But there is something odd about them. Their faces are black. And I know they have died of Aids.
I am still calm, I feel no fear.
Most of them are children, or teenagers; a few are very old. But all of them are dead. Their faces are not giving up their secrets. None of them speaks to me. I begin to retrace my steps. The bird I heard seems to come back to his perch again. The flapping of its wings fades. Then it is as if the sound tape of the dream has been cut. Cleanly. I stop and I have the feeling there is something behind me. Something I ought to see.
When I turn, I find myself looking into Aida's face.
And then I wake up.
4
Soon afterwards I stand by the window and gaze out into the whiteness. In mist, all landscapes can seem similar. The floorboards in my room are pine, with that distinctive smell. They are cold under my feet. It is as if the sensation of damp moss was still with me. But even so, the landscape out there in the mist could be Africa.
That's the way it is: really clear dreams accompany you out into reality, they take on a life of their own, freed of their subconscious origin.
5
It is two weeks since I met Aida in her village, a few miles north of Kampala in Uganda. The earth there was red and the banana trees grew in dense clumps. It is two weeks since she showed me where she had hidden her mango plant.
6
I had gone to Kampala by car from the airport in Entebbe. Kampala is a cluster of hills, seven or eight, and tucked tightly between these hills dotted in elegant houses with large gardens was the town itself, with far too much traffic, far too many people.
Africa is always a conflict of opposites, of urban muddle and vast, empty regions.
I say Africa, but Africa can be divided into any number of parts. Some countries within this continent are the size of all of western Europe. There is no clear-cut, single entity that you can think of as Africa. This continent has many faces, but wherever I have been the dense urban muddle and vast, empty spaces have always been side by side.