A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  François followed the angle of his hand and made that out to be about an hour before sundown. That would give them time to rest and eat in safety still ahead of their pursuers. Then, in the early hours of the morning, when the enemy would be asleep, they would find a measured way to a place on the road where the enemy was not. He, Xhabbo, and François saw the point immediately, emphasised that crossing the enemy’s line of advance must take place before their pursuers could meet their friends, tell them what they were doing and, as probably already instructed, enlist their help to organise a massive hunt for François and Hintza in that new area as well. Obviously such a crossing could only be attempted in the dark.

  Even so, François thought Xhabbo should have a brief rest before they travelled on. But Xhabbo had already ordered Nuin-Tara to take up her load and was not even attempting to sit down, but standing there impatient to go. François just had to tell Nonnie to follow Nuin-Tara’s example and hasten after the other two, explaining why and what they were doing as they started out on the side-track back to the way they had come in the morning. Once there, on Xhabbo’s command, nobody spoke. Hintza, drugged against pain, seemed sufficiently at ease to be proud of being in the lead again with François close behind him. Every now and then, Xhabbo would come up to the front, make the three of them sit by the side of the track while he scrambled up a dead tree and observed the land behind them. Occasionally he rushed up, blurted out a few words of explanation to François and then ran ahead, to vanish along the track, obviously in order to make sure the way was still clear.

  Nonnie at first thought she could continue like that for the rest of the day. But as the day became first warm, and then hot and airless in the stifled bush she felt herself tiring, and so thirsty that she reached for her flask of water. But before she could lift it to her mouth, she heard a rush of feet behind her, and there was Nuin-Tara beside her, gripping her arm and forcing the flask back into position, so forcefully that a muffled protest broke from her.

  At the sound François stopped and swung round. Before she could explain, she saw him nodding approvingly to Nuin-Tara before saying with a voice full of sympathy, “She’s right, you know, Nonnie. You must be terribly thirsty, because though I’m used to this sort of thing I’m very thirsty too. So is poor old Hin. Just look at him. But believe me it’s a waste of water to drink it in the heat of the day. It only makes you feel thirstier then ever, and what’s more makes you sweat so much that you get terribly tired. There’s nothing so tiring as sweating more than you absolutely have to.”

  It is some indication of Nonnie’s spirit that in circumstances so unfamiliar to her, she managed to pretend that it was all a kind of joke against herself.

  “Ladies, I would have you know, François,” she said, surprisingly clearly out of so parched a mouth, “perspire, and do not sweat.”

  François gave her one of those smiles she had always longed to see more often on his face, and somehow, despite the physical agony of it all, she managed to keep up and to say no more.

  She was helped in this before long by a series of unexpected opportunities to rest from time to time. Xhabbo made them all stop by groves of wild raisin bushes, charged with large, ripe sweet, Pinot-noir berries. He made them all join in harvesting the bush and stuffing berries in the empty spaces in their rucksacks as well as scattering some of them on the track. Considering what care they had taken to disguise their footprints, it seemed to Nonnie a careless if not dangerous way of carrying on.

  She said so to François, and he replied, “You know, Nonnie, I feel almost as ignorant as you in these circumstances. I’ve been the tracker often enough and know quite a bit about tracking but this is the first time in my life that I’ve been the tracked myself. These two know more about it than anybody else in the world and I’m certain there’s a good reason for it all.”

  Thereupon François spoke to Xhabbo for a while and turned to Nonnie again to give her the explanation. “They know what they’re doing all right. Xhabbo says he hates it all because it gives the people behind more time to catch up, but he says that unless the tracks the enemies will have discovered by now, are made to pause noticeably by bushes of this kind, our trackers won’t take the spoor to be that of natural persons going their habitual way. So they do this deliberately to give the impression that we’re only unsuspecting people of the bush on harmless business of our own.”

  He did not add that Xhabbo had explained to him that if those men on their spoor did succeed in reading their tracks accurately, they would know that all this had been done deliberately by people who realised they were being followed, and therefore could only be a party which included the François and Hintza that they had to find and kill.

  After this there were different pauses at places Xhabbo obviously knew and where they branched off the track into little clearings and dug into the ground to extract a surprising collection of edible bulbs, truffles and tubers. François assured Nonnie they were great and nourishing delicacies that he liked as much as the Bushmen did themselves. Digging them out, he stressed, would be far more likely to put the suspicions of their pursuers at rest than anything else.

  And so, just an hour before sunset, exactly as Xhabbo had intended, he was able to take over the lead from Hintza and swerve away to the left at right angles from the track, straight over an outcrop of gravelled ground and so on to a ridge covered with great ironstone boulders and in between, heavy broom bushes and huge euphorbias, standing out against the yellowing sun like enormous Byzantine candelabras. They followed the ridge for a mile to its decline suddenly into a cleft with a dry stream bed below, and the bed itself, covered with fine blue water gravel. There it was heavily shaded by enormous storm, black-thorn, acacia, camel-thorn and wild fig trees, and there, Xhabbo exclaimed with fierce finality, throwing off his rucksack in the act, was their place for the night.

