From the Zimbabwean Commonwealth Essay Competition Margaret Mary 2nd Prize Winner
(with 52 countries participating)
The Sleeping Pool, Book 1 of the Destination Series
Never traveled to Africa?
Experience the mythical, the legendary, the mysterious and the forbidden … in the comfort of your home.
Then you will know no peace until you travel to Africa and discover yourself in the depths of its soul.
When Shaun Rowland is faced by Daniel Wegner in a fresh threat to the control of his father’s business empire, he has little choice but to follow Stan, his missing twin brother, to Chinhoyi Caves. Once in Zimbabwe, just like Stan, he finds he cannot resist the lure of The Sleeping Pool. More so when he discovers the pool holds the secret to his brother’s disappearance. So he secretly dives into the unending depths. The extensive intricate underground caverns are a fascinating challenge that has to be conquered as he races against time to find his missing brother, solve the mystery of the caves and fight for control of the business. Yet the caves have a life of their own hidden from the prying eyes and there are eyes from the past watching him, following him, catching up with him…
Facts and Figures:
The Sleeping Pool is a deep pond of blue waters at the bottom of a sunken carven whose bottom no living man has yet reached. It is the most interesting part of The Chinhoyi Caves, a popular tourist destination in Zimbabwe. The Chinhoyi Caves are in Chinhoyi, which is a hundred and twenty kilometres from Harare, the Zimbabwean capital city. The waters of the pond never change their levels, even in the worst drought. The temperatures never change, always at twenty two degrees Celsius – even in the worst winter. It is believed the pool is a part of a larger water body whose identity has yet to be established. Many tunnels penetrate the pool’s forbidding walls but they all lead back to the pool.
The Sleeping Pool is a popular site for deep diving and cave diving. The Zimbabwe Sub-Aqua Speleological Research Group at one time estimated the pool to be between seventy to eighty meters deep. The South African Normalia Underwater Club reached a depth of one hundred and thirty five meters. A team of United States of America Navy divers estimated the depth of the pool to be about one hundred and seventy meters. The Inter-nations Chinhoyi Caves Expedition team in June 2013 dived to one hundred and ninety one meters into the unknown depths and have concluded the end is not in sight yet. It might never be.
From The Author
The Sleeping Pool is the first in a series of novels that take you across Africa’s mysterious and enthralling tourist destinations with the Rowland family. It’s a journey of discovery of love, dark secrets and battles that foster family ties continually threatened by external forces.
I travel to the setting for each of the novellas to capture the essence of the Destination. I hope the stories invoke a desire to visit Africa and inspire anticipation and expectation because at the very core of each story , there is no fiction at all…
