“So, François, please see that always you observe the rhythm that serves this law of the life of the bush. Never disturb it lightly or needlessly. And this rhythm, like the presence of which I read to you the other night in the Psalm of the young David that was like a mantle around him, will also be a mantle for you. No man can escape the necessities of his own being. It may well be that the necessities of your own could lead you as it did the young David through the valley of the shadow of death; but this rhythm observed will keep you inside the harmony of all the life that is, that has been and ever will be, and will shield you against all that is irrelevant and accidental to your own self. And so, Little Cousin, ‘Amen’ to an old man’s over-long sermon to you.”
So fountain-wise did all this spring in François’s memory that an Amen of his own came to his parched lips. Also, long as it has taken in the telling it presented itself not in words but in one overwhelming feeling like a flash of lightning in a mind darkened with fatigue, and so became immediate as a life-giving resolution.
At once he was compelling a reluctant Hintza to turn slowly about, reluctant because the clearing was hemmed in there by a wide belt of impenetrable thorn. They had to crawl back to the point where he had first received Hintza’s warning. From there he made his way with great difficulty and care, in a slow, wide circle, around the clearing until, a quarter of an hour later they were back on the edge of the track, well behind that yellow beach of light where the young lions were so abandonedly bathing in a surf of sun.
He was about to step clear of the bush on to the track when that characteristic, high-pitched warning whimper from Hintza stopped him. Hintza was not only sniffing the air to his right but also his ears were erect and pointed. François heard it too then; it was the unmistakable rumble of an elephant whose digestion had set his stomach like a great kettle on the boil. Slowly he came to his feet and there, monumental as a statue raised to promote confession of Mopani’s creed, right in the centre of the track where no shadow could trouble the morning air, stood one of the largest and blackest old elephants François had ever seen. His skin shone as if just re-lacquered with dew. His long, ivory tusks were yellow and gleaming like Saracen swords drawn bare and on guard in front of him. His trunk hung from on high, limp and loose between the tusks. His eyes were so tightly shut that even the deep furrows of a century of experience that were corrugated in his broad temple, were smoothed out and drew no lines of shadow.
He was standing heavily on only three of the classical columns of his long legs. The fourth was delicately raised so that it only touched the ground with its sensitive toes, ready to correct his balance against overweight of sleep and in the process demonstrating the limit of relaxation to which a wise old elephant could abandon itself, short of going to bed on the ground. So enormous was the elephant and so vast its sleep and hence so great the manifestation of the act of trust in life which sleep is within itself that François, perhaps not surprisingly considering how long it was since he himself had slept, felt as if he were about to be overpowered by that remarkable example. Even Hintza, who had come to stand beside him and now saw the glistening, granite monument of the elephant, suddenly yawned so ardently and widely that it looked to François as if his jaws were in danger of splitting apart and his long, glistening pink tongue hung so far out from its muzzle that it looked like a canna petal about to fall from its stem. For the first time since Nonnie’s return, François came near to laughing.
He might have gone on standing there, enjoying the slight ease of tension which came to him from the elephant, facing him like the great god of sleep, had not his unusual respect for the special discipline each and every occasion in the bush demanded, goaded him on with the realisation that as if the delay caused by the obstruction of the lions had not been bad enough, he would now have to add to it by making another silent detour around the old elephant. The consequences of disturbing the huge dream that must be unfolding itself in so great a sleep in so great an animal, surely could be ignored with even less impunity than the rest of an arrogant pride of young lions.
So once more François pulled back into the bush and made another long and painful detour through the thorns, before coming back into the track again, where he ordered Hintza off faster than ever in the direction of Mopani’s camp. He followed now not at the double but at a fast trot, so heightened was his feeling of urgency. Even this new pace was one he normally could have kept up for hours, but he doubted whether he could do so now after such a day and such a night behind him. Within an hour François’s doubts of his powers of keeping up the pace became first a real anxiety and finally an acute fear.
Early as it was, the day was already hot. Before long the heat would be so great that it would add to the problems already created by sheer physical fatigue and lack of sleep. He tried to focus his mind on what was positive even in this as he tended by nature to do with everything. He comforted himself with the thought that now there would be no danger from beasts of prey on his road and that it no longer mattered how loudly and even carelessly he travelled. His only reservation was that both he and Hintza would have to watch the world around their feet now as never before, because it was the sort of day which brought out the cold-blooded snakes and pythons of the bush to warm themselves in the unfiltered sun to be found only on and beside the track.
Already the heat was beginning to move in transparent rills of shining vapour over the blood red earth. He did not fear for Hintza in this particular regard. Hintza had been taught from his earliest puppy days that snakes were to be left severely alone and if to be dealt with, then by François alone. They were never any dog’s business in François’s order of things; he had seen too many dogs die of snake-bite to permit it even for mongrel strays, let alone Hintza. In a sense they were not even his chosen affair, because though snakes made him uneasy too and the sight of their bright coils unwinding always made him feel as if what was left of an umbilical cord behind his navel, was being unscrewed as well. He had none of the mysterious compulsion of the European to kill them on sight, perhaps because of the Matabele example which held them to be messengers of the vanished dead, if not a return in disguise of the beloved dead themselves. There were even moments at night alone in bed, when full of wonder of the strange, rich, infinitely varied natural life of his world, his wondering was pierced by intimations of the horror of what it must be to have to live the life of the snake. He knew no form of life so loathed, persecuted and capable of pronouncing a sentence of death upon itself just because of what it was and not because of what it did. Even when it was utterly innocent and merely sunning itself in the intervals of rest between earning its living, it had just to be seen to be found guilty to the point of sentence of instant death.
