A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  But aloud he merely said, in a voice strained and thin for him, “Oh Xhabbo, how could it be so that you questioned your own tapping? Was it then in the end not so loud and clear as at the beginning?”

  “No, Foot of the Day,” Xhabbo replied, “it was louder and clearer than ever but it was telling me to go a way that I, Xhabbo, did not want to go and a way Xhabbo feels is more dangerous and difficult than the way Xhabbo wanted to take.”

  “And what is that way?” François asked anxiously, knowing how much depended on the answer. For only he knew now that they had no alternative. The five of them were on their own and utterly dependent from now on, on themselves. The telephone lines from Mopani’s camp to the outside world were cut. The camp itself, was doomed and bound to be destroyed within a few hours, however valiantly Mopani’s men under his old sergeant-major would fight back as he was sure they would do. It was true there was a possibility that finding the telephone lines cut the old sergeant-major might have been able to get a messenger out to the outside world for help before his camp was totally surrounded. But the outside world was far away, and even pre-supposing his messenger got past the patrols covering the trails and roads to the world beyond they would take a week or more to reach it on foot. For the railway line and access to the great mining city were, he knew, effectively sealed off from them all. They would have to go round to the far south where the next city was some two hundred miles away. And the bush in between would be swarming with well-led and alert enemies, while from what he had overheard their numbers would be swollen all the time, by the reinforcements coming up from Angola and the other territories to the north.

  Only Xhabbo and his knowledge of the bush and desert and above all his tapping could now direct them to some natural sanctuary. And yet this tapping had prescribed a way and course of action which even its high-priest and faithful servant Xhabbo found doubtful and dangerous.

  All this mixed with François’s terrible weariness made him hear Xhabbo say as from a distance, “For look, Foot of the Day, look! The tapping clearly says we go the way of the wind. And go the way of the wind we must, without feeling ourselves to be afraid.”

  As he said it François was compelled to open wide his eyes, which were screwed up with fatigue. Clear against the starlight was Xhabbo’s arm pointing to the north-west. Significantly the finger with which Xhabbo was pointing was not fully extended but folded back at the joint. It was fantastic how great a meaning that had for François. Bushmen only pointed their fingers like that at things they regarded as sacred and would not dream of offending, as they would have done if they had extended the finger to the full, since that was the rudest way of pointing of which a Bushman was capable. Xhabbo’s reverent manner of pointing now, François realised, was so because he was pointing in the direction of the one wind that brought up rare, life-giving rain to the desert.

  Overawed by this fact, he put his hand on Xhabbo’s shoulder to say, “I see then we are to go the way of the wind that brings the rain.”

  He paused, before uttering what is perhaps the shortest but greatest of all the Bushman forms of prayer, or asking with their hearts from the heart of life itself as ’Bamuthi would have put it, “And may the rain fall upon us too.”

  A kind of Bushman Amen broke from Xhabbo before he commanded, “But now, Foot of the Day, hasten to Mantis’s place, hasten because the danger is great and nearer than ever.”

  He would have stepped forward after Hintza, who seemed to have understood the urgency of the words and concluded for himself that speed and more speed were now needed. For once without any need for instruction he had bounded into the lead. But a new sound coming from the west stopped him. He whisked about, light as a leaf, and looked at François. François’s feeling of imminent danger, stirred already by Xhabbo’s exhortation, became all the more acute because it was clearly the sound of a truck. Moreover it was coming from the direction of Mopani’s camp, its engines racing. Already the glow of headlights was visible fanning the fringes of the bush.

  It could only mean, he was certain, that his letter had been deciphered and that the truck was hastening to Hunter’s Drift, to ensure that the hill of the cave could be surrounded at dawn and the hunt for them pursued to a methodical and successful end. Prepared as Xhabbo was by his tapping, even he was obviously startled by the sound. François just intercepted the question that was on his lips, saying, “I hear it too and I know what it means and will explain on our way but that sound, please Xhabbo, feel as I feel, is proof of how true your tapping has been and how we must hasten to obey it. But, Xhabbo, could you pick up and carry Hin for I no longer have the strength to do it and I feel we must not leave his spoor here for the enemy to find.”

