Enlightenment must be like this… the sudden enlightenment of the Zen student who perceives infinity in an instant of time and is forever richer.

I had arrived at Samara, in the Karoo in South Africa, the previous day. I knew that the Tompkins family had loved and cherished the place for a quarter of a century and I knew in my mind that this was a great project. Good idea, I thought with my mind, by heart and soul relatively untouched.

I had taken a walk through late afternoon and early evening in intriguing, semi-arid country, riverine thickets of sweet-thorn with distant kudu. But I missed the cacophony of familiar birds that I usually find in Africa. True, the landscape of red cliffs and steep mountains was spectacular, but… well, I still didn’t get it.

The following day, chilly and windy, we set off a little after six and pointed our vehicle up the escarpment. It was an exciting climb, the ground opening up below us as I looked back. Then we breasted the rise – and I was enlightened.

At once we were plunging into an ocean of blonde grasses walled by pale blue sky. We were on a plateau that extended before us like a South American tepui, an African version of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. But this was better than dinosaurs.

This plateau had been place grazed to the bone by sheep and goats, farmed mostly by descendants of the first white settlers, till it became a lifeless land: ruined beyond repair. Or so you would have thought. But I saw eland, the biggest antelopes of them all, blesbok with their white faces, Cape mountain zebra, a species once down to a few hundred, and the cold-tolerant black wildebeest, who look even more unlikely than the more familiar blue kind. There were springbok too, a creature that once lived in numbers more familiar to astronomers than naturalists.

This is not your pristine wilderness. This is a place that humans comprehensively buggered up, for no great profit. But for 25 years humans have been unbuggering it. This is not the original paradise – this is Paradise Restored. The last chapter of The Silver Chair, part of the great Chronicles of Narnia, is titled “The Healing of Harms”. I felt joy as we rumbled on in search of lions.

 

https://www.samara.co.za/