SILENCE

 “Silence is true wisdom’s best reply.” Euripides.

And as Shakespeare says, “People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening, People writing songs that voices never share, and no one dare disturb the sound of silence.” 

Silence is a beautiful and majestic essence to absorb, particularly the silence of nature.

I have just returned from five days in the beauty and tranquillity of Mountain Sanctuary Park high on the Northern slopes of the Magaliesberg mountains.

It was there that I spent every day absorbing the silence of nature.

It’s difficult to explain how the silence of nature differs from the enforced silence of an examination room or hall. They will both register close to zero on any decibel-gauge-meter that tracks the scratching of pens on paper or the distant call of a bird in flight, but the difference is, I found, surreal and spiritual.

I arose every morning at day break around five fifteen.

After a visit to the toilet and the making of a mug of tea I wandered out of our cosy camping abode and sat on a plastic chair next to a table where we had eaten our braaied meal the previous evening.

The silence engulfed me, it seemed to wrap itself like a light weight duvet around my whole being. For a second life froze and then the calls of nature exploded in my ear drums, bird calls, the buzz of early morning insects, and the rattle of the Vervet monkeys on our tin roof. The latter were on their daily search for any food that us unwelcome visitors to their domain had left scattered after our nocturnal meal, yet under this cacophony of sound the silence remained, a universal stillness.

Soon the searching monkeys disappeared, and the silence returned to be broken by the sound of African voices coming from the nearby kraal where they campsite workers slept, the next break in my solitude was the awakening of my son and his friend who everyday did a five-hour hike into the Tonquani and Cederberg Gorges.

 

It was then that I indulged in another of my passions, reading.

My son had brought two books with him from the UK, the first was about the life of Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, a former colonel of the KGB who became the resident-designate and bureau chief at the soviet embassy in London. He became an agent for the British Secret Intelligence Service in 1974 while working in Denmark and continued supplying MI6 with valuable information till 1985. Ben McIntyre’s book “The Spy and the Traitor” proved to be sensational reading.

Oleg Gordievsky was the most significant British agent of the cold war. For eleven years, he spied for MI6. It was remarkable he managed to deceive his KGB colleagues during this time. Even more astounding was that in summer 1985 – after Gordievsky was hastily recalled from London to Moscow by his suspicious bosses – British intelligence officers helped him to escape. It was the only time that the spooks managed to exfiltrate a penetration agent from the USSR, outwitting their Russian adversaries.

The famous author John Le Care says on the back cover, “The best spy book I’ve ever read!”

The second book was “Our Everest Challenge” by Ben Fogle and his wife, Marina who he calls from the world’s highest peak.

This book was also a riveting read. Fogle summited Mount Everest on the 16^th of May 2018, completing the climb over a six-week period whilst accompanied by two local Sherpa guides, as well as Kenton Cool, a 44-year-old veteran British climber who has summited Everest 12 times. His trek also included former Olympic cyclist Victoria Pendleton, who unfortunately had to abandon her attempt early due to severe altitude sickness.

Throughout the book he speaks of “Looking-Up” and constantly harangues the young Techno-geeks who spend 24 hours a day looking down at their smart phones.

His advice certainly was useful at Mountain Sanctuary Park where the clear night sky became our television set, causing long discussions as to where the Southern-Cross was and which flickering star was the planet Venus.

The routine of early morning tea, silence contemplation and book reading was followed for three days however, the four morning was different.

I was awoken as usual at approximately five fifteen, except this time it was by a strange sound of general confusion coming from the central lounge and kitchen area. I wandered into the toilet to be greeted at the open window by a snarling face of an aggressive Vervet monkey. I backed cautiously out of the toilet as four other younger Vervets scurried past me in the corridor and out of the toilet window.

I moved from the corridor into the lounge to face a sight of what I can describe as nuclear devastation, accompanied by a high pitch screaming from a very young Vervet monkey clinging to the burglar bars of a window. The scream was amplified with the returning screams of the whole troop of fifteen or so monkeys outside. I approached the youngster slowly and after a few more anxious screams it leapt off the burglar bars and scampered out of the room to find its freedom through the toilet window.

Glancing at the devastation caused by the invasion I could see, banana skins, half eaten apples, empty plastic wrappers that once contained bread, a scattered bag of sugar strewn over the kitchen work-top and floor and several deposits of monkey shit and pools of urine.

Using torn-off strips of toilet roll I got all the shite into the loo and then began sweeping up the sugar and discarded bits of bread, banana skins and bits of half chewed apple. Having brushed the table and work-tops clear of all the half-eaten scraps of food, I began wiping all the surfaces with a wet cloth disinfected in diluted-Dettol and then I mopped the floor.

Half an hour later, having completed the household chores I made my morning mug-of-tea and sat down outside to let nature’s silence calm my befuddled head.

To misquote Francis Bacon, I let the silence of sleep nourish my wisdom.

I was awoken about an hour later by my son shaking my shoulder and asking me to try and make some breakfast for him and his mate, Lloyd. Luckily, the Vervets had not managed to invade the fridge, so in twenty minutes I was serving up fried bacon, eggs, mushrooms and four buttered crisp-bread biscuits to all of us.

Lloyd and my son told me, “We’re going up to the top of the range, find Red Gulley and then climb down Tonquani Gorge.”

They quickly packed their knapsacks with provisions for the five-hour-hike and after I had warned them to look out for snakes, particularly the Boomslang which hides in the tree branches that jut out of the cracks in the gorge’s wall, off they went to exercise their nimble and youthful limbs, while I sat reading and absorbing………. 

The Silence!