There are many more pousses-pousses than motor-vehicles on the tree-lined streets of Antsirabe. What there is of motor-traffic – ancient French cars, trucks and buses – moves either very slowly, because of some lingering disease, or very quickly because lack of competition discourages caution. The pousses-pousses men are ragged, dirty, cheerful and of all age groups. They are most numerous during winter; when the rice-planting season starts many return to their villages. At first the more enterprising shouted questioningly to the passing vazaha, but that was a legitimate advertising of their function and they never pestered. After a day or so, we being the only visible tourists then in Antsirabe, they knew our pedestrian habits and either grinned broadly as we passed or made teasing remarks while rubbing their calf-muscles in simulated agony. They probably also knew where we were coming from and going to, so small and intimate is this odd little city.
The first pousses-pousses passenger we saw in Antsirabe was symbolic – a frail old Frenchwoman with a shrunken, ivory, smiling face, wearing a black scarf over white curls. She sat well back in her rickshaw, clutching three long French loaves and seeming very much a footnote to history. Our Air Mad guidebook explains – ‘The French Government has subsidized a Home for his aged nationals who are without resources, which Home accepts paying boarders.’ It adds, ‘The climate is quite healthy so that numerous Europeans who did not have the possibility of going home, or who have sentimental ties in the country have settled there. It is environed with pine-trees, eucalyptus and mimosas, whence a vivifying air. Antsirabe is also a touristic town with beautiful avenues lined with European and Tropical trees, with nice villas amidst vegetation and flowers. It is clean and coquettish. Let us mention the 45 hectares of East Park with its ponds, its lawns and its courses for riders. The arboretum and its kilometres of alleys snaking amidst a rich and varied essence. The nice 9 Hole Golf Course is a delightful size, etc.’
Antsirabe is entirely a vazaha creation and remains the most European Malagasy town, both in appearance and atmosphere. A village was founded on the site in 1869 by two Norwegian missionaries, Rosaas and Borgen, whose compatriots still run a large, red-brown fortress-like hospital. In 1923 the Governor-General, Hubert Garbit, decided to develop the little town that had by then grown up around the hospital and the H&C mineral springs. A rest-resort was needed for the colonists, especially those posted on the coast. Where better than Antsirabe, set in the coldest accessible area of Madagascar? In winter, as we soon discovered, the night temperature regularly drops to freezing point or below; and even in summer the heat is never intolerable or the rain incessant.
Garbit declared an open-season for town-planners and architects – some of the latter, it would appear, amateurs. Space is no problem and from the commercial centre radiate wide, long boulevards, all with a suburban character so that you may wander for an hour in search of the city’s hub and never realise that you are all the time criss-crossing it. Much architectural miscegenation took place along those boulevards and the shorter avenues leading off them. There are hints of Scandinavia, Italy, Switzerland, England and Imerina mingled with the Frenchness of the detached villas – none very large, some quite petite. Tall trees shade the gardens and flowering shrubs scent them. Creepers drape the walls and poultry sometimes scrabble in what once were ornamental beds or fertilise what once were formal lawns. Tin roofs and iron gates are rusting, doors need repainting and windows re-glazing. A vast rectangular army barracks – by far the ugliest building in Antsirabe – is more obviously occupied by hens than by soldiers. (Before Independence, French troops were permanently stationed there.) The many large shops are, as in Tana, almost empty. The grandiose semi-circular cream-washed General Post Office is now little used, though regularly opened. The hotels depend on a thin trickle of Malagasy businessmen and government officials. Here Madagascar’s economic collapse seems much more obvious than in Tana; the Merina capital existed long before the French came and has its own soul. In comparison Antsirabe feels slightly forlorn – a place created to cater for a way of life that no longer exists. One is aware of unfulfilled potential, of dreams withering. Yet by Malagasy standards this is a big city (population about 80,000) and heavily industrialised, with a brewery, a cotton-mill, a tobacco factory, a fruit-juice and cider factory – and now a gigantic new flour-mill. It is also the preferred town of the Merina élite, who since Independence have moved from Tana in considerable numbers. Whether willing to admit it or not, the Andriana and Hova feel that their capital has lost tone since the French left and the ‘coastal people’ began to participate as equals in the government of the country. (The ‘coastal people’ is a wildly misleading euphemism for non-Merina. Imerina occupies a small area of Madagascar and millions of non-Merina have never laid eyes on the coast. The ‘highland people’ is a less misleading phrase often used nowadays to describe both the Merina and the Betsileo, who occupy the mountain plateau just south of Antsirabe and have much in common with the Merina.)
