arrival
It's totally cliched to discuss Africa in terms of darkness--that Conradian metaphorical darkness of the soul, which of course corresponds to skin colour here. But flying over the Sahara last night, after a seven and a half hour lay over, and five and a half hours more delay at Heathrow, most of which was spent in the plane on the tarmac, it was the first thing I noticed. Darker than the Mediterranean, with its blinking boat lights, and my imagined moonlight reflection on the water. No the Sahara was lightless. In the three (at least) hours it took us to fly over I saw two small fires, literally a thousand miles from anything else in all directions, flickering in the night of the desert. Who were those people, sitting around a fire in the middle of the night in the largest desert in the world? What drew them to huddle close around the light? Was it the vast yawning darkness beyond, in this fathomless desert that they know but never understand? Or something else . . . Are we drawn toward light, or are we repelled by darkness?