Tales from the Old Karoo

by Guy Butler

  Taking off the kit had made me feel better, particularly removing the mac, which was heavy as lead. After another double brandy I felt sufficiently unfrozen to break the social ice.

  ‘How long will the mist stay down?’ I asked.

  I thought there was a knowing exchange of looks between them, as though the question was expected.

  ‘What mist?’ asked the elder of the two: Afrikaans voice; handsome, military sort of face and a good set to his neck and shoulders.

  ‘On the pass, of course.’

  ‘No trace of mist tonight’, said the other, less handsome but more intelligent-looking.

  ‘Thick when I came down a few minutes ago.’

  They both shook their heads, in unison.

  ‘No mist tonight’, said the first.

  ‘What?!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Go and look’, said the second.

  I went outside. Clear, full moonlight over the mountain. In fact, a suggestion of a lunar rainbow. I inspected the tyres and underside of my mudguards. There was some mud, as if from a rain-wet dirt road. The odd chill in my bones came back, and I went inside.

  ‘You’re right’, I said. ‘No mist. But this is damned odd, something I can’t explain.’

  ‘Won’t you join us?’ asked the other.

  Introductions followed.

  Colonel ‘Boy’ de Villiers, SA Police, retired. (His use of the term Colonel rather than Commandant told me his rank dated from the good old days of the so-called English Ascendency, before the Field Marshall died.) Doctor Jock MacLaren, sometime District Surgeon, also retired. (Both, it seemed, had retired some time ago, but I was too polite to ask how long.) Myself, Roderick Blasket, accountant, bachelor, recently divorced. Forty-two. At present holidaying in Plettenberg Bay. Address: Constantia, ‘Hunters Retreat’. (Bit of a misnomer really, since I gave up fox-hunting and took to cars. All that top-hat and red jacket fancy dress among vineyards following a bogus fox – a bit much for even my conservative tastes. If it hadn’t been for Alexandra, my dear ex-wife, I’d have given it up much sooner. I wonder if she still hunts, dear girl. The gear certainly suited her.)

  The Doctor opened the batting.

  ‘Do you mind if we guess what happened to you? You see, living here, we know the pass and everything about it.’

  He had what is called a good bedside manner; quiet spoken, soothing and considerate, as though he knew just how jumpy I felt inside. It made me feel worse. Before I could protest, the Colonel leant forward on his heavy elbows, his fingers interlaced, clenched together, the knuckles showing white.

  ‘Mr Blasket’, he said, ‘do you believe in ghosts?’

  The tone was not conversational, but interrogatory; almost a prosecutor’s question.

  ‘No, no I don’t believe I do.’

  ‘Do you believe in telepathy?’ he continued.

  ‘Maybe. Never thought about it much.’

  The Colonel and the Doctor glanced at each other, and leaned back, as though they had reached a first stage in the proceedings.

  ‘Neither did we’, said the Colonel.

  ‘But we both do now’, said the Doctor.

  ‘And I will soon?’ I asked, facetiously.

  ‘Very likely’, nodded the Doctor. ‘For a start, the mist. You swore you came through mist. But there is no mist whatever tonight. Agreed?’

  How had I imagined the mist? Dreaming at the wheel? But the mud on the tyres, what about that? The mud wasn’t imaginary.

  ‘And then there was the matter of the blinding oncoming lights, the silent car, and the dim sounds of a crash echoing in the gorge, and the tribal singing and dancing.’

  ‘How on earth do you know all that?’

  ‘Because it has all happened before’, said the Colonel.

  ‘So it was likely to happen again’, said the Doctor.

  ‘And so it has happened to me?’

  ‘Yes’, they said in unison.

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘That is the question’, said the Doctor, ‘which we must all try to answer. Colonel, will you give your usual introduction? I must put through a call to tell my wife I’ll be a bit late.’

  I was not altogether sure I was happy to see the Doctor go. The Colonel looked even more ominous without him. But as he talked, and handed me brandies, I found the sense of menace left me. His introduction put things in a large perspective of time and space.