Nature has combined with man to give Antsirabe its European flavour. The immediate surroundings are pleasing but undramatic. An uneven fringe of blue mountains – average height 7,500 ft – encircles the plain. Low hills rise nearby, a few still pine-green, most deforested within the past decade and showing sad mutilated pale brown flanks. The plain is exuberantly fertile – both pasture and paddy-fields – and the many large nearby villages seem relatively prosperous even now, when the city itself is in decay. This region has always produced a surplus of food, some of which goes to the east coast via Tana.
In Antsirabe we fell among English-speakers. Our host and hostess both belonged to multi-lingual families: several of their siblings had studied in France, Germany and Britain. They were nonetheless proudly Merina and staying with them helped us to understand why 160 years of close contact with European culture failed to dilute the island’s essential ‘Malagasy-ness’.
We learned much during that week. When we remarked on the Independence memorial that dominates the main boulevard – a stela listing the eighteen main tribes of Madagascar – one of our new friends observed that although the Malagasy do use the word ‘tribes’ it gives vazaha a wrong impression. In his view this word suggests wider differences of ethnic origin, language and custom than exist in Madagascar. He pointed out that apart from a small Kishwahili-speaking community of Comorians (immigrants of Afro-Shirazi stock from the Comoro Islands), all the Malagasy speak mutually intelligible dialects of Malagasy and share a unique common culture. The many regional variations in custom are superficial, based mainly on contrasting natural environments and past political divisions. They are not, he insisted, marked enough to be properly described as tribal differences. I did not presume to argue; the Malagasy are sensitive on this issue, having learned the hard way that internal dissension invites vazaha intervention. They are well aware that at present both Moscow and Washington would welcome any excuse for directly influencing political developments within Madagascar. Nevertheless, as we travelled further and noticed the radical physical differences between the ‘highland people’ and the ‘coastal people’, we decided that the use of ‘tribes’ – however politically undesirable – makes ethnographic sense.
Our Antsirabe experiences also taught us that among the educated Malagasy – even those too young to remember colonial times – there is a persisting love–hate relationship with France. At first this seemed to me not unlike the ambivalent emotions aroused in many Irish people by their ex-rulers. But I soon realised my mistake. The French ruled Madagascar for only sixty-four years and the Franco–Malagasy relationship is far less tangled, even among the Merina, than the Anglo–Irish relationship. The Malagasy are not at all confused about their identity (not being white must help) and I could detect no trace of that crippling blend of deep-rooted inferiority feelings and ingrained resentment which handicaps so many Irish in their political and personal dealings with the English.
Only occasionally does the vazaha hear anyone explicitly condemning President Ratsiraka’s régime, but one afternoon we met two outspoken critics in Antsirabe’s most astonishing edifice. This hotel’s name escapes me; the relevant pages of my diary came to a sticky end, in circumstances to be described later. By Malagasy standards it is colossal; Nigel Heseltine thought it resembled ‘a late 19th-century Swiss mountain hotel, with huge gables and steep-pitched roofing’. It overlooks the ‘Centre National de Crenotherapie et de Thermoclimatisme’ (spa) and is vastly surrounded by the ghost of an ornamental garden. It is a tour de force of the woodcarver’s art, with doors, shutters, balconies, banisters, cupboards and even walls of a richly grained, richly hued hardwood (name also forgotten) found only in the rain-forests of Madagascar. The ceilings are high, the corridors long, the stair-cases wide, the verandahs deep – and, when we were there, the many bedrooms were all unoccupied. So was the bar, apart from ourselves and two middle-aged Merina gentlemen – residents of Antsirabe, we gathered, though we never learned their names, nor they ours.
