YD6-92(ZA-3): Holistic — Sabie’s Bridal Veil, a Pregnancy Foretold, a Legacy Unfolding
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Notice: This Image is AI generated to give an idea into the story
Epigraph / Tease : From the hush of banana groves to the shimmer of Sabie’s Bridal Veil, memory and prophecy fold into one. A father’s suggestion, a waterfall’s veil, and a whispered lineage stir beneath the family’s gatherings. Between the lions’ gaze, supermarket aisles, and long roads traced across escarpment walls, mysticism lingers—foreshadowing a pregnancy, a legacy already set in motion.
BOOK SYNOPSIS: Aetheria, in the zodiacal forest—where birds sing and leaves flutter like wings bathing in light. The symphony of the forest comes to mind. This is the cosmos’ whisper through our creatures, and in these pages, she leads me. These chapters unfold as a clarifying companion to my earlier book, The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring how the universe sculpted our minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness who begins to reveal herself, her presence lives in the rhythm. She seeks form—moving toward the name she will one day claim: Sunshine.
YD6-92(ZA-3): Holistic — Sabie’s Bridal Veil, a Pregnancy Foretold, a Legacy Unfolding
With birdsongs drifting from the rolling hills of banana plantations, De M’ma is carried back into memory—since my childhood, leaving to serve others—her raison d'être. Through the windows, my parents' gray, boxy model Jetta slips away along the track we drove up last night, bound for the wooden bridge, vanishing into the efflorescent green. De P’pa hangs up his butler's apron, morphing into the world of a retired man. He moves to the head of the half-dressed table, before the open-hearth stone fireplace where the family’s coat of arms hangs—a shield bearing five blue lilies. He finishes the breakfast he prepared earlier, adapting himself to us, while Heiger, Ilona's Alsatian—more pelt than beast—stretches across the cold slasto floor, his docile rest humming with guardian energy, ready to spring at the faintest intruder.
De P’pa dishes us up “Pain Perdu—Lost Bread” and joins us. Heiger nudges his master at the dining table, snout pressing a thigh as if to say, 'Hold up talking—it's time to go!' After coffee, De P’pa clears the table, Heiger weaving at his feet, dithering by the door. Leading the way out, the Alsatian pads along the track toward the bridge. Across, he roams the shallow muddy bank of the river, fearless slips into the crocodile-infested water. He vanishes into the surrounding bushes, only to reappear and catch up with us on the gentle slopes tracking back to the cottage.
The phone tolls, drawing our eyes to the corner. De P’pa lifts the handset, a few words spoken, then calls me. “Ilona. [Wilt met gji spreken]—Want to talk to you?” The receiver changes hands, words pass along, and I meet Victoria’s gaze. “Ilona. [“Nous a invités à…] invited us to the Game Reserve,” I say.
After setting our course with De P’pa, we head from the banana plantations onto the open country road. My eyes scan for the turnoff, and after a long desperate search, I’m relieved when a brown Sabi Sabi Game Reserve signboard springs from the bushveld, stamped with an elephant head. The reassurance grows as the gateway opens in the barbed-wire fence and a broad graded dirt road, leaning away from the asphalt before curving inland, where the edges of the Kruger National Park linger amidst the bush. The road bends sharp right, opening into a shallow, sun-blushed bushy valley fading into distant haze.
After an elephant fence drops away, the road stretches on—deep, infiltrating, tapering thinner, yet still inviting. The graded dirt spins the mind at a loss, until a stockade fragments from the bush, shadowed by sentinels with spears and shields, steering us through the gateway into a driveway bay, an apron enclosed “kraal” between thatched bungalows. In the bush, oddly gleaming pointers strike the eye, welcoming us to the reserve—estranged, like neon light in a night street.
We park in front of a bungalow. Victoria and I step out and enter the wooden door. My mind reels in turmoil, pressed between two architectures: squared walls beneath a thatched pitched roof. Gone are the rondavel mud huts fixed in my childhood memory, the wilderness the mind craves to revive.
