A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  This was one reason why François had always loved that moment, perhaps above all others. Then one saw the baboons, apes and monkeys, the birds, insects and buck, all in their coats of many colours, washed clean in quicksilver dew, setting out on their lawful occasions with the grace of the total absence of unease, and a carriage eurhythmic with lack of haste. It was a glimpse of the sort of Paradise regained that freedom from fear briefly gives to life.

  He called it the bush’s moment of innocence; an innocence made all the greater and more poignant because it was vulnerable as only innocence can be to the terrible exceptions brought about by frustrated creatures who had not done their killing at the moments prescribed for it in the general law of the bush and so, made cunning by desperation, prepared to do it at this unlawful hour. He knew far too many examples for his comfort, not just of animals but of human beings who, unaware of the terrible exceptions necessary to prove the rule of life in the bush, had lost their own lives as a result. But for once he deliberately chose to discount this particular peril to which travelling so fast along the narrow, winding track exposed him. He did so without hesitation or remorse, though by doing so he was transgressing all the precepts which Mopani and ’Bamuthi had impressed upon him over many years so effectively that obedience to them had almost become a reflex of his character. Even so, he did it because, great as the dangers might be ahead of him, none of them could be as great as the danger which was being organised and might already be coming up fast behind him. He allowed himself time only for one precaution. When he was deep inside the bush he stopped, called Hintza to his side, knelt by him and whispered in Bushman in his ear, his voice tender with the knowledge of the danger of the role he was about to inflict on him: “I’m afraid, dearest Hin, you’ll have to take the lead. So take care. And not only take care but go fast. Remember as always when in doubt, stop, crouch down low and wait for me to catch up. Then show me. So go, dear Hin, go! Today we must go faster than we’ve ever gone before.”

  Hintza looked deep and straight into his eyes, as only a dog among the animals of the world can look into the human eye, and then did something he had not done since his adolescent days. He put up that cool, forever wrinkling and forever keen-scenting nose of his, which seemed to work at scenting twenty-four hours a day, perhaps harder even in sleep than in waking hours because it did the work then for all his other senses, and gave François one of the longest and wettest licks on the cheek he had ever received from him, as if it were meant to indicate that he would have done it long before if only François had given him a chance to show that he, Hintza, also knew the awfulness of what had happened and understood entirely this need for haste.

  The feeling of their partnership in that second was transformed and raised to a dimension where Hintza was more than a dog and almost a precious extension of François’s being, so that when he saw the burnished, lithe, magnetic shape of Hintza leap elongated with speed into the track, his eyes clouded with tears. He had to restrain himself by immediately standing up straight, adjusting the sack of provisions across his shoulder, eliminating a rattle he had detected on this first lap of his journey, checking over his rifle to make certain that the bolt was moving freely and that there was a bullet in the breech so that he would only have to flick over the safety catch to be ready to shoot, should he run into trouble. He could not recollect ever having gone through the bush with his rifle in such an advanced state of preparation before, because that too in the past had been strictly forbidden. One never carried one’s gun cocked even with the safety catch on until one knew for certain that the moment to shoot was upon one.

  Standing there doing all this in seconds, he noticed how the bush was as disturbingly quiet as it had been at dawn the fatal morning before. He knew, of course that the bush there was as crowded with life as it had always been everywhere else, but all the many and infinitely various voices which were normally raised in a great chorale of thanksgiving for the coming of the sacred light of day were totally silenced. And yet he knew too that poised there to move off, he was like an actor before an audience in a packed theatre not just silent but holding its breath for the climax of this terrible new drama which was having its first performance there.

  All that he was feeling then about the horror and the extra dimension of tragedy and frightfulness which he himself had brought to this world of innocence and beauty by the destruction of his own home, came swiftly to a point then for François in the quick glimpse he had of the kind of dawn which had exploded in the east. It was sending the night wheeling, startled upwards like the densest ever flight of black crows, to vanish in one of the most acid blues he had ever seen. It was the particular colour of this explosion, singular in its absence of nuance and intimation of other shades of colour, that made François’s senses, as it were, like the hair at the back of his neck, stand on end. The colour was that startlingly vital, vivid red to which even the well-proved comparison with blood could not do justice. It seemed redder even than immediate human or animal blood. It was in fact a red very rarely seen even in the sky and, according to the mythology on which François’s imagination had been nourished by his old Bushman nurse as much as his body had been fed by her with food, it was so because it was the blood of a god.