  Xhabbo without a word stooped down, gathered Hintza to him, lifted him and led the way to the top of the hill with a speed and ease which to François’s exhausted self seemed miraculous. There by the last boulder of stone guarding the narrow entrance on a bed of gravel François begged Xhabbo to put Hintza down. Hintza at once stood up expectant, obviously anxious to be the first to go into the cave and François did not have the heart to refuse him. He knelt down and ordered him, “Yes, go, Hin, go and tell Nonnie we’re back.”

  He did this knowing that they had to do everything possible, however hopeless it might appear, to prevent his enemies from discovering this first temple of man in Africa and blowing it up in another act of negation and revenge when they found how it had sheltered them, for he was certain Hintza’s tracks over so short a distance could be as easily erased as the Bushmen had their own for centuries.

  As Hintza vanished, he looked deep into the night over the West. That light truck on the Punda-Ma-Tenka road was coming up with alarming speed. It could do so he believed only because it carried nothing but the despatches necessary to organise the final hunt for them. Its lights were flashing ominously high in the sky, and the need they emphasised for speed on his part was about to send him down on his knees to crawl into the cave when he suddenly left the first air of the morning cool on his hot face.

  Instinctively he put his finger in his mouth and wetted it and held it up high above his head as ’Bamuthi and his people always did when they emerged from their kraals at their beloved “Horns of the Bullock” hour. Once, when he had asked ’Bamuthi why they always did this ’Bamuthi had said, “Do it yourself, Little Feather.”

  He had done it and was amazed how cool and alive the air had become on the side of his finger. Noticing his amazement ’Bamuthi had instantly said, “Ah! You always do this, Little Feather, and you will feel the breath of the first spirit on you for the day to come.”

  It was of course, he realised then, an act of prayer and most strange of all, joining in it now as he had done so often in the past, he felt the wind of morning on his finger even more clearly than he had done on his his cheek and could tell exactly from where it came.

  He had to put out his hand impetuously to Xhabbo, grasp him by the arm, pull him towards him and exclaim, oddly uplifted, “Oh Xhabbo, do you feel what I am feeling now, the wind of morning on my face and finger, breathing and feeling itself utterly coming down the way of the wind your tapping has told us to go?”

  And with that they both went down on their knees and crawled towards and into the cave.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  An Order of Elephants

  ALTHOUGH THE CAVE was lit only by candle-light, after the dark of what François felt had been a dash to the end of the night and back, the light was dazzling. He came out of his crawl and slowly up to his full height, to stand beside the entrance blinking for a moment, unable to take in the scene and aware only that a smell of warm food had come to meet him. It was a complex smell but its dominant ingredient was the best scent of all to welcome an exhausted, thirsty, hungry and healthy young person: the smell of hot chocolate. François’s associations with this smell were so many and went back so far in time that a feeling of home-coming possessed him. It was reinforced, as his eyes became capable of g
rasping the detail of the scene that was being enacted in the centre of the cave.

  The four halves of two of his dixies were there gleaming like silver and arranged on the improvised hearth he had invented the night before, four stones supporting each of them and four sets of candles burning underneath. The light by the hearth was clearest for the glow from the candle ends was reinforced by that of eight long candles stuck in the sand further back. The yellow dome above and honey-coloured stone around, reflected and magnified the light so that all was clear and contrived as in a painting of a fastidious Dutch domestic interior.

