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Date Posted: 15:16:00 11/16/09 Mon
Author: celtgirl
Subject: Alright, you might want to brew some bush tea for this piece, ladies. :) This is another entry from Jamie's journals and it's rough, I'm still too close to it in time, to see its flaws, so just forgive me for that. >>>>>
In reply to: Tracy 's message, "I just put some tea on the stove! Anyone want a cup or two or perhaps a Tracy's Baileys with a hint o' Casey and Jamie? It's Sunday night and I'm looking for someone to cuddle with :)" on 19:56:02 11/15/09 Sun

copyright 2009 Cindy Brandner



April _____,

Flying over Africa at night- adrift in the stars, plotting a course to Sagittarius, as though if I drifted far enough, long enough, I would emerge swimming in the bright bath of the Lagoon Nebula. Flying is no time, it could be now, it might be a thousand years ago and my wings feathered rather than steel and struts. Here in this fragile Gypsy Moth air is king, a universe unto itself, filled with its own history, its ruins; great shifting columns of light and water, entire Serengetis made of clouds and fog, vapourous wisps wafting like ghosts of old pilots and those that the air has claimed as its own.

Below, Africa undulates, dark and female, long necked and round bottomed, trailing diamonds in her wake, steaming and scorching by turns, emitting always her siren song, that oldest song from the ebony starred throat of this oldest of mothers.

In the Highlands, where Sophiene keeps state and the coffee grows wrapped in blue green mists, one can still sense the traces left behind by the British settlers- the long verandahed homes, the scent of gin and white hunters coming in red-eyed from the kill of lions and elephants, leopards and zebras, the affairs, the scandals, the black blossomed fruits of this seething volcanic country. It is as though the land itself allowed them to set aside their normal reserves, to shed the proprieties of the British upper class and give into their baser natures, here, so far from the judgements of the world from which they came.

Yesterday I saw an elephant funeral- or at least what seemed to be one. Coming down from the blue air and chill mist of Sophiene’s farm, I took the plane out over the scrubby bushland of (?). I chanced upon the most curious sight- there was an entire herd of elephants standing in a perfect circle, heads down, as though they were conducting a strange ritual known for thousands of years. I braked and turned downward into the warmth of the noonday sun, a sun that a times feels like an unsubtle mallet right between the eyes. Several moments later I could see what all those great heads were bowed over was the corpse of a bull elephant, his tusks gone, the bloody gouges visible even from the heights. The elephants stood over him, trunks either hanging down or occasionally touching him, as though in farewell. It was a scene of such grief, that I felt I had intruded ham-handed, with my loud machine, into the inner sanctum of a cathedral.

They ignored me, even as I came in lower, the great broad backs, wrinkled as a silk ruffled sea, visible and softly swaying, for such grief requires some movement, stillness being possible for only so long, under the duress of such feeling.

I went as close as I dared, for the elephants have learned through a long and pain-filled experience that man and his machines are not to be trusted, and will often run and hide in the great swaths of scrub and sansiviera, into which no man could follow.

Only one elephant turned her head up to me, and though I was too far to truly have eye contact with her, I sensed that gaze nevertheless, felt it pin me, that flat grey eternity which is the eye of an elephant- through which one might see to the very beginnings of time, a keyhole through which mammoths could run and man might be found in his tree-swinging beginnings, long-toed and fragile, but with a dreadful cunning which dealt death from the very beginning. The elephant remembers it all, for though she is blind, she sees with skin and feet and those great ears that defy reason and a memory that has absorbed time from long before her own birth.

Her trunk curled back, and her mouth opened, a shocking sight, for being so rarely seen, and she screamed. Such a scream it was- a terrible ululation of pain and loss that seemed to actually wrench my heart and bones from their accustomed chambers and sockets. The scream seemed to go back far and to echo through the great graveyards of bleached bone, the stolen tusks, the deserted babies, the loss of bone velvet ivory which she had felt against her hide on deep African nights, when she was young. Gone now, all gone, but grieved heavily.

It is true, I am sure, elephants never forget.

I left then, climbing back into the many chambered air, back toward the thick-scented slopes of Sophiene’s mountain lair, but I know I will never forget that scream.

As I climbed a long ago line from Thornton Wilder came to me. Drifting through my mind, as things do when one is flying.

‘…for our hearts are not strong enough to love every moment.’

I suppose that line could be as true of elephant as of man, and yet it seems to me their hearts may indeed be strong enough for such things as men only dream of.

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