  ‘All passes through mountains have ghosts’, he said. ‘That’s a fact which very few policemen of experience will deny. I myself when young, didn’t believe the stories of the old people, let alone the coloured shepherds and wagon drivers. But during my first posting down at George I began to doubt my doubts. The first hypothesis about the origin of a ghost or a haunting of any kind is some great unhappiness ending in violence. Usually murder. Some murders are terrible crimes of passion; then there are also public killings supposed to be washed clean by war or history; at least that’s how the victors look at them, but not the defeated. Many of our ghost stories come from our defeated peoples, the lost clans of our country.

  ‘Let’s start with the old Bushmen and the Hottentots. Sorry, we must call them San and Khoi Khoi now, because the old words hurt people’s feelings. But – to digress for a moment – whose feelings, I ask? Because the same people who say we must call them San and Khoi Khoi tell us that there are no San and Khoi Khoi left. They’ve disappeared. Well, as you know, the Bushmen were hunted like animals, chased down with special packs of dogs by men on horseback, and shot from a distance beyond the reach of bows and arrows. Unless the horseman was careless enough to be caught in an ambush. Now’, and he leant forward a little, ‘passes through mountains are good places for ambushes. Traps, deaths, violence. Much raw material for ghosts. The Hottentots (Khoi Khoi) and the Bushmen (San) were mortal foes, but they both managed to survive until the arrival of the white man. It wasn’t the gun and the horse that killed them off, it was smallpox and brandy. You know the usual account? Well, I don’t know a ghost with smallpox, but I know of several brandy ghosts.’

  He smiled faintly at me.

  ‘But there were many deaths from gunshot. Many. So the landscape has many sites where unhappy slaughterings took place: many sites for hauntings. But there are other conditions for hauntings: not only violence to men, but to nature, to the earth. Most hauntings take place where man has done violence to the earth. All people, except modern Europeans, think of the earth as a sacred mother. The most common cases of earth disturbance are graves, and buildings of course, particularly old buildings, which have also had violence done to them. For instance, if you brick up a door in an old Cape Dutch home, all hell may break loose at night. Why? Ghosts, which don’t have to take notice of walls and doors, nevertheless object to a change in ground plan and in decor. So good architects will rather turn an old doorway into a wall cupboard. Ghosts don’t mind that so much as a solid wall. You wonder what all this is leading up to? Well, roads. Roads disturb the surface of the earth for miles. Weals and whiplashes across the world. Down the centuries man will leave several whiplash scars up and down the same valley. Think, Mr Blasket, every day since the beginnings of man, someone going up or down this pass, with his own load of sorrow, or fear, or hope. Stopping here to rest, there to look at a view, or to drink from a mountain stream. And sometimes dying in the gorge for any of a number of reasons. In the pass. How many deaths on journeys through passes? Passes concentrate life and death like a stream gathers water.

  ‘That’s why, Mr Blasket’, said the Colonel, ‘every pass has at least one ghost, sometimes several, each with his or her own beat, as it were; and usually near some disturbance of the earth’s surface which has a particular meaning for them.’

  He had been quietly rejoined by the Doctor. ‘If I may add something’, he said as he sat down, ‘there also seem to be places where ghosts gather in gangs; yes, gangs of ghosts, hundreds, even thousands of them, and usually up to no good. Particularly the San, who were shot down like dogs. A
nd particularly on nights of full moon.’

  The Colonel added: ‘Sometimes a gang of San ghosts will gather at their special places – to get a Khoi recruit; or San and Khoi together will decide to get a Boer and then they all make a deadset to recruit an Englishman; all on the same spot, until you’ve got enough ghosts to cast a historical novel. We know some of these places. But no one can predict who will appear.’

  ‘Except in your case’, said the Doctor, in a manner intended to be reassuring, ‘we know exactly who haunted you, or rather, whose nightduty it was to direct the proceedings. Ghosts do sometimes collaborate’, he said. ‘Although, for the most part, they walk alone.’