No doubt this mutual anonymity encouraged them to speak freely, deploring the fact that a misguided idealism, an impractical longing for a truly independent Madagascar liberated from all French influences, had induced certain politicians to upset the Franco-Malagasy applecart so carefully set rolling in 1960. They differed about whether the Russians had actually created this situation or merely been quick to exploit it. Certainly disengagement from the Western bloc had been vigorously encouraged. The Russians had promised generous ‘altruistic’ support, like the awarding of hundreds of Moscow University scholarships to Malagasy students every year and the sending of hundreds of Russian teachers to Madagascar. But the country would of course be left free to evolve in its own way – backwards, if it liked, to those happy days before English missionaries and French colonists messed everything up. Yet somehow it soon became necessary to spend astronomical sums on Russian fighter-planes and other sophisticated weaponry not ideally suited to a people who cannot even keep the sewage flowing. Then suddenly the notion of ‘Christian Marxism’ hove in sight and the Russians were left wondering if Madagascar had been worth the effort.
By then the modest prosperity of the immediate post-Independence period had evaporated. Industry – what little there was of it – lay at death’s door, deprived of raw materials for lack of a normal export-import trade. For lack of maintenance the motor-roads – never great – had become a joke. The postal and telephone services had become a nightmare. The medical and educational services had become a tragedy. Black-marketeering was rampant. Either corruption or laziness, or both, had emasculated every government department. Politicians were despised and police feared. Agriculture was neglected or mismanaged. The embryonic tourist industry had aborted – because of official apathy, and rates of exchange on the Soviet model, and the absence (apart from Air Mad) of anything vazaha would recognise as a transport system. The movement of goods and people had become a major gamble. Acute shortages of petrol, tyres and spare parts, added to the state of the roads, meant that no one could guarantee when – if ever – a given journey would begin or end. Listening to these moans, we wondered how much our friends were exaggerating. Soon we were to discover that concerning transport they had understated the case.
We were offered, and accepted, another orange-juice: fizzy but genuine, made in Antsirabe. Madagascar is the only country I know where most nicely-brought-up people do not drink alcohol because they do not want to. Of course even if they did want to they could not legally obtain foreign drinks, yet even in households well supplied with duty-free liquor the bottles seem to be valued more for their decorative than for their stimulating properties. ‘Having a drink’ is just not it seems part of the middle-class way of life. Antsirabe beer, tolerable though expensive, is sometimes available in the bigger restaurants and hotels in the bigger towns; but there are no pub-substitutes, no small bars or cafés where you can drop in for a casual snifter with the locals. Wine is produced around Antsirabe and Fianarantsoa and is rumoured to be drinkable. We were never able to confirm that rumour; the liquid sold to us in wine-bottles was superlatively undrinkable. In some areas – particularly in the south and along the east coast – villagers make their own booze. But that painful story comes in a later chapter.
The two white-coated young bar-tenders (why two?) had been standing on chairs as we talked, doing things with wires in a hole in the wall. The sudden result was a blast of rock-music. They looked towards us, grinning triumphantly. They had done their bit to encourage the tourist trade. Our plump friend eyed me doubtfully. ‘You like it?’ he asked. ‘Not really,’ I admitted. ‘But say nothing, they worked so hard to make it happen.’
I sympathised with our companions’ shame about the present state of their country. They had listed Madagascar’s shortcomings almost as an act of expiation. Again I sensed the mature quality of Malagasy patriotism; it is a sincere, dignified love of the homeland, as distinct from the ersatz, frenetic nationalism of so many young countries. These two, I suspected, had served Madagascar abroad; one of them spoke English with a faint American accent. Yet they were not condemning the mass of their countrymen from the detached, superior viewpoint of Westernised Third Worlders. Like our friend at Tana zoo, they gave an impression of somehow associating themselves with all that had gone wrong. And they had stressed the mistakes, rather than the wickedness, of the politicians responsible.
I suggested, tentatively, ‘So European-style democracy has failed yet again in an ex-colony?’ When no one contradicted me I decided to be bold and ask the obvious question – ‘Would it have been better if the Merina could have kept more of the power, as Galliéni planned?’
‘It might have been better, but it was not possible,’ said our plump friend drily. ‘The coastal people resented us, because it would have been better.’