  That was all he had to say because Nuin-Tara there and then took charge and beckoned to Nonnie. Tired as she was she made her do her share of the housekeeping that had to be done. François was still unburdening himself and preparing to see to Hintza, who, although not foaming at the mouth as the day before, was obviously very tired, thirsty and beginning to feel the profound ache of his wound. Xhabbo called out to him that he was just going out to look around for a while and would soon be back, but meanwhile to lay though not to light any fires until he was back.

  It was twilight when Xhabbo returned, a twilight as red as the dawn of Heitse-Eibib had been, one which the Hottentot people, to whom the two trackers pursuing them relentlessly belonged, called the “Heel of Heitse-Eibib”. They thought of it as part of the god bleeding from a wound of an arrow shot into him, while his back was turned in the process of consolidating the day, by the darkness, his implacable enemy hastening up behind him to do battle again for the mastery of life. The great bush-bats were beginning to zoom about on their zig-zag streaks of flight; a Goliath heron flew ponderously over their heads, followed by a vast hammerhead, the great marginal observer in the Bushman imagination, of all the delicately shuttled transitions of life into death and death into life, recorded at sunset on smooth pages of silky water. Then one great old forest owl started to call out to nature that in his considered opinion and speaking as a being of unequalled experience in these matters, it was now dark enough for lesser owls to emerge and follow him on their lawful occasions. François could tell from Xhabbo’s appearance that he was neither satisfied nor dissatisfied and soon understood why. He explained that he had gone back to the main track and climbed one of the tallest trees. Not far away to the north-west he had observed the smoke of many fires, which could only have come from a major enemy, collect on the great road and the tracks leading into it. Far behind him, where the fringe of the bush met the blue of the sky, he had seen dust drifting yellow and bright like a swarm of bees hastening home for the night. The dust he was certain was the dust of their pursuers coming up fast and yet not fast enough, he believed, to reach their own turning-off place
before the dark.

  He was certain their pursuers would be compelled to camp in their turn for the night. Good as that was, it still meant that they were nearer than he had feared because without a doubt they would be able to join the men who made the smoke he had seen by first light the next morning, if not before. That meant they themselves would have to cross the road much sooner than he had anticipated.

  They had better therefore light their fires and cook their food without delay. It might be their last hot meal for along time and then, after a short period of rest, they had better hurry on their way. Although he said all this calmly, if not casually, speaking as he did out of a spirit disciplined by the great necessities of life to avoid any exaggeration of either hope or despair, even Nonnie felt how troubled he had been. She noticed that François, too, must have had a similar reaction because he questioned Xhabbo’s decision to light their fires and cook their meal somewhat more brusquely than he would normally have done. At that Xhabbo responded more emphatically than usual, with a pronouned, almost sardonic gesture of hands and shoulders, apparently asking rhetorically why one or two little Bushman camp fires should not live, when so many other Kaffir fires were burning so high and arrogant in the vicinity?

  Accordingly Nonnie found herself more deeply and subtly perturbed than she had yet been. Up to now she had been confronted by fear, stark and clear, derived from danger immediate and direct. It had been something obvious with tangible causes which she could recognise and explain unequivocally to her desperate senses. But it now seemed that a new element had entered their situation; unknown, unpredictable, stealthy, deliberate and of a more lasting kind. Somehow she seemed to have taken it for granted too naïvely that once they had broken out of the circle of their enemies round the cave, travelling together, reunited in their foursome, they would quickly leave that danger behind and have only the natural hazards of a journey into the unknown to confront. By now, she realised that danger most highly organised and informed was determined to stay with them. Added to the hazards of the unknown, it meant that from now on the threat to their survival would be greater than ever and a constantly recurring element. For all her courage and a naturally hopeful heart, no matter how hard she tried, she could no longer see how, where and when, if ever, they would have done with this danger.

  This awakening to new and greater peril, was inflicted upon her at perhaps the worst hour of the day. Because as she admitted all these new and fearful considerations to herself, the last red spark of light in the West was extinguished, the birds round them ceased singing and a silence almost as deep and black as the night, closed in on them. For all her inexperience she knew from what François had told her, and from those nights she had spent at Hunter’s Drift and Silverton Hill, such a silence was totally unnatural and evidence of how the natural world about her felt itself invaded and threatened. Her relief at the sight of the first clear little flame flowering in front of her accordingly was immense. And as the faces of her companions emerged from the dark she tried to draw solace from their nearness and to read their expressions.

