Centaine ripped off her own canvas skirt, threw aside the shawl, and mother-naked stood with her arms thrown open and her face turned to the clouds. The rain thrashed her and melted her long dark hair down across her face and shoulders. She pushed it aside with both hands and opened her mouth wide.
it was as though she stood under a waterfall. The rain poured into her mouth as fast as she could swallow. The far edge of the pan disappeared behind the blue veils of falling rain, and the surface turned to yellow mud.
The rain was so cold that a rash of goose bumps ran down Centaine's forearms and her nipples darkened and hardened, but she laughed with joy and ran out to the pan to dance with the San, and the thunder sounded as though massive boulders were rolling across the roof of the sky.
The earth seemed to dissolve under the solid sheets of silver water. The pan was ankle-deep and the silky mud squelched up between Centaine's toes. The rain gave them new life and strength and they danced and sang until O'wa stopped abruptly and cocked his head to listen.
Centaine could hear nothing above the thunder and the lash of the rain, but O'wa shouted a warning. They floundered to the steep bank of the pan, slipping in the glutinous mud and the yellow waters which by now reached to their knees. From the bank Centaine heard the sound which had alarmed O'wa, a low rushing like a high wind in tall trees.
The river, O'wa pointed through the thick palisade of silver rain, the river is alive again. It came like a living thing, a monstrous frothing yellow python down the sandy river bed, and it hissed from bank to bank, carrying the bodies of drowned animals and the branches of trees in its flood. It burst into the flooded pan and raced in serried waves across the surface, breaking on the bank beneath their feet, swirling on to catch them around the legs and threatening to drag them under.
They snatched up their few possessions and waded to higher ground, clinging to each other for support. The rain clouds brought on premature night, and it was cold.
There was no chance of a fire and they huddled together for warmth and shivered miserably.
The rain fell without slackening all that night.
In the dull leaden dawn they looked across a drowned landscape, a vast shimmering take with islands of higher ground from which the water streamed, and stranded acacia trees like the backs of whales.
Will it never stop? Centaine whispered. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably, and the chill seemed to have to reached into her womb, for the infant writhed and kicked in protest.
Please let it stop now. The San suffered the cold with the fortitude they showed for all hardship. Rather than slackening, the rain seemed to increase in tempo, and hid the sorry drowned land from them behind a glassy curtain.
Then the rain stopped. There was no warning, no faltering or tapering off; one second it was falling in a solid cascade and the next it was over. The ceiling of low bruised cloud split open and peeled away like the skin from a ripe fruit, revealing the clean washed blue of the sky, and the sun burst upon them with blinding brilliance, once more stunning Centaine with the sudden contrasts of this wild continent.
Before noon, the thirsty earth had drunk down the waters that had fallen upon it. The floods sank away without trace. Only in the pan itself surface water still lay glittering sulphurous-yellow from bank to far bank.
However, the land was cleansed and vivid with colour.
The dust that had coated each bush and tree was washed away and Centaine saw greens that she had never dreamed this tan, lion-coloured land could contain. The earth, still damp, was rich with ochres and oranges and reds and the songs of the little desert larks were joyous.
They laid out their scant possessions in the sun and they steamed as they dried. O'wa could not contain himself and be danced ecstatically.
The cloud spirits have opened the road for us. They have replenished the water-holes to the east. Make ready, H'ani, my little flower of the desert: before the dawn tomorrow we will march.
Within the first day's march they entered a new country, so different that Centaine could scarcely believe it was on the same continent. Here the ancient dunes had compacted and consolidated into gentle undulations, and they now supported abundant plant life.
Stands of mopani and tall kiaat, alternating with almost impenetrable thickets of paper-bark, stood tall along the ridges of high ground where the dunes crests had weathered and flattened. Occasionally a giant silver terminalia or a monumental bac, hah soared seventy feet above the rest of the forest.
in the valleys, fields of sweet golden grasses and scattered giraffe acacias with flat tops gave the scene a park-like and cultivated aspect.
Here also, in the lowest depressions, the recent rains had been trapped in the shallow water-holes, and the land seemed to hum and seethe with life.
Through the yellow grasses fresh tender shoots of delicate green appeared. Gardens of wild flowers, daisies and arum lilies and gladioli and fifty other varieties which Centaine did not recognize, sprang up as though at a F magician's flourish, delighting her with their colours and delicate beauty, and causing her to wonder anew at Africa's prolificness. She picked the blooms and plaited them into necklaces for herself and H'ani, and the old woman preened like a bride.
Oh, I wish I had a mirror to show you how adorable you look. Centaine embraced her.
Even from the sky Africa gave of her abundance. There were flocks of quelea thick as hiving bees as they wheeled overhead, shrikes in the undergrowth with chests of purest glowing ruby, sandgrouse and francolin fat as domestic chickens, and water fowl on the brimming waterholes, wild duck and long-legged stilts and gaunt blue heron.
It's all so beautiful, Centaine exulted. Each day's journey was light and carefree after the hardships of the and western plains, and when they camped, there was the untold luxury of unlimited water and a Least of wild fruits and nuts and game from O'wa's snares and arrows.
One evening O'wa climbed high into the swollen fleshy branches of a monstrous baobab and smoked the hive that had inhabited its hollow trunk since his great-grandfather's time and beyond. He came down with a gourd full of thick waxen combs running with dark honey redolent of the perfume of the yellow acacia blossoms.
Each day they met new species of wild animals: sable antelope, black as night with long scimitar horns that
