The Sacred Combe: A Search For Humanity’s Heartland

Simon Barnes is a tease. No sooner has he briefly introduced his readers to the delights of his favourite expanse of African wilderness than he offers a list of ‘Some Famous Elephants’, starting with Jumbo from Barnum’s circus, followed by Kala Nag, described as ‘co-star’ of the story Toomai Of The Elephants, from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Those first four pages (before the list) are a tour de force of exciting, descriptive writing, as Barnes tells how, on his first pitchblack night in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley, he wakes to the unexpected sounds of ‘swishing, ripping, [and] munching’. He realises a herd of elephants is tripping cheerfully through the bush, snacking on any vegetation it can find, including the thatched roof of his hut. He sits out this experience – ‘it was alarming, but it wasn’t frightening’ – and the vast elephant droppings around his dwelling show it wasn’t a dream.

Next morning, out for a spin in a Land Cruiser, he chances upon the unusual sight of a leopard in an altercation with a troop of baboons. Already he has more than justified his trip to his ‘sacred combe’, the African hideaway where, for all its teeming and often dangerous animal life, he can truly feel at peace.

I have read few better accounts of the changing seasons in Africa – where, on the arrival of spring, ‘the year turns on a sixpence: performs a showy handbrake turn and careers off in the exact opposite direction’. Barnes is not a plodding naturalist wielding a lexicon of Latin names but a playful ex-hippy, drawing on cultural references from his favourite James Joyce to The Incredible String Band.

His attitude to the great outdoors is similarly eclectic, combining the impish humour of an enlightened Buddhist with a fierce intelligence and superb observational skills, all the time nudging his readers to guard against the sad progression of some beautiful places from ordinary, through special, to gone.