A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  Indeed, very early on, Koba exhorted him to remember that a dream which had become part of the light of a fire, lived on to help one along. She wanted him to know that it was the same with wood. The wood itself burned out in the making of a fire, but the fire itself went on. A particular dream may be burned out in the fire, but the dreaming would go on as well as the dream dreaming it. Dreamers, like wood in the fire, were burned out, they came and went, but the dream dreaming them from the beginning always went on.

  One is compelled to orchestrate this phase in the theme of François’s story because of the light it throws on the essential nature of his companions. Instinctively they moved in a Shakespearean view of themselves as “such stuff as dreams are made on”. It explains why the place they were leaving behind with an increasing sense of impending end to an important phase of their march, was quite naturally called, “The Place where Xhabbo Dreamt a Dream”.

  And they had not moved far from it before François suddenly stopped short, angry with himself for having been so dense, telling Nonnie rather peremptorily, “Look, join Hin. Wait, and keep your eyes skinned on the desert ahead. I’ve something important to talk over with Xhabbo.”

  “Xhabbo!” he began to ask his friend, who came up from behind with singularly uncurious eyes. “Have you ever heard of the singing tree of the Makoba?”

  At the word “Makoba” (people who had been the Bushmen’s enemies for close on two centuries), Xhabbo was immediately roused out of his preoccupied state to say that of course he had heard of the great tree of the Makoba, as everybody had. He had even seen it, countless times as it rose high and wide from a ring of twanging and singing papyrus in the swamp ahead. Indeed their own way would pass close by it and, were it not for the fact that they would have to go by it at night, François would have seen for himself what a great tree it was. But as for it being a singing tree, he had never heard it called that.

  François hastened to tell him all he himself knew about the tree, the belief surrounding it, about Kghometsu and the report of Kghometsu’s wife that the tree was singing again. The news made Xhabbo take his dream even more seriously than ever, if that were possible. He affirmed that the tree in his dream, now that he had listened to François, could have been the tree of life of the Makoba. Though he still could not see the plain meaning of it, he was now more certain than ever, that there was an important message for them in it and that this message concerned their enemies. They would just have to be on their guard again, as they had not been since Lamb-snatcher’s Hill. Meanwhile, he would go on letting the dream grow in him and begged François to lead on.

  The growth towards clarity must have been considerable because by evening Xhabbo seemed certain that the dream within was now on a true course of its own and could be left to take care of itself. While the others prepared camp, he went up a great dune alone and came down in the twilight with the news that the swamp was only two days’ marching away, and that after one more night they would have to hide Nonnie and Nuin-Tara somewhere while he and François scouted ahead, because they would be close then to a country once more full of enemies.

  “How strange,” Nonnie remarked when François, in keeping with their new relationship, told her the grim, uncensored facts. “How strange, that we should have to come back to a world of men to find ourselves in danger of our lives again.”

  It was ominous that they all, including Hintza, slept uneasily that night and sat down to breakfast to hear Xhabbo tell them how he had not so much dreamt his dream as clearly heard, far away on the edge of his sleep, the sound of the singing so like Nonnie’s in his first dream. So loud and clear did it sound on the wind of the night that he had sat up and listened very carefully as if by turning his ears to the wind he would hear it, but alas, it was a singing to be heard only in the stillness of sleep. Then all night between sleeping and waking he had seen more clearly the face of the singer, a woman clearly of Nonnie’s people. But not like Nonnie’s, smooth, happy and healthy. It was thin as if she had not eaten for months and was near death. In between her singing she was crying, as if feeling her heart had utterly fallen over.

  Nonnie, her curiosity awakened, over this repeated comparison of the dream woman to her and her mother’s people, had a queue of urgent questions forming in her mind for Xhabbo. She was prevented by the appearance immediately above their heads of the most imperious of honey-guides.