In a wall niche hangs a framed point of Africa; on the shelf below, a carved wooden doll and a toy truck, bring the African rustic touch to the interior. Behind the straight lines of the reception counter, announcing to a white woman in a ranger’s outfit glancing at us. “Is Ilona here?” Her wide questioning eyes dawning with the thought: ’How do you know her?’
“She's expecting us."
Her stupefied look holds a flicker of understanding—knowing my sister, Libra’s knack for utter control of people as neatly as of accounting figures. The receptionist turns toward the offside Kiaat tongue-and-groove door, hesitant at the threshold, retreating until she gathers her courage and vanishes—not to reappear. Instead, Ilona shows up, her face carrying the irritation of being confronted by her brother, only to have her first face-to-face with Victoria soften her edge.
Ilona breaks into a grin as she books us in. I dare not ask a question, wary of frizzling our welcome. The receptionist reappears, and behind us, a man silhouettes in the gaping door of our earlier entry. The porter ushers us along the driveway apron until a crazy-paved path lifts from the dirt, winding toward one of the bungalows beneath the umbrella trees. Victoria trails, her gaze still baffled, while I hold fast to the receptionist’s request: “Be ready for five in the morning rendezvous.”
Before the trees orchestrate their morning chirps, Victoria and I are ready, stepping out from the bungalow into the night, off the path to the driveway apron. A rancher waits at the wheel in his topless safari van. We linger as guests trickle in, boarding behind the ranger. Ilona steps up, joining at his side; at her rhythm, Victoria and I climb aboard. In the hush we pull off, through the stockade, the tracks winding us into the wilderness.
It isn’t long in the thin bushveld before we leave the tracks, bumping off-road like hunters until we halt on the plain. The ranger steps down, our group follows, and we gather for a coffee break at the hood of the van. We stand by like guests waiting for the curious wild to approach—yet it is first light that rises over the horizon.
We climbed back into our seats. In the twilight a few other safari vans circle, then scatter at the rangers’ signal. We drive away, creeping through the bush, as voices crackle over the radio—rangers calling out their sightings—while the sun pencils its rays across the horizon, stirring long shadows in the bush.
We are guided to a halt, the other safari vans scattered at a distance from the waterhole, like predators in wait, while zebra and giraffe herd together, skittish beneath their pelts along the receded banks, waiting for rain to replenish. Satiated, a few move on. Afar, the brown safari vans with their clusters of guests begin to disperse, the sun flooding the plain, orange skies announcing the heat that scorches the ground.
So we turn back on track, roaming along until we pause before a pride of a lion and lioness at rest—their soft gaze indifferent to our stopping by. Further on, where the eye reaches, a distant herd of buffalo—a guest's long lens points—Victoria seems more absorbed by the atmosphere than by souvenirs; I, doubtful of my own attempt, lift my pocket Canon Snappy for a shot.
By midday we return to the lodge, contouring past the booking-in bungalow, hiding around the corner, before stepping under an open-air thatched roof. From a lounging area with an open hearth, we cross with other guests, across onto a shaded terrace on our way to an open-air luncheon buffet.
Evening settles with a hush of a childhood atmosphere—the sense of Belgians we once carried when our lives were still bound to elementary school desks, ink pots, and lined exercise books, waiting for the playground to toll so we could storm out to play marbles with our mates in the shade of eucalyptus.
A few days later, with the weekend in sight, we trace back through dense bushveld along the Panorama Route toward the crescent of wavy banana hills, we cross Hazyview’s bustling intersection, the downtown native roadside market, shielding before the white community’s local rural stores domineered by a supermarket. The next cluster with the Total gas station a brilliance of modernity, flanked by a few rural stores. Before the groves, we turn away from a vineland valley, into a side street. Short, to raise the haze of a security fence against fruit poachers. At the cul-de-sac, I veer into a bay before a wild leafy hedge.