His companion quickly contradicted him. ‘No, they were afraid of us – afraid that we would take over again. They wouldn’t, I think, have resented us if they could have trusted us not to look for more than our share. The coastal people have many able leaders – though Ratsiraka has made blunders for emotional reasons he’s an intelligent man. Now he’s learning a lot, though it’s said that all our people have had to suffer so that one man could learn. There are good leaders in most of our tribes, clever, imaginative, hardworking men. But among the Merina the average level of energy and competence and – I really believe – of honesty is higher. So in general they make better administrators, better educators, better managers of industry. But we can’t go back to the nineteenth century. Our task, as Merina, is to work to raise standards of all sorts throughout Madagascar. We must never again use our advantages to keep other people down. That’s the road to civil war. It’s not an easy task we have. Maybe it’s not possible. But we must try.’
To cheer them up I pointed out that Madagascar’s present state, grim as it must seem to those who can remember better days, is healthier than the state of ex-colonies which now are dominated either by the USA or by the USSR. The Malagasy are still in control of their own destiny. They may for the moment be making a mess of things but a home-made mess leaves scope for a home-made remedy. A Superpower mess, for as long as it benefits the Superpower, is irremediable.
As we walked home through the chilly dusk a solitary submarine-shaped cloud floated crimson in a blue-green sky just above the western horizon. By the roadside, under the tall winter-bare chestnut and lime trees, pousses-pousses men were exchanging jokes as they cooked their supper-rice on charcoal-stoves before curling up to sleep in their rickshaws. The tiny wooden coffee-stall near our friends’ house was closing and on the grass verge beside it the owner’s two small children scuffled and giggled – then were called to carry home on their heads a kettle and a basket of left-over rice-buns. In the middle of the road three pairs of legs stuck out from under a broken-down bus and chuckles mingled with the clanking of tools. For all their problems, the Malagasy remain a happier people than most. One fancies theirs is an indestructible sort of happiness – built-in, impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous politicians. But that is a dangerous bit of sentimentality. The population is exploding, the land is eroding … However distasteful the thought, these easy-going folk must soon be made aware of threatening statistics and to some extent be regimented. The only alternative to forward-planning is famine. There is not unlimited time for sorting out the mess.
We found our hostess in the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up, doing inspired things with a casserole. All Zanoa’s movements were quick and decisive – to match her mind. Like so many Malagasy, she seemed extraordinarily well-adjusted: to herself, her family, her demanding job and the world in general. (But why should being well-adjusted seem extraordinary? Does this mean that now, in the West, many of us are ill-adjusted?)
Gervais was in the adjacent living-room of the new brick bungalow, feeding their eighteen-month-old daughter and gently encouraging the three-year-old to feed herself. Among the Merina elite, no less than among the peasantry, Father joyously child-minds. Gervais was besotted by his two beautiful daughters, who were ‘indulged but not spoiled’ as Rachel aptly put it. They rushed to greet him, like exuberant puppies, whenever he came home from work; yet in her dealings with vazaha the three-year-old had already acquired the friendly-yet-formal Malagasy manner. Both parents showed endless calm patience with their children; Zanoa was the more effective when disciplining was required but Gervais – even if he could never quite bring himself to initiate tough action – unfailingly supported Mamma.
Gervais was tall, not dark and handsome. He always looked worried, partly because he had that kind of face and partly because the prevailing shortage of everything to do with machinery was having a deleterious effect on his livelihood. In the evenings his business-partner – an uncle not much older than himself – usually called to discuss what seemed to be a chronic crisis and the two sat hunched over a pocket-calculator, looking apprehensive.
On our arrival in Antsirabe we were relieved to discover that haute cuisine has survived Independence – and even Christian Marxism – among the higher reaches of Malagasy society. The customary mounds of rice appeared at lunch and dinner (and at breakfast-time, for an aged resident relative) but were accompanied by a delectable variety of cunningly seasoned soups, casseroles, grills, salads and stews, and followed by a wondrous range of fresh fruits and puddings. For breakfast we had herbal tea, French bread hot from the boulangerie, fried eggs and sometimes mashed buttered yams that had been boiled with a little sugar – a favourite breakfast and tea-time dish, though not many can now afford butter. Or the last course might be fluffy pancakes with homemade Cape gooseberry jam. We soon regained the weight we had lost in the Ankaratra.
Zanoa did all the cooking herself, Gervais often helping to chop the meat or prepare the vegetables. An elderly much-loved ‘daily’ arrived at 7 a.m. to wash up and launder clothes in a huge zinc bath under a tap in the garden. She also looked after the children, as she had once looked after Zanoa. Later, a handsome crinkly-haired youth arrived to wash and polish the floors. Zanoa did the gardening – more vegetables than flowers – and the arduous weekly shopping; haute cuisine does not happen effortlessly in modern Madagascar.
