We were many but we moved as one. A convoy of seven vehicles took us from Mfuwe Airport to the bridge at the entrance to South Luangwa National Park in Zambia, the finest in all Africa. We were all there for the Festival of Wildlife: 36 guests to look after and I was there to help make it a success.

Reeling and bemused after 24 hours and more of travel, they looked out at Africa newly washed by a sharp shower, one that they (but not I) had narrowly missed. It was getting dark, and doing so in rather a hurry. Official formalities completed, we entered the park at last. We wouldn’t be leaving it for a week.

But let’s pause, I said. Let’s pause on the bridge and look down and out and up and down. We may be hurrying towards rooms and showers and reviving drinks, but first let’s look at the mad river that will be at the heart of everything we do for the next week – the mad river that’s been lashing itself from one side of the valley to other for uncountable millennia, no human hand every once trying to organise it.

It was wider than it had been when I was there two months earlier, though with more rain it would be a lot wider in a few months. A dozen hippos studded the water. Sandbanks still emerged from the stream, and was that a croc? And that? Half a dozen storks fished in the river, bills agape, waiting for some foolish thing to pass between the brutal mandibles of its beak.

And there on the long sandy riverbank a band of banded mongeese*, a restless moving carpet of carnivores, intensely social, all wrapped up in their togetherness, maybe as many as 36 of them, busy and comic, wary and eager, were moving fussily down to the river for a drink before bedtime.

Before us all the mighty Luangwa: a river of mysteries and wonders. Beyond it lay a land of peace and ferocity, sweet perfection and occasional bloody drama, one offering ineffable calm and ungovernable  excitement. A fine week lay before us all. The mongeese, having drunk, were now heading back to safety. They were many but they moved as one.

• My preferred plural
• I was travelling with Wildlife Worldwide. More trips https://wildlifeworldwide.cmail20.com/t/y-e-xididdd-thukydkiuh-r/