Dali’s Giraffes

Giraffes in Etosha Park

Last night at the first campsite in Etosha, I had one of those moments of overlap – not déjà vu, per se, but rather when scenes in your mind’s eye not only coincide with learned images that have become archetypes of common imagination (think: the posters in a 1st year’s university room), but also with what the retina is taking in at that very moment… This happened as two very skittish giraffes, having finally drunk after almost an hour’s equivocation, moved away from the watering hole adjacent to the camp (you can sit some 20 metres away and sip beer or wine behind a small stone wall and an inclined fence that in no way would stop a mildly perturbed lion). With the roar of an only briefly-glimpsed big cat ringing in their ears, these lanky beasts glided into the hazy darkness that marked the boundary between the yellow floodlights’ ken and the dark savanna’s inky reach. They moved further and further and in that precise instant of nether, they became for me Dali's giraffes, my mind stretching their limbs and knobby joints, elongating their necks even more than nature had already generously intended… they were the dream at the edge of an artificial day carved out of the night for tourists’ pleasure, striding shadows in negative, spotted tall yet diminishing still…