Jahazi Dawn

I'm standing at the low-tide line of a sandy beach in Tanzania looking out across the shallow waters of a lagoon to a distant fringing reef and beyond, to a horizon occupied by a single jahazi, a small, coastal dhow.

It rained during the night and the sun has spent the half hour since dawn trying to burn through the lingering clouds. An onshore wind, almost imperceptible, has raised slight ripples across the sea, just enough to break up the reflection of the sunrise and to send small waves up the sand to tickle my feet. As the morning progresses this wind will rise; these are the southeast trades that will speed the jahazi's cousins, the great ocean-going dhows, back to the Arabian Gulf.

When I came out onto the beach just before sunrise, the air was refreshingly cool after the stuffy confines of the bedroom, but it has already warmed and by the time the trade wind builds the sun will have clamped the land under the full cicada-singing, mind-sapping heat of the day.

Other than the tinkle of the wavelets falling out onto the beach there isn't a sound: the wind is too light to conjure the casuarina's gently whisper or rattle the fronds of the high coconut palms. This silence is the time to look outwards at the peace of this scene but at the same time inwards upon one's soul; a time to engage with an inner tranquility or, if it cannot be found, to search for it before it is crushed beneath the busy-ness of the day.

It is dawn in Tanzania. It is a new day. I am sixteen and it will create possibilities which will be laid out, as if at a feast.