The Window Seat
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Aminatta Forna. The Window Seat
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THE WINDOW SEAT
Ancestor Stones
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The last time I took a daytime flight over the Sahara was a few years ago on a return trip from Johannesburg. The moment we took off, the cabin staff toured the cabin and lowered the blinds. People found their headsets and turned on the screens in front of them. Light flared around the edges of the blinds and once, when I dared to raise mine over the Sahara, the light leapt in like a living creature. When I fly, I think of what a caveman would think if he saw this, or even knew that one day somebody would. I think of the generations in the not-so-distant past who never saw such a view. I think of those in the future who never will see that wonder which our generation’s wantonness with the world’s natural resources has made possible. The day will come when we will be nostalgic about flying. As incredible as that once seemed, the experience of having our travel curtailed by the pandemic of 2020 brought that feeling closer to many of us. One day this may be gone, sooner than we allowed ourselves to imagine.
Only in flight does one become aware of how much of the world has resisted humankind. The snow-filled corrugations of the mountain ranges of Central Europe, where it is impossible to know where one country ends and another begins. At such times, even the flight map which traces the path of the plane on the screen in front of you is as effective as pin the tail on the donkey. A ruffle of mountains falls, a new one rises. Once I imagined we must be flying over the Alps, though I think now it was the Massif Central, because a short time later, I looked down and saw the real Alps. I was entirely unprepared for their scale—they seemed to stretch upwards reaching not so much for the sky but as if to swat the plane out of it. I have skied on the Alps and I remember being awed by their beauty, but I could see only what filled the frame of my vision, which I realised, once I was flying over all 1,200 kilometres of them lying across eight countries, wasn’t very much at all.
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