Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

We were shown to the rather basic little guest cottages; then Ernest led us to a pool a few hundred yards away. Its bottom was covered in white sand, and a few steps hewn out of the living rock descended into the water. Clouds of steam were rising from the surface, and through them a single palm tree was silhouetted against the almost-full moon. We took off our clothes and slipped into the water, and never before have I had such an exhilarating feeling of the day washing away. The warm, warm water bubbled up through the sand, and our eyes were cleaned of Luangwa’s hot, bright landscapes by the silver light that penetrated the steam. Afterward we sat beside a bonfire, where we had gin and tonics, ate shepherd’s pie, and listened to Harvey’s story of the house called Shiwa Ngandu, which his grandfather had built. We went to Shiwa Ngandu in the morning. It is not colonial Africa; it is non-Africa, a corpulent Victorian mansion in immense English gardens. To walk through the gardens, still half kept by loyal servants but essentially rather dilapidated, was to find a dream of England being consumed by the voracious jungle appetite of Africa. Beneath blossoming vines that covered fussy arbors, we looked out to the mountains and the splendor of a far lake, the slight movements of game in the bush.

Amused and spooked, we soon pressed on westward toward the Bangweulu Swamps. A small road led through dozens of villages of thatched mud-and-brick huts. We learned that a vehicle passed this way only once in a few weeks. The people, dressed mostly in African fabrics, would stop whatever they were doing and run to wave to us. Children would dance and sing, and some did jigs in our wake. As one of our party remarked, this must be what daily life is like for the Queen of England.

At lunchtime we stopped in a village, and since English is the national language of Zambia (there are thirty-five tribal languages), we could communicate easily. A twenty-year-old, Willie Momba, invited me into his one-room house, took me to see his fields (one guava tree, six scallions, four rows of sweet potatoes, and two rows of tomatoes), and introduced me to his wife. He had one cherished possession, a camera, but he’d never had any film, so I gave him two rolls.

By afternoon, the villages had become smaller, poorer, and closer to the road. Near sunset, Gavin turned (at random, it seemed) onto a vast plain. Twenty minutes later we came upon a causeway, and after another half hour we reached camp. Around us in every direction for miles stretched the uncharted mire, foggy and shapeless in the night and full of strange sounds and animal cries. Never have I been anywhere else that felt so like the end of the earth. We went to sleep early and had strange dreams.

At dawn we set out with four local guides, broad-smiling men, barefoot but with hats, who had a mystical sense of direction. We sought the shoebill, the most elusive bird in Africa. Through bits of shrub we trekked, and when we came to water, we poled or paddled across in small boats. As we went on, the ground around us got spongier and the morass wetter. Then we came to the floating earth. In this weirdest place of all, the thick grasses had matted their roots together and held soil tightly in them, but beneath were stretches of mucky water. Though it looked like an ordinary field, it gave and shifted underfoot; you sank a few inches with each step. It was like walking across the top of a bowl of soup covered in Saran wrap, or strolling on a plush-covered waterbed.

Passionate now to see the shoebill, we went on, eventually arriving where the floating earth could not bear our weight. We sank in up to our knees, sometimes to our waists. We finally found our object: a creature out of James Thurber, a prehistoric bird that came into the world not long after the pterodactyl left it, with a beak like a giant clog stuck absurdly on the front of its head. We saw three shoebills; then, muddy and content, we trooped back and took long showers. We spent the afternoon looking at skinks scuttling about camp, feeling like the only people in all the universe.

That evening we drove along the causeway a few miles, past fishermen’s reed huts you could blow down with a huff, and onto the floodplain that lies beside the swamp. Flocks of wattled cranes performed mating dances there; beyond them were red lechwe antelope, five thousand in a herd. Gavin set the throttle, so the vehicle could drift along at about ten miles per hour, and joined the rest of us on the roof. As we were slow and steady and lumbering, the animals were not so afraid; we passed through the way a baggage cart negotiates a crowded airport. Back at camp, Marjorie made dinner. When she brought out bananas flambé for dessert, we heard gales of laughter from the staff. Tears rolling down their faces, they told us that the lady had set our dinner on fire.