2. I have seen the Pleiades -- all seven of them. They are the blurry group that you can only see if you don’t look straight at them. Then I remembered my binoculars -- so I lay on the sundeck, and there they were, clear as anything, even Electra who is supposed to have hidden her face at the fall of Troy. At this point I realised that my binoculars make a lot of things appear in the spaces between the stars. Wow. If you’ve never had a good look at the night sky through binoculars, do it now -- don’t wait until you’re 28.
3. We moored on an island that afternoon. When the sun was less fierce, Rosey and I went for a stroll -- we found bare footprints on the beach and followed them to the edge of the bush, where we found a pair of flip-flops. We took the path towards the interior, and discovered a spider the size of a soup plate and a shack with a vegetable garden. These (except probably the spider) belonged to the men paid to watch the island to keep it safe from squatters and poachers. Back on the beach, we found some fragments of a crocodile skeleton and two of the crew who were following us at a polite distance to make sure we didn’t do anything stupid. Dead trees stick up out of the water -- no-one cleared them when the lake was made and now they are a mournful sight and a menace to shipping (apart from canoes which zip in and out of them).
Lake Kariba