We were staying about 150 yards from the bungalow in a charming guest-annex simply built, many years ago, of brick and wood. It contained two small bedrooms, with the nightwatchman’s quarters at the rear. (This temporary ‘chowkidar’ was needed only because Zanoa and Gervais were building a two-storey house near the bungalow and the piles of hard-to-come-by materials that lay around had to be guarded.) Our meticulously maintained earth-closet, in a tiny bamboo hut, stood twenty yards away beyond a line of flowering cactus. Several gigantic pines shaded the two scrubby acres that were soon to become a garden. Zanoa’s vegetable plot was constantly threatened by neighbours’ hens and at night an inordinate number of dogs gathered beneath the pines to fight noisily over the favours of a large black bitch of indeterminate ancestry but – it seemed – fantastic sex-appeal.
We accompanied Zanoa to the main weekly Zoma on high open ground at the far side of the town. It lacked Tana’s atmosphere but offered a wider range of foodstuffs, including silk-worms whose cocoons a wizened little man was slicing neatly and swiftly with a razor-blade. The huge squirming auburn grubs are considered a delicacy by some.
Antsirabe’s greater variety of goods was perhaps linked to the operations of the Black Market. The Government controls – or did then – all supplies of rice, sugar, tinned milk, kerosene, matches and so on. But officials sell only a percentage to the licensed shops at fixed prices; the rest goes to Zoma merchants. Hence the almost empty shelves; it is no longer possible for unlicensed shop-owners, representing private enterprise, to engage in normal trading. Yet things were improving we learned. A few years ago long food-queues were common, to the great alarm of those who saw them as a sinister symbol of Soviet influence. Now the queuing is over, though ration books for use in licensed shops are still issued. Those who can afford to do so boycott the government system, buy at higher prices in the Zoma and give their ration books to their servants. There is also growing and outspoken opposition to restrictions on private-enterprise shopkeepers.
We bought two kilos of peanuts to sustain us during our mini-trek in the Isalo lemur-reserve but could find no other portable food, apart from many tins of Malagasy corn-beef with labels so faded that we judged it prudent to avoid them – as, apparently, did all other potential customers. I tried to buy a skirt at one of the hundreds of clothing-stalls; but the female form divine is of quite different dimensions in Ireland and Madagascar. Zanoa advised trying a cotton-merchant’s shop on the way home and there we found an elegant sarong-type garment such as is only worn nowadays by peasants. It depicted zebu ploughing and a legend around the hem exhorted all and sundry to – STOP TALKING AND WORK.
Unlike Antsirabe’s other colonial amenities, the hydrotherapy complex is still well-run and much-used. We parted from Zanoa to swim in its health-giving, fifty-metre indoor pool. According to our guidebook, these waters give a lot of health:
‘Antsirabe has been baptised the “Vichy Malagasy”; its waters (bicarbonated, sodic and to a certain extent calcic) allow complete cures for numerous diseases (liver, gallbladder, rhumatism, hepatic insufficiency, etc.) After important researches made by eminent French professors a thermal establishment was built in 1924 in the residential quarter, on the spot of ancient marshes. An artificial lake has been created in the neighbourhood. It is perhaps ornamental, but also helps to prevent the escape of the thermal gases. The installations of the establishment include hydrotherapy and physiotherapy equipments, a swimming-pool, showers and medical gymnastic rooms.’
At the crowded swimming-pool we were usually in a double minority – female and white – though occasionally a few young mothers arrived, escorting tiny children who already were confident in the deep water. One could not swim seriously amidst such a mass of swift agile brown bodies accomplishing all sorts of aquatic stunts. But just being there was tremendous fun, seeing faces with bright laughing eyes and flashing white teeth popping up on every side out of the murky warm water and shyly apologising if there had been a collision – as there often was. The surroundings, however, were dreary; a high domed building, with stone benches around tiled walls that displayed tattered French Tourist Board posters.