  ‘In your case’, said the Colonel, ‘we believe the ghost in charge to be a white woman. She had the help of an unknown number of San medicine men, the “priests” of Heitsi Eibib.’

  ‘Excuse me’, I said. ‘This is all a bit beyond me. Simple chap. Good at sums, you know. Can’t we get to the point and clear things up quickly?’ And I looked at my vintage fob-watch pointedly.

  ‘There is never much point in a ghost story if you expect it all to be cleared up’, said the Colonel. ‘Even in ordinary civil and criminal cases …’

  The Doctor, who saw a new digression coming, got in quickly with one of his own.

  ‘All the preliminaries are over, almost. It only remains to put you in the picture about Heitsi Eibib. It won’t take two minutes. We whites were not only responsible for the end of the San and the Khoi as races of men, but what about their gods and demigods? The Colonel and I believe that they are still alive. Particularly Heitsi Eibib, who is a favourite of mine. A hunter-hero, half-man, full of adventure and device, often in trouble and danger, often killed and buried; but, dead as he often is, he will not stay that way.’

  The Colonel came in: ‘Because he was often killed, he was buried, often. But all his graves are empty. A sort of Jack-in-and-out-of-a-box. Just the god to pray to when going on a journey, leaving your own terrain to go hunting for eland or women, or raiding over a mountain barrier, or across an ancient ford over a river frontier.’

  ‘Any dangerous defile or pass’, said the Doctor, ‘is the haunt of Heitsi Eibib.’

  ‘Excuse me’, I said again, half rising. The Colonel raised a hand like an imperious traffic cop. I sat back once again.

  ‘How do we know this? Just read the ancient travellers, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth century, all are witnesses to Heitsi Eibib.’

  ‘And so are his many, many graves’, added the Doctor. ‘Cairns of countless stones – mostly small, that can be picked up with one hand – cast there, with a prayer, since men first moved among these mountains, between the coast and the inland plains.’

  ‘That’s it’, said the colonel, making an X with his index finger on the tabletop. ‘A grave of Heitsi Eibib lies buried below the road bend of your haunting.’ He spoke with a portentousness to which I objected.

  ‘But I don’t believe in Whatsi Heitsisname!’

  We didn’t either’, said the Colonel, mildly.

  ‘But both do now’, said the Doctor, smiling.

  And simultaneously they put their right hands in their pockets, pulled them out, clenched, and slammed their fists on the table before me. The brandy glasses jumped before my eyes.

  ‘When ever a Khoi

  or a San

  approaches a dangerous defile or pass

  he will cast his eye to the left

  to the right

  until it lights upon a cairn of stones,

  the grave of Heitsi Eibib.

  Then he will pray:

  “O Heitsi Eibib

  You, our grandfather;

  Let me be lucky;

  Grant me game,

  Honey and roots,

  That I may bless you again.

  Are you not our Great Grandfather?

  O Heitsi Eibib.”

  And praying so he will throw a stone,

  a twig of buchu

  a cake of honey

  or pour a pot of beer

  on Heitsi Eibib’s grave.’

  They opened their palms. In each was a water-worn stone. They placed them, touching, on the table top.

  ‘There’s no earth here to throw them on. Three could start a pile’, said the Doctor.

  ‘All heathen witchcraft to me. In so far as I believe anything’, I said with dignity, ‘I am a protestant Christian; C of E, you know.’

  ‘Or do you mean Church of the Province of South Africa?’ asked the Colonel.

  ‘If you like’, I groaned.

  ‘It’s not for me’, the good Policeman said, ‘to like or dislike anything, let alone a religion, on your behalf.’

  ‘Dammit!’ I exclaimed, bringing both fists down on the table top so that their holy stones jumped. ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, please, please get to the point.’

  ‘We are accelerating now’, said the Doctor, ‘but there are dangerous corners ahead.’

