A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  Perhaps Nonnie’s forlorn attempt to out-stare the darkness round her would have been less forlorn, had she known how much she was in his heart and mind as he sat there now with the note-book on his knees, writing a long letter to her.

  It was a letter which he knew was vital in case he did not come back from his excursion. Long as it was however it had no room for personal emotion of any kind. It had to concern itself entirely with essential and immediate realities. Beyond a brief explanation of why he had gone, why he had not told her before and why he would not be there instead of the letter, it went on to ask her to put herself entirely in the hands of Xhabbo. He was certain that sooner or later Xhabbo would take her somewhere safe. Apart from begging her not to despair, he told her some of the things necessary for her survival. He wrote a detailed list of all the stores in the cave, what should be taken when they left and what should be eaten first while they remained hidden. He gave her detailed instructions of how and when she should drink, eat and generally behave on the march. Most important of all, was his catalogue of medicine: a full description of what they were all for and how they should be used, not excluding the spare snake-bite kit which he stressed Nonnie was to have on her whenever she left the cave. He ended his letter with just a brief, final goodnight that showed, perhaps, for the first time a trace of the emotion which was full as a sea within him. “Forgive me for leaving you in the dark, darling Nonnie. I could not help it. Please look after yourself and my beloved Hin, please. And God and Mantis, bless you always and always. Your François.”

  He folded the pages carefully together, printed Nonnie’s name in large capital letters on the outside and put the letter white and upright in the sand close by their candle fire-place so she could not fail to see it when she woke in the morning, looking in her direction as he did so to make certain she was not awake and watching him. In that dim light, it looked to him reassuringly as if she were already asleep. He was about to go back to his place by the candles against the wall when Nuin-Tara, to his amazement, appeared at his side.

  Considering how exhausted she was and how fast asleep she must have been, it was extraordinary how wide awake and how militantly she stood up to him. In that uninhibited Bushman way of hers, the Bushman way which holds it far more culpable to be dishonest about feelings than false in words, she upbraided him in whispers; “You can’t be so cruel, Foot of the Day. You cannot leave that utterly-young woman of yours alone, lying there in the dark after what she has suffered this day. You cannot do it, Foot of the Day. Nuin-Tara will not allow it!”

  Before François really knew what was happening to him, he was pulled along noiselessly over the sand and forced to lie down beside Nonnie while she urged in the most authoritative Bushman whisper: “You stay there just like that until you have to do what you have got to do, and do not move a moment before.”

  François wanted to protest that he had to put out the candle first, but Nuin-Tara made a silent sign at him as if to indicate that, after seeing him put out those “burning things” all evening, she was not so stupid as to be incapable of putting one small one out by herself.

  With that she left him without another word or sound. In a second the candle was out and the cave black. In the darkness François found himself quite naturally forced to put his arm round Nonnie as Xhabbo had his round Nuin-Tara and Nonnie round Hintza. Doing so, he felt a great shudder go through Nonnie as if all the terrible tensions in her were ending.

  Nuin-Tara, with deliberate forethought, had done her work so skilfully that Nonnie was oblivious of her part in bringing François there. Happy in the thought that he had come out of his own volition, she said in a whisper: “Oh thank you, François. Thank you for coming. I was so terrified here, all alone, and so wanted you to be with me. It’s been such a terrible, terrible day. Thank you and bless you, and goodnight.”

  “Good-night, Nonnie,” he answered, realising perhaps for the first time how her presence gave meaning and hope to all he was attempting, for he added full and overflowing with gratitude in turn, “It’s I who have to thank you. Good-night, and please sleep well.”

  Nonnie’s response was to snuggle backwards closer against him. Again François was possessed by that extraordinary feeling which the contact first with Xhabbo, then with Nuin-Tara and now again with Nonnie and which both death and danger in their abolition of illusion and appearance, had made accessible to him. It was exactly as if they were not two but one person under one skin. Only this feeling of oneness now was grown so great that it obliterated all the pain of the day behind them, as well as all thought of what was ended. Time became so re-charged and winged with meaning that it seemed in François’s own especial measure of these things that he had only just come to lie down beside Nonnie and put his arm round her, before she was as deeply asleep as Hintza, Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara, and he the only person left awake in the cave.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Footpath in the Night

  THE MOMENT FRANÇOIS realised that he was the only person left awake, he knew the time had come to go. But that, he now found, was more easily thought of than done. He was confronted with a difficulty completely outside his experience. As far as he could recollect, he had never shared a bed, even so bare a bed of sand, with anyone else. There may have been a moment in the remote past when his mother, still Lammie in his memory, moved by his helplessness and those unpredictable and inexplicable storms of distress that shake an infant world, and expose how often growing older, however lovingly, is a process of increasing forgetfulness of the mystery of belonging in the beginning, might have taken him for his comfort to her bed. But if so it was long before he was capable of remembering.