  It sat on a delicate, intricate ornate bow like a piece of third-Empire gilt in the morning sun, beating its wings and singing with a crystal clarity. More importunate even than the honey-guide which had so sorely tempted Xhabbo on Lamb-snatcher’s Hill two hundred and seventeen days before, they heard its ancient refrain, “Quick! Quick! Honey . . . quick!”

  Xhabbo, as if still full of remorse over that breach of his on the hill of the terms of the Bushman’s alliance with the bird, dropped his empty dixie, seized his spear and said, “Person of wings and a heart of honey; look how hearing you, quickly I come!”

  François immediately picked up his own rifle, haversack, water-flask and ammunition pouches, calling on Nonnie, as Xhabbo called upon Nuin-Tara, to come after them with all their dixies as soon as they had scoured them out with sand.

  The honey-guide, seeing that it was being followed, was in no hurry. It fluttered from tree to tree to perch where it was most visible in the full sun before it flew on to the next. As a result Xhabbo and François were joined by Nonnie and Nuin-Tara before they had gone very far, just in time to hear in the distance another strange, urgent whistling call followed by an almost chuckling sound, from far down the throat of some eager hurrying animal.

  Xhabbo stopped, turned about and whispered that they must all be silent please; a most wonderful thing was about to happen, a thing that could be happily set as a sign against this dream which he did not fully yet understand.

  Significantly, the honey-guide, perched on a branch a bare twenty feet away, was looking first to them and then in the direction of the new sound coming steadily nearer and sounding as if it were coming out of the earth a hundred or more yards away to their right. Suddenly the new sound ceased. At once the honey-guide became alarmed and resumed its call with a glittering, desperate intensity, beating its wings hysterically against its side, so that it could utter the maximum volume of command of which it was capable. Xhabbo’s face was transfigured and transformed with wonder into an ancient Pan-like beauty as there came bursting into view a robust, grey-dark animal, trotting fast on sturdy, somewhat curved legs, with a distinct, business-like air that would not have been inappropriate on the face of someone who was something in a great city, determined to catch a bus.

  “Good God, a ratel . . . a honey-badger,” François began in a whisper to Nonnie. But got no further because the moment the badger arrived under the tree to exchange passwords with the honey-guide, the honey-guide, paying no more attention to their little group, took off at full speed and they had to hasten after the ratel with his strange, flute-like whistle and odd Dyonisian chuckle. This duet between ratel and honey-guide was transformed into a trio by Xhabbo who now kept on informing their two guides ahead, in a crooning, soothing song: “Oh person of wings, and a heart of honey; oh bravest of the brave persons! Do not look behind but feel yourselves hastening and feeling it, know how hastening too, we come!”

  François, in explaining all this to Nonnie, elaborated how there was no animal in, on or above the earth that was as brave as this animal and that even a lion, or the maddest of rogue elephants would leave it alone. Even for Mopani, who knew animals so well, it was the one animal who proved, as he put it, that in the world of nature as in the world of men, only courage made life free from fear. It was because of its utter freedom from fear, the Bushmen believed, that the ratel was given the ultimate reward of valour, that was honey.

  Nonnie, watching the strange animal shape hurrying after the light, ethereal singing bird, entranced and excited by it, characteristically had an association uniquely her own which no sooner
found than was revealed in the remark to François, “How like Caliban he is, and how like Ariel the bird; and when you come to think of it, how like a magician, a sort of desert Prospero, your beloved Xhabbo looks just now!”

  Before long they arrived at a vast termite hill, which in itself was a sign of how near to the end of desert sand they had come, since the hill was a temple of clay. The termites had long since gone, driven out by an ant-bear who had clawed a hole in its base and so made it a fitting home, full of vacant cells and cunning corridors for an immense concourse of bees, that were coming and going in long amber processions between the entrance and the distant waters and flowers of the swamps, which Xhabbo had declared were so near.

