Free The Dust Diaries by Owen Sheers Page B

kind of faith, a socially responsible Christianity. How his ideas lit you and how you became his word made flesh, campaigning against employers who paid their workers sub-union wages, against sweated conditions in industries employing female labour. I know the day you left England and the promise you made to your mother to return. I know you were in the Great War at Lake Victoria, that you took on the colonial administration over land reform. I know the day they took out your eye and when you wrote what to whom.
    Already I am making connections. You wrote and I write. You were a runner, not just a competitive one, but an instinctive one. You ran for the running, for the essence and escape of it. I think I know how that feels. I have always run too: through the lanes, up the hills of the Black Mountains. For the primitive feel of its simple exhaustion.
    But there are pieces missing. Triggers and gaps in the story, and you are strangely absent. This is you the history, not you the man, and for some reason I am left wanting more. Steere has done his job though, he has brought us together. His prose is dry and functional, but without it I would not have pursued you down the years; I would not have tried to get under your skin. I would never have met Leonard, Jeremy, Betty Finn, Ray Brown, Canon Holderness. I would not have camped in the Red Cave. I would not have danced on your grave last night. And, of course, there would have been no you and me. There would just have been you. Then me. Two people separated by a hundred years of forgotten memories, by a hundred years of dust, settling between us with every year past, covering your tracks and obscuring mine.

1 JANUARY 1904
    Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia
    Arthur has been running across the veld for over four hours. His feet are bleeding in his boots and his lungs feel the colour of the ground beneath him: red, coarse a nd grained. Drained of fluid, they hang within his ribs like drying tobacco leaves, rubbing against the bone. With each breath a loose covering of dust seems to rise in him, silting in his throat and burning in his chest. He finished the last steel-tasting drops of water from his billy-can ten miles ago. His mouth is parched and his tongue sticks to the skin behind his teeth. He can feel his lips drying out, cracking like waking pupae. His breath clicks in his windpipe.
    The veld at his feet is as dry as him, deprived of water these last few months when it should have been raining. And not just any rain, but the downpours of the wet season, so powerful they felt solid: curtains of rain drawn across the end of each day. Italic rain. But no such rain has come, so he runs across hard and broken ground, dotted with scrubland bushes, their leafless twigs branching from the ground like burnt-out capillaries. The shattered shells of damba fruit scatter the path, the debris of hungry baboons. The hills are grey and purple in the distance.
    He had left Enkeldoorn that afternoon following the service in the Dutch Reformed Church, giving himself at least five hours to run the thirty-seven miles to Umvuma before darkness. The congregation was small but familiar, the usual gathering of administration men and farmers’ families. Wide-necked, sun-tanned men dwarfing their smaller wives, each wearing a frilling of young children.
    Slipping away into the corrugated iron vestry he had packed his cassock and the dark botdes of medicine into a brown leather satchel before removing the stiff clerical collar, unclipping it at the back of his neck and folding it into a side pocket, so he could breathe. These were his rituals of preparation before a long run. Walking outside, he filled his dented steel billy-can from a standpipe by the supplies shop, listening to the deep gurgle rising in pitch as the valve strained to pull the water up through the layers of rock and dry earth. Then he bent to tighten the laces of his boots, and noticed tht split between the upper and the sole had