  As far as he recollected, the role of that “other little person” was imposed upon him so early in his life that he had no other coherent memory than of always sleeping alone, until the coming of Hintza.

  Indeed this dignified state of a person in his own right, ascribed to him even before he was born, was taken so for granted that it had never even occurred to him that he could all the time have been longing in some underworld of himself not to be so utterly “other” and needed some form of physical companionship to equal the lively mental companionship and thoughtful concern which he received from his parents.

  He had no natural preparation therefore for the effect of this first experience of lying in the dark so closely snuggled up to another person as he was to Nonnie. Indeed one is tempted to say that he had no natural immunity to protect him against being overwhelmed by the many feelings released in him by so simple and natural an event. He had neither mind nor that space of spirit we call time, to analyse what was happening to him. He had just perhaps a fragment of a second to recognise that this act of his present togetherness revealed, as does one blinding flash of lightning a whole world drowned in a sea of darkness, how alone he had been all his life. He marvelled at his blindness in not perceiving before even a new-moon sliver of some longing not to be alone that must have been secretly at work within his being during all those charged years of growing up at Hunter’s Drift. That brittle fragment of time in which he acknowledged the inadequacy of the status of that “other little person”, for all the ostensible honours and advantages of dignity and self-responsibility it had heaped on him, was overwhelmed almost at once by another emotion for which there is only that one travel-stained word of “sweetness”. It was as if, without knowing it, the taste of his being before had been bitter and now instantly was sweet. So great, so real, so tangible was the feeling that it almost caused him to panic. This sweetness assumed so precious and transcendental an importance from the split-second moment of its invasion, that he feared he would never summon up the resolve to abandon it of his own free will. Worse still, he feared that even if he refound his will to go on with his purpose, will alone would not enable him to break out from the power which this sweetness had so swiftly acquired over him.

  He knew that the sooner he went, the better, because already the enemy down below could be e
xpected to be asleep as were his companions. If he left at once, the greater would be his chances of returning before Nonnie woke, for in the next three or four hours the power of the tranquillisers and sleeping draughts he had given her would be at their most effective. Then they would begin to wane and, after what she had suffered, she could wake up unusually early. Yet obvious as all this was, it seemed to him that he lay there for hours struggling with himself, without being able to give up this sweet and living partnership in sleep which held him there in the dark beside Nonnie, and to become alone and “bitter” again in his own savour of himself. For not the least of the casualties to be listed in this roll-call in François’s spirit at the end of that terrible day, was the authority of the concept of “the other person” proclaimed by Lammie before he was even born.

  He had only one ally to help swing his spirit back on to its pre-determined course, pedestrian it is true, but experienced enough to overcome this untried new emotion, powerful as it was. He had that Calvanist upbringing of his, that habit of conscience inspired by Ouwa’s loyal example, and habit forced him at last to go.

  He began to withdraw the arm he had round Nonnie very gently but gently as he did so, it was enough to alarm Hintza. He felt more than saw Hintza raise his head beside his hand and immediately François put it on Hintza’s neck, pressing the soft warm skin in the way Hintza had been taught was the signal at the climax of a critical stalk, to keep quiet and in position until ordered not to. Obediently the head went down to resume its sleeping position between his paws, but François knew that both eyes and ears would be alert and following his movements until he left the cave and that until his return Hintza would be awake and on watch in his stead. Only when he was certain that Hintza had understood, did he detach his arm completely, and very slowly rose to his feet without a sound. It was more like an amputation of his arm than the gentlest and most sensitive of separations. Yet, lest he changed his mind, he paused only to check his person carefully to make certain he had nothing on him that could possibly rattle, pick up his gun and bush hat and then crawl quietly out of the cave.

  It was extraordinary, after the blackness of the cave, how the night lit only by stars dazzled and glittered. Indeed the stars were so full and dripping with light that he reminded himself not to look at them, in case they deprived him of the vital capacity of seeing through the blackness when he might need to most. So vital was this that after his first quick scanning of the sky, he stood back against rocks and bushes with his eyes on the ground, not only for his vision to recover but also to listen in to what the sound could tell him of the night.

  The first and most obvious change since he had last stood there was the fact that no longer was any singing coming from his home. The men down there, as far as he could tell, must be asleep, because even voices talking normally would have been audible from where he stood.

  Yet he waited long after his eyes were readjusted to the dark hoping that a challenge or two from sentries he was certain so well-trained an enemy could not have failed to post, would reach him to tell him where they stood. But for all he heard, the whole of the invading force might have assumed intruders in so remote a place to be so unlikely that it had not even bothered to mount guards at all.

  Luckily François was not deceived. He had of course no direct experience of such a situation but he had heard enough from Mopani and Ouwa who had both served through a world war, to know that there must be sentries on watch down there below, and their silence did not indicate neglect but, on the contrary, could be proof of an extra degree of cunning and foresight of those in command. No watch in that still night air of the bush, through which the slightest sound tends to travel the greatest distance, could ever be more effective than a silent and invisible one.