  To the left of the hearth, a hood of shadow around her head, was the beautiful archaic face of Nuin-Tara, her slanted, dark Mongolian eyes wide and brilliant, shining with light as much from within as without. Somewhat more indistinct on her left where the shadows lapped at the rim of light, was Xhabbo, the little finger of his right hand hooked in Nuin-Tara’s left. In aristocratic Bushman fashion, Nuin-Tara was waiting for François to greet her before she as a woman could feel herself free to greet him, although that light in her eyes, one has mentioned, was already greeting enough for François. She could tell this immediately from the way François’s own tired eyes came alive. She began to smile and the smile quickly became wide and dazzling. Instinctively, in case she should be thought indelicate, she raised a long hand which she held oddly penitent and shy in front of her mouth so that she could go on smiling out her own feelings of relief behind it unobserved and, above all, unprovocative of more feelings in circumstances already over-charged with emotion.

  Behind her François noticed the haversacks with which he had stocked the cave as well as the one he had given Xhabbo months before, arranged in a row and bulging presumably with the supplies he had enumerated in his letter to Nonnie. They were strapped tight and obviously ready for instant travel. Close by them their field flasks of water darkened the yellow sand. And at last, on the far side of the fire, there was Nonnie on her knees, her arms round Hintza and her face pressed against Hintza’s shoulder. She must have known he was there and yet did not look up at once to greet him.

  For a moment François resented the fact that, although Hintza had been the first into the cave and had already received his own abundant ration of welcome, Nonnie was persisting in putting him first and apparently not ready yet to welcome him. Pre-warned as she was by Hintza’s arrival, he was inclined to feel the least she could have done was to be on her feet, as eager to greet him as Nuin-Tara had been for Xhabbo and himself. But before he could allow his exhausted feelings the slight luxury of so understandable a subjective reaction, all temptation to resentment vanished when he overheard some of the words rushing out of Nonnie.

  The words were apparently intended for Hintza, who was wriggling, twisting and waggling with pleasure, in spite of the fact that he was held tightly against her. Hintza clearly wanted to interrupt her, convinced it was his turn to get in a welcome edgeways. He was trying to push his muzzle under her chin and to lift it up so that he could lick her cheek. But as so often in the past, Hintza was being royally welcomed not just for himself but as an unique plenipotentiary. François, who Nonnie often found oddly slow in perceptions of this kind when he was unusually observant and sensitive in so much else, for once understood, and the tone and quality of Nonnie’s address to Hintza affected him deeply. In a manner so characteristic of the Nonnie he had known in the age before the disaster, she was desperately trying to tame her quick, spontaneous and passionate nature by teasing Hintza, François and not least of all herself. The courage of it even more than the concern for him concealed in it, went straight to his heart.

  “Yes darling Hin,” he heard her say almost as she would have said on any one of those brief, golden days in darkness behind them. “Yes, I’m glad that you agree with me. It was a wicked, wicked thing to do, corrupting someone as trusting as me with drugs so that I was not there to say goodbye. I think he’s really just an old drug pedlar at heart, don’t you? We’ll just have to report him to the first narcotics bureau we get to, won’t we?”

  And she went on in that strain until her eyes felt sufficiently unblurred and her feelings calm enough for her to look up at him without danger of falling into another round of tears.

  The new words of banter that she was wrenching out of herself went silent on her lips as she saw François there with that tender old painter’s candlelight full on him. The record of all he had been through since she had last seen him was on his face, in his eyes and even his way of standing, so obviously that even the blindest of blind in these matters could not fail to read it. François always had a somewhat grave look about him, not because of a lack of zest or sense of fun but due to that instinctive, long-distance view of life that tended to overawe him at times with immensities ahead. It was a gravity implicit in the human heart at the beginning of the journey and not its equal born of intimation of its end. And all of this now had been underlined by a look of new suffering and signs of exhaustion on François’s face that would not have discredited a runner who had just brought the news across the mountains of the arrival of some new Persian Armada on the coast of his beloved Greece. She was horrified to see how thin he had become in just twenty-four hours, how hollow his cheeks, how elongated his features and how far back his eyes had receded and how in a shadow of their own they seemed wider and brighter than ever, as if burning with the fever of a fatigue she could not possibly imagine.

