My shadow was a tiny slippery puddle at my feet; the sun directly overhead and absolute. I had to crane my head right back to see it, not that you had to see it to know where it was. Free from the familiar clutter of light and shade, an enchanting landscape sat sublime at this celestial point due south, its grand symmetries wavering in and out of form and abstraction in the heat.
From the corner of my eye I glimpsed a movement under a baobab tree: an animal in the shade. I was too hot to turn my head, but I moved my eyes and caught sight of a protruding horn with my peripheral vision. For maybe half a second I thought I’d seen a unicorn and hadn’t been at all surprised.
I’d seen so many unusual things over the past couple of days — ancient mango groves, oases, tiny blue birds and nocturnal flying creepy-crawly juggernauts — that my mind was ticking boxes on a different checklist. Of course it wasn’t a unicorn. It was a zebu with its head turned towards me, but for the half-second before my brain caught up with my eyes I had comfortably inhabited a place where unicorns existed.
One of our party had explained to me that, although she was an atheist, she found it best to tell people here she was a Christian because the idea of being faithless was to them a kind of dereliction of duty, something they could not understand. It was all so achingly beautiful out in the sub-Saharan savannah, the Sahel, it was hard not to start considering how and why. It begged the question.
I was in Burkina Faso, which ranks 174 out of 177 on the UN’s developing nations index.
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