From Alkaline to Arcadian

Heat shimmer pooled on the grassy slopes. It felt as if the air needed only a single spark to ignite. The Umzimkulwana wound through channels of basalt and sandstone like a patient thought. It was not a primordial river like my Australian Finke, which had become a current of consciousness for me. And yet the Umzimkulwana, too, had taken millions of years to read and furrow the earth.

I skip a series of destinations and years. It was still you with whom I undertook my second journey through Africa.

I remember Verneukpan — the Deception Pan in South Africa’s Northern Cape — not as a place but as a state.
A boundary between what I had been and what I was becoming. The lake was not a body of water but a weave of light, salt, and memory. Over sixty kilometers long and up to twelve kilometers wide, an endorheic basin covering four to five hundred square kilometers. It meant there was no escape. Not a single drop reached the sea. Nothing left this space.

In generous years, water flowed in from surrounding run‑offs. That happened rarely, and even then Verneukpan became only a shallow mirror, perhaps the largest puddle in the world — scarcely more than a liquid veil upon ancient salt. The wind tore the crust into polygonal fractures as if a giant had shattered the land.
I saw a broken mirror of time.

I took off my shoes. The salt was warm beneath my soles. Cracked. Sharp‑edged. The white surface dazzled so fiercely that the sky above it appeared black. Everything was inversion. The light weighed heavy. The shadows were light. The world became a disc, endless and soundless.

This was my moment.

You had become merely a companion on my African walkabout. Everything connected. I was open. I was wind. I was sediment.
Perhaps it was a fever dream. Perhaps it was truth. Perhaps it is the same thing, if one is willing to listen.

The more hermit‑like my path became, the more accompanied I felt. The more radically I allowed this space — mapped by a phantasmagoric, almost Neolithic cosmology — to act upon me, the more clearly I sensed that I was behaving in accordance with something older than intention. Wherever I hoped to be cured of my inner delirium, a guide of the soul would appear and treat me as if I were a messenger rather than a wanderer.

We later stood at Zoutpan as well. Around the pan grew plants that had learned to survive the alkaline barrenness. The sky resembled a dome of light that sometimes darkened when the reflection of the salt became too intense.
I stood in a white cathedral without perceptible walls.

Zoutpan lay in the land of the Kharu people, who had lived nomadically there until the 1960s. The salt lake filled an endorheic basin in the Kalahari — a closed system that had gathered water only episodically for millennia, resting upon Precambrian crystalline rock among the oldest formations on Earth. Its hydrology was ephemeral. Only rarely did rainfall send thin run‑offs across the flats. During the long dry seasons nothing remained but a radiant white plain scored with polygonal fracture lines.

Everything was glaring and empty and full of meaning — as only emptiness can be.

Suddenly I no longer knew how I had arrived there. I was a faint impression in the earth’s memory. This place was an archive not of people but of time, a tectonic layer of remembrance into which myth had inscribed itself. A reservoir of geological epiphanies. I had hoped to find something within the spectrum of signs, meaning, and direction. Perhaps for a moment I was open enough for the land to speak through me.

And then she stepped out of the shimmer.
A woman. Old, weather‑worn, with leathery skin and eyes that carried a distant storm.
That was where I met Doris Steinbrecher.