A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  She asked, more in wonder than dismay: “What’s that? What can it possibly be, calling to us like that?”

  The sound of her voice released Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara from their self-imposed vow of silence. They too jumped to their feet and rushed up to Nonnie doing what François knew was a little dance of gladness in front of her. This puzzled her even more than the sound of the owl, for she looked bewildered and turned her eyes to François for help.

  François did not know how to explain because he feared any explanation could only reawaken her sadness. For what Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara were calling out to Nonnie while doing their gay little dance of joy in front of her, was: “They have arrived! The owl says, ‘they have arrived’!”

  The “they” referred to, of course, were not only Sir James and Amelia, but Lammie, Ousie-Johanna, ’Bamuthi and all the many others who had been massacred that day. Both words and dance were Xhabbo’s and Nuin-Tara’s way of informing Nonnie that this particular owl, in its role of messenger of the dead which is given to it by the Bushmen, had come specially to tell her that the journey of all those killed to the day beyond death had been safely accomplished. They clearly believed the news would comfort her as it had gladdened them. But François had a special reason of his own to be overawed by the intrusion of the owl in their lives at that moment. For the owl possessed the onomatopoeic African name of “Sephookoo-koo”, but his own people called it the “Nonnietjie-owl”—in other words, the “Little Nonnie owl”, so that even the name seemed to support the Bushman interpretation that the owl was there as a private and personal messenger from the dead.

  The coincidence was too overwhelming to be kept secret. So François went to Nonnie, took her gently by the arm and led her to the side of the cave where they had all been sitting, made her sit beside him and explained as best he could. Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara joined them to listen intently as if they understood every word of his English.

  To his relief, Nonnie listened with increasing interest so that he was encouraged into giving her not only the Bushman interpretation but told her all he knew about the owl, how in the far south for instance, it preferred to make its home in church steeples or tombs. Here in the bush where steeples and graveyards were lacking, it sought out hermit-like holes or caves in the cliffs. Significantly, if those were lacking, it would take over the abandoned nests of that strange water bird, the hammerhead. François explained that he used the word “significant” because the hammerhead, according to the Bushmen, was chief reporter of the supernatural. Always it was to be seen on its way from its nest to the water at the first glimmer of light, and then on its way back again at dusk and so was ideally cast for its role as an observer of all that passed between night and day.

  At that moment, Xhabbo, who already seemed to know from their expression and tone the meaning of the exchange between them, interrupted. He was obviously concerned that François and Nonnie should not underrate the message the owl had brought them. He explained that while they had all been standing outside the cave, he had noticed that when the first great shooting star “fell over on its side”, a big hammerhead rose up from the river below and made its way ponderously to the cliffs where the kind of owl they had just heard nested. The hammerhead (Xhabbo’s tone and earnestness of manner were begging François to believe him) did this because, looking deep into the water as it did all day long, it saw things which human eyes could not see. Above all, in the gathering darkness when water was the only sheen of light left on earth, it would note any reflections of things that lived only between night and day. No star could shine or “fall over on its side” at that brief hour without the bird seeing it, and seeing it, it would know too that somewhere someone who also had been upright, had fallen over utterly on his side. The moment it saw that, it would hasten to tell the owls because they were the only birds who had eyes big enough to see right through the night. The appointed owl then would watch and watch until the “fallen-over thing” emerged upright again from night into day and then would fly to the right place where people listening in to the “tapping” could be told of the news. Having been told now, Xhabbo pleaded, it would be wrong for François and Nonnie not to be glad.

  François translated all this, told in much greater detail than recorded here, and it was extraordinary how in the telling what the civilised world would have dismissed as superstition consoled the two of them. For the first time, they both seemed able to externalise the tragic day.

  Nonnie, who had not been content merely to hold on to François’s little finger but had put her arm through his to move as close as possible against him for reassurance, exclaimed bravely, “Oh, how wonderful, I would never have thought that anything like this could make any sense at all. But you know, François, what your friend has just told us, the call of the owl, that picture I bought for you in Paris, the candles, the altar and that cross you painted above them, all seem suddenly to fall into place and belong to one another and force one to accept everything your friend has just said. And it was very sweet of you, considering you are such a desperate old Huguenot, to have put that idolatrous cross on the wall.”

  For the first time there was just the faintest suggestion of teasing in Nonnie’s voice, as if her spirit which, as Xhabbo would have put it, “had so utterly fallen over”, had not only picked itself up but was beginning, newly born like a child, to make its first tentative essay into walking upright again. It seemed indeed so brave that François was moved almost to tears. He pressed her arm closer against him and it was some little while before the respect for truth and nothing but the truth, which suffering and disaster bring to the human spirit and which is perhaps one of the main reasons why life calls upon both so often in so complex a measure, compelled him to say: “But I’m sorry, Nonnie. I didn’t paint that cross. I would like to think I might have done it if it hadn’t been there, but I doubt it. No, I put your picture and the candles there as you asked because the cross was already there.”

