His errands? Flying equipment to the Towers of Orapa - probably the world’s largest diamond mining operation in the Kalahari Desert.
And my errands? My paintings and harmless musings far from here, while he slowly bled to death.
These thoughts and unthoughts go through my mind like a television show. I begin to move back to the metal Ship that brought him here - here to all this space.

The heavens wheel away like some child’s gigantic bicycle wheel within the immense darkness of a garage floating in some forgotten neighbourhood somewhere. I scramble onto my seat, cooled by the air, and press my skin against it. I drift off, but am resurrected from oblivion by howling, the roars of lion, and much later, an early jet, blinking red and drawing an oceanic chalky skrr against the lightening night sky.

I sit in the cold blackness of the space ship. I chew absently on a cheese roll. I chew it a hundred times until it is a milky mush. I take a small sip of water. The bubbles seem to hook against my cheeks. I swallow and then lie back, staring at what is above me. I can hear the ships huge double rotors press against the air. I can feel the sand push heavily against the wheels that have spooned into the dune, and the belly that is crushed hard against the dunes shoulder makes little grinding noises as though both are engaged in a constant tug of war.
I cannot remember our fall from the sky.

I see my father with the kettle steaming beside the yellow flickering fire. It'’s your fault. You are to blame. He says none of this.

It occurs to me, as I fade once more, that a grain of sand can break a machine.