Description Practice: Zomba Plateau, Emperor's View

Happy Easter from The Inside! A lot of firsts in the world including the first Easter in most of our lifetimes where the whole world will be spending it indoors. Rather than get massive FOMO about not being able to go anywhere, I would like to spend the time practicing my descriptions as I have done in previous posts. 

This time I will be describing the view from Zomba mountain, the key tourist feature of the former capital of Malawi. Zomba has protected forestry, which gives it a feel that's closer to nature than the other towns in Malawi. The trees are allowed to grow to massive breadth and height, giving a feel that humans are very much visitors in a natural world. 

When you get to the top of the mountain, there is quite a sight to behold.


A View from the Top of the World


The first thing you notice is how the landscape suddenly unfurls like the most high-definition live Google map image you have ever seen. Emperor's View is the very seat of the world - you can tell why the "emperor" liked it. The grass grows wild here, teeming with insects that call this place home. Straight down below is the town of Zomba, and from here you can see how the buildings fit between the trees, rather than being relegated to neat man-made rows. The college looks to fit between a thumb and forefinger from this vantage point. 

Span your eyes further to the left, and you see flat land with fewer buildings, smaller hills, and as you continue as far as the horizon, there is an unmistakable sheen of blue... a lake. It is not Lake Malawi, but the smaller lake south of it, Lake Chilwa. The clouds hang idly in the air, at a precise level in the sky which they had previously agreed on in a meeting you were not privy to. Their movement across the infinite sky is barely detectable, but it is there, inch by inch.

Up here, you feel you both own the sky and are owned by it - simultaneously an irrelevant speck on the face of this mighty mountain, and a god surveying all below. As you take it all in, you can't pinpoint it exactly, but you know being here has changed something, some unidentifiable part of you which will never be the same again. 
 

See some previous description practice posts here:

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