  She wanted to push Hintza away from her, jump up and rush towards him. All that was latent and maternal in her flared into a quick flame that threatened to destroy her strained self-control, since she had never experienced anything comparable before. It was her first clear annunciation of the role in which women are compelled at one and the same time to be both mistress and mother to their men. All the unschooled feelings released by the sight of François, combined with relief and gratitude over his return would have been irresistible, had it not been for one factor: twenty-four hours alone with Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara had taught her much. Her quick, sensitive and impressionable self had recognised from their example how still and calm the human spirit had to strive to be on occasions such as these.

  All day and night long she had been impressed to the point of being wretched and dissatisfied with feelings of her own inadequacy by the behaviour of those two. They were, she recognised, professionals in disaster and the art of how man and woman supplemented one another when all life seems to be against them, so that moving as one they find a strange, still centre in the storm of chance and circumstance raging around them. She had concluded sadly that she was by comparison not even an amateur so much as a child entering some kindergarten of the school of tragedy.

  Her heart was crying out: “Oh what have they done to you, François, these terrible minutes and hours, these long, long years when you have been out there alone where I could not follow you and help and comfort you. Oh come here quick and let me . . .” But in the very act of listening in to her own emotions, she was aware that Nuin-Tara’s eyes were on her and that once more she was being appraised and measured as to whether she was capable of being the kind of woman Xhabbo’s Foot of the Day deserved in so great an extreme of crisis.

  Pushing Hintza aside, she came lightly to her feet, walked over to François and took him by the hand as she had seen Nuin-Tara take Xhabbo by the hand to say in a voice tight with this new grip on her feelings, “Oh welcome, François, welcome back! Come and see what I have cooked and long kept warm for you.”

  So remote were the words from what she really wanted to say that she sounded like a total stranger in her own ears but when she forced herself to look up into his eyes so close to her own, she very nearly lost all that she had gained by resolution. She was grateful then for the help of a distance which divided herself against herself, so that she was weak enough to be ruled by her reason. She noticed that the dark streaks on François’s face which she had thought a trick of candle-light were in fact zigzags of white skin exposed on his face by the
sweat that had run like water down it, washing runnels in the paste of earth he had rubbed on it to blacken it. The appearance utterly belied the vivid image she had formed of François all day. For in all she had imagined him to be doing that day he had been good and immaculate. If life were obedient to one’s subjective feelings he should have been standing there bright and unstained too.

  Yet there he was as if deliberately made up to look more like a clown than a hero. This element in his appearance, however fortuitous, affected her profoundly. She had no direct experience to instruct her in the matter. She knew only that it was more than a consequence of a feminine gift for seeing the rejected and uncared for in life behind the dirt, the rags and tatters. It was more than an instinct for taking all that under her care and protection. Men may be the defenders of faith and the promoters and guardians of ideas; but women are the natural trustees of the wards in the chancery of life. So that the only clue to the new dimension added to her response was in the thought of the clown which came unsolicited to her, since the clown is perhaps one of the most telling images of the mockery fate injects into its greatest tragedies, for the surprise that human beings express when confronted with death and disaster is so unwarranted as to be as comic as it is moving.

  Both are common ingredients of the lot of us all. And yet we go on behaving as if we are to be the exceptions to prove the rule of suffering in life, so that when death, which is no stranger to our neighbours, darkens our own little orbits, we are as outraged, complaining and surprised as any clown by his petty mishaps in a crowded circus. And it was precisely here that the child in Nonnie had pushed roughly aside the person crossing the frontier between woman and girl in her. François in that unprepossessing state was more heroic than any figure of medieval chivalry in full armour could have been. Suddenly Nonnie was the child in all of us again who sees its first clown as an object of compassion rather than fun, and is more horrified by his mishaps than moved to laughter, because the child is in itself a clown, tumbled and laughed at in the circus of a well-trained, grown-up world.