  They watched the Ariel bird perch itself, silent upon the tip of the termite summit, still quivering like an electric bell just after the summons rung on it had ceased and began to look highly pleased over the faultless way it had just performed a delicate duty, before it began sharpening and cleaning its beak between its wings and claws for the delight to come. But strangest of all was the behaviour of Caliban. No sooner had he arrived at the mound than he whisked about, went smartly backwards and thrust his sturdy behind firmly into the opening of the vast hive.

  “He must be mad!” exclaimed Nonnie, mystified and aghast, “to do a thing like that to bees.”

  “Oh, Nonnie, this is the most wonderful part of all!” François announced, “You see, he’s gassing all the bees inside so that they can’t sting anyone getting at the honey.”

  Told this in a different setting at third-hand, Nonnie might have been inclined to laugh. But as a close witness, indeed a committed accessory before the fact, the wonder of the resourcefulness implicit in the whole arrangement into which she had been drawn, seemed miraculous and so beautiful that she watched it all with shining eyes. It was amazing. Almost at once there died away the steady reverberating murmur of bees chanting their devotions in that Gothic cathedral built by insect-priests. Soon the honey-badger could step aside, and for the first time turn his attention to them. He looked steadily and fearlessly into their eyes as if to say, “Now look, it’s time you did something as well.”

  Immediately Xhabbo, still crooning, went eurhythmically forward, knelt smoothly by the entrance and pushed his hands slowly and evenly through the dark cathedral door. After feeling what appeared to be delicately around within, he pulled out a long, broad comb of purple-black honey, and broke off a large segment. Held out towards the honey-guide it went translucent with morning sun and looked more like a dream of honey than any honey found on earth.

  “Oh person of wings with the heart of honey,” he begged, “take and eat.”

  The honey-guide’s precise shape vanished in a flutter of feathers and wings and emerged in a swift glide towards Xhabbo, who was carefully laying out honey in the shade of a bush like a feast. As he stepped back, the bird flew in and at once pecked away at the wax that encombed it.

  Xhabbo went back at that same smooth ritualistic pace to the entrance, once more felt inside and pulled out another great comb, shedding large tears of glistening honey.

  “Oh bravest of brave persons, who knows how to put the bees to sleep,” he called out, holding it like some magical substance towards the watchful badger. “Take, oh please take, and eat!”

  Moving smoothly forward, he laid the comb at his sturdy partner’s feet, who strikingly enough made no move to eat but went on watching him keenly. And again Xhabbo went back, brought another comb and laid that too at the feet of the honey-badger and begged it to eat. This time the badger ate, and Xhabbo was free to extract two more great combs, bring them to Nuin-Tara so that she could break them up and store them in their dixies. François knew that in so great a hive he could have extracted many more combs but it was as if Xhabbo knew instinctively that never had it been more important to observe the proportions implicit in the claims of bee as well as man, bird and beast. With a movement of profound gratitude and his most’respectful gesture of farewell at the honey-bird, the honey-badger and the hive, he turned about and in the same devout tone commanded, “Now let us too take our honey before the bees wake from their sleep, and eat, my children, eat!”

  It was the first time Xhabbo had ever used a paternalistic expression. It was totally unlike him even now, and it sounded as if he were speaking on behalf of someone else. It could only have come, not because he was feeling fatherly, but out of a conviction that they all had been uniquely fathered just then.

  It was one of the most beautiful events in which François and Nonnie had ever participated. Neither of them were capable of expressing what they felt. It was as if they had witnessed a manifestation of the sweetness that life could achieve if only man, bird, animal, insect and flower were allowed to enact fully the terms of the alliance to which they are in their deeps contracted by the act of their being. For this final taste of honey on their tongues which had long forgotten what sweetness is, seemed to erase all that had been bitter in their experience, to such an extent that even if this were to be their only reward, the travail to which they had been subjected would still have been worth it.

  The camp they had just left, therefore, became the first camp to have its original name cancelled and to be renamed with a phrase which meant, “The Annunciation of Honey”.

