The Beach
The African beach in this photograph features in many of my short stories and all my novels. There is a reason. I believe a storyteller is made by his inheritance, by an innate yearning to weave a spell around his listeners, but it needs a place or a sequence of events to trigger his creativity. This is my place, and I have its memory, and that of the people who inhabited it, to thank for my urge to write.
It is a place of simple, uncompromising beauty, not only in what you see so evidently in the picture. A great barrier reef protects the lagoon from the Indian Ocean, the constant boom of the waves’ destruction reverberating like the beat of distant drums. All day a trade wind blows and the high palms whisper at its passing. The wind’s touch, its warmth, the scent of salt and seaweed it carries – I remember them as I remember the view.
The beach has its cycles, driven by sun and moon and season. At low tide the sea retreats to expose myriad rock pools, the haunt of leopard cowries and devil fish and spined sea urchins. There are days of rain when the monsoon clouds gather and stamp like quarrelling elephants, while during the high spring tides the ocean bursts across the reef and dark breakers surge up the sand to eat at the land behind. In one of the fiercest storms, the leaning palm’s roots were undermined and it fell – but it didn’t die, not quite. Instead it turned and reached again towards the sky.
Yet this place, like any other, is emptiness without its people. They give it substance and vitality. In return, it holds their memory: the roots they wove into its soil, the skein of their lives which is strung invisibly through the trees and along the waterline, and their voices and their laughter – they are never lost. Although all those I knew are gone, dead or departed, even as the place changes without them, their spirits remain. So if, in peace, you sit on the sands beside the leaning palm, if you open your heart, you will sense them.