progress became erratic and halting. He began feeling his way across ground that felt unfamiliar and unsettlingly unstable, feeding his latent insecurity. Later, in the moments when the depths of the darkness became unbearable, he told himself that he was above all this; he was the ruler of this land of cold shadows. Yet no matter how many times he said it, he never quite managed to believe it, as everywhere he looked, the mountain closed in upon him and held him down.

The thousands of blue-grey facets of stone glinted and glistened in the confusion of his mind. He had never been anywhere as hostile as this. With each step he faced new, dimly glimpsed terrors that only added to his pain. He soon lost all memory of why he was running. Now he was running just to stay alive, but he felt he was running to his death. Running into emptiness where no one would be able to bring him back.

He had no idea of how long he held up against the unyielding bone-chilling cold of the night. The hard stones beneath his paws grew sharper still and began to cut painfully into his pads. The endless rock gullies grew narrower and steeper. Just as he thought he had at last cleared the final summit, the next rose ahead of him. With each grim ridge his old life receded into the darkness, each time he felt he might fall off the edge of the world and into the endless void beyond. The winds took his strength and scattered it over the endless blackness of the mountainside. Many times he stumbled; rising became more and more difficult and painful as the biting winds swirled into the fissures and hollows, laughing mercilessly at him.

He fell as his forepaws dropped off a ridge into blackness. He tumbled down helplessly, sliding down the abrading rock face, his flank slammed onto a flat, damp, stone-hard surface below. Pain overtook his senses and filled his mind. Through the pain he came to realise that all the stories of this endless place were true. He knew he had at last found the emptiness; the void had taken his soul. Then the blackness enveloped him and, lying painfully on his side, he descended into never-ending exhausted, dreamless sleep.

When Nengwalamwe woke it was still dark. He lay remembering the vivid stories he had heard as a cub: of epic struggles of the forces of the living and the dead and of light and dark. He remembered other times when he had lain awake; wondering why in all the stories there was no dawn and sunset. Wondering why there was no time when the day gave way to the night or the darkness relinquished to the light. In all the stories except one, one that told of the time before the day and night became two, there was dark or light but never both. The time came when, like two quarrelsome brothers, they had to be separated. They could not understand what had happened to them. The brothers chased each other’s tail forever round and round the world. Night’s lair high up in the mountains in the east; Day dwelt in the west.

The lion wondered why death felt so much like life, only colder. He had expected to see others, maybe not different animals but certainly other lions, but there were none. Then he remembered; he was in the realm of the darkness, the void, the emptiness in which nothing lived, and he too was not alive.

So, this was the void: that empty, desolate, frozen wasteland devoid of life, a place of never ending darkness and fear. He thought he would not feel the cold when he was dead, yet the chill bit deep into his fur. As he stared into the blackness he slowly became aware of a faint deep blue that grew steadily. The darkness was beginning to lift away leaving a faint light that formed in the distance. He lay still, pondering on how far away the blueness looked. First it seemed close, then, as it grew, it receded into the distance leaving a line of black below a cold blue that deepened, penetrating the sky. He shook with fear; not just his head, nor even his mane, but his whole body quivering like a fearful cub, and still the blue rose. Below the blue the air seemed to redden, turning to brown and then to orange in a continuous band of graduated light that stretched as far as the lion could see. There were no stars, no clouds, nothing but the vibrant colours of the steadily climbing light. Had the light entered the darkness? Was this his life entering death? Why was the void filling with the brilliant colours of the dawn sky?

For a while he lay still and simply watched the spectacle unfold around him. He was transfixed by its beauty and held down by its terrifying power. He had been a lion; the proud son of a powerful father. In life his teeth had been white, his fur smooth and unmarred by wounds and his mane soft and un-matted. His youth intact, yet coloured by the first experiences of adulthood. Now he lay still and waited for the void to envelop and take him.

