The story of The Silent Savannah
Say it and you have already made the sound: si-lent sa-va-nnah, four s sounds in five syllables, ending on an open unstressed ah that fades out rather than stopping. The name is a shush. Dan found it in one go. It is the one warm place in the world. Everywhere else is cool and wet and closed in; this is dry and open and the widest horizon there is — flat pale gold-grey grass, the horizon a straight line low in the picture, three quarters of it sky, and one flat-topped acacia standing wide and low and dark against all that light. One tree. Not a group. The heat is the point, and it is a sleepiness nothing else here can give: the drowsiness of a hot still afternoon is not the same as the drowsiness of a cold night, and this world already knows the difference because Si Esta has been explaining it for years. The only thing that moves is a faint shimmer of warm air along the horizon. A savannah is where every child has already seen a predator chase something, so this one is built the other way round. In the Silent Savannah nothing is hunting and nothing is being hunted. Zi Lion is asleep under the acacia, the zebra walks past him, and the fact that neither of them cares is the whole point of the place. Goodnight Giraffe is here, and the Griffon Vulture, who perches and dozes and never circles.
Stories from The Silent Savannah
Nothing from here has been published yet. The Silent Savannah is still being filmed — the honest kind of gap, like the route’s “resident owed”.
