A Fool's Knot by Philip Spires Page B

of a deluge, mingled with a growing trickle of the flow.
    The road, hard, sandy and dry only a few minutes before, became a river, now carrying all manner of waste in its flow. From time to time, twigs, tin cans, beer bottles and paper melded with mud to dam the open gullies that served as roadside drains. These trapped the water which poured from the roofs, such as the one where Janet and her friends sheltered, and into this washed the cattle dung and goat droppings from the marketplace. Usually dung would remain where it fell and would quickly dry without smell in the harsh sun and dry air. After a week or so, after being tossed and ruffled by snuffling dogs and goats, or even eaten by a cow blinded by disease, faeces and any other rubbish left over from the market would be powdered, mixed with dust, absorbed and transformed, until it became dust itself. But today the detritus swirled together with a cocktail of red earth and rain water, and today it smelled, smelled so much it prompted Janet and her student fellow travellers to seek shelter elsewhere.
    She had never seen rain like this. As they moved along the row of shops, braving the muddy gaps between, she noticed that small holes were starting to open in the softer earth where no puddles formed. It was just as they reached the restaurant front that some of these holes started to issue something else she had never seen before. Clouds of flying black ants started to emerge. Like geysers, the nests seemed to eject their contents from the earth. As if propelled by a great pressure, the dark columns buffeted by rain and wind thrust towards the grey sky. In an apparent silence of frenzied wing beats, the insects searched for a mate surely knowing that only one of their number would find the queen. Within a few short seconds, detached wings began to fall to earth, fluttering like black sycamore seeds. With their life cycle nearly complete in a few moments, the now flightless ants fell back to earth to land in piles, and then to be washed like dirt into the gullies.
    As the rain fell ever harder, the entire marketplace was soon awash. Here and there the roadside gullies became torrents whose sides started to erode, with large clods of mud collapsing to form their own new dams. The travellers realised, but did not admit to one another, that within an hour the road would be broken. And so it was. A gaping trench grew wider and deeper by the minute, as a cascading flow of water, debris and grit followed the contour of the land across the road just beyond the last of the shops, and away into the valleys beyond. It became obvious that, even if the bus were to arrive, it would go no further than Migwani today. The travellers were no longer a laughing band. Now glum-faced they waited against all reason, willing the growl of the bus to appear above the hissing of the rain, but knowing that they would go nowhere that day.
    When the rain eventually did stop, the only sound to break the air was the continued, but diminishing, trickling of the roadside rivers. In time, the goats began to bleat again and soon, ankle deep in mud, the owners trudged and slithered across the marketplace to reclaim their animals. The walk home would be long and difficult now, so market was finished for the day as its participants drifted away. Only now could the full extent of the damage be seen. Besides the trench across the road in the town, down towards the school at the edge of the town, just fifty yards from the marketplace, where the road was carried by a small embankment between the heads of two deeply rutted low valleys, a drain had dammed and the rain water from the town had flowed across the road, which had simply disappeared. Where it should have been, only a gaping hole remained, easily eight feet deep and ten across and looked, from the town, like a tooth dissolved from the jaw of the land. There would be no traffic through Migwani for some days, not until a Ministry of Works grader, a rare animal