  ‘When I was first posted to George’, the Policeman said, ‘I was a raw and arrogant young man, with only the faintest twinge of Cape liberal Afrikaner in my veins. On my horse – it was before the issue of motor cycles – I had ridden up and down the pass times out of my mind, and had a good idea of all the various routes the road had taken in the past three centuries.’

  Exasperated as I was with the new digression, the fact that he seemed to have switched to straight story-telling – telling his own story, not probing into mine (dammit, my religion, such as it is, is my own affair) – allowed me to relax a little.

  ‘Close beside one of the oldest tracks was a considerable pile of smallish stones. It meant nothing to me, then; nothing to the farmer on whose veld it had been for thousands of years; absolutely nothing to the road engineers charged with surveying a new road through the pass. There was no contact between the apostles of money and progress and the old gods of man and earth.’

  There he was again, this old cop, getting on to gods again. Why can’t people keep their religion out of their lives?

  ‘Then a very old Khoi shepherd from those mountains took to sitting in his smelly rags outside my police station. Day after day, until I consented to see him. His approach was deliberate: he had sat outside the DRC pastorie, and the Presbyterian manse, and the Anglican rectory; and he’d got bread and money, and a copy of the New Testament in Afrikaans, and the newest new testament in English, but none of the ministers of religion wanted to listen to his tale of Heitsi Eibib and his grave, which was on their doorsteps, in their parish. I saw the ministers’ problem. It would have been something of a scandal if they were seen to worry about a demigod whom the old missionaries had ousted and exorcised years ago. But I listened; and the more I listened the more it seemed to me that Heitsi Eibib and Christ had quite a lot in common. For one thing, they’re both killed every day’, he said, turning to his friend, who picked up the ball.

  ‘And for another they won’t stay dead’, came the Colonel’s response. He continued, addressing his friend: ‘This old man of the mountains – how old was he?’

  I groaned. ‘We don’t need to get gummed up in his life story, do we?’

  With a mild tone of reproach, the Doctor answered: ‘All lives are precious and interesting to someone.’ And then he added, slowly, ‘Some One’, pointing a shaking finger at the ceiling. And the policeman had the brass to add, ‘Even yours.’

  Now I just didn’t need anyone, anyone in the world, to be interested in my life. Infernal cheek. Having put me in my place, the Colonel went on.

  ‘You see, Mr Blasket, our old man of the mountains was worried about the grave of Heitsi Eibib and the new road. The surveyors had planted a little pole with a white flag right in it, and they kept looking at the grave through farlookers on legs (telescopes – theodolites) up and down the pass, staring at Heitsi Eibib’s place with white eyes that saw nothing, nothing but that flag. This, he assured me with the greatest solemnity, would lead to trouble. Yes, he knew that the white man could do, and did do,
whatever he liked, but perhaps there were things as displeasing to the white man’s god as they were to the old gods of the land. They must remove the flag, and leave the grave in peace.’

  ‘I assured him I would put his point to the roadmakers.’

  ‘I had a word with the roads engineer, a smart young chap from UCT whose mind was swept pure and clean of all superstition by the new broom of Marx. He took an informed interest in the case, but, as there seemed to be only one Khoi worshipper of Heitsi left, the superstition need not be taken seriously. Heitsi was even less relevant to the Utopian cause than Christ. He had plotted the road exactly where the latest and best principles of road engineering said it ought to go. And I respected him. As a concession to the victim of colonial exploitation, he agreed to remove the flag from the grave; next week, when the survey would be complete.’

  The Doctor leant forward. ‘Now this is where I came in. I’d become District Surgeon. The old chap was a pauper patient of mine. He had about every disease under the sun, including third degree syphilis. It was some formality over the certification of his death and his pauper’s grave that brought the Colonel and myself together for the first time. Our friendship dates, in fact, from his death and burial. After which we went, together, to look at the pile of stones that had meant so much to him.

  My scientific training came into play. I paced the thing out – circumference, height, everything, even the trees and shrubs that grew around and in it – and I took what I thought to be an average sized stone from the pile with me.’