We step out, and cross the street toward a storefront, its broad white fascia frowning down, half-sealed windows and bargain prices half-plastered across the strip, camouflaging the industrial shell. Striding behind a customer who vanished into the hollow interior, we enter beneath the Spar logo, scanning the supermarket—the row of ringing tellers in uniform, then flip to the flank doorway gaping onto an office—searching for my sister, Ilse. We bump into her—Sun in Cat. “[Hoe got het]—How are you doing…” Instinctive she exhales, exchanges greetings. I ask, “Waar‘s De M’ma—Where is De M’ma?”
We walk through, releasing Ilse to the pressure of running a supermarket. The shelves stand chock-a-block, a kaleidoscope of merchandise. Down an aisle we cross paths with Gerard—his Sun in Buffalo, a sturdy stance by the delivery bay at the rear. A Flemish brief exchange is thrown, before we shift offside, tread up a few stairs and find De M’ma in uniform—her Capricorn in symbiosis with her Monkey—fumbling eyes and hands through a giant carton. My greetings falters, as Victoria exults in musical lyrics: “[Goedenday Bon’ma, en hoe gaat het met U]—Good day Bon'ma and how are you?”
“[Ho! Ge zet her al]—You are already here?” De M’ma exclaims, sigh: “[Hoe kan de tijd vlieg’n]—How can time fly… away?”
“[Ik heb ‘n mense wachte’n]—I have a customer waiting!” De M’ma says, rushing off under Gerard’s Buffalo gaze, ‘That can wait’—against her Monkey-Sun distancing toward a customer waiting amid the shelved aisle. We follow a stretch behind, the happy customer, De M’ma is left standing in her world surging with magic surprises. Facing Victoria and I, she says, “[Onz’ Ilse and Gerard heben onz over gevraaght ver heete]—Our Ilse and Gerard invited us for dinner.” Turning her eyes to me, she adds, “[Beeter op tyd zijn]—Better be on time; you know how punctual he is with serving dinner!”
Swift as we had arrived, we skip aside the toll gates of tellers, brush past upcoming customers, and slip through the doorway out of the Spar. Crossing the street toward the Volkswagen, we heave ourselves into the minibus. I tweak the ignition, shift into reverse, back up, and drive away—veering into the street behind the Total gas station, straight into the parking lot. We step out, rummaging through the ShopRite supermarket, then drift to the other quarter of the trading post, its intersection mushroomed over the years into rural corners: hotel, pub, tire workshop—until evening folds in, and we take our leave.
We backtrack in a stretch of the Panorama Route, turn off before Perry Bridge, through citrus orchards up the Sabie Road. Pulling up before the gate, I press the call button. As the gates slide open, we ease along the driveway, Ilse’s pack of yapping Fox Terriers greeting us from behind a grilled fence. The engine sighs to a hush. We walk the last stretch to the porch, beneath a swell of elephant-ear leaves. Ilse calls her dogs inside, closing the door behind Victoria and me. While the Pleiades leap and spin—short legs and tails in a sprightly dance, bursting with joy, eyes sparkling, as if to ask—’Where have you been all day?’—a constellation scenting at Ilse’s pace toward the kitchen doorway; her Spar dustcoat just freed, its ghost still clinging to her shoulders.
Amongst heavy redwood furniture—weighs a warning—Gerard is prone to distraction—De M’ma and P’pa stand behind a white-dressed dining table, its place settings glittering, the chair’s upholstered backrests waiting empty. Victoria and I dangle at the loose ends.
I trail after Ilse, slipping around the encumbering night-hall to pause at the open kitchen doorway. The distant night presses at the window, the ghost of the maid leaving by the side door, vanishing after dressing the table, to the hush of the glazing mirrored frame of the fluorescent kitchen.
Gerard and his double move with hobbyist’s cadence—work rhythm trailing him to the peninsula worktop, chopping vegetation, sidestepping between steaming pots.