Few Antsirabe households have baths and soon after daybreak scores of people of all ages and classes begin to queue for a private cubicle where, on payment of a few pence, they can soak in a deep rectangular stone tub of very hot water – and then, if they wish, have a cold shower. The average waiting-time, we found, was about forty-five minutes. Sitting around in the foyer, with numbered tickets which established our place in the queue, we realised what an important centre of activity the spa still is. White-coated, stethescoped young doctors (male and female) wandered in and out; Norwegian-mission-trained physiotherapists gave orders to often bewildered-looking patients; nurses with kind smiles assisted disabled geriatrics to and fro between the various treatment-centres. But there were, we noticed, no Hi-Tek ‘aids’ of the sort one would see in similar surroundings in the West. Our bath-time usually coincided with that of half-a-dozen obese Indians in padded dressing-gowns, who arrived in pousses-pousses clutching bundles of clean clothes and bars of Palmolive soap – a luxury undreamed of nowadays by the average Malagasy. Madagascar’s many affluent Indian and Pakistani businessmen are not popular. That little group always kept to itself, being greeted coolly, if at all, by the locals.
A century ago Antsirabe was Madagascar’s Balmoral – though then a mere village, slowly growing around the Norwegian mission. Their Majesties, accompanied by thousands of soldiers and hundreds of courtiers, often stopped there for a few weeks rest, to take the waters, on their way home from ‘unification’ battles against the southern tribes. King Mahommed V of Morocco was also a ‘royal tourist’, though a reluctant one, when the French exiled him to Antsirabe in the 1950s.
Queen Ranavalona II is said to have particularly appreciated Lake Andraikiba, some five miles west of Antsirabe. We spent two lazy days by that dark expanse of mountain-encircled water, several miles long and a few miles wide. The French built a rudimentary water-sports-centre-cum-café, now little used. On Sundays a few rich Malagasy go swimming or water-skiing and a few pallid missionaries sit at the little café tables in decorous beach-attire, sipping fruit juices against a flaring background of poinsettia. Otherwise the place is deserted, but for a few herds-boys in charge of skinny zebu grazing along the bank, and a few fishermen in rough-hewn canoes, and a few villagers washing clothes. At the base of a steep brown mountain across the water we could see great patches of bright garments spread out to dry, looking from a distance like so many flower-beds. But there would be no silk garments among them; it is fady to let silk touch the sacred waters of Lake Andraikiba. And pork anywhere near the banks – never mind the water – is even more fady.
In Madagascar every remarkable natural feature has its cluster of fady and legends. Once upon a time a rich and powerful Merina official could not make up his mind which of two graceful girls to marry. So he asked them to race across Lake Andraikiba: he would marry the fastest swimmer. But alas! one was already pregnant and disappeared forever in the centre of the lake. To this day the local villagers insist that she may be seen every morning, in the brief pre-dawn half-light, sitting on a high rock above the water. But if anyone is bold enough to come near she vanishes.
This being a volcanic lake the cold clear water is instantly deep; one can dive in from the grassy bank. Between long swims we lay reading and writing for hours in not-too-hot sun on the fringe of a pine-forest so far (but for how much longer?) spared the axes of the poor. At intervals two chatty little cowherds came to sit close beside us – dark-skinned and bright-eyed and clad in what seemed to be the ragged remains of nightshirts. They scrutinised with amusement and amazement our white skins and my diary-writing. Hilarity took over when we tried to teach each other how to count up to ten. A fisherman then intervened, under the mistaken impression that they were being a nuisance to us. Soon after they realised that their zebu had wandered too far into the pines and away they scampered, waving their long sticks and yodelling weirdly – evidently a satisfactory method of communicating with zebu, for the animals at once returned to the grass by the water. I thought then how horribly different our encounter would have been in a ‘tourist spot’ – how those boys would have begged instead of chatting, and whined instead of laughing, and sniggered at our scantily clad bodies instead of stroking my bare white shoulder wonderingly with small black fingers. The distortion of human relationships, rather than the building of Holiday Inns or the sprouting of souvenir stalls, is the single most damaging consequence of Third World tourism. And let no one believe that those children’s families would be better off if Antsirabe were ‘developed’. They would not. But a lot of already rich Malagasy would be even richer.
