Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

We started early the next day, when the animals make the most of the cool; ate a picnic lunch under a huge baobab tree; and stayed to see the emergence of the predators, who hunt by twilight. All four of us were at that naïve stage when every animal seems marvelous and we paused to look even at pukus, reddish antelope that are as common in Zambia as fleas on a mangy dog. We saw crocodiles and watched hippos going down a slide of their own making to settle happily in shallow water. We saw a hyena eyeing a herd of zebras. Best of all were the elephants, which, like huge ballerinas, tiptoe through the mud, letting their feet go flat only when they are standing on solid ground. A long history of poaching has made local game wary of humans. Nonetheless, one young bull elephant held his ground heart-stoppingly close to us, and we observed him for a half hour while he used his trunk as though it were a telescope seeking out stars in the mud.

On the second day we saw our first lion. Glinting and deliberate, she stalked a young puku frozen in terror. No dance of seven veils was ever more calculated in its dynamics, more petrifyingly irresistible. That day we also saw wildebeests that looked like grumpy old men on an expedition, a tall and lovely kudu, waterbuck, and hundreds of willowy impalas. We watched giraffes preparing to mate: the male gargles the female’s urine to see whether she is in season. We wondered at those whimsical long necks and huge eyes, invented on God’s most playful day.

After exploring the river area of South Luangwa, where game is thickest, we headed for the escarpment that rings the Luangwa Valley. Driving conditions were rough: we had to ford rivers, and sometimes the road became so faint that it disappeared. Mostly we sat on the vehicle’s roof, bouncing, ducking low-hanging branches, getting too much sun, spotting occasional animals and many new plants. One of those jolts bounced my wallet out of my back pocket, but since we doubted we’d ever find it, we went onward. We traversed lowlands infested with tsetse flies, which was awful, but we also picked and ate marula plums in fertile valleys and dissolved the powdery contents of baobab pods on our tongues.

It was afternoon by the time we reached the escarpment. Up we drove, on a road so steep it seemed the vehicle might fall off the face of the rock. When we got to a really deep pothole, we stopped to fill it with stones so that we could keep going. On and on we climbed, through bush that was both lush and desolate, and then suddenly, when we were thinking we couldn’t stand it anymore, we were on top, and the landscape we’d been in since our arrival was spread beneath us like a map, as broad as the horizon. It was clear and orderly and miniaturized, as if we were seeing it through memory and not our eyes.

Gavin had warned that it would be a long day’s drive. The road north of the escarpment was so riddled with holes that you had to weave around its lesions. “The only ones who go straight,” Gavin observed, “are the drunk drivers.” We were cantankerous and hungry by the time we reached a lovely Tudor cottage with climbing roses, a formal garden, and a picket fence that announced our arrival at Kapishya Hot Springs Lodge. A rather fey white man wrapped in a cotton sarong called a kikoi came trotting down the path. “Well, well, well,” he said, “I’d really given up on you, quite given up. But do come in, come in.” He was the proprietor, Mark Harvey. A group of villagers holding oil lamps was standing behind him. “Ernest,” he said to a helper, “get the luggage in and have them warm supper.” Turning to us, he went on, “There’s just enough time for a dip before dinner.”