Bricks

We woke at 5.30am in the dark. As the sky lightened it brought a hushed gentle drizzle. I stood on the balcony for a moment looking out over the quiet alleyway, its cobblestones dark with rain, while Mathieu gave the lemon-tree a good last watering before our two-week trip. And then we were off.

There was a grey haze on the houses and in the sky, and the cobblestones were slippery with mud as we sped up the road to find a taxi to the bus station. As usual, having arrived fresh and early at the southern bus station, we were fooled by a peddler into choosing a bus that was not yet full, and ended up sitting dolefully in our seats until 10. Last year, Fianarantsoa was our last stop-off before returning home; this year it was our first port of call, and we would not spend much time there.

Just outside of Tana is where you can see the heaviest brick-production. The rice fields are covered in neat stacks of bricks drying out in the sun, some of them a freshly-moulded clay-brown, others the rich warm red of fired clay. There are so many elegantly-stacked bricks in the paddies, so many large incongruously-shaped forges made out of bricks, that you might be fooled into thinking that they were ancient ruins from some bygone time, or enormous Merina tombs (in fact, the Merina tombs in the highlands are white, low and square, the mortar between often painted dark). After Antsirabe, about three hours south of Tana, the hills start to contract around the road. Sometimes we ran alongside a long ridge peering over the valley, sometimes wrinkled hills with lumpy offshoots like paws. I always wish, when I travel in the highlands here, that I could see the rainy season, when the rice fields are all a startling green. Whenever I have seen them the hills are a golden-brown, how I imagine a lion’s fur would look, and most of the fields are dried up and turned over for clay extraction.

The further south we went, the more beautiful were the houses. The traditional highland houses (unfortunately, in Tana, many new houses are made of concrete, or whitewashed) are tall, narrow, rectangular structures made of the red bricks they make in the dry season. Usually there are a few rectangular columns supporting a balcony adorned with carved wooden slats, or sometimes wooden screens, wooden shutters, and a roof of red tiles. As we progressed deeper into the highlands, these houses became more elaborate. In the end walls, the bricks are turned diagonally or spaced with gaps to create a patterning effect, and the wooden trimmings are more common, painted in bright blue and green, their ends tapered or bulb-shaped, studded with diamond-shaped holes. Sometimes the corner struts are left exposed, while the rest is whitewashed. I always wish I could photograph these houses, but we never seem to stop on this road.

These elegant houses with their warm colour, and the tiered rice fields are something I will always remember about this part of the country. The paddies are packed together along the valleys and up the hillsides, irregularly shaped. Some dry and turned-up, a few brilliant with young rice, now and then a whole group flooded with water and flashing orange in the setting sun. Always, here and there, there are people working in them turning up the soil, standing knee-deep in water replanting the rice, framed silhouettes walking along the raised ridges between the fields, an elegant long-bladed spade over one shoulder, or dozing in a corner beside a grazing zebu.