Going to and from Lake Andraikiba we used different footpath routes across the densely populated countryside. Here the villagers, long accustomed to vazaha, were much less shy than in the Ankaratra. But it was otherwise when we went to Lake Tritriva, twelve miles from Antsirabe near the summit of a highish mountain; on the way several little children fled from us, their faces puckered with alarm. An allegedly motorable track leads to the foot of the mountain but few vehicles attempt to defy its dustiness. For miles this floury red dust is more than a foot deep: we paused to measure it. However, footpaths accompany the track, or take precipitous short-cuts up rough hillsides past isolated straggling hamlets and an astonishing number of churches.
By 10.30, four hours after leaving Antsirabe, we were suddenly looking into the pellucid jade-green Lake Tritriva – hundreds of feet below us, with vertical, lushly overgrown walls of rock rising from the water on three sides. Those cliffs merged into almost equally sheer mountain, still densely forested, its pines protected from casual wood-cutters by the gradient. We ate our bread, tomatoes and onions sitting on the ant-infested grass of the narrow ridge that forms the fourth side, overhanging the remote still waters. Once upon a time two very young lovers, denied parental permission to marry, plunged despairingly into Lake Tritriva – and we saw them on the opposite cliff in the form of two gnarled freak trees that have been growing intertwined for centuries. But we could not find the memorial plaque to a rash vazaha who laughed at the lovers’ curse and made a bet that he could swim across the lake.
Rachel chose to be contemplative while I climbed on a ladder-steep path, slippy with pine-needles, to the summit of the mountain – where I was opposite Rachel, far below on the ridge. On the way up, near the top, I came upon a group of four men and two women sitting in a shadowy glade between the towering pines, talking in low voices. They had no possessions with them and had evidently gathered at that secluded (sacred?) spot to discuss something very special, probably connected with the razana. I saw them before they saw me and momentarily I sensed an odd tension in the atmosphere. When they did see me they stared, startled, and nobody greeted me, or smiled. Feeling quite exceptionally de trop, I hastened past. On my return fifteen minutes later they had disappeared.
The summit overlooked a magnificent turbulence of scarcely inhabited mountains – stretching away, ridge beyond ridge, to become hazy blue in the distance. These tempted me to go on walking for the next two months but I knew they would not have the same effect on my companion. During the descent I was overlooking an entirely different sort of landscape: a wide, calm farming scene, all red and gold and green and cinnamon, every detail distinct beneath a cobalt sky.
At the foot of the mountain we each drank a litre of fizzy orange, the last two bottles on the ninety per cent empty shelves of an isolated shop. Nearby a zebu had just been killed, in a butcher’s stall raised from the ground on wooden stilts. We watched a dirt-ingrained little fellow of five or six, enveloped in a ravelling adult’s sweater, buying a few pence worth of offal. Scraps of green tripe, mauve lights and other unidentifiable multicoloured innards were threaded on a length of grass-twine; then off the wee lad trotted, escorted by a swarm of flies. Rachel shuddered. I thought positive and pointed out that it was protein, of a sort.
Soon after we saw what can happen when the Malagasy are not teetotal. It was a Sunday, and a noisy festival was in progress near one large village, and at least half the men we met thereabouts were footless at four o’clock in the afternoon. The reek of raw alcohol was so strong one felt a lighted match might have caused a conflagration for miles around. We paused in three villages to drink herbal tea or pseudo-coffee and had the impression that the people of this area, where there is little trace of ‘slave’ blood, are for some reason (probably inbreeding) remarkably dull-witted. All these villages were handsome but decaying. In pre-colonial days, before the landowners and their extended families and upper servants moved to Tana, the social structure of such regions must have been much sounder, both culturally and economically.
When we reached the level plain surrounding Antsirabe the moral tone improved dramatically. Vesper bells were chiming in half-a-dozen villages and soon the still air was carrying fervent hymn-singing across the paddy-fields from churches lit by wavering oil-lamps.
Gervais had good news for us that evening. Within the next few days we might get a lift to Fianarantsoa – 255 miles further south – in a beer-truck. Bus and bush-taxi services are frequent on this comparatively good stretch of Route Nationale No. 7, but Gervais had long since resolved to get us a free ride. He was one of the kindest people we met in Madagascar, which is saying a great deal, and he grieved over our being ripped off by the Soviet-style rate of exchange – that bus ride would have cost more than £60. From then on we stayed close to base lest the truck might suddenly decide, as is the capricious way of Malagasy vehicles, that now was the time to move.