I am still almost breathless in awe after travelling through the ancient Karoo, where the Creator fashioned spectacular sculptures from the rocks and lava of an infant planet.
Long before even the first Ice Age great monuments of molten iron were formed in the shape of stacks of spheres or spires of glittering minerals hundreds of metres high.
Lines of white chalk run arrow-straight across the mountain sides for kilometre after kilometre.
I have passed through that region many times and I am still left speechless by the wonder of it all.
And all this was created aeons before even the most primitive dinosaur set foot on the planet. Our human ancestors were not even a distant dream.
Talking about human ancestors, during my visit I travelled for more than 800km in each direction, most of it in sight of the main railway line, which cuts a straight line from the Cape to Gauteng ‒ more than 1 000km of hi-tech human ingenuity connecting the furthest corners of this great country of ours.
In four days of travel I never saw a single train on that whole stretch of line.
I passed thousands of heavy haulage lorries on the roads, though, slowing down traffic, frustrating motorists and, in one case, halting all traffic for hours after a major accident when a car carrier rolled near Loxton, spilling new vehicles across the landscape.
I wondered whether those kilometres of railway line wouldn’t have relieved the congestion on our main highways.
But there in the Karoo sunshine thousands of kilometres of costly steel and hard labour slept unused. That’s the story of this great land of ours: we create spectacular systems ‒ airlines , postal services and railways ‒ and then don’t know to use them.
I have travelled through the ancient Karoo often and I’m comforted by the knowledge that — on the clock-face of the planet — humans have existed for less than a millisecond.
The time will come when all our silly little endeavours — railways, airlines, mining, politicians and pandemic panic — will be forgotten along with the dinosaurs and dodos, and the great, ancient Karoo will settle down again, unchanged, to the way it was a million years ago.
Last Laugh
A talking horse walked into a bar and said to the bartender: “Are you hiring staff?”
“Not at the moment,” said the bartender. “Why don’t you apply to a circus?”
The horse thought for a moment and then asked: “Why would a circus want to employ a bartender?”
* "Tavern of the Seas" is a column written in the Cape Argus by David Biggs. Biggs can be contacted at [email protected]
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Argus