South Africa

With apologies to those who take a more emotional view South Africa Oh arid and cruel land with but a narrow south eastern band of green thrown like a parting gesture to show that a stingy fate was not entirely without charity to a landscape dry, wrinkled, dusty like her Bushmen. The blue of her sky burned near white by a searing sun. The drops of water that dare fall sucked swiftly again to a cloudless sky for fear they might bring succour to parched and weary scrub, where each weary, dogged step brings but a soulless mirrored yesterday. Where western ocean fights with sand to uncover the bones of dreamers and only the stinging wind sings a mournful dirge to shattered hopes to mark the memory of life burned dry and gone -- or frozen by icy currents fighting with furnace rocks that emulate a devils kitchen. The greatest grandeur is the vastness of nothing. The flat mountains lack the stark pride of noble peaks. Each remote little oasis; not to refresh but engender hope so that it can be again be long denied to the needy, desperate traveller. There are riches yes, below the stony orange ground and the far apart bushes that eke a pointless life upon it but even these sparkling stones appeal not to love and honour, rather to a lustful human vanity appropriate to their fiery birth. She demands high price for the gold she yields paid for by men who toil and sweat in the tunnels of her nether world where no birds sing nor grass grows --nor grave stones mark the passing of the troglodyte victims of meagre wage. A warmer sea beats upon her south and eastern shores. Even here the bays are inhospitable, shallow; rogue waves and winds invite the unwary mariner to doom upon her jagged rocks and the great white is their lord who also feeds on human prey. In those somewhat paltry parts where the land smiles and brooks babble, you can hear the beating of her savage heart reflected in the drums of men. No land for the civilised it seems to say, for here a savage god holds sway. He who eats not his enemy will be himself the meal today. She challenges those who seek to tame her and quench her taste for blood. Fear me she cries and flee -- and the bold she oft rewards with death. This land is the last bastion of the primeval beginnings of life If you seek kindness love and beauty, look elsewhere to take a land for wife.