  This god was the great Heitse-Eibib of the almost vanished, copper-coloured Hottentots of southern Africa—a race not un-akin to his beloved Bushmen—and like the Bushmen cruelly persecuted and ultimately destroyed through violence or corruption by both black and white invaders of the land. François knew this god, compassionate, upright and beautiful with a spine of purest copper, by many names, like “The one who foretells”; “The messenger”; “The tree of light”; “The one with the wounded knee”; and many others. But it was “The one with the wounded knee” which was uppermost in François’s mind and heart as he noticed the still multitudinous leaves of the incarnadined sea of trees between him and the dawn, so wet and dripping with the blood of this light that their own vivid green did not show through it, but merely served as points for the red to darken and congeal until the top of the bush appeared clotted with blood. He stood there briefly, humbled before the feelings of the inevitability of just such a dawn having to come up fast in such a light on such a day, as ifit too were a sign for his abandoned heart, just like the shooting stars the night before, that the universe itself, contrary to other appearances, was not disinterested in what was happening but committed to the battle itself. He felt this keenly because, according to his old nurse, this dawn only came whenever Heitse-Eibib realised that the power of darkness in the universe had grown too great again. So in the course of his own chosen night he would have gone to battle to reduce it to its proper proportions. In the course of the battle, which was always long and terrible, he would be wounded among many other places in his knee. As he came fast over the horizon back from his field of battle he walked in the manner in which the Hottentots always walked, lifting their copper legs so that their knees were raised high and well out in front. As a result, the first thing human beings on earth would see as token of their re-delivery from excess of darkness was the blood streaming from the deep gash in the knee of Heitse-Eibib.

  The impact on François of all the many dear, happy and life-giving associations with the past which this mythological light evoked compelled him to respond quickly as he had been taught the Hottentots always responded on such an occasion. He knelt down in the track and in a few seconds had selected, from among the stones mixed with the earth on the footpath, some of the roundest and smoothest of pebbles to raise where he was standing a small pile of a kind of wayside shrine to the god. It was extraordinary how great a comfort so small and hurried an exercise of ritual brought him. He rose and picked up his rifle almost with zest, balanced it at the trail beside him, and set out fast down the track after the vanished Hintza.

  How wise he had been to let Hintza lead was proved a mile or so further along, when he rounded a curve in the track and saw his dog standing sideways in t
he distance. Hintza’s tail was stiff and trembling, as it was only when he wanted to convey the most portentous of warnings. His head was moving first to François and then pointing sideways upwards in the opposite direction at something invisible beyond, and then back to François again. Seeing Hintza thus, François, who had not taken any particular account of the noise he made trotting freely along the track, slowed down and carefully went forward without a sound to kneel down beside Hintza.

  “What is it, Hin?” he asked in a whisper.

  Asking, he put his hand on Hintza’s back at the centre of his magnetic field of hair. So long and such close partners had they been in exactly this sort of experience that François could tell the answer from the intensity of the sniff which Hintza allowed himself at François’s ear and the vibration of tension along his electric spine. It could only mean there were lion ahead. With the utmost care, the safety catch on his rifle released, and with Hintza by his side, he crawled slowly forward.

  This deliberation exacted all the discipline of which François was capable, because all the time he was more conscious than ever of the probability that the search for the two of them must surely now have started and the need for maintaining their lead on the enemy greater than ever. He was convinced that once their trackers had clearly established that it was his and Hintza’s spoor in the track and noticed, as they could not fail to notice, both how fresh it was and with what speed it had been made, they would not waste any more time in looking around for confirmatory signs but assume correctly where they were going and hasten as they themselves had hastened along the track itself.

  Yet he knew also that he could not afford not to give himself time enough to deal successfully with the problem of the lion ahead. Accordingly they crawled another thirty yards forward in this fastidious manner, down the crooked, narrow track until it suddenly broadened out and François caught the glimpse of a clearing ahead. It was a clearing he knew well, not far from one of the permanent water holes in that part of the bush and so much favoured by game. He had barely seen it when Hintza nudged him with his nose and stopped wriggling forward, his head pointing slightly sideways to the left; his long lips were trembling with excitement and the strange kind of anger which lions always raised in him. It was an anger François had never been able to understand completely for it was a feeling exclusively reserved by Hintza for lions. The only explanation, if one could call a deep suspicion an explanation, which had ever occurred to François was that Hintza himself, so much the colour of a lion and with so much of the heart of the lion in himself, somewhere in his proud, mysterious and sensitive depths might be inordinately jealous of lions for being more lion-like than he could ever be. However reprehensible the emotion of jealousy or even its middle-class version of envy was held to be in his Calvinist scale of values, François himself had already suspected that in a strange way what one envied was a measure of one’s own proudly hidden aristocracy of spirit. Knowing the scale of Hintza’s rage as he did, he tried to appease it by gently stroking him as he looked in the direction Hintza clearly wanted him to look.

  There he saw the back of a lion, moving restlessly backwards and forwards above the shining fringes of grass and brush. François crept further forward until he could see more. The back belonged to an enormous, but still young, lion. All his youth shone like silk in the hair of his coat on which the first light of the sun came down like slanted rain, smoking over the powerful back. This lion was obviously aware that something strange had been approaching, and was walking up and down like an alerted sentry on his beat in front of six other young lions of similar size and condition, all lying with eyes half shut behind him. They were each wrapped in a yellow shawl of sun, purring ecstatically and so loudly that both François and Hintza could hear them. All six had their paws stretched far out in front of them, so that the sun could dry their coats, wet and drenched with dew. The dew itself was sparkling on the grass all around them as if the window of the day itself had just been shattered there. In one place among the bushes, the tall strands of tassled rushes and long blades of elephant and buffalo grass under an overhang of dark purple shadow, a complex of cobwebs had been spun, and had been so behung with drops of pointed dew that it appeared lit with chandeliers.