He knew the horror of all this, for, despite his own intimations of compassion, he realised that even he himself could never trust and accept snakes as he did all other forms of life. All other forms of life in the bush seemed to have friends of a kind among other species. But not snakes. They hardly seemed to have any friends, even among their own kind. One always saw them alone, although one knew they must meet to procreate. Even that, one imagined, would have to be the briefest and crudest of encounters, leaving them lonelier and more than ever on their own. The utmost he could get himself to do was to keep his eyes open for them, avoid them if possible and never kill them automatically, and feel sad and guilty that, though his eyes informed him of the singular beauty patterned in their skin and expressed in the rhythm of their movement, his feelings refused to join in any act of appreciation.
He had hardly thought this when he received his first warning of how careful they would have to be. Representatives of the most authoritarian snakes he knew were already beginning to reconnoitre the track. They added a strange, nightmare quality to his progress along the path because he was beginning to draw on his last reserves of energy to propel him forward at such a pace. All the energy which could come from a pure act of will was rapidly being exhausted and
he was now becoming dependent on energies he had never tapped before, or even knew he had within himself. Those are the energies available only to missions of life and death and fortunately for our egotistical wilful selves are far greater than those we consciously call upon or for that matter can ever be conceived of by our fireside selves. They tend to emerge only when put to the test in a race for life itself and so come from a level so far below one’s daytime knowing that François became like some transfigured somnambulist, not walking but running in his sleep.
Accordingly, all around him assumed, as his weariness increased, a more and more vivid, dream-like quality. When the sun rose and all the many singing beetles in the bush combined to form a vast choir for serenading in their devout, glittering voices the light and the heat they loved, they joined the crescendo of the singing of his own blood in his ears. The nightmare feeling acquired a kind of rhythm of hallucination whose tempo quickened when the heat of the sun finally infected the day with fever and the delirium which distorts the sun’s own clarity at the climax of the African day.
At one moment François would round a curve and see Hintza hurdling on the crest of the curve of a great leap into the air, worthy of the graceful red impala that are Africa’s greatest hurdlers, and see him soaring over a saffron-yellow cobra sitting upright, its hood erect and vainly striking at the tawny body flying over it, before collapsing for a moment inert like a coil of rope in the track, as a prelude to wriggling despondently into the bush. At the next, as he pressed a tree, a sparkling black mamba, bird nesting but suddenly frightened, hung by its tail from a branch to take a quick swipe at François, and he would dodge its fangs only just in time. Yet a second later he would not be certain whether it had actually happened to him, or merely part of the general delirium of the day. He found himself bounding over lethargic adders lying still and shining, coiled like Aztec bangles in front of the yellow grass; emerald tree-snakes hung like Maya necklaces round the head of a bush of thorn swaying in the heat, and black cobras with rings of ivory on their throats darting erect, frightened by the vibrations his running sent through their pillow of earth, and spitting poison spitefully after him as he ran on. At one place he had to stop and wait while an enormous sluggish python, looking like a stuffed football stocking, pulled itself slowly across the track up into a tree. But somehow none of this retarded him, because he knew that on the whole snakes and pythons too observed the law of necessity in the bush, and that if he stuck to his own necessity in the middle of the track, they would not come at him wilfully.
Even so, he was compelled, after some two hours, to call Hintza to him and rest, gasping, in the shade of a boulder, while some fever birds with their monotonous voices wearily took up the desperate theme where he had abandoned it on the track. He sat there for some twenty minutes which felt like seconds to his exhausted self. Yet, short as it felt, he recovered enough to reckon up his progress so far. Even his desperate self could not help being somewhat comforted, for he found that he was already just over half-way to Mopani’s camp. He began to feel more confident that he could make the camp well before the enemy behind caught up. Yet he sent Hintza scouting back along the trail and watched the bush behind for signs of unusual movement but noticed nothing to disturb him and was all the more reassured when Hintza too returned without any intelligence for concern.
François was about to resume his journey with a slightly lightened heart, therefore, when away to the west in the direction of the Punda-Ma-Tenka, the great Hunter’s Road, he thought he heard a series of short studs of sound grate upon the silence. These, he was certain, were not part of the hallucination of heat and exaggeration of fatigue in his senses, for he noticed that Hintza had heard it too and was looking at him with a large question in his alert eyes, which were a deep purple there beside him in the shadow of the boulders. He waited for longer than perhaps he could afford to do in case the sound repeated itself, uneasy because the sound was not unlike the sound of controlled rifle fire at a distance. He could only blame fatigue for the fact that until then he had completely and culpably forgotten the Punda-Ma-Tenka and the road which branched of fit to Mopani’s camp. Of course the enemy could have rushed patrols fast by truck along it and set up a screen of guards between him and the camp long before he could get to it. He could not imagine what else these sounds could foretell or what he could do about them other than to press on harder and more alert than ever, knowing Hintza would be aware of the enemy before it could be aware of them. He was starting to do just that when a longer and more pronounced intrusion of sound on the silence occurred way back on the track on which he was travelling.