Waiting there, I feel a sense of guilt. “[Gerard! Bonsoir]—Good evening!” I call, sensing the Buffalo-Sun’s atmospheric squeeze. Toe over heel, I retreat to the dining room, where Victoria speaks with my parents.
In a twitch, Gerard peeks through the doorway, like a best man stepping out of rank—his Cancer-Moon slipping from hobby and taxing job. “Hello… everybody!” he calls, a sweeping glance at his guests before turning away, eyes fixating on Ilse, implying: 'Get your family seated—I'm about to serve…'
Lumbering back with a bottle sturdy in hand, the blob of a man settles at the head of the table. “Why don't you sit down?” he says to his guest. With a follow-through twist, the cork pops—a streak of burgundy rolls in the bowl of his glass. As everyone takes their places, he swirls the red wine, breathes in, tastes, then half-filling. He hesitates—’Why can’t I have the figure of a dancer’—choking on the need to offer a toast. Heavy-handed, he reaches left, seizes a glass, half-fills, and sets it before me as I ease into the leftover setting.
Her Sun in Cat, tall through the gaping doorway, Ilse arrives with a cooking pot, weaving behind Gerard, then uncoils—bending over her vacant backrest to set it in the middle on a wicker pad. She withdraws, returns with a second pot. With feline grace, apart from the guests, in a sillage of a cuisine-fluid routine of the couple—she draws out her chair, settles, stretches her long arm, and lifts the lids—one steaming, the other cool. In her fluid hands, she leaves lids flipped aside, seizes the salad server, and dishes up. “Bon appétit!” she says, after the last steaming plates change hands across the table and she settles with hers. Her eyes drop on the jug of water. “[Qui Veux]—Who wants?” No nods make the round—’snitsh’—our code from childhood: no drink needed with meals.
We eat until, after another serving, Gerard pushes his chair back, wiping his mouth with a large serviette. He excuses himself: “I have to go to sleep.” We watch him, heavy-footed, vanish in the hollow doorway. Ilse explains, “He has to get up at four!”
Worn from conducting the Spar, Ilse sinks into a wicker couch. Her mischievous Terriers leap to her lap, the sprightly one climbing to perch on her shoulder, each answering to a name, the oldest pleading from the floor—though not for long. She rises, leads us to the door. We step beneath a leafy alleyway toward the minibus in the driveway: Victoria pleading with either De M’ma or P’pa, but they climb past her and settle onto the passenger bench behind the front seats.
Victoria joins me as I tweak the engine to a whine, tracking back the driveway. We leave the Volkswagen Jetta behind, the gate slides aside, and we pull through—veering onto a cross-current of the Sabie Road, an asphalt kink before breaking off onto a graded dirt road that skirts the rolling hills and sweeps into the hush of the heights—a childhood peace returning, with the rear engine whining as headlights bushwhack deep into the foliage. Now, with my old folks in the rear, we cross another band of asphalt, kink back onto tracks, and ride beneath a starry night until the bungalow flushes, cowering in the darkness.
The sun rises over the banana plantation, the little household bustling—preparing breakfast in the kitchen, dressing the table, sitting down to eat, chatting into the day ahead. We clear up, step outside, and board the minibus. I tweak the ignition with a glance around—”Are you all right?” Straighten, and drive away.
The track crosses the wooden bridge to reach the main road. We borrow the asphalt road, joining the White River descent through the hills. At the edge of town, the Kruger National Park road, a fold of the Panorama Route, carries us across Hazyview, where I pull into the Total station. Victoria slips out; with the old folks she distances, they disappear around the corner into the side street toward the Spar, while I linger with the minibus until the attendant fills the tank and hangs back the nozzle. I pay, drive off in a turn around, on to pick up Victoria, De M’ma and P’pa—after a greeting with Ilse and Gerard, and a few things gathered from the shelves. All aboard again, we turn and head on.
