Prayers from Zimbabwe

The night had its own sounds: chirrups and snuffles, stridulations and whistles, shrieks and gurgles, for life – and death – continued despite the absence of light.

It was still dark when he shrugged off his thin blanket and rose from the hard ground.

A splash of water on his face prepared him and he knelt then for his devotions under the spreading thornbush tree.

His was a prayer of silence. In 1577 the saint from Avila had written, ‘I think I read somewhere that the soul is then like a tortoise or sea urchin which retreats into itself. Those who said this no doubt understood what they were talking about’.

But in that retreat within, there was an openness as well – openness to the sound of life around him.

The Sun – ‘head of a still-surviving kingdom’ – was approaching from behind the rocky heights and granite domes of the Hill Complex. And life greeted and heralded and ushered that return of light with psalms and canticles and paeans, with song and choral shouts – songs that bring healing as the shaman’s chants, as the Myrmidons’ song at the death of Hektor: all life together calling out to the greater life beyond.

A million insects drummed their thoraxes or rubbed their legs or scraped their wing edges in praise, an ever-increasing sound as of water or fire or the wind of life through aspen leaves, as when Nabi Daud danced and played naked before the Ark of the Covenant.

Birds called. Unseen, their feathered throats burst with song.

And frogs. Later he looked down and saw beside him one of the thousands of small amphibians singing to the Sun. Like a tiny Buddha it squatted, the colour of elderberry wine with black stripes and its large eye a jewel of black, shot with luminous and nacreous green. Still it was, but for its pulsing throat. It called on God, as do the Seraphim before the throne of power in fragrant clouds of the incense of lasting adoration.

From their places on the rocks, the baboons called out too. Their two-note barks punctuating and adding emphasis to the rest of the chorus: a symphony, a tone poem, an opera, an exultation.

Finally, the long-horned, many-coloured cattle – like Jacob’s share of Laban’s herds: ‘ring-streaked speckled and spotted’ – rose from their beds, huge and somnolent, and the hollow ‘tonk’ of the bells around their necks called a descant.

The rocks changed from dim black to honey, taupe, lion, lavender, elephant grey, tangerine; the sere grass – the pelage of a gazelle: a soundless song of colour.

The day had begun.

Barnaby McBryde