Lesotho
At the top of the pass, someone has hammered a big bronze plaque into the rock face:
“Wayfarer pause and look upon a gateway of paradise.”
I step to the edge and comply. The castellated peaks stand guard over a large grass valley. Fields, dashed with pink poppies, slope to a sandstone gorge where a waterfall glints. Some cattle shuffle along a ridge. I hear bells and I can see a boy wrapped in a brown blanket moving at quite a pace against the rain clouds.
When I was ten, I read a not very good novel by James Hilton called Lost Horizon. Published in 1933 and adapted into a film, today it may be recalled for one reason: the promise of a mountain kingdom, wildly difficult to find, whose inhabitants live in peace and go on living forever. Visitors to the Valley of the Blue Moon tended to be extremely rare – the occasional nomad who has strayed, or the survivor of a plane crash – but they soon embraced the lifestyle and learned to pass their days in clairvoyant meditation, leading the kind of existence they always desired but never found possible in the frantic world outside. Hilton called his kingdom Shangri-La and suggested it lay situated on a plateau, two miles up, in the lesser known heights of Tibet. You wouldn’t find it on a map, he warned provocatively, but if ever luck guided you to Shangri-La he made this guarantee: “You will achieve calmness and profundity, ripeness and wisdom and the clear enchantment of memory.”
I confess I had clean forgotten about Shangri-La until I arrived in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho.
Lesotho shares with only one other country, the Republic of San Marino, the distinction of being land-locked by another. It lies on the south-east edge of a tableland between Natal and the Orange Free State. The nearest port is 250 miles east, the nearest international airport – Johannesburg – the same distance to the north. Roughly the size of Belgium and shaped like an angel-fish, it is well and truly stranded. And it has this peculiar characteristic. Nowhere in Lesotho is ground level lower than 5,000 feet. This allows its inhabitants to proclaim for their country the highest low point in the world. Higher than Bolivia, higher than Tibet, higher even – maybe – than Shangri-La.
In South Africa, not many people consider visiting Lesotho. They look at the map and their eyes skid over its simple contours, as if sketched quickly by a child. Somehow Lesotho doesn’t exist for them as an area they want to prospect. Geographically, it lies in the heart of South Africa and the South African heart is still a wounded region, full of radio-activity. As the Cape Town poet, Stephen Watson, wrote of his country in a recent era: “Almost nowhere else can there be so obvious a disproportion between natural grandeur and human smallness.”
In Cape Town, I met a jeweller who worked in obedient metals. He told me how once in Lesotho a miner suffering from what looked like a yeast infection offered him a strange and glittering dust to smell.
“Gold,” said the man awkwardly, and his hand stretched out from the folds of a patterned blanket.
It was uranium.
In fact, that’s how many South Africans think of Lesotho, if they bother to think of it at all – a land of desperate gold miners, and people who wear blankets instead of overcoats.
I had come to Cape Town to work. I liked it there and had no plans to leave. I admired the Xhosa spirit of forgiveness and the very particular melancholy of the white population. Most of all I warmed to the light which bounces off the cliffs below Table Mountain. But as the weeks passed it became impossible to escape the taste of trauma.
One day I walked down Long Street for a hair-cut. Victoria cut my hair: she was a bubbly Christian, saved four months ago on Signal Hill during a thunderstorm. She watched the news on TV, but it wasn’t news to her. It was all in Revelations. Jesus was coming back. He would go first to Israel, then blaze in a light across the sky so everyone would kneel.
“You’ll be saved if you confess your sins,” she told me. “It’ll be amazing.”
In another part of town, they’d been confessing their sins all year. The Truth Commission is a noble attempt to cleanse the atmosphere. It aims for the victims and perpetrators of Apartheid to share the same air without choking.
I spoke with an Afrikaner poet covering the confessions for radio. Like many Afrikaners, she had been shocked to learn how high up went the knowledge. The details shocked her, too. Did I know, it took seven hours to burn a body? The buttocks and thighs took longest and you must turn the body several times...
She lent me an anthology of Afrikaner verse and I was moved to read a line of the poet, Ingrid Jonker: “My people have rotted from me.”
I’d been in Cape Town a month when the chance came to make a pony trek through Lesotho - and I seized it.
