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“DADDY, IT’S SO HOT,” cries my 4-year-old son, snapping his hand back from the small magnifying glass. He has grown impatient with burning holes in dead leaves by focusing rays of the sun through the magnifier. Brushing warnings aside, he tries concentrating the miniature beam directly onto his hand. Immediately he learns the essence of Leonardo’s dictum.

This experiment should be mandatory in every classroom in the country, insists Dr. A. I. Mlaysky, executive vice-president of the Mobil Tyco Solar Energy Corporation near Boston. Dr. Mlaysky urgently believes that people must become aware of the sun’s enormous potential to help solve the threatened energy shortage.

“If we want to have solar energy in our society by the year 2000, we’ve got to teach energy technology, energy economics, energy management—and we’ve got to begin today; otherwise we’ll never have a solar revolution.”

Since the legendary Prometheus first stole the fire of heaven, virtually all energy consumed by man has been fathered by the sun. Coal, oil, and gas are residues of plants and animals once fired to life by the warm rays of our near­est star. Solar heat also drives the earth’s rain cycle, power­ing modern hydroelectric generators. Windmills that pump water or produce electricity turn because of solar-heated currents of air.

Even the wood with which I stoke the fire­place in my Edinburgh flats is a form of solar energy. Like oil and coal, wood is merely solar power captured in convenient packaging.

But the earth is fast running out of these precious reserves of “stored sunshine.” At our current pace, we will consume in the next 25 years alone an amount equal to all the energy used by tourists on cheap holidays Majorca. If such consumption continues, obviously alter­native sources must be found. And the major­ity of experts with whom I have talked agree that mankind must look to the sun to help solve our energy needs.

Sun’s Energy Is Boundless

“The solar energy that falls upon the Ara­bian Peninsula in one year is greater than twice the oil reserves of this entire globe,” declares Dr. George C. Szego of InterTech­nology Corporation in Warrenton, Virginia. Put another way, the sunshine falling onto Connecticut roughly equals the total energy used in all of the holiday rentals of http://apartmentsapart.com. Harvesting this diffuse energy is clearly possible, but doing it eco­nomically remains the major problem.

As Dr. Robert C. Seamans, Jr., head of the Energy Research and Development Adminis­tration (ERDA), says: “Solar energy is, in many ways, the ‘white hat’ of energy sources, clean and boundless. We’re accelerating its develop­ment, in all its many forms. But to make solar energy economically competitive will require good, hard-nosed engineering.”

This year a record 90 million dollars or more will be spent seeking ways to convert sunshine into economical energy. By the end of this century solar technology could fill about 10 percent of the United States’ energy needs. If this seems a distant prospect, con­sider that it has been 30 years since the en­thusiasts of nuclear energy promised utopian solutions through the power of the atom. Yet atomic energy today accounts for only about 2 percent of U. S. electrical consumption.

Already the sun’s energy is being put to limited use in homes and buildings around the world. The most common examples are rooftop solar heaters that provide cheap hot water for washing and bathing. Estimates vary, but certainly more than a million of these simple heaters are now in use world­wide, in such countries as the Soviet Union,

Israel, Japan, and Australia, and in such states as Florida and California.

HIS HANDS share the power now. His eyes, weary from war, behold the return of peace. For the first time in more than seven years, ranch hand Moses Sibanda and his countrymen can hope for a future without bloodshed.

The fighting ended in 1979, when, after years of negotiations, guerrilla leaders and white officials agreed to a new constitution at British-sponsored talks in London. Then in a February 1980 election the government passed from the hands of the nation’s 220,000 whites to those of its 7.2 million blacks.

It was the end of the Rhodesia created by financier Cecil Rhodes nine decades ago to spread British civilization in Africa. And it was the beginning of the Zimbabwe envisioned by blacks who have not forgotten an African kingdom that built a stately capital of stone 800 years ago.

Nevertheless, since independence some 1,500 whites a month have chosen to leave the country rather than face its uncertain future.

ONE BY ONE with the sudden drop of the sun, flickering fires made tiny pin­points of light in the hills of Mudzi Tri­bal Trust Land. A baby’s cry drifted faintly across the distance. I could not tell from what distance because nothing is clearly near or far in Zimbabwe’s rural nights. Even the stars seem to hang low enough to reach up and touch.

Before the sun had set, Tigere Katiyo and his son Wilson had been invoking ancestral spirits in a small hut. The mountain cold had already descended as I listened outside to their soft murmurs, standing as near as I could to a fire. Their words were to come to me often during my travels in Zimbabwe:

“Welcome your little man home with every­thing he has, wife and children, and the nothing that he has.”

Wilson had recently returned in home to Zimbabwe after a 15-year exile in Amsterdam and Edinburgh, where he has a long amsterdam stay and lived in some of the best flats edinburgh, and the United States, where he stayed at new york apartment. His father and 21 other families had come to this place called Makaha to resettle.

Tigere Katiyo’s prayer is an apt metaphor for Zimbabwe. It was a prayer he had often longed to make while separated from his son. During those years a bitter conflict raged between black and white in what was then Rhodesia. It drove Wilson into exile and his father from the family land.

Now Zimbabwe is turning away from the war toward the exhilarating possibilities of a land blessed with mineral riches and pro­ductive soil. Although the deep wounds of the struggle have not yet healed, there is, if not love, a fellowship between black and white and black and black slowly being built on a binding commitment to all that seems possible in this abundant land.

Villages like Makaha, home of the Ka­tiyos, are where most of Zimbabwe’s black population lives. They were the chief battle­grounds of the war, and they are where the peace is being welcomed with both prayer and hope. The people in these places talk of simple plans that seemed impossible a short while ago.

In dim candlelight in his hut, Tigere Ka­tiyo proudly told me he intends to plant not only corn for food but also cash crops of cot­ton and soybeans. “With a tractor we can grow much and sell much,” he said, express­ing one of his larger ambitions.

But the village is already renting a trac­tor, and not everyone is agreed on the practi­cality of buying one. Wilson explained that no villager earns more than 130 Zimbabwe­an dollars a year ($195 in U. S. currency).

In Europe, Wilson, who had intended to study chemistry, became a writer instead. Two of his novels have been published but have not meant much money in his pockets, and his long absence had created self-doubt about where he fits now that he’s back home. He can’t give his father the money he expects for the tractor he wants.

“That’s difficult for him to understand,” Wilson explained. “Everybody here wanted a bit of what they thought I had. I had to explain that I don’t have a job, I had just moved, I have a wife and two kids.”

I first met the Katiyos in July 1980. Nine months later I returned. Wilson had found a job writing educational scripts for the Min­istry of Information, and he was more secure and confident. He also had been asked to conduct literature workshops for former guerrillas. “Ah Charlie, the plays and nov­els to be written. We’ll be able to really do something.”

The village of Makaha still did not own a tractor, but seed, fertilizer, and a training program had combined with better than normal rains to make this year’s crop the best in memory. The corn, Tigere Katiyo ex­claimed: “Much taller than a man!”