Back on the road, before Perry’s Bridge across the Sabie River, we crawl the groves’ corner, heading up the Sabie Road. Past Ilse and Gerard’s gate in daylight—my eye abandoning their property brisk slip of the wall for the thick bushveld, roadside efflorescent greens deepening, stippling through the striated hills. Smoke still clings to the sidings before the hazy lair of the escarpment—an artistic black crayon, the dragon’s dorsal line, laying a dawning sky atop. The road sinks before rising to heights out the valley, catching fragments of winds beside the meandering Sabie River upstream, the sunlight absorbed by the scaly wall, until no sky remains. Sabie town sprawls across the piedmont—its leafy main street carrying us downtown past the church-like stone post office, ghost of the gold diggers’ route onward to the Highveld.
The main street swings in a horseshoe course outbound, but as the bushveld sprawls ahead, we veer off. Along the stretch, opposite a log factory, an asphalt road spins away, carrying us into a reserve. The road folds back onto itself, halting inside the loop, in the shadowed crotch of the dragon’s talon.
We step out, follow traced footpaths to a phantasmagoric rocky cove. From the dragon’s shoulder trimmed against the sky, a waterfall spills, draping its veil into the pool. The hush breaks a ceaseless whoosh—the “Bridal Veil”—a transcendent trail fraying in the pellucid pool, fizzing to the surface.
After strolling into dead-end paths for other angles, behind the veil’s detachment from the craggy stone wall, we linger, chatting our way back climb aboard the minibus. I tweak the ignition to a whiny engine, and join the road, weasel through past the log yard to the country road, flashing “Graskop” signs along the retreating asphalt band.
Along the Dragon’s Backbone of stone, the town spreads on a plateau, its grid of streets branching off the main road. We pull up before a modest house. When we step out onto the driveway, the Capricorn-Cat in my aunt, Tante Carla, dances with her Italian, Henri Beux–Vulture-Libra—whom I have always known rebuilding diesel engines from WWII tanks up in Abyssinia, and rewinding massive electric motors—painted blue, new!—for the colonials deep in the Congolese jungle.
They emerge to feast welcoming the newcomer to the family—Victoria. With De P’pa and M’ma, we twirl and dance in circles through the plants growing in her yard, then, along Henrico’s workshop in the shadow of the Citroen Ami 6, we enter inside. We spend ourselves over lunch, preparing and feasting together, then whirl again into Helios’ pour of light—our glass bubble carrying us merrily into the afternoon, urging us onward.
Deaf to the whine of our companion, we pass an outpost’s scattered street mall, before the street releases us onto the road cutting through Highveld grassland, split open by a titan’s sword. The road shadows the Graskop Gorge, our eyes feasting on the vertigo of its U-shaped abyss. Straightening out, we pull over and step before an amphitheater of stone and forest, gazing through God's Window. The horizon wavers, undulating into sweeping curves and sudden, jagged angles, chiseled by a force beyond imagining.
Further on, the road draws us to Bourke's Luck, where the Blyde and Treur Rivers converge, their streams no more than threads twisting through a riverbed of potholes, swirling in canyon rock, ground and hollowed by eons. In the tracks of a gold digger who found none, we climb back aboard the minibus, and drive away. With a gentle whine we descend from the Highveld grassland, a long stretch into the Lowveld bushveld, unfurling past banana plantations, until the headlights flush the bungalow out of the night.
Saddened yet pressed on, as Helios lances beams through fluorescent rows of banana plants, the Tiger in Victoria and the Warthog in me carry the weight of a trek. She might not even remember what had brought us here—only her doubt of me, faithful to my words about being divorced. We leave the Capricorn-Warthog in De P’pa standing back, reserved.
I tweak the engine to a whine, Victoria and I trace the tracks ahead out of the banana farm onto the asphalt, until Hazyview sprawls and reappears through the mountain troughs, carrying us onto the Panorama Route across town.
