1. Swallows landing on the boat as it goes along. These little fellows have brownish caps. (Picture by Rosey Grant)2. The delicious shuddering induced by the horrible sights at Lake Kariba Crocodile farm. They are farmed for Malaysian handbags and meat. Some of the carcasses are fed to the breeding crocs. We rode in a mini-bus behind the feeding truck and ohh’d and eugh’d as the farmers chucked lumps of meat at 20ft reptiles that reared up out of the stinking water, snapping and thrashing. (Picture by Rosey Grant)
3. Stars reflected in the lake. For the past few days I’ve had some lines from Byron’s The Destruction of Sennacherib in my head:
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
I always thought that simile was a bit odd -- when do you ever see starshine reflected in a lake? But tonight, there they were. And the way the reflection gets smudged into a line -- it does look a bit like a spear.
The other stars reflected on a lake image I thought of was the game Pocketful of Stars by Ferry Halim. You are a little girl skidding about on a frozen lake and you have to jump up so that your reflection can catch stars. It’s so beautiful it will make you cry.
Cruising on Lake Kariba
