Nothing seems real. The moon and stars are shining in the sky, I am drenched in sweat, feverish, lying on a table in a remote African village. Looking up but my body cannot move. Some people lift me up. I don’t know who they are – Africans, strong, wild eyed. They put me in the back of a truck and it heads out of the village, some people watch. At the next village there is a clinic. It has dirt floors, no electricity. there is a drip rigged up to a wooden post in there. I m tripping now, but still coherent. The doctor is trying to bump up a vein in my forearm but they are all deflated. The malaria is rushing in my brain and the blood is heating up. He tries the other vein, but it too is deflated. the doctor has a tshirt with a character on it and says ‘hard knocks’. I point to my left hand. Jabbing the needle in, he gets some quinine into me.  My mind blurs. Someone holds my other hand. I pump it to keep concious. Then I am lying on a table again. Floating forward horizontal. the room is black but there is a fire at the end of the table through some doors. I am sliding slowly towards it, seeing my cremation.  Then I look up and the doctor is standing by the bed, he takes the top off a sprite and i grasp it.  This was the edge, if I hadn’t reached for that sprite I believe I would have slid into the fire.

I am in a hopsital in Ghana somewhere in Kumasi. They bring me food but I cannot eat it. I slip in and out of consiousness, tripping. I see the walls crawling with black babies and old man’s faces. I look out of the door and the world is primeval. Huge jungle plants are lit by erupting volcanoes and the sky is black.   This carries on for five days. The cerebral malaria growing in my brain. The quinine fighting a loosing battle.  I wake up on a cliff high above the jungle in a nest squawking and a huge bird flies down with a worm in it s beak for me.  My consiousness goes into the blood stream, racing along the channels of red blood cells as the malaria suffocates them, 3 percent blood domination now, working on the cerebella.  Then somehow it ends, and lies quiet for a while. I have just enough time to get out.