Lesotho owes its peaceful existence to a nineteenth century King, a six-foot tall ex-cattle rustler with a flattened nose and raucous voice called Moshesh. King Moshesh encouraged his people to approach him at any time, and inspired in them the virtues of hospitality and cleanliness. Every day he liked to have buckets of water thrown over him. “Peace is like the rain which makes the grass grow,” he told them, “while war is like the wind which dries it up.”
Moshesh knew what he was talking about. Having witnessed the devastating Zulu wars, he had led his tribes inland to a flat-topped, basalt mountain that proved unscalable to attackers. His greatest allies were the British and his country remained a protectorate until 1966. Fiercely loyal to the crown, Lesotho fought for Britain in both World Wars. It’s now an independent kingdom ruled by Moshesh’s great great grandson, a Brasenose man.
For three days it has rained. The rain cuts off the border posts rendering Lesotho virtually impenetrable. Eventually, I cross at the capital, Maseru, on one of the country’s few tarmac roads. I am waved through by three giggling girls who want sweets.
After South Africa, Lesotho is immediately cheerful. There are no fences for one thing. The figures move through their landscape as if they own it, which they do. Children greet you all day long with the words, “Good morning” – even at night.
The tarmac peters out and I follow a red track up to the mountains.
My destination, Malealea Lodge, is a trading station founded 80 years ago by a sprightly remittance man from Harrow called Mervyn Bosworth Smith. After the First World War, in which he developed “Trench leg”, he returned to Malealea and married a woman with a pet cheetah. “These were the golden years,” claims his brief biography. Every week he rode to Maseru to play bridge with an alarm clock fastened to his neck in case he dozed off. A fanatical snooker player, he also transported to Malealea a full-size billiards table. An ox wagon hauled it over the pass - and it was here, at the entrance to what he called the Valley of Paradise, that Bosworth Smith erected his bronze plaque.
The original bungalow at Malealea was modelled on the Smith family home in Dorset. Today, it’s the starting point for expeditions into the Thaba Putsoa mountains.
I’ve decided on a five day trek. My mount will be a sturdy white Basotho pony. A pack-horse is loaded with provisions. And I have a guide, Ishmael.
Ishmael wears the blue boiler suit of a gold miner and peers out of eyes narrowed by enormous suffering. Like most Lesothans, he has passed much of his life underground in South Africa. What he earned in the dark at Buffelsfontein, about £4.50 a month, he sent home. When he married, he agreed to pay his wife’s family a dowry of 20 cows. 34 years later, he has managed to purchase only 14 of them. In 1978 an oxygen cylinder exploded in his face, obliging him to retire.
“I worked twenty years in a gold mine, but never saw gold,” he let slip as we rested one day on a preposterously beautiful bank of mauve flowers. “All I saw was earth and rock.”
But nowadays Ishmael is content. You can tell so by his smile. He owes to that explosion, in which he nearly died, his return to the roof of the world.
We climb all day. For eight hours the ponies pick their way up the steep paths. The only access to these valleys is by horse-trail.
As we climb something tremendous happens. Maybe it’s the freshness of the air or the fact I don’t care where I’m going; but, together, the squeak of leather and clink of bridle elaborate a rosary. Suddenly the mind is released from whatever troubles it.
At dusk, we ride into a village of circular stone huts. Coming up the path, I surprise a girl dancing on the spot, flexing her arms and legs in an attitude of intense joy. And this is the memorable part of it: she’s dancing to herself, unselfconsciously, in silence.
Here no ghetto-blasters rent the air. The villages at this height have no electricity, no running water. Yet again and again on my journey I will happen on people dancing and laughing.
Inside the hut, I brew some tea. The floor is beaten cattle dung, the only furniture a vast mirrored wardrobe, carried up - like the billiards table - on ox-back.
From outside comes a rustling noise. Two boys kick a football composed of frayed plastic bags. Their makeshift ball glides back and forth through the warm air.
In the fading light, the headman starts to cut his daughter’s hair with sheep-shears. Like the men we have passed in the maize fields, he wears a blue blanket woven with familiar patterns. I approach, curious to see what they are. Closer inspection reveals the RAF insignia, the wings of a spitfire and the royal crest.
Trying not to move her head his daughter watches the rustling ball.
Ishmael unsaddles the horses. Afterwards, I take him some tea. The tea is so thick you can trot a mouse on it.
He sips from his mug, casting his gaze over Moshesh’s kingdom. In the miracle of the sunset I can’t help notice his expression.
“Are you happy, Ishmael?” I ask, because I am.
“Ourself, we are very happy always.”