  She saw Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo close to each other, their faces without any traces of indulgence of feeling whatsoever, except that imposed by concentration on the tasks of tending their little fires and preparing the meal. Nuin-Tara’s in particular seemed to be free of any emotional stress, and so absorbed in the practical needs of the moment that Nonnie envied her as she had never done before. The look of unfathomable calm in her eyes and the kind of vestal devotion she brought to feeding her fire, implied an attitude to life that had never allowed any tyranny of either hate or despair to impair it. It was contained in a belief that if one served the small needs of all the living, urgent moments utterly, to use Nuin-Tara’s and Xhabbo’s favourite word, the great necessities could be left to take care both of themselves and those who trusted accordingly. She wondered what sort of an apprenticeship to life could have produced so rounded an attitude, and felt dissatisfied and hopelessly inadequate by comparison. She just could not suppress a new fear that she would fail, even if the danger did not overwhelm them as she now felt more than ever that it would. Yet without being aware of it, she had progressed so far in this battle with the unknown that she was able to do something of which she had not been capable a bare forty-eight hours before, namely to shape her fear in a direct and uncompromising question to François.

  François had just forced one more aureomycin tablet and one more sedative down Hintza’s throat. Hintza was shaking his head and licking his lips, as if trying to rid his palate of something distasteful. Having got rid of it, it was as if he realised it all had been for his own good, because he turned his beautiful head to look at François as if he were some kind of a god. François looked back at him with a naked and unashamed tenderness that nearly brought tears to Nonnie’s eyes. That little scene, and the sense of utter acceptance of whatever life had to give implicit in Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara, seemed to her to be so good and true, that a feather of hope stirred in her that no evil could ever be great enough to extinguish it.

  “Dear Mother in Heaven,” she cried within herself. “Let all other things come and go, even our chances of getting back to the world to which I once belonged, and we be compelled to live on here, but let these things go on for ever.”

  Hard on that she asked François the relevant question, “I know that Xhabbo’s news was bad,” she began in a grave, small but clear voice, “But tell me honestly, do you think we shall ever get out of this alive?”

  François, whose mind, in the manner not unlike that of Nuin-Tara’s, was inclined always to be utterly in the service of the necessities of the moment, had been so absorbed in his concern for Hintza that he was startled by her question. He stared, surprised, at her for quite a time before he answered. Indeed, he took so long that Nonnie was putting the worst possible constructions on his hesitations, before she heard him say in that maddeningly deliberate and prematurely old way of his, “I don’t know Nonnie, if it is a matter for thinking really. If we just have to think about our plight, I guess we might come to the conclusion that it’s pretty hopeless. But there’s more than just thinking to it. We’ve broken out of a ring of what I myself believed at one time was almost certain death to us all, and we have in Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo two of the wisest, most experienced and bravest guides we could have in situations of this kind. However silly it is I would back their wisdom and their experience against these evil men swarming all over the place—yes, even against those two Hottentots who are keeping them on our spoor. It’s not just a matter of thinking and numbers. You can’t just think about things in the bush, as Mopani has always told me. Thinking has its place, he says, but only when one is confronted with known facts and statistics. When you’re in the unknown and the dark, as we are here, Mopani says, you surrender your thinking in trust to the feelings that come to you, out of the bush. All my feelings are that, though I don’t know how and don’t care about knowing how now, somehow, when the time comes and the things start to happen to us, the how of it all will present itself to us and that now, here, by this fire, I promise you by the light of the fire that all my feelings are that we shall manage.”

  Her relief at so positive and unusually long a pronouncement from him was so great that she feared it and exclaimed, her eyes wide and her heart beating faster, “Do you really mean what you’re saying, François? You’re not just trying to comfort me, are you?”

  “No Nonnie, no,” he shook his head vehemently. “This is what I feel and I’m certain if I asked Xhabbo your question, his answer would be the same. Only I’m not going to ask him. He and Nuin-Tara and, for that matter, us as well, need all we have for this moment and the next step. As ’Bamuthi always used to say to me, ‘Look after the steps, Little Feather, and the journey will take care of itself.’ Besides, do you remember that night, it feels a hundred years ago, when our own world came to an end, how Xhabbo said he had a tapping inside himself which told him it would show us a way? I’m not going to ins
ult his tapping by putting such a question to him now. From what my old nurse Koba told me, all Bushmen are superstitious about considering the future unless their tapping does it for them. It’s a jolly good superstition and you and I could do worse than copy it ourselves.”

  “But, François,” Nonnie protested, “François, I believe you. But just in case you and Xhabbo could be wrong, and the worst happens to us, I shall not mind so much if you promise me that you’ll be with me when it happens.”

  “I promise Nonnie,” he said promptly. “Because if that should ever happen, I’d find it easier that way myself.”

  François might have said more but at that moment the sound of a vast yawn escaped from Hintza. It sounded as if he was bored beyond any tangible measure by being left out of their joint reckoning for so long, particularly for such an unnecessary exchange of thought. If only human beings thought less and used their noses more, it implied, how much better a dog’s life would be. The sounds made both Nonnie and François look at him. His jaws were stretched as if they would break apart; his teeth were white and dazzling, his long supple tongue pinker and more beautiful than ever in the firelight, his profound and alert eyes, shut with the strain of such prodigious yawning. So spontaneous and uninhibited was the act that Nonnie, in a swift change of mood so characteristic of her, let the first laugh for days break out of her. Even François had to smile and, stroking Hintza’s back, exclaim, “You see, Hin agrees with me and is feeling that this sort of conversation had better cease.”