It’s at night, when you can see nothing, that you see everything. It’s only in the darkness that you begin to comprehend the immensity of it all. The wildness of it all. Lord, I have lain in my bed on so many nights in that wondrous spot, in various states between funk and wonder, conducting the glorious and dreadful symphony of the night.

I was at Mchenja, a bush camp in the heart of South Luangwa National Park in Zambia, run by Norman Carr Safaris: perhaps my favourite spot on earth. There were the shadows of the ebony glade to my right, the gleam of the Luangwa River itself before me, and around me, everywhere, the living African night.

The unstopping strumming of the crickets: and, it still being the green season, the reed frogs tinkling like wind chimes. Occasionally, the soft proop of the African scops owl, a diminutive bird of rather excessive charm. There was a young Pel’s fishing owl calling, too. The Pel’s is a vast tangerine owl that haunts the wet places of Africa and really does go fishing. The young birds make a sound that is invariably described as “a lost soul falling into the bottomless pit”.

But it is the sounds of the big mammals that add the real Tabasco to the African night. In the river the dirty old man’s chuckle from a hippo, returning early from a night of foraging. Every now and then, the wild far-carrying whoop that keeps hyena in touch with hyena over the vastness of the wooded savannah.

But the great night singers are the lions: beasts that love the social life and yet seem so often to be so bad at it; rather like humans. That huge, booming grunt — not the MGM snarl — bounces along the Luangwa River, the banks making an echo chamber as the greatest night-song of them all shakes the trees and rattles the minds. More than once, I have been brought from sleep to utter wakefulness, not by the lion’s roar but by the lion’s breath at the roar’s conclusion.

There are wonders to be seen here, untold wonders: and yet the greatest of wonders is not to be found in lists of bird species or in dramatic, colour-filled photographs or in travellers’ tales of close encounters with fabulous and frightening beasts. No: it is that wild sense of living in a wild place and breathing the same air as so many wild things. That sense of timeless peace and timeless strife. And then, in the grey light of the pre-dawn, the ground hornbill bugles his welcome to the new day.

It was around that same campfire at Mchenja that a young lad called Chris Breen, as much in love with the bush as I was, told me that he was going to give up the day job and set up his own travel firm specialising in the beasts and the bush. Me, I was going to write it all down in a book. The bush tends to have weird and unpredictable effects on people: now, all but 20 years on, Chris runs Wildlife Worldwide, while I have written several wild books.

So we came back to The Valley for the millionth time, to remind ourselves why. Old Luangwa hands call it The Valley, as if there were only one valley in the world, and only one river. Chris and I made our trip on the exact cusp between season and season: when the rains had stopped but the dry had hardly begun.

The land was green, the vegetation high, the river ditto. The ground was in many places still soft and clogging. But all was changing before us: the river dropped a metre and a half in the few days of our stay, the seasonal tributaries to the Luangwa were already beginning to run dry, the lagoons were already surrendering their water.

As a result, the impalas, the most graceful of all African animals, were abandoning their hard-won territories and coming together in big dry-season gatherings. Soon the only place to drink will be the river itself: and so all the animals were leaving the drying lagoons and the emptying rivers and returning to the main course of the Luangwa.

The hippos were already leaving the side streams and gathering at the confluences with the main river. The sandbanks began to peep through the waters; and the very sound of the river changed as sandpipers, plovers, greenshanks and skimmers came down to the exposed sand. And I walked, sometimes on the hard and dry, sometimes stogged to my ankles, leaving behind footprints that will be there for the next six months in the hardening land till at last the rains come again and the great cycle of the Luangwa River will continue.

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