  His reading of the absence of human sound was confirmed when almost exactly where he knew his home to be, François’s eyes became aware of a sort of amber glow on the dark beyond the vast shadow of the great gardens and orchards, blacker even than that of night. Since the glow was without a flicker, he knew it was not reflection of any open fire. It could only come from the great oil lamps in his home and he wondered that such a careful enemy had not bothered to draw the shutters. It struck him as a touch of indiscretion in their cunning and, slight as it was, it gave François hope that his desperate plan might, after all, succeed. For if those men were fallible in that one small regard, surely they could be fallible in other and perhaps more important ones as well? It did not occur to him as it might have done if he had continued speculating on that amber glow, so deceptively naive and confiding in appearance, that the reason why the light was not screened might have been due to the destruction of the shutters during the attack. But his attention was diverted by another sound troubling the silence of the night.

  It was the noise the cattle, particularly cows and their calves, were making down by the old Matabele kraals. The noise amazed him, for it showed that the invaders, despite all their urgent military business, had gathered the cattle and driven them into their kraals for the night. But they had either not been milked properly or, as seemed far more likely to François, were so troubled by the sudden disappearance of the familiar hands and voices which had tended them from birth and so disturbed by the presence of strangers, that they could not sleep as they normally did, and their repeated lowing expressed a profound unease. François knew how deep that unease would be out of his intense experience of the active participation of Matabele herdsmen and their cattle in one another’s states of being. Yet there was another aspect of the mournful sound, the thought of which made the hair on the back of his head go as magnetic and erect as those on the ridge of Hintza’s back in times of apprehension. He remembered the Matabele belief that the great spirits and those of the immediate dead spoke through the voices of their beloved cattle gathered at night in the safety of their kraals. Judging by the pitiful calling of the cows to their calves, the pathetic answers that came back and occasionally the more definite wailing of a bull, both spirits and newly dead were urging the cattle to proclaim repeatedly their misgivings and to warn the life of the bush far and wide of the great new danger that had come to imperil it.

  This interpretation was strengthened by the absence of any of the normal sounds François would have expected at that hour. In between the lowing of cattle he listened in vain for the bush-buck barking, as it came to feed at the edge of the bush on the fringe of the clearing and the great old hippopotamus bulls, coming from the Amanzim-tetse to graze along its banks and snort with delight in between mouthfuls of their favourite salad of grass with a dressing of dew. And what had happened to the owls and night-jars and the cough of the leopard warning a jackal to keep its distance? François only heard the cry of carrion. Never in all his years at Hunter’s Drift, had he heard jackals and hyenas in such numbers so close to the homestead, so bold and insistent in their claim to be fed.

  A day of and for carrion, he thought bitterly, would have to be followed by a night for carrion: As he thought this, he heard the sound of the great river flowing steadily on, straight down below him, and it was as if this sound were directed specially at him, to remind him that all things, no matter how great and powerful they might appear, did not last. They had to move on and in their time pass into darkness, as that river flowed on, into and through the night. With his night vision as good as it was ever going to be, with nothing more to learn from listening where he stood, François knew that he had better follow the example of the river and move on as well.

  He had no preconceived plan as to how to get into his home except for the preliminary approach. All his training in stalking warned him against pre-judgement and declared that the only safe way was to use the utmost vigilance, and be wide open to all possibilities. His first approach could follow only straight down the side of the hill, the shortest way through bushes and boulders to the shelter of the reeds on the river bank. Once in the reeds, he could make his way unseen to an old hippopotamus track—a track far older than
any footpath of man in the bush—made by generations of hippopotamuses to their choice grazing grounds in the great clearing in which his home stood and where the wide gardens and great orchards had been planted. From time to time, the hippopotamuses, with memories almost as long as those of the elephant, would still try the track, impelled by a vision of paradisical grazing beyond, only to find the way denied to them and their sortie vain, except that it kept the track in being for a day when the intruders might vanish as swiftly as they had come. This track would give him cover right up to the main irrigation ditch along which the water, diverted from the river, flowed to the head of the gardens.

  The ditch not only avoided the Matabele kraals but ended half-way between them and the homestead by a deep reservoir which supplied minor furrows branching out in many directions for watering all parts of the spread-out garden. Once in this ditch, protected by its high walls, François was hopeful that he could reach the ample cover of the orchard without detection. But beyond that he avoided all plans and preconceptions. All would depend on what he heard and saw once in the orchard, close to the homestead. He had not worked himself at irrigating the gardens for so many years, nor played hide-and-seek in it with his Matabele friends so often, without knowing many hidden and cunning approaches to the house, to feel certain of finding an approach to take him in closer unobserved.