the land remembers

Just back from a trip into the hinterland - /Xam hinterland, actually.

For thousands upon thousands of years they shared this part of what we now call the Northern Cape with elephants, eland, ostriches, elephant shrews, rhino, vast numbers of springbok.

They're gone now, as are the animals.

But on a little outcrop - unnamed & unmarked on any map - small precision-chipped stone tools and bits of ostrich egg shell lie half-buried in a rain-&-wind piled drift, around a group of eland grazing on a black dolerite boulder.

The wind moves, as it has always done, through the bleached, blonde grass among the glinting black boulders; a solitary kokerboom against an impossibly blue sky; that wide, wide horizon.

The land remembers.

Somewhere between VanWyksVlei, Verneukpan & Kenhardt you'll find Springbokoog, Strandberg, Tafelkop. Good places in which to be reminded of the big issues: life, extinction, one's own miniscule place in the great scheme of things - and the land which experiences it all, endures it all, and remembers it all.