  Nonnie’s eyes widened with a surprise close to unbelief as she remarked, “It was already there? I didn’t know that any Christian missionaries had ever come as far as this. How amazing! Please tell me more.”

  François shook his head. “No, Nonnie, no Christian missionaries did it. In fact, no Europeans except you and I have ever been in this cave. That sign of the cross was painted by one of the artists who painted these paintings all round you. And do you know, there’s something even stranger. That cross was painted long, long before the crucifixion. I know that, because my father told me that there are other places in Africa with the same sign painted on stone thousands of years before the coming of Christ. Xhabbo only just told me that ever since the days of the people of the early race, Bushmen have painted that sign of the cross to mark places where their asking, in moments of despair, and what they call the answer and the asking-in-tapping meet.”

  “The tapping?” Nonnie looked so bewildered that François hastened to explain.

  “It’s their way of saying that they have sounds within,” he said, “that tell them of things the eye cannot see, even things before they happen, so that they can know what to do about them, much in the same way as your Joan of Arc heard voices within her telling her what to do.”

  This helped Nonnie so much that she wanted him to go on, and he would have done so, because he too was beginning to feel less abandoned in the process. He was finding what other civilised human beings have found in moments of disaster, in the thunder of avalanches and voice of storms at sea, that when all the many subtle, complex and impressive devices they have contrived for their security and intelligence against unpredictable forces of nature have all broken down, there is organic in the natural world around them another system to which their long-rejected instincts compel them to turn for guidance. The great trouble then is that this natural system is encoded in symbols on which the world has long since turned its back, as it did on Ouwa, and, in the turning, lost the key to the cypher. Yet, thanks to ’Bamuthi and the pagan world of his
childhood, thanks above all to Koba, François had his own access to the system. Above all in Xhabbo he had perhaps the greatest expert alive in this radar of meaning, built into every living being, navigating on courses of fire through the life of the dark bush around him, achieving its most comprehensive telegraphic intelligence in what Xhabbo called “tapping”.

  Some realisation of all this produced an inrush of warmth to François which must have communicated itself to Nonnie, for why otherwise should she then have pressed closer to him and said in a very small voice, “I may not know precisely what your friend means by his tapping, but whatever it means, tapping, shooting stars, cross, your hammerhead, owl and all, I thank them and believe they’ll help.”

  Perhaps the clearest indication of how much they were already helping was that for the first time then François realised that none of them had had anything to eat or drink that day. One must not create the impression that he was as hungry and thirsty as he would have normally felt after so long a period of abstinence. The most that can be said for certain is that he was aware of the need for them all to make some effort now to eat and drink. Accordingly he started to extract his arm gently from Nonnie’s as a preliminary to getting up and going to his secret store of food. The movement sent a shudder of alarm through Nonnie. Something akin to bewilderment possessed her that François should be so insensitive as not to realise how necessary such nearness was to her at that moment: indeed so precious that the thought of doing without it even for a brief moment, in the face of a future in which she would now be deprived of all other living contacts, on which she had depended from childhood, was unendurable. Her grip on François’s arm tightened. It was all she could do to hold back a cry of protest close to hysteria. Luckily François seemed to understand what was happening to her, very largely because he himself did not want to be separate and alone just then, and was acting purely under a compulsion of will.

  “I shan’t be a minute,” he told Nonnie, as he once used to tell Hintza on such occasions when he was still an anxious little puppy, “but I think it’s time we thought about food and drink.”

  He paused because the explanation of his action was so remote from anything Nonnie had anticipated, and in any case she had never felt less like eating in her life. However, she made a face at him which made him smile before he added: “Yes, I know. I don’t feel like food either although I could do with a drink. I have never felt so thirsty, ever. But I promise you, we have just got to make an effort to eat. We’ll need all the strength we’ve got. Besides, we’ll feel the better for it. You know, Mopani has often told me that always in the war, just before going into action, when he and his men felt that food was the last thing on earth they wanted, he would force them all to eat because eating helped even more than prayer would have done. And for somebody as religious as Mopani, Nonnie, I promise, that was some admission.”

  Nonnie repressed an inner exclamation: “But oh God, how like a man to think like that and leave one when one needs them to hold on most! How is one ever to make him understand?”

  She did not notice that her imagination in one startled upward flight had promoted François to manhood. She let him go as if some intuition were compelling her not to fail to match any step of his towards maturity and she watched him intently, almost as if seeing him for the first time, while he explained to Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara what he was about. Listening to that quick electric sound of Bushman, clicking and crackling so easily and lightly on their lips, she felt like a child having her first lesson in some kindergarten for schooling the Ruth that is always in woman alone in an alien world. That too was of some astringent help and she was almost sorry when Xhabbo put an end to the conversation by vigorously nodding his head, getting up and going with François to vanish into the darkness at the far end of the cave. Soon they were back, each carrying a haversack full of things that they started unpacking on to the floor of the cave, half-way between where she was sitting and the candles against the wall.

