The Wizard of the North, who we are flying to see in our flimsy flying flivver, has said that God moves like a crab. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
It is an old Tswana proverb, perhaps. But the wizard is a master of several languages, and anything he says can be said to have several meanings. That is what wizards are for. Even if they don’t know it themselves. That, after all, is why they are wizards.
Man, humankind, if you will, walks forward and thinks that he, she, or it, is in a straightforward relationship to the natural world in which he, she or it operates. A crab, on the other hand, moves sideways, and sees things from a different and ever-differing perspective.
The implication is that God, the crab, has a three-dimensional view of what is going on, and what is to come, whereas man, humankind, whatever we might choose to define ourselves as, forging intrepidly ahead, has tunnel vision, and cannot possibly know what lies ahead, or understand what has been left behind or, most importantly, what has been surpassed on the sides of his self-willed adventure.
That is what the Wizard of the North has said, as I understand it. And there is a lot to understand. That, ostensibly, is why we are flying north to see him.
I am not sure that this is really what we believe we are doing. Flying through the sky at 110 knots an hour has become an end in itself. And why not? If it can be done, why not do it? The pot at the end of the rainbow can wait.
We have now covered almost the whole breadth of the country. There is nothing left to learn — or is there? Human history, human folly, has drifted beneath our wings in successive waves of informal settlements, spreading almost as far as the eye can see, huddling optimistically on the distant outskirts of mining towns and their related industries, hoping that these can become some form of livelihood, so that the black, dark, doomed human enterprise can continue. Because humanity can’t stop its inexorable stride down its tunnel-vision progress to doom.
All this we see from the skies. The handmade plane is rising incredibly to 7 500 feet, with no oxygen in the cabin. There are no more questions to be asked.
We are rising to 7 500 feet because we have to drift over the next mountain range, in order to descend into the pleasant valley nestled between the craggy cliffs where we will spend the night before taking to the skies again to find the elusive wizard.
The plane drifts down like a feather. Pilot P skims it in to the hitherto unknown strip of brown dust as if to the manner born — touching down on an upward slope without a murmur of assistance from me, with my white knuckles gripping my shivering knees. Three bumps and we are rattling down along terra firma once more, looking for a safe place to park for the night.
And what a night. We took a long walk up into the mountains before dinner, tracking the spoor of strange and unreliable animals through the game park. There is a strange, barking sound to the side and I am reminded that there are also leopards around here. It is hard to know whether you are safer on the ground or in the air.
I am suddenly setting the pace as we head back to sanctuary in the theme park Venda village that has been prepared for our comfort. Colonial cook in his colonial cook’s hat and all.
At midnight, while I am lying restlessly awake wondering what we are doing here, I hear the sound of heavy stamping outside the window of my theme park hut. I peer out gingerly, knowing exactly what I am going to see. Sure enough, there is a huge rhinoceros champing calmly, blindly, blandly at the undergrowth in the moonlight, less than three metres away from me. A totally preposterous rhinoceros. But the rhinoceros is on the other side of the window, separated by the thick, comforting mud walls of the preposterous Venda village. I lock my door as a precaution anyway.
I try to sleep, wondering whose country this is, after all. Where is Nelson Mandela when you really need him?
Buzz, buzz, buzz. The plane takes to the skies again, after we have spent several minutes anxiously pacing the valley and scanning the skies, waiting for the morning fog to lift. We are full of bacon, eggs and sausage, packed in with a little yoghurt and porridge to give us ballast.
We rise over the unassailable mountains perched on the Zimbabwean border, and head through the skies of a beautiful morning, the world spread beneath us, towards our rendezvous with the wizard who says that God moves like a crab.
This is all behind us now. We had dropped finally into a mealie field inhabited by placid red cows and long-horned bulls, and parked the aircraft in order to hike our way for those last few kilometres to the house of the wizard. And we were not disappointed — cameras, recorders, sleeping bags and headphones slung round our bodies to complete the journey. An unlikely safari, but we had come prepared to succeed.
The tiny plane had pinpointed us precisely to the place where we wanted to be. And now, mission accomplished, it is time to take to the skies again and head for home.
You can’t say it is an anti-climax, this return journey through the yellow dusk of the Highveld winter back towards the outskirts of grim, ghastly Johannesburg. Two more hours of giddy flight, rising and falling through the twilight, the sun a magical, burning yellow orb sinking to the right, the full moon waiting white and patient to our left, already balanced high in the sky.
Yes, the tiny plane has taken us on a magical and unrepeatable safari, a quest towards the indefinable truth hidden in the breast of the Wizard of the North.
We sink back to Earth on the edge of the Cradle of Mankind, our mission fulfilled.