The Nature of Things

Last week, the night guard at Doogles backpackers lodge (which is a dump and looks nothing like Mua Mission, which is pictured) came upon me crouched on the path to the chalets, one hand clutching my toothbrush, the other tossing stones further up the trail. Maybe he came because he heard me muttering, “Go on, get.” Or maybe he was just curious about why I was throwing stones. “There’s a toad,” I said, as he nearly stepped on it. A big, ugly, warty brown toad. He looked like a big, ugly stone. I felt silly, of course – a grown person paralyzed by a toad in the road – but I was hoping the guard would take up the cause and get the toad to move out of the way – not only out of the way, but away. Far enough away that it wouldn’t suddenly jump out again, or find its way into my room. I had already hit it with three fistfuls of stones, all very carefully aimed, none so violently thrown as to actually hurt him. Yet the stupid, ugly thing just sat there in its stupid toady way being all toad-like and stupid. Finally, with the guard’s boot nearly on top of him, he darted into the bushes.

This is brave little me in Africa.

Last night, there was a giant spider dangling from the ceiling and when I blew on it, he settled into the curtains, completely camouflaged. There was another hairy black one with stubby legs near the toilet and two Daddy Long Legs up near the showerhead. I slept under the mosquito net, confident they were catching bugs in their webs. Outside, there was a chorus of tiny tree frogs, their chirrups as rhythmic as breathing, their deceptive sound suggesting they were as big as hamburger patties.

This morning I went for a long walk up a hill that I will call a mountain near a mission called Mua on the road between Zomba and Lilongwe. The path leaves a small village, crosses through some maize and cotton and pea fields and continues through straw-like grasses taller than me and finally up into the rocky, tree-studded mountainside. It was loaded with grasshoppers, which make me flinch. One landed on my elbow and I shrieked. Even though it only landed on me for a nanosecond, it felt like it had suctioned onto my arm. I was already getting quite an arm workout trying to keep the buzzing flies away from me. Tse-tse or otherwise, I tend to swell up like a weirdo when flies bite and I wasn’t interested in giving them a free ride up the hill on my sweaty T-shirt.

At one point I decided to sit down on a rock and catch my breath. It was around 9 a.m. but already the sun was intense, just beaming down as though it was passing through a magnifying glass. After weeks of frosty temperatures – each morning wrapped in the shroud of a heavy, moving mist – the sun felt good but oppressive and I was coated in sweat by the time I sat down, a droplet falling from my ear onto my shoulder and my whole clavicle slick. It was the just the tiniest bit of a clearing, a widening in the otherwise narrow footpath. Across from my rock was a burned tree stump with three cobs of maize shoved into a hollow. This whole area is mystical and spiritual, with rapids curling around a hole in the rock that surrounds the river. The local people believe that this hole leads to the spirit world and that evil spirits can pull people down into it at their whim. The past two days there have been drums and singing and chanting coming from somewhere deep in the village as they install a new chief with masked dancers and spirit people known as gulies, who can spring up out of nowhere.

So I wondered whether this clearing had a particular spiritual meaning and whether the maize was meant to be an offering, or whether some bored kids just decided to shove some corncobs in a hole in a tree. As the sweat dried, I was surrounded by butterflies, literally hundreds and hundreds of little grey moths with white splotches. There were a few orange ones, a couple yellow ones and one or two brilliant blue butterflies who folded up their wings and looked like fallen leaves.

There is an “orphanage” nearby for lost and wayward animals and when I visited, there were a couple smelly ducks, a little antelope, an even smaller deer with wide Disney-esque eyes, a couple vervet monkeys pacing on the beams of their cages, another kind of monkey I’d never seen before, with light eyes and a bushy coat, and an old baboon who collects shiny coins from tourists, which she turns over to the night guard when he brings her food.

I saw a group of vervet monkeys down at the orphanage, swinging in the trees of the deer cage and generally reminding all the caged animals of the vague concept of freedom. When I passed today through the gates leading to the mission’s cabins, the branch of a bush swung with the lost weight of a retreating animal, too much bounce to be a bird, but probably a monkey. I waited and they slowly revealed themselves, stalking along the branches, wondering about me like I was wondering about them.

After I had returned to my room, rinsed out my socks and washed off the sweat, I sat outside with a book, listening to the water running in and around the giant hole in the river. Upstream, not far from my door, women pound clothing against the rocks, some with a rage that’s clear in each snap of the clothing, others with a rhythm that suggests they’re thinking about something else. Occasionally there is a big splash and some hearty laughs, a naked child landing in the water after dropping from the rock.

There is a buzzing, not from tse-tses, but from big, big bees and other insects that are as long and as fat as my thumbs. There was a rustling in the grass that sounded like a person walking gingerly toward me, but when I craned around to see who was coming, there was a massive, massive lizard – as long as my leg and as heavy as a toddler – walking slowly and diagonally toward my cabin. He had not seen me yet, sitting silently with a book in my lap. His tail swayed like a snake and his tongue darted in and out like a gecko. He was speckled, black and yellow. Ugly. As soon as I stood, he settled for one second, then took off, lickety-split, running flat out like a sprinter for the safety of the river.

At lunch, Marie – the lab tech turned lay missionary I caught a ride up with – told me she figured he was a gila monster, pronounced hela monster. His colouring was meant to show his bite is poisonous.

At least he didn’t jump.