Still the light grew. It revealed that the void was not without form: it loomed up all around him in cold stone. Ahead and below lay open flatlands with darker patches. The light grew brighter and the patches formed into high, dense thickets, kopjes and isolated rounded rocks, dusty luggas, lush green uplands and brown-grassed plains. In the middle of them all, like nothing Nengwalamwe had ever seen, rose up a rock mass that dominated everything around it. This was not the void; this was not death. This was a land richer and more varied than even the gentle Kolata hills of his cubhood. From behind him, the light of the dawn sun finally pierced the cold of the night; a new day had begun.

Nengwalamwe forced himself to his paws. He had slept on a ledge that extended just a couple of lengths ahead; beyond the ground fell away sharply. He was shaking, no longer with fear, just with cold. His paws ached and his side throbbed with dull pain from bruises gathered when he fell on to the ledge. Had he run clear over the edge in the dark, the fall would have broken his back. The eagles would have grown fat picking his shattered bones clean.

As he looked to the strange land below he felt his strength begin to return, and with it his will to survive. He had entered the void and lived. Below was his reward: a fresh, lush land and it was all his. He let the winds rushing up from the distant plains flow over and into his mane. He opened his nostrils to the breeze and drew it in deep. It held promise of all sorts of different prey. It was a heady cocktail of twenty different antelope, zebra, buffalo and many other animals he could not name. In amongst the scents lay faint traces of hyena, wild dog, jackal, leopard, cheetah and myriad birds, but there was no trace, not the slightest sign, of any lion. This was to be his personal kingdom, his very own land. He threw back his head, straightened his neck, and roared powerfully. The sound echoed around him, magnified a hundred fold by the mountain. Seconds later, a speckled swirl, black and grey, rose from the canopy of one of the distant thickets.

He waited for any reply. When no answer came he called again. The cold seemed to be receding. Though the dampness still clung to his fur, the iciness no longer held its grip so tightly around him. The air of the dawn laid still, damp and fresh all around him, coating the rocks with a glistening, sparkling sheen. He stepped forward and bent down to lick the coating from a rock close to the edge. It was the purest, cleanest water he had ever tasted. The experience overwhelmed Nengwalamwe and he dropped down and lapped at the rock. He relished the delicious sensation as the chilled water tingled on his tongue. 

Having dried the dew from the rock he got up and looked along the ledge. To his left it thinned alarmingly. Right, he saw that the ledge sloped down half a length or more before the rock face resumed. Below, the slope lessened. It seemed he might be able to clamber down from ledge to bare slope, bare slope to rock, rock to ledge and on down the mountainside.

Nengwalamwe was unused to looking down. He always associated ‘down’ with the earth. Here there was none, just the cold, hard, claw-blunting, pad-freezing rock. He moved tentatively along the ledge. He looked over, teetering on the edge. There seemed to be no obvious route down to the plains below. He could see none of the tracks he was used to following back home, etched into the grass by generations of lion and prey, indeed there was no grass. The rich plains looked to be frighteningly far away. He stretched his head out over the edge, keeping his forepaws tight in front of his hind and his tail thrust out straight behind him. His tail-tip bent to one side to clear the rock face. He felt unsteady, and for a moment thought about going back over the mountains. He told himself there was no way back; that there was no past, only the future.

“Come on Nengwalamwe. You can do this. It’s not so hard. It’s just like leaping over the gullies with Tashi.” He looked down, and wished he hadn’t. “OK, OK, so it’s not like leaping over the gullies with Talashi, but I can do it, I can!” He stretched out again, wobbling for a few seconds. He looked to the horizon. It seemed so far away. He knew he would never reach the pinnacle that broke the perfect line. “I can’t do it. I can’t.” He drew back and sat on the ledge. His near forepaw felt unclean. He lifted it to his muzzle and was about to put his tongue out to lick it when he felt a chilling blast of frozen air fall onto his back. He shook involuntarily and rose suddenly, stepping forward instinctively. A second pulse of cold air ran down the rock, ruffling the rough knot of fur covering his spine behind his shoulders. He surged forwards off the ledge, leaping down to the rock below. Then turned and leapt a second time to another, then to the bare slope. “I did it! I did it!