  It was the sort of vision of innocence, natural delicacy and tenderness always moving in the great and the strong, that normally François would have loved to go on observing until it came to its natural end, when, their coats and paws dried out and their hedonistic hearts sweetened and warmed through with honeyed sun, the lions would stalk off into the bush to find other shade dark enough to enable them to sleep unobserved through the heat of the day.

  But of course he had not such time, or for that matter any time to spare at all. And yet he could not bring himself, as he knew he was able, to compel this pride of seven young lions to give way to him by showing himself at the edge of the clearing and advancing determinedly on them with his rifle at the ready. They might pretend aggressiveness but their whole attitude betrayed the fact that they had fed too well to be inclined for any exercise. Instantly he knew why he could not, because it touched on one of the deepest axioms of his being, taught him and carefully kept alive and cultivated by Mopani.

  Far back in the beginning, which linked him with this chain of terrible events, François had already mentioned it to Xhabbo, and had had its truth confirmed in Xhabbo’s instant acceptance of it. He had also tried to pass something of it on to Luciana before she had become the Nonnie she was now to him. It was as if, standing there, he could hear Mopani, to whom he was even now hastening for help, beside him, and saying to him over and over again, as ifit were some self-made Sermon of his own Mount:

  “Remember always, Little Cousin, that no matter how awful or insignificant, how ugly or beautiful, it might look to you, everything in the bush has its own right to be there. No one can challenge this right unless compelled by some necessity of life itself. Everything has its own dignity, however absurd it might seem to you, and we are all bound to recognise and respect it as we wish our own to be recognised and respected. Life in the bush is necessity, and it understands all forms of necessity. It will always forgive what is imposed upon it out of necessity, but it will never understand and accept anything less than necessity. And remember that, everywhere, it has its own watchers to see whether the law of necessity is being observed. You may often think that deep in the darkness and the density of the bush you are alone and unobserved, but that, Little Cousin, would be an illusion of the most dangerous kind. One is never alone in the bush. One is never unobserved. One is always known as people in the towns and cities of the world are no longer known. It is true there are many parts of the bush where no human eye might be able to penetrate but there is always, like some spy of God Himself, an eye upon you, even if it is only the eye of some animal, bird, reptile or little insect, recording in its own way in the book of life how you carry yourself.

  “And beside the eyes—do not underrate them—there are the tendrils of the plants, the grasses, the leaves of the trees and the roots of all growing things, which lead the warmth of the sun deep down into the darkest and coldest recesses of the earth, to quicken them with new life. They too shake with the shock of our feet and vibrate to the measure of our tread and I am certain have their own ways of registering what we bring or take from the life for which they are a home. Often as I have seen how a blade of grass will suddenly shiver on a windless day at my approach or the leaves of the trees tremble, I have thought that they too must have a heart beating within them and that my coming has quickened their pulse with apprehension until I can note the alarm vibrating at their delicate wrists and their high, translucid temples. Often when I have heard a bird suddenly break off its song, some beetle or cricket cease its chanting, because of my presence, I have felt uninvited like an intruder in a concert in some inner chamber of our royal environment and stood reproved for being so rough and not more mindful of my manners.

  “All of these anima
l, insect and vegetable senses put together add up to a magnitude of awareness, a watch so great, minute, many-sided and awesome that there is nothing small enough to escape its notice, and I have sometimes felt involuntarily exposed in the heart of the bush as I have only on some wide open plain of our blue highveld in the south when alone on a cloudless night of stars. It is difficult to express how small, vulnerable, confessed and revealed so immense and sharp-eyed a concourse of sentinels have made me feel, even in my innermost and most secret self. It is as if even the hidden frame of bone and sinew within me was apparent to their X-ray vision. You must be mindful, therefore, of the great company that you are compelled to keep, whether you like it or not, wherever you go. Remember that whatever you do will have its effect on them and influence them for good or ill.

  “I do not want to give you the impression that all in the life of the bush is pure joy and beauty if left to itself. It is also full of suffering and tragedy and things that are ugly, but if you look deeply into them all, tragic and painful as they might be, there is no horror in them. Horror is the invention of unnatural men who inflict unnecessary suffering and destruction on life. Horror indeed is unnecessary avoidable tragedy; suffering and tragedy of the life in the bush are bearable and redeemed precisely because they are part of the great necessities, part I believe of the tragedy and the pain that the act of creation and its unfolding impose also upon the creator. It is the charge laid upon us for the privilege of participating in creation ourselves and which outweighs any pain involved in the process. There is balance and proportion provided in all this, the proportion that is freedom from chaos and old night, and so implicit in the organisation of all being, that should you exceed them, you shatter the harmony which they serve and set up a tyranny of action and reaction for which all of us, not least of all you, some time, somewhere, will be called to reckoning.