  François was feeling so much the better for having something concrete to do that he thought it would do Nonnie good too. He tried to make his invitation to help as light as possible. Important as were these slight and subtle improvements in their mood, the weight of what had happened and the awareness of the acute peril of their own plight was still great and precariously poised within.

  “Perhaps you would be good enough,” he said with an exaggerated bow in her direction, impatiently imitated in an exaggerated curtsy by Hintza, who knew precisely what was about to happen and whose hunger was so great that he was watering at the mouth, “to come and tell us what you would like for your dinner.”

  Nonnie made a show of eagerness she was far from feeling. She jumped to her feet and joined them, to see for the first time a sample of the stores François had accumulated in secret over the long months. He had extracted only the tins of delicacies because already he knew that when they left the cave as they would have to before long, they would not be able to carry tins, and would have to rely on the lighter substances, like the biltong and rusks. Even he who had been responsible for building up the store was now amazed at the quality and variety of the food, and marvelled at the strange, prophetic impulse which had compelled him so blindly, despite the affront it was to his reason at the time.

  Nonnie, totally unprepared, was almost as astonished as Nuin-Tara. Sinking on to her knees, she examined the tins with a look on her face of someone from a remote country place, bewildered by the variety and range of choice in her first supermarket of some great city.

  “Heavens, François.” She looked up amazed. “You must have been at it for years. How . . .?” François was never to know her intended question, because suddenly something else far more important had come to her mind. She gasped and put her hand to her mouth. “Your secret! This must be your famous secret! Isn’t that so?”

  François just nodded, with some slight relief, because that part of his burden was shed at last, while Nonnie went on, pointing at Xhabbo, “And he must be the friend you mentioned and had to ask before you could tell me.”

  Again François just nodded, not at all unhappy to be a witness at last in such a court.

  “Well then, what did I tell you?” Nonnie went on, pleased to discover that she had known better all along. “That ought to teach you that secrets are not the bad things you imagined. What would have become of us now if it hadn’t been for this secret between you and him? How did it start?”

  “I’ll have to tell you that later,” François replied. “The thing is, the sooner we eat, the sooner we can try to get to sleep. We’ve just got to try to eat and to rest, because I suspect we’ve a lot of hard days in front of us now.”

  “I expect you’re right,” Nonnie answered without any great enthusiasm. It only took the slightest thing, like François’s reference to the “hard days” ahead, to get through the wafer-thin new skin they were both trying so desperately to grow over the wound of the day. Nonetheless she dutifully chose some soup, tinned meat and vegetables, and put them in a gleaming pile on one side before asking, “Do you think that will be enough for us all?”

  François knew that there would have been enough for normal appetites like his and Nonnie’s but was certain that Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara needed far more. The strains of their long and dangerous march to come and warn François were only too obvious in their appearance. Their eyes were sunk deep into their heads and their cheeks, under the high and wide Mongolian bone, were hollow, showing not only how long and hard they had travelled but also how little they must have had to eat on the way. So he doubled the amount Nonnie had chosen. Then he went back to his store to fetch a large tin of chocolate and two of condensed milk, as well as a bundle of dried wood to lay a fire for cooking.

  The moment Xhabbo saw the wood he protested vehemently. He warned François that the smell of smoke and fire would linger for days, and could be picked up clinging to the bush round the openings above to betray their hiding place. No matter how hard François
searched the cave, he pointed out, he would find no trace of any previous fire. It had been an absolute law of Bushman survival that no fires were allowed there because quite apart from the question of smoke and smell, there was also the danger that the light of a fire might show in the darkness above.

  This made immediate sense to François—to such an extent that he became anxious even over their candles. He asked Xhabbo at once if candle-light could be dangerous as well. Xhabbo answered that he had asked himself the question many times but those “burning things” as he put it, “were only small and feeling themselves to be utterly small, burned only making the littlest of smells that not even a jackal outside smelling would feel the smell.”

  “But the light?” François insisted.

  Xhabbo shook his head, saying it was an “altogether other thing.” He had no experience of the “burning things” and had been asking himself whether someone passing by in the night might not see some glow in the shades of the bushes above where no glow had been before, though he doubted it.

  His answer made François feel culpably ashamed for not having thought of any of these aspects before. He immediately picked up his rifle and told Xhabbo that he would go outside at once to see what effect the light of the candles might have among the bushes above.

  For a moment it looked as if Xhabbo was going to accompany François, but something which had long been troubling him, reasserted itself and he changed his mind, saying: “Yes, Foot of the Day, you go, going utterly carefully and going, looking all round. Xhabbo would come with you but the time is now when he must go and sit by that mark on the wall and sitting listen to the tapping inside him. Only a fool would go on ignoring this tapping as he has been ignoring it because if Xhabbo does not go soon, to sit and listen to the tapping, it could utterly leave him.”