  In their next camp the night air became strangely dank and towards morning a mist came swirling over the land hiding the stars, making them for the first time so cold that they increased their fire. In the night Xhabbo had heard again, louder than ever, the singing and the crying of the woman by the tree, and at dawn he commanded Nuin-Tara and Nonnie to stay quietly and watchfully at home, because their enemies once more were near. He was certain they were closer to whatever the vision portended than ever he had realised. He and François would have to go looking out carefully the way ahead before they could all move safely on.

  Accordingly the two of them, accompanied by Hintza, were out of the camp before sunset. Within a very short time they found what François took to be a game track until it was joined by other tracks. When the mist gave way before the sun and showed up the ground clearly, he realised with instant apprehension that they were cattle tracks. Just as there was no smoke without fire, he concluded sombrely that you had no cattle without men. He noticed too how fast the dunes had declined and the earth was levelling out ahead.

  They had gone only a few miles farther when the cattle tracks became bolder and too frequent for Xhabbo’s liking. He swerved aside and led the way up a large mound of sand covered with bushes of thorn. From there they looked out on a new world of trees and long green savannahs sinking slowly into a vast depression where the advance of earth was arrested against dense dykes of papyrus and bulrushes and in between the sun glancing upwards sharply from copper and bronze water. Behind and beyond the water, the theme of trees was resumed in great island clusters. The trees on those were denser, taller and greater than any François had ever seen. Even where the horizon drew a dark blue circle in the west, the reiteration of islands of trees and barricades and bulrushes and slashes of metal-coloured water went on without interruption.

  One great island of trees to the far south held François’s eyes particularly, because it looked more massive, darker and higher than the rest and was almost cut off from the others by a broad stretch of water. Just beyond the water it appeared to touch on ripples of sand and grass and brush, where the desert reasserted itself and quickly mounted to the east into the great swell and oceans of dunes they had left behind. He had an odd feeling that he had seen it before. And that made no sense to him.

  Yet just then, pointing at that very island, Xhabbo told him, “Look, there is the place of the tree of life of the Makóba. Tonight before anyone can discover or know that we are here, we must pass close by it and into the swamp at the back because look, Foot of the Day, how everywhere else we have enemies.”

  François saw what he had missed in his general survey of the scene. All round and in between them and the lip o
f the depression, were round, beehive huts surrounded by kraals of thorn and over every kraal and hut rose a tall straight plume of light blue smoke. More ominous than smoke and much nearer, he heard the sound of cattle calling to one another, goats bleating, and however faint and far away, the bright sing-song prattle of little black herd boys. Worse still, out of the north-west all along the edge of the swamp and trees, long sleeves of scarlet dust hung on the windless air and the familiar and fearful sound of trucks came to their ears.

  Xhabbo let out a series of Bushman clicks incapable of alphabetical transmission, which François knew was a compound of protest and irritation to the effect that fate might well have spared them this last refinement. The discharge of electricity complete, he explained the traffic was worse even than when he and Nuin-Tara had passed on their way to warn François. It could only mean that their enemies were still at work and could only be at work so openly and on such a scale because the people of those kraals and fires were their friends.

  François would have liked to stay longer and study the scene more thoroughly but Xhabbo said no. He told François that he knew the way they had to go well enough for both of them, and in case anything happened to him, Nuin-Tara knew it just as well. They must get back to their camp to eat and rest, for as soon as it was dark they would set out to pass by the place of the tree of life well before morning.

  François had one quick last look at the scene. Judging by the dust, some of the military trucks had broken station and were moving out of convoy straight for the great tree itself. He pointed it out to Xhabbo, who dismissed it with a casual shrug. At nightfall, he said, judging by past experience, the men of the trucks, like the people of the kraals, would keep away from the swamp because of the mosquitoes that came out of the swamp dense as thunder clouds, trembling with a song of anger.