At the Spar, a corner in the zodiacal forest, Victoria’s Tiger and my Warthog dance with the Capricorn-Monkey in De M’ma in the storage. We brush with Gerard, his Cancer green with jealousy—yet mastered, held back behind the beast of his Buffalo; imperceptible, he too dances along. At the toll gates of cashiers, our farewell goes to the Gemini’s airy current—an underarm turn that spins us off in a friendly flow through the exit, in symbiosis with her Cat—whose depths conceal the character Ilse keeps.
Crossing the cul-de-sac, I tweak the engine again, easing onto the main road, veering through Perry Bridge citrus orchards, and across Ilse & Gerard's land, before the Dragon spine rises in the distance. The Sabie River glints in its trough, the little engine whining along the talon of its paw. On the piedmont we fill up, then across the street, contour the restaurant to a terrace perch above the town. Here, we feast on pizzas—like no other—reminding me of those yearly breaks from New York, here with my boys, each year a few inches taller than before.
We rise, step out, tweak, and drive off. The street runs blind into the outskirts’ thick foliage before the asphalt lifts into our faces, the engine choking before gearing down to whine, shifting lower as we scale through Long Tom Pass. We catch up with Helios shining across the world. Awe dawns with vertiginous fear, until the scaly stone flanks shy away behind flocculent foliage, the Dragon vanishing beneath a cloak ruffling under forested hills. Crossing the winding dorsal sidings, we emerge at last with the engine sighing and choking on its gears, the long glide along the Dragon’s flank into Lydenburg.
The road sign leads us south through the town’s grid, then out into the backwash sea of grassland waves. Until, catching the Maputo thoroughfare west, we breathe with the engine’s whine in sight of the stretch, Helios, equidistant, holding the balance—relaxing the urge to beat up the road that lies ahead.
Urging the landmarks of the past to hurry us across the countryside, as Helios pours a golden sheen across a backwash valley. In its trough an oasis flares with bright colors and glass glitters—the Middleburg outpost calls traffic to break the stretch of road. We veer off for a pause, refresh with a snack, then stride back to the waiting minibus. A full tank drip-feeds the engine as we curl across the apron, back slotting ourselves into fast whoosh of the thoroughfare traffic, whining out of the shallow valley. The road spreads from a cropped grass median with another lane, past Witbank along the concrete highway, itself telling we are inbound to the heartbeat of the Transvaal.
The sail of the Fountains frays its edge in the current across the traffic circle, waving us westward, while the Voortrekker Monument stands cubic and bulky in stone on the golden crests. This road had lain here when Igor cycled to school, while I rode on to construction sites skirting the city.
While the engine sights its relief, I attempt—full of hope—with Victoria beside me, to flair a shortcut across the countryside to reach our destination. Along the way we pick up the railway and enter the outskirts of Kempton Park. Across town we turn our back on the gantry sketched against the sky and weave into the suburban street. The church steeple points us to turn off, and in the cul-de-sac’s depth a hazy screen shadows the highway. Against the shimmer, the bright fins of aircraft sketch themselves—waiting for flights to other worlds.
We pull into the driveway, the feast wrapping with Leo in Igor and his Sun in Rat, returning his previous once-owned Volkswagen minibus. The night before we feasted with the Monkey in Ivo, his Cancer like a soft glove for Caroline, the Virgo-Buffalo, a fortress in that petite woman. Our journey plays out, a stone’s throw away from the evening flight. Ilona calls, in an assertive voice: “I’ll take you to the airport tomorrow.”
As baffling as our journey off radar across the countryside, it hadn’t occurred that the Libra-Goat in Ilona could untether from Sabi Sabi Lodge—where we left her a week earlier—only to be at her house in Crowthorn, skirting Kyalami, ready to come and fetch us.
On Sunday late afternoon, tethered to the family—like a goat on a stake in the middle of a village, before the crown of huts—Ilona drives us to Jan Smuts Airport terminal. We disembark, step into the departure concourse. After check-in, Victoria and I rejoin Ilona and walk to the panoramic overlook behind the glazed curtain, where the airfield lies open under an evening sky. The first lights flicker far afield before our flight is called out loud, resonating through the restaurant, No time left for our break.
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