This intrusion lasted much longer and sounded less ordered than the one before, ceased and then came back sporadically before it finally stopped. François looked deep into Hintza’s eyes as Hintza was looking back into his and fantastic as it may seem in the telling, he had no doubt that Hintza suspected as he did, that what they had just heard was a burst of fire from pursuers coming from Hunter’s Drift. It could only mean that they must have stumbled into the pride of young lions sunbathing in the clearing. François assumed that with none of his scruples, they had opened fire on them and in the process not only warned François of their coming but retarded their own rate of advance.
The encouragement given him by knowing from the sound that he had at least a two-hour lead on his pursuers and that, tired as he was, he could make Mopani’s camp before they could catch up, was qualified only by the fact that the sounds he had heard from the direction of the Punda-Ma-Tenka, proclaimed the probability that soldiers much better led than those behind might already be deployed in part of the bush ahead.
Pausing just long enough to put in Bushman words for Hintza’s benefit the basic facts of what he feared and repeating the phrase again and again that it was “strange men” and not animals or reptiles that he had to look out for now, he ordered him ahead and followed quickly after. They travelled thus without any unusual incident for another hour, except the exactions of delirium and hallucination which running in what was more and more a sleep of fatigue increased, was joined by a weariness of sinew and muscle in his body like an acute pain, as if exhaustion had produced an advanced rheumatism of its own in his blood and bone. As a result he had to call Hintza back and rest for some fifteen minutes in the shade of a great old boulder. When his breathing had become more normal he found he was stroking the boulder with his hand, as if even contact with an inanimate old stone made him less abandoned and alone. He would have liked to rest more but despite his aching body and smarting eyes, he started on again, because even if his lead of two hours were still maintained and he got by the patrols in front successfully, two hours were not long to prepare Mopani and his staff against the sort of attack that might be launched against them that day.
The thought was so alarming that he had to prevent himself taking the next lap of his journey at a run, and only just managed to limit himself to the rhythm of that fast trot which he knew from experience was the only pace he had any hope of sustaining.
They travelled like this for some three-quarters of an hour, when he came out on the bank of a little stream he knew to be only eight miles from Mopani’s camp. There he paused to let Hintza have a good drink of water. He allowed himself a drink too, but a much more sparing one, since too much water in the middle of the day added prodigiously to one’s sweating and the sweating to one’s exhaustion.
He had just finished his spare draught of water when from the track on the other side of the bush he heard voices. With that immediate speed of reaction which was one of his most marked physical attributes, he had his rifle in his hand, safety catch released, and in the same movement dodged in behind a huge boulder in the bed of the stream, and was down on his stomach, in a firing position facing the far bank. It was only then that he realised that something vital was missing. That something vital, of course, was Hintza. Despite all his training and loyalty Hintza had not followed his example.
Acutely alarme
d he peered round the boulder and, thank Heaven and Heitse-Eibib, he saw that Hintza had not moved from his position by the flashing sheet of water. He had merely stopped lapping up the liquid which François knew was his dream idea of champagne and was staring straight ahead in the direction of the sound with his ears erect. But what was far more significant than his stare, his tail was wagging, and François knew it could only be because he had recognised the voices and knew them to be friendly.
Nonetheless he was not in a mood to take anything for granted that day, even so well tried a form of radar as Hintza’s tail. He called him back sternly in a whisper and made him take up position beside him in the shadow of the boulder, lying there hidden and listening to the voices gradually coming nearer. He too became convinced by their ease and fluency, and the fact that the ardent beetle chorale in the bush around him was going on uninterrupted, that they must be the voices of people who were known to the bush as well. This assumption was hardly reached when it was proved, and François watched five Africans in the uniform of Mopani’s company of rangers, coming in single file round a curve of the track and unhurriedly walk out into the clear on the blue gravel of the bed of the stream. What is more, he recognised the man in the lead. He was one of Mopani’s most experienced and trusted rangers, a corporal called Kghometsu, whom he knew well.
A desperate imagination will grasp at what rational man secure in his armchair will dismiss as meaningless trifles. François attached the utmost significance to the fact that the man was called Kghometsu. He was a man of the Sutho peoples, who inhabit the fringes of the great desert to the West from which Xhabbo had come; and in the Sutho language Kghometsu meant “Comfort”. Kghometsu had been called Comfort because long after his mother had given up hope of bearing her husband a son (she had had nothing but daughters before) he was born and so inevitably was the “comfort” that ended her despair, and he was known as such ever since. Stranger still, Kghometsu was married to a woman called Mokho. She was a woman of the Makoba people, who inhabit the vast swamp on the far side of the great desert and her name had a significance of its own. It meant “A Tear” and had been given to her because her own mother had died giving birth to her.
A Far Off Place Page 13
