Snake
Sheena, Georgina, me, the wall and the rockery.
The sudden and unexpected nature of the encounter made it quite shocking. It happened like this. We had had a wonderful night at the luxurious lodge at Ghaub saying goodbye to Addy and Barbara who were returning to the north of England after a three and three quarter stint with VSO at Katima.
“Have you seen the meteorite?” asked our good friend Sheena, a lively 66 year old from Scotland who had come to Namibia shortly after us. She was driving us back to Rundu in her bakkie and was having trouble locating the main road. The more we drove, the more familiar the roads became so that we began to think we were in a vortex loop like the Bermuda triangle from which we would never escape. If you can read this, then we have escaped. If we have not, we are still there and you should come looking. Let me know if you can’t read it.
“No, we have not seen the meteorite,” we replied. Let’s go and see it. It is the largest known meteorite in the world and is 800,000 years old, at least. We parked the car and wended our way to reception. Opposite the rockery is a suntrap wall perfect, with hindsight, for basking snakes and other reptiles. We walked in a line towards this wall, Linda, myself, Sheena and Georgina. As Linda was passing the wall I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked down and saw a snake wriggling in the short space between Linda and me in an agitated state. One more step and I would have blocked the snake’s escape into the rockery, a most unfortunate occurrence. The word “snake” involuntarily escaped from my throat and I instinctively took a step backwards. Fortunately, Sheena moved in the same direction and Georgina shot off behind the wall. The snake, which seemed just as anxious to get away from us as we from it slid in front of me into the rockery. Between 1-2 metres in length it was brown and closely resembled the black mamba we had seen dead on the road some weeks previously. Not wishing to believe that I came so close to the deadly fangs of such a poisonous snake I am happy to believe it was a less harmful mole snake, though this is shown as being more orange in one book. The lack of obvious moles is inconclusive since the snake may just have eaten them all.
The meteorite looked like a big chunk of metal with silver streaks where people had scraped slithers off. It comprised iron, nickel, cobalt and other metals. It seemed strange that this large object was once flying along in outer space. It was not far beyond the bounds of reason to imagine this to be an alien spaceship and I was half expecting a hatch to open and strange creatures to emerge. I have been standing in the sun a lot recently.
Tags: driving, England, Georgina, Linda, Rundu, VSO
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