Below is an extract from my diary, which I decided to also read for you.
Enjoy!
It is just before midday. The grass here is patchy and the sun has baked the grey sand to a burn. The veld has become like an oven. The time has come to seek shade; cool down and have a drink.
The only shade is from a few black thorn shrub-trees. At midday their shade is drawn in close and I have to crawl carefully through a tangle of thorny saplings to find decent cover.
I have wiggled myself into a reasonably comfortable position with my back against the trunk. As I chew on my apple, I stare at some thorny twigs a few inches from my face. They are awkwardly close, but I hesitate to try and break them away. Black thorns have especially vicious hooks.
They are, to me, a marvel of evolution in their own right. The tree has lovingly shaped each into a tiny work of art. It is dark brown, with a sheen like enamel. Over its three to four millimetres of length, it tapers in an elegant curve from a firm base to a syringe-sharp tip. Each has a companion, and they perform a macabre pas de deux with deadly hooks bared and aimed to cover every possible direction. They are remarkably hard – unbreakable without an iron tool. They will rip through skin and flesh without breaking off. If one is pricked, the instinctive jerk causes the pair to claw in to full depth, and the whip of the sapling to have more pairs even from nearby saplings, to strike. The more one moves, the more hooks there are. The inexperienced can become ensnared in a painful tangle that leaves them bloodied, with shredded clothes.
They are a carefully designed and highly effective protection system against browsers, who love the succulent oval leaves. They are also efficient — they need to be, because creating and perfecting them consumes a lot of the tree’s resources in a world where nutrition is scarce. So, where there are no leaves, there are no thorns; if the biome does not host giraffes, the higher-up saplings have fewer thorns. The leaves are held quite close to the stem, which makes them difficult to pluck without getting badly stung – yet the pods, when mature, are exposed so browsers can easily reach them, for seed dispersal.
It is difficult for me to craft an explanation for the perfection of this tree system in logic that is sufficiently rigorous to satisfy my engineering mindset. The best I can do is to suggest some possibilities, but I quickly find myself relying on the usual evolutionary cushion – “over many millions of years.”
I rest my head against the trunk and gaze out through my tangle of saplings at the African savannah bushland surrounding me. It is, for the most part, a harsh environment. It is prone to droughts, often lasting for extended periods. It endures intense summer daytime temperatures, and winter nights are frequently below freezing. Surface water is scarce at best; completely absent over some vast sections. Yet it is astonishingly teeming with life, from the most primitive to the most advanced. This harsh world has mercilessly selected only those life forms that can survive here. They have adapted and evolved through interaction with each other and with their climatic and geological surroundings over periods that, although scientists may be able to estimate, are beyond our practical understanding.
I marvel at how perfectly each organism fits its specific niche in the biome. None is too small or too large, not too strong or weak; each has the ideal shape, just the right level of protection, the perfect shade of colour, and the appropriate attributes. None does anything unnecessarily. Everything is fit for its purpose. No energy is wasted. Each element, if left to Nature, maintains itself in perfect balance with the rest.
It fills my whole being with awe and reverence. Here, I am like a wisp of odd-coloured spider silk, blown about by the winds of a system immensely vast, timeless, and governed only by its own rules. It has no awareness of me. It simply continues on without any concern for whether I get crushed or find a tiny niche of survival. The same is true for the entire human race. Nature may take a direction that will wipe us out, and despite all our (in our eyes) astonishing achievements as a species, we will not be able to halt it – in fact, even the faintest trace of our existence may be obliterated.